Oxford: Innovative Gordon Sanghera wins national Barclays entrepreneur award
Gordon Sanghera of Oxford Nanopore Technologies has won the Colleague’s Choice Entrepreneur of the Year Award at the Barclays Entrepreneur Awards 2018.
CEO and founder Gordon Sanghera was named as the winner of the award by Sir Ian Cheshire, chairman of Barclays Bank UK, at the awards dinner in London. Initially winning the Icon of the Year Entrepreneur Award for the South East region, he then went on to take this prestigious national award.
The awards are a celebration of Barclays most innovative entrepreneurs and businesses, as voted by Barclays colleagues and a panel of regional and national judges from the wider entrepreneurial eco-system.
Richard Heggie, head of High Growth & Entrepreneurs Proposition at Barclays, said: “The Barclays High-Growth & Entrepreneur Awards, now in its third year, has proved to be a valuable and influential business competition for entrepreneurs and high growth businesses across the country. Entrepreneurs are fundamental to the UK’s economic competitive advantage, disproportionately driving job growth, attracting investment, and creating the innovative products and services that shape our todays as well as tomorrows. ”
Founded in 2005 as a spinout from University of Oxford, Nanopore Technologies has developed the technology that can sequence almost anything in a fraction of time and cost of anything currently available. The firm’s goal is ‘to enable the analysis of any living thing, by any person, in any environment’.
Oxford Nanopore Technologies is a private company headquartered in Oxford with satellite offices in Cambridge (UK), New York and Boston, and other personnel based in Japan and France. It has currently raised private equity of £451 million and employs more than 300 staff globally.
Sanghera has a grand ambition: to build a new science-based company under British ownership that commands a large global market. He is doing this with Oxford Nanopore Technologies, having helped to develop a game-changing and disruptive technology in sequencing DNA which will be a major player in the global market. The firm is now classed as a ‘Unicorn’ with a valuation of circa £1.5 billion.
From left: Sir Ian Cheshire, chairman of Barclays Bank UK, Tim Cowper, FD at Nanopore Technologies who picked up the award on behalf of Gordon Sanghera, and Nick Jenkins, founder of Moonpig.com
