Prenetics (PRE), a health sciences company that raised $48 million earlier this year in part to build a bitcoin treasury, said it decided to stop buying BTC due to prolonged weakness in the cryptocurrency market.
The company rolled out its bitcoin accumulation strategy in June following a model championed by Michael Saylor’s Strategy Inc, in which firms raise capital to buy and hold crypto on their balance sheets. The business model gained traction earlier this year as crypto prices rose, but enthusiasm faded after the steep market decline in October.
On October 27, Prenetics CEO and co-founder Danny Yeung announced the funding round, which included investors such as Kraken, Exodus (EXOD), GPTX, and American Ventures. He said the funds would help their “IM8” business scale globally while accumulating 1 BTC daily toward a goal of $1 billion in revenue and bitcoin within five years.
However, the firm said in a statement on Tuesday that it stopped buying bitcoin on Dec. 4 to focus its resources solely on IM8, which it said has generated more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) since it launched 11 months ago.
“The phenomenal success of IM8 has exceeded all expectations and scaled much faster than we originally expected,” said Yeung. “Our board and management team unanimously agreed that the most promising path to creating significant, sustainable shareholder value is to devote our undivided attention to this opportunity clearly visible in IM8.”
Prenetics, backed and co-founded by English soccer icon David Beckham, said it will not allocate any existing or new capital for the purpose of buying additional bitcoin. However, it still plans to hold its existing 510 bitcoin as a reserve asset, worth nearly $45 million as of Tuesday afternoon ET.
Prenetics stock is up 189% this year, while Michael Saylor’s MSTR is down nearly 48% and bitcoin is down about 5.6%.
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