Twist Bioscience - Earnings Call - Q4 2025

Executive Summary

• Record Q4 FY2025 revenue of $99.0M, up 17% YoY; revenue beat S&P Global consensus ($97.36M*) while EPS (-$0.45) modestly missed consensus (-$0.417*).
• Gross margin of 51.3% (vs 45.1% PY, 53.4% in Q3); sequential moderation driven by mix and a temporary NGS customer transition; management expects FY2026 GM >52% and to exit FY2026 at adjusted EBITDA breakeven.
• Segment strength: SynBio $39.5M (+17% YoY), NGS $53.0M (+16% YoY), Biopharma $6.4M (+22% YoY); EMEA grew 35% YoY to $34.6M, highlighting international momentum.
• FY2026 guidance: total revenue $425–$435M, DNA Synthesis & Protein Solutions $194–$199M (new combined segment), NGS Applications $231–$236M; Q1 FY2026 revenue $100–$101M; path back to ~20% NGS growth by Q4 on a large diagnostic ramp and early MRD contribution.
• Near-term stock catalysts: large AI drug discovery order (record PO), new MRD Express product (12-hour turnaround) and platform partnerships (Element Trinity Freestyle, sequencer-agnostic traction).

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

What Went Well

• Record quarter and 11th consecutive sequential growth; FY revenue hit $376.6M (+20% YoY), with GM up 8.1 margin points YoY to 50.7%.
• AI-enabled drug discovery demand accelerated; AI project orders increased >$25M YoY, including Twist’s single largest purchase order; management emphasized convergence of SynBio and Biopharma into “DNA synthesis and protein solutions”.
• International outperformance: EMEA revenue rose to $34.6M (+35% YoY), with Americas $57.3M (+9% YoY) and APAC $7.2M (+9% YoY); China ~1% of FY revenue, limiting macro exposure.
• Quote: “We have successfully positioned the business for continued profitable growth…Fiscal 2026 is about translating our margin strength into durable revenue growth.” — CEO Emily Leproust.

What Went Wrong

• Sequential GM compression to 51.3% from 53.4% in Q3, driven by customer mix and an NGS customer transition timing; management guided improvements through FY2026.
• NGS guide perceived below Street for FY2026 (11–13.5% growth); air pocket continuing into Q1 before ramp in Q2; underlying NGS ex-large customer ~20% growth in FY2025.
• Operating expenses (ex-CoR) rose YoY in Q4 to $80.8M; focus remains on revenue growth while sustaining margin discipline; adjusted EBITDA still negative in Q4 at $(7.8)M despite YoY improvement.

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Welcome to Twist Bioscience's 2025 Fourth Quarter Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To participate, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. You will then hear a message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, simply press star one one again. Please note this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Angela Bitting, Senior Vice President of Corporate Affairs. Please go ahead.

Angela Bitting (SVP of Corporate Affairs)

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone. I would like to thank you for joining us for Twist Bioscience conference call to review our fiscal 2025 fourth quarter and full-year financial results and business progress. We issued our financial results press release before the market, and it is available at our website at www.twistbioscience.com. With me on the call today are Dr. Emily Leproust, CEO and Co-Founder of Twist; Adam Laponis, CFO of Twist; and Dr. Patrick Finn, President and COO of Twist. Today, we will discuss our business progress, financial and operational performance, as well as growth opportunities. We will then open the call for questions. We ask that you limit your questions to only one and then requeue as a courtesy to others on the call. This call is being recorded.

The audio portion will be archived in the investor section of our website and will be available for two weeks. During today's presentation, we will make forward-looking statements within the meaning of the U.S. 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 in actual results in financial periods or are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. These risks include those set forth in our press release we issued earlier today, as well as 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.

We'll also discuss adjusted EBITDA, a financial measure that does not conform with generally accepted accounting principles. Information may be calculated differently than similar non-GAAP data presented by other companies. When reported, a reconciliation between GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures will be included in our earnings documents, which can be found on the investor section of our website. With that, I will now turn the call over to our CEO and Co-Founder, Dr. Emily Leproust.

Emily Leproust (CEO and Co-Founder)

Thank you, Angela, and good morning, everyone. Today, our team delivered a record quarter with $99 million in revenue exceeding our guidance. This represents an increase of 17% year-over-year and our 11th quarter of consecutive growth. For the year, we reported $376.6 million in revenue, a growth of 20% over fiscal 2024. Gross margin for the quarter came in at 51.3%. For the year, gross margin was 50.7% compared to 42.6% for fiscal 2024, demonstrating the leverage of fixed costs with higher volume and reflecting our focus over the last two years on continuous margin improvement. I'd like to underscore that over the course of fiscal 2025, we grew our business 20%, leveraging our proprietary silicon-chip-based technology platform to deliver high-quality products and services rapidly to our growing customer base.

