Ginkgo Bioworks

In it'sits early years, the biotech company was supported primarily through governments grants. Working on a variety of projects with different government agencies, such as the national science foundation and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), before gaining access to venture capital funding in the summer of 2014.

Ginkgo Bioworks had pre-money evaluation of $350 million before receiving $100 million in its series C funding round on June 8th, 2016. The funding came from a number of old and new investors including: Y Combinator, Viking Global Investors, Senator Investment Group, Baillie Gifford, and Allen & Company .

On December 14th, 2017 Ginkgo Bioworks completed its series D funding round. The comapnycompany had a pre-money valuation of $725 million and gained an additional $275 million dollars in venture capital. The $275 million came from Viking Global Investors, Y Combinators Continuity fund, Cascade Investment, and Bill Gates. Ginkgo Bioworks is using the series D funding to build a BioworksS3 at its headquarters in Boston and hire an additional employees.

On September 23rd, 2016 Ginkgo Bioworks announced they will be working with Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM) to design organisms capable of producing cultured ingredients for use in agricultural processing and food ingredient industries . ADM hopes to help Ginkgo Bioworks create new organisms that reduce cost and increase the sustainability of their agricultural processing and food ingredient business. ADM plans on using Ginkgo Bioworks for solving problems faced by their customers through providing novel ingredient production and formulation processes.

On March 20th, 2018, the German company Bayer and its crop science division announced they will be starting a new company called Joyn Bio.

Ginkgo Bioworks announced on September 22, 2016 that they will being partnering up with Cargill to help them improve their bio-industrial fermentationsfermentation processes.

On October 19th, 2016 Ginkgo Bioworks became partners with Prospect Bio. Prospect Bio and Ginkgo Bioworks are working together to create a new biosensor that will improve the speed and lower the cost of organism prototyping for new strain development. The biosensor underdevelopmentunder development will make the process of organism screening (testing for a desired trait) process faster. Organism screening is one of the slowest processes of the design, build, test system Ginkgo Bioworks uses for organism development. Normally, each organism created by Ginkgo Bioworks has to be screened individually. A biosensor allows for the screening of many organisms at one time. Ginkgo Bioworks is hoping for a forty-fold decrease in the cost of screening and increase the speed of creating commercial ready organisms.

On January 20th, 2017 Ginkgo Bioworks announced that it had acquired Gen9 — a company specializing in DNA synthesis. Ginkgo Bioworks previously contracted Gen9 to deliver 300 million base pairs in 2017, making Ginkgo Bioworks Gen9's biggest customerscustomer beforeprior to the acquisition took place.

Ginkgo Bioworks CEO, Jason Kelly, said in relation toof acquiring Gen9 "Our mission is to make biology easier to engineer and through that to enable our customers to grow better products. Having Gen9’s synthesis and assembly technology available to our customers is a valuable addition to our foundries, allowing us to further speed up the process of organism design".