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Ginkgo Bioworks 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.
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.
Chief Financial Officer Steve Coen said first-quarter results reflect a change in financial presentation following the sale of Ginkgo’s 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 were 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.
Coen said all financial commentary in the quarter relates exclusively to continuing operations.
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.
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 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 fell following restructuring. 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 it 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.
Kelly said Nebula is designed to combine automation with the flexibility scientists expect from a lab bench. He said the goal is to let scientists order experiments without manually moving samples among instruments or programming each step.
Kelly said Nebula has supported more than 100 submitted protocols, including more than 30 unique protocols submitted by scientists rather than automation engineers. He said the system integrates more than 50 lab devices and is expanding to more than 100 reconfigurable automation carts, or RACs.
Ginkgo expects to connect 103 to 105 RACs into a single setup in Boston imminently. Kelly said the installation of roughly 50 additional pieces of equipment over about three weeks demonstrates the company’s approach to lab automation.
Kelly said the hardware approach centers on RACs, described as “a robot wrapped around each laboratory device.” He said scheduling software called Catalyst coordinates multiple protocols across the system and is key to enabling open-ended experiments on a shared automation platform.
Kelly said Ginkgo is using its 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.
Ginkgo also highlighted work with OpenAI. Kelly said GPT-5 controlled the lab across six rounds of experiment design and that 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, 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 discussed new channels involving AWS, Benchling and Tamarind Bio, particularly around antibody workflows. Kelly said the company is not yet seeing a flood of inbound from those channels but is seeing 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.
Kelly said Nebula could reduce space utilization by threefold compared with manual labs and increase available operating time from roughly 40 hours per week to 168 hours per week.
He 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, enabling 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 Ginkgo expects autonomous labs to increase experimental throughput by lowering the effective cost of running samples, positioning 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.”
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