Xtremepush cofounder has been nominated in the Established Business Category for this year’s EY Entrepreneur of the Year awardsTommy Kearns: 'When Apple and Google opened up push notifications, something clicked. I saw an opportunity'. Photograph: Naoise Culhane Thu Aug 06 2026 - 19:00 • 3 MIN READTommy Kearns is the co-founder and chief executive of Xtremepush, a global customer engagement platform built for regulated industries.Its self-described aim is to help enterprises communicate with millions of customers across email, push notifications, SMS, WhatsApp and more – powering onboarding, loyalty programmes, fraud alerts, responsible gaming and real-time marketing in fully compliant environments.Founded in Dublin in 2014, Xtremepush operates across offices in Dublin, London, and New York, with a global team of more than 170 people and clients including FanDuel, Fanatics, BetMGM, Caesars Entertainment, Bank of Ireland, Barclays, An Post, Laya and Three.What vision or light bulb moment prompted you to start up in business?The app economy was exploding, but businesses had no intelligent way to talk back to their customers. When Apple and Google opened up push notifications, something clicked. I saw an opportunity to build a platform that allowed businesses to communicate personally, in real time, using data rather than instinct.Push notifications were the missing piece. That simple idea of helping businesses have timely, intelligent conversations, rather than just broadcasting messages, became the foundation of Xtremepush; everything since has been chasing that original insight.Describe your business model and what makes it unique.At its simplest, we help businesses have better conversations with their customers.If your bank needs to warn you about fraud, your insurer wants to send an important update or your favourite sports app wants to send you a personalised offer, Xtremepush decides the right message, through the right channel at the right time, all while ensuring it complies with strict regulatory rules.We help organisations build trust, not just engagement.To what extent does your business trade internationally and what are your future plans?Xtremepush is a global business.More than 70 per cent of our revenue now comes from outside Ireland, with North America being our largest and fastest-growing market. That’s something I’m incredibly proud of because it proves geography is no barrier to building world-class technology. Our ambition isn’t simply to sell into more countries; it’s to build the company that global enterprises trust when AI and customer engagement converge. That’s a challenge worth dedicating the next decade to.What are you doing to disrupt, innovate and improve your products?We’ve launched XpertOS – the world’s first Governed Agentic Operating System for customer engagement. It doesn’t just automate campaigns; it orchestrates intelligent, compliant engagement autonomously, while keeping humans in control. We’re not adapting to the AI era. We’re defining what it looks like in regulated industries. Internally, AI has already fundamentally changed how we build and run the business.What is the most common mistake you see entrepreneurs make?Falling in love with the solution instead of the problem. Too many founders focus on what they’ve built rather than whether it solves something real and meaningful. Sustainable businesses are built by solving genuine problems repeatedly – not by chasing trends or building technology for its own sake.What advice would you give a less experienced entrepreneur?I’d tell my younger self that every opportunity has a cost. As founders, we naturally want to say “yes” – to customers, new markets and new ideas. I’ve learned that every “yes” means saying “no” to something else. Our biggest breakthroughs came when we focused on the opportunities where we could genuinely be the best in the world, rather than simply another competitor. That’s why today we’re focused on governed AI for regulated industries, not AI for everyone.What was the game changer or turning point for the company?For me, the turning point wasn’t just winning a customer; it was changing how we saw ourselves. Bank of Ireland gave us credibility in one of the world’s most regulated industries, and our first big US enterprise customer proved we could compete internationally. From then on, we stopped asking whether we were good enough to compete globally and started asking how big we could become.IN THIS SECTION