An 18-year-old former winner of the BT Young Scientist of the Year award and his 16-year-old brother are two of the founders of an internet start-up which has received backing from some of Silicon Valley's leading investors.
Auctomatic, an application which enables businesses to manage their sales on eBay and other auction sites, will launch in the next two to three weeks but has already been receiving positive feedback from "PowerSellers" on the web's most popular auction site.
Tipperary native Patrick Collison has deferred his place in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to concentrate on the start-up.
He has moved to San Francisco with his younger brother John for the summer.
In January 2005, Patrick won the Young Scientist of the Year award for Croma, a new programming language based on Lisp, which simplifies the way web applications can be built.
Patrick was in transition year in Castletroy College, Limerick, when he won the award but, last year, he decided he wanted to fast-track his education and applied to US colleges for admission.
"I tried to do the Leaving Cert last year but it turns out you can't do it if you haven't studied for it for two years," says Patrick.
The solution was to sit A- levels and, as a result, he was admitted to MIT last September.
When he was home for Christmas, discussions with his younger brother led the two to start the project that became Auctomatic.
John was a member of the Irish team that travelled to the International Junior Science Olympiad in Indonesia in 2005.
They rented an office in Limerick for three months but had no luck in securing funding in Ireland despite applying to Enterprise Ireland and other sources of seed funding.
"From my limited experience, organisations in Ireland are much more risk-averse and very credentials-oriented," says Patrick.
The pair applied for funding to Y Combinator, a specialist seed fund established by Paul Graham.
Graham is the man credited with writing the world's first web-based application, Viaweb, which he subsequently sold to Yahoo.
Y Combinator had three months previously backed a similar UK-based start-up from Harjeet and Kulveer Taggar (not brothers but distant cousins).
On Y Combinator's suggestion, the two firms merged and moved to San Francisco.
Auctomatic has subsequently received backing from heavyweight angel investors.
Paul Buchheit, the architect of Google's Gmail application and the man who suggested the company's "Don't Be Evil" motto, has invested, while Evan Williams, creator of Google's blogger platform, sits on the board.
After months of coding in San Francisco, the Auctomatic application is finished and is being tested with users.
"Ebay's US sales are about $60 billion per annum and about half of that comes from full-time sellers, but there are no good solutions to manage the process," explains Patrick.
"It was designed for individual-to-individual sales but it was never seen as a site for businesses."
If Auctomatic can tap into some of that (the company plans to charge a 1 per cent commission), the Collison brothers could become Ireland's youngest tech millionaires.
