Voiamo is seeking to raise £4 million ahead of a planned AIM float in 2011.
Broker Charles Stanley is seeking to raise £4 million of pre-float funding for Voiamo, a company boasting technology to slash the cost of international mobile phone calls, ahead of a planned £3 million AIM float in 2011.
The present fundraising will put a value of £10 million on the company, whose chairman, Nigel Bramwell, claims it could be making annual profits of more than £130 million in its fourth year of operation.
Backers have already spent £3 million to £4 million on commercialising Voiamo’s technology, pioneered by Indian inventor Vinod Sankar, which allows mobile phone users to receive international calls when abroad as if they were local. That could save business travellers and tourists hefty sums on the current high costs of ‘global roaming’ between networks.
Bramwell says the system allows a card to hold up to 99 different country numbers and will make money for Voiamo if more than 45,000 people use it. The project ‘goes live’ in January and he suggests that turnover could exceed £770 million in year four.
According to Bramwell, Voiamo is targeting ‘second tier’ mobile network operators, such as Hutchison Telecom, Sprint and Bouygues Telecom. He argues that this will save the marketing costs borne by other players in this area, such as Truphone, which market to the public and companies.
This will be one to watch at a testing time for the AIM new issues market.
