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Agilent makes the tools and machines scientists use to measure, test, and analyze chemicals, medicines, and electronic parts.
Agilent Technologies is a company that sells the picks and shovels of modern science. Its customers are the people who develop new drugs, test the safety of food and water, and check that computer chips and electronic devices actually work. Agilent builds the instruments, software, and chemical supplies those labs depend on every day.
The business splits into two main pieces. One serves life sciences and the drug industry, selling machines that separate and identify the tiny molecules inside a sample, plus the reagents and software that go with them. The other serves the electronics and industrial world, making test and measurement gear that engineers use to check whether a chip, a component, or a whole device behaves as designed. There is a third, smaller piece too, providing contract manufacturing for electronics. The logic of the company is that once a lab buys an Agilent machine, it tends to keep buying Agilent's consumables, service contracts, and replacement parts for years. That recurring revenue is the quiet engine. The instruments themselves are the entry ticket; the steady drip of supplies and support is what makes the business durable. Customers stick around because switching would mean retraining staff and revalidating results, and the cost of a bad measurement is far higher than the price of the tool.
In 1939, Bill Hewlett and David Packard started a company in a one-car garage in Palo Alto. They built electronic test and measurement tools, the instruments scientists use to check how electrical things behave. That garage became known as the birthplace of Silicon Valley, and the measuring business they started is the family tree Agilent comes from.
By 1965, HP wanted to grow beyond electronics. It bought F&M Scientific, a maker of gas chromatographs — machines that separate and identify the chemicals in a sample. That purchase was Agilent's first step into life sciences, and much of the company's business today grew from it.
In 1999, HP split off its test and measurement, chemical analysis, healthcare and semiconductor businesses into a new company called Agilent. The name was meant to suggest agility and insight. The stock sale that year raised two billion dollars, the biggest Silicon Valley had ever seen at the time. So a piece of old HP was now standing on its own, with a pile of different businesses under one roof.
Agilent's new collection of businesses was a mixed bag, and soon it began trimming. In 2001 it sold its healthcare solutions unit to Philips for one and a half billion dollars. That narrowed the company, but it still had a long way to go before it knew what it wanted to be.
In 2012, Agilent bought Dako, a Danish company that makes cancer diagnostics. Dako's tools help pathologists figure out exactly what kind of cancer a patient has and which treatment might work. It was a bold move into medicine, and it pointed Agilent toward a future very different from its electronics past.
The big question was finally answered in 2014. Agilent spun off its electronic measurement business as a separate company called Keysight Technologies. What was left was sharply focused on life sciences, diagnostics and lab analysis — so focused that S&P began treating Agilent as a healthcare company. The old HP measuring heritage now lived in Keysight, while Agilent chose a new path.
Now a leaner company, Agilent went shopping. In 2015 it bought Seahorse Bioscience for a quarter of a billion dollars, entering the cell analysis market. Seahorse tools measure how cells use energy, which fit neatly with Agilent's existing lab machines. The company was building a new identity, one piece at a time.
That same year, Mike McMullen took over as CEO from Bill Sullivan, right as the Keysight spinoff began paying off for shareholders. McMullen had run Agilent's chemical analysis group and had pushed for several of the company's key acquisitions. So the person steering the ship already knew where he wanted to go.
In 2019, Agilent added BioTek Instruments to its cell analysis lineup. BioTek was combined with Seahorse to offer a fuller set of tools for studying how cells work. The pieces from earlier deals were starting to fit together into a real business.
By 2024, Agilent was pushing into making the ingredients for advanced medicines. It bought BIOVECTRA, expanding its contract manufacturing business for specialized drugs and nucleic acids. This was a bet on a growth area, and it showed how far the company had come from selling test equipment.
Also in 2024, Padraig McDonnell became President and CEO, succeeding Mike McMullen. McDonnell had been chief operating officer and was already lined up for the role. A new leader took over a company that had been reshaped almost beyond recognition since the HP days.
In 2026, Agilent announced it would buy Biocare Medical, a move that widened its pathology platform. The company expected the deal to lift revenue growth, improve profit margins, and add more non-instrument revenue in its first year. It was another step in the same long march: from measuring electrons to helping diagnose and treat disease.
Agilent was spun out of Hewlett Packard in 1999, inheriting a long tradition of measurement gear, and it later bought Varian, a major maker of scientific instruments, in 2010 to deepen its lab business. More recently it has leaned into helping drugmakers and biotech firms, where demand is tied to research spending and the pace of new medicines. The risks are real: lab budgets can freeze in a downturn, China has been a large and volatile market for its instruments, and rivals like Thermo Fisher Scientific and Waters compete hard for the same customers. Agilent also returns cash to shareholders through dividends and buybacks, and in 2024 it bought BIOVECTRA, a contract drug manufacturer, to expand its services to pharma clients.
Saved answer · last researched 1 Nov 2026