TIDMSURE
RNS Number : 8940J
Sure Ventures PLC
26 August 2021
Sure Ventures plc ('Sure Ventures' or 'the Company')
Portfolio Update Q2 2021 period
Sure Ventures is 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') and Artificial Intelligence
(AI). We are pleased to provide an update on the Company's
investment portfolio.
SURE VALLEY VENTURES FUND
Sure Ventures made a EUR7million commitment to Sure Valley
Ventures Fund ('Sure Valley') representing an interest in Sure
Valley of approximately 25.9%. This commitment was made at a price
of EUR1.00 per share. The current NAV of the Sure Valley Ventures
ICAV is 116.985
Sure Valley has several investments across the AI, AR, VR and
IoT sectors:
VR Education Holdings (VRE) - http://immersivevreducation.com/
HTC are now a major Shareholder in VRE and this validation has
helped it gain break through contracts since 30 June 2020,
particularly in the US market, with sales of the ENGAGE platform
for training and remote distance learning purposes to several
organisations including Facebook, The United States Air Force
Academy, University of Arizona, Colorado State University, SNCF,
Lobaki, Houston Community College and Stanford University.
ENGAGE revenue is continuing to accelerate, with unaudited H1
2021 revenue expected to be c.EUR1.25 million, an increase of 84%
on the prior year (H1 2020: EUR0.68 million). ENGAGE reached the
milestone of 100 commercial customers as announced in May 2021,
including Abbott Laboratories, KPMG, MongoDB, and the US State
Department as recent additions.
WarDucks - www.warducks.com
The company has six bestselling titles under its belt, the
latest two of which were Top Ten on PlayStation VR. The company is
building on its success to date and is now developing a major new
AR mobile game that is in the same category as Pokemon Go. To
achieve this the company has hired well known and renowned game
developers from the US and brought them to Dublin including the the
famous game designer John Romero to help design the new product.
John Romero, cofounder of BAFTA award-winning Romero Games studio
and winner of over 100 awards, will work as a Creative
Consultant.
WarDucks has been busy developing a superior mapping solution to
create beautiful, performance-optimized virtual worlds for mobile
devices using real-world geographical locations. This
ground-breaking mapping software will be available for license to
other developers in the future.
Wia - www.wia.io
WIA https://www.wia.io/ is an Internet of Things (IoT) company
with a ground-breaking 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. This
generates considerable time and cost savings for teams who would
have previously had to spend many months on 100,000's of lines of
code to try to build out their own IoT cloud infrastructure.
During the COVID-19 lockdown the company has focused on
developing IoT Tech to help businesses return to the workplace
safely. In June Wia released the next iteration of the Wia Cloud.
The new Wia Cloud is designed to help businesses understand and
monitor their building, making it a powerful tool in the effort to
return to the workplace.
CameraMatics - www.cameramatics.com
Cameramatics is the leader in Camera and software solutions for
commercial fleets, Cameramatics delivers products that allow fleet
managers to reduce fleet risk, increase driver safety and comply
with growing governance and compliance regulations.
CameraMatics ("Mysafedrive Ltd") successfully raised in excess
of EUR4 million in a Series A Investment Round (Announced 11(th)
Jan 2021) from a consortium of investors led by Puma Investments,
along with follow on from existing investors Sure Valley Ventures
and Enterprise Ireland. Sure Valley Ventures led the "Seed Round"
in November 2017 and this round represents close to a 4-fold
unrealised gain from our initial investment
Revenue for the first half of this year is equal to Revenue for
full year last financial year. Strategic senior hires from the
industry have been added to executive team in the US market and
several new contracts have been won, which are scheduled to be
rolled out in the next month. The Maritme contract for 1700+
vehicle-fleet was won in the UK market and roll out is well under
way. Sales activity in the UAE has started with some potential
large opportunities. Management has an expected revenue growth rate
of 200% for the year and a new version of its platform with
increased functionality is being released on the 1(st) of
September. This launch coincides with a new product range which
will enable us to offer a dashcam type solution, which can fully
integrate with the full CameraMatics suite of functionality.
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 3 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, we see this Accelerator being a source of
proprietary deal flow. The fund has invested EUR300,000 over three
calls. The three calls have been run and now the Accelerator is
being wound down.
