Nion Co. was founded in 1997 in Washington State, USA, by Ondrej Krivanek[2] and Niklas Dellby, with a mission to design and build advanced instruments for electron microscopy.

Prior to founding Nion, Krivanek and Dellby built a working proof-of-principle aberration corrector for a STEM, in Cambridge UK.

Following this success, Philip Batson of IBM TJ Watson Research Center asked them to build an aberration corrector for his STEM.

Krivanek was a research professor at University of Washington at the time, and he and Dellby decided to start Nion Co. and build a redesigned corrector.

[4] Nion developed such an instrument as its next project: a 100 kV aberration corrected, high-stability electron microscope called UltraSTEM,[5] with resolution capability well below one Angstrom.