Inside Track: Irish coffee guru Meehan saving the planet (2024)

Margaret Byrne, the Armagh woman who ran Sunderland AFC, is now selling snazzy alloy wheels. Byrne was chief executive at the English football club when it was owned by Ellis Short, the Irish passport-holding private equity baron.

She resigned from the role in 2016 after acknowledging she had made a serious mistake in allowing Adam Johnson to keep playing for the club while he was on bail for a sex offence — for which he was subsequently convicted.

Byrne received an £850,000 payout from Sunderland and set up a football agency called First for Players, which represents players including the England footballer Beth Mead and Dundalk striker Patrick Hoban. She was also involved in the £25 million deal to bring Yannick Bolasie to Everton.

Now I see she has joined up with the Wheel Company, becoming an investor and a director of the alloy wheel renovator specialist, which operates across the north of England.

There are plenty of petrolhead footballers — from Antony to Zlatan Ibrahimovic — looking for pimped-up wheels.

Blue Bottle Coffee founder answers the cry for kelp

Bryan Meehan who sold his Blue Bottle coffee chain to Nestlé in a deal valuing the artisan coffee group at more than €580 million, is getting serious about sustainability.

I’m told that the Dubliner has just chucked some money into a $15.3 million pre-seed funding round at the green tech firm Loliware, which makes sustainable drinking straws out of seaweed. Loliware’s Blue Carbon straw is made from farmed seaweed that has been converted — through a fiercely clever bit of alchemy — into plastic pellets and then into straws. They are fully recyclable and compostable.

Meehan previously raised money from the likes of the Hollywood actor Jared Leto, the skateboarder Tony Hawk and Bono to build out his organic coffee chain, Blue Bottle. He also co-founded the Fresh & Wild organic grocery chain, which was sold off to Whole Foods.

The serial entrepreneur, who is also behind the all-natural cosmetics group Nude, most recently banged some money into EcoCart, a carbon emissions tracking play. Full-time job, this, saving the planet.

Fleming bounces back as Britain’s modular builder

Interesting to see that it was John Fleming, above, the son of a Cork fisherman who became one of the biggest developers in the country before the bust, who has just sold a 192-bed London hotel to Dermot Crowley’s listed hotel group, Dalata.

Fleming originally struck a deal to develop the Finsbury Park hotel for Premier Inn, before Dalata stepped in to buy the property for €50 million.

The Corkonian was the first big-name developer to head across the Irish Sea to take advantage of the UK’s less draconian bankruptcy regime. He is now well and truly back on his feet and is at the forefront of modular, or factory-built, construction in the UK.

Fleming paid £26 million for a tiny sliver of land in Canary Wharf, east London, from the receiver of a company controlled by the colourful businessman Ramesh Dusoruth.

Fleming, who developed Fota Island Resort hotel, is building a 48-storey student accommodation block on the docklands plot with more than 1,000 beds. His next-door neighbour will be Sean Mulryan’s Ballymore and its 52-storey apartment block on Cuba Street.

Mahonys steer cash into payroll start-up Outmin

The Toyota and Lexus-distributing Mahony family have emerged as backers of Ross Hunt and David Kelleher’s innovative Outmin start-up, which showers bookkeeping and payroll services with a big dollop of technology to make them more efficient.

I believe that the jeweller Daniel McManus and PI pizza king John Savage — via his Goulding Capital — are also backers of the start-up, along with Noel Kelly’s Kellysan Enterprises.

Kelly was one of the co-founders of the oil services firm Kentz, which was sold to SNC-Lavalin for €1.4 billion about nine years ago.

Outmin is Hunt’s next big project, having co-founded the utterly genius Cainthus, which uses facial recognition to tell if moo-cows are under the weather.

While this sounds utterly bonkers, it turns out to be extraordinarily valuable for farmers, leading to the vast US commodities and agri-trader Cargill taking control of the business.

Waste boss bets farm on cow tech firm Herdwatchhttps://www.daft.ie/

I see that the Jmag vehicle of Jimmy Martin, the Limerick waste technology entrepreneur, has bought a big fat chunk of Fabien Peyaud’s farming software business, Herdwatch.

Martin’s Jmag raised money from assorted high-rollers including John Herlihy, the former Google and Linkedin boss, and KKR’s Alan Burke — who sold Avoca Capital for €100 million in 2014 — and ploughed it all into the farming technology business. Martin is one of the founders of AMCS, which has developed a waste management software platform used by city authorities and recycling operators.

Herdwatch, which attracted funding from Renatus and other backers last year, helps farmers with livestock management.

Internal research showed that its software saved farmers up to three hours a week in paperwork. That gives them more time to buy property in Dublin, I suppose.

Gradguide’s Hughes taps into sales teams tech

Mark Hughes, above, who sold his Gradguide graduate jobs and mentoring website to the UK technology group Native last year, is back on the start-up horse. I hear he’s teamed up with ex-Intercom whizz Patrick Finlay in a new venture called SolidRoad.

The start-up is developing a way to coach sales teams by using artificial intelligence to help them seal the deal while on calls. Terry Clune, the zillionaire fintech founder of Taxback and later TransferMate, could be due a call. His CluneTech venture company funded Hughes’s Gradguide with a €2 million equity investment as the venture aimed to become the number one connector of talent-hungry technology companies and shiny new graduates emerging from universities.

•Ronan Dunne, the Dubliner who ran the O2 mobile empire in the UK before heading to America to helm the vast telco Verizon, has rocked up in a tiny voice technology company as a special adviser. I’m told the Blackrock College man has joined up with the Australian Norwood Systems in an advisory role. This is most curious as Norwood — listed on the Australian Stock Exchange — has a market cap of just over €5 million. However, the specialist developer is working on clever ways of using machine learning to transform things such as chatbots which handle call forwarding and voice messaging. The New Zealand telco Spark is already on the customer list. Dunne knows the industry inside out, so it is a significant link-up.