Oxford Nanopore's valuation hits £1.5bn after Asia-Pac funding round

Biotech firm Oxford Nanopore has raised £100m from its latest private funding round, valuing the rapidly-expanding UK group somewhere in the vicinity of £1.5bn as a result.

Including the funds collected from Oxford Nanopore's Asia-Pacific investors - previous investor Singaporean sovereign wealth fund GIC, Australian superannuation provider Hostplus, and China Construction Bank - to aid its commercial expansion goals, the British firm has collected a total of £451m through private share placements.

Oxford Nanopore intends to establish an additional base of operations in Oxfordshire, complete with a new factory in order to meet an increasing demand for its gene sequencing machines, which utilise its own innovative technology to read biochemical "letters" encoded in DNA.

"Our aim is to become an independent global technology company based in the UK," said Gordon Sanghera, Oxford Nanopore's chief executive.

"Our investors are ambitious and support our long-term vision: to enable the analysis of any living thing by anyone anywhere," he added.

London-listed intellectual property firm IP Group, which holds an undiluted beneficial stake of 18.3% in Oxford Nanopore, currently valued at £274.1 million, will remain Oxford Nanopore's biggest shareholder.

Alan Aubrey, IP Group's chief executive, said, "In this context, we were pleased to introduce both CCBI and Hostplus to the round who both share our belief in and ambitions for the company. Oxford Nanopore has achieved significant growth over the last year and we look forward to further progress this year."

Sanghera said that Nanopore had seen orders for its equipment jump roughly 300% each year, coming in at $23.5m last year, and with an expected $75m to come in 2018, those figures make up just a small portion of the world market for DNA sequencing, which is estimated to be worth about $3bn and growing by 15% to 20% every year as genetic medicine continues to expand.

Nanopore cut its teeth with the development of the world's first small and easily portable DNA sequencer, the MinION, which can be used by scientists in the field to identify microbes responsible for outbreaks of infectious diseases.

According to Sanghera, its latest technological wonder, PromethION, can read an entire human genome, all 3bn letters of DNA, within 48 hours for as little as $625, a significantly friendlier price tag than its competitors.

Bryan Yeo, GIC's head of equity investment, said he was drawn to Nanopore due to its "unique business model of providing accessible real-time DNA analysis technologies that can be applied to pocket-sized or industrial installations."

"We believe this will continue to drive growth in their user base as well as in new applications," he added.

As of 1400 GMT, IP Group shares had picked up 1.37% to 103.4p.