The start-up is building towards a larger VC-led investment round, said CEO Anthony Mc Loughlin.

Dublin-based automation platform Better Futures has raised €600,000 from Enterprise Ireland, under its High Potential Start-Up programme, and private angel investors to expand its product and go-to-market teams.

The round brings the 2023-founded start-up’s tally to €1.1m in total funding raised.

The start-up wants to reduce the time spent by engineering teams managing documentation. Its AI platform – called ‘EVA’ and specifically designed for governed automation – enables teams to encode regulation, standards, rules, templates and expert knowledge upfront, and use that knowledge to automate and validate documentation workflows, according to the company.

The funding announcement coincides with the launch of Better Futures’ next-generation of EVA, which it said is designed to scale customer use cases across complex engineering documentation workflows and enable broader self-service adoption.

The launch builds on the start-up’s experience with early customers, including manufacturers ABB and Bausch+Lomb, Better Futures said. It raised €500,000 in a pre-seed round in 2024 to launch EVA.

The NovaUCD-headquartered company said it will use the freshly raised funds to further develop EVA and also expand customer adoption across regulated industries including energy, life sciences, aerospace and advanced manufacturing.

“In highly regulated industries, engineers can spend more time on documentation than engineering itself. AI can help automate but it is not just about generating content faster. The key challenge is trust,” said Anthony Mc Loughlin, the founder and CEO of Better Futures.

“[EVA] is a governed AI platform designed to bring trusted automation to complex engineering documentation workflows.”

The start-up is building towards a larger VC-led investment round to accelerate growth and establish leadership in this emerging market, Mc Loughlin added.

Better Futures is also a client company of the European Space Agency (ESA) Business Incubation Centre (BIC) Ireland initiative at NovaUCD.

ESA BIC Ireland – managed by ESA Space Solutions Centre Ireland, a consortium partnership made up of a number of Irish universities – supports companies in the country that are using space technology and data.

Amanda Ward, the head of digital technologies at Enterprise Ireland, said: “AI is now central to Ireland’s start-up ecosystem, with a new generation of AI-first Irish founders building from Ireland for international customers.

“Better Futures is a clear example of that ambition – applying AI to a genuine commercial challenge in highly regulated industries, where AI adoption must be low-risk, informed and commercially grounded.”

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