Rehovot, Israel
June 12, 2007
Evogene Ltd. announced today that it has completed an
Initial Public Offering on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE:
EVGN). The company sold units consisting of ordinary shares,
Series 1 warrants and Series 2 warrants. In total, 3,800,000
shares, 3,900,000 Series 1 warrants and 3,400,000 Series 2
warrants were sold in the offering. In addition, existing
shareholders exercised warrants for approximately 2,000,000
ordinary shares, bringing the total new capital raised to
approximately $8,000,000.
The Series 1 warrants included in the IPO are exercisable until
May 31st, 2009 at a price of 8.45 NIS ($2.02) per share; the
Series 2 warrants are exercisable until May 31st, 2011 at a
price of NIS 11.05 ($2.64) per share. The full exercise of both
series of warrants would approximately generate an additional
$16,800,000 of capital.
Ofer Haviv, Evogene President and CEO stated: "We are very
pleased to have completed this IPO which is a significant
milestone for the company. The capital raised will enable us to
expand our gene discovery efforts, to advance our products
towards commercialization, to widen our activities in the field
of Biofuels and to be full partners with leading companies
worldwide in the development of products arising out of our
unique and broadly applicable discovery capability".
Evogene’s mission is to be a leader in delivering improved
plant traits to the agro-biotechnology and biofuels industries
through the use of a continuously improving proprietary platform
combining state-of-the-art computational genomics, molecular
biology and advanced breeding methods. Evogene’s current product
development portfolio includes such traits as: abiotic stress
tolerance and yield, enhancement of cotton fiber quality,
improving nitrogen use efficiency, increasing oil yield for the
BioDiesel industry and plant manufacturing of therapeutic
proteins. Until its spin-off as a separate company in 2002,
Evogene was the agro-biotechnology division of Compugen Ltd.
(Nasdaq: CGEN). Evogene’s core in-silico technology, the
ATHLETE, is based on Compugen’s proprietary LEADS computational
platform. |
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