Sure Ventures plc (‘Sure Ventures’ or ‘the Company’)
Portfolio Update
Sure Ventures plc, a London listed venture capital fund, which invests in early-stage software companies in the rapidly growing technology areas of augmented reality (‘AR’), virtual reality (‘VR’), Internet of Things (‘IoT’), Artificial Intelligence (‘AI’) and Fintech, is pleased to provide an update on its investment portfolio.
SURE VALLEY VENTURES SUB FUND OF SUIR VALLEY VENTURES ICAV
Sure Ventures made an initial €4.5 million commitment to Sure Valley Ventures Fund (‘Sure Valley’) representing an interest in Sure Valley of approximately 22.17%. This commitment was made at a price of €1.00 per share; the last recorded Sure Valley dealing NAV as at the 30th of September 2019 was €0.954.
A subsequent commitment of a further €2.5 million by Sure Ventures was announced on 2 September 2019, taking the overall total commitment in Sure Valley to €7.0 million, representing a 25.9% share in Sure Valley. This additional commitment was also made at price of €1.00 per share.
Sure Valley has several investments across the AR, VR, IoT and AI in Fintech sectors:
VR Education Holdings Plc – http://immersivevreducation.com/
VRE is a ground-breaking developer of VR software and immersive experiences with a specific focus on education and enterprise learning and development. VRE’s core platform is the Engage VR platform that enables educators to develop VR education experiences and enterprises to develop corporate learning and development VR simulations for workplace training. Last interim results showed progress with revenues up 60% and losses have fallen significantly. The company has released five major products to date:
· Apollo 11 VR: immersivevreducation.com/apollo-11-vr
· Titanic VR: immersivevreducation.com/titanic-vr
· Berlin Blitz: immersivevreducation.com/1943-berlin-blitz
· Engage VR: immersivevreducation.com/engage-platform
· Raid on the Ruhr: https://immersivevreducation.com/raid-on-the-ruhr/
WarDucks – www.warducks.com
Founded by former Facebook employee, Nikki Lannen, WarDucks’ mission is to build incredible, high quality, fun AR and VR games. The company has six bestselling titles under its belt, the latest two of which were Top Ten on PlayStation VR. To enable the company to take this product to the market, it completed a series A round of €3.284 million in Q1, with new investors EQT investing €2.58 million, Sure Valley following on to maintain it percentage with €453,858.32 and existing investors making up the remaining investment. The transaction completed on the 29 of March 2019. This represented a 4x unrealised uplift in Sure Valley’s initial investment. The team are busy building their AR game portfolio and we are pleased with the progress to date.
Wia – www.wia.io
WIA https://www.wia.io/ is a ground-breaking IoT cloud platform https://www.wia.io/product, enabling developers to turn any type of sensor device into a secure, smart and useful application in a matter of minutes. WIA is the easiest and fastest way to link sensors and devices to develop IoT applications. WIA’s end-to-end platform provides full device and application management, security, data capture and storage, analysis, control, as well as the seamless integration of enterprise systems. WIA also just lunched its own hardware product called the “Dot One” https://www.wia.io/dot-one as an entry level device for first time makers. It now has 65K developers using its platform.
ProVision – www.provisioncameramatics.com
ProVision is the leader in CameraMatics solutions for commercial fleets, delivering products that allow fleet managers to reduce fleet risk, increase driver safety and comply with growing governance and compliance regulations. ProVision has merged four key technologies: video input systems (cameras and scanners), smart processing systems, communications systems and unique algorithmic IP to deliver intelligent driver and fleet safety systems. To support further growth and USA market entry, the company has started meeting investors to lead its series A round and Sure Valley expect the company to complete that round before the end of Q4 2019. The company is growing revenues quickly both from new customer wins and from a reoccurring revenue perspective.
NDRC Arc Labs – http://www.arclabs.ie/
The NDRC@ArcLabs investment was structured as a subscription as a limited Partner to the Accelerator. The purpose of the Accelerator is source and develop 30 start-ups over two years that Sure Valley has the right to invest in. The Accelerator is running three calls for 10 start-ups over two years in areas that are related to the fund’s investment strategy of AR/VR, IoT and AI. As a result of the Accelerator’s programme significantly overlapping with the Fund’s investment areas, Sure Valley sees this Accelerator being a source of proprietary deal flow.
Artomatix – https://artomatix.com/
Artomatix has patent pending AI software technology that cuts the cost of content creation for animated movies, video games and AR/VR applications by over 85% through AI automation. Given that the typical cost of a CGI movie, such as Avatar, is $300 million, a AAA video game such as Destiny is $330 million and a typical animated movie is $175 million and can take 4-6 years to develop, Artomatix has the potential to revolutionise these industries. Sure Valley invested €750 thousand in preference shares at a pre-money of €11 million and also purchased €150 thousand ordinary shares at pre-money of approximately €3.5 million. These ordinary shares have been converted to preference shares to bring our total shareholding in the company to just over 10% fully diluted. The company was also awarded a 3.2m euro grant from the Irish government’s disruptive Technology Fund and the Fast Track to innovation fund (EU) in December, which is being put to good use. The team has now secured some major studios as paying customers.
