Ginkgo Bioworks Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
August 5, 2026

Key Takeaways

  • Negative Sentiment: Revenue fell sharply: Q2 2026 revenue declined 48% year over year to $20 million, while adjusted EBITDA worsened to negative $36 million from negative $25 million.
  • Negative Sentiment: Q2 cash burn increased to $45 million from $38 million a year earlier, and excess leased-space costs rose to $14 million; the company nevertheless reaffirmed full-year 2026 cash-burn guidance of $125 million to $150 million.
  • Positive Sentiment: Ginkgo reported progress scaling Nebula, its Boston autonomous lab, to 105 racks and said it is operating 24/7 with roughly 30 unique protocols per day, potentially improving service economics and demonstrating the platform to prospective customers.
  • Positive Sentiment: The company announced autonomous-lab awards involving MIT, Caltech, the University of Maryland, and Northwestern, expanding its reach into academic research and potentially supporting future lab-equipment, software, and support revenue.
  • Positive Sentiment: Ginkgo said its ADME-One service attracted approximately 16 customers in its first six weeks and offers a drug-screening panel for $199, substantially below quoted Western and Chinese CRO pricing, although the company still needs to establish repeat demand and scale.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
Ginkgo Bioworks Q2 2026
00:00 / 00:00

There are 3 speakers on the call.

Operator

I'm Daniel Marshall, Senior Manager of Communications and Ownership. I'm joined by Jason Kelly, our Co-founder and CEO, and Steven Coen, our CFO. Thanks as always for joining us. We're looking forward to updating you on our progress. As a reminder, during the presentation today, we will be making forward-looking statements which involve risks and uncertainties. Please refer to our filings with the SEC to learn more about these risks and uncertainties, including our most recent 10-K. Today, in addition to updating you on the quarter results, we're going to make the argument that autonomous labs are an imperative for American science. We're also going to provide insight into how we are going to scale the capabilities of Nebula, our autonomous lab in Boston, and share an update on how we are getting autonomous labs like Nebula into the hands of the next generation of scientists.

Operator

As usual, we'll end with a Q&A session. I'll take questions from analysts, investors, and the public. You can submit those questions to us in advance via X, #ginkgoresults or email investors@ginkgobioworks.com. All right. Over to you, Jason.

Speaker 1

Thanks, Daniel. We always start with our mission here, which is to make biology easier to engineer at Ginkgo. In 2026, our goals remain the same. We want to focus and invest to win in this new category of autonomous labs. We want to focus Ginkgo's efforts really on the technology side, largely into autonomous labs. We're going to invest to extend our lead there. Second, we want to demonstrate the capabilities of an autonomous lab by using our big system here in Boston, Nebula, which I'll talk about today, that we, in the last quarter, expanded that substantially, so that we can sort of move the majority of our work onto that system over the course of the year and into the future.

Speaker 1

That's a great chance to both improve the economics of our services and also demonstrate to other potential buyers of autonomous labs just what you can do with a system like this. So I want to talk a bit about that today as well. Finally, want to book new sales of autonomous labs in biopharma, national labs, and as I'll mention today, research universities, which we're very excited about. We have made a lot of headway, as you know, and we've been talking about for a couple of years now on improving our cash burn. You can see that in the second half of this year, we intend to improve on that burn even further than we did in the first half of the year. That is really work we've been doing in the first half of the year, sort of paying off and bearing fruit.

Speaker 1

Really excited. This gives us this plus our $302 million in cash and cash equivalents, as well as we have an additional $87 million that we've set aside for restricted cash for various customers and certain operating activities. Puts us in a really nice spot going into the second half of this year and the future to really have the capital we need to continue this growth into autonomous labs. With that, I'm going to pass it over to Steve in order to dig into the financials. You'll hear from me again in the strategic session. Thank you.

Speaker 2

Thanks, Jason. Before I walk through our financials, I want to remind everyone that following the previously announced transaction that closed on April 3rd, the divestiture of Biosecurity is classified as discontinued operations within our financial statements. Accordingly, we have and will retrospectively recast all prior periods presented to conform to this presentation. The former Biosecurity results are now reported as loss from discontinued operations below loss from continuing operations. All of our financial commentary I will provide today relates exclusively to continuing operations where we now operate as a single segment. With that, I'll now discuss our Q2 results. Revenue was $20 million in the second quarter of 2026, down 48% compared to the second quarter of 2025. For the first six months of 2026, revenue was $40 million, down 49% compared to the same period last year.

