Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Fiscal 2019 4th Quarter and Full Year Financial Results Conference Call. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Jim Thorburn, Chief Financial Officer. Thank you and please go ahead, sir.
All right. Thank you, Chris. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for Twist Bioscience conference call to review our fiscal 2019 Q4 and full year financial results and business progress. Please review the press release we issued earlier today, which is available at our website at www dottwistbioscience.com. With me on today's call is Doctor.
Emily Leprost, CEO and Co Founder of Twist. Emily will begin with a review of overall progress in Twist businesses. I will report on our financial and operational performance, and Emily will discuss our upcoming milestones and direction. We will then open the call up for questions. As a reminder, this call is being recorded.
The audio portion will be archived in the Investors section of our website and will be available for 1 week. During today's presentation, we will make forward looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. Forward looking statements generally relate to future events or future financial or operating performance. Our expectations and beliefs regarding these matters may not materialize and actual results and financial periods are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. These risks include those set forth in the press release we issued earlier today as well as those more fully described in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The forward looking statements in this presentation are based on information available to us as of the date hereof, and we disclaim any obligation to update any forward looking statements, except as required by law. With that, I will now turn the call over to our Chief Executive Officer and Co Founder, Doctor. Emily Le Prost.
Thank you, Jim, and good afternoon, everyone. Fiscal 2019 was a year of continued innovation and execution. We shipped our product to more than 1300 customers compared to over 700 in fiscal 2018. We reported record revenues of $54,400,000 more than doubled the $25,400,000 in revenue for the same year period in 2018 and substantially more than our initial guidance provided approximately 1 year ago on our fiscal 2018 year end call. In addition, we booked $70,000,000 in orders versus $39,400,000 last year, and we were gross margin positive for the year, a tremendous goal accomplished, which validates our business model.
We reported solid growth in Synthetic Biology and exceptional growth in NGS. Our silicon based writing platform continues to provide significant advantages, not only in our revenue generating businesses, but also in our biopharma and DNA data storage vertical market opportunities. Our success in fiscal 2019 was due to 2 key factors, excellent products and our commercial execution. I would like to highlight our accomplishments for the year and also give you some insight into the future growth of our businesses. Beginning with our excellent products in synbio, we shipped about 81,000 genes in the Q4 of fiscal 2019 compared to about 71,000 in the Q4 of 2018.
The full year 2019, we shipped more than 288,000 genes, all of which are unique sequences. This is incredible scale. And we received 2.4x the number of purchase orders, which were smaller in size by about 60%, indicating that we are starting to reach customers in the long term of the market. Even more importantly, we delivered 8,000,000,000 bases if we include fragments, OIBAPools and violet library as well as NGS products. That is a lot of DNA, but still a fraction of our future capacity.
To drive these numbers, over the course of the year, we introduced several key products in the synbio market. Leveraging our commitments to innovation, we introduced long genes up to 5 kV and we launched long oleganucleotide up to 300 bases in length, which we believe is the longest commercial offering for Liverpool. This product continues to demonstrate our ability to push the boundaries of what is possible in oligosynthesis At 300 basis and an error rate of 1 in 2000 basis, we have an exceptional product that can be used for gene editing research as well as data storage and other applications. Both long genes and long oligos have been possible because of our continued investment in R and D, our commitment to remain agile, never complacent, always advancing the frontier of science. We have made incredible inroads into the synbio market, but we still only have about 10% market share.
So we are only scratching the surface of what's possible. As we look ahead into 2020, we will continue to serve our current customers and we plan to introduce product line extensions that we believe will allow us to meet the needs of large pharmaceutical companies that require larger quantities of DNA. In addition, we will introduce a product that we believe will allow our gene fragments to be even more widely adopted by the long tail of the market. We believe both of these market areas present growth opportunities in new customer acquisition, extending current customer relationships and continuing to take market share from our competitors. For Genomics and targeted NGS, in the Q4 of fiscal 2019, we shipped our target enrichment products to 160 customers with 36 of these customers now in production.
