Three Derry companies, FoodServe, Phase X Consulting and Creevagh Consulting Engineers, are investing a combined £1.6 million and creating 21 new jobs, with Invest NI offering £289,989 towards the plan. Read quickly, the headline sounds like the state is backing a £1.6m expansion. Read the numbers, and Invest NI is funding £289,989 of it — 18% of the total. The other 82%, just over £1.3 million, is coming from the three companies themselves.
That gap matters beyond this one announcement. Any Northern Ireland business sizing up an Invest NI application is, in effect, sizing up the same ratio: how much of your own investment plan will genuinely be underwritten, and how much you need to be able to fund yourself before, during and after the support arrives. This announcement is a clean, fully-sourced example of what that split actually looks like in practice, at three real companies, with real figures attached.
What Invest NI actually announced
The three companies are all based in Derry's North West region. FoodServe, headquartered at the company's Derry base, provides digital ordering, marketing and customer engagement platforms for restaurants and takeaways; it is investing £710,000 and creating 10 new jobs as it grows sales across Great Britain and pursues opportunities in the United States and the UAE. Phase X Consulting, a specialist Workday integration, testing and reporting provider based at Ebrington, is investing £512,000 and creating 6 jobs, aiming to strengthen its technical capacity as it grows across Great Britain and Ireland. Creevagh Consulting Engineers, which provides engineering design and consultancy services to clients across Ireland and Great Britain, is investing £383,000 and creating 5 jobs.
Aeidin McCarter, Invest NI's Head of Regional Business for the North West, met the companies at FoodServe's Derry headquarters and said the team had "worked closely with these three innovative, ambitious businesses to support their growth as they invest in their people, expand their services and pursue exciting opportunities in new markets." FoodServe founder and Managing Director Keith Donaghy said: "As a company founded in Derry, we are proud to be creating skilled jobs in the North West while developing technology that helps food businesses grow and compete in a changing market." Invest NI's release describes the new roles across the three companies as software developers, engineers, sales and marketing professionals, customer support staff and administrative positions.
The part of the headline worth doing the arithmetic on
Combined investment across the three companies is £1,605,000. Invest NI's offered support is £289,989. Divide one by the other and Invest NI is funding 18.1% of the total plan — not the £1.6m the headline leads with. The remaining £1,315,011 is money FoodServe, Phase X and Creevagh are putting up themselves, whether from retained profit, a bank facility, or a mix of both, before a penny of the announced total lands as turnover or new capability.
| Derry investment announcement, 17 September 2026 | Amount | Share of £1.6m total |
|---|---|---|
| Total investment (FoodServe, Phase X, Creevagh) | £1,605,000 | 100% |
| Invest NI support offered | £289,989 | 18.1% |
| Funded by the three companies themselves | £1,315,011 | 81.9% |
Turn the same figures round per job and the pattern holds. Across the 21 new roles, Invest NI's support works out at £13,809 per job. The companies' own money works out at £62,620 per job. Total investment per job created is £76,429. None of that is a criticism of the scheme — Invest NI support is designed to move a plan that's already commercially viable, not to fund the whole thing — but it is a very different number to plan around than the one in the headline, and it is the number that should sit in any Northern Ireland business's own cash flow forecast before an application goes in, not after an offer letter arrives.
What creating 21 jobs costs before any support is counted
The investment side of this announcement gets the attention, but the jobs side carries its own cost that Invest NI's support isn't aimed at covering: employer National Insurance. Every UK employer pays 15% employer NI on an employee's pay above a £5,000 secondary threshold. The roles named in the release, software developers, engineers, sales and marketing staff, customer support and admin, span a realistic salary range, so an illustrative average of £29,000 across the 21 new roles is a reasonable planning figure, not an official one.
| Illustrative North West firm, 21 new roles at £29,000 average | Per role | All 21 roles |
|---|---|---|
| Employer NI (15% above £5,000 threshold) | £3,600 | £75,600 |
| Employment Allowance available per company (if unused elsewhere) | — | up to £10,500 each |
| Minimum unfunded NI cost, even with full allowance headroom at all three companies | — | £44,100 |
That last row assumes all three companies still have their full £10,500 Employment Allowance available, which is unlikely if any of them already employs a reasonable-sized team, since the allowance covers a business's whole annual employer NI bill, not just new hires. For a company with existing headcount already using most of that allowance, close to the full £75,600 lands as a real, immediate payroll cost that sits alongside whatever Invest NI support the company actually receives, and well before any of the 21 new roles turns a profit.
What it means for a Northern Ireland owner specifically
If you're preparing your own Invest NI application, the useful number to take from this announcement isn't £1.6m or even £289,989 — it's 18%. Budget your own investment plan on the basis that support, if awarded, is likely to cover a minority of the total cost, not most of it, and make sure your business can fund the rest, plus the employer NI on any new roles, from its own cash flow or existing finance before the support arrives. If job creation is part of your pitch, get the real payroll cost of those roles checked against your business's own Employment Allowance headroom before you put a headcount figure in an application, not after, because that headroom is shared across your whole payroll, not allocated fresh to each grant-funded hire.
What to do this week
If you're weighing up a similar expansion, start with Invest NI's own support for business pages to see which current programme actually fits your plan, since this announcement doesn't name the specific scheme FoodServe, Phase X and Creevagh used, and eligibility varies significantly between them. If you're already talking to Invest NI's North West team, ask directly what percentage of your total project cost the offer is likely to cover before you build a business case around a bigger number, and get in touch with Invest NI to confirm it in writing.
Separately, ask our payroll team to run the real employer NI cost of any roles you're planning to create against how much of your own £10,500 Employment Allowance is already committed elsewhere in the business, so the jobs side of any application is costed on your own payroll, not an assumption. If the bigger question is how a grant or investment offer actually lands on your tax return once it's approved, our related note on how a £3.2m Invest NI grant landed on one Newry company's tax position works through the mechanics in detail.
What is still uncertain, and when we'll know
Invest NI's release does not say which specific support programme funded the £289,989, how that figure splits between FoodServe, Phase X and Creevagh individually, or whether the support is structured as a capital grant, a contribution to salary costs, or a mix of both — and that structure materially changes how each company's own accountant will treat it for tax. None of the three companies has yet filed accounts covering this investment at Companies House, so there is no independent confirmation beyond Invest NI's own release of how the money is being spent inside each business. What is fixed and checkable now: the £1,605,000 total investment, the 21 jobs, the £289,989 support figure, and the 15% employer NI rate and £5,000 threshold used above, both confirmed unchanged for the 2026/27 tax year with no Budget date yet set that could move them again.
A funding offer that covers a fifth of a growth plan is exactly the kind of thing our tax planning service is built to stress-test before you commit to the other four-fifths, and our management accounts service keeps the real cash flow gap between "offer accepted" and "money received" visible every month rather than as a surprise.