Ginkgo Bioworks Q1 Earnings Call Highlights

Key Points

• Ginkgo Bioworks is pivoting its 2026 strategy toward autonomous laboratories after selling its biosecurity business and creating a new company, Perimeter, while remaining a shareholder.
• The company’s first-quarter 2026 revenue from continuing operations fell to $19 million, but expenses and cash burn also declined; cash burn was $48 million and Ginkgo ended the quarter with $373 million in cash and no bank debt.
• Management says its Nebula autonomous lab platform is becoming central to the business, with more than 100 submitted protocols, integrations across 50+ devices, and partnerships with AI and cloud players like OpenAI, AWS, and Benchling helping validate the model.

Ginkgo Bioworks NYSE: DNA said it is sharpening its 2026 focus on autonomous laboratories after completing the divestiture of its biosecurity business and reporting lower year-over-year cash burn in the first quarter.

Co-founder and CEO Jason Kelly said the company’s central objective remains “to make biology easier to engineer,” but that its 2026 investment priorities will be centered on winning the emerging category of autonomous labs. Kelly said interest in the field has grown among Silicon Valley startups, AI companies and government organizations.

“I do think we’re onto the right track with this focus for the company,” Kelly said.

Ginkgo is pursuing the autonomous lab strategy in two main ways, Kelly said: running its own services on top of its Boston autonomous lab system, called Nebula, and selling autonomous lab systems to early adopters. He cited Pacific Northwest National Laboratory as an existing example of an outside customer.

Biosecurity Business Reported as Discontinued Operations

Chief Financial Officer Steve Coen said Ginkgo’s first-quarter results reflect a change in financial presentation following the sale of its biosecurity business, which had previously been reported as a separate segment. Ginkgo announced the definitive agreement in February and closed the transaction on April 3.

Coen said the transferred biosecurity assets met the criteria to be classified as held for sale and reported as discontinued operations as of March 31, 2026. As a result, the company is retrospectively recasting prior periods to remove biosecurity revenue, expenses and cash flows from continuing operations.

“To be clear, all of the financial commentary I will provide today relates exclusively to continuing operations,” Coen said.

Kelly said the spin-off created a new company called Perimeter and brought in $60 million along with new investors focused on defense technology. Ginkgo remains a shareholder in Perimeter, he said.

Revenue Declines While Expenses Fall

For the first quarter of 2026, Ginkgo reported revenue of $19 million from continuing operations, down 49% from the first quarter of 2025. Coen noted that the prior-year quarter included $7.5 million in non-cash revenue related to the mutual termination of the BiomEdit agreement. Excluding that item, revenue declined 37% year over year.

Operating expenses also fell as a result of restructuring efforts. Research and development expense decreased 38% to $30 million from $49 million a year earlier, while general and administrative expense declined 35% to $13 million from $20 million.

Net loss from continuing operations was $76 million, compared with a loss of $83 million in the prior-year period. Adjusted EBITDA was negative $42 million, compared with negative $44 million in the first quarter of 2025.

Coen said adjusted EBITDA now includes the carrying cost of excess lease space, which was $16 million in the quarter. He described that as a cash operating cost related to space Ginkgo is not occupying, net of sublease income, and said it could potentially be mitigated through subleasing.

Cash burn in the quarter was $48 million, down 17% from $58 million in the first quarter of 2025. Coen said the quarter included a $14 million payment to Google Cloud tied to an October 2025 amendment that reset annual commitments and reduced future minimum commitments by more than $100 million compared with the original terms.

Ginkgo ended the quarter with $373 million in cash and no bank debt, Kelly said. The company reaffirmed its full-year 2026 cash burn guidance of $125 million to $150 million.

Nebula Becomes Core to Strategy

Kelly devoted much of the call to explaining Ginkgo’s autonomous lab strategy and how Nebula differs from traditional lab automation. He compared traditional automated workcells to subway systems: highly automated but limited to predefined routes. By contrast, he said an autonomous lab should combine automation with the flexibility scientists expect from a lab bench.

