Momentum may be the word of the day. Prime Medicine, Inc. (PRME proposed) – a pre-clinical gene editing company – plans to raise $151.3 million this week. Mobileye Global (MBLY proposed), Intel’s self-driving car unit, may be up next. The Wall Street Journal reported late Monday (Oct. 17, 2022) that Mobileye is likely to cut its valuation to under $20 billion – less than half the $50 billion market cap estimated last December – and launch its IPO roadshow on Tuesday.
The U.S. stock market’s huge rally on Monday gave Mobileye’s bankers a reason to proceed with the IPO, according to The WSJ. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are leading the pack of 10 joint book-runners. This will be Mobileye’s second spin around the block as a publicly traded company. Mobileye, an Israeli company founded in 1999, went public in 2014 and traded under the symbol “MBLY” on the New York Stock Exchange. Intel bought Mobileye in 2017 for $15.3 billion. Mobileye recently reclaimed “MBLY” as its proposed stock symbol – but this time, it plans to trade on the NASDAQ.
Prime Medicine’s IPO is the fourth quarter’s first IPO to weigh in at more than $100 million. It’s coming at a time when no traditional IPOs were priced during the first two weeks of October. (Only five deals – four SPAC IPOs and a tiny NYSE – American uplisting – got done between Monday, Oct. 3, 2022, and the closing bell on Friday, Oct. 14, 2022.)
Into the Gene Editing Pool
Biotech players are said to be all in for Prime Medicine’s IPO. The deal is set for pricing on Wednesday night – Oct. 19, 2022, the 35th anniversary of Black Monday – to trade Thursday (Oct. 20) on the NASDAQ. This is an IPO of 8.9 million shares at $16 to $18. A pricing at the $17 mid-point would give Prime Medicine a market cap of about $1.6 billion.
J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Jefferies are the joint book-runners.
Prime Medicine, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says its patented Prime Editing technology works like a “word processor” with a search-and-replace function to find and fix genetic defects that cause disease – all without causing any breaks in double-stranded DNA, according to the prospectus.
David Liu, Ph.D., a Harvard professor described by Endpoints News as a pioneer in the field of gene editing, is a co-founder of Prime Medicine. He is also its biggest shareholder with a stake of almost 25 percent.
GV, the venture capital arm of Google’s parent, Alphabet, is Prime Medicine’s biggest institutional investor with a stake of 14.6 percent – a fact in the prospectus (page 257) that caught the attention of BioPharma Dive.
Prime Medicine’s initial focus will be on diseases of the blood, including sickle cell disease, as well as on diseases of the liver, the eye and the ear, the prospectus says.
The company, which employs more than 135 people, is not profitable, according to the prospectus. Prime Medicine reported a net loss of $132.51 million on no revenue for the last 12 months.
Small Deals & A Biotech Filing
A look at this week’s IPO Calendar shows four more IPOs – all small-cap deals – and three of those four are carry-overs from last week.
Over at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, cancer biotech Acrivon Therapeutics (ACRV proposed) filed its S-1 on Monday (Oct. 17, 2022). Acrivon Therapeutics’ IPO is estimated at $100 million. Perhaps we can chalk it up to momentum.
Stay tuned.
(For more information about these companies, please check the IPO Calendar and the individual IPO Profiles found on IPOScoop.com’s website.)
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