SD-WAN Provider Martello Goes Public on TSX Venture Exchange
Ali Longwell
September 12, 2018
SD-WAN and performance management provider Martello Technologies went public today on Canada’s TSX Venture Exchange (TSXV).
While Martello President and CEO John Proctor said “there was no placement concurrent with our TSX listing today,” Bloomberg reported that the company traded at $0.34 per share, up from its private placement price of $0.12 per share. Martello listed its shares on the TSXV under the symbol “MTLO.”
In preparation for going public, Martello completed a reverse takeover of Vancouver-based shell company Newcastle Energy in August. The takeover helped the company prepare for its public offering by becoming a technology issuer on the exchange. Newcastle was already listed on the TSXV and is an investor in Martello.
Additionally, in June, the firm sold $7.5 million worth of shares in a non-brokered private placement. These private shares were purchased by current investors, including Martello employees and their families, and were valued at $0.48 per share.
At the time of the private placement, Proctor told SDxCentral that this was a move to make liquidity easier when the company did go public to expand certain areas of the business. Particularly, Proctor said that going public would create “an environment where we have the ability to acquire and merge with new companies.”
Proctor wrote in an email to SDxCentral today that Martello’s “ambitious growth strategy includes organic growth and growth through acquisitions. We’re looking to build or buy technologies that are accretive to our ‘powering network performance’ mission, to solve more of our customers’ problems.”
In April, Martello acquired Elfiq Networks to launch its SD-WAN platform, Atlas. Atlas is a subscription-based SD-WAN service. It includes a new hardware platform called Edge, a virtual private network (VPN) called Stream, and a firewall.
The company claims its SD-WAN technology can manage over 500 interconnected sites with a single controller without performance degradation.
Martello intends to continue this “build and buy” strategy, according to Proctor. “You can expect to see more acquisition activity from Martello in 2018,” he said.
Martello is an Ottawa, Canada-based company that develops software and hardware for cloud-hosted unified communications and network performance monitoring and diagnostics, including its new SD-WAN offering.
The company is co-chaired by Bruce Linton, who founded an Ontario-based cannabis company Canopy, and Terry Matthews, who has founded a number of tech companies including Mitel Networks. Linton also served as the CEO of Martello for six years before handing over the reins to Proctor.
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