One of Cork’s youngest entrepreneurs, 19-year-old Gregory Tarr is hiring “as many people as are qualified for the job” in his company Inferex, which creates the infrastructure for AI to exist.

Speaking to The Echo, Mr Tarr, who started his company after winning the BT Young Scientist competition in 2021 and dropping out of secondary school, fundraised €1.25m online to kickstart his business, something possible thanks to the Covid pandemic.

“Covid was extremely beneficial for me, I didn’t have to leave my bedroom to raise over a million dollars for a company that didn’t exist, just over Zoom,” he says.

“It probably is the reason it happened for me so young.”

Despite this helpful start, Greg said, a year on, with the company up and running, Covid is now a hindrance.

“Now we are a proper company, it is a hindrance. Travel is annoying. I would love to go for coffee with an investor without worrying if I will contract a deadly disease.”

The young entrepreneur said being CEO of Inferex is “90% of his life”, but said he thoroughly enjoys his lifestyle.

“I feel like I was born to do this, I think I have wanted this to be my job for as long as I can remember. It’s exactly what I expected. It’s a lot of work, but you get to meet and talk to some of the most interesting people in the world and you get to surround yourself with those people and build amazing products and help hundreds of people, hopefully, someday.

“It’s spectacular, I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

The teenager said his parents are very proud of what he has achieved. “I don’t think they saw it coming,” he says. “I didn’t! They knew I was going to own a company at some point, I don’t think they expected it to be this soon.”

In terms of learning the ropes of being the head honcho, Greg said he does reach out to those around him for advice.

“I need advice all the time, the entire industry has welcomed me with open arms,” he says.

“I go to my investors — they have seen these problems and know the solutions, and other founders — it seems like the challenges that I have are the challenges that other founders have had with their products.”

Looking ahead, Greg said he hopes to be a serial or parallel entrepreneur in time.

“Once I’ve got some level of autonomy in the business, I will start a few new ventures, I’m still just learning the reigns and roles of a CEO and once I’ve mastered that, I will move on to more companies and managing more people.”

Something Greg has in his back pocket is a patent for one of his previous BT Young Scientist projects.

“I think my first BT project has the most potential to be developed further. It was a bioreactor that could grow large quantities of algae in arid environments and the goal was to turn the least fertile grounds in the world like the nomad desert into the most fertile and profitable lands while creating renewable fuel. So, I have a patent for that design and some 10-20 years down the line I will come back to it, but AI is definitely the easiest thing for me at the moment.”

Inferex currently has four or five full-time employees, with a range of part-time people as well as consultants and investors.

Greg said he is currently hiring people to “build crazy shit, crazy fast”.

“We are hiring at the moment, as fast as we possibly can, we are hiring AI engineers and infrastructure engineers, the ying and yang of the company,” he said.

The teen said he is in a very privileged position of being able to pick talent from all over the world, as his company has no fixed abode.

“The business is fully remote. I’m living in Killarney at the moment, my parents are still living in Cork, we have a few engineers in Dublin, Canada, we have some consultants scattered around the world, America and India, Pakistan.

“I wanted to be remote, who wants to fork out 40 grand for an office that restricts your talent pool?”

In terms of what he is looking for, Greg said adaptability was vital as it was very much a ‘learn on the job’ gig and said he could give people with natural raw talent an opportunity.

“I will hire anyone regardless of their qualifications, as long as they can do their job. We have invented new ways of interviewing people so we can efficiently determine that. So, if you are self-taught like me or have degrees or qualifications, everyone is held to the same standard.

“I don’t even read CVs anymore, I just put them on a 30-minute call and I’ll be able to tell.

“Of course,” Mr Tarr elaborated, “having 10 years of experience would help a little bit.”

Explaining why he was hiring in this way, Greg said: “There is no one on Earth qualified to build Inferex, because it has never been built before. So it is a very much learn-on-the-job sort of thing.

“We will hire as many people as are qualified. I could scale the company to 100 people, we are hiring senior software engineers and intermediate software engineers with experience in AI.”

Mr Tarr said if anyone is looking to apply, all the information is available on Inferex.com.