Software company seeks to raise more than £32m

Live data company WANdisco has announced a proposed fundraising by way of a subscription and a placing to raise about $45m (£33m) in aggregate at a price per share of 446 pence per ordinary share.

The Sheffield-based company also intends to enter into subscription agreements with certain US investors who have indicated they intend to subscribe for an aggregate amount of 5,594,152 new ordinary shares equivalent to $34.5m (£25m) at the issue price.

Up to $30m (£22m) raised by way of the subscription will be issued using the company’s existing shareholder authorities from its 2020 AGM, free of pre-emption rights.

The additional $4.5m (£3m) raised by way of the subscription will be conditional on shareholder approval at a General Meeting of the company.

WANdisco’s directors say they intend to use the net proceeds of the fundraising to accelerate and strengthen the Group’s commercial position by building balance sheet strength in order to capitalise on future opportunities to further scale the business.

The extra money will enable the firm to expand opportunities with other cloud vendors such as AWS and Google (GCP).

It will provide capital to accelerate growth and pursue closer ties with ML/AI (Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence) ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) and widening its SI (System Integrator) relationships.

And it will provide capital for greater enablement support for the early stages of growth, as the Group’s relationships with current Systems Integrators deepen.

WANdisco adds that it is expecting to report unaudited revenues of at least $10.5m (£7.6m).

As of 28 February 2021, the company’s cash balance was $19.7m (£14.2m). With the injection of new capital it expects to invest further in engineering and go to market resources, bringing total cash costs in 2021 to about $44m/31.8m.

David Richards, chief executive and chairman of WANdisco, said: “We are strategically positioned to deliver on the vast cloud migration opportunity ahead of us, expanding relationships beyond Microsoft Azure to partners such as AWS and Google as well as independent software vendors and system integrators.

“The promotion of our LiveData Platform by Microsoft Azure to their preferred product for cloud migration technology, establishes our technology as a global standard for cloud enablement.

“To accelerate our market opportunity and take our solutions to the next stage of their evolution, we will be making strategic commercial hires to support our largest channels and engineering hires to support the product journey.

“In addition, we are pursuing the potential value creation provided by a US market listing, with access to a greater pool of capital in the region where many of our investors reside, alongside an increased profile in the US with our commercial partners.

“While WANdisco continues to be committed to the AIM market which has supported WANdisco’s growth to date through access to capital, the scale of the opportunity ahead and increasing US concentration of both customers and investors provides a compelling rationale to pursue a potential US listing.”

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