Catherine Schulte, covering Life Sciences and Diagnostics here at Baird. We're very excited to have Twist Bioscience here with us today. From the company, we have the CEO and Co-founder, Dr. Emily Leproust, and the CFO, Adam Laponis. So, Emily, Adam, thanks so much for being here. And I think Emily's going to go through a couple of slides, and then we will dive into Q&A. So if anyone has a question as we are going through things, feel free to email them to session1@rwbaird.com, and I will pass them along. Thanks.
Good morning. Thank you for the invitation and the introduction. I'll just give a few slides to refresh on the Twist story. I will start by saying that I'll be making some forward-looking statements, so for those of you that are new to the Twist approach, we have a technology where we miniaturize the chemistry of writing DNA on a silicon chip. Instead of synthesizing 96 pieces of DNA on a 96-well plate, about this size, we've miniaturized, and we can make a million or more pieces of DNA, so that miniaturization gives us a lot of advantages. Initially, we were making DNA. Since then, we have expanded into RNA products and protein products, and if you look at our website or to our customers, we serve a lot of different SKUs, thousands of SKUs, hundreds of applications, and thousands of customers as well.
But they all come to the same chip. So even though you may have a product that enables diagnostic for early cancer detection, or a product that enables trait development in cows, it actually comes from the same chip. We are organized in three business groups. One is SynBio. The other is NGS. And the last one is Biopharma Drug Discovery Services. And by now, we have a proven platform. And we have paired that innovative platform with a very strong commercial execution. We call it commercial violence. And thanks to that, we've been able to ramp our revenues here. I'm just showing the last few quarters where we were able to ramp revenues significantly at the same time because we have been able to contain our costs. The gross margin, as you can see, has grown up by 20 points.
And we were above 50% for the first time last quarter. And growing revenue, growing gross margin, and by keeping our OpEx line relatively flat, we've been able to shrink our losses. And our Adjusted EBITDA break-even is very close to zero. And the goal is to keep growing in a way that's profitable past the Adjusted EBITDA zero. And I'm going to skip this slide in the interest of time. And maybe the last slide, just to give you a sense of Twist, what are the special moats that enable us to grow like this? First is really a deep understanding of what our customers are doing. So we're a very technical team. And the second is that we've built multiple and very efficient channels. We have direct sales. We have e-commerce. We have OEM, and so on.
For our customers, what we've really down for them is industrialized the production of customized reagents to enable them to study biology and realize the power of biology to diagnose or cure diseases. With us, we have digitized very broadly our operations. If you come visit us, there's no paperwork anywhere. Everything is digitized. We have also standardized and automated our production facility. One of the things that people are surprised when they visit is there's not a lot of people around, even though the production is humming. In terms of our infrastructure, we are building an infrastructure that will enable us. Our next goal is to get to $1 billion revenue. To get there, we'll keep doing what we've down, which is leverage our technology and keep innovating to really delight our customers.
And what we enable our customers is, whether they do research or whether they work in a more regulated environment, we're able to enable, again, that production of customized reagents to enable either research or regulated scale. And the last, but actually not least, we've built a culture of performance where diversity of thought is important to us. So I'll stop here, and we can jump into the questions.
All right. Great. Thank you, Emily. Appreciate the overview. Maybe starting on the SynBio side of your business, revenue grew 7% in your fiscal third quarter, nearly 20% if you excluded the large order from last year. It seems like you're outgrowing peers there. So maybe just talk about what you're seeing in that business. And are there particular customers or subcategories where you feel you're taking the most share?
Yeah. And thanks for the question. And really, we were in a mode of share-taking. The end markets were a little bit, from a funding point of view, there was a little bit of uncertainty in academia and in some segments of the biopharma and biotech industry. But our goal is to take market shares. And our competitors in that markets were flat and all down, which means that we definitely are taking market share. And it's not an accident. That's how we built the company. That's how we built products that are differentiated on speed and quality and price. And so in an environment where maybe the funding is a little bit harder, we can offer more shots on goal. And we can enable people to keep advancing their work, even if their budgets are constrained.
