Ten Years of Hardware on About $1.6 Million

Molecular Reality Corporation publishes one number about its money. It has raised about $1.6 million to date. The company does not publish the size or date of individual investments, and this article does not either.

For a hardware company in the life sciences, that total is small enough to be the story. This newspaper's usual approach to a young instrument maker is to set its funding against its spending and its spending against its milestones. Molecular Reality does not publish its spending. Its pages and posts, though, are full of prices.

Some of the sums, all from the company's own pages and posts: about $100 each for the silicon pores it bought around 2018 from an outside fabricator, most of which broke in the first week; "a few hundred dollars on Facebook" for advertising that, by the company's December 2022 count, had put about 800 people on a wait list; a $20 Tesla coil lighter, used to try a published method of making pores with sparks; and, in an August essay that criticizes the company's own artificial-intelligence plans, an estimate that the first test of those plans should cost "~$50 of GPU", or "the price of a pizza".

What the money bought

Molecular Reality was founded in 2018 as demonpore, inc. by Kent Kemmish and Charles Gaillard, and renamed in 2021. Its hardware is older than the company. The earliest experiment on its YouTube channel, a recording titled "best pore data yet" that runs 19 minutes and 17 seconds, dates from about 2015 or 2016 and shows an early sliding-pore rig read out on a benchtop picoammeter. From that bench to today is the ten years in this headline.

The idea at the center of the business is a pore whose size can be changed while it works. Most nanopores, whether protein or solid-state, are fixed when they are made. Kemmish's design stacks membranes whose holes line up and slides one across the other, so the opening can be widened, narrowed or cleared of debris; the company calls the result a juxtapore and the technique sliding occlusion. Kemmish dates the idea to 2012, "when I first thought of mechanical nanopores", in the joined-date field of his own profile on the company's site.

Around 2018 the company had its headquarters on Edison Way in Menlo Park, California. Kemmish later described the best single afternoon of data from that period in a post, a run on a "beautiful, fully wet, stable 200 nm underpore" made by focused ion beam, the $100 pores again. He was candid about the circumstances: "The tragedy is that we didn't have hundreds of these pores, or, with a bank account approaching zero, any time to try it hundreds of times."

The years since produced: the founder's own blood run through one of its pores in late 2018; a prototype instrument styled as a 1980s game console, the demonpore 64, whose core electronics, a platform the company named Teabiscuits, an outside engineer designed in 2020 and 2021; silicon arrays of pores for a device called the Molecular Aquarium, made in 2020 with a fabrication partner; a red handheld called the MR1 Molecular Streaming Device; and, this year, a live stream of a working nanopore experiment, run from a commercial amplifier on a bench in the US Southwest. The company's FAQ describes that bench as "the kind of bench operation where the founder solders and the webcam points at the rig."

Some of the older hardware is still waiting for money. A March post signed by the company's Quartermaster persona shows one of the 2020 pore arrays under a microscope, photographed through the eyepiece with a phone, and closes with an inventory note: "Kemmishtree has a bunch of arrays like this sitting on his table. They're ready to go when the Corps has the resources to test them."

Its live stream does not wait for the company's own electronics. It runs on an EDR4, a commercial amplifier made by Elements, an Italian maker of small patch-clamp instruments, and it samples the pore current 200,000 times a second. As of August the archive held eighteen recordings.

Where the ideas came from

From the start the company has wanted its instruments to look like toys. A December 2022 company document gives the demonpore 64 "the general appearance and footprint of a classic 1980s gaming console", along with a 3D-printed syringe pump, USB power, Ethernet and a custom joystick on a DB9 plug. It anticipates the objection: "it may look silly at first, but if you've ever spent hours and hours doing hands-on experiments with solid state nanopores ... you'll immediately realize the value of a joystick." Kemmish's CV describes the business plainly as "nanopore-based molecular sensors marketed as gaming consoles", and a painted poster in one of the company's early videos carries the slogan "Advanced scientific instruments disguised as toys." Looking back in March, he was blunt about the console: "we should have shipped in a form very close to the one seen, very early on. But we didn't."

Its plans also have molecular sensing sold, eventually, like water or power. Kemmish wrote that idea up, he says, "one night in 2022" in a document titled "Our North Star". It defines utility-scale molecular sensing as "Molecular sensing with the scale, economics, and universal adoption of electricity, running water, and internet", with sensors "in air handling systems, toilets, and drains", and it describes the sample preparation as "washing vegetables in the sink, brushing your teeth, washing your hands, taking a shower, using the toilet, breathing in and out, etc.." He later shortened the phrase to Universal Molecular Streaming, "because it's fewer syllables." He has been just as plain about timing. Of one product in that document, the Molecular Aquarium, he wrote this year: "I don't think we'll have 'molecular aquariums' for sale this decade at your local neighborhood Target store."

