Insilico Medicine lists on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange

Background

Finding a new drug is slow and expensive. A candidate molecule has to be designed or screened, made in a lab, tested for activity and safety, and then carried through years of clinical trials. AI drug discovery companies try to compress the earliest part of that chain: machine-learning models are trained on chemical and biological data to propose molecules, predict properties such as toxicity or binding strength, and rank which compounds are worth synthesising and testing at all. Companies working this way usually spend years on research before they have a product to sell, so access to capital — including a public listing — shapes how far they can push a pipeline.

The listing

Insilico Medicine listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on 30 December 2025, trading under the stock code 3696.HK.^[1] The company said it was the first AI-driven biotech to list on the exchange's Main Board under Chapter 8.05 of the listing rules.^[1] That statement is about the company's category rather than the size of the offer: Hong Kong's Main Board has been a venue for biotech flotations for some years, and the claim identifies Insilico as the first among them to describe its drug discovery work as AI-driven.

Size of the deal and demand

The IPO raised HKD 2.277 billion, the largest Hong Kong biotech listing of 2025 by funds raised.^[1] Insilico offered 94,690,500 shares.^[1] Ten per cent of the offer went to the Hong Kong public tranche, which was oversubscribed about 1,427 times, while the international tranche was oversubscribed 26.27 times.^[1] Morgan Stanley, CICC and GF Securities were joint sponsors.^[1]

The two oversubscription figures do not measure the same thing. The public tranche is the portion aimed at retail investors in Hong Kong; the international tranche is placed with institutional buyers. A retail multiple in the thousands sitting next to an institutional multiple in the tens describes which end of the market the heaviest demand came from, and how the shares were split between them.

Cornerstone investors

Fifteen cornerstone investors took part, including Lilly, Tencent, Temasek, Schroders, UBS Asset Management, Oaktree, E Fund and Taikang Life.^[1] The company said Lilly and Tencent were both subscribing as cornerstone investors in a biotech for the first time.^[1] Cornerstone investors are allocated shares before trading begins and normally agree to hold them for a lock-up period. Their presence gives a listing a committed base of buyers and puts named institutions on the register from the first day of trading.

The list mixes a pharmaceutical company, a technology company, sovereign and institutional asset managers and insurers. Each is a different kind of money with a different reason to be there, and the company singled out the two first-timers as evidence that the category was drawing in investors who had not previously backed a biotech flotation in that role.

What the listing records

For anyone tracking where AI sits in drug discovery, the substance of this event is a set of numbers rather than a verdict. A company whose pitch is that software can shorten early-stage discovery raised HKD 2.277 billion on a public market, with the retail tranche subscribed more than a thousand times over.^[1] Those figures do not say whether the science will deliver; a listing measures demand for shares, not the success of a pipeline. What the entry leaves behind is a dated record — offer size, the split between the public and international tranches, the oversubscription multiples, the joint sponsors, the cornerstone names.^[1] Later listings in the same category will be read against it.