- Biotech has been an extremely active sector in healthcare dealmaking in recent years.
- Raymond James’ top banker explained why that’s key to the firm’s growth in healthcare.
- The boutique bank has made nine senior healthcare hires over the past two years.
- See more stories on Insider’s business page.
Healthcare banking has been hot in recent months, buoyed by activity from sectors like pharmaceuticals and healthcare technology.
And Raymond James’ top banker sees the potential to capitalize on those tailwinds.
“Biotech has been on a multi-year bull market in terms of public-equity issuance as well as M&A consolidation,” Jim Bunn, president of global equities and investment banking at Raymond James, told Insider in a recent interview.
“There’s just a tremendous amount of super interesting drug discovery, and the public investors have been interested in investing in the biotech space at a much earlier stage,” Bunn said.
Biotech firms use public offerings to generate capital to fuel the development of new drug products.
To win business from those companies, investment banks generally require capabilities in mergers and acquisitions, equity capital markets, and research — the latter two being critical to winning mandates for public offerings. Raymond James provides all of those services.
In March, the boutique bank was the sole bookrunning manager on the initial public offering of the life sciences and pharma-focused Ibere Pharmaceuticals SPAC, which raised $138 million in its IPO.
Alongside Bank of America and Jefferies, Raymond James was a bookrunning manager on Tarsus Pharmaceuticals’ $101 million IPO in October.
As of mid-June, Raymond James is the 26th-ranked bookrunner on US healthcare ECM deals, according to Dealogic, advising on more than $200 million worth of transactions. It ranked 34th in 2020.
The bank is ranked 25th this year in US healthcare M&A, working on $1.4 billion worth of deals. Last year it ranked 24th, surging more than 20 spots from its 2019 ranking (47th).
The healthcare team is projected to finish the year with its strongest revenues yet, Bunn said, and plans to double the team’s performance within two to three years.
“We hope to do it even faster,” he added.
Strategic hires have been key to the healthcare group’s recent success
The bank, which is headquartered out of St. Petersburg, Florida, has been building out its healthcare team through strategic hires.
It sees further opportunity to invest in two to three senior hires in healthcare services and IT, Bunn said, but noted the firm has five MD’s covering biotech and two covering MedTech, which he sees as “a pretty full team.”
The group added nine senior hires in the past two years. It’s led by Andrew Gitkin, co-head of healthcare banking since June 2019, when he joined from Piper Jaffray, where he led West Coast biotech banking.
It also added biotech-focused MD’s including Bell Zhong from JPMorgan Securities, Brian Gleason from Citi, and James Kim from Cantor Fitzgerald.
Earlier this month, Ryan Kaeding joined from Piper Sandler as a managing director in the medical-technology sector.
Across investment banks, healthcare dealmakers are in high demand.
Insider has been tracking nearly 20 moves of senior healthcare bankers between firms like Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Barclays, and boutique banks like Piper Sandler, Raymond James, and SVB Leerink.
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