Illumina Acquires Fluent Biosciences

Illumina have acquired Fluent Biosciences.

Folks have commented that the deal must have been worth less than $120M due to the threshold at which an acquisition needs to go through some kind of regulatory process… But I wouldn’t be surprised if it was significantly less than $120M.

Fluent seems like a small company (I can find ~30 employees on LinkedIn). They seem to be selling fewer kits than Parse. I can find only 1 Fluent sale, versus 4 for Parse and 34+ for the Chromium on USASpending. Given that a lot of 10Xs growth (and therefore valuation) may be coming from spatial, I would imagine Fluent would be worth far less than 10% of 10Xs market cap (~$2B).

According to Crunchbase Fluent raised $22..9M, from what I can tell at least $5.5M of this was in grants. In the current environment perhaps those investors would be happy to get a small multiple return on their investment… particular given Fluent’s limited traction.

People like to think of Illumina as a big spender, offering billion for companies like PacBio and GRAIL. But they previously spent $60M and $100M on Avantome and Advanced Liquid Logic. I suspect the Fluent deal is more likely to be in this range.

On a technical level, Fluent doesn’t appear to have a strong lead either, with a recent review suggesting they were “ok” but not really competitive with 10X (the current market leader):

Patents suggest that Illumina has also been doing real actual work on single cell isolation platforms using digital microfluidic and droplet based approaches.

So… why didn’t they just develop something in house? Well,