Blackbird raises £8m to develop technology offering

Video technology company Blackbird announced a placing to raise £8m on Wednesday, to develop its technology offering, grow its teams, expand its patent portfolio, and conduct market research.

The AIM-traded firm said the placing would consist of 28,571,429 new shares at a price of 28p each, raising £8m before expenses.

It said the placing shares were placed with existing and new investors, with certain members of its board and their family members subscribing for a total of £0.41m in the placing, of which £0.38m would be subscribed by chief executive officer Ian McDonough and his family members.

The placing shares would represent about 7.8% of the company’s issued share capital as enlarged by the placing.

Blackbird said it planned to develop its existing ‘Powered by Blackbird’ (PBB) intellectual property to take advantage of opportunities within the creator economy, enterprise video and content distribution markets.

It said the estimated net proceeds of £7.6m would be used to develop its technology offering in new markets, grow its software engineering, product and business development teams, expand its patent portfolio, and conduct “appropriate” research, prototyping and market testing of new technology developments.

“With our core business in rude health we are incredibly excited to announce a placing to raise £8m to enter new markets with our ‘Powered by Blackbird’ intellectual property,” said CEO Ian McDonough.

“Recent contract wins for the company include Univision, Eurovision Sport and a further expansion with TownNews to 80 regional US stations.

“‘Powered by Blackbird’ already has its first customer in our current sector focus of professional media and entertainment.”

McDonough said the company was also recently awarded ‘Best Tech Company 2021’ by the SportsPro OTT awards.

“While our reputation builds in the professional media and entertainment vertical, our technology has advanced through API development and the first ‘Powered by Blackbird’ licence deal has shown our applicability to companies across multiple video markets.

“The creator economy, enterprise video and content distribution markets are of huge scale and have attractive growth rates offering a massive opportunity built around our existing intellectual property.”

At 1143 GMT, shares in Blackbird were down 6.31% at 28.58p.