{"id":606244,"date":"2026-08-27T13:38:18","date_gmt":"2026-08-27T13:38:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/606244\/"},"modified":"2026-08-27T13:38:18","modified_gmt":"2026-08-27T13:38:18","slug":"the-long-road-to-building-an-irish-ai-start-up-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/606244\/","title":{"rendered":"The long road to building an Irish AI start-up \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the defining features of social media<\/a> for business<\/a> is that it\u2019s relentless. It demands a constant flow of new material, and for SMEs<\/a>, that can put additional strain on scant resources. <\/p>\n

There are, of course, companies that can afford to hire a social media manager or to pay a contractor or a marketing agency to run their online coverage for them. For the rest, it\u2019s an in-house task conducted with varying degrees of success. <\/p>\n

Cue the arrival of Coso, an AI<\/a> agent designed to do much of the heavy lifting on content creation once it has learned about a company and its brand. <\/p>\n

The agent automatically generates weekly multimedia content, a human approves it, and the content goes live across the company\u2019s social media channels with a single click. No marketing agency or outside contractor required. <\/p>\n

Coso.ai<\/a> is the brainchild of James Flynn and Brendan Scullion and while the business now has the wind in its sails, it\u2019s been a long road that tested the founders\u2019 staying power. <\/p>\n

The origins of the business go back eight years to a conversation in a pub, and the company was set up in 2020. <\/p>\n

However, Covid, funding issues, rapidly evolving AI and the long development time necessary for deep tech meant its alpha product only launched in November 2025, with the beta following in July of this year. <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d say the hardest part of getting to where we are now was putting all of our heart, soul and energy into bringing a product to market and staying resilient when things weren\u2019t looking as rosy as they are now,\u201d says Flynn. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe idea for Coso started forming when I was having a drink with some friends who were working at a marketing agency at the time and doing competitive analysis of their clients\u2019 competitors by hand. <\/p>\n

\u201cTo me this exercise seemed like something that should be automated. Indeed, it was the perfect problem for AI to tackle as it solves one of the biggest bottlenecks in building AI systems: labelling data.\u201d <\/p>\n

After three years R&D we basically ran out of cash and I ended up delivering pizza<\/p>\n

\u2014 \u00a0James Flynn<\/p>\n

Flynn says this is usually done by a human \u201cand takes ages and is very costly\u201d. \u201cBut because all social media data is inherently labelled as good or bad based on the number of likes, comments and shares a post gets, it\u2019s perfect for building AI systems on. We set out to train our own models from scratch to predict content performance, suggest improvements and ultimately generate content. <\/p>\n

\u201cToday, we use a combination of our own technology and models like Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini to create social media content for our customers. At the moment companies either pay an agency \u20ac30,000 a year or do their own, and DIY rarely works. Coso is the first product to offer a viable alternative to an agency through the use of cutting-edge AI.\u201d <\/p>\n

Flynn and Scullion met while working for quantitative trading firm Susquehanna International Group. Flynn, who studied computer science at UCC, was a systems security engineer with the company. Scullion, who is a computer and electronic engineering graduate from ATU Galway Mayo, was a database engineer. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe built some really cool technology and created our own version of reverse image search, for example,\u201d says Flynn. \u201cSo, if a company was on social media, we could basically find images that their competitors had posted, figure out which of them had done well and then use that as a basis for informing their social media strategy. The problem was that we had a number of great individual solutions but not a cohesive product. After three years R&D we basically ran out of cash and I ended up delivering pizza.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Irish AI start-up targets missed calls and lost revenue in tradesOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

To keep body and soul together, the co-founders went back to paid employment but never let go of their idea. \u201cWe were on a downward trajectory for a bit, but we picked ourselves up, raised a small bit of money and got going again,\u201d says Flynn. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe rearchitected everything to get all of our advanced technology into one product, and we are well ahead of the market now in terms of our capabilities. This won\u2019t last forever, so the earlier we can scale and make the most of our first-mover advantage, the better. <\/p>\n

\u201cAt this point Coso writes, designs and schedules a full week of content for our customers. All they have to do is approve the posts. It also writes the captions, fills the calendar and offers fresh content every week. Customers can edit a post, and edits are saved and remembered.\u201d <\/p>\n

Coso is built for people who are not trained in social media marketing, and it is aimed at SMEs that need to post new content regularly but don\u2019t have, or can\u2019t justify, having someone do the job full-time. <\/p>\n

\u201cTaxi firms, clinics, solicitors, local franchises and service businesses of every kind are our market and every post is tailored to a company\u2019s brand, not pulled from a generic template,\u201d says Flynn. <\/p>\n

Coso is based at Dogpatch Labs and employs four. It has roughly 100 paying customers on its books, including marketing agencies that often have to run social media campaigns for their clients as a loss leader. <\/p>\n

Coso\u2019s customers are spread across Ireland, Britain, the US, Greece, South Africa and Australia. Product pricing starts at \u20ac99 per month, and the system is multicultural and multilingual. The company is aiming to have 1,000 clients by the end of 2027.<\/p>\n

Coso is an Enterprise Ireland HPSU company, and has raised roughly \u20ac700,000 to date through the founders, State support and angel funding. <\/p>\n

Conventional wisdom has it that start-ups looking for money should do a concentrated round of pitches to potential investors, which can be both time-consuming and exhausting. <\/p>\n

Coso\u2019s co-founders took a more informal approach and met their investors over time at different events, through a WhatsApp group for start-ups and through personal contacts. <\/p>\n

Asked how well the start-up ecosystem supported Coso, Flynn says: \u201cI think there should be fewer consultants and fewer people that have not built a tech business in the last 10 years in the mix. <\/p>\n

\u201cGovernment supports should also be based more on the realities of an early-stage start-up and there should be tax incentives for angel investing, along with education on investing in general to encourage less money being spent on property and savings and more being put into supporting domestic businesses. I think the entire guidance around start-ups should be driven by founders who are running scaled tech companies or recently had an exit.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One of the defining features of social media for business is that it\u2019s relentless. It demands a constant…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":606245,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,16122,61,91347,60,80],"class_list":["post-606244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-digital-solutions","tag-ie","tag-innovators-to-watch","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=606244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606244\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/606245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=606244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=606244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=606244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}