What are the most valuable synthetic biology startups?

Top startups in the Synthetic Biology market ranked by valuation

Here is an updated table that ranks the top startups in the Synthetic Biology market based on their latest reported or estimated valuations.

If you need to dig deeper and get more detailed data, please check our report covering the Synthetic Biology market.

What are the most valuable Synthetic Biology startups today?

Synthetic Biology is currently a very top-heavy market: Twist Bioscience sits far ahead at about $10.3 billion, while only a small group of companies still reach billion-dollar valuations.

Benchling comes next in our ranking at an estimated $3.1 billion to $3.8 billion, followed by Generate Biomedicines at about $2.2 billion. Solugen sits around $1.6 billion to $2.2 billion, Pivot Bio around $1.6 billion to $1.7 billion, Perfect Day around $1.4 billion to $1.7 billion, Asimov around $1.1 billion to $1.8 billion and Mammoth Biosciences around $1.3 billion to $1.4 billion.

After that, the valuation curve falls quickly. Using the midpoint of every range in our 98-company dataset, the companies are worth roughly $45 billion combined. Twist alone represents close to 23% of that amount.

The list also shows how broad Synthetic Biology has become. The leaders include DNA manufacturing, biotech software, AI-designed medicines, industrial chemicals, microbial fertilizer, food proteins and gene editing. Investors are willing to pay large valuations across several parts of biology, but only when the company has a convincing path toward a very large market.

Rank	Company	Current valuation	Main business
1	Twist Bioscience	$10.3B	Synthetic DNA manufacturing
2	Benchling	$3.1B–$3.8B	Life-sciences software
3	Generate Biomedicines	$2.2B	AI-designed medicines
4	Solugen	$1.6B–$2.2B	Bio-based chemicals
5	Pivot Bio	$1.6B–$1.7B	Microbial fertilizer
6	Perfect Day	$1.4B–$1.7B	Fermented dairy proteins
7	Asimov	$1.1B–$1.8B	Cell-programming infrastructure
8	Mammoth Biosciences	$1.3B–$1.4B	CRISPR therapeutics
9	Obsidian Therapeutics	About $1.0B	Engineered cancer therapies
10	EvolutionaryScale	$800M–$1.2B	AI protein models

How many Synthetic Biology unicorns are there right now?

Only about 10 companies in our Synthetic Biology ranking are currently worth around $1 billion or more, and even that figure includes public companies rather than only traditional private unicorns.

That distinction is useful because the sector used to look much richer in billion-dollar companies. The previous funding cycle pushed companies such as Ginkgo Bioworks, Zymergen, Impossible Foods and several fermentation businesses to valuations that were many times higher than where comparable companies trade today.

Using our current estimates rather than old funding-round headlines changes the picture considerably. A company does not remain a unicorn simply because investors once priced it above $1 billion.

These days, getting above the billion-dollar mark usually requires at least one unusually strong asset. Twist has hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue and improving gross margins. Generate has a Phase 3 drug program. Pivot Bio already sells its microbial nitrogen products across millions of acres. Mammoth owns a valuable CRISPR platform. Solugen has moved beyond laboratory development into industrial production.

The current unicorn count says more about selectivity than abundance. Synthetic Biology still creates very valuable companies, but billion-dollar valuations have become much harder to keep.

Why is Twist Bioscience worth so much more than other Synthetic Biology companies?

Twist Bioscience is worth much more than its Synthetic Biology peers today because the company is producing the kind of financial evidence that the rest of the sector often struggles to show.

Twist generated $376.6 million of revenue in fiscal 2025, 20% more than the previous year, according to its SEC filings. Gross margin moved from 42.6% to 50.7%.

The company has kept growing since then. Quarterly revenue reached $103.7 million, then $110.7 million and most recently $118.4 million. That latest quarter was the company's 14th consecutive quarter of sequential revenue growth.

Twist has also raised its full-year revenue guidance to roughly $456 million to $457 million while maintaining its target of reaching adjusted EBITDA breakeven in the final quarter of the fiscal year.