I'd like to take a minute to reflect on the growth of the NGS business. In February 2018, we started with a single offering of our DNA probes within a target enrichment kit. Last year, we reported over $3,000,000 in revenue and have rapidly scaled revenues to $21,000,000 in fiscal 2019. Today, not yet 2 years after our commercial launch, we have a robust NGS product offering that can be integrated with multiple sequencing workflows, both for standard and customized research. Our exponential revenue growth reflects the high quality of our products, now verified by skeptical scientists who are enthusiastically sharing their data and helping us convince other potential customers.
Our success is not an accident. We analyzed the market needs and then applied our silicon technology to provide a better product that out innovative entrenched competitors. Beyond our core offerings, this year, we introduced new fixed panels including the mastixome and mitochondrial panel, both of which support clinical research. Just as we did with SymBio, we began by targeting large customers and we are currently tracking 88 opportunities. Looking towards growth for 2020, we are planning product extensions that focus on key market areas where we believe our silicon based DNA writing platform offers us an advantage of our competitors.
We believe the future liquid biopsy market is one such area with tremendous potential for growth both as an industry in and of itself and also for Twist specifically. Oncology as a whole is a burgeoning area of research for improved diagnosis and patient certification and our near term line extensions will be focused on addressing the growing market need. In addition, we have made initial inroads in converting the SNP microarray market to NGS with the customer now moving into the validation and adoption phases and others in pilot trials. In addition to expanding our product line, both of SYNBIA and MGS, we will continue to drive commercial execution by investing in our sales, marketing and support teams. In fiscal 2019, we doubled our quota carrying sales representatives from 30 to 60, and we will continue to invest in this team moving forward.
In addition to our own team, we will extend our global network through distributors. As an important variation of these efforts, we are working with PerkinElmer to co market our human core exome kit along with their cyclone NGSX workstation. And we're already seeing the results with new customers coming on board. We also offer our products to run within the workflow of MGI International Sequencers, which are installed mainly in Europe and Asia. We expect to sign additional distribution agreements worldwide to expand our reach while minimizing our infrastructure.
Moving to verticals. For biopharma, in fiscal 2018, we had an idea that our silicon based DNA synthesis platform could be used to create precision antibody libraries to accelerate and enhance drug discovery efforts. We now have data to support this idea. And in fiscal 2020, we expect to leverage this data into partners. This morning, we announced the expansion of our collaboration with Pantheon Therapeutics for the optimization of additional antibodies.
This come after a successful initial program where we improve the affinity of an autoimmune bispecific antibody and harmonized species cross reactivity for optimal preclinical testing. This is a collaboration that draws on the Twist antibody optimization solution to enhance the characteristics of antibodies and a great demonstration of what our technology can achieve. In addition, on the discovery front, we continue our work internally to generate antibody leads using our biopharma platform. We previously reported that we had functional antibodies to 3 GPCR targets. I'm pleased to announce that we now have found functional monoclonal antibodies against 7 GPCR targets.
This includes Addera 2a, CX and V2R for cancer, CRTH2 and again CXCR5 for asthma and inflammation, FSHR for infertility and GLP-1R for metabolic diseases. We're running these leads through optimization using our platform for partnering discussions. Moving forward, we will continue to generate robust data to support discussions with potential pharma and biotech partners in fiscal 2020. Some of our projected collaborations will focus on complementary technology to drive the drug discovery. Will be milestone and royalty driven agreements, more traditional of biotech companies.
For the latter, we expect the initial collaborations will be smaller pharmaceutical and biotech companies looking for novel drug discovery and will grow in value and size over time as we have additional third party validation. Turning to data storage. We continue to work to reduce the cost and increase the density of DNA data storage to $100 per terabyte. We're in the final stages of negotiation for non derivative funding through a government contract on DNA data storage. We continue to proceed with the seamless chip driver development, which will be designed and fabricated to be compatible with multiple device designs and will be a key part of our methodical development path to have some micron feature densities.
