Australian fertility pioneer, Genea has raised $30 million from sophisticated investors including the company’s first institutional investor, in an oversubscribed capital raising.
Investors committing funds to the expansion of the world leading fertility research, technology and treatment company included Melbourne-based specialist emerging company investor Acorn Capital and high-net-worth investors from Australia and overseas.
Initially launched with a target of $25 million and with discretion to go to $30 million, the capital raising attracted significant interest leading to a full subscription of $30 million.
Clearly, they are doing something right
Genea CEO Dr Tomas Stojanov (pictured) said the intense interest in the capital raising proved the value of Genea’s strategic approach.
“In contrast to our competitors in the Australian fertility space who are seeking growth through acquisition of clinics, Genea has mapped a path of international growth through expansion into global technology and medical device markets,” Tomas said.
“In 2012, the Genea Board and Management Team recognised that focusing solely on the development or acquisition of fertility clinics in Australia might limit sustained profit growth as well as the ability of the Company to achieve its growth potential.
“Instead we opted to play to our other strength, world leading research into fertility treatment.”
How is this strategy working out for Genea?
That strategy to pursue a global IVF markets led to the formation of two subsidiaries within Genea:
- Genea Biomedx to utilise the company’s innovative fertility technologies to develop, manufacture and distribute globally a range of sophisticated medical instruments and products to automate IVF laboratory processes; and
- Genea Biocells to globally commercialise the groundbreaking work done in the area of stem cells.
The potential of these two groups, alongside Genea’s successful fertility treatment offering, has proven attractive to investors and the company is now well placed to execute on that growth potential.
The strategy also attracted the interest of leading international healthcare and life science company Merck and the two companies signed an exclusive global collaboration agreement in May this year.
Together with Genea’s founding membership of the Global Fertility Alliance alongside Merck Serono, the biopharmaceutical business of Merck, and Illumina, a leader in developing and commercialising systems for analysis of genetic variation and function, this partnership concretes Genea position at the forefront of fertility science.
“The key to Genea’s success lies in what we like to call the virtuous circle – the integration between the doctors, scientists and nurses in Genea Fertility’s clinics and the researchers and innovators at Genea Biomedx. We are all firmly focused on patient outcomes and furthering the science of fertility treatment,” Dr Stojanov said.
