Sorcha O'Grady, TruckScience, on right, with Olga Golub and Deniz Pecel from Google.Photo: Shane O'Neill

Local company chosen for Google startup programme

MAYO company TruckScience has been announced as one of 30 high potential Irish startups selected by Google Ireland to participate in its Adopt a Startup programme.

TruckScience will now receive 12 weeks of mentoring by a dedicated Google support team. The team will work with the Castlebar company to develop and improve its overall business strategy and at the end of the 12 weeks they will be invited to take part in a Dragons’ Den style competition.

The principal aim of our Adopt a Startup programme is to assist startups to develop their business strategies and provide them with hands-on support and advice on how they can take their enterprises even further,” explains Paddy Flynn, head of Google Ireland’s startup programme.

Now in its fourth year, this is a highly effective and successful initiative for Google in Ireland. Over two cycles of the programme in 2015 we had 16 finalists and a total of 52 startup participants. Many of these companies have gone on to raise significant capital funding and greatly increased their employee numbers.”

He added: “This programme is a further opportunity for Google to support the Irish startup ecosystem in a meaningful way. The calibre of participants in the spring programme is very strong and it’s great to see that close to half of the companies are based outside of Dublin, with a large number headed by female founders and co-founders.”

Each startup will receive 12 weeks hands-on mentoring, access to an exclusive lecture series at Google offices and Google Apps for Work licenses, free for a year. Successful startups will also get the opportunity to pitch their developed business plans and results of the programme to members of Google Ireland’s leadership team as well as prominent figures from the Irish startup community at a grand final in Google’s European headquarters in July.

The winner will receive €10,000 Google AdWords credit and will also become eligible for the Google Cloud Platform for Startups programme which comes with $20,000 Google Cloud credits.