Irish insolvency tech start-up Cerebreon raises €1.69m

Cerebreon, a Donegal-based insolvency tech start-up, has closed a £1.5 million (€1.69 million) seed round led by Delta Partners.

Other participants in the funding round include the business angel network Hban, the Western Development Commission, Consilience Ventures, and long-time backer Growing Capital, a Dublin-based investment firm that has backed a number of Irish start-ups in recent years, including Flipdish, Geowox and Popertee.

Cerebreon, which develops fintech software targeted at the UK insolvency industry, said it intended to use the financing to scale its support to vulnerable customers to avoid bankruptcy.

"Our mission is to support the most vulnerable people in society to help them to avoid insolvency. Unsecured personal debt was measured at £3.6 billion, [and] with the Covid-19 outbreak UK families are taking on increasing levels of debt to survive," said founder and chief executive Gillian Doyle.

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Founded by Ms Doyle and Kenneth Doherty in January 2016, the start-up has developed a data extraction, analytics and transmission platform for the insolvency and debt recovery industry that uses machine learning to increase the success of insolvency arrangements, ensuring, it says, that as many consumers as possible become debt free, as well as maximising returns for suppliers.

“By supplying data, debt insight and insolvency predictions to creditors as well as the insolvency industry, we can have a direct and positive effect on financial wellbeing and ultimately survival as a result of breaks in family incomes,” said Ms Doyle.

In January, the company was selected for Accenture's London-based Fintech Innovation lab programme. It was also a finalist in last year's Enterprise Ireland's high-potential start-up Founder of the Year award, and is a former winner of InterTradeIreland's Seedcorn readiness competition.