Welcome to the Jefferies Global Healthcare Conference. My name is Justin Choi with the Jefferies Healthcare Investment Banking team, and it is my great pleasure to introduce Emily Leproust, CEO of Twist Bioscience.
Thank you very much for the introduction and the invitation. It's a great pleasure to be here today. Before I start, I'll say that we'll be making some forward-looking statement. So at Twist, we write DNA from scratch and I'll very shortly get into the technology. But just to set the context, we are on a path to scalable and profitable growth. We are achieving that by focusing our revenue growth in growing markets. We beside the technology, which I'll describe shortly, have a track record of very strong commercial execution. Our operation are extremely efficient. We are launching new products, and we have a path to profitability. So we think we're on a great path.
But from a technology point of view, everything we make, and the differentiation that we have compared to the competition is based on our silicon technology. We take the known chemistry of writing DNA, the A, the C, the Gs, and the T that everybody else is using. But instead of using a 96-well plate to write DNA, we use a silicon, where instead of writing 96 pieces of DNA, we write 1 million pieces of DNA. So as a matter of fact, that miniaturization has been focused on producing DNA, but recently we have expanded into RNA and protein markets.
And the key for us is that the customer never sees the silicon chip, and what happens is, we collect all the orders for a day, and typically at noon and at midnight, we put all the products for all the customers, all the applications, on the same chip. We make the DNA, and then we ship to the right customers, the right DNA. So it's really, we've built a very efficient production facility that relies on the silicon chip. Once we've made the DNA on the silicon chip, that's what we call the front end. Then depending on the flavor of DNA that the customers want, there may be different back ends.
So, in the SynBio product group, if someone wants an Oligo Pool, we make the DNA, take it out of the chip, and then ship it. If someone wants a fragment, we assemble the Oligos into a fragment. If someone wants a Clonal Gene, we clone it in the vector. If someone wants an IgG protein, we express the protein from that Clonal Gene. We also make Variant Libraries, and then up in the green box, we can amplify the oligonucleotide from that has been synthesized to create NGS panels. And so you can see that, even though we have hundreds of SKUs that serve hundreds of applications, everything derives from that silicon chip technology. And so that silicon platform is now proven. We've, we've been leveraging it for the last 10 years.
The production is extremely powerful. We make 16 million oligos per day. We've built a scalable infrastructure. We have the ability to deliver hundreds of thousands of genes per month. The customers interact with us with a great e-commerce platform that is beautiful, intuitive, and frictionless, so the user experience is extremely good. And then at the end of the day, we are building a business, and that business is similar to a semiconductor fab, where we do have a high fixed cost, but the variable cost is very low. And so what that means is that as we absorb the fixed cost and we ramp revenue further, the gross margin gets better.
So, looking at that revenue growth, we had, you know, $2.3 million of revenue in 2016 when we launched at the time of IPO. In 2018, we've done a 10x at $25 million. Last fiscal year, 2023, we had another 10x, $245 million, and as you can see, as we ramp revenue, gross margin went up. Last year, with a little dip in gross margin as we added our Factory of the Future, our second manufacturing site. And then if we look quarter-over-quarter, our last quarter, our Q2 quarter, which is March, ending in March, was $75 million, and the gross margin for our Q2 was 41%.
Initially, our revenue were very much focused on SynBio, and over the years, we've grown our NGS product line, and we've added a Biopharma product line. The next few slides, I'll spend a few minutes, sorry, a few minutes on each of our product groups, and there are four of them. Two of them are what we call life science tools, so we sell a product. Customers gives us the flavor of DNA, protein, RNA that they want, and we ship it to them. And then we have two other product groups that are more applied markets. One of them is our Biopharma Solutions, where there we provide a service. You give us a target, we give you a drug.
And then we have a fourth product group, which is non-commercial yet, where we use DNA as a media to storing data for the long term. So looking first at SynBio, again, from the silicon chip, we make a large range of products: Clonal Genes, Fragments, Express Genes, Oligo Pools, Variant Libraries, IgG protein, and more. And the main customer for SynBio product groups are pharma companies, biotech companies that are discovering therapies and optimizing therapies that are discovering target as well. We also have industrial chemical company customers that are engineering enzymes for industrial applications. And we have AgBio and academic labs that are doing a large number of different applications, from CRISPR to cell engineering to enzyme engineering.
The reason why we used to win in this market was because our cost and scale and quality was great. I mentioned our user experience, and lately, we've been making a great focus on speed. So, prior to January 2023, speed was a little bit our Achilles heel. But starting in January 2023, we have had very competitive speed. And recently, in January of this year, 2024, we've introduced our Express Genes offering, where now we have a product which is significantly faster than the competition. And so, January last year, we achieved parity on speed, and now we have achieved dominance on speed.
