The deal values the company at $15 billion or 24.1x 2024E revenues.
The deal is expected to close in the third quarter of 2021.
Ginkgo Bioworks, a biotech company based in Boston, announced that it will go public via a merger with Soaring Eagle Acquisition Corp. (SRNG), a special purpose acquisition vehicle (SPAC), in a deal that gives the company a pre-money equity valuation of $15 billion. The company expects to receive proceeds of $2.5 billion as part of the deal.
Shares of Soaring Eagle Acquisition Corp. rallied earlier in the day after the announcement but later went down due to weakness in the broader markets.
Nuvalent, Inc., a Cambridge, Mass.-based biotechnology company creating precisely targeted therapies for clinically proven kinase targets in cancer, closed a $135m Series B financing.
The round was led by Bain Capital Life Sciences with participation from sole founding investor, Deerfield Management, and additional new investors Fidelity Management and Research Company LLC, Wellington Management Company, Viking Global Investors, Janus Henderson Investors, Avoro Capital Advisors, Boxer Capital of Tavistock Group, Venrock Healthcare Capital Partners, Fairmount Funds Management LLC, Driehaus Capital Management LLC, and Logos Capital. In conjunction with the funding, Andrew Hack, M.D., Ph.D., a Managing Director of Bain Capital Life Sciences, will join the Nuvalent Board of Directors.
Lightmatter, a Boston, MA-based photonic computing company, raised $80m in Series B funding, bringing total investment raised so far to $113m.
The round was led by Viking Global Investors with participation from GV (formerly Google Ventures), Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Lockheed Martin, Matrix Partners, SIP Global Partners, Spark Capital, and others.
The company intends to use the funds to accelerate production and go-to-market of its first generation roadmap products, and build out its sales and operations teams.
Founded in 2017 by CEO Nick Harris, Lightmatter is committed to developing AI compute technologies that accelerate AI growth while minimizing its environmental impact on the planet. The company provides Mars, a photonic computer, Passage, a new wafer-scale solution to enable computer chips to communicate at speeds, and Envise, a general-purpose photonic AI accelerator.
Lightmatter’s photonic AI ambitions light up an $80M B round
AI is fundamental to many products and services today, but its hunger for data and computing cycles is bottomless. Lightmatter plans to leapfrog Moore’s law with its ultra-fast photonic chips specialized for AI work, and with a new $80 million round, the company is poised to take its light-powered computing to market.
We first covered Lightmatter in 2018, when the founders were fresh out of MIT and had raised $11 million to prove that their idea of photonic computing was as valuable as they claimed. They spent the next three years and change building and refining the tech and running into all the hurdles that hardware startups and technical founders tend to find.
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