IXUP rejoins the boards with a bang after $5.75m placement

Data analytics company IXUP (ASX:IXU) announced “firm commitments” for a $5.75m share placement this morning.

The company came out of a nine-day trading halt to announce the news, along with a push into the global gaming sector and some board changes.

Shares in the company rallied to a multi-year high of 9c, although the stock is still off its November 2017 listing price of 20c.

Share placement

The IXUP share placement will see the company issue 104,545,455 fully paid ordinary shares at 5.5c.

At current prices, that leaves investors with a tidy 63 per cent gain on their money.

IXUP said the placement received strong demand from “institutional investors, strategic investors along with high net worth individuals, including new non-executive chairman Julian Babarczy”.

Babarczy invested $250,000 as part of the share placement, and assumed the chairmanship following the resignation of Grant Paterson.

He joins the board following a 14-year career at investment firm Regal Funds Management (also an IXUP shareholder), from where he resigned in January.

IXUP also announced it has appointed a new CEO, with Marcus Gracey stepping into the role after joining the company as a non-executive director on October 22.

Along with the share placement and board news, IXUP also announced a strategic partnership with US digital gaming company Tekkorp Capital LLC.

As part of the agreement, Tekkorp will identity and assess commercial opportunities in the digital gaming and wagering markets in which it operates, where IXUP can deploy its core technology.

In return, Tekkorp will be granted up to 40m unlisted options with an exercise price of 10c, dependent on the satisfaction of various commercial objectives.

Commenting on the outlook, Babarczy said he was optimistic about the commercial applications of IXUP’s “world-leading encryption technology”.

Along with its existing verticals, Babarczy said the gaming sector could also be a key growth driver where IXUP’s use case has the “potential to become fundamental to industry operations and regulations”.