How to understand new encounters between the living and the technological? Exemplary for such new encounters are the biotechnological creations of synthetic biology, where life and technology are related in increasingly complicated and intimate ways. This developing biotechnological field frames its new entities as ‘artificial life’, ‘living technology’, and ‘biohybrid systems’. While synthetic biology too easily uses machine metaphors and technological frames for living entities, traditional philosophical frameworks also risk ontological reductionism in their efforts to understand life and technology in relation to each other. In contrast, Gilbert Simondon’s theory of individuation helps to understand the similarities between living and technical beings, without reducing life forms to machines and without conflating technological objects with vital objects. In this article, our goal is twofold: first, to understand the relationship between life and technology, and second, to understand new borderline cases resulting from synthetic biology, all with the help of the theory of individuation. Our hypothesis is that individuation helps us understand these new encounters between the living beings and technologies and to bring conceptual clarity to dominant dualisms such as life and technology, artificial and natural. We will also show that synthetic biology can shed new light on Simondon’s way of understanding the relationship between life and technology.