The state of DNA synthesis is a bit like humanity's journey to the moon—just because something has been achieved before doesn't mean we should cease figuring out how to do it better.” That is how Harold P. de Vladar, CEO and founder of long-synthetic DNA service provider Ribbon Biolabs, sees the vast opportunity in the DNA synthesis space. de Vladar says that the DNA synthesis equivalent to the Apollo 11 moon landing was Craig Venter's landmark work on assembling the 5386 bp bacteriophage ΦX174 from short single strands of synthetic, commercially available DNA known as oligonucleotides.1 Venter and his team at the J. Craig Venter Institute built the ΦX174 genome using an adaptation of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) called polymerase cycle assembly2 in 2002-2003—just after the sequencing of the human genome in the early 2000s. This problem still existed until a few years ago. “When I was still a researcher, I confronted the problem of making long DNA by wanting to synthesize a library of small phage genomes, around 4000 bp, and that was an impossible project. I wanted like 250 sequences, and this was unachievable,” de Vladar said. About 10 years ago, de Vladar saw that a company called Twist Bioscience was starting to appear in the news. He came to the realization that people were still interested in synthesizing long DNA. “Superficially, synthesizing DNA seemed solved, but when you start looking into the details, how the cost per base per has dropped for sequencing and so on, you realize that this was far from solved” (Box 1).