Private labs has been Ginkgo’s main strategy for 2026: the company will concentrate money there, move work from traditional benches to the Nebula system in Boston, expand the rack capacity to 100 racks, and commercialize offerings that include Solutions, Datapoints and cloud lab service while integrating AI (eg, GPT-5) into “lab” testing.
Biosecurity divestiture plans to reallocate capital: Ginkgo will diversify and take its biosecurity business private with outside investors while keeping a small stake, allowing the company to “reverse share” but free capital for private lab investments.
Finances and directions for 2026: mobile engineering revenue decreased (Q4 down 26% year-on-year; full year $133M vs $174M in 2024) but R&D and G&A reduced losses improved and Adjusted EBITDA, cash burn decreased to $171M in 2025 (Q4 $47Mding), and management of $10M only $10 2026 instead of income.
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Ginkgo Bioworks (NYSE: DNA ) used its fourth-quarter earnings call to reveal a sharp 2026 strategy focused on “independent labs,” while also explaining a year-over-year decline in cellular engineering revenue and continued progress in cost reductions and cash burns.
Founder and CEO Jason Kelly said the company views the fourth quarter of 2025 as “the first quarter” in defining and leading the private labs segment. He described 2026 as a year focused on “investing to win” in private labs, positioning them as part of a broader movement that includes robotics, AI, and autonomy.
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Kelly has set three priorities for 2026:
Focus on investment in private labsincluding changes in funding allocations enabled by systematic biosecurity diversification.
Show skills in Boston By “systematically eliminating” traditional lab benches, walk-up automation, and work cells and moving more work into “one large independent lab” controlled by software.
Book more independent lab sales beyond project work related to the company’s Energy Department, directed to national labs, biopharma, and research universities.
Kelly spent part of his remarks explaining the company’s plan to spin off its biosecurity business, which he said grew out of work started during the COVID-19 pandemic. He highlighted the company’s monitoring efforts—different from diagnostic testing—including programs that have helped reopen “5,000 schools across the country,” as well as ongoing monitoring work at airports in partnership with the CDC, including testing of contaminated water on airplanes and related programs in other locations such as Doha, Qatar.
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Kelly said interest in the defense technology sector has increased in recent years and that Ginkgo has received interest from “pure investors” looking to build next-generation biodefense companies. Under the planned spin-off, Kelly said Ginkgo would spin off the biosecurity business, take it private, and bring in outside investment, while Ginkgo would retain a small stake. He described the move as a way for Ginkgo to “join the top” of biosecurity while focusing its financial resources on private labs.
CFO Steve Coen provided an update on fourth quarter and full year 2025 results, including segment revenue, expenses, and Adjusted EBITDA.
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Mobile engineering income it 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 said was primarily “driven by ongoing programming” related to restructuring activities.
Full year 2025, mobile engineering fee it was $133 million, compared to $174 million in 2024. Coen also pointed to the revenue associated with the release of deferred revenue following the similar termination of previous agreements:
Q1 2025 included $7.5 million of non-cash income related to the completion of the BiomEdit agreement.
Q3 2024 included $45 million of non-cash income related to the completion of the Motif FoodWorks deal.
Excluding those impacts, Coen said mobile engineering revenue was $125 million in 2025 and $129 million in 2024, a decline driven primarily by restructuring of customer plans associated with the restructuring.
Biosecurity income it was $7 million in Q4 2025 and $37 million in the full year 2025.
At a cost, said Coen Mobile engineering R&D costs down 44% to $28 million in Q4 2025 from $50 million last year. For the full year, mobile engineering R&D expenses fell 42% to $159 million from $272 million.
Coen also discussed the cloud’s pre-commitment and commitment to the AI partnership with Google Cloud. He said the full year 2025 R&D covers a $21 million shortfall. In October 2025, the company “amended and reset” annual commitments and settled the shortfall of $14 million. Coen said the reset reduced future base commitments by “more than $100 million” compared to original goals and extended the commitment period from three to six years.
