£tern a review of how the company curates the investments and hopes to brings about nav progression.
Tern PLC provides venture capital funding to high growth UK companies, taking influential positions (25% or more at Series A funding) in business proven companies with a significant cornerstone customer. The investment sweet spot is between £1m and £10m. Rigorous investment analysis is done before investing with disruptive tech, financial strength and low capital needs important. FY 2019 results were published in May 2020 and after started life as a very small shell investment company 2019 became the year for executing the business model.
Tern’s investment focus is the internet of things, mainly in the fast growing medical and industrial space. The Chairman ( Scottish, based in Seattle ) and CEO (highly experienced, lives in Californian) are both known industry figures. The CFO is based in the London HQ. Tern started as a shell company and currently has 4 investments with Device Authority the biggest asset at £14m. The plan is to have 10-12 ‘club holdings’ and ‘1,2 or 3’ new holdings are in the final stages of due diligence. News is expected before the year end. The existing and potentially new investments are fully funded after recent fund raises. As with venture capital investments there is a focus on the exit with multiple historic funding’s helping move up the exit price.
The current market cap is £23m (YE net assets of £18.9m) and the FY19 NAV was 7p . The coronavirus crisis has brought the investment CEO’s much more together and inter investment business have resulted. Important KPIs, used by the CEO to show progress are kept simple like total head count and revenues. A total portfolio approach is used. Interim results are due on the 21/9.
The Zoom introductory meeting was with Al Sisto, the CEO and Sarah Payne, the CFO, linked California, Buckinghamshire and Putney. As Al stated, things at the PLC are ‘considerably better than thought’ with CV bringing about better internal communication and a meaningful business introductions, linking the two largest investments and a UK car company for ventilator production. Currently 60% of the CEO’s time is spent with the partner investments and 40% looking for new ones. This is a flip over since cv-19. There are ONLY 5 full time employees and the CEO owns 3.5% of the PLC.
Tern started with three small…
