Small Cap Gainers: PLSE, GDYN, SPRO

3:26 pm Thursday, July 01st, 2021

Pulse Biosciences, Inc. (NASDAQ:PLSE) soared 27% to $20.83 after the company announced that it has entered into a stock purchase agreement with Robert W. Duggan, an experienced life sciences executive and the Company’s Board Chairman, for the purchase of 3,048,780 shares of the Company’s common stock at a price of $16.40 per share, the last reported sale price of the Company’s common stock on June 30, 2021, the immediately preceding trading day.

Grid Dynamics Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:GDYN) gained 24.50% to $18.70. This morning, Grid Dynamics announced that it is pricing its common stock offering at $15.03 a share. The company will offer 10 million shares to the public, 4 million of which are going to be newly issued from Grid Dynamics and 6 million of which are coming from existing Grid Dynamics shareholders.

The company said it will not receive any proceeds from the sale of shares from the 6 million shares being sold by current stockholders. This means the only part of this common stock offering that is raising money for Grid Dynamics is the 4 million being offered by the company itself. At the offering price of $15.03, this will raise around $60 million for the company and boost its shares outstanding from 54 million to 58 million.

Spero Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ:SPRO) went up 19.70% to $16.71  after announcing a new product partnership with Pfizer (NYSE:PFE), in addition to a major equity investment by the same pharmaceutical icon. Namely, Pfizer is now a licensee of Spero’s drug-resistant infection treatment SPR206, as well as an owner of about $40 million worth of Spero Therapeutics. That’s nearly a 10th of the small company.

The move is a somewhat risky one on Pfizer’s part. Spero is not yet generating any product revenue, and SPR206 is only in the midst of phase 1 trials as a treatment for multidrug-resistant (or MDR), Gram-negative infections. The company’s most-developed project is a treatment for urinary tract infections called Tebipenem HBr. It’s only recently completed phase 3 trials, though, and has yet to be submitted to regulators for final approval.