Kubera buys stake in Ocimum for $17 millon

PRIVATE EQUITY WATCH

Investment company The Kubera Cross-Border Fund has announced that it has acquired a significant minority interest in Ocimum Biosolutions for an equity investment of up to $17 million.

Ramanan Raghavendran, managing partner, Kubera Partners, said, "We believe genomics outsourcing is at the cusp of significant growth given the demands on the drug discovery function for labs around the world. Ocimum is well positioned to capture this opportunity because of its leadership in genomics, deep technology knowledge and experience, global delivery capability and above all its world class scientific talent and management team."

Ocimum is a life sciences research and development-enabling company, with three focus areas "" BioIT, BioMolecules, and BioResearch "" delivering end-to-end genomic products and services from three global locations: Indianapolis (United States), Ijsselstien (Netherlands), and Hyderabad (India).

"We were looking for a partner that apart from providing growth capital and acquisition financing has a similar footprint as ours and can understand our business and our global customer service and delivery model. Kubera's track record and their ability to add value in a cross-border sense uniquely qualifies them to help with businesses such as ours," said Anuradha Acharya, CEO, Ocimum.

"The Gene Logic acquisition will help us in achieving our vision of becoming the number one genomics outsourcing company in the world. We will leverage our global positioning and Gene Logic's branding and scientific leadership in toxicogenomics, pharmacogenomics, and clinical genomics to become a partner of choice for our customers," she added.

The financing will primarily be used by the company to fund its acquisition of the Genomics division of Gene Logic Inc, which will add significant capabilities to Ocimum's suite of offerings.

The division's BioExpress and ToxExpress database comprise of a bio-repository of over 80,000 samples and the services business provides data generation and analysis services to large labs around the world.

The division, with revenues of over $15 million, is being acquired by Ocimum for a cash consideration of $10 million. Ocimum has in the past successfully integrated MWG Biotech's (Germany) microarray business and Isogen's (Netherlands) oligonucleotide business.