View source for Demonpore, inc.

{{Short description|American nanopore company (2018 to 2021)}}
{{Lowercase title}}
{{About|the company|its web domain|demonpore.com|its console-shaped instrument|demonpore 64}}
{{Infobox company
| name = demonpore, inc.
| image = Flyer-maxine-name.png
| image_caption = "So... What's with the Name?": a page from the company's first slide deck, about 2015
| type = Private
| industry = Scientific instruments
| founded = 2018
| founders = [[Kent Kemmish]]<br>[[Charles Gaillard]]
| hq_location = Edison Way, [[Locations of Molecular Reality Corporation|Menlo Park, California]] (about 2018)
| key_people = Kent Kemmish (CEO)
| products = [[demonpore 64]] (prototype)
| website = [[demonpore.com]]
| fate = Renamed in 2021
| successor = [[Molecular Reality Corporation]]
}}

'''demonpore, inc.''' was an American company that built prototype [[nanopore]] instruments from 2018 until 2021, when it changed its name to [[Molecular Reality Corporation]]. [[Kent Kemmish]] and [[Charles Gaillard]] founded it as a Delaware corporation, and it wrote its name in lowercase letters.<ref name="records" /> The name refers to [[Maxwell's demon]], the imaginary being that sorts molecules at a door between two chambers. Kemmish's central idea was a pore whose size could be changed while in use, by sliding one perforated membrane over another, and when he described it to a colleague it reminded the colleague of the cartoons used to explain the demon.<ref name="minds" />

The name is older than the company. The domain [[demonpore.com]] was registered on Christmas Eve 2014, and the first slide deck with a cartoon demon in it dates from about 2015.<ref name="whois-dp" /><ref name="minds" /> After incorporating, the company worked from an office on Edison Way in Menlo Park, California. There it filed its patent on [[sliding occlusion]], recorded what Kemmish calls its best afternoon of data while he was elsewhere, and put his blood through one of its pores. It then built the [[demonpore 64]], a nanopore reader in the shape of a 1980s game console. Kemmish later gave the reason for the change of name in two sentences, the second of which reads: "Sorry, you can't name a biotech startup after Maxwell's Demon in the age of Qanon."<ref name="floss" />

== Name ==
=== Maxwell's demon ===
In a letter of 1867, and later in his book ''Theory of Heat'' (1871), [[James Clerk Maxwell]] described a being quick enough to follow single molecules, posted at a small hole in a wall that divides a vessel of gas. By opening and closing the hole it lets fast molecules through in one direction and slow ones in the other, so that one side grows hot and the other cold without any work being done, against the second law of thermodynamics.<ref name="maxwell" /> Maxwell called it a being. The word "demon" was William Thomson's, in 1874, and in a lecture five years later he explained that it "originally in Greek meant a supernatural being".<ref name="thomson" /><ref name="thomson1879" /> The accepted resolution, which grew out of work by Leo Szilard in 1929 and Rolf Landauer in 1961, makes the demon pay in information: it has to keep a record of what it sees, and erasing each bit of that record dissipates at least ''kT'' ln 2 of heat, about 2.9 × 10<sup>−21</sup> joules at room temperature ([[Landauer's principle]]).<ref name="szilard" /><ref name="landauer" />

A pore that can open, narrow and close is in a position to do the demon's job. The company's 2026 material defines a demonpore as a pore that measures each molecule as it arrives and then decides whether to let it pass, send it back or hold it.<ref name="records" /> It also prices the decision. At 200 millivolts and 3.1 nanoamperes, a 10-microsecond event dissipates about 6 femtojoules, roughly two million times Landauer's minimum for one bit.<ref name="p1" />

=== The cartoons ===
The connection was made by someone other than Kemmish. In March 2026 he published a post written in the voice of the company's red cartoon demon, [[Maxine (character)|Maxine]], which begins with her introducing herself: "I'm Maxwell's Demon. Little cartoons explaining me inspired Molecular Reality Corporation's original name, demonpore inc.." It continues: "When our founder Kent explained his concept for sliding-occlusion-based dynamic mechanical nanopores, it reminded a colleague of those little cartoons."{{efn|The post does not name the colleague. Neither does this article.}} The post dates the company's first slide deck to "several thousand years ago in AEST (Accelerationist-Equivalent-Subjective-Time), i.e., around 2015".<ref name="minds" /> Registration of demonpore.com on December 24, 2014, shows that the name was in use some months before that.<ref name="whois-dp" />

