Weebit Nano Secures $12 Million

Weebit Nano Ltd secured firm commitments from new and existing sophisticated and institutional investors to raise $12 million (before costs) via a strongly supported oversubscribed share placement.

Placement proceeds will enable the company to accelerate its commercialisation initiatives, including strengthening its technology, engineering and sales teams and increasing marketing activities in the embedded memory market, where the company remains on track to achieve its first commercial agreement by mid-2021. It will also be able to accelerate the next phase of standalone memory development across both the technical and commercial aspects to fast track deployment, whilst also developing the next gen of its neuromorphic demo.

Market Eye acted as corporate advisor, and Canaccord Genuity (Australia) Limited acted as lead manager to the placement.

CEO Coby Hanoch said: “We are very encouraged by the strong level of support shown by both new and existing investors. I would like to thank our existing shareholders for their continued support. We also welcome the new shareholders to our register during an exciting time for Weebit Nano as the company moves closer to commercialisation. After successfully completing our technology stabilisation process and recently broadening our strategic partnership with CEA-Leti, we are very excited to be in the final stages of pre-commercialisation and to be able to further accelerate key development and commercialisation activities across the embedded and standalone memory domains, as well as the neuromorphic domain.”

“We see huge potential for Weebit Nano’s technology in these very attractive markets. This Placement allows us to bring forward growth initiatives that were planned for one to two years’ time, supporting our ability to deliver on the attractive opportunities we see for the company,” he added.

Funds raised from the placement will be used to:
• accelerate process qualification towards a production fab and initiate the shift to 300nm/28nm technology in the embedded memory market;
• accelerate commercialisation initiatives, including strengthening the sales team and increasing marketing activities in the embedded memory market;
• accelerate the next phase of the standalone memory technology project and support partnership programmes with select foundries to accelerate deployment;
• accelerate research of neuromorphic computing architectures and develop the next gen of the neuromorphic demo; and
• general working capital and costs of the Placement.

Placement details
It comprises an offer of 7,058,824 new fully paid ordinary shares in the company (placement shares) at an issue price of $1.70 per share representing a 24.8% discount to the last closing share price on November 20, 2020, and a 20.3% discount to the 10-day volume weighted average market price of the company’s shares on ASX.

Placement shares will rank equally with the company’s existing ordinary shares on issue. The placement will take place as a single tranche and fall under the company’s available Listing Rule 7.1A capacity.

Share Purchase Plan (SPP) details
Weebit Nano intends to offer the opportunity to all eligible shareholders to subscribe for up to $30,000 of fully paid ordinary shares in a non-underwritten SPP shares, under the same terms as the placement to raise up to $3 million. As the share purchase plan in June-July 2020 did not rely on ASIC Corporations (share and interest purchase plans) instrument 2019/547, any eligible shareholder that participated in that share purchase plan can also participate in the SPP about to be launched.