Jason Kelly, co-founder and CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks, shares insights on how automation and AI are revolutionizing biotech. He discusses the importance of generating standardized experimental datasets for effective machine learning, allowing faster R&D processes. Jason highlights the company's shift to an automation-first model and modular lab technologies that democratize advanced experimentation. The conversation also touches on reducing drug development costs and the strategic importance of biotech in national security.
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question_answer ANECDOTE
Early Hustle And YC Breakthrough
Jason Kelly started Ginkgo right out of grad school in 2008 and survived by winning grants and buying used equipment.
He later attended Y Combinator in 2014 and used that runway to raise large private rounds and scale the company.
insights INSIGHT
Platform Automation Scales Across Markets
Ginkgo industrialized automation to lower R&D unit economics across many biotech markets.
The same DNA synthesis, analytics and liquid handling scale across bacteria, yeast and mammalian workflows.
insights INSIGHT
AI Needs New Standardized Bio Data
Legacy biopharma data is messy and lacks metadata, so it cannot reliably train modern ML models.
Companies therefore must generate new, standardized high-throughput datasets to unlock AI's potential.
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Synopsis:
This episode is proudly sponsored by Quartzy.
Biotech is undergoing a scientific redesign, and Jason Kelly reveals to host Alok Tayi how automation, AI-ready datasets, and modular lab technologies are reshaping the future of R&D. Jason explains why legacy biopharma data—messy, inconsistent, and lacking metadata—cannot power modern machine learning, and why the industry must generate entirely new, massively standardized experimental datasets to unlock AI’s true potential.
He walks through Ginkgo’s evolution from platform partnerships to a next-generation CRO built for AI-driven discovery, offering industrialized functional genomics, mammalian engineering, CRISPR libraries, and high-throughput developability assays at unprecedented scale. Jason also describes how Ginkgo’s reconfigurable automation systems—robotic building blocks that replace 18-month custom builds—are democratizing high-throughput experimentation and making advanced lab infrastructure as flexible as cloud computing.
Together, Jason and Alok explore how the fusion of automation and AI can collapse R&D timelines, rewrite cost structures, and enable thousands of new biotech companies to test ideas faster than ever before. For scientists, engineers, and AI practitioners, this episode offers a compelling look at the new scientific architecture emerging at the intersection of robotics, data, and programmable biology.
Biography:
Dr. Jason Kelly is the co-founder and CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks. He took the company public and raised $1.6B in the largest US biotech public listing to date in 2021. Today the company is pioneering autonomous labs that accelerate bioengineering across biopharma, agriculture, and industrial biotech industries. Jason also previously served as the Chair of the US National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology which oversees how advancements in emerging biotechnology will shape current and future activities of the US Department of Defense. Prior to Ginkgo, Jason received B.S. degrees in Chemical Engineering and Biology and a PhD in Biological Engineering all from MIT.
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