MikroTik Brand Guidelines: RouterOS, a Hexagon Mark & a Riga Factory Hall

Two founders, one routing program.

MikroTik was founded in Riga, Latvia, in 1996. English Wikipedia names its founders as John Tully and Arnis Riekstiņš, and Latvian Wikipedia dates the company’s registration to 14 March 1996. Its legal name is SIA Mikrotīkls; MikroTik is the trading brand. The company says the name comes from a play on the Latvian for “small network.”

The starting point was software rather than hardware. In 1997, the company says, it began work on a routing utility, then an MS-DOS program called the “Tik” software system, and built its first PC routers around wireless cards. English Wikipedia describes the early aim as networking software for ordinary x86 PC hardware. That program became RouterOS, an operating system based on Linux: the company dates the name and the first Linux-based version to 1999, while Latvian Wikipedia places the first Linux-based RouterOS in 1997.

Hardware followed. English Wikipedia says MikroTik began producing its own low-power single-board computers, branded RouterBOARD, in 2002, and Latvian Wikipedia gives the same year; the company’s own timeline says the RouterBOARD brand was born in 2003 with two products, the RB24 and the RB200. Either way, the pairing of an in-house operating system with in-house boards became the basis of the range.

When the Foreign Investors’ Council in Latvia announced in May 2021 that MikroTik had joined it, the council said the company was founded “to develop routers and wireless ISP systems,” had more than 280 employees and was the largest manufacturing company in Latvia. The company remains privately held: Latvian Wikipedia names Riekstiņš and Tully as its owners. In 2020 the Latvian operator LMT described Tully as co-owner and chairman of the board, and in 2025 ServeTheHome described him as chief executive and co-founder, an American expatriate.

RouterOS, RouterBOARD and a hexagon.

MikroTik describes its work as designing router software and hardware “for every type of network – from small offices to national ISPs, data centers, and large enterprises.” Its range runs from small home routers such as the hAP to Cloud Core Router models, CRS switches, outdoor wireless links, LTE and 5G routers such as the Chateau, and, more recently, the RDS2216 storage server that ServeTheHome saw in numbers at the Riga offices in 2025. The company says it has more than 250 products in its current assortment and more than 800 distributors and resellers in 130 countries.

The common thread is the software. MikroTik’s routers run RouterOS, configured through tools the company names WinBox and WebFig, and the company says the same operating system runs across its different product categories. It also runs a training and certification programme, which it says reaches more than 90 training centres on every continent except Antarctica. The company says its products are used by internet service providers, businesses and individual users.

MikroTik publishes its own brand guidelines on its website; the version read for this guide was dated 5 November 2026. They describe the logo’s background shape as a hexagon, chosen because the product design is “all about math and efficiency,” and compare it to beehives, snowflakes and basalt columns. The “M” inside is drawn to look like an arrow, which the guidelines call “an agent of growth and curiosity.” Users are told not to stretch, tilt, outline or recolour the mark, and not to use the name without the symbol.

The colour rules are strict. The guidelines say the logo always appears in one of three colours, named MikroTik Black, MikroTik Gray and MikroTik Light — a near-black, a mid grey and a pale grey — and, for products and marketing, add a set of bright gradients as complementary colours. The named typeface is Manrope, a geometric sans, with JetBrains Mono as the monospace face,, used, the guidelines say, on everything from device labels to marketing brochures. Even the spelling is set down: merged words with internal capitals, as in MikroTik, RouterOS, WinBox and WebFig, with a few listed exceptions such as RouterBOARD and The Dude.

Design and documentation.

Networking hardware is mostly bought by people who will never see it in use. Switches sit in locked racks, servers in data-centre aisles, and access points on office ceilings, so the makers rely on a small set of familiar pictures: a rack of switches with rows of lit ports, a white disc fixed to a ceiling tile, a home router with its antennas raised, a long cold aisle of cabinets under strip lighting.

The companies in this group range from makers of home and small-office routers to suppliers of whole data-centre racks, and from long-listed corporations to firms owned through holding companies in Asia. Many design their products in one country and have them built in another, often by contract manufacturers, so what a company says about where its equipment is made is worth reading closely and attributing to the company.

Trade fairs are where much of the industry shows itself. Computex in Taipei, Interop and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona have long been venues for product launches and partner meetings, alongside more specialised events for supercomputing and service providers. Product names do much of the branding work: families of routers, switches and servers carry short names and model numbers that customers learn to read, while the management software that runs them is increasingly sold as a subscription alongside the box.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it now, where it says its products are made, and any regulatory or legal history reported by dated sources — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Designed in Riga, made in the EU.

MikroTik works from Riga’s historic VEF district. The company says its headquarters occupy a landmark building constructed in 1900, with a statue of Zeus at the entrance, in a complex once known for electric machinery, light bulbs, radios and small cameras. Latvian Wikipedia says the owners began restoring the historic VEF buildings in 2014. ServeTheHome, which toured the site in 2025, described a late-1800s factory whose facade could not be changed because of its historical significance, so MikroTik built a modern office inside it; the writer noted that the factory had survived two world wars and several occupations, and had made telephone switchboards, radios, cranes, aircraft and Cold War-era spy cameras.

On where products are made, the company says the “full cycle from prototypes to real products” takes place in the EU. ServeTheHome’s report, published in September 2025, describes the split. Product definition, design, prototyping and testing happen in Riga, where MikroTik keeps component reels for low-volume prototypes, rooms of radio test chambers and a team that builds robotic test rigs for the factory floor. Volume production goes to contract manufacturers: the writer visited a HansaMatrix line at Ventspils, on the Latvian coast, where MikroTik products were assembled, labelled, loaded with software and packed. He reported that manufacturing happens mostly in the north-eastern EU and that MikroTik’s South-East Asian production had almost all moved out of China. In 2020 LMT announced a jointly developed LTE18 router that it said was “fully manufactured in Latvia.” The company also says it runs a 17,000-square-metre warehouse in Riga.

ServeTheHome also noted that MikroTik sponsored its access for the tour, while the publication paid for the trip itself, so its account is a visit hosted by the company rather than an audit.

For a design guide, MikroTik shows how an engineering firm can write down a tight identity — one mark, three neutral colours, one typeface and a rule for every product name — and keep its playful side for gradients and naming. Compare Ubiquiti, another maker of routers and wireless gear, and Zyxel. For this guide we use graphite, steel grey and pale grey with a teal accent and a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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