essensys plc will leave the London Stock Exchange on 10th June after it applied to cancel its public listing.
Founder Mark Furness led a £73 million IPO in 2019 but now intends to take the PropTech firm private again for just £11.3m after the deal was approved by more than 98% of shareholders.
He has been backed by high-profile investors Sir Terry Leahy and William Currie.
This morning essensys plc warned: “Following the cancellation becoming effective and the essensys shares ceasing to be admitted to trading on AIM, essensys shareholders who have not accepted the offer will own shares in an unquoted company and, accordingly, will not benefit from the protections under the AIM rules that were afforded to them whilst essensys was so admitted.”
Furness is essensys plc’s largest shareholder while the vehicle containing him, Leahy and Currie hold 37% of its share capital.
“Bidco (the vehicle) will have significant control over essensys and will be in a position to ensure the approval or rejection of ordinary and special resolutions of essensys and to determine its overall direction,” it stated last week.
“Following the offer being declared wholly unconditional, each of Jon Lee and Sian Herbert, the independent non-executive chairman and independent non-executive director of essensys, respectively, has resigned from the essensys board with immediate effect.”
essensys will re-register as a private company once shares in the listed entity are cancelled.
Furness founded the firm in 2006 and it floated in 2019 at a valuation of £72.6m, raising £28m from investors. Its share price peaked above 300p in 2021.
Based in London with operations in New York, Sydney and Amsterdam, essensys is a software and cloud service provider for the flexible workspace industry.
Amid a restructuring of the business, essensys – now led by James Lowery – recently reported shrinking profits and falling revenues in its latest half-year results.
essensys said it had implemented restructuring to enable greater focus on its essensys platform and elumo, a new dynamic booking and access control platform for meeting rooms in flexible workspaces, co-working spaces and office buildings.
Lowery said recently: “We have restructured the business to provide greater focus across our two core products, transformed our customer support function and successfully delivered the first cohort of elumo customers.
“Alongside this, we have maintained a disciplined approach to capital allocation and operational efficiency while continuing to invest in the development of our solutions. These actions have established a solid foundation for future growth.
“The period has also seen the recommended cash offer for the company from our founder Mark Furness. The independent directors believe that this offer will facilitate clear strategic and operational benefits for essensys’s internal and external stakeholders, including the employees and customers of essensys and provides a fair and reasonable value and a certain exit opportunity for shareholders.”