Speaker 2

As previously disclosed, revenue in the first six months of 2025 included $7.5 million in non-cash revenue relating to the mutual termination of the BioMerit agreement. Excluding this, revenue for the first six months of 2026 was down approximately 42% from the prior year period. It is important to note that our net loss includes a number of non-cash and other non-recurring items, as detailed more fully in our financial statements. Because of these non-cash and other non-recurring items, we believe adjusted EBITDA is a more indicative measure of our profitability. A full reconciliation between adjusted EBITDA and GAAP net loss from continuing operations can be found in the appendix. In the second quarter of 2026, R&D expense decreased 4% from $31 million in the second quarter of 2025 to $30 million in the second quarter of 2026.

Speaker 2

G&A expense decreased 26% from $16 million in the second quarter of 2025 to $12 million in the second quarter of 2026. These decreases were primarily driven by our restructuring efforts, which was substantially concluded at the end of 2025. Net loss from continuing operations was $57 million in the second quarter of 2026, compared to a loss of $53 million in the prior year period. Moving further down the page, you'll note that adjusted EBITDA in the second quarter of 2026 was negative $36 million, compared to negative $25 million in the second quarter of 2025.

Speaker 2

It is important to note that adjusted EBITDA includes the carrying cost of excess lease space, which you can see was $14 million in the second quarter of 2026, up from $12 million in the prior year period. This cost represents the base rent and other charges relating to leased space which we are not occupying, net of sublease income. This is a cash operating cost that is not related to driving revenue right now and can be potentially mitigated through subleasing. Finally, cash burn in the second quarter of 2026 was $45 million, compared to $38 million in the second quarter of 2025. For the first six months of 2026, cash burn was $93 million, down from $96 million in the same period last year. A 3% decrease.

Speaker 2

As previously reported, we paid Google Cloud $14 million in the first quarter of this year relating to the 2025 amended commitment, which increased our cash burn for the period. Resetting the commitment reduced our future minimum commitments by more than $100 million compared with the original terms and extended the commitment term from three to six years. Excluding this payment, cash burn reflects a significant decrease in the first half of 2026 compared to the first half of 2025, which was a direct result of the restructure. During the second quarter, we raised $17 million through our at the market equity program. Consistent with our methodology, these related proceeds are excluded from cash burn for all periods presented. Turning to guidance.

Speaker 2

As we discussed earlier this year, 2026 is about continuing to be cost efficient while investing in our AI robotics and software to bring autonomous labs to our bioscience customers, including the build-out of our frontier autonomous lab in Boston. We have turned the page from focusing on restructuring actions to focus this year not only on cost efficiency, but on investing in what we see as our opportunities while continuing to provide our customers the advanced services they have come to expect. For these reasons, we believe cash burn best reflects our continuing services and tools and further investments in autonomous labs. In terms of outlook for the full year, we are reaffirming our overall cash burn guidance for 2026 totaling $125 million-$150 million. This range reflects a firm balance amongst cost efficiency, continuing services and tools, and further investments we are making.

Speaker 2

In conclusion, we are pleased with the continued improvements in cash burn efficiency and our business pursuits for 2026. With that, I'll hand it back over to you, Jason.

Speaker 1

Thanks, Steve. As I said, Ginkgo's mission is to make biology easier to engineer. We're going to have three strategic topics today to dig in on. First, there's been a lot of activity in U.S. science, a new report coming out of Office of Science and Technology Policy I'm going to touch on. Autonomous labs are becoming a real imperative for the U.S. to stay competitive in science and particularly in biotechnology versus China. I'm going to speak to that. Second, Nebula, our large autonomous lab here in Boston, is the largest in the world. It's growing rapidly. I want to showcase what we've been doing with it. Finally, we are using that lab and all our infrastructure here at Ginkgo to offer up competing services to offshore CROs that are quite economically competitive for customers, and I want to highlight one of those in particular.

Speaker 1

All right. Let's dig in on the autonomous labs. There's been a lot of news in the last quarter, in particular, an article coming out in "Stat" magazine that featured Ginkgo quite heavily about this question within the biotech industry of should we be offshoring our work to China for the discovery of drugs? Is that a concern in a world where there's increasing geopolitical tensions between the two countries? Ginkgo was featured around how our automation could be a counterweight to lower cost labor in China.

