As co-founder of AwakenAngels, Ireland’s first and only women-led angel syndicate, Mary McKenna, MBE, is leveraging her experience as a serial entrepreneur and seasoned investor to support the next generation of successful female entrepreneurs.
Launched in 2023 as part of AwakenHub, an all-Ireland female founder community with 3,000 members in the North and south, AwakenAngels connects angel investors with ambitious women-led start-ups.
For McKenna – who co-founded Learning Pool, one of Northern Ireland’s greatest homegrown tech success stories – supporting start-ups through the precarious early stages of growth is a long-held passion.
Since exiting Learning Pool in 2014, she has worked extensively with early-stage ventures in Ireland and Europe, building a sizeable personal portfolio of investees as an active angel investor.
“I genuinely love the chaos of the start-up environment, the early pivots and seeing the founding team come together. Angel investing allows me to give something back as an exited founder who can offer genuine advice based on real world experience,” McKenna says.
“That kind of input can be very valuable for business founders, particularly women who haven’t traditionally had anywhere near the same level of support as their male counterparts.”
Early career and entrepreneurial start
Originally from Tyrone and now living in Donegal, McKenna qualified as an accountant in 1997 while working in London for the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy
“I was a Chartered Secretary at the time, working as CIPFA’s administration and finance manager, and a new Chief Executive joined who offered to give me a decent promotion if I completed another professional master in either law or accountancy,” she says.
“I thought about it for a couple of days and chose accountancy. Thank goodness I did because these days I look at hundreds of business plans every year. There is enormous value in being able to quickly understand the underlying messages in a balance sheet.”
In 2000, McKenna accepted a job offer in Belfast and joined Amphion Semiconductor, a high-tech spin-out of Queen’s University Belfast, as Chief Financial Officer.
“I moved back to Tyrone and three weeks after starting the job, found myself in California in the middle of Silicon Valley, where our sales and marketing team were based, looking to raise finance,” she says.
“I led the company through two investment rounds, and we sold the business to Conexant in the US three years later. The learning curve for me over those three years was almost vertical.
“I’d gone from a job in London I’d been doing for years and knew like the back of my hand, to something completely new and different. It was stressful but I learned so much.”
Learning Pool: origin story
McKenna’s next move was to cofound Agility Consulting, a two-person boutique management consultancy established in 2003.
“The origins of Learning Pool is a good lesson in recognising opportunity when it knocks,” she says.
“Agility Consulting had quite a few Government contacts in the UK and, one day, Paul and I were in a co-working space in Borough Market in London, killing time before heading to the airport.
“At a desk nearby, two guys were talking about an information memorandum they’d received about a project called Learning Pool one of the UK’s central government agencies was looking to sell.
“They weren’t interested and threw it in the bin. I was interested though, so I took it out and arranged to meet with the government agency.
“They’d built e-learning content at a time when it was really new, and broadband was just being rolled out. It was a new way of delivering learning programmes that could be updated online without having to reissue the updated physical DVDs we’d all relied on up to then.
“The product was built and already had local authority clients in the UK, but it needed some work – and the rest is history, really. Our bid was successful, we founded Learning Pool in 2006, rebuilt the product and bootstrapped the business right up to 2014.”
As Learning Pool’s Chief Executive for close to eight years, McKenna led sales to central government departments, local authorities, housing associations and other public sector bodies in the UK.
“Successfully bootstrapping a business requires accelerating revenue at lightning speed, so there was a lot of pressure in those early years. We were profitable within our first eight months of trading, believe it or not, and doubled our turnover every year from there until I exited in 2014.”
By that stage, Learning Pool had grown to employ 100 people, and McKenna had been awarded an MBE for services to digital technology, innovation and learning.
“What I am most proud of from that time was the employment we created in Derry, a city that had borne the brunt of underinvestment for decades,” she says.
“We were able to create rewarding jobs for the city’s graduates and that was very fulfilling for me personally. The business was well-established by 2014 – all the necessary structures and processes were in place – and I found myself missing the excitement of the start-up environment.”
Non-executive, mentoring and advisory roles
In the years since, McKenna has lent her deep knowledge as a successful business founder to numerous public boards and private companies in a range of non-executive, mentoring and advisory roles.
Currently, she is an Expert Adviser to several European Innovation Council programmes and is Ulster University Business School’s first ever Royal Society Entrepreneur-in-Residence.
McKenna sits on the board of both the Western Development Commission, the Irish state agency responsible for promoting economic development in the west and northwest, and Millennium Forum Theatre and Conference Centre in Derry.
She is a non-executive director with Belfast start-up Jetpack Learning and Advisory Board Member with Placecube in London.
She has also worked as entrepreneurship expert with the Saïd Entrepreneurship Centre at the University of Oxford in the UK since 2017 and sits on the board of Coinvest Capital, a venture capital fund in Lithuania.
