Investment Trust Insider on Augmentum Fintech – James Carthew: good luck to Augmentum, it may get financial startups right
Augmentum Fintech (AUGM) has just published its first set of annual results, covering the period from launch up to the end of March 2019. At that point, it had committed 75% of the £94 million it raised in its flotation and had a war chest of £15 million. It has since spent £8.5 million of this with the announcement of top-up investments in three of its existing holdings.
The board would like to see the company expand and, having delivered decent growth in net asset value (NAV) since the initial public offer (IPO) March last year, it probably stands a good chance of achieving that aim, markets and shareholders permitting.
Shareholders are being asked to approve the issuance of up to £150 million of shares before 31 March 2020 and the fund is trying to raise £30 million of that now. The managers have a £450 million pipeline of potential investments earmarked for the proceeds of any fundraise.
I wrote about Augmentum in August last year. At the time, it had acquired a seed portfolio that included stakes in Zopa and Interactive Investor and we were waiting for it to start deploying the balance of its flotation proceeds.
The deals began very shortly afterwards – £7 million allocated to three companies, digital bank Tide, DueDil, a provider of information on private companies, and… read more here