Jason Kelly - Ginkgo Bioworks CEO and Co-Founder on Automation, AI Data & Biotech’s Reset

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.