CAMBRIDGE, ON, Dec. 13, 2018 /CNW/ - exactEarth Ltd. ("exactEarth" or the "Company") (TSX:XCT), a leading provider of satellite Automatic Identification System ("AIS") data services announces that it has closed its previously announced private placement of 13,000 convertible debentures (the "Convertible Debentures") of the Company at a price of $1,000 per Convertible Debenture (the "Offering Price") for aggregate gross proceeds of $13,000,000 (the "Private Placement").
"This financing, together with the previously announced $7.2 million Canadian government development financing, provides significant financial flexibility for the Company and demonstrates confidence in our strategy and outlook from new and existing shareholders, as well as other stakeholders," said Peter Mabson, CEO of exactEarth. "With exactView RT already delivering a proven and unique real-time satellite AIS service, we can now further invest in the business to accelerate our growth plans and commercialization activities for the service. Our stronger balance sheet and growing sales pipeline have us well-positioned to capitalize on our core market opportunity and to expand our addressable market through the development and launch of innovative data-driven applications that only our real-time service can enable."
exactView RT currently consists of 52 high-performance operational satellite payloads, onboard the Iridium NEXT constellation, which are capturing AIS data on more than 300,000 vessels. Already today, exactView RT provides the leading vessel detection, revisit rate and latency performance of any satellite AIS service in the market. exactViewRT is expected to reach its full operational capability of 58 payloads after the successful in-orbit commissioning of the final Iridium NEXT satellites, which are expected to be launched in January 2019.
The $7.2 million to be provided to exactEarth from the Government of Canada's Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF) program is available as reimbursement of eligible expenses. exactEarth has already received $1.4 million and expects, subject to project timelines and applied resources, to claim a further reimbursement of approximately $1.6 million in the first year of the funding, and approximately $2.2 million and $2.0 million in the second and third years of funding, respectively.