REVISED, June 19 — A Vancouver firm working on a new soy protein product and fine-tuning its processes for canola protein ingredients has listed its common shares on the TSX.
Burcon NutraScience said Thursday it has wrapped up a sale of about 2.94 million shares at $5.75 per share, to a group led by Toronto-based Paradigm Capital and including BMO Capital Markets and Vancouver’s Haywood Securities.
The net proceeds remaining from the sale’s gross value of $16.9 million are expected to be used for continued research and development of Burcon’s soy protein isolate extraction and purification technology, called Clarisoy.
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The cash raised will also go toward “further refining” of Burcon’s canola protein isolate extraction and purification processes for the products Puratein and Supertein, as well as filing new patent applications and “expanding (Burcon’s) intellectual property portfolio.”
“We are pleased with the strong response from our new institutional shareholders, particularly at a time when access to capital remains difficult,” Burcon president Johann Tergesen said in a release Thursday. “The completion of this financing serves as a validation of the potential of our products and technologies.”
Burcon, which until now has traded on the TSX Venture Exchange, picked up conditional approval from the TSX on June 1 for listing its common shares. The stock exchange’s requirements, to be met by a deadline of Aug. 28, included raising gross proceeds of $10 million.
“With the closing of today’s financing those requirements have now been met,” Burcon said in its release. Its common shares, now posted for trading on the TSX under the symbol “BU,” closed Thursday at $5.55.
CLARIFICATION, June 19 — A previous version of this article stated Burcon has now gone public on the TSX, when in fact it has traded publicly until now on the TSX-V under the same symbol. Burcon’s shares first went public on the former Vancouver Stock Exchange in 1999.
