SPT Labtech Brand Guidelines: TTP Labtech, Melbourn, the mosquito & EQT

A Cambridge consultancy’s instrument arm goes its own way.

SPT Labtech started life as TTP Labtech, the laboratory-instrument business of TTP Group, the technology company based on the Melbourn Science Park near Cambridge. Sources give different starting points. Contract Pharma reported in June 2022 that the company has designed and manufactured liquid-handling and sample-management products “since 1997”; TTP Labtech’s own announcement of September 2018 spoke of its portfolio having grown “over the last 18 years.”

The break from its parent came in 2018. On 27 September 2018 TTP Labtech announced that investment from Battery Ventures, the technology-focused investment firm, would back its growth plans, and that the decision to divest it from TTP Group had been taken to allow for that growth. The company said it would expand its premises on the Melbourn Science Park and continue manufacturing in the United Kingdom; the terms were not disclosed. Peter Taylor, chairman of TTP Group, was quoted saying the business now had a partner for investment in research and acquisitions.

The new name followed. On 13 December 2019 the company announced, in a release published by Cambridge Network, that TTP Labtech Ltd would become SPT Labtech from 6 January 2020, and that the change was a contractual requirement of its 2018 divestment from TTP Group. David Newble, then managing director, said the name was chosen to give customers familiarity and to acknowledge the company’s history; the inspiration was “Sample Preparation Technologies,” he said, but the company would not use that phrase from then on.

The business it renamed was already broad. In the 2018 announcement TTP Labtech described a portfolio of automation, instrumentation and consumables serving pharmaceutical, biotechnology and academic research customers. By the time of the 2019 release it listed liquid handling, sample management, cryo-electron microscopy and multiplexed detection, used across drug discovery, structural biology, genomics and biobanking, together with a range of validated consumables such as tips and plates.

mosquito, dragonfly and a growing family.

SPT Labtech’s products are low-volume liquid handlers and sample stores, and the company writes their names in lowercase. The mosquito range handles nanolitre volumes; at the time of the 2019 rename the company listed mosquito X1, mosquito HTS, mosquito crystal, mosquito LCP and mosquito genomics HV for work from assay development and genomics to protein crystallography, alongside the dragonfly dispensers. The firefly is a compact liquid handler for genomics, and the chameleon prepares samples for cryo-electron microscopy. Sample storage carries other names: comPOUND for compound management, arktic for storage down to minus 80 degrees and comPACT for minus 20.

Under Battery Ventures the company grew by acquisition. Its website says that in August 2019 it launched chameleon and bought Quantifoil, the maker of support foils for electron microscopy in Jena, Germany; that in the summer of 2020 it bought LBD Life Sciences, an instrument supplier in China, and opened an office in Japan; and that in 2021 it bought Apricot Designs, a Californian company with a 30-year record in air-displacement liquid handling and an OEM business, and the robotics firm BioMicroLab. The company says Apricot’s air-displacement range complemented its own positive-displacement instruments.

The company says its products are made in several places. It names Melbourn as the global research and production centre for the core SPT Labtech range; Covina, California, as the production centre for the apricot and BioMicroLab ranges; Jena as the research and production centre for Quantifoil; and Hangzhou in China as a further production centre, with commercial hubs in Tokyo, Shanghai and Delhi.

Benches, decks and screens.

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.

From Battery Ventures to EQT.

Battery Ventures’ ownership lasted about four years. On 29 June 2022 Contract Pharma reported that the EQT IX fund, known as EQT Private Equity, had acquired SPT Labtech from Battery Ventures, with completion expected in the third quarter of 2022. The magazine described the company as headquartered in Melbourn and owned by Battery Ventures since its spin-out from TTP Group in 2018. David Newble, by then chief executive, thanked “the Battery team” for its stewardship “over the last four years” and welcomed EQT as the new owner.

The company’s website, carrying a 2026 copyright line, still describes EQT Private Equity’s 2022 acquisition as the basis for its plans for innovation, geographic expansion and new markets. Its news page in October 2026 led with a partnership with Takara Bio USA on library preparation for next-generation sequencing, in keeping with the genomics work the company describes as a focus of its miniaturisation efforts.

The identity has a clear structure. The company name is a set of initials whose original expansion the company chose not to use, while the products carry lowercase names — mosquito, dragonfly, firefly, chameleon. Where an acquired brand has its own standing, as with Quantifoil, the company keeps the name and lists it alongside its own ranges.

For a design guide, SPT Labtech shows how a small set of lowercase product names can carry an identity through a spin-out, a rename and two owners. Compare INTEGRA Biosciences, another maker of liquid-handling tools, and Gilson, the pipette maker. For this guide we use a deep green, a moss green and a warm gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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