That combination is unusual in this market. Plenty of Synthetic Biology companies can show technically impressive platforms. Far fewer can show sustained revenue growth, gross margins above 50% and a near-term path toward operating breakeven.

The contrast with Ginkgo Bioworks helps explain how aggressively investors now separate companies inside the same sector. Ginkgo's latest reported quarterly revenue was about $20 million, down 48% year over year, while its net loss from continuing operations reached $57 million.

Twist's premium looks much less surprising once we compare actual operating trajectories rather than scientific ambition.

What does Generate Biomedicines' IPO tell us about Synthetic Biology valuations?

Generate Biomedicines shows that public investors will still give a multibillion-dollar valuation to an AI-biology company when the technology has moved far enough into actual drug development.

Generate sold 25 million shares at $16 each in its IPO, raising $400 million. Its current public-market value sits around $2.2 billion in our ranking.

More importantly, Generate now has evidence that goes beyond model performance. Its GB-0895 antibody is being tested in two global Phase 3 trials for severe asthma. The company recently reported that recruitment was underway across all six global regions.

That is a very different valuation story from an early-stage AI platform with a promising model and no clinical asset. Generate can still fail clinically, of course, but the market can now value both its underlying platform and a specific late-stage drug candidate.

This is becoming an important dividing line in computational biology. AI can help a company reach a large valuation, but clinical or commercial proof makes that valuation much harder to dismiss.

Are AI biology startups becoming the next big Synthetic Biology companies?

AI biology is currently one of the strongest valuation pockets in Synthetic Biology, although the gap between exciting models and valuable products is still wide.

Generate Biomedicines is already worth about $2.2 billion. EvolutionaryScale sits around the $1 billion mark in our dataset after launching with more than $142 million in seed funding. Profluent is worth an estimated $650 million to $800 million, while Cradle and Basecamp Research sit in the hundreds of millions.

The reason investors are interested is fairly simple. Traditional biological R&D involves repeatedly designing something, building it, testing it in the laboratory and learning from the result. That loop is expensive and slow. Better computational models could reduce the number of failed physical experiments required to reach a useful protein, enzyme or medicine.

But not all AI-biology companies should be treated as equivalent. Generate has Phase 3 assets. EvolutionaryScale is building foundation models for proteins. Profluent is designing gene editors. Cradle sells protein-engineering software.

Those businesses will eventually be judged on different things. The most valuable AI-biology companies will probably be the ones that prove their models create molecules, therapies or workflows that are measurably better than what conventional methods produce.

For now, investors are clearly willing to fund the possibility. The harder part is turning it into revenue or clinical value.

Are gene-editing startups worth more than industrial Synthetic Biology companies?

Gene-editing companies often receive higher valuations per dollar of current revenue, while industrial Synthetic Biology companies need much stronger proof that manufacturing economics actually work.

Mammoth Biosciences is worth roughly $1.3 billion to $1.4 billion in our ranking. Tessera Therapeutics sits around $650 million to $700 million, Profluent around $650 million to $800 million and Arbor Biotechnologies around $280 million to $320 million.

Industrial biology has Solugen near the top at roughly $1.6 billion to $2.2 billion, followed much further down by Arzeda, Genomatica, Lygos and ZymoChem.

The economics explain much of the gap. One successful drug can generate billions of dollars in sales without requiring the company to manufacture enormous physical volumes. Industrial chemicals compete against supply chains that already produce huge quantities at low cost.

A company such as Solugen therefore needs to prove much more than whether its biology works. Its processes have to produce chemicals cheaply enough, consistently enough and at enough scale to compete with conventional manufacturing.

Gene editing carries huge clinical risk, but the payoff from one successful therapy can also be enormous. Industrial biology tends to face less binary product risk but much more pressure from unit economics.

Is precision fermentation still creating billion-dollar Synthetic Biology companies?

Precision fermentation still produces large Synthetic Biology valuations, but the easy-money phase has clearly ended.

