Beta Bionics’ 2016 crowd round: 0.86x at the IPO price, per share

The round

Beta Bionics, which makes a bionic pancreas for insulin delivery, was the first company to reach the $1m limit under Regulation Crowdfunding. Wefunder ↗ (opens in a new tab) records $1,000,000 from 718 investors; MIT Technology Review ↗ (opens in a new tab) counted 775 at the time, averaging $1,300.

The price is in its Form C/A ↗ (opens in a new tab): common stock at $100 a share, the same price per share Eli Lilly had paid for its Series A preferred stock. Lilly's $5m for a 5% stake is what set the $100m valuation.

What happened

The company raised several much larger private rounds and then listed. It priced its IPO ↗ (opens in a new tab) at $17 a share in January 2025 and traded on Nasdaq as BBNX. Reuters ↗ (opens in a new tab) put the value at about $700m at that price, and at the $22 open ↗ (opens in a new tab) at $943.6m.

A 2016 share did not stay one share. The final prospectus ↗ (opens in a new tab) records a ten-for-one stock split on 25 August 2023 and a 1-for-1.970 reverse split on 21 January 2025. Applied to $100, those two steps give $19.70, and the prospectus states the Series A's original issue price as exactly $19.70.

What the figure does and does not say

We worked this figure out ourselves from the filings ↗ (opens in a new tab), and it is the reason this case reads differently from the usual telling. Company value went from $100m to about $700m at the IPO price, roughly 7x, and to about 9.4x at the first trade. That is the arithmetic behind a figure like 10x. It is not a return on a share, because the company issued a great many new shares in between. Per share, $17 against $19.70 is about 0.86x, and $22 is about 1.12x.

So at the listing price a 2016 crowd holder was slightly behind, before fees and tax. It is a paper position, as we have seen nothing on whether any of the crowd sold, and the shares have traded since at other prices, which this page does not follow. The Form C/A ↗ (opens in a new tab) describes common stock, so we use its price, and do not apply the better conversion terms the preferred stock held.