Our mission is to make biology easier to engineer. At Ginkgo, we’ve always strived to bring the best technologies—including biological tools, automation, and software—together onto one platform to better serve our customers.
Today we’re excited to announce that we’ve signed definitive agreements to acquire two teams and technologies that will help us achieve this important mission, one from Bayer and Joyn that builds our vertical capabilities in agricultural biologicals and the other, Zymergen, that brings in-house core hardware and software to accelerate our horizontal Foundry capabilities.
We are building this platform for our customers, who come to us with their biological design challenges and product ideas. We reiterate this point a lot, because it is unusual in the biotech industry: we aren’t interested in building our own products, we’re interested in building a platform that will allow the rest of the world to deploy biology as a solution for our hardest challenges, from food security to pandemic response, from supply chain resilience to climate change.
We previously announced our plans for this agreement with Bayer, to acquire Bayer’s 175,000-square-foot West Sacramento Biologics Research & Development facility, team, and internal discovery and lead optimization platform, as well as integrate the R&D platform assets from Joyn Bio, our joint-venture with Leaps by Bayer formed in 2017.
We share a common vision with the teams at Joyn and Bayer that will be joining our team to develop and deploy the best that biology has to offer in agriculture. To ensure sustainable food security for an ever growing population, we need to invest in biological solutions and work with the best teams around the world to bring these solutions to market. We are excited to be able to make this platform accessible to innovative companies and teams who may otherwise not have the resources or expertise to develop these capabilities in house. We look forward to engaging with other customers in supporting the development of their agricultural biological programs in addition to Bayer on our new agriculture biologics platform.
We also share a common vision with Zymergen—that biology can transform a wide range of industries including manufacturing, agriculture, and medicine. Through the transaction announced today and expected to close in the first quarter of 2023, we plan to integrate Zymergen’s core automation and software technologies for scaling strain engineering capacity into our Foundry, including Zymergen’s machine learning and data science tools for exploring known and unknown genetic design space.
We expect this acquisition to significantly enhance the strength of our platform to better serve our customers, both through the expansion of our Codebase of biological assets and the automation, software, and data tools of our Foundry. We will as always remain a horizontal platform, enabling customers across industries rather than producing our own products, and will support Zymergen’s plans to evaluate strategic alternatives for their Advanced Materials and Drug Discovery businesses.
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 beyond 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 technical teams, who will support our scaling objectives.
We’re so excited to work with the amazing teams from Bayer, Joyn, and Zymergen to continue to grow our offerings and our capabilities to support the essential work happening across industries to grow the bioeconomy. See key legal info here and read more about these exciting transactions in our press releases today on Bayer and Zymergen, or watch the recording of our conference call this morning here.
