The IPO Buzz: Seizure Detector CeriBell (CBLL) Prices IPO at $17 – Top of Range

Seventeen has a nice ring to it: CeriBell (CBLL) priced its IPO at $17.00 – the top of its $16.00-to-$17.00 range in its recently upsized terms –on Thursday night, Oct. 10, 2024. The Sunnyvale, California, company, which makes a seizure detection system used to monitor hospital patients in CCUs,  sold 10.61 million shares – the number of shares in its upsized S-1/A filing – at $17.00 each to raise $180.3 million on Thursday night (Oct. 10, 2024.) CeriBell’s stock is expected to start trading today – Friday, Oct. 11, 2024 – on the NASDAQ. BofA Securities and J.P. Morgan were the joint book-runners. William Blair, TD Cowen and Canaccord Genuity served as the co-managers. The high-end IPO pricing at $17.00 gave CeriBell a market cap of $578.32 million. Early Wednesday morning, on Oct. 9, 2024, CeriBell increased its IPO’s size by raising the number of shares to 10.61 million – up from 6.7 million shares initially – and pushing the price range up to $16.00 to $17.00 – up from $14.00 to $16.00 initially – to raise $175.0 million. CeriBell disclosed insider interest for up to $40 million – or 22.86 percent of the IPO under its new upsized terms – in the Oct. 9, 2024, SEC filing. Those insiders, all existing shareholders, included Longitude Capital; The Rise Fund, controlled by private equity giant TPG, and affiliated with two  CeriBell board members, Juliet Tammenoms Bakker and Lucian Iancovici, M.D.; the Ally Bridge Group and Red Tree. Founded in 2014, CeriBell is a commercial medical device company whose EEG platform and hardware – including a disposable headband equipped with sensors –  is used by hospitals to monitor critically ill patients at high risk of seizures. The system uses a proprietary AI-driven algorithm to help interpret the data, the prospectus says.  As of Sept. 30, 2024, “the Ceribell System has been adopted by more than 500 active accounts, ranging from top academic centers to small community hospitals, and has been used to care for over 100,000 patients,” the prospectus said. “While seizures are often associated with epilepsy in the outpatient setting, in the acute care setting they are commonly triggered by serious conditions such as brain tumors, traumatic brain injury, stroke, cardiac arrest, and sepsis, among others,” the prospectus said. CeriBell’s amended S-1/A filing went on to state why ER doctors and nurses say: “Time is brain.” From the prospectus: “A seizure lasting longer than five minutes is known as status epilepticus, a serious medical emergency that can lead to mortality or severe and permanent brain damage. Seizures occurring in the acute care setting tend to be non-convulsive, which makes empirical diagnosis extremely challenging.” IPO investors said CeriBell’s revenue growth caught their attention. CeriBell booked revenue of $45.23 million for the full year 2023 – up from $25.92 million for 2022, according to the prospectus. For the six months that ended June 30, 2024, CeriBell reported revenue of $29.72 million – up from $20.48 million for the first half of 2023. CeriBell – like many biotechs and medical device companies when they go public – is not profitable: The company reported a net loss of $32.9 million on revenue of $54.4 million for the 12 months that ended June 30, 2024, according to the prospectus. (For more information about these companies, please check the IPO Calendar and the individual IPO Profiles found on IPOScoop.com’s website.) Note: Never trade on proposed symbols. They have been known to change and you might buy something on the OTC Bulletin Board. To see what time the NASDAQ IPOs are expected to trade, please log in to: NASDAQTrader.com then scroll down to IPO Message. 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.