And especially in the academic environment broadly, we said that sequentially there was very strong growth quarter over quarter, even though there was a funding issue in academia. So again, not an accident is that differentiation of products, thanks to the technology that enables us to take market share. At the same time, there are some very bright spots. One of those bright spots is there's a lot of VC funding going to AI-based drug discoveries. And those companies, they don't want to receive products.
They don't even have a lab. And so those companies, not only do they want a lot of data points, but they want a full service where all they want is data. And that has been a source of very strong strength in the market. But overall, I think compared to the competition, we're doing really well. We'll keep leveraging that innovation and that focus on customers, the multi-channel approach to reaching them.
Yeah. And at the same time, I think SynBio came in a bit below your expectations and declined sequentially for the first time in, I think, almost three years. You talked about some new customers ramping more slowly than expected. How much of that is kind of some of the funding environment that you talked about? Is it commercial intensity? And do you think we should get back to this kind of consistent sequential revenue growth for SynBio as we get into fiscal 2026?
Yeah. I mean, we had a tough comp year- over- year with one customer being down several million dollars, which we knew. And so we've been working on bringing a number of net new accounts, which we were successful in doing. But maybe those net new ramped a little bit slower than we had anticipated. So it was a timing issue. And we anticipate that the guidance that we gave at the time for Q4 was a very good one, more of a return to what we had experienced. And so when you bring a lot of new customers, we have to relearn their pattern of buying. But at the end of the day, the customer experience and the customer satisfaction is very high. And we see those customers coming back.
Maybe talk a little bit about the express portfolio on the SynBio side. And I think you've talked about more and more of that business coming from contracts with customers rather than the spot pricing model that you established. So maybe how has that dynamic played out since launch? Is that something that helps improve visibility with customers going forward?
Yeah. So when we launched the Express Portfolio in January, fully in January a year ago, it was in some way a limited launch where it was Express Genes. And that launch was successful in the sense that we are making 100% of our production at Express speed in five days, which was, I think, still, I think, the only class where we're the only ones that make all our genes in five days. And we had a differentiated pricing model to make sure that we reflected the full value of that launch. Since then, what has happened is we've significantly expanded the Express offering. We're going up the value chain. Then we've launched Express Prep, Express IgG. So you take a gene, you prep it. Then you take two genes, you put them in a cell, and you make IgG. You make protein.
So all of that became Express going down the value chain. So before the clonal gene, you can also buy a fragment, a non-Express fragment. But in July, we launched the Express version of the fragment. And so now, the work we've done is to focus on speed as a main axis of the entire Twist Bio portfolio. There's still a few product lines that are not Express yet, such as libraries and oligo pools. But the vast majority of our gene portfolio now is available Express, which means that the value to our customer is significantly enhanced because all of our customers want speed. And it's quite a turnaround at the time of IPO for those of you that were there. And speed was not our strength there. Then it used to be scale and price and quality. And we still have those. But now we've added speed.
And so it's just expanding the menu of products. If a customer is not time-sensitive and they are more budget-sensitive, they can still get it at a standard speed at a slightly lower price. So again, the idea is not to force a customer into one size fits all. It's really giving customization of what they get to meet their needs with the budget that they have, with the science they want to do. And it sounds like there's a lot of optionality in terms of product features, which there is. But it all gets made on the same silicon chip. So at the end of the day, anytime we launch a new flavor of our products, we are building on top of the investment we've made in the silicon technology.
Yeah, and on the NGS side, you're on track for another year of 20%+ growth there. Is there a way to think about how much of that's being driven by new customers versus existing customers scaling? And how durable do you think that type of growth rate is as we get into 2026?
Thanks for the question. It's an exciting time in the NGS, and it's not as impacted by some of the macroeconomics that some of our other customers are, so we're really encouraged by what we're seeing. When you look at it purely from a revenue perspective, it's a much longer ramp into significant revenue for our NGS customers, particularly in the diagnostic space where they're validating a test, so a lot of the growth in revenue is coming from existing customers continuing to build out and commercialize their products, but we're very excited about the number of new customers and folks developing different products on our platform, and we see that as driving not just the growth in 2026, but even beyond that point.
And then you guided to a sequential decline for NGS with a large account transitioning to some commercial production. I think just given the magnitude there, can you give us some color? A $5 million sequential drop implies some pretty significant volume. So we've just gotten some inbound questions on what exactly is driving that.
