Three young Irish firms specialising in the software, healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors have together raised up to €4 million venture capital funding in recent weeks to help them grow.

H2HCare, Cibenix and NeuroCure raised the cash from a range of Irish venture capital firms and Enterprise Ireland, reflecting a much improved funding environment for early stage companies.

Delta Partners, one of Ireland's oldest venture capital firms, has invested €850,000 in NeuroCure, a speciality pharmaceutical firm that aims to find new uses for old drugs for neurological diseases.

The company was founded by Dr Peter Daly, who previously co-founded one of Ireland's first biotechnology firms, EiRx. NeuroCure will be based around the pioneering work of Prof Ted Dinan, an academic from UCC who specialises in analysing therapeutic switching techniques.

The firm will initially generate revenue by licensing the intellectual property that it develops to biotechnology firms, which will use the technology to develop new drugs, says Dr Daly.

Mr Frank Kenny of Delta Partners said it has been particularly difficult for early stage firms to get seed funding in recent years. But firms such as Delta are now beginning to make deals, he said.

Bank of Ireland Venture Capital, Enterprise 2000 and Enterprise Ireland have all teamed up to invest €2 million in H2HCare, a software firm founded in 2000 to target the healthcare sector.

The company's web-based software provides appointment scheduling, electronic patient records, in-patient management and secure electronic connectivity between healthcare firms.

Mr Eamonn Furniss, managing director of H2HCare, said the funding round took 14 months to complete in a difficult environment.

Meanwhile, Cibenix, a software development company targeting the mobile phone sector, has also raised more than a €1 million in first-round funding. The firm develops software applications to run on mobile phones. Enterprise spirit is alive and well in the tech sector: page 9