Martello Sells $7.5 Million in Private Shares, Preps Its SD-WAN for What’s Next
June 6, 2018
In preparation of going public on the TSX Venture Exchange (TSXV), the Canadian stock exchange, SD-WAN and performance management provider Martello sold $7.5 million worth of shares in a non-brokered private placement.
A number of current investors purchased the private shares of Martello. These include investment firm Donville Kent, Martello employees and their families, high net worth individuals, and large institutional funds. Martello President and CEO John Proctor said the company had been looking to make $6 million, but the demand for the shares exceeded expectations.
The company will complete a reverse takeover with Newcastle Energy Corporation in order to go public and become a technology issuer on the exchange. Newcastle is already listed on the TSXV and is an investor in Martello.
This private placement was meant as a way to have better financial resources that will make liquidity easier, when the company does go public, and to expand certain areas of the business, including sales. Part of the reason this liquidity is important is because the vendor wants to acquire other companies, Proctor said.
Martello is poising itself to “make all the really cool stuff happen,” Proctor said. “The networks out there are getting more and more complicated, more and more congested, and we wanted to really simplify and make that environment more efficient.”
One way it plans to accelerate its growth is with new mergers and acquisitions, an area in which the company has placed specific focus in the past. Proctor said Martello looks for smaller companies that are “doing something very specific in the network environment” that aligns with its work. He continued that Martello is “very keen” to welcome companies as “a part of our family” and retain the main focus of the acquired company’s technologies.
In January Martello acquired SD-WAN vendor Elfiq Networks, and in April the companies debuted their joint SD-WAN platform Atlas. Atlas is a subscription-based SD-WAN service that includes a hardware platform, edge, a virtual private network (VPN), stream, and a firewall.
In moving forward and expanding its business, Martello is placing particular emphasis on expanding its SD-WAN product line with unified communications. The company intends to take the unified communication capabilities, tools, and analytics it has and apply them to its Atlas SD-WAN environment in an effort to help with real-time service.
Proctor also said that they are working with a number of partners to “license our SD-WAN technology in a number of different scenarios,” including a mixture of hardware and operating system environments where SD-WAN can take a supportive role.
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