Irish-owned UK online retail portal Ufurnish raises €3.8m

Ufurnish.com, an Irish-backed online furniture sales portal based in Britain, has raised a further £3.4 million (€3.8 million) in seed funding from wealthy private investors. The most recent fundraising round puts a putative value on the business at £15 million to £20 million, it is understood.

Ufurnish was cofounded in London four years ago by Sligo entrepreneur and former HSBC investment banker Deirdre McGettrick, and her partner Raymond Wright. It has raised more than £5.2 million since its inception and is majority controlled by its two founders.

While its shareholders include some of the best-known men in Irish business such as Smurfit Kappa chief executive Tony Smurfit and the Dalata hotel group co-founder Pat McCann, Ms McGettrick said the company’s investor base is now about 30 per cent female.

Its roster of backers includes some of the top Irish businesswomen in Britain, such as Rosaleen Blair, founder and chair of Alexander Mann Solutions. Other investors include Ciara McElligott, a partner in Tetrarch capital, where her brother Michael McElligott is a principal. Michele Connolly, a KPMG Ireland partner and board member of the National Maternity Hospital, is also an investor.

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“Obviously, the lion’s share of our investors are still men, but to have 30 per cent women backers for a data and technology firm in the furniture sector is unusual, to say the least,” Ms McGettrick said.

While the furniture sector tends to be male dominated, she said many of the customers making buying decisions are female.

“It is nice to have that female entrepreneur viewpoint. What I found working in investment banking is that men are the more prolific investors. I hope that is changing,” she said.

The business operates as a customer-facing portal for the UK’s biggest furniture retailers, such as John Lewis, Argos, Habitat and Wayfair. It has been characterised in the past as a “Skyscanner for furniture”, collating all the best deals from various retailers on to one online platform.

The business is chaired by Mr McCann, a former IBEC president who retired from Dalata in 2021. Its other directors include its founders and Tony Hickey, a former chief financial officer of Tullow Oil.

Ms McGettrick, who has been based in London for more than a decade, said the latest tranche of cash it has raised will be used to fund marketing in its core British market as well as staff recruitment. As a former banker, she conducted the fund raising herself.

“With my background I was able to reach people with the ability to write a cheque,” she said.

Brexit, she said, has steered many British furniture retailers away from selling into the Irish market but Ufurnish would consider opening an Irish site in future if that trend reversed.