IP Group upbeat on latest Oxford Nanopore fundraise

(Sharecast News) - Intellectual property-based business developer IP Group said on Thursday that its portfolio company Oxford Nanopore Technologies has raised £29.3m of new capital, and facilitated the secondary sale of £80.2m of shares, for an aggregate investment of £109.5 million.
The FTSE 250 company said that, following completion of the transaction, it would hold an undiluted beneficial stake of 16.4% in Oxford Nanopore.

Oxford Nanopore is developing what IP Group said was "the only" real-time DNA/RNA sequencer that could sequence any read length, and was fully scalable from smaller portable formats to larger devices for population-scale sequencing.

The directors said they expected that the transaction would result in a fair value gain to the group of around £12m, compared with Oxford Nanopore's last financing round in March 2018, and that its holding would be valued at about £264m.

IP Group would realise £22m cash from a partial sale of its holding in Oxford Nanopore as part of the secondary element of the transaction.

In addition, IP Group said that cash realisations during 2019 totalled more than £75m, compared to the £30m it achieved in 2018.

That excluded the £22m partial realisation of Oxford Nanopore.

As a result, the group said it was expecting that gross cash resources at 31 December would be "significantly in excess" of the £161m reported at 30 June.

"We're delighted to see another successful fundraising for Oxford Nanopore which rounds off an impressive year of commercial success and technical validation of nanopore sequencing," said chief executive officer Alan Aubrey.

"IP Group has continued to focus attention this year on generating realisations from our maturing portfolio and we're pleased to report that cash exits in 2019 were more than double the amount recorded in 2018, leaving the business well-funded and well positioned for 2020."

Oxford Nanopore noted that funds were raised from both new investors and existing shareholders from the United States, Europe and Asia Pacific.

The fundraising brought the total primary investment in Oxford Nanopore to around £480m.

Last month, Oxford Nanopore confirmed that its technology had been selected for the population-scale 'Genome Program' launched by Abu Dhabi's Department of Health.

The project was aiming to be the first of its kind worldwide to provide citizens with their own high-quality genome as a baseline, and was set to incorporate genomic data into healthcare management.

Among other developments during 2019, Oxford Nanopore users reported new methods for rapid cancer and infectious disease characterisation, HLA tissue typing and food safety.

At 0904 GMT, shares in IP Group were up 1.83% at 72.3p.