This article has been updated with additional information from Bionano's earnings call.
NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Bionano Genomics reported after the close of the market on Thursday a 41 percent year-over-year increase in its fourth quarter revenues, the company's first full quarter as a publicly traded firm.
Separately, the firm said it has entered into two separate debt and equity financing agreements totaling $41.5 million with Innovatus Life Sciences Lending Fund, East West Bank, and Aspire Capital.
"We have had an impressive year as a company, as highlighted by our IPO in August of 2018, and punctuated by our performance this past quarter," said CEO Erik Holmlin in a conference call on Thursday to discuss the firm's financial results. With the cash from the IPO and the two financing agreements, "we believe our balance sheet remains strong, which will allow us to continue to pursue aggressively our market development efforts, our global commercialization plans, and our key product development initiatives," he added.
The San Diego-based genome mapping firm reported $4 million in Q4 revenue, up from $2.8 million the previous year. Revenues consisted of $3.8 million in product revenue and $168,771 in other revenue, compared to $2.6 million in product revenues and $288,915 in other revenues in Q4 2017.
Holmlin pointed out during the call that the company recently made several improvements to its Saphyr platform resulting in an easier and shorter workflow, higher throughput, and better sensitivity to all types of structural variations.
He also mentioned that Children's National Health System recently adopted the Genoox Integrated Platform for structural variant detection that Bionano and Genoox launched last fall.
In addition, he said, Bionano has been working with a number of groups to compare the performance of the Saphyr platforms to traditional cytogenetics methods used in hematology-oncology diagnostics and expects results to be presented at scientific meetings later this year. "We believe these studies will lay the groundwork for Saphyr to penetrate labs that would develop assays for cytogenetic applications, enabling Saphyr to become the first digital cytogenetics platform, effectively modernizing genetic and oncology testing as we know it," Holmlin said.
Bionano's R&D costs totaled $2.5 million in Q4 2018, about the same as in Q4 2017. Its SG&A costs were $4.6 million, up 31 percent from $3.5 million in Q4 2017.
The firm's net loss for the quarter was $6.4 million, up 8 percent from $5.9 million in the year-ago quarter.
For full-year 2018, Bionano's revenues increased 26 percent to $12 million from $9.5 million. Product revenues grew to $11.5 million from $8.8 million, while other revenues narrowed to $537,562 from $735,339.
The company's R&D expenses for 2018 declined 21 percent to $9.5 million from $12 million in 2017, and its SG&A expenses grew just under 1 percent to $14.2 million from $14.1 million.
Bionano's net loss for 2018 was $18.5 million, down 21 percent from $23.4 million in 2017.
Under a debt financing agreement announced on Thursday, Innovatus has agreed to provide Bionano with up to $25 million in term loans while East West Bank is providing the company a revolving line of credit for up to $5 million. In addition, Innovatus has purchased $1.5 million of Bionano's shares of common stock.
The company plans to draw down $20 million of the term loan next week and to use $11 million of this to pay existing debt. Together with the $1.5 million from the equity investment, this leaves the firm with about $10.5 million in net proceeds.
Under a second financing agreement, Aspire Capital purchased $1 million of Bionano's shares of common stock and committed to purchasing up to $9 million of additional shares of common stock at Bionano's request over the next 30 months.
As of Dec. 31, 2018 Bionano had $16.5 million in cash and cash equivalents.
The company's shares were down about 7 percent, at $3.89, in mid-morning trading on the Nasdaq on Friday.