Shares of Absci surged more than 30% on Thursday as the Vancouver, Wash.-based biotech company made its debut as a public company.
Absci priced its stock at $16 per share a day earlier, with expected proceeds of $200 million. Shares opened Thursday at $21. The company is now valued at nearly $2 billion. It is trading under the ticker ABSI and will ring the closing bell on the NASDAQ this afternoon.
Absci, which is developing technologies to accelerate drug discovery, is riding a wave of biotech IPOs. By mid-2021, 49 biotechs had gone public, according to Biopharma Dive — a faster pace than 2020, which itself was a record year.
Absci joins several other Washington state biotechs that have gone public this year, including Sana Biotechnology, Impel Neuropharma, and Nautilus Biotechnology, which went public via a SPAC merger.
Icosavax and Eliem Therapeutics recently filed for an IPO, and Lyell Immunopharma, based in the Seattle area and South San Francisco, also went public.
Absci CEO Sean McClain started the company in 2011 in a basement lab in Portland, Ore., shortly after completing his undergraduate degree. He’s led the company through partnerships with several drug companies, including Merck, and through the recent acquisition of synthetic biology company Totient and Denovium, a small deep learning startup that analyzes protein function and behavior.
Absci uses in silico models to optimize designs of protein-based drug candidates, and synthetic biology platforms and custom-engineered E. coli strains to manufacture them and screen them for optimal activity. The company, which began commercial operations in 2018, is still in the early stages of building its drug company customer base.
“They are a young company that in my mind has done everything right, in terms of their development,” Leslie Alexandre, CEO of the industry group Life Science Washington, told GeekWire. McClain’s youth also stands out among biotech CEOs, where advanced degrees and some grey hair are standard. “For being relatively young in the business, he has performed the way you would expect of a more seasoned mature, life sciences CEO,” Alexandre said.
The company’s revenue last year was $4.7 million, up from $2 million for 2019. Net losses were $14.4 million in 2020, compared to $6.6 million in 2019.
Total private funding for Absci by March of this year was $230 million, including a $125 million funding round this spring and a $65 million Series E round last fall. Prior to the IPO, Phoenix Venture Partners was the company’s largest shareholder, with a 17.46% stake, followed by McClain with 11.2% of the company. Phoenix Venture Partners led the company’s $5.1 million Series A funding in April 2016.
Absci has more than 170 employees and is preparing to move to a new 78,000 square foot campus just northeast of Vancouver, in Battle Ground. The company’s growth should help boost the biotech ecosystem in the Portland area, Eric Rosenfeld, founder of the Oregon Venture Fund, told GeekWire. The fund was an early investor in Absci.
The Portland area ended a ten-year IPO drought in 2018 when Vancouver-based laser maker nLight went public. In June 2020, ZoomInfo, also from Vancouver, raised $887 million in its IPO.
