(BFM Bourse) – The young company specializing in the fight against obesity will take its first steps this Wednesday on the New York Stock Exchange via a merger with SPAC Compute Health Acquisition Corp.
The American start-up Allurion, specializing in the fight against obesity, made its debut on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday, in order to access new capital to accelerate its growth on an international scale.
This listing is the result of its merger with Compute Health Acquisition Corp., a SPAC or “Special Purpose Acquisition Company”, that is to say a company without commercial activity but specially constituted to raise funds by going public in to acquire a target company, in this case Allurion.
The deal raised about $100 million from SPAC investors, including Omar Ishrak, the former boss and chairman of the board of Medtronic, a major US medical device maker, Allurion says. in a press release.
Omar Ishrak will co-chair Allurion’s board of directors and Bob Langer, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and co-founder of Moderna, will chair the scientific advisory board.
A quotation to continue its development
Established in France for several years, the company continued its geographic expansion in 2022 in Canada, Mexico, India, Australia and Brazil, and intends to “continue this development thanks to this listing”.
The new capital will also “be used for research and development as well as advertising”, to gain “notoriety”, detailed to AFP Benoit Chardon, international director of Allurion, based in Paris.
So far, 150,000 patients have been treated by the Allurion program, which operates “mainly in Europe, the Middle East and Latin America”, but not yet in the United States, where the costs of launching medical devices are high, nor in China, he added.
Founded in 2009 at Harvard (Massachusetts, United States), Allurion has developed a medical device intended to fight against obesity: a gastric balloon to be swallowed in the form of a capsule, with a lifespan of approximately four months before resorption , which should help patients reduce their food intake.
It also offers a behavioral change program and remote patient monitoring using artificial intelligence. Its revenue rose from $20 million in 2020 to $64 million last year.
“Weight management and artificial intelligence are two themes that will shape the next decades of healthcare, and Allurion is doing pioneering work in both of these areas,” said Dr. Shantanu Gaur, co-founder and CEO of ‘Allurion, quoted in the press release.
Thanks to artificial intelligence, “we manage to predict from the 20th day of the program who has the best chance of losing weight”, which makes it possible to modify the support for those who risk not achieving their objectives, indicates for its part Benoit Chardon, of Allurion.
(With AFP)
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