Accenture Technology Ventures will shortly announce further investments in Irish technology firms, a founding general partner of its European team said yesterday.

Mr Nad Sloane said he was immensely impressed with the number of early-stage Irish technology companies and the quality of their ideas and management.

Today the company will announce a major investment in Buytel, a biometrics firm that develops voice verification products. Two more Irish investments are likely to be announced shortly.

The venture firm was working with Accenture's launch centre in Dublin to identify companies for investment from its $1 billion (€1.12 billion) global technology fund, said Mr Sloane.

He said the Republic was similar to Israel because it had good technology, an educated workforce and a small population forcing it to look outside its borders.

Buytel is the first announced and largest investment Accenture has made in an Irish company. "It's in a very good technology space and we believe voice verification has the greatest potential of all the biometric options such as fingerprinting or iris scanning. It's less intrusive and hopefully less costly."

Accenture has already begun to introduce Buytel to its worldwide clients and hopes to serve as a reseller for Buytel's products outside Europe.

Despite the market downturn Accenture has continued investing. Last year it invested some $200 million in companies.