Oracle will invest £150m in a British biotech company tracking Covid mutations in its upcoming London float.
The $240bn (£175bn) Texas-based software giant, founded by Larry Ellison, will become a cornerstone investor in Oxford Nanopore, which is set to go public next month.
Founded in 2005, Nanopore develops portable kits for analysing DNA samples to track new diseases.
Its technology performs about a fifth of coronavirus sequencing worldwide and the company was chosen as a Government supplier for hundreds of thousands of Covid testing kits to the NHS.
The company is expected to be worth about £3bn, although analysts at Jefferies said the figure could be as high as £4.5bn. It was last valued at around £2.4bn.
The deal for Nanopore, which was once backed by stock picker Neil Woodford before his fund’s collapse, is expected to leave its top executives sitting on shares worth more than £100m.
The deal with Oracle means it will provide digital infrastructure and data services to the Oxford company.
The £150m investment will form the lion’s share of Oxford Nanopore’s plan to raise £300m in next month’s listing.
The company expects to reach a free float of about 25pc of its shares and some existing investors will be able to sell part of their holdings as part of the deal.
