AI firm Albert Technologies announces proposed conditional placing to raise up to £13.6m

Albert Technologies Ltd (LON:ALB), the developer of AI marketing platform Albert, today announces a proposed conditional placing to raise up to £13.6 million.

According to a regulatory filing with the LSE, the company will place up to 36,756,757 new ordinary shares of NIS0.01 each in its share capital at a price of 37 pence per placing share. The placing will be conducted by way of an accelerated bookbuild process. The placing price represents a discount of approximately 1.3% to the closing price on May 30, 2018, the last trading day prior to today’s announcement.

The Board intends to use the proceeds of the placing to expand Albert Technologies’s direct sales and marketing activities to support continued growth in its client numbers, as well as to increase the use of Albert within the company’s current customers’ digital advertising and media buying campaigns. The company also aims to continue to invest in the development and enhancement of Albert. Furthermore, the proceeds from the placing will be used to provide general working capital to the company.

The company notes that 2017 was a significant year of transition and evolution of Albert Technologies as it closed its legacy indirect business to focus exclusively on Albert, the company’s proprietary technology.

In 2017, the company marked some achievements in its execution strategy. It made significant progress in deploying a strategy that allowed it to combine a sales strategy that could focus on both small-to-medium-sized business customers as well as large brands and global enterprises. Several strategic partnerships and relationships with global advertising agencies and distribution partners were established in the 2017 financial year.

As at December 31, 2017, Albert Technologies had cash, cash equivalents and short-term bank deposits of US$11.1 million. As stated in the preliminary results of the company for the year to December 31, 2017, the Board has adopted a contingency plan to reduce costs in the absence of additional funding to allow it to continue to meet its obligations.

The Board believes that the company has an excellent opportunity to capitalise on increasing engagement and interest in the use of AI technology in digital advertising campaigns and to fully exploit the pipeline of opportunities created by the progress made over the last 15 months with the Albert SaaS model. Therefore, the net proceeds of the Placing will provide the company with the capital required to not only enable it continue to invest in the ongoing development and enhancement of Albert to maintain, what the Directors believe is, a market leading AI marketing platform, but also to continue to convert the pipeline of opportunities into customers and increase its sales and marketing presence to expand the Company’s reach.

Since the start of 2018, the company has:

• signed a pilot agreement with one of the top five global advertising agencies;
• secured a 12-month contract with one of the top 25 independent advertising agencies in North America;
• started a pilot project with one of Europe’s leading telecommunications companies;
• commenced a pilot project with a Fortune 50 consumer goods corporation, in a key Latin American territory;
• begun a pilot project with one of the top five retailers in Latin America; and
• started a pilot project with one of the world’s biggest insurance companies.

Albert Technologies has registered a threefold increase in average monthly revenue per customer during the period from March 2017 to March 2018 and monthly recurring revenues in March had increased to US$0.36 million, approximately four times greater than that in March 2017. Revenue for the first quarter of 2018 was approximately US$1 million, over five times the amount of Q1 revenues for 2017.