Opentrons Brand Guidelines: Genspace, Brooklyn 2014 & the Open-Source Pipetting Robot

A biohacker’s pipetting problem.

Opentrons grew out of Genspace, a community biology lab in Brooklyn, New York. WIRED reported in November 2014 that the project “originated at Genspace,” a lab founded in the do-it-yourself spirit of the Maker movement. The company’s legal name is Opentrons Labworks, Inc.; English Wikipedia gives its founding year as 2014 and its founders as Will Canine, Chiu Chau and Nicholas Wagner.

The Los Angeles Times told the origin story in October 2021. Canine, who had no background in molecular biology, wanted to extract and read DNA at Genspace, and his unsteady hand kept spoiling the pipetting — the slow job of moving tiny amounts of liquid from one vessel to another. He teamed up with Chau and Wagner, whom he met through a DIY-biology mailing list and who had already built a first model of his robot idea, the Times reported. Together they recruited software developers to build an interface that let lab workers choose ingredients and commands.

In 2014 the robot was accepted into HAXLR8R, a summer-long hardware accelerator in Shenzhen, China, which the Times says turned it into a product that could be mass-manufactured; WIRED reported that SOS Ventures backed the project through that accelerator. On Halloween 2014 the team launched a Kickstarter campaign at a microbe-engineering competition in Boston, the Times reported, and its success pushed the team out of Genspace into its own office in the same Flatbush Avenue building.

In 2016 Opentrons joined the Winter cohort of the startup accelerator Y Combinator, English Wikipedia says. Afterwards it brought in Jonathan Brennan-Badal, formerly of the digital comics platform ComiXology and a Genspace board member, as chief executive, according to the Times and Wikipedia.

From open hardware to the Flex.

The first machine, the OT-1, came out of the Kickstarter and was released in 2015. WIRED described it in 2014 as an open-source liquid-handling robot that anyone could “copy, build, and modify,” with a Raspberry Pi microcomputer as its brain, many off-the-shelf parts and a JavaScript-based, drag-and-drop web interface for designing experiments. English Wikipedia says the OT-1 used adapters to move ordinary handheld micropipettes, and that it was the last of the company’s robots to follow open-hardware standards.

In February 2016 Canine pitched the idea to TechCrunch as the “PC” of biotech labs. Older liquid-handling robots, he said, were like mainframes that needed engineers to run them, while his robot was controlled from a web browser and could download shared protocols from the cloud. TechCrunch reported that the company said more than 50 of its robots were already working in private and academic labs.

The OT-2 followed in 2018. English Wikipedia says its hardware, including its electronic pipettes and add-on modules, is proprietary, with only coarse enclosure drawings released, while the software remains open source. The Flex, released in 2023 as the OT-2’s successor, measures about two feet on each side, and the Flex Prep of 2024 adds no-code set-up through a touchscreen, Wikipedia says. On its website today Opentrons pairs the robots with the Opentrons App and a drag-and-drop Protocol Designer, and calls its system open source.

The OT-2 found a new job in 2020. The Los Angeles Times reported that once the US Food and Drug Administration issued emergency use authorizations, Opentrons shipped hundreds of OT-2 robots to COVID-19 testing labs in American cities and beyond, including pop-up labs in shipping containers in London, and that users included the Mayo Clinic, Harvard, Stanford, MIT and BioNTech. English Wikipedia adds that Opentrons helped set up the Pandemic Response Lab in Queens with NYU Langone Health, and that the lab had shut down by the end of 2022.

How lab-automation makers present themselves.

Laboratory automation is sold to scientists, and its makers tend to present it in a laboratory register: white or pale grey instrument decks, pipetting heads lined up over microplates, racks of tips and plates picked out in colour, and clean benches with little else on them. Product photographs usually show the machine from the front or from above, so that the layout of the deck, the channels and the labware can be read at a glance.

Software is part of the picture. Pipetting robots and plate handlers are run from method editors and touchscreens, and makers often show those screens next to the hardware, with protocol steps, plate maps and progress bars set in plain sans-serif type. The pairing lets a single page show both the instrument and the way it is run.

Many of the companies began with a single hand instrument and grew towards automation. Hamilton’s history starts with a glass microliter syringe of the late 1940s; INTEGRA Biosciences grew from a Zurich firm founded in 1965 into a maker of electronic pipettes and benchtop robots. Acquisitions of smaller specialists, in microdosing or in digital microfluidics for sequencing, have pushed the same businesses towards ever smaller volumes.

The trade meets at fairs and conferences such as SLAS, the meetings of the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening, and analytica in Munich, where makers show their instruments to laboratory buyers. Several of the makers in this round are Swiss or have Swiss sites, while others are based in the United States or the United Kingdom; their guides set those shared conventions against very different histories and owners.

Robots for scientists.

Opentrons is privately held, English Wikipedia says, and English Wikipedia lists two acquisitions: Neochromosome, a genome-scale cell-engineering company, in March 2021, and Zenith AI, a machine-learning business, in June 2021. Its headquarters is in New York; Wikipedia places it in Long Island City, Queens.

In a release dated 29 January 2026 the company announced James Atwood as chief executive. He had led its robotics business since April 2023 and took the top job in July 2025, the company says. The same release says Opentrons is backed by SoftBank and Khosla Ventures, that more than 10,000 of its systems are installed in labs around the world — the company’s own figure — and that NVIDIA had chosen it as a partner to connect its BioNeMo AI platform to physical lab experiments.

The company’s website opens with “We make robots for scientists” and gives its mission as to “democratize access to laboratory robotics,” with a goal of turning today’s ratio of scientists to lab robots on its head. Will Canine and Chiu Chau are still listed there as co-founders.

For a design guide, Opentrons shows how a lab-robot brand can borrow the language of personal computing — open source, browser control, downloadable protocols — and keep it as the hardware moved from a crowdfunded open kit to proprietary robots. Compare Gilson, a maker of laboratory pipettes, and Andrew Alliance, another maker of pipetting robots. For this guide we use a harbour blue, bench white and a tip orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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