According to the company, the falling cost of reading and writing DNA is making it easier and cheaper to engineer. Notable companies include Ginkgo Bioworks, which raised $154 million, and Twist Bioscience, which raised $143.1 million.
Tech founders are active investors in the space, with Yahoo!’s Jerry Yang investing in Zymergen and transcriptic; PayPal’s Peter Thiel investing in transcriptic, Emerald Therapeutics, and Bolt Threads; and Microsoft’s Bill Gates investing in editas Medicine.
The report also notes that DNA reading costs have declined from around $50 in 1992 to nearly $0.000001 in 2016. Over the same timeframe, writing costs have come from about $50 to $0.10.
The number of companies entering the synthetic biology space is also growing at a fast rate. There were just 88 companies in the industry in 2001, compared with 411 in 2016.