That deck's page about the name was reproduced with the post. It is headed "So... What's with the Name?", and under the heading the words "Biotech Click-Bait!" are struck through. The text says that "DEMONPORE™ commemorates physicist James Clerk Maxwell's thought experiment about a magical molecular gatekeeper who violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics", and that the demon "opens and closes a 'pore' between two chambers to allow only faster-than-average particles to enter". Four cartoons introduce Maxine, who "is a shape-shifting trailblazer", "doesn't play by the rules", "wants to be a medical super-intelligence" and "just might save your life". The rules she does not play by are, the second caption specifies, "corporate or thermodynamic". A last line reaches for a second family tie: "Incidentally, other work by Maxwell inspired the Coulter Counter".<ref name="minds" />{{efn|The second claim has support. According to the historian of the [[Coulter counter]], Wallace Coulter had read as an engineering student of a method for calculating the electrical resistance of a suspension of particles, and the method is the one in Maxwell's ''Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism'' (1873).<ref name="g20ch3" />}}

=== Spelling and derived words ===
The company kept its name in lowercase, including in the name of its console, the demonpore 64.<ref name="records" /> In its logo the letters are red, the "o" of "demon" has a pair of black horns, and the "o" of "pore" is drawn as a black ring. The same logo heads a painted poster shown in an early company video, above the line "Advanced scientific instruments disguised as toys™".<ref name="vid-presents" /> Recordings from the period shorten the name to "dpore", as in the video title "wet dpore EDH 1 100 mM KCl".<ref name="vid-edh" />

The word was also used as a common noun for the device. A 2026 post describes the company's early experiments as attempts "to form and adjust demonpores with the greatest control and sensitivity". The same post supplies Kemmish's name for the staff: '''teamonpore'''.<ref name="blood" />

== History ==
{{Main|History of Molecular Reality Corporation}}
=== Before incorporation ===
Kemmish dates his first thought of mechanical nanopores to 2012, his last year at the electron-microscopy sequencing company [[Halcyon Molecular]].<ref name="records" /><ref name="cv" /> The first sliding-occlusion experiments, in 2015 and 2016, read the current through a pair of sliding surfaces on a benchtop picoammeter. A 19-minute video of one of them is listed in the company's catalog as "[[Pre-Wright Brothers Flights]]", and on YouTube it is titled "best pore data yet".<ref name="records" /><ref name="vid-bestpore" /> In a company note, 2015 to 2017 are remembered as the years when "we'd just started getting mechnical{{sic}} nanopore data and literally living in a van".<ref name="records" /> A video recorded in March 2017 is titled "nanotech history, in my mom's basement, March 2017".<ref name="vid-basement" /> The patent application claims priority from May 9, 2017.<ref name="patent" />

=== Edison Way (2018 to 2019) ===
Kemmish and Gaillard incorporated demonpore, inc. in 2018.<ref name="records" />{{efn|The company describes Gaillard's low public profile as deliberate; see [[Charles Gaillard]].}} For a period its headquarters were on Edison Way in Menlo Park, California.<ref name="fib" /> The company has described its founding team as including alumni of Synthego, [[Oxford Nanopore Technologies|Oxford Nanopore]] and the Harvard Nanopore Group.<ref name="records" /> Its patent application, "Stacks of coaligned nanopores and fabrication and uses thereof", was filed on May 9, 2018, and published that November.<ref name="patent" />

