Locations of Molecular Reality Corporation

A company note asks members to "Remember way back in 2015-2017 when all of this was a twinkle in our eyes and we'd just started getting mechnical[sic] nanopore data and literally living in a van". It does not say where the van went.^[1] The first sliding-occlusion measurements of the same years, in which the current through a pore was read on a benchtop picoammeter as one surface slid over another, are on the company's video channel as "best pore data yet".^[4]

A four-minute video on the company's channel is titled "nanotech history, in my mom's basement, March 2017".^[5] The city is not given. Two months later, on May 9, 2017, came the priority date of his patent on sliding occlusion.^[6]

After its incorporation in 2018, demonpore, inc. had its headquarters in Menlo Park, California.^[7] Kemmish's account of the period is mostly about water: two colleagues spent "an entire week, maybe two" getting salt solution through silicon pores drilled "3,000 miles away", and then recorded what he called "the best single afternoon of collecting data we ever achieved early on at demonpore, inc.", the current through a 200 nm pore rising and falling as a blade slid across it. He was not there: "I was somewhere else for most of that day, probably trying to raise money."^[7]

Menlo Park, California, gave its name to Menlo Park, New Jersey, a real estate development where Thomas Edison opened his laboratory in 1876.^[8]

The company has also used what it calls "our El Dorado Hills garage lab". A video from there is titled "wet dpore EDH 1 100 mM KCl", a wetting test of a demonpore in potassium chloride solution.^[1][9] Its dates are not recorded. El Dorado Hills lies in El Dorado County, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, where the discovery of gold at Coloma in January 1848 began the California Gold Rush.

The company's field guide places its laboratory only in "the United States Southwest", and describes it as "the kind of bench operation where the founder solders and the webcam points at the rig". The same answer adds: "You can watch everything from anywhere."^[10] Kemmish's CV names Phoenix.^[2] On the evening of May 7, 2026, an EDR4 amplifier from the Italian company Elements srl and a flow cell were set up there for the company's first end-to-end live streaming test.^[11] By August 2026 the bench had produced eighteen recorded streams, the shortest a seven-minute test of tap water.^[10] The laboratory's shelf of samples lists Phoenix tap water, and the field guide explains the choice: "Tap water carries whatever the pipes carried."^[1][10]

The members' calendar in EQBio-OS shows events in Arizona time. Most of Arizona does not observe daylight saving time, so the clocks at the company's two benches agree from March to November and differ by an hour for the rest of the year.^[1]

A second bench in San Mateo, California, is run by a member of the company's hardware team and streams from a rig built around an ESP32 microcontroller. The company's open instrument design, the MR1 Nanopore Reader, uses the same family of microcontroller.^[1] San Mateo, Menlo Park and Redwood City, where Kemmish worked for Halcyon Molecular from 2009 to 2012, are all in San Mateo County.^[2]