Kevin McCarthy was all set for a university career. “I thought my future was in academia,” he says.

As a teenager in the 1990s, and the proud owner of a Gateway 2000 PC, he had fallen hard for computers. “It gave me the bug,” says the native of Boolavogue, Co Wexford, who went on to study computer science at University College Dublin.

He graduated in 2003 with first-class honours and worked briefly for one of UCD’s most successful spinouts, ChangingWorlds. He then completed a PhD in content-based recommender systems, the algorithms that today build our Spotify playlists and Netflix suggestions, under Professor Barry Smyth, one of the ChangingWorlds founders.

There followed stints as a post-doctoral researcher on “sensor web technologies” at UCD’s Clarity centre and as a research fellow at Insight, its data analytics centre.

However, along the way, universities’ research funding model had changed. “It became a lot more about industry-participant funding and as a result we had a lot of industry partners coming through the door.” They were all seeking hot academic discoveries ripe for commercialisation, and McCarthy acted as something of a maitre d’, showing companies to the right research benches to find it.

The experience provided the inspiration for Aficionado Technologies, his first venture. It developed software to help research organisations advertise their human talent, intellectual property and patents in order to match with industry partners. Though it got some traction, ultimately it didn’t work: “We had a good product. We didn’t have a good product-market fit.”

Also, as a technologist, he “was comfier with the technology side than the commercial side, even though the commercial side needs just as much attention. So there was lots of learning from that”.

In 2016 he broke out again, co-founding RecommenderX, a developer of enterprise data visualisation and decision support systems, helping organisations to make better decisions by transforming complex data into easily understandable visual formats, enabling faster analysis and more informed choices.

• Data helps Irish firms face the future

In the early stages, to generate revenue, he offered data science services to clients on a consultancy basis. The company grew, with staff rising to 35 at one stage, but the loss of key contracts in 2018 forced a pivot. “We realised that if we became a product business in this space we could grow further and get a higher valuation for the company,” he says.

McCarthy found that consumer goods companies were basing key decisions on price and promotions on data derived from a number of different sources and in disparate formats.

“To get a clear picture of how your products are performing across the whole market was almost impossible,” he says. “These companies are drowning in data sources. By the time they crunch and compress it all to produce the monthly reports, new data has come in. So they spend all their time analysing data rather than understanding and actioning it.”

With the help of investment from venture capital firms including ACT and Elkstone, McCarthy’s business developed its own analytics platform, Advise, using advanced artificial intelligence. It automates the entire data analytics process, ingesting all available information, harmonising it and automatically generating a range of reports instantly. Data analysis is a global problem, and therefore a global opportunity.

• Data analytics is the final frontier for employers

“As far as we are concerned data analytics is now dead, because we’ve automated it,” he says. Although Covid was tough, as consumer goods companies wrestled with lockdowns and supply chain snarl-ups, RecommenderX has doubled revenues every year since 2022, mainly through referrals. This year it will earn revenues of €5 million.

These days McCarthy admits he no longer daydreams about the salary — and pension — he would have enjoyed in academia, or even as a highly skilled professional in industry. He says: “This is totally my passion.”