Evogene Ltd. announced today that it has completed a second closing of its initial private placement in the amount of $1.5 million bringing the total for the first round to $3.5 million. The first closing took place in March 2003. The second closing was restricted to the group of United States, European and Israeli investors that participated in the first closing.

Evogene is an emerging company focusing on the improvement of crops and the production of plant derived products. The company is unique in merging state-of-the-art predictive computational biology and molecular biology with the most advanced classical breeding technologies. Its computational biology activities include a license to use Compugen's (Nasdaq: CGEN) LEADS computational biology research engine in the field of agro-biotechnology.

Hagai Karchi, Ph.D., chief executive officer of Evogene Ltd, said, "We are extremely pleased with our progress to date and this additional funding will allow us to accelerate our activities related to potential agreements with agro-biotechnology partners as well as the development of our main internal projects: key trait improvements in cotton, gene and promoter discovery in monocots (rice, maize and cereals) and a proprietary platform for the production of therapeutic proteins in plants." Ofer Haviv, CPA, chief operating officer of Evogene, added, "We are very pleased with this additional vote of confidence from our investors, almost all of whom participated in this second closing."

Evogene Ltd. is a pioneer in integrating predictive computational biology and plant genomics with classical breeding to generate improved crops and new agricultural biotechnology products. This objective is accomplished through the development of high-throughput, economically efficient platforms that accelerate, direct and mimic the natural evolution process.

Evogene's activities were initiated in 1999 as a division of Compugen; in 2002 Evogene was created as a separate company founded by Compugen and Drs. Hagai Karchi and Rafi Meissner.