Twist Bioscience Pursues Growth at All Costs. How Long Will Investors Tolerate It?

In recent years, promising start-ups have faced almost no obstacles to raising capital, so long as they pursued growth at all costs. Investors accepted significant losses in the present on the premise that these would translate to incredible market share in the future. The environment of easy money created many questionable valuations (see: WeWork), and even rare instances of outright fraud (see: Theranos). 

But the market shifted in 2019. Investors are thinking more objectively about the stories presented by start-ups and emerging companies, and are much more interested in profitable growth, or at least progress toward it, than empty promises of a big payoff down the road.

While tech companies such as WeWork, Uber, Slack Technologies, and others have been hit by this newfound skepticism, even swearing off the growth-at-all-costs mantra of years past, the field of synthetic biology has yet to (publicly) face its reckoning. If and when it does, Twist Bioscience (NASDAQ: TWST) might be the first to fall. 

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Source Fool.com