We are 3 months into the design phase, a process which takes a total of 9 to 12 months and the end design truly represents a key milestone to future improvement. Finally, with regards to our global strategy, we continue to see growth in all geographies. We completed our move of back end operations, R and D and corporate into our larger facility in San Francisco. We have also expanded our presence in EMEA and APAC. Looking at EMEA alone, our orders this year are almost equivalent to the total revenue for the entire company in fiscal 2018.
We have invested in EMEA and this is paying dividends. Including an important point in our global operations. Regardless of the customer locations around the globe, our intellectual property to manufacture DNA and silicon will always remain in the United States as we are an American company. We may, however, finish our products in other locations as we plan to do in China for our Chinese customers in order to expedite the time from order to delivery. We remain on track to ship our first products from our Chinese facility by the end of Canada 2019.
At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Jim to review our financial results for the quarter.
Okay. Thank you, Emily. As Emily noted, the 4th quarter was another very strong quarter for us in terms of revenue growth and increased gross margins. Our annual revenue for 2019 was $54,400,000 which exceeded our revised upward guidance of $52,000,000 to $53,000,000 This represents another year of triple digit growth for Twist. As we continue to grow our revenue and leverage our fixed costs, our gross margins improved and the margin for the year was $7,000,000 positive compared to a negative gross margin of $6,800,000 in the previous fiscal year 2018.
We exited our fiscal year with a very strong operational performance in the 4th quarter. Revenue was $15,700,000 a sequential increase of 16% and 87% year on year. We booked 20,000,000 orders, sequential growth of 10%. Book to bill ratio was 1.3:one and gross margin for the quarter was positive 21%. And we ended the year with $138,100,000 in cash and short term investments.
Now looking at some of the details of orders in Q4, our NGS bookings had another good quarter of 8,000,000 dollars Our bookings for the quarter, that was up from 6.8% quarter 3%. We received orders from approximately 100 and 80 NGS customers, with approximately 40% of those orders from diagnostic service companies, which we categorize in healthcare. Synthetic biology orders of $12,000,000 in Q4 was a 6% sequential increase over Q3 and 43% year over year growth. Note this includes orders of $2,800,000 from Ginkgo. Growth was strong across all regions in Q4, reflecting our investment in the commercial organization, as Emily noted.
We scaled our resources there and field sales representatives and total resource and commercial organizations scaled up from 70 to approximately 120 as we've added technical support and customer support. We also launched a number of new products that are gaining traction in the marketplace. So in summary, overall orders for the year were 70,000,000 which is 7% to 8% year on year growth. Some of the highlights are synbio orders, which are defined as genes, libraries and oligo folds, including Ginkgo, were almost 42,000,000 and that represents 31% year over year growth. Our orders for Ginkgo were 8 point $1,000,000 as compared to $9,000,000 in fiscal 2018, and that's primarily due to the timing of Ginkgo purchases.
Excluding Gingko, our synbio orders for fiscal 2019 were $33,600,000 compared to $23,400,000 representing 42% year over year growth, and that's primarily due to strong genes and oligo pools orders, in particular from industrial chemicals, academic and healthcare. NGS orders grew to $28,300,000 compared to $6,900,000 in the same period of 2018, representing more than 300% growth year over year, and that's primarily from healthcare. We've seen pretty phenomenal growth as we launched that product in February 2018. And the pipeline for larger opportunities continue to scale and we're now tracking 88 larger accounts. Note that 36 have now adopted.
That's an additional 10 from our last earnings call in August. We now have 52 customers in pilot and validation stages compared to 58 last quarter. Please note, we provide orders not to directly translate into revenue, but more to provide a trend line for each product group. We also anticipate both NGS and Ginkgo orders to be lumpy quarter to quarter. Now let me talk about revenue now.
