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Frontier Developments is to be admitted to the London Stock Exchange’s Aternative Investment Market (AIM).
Founded in 1994 by CEO David Braben, Frontier is an independent developer with studios in Cambridge, UK and Halifax, Canada.
Last year Braben went to Kickstarter looking for £1.25 million to make a sequel to his classic space game Elite and raised £1.5 million.
It’s quite a leap to go from asking fans for cash to being publicly traded, but the company plans to use its additional funding to expand the business and add to the features and platforms supported by its Cobra development platform.
This suggests the new Frontier Developments will be billed to investors as a tech distributor rather than a game developer, but that could depend on the success of Elite: Dangerous and other titles.
Trading is expected to start on July 15th with a Market Capitalization of £39.4 million.
Pre-IPO fundraising gathered £2.8 million in June, and a placing of new Ordinary Shares arranged by Canaccord Genuity has raised another £4 million.
This is in addition to the debt-free Frontier’s £7.2 million in cash reserves as of May 31st, and a revolving credit facility of £3 million with Barclays Bank.
“We are very excited to be listing our Company at a time of such strong momentum in the business and the sector,” said Braben.
“This placing of Frontier shares, combined with our recent oversubscribed funding round, is a strong endorsement both of the opportunities we have identified, and our team’s ability to deliver on the next round of enhancements to our business to make the most of those opportunities.”
“It gives us the necessary financial impetus to continue operating at the forefront of the continually evolving and expanding global games market.”
