Kailera Therapeutics—one of the biggest money-raisers of 2025—is now planning to go public as it seeks further funding to push its obesity portfolio through the clinic.
The biotech emerged in 2024 with ex-China rights to four GLP-1 drugs from Jiangsu Hengrui Pharmaceuticals. Massachusetts-based Kailera is helmed by CEO Ron Renaud, who oversaw neuroscience biotech Cerevel Therapeutics in the months leading up to its $8.7 billion acquisition by AbbVie.
Kailera secured the joint-second-highest fundraise of 2025, a $600 million series B that followed a $400 million series A the previous year. But obesity drug development isn’t cheap—of the $900 million that Kailera has raised to date, the company was down to $652.7 million as of the end of 2025.
The biotech had an accumulated deficit of $368.7 million last year, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission Friday. Kailera said it expects “to continue to incur significant expenses and recognize operating losses for at least the next several years” as it moves it pipeline through clinical development and towards regulators.
This pipeline is led by KAI-9531, also known as ribupatide, an injected GLP-1/GIP agonist currently in global phase 3 trials. Hengrui tied the drug to mean weight loss of almost 18% at 48 weeks in a late-stage trial in China last year.
Kailera has touted ribupatide as being designed to have a superior clinical profile to Eli Lilly’s blockbuster GLP-1/GIP agonist Zepbound. But the biotech acknowledged in Friday’s filing that it has not conducted any head-to-head trials of ribupatide against an approved obesity drug—a make-or-break test in the highly competitive weight loss space.
Kailera is also working on an oral version of ribupatide, which demonstrated a mean weight loss of up to 12.1% over 26 weeks in a China trial last month. At the time, Kailera Chief Medical Officer Scott Wasserman, M.D., said these results suggest a “potentially game-changing clinical profile.”
The biotech has another oral candidate in the clinic in the form of KAI-7535, a GLP-1 agonist that Hengrui has already taken into a phase 3 study in China. Topline results from that trial are expected to read out this year.
The final piece of the pipeline is KAI-4729, a once-weekly injectable GLP-1/GIP/glucagon tri-agonist in a phase 1 trial in China.
Kailera has yet to set out how many shares the company is planning to offer for an IPO, or at what price. Despite some wider concerns that renewed global market volatility will put a dampener on IPO sentiment, a listing by Kailera would suggest that biotechs remain willing to take on the public markets this year.
