Six months after postponing its initial public offering, Jaguar Animal Health finally went public Wednesday. But investors didn't exactly roll out the red carpet for the Silicon Valley company. Jaguar ($JAGX) offered 2.86 million shares at $7 apiece. The stock price immediately fell nearly 3% to $6.80.
It's been a long, tough road to Wall Street for Jaguar, which is developing gastrointestinal products for livestock and pets. The company initially announced last August that it planned to raise $70 million in an IPO. By November, that number had fallen to $51.75 million. But shares of several other animal health companies were faltering, including Parnell ($PARN) and Kindred Biosciences ($KIN), so Jaguar stayed on the sidelines.
Jaguar expects to raise just $20 million before expenses from Wednesday's IPO.
Jaguar is developing prescription and nonprescription medicines derived from a botanical ingredient called crofelemer. In December, it finished a safety study of Neonorm Foal, an experimental product for treating diarrhea in young horses. Its lead prescription product, Canalevia, is being developed to treat diarrhea in dogs, including those undergoing chemotherapy.
Late last year, Jaguar released its first product, Neonorm Calf. It has shipped about $450,000 worth of the product, according to the company's S-1 filing to the SEC.
Jaguar plans to use $2.4 million of the funds raised in its IPO to complete studies of Canalevia and another $3.5 million to prepare for the commercial launch of the product in the U.S. and abroad, according to the S-1. The rest will go towards developing its other products, building manufacturing capacity, and paying down debt.
Jaguar ran up a net loss of $8.6 million last year, making it a particularly risky investment. Or as the investment site Seeking Alpha puts it, the company's price-earnings ratio of -7 reflects a "heavy cash burn rate relative to market cap."
- access Jaguar's S-1 here
- read a summary of the company's financials at Seeking Alpha