For a business precedent the company points to Wallace Coulter. In the late 1940s Coulter worked out that cells passing one at a time through a small hole in an insulating barrier could be counted by the dips they make in an electric current. His patent was granted in 1953. The company he and his brother Joseph founded, Coulter Electronics, became Beckman Coulter in 1997, and the Coulter principle still counts blood cells in hospital analyzers. A March post on the company's site, signed by a persona named Thucydides, makes the connection: "Coulter Counters are pore-based devices, but in the era of commercialized nanopore sequencing, it's easy to forget that the only serious difference is size." The FAQ puts the company's place in that history modestly: "We are a small branch on a seventy year old tree, and the tree is wonderful."

Who put money in

George Church, Esther Dyson and UPMC Enterprises have invested in the company. Dyson was an early investor, and UPMC Enterprises put money in during 2019. UPMC Enterprises is the venture arm of UPMC, the hospital system based in Pittsburgh.

Church's connection to Kemmish is older than the company. In 2009, while Kemmish was on the founding team of Halcyon Molecular, a startup trying to sequence DNA with an electron microscope, he wrote a winning grant application to the National Human Genome Research Institute with the Church Lab at Harvard Medical School as the formal awardee. In 2013 the two were co-authors on a PLoS ONE paper about pulling single DNA molecules out of a liquid surface, "Molecular Threading". Church became Molecular Reality's first formal scientific adviser.

Halcyon Molecular closed in 2012. Kemmish's CV also lists work recruiting early staff for the gene-editing supplier Synthego and the optical-computing startup Fathom Computing.

The patent

The company's main piece of intellectual property is easy to value now, because it has lapsed. US Patent 10,908,144, "Stacks of coaligned nanopores and fabrication and uses thereof", names Kemmish as inventor. It claims priority from May 9, 2017, was filed a year later, and was granted on February 2, 2021. Google Patents marks it expired for a fee-related reason, effective February 2, 2025: the maintenance fee due three and a half years after grant was not paid.

The founder has said publicly that the patent no longer figures in how he describes the company. In a March post about a planning document from 2022, he wrote: "I don't pitch the project anymore with any reference to 'our IP portfolio'. I never believed that biotech should run on intellectual property, but I was pandering." In February the company's site went further, promising that "our schematics and protocols will all become public domain."

The company's game, which is also its management system, has a quest on the subject. Now switched off, it offered 5,000 experience points to anyone who would "Come up with ideas and make public-domain-assigned patents out of them". The quest is titled "Patent production (anti-trolling)".

The payroll

Molecular Reality has never been large. A note in the company's records remembers the period around 2015 to 2017, before incorporation, as the time "when all of this was a twinkle in our eyes and we'd just started getting mechnical [sic] nanopore data and literally living in a van". The late-2018 blood experiment happened, in Kemmish's account, "with most of teamonpore in the room". A company summary from October 2025 counted two full-time employees. A company document from July this year counts three people.

Others have contributed from outside the payroll. In 2020 and 2021 an outside electronics designer built the console's core electronics, and another contributor led the design of its enclosure and flow cells. Around them all sits a larger circle of volunteers, which began with a 2021 advertisement that said "join our epic quest". The company runs a community it calls the Molecular Streaming Corps, "our community, our tribe of player scientists", and its sales page counts "745+ members and counting". In February the site described the arrangement in one line: "We view this as a movement first, and a corporation second."

One public post on the site, signed by a persona named Jeanne d'Arc, links to a document of "234 answers by real humans to the question 'what excites you most about what we're building?'" and adds: "Every so often I look at this and remember we're not crazy and/or alone in wanting to see this project come to fruition."

The FAQ, written in the voice of the company's green felt mascot, Keltar, summarizes the staff as "A small team, a serious bench, and an unusual amount of green felt."

The ledger

Keltar also volunteers, unprompted, that he gives "no medical advice and no investment advice, because a felt puppet with a processor should stick to wonder." This newspaper respects the boundary.

The company's own explanation of why its instruments look the way they do is a cost argument. Kemmish's post on the Menlo Park pores closes on it. The hard part of the work, he writes, is the "dumb problems", the most stubborn of which is "how do you get water through the pore?", and "These 'dumb problems' of frontier solid-state nanopore research are precisely why making the MR devices as easy to use as toys is everything."