Twist Bioscience Brand Guidelines: DNA Written on Silicon in South San Francisco

Three founders and a silicon plate.

Twist Bioscience was founded in 2013 by Emily Leproust, Bill Banyai and Bill Peck, according to English Wikipedia, which describes it as a public biotechnology company based in South San Francisco that makes synthetic DNA and DNA products for customers across many industries. A 2019 profile by the law firm Orrick, which represented the company when it went public, says Leproust established Twist in 2013 and led it as chief executive.

The idea was industrial from the start. In December 2015 IEEE Spectrum described the company as part of the young synthetic-biology industry and quoted Leproust: “I remind everyone at Twist, we are a manufacturing company. We manufacture DNA.” Building strands of DNA was routine lab work, the magazine explained, but it was usually done by hand, one tube at a time. Twist’s founders had built a machine to automate it.

At the heart of that machine, IEEE Spectrum reported, was a silicon plate pocked with 10,000 tiny wells, each about 600 nanometres wide, etched with the same photolithography techniques that computer-chip makers use. A different strand of DNA could be built in each well; Leproust told the magazine the machine did “the exact same chemistry” as a doctoral student at the bench, only in a far smaller volume. The company was not selling the machine itself but the DNA it made. It began production runs for selected customers in 2015, with a full commercial launch planned at its San Francisco headquarters for 2016. Customers at the time typically ordered strands of 300 to 1,800 bases, Leproust said.

Not everyone was persuaded. In the same article the biotech consultant Rob Carlson, managing director of the BioEconomy Capital fund, said he did not understand the business model: making and testing more DNA, he argued, was not the hard part; scaling a microbe from the test tube to commercial production was.

From oligos to a factory in Oregon.

Twist went public in 2018. Orrick’s 2019 profile describes a roadshow held in October 2018, one of the worst months for life-sciences stocks in years, and an offering that was priced within its range and then traded higher. The shares trade on Nasdaq under the symbol TWST. At the time, the profile says, Twist had a novel technology, its own software, scalable commercial infrastructure, more than 600 customers and an e-commerce platform for ordering DNA online. The profile also noted that synthetic DNA could one day become a medium for long-term data storage.

The years around the listing included a long legal dispute. In February 2020, The Motley Fool reported, Twist settled litigation brought by Agilent Technologies, the former employer of members of its management, over claims including breach of contract and misappropriation of trade secrets. The settlement contained no admission of wrongdoing, and Agilent granted Twist a licence to aspects of its oligonucleotide-synthesis technology; a trial that had been scheduled for later that month did not go ahead.

Capacity grew next. In February 2023 the regional economic-development body Greater Portland Inc. reported that Twist had shipped its first products, oligo pools and gene fragments, from its second production site, a 110,000-square-foot facility in Wilsonville, Oregon, that the company calls its “Factory of the Future.” The building was designed for assembly-line-style production, with further space available for growth, and Twist was the first company to use Wilsonville’s new property-tax rebate programme.

Collaboration has been part of the pitch too. In May 2021, English Wikipedia records, Twist and the Genome Project-Write consortium launched a computer-aided design platform for whole-genome design, meant to help researchers scale up from designing plasmids to designing megabases of DNA.

Today the company’s website groups its range under DNA synthesis — genes, gene fragments, oligo pools and variant libraries — alongside antibody discovery and characterisation services and next-generation sequencing products such as library-preparation kits and target-enrichment panels.

Instruments, flow cells and data.

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 storage spin-out and a narrower focus.

One of the more unusual uses of Twist’s DNA was data storage. In May 2025, Blocks & Files reported, Twist spun its DNA data-storage business out as a separate company, Atlas Data Storage, led by Varun Mehta, co-founder of Nimble Storage. Bill Banyai, the Twist co-founder who had run the storage effort, became Atlas’s chief technology officer, and Leproust joined its board. The idea, the magazine explained, is to translate binary data into the four DNA bases — adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine — write it into short DNA fragments and read it back later with a sequencer. Investors in the new company included ARCH Venture Partners, Deerfield Management and Bezos Expeditions. Twist assigned and licensed its storage technology to Atlas and kept a minority ownership stake, with the two companies run independently by separate management teams.

The same report summed up the core of the business in terms close to those used a decade earlier: a proprietary, semiconductor-based process for making synthetic DNA on a high-throughput silicon platform that miniaturises the chemistry. The company says its DNA is used in research from medicine to agriculture; Greater Portland Inc. described it in 2023 as a company that “writes” DNA on a silicon chip for healthcare, agriculture and research customers.

For a design guide, Twist Bioscience shows how a life-sciences brand can borrow the language of the semiconductor fab. Compare Agilent, the instrument maker whose dispute with Twist ended in a 2020 settlement, and Illumina, the San Diego sequencing company. For this guide we use deep teal, aqua and silicon grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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