Before co-founding OptaHaul, Gallagher worked for cloud venture builder, Zoosh, which was asked by a Hungarian dairy processing client to come up with a software solution to reduce the cost of transporting milk. Having successfully cracked the problem, it was clear there was a wider market for the solution and a decision was made to spin it out into a standalone company.
“It’s a niche product, but an important one that addresses an international need. The Irish market is important to us, but in overall terms it’s tiny so we want to tap into the US which is actually quite far behind in terms of digitalisation. The dairy industry has been badly neglected from a technology point of view.
OptaHaul currently employs four people and there are plans to grow this to seven in the coming months. The company raised a pre-seed round of €300,000 last year from a combination of friends and family, a private fund and an angel investor with a dairy industry background. The company has also been supported by Westmeath Local Enterprise Office.
OptaHaul is platform-agnostic so it will work with customers’ existing hardware and software and with other systems already in use such as milk intake and fleet telematics. “Logistics software often involves significant upfront IT hardware costs and takes time to install. OptaHaul’s cloud technology eliminates capital expenditure and is up and running and generating savings very quickly,” Gallagher says.