Lucey secures €1m funding
A Dublin-based software start-up has raised about €1 million in funding after developing a number of online businesses applications aimed at small and medium-sized businesses.
Lucey Technology delivers its offering using the software as a service (SaaS) business model, in which customers pay a monthly fee determined by the number of users and level of services they require.
Ian Lucey, founder and chief executive of Lucey Technology, said the company was founded with the goal of taking services usually available to larger businesses and making them available to smaller companies.
Lucey Technology’s software is developed using Microsoft’s SharePoint platform.
‘‘It is normally used internally by big businesses, but we have re-engineered to be used for external applications by smaller companies,” Lucey said.
Among the services Lucey is selling are online payments, instant messaging, video conferencing, voiceover IP telephony and document sharing, such as quotes, sales orders, invoices, and contracts.
The company has already been trialling its technology with a number of accountancy practices, and Lucey said one application it offered was digital signatures.
An accountancy firm usually files accounts electronically, but still needs to send them to the client for signing. Allowing a client to sign off on its accounts electronically saves on time and allows the accountant to be paid more quickly, he said.
Lucey said buying an online payments solution as a service rather than negotiating one individually could also lead to cost savings.
‘‘A lot of banks will charge between 2 and 5 per cent to small companies for processing online payments,” he said.
‘‘We have negotiated a rate of 1.24 per cent on the basis of the amount of business we can bring in, which no small company could get by themselves.”
Lucey Technology’s business model charges customers for usage on the basis of three metrics, namely the number of staff using the software, the number of features required and the amount of space used on its servers. Fees start at €10 per month, he said.
Although the company has just launched itself on the market, it already has 60 customers that it signed up during beta testing. Lucey said that interest in the offering was strong and he won 20 new customers alone at a conference last week.
The company has raised approximately €1 million in investment since its foundation late last year. €500,000 of this came from Enterprise Ireland, with the balance coming from BES scheme investors and Lucey and his co-founder Joe Healy.
