Ginkgo Bioworks (NYSE:DNA) used its fourth-quarter earnings call to outline a sharpened strategic focus for 2026 centered on “autonomous labs,” while also detailing year-over-year declines in cell engineering revenue and continued progress on expense reductions and cash burn.
2026 focus shifts toward autonomous labs
Co-founder and CEO Jason Kelly said the company views 2025’s fourth quarter as a “breakout quarter” in defining and leading the category of autonomous labs. He described 2026 as a year focused on “investing to win” in autonomous labs, which he framed as part of a broader movement combining robotics, AI, and autonomy.
- Concentrate investment on autonomous labs, including capital allocation changes enabled by a planned biosecurity divestiture.
- Demonstrate capabilities in Boston by “systematically decommissioning” traditional lab benches, walk-up automation, and work cells and moving more work onto a “single large autonomous lab” controlled by software.
- Book additional autonomous lab sales beyond the company’s Department of Energy-related project work, targeting national labs, biopharma, and research universities.
Biosecurity divestiture: maintaining upside while redirecting capital
Kelly spent part of his remarks explaining the company’s plan to divest its biosecurity business, which he said grew out of work begun during COVID. He highlighted the company’s monitoring efforts—distinct from diagnostic testing—including initiatives that helped reopen “5,000 schools nationwide,” as well as ongoing monitoring work at airports in partnership with the CDC, including wastewater testing from planes and related programs in other locations such as Doha, Qatar.
Kelly said interest in the defense technology sector has expanded in recent years and that Ginkgo received inbound interest from “pure play investors” who want to build next-generation biodefense companies. Under the planned divestiture approach, Kelly said Ginkgo would spin off the biosecurity business, take it private, and bring in outside investment, while Ginkgo retains a minority stake. He characterized the move as a way for Ginkgo to “share in the upside” of biosecurity while focusing its cash resources on autonomous labs.
Financial results: revenue down, losses and cash burn improve
CFO Steve Coen provided an update on fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 results, including segment revenue, expenses, and Adjusted EBITDA.
Cell engineering revenue was $26 million in Q4 2025, down 26% from Q4 2024. Coen said the company supported 109 revenue-generating programs during the quarter, down 4% year over year, which he attributed primarily to “ongoing program rationalization” tied to restructuring activities.
For the full year 2025, cell engineering revenue was $133 million, compared with $174 million in 2024. Coen also pointed to revenue items tied to the release of deferred revenue following mutual terminations of prior agreements:
- Q1 2025 included $7.5 million of non-cash revenue related to termination of the BiomEdit agreement.
- Q3 2024 included $45 million of non-cash revenue related to termination of the Motif FoodWorks agreement.
Excluding those impacts, Coen said cell engineering revenue was $125 million in 2025 and $129 million in 2024, with the decrease driven primarily by restructuring-related customer program rationalization.
Biosecurity revenue was $7 million in Q4 2025 and $37 million for the full year 2025.
On expenses, Coen said cell engineering R&D expense fell 44% to $28 million in Q4 2025 from $50 million a year earlier. For the full year, cell engineering R&D expense decreased 42% to $159 million from $272 million.
Coen also discussed a prior cloud and AI partnership commitment with Google Cloud. He said full-year 2025 R&D included a $21 million shortfall obligation. In October 2025, the company “amended and reset” annual commitments and settled the shortfall obligation for $14 million. Coen said the reset reduced future minimum commitments by “more than $100 million” compared to original terms and extended the commitment term from three to six years.
Cell engineering G&A expense decreased 40% to $12 million in Q4 2025 from $20 million in Q4 2024. For the full year, G&A expense fell 51% to $56 million from $115 million, which Coen attributed to restructuring efforts.
Cell engineering segment operating loss improved to $17 million in Q4 2025 from $38 million a year earlier. For the full year 2025, the segment operating loss was $96 million versus $219 million in 2024, which Coen again tied directly to restructuring actions, with some impact from the previously mentioned items.
