Topline
Genomics powerhouse Natera surged in trading Friday following a blowout second-quarter earnings report and a strong revenue beat, sending the stock to an all-time high and its co-founder’s billionaire fortune even higher.
Key Facts
Natera shares closed up 21.3% at $322.10 on Friday, recording an all-time high and pushing co-founder Matthew Rabinowitz’s estimated net worth to at least $1.5 billion, according to the company’s annual proxy filing and market data.
Friday’s surge in share price was fueled by what one analyst described as “blowout volume” for Natera’s cancer-detecting blood test Signatera in the second quarter, as the company reported $752.8 million in revenue, well above the estimate of $673.9 million, according to Finnhub earnings data.
Natera’s market capitalization jumped to $46.1 billion after ending July around $38 billion, according to market data.
Rabinowitz holds roughly 2.28 million shares worth approximately $717 million, as well as options and vesting restricted stock units, according to the company’s proxy filing and insider transaction disclosures.
Big Number
40.6%. That is how much Natera shares have grown since the start of the year, when they were priced around the $228 mark. The company’s lowest closing price this year occurred in late March, when shares fell to $182.65.
Tangent
Rabinowitz also holds roughly 19.4% of genome firm MyOme on a fully diluted basis as of March 31, according to the proxy.
Key Background
Rabinowitz was chief executive for a location-services technology company between 2000 and 2007 and co-founded Natera in 2005, working as chief executive for 14 years before becoming executive chairman. A Stanford University graduate, he also logged stints as a consulting professor at his alma mater from 2004 to 2012 and later worked in Harvard’s genetics department. His research spans over 100 patents and publications about subjects like bioinformatics, machine learning and genetic testing, which earned him IEEE’s Scott Helt Memorial Award and the World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneer Award for two separate companies he founded. Natera appears to have benefited from his leadership, dramatically increasing testing volume and jumping from annual revenue in the low hundreds of millions to $2.3 billion within the last decade.
