Lateral Corp to list on NZAX before seeking $1.5m for growth

Lateral Corp, the mobile technology developer, will list on the New Zealand Alternative Index before tapping eligible investors for capital to fund growth in international markets.

The Auckland-based company, which makes user-pay mobile product as well as providing mobile payment and marketing services, will join the NZAX via a compliance listing, meaning it won't raise any new money, on Aug. 18. It will then raise $1.5 million in capital from qualifying investors to fund growth plans in the Australian, US and UK markets, it said in a statement.

Over the past decade, Lateral has managed the text voting for most of New Zealand's large television shows, like New Zealand's Got Talent. The majority of its business comes from Australia, where it owns OZchat, a subscription based chat service, which charges directly to the user's phone bill, rather than their credit card. Its latest platform, Viaduct, is a cloud-based host for digital products, services and applications and can also manage sales and bill customers.

"Rather than building a single app to distribute through the Apple or Google app stores we're developing a digital supply chain," chief executive Roger Grice said. "We have spent the past five years developing our Viaduct platform, which not only develops apps, but can host other apps, enabling us to distribute and bill for third party digital products."

Lateral will follow next week's NZAX compliance listing by Pushpay, another Auckland-based mobile payment app developer, on Aug. 14. Pushpay raised $9 million in new equity issuing shares at $1 each, boosting the total number of company shares to 50 million, and valuing it at $50 million. The capital raise was underwritten by cornerstone shareholders Christopher and Banks Private Equity, an investment vehicle for the Huljich family.

Last December, Pushpay raised $5.1 million in two tranches, which saw the Huljich family take a 23 percent stake. Established in 2011, PushPay last year also attracted $1 million in backing from Douglas Kemsley, the Hamilton-based former chairman of internet and cloud services provider Maxnet, and a $253,000 development grant from the government's Callaghan Innovation Fund.​

(BusinessDesk)