Pointy secures a €100,000 investment to help retailers get online fast

Irish start-up Pointy is aiming to help retailers keep €3.6 billion in online sales in Ireland, by enabling them to create a website listing all of their products in just five minutes.

The Dublin-based company has created a small electronic device that plugs into a shop’s barcode scanner and point-of-sale system. Whenever a product is scanned, Pointy automatically recognises it and uses the information to build up a website for the shop. The start-up also helps retailers to come up on search engines so that customers can more easily find them.

AIB and Frontline Ventures have invested €100,000 in the start-up, to help it get independent retailers online fast. The funding is from AIB's €2 million Discovery programme, which forms part of the Frontline Ventures l Fund Partnership.

Pointy co-founder Mark Cummins said almost 90 per cent of commerce is still conducted offline, adding the internet hasn’t really touched it yet.

“Finding products locally should be as easy as finding them on Amazon, but the reality is that many independent retailers don’t have their products listed anywhere.”

Mr Cummins said Pointy solves this problem by making every product in every local shop searchable.

“The shop just plugs the Pointy device in and we take care of the rest. We’ve had shops set up and go live with thousands of products in less than five minutes.”

AIB’s head of technology, media and telecoms banking John O’Dwyer said Irish consumers are spending an estimated €6 billion online per annum, of which only 40 per cent is being kept in Ireland. As a result, there is a potential market of €3.6 billion in online sales that currently leaks out of Ireland.

Easy e-commerce

“A key objective of the Government’s national digital strategy is to help local retailers capture more of this market and Pointy’s innovative device is addressing that very need by taking the complexity out of e-commerce for local retailers”.

Pointy was founded in 2014 by Mr Cummins and Charles Bibby. Mr Cummins previously founded a start-up called Plink which was sold to Google in 2010. He went on to work at Google in California. Mr Bibby did a PhD in robotics at Oxford and went on to design security systems for the London 2012 Olympics. Both quit their jobs and moved to Ireland last year to work on Pointy.