3. Berkeley Lights, Inc. (NASDAQ:BLI)
ARK Investment Management’s Stake Value: $309,333,000
Percentage of ARK Investment Management’s 13F Portfolio: 0.57%
Market Cap: $1.711 billion
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 15
Ranking third on our list of Cathie Wood’s top 15 small-cap stock picks is Berkeley Lights, Inc. (NASDAQ:BLI), which is a company that enhances the use of cell-based products. Their signature technology and workflows allow scientists to identify the cells they need at an accelerated pace. Berkeley Lights, Inc. (NASDAQ:BLI)’s core workflows include Antibody Discovery, Cell Line Development, Cell Therapy Development, and Synthetic Biology.
Wood’s ARK Investment Management owns 6.9 million shares in Berkeley Lights, Inc. (NASDAQ:BLI), amounting to $309.3 million, and making up 0.57% of Wood’s 13F portfolio.
Out of the 873 elite hedge funds monitored extensively by Insider Monkey, 15 funds were bullish on Berkeley Lights, Inc. (NASDAQ:BLI) at the end of June, down from 16 in the previous quarter.
On August 11, the company reported earnings for the second quarter. The EPS reported by Berkeley Lights, Inc. (NASDAQ:BLI) was -$0.27, missing estimates by -$0.04. The actual revenue for the company was $19.25 million, missing estimated revenue by -$0.39 million. Cowen analyst Dan Brennan maintained an Outperform rating on Berkeley Lights, Inc. (NASDAQ:BLI) on October 14.
Alger Small Cap Focus Fund mentioned Berkeley Lights, Inc. (NASDAQ:BLI) in their Q1 2021 investor letter. Here is what they said:
“Berkeley Lights Inc. was among the top detractors from performance. Berkeley Lights is a leading digital cell biology company founded in 2011. The company provides a single cell manipulation platform to enable and accelerate rapid development and commercialization of biotherapeutics and other cell-based products. The Berkeley Lights platform provides an advanced environment for rapid functional characterization of single cells at scale, with advanced automation systems that analyze live cells using proprietary consumables and application and workflow software to deliver robust single cell data. Berkeley Lights’ workflows enable a deep understanding of each cell’s behavior by recording critical data such as relevant phenotypic characteristics and linking to genetic information using real -time continuous images on thousands of cells, cell by cell. The company drastically reduces the amount of time required to get results for each of these application workflows by using customer defined criteria to find the best eel I for each customer’s desired product.
We believe the underperformance of Berkeley Lights shares during the first quarter was driven more by heavy insider selling than by a change in fundamentals and we believe the base business remains strong. For example, the company recently announced a new$17 mi11ion multi-year non-exclusive collaboration agreement with a global leader in the contract development and manufacturing organization (COMO) space, which will expand the company’s total addressable market and potentially allow the company to develop new workflows that it can commercialize in the future. More broadly, Berkeley Lights has tail winds from strong demand for cell -based products, increasing complexity of these products and a growing number of therapeutic modalities, all of which should drive demand for the company’s technology.”
