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Colata, a Dublin-based sports technology company, is seeking to raise €1 million in its upcoming seed funding round later this year. Founded in 2023 by Fiona Ryan and Kieran Collins at TU Dublin, Colata currently employs five staff members and has already secured €700,000 in funding. “We’re a sports analytics company. We solve a particular problem in sporting organisations. Data is everywhere; they’ve got these deep data silos across many systems. Everything is monitored in relation to athletes now,” Ryan told the Business Post. “We sit at the strategic layer. We bring that data into Colata, integrate it, and add an agentic layer on top of it. That provides contextual knowledge in relation to the data.” The company’s AI system is named Reilly. Users simply ask Reilly a question, and it provides the relevant information. Ryan and Collins had worked together extensively in TU Dublin and at the Ludgate Hub in Cork before starting Colata. “Kieran was experiencing an issue with elite sporting organisations that he was working with. It kept on coming up time and again. They were dealing with large datasets and struggling to get insights from them. He was MacGyvering solutions for them,” Ryan said. “We decided there was something worth exploring and started talking with the TU Dublin innovation office. That led to us engaging in some programmes and engaging with sporting organisations.” Given the scale of the problem Colata sought to tackle, the business engaged in substantial research before truly hitting the ground running. “We had a robust feasibility study behind us before we sought funding. We applied for commercialisation funding with Enterprise Ireland and that allowed us to create our product offering while expanding our development team,” Ryan said. “The last two years have been really focused on the development side of things. We’ve spun out of the university successfully, we have five patents filed and nine organisations using the system.” Colata is supported by Enterprise Ireland and Ryan said the agency’s help has been invaluable to the company’s development. “It’s not just about the money but also the educational supports and the ecosystem they can wrap around you. We had access to all of that as well as to fantastic mentors through Enterprise Ireland,” she said. “They gave us the mindset and the knowledge needed to scale the business over the last number of years.” The immediate future of the business is focused on more research with customers but Colata also aims to crack some international markets in the near future. “We really want to double down on our numbers, increasing our trial partnerships and increasing the number of practitioners using Reilly. We’re predominantly looking at Ireland and the UK at the moment but we have plans to reach the US in 2027,” Ryan said. This Making it Work article was produced in partnership with Enterprise Ireland.