Hong Kong-based Insilico Medicine, a clinical-stage AI drug discovery startup, filed for an initial public offering on the local bourse on Tuesday.
The move comes a year and seven months after the pre-revenue firm was reported to be confidentially filing for a US initial public offering in November 2021 seeking to raise around $300 million, per Bloomberg.
The biotech firm seeks to list on the Main Board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange via Chapter 18A, a listing rule that has enabled pre-revenue and pre-profit biotech firms to go public since April 30, 2018.
Insilico joins a total of seven other pre-revenue biotech firms to tap into the Hong Kong bourse after a year of sluggish IPO market especially for biotech firms, as of June 29.
In 2022, only eight biotech firms were listed on the Hong Kong bourse, raising a total of $473 million, down 60% from 20 firms in 2021 and 42.9% from 14 firms in 2020, according to a report published by law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP in April.
Launched in 2014 at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Insilico Medicine’s founder and CEO Alex Zhavoronkov moved the firm’s headquarter to Hong Kong in April 2019. As of June 27, the firm has built an internally generated pipeline consisting of 31 programmes across 29 drug targets, per the filing.
It incurred a pre-tax loss of around $221.8 million on revenues of $30.1 million for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2022, per the filing.
Morgan Stanley Asia Limited, China International Capital Corporation, Hong Kong Securities Limited, and BNP Paribas Securities (Asia) Limited have been appointed as overall coordinators of the IPO.
Previously, the firm closed its second tranche of Series D round led by new investor Prosperity7 Ventures, the diversified growth fund of oil giant Saudi Aramco’s Aramco Ventures, bringing the firm’s total funding in the round to $95 million in August 2022.
The firm has since raised over $400 million in total, counting notable investors including the likes of Warburg Pincus, Qiming Venture Partners, Wuxi AppTec, B Capital Group, OrbiMed, Deerfield, Pavilion Capital, PIDC, CPE fund, Mirae Asset Capital, and Lilly Asia Ventures, among its backers, according to the filing.