Okay, good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us here for the Twist Bioscience management presentation. My name is Matt Larew. I cover tools here at Blair. Happy to be joined today by Twist's founder and CEO, , CFO, Adam Laponis, and I think Angela, and Angela Bitting, who wears a variety of hats, including IR. Before we get into the presentation, two quick things. The breakout session is in Jenney A on the second floor. And then, for compliance here, I'm required to inform you that for a complete list of research disclosures or potential conflicts of interest, please visit our website at williamblair.com. All right, I'll turn it over to Emily.
Thank you very much, Matt, for the invitation and the introduction. It's my pleasure to talk about Twist. So at Twist, we write DNA from scratch, but before we get there, I have to say that I'll be making some forward-looking statements today. And so at Twist, we write DNA from scratch, and in the next slide, I'll talk about the technology. But what you need to know is that we are very strongly focused on having a scalable, profitable growth. And so to do that, we're growing our revenue, taking market share. That's based on a very strong commercial execution in growing market.
As we sell products, we have to ship products, and so we have built a very, very strong operational excellence, and our customers are delighted. We keep launching new products to help with revenue but also margin. At this point, we have a very clear path to profitability. In terms of the technology, we have a silicon chip where we can write DNA on, and we compare that with the regular way to make DNA, which is a 96-well plate, where you can make 96 pieces of DNA at the same time. On our one silicon chip, instead of making 96, we make one million pieces of DNA, so 10,000 times more throughput.
And then from that one chip, we make DNA, but we've also been expanding to protein and RNA. All the products, all the applications, all the customers, all the market we go after, all come from the same chip. So the way that works, we have on the left, the chip, which we call the front end, and at that point, we make pieces of DNA that are up to 300 base pair. Those are the oligos. We can ship those oligos, that's called oligo pool. And then as you go right of the oligonucleotides, we can assemble them into gene fragments. We sell that. We can assemble them into clonal gene. We sell that. We can express the gene into a IgG. We sell that.
Back to the oligonucleotides, we can process using molecular biology those oligos to make variant libraries, which we sell. All of those products are used in our Biopharma Solutions to discover drug. Then again, starting from the oligos up into the green box, we can amplify those oligos to make panels for NGS applications. So even though we have many different products, many different applications, it all comes from the same silicon chip. That platform, that silicon platform, is so proven. It's been. We've been processing revenue for 10 years. The production capabilities are extremely powerful. We make 60 million oligos per day, and we have created an infrastructure that is scalable. We have the ability to deliver hundreds of thousands of genes.
We have an exceptional user experience, thanks to our e-commerce technology, which is beautifully intuitive and frictionless. And then last but not least, we are building a business that we believe has a very compelling business model. We are very much similar to a silicon fab, where we do have high fixed costs because silicon, but that is a moat to new entrant, and then we have very low variable costs. So when we get new—Once we absorb the fixed cost, any extra revenue, the vast majority drops to the bottom line. And so over the last few years, we have experienced very strong revenue growth. As revenue growth happened, growth margin expanded. Last year, we had a little reduction in growth margin because we introduced our second manufacturing site, so we added more capacity.
Then if I double-click, sorry, and look at quarter growth, you can see over the last many quarters, initially, it was all blue, mostly with SynBio products. SynBio has grown. We've added NGS, which has grown in green. Then, recently, we've also added Biopharma Services, which in purple, which has grown. So last quarter, we had $75.3 million revenue, and the growth margin was 41%. And the year before, our growth margin was 31%. And so, so 80% of the revenue growth dropped to the bottom line to increase our growth margin to 41%. We have four different product groups. I'll talk to a few minutes about each of those today.
The first two are products, the third one is a service, and then the fourth one is not yet revenue generating. So let's start with SynBio. SynBio at the bottom, we have a number of products. I won't go through the details, but those products are used in very large end markets. The biggest one is pharma and biotech, so the discovery of drugs, some in industrial, chemical, and AgBio , as well as academics. And now the applications are very diverse, but the main application where our DNA is used is in target discovery, target validation, drug discovery, drug validation. We also have enzyme engineering, cell engineering some CRISPR applications. The reason why we win, it used to be cost and scale and quality.
