REG - Sure Ventures PLC - Portfolio Update Quarter 3 2021

Sure VenturesAnnouncement

25/11/2021 09:10

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RNS Number : 5896T  Sure Ventures PLC  25 November 2021

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

Portfolio Update Q3 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 €7million 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 €1.00 per share. The current
NAV of the Sure Valley Ventures ICAV is 112.619 EUR

Sure Valley has several investments across the AI, AR, VR and IoT sectors:

VR Education Holdings now Engage XR Holdings PLC (https://engagevr.io/)

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.€1.25 million, an increase of 84% on the prior year (H1
2020: €0.68 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. Name change has now
taken place and the company is now called Engage XR holdings PLC with a
metaverse focus. Engage now quates to 72% of total group revenues with a
compound annual growth rate of over 100%.

WarDucks - www.warducks.com (http://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 (http://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 (http://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 €4 million
in a Series A Investment Round (Announced 11th 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 was

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 1st 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/ (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 €300,000 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 €750,000 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 €1.5 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.

Admix raised their series B funding round in October 2021 and that falls into
the next quarter NAV calculation and NAV period, but the $25m round
represented a 1500% uplift from our original investment.

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 1st of
July 2021, raising £11m and attracting "deep-tech" institutional investors to
participate.

Ambisence

Ambisense's 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. 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. Ambisence also closed out a 3
million Euro round to fund growth with BGF (One of Irelands leading growth
capital investors) during the quarter.

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 £1.1m (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 €5,400,000
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 €6 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
£2.7m*. As previously announced, June 2021 was our best ever monthly result
with unaudited Group EBITDA of £126k on revenue of £850k (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 £1m, with unaudited EBITDA at circa £200k, 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 £500,000 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,

"This quarter has seen rises in the value of both engage XR (VREducation of
old) and Immotion PLC. Those uplifts, plus the mark-up in value of the
ambisence round has covered most of the costs of the period with the NAV
calculation down by 1.1% at 107.22, which means we are trading currently at a
9.9% discount to the current market price.

However, the very exciting uplift in value occurred just after quarter end
with the Series B round of Admix, representing a 1500% uplift from our
original Investment. We have a number of portfolio companies approaching that
stage of their funding cycle and as a board member and AIFM team member I am
very confident in the progress this will bring to the Q4 NAV in January"

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
£400,000 over the next 12 months. Website: https://www.sureventuresplc.com/

 

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