Importantly, through the addition of new products and solutions, we expanded our market share with an eye towards addressing new services in the market in the year ahead. Our commitment to commercial excellence continues to ensure we meet and exceed our customers' expectations. Today, with our differentiated manufacturing technology, our innovative R&D for the continuous introduction of new products, our base of more than 3,800 customers across multiple industries, our hundreds of SKUs serving a wide range of diverse applications, and an increasing market share in multiple markets, we are operating with incredible execution and financial discipline. With the adjusted EBITDA breakeven within our reach by the end of fiscal 2026, this year we focus on setting the stage for future growth acceleration. Turning to our results, SynBio revenue came in at $39.5 million, up 17% year-over-year.

Our growth in SynBio continues to be led by the Express portfolio, which remains best in class in terms of price, turnaround time, and scalability. Two years after launch, our customers have come to depend on the rapid turnaround time, high quality, and exceptional experience they received from Twist as their new normal and what they expect regularly. We have decreased the turnaround time for gene fragments, clonogenes, high-throughput DNA preps, and high-throughput IgG proteins, and we now run assays and provide antibody characterization data as part of our offering for many customers. One area of substantial growth for SynBio and Biopharma offerings came from customers treating Twist to power their therapeutic discovery initiatives, both traditional drug discovery and AI-enabled discovery, because our platform delivers precision, scale, and speed at enabling economics.

While traditional discovery continues to be a focus of many customers, the rapid expansion of AI-enabled drug discovery creates powerful new opportunities and amplifies the value of our technology. Recently, this AI-driven discovery fueled significant growth for Twist. In fiscal 2025, orders from customers working on AI discovery projects grew more than $25 million versus fiscal 2024. These projects primarily fall into the SynBio and Biopharma bucket today, and a customer pursuing AI-enabled discovery delivered our single largest purchase order to date. The emergence of dozens of new organizations across pharma, biotech, and big tech pursuing new discovery approaches expands the market opportunity for SynBio and Biopharma groups today. Relatively, as we have moved further up the value chain from fragment to genes to prep to protein to delivering characterization data and beyond, the strategic connection between our SynBio and Biopharma groups tightens.

More customers now leverage both products and services to accelerate discovery and identify breakthrough therapeutics. This growing convergence highlights the power of our integrated platforms and reinforces Twist's unique position to serve the full spectrum of innovation in discovery, with more products and services to facilitate this growing opportunity coming in the months ahead. Over the last several years, our product introductions have focused on pharma and biotech customers pursuing therapeutic discovery as well as academic research. As we analyze the future market opportunities, we believe these continue to be ripe areas of focus for additional tools and services. Moving forward, we have a robust roadmap and planned product introductions to augment our portfolio that we believe will continue to drive revenue growth in 2026 and in the future.

Turning to NGS, we reported revenues of $53 million, growth of 16% year-over-year, driven largely by continued commercial success from our diagnostic customers' clinical assays. Our NGS products are an integral component within many commercial diagnostic workflows. We call that we provide tools for customers offering tests for therapy selection, liquid biopsy, comprehensive genome profiling, rare disease, non-invasive prenatal testing, and population genetics. In addition, we continue to support minimal residual disease customers with several of these groups targeting commercial launch in late 2026 and planning commercial scaling into 2027. We are beginning to see conversion of the microarray to FlexPrep plus sequencing workflow. Introduced about a year ago, we believe this product provides significant potential growth opportunities both for population genetics and ag bio applications.

During the quarter, we had two significant population genetic wins, with the final growing in serviceable opportunity for the $500 million market that uses SNP microarray technology today. Customers in both segments run millions of samples, so once converted, the business is bulky. We have maintained our sequencing agnostic strategies throughout our NGS product portfolio with all sequencing platforms. While the majority of our customers continue to use the Illumina platform and we have an active OEM agreement with Illumina, we also see growing interest in other platforms. To this end, we announced an advancement of our agreement with Element Biosciences last month that enables us to gain exclusive access to Element's new Trinity Freestyle workflow, facilitating the use of Twist's full lineup of library preps for the IVT system.

Together, Element and Twist shorten the workflow from sample sequencer from more than 20 hours down to 5 hours, a true time savings. In addition, we are powering the gene-by-gene population genetics test that runs on the Ultima Genomics sequencing platform. This complements our work with PacBio, Oxford Nanopore, and others. We continue to see traction building for our RNA-seq workflows, having customers who offer diagnostic tests as well as labs offering clinical services with growth expected across all areas of our NGS portfolio in 2026. Looking at Biopharma services, we reported $6.4 million in revenue, an increase of 22% year-over-year. Importantly, orders of approximately $11.5 million for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025 reflect a large order that spans both SynBio and Biopharma from a key account that we do not expect to repeat every quarter.

