Evident Brand Guidelines: Olympus’s Microscope Business, Carved Out in 2022 and Sold to Bain

A Tokyo workshop founded to make microscopes at home.

Evident is a young company with an old line of work. Its microscopes come from Olympus, which says it was founded on 12 October 1919 by Takeshi Yamashita as Takachiho Seisakusho, in Tokyo, to produce microscopes in Japan. Its first microscope, the Asahi, went on sale in 1920. Japanese Wikipedia says the workshop, in Hatagaya in Shibuya, also made clinical thermometers at first, and that the Olympus name, registered as a trademark in 1921, refers to Mount Olympus, home of the Greek gods — an echo of Takachiho, the peak where the gods gather in Japanese myth.

Microscopes stayed at the centre as the company added cameras. Japanese Wikipedia says a GE-model microscope took a top prize at a 1928 exposition and that the Seika GE, made from that year, was used by the Emperor Shōwa. Olympus says its first camera, the Semi-Olympus I, followed in 1936, after it developed Zuiko photographic lenses.

The war changed the business. Japanese Wikipedia says the company was renamed Takachiho Kogaku Kogyo in 1942, bought former silk mills at Suwa in late 1943 and at Ina in spring 1944 and turned both into optical-weapons factories, and moved its Shibuya works to Suwa in 1945; an air raid in May 1945 destroyed its head office and main factory. After the war it restarted with cameras at Suwa and microscopes at Ina, in Nagano Prefecture, and in 1949 it became Olympus Optical Co., Ltd. and listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

From Olympus Scientific Solutions to Evident.

For seven decades the microscopes were sold as Olympus products, alongside its cameras and endoscopes; Olympus says it developed an early practical gastrocamera in 1950. Its timeline records a European headquarters in Hamburg from 1964 and, in 1968, Olympus Corporation of America, set up to sell microscopes and medical equipment in the United States. The parent took the name Olympus Corporation in 2003. Japanese Wikipedia names the upright BX and inverted IX research microscopes, and the LEXT industrial laser microscopes launched in 2003. Olympus’s own timeline also records that in 2011 it formed a third-party committee to investigate the earlier concealment of company losses.

The split came as Olympus narrowed its focus to medical technology. Its timeline lists the transfer of its imaging business in 2021. Japanese Wikipedia says the new company was set up on 30 November 2021 to take over the scientific business, and on 4 April 2022 Olympus announced that it had completed the separation of its Scientific Solutions business, which covered its industrial and life-science businesses, into the wholly owned Evident Corporation; the plan had first been announced in June 2021. The release said the new name reflected the aim of helping customers discover new insights and find new evidence in their fields, and quoted the president, Yoshitake Saito, on moving from selling products towards solving customers’ problems.

Ownership changed the next year. In a notice dated 29 March 2023, Evident said that the transfer of all its shares to K.K. BCJ-66, a special-purpose company indirectly owned by funds advised by Bain Capital, would close on 3 April 2023, after competition approvals; Japanese Wikipedia records the transfer on that date. Evident says it became a standalone company that April and later reorganised into two units, Micro Imaging Solutions and Test & Measurement.

Design and documentation.

Laboratory instrument makers tend to present themselves through the laboratory itself. Their pictures are usually of benchtop instruments in bright white rooms: chromatographs, spectrometers and titrators lined up on long benches, with sample trays loaded and a screen beside each one showing a chromatogram’s peaks or the curve of a spectrum. The instrument is often shown with its door open or a vial in a gloved hand, so that the scale of the work is clear.

People appear in a familiar costume. Scientists in white coats, safety glasses and nitrile gloves lean over a pipette, check a result on a monitor or load a rack of samples, and the setting is usually a clean, well-lit room rather than a factory floor. Lab automation brings its own imagery: pipetting robots moving across a deck of microplates, grippers lifting a plate from one station to the next, and close-ups of tips, tubes and wells.

The same settings recur across the category: product photographs on plain white or pale grey backgrounds, cut-away diagrams of an instrument’s inner path, and data shown as it would appear on the screen — a set of peaks, a spectral curve, a titration curve or a grid of wells coloured by result. In this kind of picture the instrument, the sample and the data carry the message, and a maker’s name usually appears as a badge on the casing or a logo in the corner.

Trade fairs remain central to how the industry shows itself. Exhibitions such as analytica in Munich, Pittcon in the United States and ACHEMA in Frankfurt bring instrument makers together on large stands, where new instruments are launched and demonstrated. The guides that follow look at what can be checked about each maker — who founded it, who owns it and how its name has changed — and keep the company’s own claims separate from what independent sources record.

A name chosen to mean evidence.

Part of the business has since been sold. On 1 July 2025, in a release from Pittsburgh, the rail-technology group Wabtec said it had completed its acquisition of Evident’s Inspection Technologies division, formerly part of Olympus’s Scientific Solutions business, which covered non-destructive testing, remote visual inspection and analytical instruments.

What remains is microscopy. Evident’s own description of itself today covers a life-science range running from brightfield and darkfield microscopy to fluorescence, 4D analysis and digital pathology, and industrial microscopes for laser scanning, digital imaging and semiconductor work. The company says it is headquartered in Tokyo, with research, development and manufacturing centres in Japan, the United States, Germany and China; Japanese Wikipedia gives its registered head office as Tatsuno, in Nagano Prefecture, where Olympus also lists a site. Evident describes “over a century as Olympus” of optics behind it and says its expertise and manufacturing capabilities are unchanged by the new name; we give those as its claims. It also says its optics have helped illuminate Nobel Prize-winning research, and that it now pairs them with digital tools for what it calls next-generation micro-imaging.

Where Olympus took its name from a mountain, Evident chose a word about proof, and its releases tie it to customers finding new evidence. Its microscopes, sold for decades under the Olympus name, now carry a name first used in 2022.

For a design guide, Evident shows how a carved-out business builds a new name while keeping a century-old product line. Compare JEOL, a Japanese maker of electron microscopes, and HORIBA, a Kyoto instrument maker. For this guide we use a violet, a pale glass tone and a green with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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