20 Young Companies in the Money

More than a month after biopharma stocks began to tank, investors and market-watchers remain divided on whether the Wall Street swoon is just the proverbial bump in the road, or a pothole that will stymie startups for months, if not years, to come.

An answer is unlikely to emerge from this year’s GEN tally of early-stage drug and diagnostic developers that closed on millions of dollars in private funding during 2015 (as of deadline on November 2).  For what it’s worth, more than half (15) of the 26 funding events by the listed companies took place since July,

As was the case with GEN Lists published last year and in 2013, this year’s tally does not include companies that secured private funding and later went public, or filed registration statements to do so. We counted at least 12 companies fitting that description this year—Aimmune Therapeutics, aTyr, BeiGene, Chiasma, CytomX Therapeutics, Dimension Therapeutics, Edge Therapeutics, Merus, Nabriva, REGENX BIO, Voyager Therapeutics, and WAVE Life Sciences.

Also not included are public companies that raised large sums of private funding. Six such companies would otherwise have been included among the top 20—Keryx Biopharmaceuticals, Agenus, Ardelyx, ImmunoGen, Oxford Nanopore, and ReNeuron.

Below is a list of 20 privately held biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, ranked by the amount of nonpublic financing they raised through November 2. Each company is listed by total raised (with a breakdown of the amount for companies reporting two events this year), the type of financing, the date announced, the purpose of the financing as stated by companies, the financing leader, other firms involved in the financing with their status as new or existing investors noted where available, and footnotes offering details of the events.