Customized organisms will revolutionize the way we manufacture everything. Gingko Bioworks is brewing the building blocks for our bioengineered future.
it has raised more than $400 million from investors that include Bill Gates’ Cascade Investments, Viking Global and General Atlantic. As of December 2017, it was valued at $1.4 billion. Over a decade after Ginkgo’s founding, Kelly and his cofounders all still work there and have retained stakes in the company thatestimates at more than $100 million each. Kelly figures he’ll take Ginkgo public eventually—he’s in no rush.
Knight, 71, a computer expert, had made an unusual mid-career switch. In the 1990s, he’d begun to wonder when Moore’s Law—Intel cofounder Gordon Moore’s observation that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every two years—would end. The problem, he explains, is that structures eventually become so small that you’re working with silicon at the atomic scale, and placing atoms in the right place with precision requires biochemistry.
With an initial investment of $100,000 from Knight , the five started Ginkgo. Their timing was lousy. The financial crisis had pushed the economy into recession. Banks weren’t lending, and venture capitalists weren’t investing. And even if they were, Ginkgo wouldn’t have appealed then. “We don’t look like normal biotech founders,” Kelly says. “No one starts a biotech company out of school, we weren’t doing a therapeutic and we had no product in mind.
“The idea of using biology for industrial purposes has long been a dream,” says Josh Hoffman, CEO of Emeryville, California-based Zymergen, Ginkgo’s closest competitor. “Unless you can get it to work at scale it’s a dream with wonderful appeal, but it’s unlikely to have impact.” The automation allows Ginkgo to test thousands, or even tens of thousands, of designs on each project, Canton says, compared with a traditional lab where a bench scientist might be able to do ten. “We were inspired by what Intel and others do in building their semiconductor facilities,” he says. This winter, Ginkgo opened Bioworks 4, which will work with mammalian cells.
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