Baidu-Backed AI Drug Discovery Firm BioMap Secretly Files for Hong Kong IPO

Following the expansion of Baidu's AI capital landscape, after Kunlun Core, Baidu's AI chip company, secretly filed for an IPO in January this year, BioMap, an artificial intelligence pharmaceutical company founded by Baidu's founder Robin Li, has also been reported to have secretly submitted an application to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, advancing towards an IPO.

According to market news, BioMap has confidentially submitted an IPO application to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, planning to raise several hundred million US dollars.CICCMorgan Stanley and UBS are assisting in the preparation of related matters. This move comes less than three months after Baidu's Kunlun Chip secretly filed its listing application, indicating that Robin Li may soon have two Hong Kong-listed companies.

Public information shows that BioMap was founded in 2020 by Robin Li and Liu Wei, the former CEO of Baidu Ventures, with Robin Li serving as chairman. The company positions itself as an innovative drug discovery platform driven by a bio-computing engine. With computational power support from the Baidu ecosystem, it has developed xTrimo, a large multimodal life science model with 268 billion parameters, aiming to shorten the traditional drug development cycle from "ten years and one billion US dollars" to 1-2 years.

In terms of commercialization, BioMap has reached a strategic cooperation with Sanofi, with a potential total transaction value exceeding 1 billion US dollars, and serves more than 800 institutional users worldwide. However, similar to many AI pharmaceutical companies, the company has not yet achieved profitability, and its independent pipeline is still in the preclinical stage, facing the valuation test during the industry's "trough period".

This IPO comes at a time when the AI pharmaceuticals industry is undergoing intensified reshuffling. If successful, BioMap will compete directly with XtalPi and Insilico Medicine, both already listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The computational power synergy from Baidu's ecosystem, along with the support of Kunlun chips in underlying AI hardware, may become its key differentiator in competitive advantage.