Business Description

Unless the context otherwise requires, all references in this section to the “Company,” “Ginkgo,” “we,” “us,” or “our” refer to the business of Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings, Inc. and our subsidiaries. Overview: Our Mission is to Make Biology Easier to Engineer Our mission is to make biology easier to engineer. That has never changed. Every choice we’ve made with respect to our business model, our platform, our people, and our culture is grounded in whether it will advance our mission. Why? Because: 1. Biology is programmable. All living things run on the same DNA code. 2. Biology matters. The ability to engineer biology has had and will have a profound impact on how we develop new medicines and vaccines, grow our food, and manufacture many of the things we use every day. 3. Biology is hard. Today, it is still too difficult and too costly to engineer biology, preventing critical innovations from reaching the market. Ginkgo sells services to government and commercial customers in two business segments: cell engineering , where we provide tools and biological R&D services across a range of industries, and biosecurity , where we provide services to customers who are working to identify, monitor, prevent, mitigate, and ultimately protect humanity from biological threats. An overview of these two business segments is provided below. Cell engineering Our cell engineering customers work with biology to discover and manufacture new products that have transformative potential across industries: • in medicine, developing innovative new therapeutics and vaccines; • in agriculture, advancing the sustainability and security of our food systems; • in industrial biotechnology, advancing the way we manufacture a wide range of products for better performance and lower environmental impact; and • in government, advancing new R&D priorities of strategic importance to the United States and its allies. Because engineering biology is difficult and unpredictable, biotech R&D is traditionally performed by in-house labs filled with highly trained scientists running lab experiments by hand over several years in the hope of ultimately developing a working product. Many cell engineering projects fail in development due to scientific challenges, and many are terminated because they are taking too long or are over budget. Ginkgo does not make end products; instead, we offer biological R&D services on our platform to enable our customers to bring their products to market. Historically, Ginkgo’s primary service offering has been cell engineering R&D services ( solutions ) where Ginkgo performs technical activities. In 2024, Ginkgo expanded its service offering to include services that provide our customers cell engineering tools for biological R&D, where Ginkgo enables its customers to conduct certain in-house R&D activities themselves. Our services are designed to offer customers better results on the dimensions of probability of success, speed, or cost – and ideally on all three. The fundamental advantage of our cell engineering platform over traditional cell engineering done by hand at our customers’ labs is that our platform improves with scale while in-house cell engineering in our customers' labs largely does not. Compounding and mutually reinforcing improvements of our laboratory automation and software infrastructure—our Autonomous Lab—and our reusable data assets enable us to improve our services with each successive project. 1 Table of Contents Our Autonomous Lab is a flexible wet lab built from our Reconfigurable Automation Cart (“RAC”) systems capable of large scale data generation; it powers generative AI and machine learning (“ML”) tools that enable more successful biological R&D. We now offer services providing such data generation, AI and automation tools directly to Ginkgo customers. Our data assets comprise best practices for cell engineering, along with sequences and host cells that have been honed through dozens of programs and can be directly reusable for our cell engineering solutions. We now offer licenses to our host cells and other IP assets, such as our broad metagenomic library. Cell engineering service offerings, depicted on a spectrum of customization and technical risk borne by Ginkgo on the vertical axis, and the mix of up-front service fees and downstream value we charge on the horizontal axis.…