SURE Sure Ventures Plc

TIDMSURE

RNS Number : 1549P

Sure Ventures PLC

16 February 2021

Sure Ventures plc ('Sure Ventures' or 'the Company')

Portfolio Update Q4 2020 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 1.0078 Euros.

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.

There has also been Engage contracts signed in Japan and China via its HTC global sales relationship. The board of VRE are pleased with the progress made and put the accelerated adoption down to COVID19 and the benefits Engage offers Educators and Businesses alike in the working from home environment. ENGAGE revenue and user base is up by 550% and more than 700% respectively, now accounting for more than 40% of Group revenues (FY19: 9%). This is in line with the ENGAGE growth plan, with strong momentum carried into FY21.

     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 and brought on the famous game designer John Romero in 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.

To enable the company to take this product to the market it completed a series A round of EUR3.284 million in Q1 2019, with new investors EQT investing EUR2.58 million, Sure Valley following on to maintain its percentage with EUR453,858.32 and existing investors making up the remaining investment. The transaction completed on the 29th of March 2019. The latest product is in Alpha. Sure Valley originated and invested EUR300,043 this company at pre-money valuation of EUR2.5 million and followed on with an investment of EUR453,858.32 at a pre-money valuation of EUR10,000,000. As a result, Sure Valley holds 10.10% of the company on a fully diluted basis. The company recently hosted a visit in their offices from Tim Cook, CEO of Apple to meet the team and view the game. Tim gave team a public endorsement shortly afterwards.

   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. The service focuses on:

-- Occupancy and Space Utilisation

-- Energy Utilisation

-- Regulation Compliance

As part of this platform Wia created their own DFS-1 directional motion sensor. The Wia DFS-1 is a whole new way to measure the in-flow and out-flow of people to create safer, greener, and more human-centric buildings. The Wia DFS-1 has been deployed at a number of customer sites including Hubspot and Irish Distillers in Dublin.

   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.

Pre Covid-19 the company was performing exceptionally well and to support the company grow rapidly Sure Valley invested a further EUR750,000 in convertible debt (EUR250,000 in Q1 2019, EUR250,000 in Q2, 2019 and EUR250,000 in Q4, 2019) and Enterprise Ireland invested EUR250,000 in Q3, 2019. This quarter Covid-19 has led to a short-term drop in revenues as logistics and delivery businesses were closed or inactive. Despite this the management team have done an excellent job of managing cash.

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. We have followed on in the Series A round and hold just over 13% of the enlarged share capital. The increased reliance on logistics and the focus on vehicle safety continues to drive demand for the Cameramatics solution.

   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 at the moment 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 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, and later she spun out the technology and developed the 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 the Irish government Disruptive Technology Fund (DTIF) programme for EUR1.5 million.

The company is making good progress on its Annual Recuring Revenues (ARR) and is in the final stages of completing a deal with major medical device company which will bring its ARR close to the point where it can complete a follow-on raise, which is planned to start in early 2021.

Admix Ltd

Admix is an advertising platform for AR/VR developers. The company is based in London and is led by Samuel Huber as CEO, Joe Bachle-Morris as COO and Mark Rich as CTO. 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.

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 does this by establishing connections to major Demand-Side Platforms (DSP) such as Pubmatic who then in turn connect to Advertisers.

Due to increased content consumption driven by the "Lockdown environment", the expansion of the sales team into new jurisdictions and some major gaming brands, both the supply pipeline and direct campaign pipeline is building at a significant pace.

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.

Arm Blueprint featured VividQ in November. As part of their ongoing collaboration with Arm, VividQ CEO Darran Milne was invited to contribute to the Arm Blueprint blog "delivering executive insight and inspiring stories from people using Arm technology". VividQ was shortlisted for two Cambridge Independent Science and Technology Awards in November. On December 10(th) VividQ CEO Darran Milne joined Bernard Kress (Microsoft) and Christophe Peroz (ex-Magic Leap) for their monthly SPIE Fireside Chat

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 use 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.

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.

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. Delivery charges from EUR3.99 (free for orders over EUR100), up to 30% cheaper than visiting a traditional convenience store. More convenient than traditional eCommerce platforms reducing the environmental impact of grocery shopping.

Sure Valley Ventures initially invested in Buymie's Seed round in March 2020, investing EUR300,000 at a pre-money valuation of EUR8,000,000 giving SVV a fully diluted equity position of 3%. 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, the investment arm of the Grosvenor estate. The pre-money valuation was EUR15,000,000. SVV invested EUR510,000 and has a fully diluted equity position of 5.05%.

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. December GMV came in at EUR1,5m and January has started strongly with and Buymie are currently forecasting EUR2M GMV which shows that they have grown over 6x in the last 6 months. The GMV run rates is currently EUR30M this year at the base line level.

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.

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.

Immotion signed a contract to provide a new Undersea Explorer VR Theatre at Clearwater Marine Aquarium in Florida, USA. This is expected to open in March 2021. This was announced alongside a trading update that gave a "more positive" view of trading conditions in the US, Australia than in UK sites. The Management have done a great job of selling content direct to consumers via their "lets explore" interactive learning experience.

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).

Sure Ventures Director, Gareth Burchell said, "Given the level of and prolonged disruption to the global economic backdrop caused by COVID 19, we are very pleased with the progress made by our portfolio companies. The Cameramatics Series A funding at another significant uplift in valuation to our initial seed investment was a key highlight, although its completion slipped into Q1 of 2021.

The progress being made by both the direct and indirect investments in the portfolio has been very encouraging indeed and we note the announcement on the 12(th) of February 2021 from Pires Investments PLC, who have taken a 28% stake in Sure Ventures PLC. They were prepared to pay a 30% premium to our share price by way of a "share swap" (In Pires "PIRI.L" shares) to gain increased exposure to our investments".

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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February 16, 2021 02:00 ET (07:00 GMT)