10x Genomics Brand Guidelines: Chromium, Visium & Xenium From Pleasanton, California

From droplets to single cells.

10x Genomics was founded in 2012 by Serge Saxonov, Ben Hindson and Kevin Ness, English Wikipedia says. Forbes reported in December 2018 that Saxonov, the chief executive, had been the founding director of research at 23andMe, and that Hindson, the chief scientist, had founded the droplet start-up QuantaLife, sold to Bio-Rad in 2011. The three had worked together at QuantaLife before leaving to start 10x, English Wikipedia says.

That shared past led to the company’s first dispute. In 2014 Bio-Rad brought an arbitration claim against the three founders, alleging they had breached obligations owed after it bought QuantaLife; in 2015 the arbitrator found they had not and denied Bio-Rad’s claims, English Wikipedia says, citing GenomeWeb.

The company has been based in Pleasanton, California, through its growth. Forbes described it in 2018 as a “buzzy, closely held” start-up selling tools that let biologists study the genetics of individual cells, and reported that it was moving to new premises in Pleasanton, quadrupling its presence in the city and adding 200 positions. Saxonov framed the business simply: “The best way to accelerate our understanding of biology is to build new tools,” he told the magazine, adding that the world knows only “slivers” of biology. English Wikipedia adds that the plans included a manufacturing facility in Pleasanton opening in early 2019. In August 2018 it bought Epinomics, an epigenetics developer, and in December 2018 it agreed to buy Spatial Transcriptomics of Stockholm, a technology developed at the Science for Life Laboratory that Forbes said would keep operating in Stockholm.

On 12 September 2019 10x Genomics announced its initial public offering, English Wikipedia says; its Class A shares are listed on Nasdaq under the symbol TXG.

Chromium, Visium and Xenium.

10x Genomics describes its business as three platform families, and Saxonov called them a “trinity of platforms” in a 2024 interview with GEN. The oldest is Chromium, the single-cell system that GEN dated to 2016. “2016 is when we saw the explosion of single cell interest with the Chromium platform,” Saxonov told the magazine, calling it the platform that set off the single-cell boom in biology.

The second family, Visium, grew from the Stockholm purchase and is a slide-based spatial gene-expression product. GEN reported in March 2024 that more than 2,900 labs had used Visium since its launch in 2019; that the Visium CytAssist instrument, which streamlines sample handling, followed in 2022; and that Visium HD, first announced two years earlier, had begun commercial shipping that week. Michael Schnall-Levin, the company’s founding scientist and chief technology officer, told GEN that the new version would let researchers take a preserved tissue sample and measure where nearly every gene in the human genome is switched on, at single-cell resolution. According to the magazine, the HD version reads a continuous grid of 2 µm squares, where the earlier slides used 55 µm spots.

The third family is Xenium In Situ, which GEN describes as a single-cell spatial imaging platform. GEN wrote in February 2024 that Xenium had grown into 10x’s third successful technology family the previous year, and that the company planned new Xenium features rather than a fourth platform in 2024. By the end of 2023, GEN reported, 10x had sold 5,966 instruments since its founding.

How sequencing companies present themselves.

DNA sequencing and genomics-tools companies sell to scientists, yet their pictures tend to repeat a small set of scenes: a benchtop instrument with a glowing panel in a clean, bright laboratory; a flow cell or chip held between gloved fingers; a colourful double helix or a data visualisation; a researcher studying results on a screen. Because the chemistry itself is invisible, the hardware, the consumables and the data become the main images.

Conferences are where many of these companies meet their customers. The Advances in Genome Biology and Technology meeting, known as AGBT, and the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics, known as ASHG, are regular venues for news. Oxford Nanopore says it presented its first nanopore sequencing data at AGBT in February 2012, and Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News reported in November 2024 that PacBio introduced its Vega benchtop sequencer at ASHG with a concert. Some companies run their own events too: Oxford Nanopore says it held the first London Calling conference for its users in May 2015.

Names and colours do much of the identity work. Instruments carry short, memorable product names, and some companies give their hardware one recognisable colour; GEN reported that PacBio’s new look, introduced with its Revio sequencer, came with a commitment to pink. The palettes in these guides are our own interpretations, not official colour standards.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — who founded it, who owns it, and which platforms it sells — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word. Where a company describes its instruments as for research use only, or says they are not intended for diagnosis, as PacBio and Oxford Nanopore do, we report that as the company states it.

A decade of patent cases, and their endings.

Patents have shaped 10x Genomics almost as much as products. In November 2018 a Delaware jury found that 10x had infringed University of Chicago patents licensed exclusively to Bio-Rad; the verdict was upheld on appeal in August 2020, and in July 2021 the two companies settled all outstanding cases in US and international courts and agreed to license each other’s single-cell patents, English Wikipedia says, citing Reuters.

The company has also been the plaintiff. Medical Device Network reported in May 2025 that 10x had sued NanoString Technologies in 2023, alleging that its GeoMx Digital Spatial Profiler infringed seven patents, and that in November 2023 the district court in Delaware sided with 10x. NanoString filed for Chapter 11 protection in February 2024, and Bruker, which bought its business that year, inherited the case. On 23 December 2024 the Delaware court ruled on post-trial motions, upholding the damages award, declining enhanced damages and granting 10x an injunction that halted US sales of GeoMx products to new customers.

The disputes ended in May 2025. Bruker and 10x Genomics agreed a global settlement under which they signed cross-licences for their patents and withdrew all pending lawsuits and administrative proceedings in the United States, in Germany and before the European Unified Patent Court, Medical Device Network reported; the financial terms were not disclosed.

For a design guide, 10x Genomics shows how a tools company can organise a whole identity around a small set of named platforms, each tied to a way of looking at cells. Compare Bruker, its settlement partner, and NanoString, the spatial-biology name now part of Bruker. For this guide we use plum, green and pink with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep 10x Genomics’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.