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IGNITE Start-ups Win at Ireland's Best Young Entrepreneur Awards
IGNITE Startup Founders Paul O’Shea of Peckish and Darragh Lucey of Yooni won Awards for Best Business Idea at IBYE Cork Finals.
Paul won the Cork City Local Enterprise Office Award and Darragh won the South Cork Local Enterprise Award and both will represent the LEOs at the IBYE Regional finals which will be held in the Cork Mart, Fermoy on the 12 June 2019.
They were among five IGNITE startup founders who were short listed for the Cork finals of IBYE Awards on the 30 April at Republic of Work and they received a share of a total fund of €150,000 that was awarded to the winning businesses.
Darragh Lucey is co-founder of Yooni with Nathan Mayes. The business aims to help students make better choices of 3rd level courses. While Paul's business, Peckish, is developing an online platform that identifies the restaurants that cater for specific dietary requirements.
Nicole Ryan of Alex's Adventure is developing a scalable model that helps secondary school students make better choices about drugs and alcohol, Ali-Rose Sisk of Safecare is developing a platform to help care homes manage audits and IGNITE alumnus Ryan O'Neill of Legit Fit, developing a management tool for fitness professionals were among the Cork finalists.
A number of IGNITE Alumni have progressed to the National Finals in recent years. Conor Lyden of TrustAp was named Best Young Entrepreneur at the IBYE Regional final and represented Cork in the 2018 Natinal Finals. Richard Barrett, co-founder of Pundit Arena received the Best Promotion of Business On-Line Google Award and Fiona Edwards-Murphy, co-founder of Apisprotect, was among the eight national finalists in the Best Business Idea category narrowly missing out on the top award in her category.
IBYE recognises the best young entrepreneurs in three categories; Best Business Idea, Best Start-Up Business and Best Established Business and the winners will go forward to represent their Local Enterprise Office at regional level and ultimately, national level.