Ginkgo today announced it has reached an agreement to sell the Company's biosecurity business to a consortium of investors ("Investors") in exchange for a minority equity position in the business alongside the Investors. Upon completion, the biosecurity business will operate as a standalone private entity focused on building a scaled, biosecurity infrastructure

 

 

platform for the United States and its global partners. The transaction provides the biosecurity business with greater flexibility and additional resources to pursue near- and long-term growth opportunities.

Per Ginkgo CEO Jason Kelly, "There is rising interest in defense tech in private capital markets and spinning off our biosecurity business into a private entity with new investors allows it to grow faster with more investment than it would inside Ginkgo. This serves Ginkgo in two ways: we are able to participate in the upside of the new entity as a shareholder but importantly we also focus Ginkgo's cash investment on our autonomous labs business."

 

Ginkgo expects to complete the transaction in the first half of 2026, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing

conditions.

 

Recent Business Highlights & Strategic Positioning

•We are making 2026 a year of investment in our autonomous lab.

◦This year, we will focus Ginkgo's efforts on autonomous labs as the common platform for biotechnology research and invest to extend our current lead in technology. We are currently expanding our frontier autonomous lab in Boston to include over 50 RACs, with 50 more expected by the end of the year

◦We will demonstrate the capabilities of autonomous labs by decommissioning the majority of Ginkgo's lab benches, walk-up automation, and workcells and moving our three R&D services businesses onto a single, large autonomous lab

•We are commercializing our autonomous lab through two distinct pathways: through our cloud lab services and by building autonomous labs for customers.

◦We just released the results of a collaboration with OpenAI where they used GPT-5 to design experiments using Ginkgo's cloud lab. This resulted in achieving a 40% improvement over the state-of-the-art in Cell-Free Protein Synthesis

◦After a pilot, we build and install customized autonomous systems directly at customer sites, allowing them to run workflows in a matter of weeks. We did this for the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, where we recently dedicated an 18-instrument autonomous anaerobic system and won a $47M contract for a 97-instrument autonomous lab

•Ginkgo continues to hold a strong cash position while winning new deals across Agriculture, Pharma, and the U.S. Government, providing a strong revenue base to position for future growth

◦We ended 2025 with $423 million in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities

◦Datapoints defined the category of Bio-AI Data Provider, worked with 10 top pharma customers in its first full year.

◦In the fourth quarter of 2025, Solutions announced partnerships with ARPA-H, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Carnegie Mellon, Agricen, Deep Origin and more