Nova Leah
Nova Leah is the leader in cyber security for connected medical
devices and is an IoT investment made by Sure Valley Ventures. Nova
Leah sells directly to the top medical device manufactures
typically in Boston, MA and the west coast of the USA. The founder,
Anita Finnegan, is an expert in the area and originally built the
technology in a top medical device software research group in DKIT,
while doing a PhD. She later spun out the technology and developed
this market selling to several tier 1 medical device
manufacturers.
Sure Valley Ventures invested EUR750,000 in the company for
10.62% of the company fully diluted. After our investment which
closed on the 5th of October 2018 the company was successful in
obtaining the Irish government Disruptive Technology Fund (DTIF)
programme for EUR1.5 million.
The company is making good progress on its Annual Recurring
Revenues (ARR) and is in the final stages of completing a deal with
a major medical device company which will bring its ARR close to
the point where it can complete a follow-on funds raise. The
company is at the series A stage and we look forward to updating
the market once complete.
Admix Ltd
Technically Admix has developed what is called a Supply-Side
Platform (SSP) which enables developers to monetize 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.
Admix's proprietary ad formats have been developed together with
existing adtech players and are compatible with IAB/OpenRTB
standards, reducing the barriers to entry for advertisers. The
DSP's that Admix have connected to, are market-leading partners,
such as Pubmatic , that are amongst the largest platforms in the
world, used by thousands of brands and advertisers and processing
billions of impressions daily, which gives them scale.
To support its growth the company completed a Series A round on
the 31st of March 2020, raising $6.25 million with a pre-money
valuation which created a substantial uplift on our original
investment. The investment round was led by Force over Mass
investing $4m with participation from Speedinvest who invested
$450k and SVV investing $535k. Business has continued in a robust
manner and we look forward to updating the market soon with
progress.
VividQ Ltd
VividQ is a deep tech software company with world-leading
expertise in 3D holography. The company was founded in 2017 by a
team of expert engineers, mathematicians and computer scientists
from the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, and St Andrews, who
solved key technology barriers in the adoption of holographic
display.
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. While physically possible, the tremendous computing
requirements to create full-depth holographic display made it
unreachable for commercial applications.
VividQ continue to partner with some of the leading chip
manufacturers, hardware developers and users of holographic
display. The company announced a partnership with ARM Holdings in
the last quarter and signed its first major contract with a Chinese
and Hong Kong based car manufacturer. To assist with growth and
development the company announced a funding round on the 1(st) of
July 2021, raising GBP11m and attracting "deep-tech" institutional
investors to participate.
Ambisence
Ambisense's Ambisense's Ambilytics(TM) 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(TM)
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. These models identify the relationships,
patterns, and drivers hidden within the data and allow customers to
forecast and predict the behaviour of targeted environmental
pollutants.
Since completing our investment, Ambisense have identified
increasingly significant government backed infrastructure projects
which, via tender process, the Company have been successful in
winning. In two particular cases, the contractors concerned feared
that the technology they required 'didn't exist in the market', but
such is the power behind Ambylitics and the ability of the Company
to design effective and bespoke monitoring models, the Company has
been successful in winning these multi-year, recurring revenue
contracts.
The Company successfully operates on a break-even basis, despite
Covid-19 related issues. In fact, it has been successful in winning
new contracts due to their ability to solve for IOT monitoring
models, whatever the circumstances. Ambisence will now look to
complete its next funding round to help fund the opportunities it
is encountering.
Getvisibility
Visibility Blockchain Limited trading as Getvisibility was
established on the 31st of August 2017 by Ronan Murphy and Mark
Brosnan. The company has developed and launched a software platform
called Getvisibility targeting this data security sector. This
software delivers visibility over unstructured data, e.g., Word
documents or pdfs, for enterprises, by automatically, accurately,
and precisely scanning and classifying the data to a corporate
taxonomy using artificial intelligence (AI) at scale (NLP and
Neural Networks).
On 7 August 2020, Getvisibility announced that it had signed a
public sector distribution agreement with immixGroup, the leading
value-added distributor of enterprise IT for the U.S. public
sector. The agreement will allow Getvisibility to grow its public
sector business, accelerate sales cycles, and operate more
efficiently in the government market. Federal agencies will also be
able to deploy Getvisibility products on-premises and into their
existing cloud infrastructure.
