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- Atai bought an additional 619,095 Compass Pathways shares in the past few days, increasing its stake in the company from 19.4% to 20.8%.
- The new shares were bought for around $ 31 each, which means Atai paid around $ 12 million in total.
- Atai plans to increase its stake in Compass Pathways to 29% in the coming weeks, according to a source close to the company.
Atai Life Sciences, the Peter Thiel-supported start-up that aims to use psychedelic drugs to treat mental illness, has increased its stake in the drug developer Compass Pathways.
Atai bought an additional 619,095 Compass Pathways shares in the past few days, increasing its stake in the company from 19.4% to 20.8%.
The new shares were bought for around $ 31 each, and Atai paid around $ 12 million in total.
Atai, who is already the largest shareholder in Compass Pathways, plans to increase its stake in Compass Pathways to about 29% in the coming weeks, according to a source close to companies who preferred to remain anonymous as the discussions are private.
Christian Angermayer, founder and chairman of Atai, told CNBC on Monday that he believes Compass Pathways is one of the most undervalued and most impactful biotech stocks.
Compass Pathways, in which Thiel also invested, plans to use psilocybin (the compound found in magic mushrooms) to treat depression. It debuted on the Nasdaq stock exchange last September and has a current market value of $ 1.4 billion.
Meanwhile, Atai was listed on the Nasdaq in June and raised $ 225 million at a valuation of $ 2.3 billion. The stock rose 40% instantly, but its value has halved since then, and Atai’s current market cap is $ 1.7 billion.
Kiyoshi Ota / Bloomberg via Getty Images
Billionaire Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and chairman of Palantir Technologies, during a press conference in Tokyo, Japan on November 18, 2019.
Atai, calling itself a drug development platform, was formed to acquire, incubate, and develop psychedelics and other drugs that can be used to treat depression, anxiety, addiction, and other mental illnesses.
Interest in certain psychedelics is growing after recent clinical studies suggested that some patients with a range of mental illnesses could help, either in combination with traditional solutions or in cases where nothing else has worked.
“The current treatments [for mental health issues] that are out there are definitely not enough, “company co-founder Angermayer told CNBC in an earlier interview.
“I don’t mean to say that they don’t work at all because they help some people, but they’re not enough.”
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), almost a billion people worldwide suffer from mental health problems.
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