Azenta, the Massachusetts life sciences company that owns the GENEWIZ gene synthesis brand, has acquired SynPlexity Inc., a Eugene, Oregon startup spun out of the University of Oregon's Knight Campus. Azenta announced the purchase on October 30, 2026, in a press release that also described a separate licensing deal with DNA manufacturer Elegen Corp.
According to a Form 8-K that Azenta filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the company signed a stock purchase agreement with SynPlexity and its stockholders on October 28, 2026, buying all of SynPlexity's outstanding shares. The deal closed at the same time it was signed. Azenta did not disclose the price; the filing's forward-looking statements refer to possible contingent payments but give no figures.
Azenta said SynPlexity's technology will become part of its GENEWIZ offering. It did not say how many SynPlexity staff will join or whether the startup's own services will continue under its name, and said more detail would come on its fourth-quarter fiscal 2026 earnings call.
What SynPlexity built
SynPlexity was formed to commercialise DropSynth, a method for making many synthetic genes at once that co-founder Calin Plesa helped develop as a postdoctoral researcher at UCLA. The technique was first reported in 2018. Instead of building each gene in its own tube, DropSynth assembles large pools of genes in parallel inside tiny droplets, which act as separate reaction chambers.
In August 2020 the University of Oregon reported that a series of changes, published in the journal Nucleic Acids Research, had lifted the number of genes made in a single reaction from 384 to 1,536 and raised the share of correct sequences from just under 4% to more than 20%. The university said the changes cut costs by 43%. In a February 2025 announcement, the Knight Campus said Plesa's group could make more than 1,500 synthetic genes per reaction at under $2 each.
Azenta describes the product it is buying as pooled gene assembly that delivers thousands of full-length gene variants in one library. It said this is aimed at researchers who need to screen large numbers of candidate sequences, including designs produced by AI models. SynPlexity's chief executive told the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network in early 2025 that the company sees itself as a link between biology and machine learning, supplying DNA at the scale and price needed to generate training data.
“These strategic investments strengthen the competitive position of GENEWIZ by expanding the products and capabilities we can bring to customers and are key to accelerating our growth.”
The founders and the funding
SynPlexity was co-founded by Plesa, a bioengineering professor at the Knight Campus, and Craig Stolarczyk, its chief executive, who had worked as a senior staff scientist in Plesa's lab. Investor SOSV also lists Samuel Hinton as a co-founder and vice president of operations. The company has worked out of the Papé Family Innovation Center on the Knight Campus.
A Knight Campus article on a $75,000 commercialisation grant that Plesa received from the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust said SynPlexity had raised pre-seed venture funding from the Portland Seed Fund and other investors, without giving amounts. SOSV lists the company as a seed-stage member of its IndieBio SF 16 accelerator cohort, and Silicon Florist reported that it was a portfolio company of Launch Oregon. No round sizes have been made public.
Plesa's lab has also drawn research funding to scale the method. In February 2025 the Knight Campus said a Chan Zuckerberg Initiative grant would support work with researchers at the University of Washington and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center to raise DropSynth's capacity more than sixfold.
The Elegen licence
The SynPlexity purchase came alongside a larger agreement with Elegen, a developer of cell-free DNA manufacturing. Under deals signed on October 28, Azenta received an exclusive, royalty-free licence to Elegen's gene synthesis and cell-free cloning technology for certain products, for an initial five years, and Elegen will supply consumables and services.
Between 12 and 18 months after signing, Azenta can pay $25 million, plus any unpaid licence fees, to make the licence perpetual. Azenta told investors it expects to spend between about $32 million and about $71 million in total on the arrangement, depending on equipment purchases and whether it exercises that option. Azenta said Elegen's platform is meant to improve DNA quality and turnaround and could be installed closer to customers to add regional capacity.
Why Azenta is buying
GENEWIZ, founded in New Jersey in 1999, is the gene synthesis brand of Azenta's multiomics business. Trey Martin, the president of that unit, said the two deals widen what GENEWIZ can sell and are central to its growth plans, and that pairing them with Azenta's global footprint and antibody discovery services would help customers develop biologic drugs faster.
The two deals cover different needs. Elegen's technology is pitched at producing individual, sequence-verified DNA constructs quickly, while SynPlexity's method targets large pooled libraries used in screening experiments, where researchers test many variants of a protein at once.
