Monday, October 31, 2011

Stemgent grabs $580K in debt funding

By Rodney H. Brown

Stemgent Inc., a stem cell research and technology company, has raised $584,810 in a debt financing, according to federal documents.

The debt funding round has a planned top end of $600,000, according to the filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Stemgent, with headquarters in Cambridge and operations in San Diego, did not identify the six participants in the debt round in the SEC document. Listed as related persons in the filing, however, are board members Harold Werner and Augustine Lawlor of HealthCare Ventures LLC of Cambridge and Ralph Christofferson of Morganthaler Partners of Ohio.

Also listed as a related person is Stefan Miltenyi, CEO of Miltenyi Biotec, a German cellular therapeutics firm that entered into a co-development and commercialization agreement with Stemgent in May of 2010. CEO Ian Ratcliffe did say that the debt financing came from “our existing investors” and that it was a bridge financing to be used for general corporate purposes.

The new debt funding is separate from the company’s most recent tranche of a Series B equity round. In June, Stemgent bumped up a previous tranche of the Series B financing to $10.6 million with a planned top end of $14 million, from an initial $5.6 million chunk of the round.

Stemgent, which has 28 employees between its two locations, has obtained licenses related to stem cell reagents from research institutions such as MIT, Harvard University and The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., according to Ratcliffe. The company makes reagent products for stem cell research, and has had them on the market since about June 2008, with a customer base primarily in academia, Ratcliffe said.

“Stem cell research is still primarily an academic activity,” he said.