Ultima Genomics Brand Guidelines: Gilad Almogy’s Spinning Silicon-Wafer Sequencer

A semiconductor engineer’s sequencing company.

Ultima Genomics was founded in 2016 by Gilad Almogy and is based in Fremont, California, on the east side of San Francisco Bay, according to English Wikipedia. Almogy came to sequencing from outside the life-science instrument trade. Wikipedia says he studied mathematics and physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and earned a doctorate in applied physics at the California Institute of Technology, and, citing the San Francisco Business Times in 2022, that he worked at Applied Materials, the semiconductor-equipment company, from 1997 to 2009, rising from general manager of a wafer-inspection division to senior vice president.

After Applied Materials he founded the solar company Cogenra with Vinod Khosla and Samir Kaul, Wikipedia says, citing the Mercury News and The New York Times; Cogenra was acquired by SunPower in August 2015. A year later he started Ultima. The thread through these companies is manufacturing at scale: Wikipedia, citing an interview, says he learned about scaling complex technologies in the semiconductor industry.

Ultima spent its first years in stealth. It came into public view at the end of May 2022, when it announced a large venture round together with the first details of its technology. TechCrunch covered the announcement on 31 May 2022, and English Wikipedia, citing that report, lists investors including General Atlantic, Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures and Founders Fund. Alongside the funding news Ultima released sequencing data gathered with early-access partners: TechCrunch named the Broad Institute, the Whitehead Institute and Baylor College of Medicine, and Wikipedia adds the Stanford University School of Medicine and the New York Genome Center. Almogy told TechCrunch that broader commercial deployment was expected in 2023.

A spinning silicon wafer.

The first platform is the UG 100, and its central idea comes from chipmaking. TechCrunch explained in 2022 that instead of pushing reagents down fluidic channels that must be flushed between steps, Ultima etches a dense array of what it calls “electrostatic landing pads” onto a 200mm silicon wafer, a standard material that can be mass-manufactured. Reagent is deposited at the centre and the wafer spins to spread it across the surface, and the sequence is read while the wafer turns, in a continuous process the company compared to reading a compact disc. A deep neural network then helps turn the optical signal into usable sequence data, the report said, and Almogy was the first author of the scientific paper describing the method.

The chemistry is also unusual. English Wikipedia, citing the University of Minnesota’s genomics centre, says the UG 100 introduces one nucleotide species per cycle, which Ultima calls a “flow,” and that two fixed-position cameras capture data as the disk turns. Wikipedia dates the platform’s commercial launch to 2024, when Ultima announced the UG 100 in a February press release.

The range has since grown around the wafer. Ultima’s website now lists the UG200 Series, in a single-wafer UG200 and a dual-wafer UG200 Ultra, alongside the UG 100, a newer chemistry called Solaris 2.0 and a library method called ppmSeq. TechCrunch had noted in 2022 that the main room for improvement in the design lay in the size and density of the wafer and its surface, which would raise throughput. The company describes the UG200 as offering “twice the output” in “half the footprint,” and says it replaces emulsion PCR with an isothermal amplification step designed to fit existing lab automation; those are its own descriptions. Its listed focus areas run from whole-genome sequencing and methylation profiling to single-cell sequencing, RNA sequencing and proteomics.

That breadth matches what Almogy described at launch. He told TechCrunch in 2022 that partners were interested in genomes, and also in RNA expression and proteomics “at a population scale,” and he pointed to single-cell work as another field held back by the cost of sequencing.

Sequencing as a design category.

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.

Private, Bay Area and built for scale.

Ultima Genomics is a private company. English Wikipedia lists its headquarters in Fremont, names Almogy as chief executive and puts its staff at about 350. The company’s website states a mission “to continuously drive the scale of omics information,” and its homepage speaks the language of production: wafers, outputs and the number of automated runs a lab can complete in a week. It offers the newer system in two configurations, one with a single wafer and one with two, and its website lists certified service providers that run Ultima sequencing for other laboratories.

The name and product codes are short and technical. The UG prefix runs from the UG 100 to the UG200 Series, and chemistry and methods carry their own names, such as Solaris and ppmSeq. Its founder’s background is in semiconductor equipment, and the silicon wafer sits at the centre of the way TechCrunch and the company itself describe the platform.

For a design guide, Ultima Genomics shows how a borrowed industrial object, the silicon wafer, can become the centre of a scientific brand. Compare Illumina, the established short-read name, and Element Biosciences, another challenger that left stealth in 2022. For this guide we use graphite, a wafer grey and a copper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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