The Hindu Business Line : Ocimum Bio gets $17 m from Kubera Cross Border Fund

Hyderabad, Dec. 17. Ocimum Biosolutions has announced that it has raised capital from Kubera Cross Border Fund (KUBC) for an equity investment of up to $17 million (about 35 per cent equity).

This includes the pro rata investment by affiliates of Kubera Partners, LLC, the Investment Manager of KUBC, according to the Hyderabad-headquartered, life sciences research and development company.

In a related development, the closely held Ocimum Biosolutions also said that it has closed the acquisition of the genomics division of Gene Logic and will retain the Gene Logic name and continue to service customers from Gaithersburg, Maryland, US. The Gene Logic division was acquired for a cash consideration of $10 million.

Earlier, in November, 2006 Ocimum Biosolutions also announced an investment of $6.5 million from IFC, the private sector arm of the World Bank for a minority stake.

Ocimum provides genomic products and services from three global locations: Indianapolis (United States), Ijsselstien (Netherlands), and Hyderabad (India). The company has three main focus areas: BioIT, BioMolecules, and BioResearch.

Ocimum has in the past through acquisitions integrated MWG Biotech’s (Germany) microarray business and Isogen’s (The Netherlands) Oligonucleotide business.

Commenting on the new partnership, Ms Anuradha Acharya, CEO of Ocimum, said, “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 is best suited”.

She further added, “With the acquisition of Gene Logic’s Genomics business, we now offer the largest portfolio of integrated genomic solutions”.

Mr Ramanan Raghavendran, Managing Partner at Kubera Partners, LLC 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.”

Mr Shiraz Bugwadia, Director at o3 Capital Advisors who advised Ocimum in the deal added, “Ocimum, with this Series B investment from Kubera Partners is well on path to become a $100 million company by 2011 and a world leader in genomics outsourcing.”

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