Programmatic advertising and social media influencer marketing company engage:BDR has announced it has listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX).
The company’s recent IPO capital raising was heavily oversubscribed. After scaling back its oversubscriptions, engage:BDR issued 50 million shares at $0.20 per share, and 30 million tradable options exercisable at 25 cents per share (for three years) to raise $10 million.
It is expected to have an IPO market capitalisation on listing day of approximately $50 million.
engage:BDR was founded by ex-Myspace strategic marketing chief Ted Dhanik, Kurtis Rintala and Kenneth Kwan, and is led by a board which includes non-executive director Tom Anderson, who co-founded Myspace in 2003.
The company has developed proprietary programmatic technology to manage internet video and display advertising for advertising agencies, as well as the websites that display those ads.
It acts as an intermediary between advertisers and publishers, and consolidates vast amounts of advertising inventory, automates complicated workflows and offers precise targeting capabilities to advertisers at significant scale.
The company has also developed an influencer marketing product called IconicReach, which provides unique capabilities for Instagram through such activities as discovering influencers for a specific marketing campaign, providing engagement data to better vet influencers, measuring advertisers’ return on investment, providing comprehensive reporting and data analytics systems, and allowing brands to launch campaigns across hundreds of pages with one click.
Dhanik, who is also the CEO of engage:BDR, said the company is committing all of the IPO proceeds to a range of growth initiatives, and that there was no vendor sell-down in the IPO.
“The founders willingly entered into voluntary stock escrow arrangements in relation to all their shares to demonstrate to investors that they are committed to the long-term growth of our business,” he said.
“The IPO provides us with capital to help drive our next stage of growth in a very high-growth market.”
