Tecan Brand Guidelines: Four Engineers, Hombrechtikon 1980 & Lab Automation

Four engineers and a renovated farmhouse.

Tecan was founded on 18 March 1980 by four engineers — Heinz Abplanalp, Heini Maurer, Heinz Möckli and Gallus Blater — in the village of Hombrechtikon, in the canton of Zurich, according to English Wikipedia. The name is an abbreviation of the German “Technische Analysegeräte,” technical analysis equipment. The company says its first offices were in a renovated farmhouse, the family home of Abplanalp, its first chief executive, and that early production took place in renovated barns, houses and warehouses scattered around the village.

At first the focus was on development, the company says, but it soon began making instruments of its own, and OEM products for other firms, for laboratory automation and environmental analysis. In 1982 it opened Tecan US in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with a production unit for the American market. In 1985 came the Tecan Sampler 500 series, which the company describes as the first process-controlled, fully automated pipetting workstations; the range that year also included pH electrodes. In 1986 Tecan was named Swiss Company of the Year and received the Branco Weiss prize for innovative companies, English Wikipedia says, and it opened an office in Singapore.

Growth came quickly and then went into reverse. Tecan floated on the Zurich stock exchange in 1987 and used the money to buy ten companies, among them the American OEM maker Cavro Scientific Instruments; in 1988 it bought SLT Laborinstrumente of Grödig, near Salzburg, now Tecan Austria. By the middle of 1989 the group was in financial difficulty and trading in its shares was temporarily suspended, English Wikipedia says. Under chief executive Hans Widmer it sold most of its subsidiaries in 1990, keeping the liquid-handling robotics sites in Switzerland, the United States and Austria, and returned to profit; by 1991 all four founders had left.

Investors, a listing and a lakeside headquarters.

Ownership changed several times in the 1990s. In 1993 the industrial investor Gottlieb Knoch took a majority of the shares and became chairman and chief executive, English Wikipedia says. In December 1997 the American company Perkin-Elmer bought Knoch’s holding and with it the majority of voting shares; in 1999 it sold those shares on the open market, and Tecan, restructured, was listed for a second time, on the main segment of what was then the SWX Swiss Exchange. The company says that placement left it fully publicly owned. Tecan Group shares trade on the SIX Swiss Exchange today.

In 2001 Tecan moved its headquarters to Männedorf, on Lake Zurich. Its product names trace the growth of laboratory automation: the Genesis workstations from 1995, the Freedom EVO platform from 2003, the Infinite microplate readers from 2004 and the Fluent automation workstations from 2015, according to the company and English Wikipedia. In 2006 Tecan Austria received two innovation awards in the state of Salzburg, one of them citing its Infinite readers, English Wikipedia says. The Cavro name lives on in OEM components such as the Cavro Omni Robot of 2013, a liquid-handling module that the company says is designed to be built into other makers’ instruments.

Acquisitions widened the business from robots into reagents and manufacturing services. English Wikipedia lists purchases including the immunoassay company IBL International in 2014, SPEware, a maker of sample-preparation products, in 2016, and NuGEN Technologies, which offers sequencing kits, in 2018. In 2021 Tecan bought Paramit, an American developer and manufacturer of medical devices and life-science instruments, which the company calls the largest acquisition in its history.

Benchtops, sample trays and trade fairs.

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.

Life sciences, diagnostics and partners’ instruments.

Tecan organises its business around life sciences, diagnostics and what it calls partnering, and much of its work is as an original equipment manufacturer: English Wikipedia says it develops and manufactures instruments, components and medical devices that partner companies then distribute. The company names a collaboration with HP that began in 2011 and in May 2025 produced Duo, a dispensing system built on HP’s inkjet technology. In January 2025 it launched Veya, a liquid-handling workstation for multi-omics work.

Production is spread across several countries. English Wikipedia says Tecan has production and research sites in North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region and a sales and service network in 52 countries. English Wikipedia describes the Grödig business, near Salzburg, as today’s Tecan Austria, and the company says a diagnostic system covered by a manufacturing contract announced in May 2025 will be built at its American site in Morgan Hill, California, part of the Paramit business.

Leadership changed in 2025. In July Tecan announced that Achim von Leoprechting, chief executive since 2019, would step down after almost twelve years with the company, cash.ch reported from the AWP news agency; Monica Manotas, a board member since April 2024 who had spent twenty years in leadership roles at Thermo Fisher Scientific, took over on 1 August 2025.

For a design guide, Tecan shows how a company whose products often carry other makers’ names can still build a clear identity of its own. Compare PerkinElmer, its majority shareholder in the late 1990s, and Thermo Fisher. For this guide we use a lake blue, white and a soft green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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