Scorpion Capital goes after Twist Bioscience as latest synbio target, comparing biotech to Theranos
16 Nov 2022
IPO
The infamous short seller who went after Ginkgo Bioworks last year has a new target in its sights.
Scorpion Capital released a 236-page report Tuesday morning focused on Twist Bioscience, the synbio startup led by Emily Leproust that’s trading down
$TWST
more than 27%. The release wiped hundreds of millions of dollars in market capital and almost 67% since January 1.
And the intro to the report did not exactly mince words.
The report, which Scorpion said was based on 20 research interviews with former executives and manufacturing employees, customers and competitors, went on to allege a litany of different issues with Twist and CEO Leproust, ranging from accusations that the technology behind Twist is a farce (saying that it’s decades old and stolen from Leproust’s previous employer Agilent), and that the biotech is operating a “Ponzi-like scheme” based on price-dumping.
The allegations are reminiscent to 2018, when Twist agreed to pay Agilent $22.5 million to resolve allegations of trade secret misappropriation. Leproust had worked at Agilent before leaving to found Twist in 2013.
The group went further, comparing the biotech’s “lab-in-a-chip” technology to the now-fallen Theranos and alleging that Twist’s actual technology is “a manual, labor-intensive, and fatally-flawed manufacturing process crippled by errors, bottlenecks, and pitiful yields.” Based on that, Scorpion added that it thinks Twist is falsifying its actual profits and margins, being negative instead of 40+% positive.
Even beyond the Theranos comparison, Scorpion went directly after management, bringing up CFO Jim Thorburn’s connection to his previous employer Televerde, where he was chief sales officer before joining Twist. Televerde is an outsourcing company based in Phoenix that provides sales support for the biotech, per Scorpion and interviews — and the firm went after Televerde for its use of incarcerated women to pad its call center operations, calling it a form of “modern-day slavery.”
The authors then pivoted into looking at investors, noting that Twist’s largest shareholder pre-IPO was a very low-profile Chinese entity called Ever Alpha Fund L.P. — which owned 14.9% of the company. Scorpion claimed that the entity is tied to GF Securities, a Chinese firm that was accused of being associated with a $12.7 billion fraud centered around Kangmei Pharmaceutical back in 2020.
Twist did not respond to a query from
Endpoints News
before publication. However, Twist issued its own brief response, saying that Scorpion’s report is “highly misleading, with many distortions and inaccuracies.” Twist then took a shot at Scorpion, saying that Twist is a public company “unlike the author of the short-seller report.”
Endpoints has been unable to independently verify the claims laid out in Scorpion’s report.
The short seller has only had a handful of targets, but has repeatedly targeted players in the synbio space after torpedoing Berkeley Lights’ stock price earlier last year, then going after Ginkgo Bioworks. In the case of GinkgoGinkgo, Scorpion claimed that the company had engaged in fraud and fired employees who tried to blow the whistle.
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