To me the fact that they have a patent monopoly on "putting DNA through a protein pore with voltage sensing" is tragic. Who knows were we would be today if these patents had been granted to the public domain.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/breakevenanalysis.asp
Are they anywhere near break even or are they going to require another large infusion of venture capital and can Nanopore find these new investors?
Their valuation is not about short term sales. Their technology really is somewhat of a holy grail. There is no "simpler" way to read DNA in terms of technology. Everything else involves complicated biochemistry. Illumina beats Nanopore Technologies right now because of the scale of their machines. But they can't scale them down much further without losing performance. The most efficient Illumina machines will always be cupboards or bigger.
No competitor can come up with something better than ONT. Nothing smaller, for certain. The only way to beat Oxford Nanopore in the future will be to implement a very similar nanopore sequencing scheme.
Illumina doesn’t beat nanopore because of the “scale” it beats it because the technology produces fundamentally higher accuracy data. The error rate on Nanopore reads is >10%. Even on first generation Illumina machines the error rate was 1%, and is now significantly lower.
Oxford Nanopore have been working on this for 15 years, this is the best they can do. It might be possible to create a Nanopore (maybe solid state, not protein) system with a lower error rate, but I think they have little hope of doing it.
I think they’d need to sell >10,000 units a month. That is if they are making any kind of profit. Unfortunately I don’t think there’s a market for anything like that number of flow cells.
Illumina (see recent IP battle with Oxford Nanopore) also have key IP in this space (for mspA).