NEW YORK – Proteomics firm Seer on Thursday evening priced its initial public offering of 9,210,527 shares of common stock at $19 per share for anticipated gross proceeds of $175 million.
Shares of the Redwood City, California-based company will begin trading Friday on the Nasdaq under ticker symbol SEER.
Seer is also granting the IPO underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 1,381,579 shares of Class A common stock at the initial public offering price, less the underwriting discounts and commissions.
In an amended preliminary prospected Seer submitted to the SEC this week, the company said that subsequent to the closing of the IPO, Fidelity, SoftBank, aMoon Fund, and certain funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price would purchase in a separate private placement $135 million of Class A common stock at a price equal to the IPO price.
In the SEC document, Seer said it plans to use the proceeds to develop and commercialize its Proteograph proteomics product. The ProteoGraph system uses nanoparticle-based enrichment of proteins in samples like human plasma to enable deeper coverage in proteomic discovery experiments. The platform is based on the observation that when incubated in a biological sample, nanoparticles collect proteins, which form a "corona." Given this, nanoparticles can serve as an enrichment tool, allowing researchers to pull proteins out of a sample, which they can then identify and quantify using technologies like mass spec.
In the prospectus, the company said it plans to begin selling the platform to "select sites performing large-scale proteomics or genomics research" in 2021 and to make it broadly available in 2022.
Since it launched in 2017, Seer has raised $162.8 million. As of Sept. 30, 2020, it had unrestricted cash and cash equivalents of $17.7 million, investments of $103.8 million, and an accumulated deficit of $42.4 million.
In September, Seer spun off an independent healthcare company, PrognomIQ, supported by an initial $55 million financing round. The company plans to use Seer's Proteograph proteomic platform along with other omics data to develop and commercialize clinical tests for cancer and other diseases. Seer retained a roughly 19 percent stake in the company.