Kelly said Ginkgo’s goal is to let scientists order experiments without manually moving samples among instruments or programming each step. He argued that autonomous labs could reduce space needs, increase utilization and make scientists more productive.

According to Kelly, Ginkgo’s Nebula system has already supported more than 100 submitted protocols, including more than 30 unique protocols submitted by scientists rather than automation engineers. He said the system currently integrates more than 50 lab devices and is expanding to more than 100 reconfigurable automation carts, or RACs.

Kelly said Ginkgo expects to connect 103 to 105 RACs into a single setup in Boston imminently. He described the installation of roughly 50 additional pieces of equipment over about three weeks as evidence that the company is doing something “very unique” in lab automation.

Ginkgo’s hardware approach centers on RACs, which Kelly described as “a robot wrapped around each laboratory device.” The company also uses scheduling software called Catalyst to coordinate multiple protocols across the system. Kelly said the software is a key part of making open-ended experiments feasible on a shared automation platform.

Cloud Lab, Datapoints and AI Partnerships

Kelly said Ginkgo is using its own service businesses — Ginkgo Cloud Lab, Ginkgo Datapoints and Ginkgo Solutions — to demonstrate the economics and capabilities of Nebula. He compared this internal demand to SpaceX using Starlink launches to test and utilize its launch platform.

Ginkgo recently launched Ginkgo Cloud Lab, which allows users to request estimates for protocols through cloud.ginkgo.bio. Kelly said the service reflects the company’s view that lab work can become less expensive when automated and run with higher utilization.

The company also highlighted its work with OpenAI, in which Kelly said GPT-5 controlled the lab across six rounds of experiment design. He said the project improved the cost of cell-free protein synthesis by 40% over the scientific state of the art, based on results Ginkgo previously announced in February.

During the Q&A session, Kelly said future work with OpenAI could test how newer models perform at experimental design and data analysis, though he described the area as “open terrain.”

Ginkgo also discussed new channels involving AWS, Benchling and Tamarind Bio, particularly around antibody workflows. In response to an analyst question submitted by Brendan at TD, Kelly said the company is not yet seeing a “flood of inbound” from those channels but is seeing some outreach and views them as an early step toward scientists ordering lab work directly from software platforms.

On Ginkgo Datapoints, Kelly said the company has worked with 10 of the top biopharma companies since launching the offering about a year and a half ago. He said the potential revenue opportunity lies in repeat demand from customers building specialized biological models that need additional data.

Management Sees Cost and Throughput Benefits

In response to a question from South Korea about how Nebula changes Ginkgo’s science operations, Kelly said the company sees a potential threefold reduction in space utilization compared with manual labs and a fourfold increase in available operating time, from roughly 40 hours per week to 168 hours per week.

Kelly said individual protocols may not necessarily become shorter, but experiments can be started at times when a scientist would not normally remain in the lab, such as late in the day, allowing results to be available sooner. He also said automation should improve reproducibility because instrument errors and liquid handling issues are tracked through an audit trail.

Kelly said the company expects autonomous labs to dramatically increase experimental throughput by lowering the effective cost of running samples. He framed Nebula as both a demonstration platform and a commercial asset for customers considering alternatives to manual lab benches.

“That’s certainly what I’m leaning in on the company,” Kelly said. “It’s what we’re investing our capital into. It’s where our new customers are coming from.”

About Ginkgo Bioworks NYSE: DNA

Ginkgo Bioworks, Inc is a synthetic biology company that designs custom microbes for customers across a range of industries. Utilizing a proprietary organism foundry platform, the company engineers cells to produce high-value chemicals, enzymes, and other biological materials. By integrating automation, data analytics and machine learning, Ginkgo Bioworks seeks to accelerate the development of biologically derived solutions at industrial scale.

The company's services span the entire development cycle, from genetic design and strain optimization to fermentation and downstream processing.

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