M E RCIA
November 2020
WHAT’S NEXT FOR
MERCIA? Following their recent success at the EISA awards, IFA Magazine’s Peter Wilson talks to Mercia’s Dr Paul Mattick about the business and why he is excited about its future prospects in the EIS sector
O
n October 15th 2020 Mercia won the EISA EST Exit Award for their development of The Native Antigen Company. The Native Antigen Company has swiftly become one of the world’s leading suppliers of infectious disease reagents, widely adopted by vaccine manufacturers. The entirely digital sales process, completed in July, returned 8.6x cost to EIS investors, and returned 13x cost to the proof of concept fund.
Asked to respond to this success, Mattick said ‘It reflects our model where we use multiple issue funds to support companies over long periods, and enable them to grow and realise value where we can.’ Mattick was quick to highlight another successful exit just the day before. Clear Review was two and half years to exit and generated an 8x return on Mercia’s EIS managed fund investment cost and a 122% fund IRR. Mattick said this returned 80% of the cost of the fund, continuing, ‘this is what we can we do and what we’ve started to do more regularly.’
Mercia is an institutional scale, early stage technology investor, with almost £1billion under management that has an EIS fund as part of its overall investment strategy. With an emphasis on deep experience, and the capability to see an investment through from seed to follow on capital, Mercia is uniquely placed to maximise returns in the changing investment landscape following the Covid pandemic.
When asked about the EIS landscape following the coronavirus pandemic Mattick expressed confidence. ‘One of the benefits to EIS is that every time you make an investment, it’s into a new portfolio of companies.’ There may be follow on investment, but investors aren’t buying into a portfolio from a pre-pandemic world. Mattick put it simply, ’It’s going to look different. Digitisation and remote working is not temporary.’
IT’S GOOD TO TALK Following their success at the EISA Awards, IFA Magazine’s Peter Wilson was in conversation with Mercia’s Dr Paul Mattick to talk about the business and how it operates. Mattick heads the Sales and Investor Relations team for the Mercia EIS Funds and is clearly very proud of the team’s success in this and in many other aspects of the business.
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ABILITY TO PIVOT AND ADAPT ‘The thing about EIS is that it can be bespoke to where we are currently, rather than where we were a couple of years ago.’ Following a volatile year, and a transformed economy, newer companies with the ability to pivot and adapt rapidly have become an appealing investment. Mattick continued, ‘These little companies are really nimble with
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