Israel-Medical-Healthcare

[midastouch017]

Biotechnology startup Evogene raises $7m in second round financing

01.3.06 | 13:52 By Eran Gabay

Rehovot-based biotechnology startup Evogene announced on Wednesday that it completed its second round of financing, raising $7 million.

The company, which is working on biotechnological methods to cultivate plants, tapped new existing and new investors from Israel, Europe and North America, it said.

Evogene previously announced the initial $1.75 million of this round which was in the form of a convertible bridge loan from existing investors.

New investors in the spinoff from Compugen (Nasdaq:CGEN) include Eric Messika, and Kadima High Tech, a fund managed by Yossi Ben-Yosef. Yet another is Glenrock, Leon Recanati's investment fund.

To date Evogene has raised $11.4 million, including its starting kitty of $900,000 from Compugen in 2002, when the company was founded. Private investors have put up $3.5 million.

Ofer Haviv, Evogene's president and CEO stated, "We appreciate the continuing support and confidence shown by our initial investors and are pleased to welcome new investors as we broaden the ownership base of the company."

He said that Evogene may be relatively young, but it is developing an "attractive pipeline of improved plant traits."

The company, which has a staff of 25, is currently in discussions with a number of leading ag-bio companies about various forms of collaboration and licensing arrangements, Haviv added.

It certainly addresses a growing market, according to Haviv: no less than $5 billion worth of biotechnologically bettered seeds for crops were sold in 2005.

"Although Evogene is a young company, we are in promising development stages of several attractive projects to improve plant functioning," he said.

"At this point we are in talks with ag-chemo companies and with leading international seed companies as well, regarding possible alliances and licensing for genes we characterized," added Haviv, who joined the company half a year ago, replacing co-founder Hagai Karchi, who created the company together with Dr. Rafael Meissner.

Evogene's 25 employees are devoted to developing improved breeds of plants that are more economically rewarding to grow. It combines mathematics, genomic and molecular biology sciences of plants with the latest cultivation techniques to create a platform that produces better plants and plant-based products. Its mathematical technology is based on Compugen's LEADS platform.

Right now Evogene is working on cotton, to improve the amount and quality of its strands, improve its resistance to environmental challenges such as aridity and salinity, and improve its exploitation of nitrogen bound in the soil, all at affordable cost. One side result of improved nitrogen exploitation would be environmental preservation, because farmers could cut down on fertilizers.

Evogene is also developing a unique botanical platform to produce proteins for the pharmaceutical industry.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/689012.html

Dubi