Getvisibility is experiencing emerging interest to provide a
solution for EUC audit compliance which could represent a
substantial market vertical. Inbound interest has been expressed by
Accenture, KPMG, PWC and Grant Thornton. Getvisbility has started
work on an open API and SDK, this will facilitate easier and faster
integrations. Phase 1 is expected to be released in early Q2 and
the company has obtained advanced EIS assurance ahead of its series
A funding round.
The company successfully raised a further GBP1.1m (June 2021) in
Equity funding, led by a leading AI-based Industry player and the
company is building a significant pipeline of interest from large
organisations.
Buymie Technologies
Buymie is an on-demand grocery service, currently available in
Dublin, Ireland and Bristol, UK. An individual can order goods from
a selection of local stores such as Tesco and Lidl in Ireland and
the Co-op and Asda in the UK via the Buymie app and have them
delivered by a personal shopper in as little as 1 hour.
Sure Valley Ventures initially invested in Buymie's Seed round
in March 2020. The seed round was led by ACT Venture capital with
participation from Haatch Ventures, BVP Ventures, HBAN and
Enterprise Ireland.
Sure Valley subsequently participated in Buymie's Series A round
which was completed in June 2020. The total amount of capital
raised was EUR5,400,000 and was led by Wheatsheaf group. Buymie
have now partnered with Co-op, Lidl, Dunnes and are in talks with
other major UK and Irish Supermarket chains. The COVID19
environment is accelerating the growth of Buymie and the pace of
its expansion continues in an aggressive manner.
2020 saw Buymie solidify its position as a market mover with
several nominations for awards such as the EY Entrepreneur of the
Year award and various other awards and the recognition continues
into 2021 with Buymie now seen as one of the world's top retail
tech companies.
Volograms Limited
Volograms is an Augmented Reality (AR) capture and volumetric
video company. Volograms' technology enables users to capture
volumetric holograms (or volograms) of real people. By inserting
the 'Volograms' into videos, people can create their own immersive
Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) content for use in
apps, social media, and VR headsets.
The mobile AR market is forecast to grow from the one billion
compatible devices and over $8 billion in revenue in 2019 to 2.5
billion compatible devices and $60 billion in revenue by 2024. The
Volograms mobile product will enable mobile phone users to take AR
pictures and videos, then view, edit, and share them with others.
This can be done directly or through social media platforms.
We believe that Volograms is opening a new market category for
AR photos and video. This category should have much greater appeal
for content creators and social media users than the existing
static 3D content solutions on offer. Central to the company's
future success is (i) its OEM strategy (ii) consumers then adopting
the technology. Given this, the SVV deal team agreed with the
company that they would bring in some additional people with
experience of an OEM strategy and mobile consumer products. If
successful Volograms has the potential to be massively scalable and
potentially usher in the rapid expansion of the mobile AR
industry.
Pre-Cog Systems
Polience Limited t/a PreCog Systems is an InfoSec company that
has developed a proprietary system to counter terrorism, prevent
crime, support border control agencies and prevent people
trafficking. Governments, organisations and owners of property
assets and inventory need to understand the behaviour and intent of
visitors to their sites. They need novel technology to allow them
to react in real-time so that actions can be taken to understand
the complexities of their environments and to protect them from
harm and bad actors.
PreCog is a patent pending software solution that understands
visitor flow, protects borders, detects persons of interest and
ensures locations are protected from those who wish to cause damage
or commit crime. PreCog provides totally unique, scalable,
actionable intelligence solution. Customers include top UK and
International Government security and law enforcement agencies
& Transport infrastructure organisations.
Virtex
Virtex Stadium is an application that enables Esports organisers
to host their existing formats on a 3D entertainment platform,
offering millions of viewers a completely new viewing experience.
The company was founded in 2016 by Christoph Ortlepp and Tim
Mcguinness. It is based in London.
Their main application is the Virtex Stadium where users can
experience the Esports events they create and host. Users will be
able to download the application in the main PC VR app stores:
Oculus and Steam and use it with their VR headset of choice (e.g
Oculus Quest 2, Valve Index). Later on the company will provide a
2D version of the application as well as port to PSVR and
mobile/Oculus Quest.
