Ocugen (
OCGN) has been one of the more polarizing story stocks of 2021. The company is led by CEO and Co-founder, Shankar Musunuri, and entered into the public equity market in 2019 via a reverse merger with floundering biotech shell Histogenics. Ocugen had been in operation since 2013 with the goal of "develop[ing] innovative therapies to treat rare and underserved eye diseases". The company had
raised $19 millionin debt and equity through the life of the company and has de minimis existing revenues today.
As the below chart shows, markets had little interest in this penny stock between the
closing of the reverse merger in late 2019 through late 2020.
Another new COVID-19 stock!
That suddenly changed on December 22, 2020 when Ocugen
announcedthat they had a new agreement with India's Bharat Biotech to commercialize Bharat's COVAXIN within the United States. Since then, the stock has surged more than 2,000%,
from less than $0.30 to more than $7.00 today, and currently sports a market cap of more than $1.5 billion.
This seems like a VAN short