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§ Public · Boston, MA, USA
A synthetic biology company engineering organisms and programmable cells, licensing them for biopharma, agriculture, and industrial biotech.
Based in Boston, Massachusetts, Ginkgo Bioworks is a synthetic biology company that engineers programmable organisms and cells for applications across the biopharma, agriculture, and industrial biotech sectors worldwide. Rather than manufacturing end products, the organization licenses its custom engineered microbes to external corporate clients and currently operates with a global workforce of 641 employees. The firm has established strategic partnerships and secured backing from notable entities including Y Combinator, Sequoia Capital, and OpenAI. Through a recent collaboration with OpenAI, the company utilized an artificial intelligence reasoning model with robotic laboratory access to outperform existing biochemistry benchmarks by 40 percent. Additionally, the enterprise offers zero upfront cost cell development programs to early stage biotechnology startups in exchange for equity stakes. Ginkgo Bioworks was founded in 2008 by Jason Kelly, Reshma Shetty, Barry Canton, Austin Che, and Tom Knight.
Ginkgo Bioworks has raised $803.1M across 8 funding rounds.
Key people at Ginkgo Bioworks.
Ginkgo Bioworks was founded in 2009 by Tom Knight (Founder) and Austin Che (Founder) and Barry Canton (Founder) and Reshma Shetty (Founder) and Jason Kelly (Founder).
Ginkgo Bioworks has raised $803.1M in total across 8 funding rounds.
Ginkgo Bioworks has raised $803.1M across 8 funding rounds. Most recently, it raised $70.0M Other Equity in May 2020.
Ginkgo Bioworks was founded in 2009 by Tom Knight (Founder) and Austin Che (Founder) and Barry Canton (Founder) and Reshma Shetty (Founder) and Jason Kelly (Founder).
Ginkgo Bioworks has raised $803.1M in total across 8 funding rounds.
Ginkgo Bioworks's investors include General Atlantic, Illumina, Viking Global Investors, T. Rowe Price Associates, 1955 Capital, Bill Gates, Cascade Investment, Michelle Detwiler, Sam Altman, Allen & Company, Senator Investment Group, Band of Angels.
Key people at Ginkgo Bioworks.
Ginkgo Bioworks is a biotechnology company focused on making biology easier to engineer by building a platform that enables customers to program cells as easily as computers. It serves diverse markets including food, fragrance, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, and diagnostics by providing customizable R&D solutions such as protein engineering, nucleic acid design, and cell-free systems. Ginkgo’s platform accelerates innovation across these sectors by automating and scaling biological research and development, helping partners solve complex biological problems efficiently. The company has demonstrated growth momentum through significant government contracts and strategic partnerships, including a recent $47 million Department of Energy contract and collaborations with Bayer[1][2][3][4].
Founded in Boston, Ginkgo Bioworks emerged from a vision to revolutionize biotechnology by applying engineering principles to biology. The company was established by a team of scientists and engineers who recognized the potential to program living cells with the same ease as software. Early traction came from pioneering automated lab technologies and securing partnerships that validated their platform’s capabilities. Over time, Ginkgo evolved from a synthetic biology startup into a platform company offering autonomous labs and scalable biological engineering solutions, deepening its focus on automation, modularity, and high-throughput workflows[2][5].
Ginkgo Bioworks rides the wave of synthetic biology and automation trends, addressing the bottleneck of manual lab work that slows biotech innovation. The timing is critical as demand grows for scalable, reproducible biological data and faster development of therapeutics, agricultural products, and sustainable materials. Market forces such as increased government funding for bioengineering, strategic industry partnerships, and advances in automation technology favor Ginkgo’s growth. By enabling programmable biology at scale, Ginkgo influences the broader ecosystem by lowering barriers to entry and accelerating the pace of biotech innovation globally[1][2][5].
Looking ahead, Ginkgo Bioworks is poised to expand its autonomous lab offerings and deepen government and industry collaborations, leveraging its modular platform to address increasingly complex biological challenges. Trends such as AI integration in biology, personalized medicine, and sustainable bio-manufacturing will shape its trajectory. As the company continues to scale and refine its platform, its influence is likely to grow, making biological engineering more accessible and efficient, thereby transforming multiple sectors reliant on biotechnology. This aligns closely with its mission to make biology easier to engineer for everyone[1][2][5].
