Former Sunnyvale HQ of 23andMe Sell for $88 Million

The former headquarters of bankrupt genomics giant 23andMe has sold for nearly $88 million.

The company leased 223 Mathilda Avenue in Sunnyvale in 2019 but the company’s space in the building was in limbo with the onset of the pandemic and the decline in office vacancy across the Bay Area. The building’s developer, Spear Street Capital, just bought the building back from Stockbridge Capital Group for $87.8 million, the Silicon Valley Business Journal reported.

The price marks a significant discount from the $183 million Stockbridge sold it for to Spear Street in 2019. In 2021, by the time 23andMe employees began returning to the office, it abandoned its three-story haunts in Sunnyvale and moved its headquarters to South San Francisco.

In September, 23andMe subleased 17,000 square feet of the 155,000-square-foot Sunnyvale building known as “The Grove” to cloud computing startup CoreWeave. Six months later, the genetic testing company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and asked courts to cancel its lease in Sunnyvale’s Peery Park business district.

That prompted CoreWeave to file a lawsuit in April to get its security deposit back and Stockbridge Capital to put the building up for sale. The building was on the market for about a month before Spear Street snapped it up for $95 million less than what it sold for six years earlier.

23andMe has not been profitable since its inception. The company went public in 2021 and its market capitalization reached $6 billion, but its financials continued to tumble. The company reported a $221 million loss in 2022, $314 million loss in 2023 and nearly $667 million loss in 2024, according to MarketWatch.

“We’ve been caught in the downturn along with the entire industry,” CEO Anne Wojcicki told CNN last year, about a year before 23andMe declared bankruptcy and after a year of layoffs that shrunk the company’s size by a quarter. “We’re absolutely exploring what our options are to prioritize our best assets… That’s what happens in this kind of market.”

The direct-to-consumer gene tester remains in business, though it appears to be offloading all of its offices. Earlier this month, it sold its South San Francisco former headquarters. On June 17, it will close and vacate its smaller San Francisco office at 870 Market Street, KRON reported.

On Monday, 27 states and the District of Columbia sued the company to prevent the sale of customers’ personal genetic data without consent, The Associated Press reported.

— Chris Malone Méndez