Cancer diagnostic specialist Grail today filed for an initial public offering (IPO) on the Nasdaq, with the stock to trade under the ticker symbol GRAL. The start-up has raised almost $2 billion in seed money in four rounds of private investing since 2016. In its 2019 round of funding, Grail's valuation was estimated at $3.2 billion. Some of the company's notable backers include Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, and Bill Gates, the second richest.
Grail was spun out of gene-sequencing giant Illumina (NASDAQ: ILMN) four years ago. In its S-1 filing, the company wrote, "Using our platform technology, we have developed a multi-cancer early detection blood test that has demonstrated in clinical studies the ability to detect more than 50 types of cancer, across all stages, and localize the cancer signal with a high degree of accuracy, from a single blood draw."
Image source: Getty Images.