More customers now partner with Twist across the full design, build, test, and learn cycle for developability assays and characterization data. This trend continues to grow, especially among AI-driven drug discovery companies. Many of these customers operate without a wet lab and rely on Twist to execute the critical experiments that bring their designs to life. We help them move fast, generate robust data, and advance programs with great confidence. We see much more integration between our SynBio and Biopharma businesses as customers increasingly use both our products and services to power their discovery pipelines. To capture this opportunity, we aligned our sales organizations to deepen collaboration and fully leverage the synergies between the two. We also received valuable feedback from investors that our SynBio and Biopharma names for revenue grouping feel more clear.

Reflecting this progress and feedback, we will combine SynBio and Biopharma revenue for reporting going forward under the term DNA Synthesis and Protein Solutions, indicating synthesis and manufacturing of sequences for DNA, RNA, proteins, and data for customers going through the design, build, test, learn cycle. DNA Synthesis and Protein Solutions more accurately represent our customer base, and we intend to provide additional insight into industry groupings that better reflects how we serve a broad range of customers. Our NGS tools will now be called NGS applications as these products and services facilitate DNA reading sequencing workflows. Beginning in the first quarter of fiscal 2026, we will be breaking out industry groupings into therapeutics, diagnostic, industry and applied markets, as well as academics and government.

In addition, something that is underappreciated about Twist is the number of organizations that buy products from Twist and then resell them under a different brand name. As such, we will also share global supply partner revenue encompassing distributor and OEM partners as part of our industry breakdown. These new groupings enhance transparency and better align with how our business operates, providing investor insight into our strong growth engine. I would now like to turn the call over to Patty for commentary on our growth initiative for 2026.

Patrick Finn (President and COO)

Thanks, Emily. As we close fiscal 2025, it's remarkable what we've achieved in the last year, and I'm even more excited about what is to come. While my comments during earnings throughout the last year focused on margin initiatives, we have now crossed the important threshold of 50% margin, almost 20 margin points increase over the last two years. We expect to continue to remain above 50% margin moving forward, and this year, my remarks will focus on our growth plans. Today, I'd like to talk about a remarkable and differentiated product introduction for our NGS product line aimed at empowering our customers in an area of increasing importance for cancer diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment. I'm pleased to share that we're in the final stages of optimizing an express product for minimal residual disease, or MRD, which we expect to introduce commercially in early calendar 2026.

As you know, MRD for therapy selection, cancer monitoring, and early treatment of recurrence offers tremendous promise. We already work with many MRD customers providing library prep and target enrichment panels for tumor-informed and tumor-naive panels, as well as whole genome sequencing approaches. We continue to hear from customers developing tumor-informed assays that they gain better sensitivity and specificity using hundreds or thousands of sequences specific to a patient's tumor. The data presented at recent medical meetings back up these beliefs. Importantly, recent studies also show that physicians desire the capability to sequence a cancer's present and have a test in hand for a patient with cancer within a four-week window. While we currently manufacture enrichment panels within about five business days, we hear a desire for delivery of a tumor-informed panel as fast as 12 hours.

Using our proprietary DNA Synthesis platform, we developed a process to do just that: manufacture and ship an individualized panel as fast as 12 hours after receiving the sequence data. Our MRD Express solution provides the speed and simplicity of a tumor-naive test while maintaining the precision and sensitivity of a tumor-informed assay, something not possible using any other method of DNA synthesis. Taking a step back and looking at the broader implications, we all know family and friends and maybe many of you personally impacted by a cancer diagnosis. In the midst of the storm, turnaround time is critically important both to determine treatment and create a personalized panel to monitor recurrence of disease. At Twist, we believe it is our responsibility to respond rapidly, potentially offering a path to enable reduced treatment time or pursue therapy at an earlier stage of disease.

This higher calling motivates all of our Twisters to go above and beyond for our customers to play a role in transforming cancer into a manageable chronic condition. On the business side, we believe Twist MRD Express has the ability to support our customers in changing the diagnostic and treatment paradigm, lowering the operational barrier of entry for personalized MRD. We enable this shift through our synthesis platform along with automation, delivering personalized panels on a timeline equivalent to a tumor-naive workflow. We believe our connection to the customer, our ability to turn a customized panel in as few as 12 hours, all underpinned by our proprietary platform, will enable increasing availability of tumor-informed cancer assays. On top of this, we have the capacity today to serve these markets, future-proofing customer supply chain constraints and vulnerabilities. With that, I'll turn the call over to Adam to discuss our financials.

