Regular readers will recall a stock by the name of Moseda Technologies (TSXV:MSD, Forum) that I’ve written about a few times, including once in this column.
The last time I spoke of it, the stock was being picked up at 7c-11c by a group that specializes in putting together tech deals, Hamza Thindal Capital, who recently rebranded to Core Capital Partners. I also noted that, when the HT crowd buys, as a general rule, lots of big money follows.
And it did. Moseda jumped to $0.30+. Plenty of folks made bank on the three-bagger, myself included.
But behind the market awareness campaigns lies an actual company, and that company has since gone through a necessary transition.
Moseda developed a secure mobile platform that connects medical equipment so that, as an example, a doctor could have 25 patients using home-based testing equipment, which said doctor could monitor from his desk, rather than having each patient come into the office and self-report.
It’s faster, cheaper, and more reliable than the existing way of doing things.
And Moseda has started doing deals. They brought in a $300k or so contract a few quarters back with a Canadian-listed company that operates in the home care space. I made a guess which company that was a while back and I think I was right, but that’s neither here nor there; the transition has involved a move away from development (this will continue but the heavy lifting is largely done) and hardware sales (which have a long lead time with decent margins) to software sales (which has a short lead time and great margins).
To make that happen, Moseda reshuffled the C-suite, moving founder and developer Nick Murray to the board and bringing in a tele-medicine software veteran in Dr. Lisa Crossley.
Crossley doesn’t fit the stereotypical tech CEO image. She doesn’t wear a bow tie, braces and skinny jeans. There isn’t a dog under her desk. She’s not all over Instagram, posting photos of her sushi.
Crossley just does the work. She has a Ph.D in chemical engineering. She’s been in the health-tech sector for two decades. Her last post was as CEO of Vital Hub Corp, a mobile health tech company, and she managed to get a billion-dollar contract in place with the government of British Columbia.
She’s not messing about.
I talked to Core Capital’s Kam Thindal, and he says Crossley has hit the ground running.
“She was brought on because she has a fantastic network and a good history of delivering contracts of a sizable nature,” he said. “It was time to ramp up revenues and we believe she’s going to bring in deals very quickly.”
Thindal confirmed his company and his network are buying Moseda at the current price and plan to continue doing so for a while.
“It’s come down a lot from the high and that’s understandable when you shake things up a bit. But now the company has reset, we believe it’s a substantially better company for having been through that process.”
Thindal has one eye on another deal right now, one that goes public Monday on the CSE with the ticker BTH.
BreathTec Biomedical (CSE:BTH, Forum) is a company that has technology that helps detect biomarkers that are present in a patient’s breath as biomarkers indicating the presence of lung infections, some cancers, Parkinson’s Disease, Alzheimer’s Disease, liver disease, diabetes and more. The goal is to develop a breathalyzer of sorts that could be used by doctors to help diagnose ailments like the above.
BreathTec execs say the tech they’re working on will be low-cost, non-intrusive and purely diagnostic, which they say will present a much faster track through the regulatory approval process, and a much cheaper run to production. They’ve done a $3 million raise to pay for clinical trials and product development.
Okay then, time for the codas; There’s no doubt this technology has potential, and there are others studying the potential of breath-based biomarkers right now, and Breath Tec is aligned with researchers at the University of Florida who have been neck deep in this work for nearly a decade.
But it’s also a company with a strong connection to Cannabix Technologies (CSE:BLO, Forum), which infamously ran to $0.56 on the promise that it had a weed breathalyzer in the works, only to fall almost every day in the year since back to $0.14 as it admitted such tech may be as much as three years away. Cannabix also has an arrangement with the same UF folks working with BreathTec, one of which serves as the company CEO.
I was once asked at an investor conference what I thought of C.BLO and I said, ‘honestly, not much.’ The questioner interrupted with, ‘but they have this technology that..’ and I corrected him, saying, ‘No, they don’t have a technology. They have a picture of what a technology might look like.’
As far as I know, that’s still the case.
Which is not to say the tech can’t work, or that it won’t, or that anyone here is being less than forthcoming. Certainly Cannabix has often made it clear there’s a timeline to get their product to market, as necessary as that tech may be to law enforcement right now, and we’re around 1/3 of the way through that timeline right now as I understand it.
So is there an urgent need to invest in BreathTec today?
Well, maybe. Depends. Kind of. I don’t know.
Apparently the technology in the BreathTec deal does actually already exist in a demonstrable state, it’s just in the form of a rather large piece of equipment at the University of Florida that needs to be shrunk down to a smaller, more compact device that could fit in a doctor’s office easily.
Here it is in its current form:
Think of it as a punch-card computer from the 70’s that has to be turned into an Apple II from the 80’s. Presumably that’s doable. You just have to, like Crossley at Moseda, ‘do the work’.
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Look, here’s the thing: C.BLO went from $0.10 to $0.56 at its debut. While it definitely trended down for some time, it took a long time to get back close to that initial level, which means nobody was cashing in and running on the pop. In fact, not only does that downswing make sense on a three-year product delivery timeline for any company, the downswing is also comparable to what just about every other smallcap has endured over the last year, alpha stage or not, beta stage or not, revenues or not.
When BreathTec hits the markets, I don’t see it running to a buck. I do, however, see it being something that will be bought up by the usual crowd that happily takes Core Capital recommendations and has made a great return in doing so over the last few years.
Both Moseda and BreathTec are in play. The marketing valve is being slowly turned on.
I’ve got Moseda stock – not as much as I once did, but I did well on the way up and retain enough to be interested, especially if it’s warming up again. And they’ve been a Stockhouse Publishing marketing client – fair disclosure – though they aren’t currently, so do your own due diligence either way.
Get both companies on your watchlist and observe the churn. Remember, the key to investing in the Venture space these days is to know when big money is going in. In fact, that’s almost as important as knowing if the company can one day make money under its own steam.
--Chris Parry
https://www.twitter.com/chrisparry