In the 4th quarter, we reported $15,700,000 in revenue, which is another record quarter and 87% year over year growth compared to $8,400,000 in quarter 4 2018 and a sequential growth of 16%. 4th quarter is a really strong quarter for us. And our synbio products are doing well and quarter 4 revenue was $9,600,000 up sequentially from 8. As you noticed from our slide deck, the quarter 4 year over year comp with Ginkgo was going to be tough as the Q4 revenue was $3,200,000 in Q4 'eighteen and $2,100,000 in Q4 'nineteen and that's due to the timing of Gingko projects. Consequently, our non Gingko business is growing very strongly and Q4 revenue was $7,500,000 up from $5,800,000 sequential growth of 27 percent and year over year growth of 74%.
Our jeans business is doing very well, very strong and it's remarkable as we moved to our new facility in the Q4 and shipped approximately 81,000 Jeans due to the strong performance of our commercial and ops team and obviously we have great products in the marketplace. There are a number of products contributing to our gene growth, including our growth in longer genes. 3.25 kilobytes accounted for 30% of our gene revenue in 2019 versus 20% in 2018. Our customer base continues to expand, driven by our commercial organization, our products, our e commerce platform, our quality and pricing. Our NGS products quarter 4, were revenue was $6,100,000 with approximately 11% sequential growth and triple digit year over year growth as more customers continue to scale into production.
We shipped over 150 NGS customers in quarter 4 and over 260 NGS customers for the year. Now let me provide a brief recap of our revenue for the year. For 2019, our revenue was $54,400,000 as our customer footprint grew to in excess of $1300 and that's up from $717,000,000 in 2018. Our DNA products are impacting industrial processes, helping transform medicine and contributing to academic research. Ginkgo revenue for the year was $9,200,000 and that was slightly above our guidance of $9,000,000 and ahead of $8,700,000 revenue in 2018.
We're approximately 1.5 years into 4 year supply agreement. That agreement is going well and we're thrilled to see the progress Grinko is making as a company and we're excited about our future prospects. NGS revenue for the year was $21,000,000 which exceeded our most recent guidance and grew 7x as compared to the $2,700,000 in 20.18. Syn Bio revenue was $33,300,000 for the year and that's up from $22,800,000 in 20.18 and that includes Ginkgo. So excluding Ginkgo, Synbio business growing very nicely, is growing to $24,000,000 from $14,000,000 with strong growth in genes and oligopoly pools.
In terms of regions, U. S. Revenue is $37,000,000 That's about 2 thirds of our business. That's more than double the revenue in 2018. EMEA, as Emily noted, is having a great year with revenue of almost $15,000,000 and that's compared to $6,600,000 in 2018.
APAC revenue for the year was almost $3,000,000 with about just under $2,000,000 from China. In terms of the key end segments, industrial biotech was about $22,000,000 in fiscal 'nineteen versus $14,900,000 Healthcare is now our 2nd largest segment and accounts for $17,400,000 of revenue and that's primarily driven by NGS and genes. I'll now talk about the P and L. So moving down the P and L gross margins. As we projected, we continue to scale revenue and leverage our fixed costs, resulting in a positive gross margin of 21% in quarter 4.
This brings our gross margin to positive $7,000,000 for the year. Operating expense, including cost of revenues for the Q4 sorry, excluding cost of revenues for the Q4 increased approximately $34,900,000 which brings our operating expense for the year of 115.8 compared to 63,800,000 in 20 18. R and D increased to 35,700,000 in 20 19 compared to 20,300,000 2018 as we invested in biopharma, synbio and NGS. SG and A increased to $80,100,000 in 2019 compared to $43,500,000 in 2018, mainly due to increased investments in our commercial organization, additional costs associated with being a public company and some higher legal fees. The total loss for the year was $107,700,000 and this includes stock based comp of $11,200,000 and depreciation of $6,100,000 CapEx for the year was $15,000,000 with major investments in our new writers, lab equipment and furniture associated with our move into our new facility.
