OligoDirect is an American brand selling synthetic oligonucleotides — primers, hydrolysis probes, miRNA reagents, siRNA and CRISPR guide RNA — to research laboratories, priced and invoiced in USD, with the price for any configuration shown live as you build the order. The company you buy from is our Hong Kong entity, and Hong Kong is where your order is picked, packed and shipped.
We are concentrating on Asia-Pacific first, and that is a decision about where we can be good rather than where we are willing to sell. From Hong Kong, most of the region is a short-haul flight and a free port away, so we can say something specific about how an order to Seoul, Tokyo, Singapore or Sydney behaves. We ship elsewhere too — it goes by international courier from the point of manufacture — but we are not going to pretend the service is identical when we have not yet run enough parcels to know that it is.
We are not a synthesis plant and we do not pretend to be one. The chemistry is contract-manufactured by facilities that have been running oligonucleotide synthesis at scale for years. Where each lot was made is stated on the commercial invoice that travels with it, because that is what your customs authority needs to be right — being an American brand does not change where a given lot was manufactured, and we are not going to imply that it does. What is ours is the choice of facility for each product class, the specification a lot is released against, the incoming check, the stock of the sequence-fixed items, the price on the page, and the relationship with you.
The chemistry here is not exotic and we are not going to dress it up. Phosphoramidite synthesis is phosphoramidite synthesis. What is unusual is the commercial arrangement. This product class is made well and cheaply, and then sold internationally through a quotation process slow enough that people budget a week for finding out a price. We skipped that part.
Vision
What we are trying to do
Writing DNA should be as easy as reading it.
Reading a genome took twenty years and a billion dollars. Now it takes a day. Writing one still takes a purchase order.
Ten years from now, synthesis should sit on the bench next to the thermocycler. Low cost is the means. The bench is the point.
Synthetic oligonucleotides are the first gate in almost every molecular experiment, and one of the most awkward things to buy. Prices are often unpublished. Getting a number for a single probe can mean emailing a salesperson and waiting two days. To a well-funded laboratory with a framework agreement that is an annoyance. To a new group, a laboratory in a country the sales map skips, or a student spending the last of a grant, it decides whether the experiment happens at all.
Meanwhile the interesting money in this industry has moved to what is new and fundable: ultra-long constructs, designed genomes, headline partnerships. The ordinary middle of the supply chain — the reliable, cheap, everyday production tools that most bench work actually runs on — has been left where it was. That is the part we chose.
We started with oligonucleotides because they are the most standardised and the most repeatedly reordered thing on the bench: the same molecule, made the same way, ordered again next month. If buying one can be made ordinary — a price shown as you configure it, a configurator, a tracked parcel, no conversation required — then the same can be done for the next reagent, and the one after it. That is the ambition. It is an ambition, not a track record; we opened for business in 2026.
What the price is for
You see the price for any order as you configure it, and we charge everyone the same. That is a statement about transparency rather than about being cheap, and we are not going to build an argument out of what somebody else charges.
What we will say is this. The goal is a synthesis capability within reach of every laboratory, and what stands between that goal and most of the laboratories in the world is not the price — it is the opacity around it. The quotation you have to ask for. The specification written in a unit that does not tell you what arrives. The date nobody will commit to. Cost is what that structure leaves behind, so we treat it as an engineering problem: where it is made, how little sits between your sequence and the synthesiser, and how much of the price is paying for people who never touch the molecule. Low cost is the means. The bench is the point.
Why it costs less
Two reasons. Neither of them is a shortcut on the product.
Where it is made. The synthesis capacity we buy from is large, mature and competitively priced, and the reagents are the same reagents used everywhere else.
What is not in the price. No field sales force, no territory manager, no quotation cycle, no account executive who needs to visit you. The catalogue is on the website and the order goes straight to synthesis.
Where this does not hold: a large university with a negotiated framework agreement is often already buying unmodified primers at a genuinely competitive rate, and an in-house core facility can beat anyone on turnaround for a plain primer. The pricing page says so. Our advantage concentrates in probes, modified oligos and the fixed-sequence catalogue, because framework discounts in this industry go deep on base synthesis and stay shallow on dyes, quenchers and purification.
Four things we are not going to claim
A supplier with no track record has nothing to show, and dressing that up would be the wrong way to start.
- No customer testimonials. We do not have customers yet, and inventing three grateful postdocs is the oldest trick on a new supplier website. When there are real ones they will be named and they will have agreed to it.
- No publication citation wall. Same reason. Every order carries a citable product ID from the first day, and the list will be built out of real papers or it will stay empty.
- No quality certification in our own name. Our manufacturing partners hold ISO 9001, and ISO 13485 on the relevant lines. Those certificates are theirs. Putting their logos in our footer would be a lie of exactly the kind that is easy to get away with, so we are not doing it.
- No competitor price comparison. Published list prices and the prices large institutions actually pay are different numbers, sometimes by a factor of two. A comparison against list would make us look better than we are, and anyone with a framework agreement would spot it immediately.