Ballinamore native sells Indian-based tech firm he founded for €25m

Ballinamore native, Con Conlon has sold the technology company he founded in India 15 years ago to the London-listed Dods Group for £22.4 million (€25 million).

The deal will result in a major payout for Conlon and his Irish and English investors who backed him when he established Merit Group in 2004. The group is headquarterd in Cennai, India, where Conlon now lives.

Merit also has India, and with facilities in London and Sri Lanka, Merit is a company that provides industry research, big data and technology services to clients in multiple industries. It employs about 1,000 people and last year reported revenues of £9.2m and a pretax profit of £1.2m.

The Merit Group, which was founded in 2004, is a specialist in the automated harvesting and transformation of data. It collects several million data points daily from about 3,000 sources and uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to categorise and enhance its information services.