Market Analysis Stock Picks Market Insight Crypto Stocks to Buy Hot Stocks Genentech had no approved medicine when investors rushed through the door. Today’s AI leaders are taking a very different path. Genentech went public just four years after its founding and before the first genetically engineered human medicine was approved. Private capital and secondary markets now let major AI companies finance growth and provide liquidity while remaining private longer. Evaluating pre-IPO AI companies requires examining the founders, the product’s real-world value, market timing, valuation, and substantial risk.

Listen to the audio version of this article (generated by AI). In January 1976, a 28-year-old venture capitalist named Robert Swanson called a biochemist at the University of California, San Francisco. The scientist, Herbert Boyer, had helped develop a method for cutting and recombining DNA. Swanson believed the discovery could become the foundation of an entirely new kind of drug company.