Speaker 1

This is a hot topic, and the reason it is highlighted in that "The Wall Street Journal" article, where you've seen the number of newly acquired drug assets, in other words, drugs bought from startup biotech companies, go from almost none coming from Chinese startups about five years ago to last year it was 48%, and the first quarter of this year it was more than 50%. That's obviously borne out in our jobs ecosystem and our technology ecosystem. This is a post in Reddit on the biotech forum. "I'm an extremely frustrated bench scientist having no luck finding work in six months after layoff. I did get an interesting suggestion of one biopharma startup CEO told me he doesn't hire for any bench work in the U.S., outsources it all to China.

Speaker 1

He said, 'Have you considered working in China?'" This person says, "Is that a good idea considering I only speak English?" I don't think that's a great idea. I don't think our scientists should be moving to China in search of biotech jobs. I think the U.S. needs to become competitive with China, and the way we're going to do that is we're going to automate the laboratory work at the lab bench. You're seeing a lot of energy around this. There's an absolutely great report out of the Office of Science and Technology Policy from Director Mike Kratsios there highlighting the new strategy for science in the United States. This is partially under the umbrella of the Genesis Mission, which I'll talk about, to bring AI into science, but also highlights NSF's new program to spend $400 million on a national network of cloud laboratories.

Speaker 1

If you look in the document, you'll see this section on autonomous experimentation. Closed-loop autonomous laboratories can collapse discovery timelines by orders of magnitude and enable science at a truly industrial scale. Focused investments in robotics and automated laboratories, leveraging industry demand and federal R&D to ensure our scientific equipment industrial base is built on the world's best hardware and software and leads the charge in the coming scientific revolution. This is awesome. It's really great to see a call to action like this out of the OSTP. It's exactly what they should be doing. If you see here on this next slide, Ginkgo's been building the first autonomous lab for a national lab here in the U.S. I had the chance to ribbon cut the first 13 of our racks at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory with the Secretary of Energy, Secretary Wright, in December.

Speaker 1

On the right-hand side, you can actually see all the expanded 97 rack system that we'll be building a schematic of that this is going to be expanded into coming up under the Genesis Mission. Really excited to be a part of that. Very excited to announce just yesterday that we had been selected to build autonomous labs for MIT, Caltech, Maryland, and Northwestern. Caltech, Maryland, and Northwestern as part of this NSF program, and MIT through a separate grant. This is really exciting because we're getting autonomous labs in the hands of graduate students, people with my sort of training, so that they're learning how to do science on top of robotics, rather than how I was taught, which was sort of slaving away at a lab bench doing experiments by hand.

Speaker 1

We have to think about the practice of how we do this work alongside the underlying technology of robotics so that they develop together. I think this program is super important. I think it's a big part of how the U.S. stays competitive. I'm quite proud we're a part of it. I want to, again, I'm going to highlight a few slides I showed last time, but I think it's an important point to make. When I say autonomous lab, what do we even mean by that? I'll draw an analogy to the transportation industry. On the Y-axis of this chart is sort of the amount of automation of a given transportation technology, and on the X-axis is the flexibility of a request from a user of that automation that the technology will allow.

Speaker 1

Low amount of flexibility, high amount of automation, top left, that's a subway. That's our Red Line T here in Boston. It's totally automated. You sit down, it takes you away, but you better want to go to one of the stops on the subway. It's not going to pull up in front of your house. Low amount of automation, a high amount of flexibility is a car. You put your hands on the wheel, your foot on the pedals, and you can go straight to your house or the grocery store, go wherever you want. It's highly flexible, but you have a human in the loop to manage the variability. That's the transportation system for the last 100 years. Unless you've been in a Waymo, which is what we call an autonomous car.

Speaker 1

You'll notice we don't call it an automated car because automated sounds like automated door or something. It's just doing the same thing over and over again. An autonomous car magically goes wherever you ask it to go without a human in the loop. Here's the kicker. If you look at miles traveled in the U.S., subways versus cars and trucks, it's 99% cars and trucks because you need the flexibility. It's not like we don't know about railroads and tracks, it's that people need to go where they need to go in their lives. That's why this is such a disruptive thing coming with Waymos, is they're going to go after the 99%. It's going to automate the overwhelming majority of the transportation ecosystem, which is what subways never got to. Here's what it looks like in the lab.

