Ginkgo.Your Innovation Partner.
Earlier this year, we announced that we’re bringing our in-house, proprietary automation technology to a lab near you. We believe that high-content, high-throughput data generation at low cost is a game-changer for so many important biotechnology research challenges.
With our RACs (Reconfigurable Automation Carts), you can integrate an arbitrary quantity and variety of scientific instruments housed in standardized enclosures. We’ve engineered the carts for maximal flexibility and scalability, allowing you to meet changing experimental needs. Each RAC includes essential features for reliability and connectivity such as a dedicated robotic arm, utility routing for electrical, air, and data connections, and an optional HEPA filter for maintaining sterile conditions. This modularity enables labs to quickly adapt to new workflows and scale operations without the lengthy downtime associated with traditional fixed automation systems.
When you install a RAC system, you’re bringing your automation process from ‘too-much-legwork’ to ‘playing-with-Legos’ levels of ease and flexibility. But that’s not the only important part of an automation platform – you also need cutting-edge software!
That’s where our Catalyst Automation Control Software (Catalyst ACS) comes in. We’ve built out a streamlined web-based interface that allows you to launch protocols, monitor execution, route generated data, and download generated data easily in the browser. If you prefer to develop on top of the codebase yourself, use our REST APIs to seamlessly integrate the system into your software stack and gain full programmatic control over your RAC system.
One key feature for any automation control software is scheduling: you want to wring all the productivity you can out of your space and equipment. That’s why we’ve partnered with Google Cloud and Google Research to integrate the Google's OR-Tools optimization suite into our stack. OR-Tools is best in its class, and has won gold in the international constraint programming competition every year since 2013. By integrating Google Research's OR-Tools on Google Cloud, we’ve increased our throughput and efficiency by an order of magnitude, ensuring that the time it takes to propagate protocol-level changes from browser-to-workbench is as short as possible. One of our workflows saw an 88% reduction in hands-on time: we want to bring those sorts of benefits to you!
With Catalyst ACS’s scheduling engine, powered under the hood by OR-Tools, you can simultaneously and efficiently execute multiple workflows, significantly increasing the throughput of your lab operations. This makes high-mix, variable-throughput lab environments accessible for automation on a larger scale than ever before. Plus, you can add more work to your RAC system, take instruments offline, or even reconfigure your hardware and Catalyst ACS - powered by OR-Tools - will automatically reschedule to accommodate the changes, enabling smooth re-allocation of tasks and resources, helping to drive velocity in your lab operations.
We’re excited to continue our partnership to bring life-science specific scheduling solutions to life, so stay tuned for future updates. It’s been so great to see many of you during SLAS 2025, and if you weren’t in San Diego to come check out the RACs in person, please schedule a call or a visit with us on this page.
