The $301M Bet on Bleeding Disorders Nobody's Talking About
A Danish biotech nobody's heard of just raised $301 million, nearly doubled on its first trading day, and is targeting bleeding disorders with zero approved treatments. Hemab Therapeutics might be 2026's most interesting IPO, but at $1.5 billion in market cap, the pressure is on.
Wall Street just handed $301.5 million to a company most people have never heard of. And the stock nearly doubled on day one.
Hemab Therapeutics, a Danish-American biotech focused on rare bleeding disorders, priced its Nasdaq IPO at $18 per share on April 30 under the ticker COAG. The deal was upsized twice before pricing. That's the biotech equivalent of a restaurant adding extra tables because the reservation list won't stop growing.
Shares opened at $27 and closed their first day at $34, an 89% pop from the IPO price. A major investor was spotted quietly adding to their position just two weeks later. Something about this company clearly has people excited.
The question is: should it?
A Company Built for Diseases With No Good Options
Hemab was founded in 2019 in Copenhagen with a specific thesis: there are bleeding disorders so rare that nobody has bothered to develop proper treatments for them. We're not talking about hemophilia, which has a crowded field of therapies from Roche, Sanofi, Novo Nordisk, and others. We're talking about conditions most doctors will never see in their entire career.
Take Glanzmann thrombasthenia (GT), Hemab's lead target. It's an inherited disorder where platelets, the tiny cell fragments that form blood clots, simply don't work properly. Patients bleed unpredictably and severely. There is no approved drug to prevent those bleeds. The current treatment? Show up at the ER and hope for the best.
Hemab's lead drug, sutacimig, is a bispecific antibody designed to redirect the body's own clotting machinery to compensate for the broken platelets. Think of it like rerouting traffic around a collapsed bridge: the destination is the same, but you're using a different road to get there.
The Data That Got Wall Street's Attention
In a Phase 2 trial, sutacimig showed an 87% reduction in treated bleeding episodes for GT patients on weekly dosing. For a disease with zero approved preventive therapies, that number turned heads.
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The FDA noticed too. In March 2026, Hemab received Breakthrough Therapy Designation for sutacimig in GT. That label matters; it means the FDA agrees the drug addresses a serious condition and that early evidence shows substantial improvement over existing options (which, in this case, is essentially nothing). Hemab also holds Fast Track and Orphan Drug designations, giving the program a regulatory tailwind.
A pivotal Phase 3 trial is planned for 2026. Between the IPO cash and its previous fundraising, Hemab says it has enough money to fund operations into 2028 or 2029. That's a long runway for a clinical-stage biotech, and it's one reason investors got comfortable writing such large checks.
More Than a One-Drug Story
What separates Hemab from the typical "one drug, one disease, pray it works" biotech is its pipeline breadth. The company is quietly building what it calls the "ultimate clotting company," and it's not limited to GT.
Sutacimig is also expanding into a Phase 2 study for Factor VII deficiency, another rare clotting disorder with limited treatment options.
Then there's HMB-002, a completely different antibody targeting von Willebrand disease (VWD), the most common inherited bleeding disorder. This drug works by protecting a key clotting protein called von Willebrand Factor from breaking down too quickly. Early Phase 1 data showed it successfully boosted the relevant protein levels in a dose-dependent way, and a Phase 1/2 trial called VELORA Pioneer is now enrolling patients.
A third candidate, HMB-003, is expected to be disclosed in the first half of 2026 for yet another rare bleeding indication.
It's an ambitious menu, but the shared biology across these conditions means learnings from one program can accelerate others.
Why the IPO Market Loved This Deal
Hemab's offering didn't happen in a vacuum. The 2026 biotech IPO window is wide open, and the numbers tell the story. Roughly $3.2 billion has been raised across approximately 14 biotech IPOs so far this year. For context, all of 2025 produced only about $1.6 billion across 10 or 11 deals. That's a dramatic shift.
The 2026 cohort is also different in character. These aren't speculative, early-stage companies hoping the market will fund their science experiments. Investors are demanding late-stage data, clear regulatory paths, and strong balance sheets. Hemab, with its Phase 2 results, Breakthrough Therapy nod, and multi-year cash runway, checked every box.
Goldman Sachs, Jefferies, and Evercore ISI ran the books as joint lead managers. The deal was originally filed for around 11.8 million shares, then bumped to 15 million, and finally priced at 16.75 million shares at the top of the range. The underwriters' greenshoe option (an extra 2.5 million shares) was exercised in full, pushing total gross proceeds to roughly $347 million.
At the $18 IPO price, Hemab's market cap sat near $800 million. After the first-day surge to $34, that figure ballooned toward approximately $933 million to $1.4 billion, depending on share count methodology. Some observers think that's rich for a company with zero revenue and trials still to run. Others argue the rare disease positioning justifies a premium: orphan drugs command high prices, face little competition, and enjoy long periods of market exclusivity.
The Risks Are Real
Let's not pretend this is a sure thing. Hemab has never sold a single drug. Its entire valuation rests on clinical data that hasn't been generated yet (the Phase 3 in GT) and pipeline programs still in early stages.
The stock has already shown it can swing violently. On the day the IPO closing was officially announced, COAG dropped as much as 24% intraday before recovering. For investors buying in the mid-$30s, that's nearly double the IPO price, leaving precious little cushion if a trial disappoints or enrollment slows.
And while the rare bleeding disorder space has minimal direct competition today, the broader hematology market is fierce. Roche's emicizumab (Hemlibra) dominates non-factor therapy in hemophilia. Sanofi's fitusiran, an RNA-based drug targeting a different clotting pathway, is pushing toward approval. Novo Nordisk, which licensed some of the foundational technology Hemab uses, maintains a significant presence in factor replacement.
Hemab's bet is that the ultra-rare corner of this market is too small for the giants to care about but too important for patients to ignore. It's a classic orphan drug thesis, and historically, that playbook has worked when the science delivers.
The Bottom Line
Hemab's IPO is the kind of deal that tells you something about where biotech capital is flowing in 2026: toward clinical-stage companies with real data, clear unmet needs, and enough cash to reach the finish line without coming back to the market with hat in hand.
The company raised over $300 million, nearly doubled on debut, and sits on a pipeline targeting diseases where patients literally have no other options. That combination of scientific credibility and market demand is rare (pun intended).
But the stock is pricing in a lot of future success. The Phase 3 in Glanzmann thrombasthenia will be the real test. If sutacimig delivers in a pivotal setting, Hemab could become the defining rare hematology company of this decade. If it stumbles, that first-day pop will look like a distant memory.
For now, the clotting company has Wall Street's blood pumping. Whether it can keep the momentum going depends entirely on what happens in the clinic.
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