Perfect Day remains the largest food-focused precision-fermentation company in our ranking at roughly $1.4 billion to $1.7 billion. The EVERY Company sits around $450 million to $650 million, Formo around $400 million to $600 million and Geltor around $420 million to $500 million.

Below them, companies such as Standing Ovation, Vivici, Remilk, Onego Bio, Verley, TurtleTree, Imagindairy, Better Dairy and New Culture mostly sit below $350 million.

Recent financing tells us what investors now care about. Perfect Day raised up to $90 million in a financing explicitly tied to scaled manufacturing, unit economics and a path toward profitability. The EVERY Company raised another $55 million and said the money would help expand manufacturing capacity and move toward profitability.

The problem was never simply whether microorganisms could produce milk or egg proteins. Companies proved that years ago. The harder question is whether they can produce those proteins cheaply enough and in enough volume to compete with conventional food ingredients.

That is why the category still has serious companies but fewer extravagant valuations. Manufacturing economics now sit at the center of the investment case.

Company	Main product	Current valuation
Perfect Day	Dairy proteins	$1.4B–$1.7B
The EVERY Company	Egg proteins	$450M–$650M
Formo	Cheese proteins	$400M–$600M
Geltor	Collagen and proteins	$420M–$500M
Standing Ovation	Casein	$190M–$350M
Vivici	Dairy ingredients	$180M–$300M
Remilk	Dairy proteins	$180M–$280M
Onego Bio	Egg proteins	$160M–$270M
Verley	Whey proteins	$160M–$260M
TurtleTree	Lactoferrin	$100M–$180M

Why is Pivot Bio still worth more than $1.5 billion?

Pivot Bio remains one of the strongest private Synthetic Biology companies because it is selling biotechnology into an enormous existing market rather than waiting for consumers to adopt a completely new category.

Pivot Bio uses microbes to help crops access nitrogen and reduce the amount of synthetic fertilizer farmers need.

The company raised $430 million in its Series D and said its products had already been used on more than one million acres. It later reported sales above $50 million and more than three million acres of use, while its own current FAQ says Pivot Bio products were used on five million U.S. acres in 2023.

That kind of adoption is valuable because farming inputs already have a clear buyer, budget and economic purpose. Pivot Bio does not have to persuade people that nitrogen matters. It has to prove that its biological nitrogen product can deliver dependable yields at a price that makes sense for farmers.

The company's valuation has also held up better than many of the high-profile Synthetic Biology names from the same investment cycle.

Agricultural biology still has plenty of execution risk, especially around farmer adoption, distribution and performance across different growing conditions. But Pivot Bio has already moved much further into the real market than most biology startups ever reach.

Has Synthetic Biology recovered from the big 2021 valuation crash?

Synthetic Biology has recovered in a few areas, but the market today is nowhere close to the broad valuation boom we saw around 2021.

Twist has become a major public-market winner. Generate Biomedicines completed a large IPO. AI-biology companies such as EvolutionaryScale and Profluent are attracting serious capital. DNA synthesis and lab automation are also getting fresh investment.

At the same time, many of the companies that defined the previous cycle remain heavily impaired.

Zymergen went public at a multibillion-dollar valuation and was acquired by Ginkgo the following year after its commercial plans broke down. Impossible Foods is now indicated at only a fraction of its old private valuation. Ginkgo itself trades far below its former peak. Amyris went through bankruptcy. Inscripta and Synthego also ended up worth far less than the capital committed to them.

What changed is the breadth of the enthusiasm. Investors no longer seem willing to revalue almost any company upward simply because it sits at the intersection of biology, sustainability and software.

These days, the recovery is company-specific. Businesses with better revenue, clinical progress or credible infrastructure can rise sharply, while weaker models continue to be repriced downward.

Did Impossible Foods really lose most of its old valuation?

Impossible Foods appears to have lost more than 90% of the valuation investors once discussed for the company.

Impossible Foods was valued at roughly $4 billion in a 2020 financing. Reuters later reported that the company was exploring a public listing that could have valued it at $10 billion or more.

