Where AI-named companies are forming in Ireland
The Irish companion to the UK report, built the same way: every company on the Irish CRO register whose name signals AI, classified by the same keyword definition and the same website classifier. Ireland is a useful second country, and its register keeps dissolved companies, so the survival picture is real, not survivorship-biased.
Monthly Irish AI-named company formations
From a near-flatline in the 2010s to the post-ChatGPT acceleration, the same shape as the UK at roughly a fifteenth of the volume. Monthly counts are small, so individual months are noisy; read the trend, not the spikes. (The most recent month is partial.)
The same story by year, with 2026 on pace
Annual Irish AI formations. 2026 is only part-filed (the CRO bulk we hold runs to mid-April), shown solid for what is confirmed and faded for the full-year run-rate projection. The post-ChatGPT climb is steep and still rising.
The AI naming surge is real in Ireland too, and tracks the UK
AI-named companies as a share of ALL Irish formations, with the UK on the same axis as a benchmark. Both rise from well under 0.1% a decade ago to roughly half a percent in 2025, and both inflect at the same point, 2023. Two independent national registers moving in lockstep is strong evidence the surge is a genuine cross-national shift, not a quirk of one country. Both cohorts use the same keyword definition, so they are like-for-like.
AI against Ireland's other naming fads
The same six naming waves run on the Irish register (linear axis; the counts are small). AI climbs hard from 2023 to become the largest wave, with wellness/beauty a steady second and crypto spiking around 2021 then fading, the same fad landscape as the UK, on a smaller stage.
What they file versus what they actually build
As in the UK, the official sector code understates how vertical Irish AI really is. 55.6% of the NACE-coded cohort file a software/IT/information code, but the website classifier shows only about a quarter are genuinely horizontal plays (developer tools, infrastructure). The rest build AI for a specific industry, finance, health, legal, marketing and so on. (Website-classified companies only; catch-all buckets excluded. 379 of 504 classified.)
Self-reported sector (NACE)
What Irish AI-named companies file as their NACE activity code. Computer programming and IT dominate, exactly as the SIC picture does in the UK. Of 499 companies, 428 carry a code.
Where they register
Eircode region of Irish AI-named companies. The concentration mirrors the UK's London / virtual-office story: formation clusters hard in the capital. Dublin alone holds 55% of the 380 companies with an eircode.
Do they survive? Ireland can actually answer this
Unlike the UK bulk (live-only), the Irish register keeps dissolved companies, so we can state a real, survivorship-free outcome for every cohort. Two views: the all-time attrition curve (what share of each incorporation year is still on the register), and the current status of the AI cohort.
Current status of the 499 Irish AI-named companies
The .ie / .ai / .com mix
Domain ending of Irish AI-named companies with a live website. Unlike the UK (where .com dominates and .ai is the AI-native second), Irish founders lean on the national .ie alongside .com, with the AI-native .ai also present. (Best discovered domain per company.)
Common registration addresses: the virtual-office pattern
As in the UK, a handful of addresses host several AI-named companies, the signature of serviced-office and registered-office providers, plus at least one genuine startup hub (Dogpatch Labs), where the shared address is real operating startups, not name-parking. Smaller in scale than the UK (the busiest holds single digits).
What Ireland's data cannot tell us (and the UK's can)
The Irish CRO bulk carries company records, sectors, eircodes and dissolution dates, but not the two things the UK report leans on most:
- People. No director or beneficial-owner records, so the founder analyses (solo-founder share, under-30 founders, nationality, owner location, director networks) are impossible for Ireland. There is no free Irish equivalent of the Companies House officer/PSC data.
- Funding. No equivalent of the share-capital and charges data we mined for the UK. Ireland does have the right form, though: companies file a Form B5 (Return of Allotments) within a month of issuing shares, and it records the consideration paid, the actual amount, which is more than the UK's SH01 reveals. Extracting B5s at scale needs the CRO filings dataset or paid document retrieval; it is the clearest path to an Irish funding picture.
So this report is complete on formation, naming, sector, geography and survival, stronger than the UK on survival, and silent where the data simply does not exist.