I'd be stunned if a partnership yielded $15-20 million upfront. In a meeting last year, a BP BusDev VP said that he would never go in with a proposal to spend more on an upfront payment than the company's market cap, because his BOD would say--why don't we just buy it?
On the other hand--even a BP is aware that the market cap of a company like Cortex is a highly volatile measure. It's not as if they can go out and buy 51% of Cortex on the open market and not send the share price much, much higher. So it would also not be accurate to slice the current market cap by some fraction and presume this is the ceiling (e.g. BP X only wants one indication, so that's only 25% of the company, 25% of Market Cap equals the maximum upfront payment). They know that buying Cortex would not happen for the current market cap or anywhere near it. So long as they don't trigger the Upfront>Market Cap red flag, they have room. So a deal could involve an upfront payment plus annual research support that exceeds in total the current MC.
Disclaimer: This is not a prediction, it is a discussion of factors that could go into the valuation discussion and how a deal could be constructed.
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