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Ceres Raises $75 Million in Late-Stage Financing
27 September 2007
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| Ceres’ view of traits of the ideal energy crop. Click to enlarge. |
Energy crop company Ceres, Inc. has raised $75 million through a private offering of convertible preferred stock. The late-stage financing round was led by Warburg Pincus, the global private equity firm.
A seed and traits developer, Ceres plans to use the proceeds for research and product development activities in several dedicated energy crops, which are bred to maximize yields of plant biomass. The funds will also be used for capital expenditures and general corporate purposes.
Within its energy crop business segment, Ceres’ development efforts cover switchgrass, sorghum, miscanthus, energycane and woody species. One of its first seed products, a high-yielding switchgrass cultivar, is currently scheduled for commercial launch in 2009.
Ceres traits under development include: stress tolerance; yield density; nutrient uptake; composition; structure; and enzyme production. These traits can improve the economics of biofuel production as well as the environmental benefits of energy crops, including drought tolerance and nitrogen-use efficiency.
We now have the resources we need to expand the scale of our commercialization efforts, and the independence to broadly collaborate with downstream players in the transportation fuel industry.
—Richard Hamilton, Ceres President and CEO
Hamilton said that the genomics-based tools and biotech traits that Ceres has developed for corn and other row crops can be fully leveraged in dedicated energy crops. The company also plans to continue the discovery and licensing of its traits to other businesses outside of energy crops.
Morgan Stanley acted as an advisor to Ceres in the transaction. Other aspects of the offering and its participants were not disclosed.
Founded as a plant genomics company, Ceres holds one of the world's largest proprietary collections of fully sequenced plant genes.
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September 27, 2007 in Biotech, Cellulosic ethanol | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
Comments
Posted by: jk | September 27, 2007 at 08:11 AM
Add nitrogen fixing, c-4 photosinthesis and not self propigation.
Posted by: JimO | September 27, 2007 at 09:48 AM
Per JimO’s last point, sterility seems possible through several pathways. While ultimately adding to the cost of the end fuel, using clonal propagation has the added benefit of employment for 3rd world workers. Ceres metric includes enhanced germination, and seeds are one of the principal pathways for introducing the monsters. While perenniality is a useful characteristic for lowering fuel system production costs, and soil sequestration of carbon is desirable, I’d be careful about its use. Plants capable of reproducing through a network of rhizomes are tough to eradicate. In short, like the previous posters, the cautions (not any doctrinaire hostility at all, but cautions) surrounding the raising of private capital announcements were the first to go off for me.
Posted by: WhiteBeard | September 27, 2007 at 01:38 PM
Sterility is easily possible for a biotech product, the question though: is there legislation enforce it?
Posted by: Ben | September 28, 2007 at 09:14 AM
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Ideal energy crop can also become ideal weed in food crop fields and in the remaining natural grasslands. There are plenty of bad examples from introducing new species - rabbits in Australia just to name one. In my opinion that is where the biggest risks of GM are.