EIK-1005

For Eikon Therapeutics, its IPO feels more like something it’s surviving rather than celebrating. The Bay Area startup is one of biotech’s most prominent privately-held companies, after raising more than $1 billion to advance its Nobel Prize-winning science. But to make the transition from VC-backed unicorn to public company, it has had to slash its valuation by nearly three-quarters from a $3.6 billion peak in 2023 when it was still private, to a much more modest $971 million for its Nasdaq debut Thursday . It priced its shares for the IPO at $18, the top end of the range it began marketing last week. But its stock price was on track to end its first day of trading down 18%, at around $15.  Eikon is one of several IPOs expected this week, plus the filing of another richly-funded startup: AI-focused Generate:Biomedicines . While Eikon bagged the largest biotech IPO in two years, raising $381 million, its valuation cut is the opposite of the trend during that time frame. Biotechs have generally been priced at or slightly above previous private valuations, according to a recent Société Générale report. Only a few biotechs took major valuation cuts during that time frame, including LB Pharmaceuticals and CAMP4 Therapeutics. But valuation cuts like Eikon’s can happen when the lofty expectations — and funding rounds — of the private market don’t match the reality of what public investors want to buy. For a class of biotechs like Eikon, with big-name founders and big-time private valuations, Thursday’s IPO is an early test of how the market will receive them. The company didn’t make any executives available for interviews and wasn’t doing other media, a rarity for companies going public, which usually celebrate their debuts with a round of press appearances. Eikon’s star figure is CEO Roger Perlmutter, the 73-year-old former research head of Merck and Amgen. He joined the startup in 2021, a couple of years after the biotech was founded, to build new types of microscopes that can see how proteins move inside living cells. Alongside his hiring, Eikon raised a $148 million Series A round. In 2022, Eikon raised a $518 million Series B, signed a massive lease for a new 285,000-square-foot headquarters in Millbrae, CA, and pitched ambitious plans of both selling microscopes and developing new drugs from its own microscopic insights. Perlmutter attracted other high-profile names from the Merck universe, like Merck’s former chief medical officer Roy Baynes as Eikon’s CMO and ex-CEO Ken Frazier to join its board. Endpoints News toured Eikon’s labs in 2023 , seeing how the company makes and uses its own special microscopes. “We’re rewriting textbooks every day,” Perlmutter said at the time. “We don’t actually have the time to rewrite the textbooks, but the reality is we’re finding that things don’t actually proceed inside the cell the way people thought.” There are many other biotech startups that also have big valuations backed by major raises. AI-focused biotech insitro was founded in 2018 by Daphne Koller, a star computer scientist at Stanford. Insitro raised a $400 million round at a $2.5 billion valuation in 2021, according to PitchBook data. Hal Barron’s Altos Labs has raised $3 billion. Like Eikon, both companies are run by biotech celebrity-level founders backed by major cash. But that doesn’t make the companies immune to challenges that affect the rest of the industry. In 2025, Eikon cut some staff and ditched its plans to sell its advanced microscopes, partially blaming the Trump administration’s NIH funding cuts, which poured billions of dollars into research labs that would have been the company’s customers. Eikon also raised $351 million in a Series D round that trimmed its valuation to $1.85 billion, according to PitchBook data. While Eikon sold its IPO shares at $18, its private investors paid $34.42 per share on average, according to a filing, meaning some previous investors may be left in the red. Its largest backers are Lux Capital, Foresite Capital, The Column Group, and Innovation Endeavors, most of whom also participated in the later, richer rounds. Compare that to Veradermics, which also went public this week . Like Eikon, Veradermics was founded in 2019, but it grew out of a dermatology hackathon rather than a Nobel Prize-winning advance. The 19-employee company is advancing an extended-release oral version of minoxidil, the active ingredient in Rogaine, to treat hair loss. It upsized its IPO on Tuesday, selling shares at $17 apiece, sitting comfortably above its existing stockholders’ average price of $13.17. And on the first day of trading, its shares soared over 120%, commanding a $1.25 billion valuation that makes it more valuable, at least for the moment, than Eikon. For at least some of the company’s investors, betting on a hair loss pill looks like it will pay out better than Nobel Prize-winning science. With the microscope business on hold, Eikon’s immediate value comes from its pipeline. Its lead assets are in-licensed, China-originated programs for well-known targets in TLR7/8 and PARP1. Its first internally developed program, a WRN helicase inhibitor called EIK1005, just entered the clinic. Perlmutter has defended those licensing deals as “priming the pump,” so that its clinical development team is in full gear as its internal assets mature. In chopping Eikon’s valuation, Perlmutter may have done what was needed as clinical bills come in. Despite the pain, the IPO puts $381 million in Eikon’s pocket. Much of the skepticism about the platform-pipeline disconnect can be swept away if Perlmutter has bet on the right drugs. A first interim readout from China for its most advanced drug is expected later this year from a potentially registrational melanoma trial. Editor’s note: This story was updated to include Eikon’s first-day trading performance.