Rove, a Dublin-based travel tech start-up, has announced that it has closed €450,000 in early-stage seed investment, at a time when the future of the travel and tourism sectors is quite uncertain. Rove has said that the seed round, which was led by Zoosh Ventures and Enterprise Ireland, will position the start-up to take advantage of a growing market segment following the lifting of Covid-19 travel restrictions. The start-up was founded in 2019 by Brian Kearney, former head of digital at Fitbit, with the goal of making activities and experience-based travel more readily accessible to holidaymakers. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, Rove recognised that there was a growing demand for adventure and activity-based travel. According to Allied Market Research 2019, the adventure tourism market was worth €150bn last year. In a statement, the start-up said: "The rise in demand for adventure tourism has been driven by an upsurge in government initiatives promoting experiential tourism. In Ireland, the success of the Wild Atlantic Way in positioning the region as an adventure travel destination and investing in experiential product development, has captured a valuable new tourist segment."

Irish start-up financial technology company Leveris has broken new ground in efforts to unlock the benefits of pure digital banking. Leveris is a digital banking platform that is entirely software based, sits in the cloud and is completely independent of legacy core banking technology. Its technology is already live and has enabled financial services firm Link Group - the largest independent loan servicer in Europe - to enter the Dutch market. The platform enables banks and non-banking firms to offer a wide variety of retail banking products. These include current accounts, deposit and savings accounts, multi-currency accounts, payments and direct debits, debit card cashback, personal loans and mortgages.

One of the most striking things to emerge from the latest Your Dublin Your Voice survey1 is the extent to which the COVID-19 restrictions have seen technology become central to our lives. Nowhere is this clearer than in the transition to working from home. 75% indicated that they currently remote work on a daily basis compared to 6% prior to the restrictions. This has helped people particularly in Professional Services, Public Administration, Education and the Creative Industries maintain at least a portion of their incomes. It may also go some way to explaining why the survey shows that people are more worried about the broader economy (60%) than their own employment situation (17%). Education has also adapted quickly with 94% of students2 indicating that they are remote learning. This appears to be a global trend with, for example, Harvard Summer School being hosted entirely online this summer. This dramatic change to the traditional delivery method of mainly face-to-face education has potentially positive implications for accessibility.