Ginkgo Bioworks YC Application

Summer 2014Public

Ginkgo Bioworks went through Y Combinator in the Summer 2014 batch as a Healthcare company. Below: what the company does, who founded it, and its application to YC, reconstructed question by question in the real YC form.

YC batch: Summer 2014
Industry: HealthcareIndustrial Bio
Team size: 641
Status: Public
Launched: 2014

Founders

Barry CantonFounder
Austin CheFounder
Jason KellyFounder
Tom KnightFounder
Reshma ShettyFounder

What Ginkgo Bioworks does

Ginkgo Bioworks is the organism company. We design custom organisms for customers across multiple markets. We build our foundries to scale the process of organism engineering using software and hardware automation. Organism engineers at Ginkgo learn from nature to develop new organisms that replace technology with biology.

Ginkgo Bioworks's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Ginkgo Bioworks, Summer 2014 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Ginkgo Bioworks

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Make biology easier to engineer

What is your company going to make? Please describe your product and what it does or will do.

We build automated foundries that design custom organisms for companies in multiple markets. Our platform combines software and hardware to scale organism engineering, making it faster and more predictable to develop biology-based solutions.

Where do you live now, and where would the company be based after YC?

We are based in Boston, MA and plan to remain here after YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

Boston has a strong biotech ecosystem and access to synthetic biology talent, which is crucial for our organism engineering and automation work.

21 more answers in the full application

Founders, Progress, Idea, Equity, Curious, Batch Preference are in the full version. Create a free account to open it in YC Insights, next to every other YC batch.

See full application

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this the real Ginkgo Bioworks YC application?

No. Y Combinator keeps submitted applications private. This is a reconstruction: the real YC form questions, answered from Ginkgo Bioworks's public data (launch notes, founder backgrounds, product description). It shows how a company like Ginkgo Bioworks would present itself to YC, not the text they submitted.