Nova Leah
Nova Leah is the leader in cyber security for connected medical devices and is an IoT investment by Sure Valley. Nova Leah sells directly to the top medical device manufactures typically in Boston, MA and the west coast of the USA. The company’s first product, SelectEvidence, helps medical device manufacturers identify and address cyber-security issues throughout the manufacturing and release process of their connected medical devices. Suir Valley invested 750K euros in the company for 10.62% of the business fully diluted. Subsequent to its investment which closed on the 5th of October 2018, the company was successful in the Irish government Disruptive Technology Fund (DTIF) programme for 1.5m euros. The company is now winning customers in the US and growing its commercial offering.
Admix Ltd
Admix has developed what is called a Supply-Side Platform (SSP), which enables developers to monetise their content by creating, managing and sell advertising inventory. Being an SSP, Admix is a broker that sells developers (think WarDucks) inventory programmatically at scale. Being programmatic automatizes the buying/selling process. Admix enables, for the first time, VR/AR inventory to become immediately available to thousands of advertisers connected to the existing ecosystem, which provides VR/AR developers with instant revenue. Sure Valley invested $500 thousand at a pre-money of $5,000,000 for a shareholding of 7% fully diluted in the business, with a right in the investment docs to get to 10% at the next round should Sure Valley choose to.
VividQ Ltd
VividQ is a deep tech software company with world-leading expertise in 3D holography: the next generation display technology. Holography has long been considered the ultimate display technology. The science fiction ideal of engineering and manipulating light to produce 3D projections appealed to the imagination of millions through franchises such as Star Wars or Star Trek. Holography overcomes these issues and paves the way for immersive 3D without the need glasses at all. VividQ disrupts existing ways of creating 3D images, such stereo or autostereo-display, to power the next generation of holographic VR headsets, AR smart glasses, and automotive head-up displays. Sure Valley invested £500K in preference shares at a pre-money valuation of £6.5m for a total stake of 5.23% fully diluted. VividQ has recently announced a commercial deal with HIMAX a $820m dollar tech company.
Ambisence
Ambisense’s Ambilytics™ platform optimises the delivery of environmental risk assessment on some of the world’s largest infrastructure projects across industrial, Oil & Gas and Waste Management verticals, partnering with global multinationals such as CEMEX, SGS & Arcadis. Ambilytics™ encompasses both IoT and AI solutions, combining information from remotely deployed field devices with contextual data sources such as weather, satellite, geophysical and operational data to build machine learning models.
Ambisense has developed a toolkit to enable customers to build fully customisable, web-enabled instruments to acquire and analyse the data required quickly and cost-effectively. Each element can be tailored to different needs whether a client wants to measure gas, air or water quality or anything in between.
DIRECT INVESTMENTS
Investments made directly by Sure Ventures plc:
Immotion PLC (‘Immotion’) is a UK based company that creates its own high-quality VR content and enhances the immersive experience by coupling this content with motion simulation. Sure Ventures made a £500,000 investment in February 2018. Immotion is making significant progress with its partnership model, signing further deals with companies such as Merlin Entertainment, The O2, Aspro Parks, Al Hokair group and The Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. It has deployed close to 300 headsets and expects to be at breakeven point by Q1 2020. The share price can be volatile, especially given current stock market volatility, but the company is performing well and making some real progress with headset deployment.
VividQ – In addition to the Sure Valley stake of £500K, Sure Ventures has made a direct investment into VividQ of £500k at the recommendation of the AIFM. The board identified the opportunity as a suitable and complementary investment for Sure Ventures and agreed that this was an exciting deep technology company that could have developed a solution that changes the way that people view content in 3D. Holography could be the next generation of display technology and the types of companies that are early stage adopters of VividQ’s software offers shareholders an exciting opportunity.
Sure Ventures Director, Gareth Burchell said, “We are pleased with the performance of our portfolio and are now witnessing the businesses commercialise their software. The commercialisation stage of a software business can yield some significant, fast0paced results and we are beginning to see the portfolio mature and expect to be able to report some valuation milestones soon. The NAV of Sure Ventures is very much linked to the share price performance of Immotion Plc at present, but as we continue to see the AIFM deploy capital, we will begin to see that dependency dilute the percentage weighting of Immotion in the NAV calculation going forward. We would like to congratulate the AIFM on finding and investing in a very exciting group of technology businesses that have the potential to create significant shareholder value.”
ENDS
For further information, please visit www.sureventuresplc.com or contact:
| Gareth Burchell | Sure Ventures plc | +44 (0) 20 7186 9918 |
| Isabel de Salis | St Brides Partners (Financial PR) | +44 (0) 20 7236 1177 |
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Notes to Editors
Sure Ventures plc listed on the London Stock Exchange in January 2018 giving retail investors access to an asset class that is usually dominated by private venture capital funds. The Company aims to provide investors with a diversified exposure to three rapidly-growing markets: augmented reality/virtual reality, fintech and Internet of Things. Sure Ventures is focusing on companies in the UK, Republic of Ireland and other European countries, making seed and series A investments in companies with first rate management teams, products which benefit from market validation with target revenue run rates of at least £400,000 over the next 12 months. Website: https://www.sureventuresplc.com/