A Galway-based telecommunications company which this week raised $12 million (€12.6 billion) in funding after just one year in operation, has been unable to begin operations in the Republic because of what it claims is resistance within the telecommunications industry.
Yac.com, the brainchild of Mr Mike Feerick (33), has attracted 50,000 subscribers to its free UK service which enables people to be reached by telephone, voicemail or fax through a free personal number.
Mr Feerick says he obtained a number of licences to trade and one million telephone numbers from Oftel in Britain at no cost. However when he wanted to do the same in the Republic he was asked by the Office of the Director of Telecommunications (ODTR) to pay £10,000 (£12,700) for a general licence.
The primary reason the Irish license costs more is because the ODTR currently offers simply a basic and a general license covering all types of service. In the UK the licenses are broken down into component service types.
Yac.com says it has also encountered problems concluding an agreement with Eircom to use its network. While the ODTR can issue new personal numbers, Eircom must load those numbers onto its network.
According to Mr Feerick: "Eircom seems to be continually putting us back, and at this rate it looks like they will continue to do so until they launch their own personal numbering service."
Eircom has said anyone wishing to open numbers on its network needs to sign an interconnect agreement with Eircom which takes 19 weeks to activate. It says it has not received any such request from Yac.com to date.
At present, Irish customers can only avail of the service by taking a UK number, an option which may only be attractive to subscribers who want to set up a virtual UK office. Callers will be charged at the standard UK mobile phone rate.
Mr Feerick established Yac.com, which stands for Your Always Connected, when he saw how UK Internet service provider, Freeserve, benefited from its free service distributing voice mail and faxes to e-mail.
Mr Feerick saw the potential for increased margins if Yac.com could redirect higher tariff mobile phone services through its own telephone switch. All Yac subscribers' messages can be rerouted as e-mails allowing them to be contacted anywhere in the world.
Following an initial $2 million investment from Pond Ventures last year, Yac officially launched in November, and says it is now growing at a rate of 1,000 subscribers a day. In less than a year the company has grown to employ 60 people at its Ballybrit premises.
The company's business plan was further endorsed this week when it raised another $12 million from a consortium which includes Zouk Ventures, which has also backed Peoplesound.com, the Internet music firm, and online retailer, Boo.com.
Other investors include AMP Capital and Emerging Technologies, a fund managed by a Swedish technology billionaire.
The latest investment places a valuation on Yac.com of around $35 million, with Mr Feerick's own stake estimated to be worth nearly $11 million.
Yac.com expects to raise a further $50 million privately later this year to help fund its global expansion, and Mr Feerick says Yac will list on the stock market before the end of this year. The company is expanding rapidly.
This is not Mr Feerick's first foray into the tech start-up arena. The US-born graduate of the Harvard Business School was formerly managing director of Interactive Investor International, an Internet-based personal finance source which successfully floated in February, achieving a valuation of $1 billion.
After selling the Irish development rights for JFAX, a leading US-based unified messaging service to Esat Telecom in June 1998, Mr Feerick envisaged further applications of the technology.
Keen to return to Galway, where he had spent much of his youth, Mr Feerick was delighted to discover Nortel Networks had located its European Multimedia Messaging headquarters in Galway. He soon convinced two of its Irish engineers to join him in developing the Yac.com prototype.
