Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings Inc

Good evening. I'm Daniel Marshall, Senior Manager of Communications and Ownership. I'm joined by Jason Kelly, our co-founder and CEO, and Steve Cohen, 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 provide insight into the autonomous lab, how we believe it will transform biotechnology, and how we plan to commercialize autonomous labs going forward. As usual, we'll end with a Q&A session, and I'll take questions from analysts, investors, and the public. You can submit those questions to us in advance via X, hashtag GinkgoResults, or through email, investors at ginkgobioworks.com. All right, over to you, Jason.

All right. Thanks, Daniel. So Q4 was really a breakout quarter for us in sort of defining and really leading in the category of autonomous labs. And so you're going to hear a lot from me about that in the future. But, you know, I want to start by saying our mission remains to make biology easier to engineer. But in 2026, the technological focus for the company and really the business focus is going to drill down on investing to win in this category of autonomous labs. And this is really a part of what I see as an emerging movement around robotics and AI and autonomy that's coming to a lot of sectors in the economy. And I think we happen to be in a sweet spot in bringing that into really a high value area around laboratory research that there's an increasing amount of excitement about. And I intend to win that. All right. So how are we going to do it in 26? So first, we want to focus our investment in our platform into that area primarily. And I'll talk in a minute, but we mentioned in our recent announcement just now that we'll be divesting our biosecurity business. That allows me to focus Ginkgo's investment and our dollars really into autonomous labs and bring in other new investors to invest alongside us into biosecurity. So that's that focused in investment. Second, internal to the company, we want to demonstrate the capabilities of our large autonomous lab here in Boston. And the way we're going to do that is we're going to start to systematically decommission our lab benches, our walk-up automation, our work cells, the way that we've traditionally done our R&D services over the last 10 years and move more and more of that work onto a single large autonomous lab that's software controlled here in Boston. And the reason I want to do that is that serves as a demonstration to the Merck's and the Takeda's and the Pfizer's and all the folks who have huge investments in traditional manual laboratories, that it is possible to take open-ended research and run it through a large autonomous laboratory system. And so I think that's really fundamentally the most important work we're doing this year. And then finally, I want to book sales of autonomous labs. You're going to hear And one of our big announcements from last quarter that we did a $47 million deal with Pacific Northwest National Labs. So I want to sell autonomous labs to national labs like that DOE deal, but I also want to sell them to biopharma. I want to sell them to research universities. And so that sort of bookings and landing new deals is the other thing we want to do in 2026 in this direction. I do want to take a minute and talk about that biosecurity divestiture. So you might remember over the last five years, we've invested a ton of energy into this space. This really came about starting during COVID because we honestly just saw a need. COVID was sort of a global scale biological disaster, and we felt we should lean in and help where we could. The niche that we found in that moment was doing really monitoring for so not diagnostic testing, but rather monitoring testing in order to reopen congregate areas and in particular reopening schools here in the United States. So I'm really proud of this is a decent sized business for us. But really importantly, we helped open 5000 schools nationwide. And this is one of these like really political topics. And I think what's neat about technology is you can sometimes find a third way between one end at the time, which was Hey, you know, we really should be closing the schools, dangerous for teachers. You know, we care about spreading disease. And then on the other side, hey, this is hurting kids. And we'd open the schools. Everyone should just go back and, you know, whatever comes, comes. And there was a third way, which was why don't we open the schools and have persistent monitoring so that if an outbreak starts to happen in a school, you can send two or three kids home and stop it. And that's exactly what we want to build at a nationwide level and what's continued after COVID in our monitoring at airports that we do in partnership with the CDC, looking for viruses in the wastewater of planes and other inputs both here and internationally in places like Doha and Qatar at the airport there. And so that sort of identify it, put it out, put that fire out before it spreads is something that's needed nationally and globally for the US to be secure. The other thing that's then happened in that period of time, you might have noticed, companies like Anduril, Palantir, Shams Sankar, our board chair is the CTO at Palantir. This sort of defense tech sector really exploded over the last five years. And so there's been increasing interest from pure play investors in the defense space who want to see next generation sort of biodefense primes. So again, these are companies that would be focused on serving the government and others on biodefense needs directly. That's very exciting because it means there's lots of new capital interested in that. But to my point earlier, where I want Ginkgo to focus very clearly in 2026 is on autonomous labs. And so one of the great things that happened was we got a lot of inbound from these types of investors. And we saw an opportunity to say, all right, why don't we share in the upside of biosecurity by taking that business unit in the company, spinning it off, taking it private, bringing in investment from some of these great investors. Ginkgo will still hold a minority position in that. So we get to get a piece of the upside of what we built. But the investment needed to build that biosecurity prime doesn't need to come from the $430 million, as I'll mention in a second, that we had on our books at the end of the year. We can focus that into autonomous labs. So I think this is a win-win all around. I also think bringing in these types of great folks that we have coming into the private entity is really gonna open doors with the defense sector and so on, and having it be a sole branded biodefense company, it's the right time. So I'm super excited about this. I think it's, I wanna give again credit to the biosecurity team at Ginkgo who did absolutely amazing work through Ginkgo, sorry, through COVID, and now has a real opportunity here, I think, to build a generational business coming up in the defense sector. Okay, the last point I wanna make before I hand it to Steve. So again, I think tremendous work over the last two years. We sort of did two things at the same time. We dramatically cut back spending as we saw sort of a downturn in the biotech sector and a lot of our customers pull back on outsourced large R&D projects, which was really our bread and butter here at the company over the years. Because of that, we drew down on our spending and pretty substantially. So in fiscal year 24, We were at $383 million and just last year, 171. So 55% reduction in our annual cash burn. That sets us up very nicely. You're going to hear from Steve on our target for cash burn for this year, even with the investment, our focused investment in autonomous labs and moving that investment in biosecurity into a separate private entity. We're actually able to do better than what we were spent in 25. But that, you know, I think for investors is important to understand where we're at from a cash position and how we've done a really nice job getting cash spending under control as we continue to make investments and get in the right place at the right time with Autonomous Labs. All right. So I'm going to hand it to Steve to dive in a little more on the financials.

