It could be you’re an industrial biotech, and you want a new enzyme for laundry detergent or it could be as part of a four enzyme pathway to make a small molecule chemical. The third enzyme in that pathway needs to be optimized. Well, all of those kind of feel like the same project. And so that’s where we’re running this experiment to see could we make that essentially more cookie-cutter offering. It would let the deals close faster. It would make the work happen faster. The customer — this is what I’m super excited about over time starts to have more certainty of success, right? Because my underlying belief is like the thing that really makes the biotech industry, not the tech industry, not software, is its unpredictability — tool have to spend money out of research budgets.
They spend money hoping they will get something. But that is not like what a software company — they spend money on a bunch of software engineers. They know they’re going to get software. Spend money on building a bridge or a building and you’re going to get a bridge of a building. And we and biotech are still living like in the pre-engineering confidence part of the idea with the standard offerings is to carve pieces out that we think are more predictable. And hopefully, there’s a nice feedback loop where even though the customer is getting something a little more standard, they can have higher confidence they’re going to get it.
Tejas Savant: Got it. And one quick one for Mark here. Mark, any color on cash burn you can share for ’23? And is it fair to assume a pretty material dip in ’24 that essentially sort of underpins your confidence in not needing to tap the capital markets again?
Mark Dmytruk: Yeah. So let’s start with 2022, just to kind of frame it for you. And so the cash — the operating cash burn, including CapEx in 2022 was roughly $300 million. And if you consider that there was a big contribution from biosecurity in 2022. It was roughly $70 million of EBITDA, then you can sort of start to — I think that’s a good starting point or a framework. We’re thinking about what 2023 would look like. So even though we don’t guide to the cash burn number. What you can do is assume, of course, you’re not going to get that big contribution from biosecurity and also assume that we are expanding the business. And so there is some OpEx expansion. And so that should sort of get you to a place where you can think about what burn would be in 2023.
2024, that’s — we’re not commenting that far out. But as Jason mentioned, in the sort of core discussion, a huge focus for the company this year. is on driving that operating efficiency within the foundry. And we do think that is one of the absolute sort of key levers or initiatives that will ultimately let us reduce the cash burn.
Tejas Savant: Yeah. Thanks, guys. Appreciate the color.
Jason Kelly: Yes. I’ll add one actually a little bit to that. If we do our job and drive efficiency this year, in other words, more and more and more programs without really ballooning spending. We have a more efficient system to scale up in the future, right? So it’s a very healthy time right now, I would say, for us to be having this focus on sort of efficiency and effectiveness on the platform side in terms of delivering against programs. If we work out a lot of people in the company are working on this right now, listening. Like if we solve this problem, like scaling in the future is going to be a dream. So I think this is really what it’s about this year, and that’s why I’m excited that it kind of — there’s an alignment between our commercial targets.
