This $1 Billion Startup Backed By Bill Gates Prints New DNA

Forget your smartphone, the coolest piece of technology in your home might be a houseplant.

That's according to Reshma Shetty, the COO and co-founder of Ginkgo Bioworks, a Boston-based biotech startup that bills itself as "the organism company." Founded in 2009 by a group of MIT scientists, and recently named to the 2018 CNBC Disruptor 50 List, Ginkgo uses genetic engineering to design and print new DNA for a variety of organisms that can then be used for anything from killing antibiotic-resistant germs to producing artificial sweetener and cheaper perfume.

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"Plants can self repair, they can self replicate, and they're totally renewable," says Shetty. "What we're excited about is being able to design biology — design microbes, design plants — to be able to do what we want."

Ginkgo's ability to essentially reprogram the DNA of plants and other organisms is what makes the company so valuable, both in its work and as a business. Large companies pay Ginkgo to develop genetically-modified organisms that make all manner of products cheaper and easier to produce.

In 2017, pharmaceutical company Bayer joined Ginkgo for a $100 million partnership aimed at synthesizing microbes that would allow staple crops like corn, wheat and rice to produce their own fertilizer. By doing that, they have the potential to disrupt the $250 billion global fertilizer market by replacing chemical fertilizers with a cheaper, more environmentally-friendly solution. (The production of nitrogen fertilizers normally used on such crops accounts for roughly 3 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, Ginkgo says.)

Of course, this puts Ginkgo's work in the middle of the ongoing debate over genetically-modified foods, or GMO foods, which have the potential to make food cheaper for consumers while feeding more people, but which detractors argue can have negative effects on the environment and on consumers' health.

Ginkgo also genetically-engineers yeast to make rose-scented oil that smells like the real thing but costs perfume companies (like France's Robertet, a Ginkgo partner) less than using actual roses and produces more consistent scents. It's the first new rose oil on the market in 150 years, according to Fortune.

With yeast Ginkgo also makes artificial sweeteners for food, which are cheaper and easier to make than those derived from sources like Stevia leaves. And Ginkgo works with the US Department of Defense to custom-design bacteria for probiotics that can treat antibiotic-resistant germs.

Thanks to its ground-breaking synthetic biology projects, the company is reportedly valued at more than $1 billion after raising over $429 million in total funding from its investors, who include Cascade Investment, the investment firm owned by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

But it took Ginkgo nearly a decade to get to that point.

Shetty and three of her co-founders — CEO Jason Kelly, Barry Canton, and Austin Che — each obtained a Ph.D. from MIT in 2008 and were working with professor Tom Knight (also a co-founder) on synthetic biology research projects when the group decided the best way to keep their work going beyond their Ph.D. research was to launch their own company.

The group formed Ginkgo in 2009 and spent the next several years surviving off of government research grants as they fine-tuned their process of genetically engineering microbes, including building automated tools that the company uses to collect genetic information from organisms, transform cells and rewrite DNA.

This was in the early days of the financial crisis and Ginkgo had no luck attracting outside investors. Money was sometimes tight, and so the co-founders improvised. For pennies on the dollar, Ginkgo bought the incredibly expensive equipment it needed from other biotech firms that had gone out of business due to the economic downturn.

"We put together our first lab for about $150,000, which is roughly 10 to 100 [times] cheaper than what most to biology labs get built for."

Read more about Ginkgo here

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This $1 billion start-up backed by Bill Gates prints new DNA — and everyone from the DOD to Bayer is on board | CNBC Make It.