Audioboom in talks with Chinese fund on $8m investment

Audioboom Group, the spoken word audio on-demand platform, said it was in talks with an unnamed Chinese fund on a potential $8m investment to accelerate growth adding that it was considering a strategic acquisition.

Any funds raised from a Chinese deal would not be used for working capital purposes, Audioboom said in a statement. The company said it expected a formal agreement by the end of September.

The investment will be conditional on the chief executive Rob Proctor, accepting a loan from the fund of around $0.5m to be used to buy shares at the same price as the fund pays.

Audioboom said it was in informal talks to buy SONR News Limited, primarily for the purpose of obtaining its engineering team and Neuro-Linguistic Programming and Artificial Intelligence algorithms.

"The board believes that the acquisition of SONR has the potential to accelerate the company's speed to market of the ad-serving platform, through acquiring the required engineering/coding team and specialist algorithms," Audioboom said.

Property tycoon and former Audioboom non-executive director Nick Candy and Proctor have a combined 27.6% interest in SONR.

There were also interim results from the company on Friday, which reported revenue up to £0.32m from £0.19m, adding that booked revenue in the second half was already ahead of the first half's total.

Total platform listens soared to 222mln from 123mln last year.

The company also said it had already raised a separate £2.55m by the issue of 102.2m new shares at 2.5p each to new and existing investors to fund working capital and acceleration of the growth in the business.

The new ordinary shares will represent approximately 16%. Audioboom said of the raising's net proceeds about £0.9m would be used for working capital, £1.2m on technical development and £0.25m for content acquisition and creative initiatives.