Ginkgo was founded in 2008 by Barry Canton, Austin Che, Jason Kelly, Tom Knight, and Reshma Shetty. Tom, a computer science professor at MIT who had been part of the early days of the computer revolution, saw another revolution on the horizon: what could be possible if we could program cells as easily as we program computers? Austin, Barry, Jason, and Reshma, graduate students at MIT at the time, were inspired by Tom’s vision and the prospect of synthetic biology.
Our mission is to make biology easier to engineer. That has never changed. Every choice we’ve made with respect to our business model, our platform, our people and our culture is grounded in whether or not it will advance our mission.
We are headquartered at 27 Drydock, Boston, MA 02210.
Information on our management team can be found here.
Information on our Board of Directors can be found here.
We provide a process for shareholders and other interested parties to send communications to the Board through the email address investors@ginkgobioworks.com.
Our Class A common stock and our warrants trade under the ticker symbols “DNA” and “DNA.WS”, respectively, on the New York Stock Exchange.
We began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on September 17, 2021.
Information on ESG and corporate governance can be found here.
The latest company news and press releases can be found here.
Ginkgo’s SEC filings can be found here.
For 2022, Ginkgo is considered a "non-accelerated filer" by the SEC, which means we are required to file quarterly reports with the SEC on or before each of:
Similar to other newly public companies, Ginkgo had to follow more stringent rules for registering securities relative to more mature public companies, which resulted in increased filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Currently, in order to register its securities, Ginkgo may use Form S-3, a "short form" registration statement. Previously, in order to register its securities, Ginkgo had to use Form S-1, a “long form” registration statement. Unlike the Form S-3 registration statement, the Form S-1 registration statement does not allow companies to automatically incorporate information from the company’s periodic and current reports (e.g., Form 10-Ks, Form 10-Qs and Form 8-Ks). As a result, companies that use Form S-1 often file post-effective amendments, prospectuses and/or prospectus supplements following the filing of their periodic and current reports to ensure that prospectuses relating to registered securities remain up to date with any new disclosures. Ginkgo registered securities on multiple registration statements using Form S-1, which means that Ginkgo updated each of those registration statements with post-effective amendments, prospectuses and/or prospectus supplements, as applicable, in order to keep our disclosures current. While we may register new shares from time to time, one way to identify if a filing is related to a previously filed registration statement (as opposed to a new share registration statement) is to look at the registration statement’s file number on the SEC’s EDGAR website. If we register new shares using a new registration statement, the registration statement will have a new file number.
Our transfer agent is Computershare Trust Company, N.A.
For investor and other interested party related inquiries, please contact investors@ginkgobioworks.com. For press related inquiries, please contact press@ginkgobioworks.com.
Information on sell-side coverage can be found here.
Starting December 10, 2021, warrant holders may exercise their warrants to purchase shares of Class A common stock (the “Shares”) of Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings, Inc (the “Company”).
Ginkgo warrant holders who hold their warrants through a broker will need to instruct their broker to exercise through the Depositary Trust Company’s (“DTC”) Warrant Platform. Warrants can be exercised for cash ($11.50 per share multiplied by the total number of Shares being purchased) and brokers will follow DTC procedures to instruct and remit the exercise funds. All exercise requests should be submitted through DTC.
Once your broker successfully instructs on the DTC exercise platform, including the remittance of the exercise funds, DTC will work with Computershare to exercise the warrants for the Shares. Please note that DTC will be aggregating requests and submitting them to Ginkgo’s transfer agent (Computershare Trust Company, N.A. (“Computershare”)), so there may be a delay between when DTC receives your request and when Computershare processes the exercise. Warrant holders who exercise through their broker will receive their Shares in their broker account held at DTC.
Because any warrant exercise request submitted to Computershare would be for warrants held through brokers and DTC, the Company asks that you please do not submit any exercise requests directly to Computershare. For additional questions about the process for exercising your warrants, please reach out to the Company at investors@ginkgobioworks.com.
Synthetic biology is the idea that we can program cells (biological machines) in the same way that we program computers. Biology runs on digital code (like a computer’s 0s and 1s) in the form of DNA, made up of A’s, T’s, C’s, and G’s, and we can read and write it to program cells. This allows synthetic biologists to reimagine the possibilities of living things, from bacteria that fight cancer to rewilding whole ecosystems. The billions-year-old tools of cells—enzymes that cut, copy, and paste sequences of DNA code—are being leveraged by humans to read, write, and edit DNA in the lab. For more information and inspiration, please visit syntheticbiology.com.
Ginkgo is building the industry-standard horizontal platform for cell programming. Customers come to Ginkgo with a product specification in mind - perhaps they want to discover a new therapeutic or create a way to produce a molecule with biology rather than traditional methods like physical extraction. We use our platform to program cells on behalf of our customers to meet their product specification. These “cell programs” are designed to enable biological production of products as diverse as novel therapeutics, key food ingredients, and chemicals currently derived from petroleum.
The foundation of our platform includes two core assets that execute a wide variety of cell programs for customers according to their specifications: our Foundry and our Codebase.
Our Foundry wraps proprietary software and automation around core cell engineering workflows—designing DNA, writing DNA, inserting that DNA into cells, testing to measure cell performance—and leverages data analytics and data science to inform each iteration of design.
Our Codebase includes both our physical (engineered cells and genetic parts) and digital (genetic sequences and performance data) biological assets, and accumulates as we execute more cell programs on the platform. Every program, whether successful or not, generates valuable Codebase and helps inform future experimental designs and provides reusable genetic parts, making our cell program designs more efficient.
The key input into our unit economics is a cell program. For each of these cell programs, we generate economic value in two primary ways. First, we charge usage-based fees for work done in the Foundry, similar to how one might pay a cloud computing platform based on the amount of compute required to run a SaaS application. Second, we share in the downstream value of the programs that are completed on our platform. This value share can be recognized in a variety of manners including royalties , equity, or lump-sum commercial milestone payments.