Andrew Alliance Brand Guidelines: A Swiss Pipetting Robot Named After Asimov’s Andrew

A physicist asks why scientists still pipette by hand.

Andrew Alliance was a Swiss laboratory automation company, founded in 2011, Global Venturing reported in January 2020. Its story was told at length in a June 2020 article by SLAS, the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening, which named its co-founders as Piero Zucchelli, Giorgio Horak, Isabelle Semac and a fourth colleague. The four had worked together for more than a decade before, at another start-up, SpinX Technologies, which developed lab-on-a-chip technology for biological assays. SLAS described the group as having backgrounds in physics, mechanical engineering, research and development, and life sciences research.

Zucchelli, who led the company, is a physicist who drew on his years at CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, SLAS reported. His starting point was a question rather than a technology. “We wanted to discover why manual pipetting was still a big problem on the market,” he told SLAS, “and why there were still a million pipettes sold every year in our field.” The company’s answer was not to replace the hand pipette but to build a robot that used it.

The early work was done on a small budget. According to SLAS, the team sketched its first robots in freely available software, turned the sketches into 3D-printed prototypes and spray-painted them on the balcony of Horak’s apartment; Zucchelli recalled photographing the finished prototype in his dining room for a self-made website. Among the company’s early financial backers SLAS named Sam Eletr, a co-founder and first chief executive of Applied Biosystems.

The team aimed everything at one trade show, SLAS2013, the society’s annual conference. Zucchelli described it to SLAS as “do or die” for the enterprise.

A robot that holds an ordinary pipette.

The product that emerged was Andrew, a liquid-handling robot that SLAS called “anthropomorphic.” Its name, SLAS reported, came from Isaac Asimov’s novel The Bicentennial Man, whose robot hero is called Andrew. Andrew was designed to work with conventional pipettes and labware that laboratories already owned, replacing the repetitive work of manual pipetting.

The launch worked. Andrew received an SLAS New Product Award at SLAS2013, which Zucchelli described as “an immediate and direct validation” from the life-sciences community. “Andrew was launched in 2013 with one model and three accessories,” he told SLAS. “By 2019, we had five robot models and more than 200 accessories, all of which have been customer-driven requests.”

The second generation arrived at SLAS2019 in Washington, DC, where the company introduced Andrew+ and Pipette+, which also received an SLAS New Product Award, according to SLAS. Andrew+ built on the original robot; SelectScience and Startupticker both described it in January 2020 as the company’s flagship. Both belonged to what the company called its OneLab ecosystem: software for programming connected pipettes and robots centrally and sharing protocols between users.

OneLab reflected the company’s view of where the laboratory was heading. Zucchelli told SLAS that the company planned to move “beyond stand-alone robots” towards instruments and software for the connected laboratory, able to link devices from other makers. During the pandemic, he said, some instruments were bought and installed remotely within 48 hours in different countries, and OneLab let customers design experiments at home and run the robots remotely.

Design and documentation.

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.

From portfolio company to part of Waters.

The company raised money from industry as well as from investors. In June 2018, SLAS reported, it announced a Series C round whose backers included Tecan, Waters, Inpeco, Rancilio Cube, the Sam Eletr Trust and Omega Funds; Global Venturing reported that Omega Funds had also provided Series B funding in 2014.

On 13 January 2020, Waters Corporation, the American maker of liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry instruments, announced a definitive agreement to acquire Andrew Alliance, as Startupticker and SelectScience reported that week. The terms were not disclosed. Andrew Alliance then had about 40 employees in Switzerland, France and the United States. Waters’ chairman and chief executive, Chris O’Connell, said the deal broadened its portfolio “to include advanced robotics and software,” and Zucchelli said the company had “found the right partner to bring our vision of connected laboratories to life.” Global Venturing noted that Waters was buying one of its own portfolio companies. By June 2020 SLAS was describing the business as “Andrew Alliance – a Waters Co.,” based in Vernier, Switzerland, and reported that Waters had completed the purchase of the start-up in January 2020.

The brand has since been folded into its owner. The andrewalliance.com address now forwards to the laboratory automation pages of the Waters website, and SelectScience lists Andrew+ as a Waters product. Andrew Alliance no longer operates as an independent company.

For a design guide, Andrew Alliance shows how a product name with a story — a robot named after a fictional robot — can carry a small company into a much larger one. Compare Gilson, a pipette maker whose hand tools are the kind Andrew was built to hold, and Integra Biosciences, another Swiss liquid-handling name. For this guide we use a deep teal, a dark slate and a pale blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Andrew Alliance’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.