Today, Forge's private-market pricing indicates a valuation around $427 million. Forge calculates that figure using secondary-market pricing, indications of interest and previous funding-round data.

The change also fits the wider plant-based meat market. Retail growth slowed sharply after the category's initial surge, making earlier expectations of rapid mass-market adoption look far too optimistic.

Impossible has raised close to $2 billion since it was founded. A current value near $400 million is a pretty sharp reminder that a huge amount of capital can build products and distribution without guaranteeing that the end market becomes as large as investors expected.

Impossible remains a real business with widely distributed products. The valuation collapse mainly shows how dramatically the expected future market changed.

Does raising more money make a Synthetic Biology startup worth more?

No clear relationship exists between how much a Synthetic Biology company has raised and what the company is worth today.

Twist has raised about $296 million in our dataset and is now worth roughly $10.3 billion. Impossible Foods raised close to $2 billion and is currently indicated around $400 million to $460 million.

Synthego raised roughly $472 million before being acquired at a value around $74 million to $85 million. Inscripta raised approximately $441 million and now sits around $40 million to $90 million in our estimates.

Spiber provides another strange example. The Japanese biomaterials company raised roughly $1.1 billion over time, yet its acquisition-related value in our dataset is only around $30 million to $35 million.

Funding measures how much investors were willing to put into a company at different moments. Current valuation tells us what the equity appears to be worth now. Those numbers can move in completely different directions.

The gap can be brutal in Synthetic Biology because companies often consume enormous amounts of money before learning whether their product works economically at commercial scale.

Company	Total funding	Current valuation
Twist Bioscience	$296M	$10.3B
Impossible Foods	~$2.0B	$400M–$460M
Ginkgo Bioworks	$790M	$631M
Synthego	$472M	$74M–$85M
Inscripta	$441M	$40M–$90M
Amyris	$2.6B	$150M–$300M estimated
Motif FoodWorks	$344M	$0M–$5M
Spiber	~$1.1B	$30M–$35M

Why have so many heavily funded Synthetic Biology companies lost value?

Many heavily funded Synthetic Biology companies lost value because they spent huge amounts of money before resolving the hardest commercial question in their business.

For industrial and food companies, that question is usually cost. A process can work beautifully inside a laboratory and still fail once the company has to buy feedstock, build fermentation capacity, purify the output and sell the final ingredient at a competitive price.

For therapeutics, the bottleneck is usually clinical development. A promising gene-editing platform still has to create drugs that survive years of trials.

For biology platforms, the problem can be demand. Zymergen had advanced technology, but its first major product did not develop into the commercial launch investors expected. Ginkgo has since spent years reshaping its own business around a different model.

That helps explain why some comparatively less capital-intensive businesses have held up better. Benchling sells software. Twist sells tools and consumables into thousands of research workflows. DNA-synthesis companies sell a basic input required by many types of biological R&D.

The stronger business models resolve commercial uncertainty early. The weaker ones can burn through hundreds of millions of dollars before learning whether customers actually want the product at a profitable price.

Is DNA synthesis one of the best businesses in Synthetic Biology right now?

DNA synthesis is currently one of the strongest infrastructure categories in Synthetic Biology because nearly every engineered-biology workflow eventually needs physical DNA.

Twist is the obvious leader, but the interesting development is happening below it too.

DNA Script has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and recently received an award worth up to $26 million through an ARPA-H program led with GE HealthCare to advance faster distributed DNA manufacturing.

Ansa Biotechnologies raised another $54.4 million in Series B financing and has pushed its commercial synthesis capabilities toward DNA constructs as long as 50 kilobases. Its recently expanded partnership with Integrated DNA Technologies gives researchers at more than 400 institutions across 33 countries access to its products.

Evonetix, Ribbon Biolabs and Molecular Assemblies are attacking the same broad bottleneck using different technical approaches.

The attraction is straightforward. A company developing a medicine, engineered microbe, biological material or gene circuit may all need synthesized DNA. The supplier therefore gets exposure to many downstream markets at once.

