Ed­i­tor’s note: In­ter­est­ed in fol­low­ing bio­phar­ma’s fast-paced IPO mar­ket? You can book­mark our IPO Track­er here.

An AI biotech with lit­tle hu­man da­ta — but lots of hype — is once again drown­ing in cash.

Ex­sci­en­tia priced its IPO late Thurs­day evening, an­nounc­ing it pulled in $304.7 mil­lion with the raise. The pub­lic de­but marks Ex­sci­en­tia’s third nine-fig­ure raise of the year, af­ter the biotech ex­pand­ed its Se­ries C to $100 mil­lion in March and raised more than half a bil­lion dol­lars in a pair of fi­nanc­ings in April. Ex­sci­en­tia shares will be­gin trad­ing Fri­day at $22 apiece un­der the tick­er $EX­AI.

Thurs­day, too, saw Ex­sci­en­tia raise more than just the IPO. In con­junc­tion with the pric­ing, the Ox­ford, UK-based biotech got an­oth­er $160 mil­lion in pri­vate place­ments from Soft­Bank and the Bill and Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion.

With the de­but, de­tails about the big IPO win­ners are com­ing in­to fo­cus. The biggest share­hold­er is now Soft­Bank, which will get a 16.3% stake af­ter the of­fer­ing. CEO An­drew Hop­kins is sec­ond on the list with 15.8% of shares.

But al­so no­table are the stakes from Evotec, No­vo Hold­ings and Bris­tol My­ers Squibb. Evotec and No­vo will each get about 11-12% of shares when the of­fer­ing clos­es, and Bris­tol My­ers is cash­ing in on an old Cel­gene deal with a 4.7% stake. The Big Phar­ma ex­pand­ed a Cel­gene-era deal with Ex­sci­en­tia ear­li­er this year, promis­ing up to $1.2 bil­lion in mile­stones in May.

The biotech has re­mained busy at the deal­mak­ing ta­ble. Ex­sci­en­tia fol­lowed that up with a small ac­qui­si­tion for the mol­e­cule-screen­ing biotech All­cyte in June — us­ing Soft­Bank’s cash — and less than two weeks lat­er joined forces with EQRx.

AI-fo­cused biotechs have proven large­ly suc­cess­ful at lur­ing in­vestors with bold promis­es about their tech­nol­o­gy, with Ex­sci­en­tia’s ef­forts at the fore­front. The com­pa­ny has promised to cut down on the lengthy drug de­vel­op­ment process by months, if not years, and is join­ing one of its main com­peti­tors on Nas­daq in Re­cur­sion Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals.

Re­cur­sion’s IPO came in a bit larg­er at $436.4 mil­lion, but both com­pa­nies claimed to plant the im­por­tant AI mile­stone flag — be­ing the first biotech to put an AI-de­vel­oped drug in­to the clin­ic. Re­cur­sion did so in Ju­ly 2019, though the biotech has said the pro­gram came out of Dean Li’s old lab be­fore he joined Mer­ck.

Ex­sci­en­tia, mean­while, made its claim in Jan­u­ary 2020 with a can­di­date de­vel­oped in part­ner­ship with Sum­it­o­mo Dainip­pon. The pro­gram emerged af­ter the pair syn­the­sized 350 com­pounds and test­ed them in a lab be­fore de­cid­ing on one to move for­ward. But re­gard­less of which biotech is re­al­ly the first to de­vel­op a drug with AI, both con­tin­ue to at­tract sig­nif­i­cant in­vest­ment and part­ner­ships.

Al­so wait­ing in the IPO wings is the ma­chine learn­ing biotech in­sitro, which hasn’t an­nounced plans to go pub­lic just yet but raked in $400 mil­lion in a Se­ries C this past March. Ex­sci­en­tia plans to spend be­tween $50 mil­lion and $75 mil­lion on push­ing its plat­form for­ward, with an­oth­er $25 mil­lion to $50 mil­lion slat­ed to com­plete a Phase I study for EXS21546.

As the cal­en­dar turns to the fourth quar­ter Fri­day, the biotech IPO mar­ket is be­gin­ning to stir once again. Ex­sci­en­tia’s de­but pushed the to­tal com­bined raise past $13.5 bil­lion, per the End­points News tal­ly, and the in­dus­try re­mains on pace to eclipse 2020’s record raise of $16.5 bil­lion. But af­ter a sum­mer slow­down, the race will like­ly come down to the wire.

Clar­i­fi­ca­tion: This ar­ti­cle has been clar­i­fied to more ac­cu­rate­ly re­flect the na­ture of Soft­Bank’s stake in Ex­sci­en­tia. Soft­Bank con­trols the shares, not part­ner Joanne Xu.

89bio said its drug was better than placebo at lessening fibrosis without worsening nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, or NASH, in two of three dose groups.

The San Francisco biotech said it thinks the Phase IIb data pave the way for a potential Phase III, following in the footsteps of another biotech in its drug class, Akero Therapeutics. To fund a late-stage study, CEO Rohan Palekar told Endpoints News 89bio “would need to raise additional capital,” with the company having about $188 million at the end of last year.

The National Institutes of Health has again declined to use so-called “march-in” rights to lower the price of Astellas and Pfizer’s prostate cancer drug Xtandi despite being invented at UCLA with grants from the US Army and NIH.

“Given the remaining patent life and the lengthy administrative process involved for a march-in proceeding, NIH does not believe that use of the march-in authority would be an effective means of lowering the price of the drug,” NIH told prostate cancer patients Robert Sachs and Clare Love, in a letter shared with Endpoints News. The institutes’ analyses found Xtandi “to be widely available to the public,” an indication that there was not a pressing need for the US to act.