Jarvio’s Founders Turn Stubbornness Into a €1.5M Pre-Seed Success with AI-Powered Ecommerce Revolution

Entrepreneurs at NDRC Founder Weekend 2025 in PorterShed, Galway

The co-founders of Jarvio, have reason to celebrate. After joining the NDRC Accelerator in May, the team closed a €1.5m pre-seed round in late June, featuring a stellar lineup of Irish angels and execs from Amazon, Target, and more. This milestone marks a pivotal step forward for this promising ecommerce startup.

Earlier this year, the team toured the US with a prototype that’s already generating buzz. “Every person we spoke to told ten others,” says Connor Mulholland. “We went to New York and Vegas, and within eight weeks, had 650 brands on a waitlist — all through word of mouth. We knew it was special when someone told us their friend was already using Jarvio… before the product even existed. When people lie about having access, you know you’re onto something big.”

Mulholland, JD O’Hea, and Jake Ryan want to change how brands sell online. Jarvio’s promise is simple yet revolutionary: ecommerce brands can automate complex workflows with “nothing but their words.” It’s like Zapier meets AI for ecommerce, with a slick interface even novices can navigate.

Ryan demonstrated Jarvio in action, typing a few prompts to instantly build workflows for inventory management and customer nurturing. The platform breaks down ecommerce into three commands — think, collect, and act — enabling users to ask it to “build me an inventory tracker that emails me monthly,” or “create an analytics dashboard from available data.” “We’ve stocked the fridge with all the ingredients; now you can cook the perfect lasagna just by talking to your fridge,” Ryan says.

Ryan and Mulholland’s partnership began years ago in a UCD lecture hall. They’re hustlers, with a knack for selling and a bold risk appetite. “During COVID, we were reselling all sorts — bird feeders, plastic dinosaurs, even 12,000 candles. I still have some at home,” says Ryan.

Their early ecommerce hustle involved driving around Ireland, sourcing bulk products to sell on Amazon — but they quickly hit a wall when approaching brands directly. “Amazon’s platform has a 96.7% negative feedback rate. It’s miserable for brands to sell there, so 9.7 million resellers thrive instead,” Ryan explains. Brands told them Amazon was too complicated, with too many tools and little margin left after resellers.

Seeing an opportunity, Ryan and Mulholland started an agency helping brands sell directly on Amazon — which was profitable, but they knew there was a bigger opportunity: a software product to replace the agency. The first version was training wheels for brands selling direct; then they pivoted to aggregating hundreds of ecommerce tools in one platform. “That was going to be a monster of a product — a trap we avoided by pivoting again,” says Ryan.

Always curious about AI, Ryan and Mulholland sensed they were onto something transformative, but investors kept asking: “Who’s going to build it?”

Ryan and Mulholland were joined by JD O’Hea, completing the founding team.

Enter JD O’Hea. With a background in software and machine learning at Workday, Seeda, and Global Shares, O’Hea met the pair by chance at Dogpatch Labs. “I overheard Connor talking about a problem they were having, and I just knew how to solve it,” O’Hea recalls. Connor’s memory is sharper: “He said we were doing it all wrong, then scribbled a solution in ten minutes. I told Jake it was the best conversation so far in building the business.”

Since then, the trio has logged long hours, including stretches in a San Francisco hacker house with other builders. The product advanced leaps and bounds, attracting interest from US and Irish investors. They’re now part of the current NDRC Accelerator cohort, having been invited this year after earlier setbacks.

Their cap table now includes several prominent startup angels, including Brian Caulfield, Rick Kelley, and executives from Amazon and Target — a testament to the strength of their vision and grit.

The pressure of startup life shaped how the founders work together. They’ve made mistakes that felt existential at the time, and had wins they thought would guarantee success. “We used to ride highs and crash lows,” Mulholland says. “Now we stay level when good or bad things happen.”

Today, however, is a day for celebration. Not just because of the funding, but because the dream they started with is still alive.

“We made every mistake in the book,” Ryan laughs. “We had a countdown clock in our Slack for how much runway we had left, and we got down to four days once. The business should’ve died multiple times. It’s brute force and stubbornness that kept us going.”

Want to meet the team? Register for our Investor Demo Day in October — Register Here