The story
The company was founded in 1999 as Mycometrix by Stephen Quake and Gajus Worthington. The company was formed to commercialize technology developed by Quake at the California Institute of Technology referred to as microfluidic large-scale integration and branded IFCs[1]. Richard DeLateur, a 20-year veteran of Intel, came on as chief financial officer in 2006. Worthington was the company’s chief executive officer from its inception in 1999 to 2016. Quake has remained a member of the company’s scientific advisory board.
The company’s founders created integrated circuits that carried fluids rather than electrons. In 2009, the company was described as “the world’s leading manufacturer of microfluidic devices.” The company’s original microfluidics products were aimed for use in applications such as protein crystallization, genotyping, DNA analysis and PCR.
The company completed a successful initial public offering (IPO) in February 2011, raising about $75 million. This followed a failed, ill-timed IPO in 2008. As of the 2011 IPO, Fluidigm had not yet become profitable. Following a $250 million investment from Casdin Capital, LLC and Viking Global Investors LP in April 2022, Fluidigm changed its name to Standard BioTools. This change in name emphasized their mission to create a diversified, scalable innovation-focused life science tools company serving the pharma research markets.
The company acquired Nasdaq-listed SomaLogic in January 2024 in an all-stock deal.
From Wikipedia’s article on Standard BioTools, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5