The biggest competitive questions are speed, accuracy, complexity, length and price. If those metrics keep improving, the market can grow even when individual Synthetic Biology applications fail.

Are automated labs becoming a real Synthetic Biology business?

Automated laboratories are becoming much more commercially relevant now that AI models need large amounts of reliable experimental data.

Emerald Cloud Lab is worth around $300 million to $360 million in our ranking. Culture Biosciences sits around $270 million to $320 million, while Opentrons is around $160 million to $180 million.

Opentrons raised a $200 million Series C to expand its automated laboratory platform. More recently, Ginkgo has shifted much of its strategic focus toward autonomous labs and cloud-lab services after restructuring other parts of its business.

AI has changed the value of experimental throughput. A model can generate thousands of biological ideas quickly, but someone still has to test them in the physical world.

Automation helps close that gap. Robots can run experiments more consistently, collect cleaner data and operate for longer periods than a conventional manual workflow.

The category is still fragmented and not every automated-lab business will become large. But the need is getting clearer: faster biological design creates more demand for faster biological testing.

Which Synthetic Biology business models get the highest valuations?

The highest Synthetic Biology valuations today tend to go to infrastructure companies, therapeutics platforms, agricultural biology and a small number of industrial companies that have already moved beyond the laboratory.

Twist and Benchling both sit near the top while selling tools used by other biotech companies. Generate and Mammoth represent therapeutics. Pivot Bio represents agriculture. Solugen represents scaled industrial biology.

Food and biomaterials companies appear throughout the ranking, but very few reach the top tier.

There is a practical reason for that. A DNA supplier can sell into hundreds of biological applications. Software can serve entire R&D teams. A successful medicine can generate huge revenue from one asset. A microbial fertilizer sells into an already enormous agricultural input market.

A new food protein or biomaterial often has to compete directly with cheap, familiar products already produced at enormous scale.

The market currently rewards broad infrastructure exposure or a very valuable end product. Companies stuck in the middle, with heavy manufacturing requirements but weak pricing power, tend to receive lower valuations.

How concentrated are Synthetic Biology startup valuations?

Synthetic Biology startup valuations are extremely concentrated today: roughly 10 companies account for most of the value in our 98-company ranking.

Using midpoint valuations, the full dataset is worth about $45 billion.

Twist alone contributes roughly $10.3 billion, or almost 23%. The top three companies account for around 36% of the total. The top 10 represent roughly 58%, while the top 20 reach about 71%.

The median company is worth only around $210 million.

The bottom half of the ranking is even more revealing. The bottom 49 companies are worth only about $3.8 billion combined, less than Twist on its own.

This is what the Synthetic Biology market looks like financially right now: many companies exist, but the economic value sits disproportionately in a small number of businesses.

Group	Combined midpoint valuation	Share of dataset
Twist Bioscience	$10.3B	22.9%
Top 3 companies	~$16.0B	35.5%
Top 5 companies	~$19.3B	42.9%
Top 10 companies	~$25.9B	57.5%
Top 20 companies	~$31.7B	70.6%
Top 49 companies	~$41.1B	91.4%
Bottom 49 companies	~$3.8B	8.6%
All 98 companies	~$45.0B	100%

Are public Synthetic Biology companies doing better than private startups?

Public Synthetic Biology companies currently show the widest range of outcomes in the market, from a roughly $10 billion winner to companies worth only a few million dollars.

Twist sits at the top of the entire ranking. Generate has also reached the public market successfully and now trades around the $2 billion level.

Ginkgo tells a different story. Its latest quarter showed revenue falling to about $20 million, and management is now concentrating much more heavily on autonomous laboratories after a major restructuring.

Synlogic and Senti Biosciences sit near the bottom of our ranking with public valuations of roughly $14 million and $10 million respectively.

Public markets make differences visible much faster. A private company can carry an old valuation for several years simply because no new financing happens. A listed company's value changes every trading day.

That is why comparisons between public and private Synthetic Biology companies need some care. Public marks are current. Some private marks are estimates designed to update valuations that would otherwise still be stuck in a very different funding environment.

