Canadian Dragon takes her female-friendly funding model to Ireland

Michele Romanow’s €1.8 billion firm Clearco firm plans to up its Dublin workforce to 200 people and to invest €100 million in young Irish firms

Michele Romanow: ‘We’re very bullish about the potential of Ireland, we think this is a fantastic market’

Michele Romanow knows how to spot a good business idea. As one of the mainstay investors in Canada’s version of Dragons’ Den, she sits through hundreds of pitches every year for the show.

It was during one of these that she said she first developed the idea for her current business, which has already achieved unicorn status by taking an entirely new approach to start-up investing.

“It was one of my first seasons on Dragons’ Den, and I was listening to an entrepreneur pitch an idea for a business. They were looking for equity investment from one of the dragons, but they were planning to use the cash to buy stock and pay for user acquisition advertising with Google and Facebook,” Romanow told the Business Post last week.