Kevin J. Knopp

Co-Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer 908 Devices

Last Reviewed: September 28, 2026

Executive Summary

Kevin J. Knopp is co-founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of 908 Devices, the Burlington, Massachusetts company that makes handheld chemical analysis devices built on miniaturised mass spectrometry and optical spectroscopy. He has run the company and sat on its board since February 2012, took it public on Nasdaq in December 2020, and in 2025 steered it through a strategic narrowing: the desktop bioprocessing business was sold to Repligen, leaving 908 Devices focused on point-of-need devices used by responders, defence and security agencies against chemical threats and illicit drugs. It is his second company in the same field. He previously co-founded Ahura Scientific, a handheld optical spectrometer maker acquired by Thermo Fisher Scientific in 2010.

Career Highlights

• Co-Founder, President, Chief Executive Officer and director of 908 Devices since February 2012 (2026 proxy statement).
• Led the company to its initial public offering on the Nasdaq Global Market, with trading beginning on 18 December 2020.
• Completed the sale of the company’s desktop bioprocessing portfolio to Repligen in March 2025, and the acquisition of Swiss near-infrared spectroscopy company NIRLAB SA in May 2026.
• Co-founded Ahura Scientific in 2002 and served as Senior Vice President over operations, R&D and safety and security sales through its 2010 acquisition by Thermo Fisher Scientific.
• Vice President and Site Leader of Thermo Fisher’s Portable Optical Analysis division after that acquisition.
• Inventor on more than 20 US patents; his products have received R&D 100, Business Week IDEA and Frost & Sullivan awards, among others, per his company biography.

Professional Journey

Knopp trained as an engineer, with an electrical engineering degree from Boston University followed by a master’s and a doctorate in optics from the University of Colorado Boulder. That grounding in optics shaped his first company. In 2002 he co-founded Ahura Scientific, which built handheld optical spectrometers for the pharmaceutical and security markets: instruments that let a user identify an unknown material in the field rather than send a sample to a laboratory. He was Senior Vice President overseeing operations, R&D and safety and security sales, and stayed through Ahura’s acquisition by Thermo Fisher Scientific in 2010, continuing as Vice President and Site Leader of Thermo Fisher’s Portable Optical Analysis division. He also served as an independent board member of Crystal IS until its acquisition by Asahi Kasei.

In February 2012 he co-founded 908 Devices and became its President and Chief Executive Officer. The premise carried over the handheld philosophy of Ahura and applied it to mass spectrometry, the gold-standard laboratory technique for molecular analysis, which had until then been confined to large, costly instruments. The company’s approach was to shrink the core of the instrument, the ion trap and its vacuum system, using semiconductor microfabrication. Its first device shipped in 2014. By the end of 2025 it had sold more than 3,700 handheld devices to over 700 customers, including numerous domestic and foreign government agencies, according to its annual report.

908 Devices went public in December 2020, with shares trading on the Nasdaq Global Market from 18 December. For a period it ran two lines of business, handheld devices for safety and security and desktop analysers for biopharmaceutical process development. In March 2025 it sold the desktop portfolio to Repligen and sublicensed related patents to the buyer. Two independent directors left the board over the following months, and the company’s filings tie both departures to that sale. What remained was a company concentrated on point-of-need chemical detection: the MX908 mass spectrometer and the ThreatID, ProtectIR, XplorIR and VipIR optical devices, used against fentanyl and other illicit drugs, toxic exposure and chemical warfare agents. In May 2026 it extended that line by acquiring NIRLAB SA, a Swiss developer of near-infrared spectroscopy for instant material identification.

Knopp remains President, Chief Executive Officer and a Class II director, with a board term running to the 2028 annual meeting, according to the company’s 2026 proxy statement. The company is headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts.

Education

Boston University

B.S., Electrical Engineering

University of Colorado Boulder

M.S., Electrical Engineering; Ph.D., Optics