[[File:photo-old-piezo.png|thumb|upright=0.8|A photograph the company published in 2026 as "the old piezo": a chip on the end of a rail above a micro-positioning stage]]
Kemmish has described the Menlo Park laboratory in detail. Its pores were silicon chips drilled with a focused ion beam by a researcher "3,000 miles away", at "about $100 each. And in the first week or so of messing around with these, trying to determine the right wetting protocol, we broke most of them." He calls obstacles of this kind "[[dumb problems]]", meaning the ordinary-sounding tasks that have to be solved again in every new setup before any science can start, and he names the worst of them: "The biggest, ugliest, dumbest one is: how do you get water through the pore?"<ref name="fib" />

Two colleagues spent "an entire week, maybe two" on such problems before recording what Kemmish calls "the best single afternoon of collecting data we ever achieved early on at demonpore, inc., when we were HQ'd on Edison Way in Menlo Park, CA." The chip held "a beautiful, fully wet, stable 200 nm underpore", and the current through it rose and fell "as the top blade slides across it". Kemmish was not present. "This was it: the best demonpore. And I wasn't in the room. I was somewhere else for most of that day, probably trying to raise money."<ref name="fib" />

In late 2018, "with most of teamonpore in the room", the company tried an analyte for the first time; until then its experiments had been about forming and adjusting the pores themselves. "Completely on a whim as we were shutting down for the day, I felt that I should prove a point, and I grabbed a razor blade and bled into the flow cell," Kemmish wrote, in a post titled "[[Rain of blood (demonpore)|rain of blood]]". The next day the same setup became a [[microparticle turnstile]].<ref name="blood" /> Company records list three more results over the following three months: pores that cleared their own clogs (December 2018), the gating and repeated measurement of single cells and nanoparticles (January 2019), and the mechanical cutting of DNA "ropes" (February 2019).<ref name="records" />

[[UPMC Enterprises]] became the company's institutional seed investor in 2019. [[George Church]], whose laboratory had collaborated with Kemmish since 2009, invested and became the first formal member of the company's scientific advisory board, and [[Esther Dyson]] was an early investor.<ref name="records" /><ref name="p4" /><ref name="sab" />

=== Consoles and aquariums (2020 to 2021) ===
[[File:demonpore 64 console render.webp|thumb|A rendered concept of the demonpore 64 as a console, horns included]]
In January 2020, as COVID-19 spread, the company tried to launch the [[Molecular Aquarium]], a chip on which one aperture slides over an array of smaller pores. "We saw covid coming," Kemmish wrote later, and "We tried to launch the Molecular Aquarium (described elsewhere) because of covid."<ref name="covid" /> Members who helped received a badge for the "[[CoronaPore]] project".<ref name="records" />

The other machine of the period was the demonpore 64, a nanopore reader with "the general appearance and footprint of a classic 1980s gaming console", a joystick on a DB9 plug and a 3D-printed syringe pump.<ref name="overview" /> An outside engineer designed its core electronics in 2020 and 2021. While testing it, Kemmish and a colleague pulled knots tied in a nylon filament through a hole about 2 mm wide and recorded a dip in the current for each knot, a demonstration of [[knot sequencing]] at the scale of string. The first game the company coded for such signals was what Kemmish calls "the unfortunately named 'Spyke Hunter'".<ref name="string" />

Neither instrument went on sale. Asked what had become of the Molecular Aquarium and the demonpore 64, the company's chatbot was given the prepared answer "Life happened! Specific hardware projects fail for innumerable reasons."<ref name="records" /> Of the console Kemmish wrote in 2026: "we should have shipped in a form very close to the one seen, very early on. But we didn't."<ref name="overview" /> The patent was granted on February 2, 2021, as [[Patent US 10,908,144|US 10,908,144]].<ref name="patent" />

=== Rename (2021) ===
In 2021 demonpore, inc. became Molecular Reality Corporation, and the domain molecularreality.com was registered on July 18.<ref name="records" /><ref name="whois-mr" /> Kemmish told the story in March 2026, in a post about a paper on "flossing" a strand of DNA between two pores. He began with three startups whose names he admired. [[Two Pore Guys]] was "one of the three coolest/quirkiest names for a genomic tech startup ever"; [[Roswell Biotechnologies]] was the second ("I was sooo jealous of this name!"); demonpore was the third. "Sadly, all three of us wimped out on our cool quirky names." Two Pore Guys had become [[Ontera]], which he called "ineffably unexciting", and Roswell had become Semicon Bio.<ref name="floss" /><ref name="p9" />

