Opening Day: Specialty insurer Bowhead raises $128M in IPO

Specialty property and casualty insurer Bowhead Specialty raised $128M in its U.S. IPO. Bowhead has also offered underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 1,129,411 shares at the initial offering price.

LATEST IPOS AND DIRECT LISTINGS:

Bowhead Specialty (BOW) opened on May 23rd at $23. The company had priced 7.53M shares at $17.00. The deal size was increased to 7.5M shares from 6.7M and priced above the $14.00-$16.00 target range. Bowhead Specialty is a specialty insurance business providing casualty and professional liability insurance products.

Kayne Anderson BDC (KBDC) opened on May 22nd at $16.25. The business development company that invests primarily in first lien senior secured loans, with a secondary focus on unitranche and split-lien loans to middle market companies, externally managed by its investment adviser, KA Credit Advisors, had priced its initial public offering of 6M shares of its common stock at $16.63 per share. KBDC intends to use the net proceeds from this offering to pay down some or all of its borrowings under credit facilities.

END OF THE WEEK PERFORMANCE:

• Bowhead Specialty – $25.70;
• Kayne Anderson BDC – $16.10.

UPCOMING IPOS: Upcoming IPO and direct listings expected include ShipBob, Lirum Therapeutics (LRTX), Lakeside Holding (LSH), Origin Life Sciences (OLSI), and StubHub.

Click here to see upcoming IPO calendar on TipRanks.

ShipBob has selected JPMorgan (JPM) to lead its planned listing, Bloomberg’s Amy Or, Gillian Tan, and Ryan Gould report, citing people familiar with the situation. The Chicago-based ecommerce fulfillment service provider has also chosen Citigorup (C) as part of the syndicate, the authors say. An initial public offering could occur as soon as later this year and could value the company at $4B, the authors note.

Lirum Therapeutics filed for an initial public offering of 2.27M shares of common stock. Prior to this offering, there has been no public market for its common stock. Lirum Therapeutics anticipates that the initial public offering price of its shares will be between $10.00-$12.00. The company has applied to have its common stock listed on the Nasdaq Capital Market under the symbol “LRTX”, and the closing of this offering is contingent upon such listing.

Lakeside Holding filed for an initial public offering of 1.25M shares of common stock with an estimated offering price of $4.00 and $5.00 per share. The company said it aspires “to become a U.S.-backed cross-border supply chain corridor that connects Asia and North America with efficiency, reliability, and affordability.” Lakeside is a U.S.-based cross-border supply chain solution provider with a focus on the Asian market including China and South Korea. For the fiscal years ended June 30, 2022 and 2023 and the six months ended December 31, 2022 and 2023, the company’s revenues amounted to $9.6M, $12.9M, $5.5M and $9.1M respectively, and its gross profit amounted to $1.8M, $2.6M, $1.2M and $1.7M during the same periods, respectively.

Origin Life Sciences said it is offering 1.875M shares its our common stock at an assumed public offering price of $4.00 per share in an initial public offering. The company has applied to list its common stock for trading on NYSE American under the symbol “OLSI.” Origin Life Sciences is a clinical-stage biotechnology company that has been developing a high-energy plasma device that generates nitric oxide in the form of a plasma/NO stream and delivers it to targeted locations of the body. “The stream can potentially be used for various therapeutic purposes, including as an anti-infective, anti-inflammatory and tissue-regenerative therapy for chronic wounds and skin and soft tissue infections,” the company said in a regulatory filing.

Online ticketing marketplace StubHub aims to go public by late summer, people close to the company told The Information‘s Cory Weinberg. StubHub has more than $2B in debt, which is “many times its estimated profits,” so the company will test investors’ appetite for companies with strained balance sheets while StubHub has “ambitious hopes for the valuation it would achieve,” further complicating matters, the report noted. The company would prefer to be valued in line with the $16.5B valuation at which it raised money during the boom of late 2021 and could call off the public listing plans if it can’t get close to that number, the sources indicated.

Opening Day” is The Fly’s recurring series of stories on the latest initial public offerings, their performance, and upcoming IPOs.