MGI Tech Brand Guidelines: BGI’s Shenzhen Sequencer Maker, DNBSEQ & the STAR Market

A genome institute, a Californian purchase and a new company.

MGI Tech, known in Chinese as 华大智造, is the instrument maker that grew out of China’s BGI Group. English Wikipedia says BGI was set up in September 1999 in Beijing as the Beijing Genomics Institute, to take part in the Human Genome Project, and moved to Shenzhen after it left the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2007. In its early years BGI was a heavy user of other companies’ sequencers: in 2010, the same source says, it bought 128 Illumina HiSeq 2000 machines.

The step towards making its own came in March 2013, when BGI bought Complete Genomics of Mountain View, California, after approval from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, English Wikipedia says. Complete Genomics had been founded in June 2005 by Clifford Reid, Radoje Drmanac and John Curson, and had developed a human-genome sequencing platform based on DNA nanoballs, which English Wikipedia says are loaded onto a patterned array chip. After the purchase it moved to San Jose.

MGI’s own timeline lists the first fruits: the BGISEQ-1000 system, which it says won approval from China’s food and drug regulator in July 2014, and the benchtop BGISEQ-500 of October 2015. The company says MGI was formally established in April 2016, and that the small BGISEQ-50 followed that October. Complete Genomics became part of MGI in June 2018, English Wikipedia says, which describes it as MGI’s research subsidiary.

DNBSEQ, then nanopores and automation.

MGI’s sequencers are sold under the DNBSEQ name, after the DNA nanoball method it inherited and, English Wikipedia says, refined after the Complete Genomics purchase. The company’s timeline traces the range: the MGISEQ-2000 and MGISEQ-200 in October 2017; the high-throughput T7 in October 2018; the G99 in September 2022; and the T20×2 in February 2023, followed by the benchtop T1+ in February 2025 and the T7+ that September. Its CoolMPS sequencing chemistry was licensed in October 2025 to the Swiss incubator Swiss Rockets, the company says.

The range has since widened beyond the DNA-nanoball machines. MGI groups its sequencers by three technology routes — laser-excited, “self-luminous” and nanopore — and lists the CycloneSEQ nanopore line, including the G400-ER of September 2024, among its products. Its timeline says that in March 2026 it acquired the BGI unit behind CycloneSEQ, a step it presents as joining long-read sequencing, laboratory automation and multi-omics in one company. Beyond sequencers, the catalogue runs to sample-preparation robots, laboratory information software, the Stereo-seq spatial line, cold-storage systems, mass spectrometers and remote-ultrasound systems.

On manufacturing, MGI describes a network rather than a single works. It says its base in Latvia opened in November 2019 and began volume production of the G400 there in May 2023, and that a manufacturing base in California was completed in May 2024. As of 30 June 2026, the company says, it had six production bases, nine research and development centres and 13 customer experience centres, and sold in more than 120 countries and regions. Its headquarters are in the Yantian district of Shenzhen.

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 listing, patent fights and US restrictions.

MGI completed a Series B funding round in May 2020, its timeline says, and English Wikipedia records an application to Shanghai’s STAR Market in December 2020 and approval in September 2021. The company lists its debut on the STAR Market in September 2022. The Federal Register notice of October 2026 describes MGI as under the control of the same ultimate controlling shareholder as BGI Group.

Its route into the United States ran through the courts. In November 2021 a federal jury in California found that MGI’s American arm had infringed Illumina patents, and a judge later extended a bar on US sales of its CoolMPS sequencers until August 2022, English Wikipedia says, citing Law360 and Reuters. In May 2022 a Delaware jury found that Illumina’s two-channel chemistry infringed two patents owned by Complete Genomics, the same source says; MGI’s timeline records that win, and says its full sequencing range went on sale in the US in January 2023.

Political scrutiny ran alongside. In 2019 two US senators raised concerns about MGI with federal health agencies, English Wikipedia says, and MGI replied that it supplies instruments and consumables and does not handle customers’ samples or genetic data. On 9 September 2024 the US House passed H.R. 8333, the BIOSECURE Act, whose text named BGI, MGI and Complete Genomics among “biotechnology companies of concern.” English Wikipedia says that bill did not become law in 2024, and that a version was included in the defence authorisation act signed on 18 December 2025.

On 29 October 2026 the Department of Homeland Security published, in the Federal Register, an update to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act Entity List adding MGI Tech, BGI Genomics and BGI Group. The notice says the US government has reasonable cause to believe that MGI provided genetic-testing capacity to the Xinjiang government; goods made by listed entities are presumed to be made with forced labour and barred from entry into the United States unless that presumption is rebutted. Separately, Swiss Rockets announced on 23 February 2026 a definitive agreement to buy Complete Genomics from MGI, subject to closing conditions and approval by MGI shareholders; agreed in February 2026, the sale was not completed at the time of writing.

For a design guide, MGI Tech shows how a sequencer maker’s name can stand for a technology, a parent group and a contested place in world trade at once. Compare Illumina, its long-time rival in the courts, and Oxford Nanopore, another nanopore name. For this guide we use navy, teal and coral with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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