Cash and short term investments ended the year at $138,100,000 Now I'll give some guidance for 2020. We're close to the end of our Q1 and we see revenue in the range of $15,000,000 to $16,500,000 this quarter. Note there's a number of less shipment days due to the impact of customer holidays and we're projecting operating loss in the range of $31,000,000 to $32,000,000 dollars I just want to make a note that our orders are very strong this quarter and our guidance for 2020 for the year in terms of revenue is $80,000,000 to 84,000,000 dollars Ginkgo revenue is estimated to be approximately $10,000,000 Non ginkgo synbio is estimated to be in the range of $32,000,000 to 33,000,000 NGS is estimated to be in the range of $37,000,000 to $40,000,000 and biopharma revenue is estimated to be 1,000,000 dollars Gross margin, average for the year is projected to be approximately 32% as we continue to grow revenue and leverage our costs, and we expect margin to scale from the current 20% level to approximately 40% as we exit 2020. Operating expenses, which include R and D and SG and A, will be approximately $130,000,000 for the year. Our net loss for the year is expected to be in the range of $103,000,000 to $106,000,000 as we continue to invest in our commercial organization, invest in R and D and prepare for the trial in the Agilent litigation, which is scheduled to begin February 24, 2020.
CapEx guidance for the year is in the range of $12,000,000 In summary, over the last year, we have executed ahead of our plan. The business is doing extremely well. We're experiencing strong bookings this quarter. We set a high bar and have a disruption platform that helps our customers scale and we want to thank all our twisters for another terrific year of innovating, executing and a terrific end to quarter 4. With that, I will turn the call back over to Emilie.
Thank you, Jim. As we move into 2020 from a position of strength, we'll continue to innovate and execute. For synbio, we expect continued revenue growth and diversification as we introduce new products to meet the needs of both extremes on the spectrum of complexity, which means researchers needing high volume, high complexity genes as well as those with few requirements of gene fragments. In addition, we will continue to enhance our e commerce experience. For NGS, we will continue our efforts to move customers through the pipeline from pilot to adoption.
In parallel, we expect to introduce new products to meet the needs of those developing leukate biopsies and cancer research tools. We will also pursue additional applications of our technology within the SNP macro market including DTC and AgBio. For biopharma, we'll continue building proof of concept data packages for the antibody we've generated through our unique drug discovery platform. We will continue to generate data for our Twist antibody optimization programs, both for internal use and for our collaborators. Finally, we expect to sign between 510 collaborations, some of which will include both milestone and royalties more typical of biotech development partnerships.
And for data storage, we will continue to execute on our roadmap to increase the synthesis density of our silicon platform to reduce the cost of DNA writing specific to data storage in DNA. And operationally, we'll continue to focus on increasing our gross margin, reducing turnaround time and expanding our presence globally. Overall, we are focused on moving up the value chain in all businesses and believe that it will be our unique silicon based DNA synthesis platform that will continue to enable our successful growth. We see continued opportunities to invest in R and D and our commercial team in order to fuel continued medium and long term growth. On the litigation front, site discovery has now closed and we're working to filing motions for summary judgment which will ask the court to dismiss Agen's claims.
We expect to file these motions later this month and we continue to believe the case is meritless and intend to defend ourselves vigorously. To the extent the case is not resolved through these motions for summary judgment, we look forward to our day in court. As you can appreciate, we'll not be discussing the litigation in the Q and A, but do encourage you to read the updates on the Investor Relations section of the website. With that, let's open up the call for questions. Operator?
Thank you. And our first question comes from the line of Tycho Peterson with JPMorgan. Your line is now open.
Hi, thanks. This is Eleni on for Tycho. So firstly, you added 10 customers to production mode this quarter versus 2 last quarter. Can you talk about what drove the uptick this quarter and how we should think about the quarter to quarter cadence in fiscal year 2020?
Yes. I mean, I think if you look at this, this is really driven by customers on internal processes. They've all confirmed that we offer significant competitive advantage. So it's their advantage to actually convert us faster. I know that in terms of the pipeline, we've extended the pipeline from 84 up to 88.
