10x Genomics says it eliminated 8% of its workforce—about 100 jobs—as part of a company effort to cut $50 million in costs and better reflect strategic priorities that include addressing the uncertain financial climate raised by federal cuts in research funding to its majority of customers in academia.
Speaking with GEN Edge this week, 10x co-founder and CEO Serge Saxonov, PhD, said the job cuts were made across its workforce, which totaled 1,306 employees as of December 31, 2024, according to the company’s annual Form 10-K filing. 10x estimated it will incur between $5.5 million and $6.5 million of costs, consisting primarily of cash severance costs expected to be recognized in the second quarter, and paid out by the end of the third quarter.
Saxonov acknowledged that its R&D operation “definitely ended up being impacted in a substantial way.”
“We still have a really, really strong foundation for growth, in terms of our R&D capacity. We’re still really, really excited about our pipeline and our roadmap, both in terms of the announced products and what we haven’t talked about,” Saxonov said. “We feel really confident in the fundamental capabilities of the company. And our goal here is to really make sure we are navigating through this kind of turbulence the best way we can, so that we emerge that much stronger on the other side of it.”
In contrast to R&D, 10x’s sales operations were less impacted, Saxonov said, since the company reorganized its sales force last year. As GEN Edge reported earlier this year, 10x committed itself months ago to more than doubling its base of biopharma industry users from between 15% and 20% of its customer base, to half or more.
That would bring industry to rough parity with the current customer base now dominated by academic- and government-funded researchers. According to 10x, U.S. academic and government research funding supports approximately 40% to 50% of the company’s revenue.
How long does 10x expect it will need to reach a 50% industry customer base?
“It’s not going to happen overnight. It’s going to be kind of a work in progress, but we feel confident that in the coming years we’ll get there,” Saxonov replied. “We do anticipate that biopharma should be growing consistently faster than academic markets for us. There’s just such a large, untapped opportunity.
He added: “I do expect to keep making progress quarter after quarter after quarter, and that’s not sort of some indefinite future out there. But in the coming years, we should definitely see biopharma become kind of an equal weight in our revenue profile.”
2025 guidance withdrawn
Citing uncertainty caused by cuts to NIH funding under the administration of President Donald Trump, 10x has also withdrawn its 2025 guidance to investors, and will instead offer guidance quarter by quarter. The company previously projected full-year revenue to range from $610 million to $630 million this year, representing 0% to 3% growth over 2024.
For Q2, 10x is now forecasting that its revenue will range from $138 million to $142 million, representing 1% growth sequentially at the midpoint. That estimate excludes license and royalty revenue that 10x expects to receive from Vizgen, after the companies settled patent infringement litigation.
“TXG is feeling the brunt of NIH woes, which management bucketed into two categories: immediate effects such as delays, reductions, and cancellations of grants, and growing threats of future changes, including proposed budget cuts, NIH funding caps, and widespread concerns about further delays and cancellations,” Jefferies equity analysts Tycho Peterson and Matthew Stanton and three colleagues wrote in a research note.
For 10x to see significant capital expenditures or “capex” by customers, Peterson and Stanton wrote, those customers would want to see certainty over future NIH budgets and a halt to procedural actions such as grant terminations, website closures, and credit card limits.
10x finished the first quarter with a net loss of $34.4 million on revenue that rose 10% year over year, to $154.9 million from $141 million in Q1 2024. 10x said it received $26 million upfront from Vizgen and will receive royalties on Vizgen’s sales of products covered by IP it exclusively licenses.
The $26 million upfront payment was recorded as a $9.2 million gain on settlement and $16.8 million of license and royalty revenue.
10x reduced its net loss by 43% from the $59.9 million net loss it reported a year earlier. While the settlement explains that shrinking net loss in part, Saxonov said, “we’ve been very diligent about our cost structure.”
“We’ve been managing costs over the course of the year, and we’ll continue to do so to keep driving that down in order to be able to invest in the business and be in control of our own fate,” Saxonov said. “Our goal is not to ever have to raise money from the capital markets, and self-fund all of our growth going forward.”
Instrument revenue drops 42%
During the first quarter, 10x reported a 42% drop in total instrument revenue, to $14.815 million from $25.453 million in Q1 2024. Sales of 10x’s Chromium single-cell analysis products fell 25%, to $5.913 million from $7.85 million, while spatial instrument sales (both its Visium and Xenium products) nosedived by nearly half (49%), to $8.902 million from $17.603 million a year ago.
“One potential customer in 2025 was no longer able to purchase our products for an AIDS vaccine-related research project due to a near-total freeze in January 2025, followed by a substantial reduction in March 2025 in funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID),” 10x disclosed in its Form 10-Q. “Fewer [NIH] staff available to process, review, and make decisions regarding funding requests or complete other funding-related activities could delay or prevent our customers from receiving necessary funding to purchase our products.”
At the recent 2025 Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (AGBT) General Meeting, 10x announced a series of planned product launches this year to further expand mega-scale experimental capabilities within Chromium, add new products to Visium, and extend Xenium into protein analysis, intended to enable users to unlock multiomic insights. Chromium Flex technology is also being applied by 10x in a new partnership with Arc Institute, designed to accelerate the development of its Arc Virtual Cell Atlas, with the goal of generating high-quality single-cell data at large scale.
10x fared better with consumables sales, which rose nearly 5% year over year to 115.356 million in Q1 2025 from $110.335 million in the first three months of 2024—an increase driven by sales of spatial instrument (especially Xenium) consumables, which grew 18% year over year to $31.247 million from $26.408 million. Chromium consumables sales barely inched up 0.2%, to $84.109 million from $83.927 million.
Despite the drops in instrument revenue, 10x increased its cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities by nearly 10% during Q1, to $377.061 million from $344.067 million.
“The fundamentals of the business are actually quite strong,” Saxonov said. “If you set aside the macroenvironment, we have really healthy gross margins and products that customers love. And that’s fundamentally what allows us to keep investing in innovation and keep driving the business forward.”
“Despite the current environment, we feel really, really good about our balance sheet, our ability to generate cash, and our ability to fundamentally protect our balance sheet, to be able to invest in innovation,” Saxonov added.