BICO raises €600m and acquires QInstruments

Freshly rebranded BICO is doing its best to live up to its reputation: The company has raised more than SEK2bn (around €200m) in order to advance its acquisition agenda. Most notably, BICO will use the funds to finance its most recent acquisition of QInstruments GmbH – a German developer of advanced sample preparation automation by mixing solutions for liquid handling robots and workflows for biomedical and life science research and clinical diagnostics. BICO invested €61.25m in the takeover.

“QInstruments leads the industry by developing beautiful, customer centric, sample preparation tools and technologies that is impacting major research areas and making a difference in the results the customers can achieve,” said Erik Gatenholm, CEO and co-founder of BICO. “QInstruments’ innovative product portfolio for mixing solutions for advanced liquid handling can be seamless integrated in our existing workflows and in addition, we also see great potential in integrating QInstruments’ technology in new instruments.”

To finance this and other acquisitions, BICO carried out a directed share issue of 4,250,000 series B shares at a subscription price of SEK480 per share. The company currently has several acquisition processes ongoing for targets of various size.