From left: Kevin Foley, partner, Grant Thornton; HPSU Founder of the Year Tony McEnroe, SiriusXT; and Kevin Sherry, executive director of global business development, Enterprise Ireland. Image: Fennell Photography
Enterprise Ireland continues support for HPSU founders who are working together to succeed globally and scale faster.
Tony McEnroe of SiriusXT has been presented with the inaugural Enterprise Ireland High Potential Start-up (HPSU) Founder of the Year award.
SiriusXT has created a benchtop soft X-ray microscope called the SXT100, which can generate high-resolution images of the internal structure of whole biological cells.
‘The future looks bright for Irish start-ups’
– KEVIN SHERRY
SiriusXT was one of nine start-up companies to be selected for the Founder of the Year award, whereby each of the shortlisted candidates were nominated by their founder peers.
Liz Fulham of SalesOptimize and Eoin O’Broin of Solar AdTek were also recognised and received awards as runners-up on the night.
The other nominees included Immersive VR Education, Hub Controls, Clubs To Hire, Future Ticketing, Feedpods and TVadSync.
Scale faster
The Founder of the Year award, supported by Grant Thornton, forms an important element of the HPSU Founders Forum.
Enterprise Ireland created this forum in 2015 and currently, there are more than 100 participants from a variety of sectors including software, medical devices, food, engineering and construction.
“The main objective of the forum is to provide a platform for founders to help founders succeed internationally and scale faster, and Tony McEnroe, CEO of SiriusXT, exemplifies a founder with a clear pathway to building international scale and with the potential to become a world leader in his field,” said Kevin Sherry, executive director of global business development at Enterprise Ireland.
“The future looks bright for Irish start-ups and we congratulate Tony and wish all the nominees shortlisted here today the very best for the future.”
McEnroe said it was a great honour to have won the accolade.
“This award is a testament to the world-class research which was carried out over many years by my three fellow co-founders, Dr Kenneth Fahy, Dr Fergal O’Reilly and Dr Paul Sheridan, as well as a dedicated team of researchers within the Spectroscopy Group in UCD’s School of Physics. This research has resulted in the development of technology that underpins our novel soft x-ray tomography (SXT) benchtop microscope, which is now being commercialised by SiriusXT.”
He added: “Our SXT100 microscope, which we plan to launch onto the market in 2018, will be the first commercial lab-scale SXT microscope of its kind in the world. It will allow researchers to illuminate whole single cells or tissue samples and produce 3D images that cannot be produced in any other way.”
