BGF portfolio company, Dianomi, a provider of native digital advertising services to premium clients in the Financial Services and Business sectors, has listed on the AIM market of the London Stock Exchange.
BGF – the UK & Ireland’s most active growth capital investor – invested GB{6.3 million in Dianomi in February 2018 to drive international expansion and support the growth of its team.
The AIM listing for Dianomi represents the first UK IPO of a BGF portfolio company. The IPO price represents a market capitalisation on admission of GBP82.0 million.
Dianomi, which was set up by co-founders Rupert Hodson (CEO), Raphael Queisser (COO) and Cabell de Marcellus (CTO) in 2003, has offices in London, New York and Sydney. Last year in FY20, revenues grew by 58.8 per cent over FY19 to GBP28.4 million and operating profit grew from GBP0.3 million to GBP2.0 million.
The Group enables premium brands to deliver native advertisements to a targeted audience across the desktop and mobile websites and Apps of premium publishers. It provides over 400 advertisers, including blue chip names such as Aberdeen Standard, Invesco and Baillie Gifford, with access to an international audience of 438 million devices per month through its partnerships with over 300 premium publishers of business and finance content, including blue chip names such as Reuters, Bloomberg and WSJ. Adverts served are contextually relevant to the content of the webpages on which they appear and mirror the style of the page, which enhances reader engagement.
Rupert Hodson, Chief Executive Officer of Dianomi, says: “We believed when we founded Dianomi that digital advertising spend would surpass print. This has proved to be true and in the last four years digital advertising has truly taken off, particularly in our core financial market and is predicted in the US to reach USD23.6 billion in 2021, an increase of over 100 per cent from 2017.
“Consumers have now transferred in large numbers to reading news online via phone, tablet or laptop, this has created significant sustainable organic growth for Dianomi, as well as opportunities to expand our presence in the mobile and video segments alongside entering new sectors where our premium positioning can naturally transfer. Today’s IPO is therefore intended to help accelerate our ability to take advantage of these opportunities.”
Matthew Singh, Investor at BGF who sits on the board of Dianomi, says: “This is a significant milestone for BGF. Since we backed Dianomi in 2018, the Company has performed extremely well, growing profitably and demonstrating a strong network effect that has seen it win strategic relationships and continue to build its roster of tier-one publishers and advertisers.
“The acceleration in performance we saw through the Covid period has persisted, with the digital marketing backdrop buoyant as consumption of online content has grown and advertising budgets have shifted to digital channels. Unaudited revenue in Q1 of the current financial year was 49.7 per cent. ahead of the same period in the prior year, demonstrating the growth momentum of the business.”
Matthew Singh will remain on the board of Dianomi to help the company transition to the quoted markets. Laura Shesgreen, former CFO & Vice President of Finance at Skype, has been appointed to the board as an independent non-executive director.
Andy Gregory, Chief Investment Officer of BGF, says: “As the first UK IPO of a BGF portfolio company this is
