Barry Flannery, the founder and chief executive of Galway-based Xerotech, doesn’t like to spend a lot of time at his desk. Sitting in the Spartan surrounds of his sparsely decorated office, he says he agrees with Elon Musk’s view of the chief executive’s role being that of “chief everything officer”.
“My job is the bottleneck,” he says. “Whatever the company has to do, there’s going to be barriers and blockages on that. It could be that a plumbing issue might suddenly be the most important thing in the company. That’s where you’ll find me. If there’s an issue on the line. I’ll be down there finding out about that.”
There are no visible signs of any blockages or barriers on a brisk November afternoon at Xerotech’s headquarters in Claregalway. Here, the company makes heavy-duty lithium-ion battery packs for so-called off-highway vehicles in industries like mining and construction.
Equipped with a PhD in applied physics from the University of Galway, Flannery has grown the business over the past seven years from his initial experiments with the technology in his parents’ garden shed to what it is today – a high-potential company that employs upwards of 130 people. For his efforts, Flannery was named as a finalist in the “established” category of this year’s EY Entrepreneur of the Year awards.
The sit-down with Flannery in his office almost doesn’t happen. A last-minute phone call with a customer forces a longer-than-expected stop-off in Galway city, where typically maddening Friday afternoon traffic then conspires to squeeze the time slot for the interview. In the end though, the trip to Claregalway is worth the stress.
Opposite a CrossFit gym in an industrial estate on the outskirts of the village, Xerotech sits across 84,000sq ft of space where it has been steadily expanding its footprint in recent years, knocking into adjacent buildings. If the exterior is unassuming, inside is a complete surprise.
Flannery begins by giving a whistle-stop tour of Xerotech’s home before settling down for the interview. “Hopefully your head will be spinning after this,” he jokes.
It all begins in the reception area, where, encased in Plexiglas, a couple of Xerotech’s batteries are on display, allowing Flannery to explain the technology. Its batteries are among the safest in the world, he says, because of a system that pumps water through a plastic skin wrapped around the interior walls of the pack.
The way we look at Xerotech, it’s an Irish company. It’s clean, green, sustainable. It’s high-quality manufacturing. It ticks three out of four of Ireland’s inbound FDI requirements but it’s home-grown
Then, at something like a brisk walking pace, it’s on to the research centre, where individual battery cells and modules can be stress-tested for performance and in particular climatic conditions. The tour also stops by the manufacturing areas. Here, machines that look like they belong in the bowels of the Starship Enterprise – and some of which Xerotech builds for itself – turn cells and modules into battery systems. Ranging in size, some could fit into a suitcase while others are closer in length to a small car.
It’s precision engineering, chemistry and manufacturing all together in one facility outside a rural Irish village and it lives up to the “head-spinning” billing.
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In his office, Flannery takes a seat at the head of a smallish conference table and settles in for a chat. With just over 40 customers on its books, Xerotech already employs 130 people. If he can achieve his growth ambitions, the Claregalway site could, it seems, become a significant employment hub in the region. Brought up near Oranmore, he says he was a “little bit biased” in his original choice of location for the business. What the future holds, however, is unclear.
“To be blunt, I would definitely have done it local just for bootstrapping reasons,” Flannery says. “But I made a major choice, a major call back in 2019: do I stay, or do I go? I could have gone to California. At this rate, I could have probably raised about half a billion dollars.”
I really drove hard here in Ireland to demonstrate this could be done. That’s why it’s literally a bit of a trailblazer company. But it’s been very hard, and I think serious consideration needs to be had about the next five years. There’s only so long I can handicap growth
Blunt is an apt description of Flannery’s style of presentation. He’s not shy about airing his opinions – and grievances – about anything, particularly the start-up ecosystem in Ireland and why it’s not geared towards creating quality, indigenous manufacturing businesses. He sees Xerotech as a test case in an Irish context, a canary in the coal mine. From Flannery’s current vantage, however, he doesn’t think its story will be repeated.
“We just don’t support hardware companies in Ireland and it’s a big challenge,” he says. “Even in Europe, it’s not very well supported.”
Just from the brief tour of the site, it’s clear why he thinks the business is so difficult to replicate. As Flannery says, it’s a “very physical company” with a “very significant infrastructure requirement”. A 2.5-megawatt substation fulfils Xerotech’s extensive energy needs – and that’s before you begin to add in the capital requirements and investment in the company’s machines.
Xerotech has, however, received Government support and Flannery is grateful for it. Enterprise Ireland is a backer, as is the Western Development Commission. Yet, when it comes to funding, he thinks a bias exists towards software and managed IT services companies and that the decks are very much stacked against the success of any new, domestic manufacturing businesses. Why exactly, he’s not sure.
“In Ireland,” he says, “if you ask most people about manufacturing, they say, ‘Is that not something they do in China?’
