Abstergo Industries operates the Animus program in the original Assassin's Creed game.
Abstergo is a modern multinational corporation secretly controlled by the Templars. Its public business activities conceal a long-term effort to locate powerful Pieces of Eden by studying genetic memories.
The Animus allows a subject to relive ancestral memories encoded in DNA. In the first game, Desmond Miles is forced to use the device while Abstergo searches his memories for information connected to Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad.
Abstergo is sometimes confused with the historical Templar Order, but the two are not the same organization. The company is the Templars' modern institutional successor and becomes one of the series' recurring antagonistic forces.