Initial Public Offerings are hot this year. Crain’s New York reports that IPOs originating in New York State—20 so far in 2014—are up threefold from this time last year. Nationally, the 42 IPOs in January and February alone paint a similar picture—more than double last year. According to The Wall Street Journal, this year ties 2007 as the strongest year for IPOs since 2000 (think dot-com) when there were 77. (Those 42 companies that went public in January and February, by the way, raised a combined $8.3 billion.)
Delving deeper, over half of the IPO’s in the U.S. in 2014 have been in the biotech/health care sectors. Unsurprisingly then, the same is true for Westchester. Here are three newly public (or filed and soon to be public) companies with Westchester HQs.
Dipexium Pharmaceuticals, headquartered in White Plains, was created to develop and commercialize Locilex, a “novel, broad spectrum, small peptide topical antibiotic for the treatment of certain mild and moderate skin infections in superficial wounds,” according to their website. Dipexium was listed on the NASDAQ using the symbol DPRX on March 13 at an initial trading price of $12. It’s currently trading around $13.25 with a market cap of $107.66M.
White Plains-based Orgenesis Inc. is developing a potentially groundbreaking “autologous insulin producing” diabetes treatment, a molecular/cellular technology that would convert a portion of a diabetic patient’s liver cells into insulin-producing cells that would then regulate blood glucose levels. At the moment, there’s a similar procedure called “pancreatic islet cell transplantation”, which transplants portions of a donor’s pancreas into a diabetic’s pancreas, but it’s an impractical treatment thanks to donor shortages and high tissue-rejection rates. Orgenesis is trading at $0.53 under the symbol ORGS.
Nightfood Holdings is developing what it calls “night food,” snack bars designed for consumption shortly before bedtime. Nightfood claims they help you fall asleep, in addition to “working with your body’s natural sleep metabolism” to help you sleep better overall. The bars are loaded up with fiber, protein, slow-digesting sugars, chocamine, and melatonin—all said to improve your sleep quality. Nightfood is based in Elmsford and, though it’s filed for an IPO, it is not listed quite yet.
