City Briefs: Avacta; WANdisco
Wetherby-based life sciences company Avacta Group has conditionally raised £48m through a fundraise announced yesterday.
The company confirmed the outcome of the fundraise this morning. It was conducted through the issue of 40,000,000 New Ordinary Shares.
Avacta says the money will be used for rapid scaling up of its diagnostics business – it will provide working capital for development of a new COVID-19 testing opportunity.
It will also accelerate the expansion of a pipeline of differentiated cancer therapies,
Dr Alastair Smith, chief executive officer of Avacta Group, said: “The placing has received overwhelming support from both institutional and retail investors, leading to a bookbuild that was multiple times oversubscribed.
“I would like to thank our existing investors and welcome new shareholders to Avacta. We are very pleased to have added a significant strategic US investor to our register.
“This substantial fundraising allows us to rapidly expand the in-house Affimer® and pre|CISION™ cancer therapy pipelines and scale-up the diagnostics business to expand the Affimer® diagnostic products pipeline.
“In the short term the funds will provide the company with the working capital to support the development and manufacture of the COVID-19 antigen tests in development which, given the potential demand, could be transformational for Avacta.
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Sheffield-based software business WANdisco has won a contract with one of the world’s largest airlines to migrate analytical data to the Microsoft Azure cloud.
The major US-based airline is deploying WANdisco’s LiveData Migrator to migrate business critical analytical data from on premise to the cloud.
WANdisco CEO and chairman, David Richards, said: “The world’s largest businesses have constant and growing requirements for analytical data that are essential to the running of operations.
“With the backdrop of COVID-19, businesses are not able to scale up or down the fixed costs of running on premise facilities in line with economic activity.
“Cloud is the answer to this problem and our Microsoft Azure LiveData Platform is the enabler for this migration.
“This global airline typifies our blue-chip client base that have exponentially expanding data requirements but have been stuck with non-scalable on-premise capabilities until now.”
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