Organomation is best known for its own line of nitrogen generators built for sample preparation, and the company also represents other specialized gas generation brands — including VICI and, now, Claind — to round out what it can offer North American labs. Claind brings decades of expertise in nitrogen and hydrogen generation for analytical instrumentation, and its story starts in an unexpected place: a pharmaceutical automation company on the shores of Lake Como, Italy. Organomation sat down with Claind CEO Giovanni Cogotzi to introduce the brand to North American laboratories for the first time — and the conversation revealed a lot more than product specs.
Claind wasn't founded to build gas generators. The company launched in 1979 focused on automating pharmaceutical laboratory testing processes — helping labs run controls more efficiently, reliably, and with less manual intervention. Gas generation wasn't even on the roadmap.
"Our core expertise were mainly electronic process automation... we were not about gas generators," Cogotzi explains, describing how the company's early years were spent building custom automation solutions in close collaboration with laboratory customers rather than selling standardized products.
That collaborative, process-first approach turned out to be the company's most valuable asset. Roughly a decade after its founding, the automation expertise Claind had built became the technical foundation for its Claind nitrogen generator line — which today makes up its entire product portfolio. In Cogotzi's words, that engineering background "became our DNA," setting up capabilities the company would lean on for the next four decades.
Key takeaway: Claind's gas generators aren't built by a company that started with gas separation chemistry — they're built by a company whose core competency is precision process control, applied to gas generation.
Claind's headquarters and manufacturing remain on Lake Como, close to Milan — a proximity Cogotzi says shapes more than just where the boxes get built. "Italian engineering means combining technical performance with great attention to product design," he notes, pointing to Milan's design heritage in fashion, architecture, and industrial product design, along with the influence of Politecnico di Milano, an internationally recognized center of engineering and design excellence.
For many instrument buyers, aesthetics might seem like an afterthought next to purity specs and flow rates. Cogotzi disagrees: "Well-designed products communicate care, quality, and reliability, and inspire confidence." It's a deliberate strategic choice, not a decorative one — and it's part of what differentiates Claind's presence on a lab bench from purely utilitarian competitor hardware.
Cogotzi has led Claind as President and CEO since 2014, and he's watched the entire category mature around him. Back then, gas generators were still unfamiliar to most labs, and Claind was among the market's earliest pioneers — alongside a small handful of companies including Parker and, later, Peak Scientific.
"We were asking laboratories to change established habits and replace traditional gas cylinders with on-site gas generation systems," Cogotzi recalls. "It was almost impossible... selling really required a big ability of persuasion."
That's no longer the sales challenge. Today, on-site gas generators are standard laboratory instrumentation, and customers already understand the technology's benefits. The competitive battleground has shifted:
- Then (2014): Convincing labs that on-site generation was viable at all
- Now: Competing on reliability, service quality, and total value delivered
- Claind's response: Moving from selling standalone products to delivering complete solutions, with what Cogotzi calls "genuine commitment to improving the quality, efficiency, and continuity" of customer processes
PSA (Pressure Swing Adsorption) is a gas separation technology that uses a material such as a carbon molecular sieve to selectively trap certain gas molecules under pressure — allowing a purified target gas, like nitrogen, to pass through while contaminants such as oxygen are adsorbed and later released when pressure drops.
Cogotzi is candid that Claind didn't invent this technology. "PSA has not been invented by Claind. We use PSA — it's a separation technology that's commonly used," he says. The differentiation, he explains, lies elsewhere: "Our differentiation lies in how we design and control the complete process... we are more expert on the process. That's where we put our know-how."
That process expertise shows up in Claind's patented Fast Purity system, part of its broader PSA nitrogen generator technology, which brings a generator up to required nitrogen purity within just a few minutes, while reducing compressed air and electricity consumption and mechanical stress on the system.
The most important benefit, according to Cogotzi, isn't a purity number — it's simplicity. "The person installing or using the generator should not need to understand or manage the complexity of the separation process," he says. The system automatically adapts to the requirements of the analytical instrument or industrial process. In practice, that translates to:
- Stable purity and stable flow
- Shorter startup times
- Fewer operational concerns day to day
Beyond the bench, Cogotzi makes a straightforward environmental argument for on-site nitrogen generation compared to gas cylinders: it eliminates truck transport. "Cylinders and liquid nitrogen supply requires gas to be produced centrally and transported to customers using trucks and other logistics infrastructures. An on-site gas generator produces hydrogen [or] nitrogen exactly at the point of use where it's needed."
There's a second, less obvious advantage over liquid nitrogen storage specifically: boil-off loss. "With cryogenic storage, part of the liquid nitrogen is lost through the boil-off to maintain the required low temperature inside the tank. So more nitrogen has to be delivered than the one that is used."
For labs building out sustainable lab gas generation reporting, Cogotzi frames the case in three concrete categories:
Avoided deliveries — fewer truck shipments and associated logistics emissions
Reduced logistics emissions tied to centralized gas production and transport
Elimination of cryogenic losses inherent to liquid nitrogen storage
The cost logic follows the same pattern. Cylinders and liquid storage carry transport, rental, handling, administration, and storage costs, plus potential losses. A generator replaces all of that with "predictable electricity and maintenance costs."
Cogotzi also teased a forward-looking angle: Claind's work on circular economy principles as a further sustainability argument for gas generators — a topic he flagged explicitly for a future conversation.
Claind's story is ultimately about what happens when an automation-first mindset gets applied to a category most competitors approach as a chemistry problem. For labs evaluating a shift from cylinders to on-site generation, that translates into systems designed to be dependable and low-maintenance in daily use, not just compliant on a spec sheet.
As Claind's authorized representative in the United States, Organomation can walk North American labs through what a Claind nitrogen generator or hydrogen generator would look like in their specific workflow — including the sustainability and cost calculations outlined above. Labs unsure where to start can also use Organomation's nitrogen generator product finder to match a generator to their evaporator setup.
This is the first in a series based on Organomation's recent conversations with Claind leadership. Next up: Claind Chief Commercial Officer Nazzareno Irrera on why labs are making the switch from helium to hydrogen — and what's really holding others back.
Q: What is PSA nitrogen generator technology?
A: PSA, or Pressure Swing Adsorption, is a gas separation technology that uses a material like a carbon molecular sieve to selectively trap gas molecules under pressure, allowing a purified gas such as nitrogen to pass through while contaminants like oxygen are adsorbed and released when pressure drops.
Q: Is on-site nitrogen generation more sustainable than gas cylinders?
A: Yes. On-site generators eliminate the truck transport required to deliver cylinders or liquid nitrogen, and they avoid the boil-off losses inherent to cryogenic liquid nitrogen storage, replacing logistics and storage costs with predictable electricity and maintenance costs.
Q: When was Claind founded, and what did the company originally do?
A: Claind was founded in 1979 near Lake Como, Italy, originally as a pharmaceutical laboratory automation company, before shifting to gas generator manufacturing roughly a decade later.
Q: Did Claind invent PSA technology?
A: No. Claind uses PSA, a widely adopted separation technology, but differentiates through proprietary process control systems like its patented Fast Purity technology, which speeds up purity attainment and reduces energy and mechanical stress on the generator.