Oxford Nanopore announces £100M / $126M fundraising
Oxford Nanopore Technologies, the UK-based technology company that has designed and sells the world’s only portable DNA/RNA sequencer, has raised £100 million ($126 million) in new funding through a private placement of ordinary shares. The investment round was led by new investor GT Healthcare, a pan-Asian fund with special reach in China, and existing investor Woodford Investment Management on behalf of its clients. Other new and existing investors including IP Group plc also participated in the round.
“We will be using these funds to expand our commercial operations across a range of territories, including in Asia,” said Gordon Sanghera, CEO of Oxford Nanopore. “The active community of scientists using the MinION has shown that there are myriad possibilities for real time, scalable DNA sequencing with nanopore devices. We are looking forward to accelerating the development and adoption of those applications, towards our goal of enabling the analysis of any living thing, by anyone, anywhere.”
Oxford Nanopore will add resource to production and sales & marketing for its novel products including MinION (portable DNA sequencer), PromethION (high-throughput, on-demand sequencer) and VolTRAX (automated sample/library preparation device). The Company will also continue to invest in rapid improvement of its existing products and to further develop and expand its innovative pipeline, including the mobile-phone compatible SmidgION sequencer.
“We are very excited to be a part of Oxford Nanopore’s revolutionary platform, which fundamentally changes – and shapes – the landscape of DNA/single molecule sequencing” said Alan Au, Founder and Managing Partner of GT Healthcare Capital Partners. “We are thrilled to collaborate with Oxford Nanopore’s management team, with whom we share the same strategic vision; to extend the reach and accessibility of Nanopore-based sequencing solutions into emerging markets. We are confident that GT Healthcare and Oxford Nanopore will work very well collectively to accelerate our expansion in new markets, particularly the Greater China markets.”This transaction brings the total funds raised by the company to £351 million.
Source: https://nanoporetech.com/