Bay­er is go­ing all in on next-gen stem cell biotech Blue­Rock, buy­ing out Ver­sant and founders for $600M

Af­ter hold­ing a ring­side seat watch­ing the grow­ing team at Blue­Rock build up an ad­vanced pre­clin­i­cal set of re­gen­er­a­tive stem cell projects in the pipeline, Bay­er wants to own it all.

Bay­er ex­ecs struck a deal to buy out the 60% of the shares it didn’t al­ready own, pay­ing $240 mil­lion in cash and set­ting up a smor­gas­bord of $360 mil­lion in de­vel­op­ment mile­stones on the ta­ble while valu­ing the com­pa­ny at a uni­corn-sized bil­lion dol­lars. The bulk of that cash is ear­marked for Ver­sant Ven­tures, which seed­ed the com­pa­ny and set up the $225 mil­lion launch round in late 2016, with the rest go­ing for stock held by some of the founders.

Now that Blue­Rock’s staff has been built to 130, with a lead pro­gram for Parkin­son’s head­ed to the clin­ic be­fore the end of this year, the Ver­sant team feels they reached the stage where they need­ed to ei­ther go pub­lic and raise a sub­stan­tial amount of cash, or let a deep-pock­et group like Bay­er take it for­ward.

And Bay­er is all in.

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