Ginkgo Bioworks

Ginkgo Bioworks is a synthetic biology company operating autonomous labs and a horizontal platform for engineering biology. Its public developer surface is the Ginkgo AI Model API (api.ginkgobioworks.ai), which runs inference on public and Ginkgo-proprietary biological foundation models — protein and DNA masked language models and embedding models such as ESM2 (650M/3B), ginkgo-aa0-650M, and ginkgo-maskedlm-3utr-v1. The API is an async, job-polling REST service: callers POST a transform request, receive a job result URL, and poll until the job completes. Authentication is via an x-api-key header, credits and keys are issued from the models portal, and an official Python client (ginkgo-ai-client) is published to PyPI. Ginkgo was surfaced as a Felicis portfolio company and enriched into the API Evangelist network.

Ginkgo Bioworks is listed with 1 API on the APIs.io network. Tagged areas include Company, Synthetic Biology, Biotechnology, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning.

Ginkgo Bioworks’ developer surface includes documentation, API reference, getting-started guide, signup flow, authentication, and 11 more developer resources.

🌐 Visit website 📡 Profile data on GitHub

18.3/100 emerging ▬ flat Agent 5/100 agent aware saas Full breakdown ↓
scored 2026-10-17 · rubric v0.24.0

1 API

Company Synthetic Biology Biotechnology Artificial Intelligence Machine LearningProtein ModelsBioinformatics Inference

Kin Score

Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-10-17 · rubric v0.24.0

Composite quality — 18.3/100 · emerging

Contract Quality 0.0 / 21

Developer Ergonomics 8.5 / 17

Access Clarity 1.1 / 17

Operational Transparency 0.3 / 11

Contract Governance 0.0 / 10

Discoverability 6.2 / 9

Regulatory Posture 1.6 / 15

Agent readiness — 5/100 · agent aware

Machine-Readable Contract 0 / 18

Agentic Access Contract 0 / 10

Documented Reversibility 0 / 6

MCP Server 0 / 12

Machine-Readable Auth 10 / 10

Idempotency 0 / 9

Stable Error Semantics 8 / 8

Request/Response Examples 0 / 7

Rate-Limit Signaling 0 / 7

Typed Event Surface 0 / 6

Agent Skills 0 / 5

Well-Known Catalog 0 / 4

Consent & Bot Identity 0 / 3

A2A Agent Card 0 / 8

Dry-Run / Simulate Mode 0 / 4

Delegated User Identity 0 / 6

Protected Resource Metadata 0 / 5

Registration Without a Human 0 / 6

Agentic Commerce Well-Known Document 0 / 5

Regulatory Posture applies to this provider. Its tags matched the Horizontal (data, software, accessibility, platform) regime, so Regulatory Posture carries 15 points of the composite. If this regime is wrong for your business, say so on your provider repo — the applicability map is public and we will correct it.

Create-or-Update Ergonomics could not be measured. We hold no machine-readable contract for this provider to read, so there is nothing to measure a write surface against. Excluded rather than scored zero: never-measured and measured-empty are different facts. Publishing an OpenAPI is what makes this facet — and several others — scorable at all.

The six quality facets above are damped to 85 points between them, because the conditional facet above carries the other 15. That is why each facet's contribution is shown against a damped maximum: raising a quality facet moves the composite by 85% of its nominal weight, not 100%. The full arithmetic is at apis.io/rating/.

Improve this rating by publishing the missing artifacts — every area above can be raised, and the full rubric is at apis.io/rating/. Every facet and dimension name above is a link: it opens that measurement's own page — what it means, the exact checks that feed it, how the whole catalog distributes on it, and the providers at the top of it. This rating is computed from github.com/api-evangelist/ginkgo: open an issue to ask a question, or submit a pull request to add artifacts. Submit an artifact on GitHub — free → Manage your own listing — the Influence plan, $499/mo →

Markets this provider is in provisional

The Kin Score Market layer reads a provider inside its market: its position, and how deep its integrations go. Depth is only comparable within a position. Provisional and unweighted: not part of the Kin Score or agent readiness.

Market	Position	Depth	Registered MCP server	Declares compatibility
Chemistry and Materials (chemical data depositors, materials-data APIs)	undeclared	-	-	-

Registered MCP server and declares compatibility are report only — not weighted. Undeclared means we found nothing we can read, so there is no number: we never infer integrations.

APIs 1

Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.

Ginkgo AI Model API

Async, job-polling REST API for running inference on public and Ginkgo-proprietary biological foundation models — protein/DNA masked language modeling and mean-embedding generat...

Security Posture 2

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.

Ginkgo Authentication

apiKey · 1 scheme

SECURITY

Ginkgo Domain Security

TLSv1.3 · HSTS · DNSSEC · DMARC

SECURITY

Resources

Get Started 3

Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call

DeveloperPortal

DeveloperPortal

GettingStarted

GettingStarted

SignUp

SignUp

Documentation 2

Reference material describing how the API behaves

Documentation

Documentation

APIReference

APIReference

Agent Surfaces 2

MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs

X-MCPServerCandidate

X-MCPServerCandidate

LLMsTxt

LLMsTxt

Design & Contract 3

Pagination, idempotency, versioning, errors, and events

Conventions

Conventions

ErrorCatalog

ErrorCatalog

Lifecycle

Lifecycle

Build 3

SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with

GitHubOrganization

GitHubOrganization

Packages

Packages

SDKs

SDKs

Access & Security 2

Authentication, authorization, and security posture

Authentication

Authentication

DomainSecurity

DomainSecurity

Company 1

The organization behind the API

Website

Website

Source (apis.yml)

