Celebrating Northern Ireland in the Americas

Next week is St. Patrick’s Day, the holiday when people around the world celebrate the island of Ireland. But in my opinion, one day out of the year isn’t enough to celebrate the success stories of Northern Ireland businesses.

Recently, I was compiling a report that required stories from the past year of Northern Ireland companies exporting into my region. I was struck by how many of them there were. Despite the challenges of the past two years, Northern Ireland companies have been making their mark in the Americas. They’re sending exports, opening offices, striking strategic partnerships and making acquisitions in the US, Canada and Latin America. It’s heartening to see.

For Northern Irish companies, expanding into international markets is critical for sales and success, and few have more opportunity for our businesses than the Americas.

The Size of the Opportunity

The United States is Northern Ireland’s second-largest single export market after the Republic of Ireland. According to HMRC’s Regional Trade Statistics, ￡992m worth of goods were exported from Northern Ireland to the US in 2020 alone. Canada is also a hugely important trading partner: ￡414m worth of exports flowed from Northern Ireland to Canada in 2020.

These trading partnerships are built on common culture. 9.7% of people in the US (that’s 31.5 million people, including half of the US presidents) and 4.6 million Canadians (more than 13% of the population) claim full or partial Irish ancestry.

And not to discount opportunities further south… Brazil and Mexico rank in the top 20 countries by GDP, and we’re seeing more companies explore opportunities in Latin America.

Life Sciences Lead the Way

A sector that has emerged as a key exporter is Life Sciences. Pharmaceutical and medical products alone account for 19% of Northern Ireland’s exports to the US.

One of Northern Ireland’s pillars in that sector is global pharma firm Almac. The company played a key role in the clinical trials of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine. In late 2021, they announced 1,800 new jobs over the next three years in both Northern Ireland and the US, where they are a major employer.

Axial3D technology transforms 2D medical images into 3D visuals in minutes. They made news last November when they partnered with Boston/Paris-based BIOMODEX to help the estimated 6.5m people in the US with brain aneurysms. They also partnered with Chicago’s Fast Radius to clear through surgical backlogs in North America. Using Axial3D models, US physicians reported improved surgical planning and surgery times on average 62 minutes shorter.

Late last year Neurovalens announced an R&D partnership with Ulster University Coleraine and the University of California at San Diego. Clinical trials will explore non-invasive neuro-technology treatments for generalized anxiety disorder, insomnia and PTSD.

B-Secur’s innovative HeartKey? ECG/EKG software was approved by the FDA in February 2021. That summer, they announced a partnership with Texas Instruments to place their tech in consumer wearable devices. They ended a momentous 2021 by raising $12m USD from Colorado VC firm First Capital Ventures.

Overwatch Research’s workflow software is specifically designed for medical research, tackling the global issue of experimental errors in pre-clinical stages. The product generated millions of pounds worth of exports in the US, which caught the eye of Silicon Valley. Last October, the company announced a $3.5m seed round in part from San Francisco-based investors, and last month, they were acquired by Benchling, a US pioneer of R&D cloud software that powers the biotech industry.

It’s people that power the Life Sciences industry, and in a time where finding talent has never been so difficult, a company like Londonderry-Derry headquartered MPA Recruitment can play a critical role. The company opened its first North American office in Toronto last August, where it will provide recruitment services for Canada’s digital health and renewable energy industries.

The Silicon Causeway

Northern Ireland has attracted many US tech companies as a location of choice for their global expansion efforts, but our technology ecosystem wouldn’t be complete without our home-grown innovators.

STATSports provides GPS-enabled wearables that track and improve athlete performance. Their tech is used by the US Soccer Men’s and Women’s National Team programs, many Major League Soccer clubs, and a number of US soccer stars. The company expanded that reach in January by partnering with US Youth Soccer, the largest youth sports organization in the world with nearly 3m players.

Last spring, Kairos launched a new office in the US after closing a ￡1.5m seed round. Their platform is used by elite sports teams and athletes to manage schedules and communications. Last year they began working with the Canadian Premier League and currently work with Halifax FC and York United.

Jetpack Learning, a game-based learning provider, tailored its new Game Changer platform for Canadian jurisdictions. The first to benefit from the platform were First Nations schools in British Columbia, which can now create unlimited learning games in their own languages. A similar platform was built for the Red Cloud School in South Dakota.

In January, another e-learning company, Learning Pool of Derry-Londonderry, acquired True Office, a New York Stock Exchange spin-out with Fortune 100 clients. Learning Pool now boasts offices in Boston, New York, Denver and Ontario, Canada.

Also in January, Kainos bought procurement IT company Blackline Group, based in Washington State, to strengthen its Workday capabilities. The acquisition is Kainos’s third in the Americas, after the acquisition of IntuitiveTEK and?Buenos Aires-based UNE Consulting last year. They now have offices in Atlanta, Indianapolis and Toronto.

In November, e-commerce fulfilment company Selazar received the largest-ever tech investment for a Northern Irish company. The ￡20m they secured will partly fund new offices and warehouses in the US, Mexico and Colombia.

And Options Technology, the leading provider of managed trading infrastructure and connectivity to global capital markets, announced in September the opening of a Toronto office. It’s the third North American location for the Belfast company, joining New York and Chicago.

Invest Northern Ireland: Not Just FDI Support

In addition to having a foreign direct investment team that helps companies from the Americas expand into Northern Ireland (I covered recent successes here), Invest NI also has a trade team: sector experts based across the US, Canada & Latin America to support the exporting needs and aspirations of Northern Irish businesses.

We help them develop and execute their go-to-market plans, refine customer profiles, qualify their total addressable market, and identify the best distribution/sales route to achieve export wins.

I’m proud that our teams have worked with many of the companies above, and lots of others, to improve their products and make in-roads into new markets.

For instance, healthcare and beauty company We Are Paradoxx has worked with Invest NI since 2017. They utilized R&D grants to develop their 3-in-1 hair tool, Supernova, and grew their international business through our trade visit programs. This growth helped them broker a deal with US shopping network QVC, where they sold over ￡35k worth of product in under 8 minutes! They also sell into Macy’s department stores.

Similarly, Invest NI has supported bespoke manufacturing company The Deluxe Group with grants to create new jobs in their Portadown headquarters, and provided guidance on increasing sales in the US, Japan and the Middle East. In January, they premiered Pub óg—a miniature version of an Irish pub you can buy for your own backyard—at the PGA Merchandise Show in Orlando, selling 25 of them at $80k USD a pop!

And we can’t forget the materials handling industry—one of Northern Ireland’s strongest exporters if they find the right local distributors, which Invest NI can help facilitate. Walker Industries, one of Canada's largest green waste and recycling organizations, uses an Ecohog machine to sort compost, diverting 65k tons of organic material away from landfills annually. Calgary Aggregate Recycling is building a soil reuse facility that will recycle soils unsuitable for use in new construction, reducing waste and greenhouse gas emissions. The facility is the first of its kind in Canada, and the wet processing technology will be supplied by Northern Ireland-based CDE.

As we collectively begin to emerge from the shadow of the pandemic, I am truly excited to welcome even more Northern Ireland companies to the Americas, and Invest NI will continue to support their international growth.

Congrats to our companies on all of their success! Contact me if your company is interested in exploring the Americas market.