Adam Laponis (CFO)

Thank you, Patty. Revenue for the fourth quarter increased to $99 million, growth of 17% year-over-year and approximately 3% sequentially. For fiscal 2025, revenue increased to $376.6 million, growth of 20% year-over-year. Gross margin came in at 51.3% for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025, with the margin for full year of 50.7%, an increase of 8 margin points versus fiscal 2024, with approximately 90% of revenue growth in FY 2025 dropping to the gross margin line, supported by our continuous process improvement efforts. Taking a deeper dive into revenue, SynBio revenue increased to $39.5 million, growth of 17% year-over-year. For the full year, SynBio revenue increased to $145 million compared to $123.5 million in fiscal 2024, an increase of 17%.

NGS revenue for the fourth quarter grew to approximately $53 million compared to $45.5 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2024, an increase of 16% year-over-year. For the quarter, revenue from our top 10 NGS customers accounted for approximately 39% of NGS revenue. For fiscal 2025, NGS revenue increased to $208.1 million, growth of 23% year-over-year. We served 588 NGS customers in the quarter, with 159 having adopted our products. For Biopharma, revenue was $6.4 million for the quarter, growth of 22% over the same period of fiscal 2024, with orders of $11.5 million. We had 84 active programs as of the end of September 2025, and we started 47 new programs during the quarter. Compared to last quarter, these programs are more substantive as we see a shift to AI discovery-driven projects. For fiscal 2025, revenue was $23.5 million, growth of 15%.

Looking geographically, Americas revenue increased to approximately $57.3 million in the fourth quarter, compared to $52.7 million in the same period of fiscal 2024, growth of 9% year-over-year. For the fiscal year, the Americas accounted for 60% of revenue. EMEA revenue rose to $34.6 million in the fourth quarter versus $25.5 million in the same period of fiscal 2024, exceptional growth of 35% year-over-year. For the fiscal year, EMEA represented 33% of revenue. APAC revenue increased to $7.2 million in the fourth quarter, compared to $6.5 million in the same period of fiscal 2024, an increase of 9% year-over-year. APAC accounted for 7% of our revenue in fiscal 2025. China continues to be a relatively small portion of our revenue at approximately 1% of total revenue for fiscal 2025.

Moving down to P&L, operating expenses excluding cost of revenues for the fourth quarter were $80.8 million, compared with $74.3 million in the same period of 2024. Operating expenses excluding cost of revenues for fiscal 2025 were $327.3 million, which marks our third consecutive year of relatively flat operating expenses excluding cost of revenues. Looking at our progress and our path to profitability, for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025, adjusted EBITDA was a loss of approximately $7.8 million, an improvement of $9.2 million versus the fourth quarter of fiscal 2024. For fiscal 2025, adjusted EBITDA was a loss of approximately $46.9 million, an improvement of approximately $46.6 million versus fiscal 2024. Cash flow from operating activities continues to improve, and we are driving to break even.

For the 12 months ended September 30th, 2025, net cash used in operating activities was $47.6 million, compared to $64.1 million for the equivalent 12-month period in 2024. Capital expenditures in fiscal 2025 were $28 million, reflecting our investment in growth for fiscal 2026 and beyond. We ended the fiscal year with cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments of approximately $232.4 million. As Emily mentioned, beginning next quarter, we will provide new revenue by industry for the following categories that increase clarity around our key customer groups and transparency on how we are progressing as follows: therapeutics customers, which include both large pharma and early-stage biotech; diagnostics customers, who use our products to deliver a clinical report for a patient; industrial and applied customers, including agricultural bio; academic research and government customers; global supply partners, which will include distributor and OEM partners servicing customers across a variety of industries.

We believe these new categories will provide added color and metrics for investors to track our progress in reaching different end markets and customer segments. We do intend to share a retrospective view on the new industry group performance in our fiscal first quarter reporting. Turning to guidance for fiscal 2026, we expect total revenues of $425 million-$435 million, growth of approximately 13%-15.5% year-over-year. For our DNA Synthesis and Protein Solutions group, we expect revenue of $194 million-$199 million, growth of 15%-18% over fiscal 2025, reflecting strong demand from our AI discovery customers. For our NGS Applications group, we expect revenue of $231 million-$236 million, growth of 11%-13.5% over fiscal 2025.

We see a path back to 20% growth year-over-year by Q4, as we expect a large diagnostic customer will begin ramping their commercial volume in the second quarter. As added color, our NGS forecast assumes approximately 1-2 percentage points of growth for MRD in fiscal 2026, with the ramp for this particular product group coming in late 2026 into 2027. We expect gross margin to be above 52% for fiscal 2026, and we expect to exit fiscal 2026 with our fourth quarter achieving adjusted EBITDA breakeven. For the first quarter of fiscal 2026, we expect revenue of $100 million-$101 million, growth of 13%-14% compared to the first quarter of fiscal 2025.