aid: ginkgo
name: Ginkgo Bioworks
description: 'Ginkgo Bioworks is a synthetic biology company operating autonomous labs and a horizontal platform for engineering
  biology. Its public developer surface is the Ginkgo AI Model API (api.ginkgobioworks.ai), which runs inference on public
  and Ginkgo-proprietary biological foundation models — protein and DNA masked language models and embedding models such as
  ESM2 (650M/3B), ginkgo-aa0-650M, and ginkgo-maskedlm-3utr-v1. The API is an async, job-polling REST service: callers POST
  a transform request, receive a job result URL, and poll until the job completes. Authentication is via an x-api-key header,
  credits and keys are issued from the models portal, and an official Python client (ginkgo-ai-client) is published to PyPI.
  Ginkgo was surfaced as a Felicis portfolio company and enriched into the API Evangelist network.'
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/ginkgo/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
x-type: company
x-source: vc-portfolio
x-backed-by:
- felicis
x-tier: stub
x-tier-reason: portfolio-lead
deliveryModel:
  model: saas
  open_source: false
  commercial: true
  callable_host: false
  label: Hosted service · you call their endpoint
  confidence: medium
  source:
  - pricing
  generated: '2026-08-28'
  method: derived
accessModel:
  pricing: unknown
  onboarding: unknown
  trial: false
  try_now: false
  public: false
  label: Unknown
  confidence: low
  source:
  - authentication
  - security
  - url: https://www.ginkgobioworks.com
    status: 301
    note: declared website redirects to https://www.ginkgo.bio/ — a different registrable domain (ginkgobioworks.com -> ginkgo.bio),
      possible rename or acquisition (probed 2026-09-03, roadmap#169)
  generated: '2026-09-03'
  method: derived
image: https://www.ginkgobioworks.com/favicon.ico
specificationVersion: '0.23'
created: '2026-07-17'
modified: '2026-07-19'
tags:
- Company
- Synthetic Biology
- Biotechnology
- Artificial Intelligence
- Machine Learning
- Protein Models
- Bioinformatics
- Inference
tags_raw:
- Company
- Synthetic Biology
- Biotechnology
- Artificial Intelligence
- Machine Learning
- Protein Models
- Bioinformatics
- Inference API
- Machine-Learning
apis:
- name: Ginkgo AI Model API
  description: Async, job-polling REST API for running inference on public and Ginkgo-proprietary biological foundation models
    — protein/DNA masked language modeling and mean-embedding generation. Authenticated with an x-api-key header; an official
    Python client is published on PyPI.
  humanURL: https://ginkgobioworks.github.io/ginkgo-ai-client/
  baseURL: https://api.ginkgobioworks.ai/v1
  tags:
  - Artificial Intelligence
  - Protein Models
  - Inference
  tags_raw:
  - Artificial Intelligence
  - Protein Models
  - Inference API
  properties:
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://ginkgobioworks.github.io/ginkgo-ai-client/
  - type: Authentication
    url: authentication/ginkgo-authentication.yml
  - type: Conventions
    url: conventions/ginkgo-conventions.yml
  - type: ErrorCatalog
    url: errors/ginkgo-error-codes.yml
  - type: Lifecycle
    url: lifecycle/ginkgo-lifecycle.yml
  - type: X-MCPServerCandidate
    url: mcp/ginkgo-mcp.yml
    note: 'Renamed from MCPServer 2026-09-03 (roadmap#247): the manifest self-describes as status: candidate — a tool list
      derived from the published API contracts, not an existing server. The scorer already read the manifest and reported
      mcp_server correctly; the MCPServer type was crediting the artifact-type surfaces with a server that does not exist.'
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: kin@apievangelist.com
- FN: APIs.json
  email: info@apis.io
common:
- type: Website
  url: https://www.ginkgobioworks.com
- type: DeveloperPortal
  url: https://ginkgobioworks.github.io/ginkgo-ai-client/
- type: Documentation
  url: https://ginkgobioworks.github.io/ginkgo-ai-client/
- type: APIReference
  url: https://ginkgobioworks.github.io/ginkgo-ai-client/api_reference.html
- type: GettingStarted
  url: https://ginkgobioworks.github.io/ginkgo-ai-client/
- type: SignUp
  url: https://models.ginkgobioworks.ai/
- type: GitHubOrganization
  url: https://github.com/ginkgobioworks
- type: Packages
  url: packages/ginkgo-packages.yml
- type: SDKs
  url: packages/ginkgo-packages.yml
- type: Authentication
  url: authentication/ginkgo-authentication.yml
- type: Conventions
  url: conventions/ginkgo-conventions.yml
- type: ErrorCatalog
  url: errors/ginkgo-error-codes.yml
- type: Lifecycle
  url: lifecycle/ginkgo-lifecycle.yml
- type: X-MCPServerCandidate
  url: mcp/ginkgo-mcp.yml
  note: 'Renamed from MCPServer 2026-09-03 (roadmap#247): the manifest self-describes as status: candidate — a tool list derived
    from the published API contracts, not an existing server. The scorer already read the manifest and reported mcp_server
    correctly; the MCPServer type was crediting the artifact-type surfaces with a server that does not exist.'
- type: DomainSecurity
  url: security/ginkgo-domain-security.yml
- type: LLMsTxt
  url: llms/ginkgo-llms.txt
x-enrichment:
  date: '2026-07-19'
  status: backfilled
  pass: local-v1
  note: backfilled from .gitignore signal + verified work evidence

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