The IPO Buzz: WKME & LYEL Lead a 16-Deal Week

WalkMe Ltd. (WKME proposed), an Israeli software company, and Lyell Immunopharma (LYEL proposed), a T cell reprogramming company, are on the IPO marquee for the week before summer officially begins on Sunday, June 20th.  Israel and its tech sector are in the IPO limelight after the success of Monday’com’s debut last week.  As for biotechs,  the flurry of deals – five biotech IPOs added early today to this week’s IPO Calendar – indicates that the sector is ready for its summer run.

Sixteen deals – 15 IPOs and one NASDAQ uplift from the SIX Swiss Exchange – are on the IPO Calendar for the week of June 14, 2021. Bankers expect to raise about $2.5 billion, based on mid-point pricing.

Didi Chuxing, often called China’s Uber, signaled what a red-hot summer this could be when it filed its initial prospectus late Thursday afternoon (June 10, 2021) with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The Wall Street Journal predicted this trend in a story by Corrie Driebusch on Thursday afternoon – published ahead of Didi’s SEC filing – under the headline: Robinhood and Didi to Kick Off a Hot IPO Summer . Didi (DIDI proposed) could raise about $5.6 billion to $7 billion in IPO proceeds, giving the Chinese ride-sharing company an estimated valuation exceeding $70 billion, The WSJ reported.

This week’s IPO action begins tonight with the scheduled pricing of AMTD Digital (HKD proposed), a spinoff by Hong Kong-based brokerage AMTD.

More investors, though, are focused on WalkMe, Ltd. (WKME proposed), a digital cloud platform company based in Tel Aviv. The IPO of just 9.3 million shares at $29 to $32 each is set for pricing Tuesday night. The stock will start trading Wednesday on the NASDAQ.

Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup are the joint book-runners.

WalkMe, based in Tel Aviv, is a SaaS business. WalkMe says its cloud-based Digital Adoption Platform lets users – a customer’s employees and customers – navigate websites, SaaS applications and mobile apps through a digital GPS-like experience . (SaaS stands for Software as a Service.)

Worth noting: WalkMe is profitable. It earned net income of $45 million on revenue of $148.3 million in 2020.

Lyell Immunopharma(LYEL proposed) is a South San Francisco-based preclinical biotech company focused on developing T cell therapies to cure cancer patients with solid tumors. Lyell’s lead product candidates include an IV-administered T cell therapy to treat patients with non-small cell lung cancer and triple-negative breast cancer.

Lyell’s IPO consists of 25 million shares at $16 to $18 each. The IPO is scheduled for pricing Wednesday night. Lyell’s stock is expected to start trading Thursday on the NASDAQ.

Goldman Sachs, BofA Securities, J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley are the joint book-runners.

Worth noting: Lyell Immunopharma is not profitable. The company had a net loss of $230.28 million on revenues of just $8.95 million for the last 12 months.

Why would anyone be willing to overlook a net loss that’s nearly 26 times revenues?

In Lyell’s case, the answer could boil down to just three letters: GSK.  Lyell has a collaboration agreement with GSK (GlaxoSmithKline), the big British pharmaceutical company that also owns about 14 percent of the company pre-IPO, the prospectus says.

Ambrx Biopharma (AMAM proposed) is among five biotechs that filed IPO terms early today ahead of pricing Thursday night – to start trading Friday, June 18^th. Ambrx, based in La Jolla, California, raised $200 million last November in a private funding round that included BlackRock and Fidelity.

Goldman Sachs, BofA Securities and Cowen are the joint book-runners.

Final Full Week of June

Two IPOs are scheduled so far for the week of June 21^st: First Advantage Corp. (FA proposed), which provides tech solutions to businesses for performing criminal background checks, drug and health screening and other screening, and Sprinklr (CXM proposed), which supplies enterprise software for customer experience management.  More names are likely to pop onto next week’s  IPO Calendar, however, as the filings keep coming in through the SEC’s filing window.

Stay tuned.

For more information, please see the  IPO Calendar. (You can click the hyperlinks in the company names on the IPO Calendar and those links will take you to the IPO profiles on IPOScoop.com.)

(Never trade on proposed symbols. You might wind up owning something on the OTC Bulletin Board.)

Disclosure: Nobody on the IPOScoop.com staff has a position in any stocks mentioned above, nor do they trade or invest in IPOs. The IPOScoop.com staff does not issue advice, recommendations or opinions.

Disclaimer: A SCOOP Rating (Wall Street Consensus of Opening-day Premiums), is a general consensus taken, at press time, from Wall Street and investment professionals concerning how well an IPO might perform when it starts trading. The SCOOP Rating does not reflect the opinions of anyone associated with IPOScoop.com. The SCOOP ratings should not be taken as investment advice. The rating merely reflects the opinion of the professionals at the time of publication and is subject to last-minute changes due to market conditions, changes in a specific offering and other factors, such as changes in the proposed offering terms and the shifting of investor interest in the IPO. The information offered is taken from sources we believe to be reliable, but we cannot guarantee the accuracy