SoftBank To Invest $900M In Pacific Biosciences

 

• SoftBank Group Corp (OTCMKTS: SFTBY) will reportedly invest $900 million into Pacific Biosciences of California Inc (NASDAQ: PACB), according to the Wall Street Journal, which comes on top of around 6% stake in PacBio that Softbank amassed almost a month back, worth over $350 million.
• Last year, PACB was blocked by U.S. antitrust enforcers from merging with Illumina in a $1.2B deal. Illumina paid PacBio a $98 million breakup fee. But under their arrangement, if PacBio raised more than $100 million subsequently, it would owe Illumina $52 million. PacBio will now have to pay that amount.
• The company recently announced a multi-year collaboration with Invitae Corp (NYSE: NVTA) to begin developing a production-scale high-throughput sequencing platform leveraging PacBio’s HiFi sequencing to expand Invitae’s whole genome testing capabilities.
• Both companies committed resources to support the development.

https://www.benzinga.com/general/biotech/21/02/19580652/softbank-to-invest-900m-in-pacific-biosciences-wsj