Oftentimes, investing in early-stage biotech companies can mean seeing a few of your picks lose 95% or even 100% of their value. Drug development is highly risky since it involves creating something new.

But a few players focus on providing drugmakers with the services they need to discover or manufacture their medicines rather than doing the research and development (R&D) themselves.

Let's take a peek at two biotechs that make their money by solving the problems of other biopharma companies. Both have a solid chance of being lucrative purchases for investors with a bit of patience.

1. Maravai LifeSciences

Unlike most biotech companies, Maravai LifeSciences Holdings (MRVI 4.75%) is profitable, and it doesn't develop medicines. Effectively, it's a contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) for nucleic acids like RNA and its double-stranded relative, DNA. In English, that means it manufactures biological molecules that are the core components of cutting-edge biotechnology products. And that makes it a business that sells metaphorical shovels right when there's a very particular kind of gold rush going on.

The company's CleanCap technology enables it to produce messenger RNA (mRNA) that has a higher efficiency for its end users than they'd be able to manufacture on their own. Customers like Pfizer and BioNTech turn to Maravai to procure nucleic acids for their mRNA-based coronavirus vaccine efforts, and the pair continue to buy raw materials from the biotech to manufacture their jab, Comirnaty.

Maraval expects to make $100 million per year from CleanCap from 2023 on. However, for the first nine months of this year, CleanCap sales related to coronavirus vaccine development and manufacturing were $476.2 million, so the near term is quite bearish.

Regardless of the expected difficulty in the next year or so as coronavirus vaccine-driven sales start to ebb, management believe demand for its nucleic acids will keep growing over time as more companies attempt to develop vaccines and therapies based on them. Also, manufacturing large volumes of high-quality nucleic acids is somewhat cumbersome, and economies of scale make it significantly more efficient for potential customers to simply buy them from a company like Maravai rather than spend money on spinning up new production lines.

In the long term, Maravai should continue to be a low-cost nucleic acid provider, and the more that the mRNA field flourishes, the more sales the company will make. Don't let the near-term collapse in revenue scare you off. The market has likely already priced in the fact that the stampede for coronavirus vaccines is over. But the mRNA gold rush is just getting started, and that's why Maravai will likely be a very good stock to own over the next decade and beyond.

2. Ginkgo BioWorks

Ginkgo BioWorks Holdings (DNA 3.29%) is another atypical biotech stock that's also a CDMO. Though it isn't yet profitable, the company has a vision: to provide a service it describes as akin to a semiconductor foundry. Customers show up with their schematics in hand, then Ginkgo implements the blueprints for a fee, providing its customers with large volumes of the completed products -- hopefully at a price far lower than what it would cost those customers to make them on their own.

In Ginkgo's case, customers' schematics are for bioengineered organisms, like strains of yeast or bacteria. Those organisms are, in turn, typically intended to be biological factories that produce an economically valuable molecule, which is the final product that the customer needs in large amounts.

This business model makes Ginkgo a possible collaborator in diverse sectors like biopharma, agriculture, industrials, and consumer technology. As of Oct. 11, it's working even with a giant like Merck to manufacture complex bioproducts like enzymes. That collaboration could be worth as much as $144 million in milestone payments -- and it isn't even the largest milestone payment on Ginkgo's order book.

And with trailing-12-month revenue of $527.9 million, it's clear that there's demand for the company's services. For now, though, most of its revenue is still derived from its biosecurity segment, which does public health testing for infectious diseases.

The biotech is still in the early innings of its growth story, which is one reason it looks appealing as a long-term investment. Its customer base is expanding, reaching 43 active clients as of the third quarter. However, foundry revenue from clients without a preexisting relationship with the company actually fell from $22 million in Q3 of last year to $15 million in the same period this year.

Nonetheless, the more customers Ginkgo can onboard, the more it can leverage the economies of scale that come with bioengineering and manufacturing.​​ That should improve its margins, and it'll also help draw in other potential clients.

Make no mistake, this is a high-risk stock. There's no guarantee that Ginkgo's business model is actually viable as of yet. But if the company demonstrates that it can profitably serve demand across multiple customers, it'll be a major turning point, and early investors will become much wealthier. Just be aware that it'll likely take a few more years before there's any chance of seeing that outcome, if it happens at all.