Our guidance includes the expectation that our Q1 revenue will be impacted by a large cancer diagnostics customer who is transitioning their assay from research to commercial, with a re-acceleration of purchasing in the second quarter of fiscal 2026. We also see significant revenue from the record AI drug discovery order, such that our two product groups will be relatively equivalent to the first quarter. With that, I'll turn the call back to Emily.

Emily Leproust (CEO and Co-Founder)

Thank you, Adam. Our team executed exceptionally well through 2025, delivering strong results and building the foundation for what comes next. At Twist, we often say after a strong finish, we go again. We see substantial opportunity ahead across all our markets. Staying close to our customers continues to be our greatest competitive advantage. It allows us to anticipate emerging needs and identify the next set of products that will move the needle for growth. Like our customers, we have an unbiased set of ideas and a disciplined approach to prioritization. Over the past two years, we deliberately focused on gross margin expansion, and with gross margins now above 50%, we have successfully positioned the business for continued profitable growth. As we reallocate R&D resources towards growth, we're investing in innovation that we believe will drive sustained top-line acceleration.

Our roadmap remains robust and well-sequenced to deliver growth over the next several years. Looking forward, we expect balanced growth across our DNA Synthesis and Protein Solutions and NGS Applications, with some normal quarterly variation. We are advancing new products that support customers leveraging AI in drug discovery, as well as those using traditional therapeutics development methods. Fiscal 2026 is about translating our margin strength into durable revenue growth. We know where we need to go, and we are already on our way. With that, let's open the call for questions. Operator.

Operator (participant)

Thank you so much. As a reminder, to ask a question, press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To remove yourself, press star one one again. One moment for our first question, and it comes from Catherine Schulte with Baird. Please proceed.

Catherine Schulte (Senior Research Analyst)

Hey, guys. Thanks for the questions. Maybe first on gross margins, guidance for the fiscal year implies low 60s incremental margins off of 25%. So it would be in that 75%-80% range if we did it off of 24%. I think the expectation was you'd flow more of the 25% upside through. I guess the question is, is this pricing-driven? Do you have some manufacturing investments that you're making? When do we get back to the kind of 75%-80% incrementals?

Adam Laponis (CFO)

Hey, Catherine. This is Adam. Thanks for the question. Very much encouraged by the progress of the team over the last two years. The 20% growth in gross margin has been extraordinary. While we expect to continue to see the 75%-80% on average, we are lapping some tough comps, particularly given what we saw in Q3 of this year. For the last quarter, we dropped, I think it was over 80% of revenue growth dropped to gross margin line. Generally, I'd expect that to continue to hold in the future. If you look at that two-year metric, it absolutely will. There will be some noise. I'd say it is more around the specific customer mix that we see in any given quarter that drives it more than anything else. We expect it to continue to expand.

That said, we will continue to focus on revenue growth as well as gross margin and optimize for the gross profit.

Catherine Schulte (Senior Research Analyst)

Okay, great. For NGS, I think that guide came in a little bit below street for fiscal 2026. You just talked through the drivers there and maybe get a little more granular on the expectations for that customer ramping that's moving into production. I think the guide implies 11%-13% or 14% growth for NGS. How should we think about long-term growth for that business? Is this kind of the new baseline that we should be thinking about?

Adam Laponis (CFO)

I'm happy to take that one. In terms of growth for NGS, we're very excited about the prospects. We mentioned it on the call last quarter that we have a customer transitioning from their verification and validation, that there would be an air pocket in Q4, and that would continue through Q1. We expect that that customer will ramp as well as other customers. A couple of points of commentary and color that we provided. We expect to be back to 20% growth by fourth quarter in the NGS business, as well as we expect to continue to see growth from MRD and other new product introductions. We've assumed about 1%-2% of overall growth from the MRD business products in 2026.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Puneet Souda with Leerink Partners. Please proceed.

Puneet Souda (Senior Managing Director of Life Science Tools and Diagnostics)

Yeah, hi guys. Thanks for taking my question. Wondering if you can—yeah, thanks. Wondering if you can provide a view into SynBio and with the new segmenting. Can you elaborate a bit on the Biopharma order? Obviously, that's driven by AI, but just trying to understand how sustainable this is, how much of a momentum, what are you hearing from the customer development teams, how meaningful the AI contribution could be in fiscal year 2026?

