Inside the IPO: Adaptive Biotech

Chad Robins is a Cornell grad and Wharton School MBA who was working in real estate finance a decade ago when he was approached with a business idea by his brother, Harlan Robins, head of the Computational Biology Program at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

As Chad Robins recalled, "When he called me up in 2009 and said, 'Hey I want to start a business, I've figured out how to sequence T-cells at a high throughput,' I was like, 'Yes, I'm in!' and then I went to Wikipedia and I'm like, 'What the hell is he talking about?' I don't know the difference between a T-cell receptor and a T-bone steak."

A decade later, the company they created, Adaptive Biotechnologies, is using the genetic code of the immune system to change the diagnosis and treatment of disease. It’s valued at more than $1 billion. It has partnerships with industry giants Microsoft and Genentech, and this week it filed raise $230 million in an initial public offering. On this episode of the GeekWire podcast, we’ll get the inside story of Adaptive Biotechnologies and share what we learned in its IPO filing.

Correction 6/3: Chad Robins and Harlan Robins hold about the same amount of equity in the company, which wasn’t apparent from the IPO filing because some of the stock is held in trusts. We've update the audio to remove this portion of our discussion.

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