Frontier IP, the Edinburgh-based intellectual property commercialisation specialist, saw its revenues almost quadrupling in the six months to December as the company swung decisively back to the black.
Announcing its half-yearly results, the AIM-listed company which helps university spin-outs commercialise their IP, said on Wednesday it had turned around a pre-tax loss of £242,000 in the six months to December 2014 to a profit of £549,000 between July and December 2015.
Frontier, which is the former technology unit of private equity company Sigma Capital, saw group revenues for the period rise to £992,000, up from £244,000 in the last half of 2014.
The value of its portfolio of stakes in start-ups grew 31 per cent in the last half of 2015 to £3.75 million, while year-on-year the fair value of the portfolio – from year-end 2014 to December 2015 – rose 138 per cent. The number of companies in Frontier’s portfolio now stands at 17.
Chief executive Neil Crabb said that recent highlights for the company included the completion of fundraising in Plymouth University spin-out PulsiV Solar and Edinburgh-based Nandi Proteins, Frontier’s star performer which is pioneering the development of healthier processed foods.
Mr Crabb added that a “milestone” agreement with Evora University in Portugal marked Frontier’s first relationship with a university outside the UK and was in line with Frontier's strategy of internationalisation.
“Opportunities continue to be encouraging and, looking ahead, we expect to see further progress in our portfolio over the remainder of the financial year,” Mr Crabb said.
He said that the post period-end completion of fundraising in Nandi Proteins would enable the company to take advantage of the current high level of interest in its technology from multi-national food companies.
“In particular, the sugar, fat and additive replacement properties of its technology are very relevant at a time when food companies are under increasing legislative pressure to reduce the level of these ingredients in their products,” he said. “Nandi Proteins is working to scale-up its technology to meet this potential demand in the coming year.”
On Tuesday, Frontier announced that the value of Nandi had doubled over the past 15 months after the latest funding round for the company had been struck at a valuation of £7.57m, twice the level of the previous fundraising in November 2014.
Nandi, which spun out from Heriot-Watt University in 2001, is commercialising a patented protein process technology which can reduce sugars, fats and emulsifiers in processed food without adversely impacting taste and texture.
Nandi alters the structure of proteins found in common foods such as egg white, soy seeds and whey, allowing them to be used to replace fat in low-fat sauces or to increase the shelf life of foods by allowing them to reach higher pasteurisation temperatures.
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