Patrick Finn (President and COO)

Hey, Puneet. Thanks for the question. We've been talking for a few quarters about strategically how important the Biopharma business is and the close ties to the SynBio product offering. I think you're starting to see real validation of that with the order described in our comments today. It leverages everything that we're good at, our knowledge from a single gene all the way through to discovery. What we're seeing with the AI potential is it's our throughput and scale that really enables and supports that offering. We continue to be very optimistic in that space and see a fantastic lineup of the total Twist offering all the way through from one gene all the way through to full discovery. It basically puts us in a good spot for our future opportunities.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. One moment for our next question. It comes from Brendan Smith with TD Cowen. Please proceed.

Brendan Smith (Director of Life Science & Diagnostic Tools and Biotech Analyst)

Great. Thanks for taking the question, guys. I also wanted to ask just a little bit more about guidance into next year. Maybe just quickly for—I know you're not guiding to GMs for Q1, but can you give us a sense of how you're thinking about gross margin sequentially from Q4 and then over the course of next year to really get to that 52%+ on the full year 2026? And then maybe just quickly on the NGS portfolio, anything that you're hearing specifically from customers, really that kind of driving some of your assumptions to get to maybe the upper versus lower bound of the guide there? Thanks.

Adam Laponis (CFO)

Adam. Happy to take the question. In terms of gross margin in the guide, we do see improvements throughout the year. I'd say it is going to parallel with revenue growth being the primary driver of our gross margin expansion as we are continuing to see our efforts from continuous process improvements play out. We are also continuing to invest in new capabilities across the business to drive our new product initiatives and growth. As mentioned in the call, a lot of focus on the AI drug discovery and capabilities to support those customers. In terms of the exit point and also where to go from here, we do see a path to continued gross margin expansion, not just in 2026, but well into 2027 and beyond.

Again, optimizing for that gross profit dollar, not necessarily just the gross margin now that we're above 50% and not looking backwards.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Our next question comes from Vijay Kumar with Evercore ISI. Please proceed.

Vijay Kumar (Senior Managing Director)

Hi guys. Thank you for taking my question. I had a two-part question on NGS. NGS, I think your Q1 guidance, it looks like it's going to be down sequentially, maybe revenues up, mid-singles. I understand that Q4 had the customer transition impact, right. Why would Q1 growth be below Q4? Is there some additional timing elements on Q1 NGS? Sort of related, on this MRD Express, did I hear you correctly that the sensitivity on a tumor-naive assay would be as good as tumor-informed? Is there any data that you've highlighted? What kind of interest are you seeing in this product?

Adam Laponis (CFO)

All right. Maybe I can start with the NGS guidance, and I'll let Patty talk to the MRD element of it here. In terms of the NGS guidance, Vijay, thank you for the question on this. We gave the update back in Q3's call that we had a customer transitioning from validation to commercial ramp, and that impacted Q1, and it's going to continue to impact Q4. We expect to see a sequential growth from that point forward for the NGS business and starting in Q2. We will continue to see that air pocket continue in Q1, and then in Q2 and beyond, we'll see the sequential growth such that by the time we get to Q4, we're expecting to be back at 20% year-over-year growth in the NGS business. I'll let Patty talk to the MRD portion of the question.

Patrick Finn (President and COO)

Yeah, Vijay, thanks for the question. I think when we look at recent medical conferences, I think you're seeing that the tumor-informed approach is leading to increased sensitivity in the assay. That's got us excited about potential and the clinical endpoint and for the patients that are going through a tough time. We see sensitivity enhancements from tumor-informed. Again, our scale and speed, we think, is really going to help enable the segment of the market that's focused on that approach.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. One moment for our next question, please. He is from the line of Subbu Nambi with Guggenheim. Please proceed.

Subbu Nambi (Managing Director)

Hey, guys. Good morning. Thank you for taking my questions. Patty, just to follow up on that MRD, MRD Express is an exciting launch next year. Could you speak to who the end user is? It almost sounded in your description like Twist is executing the MRD assay for the physician or delivering the panel to a hospital to run in-house. Or is it the same customer as your NGS diagnostics?

Patrick Finn (President and COO)

This would be a great question, and thank you for the opportunity to clarify. Twist's role in the community is an enabler. We don't run the test. We supply our customers and our partners to enable them to drive their assays to the clinic. Again, our role will be to supply and enable them.

Subbu Nambi (Managing Director)

Perfect. How will you approach pricing for the MRD Express? What are the expected margins here? I'll hop back in the queue.

Patrick Finn (President and COO)

Yeah, good question. Pricing has not been set at this point. We go from our basic principle, Subbu, which is we're here to enable our customers at scale to truly drive their product to market. We think with this product in particular, truly impact the impact of MRD to healthcare. We've listened closely to the customer base. I think we understand the value to this market segment of speed and this 12-hour turnaround time. I think our operating scale and, quite frankly, de-risking any vulnerabilities in supply chain is good value. We'll share that value with our customers as we go forward and enable them to drive best-in-class differentiated assays out to the market.

