Ginkgo Enters Into A Definitive Agreement To Acquire Zymergen

The Acquisition by Ginkgo is expected to enhance its platform significantly by integrating robust automation and software capabilities and diverse biological engineering expertise.

FREMONT, CA: "We have always had incredible respect for the Zymergen team and the strength of the technologies that they have built for cell programming. We are thrilled to integrate Zymergen's capabilities into our Foundry, which we expect to accelerate the growth of our platform as we continue to deliver on our mission to make biology easier to engineer for our customers, helping us drive down the costs of cell programming as we invest in scale. We can't wait to welcome Zymergen's technical teams, who will support our scaling objectives." says Jason Kelly, CEO, and co-founder of Ginkgo Bioworks.

Ginkgo Bioworks, one of the premier horizontal platforms for cell programming, and Zymergen revealed a definitive agreement under which Ginkgo would acquire Zymergen in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $300 million in market capitalization. The agreement's terms are unanimously approved by both the companies' boards of directors. 

Ginkgo is a horizontal platform that serves customers across industries rather than producing its products. It will help Zymergen evaluate strategic alternatives for their Advanced Materials and Drug Discovery businesses, which have valuable product pipelines and rapid prototyping capabilities. Zymergen will continue its solo cost-cutting activities, such as workforce reductions and program optimization. Finally, acquiring Zymergen personnel is expected to assist Ginkgo in planning to recruit as the platform scales. Once the integration is complete, Ginkgo expects these efforts to reduce incremental run-rate operating expenses associated with the combination.

This acquisition brings together two highly complementary firms that believe biology has the potential to alter several industries, including manufacturing, agriculture, and medicine. Ginkgo intends to incorporate into its Foundry Zymergen's key automation and software technologies for scaling strain engineering capacity, including Zymergen's machine learning and data science tools for exploring known and unexplored genetic design space. Following the deal, Ginkgo clients will benefit from developing Ginkgo's library of biological assets ("Codebase").