Andrea Reynolds has been a must-watch business figure for several years. With 15 years of experience in corpo- rate financing, largely focused on matching businesses with funding and investment opportunities, Reynolds launched Swoop in 2018 to help SMEs start up, scale up and finance their new ventures. It’s a technology platform designed to simplify and speed-up access to loans, grants and equity funding for SMEs. It effectively works as a sort of virtual CFO, pulling in a business’s bank accounts and other data to help it ascertain better financing options from a wide range of lenders, investors and government grant agencies. It also helps businesses unlock cash by establishing ways to cut costs for bank- ing, utilities and other services. Reynolds also runs reg- ular funding masterclasses, webinars and workshops for SMEs to educate teams on the funding landscape, prod- uct types, investment applications and investor readiness. In December, Swoop was named as the fastest-growing Irish technology business in Deloitte’s ‘Fast 50’ ranking. It employs over 80 people and has offices in Dublin, Lon- don, Toronto and Sydney. The company last year raised €6.3 million in a Series A funding round that valued Swoop at over $30 million. The youngest daughter of the late former Irish Taoiseach Albert Reynolds, she is an accountant by trade and started her career at KPMG – which may explain how Swoop broke even within five years of its foundation. Arguably the UK’s number one expert in business funding, she is affectionately known to industry peers as the ‘Martin Lewis of business finance’.
