Analysis
Firmus, the Nvidia-backed data-center developer, withdrew its roughly $31 billion-valuation Australian IPO the day it was due to publish its prospectus, citing market turbulence -- abandoning a target price of A$11 a share after originally filing for a much smaller A$5 billion plan in September.
In the days since, the IPO market hasn't shut down -- it's just stayed open for far smaller deals:
- TRex Bio (TRXB) -- priced at $14.00 a share, the low end of its range, selling 8.33 million shares for about $116.7 million before trading on Nasdaq.
- Retension Pharmaceuticals (RTSN) -- after amending its S-1 twice, priced an upsized offering at $12.00 a share for $45 million.
“- Retension Pharmaceuticals (RTSN) -- after amending its S-1 twice, priced an upsized offering at $12.00 a share for $45 million.”
Combined, the two biotechs raised $161.7 million -- a rounding error next to the valuation Firmus walked away from.
The gap between what got withdrawn and what actually priced is the clearest read on where underwriter appetite sits right now: small, well-understood biotech stories with modest capital needs can still clear the market, even in the same week a multibillion-dollar infrastructure listing couldn't. Retension's willingness to upsize its deal after two rounds of amendments suggests real investor demand exists for the right story at the right size -- it just hasn't been tested yet at anywhere near Firmus's scale.
That leaves an open question for the rest of this quarter's pipeline: whether a mid-size growth or infrastructure name, large enough to matter but far short of Firmus's original target, can thread the needle between its failure and TRex Bio's modest success. Nothing in the current pipeline has tried yet.