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Founders: Ray O’Neill and John Harney
Elevator pitch: financial management for renewable energy projects
Funding: funding from NDRC accelerator
Status: raising a seed round
RAY O’NEILL WANTS to build Wall Street-style management techniques for the renewable energy sector with his startup, Fincovi, which helps companies manage their financial workflow.
With years of experience in the renewable energy and finance sectors, he has seen first-hand how cumbersome financial management in renewables can be.
O’Neill previously worked at Australia’s federal scientific research agency, CSIRO, where he worked on commercialising research, but he returned home to Ireland in 2011 “when most people were on the plane going over to Australia”.
This eventually led to roles at AIB including head of energy and clean technologies and head of sustainability before taking a role as venture partner at investment group BVP.
“I saw an opportunity to manage the renewable energy projects that were in Ireland better than they would be managed today,” O’Neill explained.
Along with his experience in energy and financing of such products, co-founder John Harney was previously a chartered accountant at Grant Thornton and financial controller at Bord na Móna.
“Both of us had seen the finance side of renewables, the banking side, the investor side and the asset owner side,” O’Neill said.
The result is Fincovi, a back-office service for the renewable energy sector.
Financial management
Fincovi, based in Athlone, works behind the scenes for clients, using its own tech, to gather and manage data on wind and solar farms, generating financial and compliance reports and mining data for insights.
O’Neill said that “financial management was kind of lagging” in the sector and as asset bases grow and generate reams and reams of more data, this management needs to get smarter.
“That’s where we saw the opportunity for Fincovi, to develop a platform for the industry and move off Excel sheets and move into something where you can get the data and make the data work for you in real time,” he said.
“We’re good at supporting financial administration. We take all the invoices, we scan them in, we look at purchase orders and bank (details) and create a management account,” O’Neill said.
Fincovi’s business is split into three key facets – managing financial workflow, mining data for performance insights and advising on the buying and selling of assets.
According to O’Neill, this frees up companies to spend more time and effort raising money, acquiring assets and building renewable energy infrastructure, “which is really what they want to do”.
“We enable the marketplace to trade between each other by having the data and information in the one place,” O’Neill said.
Full model
Fincovi maintains an outsourced model where it handles all of the heavy lifting on behalf of clients rather than providing a software-as-a-service (SaaS) product, which has become popular in many other sectors.
“When we went around and validated we found a lot of people in the industry said, ‘No, we don’t want a SaaS product, we want a service that is delivered.’ We pivoted early on. We’re going to have to have deliver this service.”
Fincovi generates revenue on a per project basis, with fees depending on the size of the development and the services required. It has 10 customers to date.
The startup recently joined the NDRC’s Portershed accelerator programme in Galway – securing €75,000 in the process – while it is in the midst of closing its seed round to finance its next stage of growth, which it hopes to close by year-end.
The company has five staff and it plans to grow out the tech development aspect of its business to complement the finance and accounting team.
“(Our base in Athlone) is enabling us to attract the quality skills at a lower cost than we could get them in Dublin,” O’Neill added.
“The seed funding will enable us to hire another 12 people (over the next year). We’re building out a tech side of our business. We do need people all the time.”
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Written by Jonathan Keane and posted on Fora.ie
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Isn’t it already like mid December?
@Adam Rekio: It may seem suspiciously like mid-December but don’t let that mislead you because that’s just what they want you to think…
@Adam Rekio: William is right! Don’t just follow all the sheeple who simply swallow what the MSM tell them to! Do your own research. Those scientists and their MSM propagandists want everyone to believe it is mid-December. Take the red pill! You’ll soon wake up to what month it really is!
@Stephen Rogan: They’re shameless and totally amoral in the lies they tell! I don’t believe for a second that Y2K thing will be as bad as they claim and they’re still trying to convince me we had people on the moon. Have you ever seen the moon? It’s tiny even when it’s full! A bit like a brain that’s been fed one too many conspiracy theories really…
@Adam Rekio: nope. 16th pm onwards is mid December
@TomTraubert: onwards until when ? You’re simultaneously saying it’s a point in time rather than a time span, and that it’s a time span (without elaborating) in the same short sentence. Impressive
@William Tallon: LOL
Language like could,may,maybe,might,possible, probably,are what is scaring the life out of our older generation. When have any of the scary predictions on figures actually happened? The government have a hold on people and they don’t want to let go.
And in 6 months time it will be something else becoming dominant.. Why don’t the experts save themselves time and warn us that omicron isn’t the last instead of acting shocked everytime.
Coronavirus March 2020,
Alpha November 2020
Delta July 2021
Omicron November 2021
Anyone see the cycle
@David Lee: was just brought out in time for the Christmas number 1
@Philip McLoughlin: lol
Loads more scaremongering
No one cares
@Rob Gale: we share a border with this country
Has there actually been any deaths reported due to omicron? Or even hospitalisations? This is insanity.
@Hanna Crowe: not really. Insanity is listening to anti-vaxxers and those who do not understand science. A virus can only spread by close human contact. Vaccines prevent serious illness. Simple.
Dominant in 4 days. What’s the R value of this variant, 100?
Thank god for boosters. The WHO would have them sent them to timbuktu if they had the decision
@Peazel: you know more than the health experts, very impressive.
the health experts don’t seem to know a lot about it either if you read what they say about it, they use an awful lot of words like this could happen, this might happen, if this happens, maybe this might happen.
I thought the UK announced two weeks ago that they had beaten Covid with their approach of opening society during summer when people could be outside. And that everyone else’s (meaning Europe’s) had been wrong. What a shower of raving loonies.
@lelookcoco: at the start of the year most people were expecting an open summer, and winter. Vaccines, you know.
And if we banned cars and outdoor activities there would be less deaths…… We going have to assess. A world in which has increasing older population is not comparable to pandemics of yesteryear.
The trouble here is governments around the world think their ahead of the virus when it’s quite the opposite!
If Omicron pretty much goes about undetected then you can bet it’s already infected more than the tracing system has picked up..
Everyone still needs to keep their gaurd up because Delta is still the big bad circulating.
Vaccines work or not?
@Aonghus O Flaherty: Going off what they said last year…Nope.
@Josepi: What did they say last year?
@Aonghus O Flaherty: Yes. If you need proof, campare last January to now, look at the hospital figures, ICU numbers and deaths, and then think about the most important difference: last January we were locked down with only the essentials available. And now the country is open except for nightclubs
@Josepi: Who are “They”? If “They” are those who thought that vaccines are a magical shield that the virus bounces off, you were listening to the wrong people.
The Dup should put up or shut up and mind thier own business
Dr Facebook has arrived in the comments
@DJ François: Welcome:)
So sorry for those that go by way of the virus. For most others, its business as usual with the odd workaround.
have your say