Actually, they have nothing to do with dance music, despite the name. Sheffield/Silicon Valley-based WANdisco (Wide Area Network Distributed Computing), the self-styled ‘leading provider of global collaboration software’, is to float on AIM.
Frankly, I’d never heard of them before (indeed part of the reason for the IPO is to increase visibility), but a quick squizz through today’s announcement makes very interesting reading.
First, they turned over $3.9m (dollars) last year (+30%) and turned (adjusted) EBITDA-positive (but I assume everything below that begins with a minus sign).
Second, they have been fully self-funding since its incorporation in 2005.
Third, co-founder, chairman and CEO, David Richards, has a bit of a history in start-ups and exits, amongst others being part of the Druid team when (then) FI Group made its almost ruinous £0.76b acquisition.
Fourth, they’ve signed up ex-Sage CEO, Paul Walker, as NED.
Management hopes to raise £10m (pounds), of which the largest chunk, $6m (dollars), will be used to develop a new product for the Big Data market. The rest is for the usual stuff, with a bit set aside for M&A.
Now, how you view these snippets is up to you (and potential investors), but it really looks like a bold move to me. Nonetheless, if successful, this will be the first UK software and IT services IPO since that of Escher Group last August (see here) (and not Ubisense as we had said in an earlier version of this post! Special prize goes to a Mr. G. O'Connor at Panmure for correctly spotting our deliberate mistake).