Royal Visit to Waterford

Last week, The Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall began their visit to the Republic of Ireland with a trip to County Waterford, NearForm’s hometown.

The trip is one of several spring tours being undertaken by the royals in celebration of the Queen’s platinum jubilee this year and marks the first royal visit to the Republic of Ireland since 2019.

In marking the history and achievements of Waterford, our very own founder, Cian O’Maidin, CEO, Ciaran Cosgrave, and Head of Life Sciences, Larry Breen, had the privilege of meeting the senior royals to celebrate the work we have done as a company in building the Irish COVID contact tracing app .

“Being invited to this event to meet not only The Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall but also other inspiring local businesses has been an immense privilege and a testament to the incredible work that the team at NearForm have done over the past two years. While we are a remote company, it’s at times like this that I am truly proud to have founded NearForm in my hometown of Waterford,” said Cian O’Maidin.

Ciaran Cosgrave, Cian O’Maidin and Larry Breen meeting The Prince of Wales

While NearForm was founded in 2011 in Waterford, we have always been a remote-first company. Today, our HQ remains in NearForm’s home town of Tramore just a stone’s throw away from the beach, but the majority of our team of over 250 work remotely, scattered across 29 countries, and working flexible hours.

Fundamentally, we don’t believe that people need to move to “tech hubs” to have a brilliant career. Instead, we bring brilliant careers to wherever we find passionate and talented people.

This has empowered us to create a highly experienced, multidisciplinary team with a track record of delivery excellence working together to solve complex problems at speed.

Ciaran Cosgrave, CEO, speaking with The Duchess of Cornwall

On the afternoon of Sunday, 22 March 2020, HSE contacted NearForm about building a contact tracing app for Ireland.

Within 3 months, the COVID Tracker Ireland app was built and released. In less than 36 hours of the official launch, the app had more than one million downloads, making it the most successful launch of a contact tracing app in the world. The app has since been used in Scotland , Northern Ireland , Gibraltar , Jersey , and in several US states: New Jersey , Pennsylvania , Delaware and New York , with NearForm subsequently donating all code to the Linux Foundation Public Health under ‘ Covid Green ’ and managing the central OSS project.

“Even beyond the technical achievements and successful, rapid deployment, the process of developing the COVID Tracker app tells a remarkable story of what’s possible in both the technology and healthcare space when talented, determined people come together to create something valuable and important,” said Ciaran Cosgrave.

For the team at NearForm, our experience building the COVID app is one of several health & life sciences projects where we have reaped the benefits of Open Source to build critical technologies changing the face of healthcare delivery, diagnostics, and data management in the medical space.

Another example of our work in the healthcare sector is with Renalytix, for whom our team of experts are building a digital platform for the groundbreaking management of chronic kidney disease.

Find out more about our work .