Discover the candidates for the Small Cap Award’s 2021 IPO of the year

The Small Cap Awards 2021 will be held in-person event on 11 November at London’s Montcalm Hotel. Hosted by Perrier Award winning comedian Dominic Holland, the show will highlight the best in UK small cap business over the last year.

You can find out more about the event on the Small Cap Network website.

Here are the nominees for IPO of the year:

Calnex

Calnex Solutions designs, produces and markets test instrumentation and solutions for network synchronization and network emulation, enabling its customers to validate the performance of the critical infrastructure associated with telecoms networks. To date, Calnex has secured and delivered orders to over 600 customer sites in 68 countries across the world. Customers include BT, China Mobile, NTT, Ericsson, Nokia, Intel, Qualcomm, IBM and Facebook.

Founded in 2006, Calnex is headquartered in Linlithgow, Scotland, with additional locations in Belfast, Northern Ireland and California in the US, supported by sales teams in China and India. Calnex has a global network of partners, providing a worldwide distribution capability. The Company commenced trading on the AIM market of the London Stock Exchange on 5^th October 2020, having raised £22.5 million following an oversubscribed fundraising process. The Company has made considerable progress since listing, successfully delivering robust trading performance, exceeding initial expectations. Share price has steadily increased from an initial listing price of 55p to a price of £1.10p today. Calnex continues to benefit from the evolutionary trends affecting the telecoms sector, notably in 5G and cloud computing, and The Board looks forward with confidence to making further progress moving forwards.

Elixirr International

Hi, we’re Elixirr, The Challenger Consultancy. We’re an award-winning, global consulting firm working with clients across a diverse range of markets, industries and geographies. We take on our clients’ toughest business challenges to deliver lasting, tangible change.

We’re a high-performance, hand-selected team of industry professionals, subject matter experts, career consultants, designers and developers. We’re unique because we pool our knowledge to create bespoke strategy. We treat each client differently, and never copy and paste. This approach enables us to deliver value beyond expectation. Not only are we changing the game in our clients’ industries, we’re doing it in our own. We’re dynamic. We’re disruptive. We’re future-first. The speed at which we make shit happen is also integral to our growth. And we have the results to prove it. Over the past six months, we’ve organically taken on 42 brand new clients and 7 gold clients*.

Our success as a firm this year is ultimately down to our four-pillar growth strategy. This focuses on both organic and inorganic growth, which our IPO has helped to drive. We have grown our Partner, allowing us to expand our company-wide network and business offerings. We have promoted two of our very own, as well as hiring 6 new partners, 4 US-based, signifying our efforts to penetrate and disrupt the US market, and strengthen our global presence. We have grown over 100% in this market over the past 6 months. Central to this achievement is the increase in revenue per partner, exemplified through our share scheme.

As our culture is built on entrepreneurialism, our people not only run the firm, but play an integral role in building our business. This is down to our equity participation scheme. Every member of our team is an owner of Elixirr, encouraging an ownership mindset by seeing real return for the work they put in every day. This risk-reward mentality has meant that our team are even more emotionally invested in the work that they do. It has helped accelerate partner performance.

Our inorganic strategies are also vital to our growth. Over the past year, we have expanded our House of Brands, acquiring award-winning boutique businesses Retearn and Coast Digital. This has strengthened our wider capabilities, enabling us to offer clients a powerful blend of expertise, supercharging every stage of their business journey.

We want to be the best consultancy firm in the world. We’ll get there because of our passion, our determination, our ability to disrupt and our results.

Verici DX

Verici Dx, whose share price was up 281% within three months of listing, is focused on developing and commercialising tests to understand how a patient will and is responding to organ transplant, with an initial focus on kidney transplants. The Company’s work is underpinned by extensive scientific research into the recipient’s RNA signatures and how that impacts on acute rejection, chronic injury and ultimately failure of the transplant. These RNA signatures also inform clinicians as to the optimal strategy for immunosuppressive and other therapies for the most successful treatment to ensure graft acceptance with the least amount of side effects.

Verici Dx was admitted to trading on AIM on 3 November 2020, with the Company raising gross proceeds of c.$18.8m (£14.5m) at IPO, to primarily fund the development and commercialisation of its two leading clinical products in the kidney transplant space:

• Clarava™, which is a pre-transplant prognosis for the risk of early acute rejection
• Tuteva™, a post-transplant diagnostic focused upon acute cellular rejection

Renalytix AI transferred the rights to FractalDx technology into Verici Dx and since then the licence agreement with Mount Sinai in the US, which originally developed the technology. The cash raised will fund validation studies for Clarava and Tuteva as well as further development and working capital. The initial validation studies should be completed by the end of 2021. The Company is in a strong cash position.

2020/21 was clearly a strong year for the company, to what do you attribute your success?

Verici Dx, which is developing and commercialising tests to understand how a patient will and is responding to organ transplant, is one of the best AIM-listed performers since it floated in November 2020. This year saw delivery of many milestones early, building more confidence that the leading products would complete their validation trials by the end of 2021, in line with the Company’s objectives set out at the time of the IPO.

Since the IPO, Verici Dx has already made strong progress, with its share price up 227.5% at time of writing (65.50p):

• In January 2021, Verici Dx announced the expansion of the scope of its licence agreement with Mount Sinai to include an additional patent filing related to the analysis of gene expression in a blood-based test to predict risk of fibrosis and rejection of the graft and included the new product, Protega, into the clinical validation trial.
• In July 2021, Verici Dx also obtained a CLIA Certification of Registration under the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) for the Company’s newly established US clinical laboratory at the Innovation Park in Franklin, Tennessee, a major milestone for commercialisation.  This was ahead of schedule.
• In August 2021, completed the patient enrolment for its clinical validation trials for lead products ahead of schedule
• In September 2021, announced Half Year Results which showed strong progress but under budget.