Operator (participant)

One moment for our next question. That comes from Matt Larew with William Blair. Please proceed.

Matt Larew (Research Analyst)

Hi, good morning. You reiterated the expectation to hit EBITDA break-even in the fiscal fourth quarter, but obviously, the year's starting a little bit lower on the top line. Given growth is contingent on the expectation of an NGS customer ramp and MRD contribution, how much breathing room do you expect to have in the fiscal fourth quarter? I guess, how airtight are you going to hold yourselves to hitting that mark? I guess that's the first question. The second is, Adam, just what does the guide include in terms of the macro picture, given we've seen perhaps some recent positive updates relative to your pharma and biotech customers? Perhaps there may be some more certainty for your academic customers coming over the next few weeks or months?

Adam Laponis (CFO)

Thanks, Matt. I say I never want to predict the macro environment.

We always will be on the side of caution and assuming things do not improve from where we are today. We have obviously left ourselves the assumption that the environment stays relatively stable. In terms of the growth opportunities, we do assume that acceleration of the commercial customer's ramping its commercial product today. We also have only assumed one to two points of growth for the year from our MRD products. We know that that ramp is going to come. We are extremely excited about it. The difficulty is always in timing that. We want to make sure we are on the right side of that timing. We are extremely excited for that ramp and the opportunity it brings to the business, not just in 2026, but in many years to come.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from the line of Doug Schenkel with Wolfe Research. Please proceed.

Doug Schenkel (Managing Director of Life Science Tools and Diagnostics)

Hey, I got a few questions. Thanks for, I guess, getting us in. First, on SynBio, you had an academic promotion that removed the express gene pricing premium for academic customers in response to funding pressure. Is that promotion still in place? If so, how much longer do you plan on running it? Building off of that, how should we be thinking about price per gene, 2026 versus 2025? That is the first topic. The second is there has obviously been a lot of focus on Q1 guidance specific to NGS and the sequential step down. As you have pointed out to others, you have repeatedly noted over the course of the last several months a pacing dynamic within NGS. Is the guidance simply a function of that, or is there any change in underlying trends or demand?

The third topic, which I think is a pretty important one, and I'm not sure this is the right forum. If it's not, we can certainly come back to this at our conference next week. I believe one of the challenges that investors have with Twist is defining the market opportunity. In the newly named DNA Synthesis segment, what is the size of the market opportunity and how penetrated are you? On the NGS side, specific to MRD and MSED, what is the market size? How penetrated are you? What is average Twist revenue per assay? I think that would make this—those are questions that I think if people had the answers to, it would help with modeling and, frankly, help people basically develop some more conviction in the long-term growth trajectory of the business. Thank you.

Emily Leproust (CEO and Co-Founder)

Thanks, Doug. Great question. This is Emily Leproust. And good job squeezing three questions in one. Maybe briefly, on SynBio, you're correct that we had an academic promotion where we got customers Express for the price of stand-up that has been widely successful. We're in the new year, and the price has not changed. It is just working for us commercially. You can see in the number of genes that the growth in genes from Q4 was really strong thanks to that. We are not announcing whether or not it will close, but as long as it's working, we'll keep doing it, and it is working. As far as the Q1 guide, yes, it's purely a pacing dynamic in Q1. There's a lot of excitement, and we're winning on many fronts. Of course, we've been very, very strong in liquid biopsy.

The MRD bespoke that we're enabling now with adding 12-24 hour express delivery, I think that would be a long-term catalyst. Our FlexPrep launch is starting to work well for the ag bio market and the population engineering market. That is another source of long-term strength. We've worked really hard to integrate into a number of sequencers. The workflow of Twist and the Element AVITI really shortens the time between the sample and being on the sequencer. Since you're doing all the washes after the capture on the sequencer, you can be on the sequencer in as low as five hours. There are lots of good things that are happening in NGS, and we definitely do not see a lower demand. It's just that it's the law of big numbers.

There's big customers that have an air pocket, and we've seen some very good growth coming back in Q4 for NGS. The last question around defining market, we totally hear you. Now is not the right forum, but I think we're looking at ways to help our investor base be as excited as we are about the market. We're very far from penetration, and we have differentiated product. To us, that means that we have a lot of growth coming. It is true that we are a tools company. Right now, diagnostic company at the moment, they deserve it. They worked on their business models. Their reimbursement is really good. In comparison, right now, maybe our growth compared to diagnostic companies is a little bit lower.

