Oxford Nanopore

Oxford Nanopore Technologies was cited by Lansdowne Partners as a portfolio reference in the announcement of its €128.9m first close on a new UK university IP spinout fund on 14 May 2026 . Its presence on the track record demonstrates that Lansdowne has prior exposure to Oxford University-origin deep technology companies that reached public markets, making it a credible anchor for the new fund's university IP strategy.

Oxford Nanopore Technologies is an Oxford University spinout founded in 2005, commercialising nanopore-based DNA and RNA sequencing technology originally developed by Professor Hagan Bayley. The company's devices enable real-time sequencing of long DNA strands using biological nanopores embedded in an electrically resistant membrane, a fundamentally different architecture from Illumina's short-read approach. Oxford Nanopore listed on the London Stock Exchange in September 2021 at a £3.4bn market capitalisation, making it one of the largest UK biotech IPOs in history at that point. The company's products include the portable MinION device, used in field research, clinical settings, and pandemic pathogen sequencing (including during COVID-19), and larger PromethION instruments for high-throughput genomics.

Oxford Nanopore's significance for UK innovation policy extends beyond its own trajectory. Its FTSE listing demonstrated that a UK deep-technology spinout from an academic institution could reach public-market scale without US listing, providing a template that Raspberry Pi's LSE listing subsequently followed. Both companies sit on Lansdowne's reference track record, implying that the new fund is positioning itself as a vehicle capable of backing companies from early-stage spinout formation through to FTSE-scale public markets. Whether Lansdowne's new fund, at €171.9m final target, can actually deploy capital at the scale Oxford Nanopore required from seed to IPO remains the key structural question.