Speaker 1

Low amount of flexibility, high amount of automation. We actually have our subways. They're called work cells. They're used for things like high throughput screening in pharma companies or for running diagnostic tests at a clinical lab where you've got the same experiment being run over and over again. They're wonderful because they're fully automated. You can walk away, you can run them 24/7. You don't need a person in the middle. They are not flexible. You cannot read a new experiment in a paper and then have it running on your work cell tomorrow. Low amount of automation, a high amount of flexibility. This is that car, right? It can do whatever you want, but you have to have a human in the loop. This is the lab bench and the manual laboratory. All right?

Speaker 1

Again, much like cars and transportation, the bench is 95%+ of the $60 billion-$80 billion a year that pharma companies spend on research, not clinical trials, but their research labs. The $40 billion a year that the NIH spends on doing research laboratory work. All that money is going towards the benches, and almost none of it today is going to robotics because, not because we don't know about robots, but because the robotics systems so far have not been flexible enough to do science and to do drug discovery. That's what we're trying to build at Ginkgo. We're trying to make our version of a Waymo, that top right corner. It should have the automation of the work cells. You should be able to walk away and run it 24/7, but the flexibility of the lab bench.

Speaker 1

That's a much bigger prize than the work cell prize, but a much harder technical challenge. The ROI for an autonomous lab is quite clear. If you compare it to our manual labs at Ginkgo, of which we have plenty, you can see some very obvious differences. For starters, you cram the same amount of equipment that you would have spread out around a manual lab with humans moving through it into about a third of the space. It's much smaller. Additionally, our lab is running 24/7. Nebula, the autonomous lab, is running 24/7. If you haven't done the math on a week, a work week for a lab technician is like 40 hours, and there's 168 hours in a week. You're getting a four-fold increase in the hours that that big sunk cost laboratory is being used.

Speaker 1

Finally, repeatability, traceability, electronic records are all just right inside of an autonomous lab without even having to work for it. AI-driven science is going to need these things. I think it's going to be hard to connect that into the manual lab infrastructure. The way that we're going to do that is through robotic labs. It's intrinsic to those systems. All right. I get asked a lot, and I started this off with a bench scientist worried about a job, are autonomous labs going to exacerbate the problem of scientists having a hard time getting jobs in the U.S.? I don't think so. This is our advertisement from IBM back in 1952. I love this ad. It says, "Hey, here's the IBM mechanical calculator." This actually predated the computer. It can do the work of 150 extra engineers.

Speaker 1

There they are, these engineers with their slide rules, right? This was the era before computation had been automated. You might have said, "Oh, well, this machine over here will of course replace these 150 gentlemen with their slide rules." That is not at all what happened. In fact, we had an enormous explosion in the number of engineering jobs. The reason was the actual limiter on the market size for computation was the fact that we were doing it manually. Once we automated computation, it turned out there was a vastly bigger market for computation than we thought there was. That what was really valuable was what was in those engineers' heads, their knowledge of practice in computation, their knowledge of the problems you want to solve with computation.

Speaker 1

Once you could get a much better ROI on that through the automation of computation with computers, that field exploded. That's really what I see as the opportunity for us in biotechnology. We're being limited by our manual labs. Our scientists' jobs are limited by the manual labs. Manual science jobs, in particular, are being offshored as fast as possible. The way to stop that is with laboratory automation. Okay. Let's talk about an actual existing autonomous lab that we have here in Boston. I love this video. Nebula is the name for our autonomous lab here in the Seaport. We have now 105 racks on it. It really is huge and awesome to see in person.

Speaker 1

If you remember how this works, we have a track system that's moving samples from device to device on the system. The arms pick up the samples, put it onto that particular device. That device does whatever particular step in the lab protocol is asked for by the scientist that submitted the job. One thing I'll highlight is we actually roughly doubled the size of the system. We added 50 new racks, basically over a three-week period, right? We had built the racks in advance in manufacturing. Just to put them in, connect up all the hardware, do a cycle of debugging on things that broke on the software when we expanded to be that big, we had it up and running doing experiments about three weeks later. That, in the world of subway work cell automation, is just crazy.

