June 12, 2016

Boston-based biotech startup, Ginkgo Bioworks, has raised $100 million Series C backed by Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund, Senator Investment Group, Cascade Investment, Baillie Gifford, Viking Global Investors, and Allen & Company LLC.

Founded in 2008, and launched through Y Combinator two years ago, Gingko Bioworks originally operated on $15 million in federal defense funding. Over that ensuing years, the company developed a method of creating custom microbes using robots at a fraction of the cost of the same process being conducted by human scientists. The company has already secured contracts with an unnamed agricultural company to create organic pesticides, a French beverage company to develop sweeteners, and the French fragrance firm, Robertet, to create synthetic rose oil.

“We believe that designed biology will be for this century what information technology and computers were to the last,” said Jason Kelly, CEO and Co-Founder of Ginkgo Bioworks in a press statement. “Biology is the most advanced manufacturing technology on the planet. As we get better at designing biology, we’ll use it to make everything, disrupting sectors that the traditional tech industry hasn’t been able to access. In the past few years, we’ve heard that biology is becoming a software problem, but biology can do many things that software simply can’t.”

This Series C round follows Ginkgo’s $45 million Series B secured in July 2015, which was led by Viking Global Partner, and including OS Fund, Y Combinator, and Felicis Ventures.

The funds from this round, which brought Ginkgo’s total private funding within the past 15 months to $154 million, will be used to support the company’s expansion into new markets including industrial enzymes, commodity chemicals, and in the human health space. It will also help fund the establishment of Bioworks2, Ginkgo’s 70,000 square foot state-of-the-art foundry which will be used by the company’s engineers to design organisms on a commercial scale.

In conjunction with the Series C, Ginkgo also announced it has contracted with Twist Bioscience and Gen9 – two leading synthetic genetic suppliers, for the purchase of 600 million base pairs of manufactured DNA within the coming months to be used as the raw material for the rapid prototyping of designed organisms. This purchase agreement marks the largest purchase of DNA on record according to the company.

“With the orders announced today, Ginkgo is moving towards fully outsourcing our in vitro DNA construction to the DNA synthesis industry,” said Jason Kelly, CEO and co-founder of Ginkgo Bioworks. “If your company is still cloning by hand you’re missing out on a big opportunity.”

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Lynda Kiernan