37°28′43″N 122°09′03″W / 37.4787°N 122.1507°W / 37.4787; -122.1507 (headquarters) Pacific Biosciences of California, Inc. (aka PacBio) is an American biotechnology company founded in 2004 that develops and manufactures systems for gene sequencing and some novel real time biological observation.

[2] Three graduate students in the lab of Professors Watt W. Webb — Jonas Korlach — and Harold Craighead — Steve Turner and Mathieu Foquet — became the first employees.

[11] Henry was a former executive VP and chief commercial officer of Illumina before joining the board at PacBio in July 2018.

[21] To use either instrument, customers must also purchase reagent packs for DNA preparation and sequencing and small consumables called "SMRT Cells."

Cells for early forms of the sequencer are slightly less than one-centimeter square and contains tens of thousands of zero-mode waveguides,[4] whereas newer systems have a higher density of cells and contain 25 million zero-mode waveguides (ZMWGs), allowing for faster DNA sequencing.

In 2013, the company released new bioinformatics tools for automated genome assembly (HGAP) and finishing (Quiver).