Research & Innovation

Ireland’s National Digital Research Centre (NDRC) was ranked the No 2 university business accelerator in the world at the UBI Awards in London yesterday (25 November).

Headquartered in Stockholm, UBI Global is a thought leader in the performance and analysis of business incubation and accelerators around the world and provides a benchmark of how more than 500 programmes in over 70 countries are performing.

In the awards last night, the number one accelerator in the world was SETsquared, the enterprise collaboration of the Universities of Bath, Bristol, Exeter, Southampton and Surrey.

The NDRC was established more than a decade ago at the Digital Hub in Dublin, in the aftermath of the departure of MIT’s Media Lab Europe, with the objective of helping turn university research into successful new ventures.

Under the leadership of Ben Hurley, the NDRC’s portfolio of start-up ventures has secured a cumulative €88m in follow-on investment from commercial investors with a combined market capitalisation of approximately €220m.

NDRC invests primarily using an accelerator model through its NDRC Launchpad, NDRC Catalyser and NDRC VentureLab investment programmes, providing modest amounts of capital and high amounts of hands-on support to early-stage companies.

In recent weeks, the NDRC launched the latest phase of its LaunchPad accelerator, with €30.000 of funding each available for 10 start-ups that will begin the programme in February.