Over the last 18 months, we've added speed, and so now we are the undisputed leader of speed as well. And we keep adding new products. For instance, the last few months, we've added our 500 base pair oligo synthesis. And what that means is that it used to be we would synthesize from scratch 300 bases of DNA, and we've expanded that to 500, which we can also assembled. Recently, we've launched our Express Genes. So what that means is, on the left, so on the x-axis, you have the turnaround time. You can buy DNA that is sort of a gene that is shipped in 10 days or DNA that's shipped in five days. And when you look at the price on the y-axis, we are leader in price at either five or 10 days.
But, it's a little bit misleading in some ways, because if you look on the right, the capacity that our competitors have is very limited at five days. They can sell a few genes at five days, but what we do at Twist is our entire manufacturing capacity is at five days. So all of our genes are made at five days, and if someone buys genes that are sold for 10 days, which we make them in five days, and then we wait five more days to ship them. So we have an advantage of speed and scale. We're the only in class technology that has 100% of their gene made in five days at the... And we also have a cost advantage.
So to give you a little bit more, I've just talked about Express Gene in the previous slide, but Express Gene is actually just, you know, the blue column or the green - yeah, the blue column on the screen. The Express Gene at five days, the Express Maxi Prep or the Express Midi Prep. But we have more flavors of DNA. We also have clonal genes and fragments, and on the right, we have IgGs. And that is because not everybody wants to do the same thing. And so what we have done is we've put in the front end an e-commerce platform that is able to capture the different flavor that the customer want to do. Think about it as ordering a coffee at Starbucks. There's a million combination of ordering a coffee, and so customers tell us exactly what they want.
We do it on the silicon chip, and then we ship it to them. And there's different based on price, on speed, there's different lengths, there's different price that they have to pay. And the opportunity with Express Genes is we've introduced a premium pricing because it's a highly differentiated product that is only in class. We have a pricing schedule that is a little bit higher. The last thing I'll say about DNA is the way how sustainable it is. And so we compare the carbon emission of making one gene, and with Twist, it's equivalent to driving a car for 0.09 miles. But making a gene the old-fashioned way that our competitors use is equivalent to driving a car for 59 miles.
That is because, again, on the silicon chip, we have miniaturized the chemistry. We use 99.8% less chemicals, and that shows into the carbon emissions. So for customers, especially in Europe, that have carbon footprint targets, switching from the competition to us lowers their carbon footprint. Moving on to the second product group, NGS. Again, from the silicon chip at the bottom, there's a number of products. On the left, we have panels. These are custom or fixed. On the right, we have all the reagents to do an NGS sequencing experiment. And the main end markets we are targeting are the diagnostic companies.
In terms of application, they are broad, from rare disease detection, genetic diseases, cancer detection, early cancer detection, minimal residual disease, detection of pathogens, and so on. The reason why we win in NGS is because of the quality. The quality of our DNA, the quality of the kits that we sell, enable our customers to do less sequencing. So the cost of their test per patient is lower. On the sequencing side, the cost of our kits is the same as the competition, but you need to sequence half as much. That means that what we've been selling to our customer is a better gross margin. If they switch from our competitors to Twist, sorry, again, they can...
They need to do only half of the sequencing, and that means that they have lower cost, better gross margin. We keep expanding. We've been a leader in single nucleotide polymorphism, so SNPs, copy numbers, structural rearrangement. We've added methylation. Recently, we've added RNA to our portfolio, and we're expanding the type of application we support. In addition to the quality that we have, one other key benefit is the speed of customization. As customers are developing new diagnostics tests, we can provide those prototype of tests much faster. Just looking at two views of our product to help you understand what we do. On the top, I'm looking at the sequencing workflow. What we say is we provide all the reagents from the sample to the sequencer.
And so there's barcoding, there's library prep, there is enrichment, there is sample ID. And what that means is all the buffer, beads, enzyme, barcodes, adapters, probes that you need to go from the sample to the sequencer, we provide. And it's mix and match. You don't have to buy everything from us. But the benefit of having all the reagent is that, for companies that develop a diagnostics test, if something goes wrong, there's only one neck to choke, and that is mine. And that is very reassuring to our customers, 'cause their test is very important. And there's only one company to call if anything goes wrong.
