Ginkgo Bioworks

BioworksS1 was the world's first organism foundry capable of complete automation of organism strain engineering. The foundry can perform up to 15,000 automated lab tasks per month allowing genetic engineers at Ginkgo Bioworks to test thousands of new organism designs every month without the need to perform the majority of repetitive lab work.[12]

BioworksS2 is an upgraded version of BIOWORKS1 that is twice as big. It provides a 6X productivity improvement on the original BioworksS1 foundry through more efficient integration and miniaturization of equipment.[13]

On July 16, 2014 Ginkgo Bioworks received $120K in seed funding from Y Combinator, TSVC, CRCM ventures, 11.2 Capital, Farzad Nazem, Todd Corenson, and David Spector.[14]

On March 19, 2015 Ginkgo Bioworks received $9 million dollars in funding from iGlobe Partners, Vast Ventures, OS Fund,[15] Felicis Ventures, Data Collective, Ian McNish, and David Beyer.[16]

Ginkgo Bioworks had a pre-money valuation of $250 million and raised $45 million on July 23, 2015 during their series B funding. Investors include: Viking Global Investors, OS Fund, Felicis Ventures, and 11.2 Capital.[17]

Ginkgo Bioworks had pre-money evaluation of $350 million before receiving $100 million in its series C funding round on June 8, 2016. The funding came from a number of old and new investors including: Y Combinator, Viking Global Investors, Senator Investment Group, Baillie Gifford, and Allen & Company.[18]

On December 14, 2017 Ginkgo Bioworks completed its series D funding round. The company had a pre-money valuation of $725 million and gained an additional $275 million dollars in venture capital. The $275 million came from Viking Global Investors, Y Combinator's Continuity Fund, Cascade Investment, and Bill Gates. Ginkgo Bioworks is using the series D funding to build a BioworksS3 at its headquarters in Boston and hire additional employees.[19]

In 2019, Ginkgo Bioworks received $290 million in September and a $350 million fund in October. [5]

On June 29, 2016 Ginkgo Bioworks and Amyris entered into a collaboration agreement and announced their intention to partner to commercialize up to 70 cultured ingredients.[20] The partnership was entered into in November 2017. Ginkgo Bioworks agreed to pay up to $20 million in technology access fees to Amyris. It paid $15 million upfront in 2016, but disputes resulted in the final $5 million never being paid. The pair continue to collaborate on "limited research and development", although Amyris hasn't recorded revenue from Gingko Bioworks since the initial upfront payment in 2016.

All of the founders of Ginkgo Bioworks created an affiliate, Stegodon Corporation, to provide and assume certain debt notes to Amyris while keeping the debt off Ginkgo Bioworks' books. Amyris' failure to pay debts at certain maturity dates has resulted in Stegodon Corporation receiving some patents from the company as collateral, several of which it has paid to upkeep with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, proving that Stegodon Corporation is actively managed.[21] Ginkgo Bioworks hasn't commented publicly on the existence of Stegodon Corporation or the affiliate's purpose. On June 29, 2018, Amyris secured a $35 million loan to repay all amounts owed to Stegodon Corporation.[22]

On September 23, 2016, Ginkgo Bioworks announced a partnership with Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM) to design organisms capable of producing cultured ingredients for use in agricultural processing and food ingredient industries.[23] ADM hopes to help Ginkgo Bioworks create new organisms that reduce cost and increase the sustainability of their agricultural processing and food ingredient business. ADM plans on using Ginkgo Bioworks for solving problems faced by its customers through providing novel ingredient production and formulation processes.

On March 20, 2018, Ginkgo Bioworks announced it had finalized a previously-announced joint venture with the agriscience arm of Bayer, which will be called Joyn Bio.[24] The joint venture will focus on designing soil microbes to improve the root system microbiomes of agricultural crops, specifically providing nitrogen fixation to reduce the need for synthetic fertilizer applications. Joyn Bio is similar to the $600 million joint venture between Monsanto and Novozymes called the BioAg Alliance, which commercialized its first products in December 2016 after conducting years of field testing.[25] Monsanto is now a part of Bayer.

On September 22, 2016, Ginkgo Bioworks announced a partnership with Cargill to improve industrial fermentation processes.[26]

On September 29, 2016, Ginko Bioworks announced a partnership with Genomatica.[27] The companies will be focusing on scaling and commercializing the intermediate and speciality chemical production of organisms made by Ginkgo Bioworks. Genomatica designs and improves industrial process of bio-manufacturing by creating economic and technical solutions to problems faced within the bio-manufacturing industry. The goal of this partnership is for both companies to work together create a unified offer for the market that provides organism design and high volume manufacturing capacity.[28]

On October 19, 2016, Ginkgo Bioworks announced a partnership with Prospect Bio to create a new biosensor to improve the speed and lower the cost of organism prototyping for new strain development. The biosensor under development will make the process of organism screening (testing for a desired trait) faster. Organism screening is one of the slowest processes of the design, build, test system Ginkgo Bioworks uses for organism development. Normally, each organism created by Ginkgo Bioworks has to be screened individually. A biosensor allows for the screening of many organisms at one time. Ginkgo Bioworks is hoping for a forty-fold decrease in the cost of screening and increase the speed of creating commercial ready organisms.[29]

On December 8, 2017, Ginkgo Bioworks and Synlogic announced a collaboration to engineer microbes for probiotic and gut-microbiome-based medicines.

On January 20, 2017 Ginkgo Bioworks announced that it had acquired Gen9[30] — a company specializing in DNA synthesis. Ginkgo Bioworks previously contracted Gen9 to deliver 300 million base pairs in 2017,[31] making Ginkgo Bioworks Gen9's biggest customer prior to the acquisition. After the acquisition, only 10 Gen9 employees remained on staff with Ginkgo Bioworks.[31]