Speaker 1

Building a new automation system with 50 new devices on it and having it up and running over three weeks is just not a thing that happens. I do think we're really benefiting from the fact that we've productized, through our rack carts, what has up till now been a custom process of integrating devices in an autonomous lab. We now, like I said, have 105 racks. This is running day and night. I'll just point out, an average-ish day would be 30 unique protocols coming from scientists. More than 100 if you count copies of protocols running across those 100 devices. I don't think there's anything else like this running in the world today, where new experiments are submitted by scientists, not automation engineers, but scientists every day onto the system, and the system just handles that variability and manages it.

Speaker 1

This is that Waymo phenomena, being able to handle the variability at scale is pretty crazy. It's not like we don't have bugs, not like we don't have issues to work through. We do. Just even being able to do that is pretty nuts at this point. It's running 24/7. There's a picture of our scheduler. The colors are different protocols. X-axis is time, Y-axis is all the different racks on the system. You can see how we have to sort of jigsaw puzzle in different protocols. If you submitted a new job to the system, it would check to see, is the device you need available in the times that you need it, and could you fit your particular set of protocols into this jigsaw puzzle? If so, you would get to go in.

Speaker 1

A lot of the work we're doing is on improving the scheduler and improving robustness of the system and all kinds of really interesting stuff. It's very much engineering work to continue to drive up the variability that scientists can put on the system, as well as increase the total number of protocols we can run at any given time. Really exciting engineering work. You should come take a tour of Nebula. We've had a lot of people come through now. Many hundreds of people in the first half of this year. There's lots of really fun videos on Instagram and TikTok and everywhere else. It's a neat system to see in person. We do tours three days a week. Anyone's welcome to sign up for it. Please do. We really love to have people come by and see it.

Speaker 1

If you're sort of a pharma company or even an academic scientist, or someone who has a particular protocol that you really would get value from automating, but you've never automated it before, if we have the same equipment that you use in your manual lab, we're happy to try your protocol on Nebula. We would just have one of our scientists submit it as their protocol that day, and we would see how well it would work. You can kind of do this sort of try before you buy on integrated automation. That's, again, not a thing that happens with the subways.

Speaker 1

They're sort of built, you test them with water, then you ship it over and cross your fingers. The customer kind of hopes that what the vendor showed works with clear, with water runs, ends up playing out in practice with biological runs once they get it in-house, and it's their job to debug it if not. We're able to bring that sort of debugging work earlier in the process. If that's of interest to you as a buyer of automation, we're finding people really like that. Okay. Lastly, we are using our autonomous lab. One way we do business is you could buy it. The other way we do business is we run our labs as a service, as a CRO, contract research organization. Increasingly, we've always done that for sort of very high-end, specialized services at Ginkgo, most notably our solutions business.

Speaker 1

We have these large projects with Bayer or Novo Nordisk, where we're doing multi-year research projects using our infrastructure. That's not what I'm going to talk to you about today. I'm going to talk to you today about going straight at the traditional CRO work that pharma companies have been offshoring to scientists in China, companies like WuXi, for over the last 20-25 years. Once you have a lab that doesn't have people in it, we really think we can compete on a cost basis very well with those offshore CROs. This is not unique to bio. There's a company I really like, it's called SendCutSend, where you can, I don't know if anybody has done this, you can order sort of custom sheet metal fabrication.

Speaker 1

This is, again, back to that graph I drew of throughput and our automation level and variability. This is custom sheet metal fabrication, which means we basically offshored it because it was a labor-intensive custom process to cut this in the particular way that a customer would want them to cut it to. We lost this industry over the last 50 years. It's really exciting to see this coming back via SendCutSend, that's through a mix of some automation, but also through really smart software to turn customer requests into smart geometries of how they're doing it and basically use technology to bring costs back in line with what you would've got by offshoring the old generation of approaches to lower-cost labor overseas. I think this is how the U.S. is going to bring back the world of atoms, right?

Speaker 1

We should not just be a country that only does information technology and services. We should also be able to build things. In order to do that, we need to rethink the way that we work with atoms. That's the only way I think you bring atoms back, versus lower-cost manual labor. We're coming after that when it comes to these CROs, these contract research organizations, most notably WuXi, has really been sort of the centerpiece of offshoring, starting with chemistry, then increasingly biotech CRO services over the last 20-30 years. We launched a service now about six weeks ago called ADME-One. ADME stands for absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion.

