[comstock]

The accounts of all UK companies are filed publicly. They had about 1M GBP of sales in 2016 from memory. I would guess with overheads, each unit is currently sold at a loss.

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.