【Portfolio News】Portfolio unicorns Oxford Nanopore Technologies and Exscientia gone public
GT Healthcare Capital Partners is proud to see two of our portfolio unicorn companies achieving significant milestones of successful initial public offerings. As innovative leaders in respective fields, Oxford Nanopore Technologies and Exscientia has revolutionized and led the technological and translational developments in nanopore sequencing and modernizing drug discovery & developments. We look forward to seeing these innovators taking stride in delivering innovation and improving patient care.
Oxford Nanopore Technologies, the company behind a new generation of nanopore-based sensing technology, marked London’s biggest biotech listing in recent years after their successful listing on 30 September 2021, and soared more than 40% by market close. GT Healthcare Capital Partners was the first Asia-based financial investor to partner with the Oxford spinoff, and led a funding round in 2017 to boost the growth and developments of the sequencing leader.
Oxford Nanopore has developed a new generation of DNA/RNA sequencing technology. It is the only sequencing technology that offers real-time analysis (for rapid insights), in fully scalable formats from pocket to population scale, that can analyse native DNA or RNA and sequence any length of fragment to achieve short to ultra-long read lengths. Since the introduction their first product, the portable MinION, in 2015, the company has since expanded to a rich development pipeline e.g. GridION, PromethIOIN that enables and catalyses a myriad of downstream applications .
Exscientia (Nasdaq: EXAI), an AI-driven pharmatech company committed to discovering, designing and developing the best possible drugs in the fastest and most effective manner, announced the closing of its USD 510.4 million initial public offering on 1 October 2021, including a USD 350.4 million IPO priced at top of the price range indicated at launch, as well as a concurrent private placement delivering gross proceeds of USD 160.0 million in favour of SoftBank and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Exscientia is an AI-driven pharmatech company committed to discovering, designing and developing the best possible drugs in the fastest and most effective manner. Exscientia developed the first-ever functional precision oncology platform to successfully guide treatment selection and improve patient outcomes in a prospective interventional clinical study, as well as to progress AI-designed small molecules into the clinical setting. Our pipeline demonstrates our ability to rapidly translate scientific concepts into precision-designed therapeutic candidates, with more than 25 projects advancing, including the first three AI-designed drug candidates to enter Phase 1 clinical trials.