City Therapeutics IPO: $175M Raise, the CTY Ticker, and the RNAi Pipeline Behind It

City Therapeutics set terms for a $175 million Nasdaq IPO on October 9, 2026 — 9.7 million shares at $17 to $19 apiece, with trading expected to begin Friday, October 16 under ticker CTY, according to IPOScoop's weekly IPO calendar. The deal hasn't priced yet.

City Therapeutics IPO: The Terms So Far

City Therapeutics set terms for its Nasdaq IPO on October 9, 2026: 9.7 million shares priced at $17.00 to $19.00 apiece, estimated to raise roughly $175 million at the midpoint. Goldman Sachs, Jefferies, Stifel, and Oppenheimer & Co. are the lead underwriters on the deal, which Value Add VC's Pulse coverage flagged as one of only two names on that week's US IPO calendar.

The other name is Iambic Therapeutics, which set its own amended terms a day earlier and was expected to price Thursday, a day ahead of City's Friday debut — a same-week pairing that gives investors a direct read on biotech IPO demand from two different bank syndicates. City's deal is structured as a traditional underwritten S-1 offering, not a reverse merger, so its final price is still subject to bookbuilding and could land anywhere in — or outside — the $17-$19 range.

Who's Behind City Therapeutics

City Therapeutics launched publicly in October 2024 with a $135 million Series A led by ARCH Venture Partners, with participation from Fidelity, Invus, Slate Path Capital, Rock Springs Capital, Regeneron Ventures, and AN Ventures, according to Pulse 2.0's coverage of the launch. The company is led by John Maraganore, founding CEO of RNAi pioneer Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, who serves as City's executive chair; ARCH's Robert Nelsen and Ari Nowacek are both co-founders and board members.

In June 2026, the company closed a $99.5 million Series B, bringing in new investors Viking Global Investors and Sofinnova Investments alongside Casdin Capital and NYBC Ventures, with all of its Series A backers returning, per Pulse 2.0's reporting on the round. City Therapeutics is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts and was founded in 2023, according to StockAnalysis.com's company profile.

What's in the Pipeline

City Therapeutics engineers small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) — synthetic molecules that silence disease-causing genes — aiming to widen RNAi medicine beyond the liver-focused delivery of earlier approved drugs in the category. Its lead program, CITY-FXI, targets the Factor XI protein to prevent thromboembolic disease and entered Phase 1 trials in 2026. A second program, CITY-RBP4, is a preclinical candidate the company describes as a potential first approved treatment for Stargardt disease type 1 (according to City Therapeutics' own description), a rare inherited retinal condition; City expects to move it into the clinic by the end of 2026 alongside one additional program.

The company has also struck strategic collaborations with Bausch + Lomb and Biogen since its Series A, extending its RNAi engineering platform into partnered programs rather than relying solely on its own pipeline.

How we counted: the three most recent RNAi/biotech-adjacent IPO terms sheets and pricings on the US calendar as of October 13, 2026; deal size and dates as reported by each company's filing or terms sheet. Sources: IPOScoop, and our own reporting on ADARx and Iambic Therapeutics, checked October 13, 2026.

What the headline misses

Every figure here is a filing-stage estimate, not a closed deal. City's own terms sheet gives a price range, not a final price, and IPOScoop's $175 million proceeds estimate is calculated off the midpoint of that range and the 9.7 million disclosed share count — it can move once the deal actually prices. The S-1/A also doesn't disclose total shares outstanding, so there's no reliable implied market-cap figure to report yet, unlike Iambic's amended filing, which did include one.

The business itself is still purely pipeline-stage. CITY-FXI only entered Phase 1 trials in 2026, and CITY-RBP4 remains preclinical — public investors in this IPO are pricing a research platform and two early-stage programs, not an approved therapy or disclosed revenue. City Therapeutics has not disclosed any product revenue in the sources reviewed for this piece.

The same-week pairing with Iambic is a useful comparison, but it isn't a controlled experiment: the two companies have different bank syndicates, different modalities (RNAi versus AI-driven small-molecule discovery), and different disclosed loss profiles. A clean read on biotech IPO appetite needs both deals' actual pricing — not just their terms — which won't be known until later in the week.

Why This IPO Matters Beyond City Therapeutics

Two RNAi-adjacent biotechs setting IPO terms in the same week — after ADARx priced its own siRNA-platform IPO at a $1.81 billion valuation less than three weeks earlier — suggests underwriters see real public-market appetite for RNA-interference medicine specifically, even as larger, capital-intensive tech and infrastructure listings have stalled or been pulled this quarter. Whether that appetite holds depends on how City and Iambic actually price relative to their ranges, not merely on banks' willingness to set terms at all.