“My involvement in various government boards is important to me because I feel it’s important that the voice of the entrepreneur is featured in policy decisions. I see it as my public duty to represent my own slice of the economy,” she says.
“For start-ups, having a safe pair of hands on the board from an early stage can add a lot of value. For me, it means being a part of the thrills and spills of early-stage businesses without the 18-hour days and the sleepless nights.”
AwakenHub: community for women founders
A seasoned angel investor with over 40 investee companies in her personal portfolio, McKenna co-founded AwakenHub six years ago to offer a community to women founders running businesses right across the island of Ireland.
Launched in July 2020 with co-founders Clare McGee, Denise McQuaid and Sinead Crowley, AwakenHub offers members a range of business support, growth and advisory services.
It is a consortium partner on Women TechEU, an EU-funded scheme offering support to women leading deep tech start-ups in Europe, and has partnered with InterTradeIreland, the all-island economic development agency, to deliver the WeScale programme for growing female-led ventures.
SheGenerate, AwakenHub’s start-up accelerator programme, launched in 2021, followed in 2023 by the women-led angel syndicate AwakenAngels.
“AwakenAngels really came out of a very clear need we could see in the market,” McKenna said.
“It was apparent that women founders needed greater access to investment and we were disappointed to discover that there were only a very small number of active women angel investors in Ireland, both North and south.
“The reality is that, once a woman founder progresses beyond the foundational stage and is ready to raise investment, 100 percent of their incoming shareholders are likely to be men.
“This means women miss out on the opportunity provided by the angel investment asset class itself and women founders are badly served by Ireland’s existing angel investment ecosystem. We launched AwakenAngels to change that.”
Since 2023, 150 angel investors have joined the syndicate, over 90 percent of whom are women and one-fifth of whom are part of the Irish diaspora, based mainly in the US.
“We hold pitch nights eight or nine times a year and we have no shortage of deal flow,” McKenna says.
“We’ve closed 13 deals to date across a range of sectors and, by co-investing with other syndicates, those deals have so far unlocked additional funding of about €10 million for early-stage women founders.”
AwakenHub, meanwhile, has grown to a sizeable community of 3,000 members in the North and south.
“Angel investment is immensely important to start-ups and early-stage ventures, but the value angel investors bring in terms of the non-financial input is equally valuable,” says McKenna.
“For the investor, backing a successful start-up can provide a great source of personal satisfaction. Of course, the prize is the exit. Five of my own portfolio companies have had successful exits so far and it’s always a huge celebration for the teams involved.”
“PEOPLE OFTEN UNDERESTIMATE THE AMOUNT OF TIME AND ENERGY YOU NEED TO BUILD A BUSINESS. IT’S AN ENORMOUS COMMITMENT. YOU NEED THE ABILITY TO SELL AND THE CONFIDENCE TO FRONT YOUR COMPANY, A WILLINGNESS TO LEARN AND BE COACHED, AND THE FLEXIBILITY TO DEAL WITH CONSTANT CHANGE”
Founder experience: opportunities and challenges
“At AwakenAngels, we look for founders who can provide credible three-year business plans that will stand up to a reasonable level of scrutiny and challenge,” McKenna says.
“We want to see convincing evidence that enough people will buy and use the products the company is creating. The easiest way to demonstrate this is through revenues, although that’s not always possible, especially for deep tech start-ups.
“In terms of the founders’ qualities, we look for resilience, stamina and a positive outlook.
“I think people often underestimate the amount of time and energy you need to build a business. It’s an enormous commitment. You need the ability to sell and the confidence to front your company, a willingness to learn and be coached, and the flexibility to deal with constant, often daily, change.”
McKenna has ambitious plans for the future of AwakenHub and AwakenAngels, with the latter shortly poised to enter the Scottish market and bring a greater number of experienced angel investors on board.
“We’re busy building strong partnerships with syndicates of a similar mindset across Europe,” she says.
“Ultimately, I hope that, in my own lifetime, we will reach a place where we no longer need to offer distinct and separate supports for women in business – that women founders are on an equal footing in every sense to their male counterparts.
“Unfortunately, I think this is quite a way off, so our own small but mighty team will continue to work hard to bridge the gap.”
As for the role of accounting in the start-up realm, McKenna concludes, “I’m very happy I chose to study accountancy over law back when I had to make that decision.
“When Learning Pool was a young company, I did all the financial forecasts and accounts on my Saturdays, and a quick back-of-the-envelope cash flow forecast every morning. If I hadn’t been doing that, we probably wouldn’t have made it through those difficult early years.
“Many entrepreneurs don’t have a good enough handle on their numbers and the levers behind them. Quite often, that’s the reason they fail.”