Linius Technologies Limited (ASX:LNU) CEO, Chris Richardson talks about FY18 results, strategy and success with the company's Video Virtualisation Engine (VVE) technology that transforms video files into data.
Rachael Jones: Hello I’m Rachael Jones for the Finance News Network. Joining me today from Linius Technologies Limited
(ASX:LNU) is CEO, Chris Richardson. Chris welcome back to FNN.
Chris Richardson: Thanks Rachael, great to be back.
Rachael Jones: For the first time, Linius Technologies makes dynamically searching video possible by indexing and tagging. How is the company progressing?
Chris Richardson: The last 12 months have been really exciting for Linius. We’ve done a great job of executing on our strategic vision and driving to a point, where we can deploy and sell our technology globally. That’s included partnering with the large cloud providers, the Microsofts, IBMs and Amazons of the world, driving channel relationships, building our internal team. And ultimately, getting to proofs of concept and commercial deals to drive revenue.
Rachael Jones: Before we talk about what Linius has achieved over the last financial year. Tell me why transforming video into data matters, and where can it be used?
Chris Richardson: Video virtualisation is the last frontier of data virtualisation, more broadly. The big data guys, the data lake guys, they’ve been doing this already for a decade. But so far, the 80 per cent of traffic on the Internet that’s video hasn’t been able to be virtualised, and that’s what Linius brings to the table. Now what that means is that we can expose the internals of the video to index, splice, analyse, augment with additional data. Really open up a whole world of capabilities in places like security and defence, blockchain, anti-piracy, a whole world of opportunities are out there.
In particular right now, we’re getting a lot of traction in what we call our search horizontal. The four verticals within that we’re really seeing the most success are news, sports, education and corporate coms.
Rachael Jones: Now let’s talk about your financial year 2018 performance. What were the highlights?
Chris Richardson: 2018 was a great year for us; really it was all about achieving our strategic goals. And we went out there, we executed in terms of our partnerships, in terms of working with IBM Inc. (NYSE:IBM), with Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT), with Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN). And after the calendar year, we’ve announced a number of proofs of concept and commercial deals. Now in terms of the company, we are an early stage company and right now, we’re in a pretty good position from a cash perspective. We have all the cash we need to achieve our goals. We’re keeping our burn rate well under control and I think fiscal year 2018, was very positive for us.
Rachael Jones: Now let’s talk about your strategy and share price. Can you tell us about the strategy that you have and how you get the technology to be widely adopted?
Chris Richardson: That really is the key question, the breadth and depth of adoption. Our vision hasn’t changed and that vision is to see all the world’s video, accessible as data. And to achieve that, our mission is really to become the de facto standard, to make virtual video everywhere usable. Now to do that, obviously we’re not going to go out and build a giant sales team to do it all on our own. So really it comes down to partnerships and those are both technology partners, like the things we’re doing with Amazon and Microsoft and IBM. And also channel partners and over the last year, we’ve been very successful in sort of launching the kernel of that channel relationship.
We’ve announced most recently our partnership with MediaAMP that’s taking us into the US education vertical. And we’re pursing a number of other channels that will be announced shortly.
Rachael Jones: Can you provide a comment on the share price over the last 12 months?
Chris Richardson: As I’ve mentioned, as I’m sure everybody knows, we are an early stage company. And as such, one expects a certain amount of volatility in the share price. But from my perspective, looking at the highs and the lows of the stock over the last year, I think our high was around AUD $0.21 cents. And to my mind, that’s actually seriously undervalued for the long-term opportunity of Linius. Looking forward, we have in terms of news flow, in terms of the deals we’re executing, in terms of continuing to execute on our strategy, build channels and go to market and scale the business. I feel confident that the share price will soon reflect the value of the company.
Rachael Jones: Last question Chris, you mentioned news flow there. What can investors look out for in terms of news flow, for this year?
Chris Richardson: I’m incredibly excited about the future of Linius, and what we’re going to be doing over the next 12 months. We’ve talked in broad strokes about what we’re doing. That’s channel partners, it’s irreplicable solutions, building out across these verticals and clearly we’ve spent a lot of time today, talking about education. But we have stuff coming out in corporate communication, in sports, in a number of other areas that are going to allow us to scale the business rapidly, and globally. And that’s I think really our focus for the next year; it’s all about scale.
Rachael Jones: Chris Richardson, thanks for flying in from Prague, Czech Republic today and thanks for the update.
Chris Richardson: My pleasure Rachael, looking forward to doing it again soon.
Ends