His own company's rename, he wrote, "was my decision", with "no suits to answer to". Then he gave the reason:

{{Quote|Instead, I was dealing with the fact that every time we had any sort of attention online, a bunch of insane people came out of nowhere to make veiled death threats. Sorry, you can't name a biotech startup after Maxwell's Demon in the age of Qanon.|Kent Kemmish|"Flossing with DNA", EQBio-OS, March 29, 2026<ref name="floss" />}}

== Legacy ==
demonpore.com still loads the company's website. Its guide to the site, narrated by the felt mascot [[Keltar]], describes the address as "an old name I mention exactly once in this entire guide", and mentions it once.<ref name="faq" /> Kemmish kept the console's name too: in 2026 he wrote that the company still wanted to ship "a very similar product and call it the 'demonpore 64', but it will be at least a 64-channel device."<ref name="overview" /> Maxine, the demon from the 2015 slide, became the mascot of the company's games.<ref name="minds" />

In 2026 the central rig of the demonpore years was still on hand. The company calls it "demonpore's workhorse" and "the actual center of instrumentation for all of our older experiments", with a piezo positioner at its heart, and reported that "it's been five years since we managed to do sliding occlusion experiments with it." Its status was given as "a slightly abandoned rocket launch pad that needs to get cleaned up so we can resume sliding occlusion experiments."<ref name="records" />

The design for the company's open desktop instrument carried the working title "Daemon Pore" until a commit of October 18, 2026, renamed it the [[MR1 Nanopore Reader]].<ref name="commit-rename" /> As of October 20, one design document in the repository still gave its "System Target" as "MR1 Nanopore Reader (Daemon Pore)".<ref name="github" />

== See also ==
* [[Juxtapore]]
* [[Molecular reality (history of science)]]
* [[Szilard engine]]
* [[Timeline of Molecular Reality Corporation]]