G&A expenses for cellular engineering fell 40% to $12 million in Q4 2025 from $20 million in Q4 2024. For the full year, G&A expenses fell 51% to $56 million from $115 million, which Coen attributed to restructuring efforts.
Loss of functionality of the mobile engineering component improved to $17 million in Q4 2025 from $38 million last year. For the full year 2025, the operating segment loss was $96 million compared to $219 million in 2024, which Coen also tied directly to restructuring actions, with some impact from previously mentioned factors.
Coen said loss of functionality of the biosecurity component 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 compared to $57 million in Q4 2024. For the full year 2025, adjusted gross EBITDA was $167 million compared to $293 million in 2024.
Coen also noted administrative costs associated with excess leased space, which he defined as the basis of rent and other charges for space the company does not occupy, net of rental income. He said administrative costs were $4 million in 2025 and $15 million in Q4.
Regarding liquidity and spending, Coen reported burning money 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 has reduced annual cash burn by 55% from fiscal 2024 to 2025, and said that 3 million Ginkgos were eliminated.
For 2026, Coen said the company will not provide revenue guidance and will instead guide through cash burn, which executives say better reflects ongoing services and planned investments in private labs. Coen is targeting a 2026 total cash burn of $125 million to $150 million, describing the scope as balancing cost efficiencies, ongoing services, and investments that include “the construction of our private lab in Boston.”
Kelly emphasized that decision, saying the company wants investors to focus on how money is spent as it invests “very deliberately” in private labs, and said it wants internal teams to focus on moving work from a traditional laboratory setup to a private lab instead of looking at short-term service fees.
Kelly highlighted several developments related to private labs:
OpenAI project: Kelly said Ginkgo has connected the GPT-5 to its private lab in Boston, allowing for repetitive “lab in a loop” test design and execution. He said the collaboration improved the state-of-the-art performance in the cell-free protein synthesis challenge by 40% after six rounds of testing.
Department of Energy / PNNL: Kelly talked about a ribbon cutting at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in conjunction with the installation work under the Genesis project. He also touted a new $47 million DOE contract to build a “97-robot, 97-rack autonomous lab” at PNNL.
Visiting SLAS conferences: Kelly said Ginkgo hosted tours of its private “Nebula” lab in Boston, which now has more than 50 racks, and that 590 people attended. He said the company plans to grow from 50 to 100 racks in 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 into the Nebula system, supporting offerings including Solutions, Datapoints, and the upcoming cloud lab service. He said that Solutions deals tend to be multi-year deals but are pursued on a project-by-project basis, while Datapoints are increasingly being run repeatedly as customers build trust. He described the cloud lab concept as an upcoming offering aimed at small orders—such as “$50” or “$200″—to allow scientists to try out independent lab work before making larger commitments.
Kelly also answered a question about fishing and production areas, saying that Ginkgo has seen interest in using its systems in manufacturing quality control agreements and is in discussions with other customers about automated shipping to production areas.
In the production of scalability racks, he said that the company made design changes in the last few years aimed at production, and that the racks are made in San Jose with final assembly and integration in Emeryville, California, through a partner. While he said scaling production is not an “immediate issue for the company,” he indicated that it is planning for possible expansion with larger partners if demand picks up.
Ginkgo Bioworks, Inc is a synthetic biology company that designs custom antibiotics for customers across a range of industries. Using a biological innovation platform, the company manufactures cells to produce high-value chemicals, enzymes, and other biological substances. By combining automation, data analysis and machine learning, Ginkgo Bioworks seeks to accelerate the development of biologically derived solutions on an industrial scale.
The company’s services cover the entire development cycle, from genetic engineering and strain optimization to fermentation and downstream processing.
The article “Ginkgo Bioworks Q4 Earnings Call Highlights” was first published by MarketBeat.
