The EIC Accelerator and SiriusXT's X-Ray Microscope: A Follow-Up

Soft X-ray tomography can show the whole inside of a frozen biological cell in 3D without slicing or staining it, but for decades it needed a synchrotron, a particle accelerator the size of a stadium. SiriusXT, a 2015 spin-out from the School of Physics at University College Dublin (UCD), set out to shrink that light source to fit on a laboratory bench. In March 2020 the European Commission picked its project LICENT among the COVID-19-related winners of the EIC Accelerator pilot, with blended finance, according to the Commission's list of selected companies. The list names SiriusXT as the only beneficiary of the project.

The grant part was €1,511,542.38 towards a total cost of €2,159,346.25, according to CORDIS. UCD put the whole award, grant and equity, at €4.5 million when it was announced in June 2020, and chief executive Tony McEnroe said then that the company would launch a commercial product "at the end of 2021". Six years on, the microscope exists, carries a CE mark by the company's account and is installed at UCD. A customer purchase has not been announced.

Where SiriusXT Stands Now

SiriusXT is active. The Irish companies register lists it with status "Normal" and shows an annual return and financial statement received on 13 October 2026, according to SoloCheck. OpenCorporates lists the same status and two returns of share allotments filed on 6 May 2026, which SoloCheck dates to 16 December 2024 and 17 April 2025. The company has issued new shares, but the amounts and buyers are not visible without paying for the filings, and SiriusXT has not announced a funding round. As a small company it files abridged accounts, and no revenue, loss or headcount from them is freely published.

Its own news feed shows a company on the conference circuit. In 2026 it exhibited at Microscopy & Microanalysis in Milwaukee and the electron tomography congress in Madison, and in October it sponsored the Volume EM Technology Forum at Peking University, where it shared a booth with Quantum Design China, which the company calls "our Chinese distributor". No independent source for that distribution deal could be opened.

The Technology: A Synchrotron on a Bench

Soft X-rays in the "water window", between about 282 and 533 electronvolts, pass through water but are absorbed by carbon-rich material, so a frozen, fully hydrated cell shows its organelles in natural contrast. Rotating the cell and taking an image at each angle produces a tomogram, in effect a CT scan of the cell at about 50 nanometres resolution, according to a showcasing report SiriusXT published through Euro-BioImaging in March 2023. The same report puts transmission electron microscopy at about 5 nanometres, but only for small regions of a cell, which is why it pitches soft X-ray tomography as the bridge between fluorescence and electron microscopy.

The obstacle was the light. The founders came from a UCD spectroscopy group that built bright extreme ultraviolet sources for chip lithography using a laser-produced plasma, and they adapted the technique to make soft X-rays, McEnroe told Silicon Republic in January 2025. The sources disagree on how scarce the alternative is: the LICENT objective on CORDIS speaks of four synchrotron facilities with queues of up to twelve months, while UCD's 2023 announcement counts six, in the UK, Germany, Spain, the USA, China and Taiwan.

What LICENT Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

LICENT ran from 1 August 2020 to 31 January 2023. Its final periodic report sets out three objectives: show that the SXT-100 can make 3D images of frozen biological samples, offer a 3D cell imaging service to researchers, and CE-mark the microscope and sell it to organisations in disease research and drug discovery. The report marks every task 100% complete and says a CE-marked version 1 was built. Euro-BioImaging's March 2023 report, written by the company, likewise says SiriusXT had "built and fully certified its first commercial product, for launch in 2023". No certificate or notified body is named in either.

The pilot did not go where it was planned. The fourth work package was to test the microscope at UCD's Conway Institute; the report says the pilot was instead commissioned at SiriusXT's own premises in July 2022, and that the move to Conway was "scheduled for May, 2023", after the project had ended. The deployment at Conway was announced on 25 October 2023, and the company's own account says the official launch took place on 7 November. McEnroe called it "formal commercial deployment", but neither UCD nor SiriusXT says whether UCD bought the instrument. UCD researchers had been promised early access to it as part of the core facility through CoCID, a separate EU project in which SiriusXT is a partner, according to Silicon Canals.

1. 3D cryo images of biological cellsDeliveredReported complete on CORDIS; three conference papers and one journal article listed under results.
2. 3D cell imaging serviceDeliveredEuro-BioImaging report: partner samples imaged "routinely" since early 2022.
3. CE-mark the SXT-100DeliveredStated in the final report and the company's 2023 showcasing report; no certificate published.
4. Pilot at the Conway InstituteLatePiloted in-house in July 2022; Conway deployment announced October 2023, nine months after the project ended.
5. Sell the microscopeNot achievedNo sale announced by the company or a buyer; first orders forecast for 2025 were not announced.

What Has Happened Since the Award

The sales forecast has been pushed back twice in public. In June 2020 McEnroe promised a commercial product by the end of 2021. In October 2023 UCD and TechCentral reported that more than twenty European and US organisations were evaluating the SXT-100 and that "first international orders are projected in the coming months". In January 2025 McEnroe told Silicon Republic the company had "spent the past two years conducting trials with over 30 target customers" and was "forecasting first commercial orders for the microscope in 2025". No order has been announced in the company's news feed or found in any other source checked for this article.

The research side has kept growing. SiriusXT is a partner in CoCID, a UCD-led Horizon 2020 project on the cellular origins of viral infections that ran from January 2021 to May 2025, with an EU contribution of €1,703,750 to SiriusXT out of €5,686,215 in total, according to CORDIS. Silicon Canals reported SiriusXT's share as €2.35 million, which CORDIS does not match. The company says it is also a partner in CLEXM, a €2.5 million Marie Skłodowska-Curie doctoral network on correlative light, electron and X-ray microscopy, and in Everest, a staff exchange project on extracellular vesicles. Before the EIC award, its SME Instrument Phase 2 project SMILE (January 2017 to February 2019, EU contribution €3,000,935) aimed to move the same microscope "from prototype to commercial product".

The Money

The EIC Fund lists SiriusXT Limited and the LICENT project in its portfolio of invested companies, and its company page confirms the listing. Neither gives the size or date of the equity stake. UCD's €4.5 million figure for the whole award, minus the €1.51 million grant on CORDIS, leaves a remainder that no source opened for this article attributes to the EIC Fund by name.

The company's cumulative funding claims rose from over €10 million in June 2020 to over €13 million in October 2023, when UCD reported a staff of 20. In January 2025 McEnroe said SiriusXT was "currently not seeking any investment". The share allotments of December 2024 and April 2025 show that new shares were issued around that time.

Why Europe Should Care

On 2 July 2025 the Commission adopted its strategy to make Europe a global leader in life sciences by 2030, backed by more than €10 billion a year from the current EU budget, according to the Commission's research portal. A European-built laboratory X-ray microscope would give drug and disease researchers a tool that today depends on booking time at a handful of synchrotrons. That case only holds if laboratories buy it.

The Verdict

SiriusXT has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.