Software firm AQMetrics plans to add 35 more staff to aid in expansion plan

Founded by: Geraldine Gibson in 2012

Staff: 65

Funding: €7 million

AQMetrics, a Maynooth, Co Kildare-based software business, plans to hire 35 staff over the next year to aid its growth plan. This will bring total staff at the company to 100.

“We’re hiring aggressively, we’re moving very fast. There’s a lot of demand coming in,” Geraldine Gibson, founder of AQMetrics, told the Business Post.

AQMetrics was founded in 2012 and develops software to aid businesses, particularly those in the financial sector, in meeting their compliance requirements. The company currently has 65 staff and has raised €7 million in funding.

“We have technology that encodes the regulations and uses automation to ensure customers comply with regulations, using the technology instead of needing large teams of people,” Gibson said.

“We map all the data customers have in their complex universes of systems and bring it into one place. Rules are then run against it that set alerts around compliance breaches or risks of breaches.”

Gibson got the idea for the company from her prior experience, both in the investment business and the tech sector. Through that work she recognised that the level of regulatory work was reaching a point where automation was going to be required to meet it.

“I had seen how compliance people I worked with were doing lots of things manually. As more regulations came in, it became really clear that there was going to be a need to learn to comply using technology. I combined the knowledge I had to come up with this solution that was lacking in the marketplace,” she said.

The business began with Gibson and a few graduates focused on AIFMD, a regulation that came out in 2015. The business immediately attracted blue-chip customers, including US Bank.

“That gave me the confidence to go out to the market to seek funding and then I could ask some people to join the company. Then in 2018, there was a new regulation called MiFID II. We built out the solution for that.”

Initially regulated under the Central Bank of Ireland, the business moved up to being regulated directly in 2018 by ESMA, the pan-European regulator, due to the volume of transactions being covered by the company’s software.

Gibson said that Enterprise Ireland had proven to be a significant help for the business throughout its growth. AQMetrics has gone through the high potential start-up unit previously and is still aided by the agency.

“They were fantastic in the early days for networking and introductions to larger firms. We signed our first revenue-generating customer following an introduction by Enterprise Ireland,” Gibson said.”

“They’ve been superb with helping our expansion into the US, UK, Singapore and more. They’ve been a very good partner and they’re able to help when we’re looking for external support.”

The focus now for Gibson is growth, both managing it and finding new ways to generate more of it.

“This year the number of enterprises signing on has been high. We need more people in the business to do that. If we can continue what we are doing today into next year, that will mean significant growth.

“In the medium term, we have our eyes peeled for acquisition targets. We haven’t identified the right companies yet, but we want businesses that will help us get more global reach.”

This Making it Work article is produced in partnership with Enterprise Ireland