On Apr. 17, 2026, Kailera Therapeutics, a high-profile drug startup aiming to compete with Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly in obesity, said Thursday it banked $625 million in one of the sector’s largest-ever initial public offerings.

The IPO haul far surpasses the $500 million it set out to raise in terms set earlier this week. Kailera sold more than 39 million shares at $16 apiece. It’ll begin trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange on Friday under the ticker symbol “KLRA.”

Kailera’s offering is among the biggest, by total proceeds, raised by a venture-backed biopharmaceutical company, according to BioPharma Dive data. Its IPO eclipses Acelyrin’s $540 million stock sale in 2023, Sana Biotechnology’s $588 million issuance in 2021, and Moderna’s then-record $604 million pricing in 2018.

The sizable IPO continues an early trend in 2026. While offerings haven’t yet picked up to the kind of pace investors had hoped, the six drugmakers that did go public in the first quarter secured a combined $1.7 billion in IPOs. The median $287.5 million raised across those offerings ranked as the highest for any quarter since 2021, data show.

For Kailera, the offering continues a fast ascent. The company started up in 2024 and has been bankrolled by prominent investors like Bain Capital, Atlas Venture and Arch Venture Partners. It’s since raised more than $1 billion in private funding to advance a portfolio of experimental weight loss drugs licensed from Shanghai-based Hengrui Pharmaceuticals.