Business

Trinity graduates seek to build multimillion software company for music industry

Co-founders of Naviro aiming to develop substantial business in the next five years

Naviro chief operating officer Ethan Monkhouse: 'What we’re trying to do is understand how [fans] behave, and give actionable solutions that are data-backed.'

Ellen O’Regan
Mon Apr 1 2024 - 06:00

Two Trinity College Dublin graduates are aiming to build a multimillion business in the next five years, with software they have designed to help predict the behaviour of music fans.

Ethan Monkhouse (24) from Kinsale in Co Cork and Lola Nolan (25) from Greystones in Co Wicklow, are co-founders of Naviro, a company that is bringing its software to market this month.

The Naviro platform scrapes data from social media and online communities of music fans, to identify a particular artist’s most dedicated fans and how best to market to them — including by tailoring ideal tour routes and identifying brand collaboration opportunities.

“What we’re trying to do is understand how [fans] behave, and give actionable solutions that are really data-backed,” said Mr Monkhouse.

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“We’ve refined a valuable solution for the music industry, trickling down from labels to managers to artists, and we designed it in a way where we can widen that scope out to a broader creative space,” he added.

The pair first met in Trinity, where both studied computer science and business and were involved heavily in the university’s entrepreneurial society Tangent.

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Both graduated in October 2022 and pursued roles in software engineering, with Mr Monkhouse also keeping up a digital marketing business he started as a student.

“We both liked [software engineering], we were good at it, but it wasn’t the end goal. We realised that we’ve got both skill sets in terms of the marketing ability and also the technical ability, so we decided to combine forces and see what we could build,” he said.

Both entrepreneurs bootstrapped the development of Naviro during 2023 and in January of this year secured €150,000 in pre-seed funding from several investors, namely Dragon’s Den’s Seán Gallagher, Paul Gannon and Clodagh O’Kane.

“Those investors have been fantastic in getting us in front of the right people, but also in advising us on mistakes they’ve made and things that they have found have worked, and that’s guided us a lot,” he said.

Naviro also received guidance from former Snow Patrol drummer Jonny Quinn, said Mr Monkhouse.

With three full-time staff and seven freelancers, the company is in late-stage talks to sign its first retainers for music industry clients.

Mr Monkhouse said they aim to hit monthly profit of €35,000 within their first few months in business and annual recurring revenue of €1.2 million by December.

He added that the ultimate goal is to sell Naviro in the next three to five years. “We do want to exit for around €160 million ... go big or go home I guess,” he said. “We are building to exit. I think we would be quite naive to say we want to hold on to it to retiring age because as a company scales a company changes.”

Ellen O'Regan

Ellen O’Regan

Ellen O’Regan is an Irish Times journalist.

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