The other view of our products is around progression of disease, and here I'm taking just one example, and that's the example of cancer. But there are many other different disease that we could talk about. So in cancer, depending on how you use our product, you can do a cancer screen. You can use our products to do therapy selection. You can use our products to measure the response to a treatment, and then post-treatment, you can do a surveillance and detection of minimal residual disease to see if the cancer comes back. So, hopefully, it gives you perspective on how our products can be used in the industry. So combining those two product groups together, SynBio and NGS, we think of it as DNA write and DNA read.
The market for the synbio part, the writing part, is $500 million for people that buy DNA, but there's another $1.4 billion of people that make their own DNA. There's more than 100,000 customers that make their own DNA. And previewing the next slide, or one of the next slides, we only have about 3,000 of those 100,000 customer. And then on the reading side, there's a sort of very big market we can go after. We are one of the leader supplier of liquid biopsy company. Again, those are the reagents that are used for liquid biopsy. This is not the size of the liquid biopsy market itself. It's the size of the reagents used to make a liquid biopsy test.
We estimate that to be $300 million now, growing very quickly. We are the leader there. We just launched a product in RNA-seq. We are about to launch a product to go after the SNP microarray market, and we have products for the DNA sample prep. So we are only scratching the surface of what we can do with, as a reminder, revenue last quarter of $75.4 million. And the combination of this SynBio and NGS product enable us to have a very diversified and resilient product portfolio. On the left, we have the combination of revenue between those two product group.
3,400 customers last year, so growing quickly, but still, we still have only a fraction of the total customer that we can go after. And if we look at the customer mix, more than 50% of our customers are in healthcare, and we are a little bit underweighted on academia, with only about 20% of our customers in academia. So that's a growth opportunity for us. And we believe that our e-commerce is going to enable us to go after the long tail of the market, the 100,000 customer that we need to go after. And that, Express Genes, in particular, combined with e-commerce, will enable us to go after those customers we don't have at this point. Moving on to the third business group that we have.
So the third product group is what we call biopharma Solution, and this is a service. So we are a drug discovery service. You give us a target, we give you a drug. And there's many different competitors that also do drug discovery as a service, but they usually either have in vivo or in vitro. And if they do have in vivo and in vitro, they usually do not have AI. And so the one particular thing that we have with our offering is that we have the combination of in vivo, in vitro, and AI under one roof. And so that, that's a very differentiated service offering. And it enables us to go out and convince drug companies to outsource some of their drug discovery to us.
And what that means is that that works really well with our synbio product, because what that means is we can go to a biopharma company, and we can sell a spectrum. And on the one hand, we can sell the reagents that they need for the customer to do the drug discovery work themselves, or we can sell to the customer, the ability to outsource to us the work. And so it, again, it's a true partner who are just not just a vendor, and being able to sell either the product or the service or both, means that we have a shared customer base. That means we can have sticky relationship, and, that means that, we can scale, the customization that we provide to our customers. And, so if I recap, just looking at human healthcare, right?
Looking at on the left, the different products that we sell from genes, Oligo Pool Library, NGS, and biopharma, versus the different steps of human health from target identification, validation, drug discovery, drug development, and disease monitoring. What that means is that we have products that our customers can lean on to do all of those things. And so we're able to serve our customers in multi-dimension on all steps of their workflow. And this is only human health. We have other opportunity in industrial chemical, in enzyme engineering, in ag bio, in academia. But just for human health, you can see that we have a very comprehensive way to engage with our customers and deliver value to them. So the last business group that we have is our DNA Data Storage group.
What we realize is that DNA is actually our hard drive. So in the box, if you look about it, if you have zeros and ones, so zeros and ones are what you store on a hard drive or tape. Zeros and ones are a digital file. You can convert zeros and ones into ACGT, and then our sequence chip, we can synthesize that DNA. And that DNA is a file system, equivalent to a hard drive. You can store that for as long as you want, and when you need the data back, you can sequence the DNA back. You can sequence to get the ACGT, and then you can decode into zeros and ones.
