The Decawave sale looks like it has overtaken the €300m Intel paid for Movidius in 2016 to become the biggest ever Irish tech exit – the industry term for the sale of a growing business backed by venture capitalists.
The links to Movidius go well beyond coincidence. Movidius is another Irish chip designer for one thing. More tellingly, both companies are part of a long tail of investments traceable through Atlantic Bridge back to the dot-com era, and the then record breaking stock market flotation of Parthus Technologies in 2000. Irish venture capital investor Atlantic Bridge was a key player in backing both Decawave and Movidius as high potential businesses. Atlantic in turn was co-founded by ex-Parthus hands Brian Long and Elaine Coughlan, who’d led the 2000 IPO on the Nasadaq and a subsequent merger with Israel’s Ceva.
The connections go even deeper than finance. Prior to co-founding Decawave, its CTO Michael McLaughlin worked with Parthus. Movidius founders David Maloney and Sean Mitchell were engineers at Parthus too. Ireland’s indigenous tech industry is dominated by software but it’s hard to think of a better illustration of a well functioning investment ecosystem than the recycling of human and financial capital over two decades demonstrated in these deals.
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