Speaker 1

This is sort of a standard panel of, in this case, 5 tier 1 assays that are run on small molecules, so chemical drug candidates, to see how good they are on these sort of, not drug properties specific to your disease, but just these general drug properties about how your body processes the small molecule. To give you a sense, you can buy these. These are very standard assays. You can get them from Western CRO vendors for $2,000-$5,000 for the panel, or from Chinese CRO vendors for $1,000-$2,500 for the panel. You can get them from Ginkgo Datapoints for $199. That's not just the assays. We've also partnered up with Inductive Bio and Tangible Scientific to handle both a PK projection as well as compound management for your small molecules.

Speaker 1

You're getting sort of the whole kit and caboodle here for close to a tenth the price. We've done a lot of work to validate these assays. I'll just flip through a few slides, but you can also go check this out on our website, both internal QC as well as, very importantly, we've compared 2 external vendors. We had the same sample go get tested by this ADME panel at external vendors and compared it to what we were seeing with our robotic automated approaches to doing ADME. We've seen really great results. I'll just flip through a few of these. On kinetic solubility on the left, you can see how we rank. This is like Spearman coefficient, how well do we put the molecules in the same order that our industry peer would on this particular assay.

Speaker 1

As well as this binning, low, medium, high, and we have good agreement there for kinetic solubility. For permeability, again, same set of assays. For microsomal stability in human microsomes, same set of assays. P450 inhibition and plasma protein binding. We have done this also for a very popular small molecule library called LOPAC, 320 different compounds. We went ahead and tested all those across 3 of our tier 1 assays and put that data set up on the web. You can download that, and then you can use that to compare to the literature. Since this is up online, it means other people have been able to go download it and check it out.

Speaker 1

There's a company called Inflexa that did a bunch of work with this data set, they published the platform's technically clean and talked about our replicates and assay controls and so on. We really encourage folks to check it out themselves. We think we stand up very well to WuXi in terms of technical capability and throughput, we kick their butt on price. I don't know why you couldn't use us. What's coming soon, this is another thing WuXi does well, which is chemical synthesis, so being able to build the molecules in addition to test the molecules. ADME is about testing. We'll bring online plate-based chemistry. We already actually do a lot of chemical purification historically at Ginkgo because of all our work in natural products. We're really just bringing that into an automated environment.

Speaker 1

Finally, we want to have inert atmospheres, in other words, anaerobic chambers to do chemistry in. Here we're fortunate because the first system we delivered to Pacific Northwest National Laboratory with our racks in it that I mentioned earlier with the Secretary of Energy, that was actually an anaerobic system. We've already had a lot of experience getting our robots into an anaerobic environment. We're going to be doing that, but pointing it towards doing chemistry. If you wanted to sort of beta test that with us, give me a call if you're interested in sort of the chemistry half of things. This is a natural complement to the biological assays we've developed at Ginkgo over the years.

Speaker 1

A lot of times in drug discovery, you're either making a chemical or you're making a protein drug, but depending on the disease you're going into, they're both funneling into a similar set of biological assays about either that disease area or whatnot. We already have a lot of those assays running at high throughput on our automation, so adding chemistry is a really natural match for us, and it's a bigger fraction of the CRO business today in China. If you want to learn more about any of this, you can go to datapoints.ginkgo.bio. There's a banner at the top, and you can check out our ADME-One service. Okay. I want to end, just as a reminder, you can buy an autonomous lab from us.

Speaker 1

If you really like this or you even like the types of assays we're doing, many customers might want to run their ADME internally, right? Maybe you want to build a service. Whatever it might be, we're happy to sell an autonomous lab to anyone that wants to use it to offer whatever types of products and services they want to develop. If you want to get experience trying one out, please try our lab services, and do consider reshoring your work if you're concerned about this offshoring trend. We want to keep adding more and more of the services you're currently getting from offshore CROs to our offerings in Datapoints and Ginkgo Cloud Lab. Okay. Let's grow the world we want to see. My email's up there. Always happy to get emails from folks if you have more questions, and happy to do Q&A.

