Incorporated on April 1, 1998, Illumina develops, manufactures, and markets integrated systems for the analysis of genetic variation and biological function.

[1] Illumina was founded in April 1998 by David Walt, Larry Bock, John Stuelpnagel, Anthony Czarnik, and Mark Chee.

In 1999, Illumina acquired Spyder Instruments[4] (founded by Michal Lebl, Richard Houghten, and Jutta Eichler) for their technology of high-throughput synthesis of oligonucleotides.

Illumina's technologies are used by a broad range of academic, government, pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and other leading institutions around the globe.

[6] Solexa was founded in June 1998 by Shankar Balasubramanian and David Klenerman to develop and commercialize genome-sequencing technology invented by the founders at the University of Cambridge.

[7] Illumina also uses the DNA colony sequencing technology, invented in 1997 by Pascal Mayer and Laurent Farinelli [8] and which was acquired by Solexa in 2004 from Manteia Predictive Medicine.

In June 2009, Illumina announced the launch of their own Personal Full Genome Sequencing Service at a depth of 30X.

[10][11] This was part of the company's strategy at the time to open its own CLIA lab and begin offering clinical genetic testing itself.

[24] In late 2015, Illumina spun off the company Grail, focused on blood testing for cancer tumors in the bloodstream.

[25] Grail is working with a blood test trial with over 120,000 women during scheduled mammogram visits in the states of Minnesota and Wisconsin, as well as a partnership with the Mayo Clinic.

[36] Against the orders of active investigations by both the US FTC and the EU European Commission, Illumina publicly announced it had completed its acquisition of Grail on August 18, 2021.

[37] The FTC urged Illumina to "unwind" the merger shortly after,[38] and in October 2021, the European Commission ordered Illumina to keep Grail a separate company[39] and adopted interim measures to prevent harm to competition, or face penalty payments up to 5% of their average daily turnover and/or fines up to 10% of their annual worldwide turnover under Articles 15 and 14 of the EU Merger Regulation respectively.

[48] Illumina said it would explore a third-party sale or a capital markets transaction if it fails to win its ongoing challenge in court.

[51] On February 4, 2025, China placed Illumina on its "Unreliable Entities List" as part of its response to U.S. President Donald Trump's second round of tariffs against it.

The company, which competes with the Chinese biotech firm BGI in gene-sequencing, said in a statement that it has had a long-standing presence in China and complied with all the laws and regulations of the countries in which it has operated.

[55][56] The technology behind these sequencing systems involves ligation of fragmented DNA to a chip, followed by primer addition and sequential fluorescent dNTP incorporation and detection.

In September 2017 both parties asked to have the settlement reviewed, with Cornell accusing both Illumina and Life Technologies of misrepresentation and fraud.

William Noon, an in-house attorney at Illumina, had filed a FOIA request for 4 of these key grants as well in January 2015.

[68] In February 2020, Illumina filed a patent infringement suit against BGI relating to its "CoolMPS" sequencing products.

[70] However, in May 2022, Illumina was ordered to pay $333 million to a U.S. unit of BGI in California for infringing two patents of DNA-sequencing systems.

[72] In March 2022, Illumina sued Helmy Eltoukhy and Amir Talasaz, the co-founders of Guardant, over stealing trade secrets.