List of nanopore companies

This is a list of nanopore companies: companies whose products use nanopores, holes from a few nanometres to hundreds of micrometres wide through which molecules or particles pass one at a time, changing an electric current as they go. It also includes a few close relatives that read single molecules electrically without a pore, and the makers of the amplifiers and recording systems the field depends on. Statuses are given only where a public source documents them.

The pores fall into a handful of families. Biological nanopores are protein channels set in a thin membrane, and every nanopore DNA sequencer on sale uses one. The first pore to detect single strands of DNA, in 1996, was alpha-hemolysin, a toxin made by Staphylococcus aureus.^[1] MspA, from Mycobacterium smegmatis, was licensed to Illumina in 2013, and Oxford Nanopore's sequencers have used pores developed from CsgG, an Escherichia coli protein, since 2016.^[2][3]

Solid-state nanopores are holes in a thin film, usually a silicon nitride membrane. They are cut with beams of ions or opened by controlled dielectric breakdown, in which a voltage across the membrane makes the hole itself.^[4] Glass nanopipettes are pulled glass capillaries with a fine tip. Elastomeric pores can be stretched to change their size, the principle of tunable resistive pulse sensing, and a mechanical nanopore sets its opening with moving parts.

Counting particles by the current they block is older than any company in this list. Wallace H. Coulter's patent for "Means for counting particles suspended in a fluid", the Coulter principle, was granted on October 20, 1953, and the company he started with his brother Joseph became Beckman Coulter.^[5] Its counters pass blood cells through an aperture tens of micrometres wide. Nanopore companies apply the same idea to holes small enough to admit one molecule at a time.

Molecular Reality's own atlas of the field, The Hole World, holds 2,112 entries. Of these, 311 are companies and 15 are instrument makers; the rest are 1,596 academic groups and 190 national laboratories.^[6]

Every commercial nanopore sequencer uses a protein pore. Oxford Nanopore Technologies sells the MinION, PromethION and Flongle, whose pores sit in a synthetic polymer membrane with a motor protein to feed each strand through.^[3][24] Roche entered the field by buying two companies. Genia Technologies, a California company, had built a protein-pore sequencer on a semiconductor chip, and Roche bought it in 2014.^[7] The same year it began a research collaboration with Stratos Genomics, a Seattle company founded in 2007, whose method converts DNA into a surrogate molecule, the Xpandomer, 10 to 100 times longer than the original, before reading it through a pore.^[7] Roche bought Stratos in 2020.^[8] Roche unveiled the combined technology as sequencing by expansion in February 2025 and launched its first instrument for it, the AXELIOS 1, in 2026.^[25]

In China, Qitan Technology of Chengdu, founded in 2016, sells protein-pore sequencers under the name QNome.^[15] Portal Biotech, founded in London in 2021, is developing engineered protein pores to read whole proteins one molecule at a time.^[18]

The solid-state companies have mostly worked on detection and mapping. Two Pore Guys, a spinout of the University of California, Santa Cruz, took its name from a nickname for the research group that developed its double-pore technology, in which one DNA strand is held between two pores and moved back and forth.^[24] Nabsys in Providence maps genomes electronically with solid-state "nanodetectors" and sells the result as its OhmX platform.^[11] Pore fabrication became a business of its own with Northern Nanopore Instruments, a 2020 spinout of the University of Ottawa's Faculty of Science, which makes solid-state pores by controlled dielectric breakdown. Oxford Nanopore bought it in 2023 to scale the method.^[19] Quantum Biosystems, founded in Osaka in 2013, read DNA by the tunneling current across a gap between two electrodes instead of a pore; it concluded its activities in 2023.^[17]

Aipore, a venture of Osaka University founded in 2018, identified viruses and other particles by the shape of the current pulses they made in a solid-state pore, using machine learning. Its system went on sale as an analytical instrument, and the university reports that a COVID-19 test built on it was checked against more than 10,000 clinical samples. The company concluded its activities in 2025.^[17] The instrument, the nanoSCOUTER, was made and sold by the Japanese test-equipment company Advantest, which launched a new version in 2024.^[23]

Izon Science in Christchurch makes pores whose size can be changed while they are in use: the pore is cut in an elastic membrane that is stretched to open it wider. Founded in New Zealand in 2005, the company took its present name in 2008. Its current instrument is the Exoid, and its main use is counting and sizing nanoparticles and extracellular vesicles.^[12] Molecular Reality Corporation makes a different kind of adjustable pore, in which stacked solid membranes slide over one another to set the opening, a design it calls the juxtapore. It streams the current from its single laboratory instrument, an amplifier made by Elements srl, live on the web, and in October 2026 it published the design of its own reader, the MR1 Nanopore Reader, under an open-source license, with the status line "Built and measured: not yet."^[4][16][26]

Roswell Biotechnologies of San Diego, founded in 2014, puts single molecules into electronic circuits on semiconductor chips and reads their activity as current. In May 2020 it announced plans with the research center Imec to develop the chips at scale.^[13] CB Insights now lists the company as SemiconBio, "formerly known as ROSWELL".^[14]

In a March 2026 post, Molecular Reality's founder, Kent Kemmish, called Two Pore Guys "one of the three coolest/quirkiest names for a genomic tech startup ever", the other two being Roswell Biotechnologies and his own demonpore, inc. The next paragraph of the post began: "Sadly, all three of us wimped out on our cool quirky names."^[27] The table bears him out. Two Pore Guys became Ontera in May 2019, Roswell is now SemiconBio, and demonpore, inc. became Molecular Reality Corporation in 2021.^[9][14][16] The largest company in the field began, in 2005, as Oxford Nanolabs.^[3]

• History of nanopore sequencing
• List of nanopore research groups
• Nanopore sequencing
• The Hole World