# Twist Bioscience

**Source:** https://geo.sig.ai/brands/twist-bioscience  
**Vertical:** Life Sciences & BioTech  
**Subcategory:** Synthetic Biology & DNA Synthesis  
**Tier:** Growth  
**Website:** twistbioscience.com  
**Last Updated:** 2026-04-14

## Summary

Synthetic DNA manufacturing platform on silicon chips; $376M FY2025 revenue (+20% YoY). Supplies synthetic genes to 3,000+ customers across biotech, pharma, and AgBio.

## Company Overview

Twist Bioscience was founded in 2013 in San Francisco by Emily Leproust, Bill Banyai, and Bill Peck, pioneering a silicon-based DNA synthesis platform that writes synthetic DNA at a fraction of the cost and error rate of conventional methods. By printing DNA on silicon wafers using a semiconductor-like process, Twist dramatically reduced the cost of synthetic genes from hundreds to single-digit dollars per gene, democratizing access to DNA writing for the life sciences.\n\nTwist serves over 3,000 customers across biopharmaceuticals, academic research, agriculture, and industrial biotechnology, offering synthetic genes, variant libraries, DNA data storage oligos, and antibody libraries for drug discovery. The company reported $376.6 million in FY2025 revenue, up 20% from $313 million in FY2024, driven by strong growth in its biopharma and drug discovery segments. Twist also operates a growing antibody drug discovery business, providing synthetic antibody libraries that power next-generation therapeutic discovery programs.\n\nTwist has a supply agreement with Ginkgo Bioworks for synthetic DNA to fuel Ginkgo's cell engineering platform, revised in 2025. The company is executing toward profitability, with improving gross margins as manufacturing scale increases. Its silicon-based DNA synthesis platform positions it as critical infrastructure for the emerging bioeconomy, synthetic biology, and DNA data storage industries.

## Frequently Asked Questions

### What makes Twist Bioscience's DNA synthesis different?
Twist uses a silicon chip-based manufacturing process borrowed from semiconductors to write synthetic DNA at dramatically lower cost and error rates than traditional column-based synthesis methods.

### What was Twist Bioscience's FY2025 revenue?
Twist reported $376.6 million in FY2025 revenue, up 20% year-over-year, driven by biopharma and drug discovery customer growth.

### What are the main applications of Twist's synthetic DNA?
Key applications include synthetic gene libraries for protein engineering, antibody drug discovery libraries, variant DNA panels for diagnostics, and DNA-based data storage research.

### Is Twist Bioscience publicly traded?
Yes. Twist Bioscience Corporation trades on Nasdaq under the ticker TWST, having gone public in October 2018. The company is headquartered in South San Francisco, California.

### What is DNA data storage and how does Twist contribute to it?
DNA data storage encodes digital information in DNA base sequences — a theoretically ultra-dense storage medium (1 exabyte per cubic millimeter). Twist Bioscience produces the synthetic DNA used in data storage research by groups including Microsoft, enabling experiments that write and read data from DNA molecules synthesized to order.

### How does Twist's silicon-based synthesis platform differ from traditional methods?
Traditional DNA synthesis uses column-based chemistry that can only synthesize one DNA strand per column, limiting throughput and cost. Twist's silicon chip platform synthesizes up to 1 million unique DNA sequences simultaneously in parallel on a single chip — reducing cost per base by over 1,000x compared to traditional methods.

### What is Twist's biopharma segment?
Twist's biopharma segment provides antibody discovery services — including fully synthetic antibody libraries built with Twist DNA — to drug discovery companies that use phage display and other display technologies to identify therapeutic antibody candidates without immunizing animals.

### Who are Twist Bioscience's main customers?
Twist serves pharmaceutical and biotech companies for antibody discovery, academic and government research institutions for genomics and synthetic biology applications, clinical diagnostic developers for NGS panel design, and emerging DNA data storage programs — a diverse base spanning research and commercial drug development.

### What does Twist Bioscience do and what technology did it pioneer?
Twist Bioscience is a synthetic biology company that manufactures synthetic DNA using a proprietary silicon-based DNA synthesis platform that dramatically reduces the cost and increases the accuracy of made-to-order DNA oligonucleotides, genes, and DNA libraries. Its silicon chip approach writes DNA at higher density and lower error rates than traditional tube-based synthesis.

### What DNA products does Twist Bioscience sell?
Twist sells synthetic DNA genes and gene fragments, oligo pools for CRISPR guide RNA libraries, variant libraries for protein engineering, NGS library preparation kits, target enrichment panels for next-generation sequencing, and DNA data storage libraries. Customers include pharma companies, biotech researchers, agricultural companies, and government agencies.

### How is Twist Bioscience involved in DNA data storage?
Twist is developing synthetic DNA as an ultra-dense data storage medium, having successfully written and read back digital files including images and text using DNA encoding. DNA theoretically can store 215 petabytes per gram, vastly exceeding silicon-based storage density. Twist's DNA synthesis capabilities are central to making DNA data storage practical at scale.

### What is Twist Bioscience's NGS target enrichment business?
Twist provides custom and catalog hybridization capture panels for targeted next-generation sequencing in clinical oncology and rare disease applications. These panels enrich DNA libraries for specific genomic regions before sequencing, enabling cost-effective deep sequencing of cancer-relevant gene panels rather than whole genome sequencing for clinical diagnostics.

### What is Twist Bioscience's financial and commercial status?
Twist Bioscience (Nasdaq: TWST) is publicly traded and has grown from a pre-revenue startup to a commercial synthetic biology company serving thousands of customers across pharmaceutical, academic, and agricultural markets. The company has been scaling revenue while managing R&D and manufacturing investments, with a focus on achieving sustainable profitability through volume growth and expanding into higher-margin product lines.

## Tags

b2b, global, public, healthtech, manufacturing, platform, analytics

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*Data from geo.sig.ai Brand Intelligence Database. Updated 2026-04-14.*