demonpore, inc.

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.^[5] 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".^[6][7] 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 × 10⁻²¹ joules at room temperature (Landauer's principle).^[8][9]

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.^[1] 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.^[10]

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, 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."^[a] The post dates the company's first slide deck to "several thousand years ago in AEST (Accelerationist-Equivalent-Subjective-Time), i.e., around 2015".^[2] Registration of demonpore.com on December 24, 2014, shows that the name was in use some months before that.^[3]

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".^[2][b]

The company kept its name in lowercase, including in the name of its console, the demonpore 64.^[1] 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™".^[12] Recordings from the period shorten the name to "dpore", as in the video title "wet dpore EDH 1 100 mM KCl".^[13]

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.^[14]

Kemmish dates his first thought of mechanical nanopores to 2012, his last year at the electron-microscopy sequencing company Halcyon Molecular.^[1][15] 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".^[1][16] 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".^[1] A video recorded in March 2017 is titled "nanotech history, in my mom's basement, March 2017".^[17] The patent application claims priority from May 9, 2017.^[18]

Kemmish and Gaillard incorporated demonpore, inc. in 2018.^[1][c] For a period its headquarters were on Edison Way in Menlo Park, California.^[19] The company has described its founding team as including alumni of Synthego, Oxford Nanopore and the Harvard Nanopore Group.^[1] Its patent application, "Stacks of coaligned nanopores and fabrication and uses thereof", was filed on May 9, 2018, and published that November.^[18]

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?"^[19]

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."^[19]

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". The next day the same setup became a microparticle turnstile.^[14] 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).^[1]

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.^[1][20][21]

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."^[22] Members who helped received a badge for the "CoronaPore project".^[1]

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.^[23] 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'".^[24]

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."^[1] 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."^[23] The patent was granted on February 2, 2021, as US 10,908,144.^[18]

In 2021 demonpore, inc. became Molecular Reality Corporation, and the domain molecularreality.com was registered on July 18.^[1][25] 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.^[4][26]

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

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^[4]