Evogene

From a Compugen spin-off to a public company

Evogene was founded in 2002 as a spin-off from Compugen, according to the biography of CEO Ofer Haviv on the company's website. Haviv was involved in the spin-off, served as CFO and COO, and has been CEO since the end of 2004. The company is based in Rehovot and trades on Nasdaq and the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange under the symbol EVGN. For most of its history it developed computational platforms for life sciences, agriculture and health, and set up subsidiaries around them, including Lavie Bio, Biomica, Casterra and AgPlenus. The website describes more than 20 years of experience in computational biology and chemistry.

ChemPass AI: designing a molecule before it is synthesized

Today the company defines itself as a computational chemistry company that specializes in the generative design of small molecules. These are chemical compounds small enough to enter a cell, and most drugs and most pesticides are made of them. At the heart of the business is ChemPass AI, a generative engine designed to scan a huge chemical space and propose new molecules that meet several requirements at once: effectiveness, selectivity, safety and manufacturability. The idea is to filter early, before a molecule is synthesized in the lab. According to the report for the second quarter of 2026, the virtual space the engine scans was expanded from about 36 billion molecules to about 110 billion. In the same period, a model for predicting antifungal activity was added.

The partnership with Google Cloud and AI agents

In June 2026 Evogene announced a milestone in its second collaboration with Google Cloud. AI agents based on Gemini models and on Google's agent platform were built into the engine. The goal is to map out, right at the start of discovery, the required product profile: which biological, clinical and commercial conditions a molecule will need to meet in order to succeed. Usually such conditions are checked only at late and expensive stages. The company claims that research tasks that took weeks or months are now done in minutes. This is a claim the company made in its report for the second quarter of 2026, not a result measured independently.

Cutting back and focusing

According to the report for the second quarter of 2026, the company went through a strategic change over the past year and a half. The number of employees fell from 117 in December 2024 to 38 in August 2026. Cash use fell from about $20.5 million in 2024 to about $14.4 million in 2025, and the forecast for 2026 is $8.5 million to $9.5 million. Lavie Bio sold most of its assets to ICL and stopped operating. Biomica licensed out its lead drug candidate and no longer runs ongoing operations. Casterra focuses on Brazil only. At the same time, the company reported six active collaborations in drug development. Revenue in the first half of 2026 was about $0.7 million, and cash stood at about $9.3 million at the end of June.

The fight over the board, September 2026

In the summer of 2026 two shareholders, L.I.A. Pure Capital and Invest Pro, demanded that the board be replaced. According to the company, they sought to replace all the directors except the CEO. The company opposed this and called on shareholders to support its own nominees. At the general meeting on 4 September 2026, the board slate proposed by the company was approved. The dissenting shareholders disputed the voting results, and on 8 September informed the company of their intention to publish a special tender offer under Israeli company law. A day later two directors resigned, and the company said the resignations were not due to a disagreement. In a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on 15 September 2026, the company said it was holding discussions with the dissenting shareholders. No later report was found.