To try to articulate even better the speed dynamics in the market for genes, on the left, I have the price that we and our competitors charge for genes at different turnaround time. You can see that whether it's at five days or 10 days turnaround time, our price is lower than what the competition charges. But we are not shrinking the market because our customers have more ideas than they have money, so it's a very elastic market. Even though the price is lower, we enable our customers to buy more genes, and therefore take more shots on goal.
So on the left side, we show that we have a price -competitive advantage, and that is because on the silicon chip, we miniaturize the chemistry, we use less reagent. But even more importantly, I'll say, is that on the right, we also have a massive scale advantage because our competitors, they can make a few gene very fast, in days. And that means that they pick a subset of their orders, and they skip the lines. But what we do at Twist is 100% of our genes are made fast, are made express. And so that means that we have we not only can do genes in days, which is extremely competitive, but we do it for all of our genes.
And if someone wants a lower-cost genes in 10 days, we will make it in five days, and then we'll wait before shipping it. And so what that means in terms of our customer offering for genes, I won't go into the details, but what you can see is that not all customers want the same thing. And so that's why we have segmented the offering. You can get genes that are fragments, that you can then get them clonals, you can get them expressed, you can get them in different mass of DNA from miniprep, midiprep, maxiprep. You can get them perfect or not perfect. There's a lot of choices depending on the research.
And again, it all comes down from the same chip, and so that's the advantage, is that from the one technology that we have, we can serve our customer needs exactly to the way they want to do their science. And then we have a sustainability advantage because we use less reagent, and so we did a comparison of what is the carbon emission of making one gene. And on our platform, making one gene is the equivalent of driving a car for 0.9 miles. But with the competition, making a gene is the equivalent of driving a car for 59 miles. And so, our customers that have emission targets, we can save them carbon emissions.
But also, again, it exemplifies that we use less carbon, so the cost of manufacturing is going to be better. On NGS, our second product group, again, from the silicon chip on the left, we can make panels. And on the right, we make all the reagents to go from the sample to the sequencer. The main end market are diagnostic companies that are using our DNA to do genetic analysis, rare disease analysis, cancer detection, early cancer detection, minimal residual disease, pathogen detection, and more. The reason why we win in NGS is because of the quality of our DNA, the quality of our panels. The uniformity is so good that our customers are finding that they can lower the amount of sequencing that they do by half.
So if you buy a kit from us or our competitors, our kit are the same price, but if you use our kit, you can put twice as many samples per lane on a sequencer, and we, we've been great at SNP detection, copy number detection, structural rearrangement. We've gone into methylation, we've gone into RNA-Seq, and we keep expanding the workflow that we support, and that has been a great enabler of our revenue ramp. To try to exemplify, or again, make it even more obvious how we serve our NGS sequencer, there are two views for diagnostic companies. One view is at the top, is what kind of reagent they can get from us in their sequencing workflow.
So in their library prep from the sample to the sequencer, we sell all the reagents that they need post-extraction. And so we have all the beads, buffer, enzymes, adapters, UDI, UMI reagents, panels, everything you need from the sample to the sequencer. And if you look at a from more of a progression of disease point of view, as one example of cancer, this is just cancer. We enable our customers to do cancer screening, therapy selection, treat response, treatment response, and surveillance and minimal residual disease detection. So again, very broad, and at the same time, this is just for cancer. There are many more applications beyond cancer. So we're very excited about those two product groups, SynBio in blue and NGS in red.
If we look at the market, compared to our revenue, we are still only scratching the surface. In SynBio, there is more than 100,000 customers that we can go after, and you'll see on the next slide that we have about 3,000 customers, so we are still at the beginning of the transition. In NGS, there's a very large market that we can go after, and this market is growing, especially the liquid biopsy market. Again, we are not selling a clinical report. What we are selling is the tools to the liquid biopsy companies to enable them to diagnose patients.
When we look at again, the combination of SynBio and NGS, the great thing about this combination is that even though it all comes from the same technology, the same silicon chip, we serve thousands of customers, more than 3,400 last year. We have growing revenue, and because we are serving many different SKUs, many different applications, it's a very resilient business. From a customer mix point of view, we have 56% of our customers are in healthcare, and only 20% at this point are in academia. So we're a little bit underweighted on academia. Moving to the third business that we have, that is our Biopharma Solutions. So again, what I've described so far is where we sell products.
This is our business product group, where we sell a service, right? So we have a group of drug discoverer at Twist. And our commercial team sells a service to our customer, and the customer gives us a target. We use the tools that we have internally at Twist, the DNA that we have, to deliver a therapeutic asset back to them, and that asset is pre-clinical. And the advantage that we have compared to other people that have those kind of services, is those competitors, they typically either have in vitro or in vivo as a way to discover drug. And if they do have both in vivo and in vitro, they typically do not have an AI approach.
And what we have at Twist is actually a combination of in vivo, in vitro, and AI. And that's a highly differentiated service offering, and that enables us to convince partners to trust us to deliver for them a preclinical asset. The Biopharma business here is actually extremely complementary to our SynBio product line because we sell to the same customer. We sell to pharma companies, biotech, and even startups that are discovering drugs. And we can call onto those same companies and sell at a different level. We can sell to the researcher that's discovering drugs at the bench, and there we sell them products to enable them to do the work themselves in the lab.