Virtex's alpha prototype is currently accessible through the
Oculus platform, preview program, with tethered headsets. The new
stadium beta app is available on Oculus and SteamVR for private
demo-ing and testing. This allows Virtex to create the strongest
visual showcases needed to convince the major Esports organisers
and the company are planning to complete a seed raise in the coming
months.
Smarttech247
Smarttech247 is a multi-award-winning MDR (Managed Detection
& Response) company and a market leader in Security Operations.
Trusted by global organizations, Smarttech247 combine threat
intelligence with managed detection and response to provide
actionable insights, 24/7 threat detection, investigation, and
response. Smarttech247's service is geared towards proactive
prevention and this is done by utilizing the latest in cloud, big
data analytics and machine learning, along with Smarttech247's
industry leading incident response team.
Smarttech247's innovative services are designed to enhance the
efficacy of our customer's security infrastructure and deliver
business-sensitive cybersecurity solutions that build and optimize
your protection, detection and remediation strategies. Smarttech247
are certified to ISO9001, ISO27001 and Cyber Essentials to provide
assurance that customers receive consistently high-quality services
and that every aspect of their data and information security is
protected.
Since Investing the company has announced:
-- Smarttech247 has announced that it has been awarded a
multi-year contract for managed cyber security services by a global
advanced manufacturing company, employing over 100,000 staff and a
leading member of the Fortune Global-1000.
-- Smarttech247 has announced that it has been awarded a
purchase order with the value of EUR6 million for plant level
Operational Technology ("OT") cyber security services, with respect
to the contract announced by the Company on 24 June 2021.
DIRECT INVESTMENTS
Investments made directly by Sure Ventures plc:
Immotion PLC
This 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.
In February 2020, the company released a trading update stating
that they had deployed above 460 contracted headsets in high
footfall tourist attractions globally. This figure represented the
estimated number of headsets required to reach breakeven and sales
momentum was progressing at a strong pace.
The nature of Immotion's business meant that COVID 19 and
lockdown restrictions reduced their revenues dramatically. The
footfall at sites across the globe ground to a halt. The Management
team have done a good job of reducing costs and using the various
Governmental schemes available to keep the business funded.
In a recent trading update Immotion stated the following:
"H1 results to show a near EBITDA breakeven outcome on revenue
of circa GBP2.7m(*) . As previously announced, June 2021 was our
best ever monthly result with unaudited Group EBITDA of GBP126k on
revenue of GBP850k (an uplift on the previously estimated figures),
driven largely by the strong performance of the core Location-Based
Entertainment ("LBE") business.
We are further pleased to confirm that the second half of 2021
has started very strongly with July being yet another record month.
Unaudited Group revenue was GBP1m, with unaudited EBITDA at circa
GBP200k, a considerable increase versus June, taking the company
into overall EBITDA profitability for the year to date."
VividQ
Sure Ventures PLC has a further direct investment of GBP500,000
in VividQ, on top of its 25.9% exposure via its holding in Sure
Valley Ventures ICAV. The progress being made, the tie ups with
major global technology players and the pathway of holography
adoption being laid out provides a great deal of promise for the
future. (See previous VividQ paragraph above). This uplift in
valuation has positively impacted our NAV and we are very hopeful
for its performance in the future.
Sure Ventures Director, Gareth Burchell said,
"The Quarterly period has seen an appreciation in value across
both our direct investment and our investment in Sure Valley
Ventures (ICAV) which has lifted the NAV to 1.0844p a share. This
represents a 17.79% uplift quarter on quarter. The progress being
made by the investee companies has been exceptional over the last 2
years and we are now starting to see that uplift being represented
in the NAV of the fund. The success rate of "Seed" to "Series A
fundings achieved by the team at Sure Valley Ventures is something
to be applauded. With new investments in companies such as Smartech
247, Virtex and Pre-cog systems showing that the pipeline of new
opportunities remains as strong as ever.
For further information, please visit www.sureventuresplc.com or
contact:
Gareth Burchell Sure Ventures plc +44 (0) 20 7186 9918
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. 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
GBP400,000 over the next 12 months. Website:
https://www.sureventuresplc.com/
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