Aquis-listed small cap The Smarter Web Company has raised £8.1m.
The firm announced the news via the London Stock Exchange RNS service on Monday morning.
The Smarter Web Company said that £5.25m had been raised via a placing, with the funds coming from a “well known institutional investor”. That £5.25m figure was gross of fees.
In the same announcement, the company said it had also raised £2,867,860 from a subscription taken up by a high net worth individual investor, also gross of fees.
The Smarter Web Company was historically a web development company.
However, in 2023 the firm started taking payments in Bitcoin and developed what it terms a ‘Bitcoin treasury strategy’.
These have become increasingly popular over in the US and essentially entail a firm using its cash holdings to acquire Bitcoin and hold it on the company balance sheet.
For reasons that are not entirely clear to this author, investors are willing to pay more for a company that holds Bitcoin than they would if they were buying the underlying cryptocurrency itself.
The most well known example of this is Micro Strategy, which has often traded at a valuation 2x the value of its Bitcoin holdings.
Small caps stand to benefit a lot more from this dynamic than larger firms, as they can see huge increases to their valuation without really doing anything beyond buying some Bitcoin. The Smarter Web Company’s share price was up almost 4% this morning on the back of this morning’s news, with the firm also seeing its shares rise almost 20x in the last three months.
Last month, Deus X Capital invested in the Bitcoin corporate treasury programme of Hilbert Group, a Swedish asset manager focused on crypto assets.
