About Us
Discover Our Story: Innovation, Passion, and Commitment Redefined
FlowJo was acquired by Waters Corporation in February 2026 as part of Waters’ combination with the BD Biosciences & Diagnostic Solutions businesses. This merger creates a global leader in life science and diagnostics. We are dedicated to accelerating the benefits of pioneering science through analytical technologies, diagnostics, informatics, and services. Together, as one company, we are driven by innovation and a relentless commitment to our customers.
For more than 30 years, the team at FlowJo has helped drive major advances in life science by delivering industry leading software for flow cytometry and single cell data analysis, supporting phenotyping and immunology research. FlowJo™ Software empowers researchers with intuitive, flexible, and high performance tools that simplify the analysis of complex datasets and accelerate discovery. We are dedicated to supporting the scientific community, providing exceptional customer and technical support, building long term relationships with users, and continually innovating to meet the evolving needs of flow cytometry research.
Our Story
Modern flow cytometry originated in the late 1960s in the Herzenberg Laboratory at Stanford University, and as the utility and power of cytometers evolved into the 1990s, the need arose for a more powerful and user-friendly analysis and display program. FlowJo was conceived in the laboratory to address this need and easily analyze flow cytometry data and was primarily written by Mario Roederer and Adam Treister, based on concepts developed with David Parks, Martin Bigos, and Wayne Moore.
Our founders collaborated on the first prototypes for FlowJo – Mario worked as a post-doctoral fellow in the Herzenberg lab and drove the evolution of the multicolor flow cytometry, and Adam served as a scientific programmer for the lab in 1995, as the analysis requirements of the multi-parametric data being gathered at Stanford had outgrown the power of any commercial software application. The first version of FlowJo was born as the next generation of the DESK software which was being used for analysis; Mario and Adam licensed the technology from Stanford and in 1997, FlowJo™ Software Version 2 was released commercially as a Macintosh-only application.
The Company
For over 20 years, the team behind FlowJo™ Software has contributed to critical advances in medicine and life science through our powerful and user-friendly analysis flagship software for flow cytometry and single-cell analysis. Flow cytometry is a critical tool in advances in our understanding and diagnosis of critical diseases including cancer, HIV, and infectious diseases. Cytometry is a technique which allows the simultaneous measurement of many characteristics of individual cells at several thousand cells per second, and our work revolves around the science of single cells. FlowJo is widely accepted as the most sophisticated and powerful analysis tool in the field for the management, display, manipulation, analysis and publication of the large data stream produced by flow and mass cytometers.
The People Behind the Flow
Mario Roederer, Ph.D. was a Senior Investigator at the NIH’s Vaccine Research Center. He holds a B.S. in Chemistry from Harvey Mudd College, a Ph.D. in Cell Biology from Carnegie Mellon, and completed postdoctoral training at Stanford. He has pioneered flow cytometry immunophenotyping and data analysis techniques, leading to 30+ color analysis and sorting.
Come Work With Us!
Are you interested in joining the FlowJo team? Please see our available positions by searching the Ashland, OR location at BD.
