Oxford Nanopore raises £35m through private share placement
The funds will be used to scale up production and logistics for its MinION devices
Oxford Nanopore Technologies, a UK-based technology company specialising in nanopore-based electronic molecular analysis systems, has raised £35m (US$59m) in funding through a private placement of ordinary shares.
The company said new and existing investors in the UK, US and mainland Europe subscribed to the fundraising.
The funds will be used to scale up production and logistics for its MinION devices and expand customer support and application development functions.
They will also support the company’s R&D operation, including its pipeline of scalable nanopore-sensing products to address all parts of the market.
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 programme 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 £180m.