Berman Tabacco is counsel for West Palm Beach Firefighters’ Pension Fund, a named plaintiff, in this securities fraud class action brought on behalf of investors of Zymergen securities in connection with its April 2021 initial public offering (IPO). Zymergen, a company that purports to integrate computational and manufacturing technologies to design, engineer, and optimize microbes for industrial applications, touted in its IPO offering materials that (1) it had a “biofacturing” platform that made better products faster, cheaper, and more sustainably than traditional chemical companies that were among the planet’s worst industrial polluters; (2) its product, Hyaline, an optical film product designed for electronics companies to use in the manufacturing of display touch sensors in personal devices and other applications, had been successfully launched and would generate revenue in the second half of 2021 (just a couple of months after the IPO); and (3) there were at least 10 other products that were in various stages of development that would be launched and generate revenues in 2022 and 2023. The Complaint alleges that, just a few months later after the IPO concluded, investors learned that those statements were false; in fact, the company revealed that there would be no product revenue in 2021 and only immaterial revenue in 2022 due to issues with the commercial product pipeline. Plaintiffs allege that Zymergen issued these inaccurate and misleading statements and omissions in a bid to raise much needed cash to keep the insolvent Zymergen afloat.