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“The way we look at Xerotech, it’s an Irish company. It’s clean, green, sustainable. It’s high-quality manufacturing. It ticks three out of four of Ireland’s inbound FDI requirements but it’s home-grown. We have got support from the State through Enterprise Ireland, but I mean the reality is, with our payroll – like 120 or 130 people – that investment has been returned to them, probably, just in tax.
“I really drove hard here in Ireland to demonstrate this could be done. That’s why it’s literally a bit of a trailblazer company. But it’s been very hard, and I think serious consideration needs to be had about the next five years. There’s only so long I can handicap growth.”
Indeed, funding is at the very top of the agenda for Flannery now and he’s looking farther afield for sources of investment.
He expected to close a €20-30 million fundraise in the summer, which has not yet been finalised. He says the company is now very close to getting it over the line and is talking to investors in the US.
It’s no secret that start-ups and early-stage companies have struggled to access capital of late against a backdrop of soaring interest rates and geopolitical upheaval. But Flannery says the dragging out of the funding round is more to do with Xerotech’s specific requirements.
He concedes that capital markets have been “hard” recently. “You’ve got to really work very, very hard and deliver an awful lot compared to what you had to do several years ago. Just in general, like the equity markets have been tough. The interest rate cuts helped a lot, and there was a bit of hold off as well, depending on the outcome of the US elections,” he says.
“We had a number of different options on the table [over the summer]. But then a more kind of attractive one started to happen. I think it’s about finding the right investor.”
Now he sees “a clear path” towards securing “milestone” investment that he believes will make Xerotech “default alive”, the second stage of its growth trajectory.
“It’s really been a sort of two-step dance,” he says. “Secure the fundamentals – which we pretty much have – and then the follow-on is basically to really scale and globalise in a big way. Like we’re already a global business. We don’t have any Irish customers: 80 per cent of my revenue is in the US.”
Xerotech so far has raised €44 million from Irish sources, he says, mostly from family offices linked to some familiar names, including Dónal Daly, who sold Avoca Capital to KKR in 2014, and City Bin founder Gene Browne.
“I would say it’s bordering on madness what they’ve done,” says Flannery. He has been humbled by the support he’s received from his investors. “The State has played a role, but it’s been firmly led by individuals who have taken a very bullish view on this company.”
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Overall, however, he thinks the “general entrepreneurial ecosystem” in Ireland is lacking. “We put ourselves down a lot,” Flannery says.
“There’s the old joke about the Irish fisherman with the bucket of lobsters. There’s an American guy on the dock and he says to the fisherman: ‘Jesus, you’d want to be careful. Some of those lobsters are trying to climb out of the bucket.’ And the Irish fisherman says: ‘I don’t have to worry about that. They’re Irish lobsters. As soon as one of them ever gets close to the top, the rest will pull them back down.’”
I think Musk is going to pull all subsidies, all supports on both sides – for EVs and for internal combustion vehicle-makers. I think it’s going to be positive. The outcome of this election is extremely good for us as a company
Flannery clearly has a chip on his shoulder, which is not necessarily a bad thing for a person in his position, competing for the business of some of the world’s largest mining companies. He is a believer in the “power of the individual” and isn’t shy about showing his admiration for Elon Musk.
“I have zero surprises as to the outcome of that election,” Flannery ventures. “We have been positioning, or I have positioning for that for the past 12 months.”
Speaking to Flannery, you get the sense that he lives and breathes the company, even in his spare time.
“I guess the biggest thing is that a lot of this is aligned with my own personal interest,” he says. “I’d be, I’d be very interested in politics, geopolitics. I’m constantly learning all the time. But this has been all-consuming.”
Flannery does admit to having some “random little hobbies”. He mainlines video podcasts and other “primary information streams” that he says help him to stay one step ahead of what’s happening in markets and geopolitics. It’s like having a “crystal ball”, he says.
So, what does his crystal ball say about the direction of travel in the second Trump administration and Musk’s role in it?
“I think [Musk] is going to pull all subsidies, all supports on both sides – for EVs and for internal combustion vehicle-makers,” Flannery says. “I think it’s going to be positive. The outcome of this election is extremely good for us as a company because it’s really going to split the world into multipolar and we’re going to end up with a foot in the US side and a foot [on the European] side.”
Reasonable people can and will disagree. Whether Trump’s policies and posturing end up costing Irish companies who have one foot in the US through tariffs and other trade barriers remains to be seen. It’s not so much Trump himself that Flannery sees as a positive for his business and the US economy generally, but more so “the people surround the administration”, he says.
“I think what you’re seeing is a real shift away from a more bureaucratic kind of regulatory world to a much more entrepreneurial world,” Flannery says.
Perhaps. While the rest of us wait for Trump’s policy agenda to come into focus, Flannery is concentrating on securing Xerotech’s immediate future and the “daily fight” of keeping the business moving towards the next milestone.
Name: Dr Barry Flannery.
Age: 32.
Family: In a relationship.
Lives: Claregalway, Co Galway, Ireland.
Hobbies: Mineral collecting, Lego.
Something you might expect: I work a lot!
Something that might surprise: Xerotech is his first ever job.
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