Path Investments plc (LON:PATH) Chief Executive Officer Christopher Theis caught up with DirectorsTalk to discuss the £3.5 million fundraise, what the proceeds will be used for and what investors should know about the company.
Q1: Chris, you’ve announced a £3.5 million fundraise earlier, Path Investments will be new to many of our viewers so could you just give us an overview of the company and what your focus is on?
A1: We originally listed on the standard list in 2017 as a cash shell and we set about looking for opportunities to acquire assets or companies which would be both cash generative and showed some capital growth for shareholders.
We raised at the time £1 million and we’ve eked that out for the last four years and we’ve looked at a number of transactions but for various reasons we weren’t happy with what we saw in the end. So, we’ve raised another £3.5 million today, we are looking at a number of very exciting opportunities and we do hope to get back to shareholders in due course on this.
The money is being used to further our investment strategy.
Q2: Moving forward, you’ll be receiving the £3.5 million in the coming weeks, that’ll be when the prospectus is published, can you tell us a bit more about why you’ve raised the funds now and how you intend to deploy them?
A2: Raising money now is a function of negotiation power for acquisitions, quite often the most attractive acquisitions are, in my opinion, quite a lot of people say to you ‘that’s fine but show me the money’.
With a number of the potential acquisitions we’ve been looking at, there’s a certain commonality in terms of cash requirements. So, having the cash available at this stage to have those meaningful conversations with the companies means that we’re in a much much stronger position to extract the sort of deal we want to be doing for shareholders.
Q3: These are obviously exciting times for Path Investments and there appear to be plenty of potential opportunities, is there anything else that people should know about the company?
A3: I think we’ve got a very experienced group of directors and they are experienced in an awful lot of sectors. They’re very well versed with the entire acquisition format in terms of the requirement for the prospectuses and the various markets and the various investors and what investors are specifically looking for. So, I think we have a very strong edge there to able to deliver on that and transactions, as I say, shareholders I’m sure will find attractive.
Our backgrounds are from the corporate finance, from the research and from the general corporate world and also, having founded a number of companies myself, quite a bit of experience in the M&A world, as indeed do the others.
So, all in all, I think as a team we are very well set for finding that acquisition which we believe we can deliver on which shareholders will be expecting us to do so.