Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:DNA) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript November 10, 2023

Megan LeDuc: Good evening. I’m Megan LeDuc, Manager of Investor Relations at Ginkgo Bioworks. I’m joined by Jason Kelly, our Co-Founder and CEO; and Mark Dmytruk, 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’ll be making forward-looking statements, which involve risks and uncertainties. Please refer to our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission to learn more about these risks and uncertainties. Today, in addition to updating you on the quarter, we’re going to dive deeper into a few case studies of how we’re seeing our mission to make biology easier to engineer, come to life as well as provide further details on our diverse program pipeline and the growth opportunities we see in biosecurity business.

As usual, we’ll end with the Q&A session, and I’ll take questions from analysts, investors and the public. You can submit those questions to us in advance via Twitter at #GinkgoResults or e-mail us at investors@ginkgobioworks.com. All right. Over to you, Jason.

Jason Kelly: I’m super excited to be chatting with you all today. I always start with a reminder that our mission at Ginkgo is to make biology easier to engineer. As we dig into the strategic section, you’ll see the progress we’re making on that mission, particularly with our AI efforts and our strong pipeline of active programs. We pursue this mission on behalf of a diverse group of customers. This is one of my favorite slides, having a customer list that ranges from agriculture to consumer goods, to chemicals to therapeutics is common for a horizontal tech platform, but it’s pretty unique in biotech. It makes sense because all these diverse programs benefit from the scaling of the same underlying technology at Ginkgo. We’ve added programs with several new customers this quarter, including smaller companies like Nosh Biofoods in the industrial biotech field and Exacta Biosciences in the ag space, as well as large companies like Pfizer in pharma in addition to new programs with many of our existing customers.

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We took a view early on at Ginkgo that scale would be needed to drive our mission. And you see that reflected in our business model as a platform service provider. We had 116 active programs on the platform this quarter, representing 36% growth over last year, and our highest active program count ever. As our foundry scales, our data generation capabilities scale in turn. You can see this on the slide comparing some of our internal assets to public data assets. Our ability to generate data at scale for customers, paired with our existing code base, is a big part of the reason customers choose to work with Ginkgo, particularly as leveraging generative AI becomes a bigger priority for our customers. For those of you that turned into our — tuned into our Investor Day, and I encourage you to watch the YouTube recording if you didn’t, you know that we’re using this data to build AI foundation models and fine-tune applications for biological engineering.

Our recent partnership with Google is helping fuel this in the last quarter, and I’m proud of the progress the team is making on track with our plans. In fact, we’ve already achieved the first milestone in our partnership with Google. The reality is that biology is getting easier to engineer. We’re really excited about that, what that opens up for our customers, better medicines, more resilient food systems, cleaner industry, but it has not lost on us that the advancement of biological engineering tools, particularly when coupled to advancements in AI, creates risk. We’re sitting at the intersection of several exponentially improving techs, and the world is grappling with how to keep up with the pace of change and limit the risks these technologies create.

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