Nautilus Opens $125M ATM, Replacing Two-Year-Old Unused Facility
Serial Equity Issuance
Company Background
Nautilus Biotechnology is a Seattle-based development-stage life sciences company building a single-molecule proteomics platform it calls the Voyager. The company has no commercial product — its first-ever revenue of $0.2 million appeared in the second quarter of 2026, driven by a Michael J. Fox Foundation grant and a single early-access customer for its Tau proteoform assay. It has an accumulated deficit of $361.2 million as of June 30, 2026.
The financial picture has been improving incrementally. The full-year 2025 net loss of $59.0 million compared to $70.8 million in 2024, and operating expenses fell 18% to $66.8 million. Cash and investments stood at $156.1 million at December 31, 2025. At its February 2026 earnings, management stated it believed that balance was sufficient to fund operations through 2027.
Nautilus also navigated a Nasdaq compliance episode during this period. Its stock fell below the $1.00 minimum bid price in spring 2025, prompting a transfer from the Nasdaq Global Select Market to the Nasdaq Capital Market on October 29, 2025. It regained compliance on November 3, 2025, after the stock held above $1.00 for ten consecutive business days.
What Was Disclosed
Nautilus entered into a Sales Agreement with TD Securities (USA), LLC on September 11, 2026, authorizing the sale of up to $125 million of common stock from time to time through an at-the-market program. Under the agreement, TD Securities will act as sales agent and is entitled to compensation of up to 3.0% of gross proceeds. Nautilus retains full discretion over timing and volume: it sets the parameters for each sale, including daily limits and minimum price floors, and has no obligation to sell any shares. Either party may terminate on ten days' notice, or immediately upon certain events including a material adverse change.
On the same day, Nautilus and TD Securities mutually terminated a prior sales agreement dated February 28, 2024 — also an ATM program with the same counterparty — under which no shares of common stock were ever sold. Shares under the new facility will be issued pursuant to a Form S-3 shelf registration statement filed concurrently on September 11, 2026, which must be declared effective by the SEC before any sales can occur.
Why It Matters
Cash and investments have declined from $156.1 million at December 31, 2025 to $143.4 million at March 31, 2026 and $129.2 million at June 30, 2026 — a drop of roughly $27 million in the first half of the year. At that pace, and against a February 2026 guidance of sufficient runway through 2027, the cash position still appears adequate in the near term. However, operating expenses are guided to increase 15–20% in 2026 compared to 2025's $66.8 million, and the company recorded $26.8 million in operating cash outflows in just the first six months of 2026.
The new ATM is sized at $125 million — approximately equal to the company's current market cap — meaning any meaningful draw would represent substantial dilution to existing shareholders. The prior ATM, open for more than two years, went entirely unused, which demonstrates that the existence of such a facility does not guarantee issuance. However, the decision to refresh and enlarge the program under a new shelf filing suggests management is establishing flexibility ahead of the commercial launch phase, which has itself experienced setbacks: in July 2026, Nautilus disclosed that its broadscale assay will not reach general availability in 2027, and pushed the Voyager platform commercial launch to early 2027 for pre-orders with instrument shipments beginning in mid-2027.
The counterweight is the trajectory of losses, which has been improving. Quarterly net losses have fallen from $16–17 million in early 2025 to $13–15 million by mid-2026, and the company generated its first revenue — however small — in the second quarter of 2026. Management has characterized the proteoform strategy shift as funded through reallocation rather than incremental spend.