The "Next Wave": Bringing Attacca to Market
31st May 2026
For an early-stage founder, the gap between having a working product and having a business can feel like the widest part of the journey. It's the stage where technical validation gives way to a different set of questions entirely: Who is your customer? How do you tell your story? Who do you call when you need advice, not code? For Attacca the spatial transcriptomics platform (formerly known as GeoXen) that gap started to close this year, on the Enterprise Ireland NextWave programme.
What is the NextWave Programme
NextWave is Enterprise Ireland's National Women Founders Accelerator, a 10-week hybrid programme combining in-person "surge" sessions with online tracks, built specifically for high-potential women founders working towards pre-seed and seed investment. It gives participants access to sector-specific mentorship, a peer community of fellow founders, and introductions into investor networks.
The programme sits inside a broader shift at Enterprise Ireland, which has been expanding its support for female founders considerably: 55 female-led start-ups were backed in 2025, with 36 early-stage funding rounds completed under the Pre-Seed Start Fund, up from just eight the year before. NextWave was launched, in the agency's own words, after listening to the barriers women founders were facing and building a programme to address them directly meaning validating, building, and scaling in equal measure.
For Attacca, taking part in NextWave marked the first real step toward commercialising the business: moving the conversation on from what the platform does, to how it gets into the hands of the labs and researchers who need it.
Lessons From Industry Experts
Every cohort is only as good as the people who show up to share what they've learned, and NextWave brought in speakers whose stories mapped closely onto Attacca's own trajectory, deep-tech, science-adjacent businesses built by founders who had to earn trust from sceptical, highly technical customers before a single sale was made.
Rosanne Longmore, CEO and co-founder of Coroflo, spoke about building one of Ireland's most closely watched medtech companies from the ground up. Coroflo has developed the world's first breastfeeding monitor. It's a problem area with almost no existing solution, and Longmore built the company after being met with early scepticism from investors, choosing instead to bootstrap and prove the concept on her own terms to which they have achieved great success.
Marina Gorey brought a different but equally instructive perspective, drawn from her years building SuperAwesome, the kid-safe adtech and gaming platform she co-founded in 2012. Under her leadership, SuperAwesome scaled to £50 million in revenue with teams across the US and Asia-Pacific before being acquired by Epic Games in 2020. Gorey focused on what it actually takes to build a high-performing organisation as a company scales, a topic that resonated well beyond gaming: the mechanics of hiring, culture, and empowerment translate directly to any founder trying to grow a team around a fast-moving product.
Beyond the founder case studies, NextWave devoted real time to something many technical founders underrate: storytelling. Sessions led by Padraig Hyland and Muireann Ryan, of The Core Story, pushed participants to think about their businesses not just as products or data, but as narratives that need to engage customers, investors, and partners alike. Hyland, a strategy and communications consultant with two decades of international business experience and a parallel career as a professional comedian, has built a reputation for helping leaders find and use their own authentic stories. For a platform like Attacca, built on genuinely complex science, learning to translate that complexity into a story a non-specialist can follow was one of the more immediately useful takeaways of the week.
Beyond the Curriculum
Some of the most valuable elements of NextWave weren't formal sessions at all.
One standout was "The Board You Can't Afford" simulated board meeting bringing together Enterprise Ireland mentors and representatives to put founders through the kind of scrutiny a real board would apply, at a stage when most start-ups couldn't yet assemble one. It was a rare chance to pressure-test strategy and messaging against experienced eyes, without the stakes of an actual board relationship. The cohort also had the opportunity to tap into Enterprise Ireland's wider mentorship network and expert panels, and to see first-hand some of the physical infrastructure supporting Ireland's start-up scene such as the Guinness Enterprise Centre and the AWS Loft, serving as a reminder of just how dense and active the country's start-up ecosystem has become. High-quality video content documenting the business was produced using Enterprise Ireland's own resources, giving Attacca a polished asset it wouldn't otherwise have had the time or budget to create at this stage. And perhaps most valuable of all: the people. NextWave put Attacca in a room with a wide network of new founders, offering what amounted to a first real immersion into the Irish start-up community.
The Next Steps Following the NextWave
For a young company navigating the move from lab-validated technology to a commercial platform, programmes like NextWave offer something that's difficult to manufacture on your own: proximity to founders who've already made the leap, direct access to people who can open doors, and the confidence that comes from realising you're not building alone. NextWave gave Attacca its first real network inside Enterprise Ireland and the wider Irish entrepreneurship ecosystem and, with it, the confidence to start pushing seriously on business development.
Read more about the NextWave participants here.
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