Illumina, Inc.

Illumina, Inc. is an American biotechnology company headquartered in San Diego, California, the world's leading maker of DNA sequencing and genetic analysis instruments. It was founded in 1998 and developed sequencing-by-synthesis technology that dramatically increased the speed and lowered the cost of reading DNA compared with earlier methods, playing a central role in reducing the cost of sequencing a human genome from many millions of dollars in the early 2000s to a small fraction of that figure today. Illumina's sequencing systems are used across academic research, clinical diagnostics, agricultural genomics, and pharmaceutical drug development, and the company holds a dominant share of the global next-generation sequencing market it helped create.