Thanks, Jason. I'll start with the cell engineering business. Cell engineering revenue was $26 million in the fourth quarter of 2025, down 26% compared to the fourth quarter of 2024. In the fourth quarter of 2025, we supported a total of 109 revenue-generating programs. This represents a 4% decrease year-over-year, primarily attributed to ongoing program rationalization as part of our restructuring activities. Turning to the next slide, on a four-year basis, Shell Engineering revenue was $133 million in 2025 as compared to $174 million in 2024. As previously disclosed, revenue in the first quarter of 2025 included $7.5 million of non-cash revenue from a release of deferred revenue relating to the mutual termination of the biome edit agreement. In the third quarter of 2024, cell engineering revenue included $45 million of non-cash revenue from a release of deferred revenue relating to the mutual termination of the motif food works agreement. Excluding these impacts, cell engineering revenue was $125 million in 2025 and $129 million in 2024. This decrease was primarily driven by customer program rationalization related to the restructuring as all discussed previously. The biosecurity business generated $7 million of revenue in the fourth quarter of 2025 and $37 million of revenue in the full year 2025. 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 segment operating loss, adjusted EBITDA, and gap net loss can be found in the appendix. Cell engineering R&D expense decreased 44% from $50 million in the fourth quarter of 2024 to $28 million in the fourth quarter of 2025. For the full year 2025, cell engineering R&D expense decreased 42% from $272 million in 2024 to $159 million in 2025. As reported last quarter, the full year 2025 period R&D expenses included a $21 million shortfall obligation related to our multi-year strategic cloud and AI partnership with Google Cloud. In October 2025, we amended and reset the annual commitments for future years and settled the shortfall obligation for $14 million. Resetting the commitment reduced our future minimum commitments by more than $100 million compared to the original terms and extended the commitment term from three to six years. Cell engineering G&A expense decreased 40% from $20 million in the fourth quarter of 2024 to $12 million in the fourth quarter of 2025. For the full year, cell engineering R&D, I'm sorry, G&A expense decreased 51% from $115 million in 2024 to $56 million in 2025. These decreases were all driven by our restructuring efforts. Cell engineering segment operating loss was $17 million in the fourth quarter of 2025 compared to a loss of $38 million in the 2024 period. For the full year 2025, cell engineering segment operating loss was $96 million compared to a loss of $219 million in 2024. The lower loss was directly related to our restructuring efforts, while partially impacted by the matters previously mentioned. The biosecurity segment operating loss improved 60% in the fourth quarter of 2025 compared to the 2024 period. And the biosecurity segment operating loss improved 38% in the full year 2025 compared to 2024. Moving further down the page, you'll note that total adjusted EBITDA in the fourth quarter of 2025 was negative $36 million, which was down from negative $57 million in the fourth quarter of 2024. Total adjusted EBITDA for the full year 2025 was negative $167 million, which was down from negative $293 million in 2024. Again, the period over period declines can be attributed to our restructuring efforts while partially impacted by the matters previously mentioned. Turning to the next slide. We show adjusted EBITDA at the segment level to show the relative profitability of our segments. The principal differences between segment operating loss and total adjusted EBITDA relates to the carrying cost of excess lease space, which was $54 million in 2025, and this carrying cost was $15 million in Q4. The cost represents the base rent and other charges related 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. And finally, turning to cash burn. Cash burn in the fourth quarter of 2025 was $47 million, down from $55 million in the fourth quarter of 2024, a 15% decrease. Cash burn for the full year 2025 was $171 million, down from $383 million in 2024, a 55% decrease. Cash burn does not include the proceeds from the ATM issuances or certain cash restrictions. This significant decrease in cash burn was a direct result of the restrictions. Turning to guidance. In terms of the outlook for 2026 as Jason has mentioned, and we'll go into further 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 on our pure focus on restructuring actions for the last two years 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. We will also close our transaction for the biosecurity business as announced and disclosed. For these reasons, in 2026, we will not be providing revenue guidance as we believe cash burn best reflects our continuing services and tools and further investments in autonomous labs. For 2026, our overall expected cash burn guidance is to be in the range of $125 to $150 million. This range reflects a firm balance amongst cost efficiency, continuing services and tools, and the further investments we are making. In conclusion, we are pleased with the continued improvements in cash burn and cost reductions in 2025, and our excited fold will come in 2026. And with that, I'll hand it back over to you, Jason.