AMSTERDAM – Life sciences company QIAGEN NV said on Monday it has agreed to acquire Parse Biosciences, a provider of single-cell sequencing solutions, for an upfront $225 million in cash, aiming to capture a larger share of the fast-growing market for analyzing individual cells.
The deal for the privately held U.S.-based company includes the potential for an additional $55 million in milestone payments, QIAGEN said. The acquisition is expected to close in December 2025.
The move significantly expands QIAGEN’s portfolio in the single-cell sequencing market, which is projected to grow from about $1.2 billion in 2024 to $2.1 billion by 2029, according to the company. This growth is largely driven by pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies using large-scale cellular data to train artificial intelligence models for drug discovery.
Parse’s technology, called Evercode, is an instrument-free platform that allows researchers to analyze millions to billions of cells, a scale that is difficult to achieve with other methods. This capability is seen as key to generating the massive datasets required for AI-driven research.
“The addition of the Parse team to QIAGEN will significantly strengthen our offerings in one of the most dynamic areas of life science,” QIAGEN Chief Executive Thierry Bernard said in a statement. “Single-cell analysis is the key to understanding health and disease at a mechanistic level.”
Parse’s products are used by more than 3,000 labs worldwide, including all of the top 10 global pharmaceutical companies and top 50 research institutions. Its recent “GigaLab” service offers the capacity to process billions of cells per year for large-scale drug discovery projects.
For QIAGEN, Parse is expected to contribute about $40 million in sales in 2026, adding approximately two percentage points of growth. The transaction is forecast to be dilutive to adjusted earnings per share by about $0.04 in 2026 but to become accretive starting in 2028.
The acquisition is also expected to boost QIAGEN’s Digital Insights bioinformatics business, as customers will require software to process and interpret the vast amounts of data generated by Parse’s technology.
“QIAGEN’s strong commitment to Sample technologies and its global infrastructure make it an ideal partner for our next stage of growth,” said Alex Rosenberg, CEO and co-founder of Parse Biosciences.
The deal is subject to regulatory approvals, including under the U.S. Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act.
Moreover, $500 million synthetic share repurchase is approved at AGM 2025 to be completed in early January 2026 as QIAGEN delivers ahead of plan to return $1 billion by end-2028, according to a statement.