4Impacts Intelligent Solutions Ltd, co-founded by Munster rugby player Donncha O’Callaghan, is seeking to raise €500,000 using the Employment Investment Incentive Scheme (EIIS).
Established in January 2013, 4Impacts is headquartered in Little Island, Cork. O'Callaghan's partner in the venture is Pat O'Flynn and in 2013 the company raised €140,000 using EIIS, of which €120,000 was put up by O'Callaghan and O'Flynn.
The 4Impacts Health Service Network provides a digital communication channel for pharma and healthcare companies to educate the public and medical professionals via multiple digital touch points. A full market launch is planned in the next 18 months.
According to O'Callaghan: “Throughout my career I have been involved in many marketing and advertising campaigns and I often found there was a disconnect between investment, value and the actual return on investment.
“It became clear that for every industry, the use of data is the underlying key component. With data, the domain expert is no longer the ultimate decision maker.
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“The Digital Out Of Home industry is growing at a very fast rate however it is one of the least served by effective data analytics.”
4Impacts provide double-sided 55” High Definition digital display totems that can run full motion video and animation.
In addition to the high-definition monitors built into the totems, there is also audience detection software that measures the demographic information of the people viewing the advertisements on screen.
Advertisers have the ability to tailor their adverts for specific geographical locations by varying their advertisement for each location.
Co-founder Pat O'Flynn commented: “The partnership was born out of an IRFU and the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year mentoring programme. Both Colette Toomey of Clonakilty Black Pudding and I were matched with Donncha and we have worked as a team to collectively scope and build on Donncha's natural strengths and goal-driven focus.
“I am very excited about this opportunity and we are already generating early revenue which is rare in a new company.”
O'Flynn is former managing director of AVR-Safeway, which he started and developed from inception in 1998 as a chemical waste management company for the pharmaceutical industry. That company was sold in 2008 to Veolia, the French Utility company.
In June 2010, O'Flynn established Solvotrin Therapeutics, a drug development company that applies smart chemistry to well established compounds to make them more effective and better tolerated.
“We create patent protected new chemical entities and demonstrate early preclinical proof-of-concept ensuring that later development is de-risked,” says O'Flynn.
Solvotrin Therapeutics has equity funding of €3.34m. Taxpayers through Enterprise Ireland have invested €500,000 in the venture. As of December 2013, the company had invested €2.4m in product development.
The EII scheme allows an individual investor to obtain income tax relief on investments up to a maximum of €150,000 per annum in each tax year up to 2020. Relief is initially available to an individual at up to 30%.
Up to a further 11% tax relief will be available where it has been proven that employment levels have increased at the company at the end of the holding period (3 years) or where evidence is provided that the company used the capital raised for expenditure on research and development.
