Gordon Sanghera has described himself, in a Mishcon de Reya interview, as the eldest child of a first-generation Punjabi family. Anyone from an Indian household will recognise what that means: the eldest carries the plan.
His own plan began in science. He studied chemistry, took a PhD in bio-electronic technology, and then joined MediSense, a spin-out in Oxford that built glucose sensors. It taught him how a lab idea becomes a product people carry in their pocket.
What almost nobody outside the lab appreciated was how long nothing happened.
In 2005 he was appointed chief executive of another Oxford spin-out, this one built on the work of professor Hagan Bayley. The idea was a nanopore: a hole so tiny that single strands of DNA could be threaded through it, and each base read as it passed. IP Group provided the seed. Spike Willcocks was co-founder.
What almost nobody outside the lab appreciated was how long nothing happened. Ten years separated the founding in 2005 and the commercial MinION in May 2015, a sequencer small enough to hold in one hand when rivals needed rooms. A £70m fundraising in 2015 helped cover the gap.
Then the product started to travel. In August 2016 NASA astronaut Kate Rubins used a MinION aboard the International Space Station. GridION arrived in 2017; PromethION, with 144,000 channels against MinION's 512, in 2019. The company listed on the London Stock Exchange on 30 September 2021 under the ticker ONT.
The cost of building a platform shows in the accounts: for 2025, revenue of £223.9m against an operating loss of £155.3m. In December 2025 the company said Francis Van Parys, former CEO of Radiometer, would succeed Sanghera, who had led it for around 20 years.
The founder's lesson is patience with the eldest-child kind of discipline. A decade of silence is survivable if you keep the first product small enough to ship and bold enough to take to space.