Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings, Inc. 2026 Q2 Earnings Call

I'm Daniel Marshall, Senior Manager of Communications and Ownership. I'm joined by Jason Kelly, our Co-founder and CEO, and Steven Coen, our CFO. Thanks as always for joining us. We're looking forward to updating you on our progress. As a reminder, during the presentation today, we will be making forward-looking statements which involve risks and uncertainties. Please refer to our filings with the SEC to learn more about these risks and uncertainties, including our most recent 10-K. Today, in addition to updating you on the quarter results, we're going to make the argument that autonomous labs are an imperative for American science. We're also going to provide insight into how we are going to scale the capabilities of Nebula, our autonomous lab in Boston, and share an update on how we are getting autonomous labs like Nebula into the hands of the next generation of scientists.

As usual, we'll end with a Q&A session. I'll take questions from analysts, investors, and the public. You can submit those questions to us in advance via X, #ginkgoresults or email investors@ginkgobioworks.com. All right. Over to you, Jason.

Thanks, Daniel. We always start with our mission here, which is to make biology easier to engineer at Ginkgo. In 2026, our goals remain the same. We want to focus and invest to win in this new category of autonomous labs. We want to focus Ginkgo's efforts really on the technology side, largely into autonomous labs. We're going to invest to extend our lead there. Second, we want to demonstrate the capabilities of an autonomous lab by using our big system here in Boston, Nebula, which I'll talk about today, that we, in the last quarter, expanded that substantially, so that we can sort of move the majority of our work onto that system over the course of the year and into the future.

That's a great chance to both improve the economics of our services and also demonstrate to other potential buyers of autonomous labs just what you can do with a system like this. So I want to talk a bit about that today as well. Finally, want to book new sales of autonomous labs in biopharma, national labs, and as I'll mention today, research universities, which we're very excited about. We have made a lot of headway, as you know, and we've been talking about for a couple of years now on improving our cash burn. You can see that in the second half of this year, we intend to improve on that burn even further than we did in the first half of the year. That is really work we've been doing in the first half of the year, sort of paying off and bearing fruit.

Really excited. This gives us this plus our $302 million in cash and cash equivalents, as well as we have an additional $87 million that we've set aside for restricted cash for various customers and certain operating activities. Puts us in a really nice spot going into the second half of this year and the future to really have the capital we need to continue this growth into autonomous labs. With that, I'm going to pass it over to Steve in order to dig into the financials. You'll hear from me again in the strategic session.

Thank you. Thanks, Jason. Before I walk through our financials, I want to remind everyone that following the previously announced transaction that closed on April 3rd, the divestiture of Biosecurity is classified as discontinued operations within our financial statements.

Accordingly, we have and will retrospectively recast all prior periods presented to conform to this presentation. The former Biosecurity results are now reported as loss from discontinued operations below loss from continuing operations. All of our financial commentary I will provide today relates exclusively to continuing operations where we now operate as a single segment. With that, I'll now discuss our Q2 results. Revenue was $20 million in the second quarter of 2026, down 48% compared to the second quarter of 2025. For the first six months of 2026, revenue was $40 million, down 49% compared to the same period last year.

As previously disclosed, revenue in the first six months of 2025 included $7.5 million in non-cash revenue relating to the mutual termination of the BioMerit agreement. Excluding this, revenue for the first six months of 2026 was down approximately 42% from the prior year period. It is important to note that our net loss includes a number of non-cash and other non-recurring items, as detailed more fully in our financial statements. Because of these non-cash and other non-recurring items, we believe adjusted EBITDA is a more indicative measure of our profitability. A full reconciliation between adjusted EBITDA and GAAP net loss from continuing operations can be found in the appendix. In the second quarter of 2026, R&D expense decreased 4% from $31 million in the second quarter of 2025 to $30 million in the second quarter of 2026.

G&A expense decreased 26% from $16 million in the second quarter of 2025 to $12 million in the second quarter of 2026. These decreases were primarily driven by our restructuring efforts, which was substantially concluded at the end of 2025. Net loss from continuing operations was $57 million in the second quarter of 2026, compared to a loss of $53 million in the prior year period. Moving further down the page, you'll note that adjusted EBITDA in the second quarter of 2026 was negative $36 million, compared to negative $25 million in the second quarter of 2025.

It is important to note that adjusted EBITDA includes the carrying cost of excess lease space, which you can see was $14 million in the second quarter of 2026, up from $12 million in the prior year period. This cost represents the base rent and other charges relating to leased space which we are not occupying, net of sublease income. This is a cash operating cost that is not related to driving revenue right now and can be potentially mitigated through subleasing. Finally, cash burn in the second quarter of 2026 was $45 million, compared to $38 million in the second quarter of 2025. For the first six months of 2026, cash burn was $93 million, down from $96 million in the same period last year. A 3% decrease. As previously reported, we paid Google Cloud $14 million in the first quarter of this year relating to the 2025 amended commitment, which increased our cash burn for the period.

Resetting the commitment reduced our future minimum commitments by more than $100 million compared with the original terms and extended the commitment term from three to six years. Excluding this payment, cash burn reflects a significant decrease in the first half of 2026 compared to the first half of 2025, which was a direct result of the restructure. During the second quarter, we raised $17 million through our at the market equity program. Consistent with our methodology, these related proceeds are excluded from cash burn for all periods presented. Turning to guidance. As we discussed earlier this year, 2026 is about continuing to be cost efficient while investing in our AI robotics and software to bring autonomous labs to our bioscience customers, including the build-out of our frontier autonomous lab in Boston.

We have turned the page from focusing on restructuring actions to focus this year not only on cost efficiency, but on investing in what we see as our opportunities while continuing to provide our customers the advanced services they have come to expect. For these reasons, we believe cash burn best reflects our continuing services and tools and further investments in autonomous labs. In terms of outlook for the full year, we are reaffirming our overall cash burn guidance for 2026 totaling $125 million-$150 million. This range reflects a firm balance amongst cost efficiency, continuing services and tools, and further investments we are making.

In conclusion, we are pleased with the continued improvements in cash burn efficiency and our business pursuits for 2026. With that, I'll hand it back over to you, Jason.

Thanks, Steve. As I said, Ginkgo's mission is to make biology easier to engineer. We're going to have three strategic topics today to dig in on. First, there's been a lot of activity in U.S. science, a new report coming out of Office of Science and Technology Policy I'm going to touch on. Autonomous labs are becoming a real imperative for the U.S. to stay competitive in science and particularly in biotechnology versus China. I'm going to speak to that. Second, Nebula, our large autonomous lab here in Boston, is the largest in the world. It's growing rapidly. I want to showcase what we've been doing with it. Finally, we are using that lab and all our infrastructure here at Ginkgo to offer up competing services to offshore CROs that are quite economically competitive for customers, and I want to highlight one of those in particular.