Elon Musk's SpaceX may be igniting global headlines with the company's astronomical IPO, but biotech listings saw their own record-breaker this week.
Parabilis Medicines secured $670 million when it hit the Nasdaq on Wednesday to drive forward the company's tumor-focused pipeline. The offering stole the crown from obesity biotech Kailera Therapeutics, whose $625 million IPO in April briefly set a new industry benchmark.
Between the two massive listings, inhaled therapy company Avalyn Pharma, depression-focused Seaport Therapeutics and inflammatory disease biotech Odyssey Therapeutics also tried their luck on the public markets.
The renewed wave of IPOs has flown in the face of macro conditions that might have once discouraged companies from going public. Earlier in the year, FDA leadership inconsistency and the war in Iran raised questions about what 2026 would hold for the market. But the FDA is still without a permanent commissioner, and Iran and the U.S. are still trading missile strikes, yet the biotechs are forging ahead, with two record-setting IPOs in three months.
So why have we gone from an IPO drought to a glut of record-breakers? And is the trend likely to last?
The industry experts Fierce spoke to trace the source of this surge in listings to several years of arid funding that followed on from the rush of biotech investment immediately after the pandemic. There were 75 U.S.-based biopharma IPOs in 2020 and 103 in 2021, according to Pitchbook data, but this number shrank in the following years before bottoming out at only 15 in 2025.
Of course, the shortage of public listings didn’t stop innovation and science from moving forward. Venture capital stepped into the gap, and many companies were able to survive the lean years and produce good science along the way. That science is now getting more attention from funders.
“Venture capital funds and Big Pharma raised billions of dollars during the pandemic to invest in life sciences—they just haven’t been investing it,” BDO Life Sciences and Market Managing Principal Brad Stewart told Fierce in an interview. “Even though the capital was there, it wasn’t being deployed.”
This pent-up “snowball” of capital was always going to find an outlet, Stewart explained.
“We're seeing the IPO market open up and we're seeing the acquisition market up, which I think are the two biggest precursors for that sort of snowball rolling downhill,” he added.
As these biopharmas plugged along with venture money, they were busy developing more advanced data. Rather than the early-stage IPOs the market experienced right after the pandemic, many of the recent listings have been for companies with promising clinical results.
“All of them have been reasonably later-stage companies with near-term readouts or excellent clinical data,” Adam Farlow, global head of capital markets at law firm Baker McKenzie, told Fierce.
“As people start to get back in the habit of going to public markets, it isn't surprising that people are cautious, investing in more de-risked assets rather than early-stage, flavor-of -the-day companies,” Farlow added.
Along with late-stage data, the size of the recent IPOs brings its own rewards, as it is more likely to support a company intent on taking its assets to the commercial market and developing more than one drug.
“The story of the last [IPO] cycle was that no one raised enough money to create an investable data point,” Milestone Advisors Founder Matt Lane told Fierce. “To me, what's important about the recent IPOs is that these companies can now raise a usable scale of capital through the IPO market.”
Capital at this scale, Lane said, allows companies to develop drugs to create data that could lead to commercial products that create profits and allow small biotechs to become midsize ones, developing multiple drugs, licensing candidates, and putting their returns back into the industry.
“They can develop multiple value drivers for investors and are not beholden to a small subset of private investors and hope that they win the lottery ticket that Big Pharma lands on,” Lane explained. “It'll be a great thing for the industry if we could see some homegrown success stories that can grow up into an Amgen, Alnylam or Vertex.”
Parabilis is a good example of this trend. Founded in 2017, the company pushed through the lean years of the industry with seven rounds of VC funding. Its recent IPO followed a fast-track designation from the FDA for its Wnt/β-catenin pathway inhibitor zolucatetide for desmoid tumors, with the company looking at launching a phase 3 trial in this indication.
The biotech's CEO Mathai Mammen, M.D., Ph.D., agreed that the industry had been in “retreat mode for some time.”
“Capital has been absent from our industry following a tremendously enthusiastic period in 2020 and 2021, so now we're coming back maybe halfway between those two periods,” Mammen told Fierce in an interview.
“There are a number of successful medicines and that helps,” Mammen said. “The macros are looking more favorable in general—they have been for the last year—so those two factors, I think, is why we're seeing some [more] IPOs now than where we had a dry spell for a couple years.”
The CEO acknowledged it was “difficult to say” why Parabilis made history on Wednesday, but he pointed to the biotech's focus on a novel type of drug called helicon peptides, which are designed to cling to targets long thought to be undruggable.
As well as developing zolucatetide in desmoid tumors, Parabilis is also ploughing some of the IPO proceeds into ongoing phase 1 trials in a rare genetic condition called familial adenomatous polyposis, the liver cancer hepatocellular carcinoma, and other solid tumors that harbor Wnt pathway-activating mutations.
“This kind of capital gives us the ability to pursue our two prostate cancer programs and additional early-stage programs like the beta contain integrator and additional programs beyond that in a way that we wouldn't have otherwise been able to,” Mammen said.
Ben Zercher, Pitchbook senior analyst of biotech and pharma, told Fierce that Parabilis is a prime example of the drug developers that will receive a warm welcome on the public markets.
“We're seeing Parabilis reap the rewards of the reopening [IPO] window, and there's a backlog of companies that have exciting assets that are in more advanced clinical trials and need the capital to fund it,” Zercher told Fierce.
The next biotech in line could be Kardigan, which has already set out plans for a $320 million IPO to fund its pipeline of clinical-stage cardiovascular drugs.
“The public markets are rewarding those clinically-driven asset-specific stories and companies—and I wouldn't call it a blip,” Zercher said. “There are still more of these companies like Kardigan that are set to go public.”
But the IPO party may not last forever if earlier-stage biotechs—which are finding it harder to access funds—can't share in the spoils.
“If we're going to clear the backlog of promising biotech companies, then we need more companies to refill the market,” Zercher said. “The thesis is that this money should flow back into early-stage investment.”
Even if clinical-stage biotechs are by definition a more niche investment than SpaceX or the planned listing for AI giant Anthropic, experts suggested to Fierce that the positive energy around public markets are good for all industries.
“As crazy as it is to draw a link between a $1.75 trillion space-driven IPO and a $200 million phase 2 trial biotech, the fact that people are looking at the market and saying ‘public markets are back again’ is a great thing,” Baker McKenzie's Farlow said.