Number of customers, it takes between 9 18 months to move through the pipeline. And as we look forward, we believe that this is going to give us strong momentum going through this year and into we're actually looking now into 2021. And feedbacks given the product reduces throughput time, gives great, great reductions in the cost of sequencing. And the customers are very happy to accelerate the product through that pipeline.
Great. And then in light of, one of your competitors, IDT, rolling out NGS discovery pools and probes at ASAG, can you talk about how your NGS sample prep offering differs? And has it been or do you expect it to become a more competitive sale process now?
That's a great question. So I think when we launched our kit, especially in the area of custom targeted sequences, we had a few key features. One of them was the speed at which we could make custom panels and then the cost of that first experiment. And it was not close. It was a very significant differentiation with the competition.
And so that has been very successful for us and has been a key driver of the pickup that we've had commercially. I think what you're saying is an attempt to respond because those are two features that are greatly appreciated by the market. And our view so far is that we still have the fastest turnaround time and the best price for custom panels. So while it's an attempt, I think it doesn't match the abilities that our silicon based platform offers.
Great. That's helpful. And then just one last one. In terms of litigation costs, could you talk about your assumptions in terms of the outcome and guidance? What the timelines are post decision and whether the costs of an appeal are included or not in guidance?
Thank you.
Yes. We don't break out litigation costs. As Emily highlighted, the case is no merit and we're going to defend ourselves vigorously. Our business is doing very well. Our NGS customer base continues to grow strongly and we're going to be positioned to grow the business and drive gross margins this year.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Doug Schenkel with Cowen. Your line is now open.
Hey, good afternoon. Thank you for taking my questions. Maybe just to start off by talking about recent trends. Given there are less than 3 weeks left in the quarter and one of those weeks has Christmas in it, so that's usually not the most productive week in the quarter. First, is it fair to say that the risk to your fiscal Q1 revenue target is pretty low at this point?
Presumably, you have a lot of that revenue in the bag. And then secondly, can you speak to order trends through the quarter? You had a very nice close to the year in terms of book to bill. The tone was quite positive, at least in my opinion, in terms of how you characterize momentum this quarter. I'm just wondering if you can say a little bit more about how orders have how the order book has built throughout the quarter.
Yes. So thank you, Doug. Order book this quarter building very strongly And the I mean, it's interesting when we were developing the guidance for this quarter, we've been watching that. You're absolutely right with Christmas and New Year in the middle of the week. We've given guidance of a range of $15,000,000 to $16,500,000 And because the order book is building so strongly, we feel very good about the $80,000,000 to 80 $4,000,000 guidance for the year and particularly with the number of NGS customers that move now from and now into adoption from the validation stage.
So that's some of the thinking behind our guidance for this quarter. Does that help?
It does. It does. And presumably what you're seeing on the order trend side recognizing you didn't guide for fiscal Q2, but there's enough momentum there that would make it feel like if you're going to do what you think you're going to do in Q1, if you're going to see a normal step up in Q2 that's kind of what shapes the trajectory of the year whether it doesn't feel like based on what you're seeing in terms of revenue and bookings that this is going to be an extremely back end loaded year or something like that?
Well, that's right. I mean, I think it was interesting. Number of customers grew. We're seeing real good strengths in Europe. The feedback in NGS is great.
Syn Bio had a great quarter. I mean, we shipped 80,000 genes in quarter 4 and we moved I mean Doug, we moved into a new facility. Shipped. And definitely the platform, we've got a disruptive platform.
Super helpful. Okay. So I was just doing some basic and quick math. So hopefully I'm not messing up anything here. But if I take your quarterly NGS revenue and divide it by the number of customers you have, the revenue per customer is going down.
Now that makes sense because you're growing the customer count pretty rapidly and it's only a fraction of those customers who are in production. So I don't see anything alarming in that trend. I guess what my question is, ultimately as you move more of those customers into production like we saw this quarter where there was a much bigger step up Q3 to Q4 versus Q2 to Q3. At some point, should we see an inflection in revenue per customer as the production mix goes up?
