Almost exactly a year ago, San Diego-based Genomatica filed paperwork to raise roughly $100 million through an initial public offering, with a proposed listing on NASDAQ under the symbol GENO. Then the industrial biotech went silent.
Today, the company is announcing that it is withdrawing its IPO, and has raised $41.5 million in a Series D round of preferred stock financing led by Versalis, the largest Italian chemical company. In a statement issued this morning, Genomatica says existing investors TPG Biotech, Mohr Davidow Ventures, VantagePoint Capital Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Alloy Ventures, and Waste Management joined in the new round.
With the $84.2 million raised previously, according to last year’s IPO filing, Genomatica has now attracted a total of $125.7 million from its investors, who presumably will have to wait a bit longer before reaching their exit from the firm, which was founded in 1998.
On the plus side, the company says the latest financing was done at “a significant increase in valuation” compared to its Series C-1 round of financing, announced in March 2011.
In a phone interview, CEO Christophe Schilling said Genomatica’s IPO filing had given the company an additional financing option. But he added that Genomatica’s capital needs are not as big as
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.
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