Moderna, Inc.

Moderna, Inc. is an American biotechnology company that pioneered the development of messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines and therapeutics, generating $1.94 billion in revenue in fiscal 2025 from its commercial respiratory vaccine portfolio, led by its COVID-19 vaccines Spikevax and mNEXSPIKE. Founded in 2010 and headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Moderna built its reputation on the speed and programmability of its mRNA platform — an approach validated spectacularly when its COVID-19 vaccine reached the market in under a year, was administered to hundreds of millions of people, and produced over $36 billion in cumulative revenue across 2021 and 2022.

This is a story about the hardest phase of a platform biotechnology company's life: the post-blockbuster transition. Moderna went from $19 billion in annual revenue to $1.9 billion in three years as the pandemic receded, yet it continues to spend over $3 billion annually on R&D. It holds $7.5 billion in cash and investments against a roughly $18 billion market capitalisation. The market, in effect, is ascribing something like $10 billion of enterprise value to a pipeline that spans respiratory vaccines, a personalised cancer therapy in late-stage trials with Merck, a norovirus vaccine, and a rare-disease program — none of which have yet produced a dollar of revenue. The file turns on a single question: whether the platform that produced one of the most important vaccines in history can produce a second act.