Coen said biosecurity segment operating loss improved 60% in Q4 2025 compared to Q4 2024 and improved 38% for the full year 2025 compared to 2024.
Total Adjusted EBITDA was -$36 million in Q4 2025 versus -$57 million in Q4 2024. For the full year 2025, total Adjusted EBITDA was -$167 million compared with -$293 million in 2024.
Coen also noted carrying costs related to excess leased space, describing it as base rent and other charges for space the company is not occupying, net of sublease income. He said the carrying cost was $4 million in 2025 and $15 million in Q4.
On liquidity and spending, Coen reported cash burn of $47 million in Q4 2025, down from $55 million in Q4 2024, and full-year 2025 cash burn of $171 million, down from $383 million in 2024. Kelly added that the company reduced annual cash burn by 55% from fiscal 2024 to 2025, and said Ginkgo ended the year with $430 million on its books.
2026 guidance: cash burn range, not revenue
For 2026, Coen said the company will not provide revenue guidance and will instead guide on cash burn, which management said better reflects ongoing services and planned investments in autonomous labs. Coen guided to overall 2026 cash burn of $125 million to $150 million, describing the range as balancing cost efficiency, continued services, and investments including the “build-out of our frontier autonomous lab in Boston.”
Kelly reinforced that decision, saying the company wants investor focus on how cash is being deployed as it invests “very deliberately” in autonomous labs, and said he wants internal teams focused on shifting work from traditional laboratory setups to the autonomous lab rather than targeting short-term service revenue.
Autonomous labs: expansion plans, customer interest, and commercialization
Kelly highlighted several developments tied to autonomous labs:
- OpenAI project: Kelly said Ginkgo connected GPT-5 to its autonomous lab in Boston, enabling iterative “lab in a loop” experiment design and execution. He said the collaboration improved state-of-the-art performance on a cell-free protein synthesis challenge by 40% after six rounds of experimentation.
- Department of Energy / PNNL: Kelly referenced a ribbon-cutting at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory tied to installation work under the Genesis project. He also cited a new $47 million DOE contract to build a “97-robot, 97-rack autonomous lab” at PNNL.
- SLAS conference tours: Kelly said Ginkgo hosted tours of its “Nebula” autonomous lab in Boston, now at more than 50 racks, and that 590 people attended. He said the company plans to expand from roughly 50 racks to 100 racks by the first half of the year.
In the Q&A, Kelly said the rack expansion is intended to help move work from benches, walk-up automation, and work cells onto the Nebula system, supporting offerings including Solutions, Datapoints, and an upcoming cloud lab service. He said Solutions deals tend to be multi-year but are pursued project by project, while Datapoints is becoming more repeat-driven as customers build trust. He described the cloud lab concept as a forthcoming offering aimed at smaller orders—such as “$50” or “$200”—to let scientists try autonomous lab work before making larger commitments.
Kelly also addressed a question about onshoring and manufacturing sites, saying Ginkgo has seen interest in applying its systems to manufacturing quality control protocols and is in discussions with some customers about deploying automation at manufacturing locations.
On rack production scalability, he said the company made design changes over the past several years aimed at manufacturability, and that racks are made in San Jose with final assembly and integration in Emeryville, California, through a partner. While he said scaling manufacturing is not the company’s “immediate problem,” he indicated it is planning for potential future expansion through larger partners if demand increases.
About Ginkgo Bioworks (NYSE:DNA)
Ginkgo Bioworks, Inc is a synthetic biology company that designs custom microbes for customers across a range of industries. Utilizing a proprietary organism foundry platform, the company engineers cells to produce high-value chemicals, enzymes, and other biological materials. By integrating automation, data analytics and machine learning, Ginkgo Bioworks seeks to accelerate the development of biologically derived solutions at industrial scale.
The company’s services span the entire development cycle, from genetic design and strain optimization to fermentation and downstream processing.