Yes. So it's a good question. We've been digging into that. So the good news on the increased number of customers, it means more customers are sampling us. More customers are still coming in at the front end of the funnel.
The flip from validation from 26% to 36% supports our revenue growth. Last year, revenue was 21%, which was slightly hotter than I personally expected. We thought we'd do about $20,000,000 this last year. And the range of revenue this year is $37,000,000 to 40. And I'm assuming roughly 50% of that's going to come from those customers that have moved to adoption.
And we believe those customers will continue to scale. And so what we're now planning for is the 2021 revenue growth.
Got it. Okay. That's interesting. This has been another big year of financing activity across synbio. I think a lot of us have seen data that supports that assertion.
Certainly for those of us who attended synbio beta, it was apparent that it's a growing field with a lot of interest from both end users as well as the investment community. If we think about the amount of money that's gone into funding growth for existing companies and the creation of new synbio companies. I'm just wondering, obviously, it's a positive trend for you, but how do you weigh that in the equation as you set guidance for this year?
I think it's interesting because we if you look at maybe if you go back even VC funding back in 2018 and I mean I guess through this year has been very strong. What does that mean? There's more applications, more market opportunity. And we have a platform that allows our customers to scale. And you just look at the number of customers, we ended up with over 1300 customers and what there's a I think there's huge room for us to grow.
And but that's probably moving into this new facility. We are positioning ourselves for another year as the guidance highlights $80,000,000 to $84,000,000 another year of strong growth and we're now starting to sharpen our pencils on what's going to happen in 2021 And biopharma is going well. So it's all all of it's leveraging off our platform. So you step back, we have a platform that provides a great product that's going to allow our customers to scale. So it's we're going to just keep our foot to the floor and keep on the gas here.
Yes, it's that all makes sense. I mean, part of the reason I ask and it probably sounds like a really obvious question, but it's just when I do again some quick math and just try to measure basically just analyze revenue on a per customer basis. Even though your guidance is above what I think a lot of folks were looking for, I think one might be able to argue that there could be a bias to the upside when you think about the funding environment and you look at your guidance, which doesn't seem to across the board factor in an assumption that this growing group of customers who is increasingly better funded is going to spend a lot more on product. But practically speaking, you would think they would. So I'm not sure there's a question there.
It's just kind of an observation that it doesn't seem like your guidance is assuming that this growing group of customers is going to spend a ton more on your products in spite of the fact that practically speaking they kind of need to and they have the money to do so. Last question, how meaningful has the MGI BGI partnership impacted revenue growth in China?
We just signed it a few weeks ago. So I think we look Too
early.
It's too early, but I think it's important catalyst for next year growth.
Okay.
We're excited about it. And we want it to be the 1st targeted sequencing kit on the platform and I'm glad that we achieved that goal.
Okay. All right. That's great. Thanks for all the airtime. I appreciate the color.
Thank you, Doug.
Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Luke Sorgat with Evercore. Your line is now open.
Great. How are you guys doing? I guess just to follow-up on that MGI question from Doug. Any discussion with Illumina right now to do the partnership with them is to help keep the overall sequencing cost down?
I don't think there is any discussion I can comment publicly on. I think we are always looking to as we mentioned, always looking to enhance our reach through placebo and partnerships. Right now we have 2 publicly announced with TurkinaElmer on MGI, But I think we have a great product and we are looking to enhance it with partnership with different channels.
Okay. That's helpful. I get it. And then your growth on the synbio ex ginkgo revenue has been quite strong versus our model. Can you talk about how much of that is from new customers and then also just from versus extra wallet share versus existing customers?
So, So, interesting question. So, it's a combination of both. It's new customers and we're getting extra wallet share. Particularly, I mean, it's interesting, some of the customers come on, they ramp faster than we expected. And those were new customers that were in Q1 calendar, I guess.
