Versarien raises £1.5m to scale up graphene manufacturing

Versarien has raised £1.5m from an oversubscribed equity placing in order to scale up its graphene manufacturing and marketing capabilities.

The company initially aimed to to raise about £1.0m at 15p, but due to strong demand the company decided to increase the size of the placing to raise £1.5m from just over 10m shares.

Henderson Global Investors and Miton subscribed for 1.33m new shares each, with each investor holding more than 10% of Versarien.

The new shares will be admitted to trade on AIM on 10 March and the company will have 131.33m shares of 1p each in issue, with none in treasury.

Chief executive Neill Ricketts said: "The funds raised will allow us to significantly scale up both our graphene manufacturing capabilities and our marketing efforts to take advantage of the substantial commercial opportunities we are seeing.

“Versarien is at the forefront of the commercialisation of graphene and the fundraising will allow us to more widely market our recently launched graphene brand, Nanene, and increase the resources available to the other graphene projects we are working on. We look forward to these funds allowing us to accelerate the use of graphene in a variety of commercial applications."

Shares in Versarien were up 6.14% to 16.98p at 1239 GMT.