Peter Foley had a useful response to a billion dollars. In June 2021, LetsGetChecked had completed a $150 million financing round, taking its valuation past the figure that earns a private company the curious title of unicorn. Foley acknowledged the milestone, then added a small corrective: “It’s just a valuation.” There are expensive ways to acquire perspective. He appeared determined to keep this one reasonably priced.
Four years later, in April 2025, he announced that he was stepping down as chief executive after a decade. He would remain on the board, he said, while the leadership team carried the business forward. Put those moments beside each other and a different kind of founder story emerges. The number gets your attention. The decisions on either side of it explain why you might keep reading.
Foley’s career contains plenty of recognisable entrepreneurial furniture: a business plan composed in a bedroom, personal savings committed to an uncertain venture, a small team that became an international organisation. What makes the account interesting is its changing scale. There is a considerable distance between writing a plan yourself and trusting other people to lead the company it becomes.
A bedroom, a bank, a beginning
Before the company, there was a less predictable professional itinerary. Foley’s first job was at Tesco. He studied law, completed a management master’s, and went through a corporate and commercial banking graduate programme at KBC. University College Dublin lists him among its MSc Management graduates of 2010. He later moved into consultancy and became a director at The Health Partnership in 2013.
There is something pleasingly ordinary about the supermarket in that sequence. A founder’s biography often becomes tidier as the business becomes larger: every earlier job is retrospectively appointed to a committee preparing the future. Foley’s route needs no such treatment. These were different kinds of work, before he began the work for which he became publicly known.
The early venture was small enough to describe without rounding. In November 2015, LetsGetChecked employed five people. Foley had put about €80,000 of his own money into it, and the company had secured €350,000 in seed capital. It was seeking further money for expansion. The figures belong to a moment when international potential still had to be supported by a very small organisation.
The company traces its origins to 2014; its public launch was being reported in 2015. That modest stretch of time is worth preserving. Businesses have development periods before they have anniversaries, and the business plan that Foley began in his bedroom preceded the version that strangers could buy into. An idea has to become an operation before the word “founder” begins doing much useful work.
The less glamorous business of getting things out the door
By May 2016, Foley was discussing a €2.5 million agreement with Quest Diagnostics in the United States. In March 2018, LetsGetChecked raised $12 million in a round led by Optum Ventures, with Qiming Venture Partners also participating. The enterprise was acquiring the partners and capital associated with a business preparing to work at a larger scale.
Money can make growth possible. It cannot pack an order. By March 2019, Foley was explaining a constraint with rather less ceremony than normally accompanies a funding announcement: the company could no longer move things through quickly enough. It needed a bigger space, more people and more automation. Its new production facility in Ballymount covered 7,000 square feet.
Foley described the practical work of bringing products in sooner and getting them out faster. Meanwhile, the main base in Dún Laoghaire housed engineers, developers, marketing and customer care staff. The geography gives the growth story some texture: one part of the business working on the systems and relationships, another working on the physical flow. The Atlantic ambition had a Dublin production floor.
This is where entrepreneurial language tends to become less elegant and more useful. Capacity, staffing, throughput, space. A founder can explain an ambition over coffee; an organisation must fulfil its promises repeatedly, on days when nobody is conducting an interview. Foley’s operational account provides a welcome interruption to the usual procession of cheques and celebratory photographs.
A further $30 million round followed in 2019. The sequence matters because it connects the financing to an enterprise already dealing with practical pressure. Larger sums were arriving alongside larger obligations. A production facility is a particularly concrete expression of confidence: sooner or later someone has to decide how much room the future will need.
A number with nine zeroes
In June 2021, the financial scale changed again. New York-based Casdin Capital led a $150 million round, with investors including CommonFund Capital, Illumina Ventures and Optum Ventures. The company had offices in Dublin and New York and employed more than 600 people around the world. Its valuation passed $1 billion.
Rory McIlroy was among its investors. A familiar name is convenient in a story containing unfamiliar funds, but the wider cast matters too. An international company accumulates relationships as well as customers: backers, operating teams, commercial partners and colleagues who can carry different parts of the work. Foley had become the chief executive of something far beyond the five-person venture of the early reporting.
The attraction of the unicorn label is obvious. It turns a financial event into an animal people remember. The danger is that the label sounds like a verdict when it describes a particular financing moment. A valuation tells you what a transaction says about a company at a point in time. A customer’s next experience remains a separate appointment in the diary.
“It’s just a valuation.”Peter Foley, June 2021
Foley’s emphasis was on what the company did for customers and how it executed. That distinction is the most useful part of his response. A funding round can be completed. Execution is a recurring obligation. The calendar does not clear itself because investors have agreed on a number, and the staff do not get to spend the following year living inside a press release.
Dublin on the return address
Foley’s international business did not require him to narrate his own departure from Ireland. In 2021 he described his intention to keep running it from Dublin. The United States was a major market, and the company had a New York office, yet he was speaking from home near its Dún Laoghaire headquarters. His working map included both sides of the Atlantic.
Earlier reporting described a chief executive who usually divided his time between Ireland and America. There is an everyday implication in that detail which the investment totals conceal. International expansion becomes a pattern of travel and coordination as well as a commercial strategy. A company’s reach can be global while the person leading it still has a particular place to come back to.
His educational connection to Dublin remained visible too. UCD included him in its 2021 alumni account of entrepreneurs, noting both the financing and his selection as an EY Entrepreneur of the Year finalist. These are public markers of a career moving into wider view. They also locate that career in institutions and communities that existed before the valuation attracted attention.
The setting helps keep the story human. Dublin, New York, Ballymount, Dún Laoghaire: these are places where people had to show up and work. They make a more informative map than a row of investor logos. The company’s expansion had addresses, and Foley continued to place himself within that geography rather than somewhere above it.
Passing the keys
His advice to less experienced entrepreneurs was grounded in endurance. In a 2021 Q&A, Foley urged people to start with something they believed in strongly enough to continue through the difficult stretches. It is practical advice precisely because it leaves the difficult stretches in the picture. Conviction has a job to do after novelty stops doing it.
That advice takes on another shade when read alongside his departure announcement. In April 2025, Foley said he was leaving the CEO role after ten years and would continue supporting the leadership team from the board. He thanked employees, board members, shareholders and customers. The announcement distributed credit across the people around the business.
A handover changes the central question in a founder profile. How did this person begin? remains worth asking. So does: what happens when the organisation’s daily leadership passes to someone else? Foley’s announcement placed confidence in the team carrying on. It is an ending to his chief executive chapter that belongs beside the beginning, rather than in a small correction beneath it.
His public professional profile now lists a stealth company in Dublin. The next enterprise has entered the public record in that limited form, while LetsGetChecked continues under different leadership. There is a familiar shape to the move: after a decade spent building an organisation that people could recognise, a return to a venture whose name is not yet public.
The billion-dollar figure will remain a convenient shorthand for Foley’s career. The smaller details are more revealing: five employees, his own money, a larger production space, the decision to keep Dublin as a base, and eventually the decision to hand over daily command. Taken together, they describe a founder’s changing responsibilities. A valuation gets a date. Building a company occupies the years around it.