Then we can also sell to the head of biologics, where we sell the service, and basically, we enable them to outsource any extra work that they have. So the combination of the service and the product is actually extremely powerful. The commercial teams share a customer base. It creates very sticky relationship. What we are able to sell in both cases is, as you know, drug discovery is a numbers game. If it's a one in a million mutant gets to be the drug that you want, the more mutant you try, the better. So that's what we offer at Twist. Through SynBio, our amazing prices, speed, quality, enable them to try more mutant.
If they ask us to do the work for them, our Biopharma team purchases internally those same mutants to find a great drug. So again, great synergy between the two businesses. Looking at just a prism of human health, you can see that the combination of the three business groups so far, Synio, NGS, and biopharmaceutical solution, you can see that through the entire value chain of human health, from target identification, validation, drug discovery, drug development, and disease monitoring, we're able to provide tools to enable customers to do that entire chain. So we are not a one-trick pony. We really enable the full value creation of our pharma partners. And again, this is only human health.
There is other views, which, I don't have time to go through today, around the benefits that we bring to industrial chemicals, to academia, AgBio and more. So moving on to our last business group. Our last business group is our data storage group. And so, for context, our DNA is our hard drive. And decades ago, it was postulated that actually we could use DNA as a media for data storage, and now we are in the stage where this is about to become a reality. Now, the way it works is, if you have a digital file that you want to store, that file is made of zeros and ones. And so you can encode—Sorry. You can encode the zeros and ones into A, C, G, and Ts.
Then on our silicon chip, we can synthesize that DNA. So what that means is that once you release the DNA from the silicon chip, that speck of dust of DNA is actually a file. It's equivalent to a hard drive. It's equivalent to a tape. And then if you want to, at any point, get your data back, all you have to do is put that DNA onto a sequencer. You read the A, C, G, and T back, and that can be decoded into zeros and ones. And so, again, for context, we are not talking about storing your data from your computer when you're writing an email in DNA. That kind of data that when you interact with your computer, that is hot data.
You need to get access, read, write of your data in milliseconds. What we are talking about is enabling cold storage or archiving of data. Where today, the use case is you archive the data for years, decades, and infrequently you need to read the data back, and today it can take hours, up to 24 hours to get the data back. So you have the... If you had to store that data in DNA, you will have time to sequence it back. And so, in the next two slides, I'll show you our progress, but overall, we believe that we are building a very valuable asset, and we have optionality at multiple points to generate more value.
In terms of the benefit of DNA, so far I've described what storage in DNA is, but I haven't described the benefit. The first benefit is the density. You can pack dozens of Google data centers into a sugar cube, and so, that's a great benefit that will use a lot less energy than data centers that are extremely power-hungry. So that's a great benefit. The second great benefit is longevity. You can store data for hundreds, thousands of years, whereas on a hard drive, you have to move your data from one hard drive to the next every five to seven years. So on hard drive and tape, the total cost of ownership keeps going up, whereas with DNA, you may only pay once.
From a technology point of view, how do we make it happen? I just mentioned the total cost of ownership, and so what we need to do is we need to do DNA synthesis at a price point that is competitive with hard drive and tape. And so to do that, we are shrinking the dimension of the DNA synthesis on the silicon, and all the revenue that we have so far is from our technology with the 1 million oligo silicon chip, which is a megabyte scale. We've shrank the chip to and the features to be able to pack 256 million oligos, and we've demonstrated that the end-to-end workflow is working at. That's a gigabyte scale. And now we are working on what we call the beta chip.
It's we shrink even more where we are putting 10 billion oligos on a silicon chip to be able to achieve terabyte scale. And we anticipate that we'll be able to do early access, early commercial access of that terabyte Century Archive in calendar 2025. So stepping back we have some very aggressive goals for each of our businesses. I won't go through the details, but the goal is to ramp revenue, ramp gross margin, and be able to achieve profitability with the cash that we have in the bank.
So what that means is that we are managing that cash well, and the guidance for this quarter, Q3, is that we'll achieve $77 million dollar revenue, growing to $77 million-$80 million in Q4, which would give us a revenue guidance for the fiscal year 2024, ending in September, September for us, of $300 million-$304 million. As the revenue ramp, gross margin ramps as well, and as we manage our cost, we anticipate ending the year with $245 million dollars in the bank. We anticipate that we are on track to get to 50% gross margin in fiscal at the end of fiscal 2025, Q4.
So to summarize in the last few seconds, we are on a path to a scalable, profitable growth, and it's not an accident. We have an innovative platform, technology growing after a large and growing market. We have differentiated products. We have a, I believe, a very strong and competing business model, a scalable infrastructure, a sustainable production, and our customers are very happy with us, and we look forward to continuing our strong execution. Thank you very much.