‘Age doesn't matter' says Irish teenage entrepreneur after raising €1.2m for AI start-up

Irish Times

3 days ago

Liam Fuller first went viral by taking business calls in his school bathroom. Now the Dublin teenager has raised $1.4 million (€1.2 million) in funding for a new business venture, Source.
Just 18 years old, when he posted this latest news to social media he wasn't surprised when the story went viral.
'The media attention and social media reaction isn't too surprising to me. It feels great,' Fuller tells The Irish Times via video link from his new office in
Paris
.
'Overall, it hasn't been too daunting.'
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While he claims that he is not used to the media attention yet, Fuller clearly understands how to attract attention online, having done 'quite a few marketing stunts in the past'.
Fuller first drew significant attention when a picture of him taking a business call in his school bathroom was posted to LinkedIn last September as part of a previous venture. 'That was pretty crazy, that went quite viral.'
It may have been 'liked' on social media, but not by his school, who gave Fuller a one-day suspension.
Source founder Liam Fuller taking a business meeting call during the school day, while running a business around Shopify plug-in CartShare
Determined not to allow school to get in the way of launching Source, Fuller made the decision to drop out of fifth year to work full-time.
The company is a platform for retail stock ordering using agentic
artificial intelligence
(which can undertake specific tasks with limited human supervision) to optimise procurement.
The idea came from speaking to retailers about the issues that faced them. 'I learned that procurement was a massive issue for retailers that have thousands of SKUs [stock-keeping units].'
Offering an alternative for clients using 'Excel and email or enterprise-grade inventory management systems from the early 2000s', Source's platform is aiming to take the data from their existing systems to give an 'Amazon-like experience' to businesses.
Scanning past sales data, Source can generate forecasts and suggest purchase orders that can be edited and approved 'at the right time, with just a few clicks', he says.
Dropping out of school was a big move for the then 17 year old but it was validated by securing a full €1.2 million funding round from a portfolio of impressive investors, led by Square Peg, an Australian venture capital fund, with participation from TEN13, Xtripe Syndicate, and former
Stripe
chief technical officer David Singleton.
The company was founded in February, as a Delaware c-corp, QuickFind AI Inc trading as Source. Fuller met his eventual investors while on holiday in Australia visiting his grandparents. While on the trip he 'rattled off a couple of cold emails' to founders down under. Investment was in the back of his mind but his focus was also on meeting new people.
Eventually, he got in touch with Paul Bassat, the founder of Square Peg and backer of Canva, Airwallex and Rokt, three of Australia's highest-valued private tech companies. After rejection at the end of their first meeting, Bassat called him back to a full, 15-person pitch meeting that secured the investment.
The company may only have been founded this year, but the idea was a long time in the works.
'I always knew from quite a young age that I wanted to build things and create things,' he says.
Fuller recalls selling Pokémon cards at age seven to other kids his age outside his family home in Donabate, on the north Dublin coast, 'hustling away', as he describes it.
Fuller was exposed to start-ups as a child through his father, although he 'didn't really understand' it at the time. His father was one of the first employees at MetaCompliance, a cybersecurity safety training and software company. When Fuller was in his early teens, his father explained how a start-up worked and those learnings were taken into a series of microbusinesses.
A standout moment, Fuller says, was convincing his parents to give him a lift to a Woodies DIY shop so he could buy rolls of duct tape, from which he made duct tape wallets based on a YouTube tutorial.
'I have clear memories of trying to make these wallets and basically berating everyone in my primary school to buy it. A couple of people did; I probably made a few hundred euros from that.'
It was from participating in the BT Young Scientist competition that he realised his desire to create a business and 'build it into something that can be commercially viable and I can sell into the market'.
The experience was 'very, very rewarding, and I really liked the competition of it too', he says.
His first real commercial success was with a plug-in to online sales platform
Shopify
, called CartShare, which allowed users to pool their orders to avail of volume-based free shipping and group discounts. The company was founded alongside other budding entrepreneurs he met at a youth accelerator programme called Patch, at
Dogpatch Labs
in Dublin.
Having jointly founded two companies before he turned 18, Fuller says age doesn't matter. 'I'm not too focused on my age. When you go out to retail stores, which are our customers for Source, and you try to get them to use your product, your age doesn't matter – it becomes completely irrelevant.
'It just matters whether you have something valuable and if they're willing to pay for it, that is what the decision comes down to.'
He is eyeing a move to live in the US, setting his sights on San Francisco. 'In the [United] States, there tends to be quite a big thing about investing in young founders.
'But for my investors, it was very, very clear that they compared me to other founders at the pre-seed stage, not other 17 year olds.'
Having turned 18 since, Fuller has moved to Paris to be close to his co-founder, Yoan Gabison, and due to the high cost of renting in Dublin. 'It was an unreasonable amount of money. It was ludicrous, it was insane. I realised that staying in Paris for the next three to four months actually made a lot of sense financially.'
This is a 'critical' stage for Source: 'It's seven days a week, it's very intense and it's all or nothing.'
They are currently building up the platform 'as quickly as possible to fulfil existing customer demand' and running pilots in Ireland and Britain, in advance of basing in the US and focusing on hiring salespeople there to fuel growth.
There is something of a resemblance between Fuller and John and Patrick Collison, the Irish brothers who cofounded Stripe having had early business success as teenagers.
Fuller laughs at the comparison, saying he would be a 'very, very happy man' if he could get close to their achievements.
'I find them to be a big inspiration,' he says, 'They grew up in the early days of the internet, and I'm growing up in the early days of AI. It is an incredibly exciting time to be 18 years old, to grow up in a time when all of this is happening.'