For more than a decade, the quiet bottleneck of contact center quality assurance has been a number: somewhere between 2 and 3 percent. That’s the slice of conversations a human evaluator could realistically review in a workweek. The other 97 percent went unseen, into the void of “we’ll sample what we can.” Generative AI is rewriting that math, and one of the companies leading the rewrite is built in Dublin.
A Dublin AI Story
Scorebuddy was founded in Dublin in 2012 by Derek Corcoran, who also founded its parent company, Sentient Solutions, back in 2001. The early product — initially called QMS — launched in 2010 as a cloud-based quality assurance tool for contact centers. Two years later, Scorebuddy emerged as a standalone platform.
Corcoran himself is a Trinity College Dublin graduate (BSc Business Studies, class of 1981) with more than 40 years in Irish technology and telecommunications. Before Scorebuddy, he held senior roles at Avaya Ireland (Country Director), AT&T/Lucent Ireland (Country Manager), and eircom (Head of Integrated Business Systems). The Scorebuddy story is not a recent founder bet. It is the patient evolution of a Dublin career into one of Ireland’s most durable B2B SaaS platforms.
Why Dublin?
Scorebuddy’s headquarters sit at 151-156 The Masonry, Thomas St, in The Liberties, one of Dublin’s oldest neighborhoods and now home to a dense cluster of design, software, and creative companies. The location matters for two reasons. First, talent: the 50+ person Scorebuddy team draws from Trinity, UCD, DCU, and Technological University Dublin, where Corcoran himself earned a second degree in Technology Management. Second, ecosystem: Enterprise Ireland’s early support (a 2005 private placement) and later the AIB Foresight SME Impact Fund (November 2024) are part of the same Irish growth-capital infrastructure that has backed Scorebuddy from the start.
The company now operates from Dublin, London, and Orlando, but the product still ships from The Liberties.
What They’re Building
The Scorebuddy platform has six modules: QA, BI (business intelligence), AI (the GenAI Auto Scoring engine), Learning (a contact center LMS), Coaching, and AI Knowledge (the 2025 addition that connects QA findings to coaching workflows).
The 2024 product hinge was GenAI Auto Scoring, launched in August 2024. The system uses configurable large language models to evaluate up to 100% of customer interactions — voice calls, chats, and email tickets — in seconds rather than minutes. Crucially, the design is configurable: QA teams set their own scorecards, criteria, and thresholds, rather than accepting a vendor’s prebuilt judgment model. That configurability is the bet, that quality assurance is too domain-specific to be handed entirely to a black-box AI.
In November 2024, Scorebuddy raised €5 million from Foresight Group (the FTSE 250 listed manager) via the AIB Foresight SME Impact Fund, with Foresight’s Philip Gardiner joining the board alongside John Purdy (Chair, Ergo co-founder) and Lisa Dillon (Microsoft EMEA VP). The raise is funding the AI product roadmap and a sustainability transition.
What Makes Scorebuddy Different
Most QA platforms either sample manually (slow, expensive, narrow coverage) or score automatically with a fixed model (fast but opaque, hard to trust for compliance-sensitive industries). Scorebuddy’s configurable GenAI design tries to combine the two: full coverage with auditable, team-owned scorecards. For regulated industries like financial services, healthcare, and betting and gaming, that combination of speed and governance is the unlock.
The other layer is the surrounding workflow. QA findings flow into the Coaching and Learning modules, so the platform doesn’t just score conversations; it routes the resulting feedback into the right agent’s training queue.
What’s Next
Scorebuddy’s roadmap centers on four lines: deeper configurability of GenAI Auto Scoring for complex enterprise workflows, expansion of AI Knowledge into adjacent QA disciplines, the ongoing Quarterly Pulse Report cadence (translating platform data into ecosystem insight), and continued global hiring across the team’s 15+ nationalities. The 2024 Foresight investment is being deployed across these tracks.
What This Means for the Dublin AI Ecosystem
For AI Dubliners, Scorebuddy is a particular kind of Dublin AI story. It isn’t a flashy unicorn. It isn’t a recent founder’s bet. It is a Dublin-built platform that earned its market position over a decade and is now using generative AI to redefine its own category. That kind of patient durability — building from The Liberties to 50,000 agents across 25 countries — is one of the quieter strengths of Dublin’s tech scene.
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