He builds cameras for things no one can see. As CEO of ONI, he wants a single molecule to be as easy to photograph as a face.
Most microscopes ask you to become a microscope person first and a scientist second. Learn the optics. Fight the software. Book the shared instrument down the hall. Paul Scagnetti runs a company built on the opposite bet: that the tool should disappear and the discovery should show up. As CEO of ONI - the Oxford spin-out formally called Oxford Nanoimaging - he leads a team whose flagship Nanoimager fits on a benchtop yet resolves detail down to 20 nanometers, small enough to track individual molecules inside living cells.
He did not arrive at biology by the usual door. Scagnetti is a mechanical engineer with a Ph.D. from MIT, a master's in mechanical engineering from Boston University, and an MBA from the University of Oregon. His resume reads like a tour of how the physical and life sciences got built into products: strategy and general management at Intel, then more than a decade at FEI Company, the electron-microscope maker, where he ran business units and eventually the entire science business group. Then a run at Illumina, the genomics giant, where he led corporate and business development - the M&A, partnerships and licensing that decide which technologies a big company buys, backs, or lets go.
In February 2023 he walked away from all of that. Illumina was a company he says he genuinely loved. He left anyway to run a scale-up in Oxford most people had never heard of.
I left a job and company I genuinely loved to join ONI for several reasons but among them were the team, the technology, and the promise of what super-resolution microscopy can become for drug discovery and research.
The answer is a diagnosis. Super-resolution microscopy is a genuine marvel - the underlying single-molecule localization methods trace back to Nobel-winning physics - but it has stayed stubbornly hard to use. In Scagnetti's words, it has been challenging to routinely enable super-resolution analysis for researchers who just want to get their research done and often don't want to become super-resolution microscopy experts. That gap between what the technology can do and who can actually do it is the whole opportunity. Close it, and a niche capability becomes an everyday instrument.
He is careful about how that closing happens. He does not describe it as one clever breakthrough. He describes it as an orchestra.
This will require a symphony-like combination of chemistry, flow cell microfluidics, imaging, automation, and incredibly complex intelligent software.
It is a very engineer thing to say. The magic is not any single part. It is getting reagents, fluidics, optics, robotics and code to keep time with each other so the person at the bench never has to think about any of it. Simplify the hard thing, and the hard thing scales.
A human hair is roughly 80,000 to 100,000 nanometers wide. A typical light microscope tops out around 200 nm. ONI's imaging reaches 20 nm - fine enough to separate objects a conventional microscope would smear into one blur.
Bars are illustrative, not linear - the real gap is far larger.
The clearest proof of the thesis arrived in January 2025, when ONI launched the Aplo Scope - an instrument Scagnetti has called the biggest launch in the company's history. It packs lasers, optics, chemistry and software into a compact footprint, reaches the same 20 nm resolution, and is pitched at a very practical prize: cutting the time it takes to validate drug targets in early-stage pharmaceutical research. Faster, clearer answers about how molecules actually interact, without a dedicated imaging core to run them.
The next wave of innovation in biology and drug development is about visualizing molecular interactions with unprecedented precision.
Read his career backwards and there is a through-line hiding in plain sight. Chips at Intel. Electrons at FEI. Genomes at Illumina. Single molecules at ONI. Four industries, one habit: taking a way of seeing that used to belong to specialists and turning it into something a product can deliver at scale. The microscope is just the latest lens.
His stated mission has the plainness of someone who has thought about it for a long time: to accelerate human discovery and fight disease by enabling everyone to see and understand the microscopic details of life. Note the word everyone. That is the tell. For Scagnetti the point was never the resolution number - impressive as 20 nm is. The point is who gets to use it.
ONI was founded and has developed with the premise that simplifying this incredible technology and capabilities will be game changing.
It has been challenging to routinely enable super-resolution analysis for researchers who just want to get their research done.
Our mission is to accelerate human discovery and fight disease by enabling everyone to see and understand the microscopic details of life.
A symphony-like combination of chemistry, microfluidics, imaging, automation, and incredibly complex intelligent software.
He holds an MIT Ph.D. in mechanical engineering but runs a company built on chemistry, optics and software.
His career crosses four fields: Intel chips, FEI electron microscopes, Illumina genomics, and ONI single-molecule imaging.
ONI's Nanoimager is small enough to sit on a desk yet tracks individual molecules at 20 nanometers.
He defines the ideal microscope as one a scientist can use without ever becoming a microscopy expert.