Oxford Nanopore Gears Up for Highly-Anticipated LSE IPO

Oxford Nanopore is edging closer to its initial public offering on the London Stock Exchange (LSE), which could see it exceed a valuation of 2.48 billion pounds ($3.42 billion). The nanotech company is coordinating with Bank of America, Citibank, and JP Morgan ahead of the London listing.

It’s remarkable that Oxford Nanopore chose to list on the LSE, as most biotech companies opt to pursue higher valuations on New York’s Nasdaq Exchange. Even fellow Oxford spinout Vaccitech, which developed AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine, preferred Nasdaq over the LSE.

The potential listing is seen as a boost to Britain’s strategy to lure more life sciences businesses into its post-Brexit market.

Backed By IP Group and Temasek

Big backers of Oxford Nanopore include Singapore’s state-owned wealth fund Temasek and intellectual property investor IP Group. The latter has a 14.5% stake in the company worth around 350 million pounds ($484 million). Oxford Nanopore is one of the two “unicorn” companies that exceeds 1 billion pounds in valuation within IP Group’s portfolio.

It raised over 200 million pounds ($270 million) in May, of which 70 million pounds ($97 million) were contributed by IP Group. The May round puts Oxford Nanopore’s valuation at around 2.48 billion pounds ($3.42 billion). However, analysts at Jefferies speculate even higher – at 3.9 billion pounds ($5.4 billion).

Analyzing Anything, By Anyone, Anywhere

Oxford Nanopore was founded in 2005 by Hagan Bayley, Gordon Sanghera, and Spike Willcocks, with seed funding from IP Group. Their key technology: nanopore sequencing. Imagine an X-ray machine at an airport security checkpoint. Luggage files past the machine, allowing inspectors to see what’s in every trunk. Nanopore technology works like that.

DNA or RNA strands pass through nanopores embedded in a special membrane, across which an electric field is applied. The DNA and RNA molecules that pass through the membrane cause characteristic disruptions in the current. This can be read by the machine to sequence the genetic material base by base.

It took a decade before the company sold its first device, MinION, in 2015. Since then, Oxford Nanopore products have been used in a multitude of situations, from rapid COVID-19 testing to sequencing organisms in space. The company reported 2020 revenues of 113.9 million pounds ($158 million), a growth of 119% from 52.1 million pounds ($72 million) in 2019.

Author

Joy Lin

Without knowledge, there is no imagination. Without imagination, knowledge is meaningless