Compared to tools company, I think we are—I do not want to sound arrogant, but I think we are doing really, really well against our competitors. I do not want to say that we are wiping the floor with them, but we are doing really well. We hear you on finding a metric. Like you said, the average test revenue per patient in NGS. We are looking at metrics. Part of the issue, as you may appreciate, is some of the test people pay more than average, and some of the test people pay less than average. That depends on the test complexity. If you have a test that uses 3 million oligos, you are going to have to pay more than if you are using 50,000 oligos.

The problem is if we have a price per test that's public every quarter, we may have half our customers being really, really unhappy, even though the value we provide is fair. Thinking about it, and not the forum, but we understand that we want to articulate our market sizing better to help our investors.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from the line of Luke Sargot with Barclays. Please proceed.

This is Sam Wan for Luke. Thanks for taking our questions. Could you talk a little bit about the new DNA Synthesis and Protein Solution segment and the rough split between Biopharma and synthetic genes in the 2026 guide? The combined segment guide came in above street expectations. I am just wondering where that's coming from and if it's driven by that large AI program.

Patrick Finn (President and COO)

Yeah, no, thanks for the question. I think the impetus was twofold. One, there was, I think, some confusion with our customer base around SynBio. Sorry. And maybe an underappreciation of how much we're doing in therapeutic discovery and development. That's number one. Number two, more and more as our sales team go to talk to customers, there was, in practice, very little separation from someone who buys a piece of DNA, so DNA Synthesis, or someone who wants the protein or the characterization. As it's one continuous workflow, some customers stop at fragments, some stop at genes, some stop at proteins, some want the full characterization. It just made sense to put them together. As far as the numbers, yes, maybe we are getting a little bit ahead of what people thought. I think it's just a reflection of this business is doing quite well.

There are a lot of synergies between the DNA Synthesis piece and the Protein piece. A few years ago, some people were asking us, "Why don't you spin off Biopharma?" We knew that it had strategic benefits. We are seeing it now. It is not the 1 + 1 = 2. It is the 1 + 1 = 3. As far as your question around where is the growth coming, is it coming from DNA and Protein? Frankly, the reason we are putting it together is because, one, we do not know, and two, it kind of does not matter. What is important is that growth is there, and we meet customers where they are. Customers may change from quarter to quarter. Some quarters, they buy the DNA, and some quarters, they buy the Protein. We will meet them where they are, and we provide great value. Our products are differentiated.

We win no matter where they want to be. We are looking forward to capturing that growth.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from the line of Mac Etoch with Stephens. Please proceed.

Mac Etoch (Analyst)

Hey, good morning, and thank you for taking my questions. Maybe just a few quick ones from me. Just given this one to two points of growth from MRD, is it possible to frame up the proportion of MRD revenues in fiscal 2025? I'll stop there and follow up in a second.

Adam Laponis (CFO)

Happy, Matt, great to hear you, and happy to share. What we've said in the past is our MRD business is relatively small. It's a lot of small numbers, and we are growing significantly faster than the overall business. Kind of applying that rule, it's a relatively small percentage of our overall NGS business in 2025, but it is growing much faster than the overall NGS business. We expect that trend to continue, not just in 2026, but well beyond.

Operator (participant)

Our next question is from Puneet Souda with Leerink Partners.

Puneet Souda (Senior Managing Director of Life Science Tools and Diagnostics)

Yeah, hey, guys. Thanks for the follow-up again. I appreciate you providing a lot of input, but we just want to boil down to a key question. What is the real NGS underlying growth ex this large customer in the first quarter and the fiscal year 2026? Thank you.

Adam Laponis (CFO)

Yeah, Puneet, if you step back a bit and look at where we were in 2025, the overall growth of NGS being around 23%, neutralizing for the growth from the one customer, it would be closer to 20%. If you go into 2026, I'd say the same general dynamic applies as well.

Operator (participant)

We have a question from the line of Vijay Kumar with Evercore ISI.

Vijay Kumar (Senior Managing Director)

Hi, Adam. Hey, sorry on this Q1 NGS question. Is the customer headwind? I know you had the customer headwind in back half, right? Is that worsening in Q1? Is that what's driving the NGS assumption? Because we already had the headwind in Q4, right? It's like, why would it worsen sequentially?

Adam Laponis (CFO)

Vijay, you're asking the right question. The air pocket from Q4 is continuing into Q1, but then it will significantly reverse as we expect the ramp to begin starting in Q2 of 2026.

Operator (participant)

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our Q&A session. I will pass it back to Emily Leproust for final comments.

Emily Leproust (CEO and Co-Founder)

Thank you for your questions and for your continued support. With a strong execution in 2025 and a clear path to profitable growth in 2026, we remain focused on delivering differentiated products and services for our customers and sustained value for our shareholders. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

This concludes our conference. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.