For synthesis, it’s mainly because there is a monopoly and the challenge (DNA assembly) is super boring in comparison to sexy things like DNA synthesis.

For robotics, it’s because Opentrons started scaling and needed to make more $$$ rather than staying small (fair to them, SoftBank dollars are attractive)

Generally speaking, biology is hard and uncertain, so the market isn’t as competitive as you’d imagine. Synthesis prices stagnated a little bit for a while in comparison to where they could be because Illumina didn’t have competition