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Case Study: MAP Digital Powers Inaugural AwakenHub Takes New York

Social enterprise—aimed at promoting women founders in Ireland—celebrated impressive growth and introduced six female entrepreneurs to the U.S. investors

NEW YORK, NY, February 14, 2023 — MAP Digital Inc., the only complete conference cloud platform and events designer readymade for Events 3.0, is proud to celebrate the tremendous success of the AwakenHub Takes New York 2023 event, held on February 1, 2023. The AwakenHub event—co-sponsored with Digital Irish and Invest Northern Ireland and held at the Bank of Ireland NYC Hub—recognized the organization’s remarkable trajectory and introduced six AwakenHub entrepreneurs to an audience of investors, family offices, corporations, government agencies, friends and allies.

AwakenHub Team: Mary Carty, Denise McQuaid, Clare McGee, Brìghde Barnes, Mary McKenna, Sinead Crowley, Louise O'Conor.

Mary Ann Pierce, AwakenHub Global Ambassador and CEO of MAP Digital.

“It was a thrill to see the AwakenHub Takes New York event find so much success, particularly as the organization’s mission to uplift women entrepreneurs from the Island of Ireland and I am an Irish American entrepreneur, myself,” said Pierce, founder and CEO of MAP Digital and global diaspora ambassador for AwakenHub Takes New York. “We saw firsthand the power of a purposefully curated, invitation-only event that captured AwakenHub’s and their six founder’s compelling success stories.”

Using MAP Digital’s integrated event platform, MetaMeetings, AwakenHub produced a high-performance, content-rich event that will serve as a content marketing engine well into the future. Through repurposing event content and distributing it to new audiences, MAP Digital will ensure that AwakenHub’s mission will spread far beyond the confines of the New York gathering and expand AwakenHub’s community globally.

“In a post-COVID world, ambitious startups should be global from Day One. Our AwakenHub team recognized this and selected six of our member companies who are closest to taking on investment or expanding their customer base into the U.S.,” said Mary McKenna, expert advisor to the European Commission, Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the University of Oxford, and co-founder of AwakenHub. “MAP Digital assembled the perfect audience for those six founders to pitch to and provided the platform to amplify their stories. We’ll be back.”

Featured founders: Yvonne Comer, Sian Farrell, Susan Kelly, Naomi McGregor, Avril Power, Eileen Rafferty.

AwakenHub is a registered Social Enterprise, with a mission to level up opportunity, access and connectivity for women founders throughout the Island of Ireland by removing barriers to investment, scale and success. The organization’s vision is a society where every founder’s journey is equitable irrespective of gender and where half of all investment goes to women-led businesses. As part of AwakenHub’s mission, the New York event showcased six women founders (three from Northern Ireland and three from the Republic of Ireland) and their innovative startups:

  • Yvonne Comer, Rugby Smarts, a game changing technology that uses AI, Machine Learning and Computer Vision to reduce the manual effort transitionally involved in Video Analysis. Galway Republic of Ireland.

  • Eileen Rafferty, Errigal Virtual Studios, LED wall that can show any background. Shoot worlds that do not exist or locations that are incapable of visiting. Tremendous cost saving and gateway to Metaverse activations. Donegal, Republic of Ireland

  • Susan Kelly, aflo™ Respiratory Analytics, aflo™ uses AI, sensors and hyper-personalized data to control life-threatening symptoms for people with asthma, COPD and cystic fibrosis. aflo™ is to improve the management of respiratory conditions for patients and clinicians, saving lives, reducing costs and improving outcomes. Derry, Northern Ireland

  • Avril Power, giyst, innovative summarization technology that produces automated, edited video summaries using AI and Machine Learning, drives 4 times more content discovery and maximizes audience retention by at least 40%. Cork, Republic of Ireland

  • Sian Farrell, StimOxyGen, stimulus-responsive oxygen generating nanoparticles for enhanced treatment of cancer. Derry, Northern Ireland

  • Naomi McGregor, Movetru, wearable technology and cutting edge data analysis eradicates preventable injury and reduces ACL recovery time for elite athletes. Belfast, Northern Ireland.

In addition to spotlighting the six female founders and their businesses, the event also announced AwakenAngels, the first Irish, cross-border, and women-led investor syndicate investing in women-founded businesses. AwakenAngels will democratize the investor landscape by making investing affordable, accessible and purposefully game-changing, with seasoned investors supporting the new investors to help AwakenHub founders build their businesses and their communities.

To learn more about the entrepreneurs, AwakenHub and AwakenAngels, and to view video content and presentations from the event, visit the AwakenHub MetaMeetings website or email: hello@awakenhub.com.

About MAP Digital: MAP Digital is the only complete conference cloud platform and events designer readymade for the Events 3.0 era. Its MetaMeetings platform tracks every click and distributes webcasts, content, and engagement and in-person or virtual events. Via artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), we transform conferences into content marketing engines. And MAP Digital's designers and engineers simplify the production process and maximize KPIs. Visit us at https://mapdigital.com and connect with us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Mary Ann Pierce, CEO of MAP Digital.