Waters Corporation, the Massachusetts maker of laboratory analytical instruments, has acquired MOBILion Systems, a Pennsylvania company that developed a high-resolution ion mobility separation technology called SLIM. Waters announced the completed deal on November 3, 2026, from its base in Milford, Massachusetts.
Financial terms were not disclosed. Waters said MOBILion's team, along with its expertise in ion mobility, comes with the acquisition. MOBILion is based in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and is led by chief executive Dr. Melissa Sherman.
Waters plans to combine SLIM with its Xevo MRT mass spectrometer, starting with proteomics research and moving over time into clinical testing.
What MOBILion built
SLIM stands for Structures for Lossless Ion Manipulation. It was developed at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Washington state, which licensed it to MOBILion for pharmaceutical and clinical research instruments, according to a 2020 PNNL release. PNNL chemists Richard Smith and Yehia Ibrahim hold more than 40 patents on the underlying ion mobility work.
The technique separates ionised molecules in a gas as they are pushed along a long, winding path by electric fields printed on circuit boards. PNNL said that design fits more than 42 feet of separation path between two boards about a foot square, letting the device tell apart compounds that look almost identical to a mass spectrometer. MOBILion showed its first SLIM-based product at the American Society for Mass Spectrometry meeting in 2020.
The company's MOBIE module couples SLIM separation to an existing quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometer. In late 2025 MOBILion presented results at the HUPO World Congress in Toronto for an operating mode it calls PAMAF, which it said raised fragment ion intensity by up to 100 times and identified three to 12 times more protein groups than conventional methods, with the largest gains at very small sample amounts.
“SLIM was built to see what other separations miss”
Why Waters is buying
Waters said the deal widens its entry into proteomics, the large-scale study of proteins, which it values as a $2 billion addressable market for liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry, growing at a high single-digit rate. The estimate is based on Waters' internal analysis.
The company argued that SLIM separation combined with the Xevo MRT, a multi-reflecting time-of-flight instrument, will allow deeper analysis of complex protein mixtures than liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry alone. It listed higher proteome coverage, sensitivity and throughput as benefits, along with a path from biomarker discovery to targeted assays on its Xevo TQ Absolute XR instrument.
Waters also tied the deal to artificial intelligence. Chief executive Dr. Udit Batra said the combined technology would produce data at the scale that AI foundation and frontier models need, and support so-called lab-in-the-loop research, in which models help decide which experiments to run next. Waters said these workflows would connect through Waters AI Link, which is based on Anthropic's Model Context Protocol. Over the longer term, it pointed to blood-based diagnostics such as multi-cancer early detection and monitoring of minimal residual disease.
Sherman said Waters was the right home for SLIM because of its history in separation science and mass spectrometry, and that pairing the two technologies could help move proteomics from leading research labs into routine testing.
The funding behind MOBILion
MOBILion raised a $60 million Series C round in July 2021, according to investment database VCBacked, which lists Agilent Technologies, IP Group, Cultivation Capital, iSelect Fund and D1 Capital Partners among its investors. The company did not publish a total for all its funding in the sources reviewed, and its founding year was not stated.
Agilent Technologies, one of Waters' main competitors in analytical instruments, appears on that investor list. Waters did not say whether any outside shareholders or partners retain rights to the technology after the sale.
Waters, listed on the New York Stock Exchange, says it employs about 15,000 people and focuses on regulated, high-volume testing for medicines, food and water safety and disease detection. No independent news coverage of the deal had appeared by the time of publication; the details here come from Waters' announcement and earlier material published by MOBILion and PNNL.
