That IPO, which took place on July 22, was priced at US$16 per share, with a pre-money valuation of about US$1.5bn. Yesterday afternoon [July 26], founder and CEO, Sean McClain, told us that those shares had reached US$23.88 each and the company was valued at US$2.15bn.
The IPO, he continued, was a validation of both the company’s work to date, and an acknowledgement of its future potential.
“Last Thursday was a super emotional and thrilling day. It has been 10 years in the making – to go from basement lab to Wall St. We are now really looking forward to the next decade and what we are going to accomplish.”
Investors have got behind Absci, he said, and believe in its vision of changing the world “one protein at a time.”
The decision to go public was driven by a desire to attract greater talent to the biotech, to help see its vision through, said the CEO.
“Talent has got us to where we are today. We knew that having an IPO would offer us great visibility as we continue to recruit more AI talent as well as SynBio talent. We have gone from 40 employees in 2020 to over 170 employees now, and we will have, most likely, 240 employees by the end of the year.”
Discovery, screening capabilities
The company’s platform is built to design and generate protein-based drug candidates and help screen them for optimal functioning.
McClain likens Absci to being “the Google index search” of drug discovery and biomanufacturing.
“One of the exciting aspects of our technology is that we can screen billions of different drug candidates in a single experiment looking at protein functionality and manufacturing ability. This data and this assay is all proprietary to us, and we are feeding this data into our deep learning models and what this allows us to do is ultimately go fully in silico where we can predict the best drug candidate towards a specific target and the associated manufacturing cell line. In the future, data is going to be what drives our business and, ultimately, allow us to get the best drugs to patients at truly unprecedented speed.”