Ceres, a US-based biotechnology company backed by crops developer Monsanto, has added two extra underwriters to the banks working on its $100m Nasdaq flotation.
The company, which supplies seeds to be used for energy, has added US-based banks Raymond James and Simmons & Company alongside Goldman Sachs, Barclays Capital and Piper Jaffray as underwriters on the initial public offering.
Monsanto owns 6.4% of Ceres, which raised $20m in its series G round in June last year by selling shares at $6.50 each. Monsanto had bought 3.3 million shares in Ceres’s E round last year at $6.50 per share following a $137m collaboration signed in 2002 applying genomics technologies to identify genes that provide improvements in corn, soybean and certain other row crops, according to its regulatory filing.
Previously, Ceres raised $75m in September 2007 in a round led by private equity firm Warburg Pincus.
Ceres posted a $19.6m loss on $4.9m in revenues for the nine months ended May 31.
Its other large shareholders are private equity firms Artal Luxembourg (18%), Warburg Pincus (15.5%), Ambergate Trust (14%), Oxford Bioscience (10.6%), Gimv (8.46%), Oppenheimer Growth (8.44%) and Quantum Industrial Partners (5.76%).