Oxford Nanopore Announces £35 Million Fundraising

Oxford Nanopore Technologies Ltd, the UK-based technology company specialising in nanopore-based electronic molecular analysis systems, has raised £35 million ($59 million) in new funding through a private placement of ordinary shares. Both new and existing investors in the UK, US and mainland Europe subscribed to the fundraising. New investors include The CF Woodford Equity Income Fund managed by Woodford Investment Management LLP.

Funds will be used to further develop the Company's commercial and manufacturing infrastructure that has been serving early customers through the Company’s MinION Access Programme (MAP); this includes scaling up of production and logistics and expansion of customer support and application development functions.  In addition the funds will support the Company’s significant R&D operation including its pipeline of scalable nanopore-sensing products to address all parts of the market. Oxford Nanopore is committed to the development and protection of its leading intellectual property portfolio.

Gordon Sanghera, Chief Executive, said: "These additional funds will allow us both to accelerate and to scale the adoption of our MinION™ devices. Our access program for MinION is progressing as expected, and we now need to broaden our product portfolio and deepen our commercial activity. We can now make devices tailored to specific high value sequencing applications and, importantly, ultra-high-throughput devices designed for large scale whole genome sequencing (WGS). We can also make variations of the core technology designed for completely novel sensing applications beyond nucleic acids."

This transaction brings the total funds raised by Oxford Nanopore since its foundation in 2005 to £180 million.