The Israeli urological cancer treatment developer raised 20% more than planned.
Israeli urological cancer treatment developer UroGen Pharma (formerly Theracoat) raised $58.2 million in its Nasdaq IPO, 20% above the planned amount. The Ra'anana-based company raised the money by offering 4,473,373 shares at $13 per share, giving UroGen a valuation of $150 million, after money. Urogen is trading under the URGN ticker.
In addition, UroGen Pharma granted the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 671,005 ordinary shares. .
Jefferies LLC and Cowen and Company, LLC acted as joint book-running managers for the offering. Raymond James & Associates, Inc. and Oppenheimer & Co. Inc. are acting as co-managers for the offering.
UroGen Pharma was founded in 2004 at the Granot Ventures incubator by Prof. Asher Holzer. The main shareholders are Mori Arkin's Arkin Holdings (21%), Pontifax fund (16.7%), US life science fund ProQuest Investments (10.2%), Swiss oncological pharma developer Telormedix (8.4%) and Australian investment company Tatham Investments (5.1%). Chaim Hurvitz's CHealth was one of the first investors in the company.
The Israeli company is headed by two figures already well known on Wall Street. UroGen's CEO is Ron Bentsur, former CEO of NASDAQ-traded XTL and Keryx while its chairman is urologist Prof. Arie Belldegrun, who founded Kite Pharma, traded on Nasdaq at a company value of $4.3 billion. Body Vision integrates a CT scan and X-ray in order to remove very small lung tumors that might develop into lung cancer.
We know that you are fed up with the description of every startup as the Waze of canned vegetables and the Mobileye(NYSE: MBLY) of cello-tape. In the case of Body Vision Medical, however, a startup founded by CEO Dorian Averbuch, the comparison with Mobileye is a valid one.
Body Vision is active in intra-body imaging. The principle guiding the existing players in this field is reminiscent of Waze's mechanism. The vehicle can be located on a stationary map by calculating the distance between a cellular device and two satellites. Body Vision is more like Mobileye - it photographs the picture (the road) and the medical device, and calculates where they are with respect to each other in real time, rather than on the basis of previous knowledge about the "road."
Averbuch is well-known in the intra-body navigation segment. He was a partner in the founding of MediGuide, which started as a project in Elbit Systems Ltd. (Nasdaq: ESLT; TASE: ESLT). He was later an executive in superDimension, another company in the same niche. These two companies both achieved successful exits of $300 million each, with MediGuide being sold to St. Jude Medical and superDimension being acquired by Covidien (now Medtronic). The knowledge that Averbuch acquired in these two companies was useful to him when he founded Body Vision in 2014.