Is Synthetic Biology becoming more about tools than finished products?

Tools and infrastructure are taking a bigger share of Synthetic Biology value because they let companies benefit from biological innovation without betting everything on one final product.

Twist sells DNA and sequencing tools. Benchling sells R&D software. DNA Script and Ansa sell DNA-synthesis technology. Emerald Cloud Lab and Opentrons automate laboratories. Culture Biosciences automates bioprocess development.

Several of these companies rank above businesses producing finished foods, materials or specialty chemicals.

The attraction is diversification. If one precision-fermentation food startup fails, a DNA supplier may still sell to therapeutics companies, agricultural companies and academic laboratories. Software has the same advantage.

Infrastructure can also scale with the sector itself. More biological companies mean more experiments, more sequence design, more data and more need for automated workflows.

Finished-product companies still have the largest theoretical upside in some cases, especially therapeutics. But infrastructure has become one of the cleaner ways to capture the growth of Synthetic Biology without carrying as much single-product risk.

Which Synthetic Biology companies could jump up the valuation ranking next?

The companies most likely to jump sharply in the Synthetic Biology ranking are the ones where one major technical or commercial milestone would remove a large chunk of uncertainty.

Mammoth Biosciences and Tessera Therapeutics fit that profile in gene editing. Clinical progress could change how investors value their pipelines very quickly.

EvolutionaryScale and Profluent have similar upside in AI biology. A model that repeatedly produces successful proteins or gene editors would be far more valuable than one that merely looks impressive in research demonstrations.

Solugen has a different test. More manufacturing capacity, stronger utilization and repeat customer demand could prove that biological chemical production works economically at industrial scale.

DNA Script and Ansa could also move higher if decentralized or enzymatic DNA synthesis takes meaningful share from conventional synthesis workflows.

As seen above, the current ranking rewards evidence much more heavily than ambition. Companies with a believable way to produce that next piece of evidence can move quickly. Companies that remain dependent on another funding round without reducing technical or commercial risk will have a much harder time.

What does it actually take to be worth more than $1 billion in Synthetic Biology now?

A billion-dollar Synthetic Biology valuation currently requires either meaningful commercial scale, an unusually valuable clinical asset or a platform investors believe can become core infrastructure.

Twist clears the bar with revenue and margins. Generate does it with a late-stage therapeutic program. Pivot Bio has real-world agricultural adoption. Mammoth has a differentiated CRISPR platform. Benchling sits inside biotechnology R&D workflows. Solugen has industrial manufacturing assets.

Perfect Day remains above the threshold in our estimate, but its financing story increasingly revolves around proving manufacturing economics rather than simply proving that precision fermentation works.

This is a much tougher standard than the sector faced during its previous boom.

A persuasive scientific story can still raise capital. Getting to $1 billion now usually requires something investors can measure outside the laboratory: customers, acres, revenue, clinical-stage assets, manufacturing plants or software adoption.

That makes the billion-dollar companies more meaningful, even if there are fewer of them.

So what does the Synthetic Biology valuation ranking really tell us today?

Synthetic Biology is still creating valuable companies, but the market has become far more concentrated and far less forgiving than the hype cycle suggested.

The clearest evidence is the ranking itself. We estimate roughly $45 billion of combined value across 98 companies, yet almost 23% belongs to Twist and roughly 58% belongs to the top 10.

The companies near the top also have little in common at first glance. One manufactures DNA. Another sells biotech software. Others develop medicines, fertilizer, industrial chemicals or fermented proteins.

What connects them is much more concrete: each has a believable route from biological technology to a large economic market.

Lower down the ranking, we repeatedly see the opposite problem. Companies raised enormous sums to solve technically ambitious problems but struggled to turn that science into profitable manufacturing, sustained demand or successful products.

Synthetic Biology today is a more credible market than it was during the peak hype years, but also a harsher one. Investors are still willing to pay billions for programmable biology. They increasingly want proof that someone will actually pay for what the biology produces.