INTEGRA Biosciences Brand Guidelines: Tecnomara 1965, Zizers & the VOYAGER Pipette

A Zurich firm, a group of companies and a move to Zizers.

INTEGRA Biosciences began in Zurich in 1965 under another name. Its owner, the Swiss group INTEGRA Holding, says in a 2025 company portrait that the business was founded as Tecnomara and grew through the integration of several companies, among them Petra Labortechnik in 1999 and Tecuria Engineering in 2001, into a business that develops, makes and sells its own products. In 2009 it moved its headquarters to Zizers, in eastern Switzerland, and in the same year it bought the American company Viaflo, which gave it a foothold in the United States, the portrait says.

INTEGRA Biosciences is part of a larger group. INTEGRA Holding describes itself as a Swiss management holding company, the majority of whose shares are held by the ORGU Foundation, a foundation under Swiss law; the holding acts as the foundation’s executive body and runs a group whose other businesses work in flow metering and energy measurement, transport technology, engineering and real estate. The group’s chief executive and chairman, Adrian Oehler, represents the fourth generation since its founder, Dr. A. Gutzwiller, the portrait says, and the group lists laboratory equipment under its aim of “accelerating science.”

The holding says INTEGRA Biosciences has expanded continuously since 2012 and now has offices in Switzerland, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, China, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark, Ireland and Australia. It gives a workforce of about 600: roughly 270 in the United States, 230 in Switzerland and 100 in direct sales markets. The company says it sells through its own sales and support organisations and a network of more than 100 distribution partners, to customers in research, diagnostics and quality control. The chief executive of INTEGRA Biosciences is Urs Hartmann, who was quoted in that role by LabMedica in March 2023.

From hand pipettes to 384 channels.

INTEGRA’s products centre on pipetting. A company brochure describes a range of pipettes from one to 384 channels, from manual and electronic hand pipettes to benchtop instruments and robots. The named lines include VIAFLO electronic pipettes; the VOYAGER adjustable tip-spacing pipette, which the brochure says changes the distance between its tips at the touch of a button so that several samples can be moved between different labware formats in one step; GripTip pipette tips, which the company says use a patented attachment system; and the ASSIST PLUS pipetting robot. The range also takes in serological pipette controllers, reagent reservoirs, aspiration systems, pumps, dispensers and equipment for preparing culture media, the brochure says, and it presents its smaller benchtop automation as mobile laboratory equipment that is easy to install.

Dated product news traces the line. In January 2015 INTEGRA announced 50-microlitre models for its VIAFLO II electronic pipette range, aimed at users of PCR applications, in a release carried by News-Medical. In 2025, according to the holding’s portrait, it launched the SWITCH hybrid pipette, which combines manual pipetting with an electronic repeat-dispense function in a single hand-held device.

The company has also moved into sequencing. In March 2023 INTEGRA bought Miroculus, a San Francisco start-up developing automation for next-generation sequencing, LabMedica reported; Miroculus had begun with a prototype system for detecting microRNA before turning its patented technology to genomics protocols. Its Miro Canvas is a compact digital-microfluidics platform that automates sequencing sample preparation, Miroculus’s chief executive said in the announcement as carried by Bionity. Urs Hartmann told LabMedica that INTEGRA had bought the start-up for the potential of its digital microfluidics in automating and miniaturising genomic protocols. In 2025 the holding also lists a strategic partnership between INTEGRA Biosciences and CleanNA in the field of reagents.

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.

Electronics by hand in Switzerland, plastics in New Hampshire.

INTEGRA makes its products in two places. The company brochure says all of its electronic products, from electronic pipettes to pipetting robots, are made in Zizers, where each device is assembled by hand. The American company, INTEGRA Biosciences Corp., is based at Hudson, New Hampshire; that site has fully automated injection-moulding and assembly systems, a calibration laboratory and a clean room, and makes mechanical pipettes, reservoirs and pipette tips. The company says it doubled its production area in Zizers in 2019 and in Hudson in 2020, and the holding’s 2025 portrait describes a newly opened Innovation Campus that houses injection-moulding production.

The brochure also says INTEGRA has won a Red Dot Award for product design and the Swiss Manufacturing Award 2020 from the University of St Gallen. The company writes its name in capitals, INTEGRA, and uses the line “We accelerate science together” in its brochure. The INTEGRA name is shared with other businesses, including Integra LifeSciences and, inside its own group, INTEGRA Metering; this guide covers only the pipette maker of Zizers and Hudson.

For a design guide, INTEGRA Biosciences shows how a Swiss maker with roots in a 1965 Zurich firm can carry one capital-letter name across hand pipettes, robots and plastic consumables made on two continents. Compare Hamilton Company, the family-owned syringe and robot maker of Reno and Bonaduz, and Eppendorf, the Hamburg maker of pipettes and tubes. For this guide we use a deep teal, a fresh leaf green and a soft mist grey on white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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