Element Biosciences Brand Guidelines: Illumina Alumni, the Avidite & the AVITI Sequencer

Three sequencing veterans and a reagent idea that grew.

Element Biosciences began in 2017 in San Diego. GEN (Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News) reported in March 2022 that the company was first sketched out on whiteboards in the libraries of the University of California, San Diego, when two scientists leaving Illumina, Matt Kellinger and Mike Previte, began brainstorming a new venture with Molly He, then a venture partner at the investment firm Foresite Capital. The company’s own timeline dates its founding to July 2017 and describes it as the work of “three scientists.”

All three came out of the sequencing industry. According to GEN, Kellinger and Previte had spent five and six years at Illumina, the San Diego sequencing company, and He had worked at Illumina and, before that, at PacBio. Their first idea was modest: new reagents for the life sciences, under a working name, 4-nomics, for which they even registered a domain. As the conversations went on, the plan grew into a complete sequencing system. He became chief executive, Previte chief technology officer and Kellinger head of biochemistry, while John Stuelpnagel, a co-founder of Illumina, became chairman, GEN reported. In 2025 the San Diego public broadcaster KPBS described He as the co-founder and chief executive who began the company with two partners eight years earlier.

The company worked out of public view for several years. Its timeline lists a Series A round in June 2019 led by Foresite Capital and Venrock, a Series B in January 2020 and a Series C in June 2021. In February 2022 Element closed the acquisition of Loop Genomics, a company working on synthetic long reads, the company says, and in May 2022 it opened a new headquarters at the Alexandria Tech Center in San Diego. In August 2025 KPBS reported from that headquarters in Sorrento Valley and said the company had grown to about 400 employees.

AVITI and the avidite.

Element came into the open on 14 March 2022 with an online event introducing the AVITI, a benchtop sequencer. GEN, which visited before the launch, described an instrument roughly two and a half feet tall and deep and three feet wide, with two flow cells that run independently, so that one run can start while the other is still going. The company says first customer shipments followed in June 2022, and its first set of global distributors in April 2023.

The chemistry is the core of the brand. Element calls it Avidity, and its central part is the avidite, a name the company has trademarked. GEN explained it as a multi-armed scaffold: each arm carries a copy of one type of nucleotide, and the core carries several fluorescent dyes that the instrument’s optics read. Because one avidite binds the DNA at several points at once, the company told the magazine, the reaction can run on lower reagent concentrations than other methods use. Through the Loop Genomics chemistry, Element also offered synthetic long reads assembled from short reads, which users could run alongside short-read libraries on the same flow cell. The company’s slogan at launch, He told GEN, was “Have it all.”

The range has since widened. The company’s timeline lists the AVITI24, launched in April 2024 and described as a “5D Multiomics System,” and its website now also names the AVITI LT, the AVITI Dx and a new platform called VITARI. KPBS reported in 2025 that the AVITI24 looks at a great deal more than DNA, and quoted a Salk Institute researcher who saw it as one platform for DNA, RNA, protein and the spatial context of the cell. The company’s timeline also records ISO 13485 certification in June 2026.

Its customers are varied. He told KPBS that they include forensic laboratories, fish farms and natural history museums. At launch she told GEN that the first priority was individual and core academic laboratories, part of an aim of putting a sequencer inside each lab rather than sending samples away to be read elsewhere.

Sequencing as a design category.

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.

Still private, still in San Diego.

Element Biosciences remains a private company, funded through a series of venture rounds. Its timeline records a Series D round in July 2024 led by Wellington Management and a Series E in June 2026 led by Samsung Electronics. Its headquarters stays in San Diego, the city where Illumina also grew, and the company says its technology has been used in more than 400 publications and that it has customers in more than 40 countries.

The brand’s language returns again and again to a single idea. “You cannot talk about Element without the word avidity,” GEN wrote in 2022, noting that the word, in one form or another, is built into several parts of the company, from the Avidity chemistry to the avidite. The company frames its purpose in terms of access, describing a mission “to empower the scientific community with more freedom and flexibility.” Its product names stay short and capitalised, from AVITI to AVITI24 and VITARI.

For a design guide, Element Biosciences shows how a challenger can build an identity around one coined word and a lab-scale instrument. Compare Illumina, where its founders worked, and PacBio, where He worked before Illumina. For this guide we use a deep violet, ink and a pale lilac with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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