Operator

Thanks, Jason. As usual, I'll start with a question from the public and remind the analysts on the line that if you'd like to ask a question, please raise your hands on Zoom, and I'll call on you and open up your line. Thanks, everyone. All right. Just a reminder, I'm going to start with some questions that were sent in beforehand. If any of the analysts on the line would like to ask a question, they can raise their hand. I'll unmute you and put you on the line. We're going to start with two questions from Brendan from TD. The first question is: What can you confirm in terms of revenues for the RAC/autonomous lab segment and the AI Datapoints? How should we think about order funnel, backlog, revenue recognition for both moving forward?

Operator

Jason, I think you might be muted by accident.

Speaker 1

Sorry. There we go.

Operator

You're good.

Speaker 1

Thanks. As a reminder, we're not doing revenue guidance this year, so forward-looking, we don't have. We also aren't currently breaking out the revenue we're bringing in to date. We do have pretty different rev rec for automation versus data points and our other services as well. Steve, are you up for sharing a little bit on just how we approach that?

Speaker 2

Sure. Give a little insight. From the large government deal, we did have a preliminary contract with them. From that standpoint, there's some small amounts of revenue. The larger deal that everyone's talking about is that revenue will come about when we deliver and complete the install. Right now, we're really in the planning and coordination phase with that. That'll be at a point in time. With regards to Datapoints.

Speaker 1

Revenue guidance this year, forward-looking, we don't have. We also aren't currently breaking out the revenue we're bringing in to date. We do have pretty different rev rec for automation versus Datapoints and our other services as well. Steve, are you up for sharing a little bit on just how we approach that?

Speaker 2

Sure. Give a little insight. From the large government deal, we did have a preliminary contract with them. From that standpoint, there's some small amounts of revenue. The larger deal that everyone's talking about is that revenue will come about when we deliver and complete the install. Right now, we're really in the planning and coordination phase with that. That'll be at a point in time. With regards to Datapoints is very much like the solutions business where we recognize revenue over time. Reminder, smaller projects than we've seen in the past. A good growth level. We're very happy with what we're seeing from growth in that. It's spread out over multiple quarters from that standpoint. A reminder, most of those projects take anywhere from three to nine months, maybe it's a little bit longer.

Speaker 2

Again, smaller deals compared to what we're used to, it'll spread out. Some of that's reflected in the numbers for Q2 for sure.

Speaker 1

If I play that back, the revenue on the Datapoints business looks similar to what you would've seen before. All these automation deals, including the new academic deals we just signed with these four universities, those really are for the hardware part of it. It's recognition on delivery. I will point out, we also have an ongoing services and SaaS revenue for those. Once they're deployed, that would come in more regularly. You have to wait for deployment for that to show up, and you have to wait for the deployment for the revenue rec to show up, even if we get cash earlier.

Speaker 2

Exactly.

Operator

Brendan's second question was: How should we think about the cadence of revenues to be recognized as part of the EMSL project at PNNL? Basically, which is similar.

Speaker 1

That's the big national lab project Steve was just mentioning. I think we covered that.

Operator

Sounds good. All right, let's move on to X. Our first question is from @busygnomedol. This question is: For Datapoints and Ginkgo Cloud Lab solutions, what is the customer repeat order rate, and what is the average follow-on order value as a % of the initial order value?

Speaker 1

Again, we're not breaking it out in that much detail. What I will say is the way we typically end up having these deals happen is we'll get an initial proof of concept deal, then a much larger expanded deal if people are happy with it, then some amount of regular recurring work. I'd say there's probably two categories. The ADME work that I'm really excited about these new, I think, what did we say, 16 customers? A lot in the first 6 weeks is very exciting. These are new. Some of these are new logos for Ginkgo, which is great.

Speaker 1

ADME is something that pharma companies are sort of just ordering off a conveyor belt a little bit as they're developing new molecules all the time, and that's why it's been sort of like a foundation of part of WuXi's CRO business. The work we're doing on Datapoints where we're, say, generating data for an AI model, that might come in campaigns where we're making a whole bunch of data. We do a proof of concept. We do some amount of data gen. Maybe the customer says, "Hey, I actually want more data for further model training." We generate more.

Speaker 1

Then maybe they're like, "Okay, the next model I want to train on something else." It gets into some sort of pattern where they're actually using it a little closer to ADME, where they're designing constructs on the regular, they want more and more data of that sort. It can be a little more campaign-y if it's for an AI project versus some of these traditional CRO services, which are on and on and on. I am pretty excited to get into-- I like both those areas. The AI stuff is really taking off recently in general, I'm also pretty excited to go after the traditional CRO because it's just a reliable source of demand. We've got to prove ourselves. We're new in that area. I do like our odds there. Looks real good.

