Current round of financing comes in the form of direct investment and a secured credit facility loan.
WaferGen Biosystems signed a purchase agreement with Malaysian Technology Development for a $5 million private placement of the company’s Series C-1 redeemable convertible preference shares. WaferGen added another $2 million through a secured credit facility loan with Oxford Finance Corporation.
WaferGen plans to use the net proceeds from the financings for general corporate and working capital purposes. The money raised by WaferGen will also be applied toward broad commercialization of its SmartChip Real-Time PCR system.
WaferGen developed this next-generation platform for gene expression studies and pathway-based biomarker discovery and signature validation. Launched in August, it is the company’s flagship nanowell-array PCR platform. WaferGen says that it combines the high-throughput nature of microarrays with the sensitivity, precision, and dynamic range of quantitative real-time PCR.
The SmartChip Real-Time PCR system comprises 5,184-well consumable chips preloaded with target-specific primers, a single-sample or multisample nanodispenser for dispensing samples and master mix onto a SmartChip panel under vacuum conditions, and the SmartChip cycler, which performs PCR thermal cycling, data collection, and amplicon melting.
Malaysian Technology Development Corporation had previously invested in WaferGen in May 2008. The current purchase price of the Series C-1 preference shares was $1.55 per share, and the closing is expected to occur in December. The investor has also been granted a right to purchase up to $2.5 million of Series C-2 preference shares of the Malaysian subsidiary at a purchase price of $2.32 per share at any time within 36 months of the closing.
The Oxford credit facility is repayable over three years, and interest on the loan is fixed at approximately 13% per annum.