Roy Horgan: The Banker-Turned-Founder Behind SolarPrint and MarketHub

You've probably seen the name Roy Horgan pop up next to two very different worlds: retail tech boardrooms and Irish celebrity headlines. Turns out both are true. He's a Cork-born entrepreneur who traded a corporate banking career for startups, and he's also married to broadcaster Angela Scanlon. Let's break down who he actually is — no fluff, no guesswork.

Quick Facts

• Name: Roy Horgan
• Hometown: Cork, Ireland
• Background: Corporate banking, then entrepreneurship
• Known for: Co-founding SolarPrint, founding MarketHub Technologies, CEO of SES-imagotag UK & Ireland
• Personal life: Husband of TV presenter Angela Scanlon

Early Life and Background

Roy Horgan grew up in a fourth-generation family food business in Cork. That's a serious head start on understanding retail and supply chains. It's the kind of upbringing that quietly shapes how someone thinks about business later on.

He holds a B.Sc. in Business and Finance, plus diplomas in stockbroking and international selling. Solid, practical credentials — not flashy, just useful. That combo set him up for a career in numbers before he ever touched a startup.

Career and Professional Journey

Corporate Banking and Early Career

Before entrepreneurship, Roy Horgan spent years in corporate banking. By 2006, he was managing a portfolio worth roughly €2 billion, spread across Europe and North America. That's not a small job — it's the kind of role that teaches you risk, discipline, and how capital actually moves.

Those years gave him a front-row seat to how big money gets deployed and protected. It's easy to overlook, but that grounding shows up later in how he ran his own companies.

Transition to Entrepreneurship

At 27, Roy Horgan walked away from banking. He co-founded SolarPrint in 2008, a company built around dye-sensitized solar cells and self-powered indoor sensors. It's niche tech — the kind that sounds small until you realize Intel and Analog Devices were customers.

SolarPrint invested roughly €7 million into the technology. It didn't become a household name, but it gave Roy Horgan his first real founder experience: building something from scratch, pitching serious clients, and learning what breaks when a startup scales.

Individual Business Ventures

SolarPrint

SolarPrint's whole pitch was elegant: sensors that power themselves off ambient light instead of batteries. Big names in tech signed on early, which said a lot about the technology's credibility even if the commercial payoff stayed modest.

MarketHub Technologies

In 2013, Roy Horgan founded MarketHub Technologies. This one hit different — it used data analytics to help retailers stop over-discounting, manage stock better, and cut food waste. Clients included Sainsbury's, Marks & Spencer, Dixons Carphone, SPAR, Budgens, and Londis. That's a serious retail client list for a young company.

MarketHub's whole approach was simple in theory, hard in practice: use real data instead of gut instinct to decide pricing. Retailers loved it because it solved a problem they'd been guessing at for years.

In 2017, SES-imagotag — a French digital pricing company with a market cap of around € 400 million at the time — acquired MarketHub. It was the kind of exit that validates a founder's whole thesis. Roy Horgan didn't walk away after the deal, either. He stayed on and took the CEO role for SES-imagotag's UK & Ireland operations, a post he still holds, sitting on the group's executive committee.

Key Achievements and Contributions

Here's a quick table of the milestones that matter most in Roy Horgan's career:

The headline achievement — it's the moment a founder's bet actually pays off. Beyond that, Roy Horgan was also invited onto the Advisory Board of Astanor, a Luxembourg-based venture capital firm focused on food, supply chain, and emerging tech investments across Europe and North America. That's the kind of invite that only comes once you've proven you can spot and build real value.

Personal Life and Family

Roy Horgan is married to Angela Scanlon, the Irish broadcaster known for her work across British and Irish television. The two married in 2014 in a ceremony in County Wicklow, Ireland. It was a relatively low-key affair given Angela's public profile, though it still drew media attention.

They live in North London and are reportedly parents to two daughters. Beyond that, Roy keeps a fairly low profile — most of what's public focuses on his career rather than his home life, and that seems to be by design.

Challenges

Not every venture Roy Horgan touched was a runaway success. SolarPrint, by most accounts, didn't achieve major commercial scale despite the promising tech and blue-chip customers. That's a normal part of a founder's story, though — the first company teaches you the lessons the second one cashes in on.

Corporate banking for a startup founder is also a tough jump. Fewer resources, more risk, no safety net. The fact that Roy Horgan made that leap at 27 and kept building says something about his risk tolerance.

Legacy and Impact

Roy Horgan's biggest fingerprint on the industry is probably in retail data analytics. MarketHub's approach to dynamic pricing and waste reduction fed directly into SES-imagotag's broader digital pricing platform, which now touches a long list of major retailers.

His path — banker to founder to corporate exec — is also a pretty useful case study for anyone thinking about a similar jump. It shows that a finance background isn't wasted in a startup; if anything, it can be the exact edge that gets a company acquired instead of stalled.

Conclusion

Roy Horgan's story is a pretty clean arc: banking discipline, an early startup that didn't fully land, a second one that did, and a corporate leadership role that followed the exit. Add in his marriage to Angela Scanlon, and you've got a public figure who's genuinely more interesting for his career than for the headlines around his personal life. If you're into founder stories with a finance twist, this is worth following.