Teacher recruitment app Schrole ready for $6m backdoor listing

Teacher recruitment platform Schrole will complete a backdoor listing in the next few weeks via Aquaint Capital, a wannabe property investor that’s been in administration since June last year.

Schrole offers a subscription-based platform that lets schools fill relief teaching roles by uploading jobs to an app.

The Aquaint shell will cost about $2 million in cash and shares (paid to Aquaint shareholders, creditors and deal facilitator Xcell).

Schrole (pronounced scroll) founder Robert Graham assured Stockhead there would also be no ex-Aquaint board members popping up in the newly named Schrole Group.

Schrole’s $6 million raising at 2c a share has proved popular, with the offer closing early. The new company will list with a market cap of $11.7 million.

Schrole had been pursuing a listing since January 2016 because it couldn’t find anyone willing to fund a software company, Mr Graham said.

“We’d already proved our product and we have a good market share in our schools. But we haven’t been able to grow at the speed we wanted to,” he said.

Still, they’ve expanded the number of schools using the relief teacher management app Cover from 11 to 104. Schools using the international school teacher recruitment software Connect have risen from 60 to 106.

They did this with a $50,000 cash balance at the end of last year, and sales revenue that’s fallen from $3.5 million in 2015 to $1.6 million in fiscal 2017.

Schrole’s loss for the year to June 2016 was $1.3 million, compared to a $715,826 profit a year earlier.

Mr Graham blamed this on the mining crunch and the costly nature of startup tech spending.

The business was originally a registered training organisation (now a subsidiary called ETAS), which was closely tied to the mining sector.

The original Schrole vendors will own 27.2 per cent of the company. Mr Graham will initially own 13.5 per cent but can increase his stake by hitting certain milestones.

With a new float of 580 million shares on issue, there are 290 million performance shares available to the original Schrole owners if they hit targets including doubling the number of schools using the apps and hitting $7 million in revenue within two years.