Immersed Going Public And Moving Chat
First off, Cody is caught up in meetings still and we need to move today’s chat to 6:00pm ET in the TradingWithCody.com Chat Room or you can just email us at support@tradingwithcody.com.
We invested in a private company called Immersed via a WeFunder crowdfunding round back in March of 2021, as you might remember. By way of background, Immersed is a leading AR/VR company and built out one of the most widely used work-from-home apps for Meta’s Oculus. Now the company is developing its own AR/VR hardware, known as Visor (visor.com), which is one of the lightest and most functional wearable devices we have seen lately. The company is also working on its own AI Assistant known as “Curator”.
Immersed announced yesterday that it is going public via a SPAC deal with a company called Maquia Capital Acquisition Corp (NASDAQ: MAQCU). The press release is available here: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/immersed-inc-global-leader-spatial-120000500.html. As noted, the SPAC values Immersed at $150mm. We invested in the company at a $60mm valuation so we are looking at 2.5x return in just over two years. When the de-SPAC is complete, all existing investors will receive shares in the newly-combined public entity, which will trade under the ticker “AIMR” (which stands for Artificial Intelligence Mixed Reality). There will be a 6-month lock up after the company comes public before anyone will be able to sell the shares that they acquired while the company was private.
As part of the de-SPAC process, Immersed is also offering existing investors another opportunity to invest in the company one last time before it comes public, again using WeFunder. If you decide to invest more money in the company, you will do so at the $150mm valuation. We have been working with the CEO, Renji Bijoy, over the last few months or so and he asked us to lead the crowdfunding round, so we are putting in another $50k for the hedge fund. We are especially excited that we are leading the crowdfunding round alongside Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger (by the way so is former Denver Broncos quarterback, Tim Tebow) who is leading the round for institutional investors. If you invest in the crowdfunding round, you are basically betting that the public company will trade at a higher valuation than $150mm once it de-SPACs. Alternatively, you can wait until the stock comes public and buy it on the open market rather than invest in this crowdfunding round. Full disclosure, Immersed is giving the hedge fund a 20% discount on its investment in exchange for leading the crowdfunding round.
Assuming the SPAC goes through and all paperwork is finalized, a large asset manager known as All Blue Capital will be investing about $20mm in the company in the form of a PIPE (private investment in public equity) plus giving it access to a $50mm line of credit. In exchange for assisting with the SPAC, All Blue is taking roughly 7% of the company (which is similar to what an investment bank would charge in the event of an IPO). Definitive agreements with All Blue still need to be finalized.
Obviously, we are very excited about the de-SPAC and about the prospects for Immersed going forward. Renji has done an awesome job as CEO in pivoting towards fixing the hardware issue with AR/VR, and we think there are some very exciting things happening at the company today. The Immersed team prepared an executive summary of their revenue projections for the next few years which you can review here.
Please remember, there is still a lot of risk involved with this investment as Immersed is a very small company with little revenue and needs to grow rapidly over the next few years. Additionally, only a few SPACs have done well since coming public over the last few years and there is no guarantee that Immersed does any better. As always, please be careful and do not invest any money that you cannot afford to lose.
If you want to invest more in this crowdfunding round, go to wefunder.com/immersed. The campaign went LIVE today, and they already raised nearly $1M of the $2M cap, so move swiftly if interested. The hope is that the SEC approves the merger before the end of the year.