We've done a number of demonstrations with companies in media, such as Netflix, in healthcare, in cultural preservation, such as the Olympic Committee, with government, to show that it does work. And what we're working on is building a Century Archive solution, which means that we're providing a deep archive solution where you can archive data for 100 years or more. And we believe that we are creating a very valuable asset with optionality at different multiple times. And so, the value proposition of DNA, first, is that it's extremely dense. You could put the equivalent of dozens of Google data centers into the space of a sugar cube, right?
'Cause you take the DNA off the silicon chip, so it's extremely, extremely dense, and the longevity is high. If you put data on a hard drive or tape, you have to move it to a new tape or a new hard drive every five-seven years, whereas with DNA, it can be stable for 100 or thousands of years. The format is immutable, and the benefit of DNA is that DNA will always be important to human health. So the technology to read the DNA back may change, but as a society, we'll always be able to read DNA. It's different from a VHS tape, where you may have the tape, but you don't have the reader anymore.
Same way as with a Blu-ray, you may have a disc, but you may not have the reader, whereas with DNA, you'll always be able to sequence it back. It's very sustainable because it takes a smaller footprint. And right now, we are only talking about storing data, but in the future, we will be able to compute data. And the first demonstration of compute is the computation of copy-paste. If you have a data center, and you want to copy the data center into another data center, that is a massive endeavor. Really, really hard to copy a data center to another one. But with DNA, if you had that data center in a piece of DNA that's smaller than a sugar cube, you can do PCR. one hour, $1, and you've done the copy-paste.
So in the future, there'll be more computation ability. And so we're working on our first archive product. From a technology point of view, if you look at the scale of synthesizing DNA, on the left, starting at the competitive technology, the 96-well plate, where you can make basically 100 oligos. Twist, I mentioned our silicon chip, where we can make one million oligos, same size as a 96-well plate. We've moved to our proof of concept chip, which is the size of a postage stamp, so 24 times smaller than the million oligo plate silicon chip. So it's 24 times smaller, but we've shrank the dimension of the features. We've increased the density to 256 million oligos, meaning that we can store gigabyte scale of data.
We have demonstrated in our Q1 ending in December our end-to-end workflow using the gigabyte scale. Now we are working on what we call the Beta chip, which is our terabyte-scale archive. There, on the same format of silicon, we're increasing the density from 256 million oligos to 10 billion oligos, and we expect an early access commercial in calendar 2025. We'll be able to scale further beyond that. As we pack more and more pieces of DNA on the silicon chip, we'll be able to to lower the cost.
As if you store data on a tape or hard drive, over time, the cost goes up on tape or hard drive, but with DNA, the cost you pay it once, and you're done. So it's all about what is the break-even point between storing data on DNA or storing on tape or hard drive? So to conclude, we have some very aggressive goals for each of our business group. I won't go through the details, but we are very laser-focused on ramping revenue, ramping gross margin, and keeping our costs, our OpEx, flat and to get us to profitability. And from a—which what that means is that we are managing cash burn very strongly.
The guidance for Q3, which we're in Q3, our Q3 ends in June, is $77 million revenue for a quarter at 41%-42% gross margin. Guidance for Q4 is to ramp revenue to $77 million-$80 million and ramping gross margin. And the guidance for the full year will be $300 million-$304 million. And with that ramp of revenue, ramp on gross margin, and strong discipline on OpEx, we should be able to get to a cash balance above $245 million dollars.
Which means that looking at next year, we think we have a path to 50% gross margin in Q4 of next year, and which means that we'll be able to get to a profitability point without having to go and raise more cash. So with that, this is my last slide. Again, we have a great business, writing DNA, selling DNA, many different applications, many different products. And it's all based on a very innovative platform where we have so large and growing markets. We don't sell me-too products, not interested in doing that. We only sell highly differentiated product, and we are building a compelling business model with a scalable infrastructure, a very sustainable production. And again, our goal is to get to profitability and scale there.
With that, I will stop. I think I'm about on time, and I'll follow Matt's lead.