May 14, 2025

Who Are the Top SEC Filing Agents for Biotech IPOs?

What is a filing agent (formerly a financial printer)?

In times gone by, financial printers were the owners and operators of giant printing presses that specialized in making SEC documents for their clients (think, half-as-thick-as-telephone-directory-sized S-1/registration documents etc.), often with a very quick turnaround.

They also provided proofreading services and operated under strict confidentiality (which was necessary given the market-moving nature of the documents they were producing).

Towards the end of the 1990s, however, the SEC began to shift to electronic filings as its preferred method to meet its disclosure requirements, and the old paper equivalents were slowly consigned to history.

These days, SEC filing agents (as the financial printers rebranded themselves) support clients with the production and filing of digital registration statements (as well as other SEC filings) and thus ensuring regulatory compliance.

The selection of an experienced and competent filing agent allows a biotech’s IPO team (select C-suite plus bankers plus lawyers) to focus on an S-1’s actual content (not to mention the prospective deal at hand). Once a submission has been finalized, the filing agent files it on the company’s behalf, or in other words “EDGARizes” it (EDGAR – Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval – being the publicly available, online database maintained by the SEC).

Often, we get asked for filing agent recommendations, so let’s look at the most popular agents that biotechs choose when they execute their IPO.

Who are the top SEC filing agents for biotech IPOs?

We looked at S-1 IPOs raising more than $50M from 2021 – March 31, 2025. Note – filing agent information is not listed in a biotech’s S-1 filing, so additional work is required to track down the information.

We found 104 IPOs for the period in question – ranging from Sana Biotechnology’s 2021 IPO at the high end (which raised $587.5 million), to HCW Biologics’ 2021 IPO at the low end (which raised $56 million).

SEC filing agents for 2021 – March 31, 2025 biotech IPOs (n=104)

Source: New Street Investor Relations

From the table above, you can see that DFIN (aka Donnelley Financial Solutions) is the clear market leader, acting as filing agent for 82.7% (86/104) of biotech IPOs in the period under consideration. Note: this is not an aberration; DFIN has long been the market leader in the sector.

Returning to the chart, in distant second place is Toppan Merrill with 15.4% (16/104) and Workiva in third place with 1.9% (2/104).

Not surprisingly, given their dominance, my clients have worked almost exclusively with DFIN over the years, and biotechs looking to start a discussion with DFIN can email errol.buxton@dfinsolutions.com and william.q.le@dfinsolutions.com.