I think it's both. I mean, the platform is allowing scale. We offer very competitive pricing and they're seeing terrific service. So, it's a combination of the overall impact of the commercial organization or e commerce platform. And we continue to see opportunities growing, particularly in Europe for Synvio as well.
I mean, the good thing is if you go back in time, I mean, Ginkgo is a great customer for us. Ginkgo share is now down at roughly 17% of our total company or 16%. And we are seeing more and more customers added as I mean, we're over, what, 1300 customers. So we're now close to 1,000 synbio customers. And the revenue for longer genes continues to grow as well.
We launched 5 kilobytes earlier this year, and we're seeing really good feedback from the marketplace.
Helpful. And then lastly, I guess on the biopharma funnel, can you talk about the order trends and where you're seeing how that funnel looks versus on the antibody optimization versus the drug discovery?
So you're thinking about the biopharma vertical, right? Yes. Yes. So as you correctly note, there is kind of 2 offerings that we have. 1 is a drug discovery offering where someone comes with their target and we can give them functional antibodies.
And then the second is an optimization solution where someone comes in with an already discovered antibody and we can turn into a better antibodies for whichever drug like properties they are interested in. It could cross reactivity, could be affinity, could be others. So I think now we have data for both and that was the focus of this year was to demonstrate that both were possible. And in the funnel, we have we are pushing opportunities for both. And so I think we should see some partnerships or collaborations announced in both areas.
Okay. That's helpful. Thank you.
All right. Thank you, Luke. Thanks,
Luke. Thank
you. And our last question comes from the line of Catherine Schult with Baird. Your line is now open.
Hey, guys. Congrats on the quarter and thanks for the questions. First, on the $1,000,000 of biopharma revenue in fiscal 2020 guide, is that only from already signed agreements? Or does it assume some success in signing those 5 to 10 new deals?
From well, we announced Pandion. So it's from some of the deals we signed and it's we are seeing, as Emily highlighted in the call, we're seeing good opportunities are coming down the funnel and we're getting more line of sight on the revenue. That's why we're highlighting $1,000,000 revenue approximately from biopharma.
Yes. And to complement that, we next year, as we announced, we are looking to sign deals that will include milestone payments and royalties. But the revenue that we guided is only for the upfront portion of those deals.
Got it. Okay. And then just going back to MGI for a moment, any qualitative comments on how those co marketing activities have gone so far? And what are you assuming for contribution from that partnership in your $37,000,000 to $40,000,000 NGS guide?
Yes. So I don't think we are planning to allocate the growth at this point on different sequencing platform. However, we do see it as a good catalyst for growth, especially in Asia and China.
Okay. And then last one for me. Going back to Doug's question on cadence, particularly for that NGS piece, expects a lot of growth there this year. As you look at your pipeline of customers and pilot and validation stages, are there any large customers you're expecting to move into production in the coming quarter or 2 worth calling out or just trying to get a better sense of revenue cadence throughout the year for NGS?
Yes, it's a good question. I mean, the orders tend to be lumpy. I mean, the good news is the broadening out of the number of customers that we've adopted and we're starting to feel as if we're I mean, we've shown revenue growth every quarter. I think in Q2 this last year, we had one large order, which did which was great. And we have not built into our forecast this year to have similar set of large orders.
So it's more broad customer adoption and a smaller revenue assumption for each customer, which gives us more confidence in terms of our $37,000,000 to $40,000,000 revenue.
All right, great. Thank you.
Okay. Thank you. And this concludes today's question and answer session. I would now like to turn the call back to Emily DeProust for any further remarks.
Thank you, Chris. So we are very pleased with the exceptional growth we have demonstrated, not only in our revenue curve, but also in our ability to take an idea and drive it into a product. We began in synbio, we've added NGS and we are making good progress both in biopharma and DNA data storage. So we look forward to sharing our progress with you in fiscal 2020 and I'm very confident that it will be a great year. Thank you very much.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.