Frontier on the attack with Cobra strike | Business Weekly ...

Cambridge video games studio Frontier Developments scratches a near-20-year itch with its proposed listing on the UK?s AIM market.

Founder Dave Braben has been one of the Cambridge UK cluster?s most globally respected technology entrepreneurs since founding the business in 1994. Now with a powerhouse board, including Abcam?s prolific entrepreneur?Jonathan Milner, and a world renowned technology portfolio, Frontier?has shot towards an IPO that would carry a market cap of around ?39.4?million.

The company has raised ?4 million through a placing arranged by Canaccord Genuity and shares are expected to start trading on Monday (July 15). This follows a pre-IPO fundraising in June that raised ?2.8m. Frontier is debt free, had ?7.2m of cash at May 31and has entered into a revolving credit facility with Barclays Bank plc for ?3m, so says it is in a strong position to take its business to the next stage.

The funds raised will allow Frontier to expand its current profitable business and further extend the features and platforms supported by its proprietary software development platform Cobra. Frontier says Cobra development will be undertaken in conjunction with development of its Elite: Dangerous title, in a move that will enable the company to ultimately license key elements of its technology and related services to third parties.

One of the world?s leading independent developers of video games, Frontier?s proprietary Cobra technology powers its cross-platform software development spanning personal computers, tablets, smartphone and videogame consoles across a wide variety of game genres.

Braben feels that the expansion of games into the mainstream entertainment industry and advent of digital distribution on all platforms brings a significant opportunity for ambitious Frontier.

The CEO said: ?We are very excited to be listing our company at a time of such strong momentum in the business and the sector. 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.?

Frontier has 227 full-time employees and operations in Cambridge UK and Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. At the end of 2012, Frontier also raised ?1.6m via Kickstarter, the crowd funding service. The funds were raised specifically to develop Elite: Dangerous ? the latest sequel to the Elite game that Braben originally co-authored, published in 1984.

Elite was one of the first home computer games to use 3D graphics and the first to employ an open-world ?sandbox? gameplay model. Its revolutionary 3D graphics ensured that the game created the modern space flight simulation genre and influenced gaming as a whole.

Video games are big business: In 2004, the game industry as a whole generated $25.4 billion. In June 2012, the global video game market was valued at $78.5bn.

Some major video game releases have eclipsed major movie openings in revenue terms. Smart phones and tablets are catching up in performance terms with video game consoles, helped by their annual product life cycles compared to the typical six year life cycle of a dedicated games console.

It is expected that spending on online games on smart phones and tablets will equal spending on both PC and console by the end of 2013.

Braben said the new-found founding freedom will open up several new opportunities for a previously hamstrung enterprise. He said Frontier was frequently presented with revenue generating projects and opportunities but was currently forced to prioritise work due to capacity restrictions.

The proposed admission to AIM will allow Frontier to increase scale, enabling the group to take advantage of more opportunities and to benefit from further economies of scale.

Braben is also a founding trustee of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a charity which aims to inspire a new generation of children to get interested in computer science through the use of a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. He was formerly a non-executive director of Phonetic Arts, a Cambridge company focused on speech synthesis that was acquired by Google in December 2010.

? PHOTOGRAPH SHOWS: David Braben

Source: http://www.businessweekly.co.uk/hi-tech/15641-frontier-on-the-attack-with-cobra-strike

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