Key Takeaways
- PacBio shares fell 8% after AI drug-discovery company TychoBio said it will use PacBio’s long-read sequencing on more than 10,000 samples.
- The deal backs PacBio’s pitch to AI companies, but the announcement gave no dollar value.
- Revenue fell from $201 million in 2023 to $160 million in 2025, and PacBio has burned cash every year for five years while its share count rose about 47%.
- Consumables revenue is the number that will show whether deals like this turn into sales.
Pacific Biosciences of California (PACB) – PacBio for short – was on a run. Shares locked in a 15% gain on Monday and a nearly 30% pop last week. And then, after announcing a new partnership with TychoBio…they popped, and then fell hard, now down 8%.
The first two moves came on news from EpiSign, a rare-disease software company that added support for PacBio’s data. Today’s news is arguably a bigger deal: an AI drug-discovery company picking PacBio as its data source.
What exactly happened
Before Tuesday’s open, PacBio said TychoBio will use its HiFi and Kinnex long-read RNA sequencing on more than 10,000 samples. TychoBio will measure how candidate RNA therapies change a cell’s RNA, then train AI models on the results. (Long-read sequencing reads long stretches of genetic code at once, so it captures whole RNA transcripts.)
Felix Raimundo, TychoBio’s founder and CEO, put it this way:
“AI models are only as good as the data they are trained on. To effectively identify new rare disease treatments, we needed the highest quality biological data, which can only be generated using PacBio HiFi sequencing technology.”
That’s quite the endorsement. PacBio CEO Mark Van Oene tied it to an earlier deal with Basecamp Research, describing the sequencing data as what “will power biological modeling in the AI ecosystem.”
And why PacBio sank on good news
The release gave no dollar value, and the business under the rally hasn’t moved much…
Revenue fell from $201 million in 2023 to $160 million in 2025, and analysts don’t expect it to top 2023’s level until 2028. A deal with no stated value gives them little reason to change that.
Meanwhile, PacBio has burned a lot of cash along the way…
The burn is shrinking, but cash and investments still fell from $279.5 million to $236.9 million in the first half of 2026.
Funding those losses has cost shareholders, too…
The share count is up about 47% since 2021, one reason the stock is still down about 89% over five years.
What to watch
TychoBio’s choice sounds like a real vote of confidence in PacBio’s data. But I think investors looking at the cash burn, and the dilution, and the lack of specifics are saying “show me the money.”
If more AI companies follow Basecamp and TychoBio, those 10,000-sample orders could add up. PacBio’s next quarterly report is the first place that would show.
So what is PacBio stock actually worth?
TIKR lets you forecast the future price of any stock in less than a minute. Just enter a few assumptions into TIKR’s valuation model and see what PacBio could be worth. Start from Wall Street consensus estimates, or adjust the inputs to reflect your own view of the business. It’s free to use.
Disclaimer:
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