That's a great question. And if you look at this dynamic, one of the things we say oftentimes is NGS business can be lumpy inherently. And the best way to manage that is to add more lumps. This dynamic's not new. But if you think about the progression from doing development work to doing a clinical validation where you may have a clinical trial with tens of thousands at one bolus to then go into a commercial ramp that has some volatility into it. So medium term, we see this as an extremely exciting opportunity with this customer. And we expect to see growth moving forward after this air pocket in Q4. But what I'd say is that dynamic's not new. That dynamic has existed at other accounts. And we continue to see more and more accounts adding and growing.
And so over time, we expect this to be less of a phenomenon in the aggregate as we have more commercial customers. But the best way we can manage is continuing to add new customers. And from a forecasting perspective, we want to make sure we're giving the right visibility ahead of the curve.
Yeah, and you've talked about MRD as a potential growth driver for your NGS business. Maybe just talk about when you think that could be a material revenue contributor and kind of the path to getting your technology baked into some of these assets.
Yeah. If we step back on the NGS-based business group, we have been very judicious in which application we were going after. And so around the time of the IPO, we made a significant investment on being early in the liquid biopsy growth. And that has been a very successful investment for us. So that was enabling the analysis of DNA methylation, the analysis of SNPs, of structural rearrangement, copy number. Since then, we've expanded into RNA sequencing. We're expanding into enabling customers to move their microarray analysis onto Twist plus sequencing. So there's a number of growth factors. A big one is the one you mentioned around MRD. Obviously, Natera has done amazing on MRD, establishing the market. And we are not in the Natera test. We are using a different technology.
But we're seeing a lot of need by companies that want to go into the MRD space with a differentiated test. Some of them are bespoke. Some of them are tumor naive. Some of them are whole genome sequencing at low pass plus imputation. And our products enable all of those. We do have more differentiation on the bespoke part and the tumor naive part. But we think it's going to be like liquid biopsy. It's going to be a source of very significant growth. Right now, it's a ramping business. It's probably our fastest ramping segment in NGS. At this point, it's still a law of small numbers. But we see as some of those tests finish validation, go into commercial, we see that it's going to be it has the potential to become a very significant source of growth, not just in 2026, but beyond.
Again, in NGS, once the test is validated and it goes commercial, every patient that gets tested, there's a revenue flow to Twist, and those tests are FDA approved, and we are baked in, and it's very hard to be displaced, and so we see MRD as one of the very, very strong growth levers that we have in the NGS space. Not the only one, but one very, very strong one.
Is there the potential to get baked into kind of next-generation assays with existing MRD players? Or should we think of this as more coming from new market entrants?
So I think a few quarters ago, I would have said probably that we could not replace other vendors in existing tests. And so our opportunity was to get baked into the next generation of tests because those require significant investment by our customers. If they're going to revalidate anyway, they do pilots to make sure that they pick the best reagents. And so a few quarters ago, that would have been those next generations would have been the best source of growth for us.
I think since then, we've had a few opportunities where even in existing tests, I think some of our competitors may have had some or seem to have some supply challenges where some of our potential customers are even considering us even to be spec'd in into existing tests, even though that will require significant revalidation. So all that to say is that I think now we have more than just one way to get in. It's not just the second generation. There's also optionality for existing tests as well.
Moving on to the biopharma side of your business, it seems like that's a business that kind of recovered a bit in 2025. How would you view the state of that part of your portfolio? Obviously, some softer biotech funding trends. How are customers kind of managing in this environment?
Yeah. So in the biopharma side, as a reminder, in the first two business groups I mentioned, SynBio and NGS, we sell a product. And that product can be more or less complicated. It may be just one tube. It may be a kit. There may be a protocol. There is a different level of support around automation. But in general, in those first two businesses, we ship a box with a physical product in it. And then in biopharma, where we're doing a service, you send us a target. And we have a group of drug developers at Twist that use the Twist products, either in vivo, in vitro, or AI, to give you a number of preclinical assets. It can be antibody, but of many flavors. It can be a small one, VHH. It can be antibody, bispecific ADC and so on. But it's generally a service.
