Allied Minds reports good progress across group

Allied Minds reported good progress had been made across the group in the first half due to a strengthened team capitalising better on its unique position in sourcing new investments, even though the value of its portfolio was unchanged.

For the six months ended 30 June 2017, the group said that "significant" progress was made since the appointment of the new CEO Jill Smith in March by focusing the group around key priorities of capital discipline, stronger governance of subsidiaries, alongside earlier and broader validation of business plans and accelerating the path to commercialisation.

The pipeline for future investment, led by the new executive vice-president of technology investments Simon Davidson, was also gaining greater thematic focus to capitalise on the company's unique position in the US Federal Lab ecosystem.

Net cash reduced by $49m to $177m and cash at parent level reduced by $23m to $113m, while revenue was "immaterial" at $2.0m from $1.3m in the first half of the year-ago period while losses for the period rose from $52m to $58m.

Meanwhile, the company's portfolio value at period end was unchanged at $416m with that of the six top companies increasing slightly to $371m from $358m, due to a reduction in the value of smaller companies.

Following the appointment of the new CEO Tom Sparkman at Spin Transfer Technologies, there was "good" confidence that the business had a highly differentiated technology position to address a very large market opportunity.

Federated Wireless was seeing wide engagement across the US telecoms ecosystem, moving towards initial deployment in 2018.

New financing rounds were expected for STT and Federated Wireless in H2 and the involvement of strategic investors remains a priority.

Linked to this, progress was made in clinical trials at Precision Biopsy and SciFlour with further newsflow expected in H2.

Also, both HawkEye 360 and BridgeSat secured initial customer agreements and were on track to have initial services operational in 2018.

In terms of the outlook, the company said: "with the measures being undertaken to enhance focus and capital allocation discipline, the Directors are confident of the Group's ability to accelerate the pace of new investments, and to drive material progress against commercialisation goals for its subsidiaries, with a view to unlocking successful liquidity events and realising shareholder value."