Patch: Seven Years of Young Builder Innovation – Impact Report 2025
A letter from Tom McCarthy
Patch Founder and Chairperson
In 2025, Patch runs our seventh summer accelerator. You may remember our first programme in 2019, which was very much an experiment – we put 12 extraordinary young people in the same room and asked them to build something cool. We had a lot to learn, but we were absolutely confident that gathering Ireland’s most talented youth and supporting them as best we could would lead to something extraordinary.
Where are we now? As of today, we have over 200 alumni. Some are waiting on Leaving Cert results and others have hit escape velocity. Patchers have won 95 awards at the Young Scientist Exhibition, including seven overall winners, three Patchers have been selected for MIT’s Research & Science Institute, and Patchers have launched 34 startups, raising more than $26M in funding.
Patch’s own activities have expanded to include a grants programme, a San Francisco Fellowship and TECS, a national talent search run in partnership with ISE. Alongside these core programmes, we now support a growing set of alumni-run initiatives aligned with our mission, such as RoboWars, Demos Anon and Give(a)go. Patchers are naturally emerging as leaders and instigators in different communities, and their footprint will only grow with time. This flywheel has taken off in the past 18 months, and nowhere as clearly as within Patch, where alumni will run all 2025 programming, led by alums Tim Farrelly (2020) and Lucy Daly (2023).
None of this is possible in isolation. Patch relies on so much goodwill and support in every area of our work. To all of the Patch mentors, speakers, funders and partners reading this: Thank you. We sincerely appreciate every iota of time and energy you give to help us, and to help Patchers. A special thank you to our funders and major partners: Stripe, Dogpatch Labs, OpenAI, NDRC, Abbey Capital, Brian Kingham, Craig Falls, Mark Cummins and Rob Granieri.
I believe that encouragement, along with community, is the most important thing Patch offers. We don’t tell Patchers what to do, but we do try and show them that the sky is the limit. This happens through a thousand different interactions; a mentor challenges a team to think differently, teammates egg each other on to attempt something they wouldn’t have done alone, or an older – or younger! – Patcher sets an inspiring example. Anybody with exceptional gifts is always at risk of settling for the status quo. The only remedy for this is a community that constantly encourages you to take your ideas and ambitions seriously. Patch’s mission, and great challenge, is to provide this to every talented young person, and give them a real chance to realise their potential.
Tom McCarthy,
Founder and Chairperson
Want to find out more? Read the full impact report here
