MW This 'AI TechBio' company goes public as IPO demand spreads to biotech

By Steve Gelsi

Caris is valued at $7.6 billion and grew revenue by 28% a year between 2019 to 2024

First, Wall Street was enamored with the initial public offerings of financial- and space-technology companies. Now, it's biotechnology that's in the spotlight.

Shares of Caris Life Sciences Inc. soared in their public debut on Wednesday, as investors bought into the company's business of molecular profiling and drug research using artificial intelligence.

Caris's stock $(CAI)$ opened at $27 a share, or 28.6% above the IPO price of $21 a share. Shares climbed to an intraday high of $29.40 soon after the open, before paring some gains but still up 27.1% in recent afternoon trading.

With a total of 283.56 million shares outstanding after the IPO, the company has market capitalization of about $7.6 billion at current prices. That makes it more valuable than 222 of the 252 components of the iShares Biotechnology ETF IBB.

The self-proclaimed "AI TechBio" company's debut follows recent successful IPOs from online-banking provider Chime Financial Inc. $(CHYM)$, space-technology company Voyager Technologies Inc. $(VOYG)$ and stablecoin issuer Circle Internet Group Inc. $(CRCL)$ That shows it's not just a specific type of business that Wall Street wants a part of, but rather that investors are generally clamoring for new issues backed by heavyweight investment banks.

Caris raised $494 million, with the help of lead underwriters BofA Securities, J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, by offering 23.53 million shares at $21 a share, above its estimated price range of $19 to $20 a share.

Caris reported a net loss of $102.58 million in the three months ended March 31, compared with a loss of $111.03 million in the year-ago period, but revenue jumped 50% over that time to $120.9 million. From 2019 to 2024, the company's revenue grew by 28% a year.

The Irving, Texas-based company, with 1,769 employees, currently manages "one of the largest and most comprehensive multimodal clinicogenomic datasets" for cancer treatments, but plans to grow further by using its technology to prevent chronic diseases before they ever get started.

"We ... believe that since we have designed the Caris Assure platform as a universal assay that runs on every coding gene in the blood, it can be utilized to identify alterations that drive other chronic disease states such as cardiovascular disease, neurological conditions, metabolic disorders and many others," the company said.

Caris has run more than 6.5 million tests on more than 849,000 cancer cases and identified more than 38 billion molecular markers.

It has used AI to identify approximately 915,000 pathogenic mutations. Out of this number, only about 17,000 were previously identified, with roughly 130 novel pathogenic mutations found on average in each person, the company said.

"We can now identify a person's circulating pathogenic mutations and enable the design of a customized individualized therapy to that specific set of mutations," Caris said. "So, it becomes an individualized, customized immunotherapy."

The company was founded in 2008 by Chief Executive David D. Halbert, who now owns 43.7% of the Caris shares outstanding following the IPO.

Other large shareholders include Sixth Street, which owns 9% of Caris's outstanding shares, and J.H. Whitney VI L.P., which owns 7.1%.

-Steve Gelsi

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June 18, 2025 14:50 ET (18:50 GMT)

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