Bitcoin Miner Stronghold Pops 62% in First Day of Trading
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A Bitcoin miner, a biotech, and a software provider are Wednesday’s initial public offerings.
Dreamstime
Shares of Stronghold Digital Mining, a Bitcoin miner, soared more than 62% Wednesday in its debut as a public company.
Context Therapeutics
,
a biotech, and Cyngn, a software provider, haven’t opened yet.
The three companies, which listed on the Nasdaq, are the first of the week’s dozen initial public offerings that are expected to price.
Another five companies are expected to price their deals later Wednesday and trade Thursday: Portillo’s, a fast-casual restaurant chain; packaged coconut-water provider Vita Coco; Winc, an online wine club; Enfusion, a provider of investment management software; and biotech Ventyx Biosciences.
Stronghold (ticker: SDIG) stock kicked off at $27 and changed hands at $30.87 in midday trading, up $11.87 from its offer price.
The strong opening comes as Bitcoin set a new high, trading at more than $65,000. The ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF (BITO) debuted Tuesday, finishing higher on the day by 4.9%.
Late Tuesday, Stronghold raised nearly $115 million after it boosted the size of its IPO. The company had planned to offer roughly 5.9 million shares but ended up selling 6.7 million shares at $19 each, above its $16-to-$18 price range. B. Riley Securities and Cowen are underwriters on the deal.
Stronghold owns and operates a coal-refuse power plant in Pennsylvania that converts coal refuse—coal mining waste that is considered a pollutant—into energy used to mine Bitcoin.
The company currently operates about 3,000 cryptocurrency asset mining computers, known as “miners,” which process the transactions necessary to create Bitcoin. Stronghold expects to use part of its proceeds from the IPO to add another 55,800 miners by the end of 2022, the prospectus said.
Stronghold said it uses 21st-century crypto-mining techniques to remediate the impact of coal mining, according to the. Greg Beard, the company’s co-chairman and co-CEO, is the former senior partner and head of natural resources at investment firm Apollo Global Management (ticker: APO). Beard and William Spence, co-chairman, will own nearly 59% of Stronghold voting power after the IPO.
Context Therapeutics was set to open later in the day. It is developing drugs focused on breast, ovarian and endometrial cancers. Its lead product candidate, onapristone extended release or ONA-XR, targets endometrial and breast cancer, a prospectus said.
The biotech was expected to price in August, when it planned to offer 1.5 million shares at $12 to $14, but pushed back the deal. It then raised the size of its deal to 5 million shares but chopped its price to $5. Context, which collected $25 million, will trade under the ticker CNTX. ThinkEquity is the underwriter.
Cyngn raised about $26.3 million after selling 3.5 million shares at $7.50, the bottom of its $7.50-to-$9.50 range. Its ticker symbol is CYN. Aegis Capital Corp is the underwriter.
Cyngn provides autonomous-driving software for industrial and commercial vehicles. The company’s Enterprise Autonomy Suite (EAS), which uses advanced autonomous-driving technology as well as data analytics, fleet management, cloud, and connectivity, is in private beta release. It is targeting 2024 for full- scaled commercialization of EAS, a prospectus said.
Other companies offering autonomous driving software have also come to market.
TuSimple
(TSP), which is developing software that puts long-haul trucks on the road without a human driver, went public in April and is down about 7% from its $40 IPO price. Rivian, the electric-vehicle truck maker backed by Amazon.com (AMZN) and Ford Motor (F) is expected to set terms for its IPO soon. Rivian’s vehicles offer some autonomous functionality, a prospectus said.
Write to Luisa Beltran at luisa.beltran@dowjones.com
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