Operator

All right, we have two questions. There's another question that's also about revenue recognition from X, I wonder if we can bundle that with another question that we got, which is about the announcement that we made today about the NSF announcements where 4 new autonomous labs are going to be built at universities across the country. I'll sort of ask both of these in one question. How do the recent autonomous, sorry, the recent announcement regarding autonomous labs at universities across the U.S. impact your outlook for other new academic labs? Is this just a product of the NSF investment, or do you see this becoming more of a trend across the board? How will revenue work with all that stuff too?

Speaker 1

Yeah. I can speak to the sort of demand, and then Steve's going to chat on the rev rec. What I'm excited about on these is I think this is the beginning of showcasing that the academic research infrastructure, which by the way, NIH alone spends $40 billion a year out to our academic medical and academic research institutes in doing biological research. NSF spends on top of that, DARPA spends on top of that. There's actually a good amount of money that flows through this community. It's sort of an attempt at a paradigm shift for that group that at least some chunk of that work, and what's pretty interesting is we have really great partners in this.

Speaker 1

If you look at the group at Caltech, they're focusing on a cloud lab, an autonomous lab, that does basically chemical structure data generation from chemicals originating in the natural world. If you look at the group at Northwestern, it's protein engineering. If you look at the group at MIT, it's for education uses, like training people on these things. Really, it's pretty cool to see, oh, and in Maryland it's biomanufacturing. Those are four disparate areas of biology research, but they're all running on the same underlying autonomous lab platform underneath. That's what I'm most excited to demonstrate is what we've been saying all along is this is an alternative to the lab bench. Across all those different labs doing very different things at academic research universities, they've all got lab benches.

Speaker 1

They often have 60% or 70% the same equipment and then maybe 30% or 40% that's a little bit specialized in their area, but it's not an infinite list of equipment. The proposal is there should be a giant automation autonomous lab core in every biology department, and you could kind of close most of the labs down. That would be much less expensive. You'd have way more output from the graduate students. It would feel a little more like buying time on a data center. I think, I don't know. We'll see. I think depending on how this first batch of NSF labs go, I think you will see a good amount of FOMO among other research institutes that don't have these, if it goes well.

Speaker 1

That should, I think, lead to both just immediate demand, or new grants, which you heard from Director Kratsios at OSTP, there's a push in this area. Even without directed funding to buy them, remember the universities, they have these overhead, they're spending to maintain all these labs. You could also say, "Well, hey, listen, if I could offset a bunch of my lab spending by adopting an autonomous lab, there may be money within the university for that, or donors that want to see it go in this direction." There's a lot of ways for universities to get money for, I think, interesting projects like this. I'm actually kind of bullish that it won't just be associated with new grants for robots, but I also think there will be new grants for robots.

Speaker 1

Maybe last but not least, I do think it also trains a set of, you're sort of also starting to train the next generation of scientists with this approach to doing science, which I think is particularly important. I'm really excited about this program. I think it's going to be great for us. Steve, did you want to comment on that?

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Speaker 1

I don't know if there's more to say on the rev rec, but yeah.

Speaker 2

Yeah, no. Bridging off what we just spoke about a few minutes ago about revenue and like, I should clarify, our legacy has been services where we get paid for the work over time. That's still true, as we mentioned, with Datapoints. With regards to the big block is when we deliver the equipment, install, but that also comes with services. I'm not going to get into the details of these contracts or the others, but we do get paid services, whether it be custom work. We absolutely have support services after the install and for which we have a long tail of revenue coming from that. We look at it, you have to think about that business model as equipment and support.

Speaker 2

The support could come in the front end, the support would definitely come in the back end on maintenance support and access and the like. That's sort of the model, but not getting into specifics. There's a twist on different contracts for what piece is what. That's what you should think about. Equipment delivery, that's when we recognize the bulk of revenue. Might be services up front, absolutely services after the fact.

Speaker 1

Yep. That's inclusive of software licensing as well on the back end. So yeah.

Operator

All right. I think that's all we got. Just a reminder to everyone, you don't have to wait for earnings to ask us questions. You can send us emails at investors@ginkgobioworks.com, and we'll respond. Hope everyone is.

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