IPO Still Awaits as Fallbrook Raises $39M

San Diego’s Fallbrook Technologies says today it has raised about $39 million in a Series E preferred stock private placement that encompasses $6 million the company disclosed in a June regulatory filing.

Fallbrook, which has spent more than a decade developing advanced technology for a continuously variable transmission, says the latest deal brings its cumulative financing to about $95 million since 2000. The company apparently arranged this latest private financing to help shore up its balance sheet after filing for a $50 million initial public offering in February. The IPO remains active.

Fallbrook’s coninuously variable transmission is used in automotive accessory drives (such as air conditioning compressors), and as the primary transmission in electric vehicles, bicycles, riding lawn-mowers, and small wind turbines. Fallbrook says its technology can lower overall energy costs in each of these areas by improving performance and fuel economy.

A new international investor, Macquarie Capital Markets Canada, and related parties provided most of the financing in the latest deal. Other new international investors included Sustainable Asset Management of Switzerland, and Ningbo Shentong Auto Decorations Co. of China. Existing investors NGEN Partners of California and Robeco of The Netherlands also participated in the round.

“The extra capital will support the commercial development of Fallbrook’s innovative and proprietary NuVinci transmission technology into five current target markets,” said Bill Klehm III, Fallbrook’s chairman and CEO. “Fallbrook is entering an exciting new phase as we transition from development to an emphasis on commercialization,” Klehm says in the statement.

Fallbrook plans to use the net proceeds from the Series E financing for working capital, product development and general corporate purposes.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.