Special Report: Crowd Media’s $4m share placement is reflective of growing investor confidence in the board and management team.

For social commerce company Crowd Media (ASX:CM8), 2020 has been all about executing on the strategic vision laid out at the company’s AGM in November last year.

And the company’s $4m share placement earlier this week is evidence that sophisticated investors are starting to take notice of its market-leading technology.

Crowd completed the raise on Monday via the issuance of 80m shares at 5c.

And speaking with Stockhead following the announcement, CEO Domenic Carosa said the company is at an exciting juncture following the beta-version rollout of its Talking Head platform.

“We really believe that technology has the capacity to revolutionise ecommerce, in terms of the ability to create 1-to-1 relationships between influencers and their followers,” Carosa said.

Future of ecommerce

The Talking Head technology is underpinned by Crowd’s AI-based Q&A platform, which has built a proprietary dataset based on over 180 million customer conversations since inception.

“So the investment will go towards further building out that tech and commercial stack, and we’re going to pay down some debt,” Carosa said.

“There’s quite a few moving parts right now so we took the opportunity to strengthen the balance sheet. That allows us to focus operationally so we don’t have to worry about capital structures or capital raisings for the foreseeable future.”

In addition, investor feedback was representative of the fact that Crowd has established a track record of execution towards its strategy objectives.

“We’re quite fortunate in that we had a number of funds and family offices join this raising, who I think had taken note of the CM8 turnaround story,” Carosa said.

Already in 2020 Crowd has established strong momentum with a number of distribution partnerships across major ecommerce channels in the US market.

And the company’s digital marketing expertise gives it an opportunity to build a first-mover advantage in where the industry is heading.

“Our Q&A technology is quite unique, in that as far as I know we’re the only company in the world that has a hybrid AI/human way to answer customer questions,” Carosa said.

“Today 65 per cent of all customer queries on our platform are answered by AI, and the rest are answered by real people.

“So it’s about combining tech and people to ultimately provide a better quality customer experience.”

Carosa added that the potential of the technology didn’t go unnoticed by London-based company chairman Steven Schapera, who joined the business in 2019.

Schapera recognised the Q&A chatbot platform as an “unpolished gem in Crowd that no one else saw”, Carosa said.

And he’s now overseeing a board-led strategic turnaround which leaves Crowd well-placed to capitalise on the future of ecommerce.

This article was developed in collaboration with Crowd Media, a Stockhead advertiser at the time of publishing.

This article does not constitute financial product advice. You should consider obtaining independent advice before making any financial decisions.

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