DNA News & Events

Ginkgo Bioworks expects total cash burn of ($150M)-($125M) in 2026

Ginkgo announced it has reached an agreement to sell the company's biosecurity business to a consortium of investors in exchange for a minority equity position in the business alongside the Investors. Upon completion, the biosecurity business will operate as a standalone private entity focused on building a scaled, biosecurity infrastructure platform for the United States and its global partners. The transaction provides the biosecurity business with greater flexibility and additional resources to pursue near- and long-term growth opportunities. Per Ginkgo CEO Jason Kelly, "There is rising interest in defense tech in private capital markets and spinning off our biosecurity business into a private entity with new investors allows it to grow faster with more investment than it would inside Ginkgo. This serves Ginkgo in two ways: we are able to participate in the upside of the new entity as a shareholder but importantly we also focus Ginkgo's cash investment on our autonomous labs business." Ginkgo expects to complete the transaction in the first half of 2026, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions.

Reports Q4 GAAP net loss of ($81M) compared to ($108M) in the comparable prior year period . "This year, we are going to focus on investing to win in the category of autonomous labs," said Jason Kelly, co-founder and CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks. "There is an emerging wave of interest in robotics and AI, and our work with the Department of Energy and OpenAI this year shows that Ginkgo is in the best position to bring robotics to an extraordinarily high value area: laboratory research."

Ginkgo Bioworks and Invaio Sciences, an agricultural biotechnology company leading in nature-positive crop protection solutions, announced a collaboration to develop strains that can efficiently manufacture peptide-based crop protection inputs. Growers are seeking inputs that protect agricultural crops from pests that are increasingly resistant to conventional chemistry. In response, Invaio's platform discovers and develops peptide-based crop protection solutions that complement or offer potent alternatives to conventional chemistry while meeting growers' standards for efficacy, affordability, and ease of use. As a part of the commercialization of its peptide-based products, Invaio will leverage Ginkgo's platform and best-in-class microbial strains for protein production. Ginkgo's strains have been engineered to provide advanced starting points for protein and peptide-based products through industrial-scale fermentation. In this collaboration, Ginkgo will further optimize its strains and fermentation processes to deliver on Invaio's production goals.