Better Futures Shortlisted for 2024 Irish Times Innovation Awards

AI focused start-up shortlisted in the design and manufacturing category.

DUBLIN, Ireland, Nov 8, 2024 – Better Futures, an artificial intelligence (AI) focused start-up, has today been announced as a finalist in the design and manufacturing category of The Irish Times Innovation Awards 2024.

Earlier this year the company began the roll-out of EVA, a novel AI Assistant Platform for engineers and manufacturers which leverages the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) with engineering accuracy and control.

EVA (Engineering Verification Assistant) enables engineers to increase efficiency by up to 40%, with instant engineering knowledge retrieval in addition to the automation of creating, checking and updating of documents.


Better Futures, headquartered at NovaUCD in Dublin, was founded in 2023 by Anthony Mc Loughlin

Anthony Mc Loughlin, CEO and founder, Better Futures, said, “It is a great honour for the entire Better Futures team to have been shortlisted for the prestigious Irish Times Innovation Awards.”

He added, “More importantly it helps to get our message out to engineers. The GPT breakthrough is revolutionary for their daily work, as it enables up to 80% automation of ‘paperwork’ and ‘knowledge administration’. We believe this is a generational opportunity to free engineers so they can focus on innovation, and on building better futures for their industries and our world. With EVA we are building a dedicated solution for engineers to help unlock this AI breakthrough within their complex engineering environments.”

He concluded, “We believe we have made a great start this year and are grateful that this has been recognised by the Irish Times Innovation Awards, we look forward now to the Awards ceremony final later this month.”

Better Futures, which has already secured clients in Europe and the US, is currently closing a seed funding round having secured €500k in pre-seed funding earlier this year.

The Irish Times Innovation Awards aim to recognise and promote the best service, product, or operational innovations throughout the island. The finalists were selected by an independent panel of judges to secure a place at the final and a chance to win the overall ‘Innovation of the Year’ Award.

Along with the prestige of winning, the overall winner will receive a UCD Smurfit Executive Development scholarship for three from a selection of their Executive Development short courses commencing in 2024/2025 Academic Year. The winner will also receive a complimentary annual Premium Digital subscription to The Irish Times.

Better Futures will be competing against two other finalists, TurboTEM and Viska Systems, in their Award category.

The winners of the competition will be announced at an Awards ceremony to be held in Dublin on 13 November.

For more information, visit irishtimes.com/innovationawards.