== Notes ==
{{Notelist}}

== References ==
{{Reflist|refs=
<ref name="records">{{cite web |title=Company records |publisher=Molecular Reality Corporation |date=October 2026}}</ref>
<ref name="minds">{{cite web |title=Welcome to my Minds |author=Kemmishtree |website=EQBio-OS |date=2026-03-28}}</ref>
<ref name="floss">{{cite web |title=Flossing with DNA |author=Kemmishtree |website=EQBio-OS |date=2026-03-29}}</ref>
<ref name="fib">{{cite web |title=Focused Ion Beam pore |author=Kemmishtree |website=EQBio-OS |date=2026-03-29}}</ref>
<ref name="blood">{{cite web |title=rain of blood |author=Kemmishtree |website=EQBio-OS |date=2026-03-29}}</ref>
<ref name="covid">{{cite web |title=(no subject) |author=Kemmishtree |website=EQBio-OS |date=2026-03-29}}</ref>
<ref name="sab">{{cite web |title=(no subject) |author=Kemmishtree |website=EQBio-OS |date=2026-03-29}}</ref>
<ref name="string">{{cite web |title=Sequencing a string |author=Kemmishtree |website=EQBio-OS |date=2026-03-29}}</ref>
<ref name="overview">{{cite web |title=2022 sci-tech overview |author=Kemmishtree |website=EQBio-OS |date=2026-03-28}}</ref>
<ref name="whois-dp">{{cite web |title=WHOIS record for demonpore.com |access-date=2026-10-25}}</ref>
<ref name="whois-mr">{{cite web |title=WHOIS record for molecularreality.com |access-date=2026-10-25}}</ref>
<ref name="patent">{{cite web |url=https://patents.google.com/patent/US10908144B2/en |title=US10908144B2: Stacks of coaligned nanopores and fabrication and uses thereof |website=Google Patents |access-date=2026-10-25}}</ref>
<ref name="cv">{{cite web |url=https://molecularreality.com/kemmish-cv |title=Stanley Kent Kemmish, Jr. |publisher=Molecular Reality Corporation |date=May 2026}}</ref>
<ref name="faq">{{cite web |url=https://molecularreality.com/FAQ |title=Keltar's Field Guide to Molecular Reality |publisher=Molecular Reality Corporation |date=August 2026}}</ref>
<ref name="github">{{cite web |url=https://github.com/EpicQuestBio/MR1 |title=MR1 Nanopore Reader |website=GitHub |date=2026-10-16}}</ref>
<ref name="commit-rename">{{cite commit |repo=EpicQuestBio/MR1 |hash=2c06333 |date=2026-10-18 |message=refactor: Rename Daemon Pore/Sentinel to MR1 across codebase}}</ref>
<ref name="vid-presents">{{cite AV media |title=Kent Kemmish(tree) Presents Demonpore inc. |publisher=EpicQuestBio |medium=Video |url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5j0us84qzE}}</ref>
<ref name="vid-edh">{{cite AV media |title=wet dpore EDH 1 100 mM KCl |publisher=EpicQuestBio |medium=Video |url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-RSmxuomAY}}</ref>
<ref name="vid-bestpore">{{cite AV media |title=best pore data yet |publisher=EpicQuestBio |medium=Video |url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcE4kRsfWvY}}</ref>
<ref name="vid-basement">{{cite AV media |title=nanotech history, in my mom's basement, March 2017 |publisher=EpicQuestBio |medium=Video |url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXff-cS5XKM}}</ref>
<ref name="p1">{{cite news |title=Hole Story: Ten Years Inside a Company Named After a Demon |work=The Femtoliter Review |author=Imogen Tillery-Vance |date=2026-10-20 |url=/press/femtoliter/2026/10/20/hole-story}}</ref>
<ref name="p4">{{cite news |title=Ten Years of Hardware on About $1.6 Million |work=Brownian Business Daily |author=Harriet Quill |date=2026-09-30 |url=/press/brownian/2026/09/30/ten-years-on-a-budget}}</ref>
<ref name="p9">{{cite news |title=Notes on demonpore, Two Pore Guys and Roswell |work=Debye Length |author=Ferris Calloway |date=2026-10-12 |url=/press/debye/2026/10/12/notes-on-demonpore}}</ref>
<ref name="maxwell">{{cite book |last=Maxwell |first=James Clerk |title=Theory of Heat |publisher=Longmans, Green, and Co. |location=London |year=1871}}</ref>
<ref name="thomson">{{cite journal |last=Thomson |first=William |title=The kinetic theory of the dissipation of energy |journal=Nature |volume=9 |pages=441-444 |year=1874}}</ref>
<ref name="thomson1879">{{cite web |url=https://zapatopi.net/kelvin/papers/the_sorting_demon_of_maxwell.html |title=The sorting demon of Maxwell |author=William Thomson |publisher=Royal Institution of Great Britain |date=1879-02-28 |access-date=2026-10-25}}</ref>
<ref name="szilard">{{cite journal |last=Szilard |first=Leo |title=Über die Entropieverminderung in einem thermodynamischen System bei Eingriffen intelligenter Wesen |journal=Zeitschrift für Physik |volume=53 |pages=840-856 |year=1929 |doi=10.1007/BF01341281}}</ref>
<ref name="landauer">{{cite journal |last=Landauer |first=Rolf |title=Irreversibility and heat generation in the computing process |journal=IBM Journal of Research and Development |volume=5 |issue=3 |pages=183-191 |year=1961 |doi=10.1147/rd.53.0183}}</ref>
<ref name="g20ch3">{{cite web |url=https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2020.495 |title=The Coulter Principle: For the Good of Humankind, chapter 3, "Invention" |author=M. D. Graham |publisher=University of Kentucky |date=2020-11-18 |access-date=2026-10-25}}</ref>
}}

{{Molecular Reality}}

[[Category:Molecular Reality Corporation]]
[[Category:Companies formerly named after thought experiments]]
[[Category:Biotechnology companies established in 2018]]
[[Category:Maxwell's demon]]
[[Category:Nanopore companies]]