Irish firm Galvia AI has launched in Manchester – and the firm says the city’s positive attitude to investment made it a clear choice for a first Ƶ hub.
The business is opening a base at the Turing Innovation Catalyst (TIC), within Manchester city centre’s newly-christened £1.7bn science and technology district Sister.
The Galway company is also launching an AI accelerator programme in Manchester to encourage dozens of local small businesses to make more use of AI.
Asked why the firm picked Manchester, Galvia CEO and founder John Clancy told BusinessLive that he had received great support from leading figures in tech and business locally – including from city council leader Bev Craig and from TIC Manchester boss Liz Scott.
The TIC’s recent Greater Manchester AI Catalyst Report showed the region has the Ƶ’s biggest AI cluster outside London, with its AI companies now worth a total of £3.1bn.
He said: “The people in the ecosystem here, the likes of Liz Scott, Bev Craig, the team in Midas, the team at Manchester Digital, Enterprise Ireland… it's their support from the start. This seems to be a city that comes from a position of yes.
“But also the wider people here – there are over 100,000 students in the city. We're looking at double digit hires in the next 12 to 18 months – that talent pool is already here.
“And you also have 13 and a half thousand people working in the tech sector here in Manchester. So it's an ideal hub from a people perspective.”
The company, whose name is taken from the Latin name for Galway, currently employs 14 across Galway and Manchester and aims to hire 10 people in the North West over the next 12 to 18 months. John said: “Half our core tech team will be based out of here. These will be data scientists, machine learning engineers, and important senior roles in the business.”
He added: “There are more businesses in the Greater Manchester area than the whole of Ireland. There’s a lot of retail based out of here. That's what excites us about this part of the world really, to see where this takes us.”
John said Galvia’s accelerator programme would be focusing on SMEs, and is working particularly with firms in the retail and hospitality sectors.
He said: “The number one question I get asked, when it comes to AI from a business perspective is ‘where do I start?’
“Most companies in our target market are small to medium-sized enterprises. And by that, I mean, companies typically that have enough data, don't have a dedicated AI division but feel ‘I need to be getting more out of my data and I don't know how to do it or where to begin’. .
“Part of the programme, part of our five-week AI accelerator, is getting under the hood of the programme participants' data to try and tell them what's the art of possible and not possible with their data.”
Galvia is looking to work with up to 50 firms in the first phase of its accelerator scheme. Workshops will cover topics from making sense of data to practical implementation, with Addleshaw Goddard supporting workshops on legal and ethical impacts of AI and data analysis.
Galvia started in 2017 in what John called “the olden days of AI”, focusing on creating conversational AI and chatbots and working with companies including Nestle and global IT giant NTT Group. Working with NTT, the company moved towards developing AI-powered platforms that can ingest data and help firms make decisions based on it. That then led Galvia to pivot to working with SMEs.
While most conversation around AI focuses on generative AI tools such as ChatGPT or Google Gemini, which create words or images from prompts, John says Galvia’s tools are about using machine learning to help clients predict future outcomes from data they already have.
He said: “We build models for our clients trained on their data that will give them a prediction three months or six months out of what's going to happen in their business, across all the silos in their company, before it happens. So they can be proactive – not putting out a fire, they can see the fire before it actually starts.”
John also welcomed the support of Enterprise Ireland, which has an office in Manchester , and said he hoped more Irish firms would follow in his footsteps and invest in the city region.
At the formal launch event on Tuesday evening, .Sarah Mangan, Ireland’s consul general in Manchester, said connections across the Irish Sea remained strong. She said there would be a “significant” joint trade mission to Ireland later this year from Manchester and Liverpool city regions.
She hailed Manchester as a “warm and welcoming place to do business”. And she said: “As you establish your first location outside Ireland, you couldn't have chosen a better place”
Manchester City Council leader Cllr Bev Craig also spoke to welcome Galvia’s arrival and to praise the city’s £2bn AI ecosystem, which she said could “help us do the good things we want to do across the city region”.
