City Therapeutics has priced its initial public offering at 21 dollars a share, selling 10,952,381 shares for gross proceeds of about 230 million dollars, above the roughly 200 million dollars the deal was first reported at. The shares are due to start trading on Nasdaq today under the ticker CTY, with the offering expected to close today. BofA Securities and Jefferies led the deal, with Leerink Partners and Piper Sandler as bookrunners on the prospectus.
City is an RNA interference company built by veterans of Alnylam, the field’s founding company, and its pitch is a next generation RNAi platform aimed first at rare diseases, led by a candidate for thrombosis prevention. RNAi, silencing a gene by destroying its messenger RNA, is one of the few platform technologies with multiple approved products and a manufacturing playbook investors understand.
That is why the upsizing matters beyond one company. Biotech IPOs have been selective all year, pricing only where a platform has human data or a clear regulatory path. A deal that grows by 15 percent at pricing, led by bulge bracket banks, tells the dozens of private companies in the queue that the window is open for quality, at a price.