Finance
Irvine’s Pacific Premier Bancorp agreed to acquire Grandpoint Capital Inc. in an all-stock deal valued at $641.2 million. The buy will make Pacific Premier the largest bank by assets based in Orange County, with $11.7 billion, topping the $10.3 billion in assets of Santa Ana’s Banc of California. Pacific Premier said it expects the transaction to be immediately accretive to 2018 earnings per share and 8.6% accretive to earnings per share in 2019. Los Angeles-based Grandpoint Capital, the holding company of Grandpoint Bank, had $3.2 billion in assets, $2.4 billion in gross loans and $2.4 billion in total deposits as of Dec. 31. The transaction will increase Pacific Premier’s total assets to approximately $11.7 billion on a pro forma basis.
— Peter J. Brennan
Healthcare
Avid Bioservices Inc. in Tustin will sell its clinical-stage immunotherapy cancer drug candidate to Oncologie Inc. for $8 million upfront, with payments spread over six months, and up to $95 million in development, regulatory and commercialization milestones. The buyer is an oncology therapeutics company based in Boston and with operations in Shanghai. It’s responsible for all future research, development, commercialization, and intellectual property costs of the candidate, currently called bavituximab.
— Sherry Hsieh
Avid meanwhile priced its initial public offering of 9 million shares of common stock at $2.25 per share, totaling more than $20 million in proceeds. The offering is expected to close next week. Wells Fargo Securities is sole bookrun-ning manager. H.C. Wainwright & Co. and Roth Capital Partners are co-managers. The parties have a 30-day option to purchase up to 1.35 million additional shares of common stock at the public offering price. Avid plans to use the proceeds to expand its contract manufacturing business and for general corporate purposes.
— Sherry Hsieh
Restaurants
A Chicago restaurant and hospitality company has joined Newport Beach-based patent licenser Acacia Research Corp. in an investment in a Pasadena-based robotics company for the restaurant industry, and a University of California-Irvine professor joined that company’s advisory board. Levy Restaurants was part of a $10 million Series B funding round for Miso Robotics led by Acacia, which led a $3.1 million venture round for Miso in July. The Levy family through its Levy Acquisition Corp. bought then-privately held Del Taco Restaurants Inc. in mid-2015, changed its name, and made it a public company.
— Paul Hughes
