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Newry-based IT start up has real ‘ambition to grow’ ahead of Fintech Festival

Damien McLoughlin, Client Executive Invest NI and Alan McKeown, Chief Transformation Officer, Invest NI are pictured with Joe McKevitt (centre) Co-Founder of UpTime Labs

IT start up UpTime Labs, based between Newry and London, is making waves in the industry with a recent award of an Invest NI Ambition to Grow grant; and has received an invitation to take part in the Fintech Talent Festival next week in London.

The ambitious, young IT company has developed the world’s first realistic integrated incident drill platform for business, to increase resilience, and help reduce downtime caused by IT outages.

Set up by Newry based entrepreneur Joe McKevitt and his business partner, Londoner Hamed Silatani, between them with more than 30 years’ experience in the IT industry, the company has been gaining traction, particularly in the London financial markets.

Joe McKevitt said: “UpTime Labs was established out of our own personal experience of working in companies that just did not have the IT resilience when something went wrong. We often compare our product to the training received in emergency situations where regular drills are carried out to replicate the type of scenario that could be faced.

“The UpTime Labs platform does this from an IT perspective, allowing the IT team within a business to gain experience, through repetition, of what to do should an outage occur.

“This matters to most businesses, from the largest to the smallest, because IT failures cost time and money. This can run into millions of pounds for some of the biggest companies, if you look at recent examples in the aviation sector.”

Joe continued: “We are very grateful to Invest NI for the support they have given us to date as we seek to grow outside the Northern Ireland market. We are looking forward to representing Northern Ireland in the upcoming Fintech Festival in London. We are also grateful to Newry Chamber for a recent acknowledgement as Best New Business in the Chamber Business Awards.”

UpTime Labs has been offered support through Invest NI’s Ambition to Grow Programme which will assist it to create jobs and sell its services outside Northern Ireland.

Alan McKeown, Invest NI’s Executive Director of Regional Business said: “UpTime Labs is a great example of a local early-stage company that is using our support and guidance, both through Ambition to Grow and our trade support, to give it the best platform to grow its business. We’re very much looking forward to this year’s FinTech Talents Festival which will give UpTime Labs and the other participating companies the opportunity to meet with potential fintech customers with the ultimate goal of growing their sales in new markets.”

UpTime Labs has been invited to be part of the Invest NI delegation for the Fintech Talents Festival in London on 13th – 14th November. This event is attended by more than 2,000 people involved in the Fintech industry across the UK and beyond.

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