One thing that when you look at the data, the revenue had come down a little bit in the previous quarter. But we knew that if we had the right commercial execution, we had a very strong service offering there. And we're seeing the turnaround there. In addition, so on its own, the Biopharma numbers are doing better. And we anticipate that they'll continue to do better on their own. In addition, we're seeing a lot of synergies between SynBio and Biopharma. I think we're seeing a lot of companies that are seeing SynBio and Biopharma as a continuum where they're doing the same thing, which is discovering drug. And sometimes they buy product from the SynBio business group to do the work themselves. Sometimes they send us a target. And they outsource the work to us. But it's the same customer base.
And so what we found is that there's a lot of benefit in having the same team, the SynBio team and the Biopharma team together as one team to sell the full menu of products. And some of the successes that we are having in SynBio is thanks to that strong integration between SynBio and Biopharma. So not only on their own, they are getting back to the type of growth we want to see. But also they contribute to sell the Twist platform. And we expect that trend to continue in the future.
Yeah. And maybe on the financial side, you reiterated expectations to achieve Adjusted EBITDA break-even by the end of fiscal 2026. I guess what's assumed in that outlook? Should we expect kind of steady improvements throughout the year? Are there specific programs and cost actions that are needed to hit that target?
Thank you for the question. I think what you've seen in the last number of quarters, even years, is a consistent theme of every dollar of growth, about $0.75-$0.80 of that is dropping the gross margin line. We've had a couple of really good quarters. We've accelerated against that, but I think we'll stay towards that number, not just in 2025 Q4, but well beyond that as well, and that's going to be the primary driver of that revenue growth, dropping the gross margins, the driver of our profit expansion. The discipline we've had for the last two-plus years on operating expenses, I expect will continue on the path to profitability, and that's really so there's no magic to getting to it.
I can actually squint and start to see it myself, so we are continuing to do what we've been doing. We expect to cross that, as we said before, by Q4 of 2026 fiscal. As we do that, that will allow some of the optionality to look forward and look beyond and determine how we continue to reinvest and drive growth.
How should we think about kind of capital allocation priorities today? How might that shift over the next five years?
In terms of where we are today, right now, we always say every good scientist and every good engineer has more ideas than they have budget, and so we are, by definition, capital constrained in every time, and so it is determining where it falls above and below the line. I think as we move on the other side of profitability, Emily has said it many times, it gives us optionality, and we'll continue to evaluate those options as we move forward, and we see the potential for growth well into the future. I don't want to give any guidance at this point in the conversation, but I think it is in terms of the optionality that that drives on the other side of profitability, we feel we're very excited about.
Yeah. We've got a couple of minutes left here. Maybe just in closing, as you think about the next 12 to 18 months, what do you view as the two biggest opportunities for the business? And maybe what would be two potential challenges?
I mean, the opportunity is, as we continue moving forward, we need to do two things. One is ramp revenue and get to Adjusted EBITDA break-even. And when we get through Adjusted EBITDA break-even, as Adam just mentioned, it really gives us optionality to make sure that strong growth continues in a way that is now profitable. It's a very target-rich environment for us. We mentioned MRD, which is one. I alluded to the microarray conversion to Twist plus sequencing in SynBio, combined with Biopharma and the push in AI funding in drug discovery company. I think that that's an opportunity for us to go get that funding. It's really a combination of, one, sustaining the innovation in a way that's capital efficient and keep ramping that revenue. We know that ramping the revenue is a big part of the enterprise value.
And then in terms of changing, I think we don't know what the funding environment will be. But I still think that that's a potentially net positive for us because we offer the full stack of value of speed, quality, and cost. So in an environment where funding is constrained, I think we can still keep advantage of that. And then the last, I think the second risk, I would say, is something that I'm very focused on, is as we grow, as we pass profitability, we can't lose the culture that helped us get there of strong innovation. And so we have to be careful that we don't have a culture that becomes more average. We need to keep that culture of high performance and bold action to grow. So it's a very internally focused risk that we're trying to make sure that we contain.
Yeah. All right. Well, with that, we are out of time. Thanks, everyone, for joining. And Emily, Adam, thank you.