Well, this latest raise was an underwhelming affair.

Arguably, it all started on July 28 with a bullish announcement that Pointerra's utility partners were selected for a US$15b grid resilience CAPEX program. The detail was vague, but hinted at a significant revenue opportunity, and shares duly rose -- in fact, they more than doubled at one point (briefly).

A few days later the company's 4th quarter announcement showed a disappointing cash inflow, but this was explained as a timing issue with much of the shortfall received in July. The company said it "continues to self-fund organic growth". The ACV metric was again notably absent.

Two weeks later, Pointerra revealed it had raised $2m via an institutional placement at 12c per share (a 13% discount to the recent volume weighted trading price, but a 25% premium to where shares were at prior to July 28). Veritas, the lead manager for the raise, was paid $120k, or 6% of the total raised.

Shareholders were offered the same deal to raise a further $1.5m, but by this stage shares had returned to sub-10c, meaning any uptake would be at a 20%-odd premium to what you could get on market. Unsurprisingly, very few shareholders took up the offer, which raised just $195k, or 13% of the targeted total. Frankly, it's amazing they raised anything!

All told, the capital raised cost 6% in fees and a 2.8% dilution to existing shareholders. And all for a relative pittance in cash -- an amount that would have barely covered the FY23 cash burn.

I've lined up a meeting with Ian for the 31st of this month, but I assume the rationale will be they just needed a bit to help accelerate some growth and will be self-funded from here ("cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye")

To be fair, they are dealing with big customers and project delays aren't uncommon for large CAPEX programs. They are a tiny company desperately trying to scale while continuing to invest in their product and resourcing. So maybe what we're dealing with here, and in other outcomes that fell short of expectations, is just a bit of over-exuberance from management, but which they genuinely feel is well founded.

But the fact is that they have damaged their reputation -- and that will take a long time to rebuild.

The lesson here for management is that it's usually best to under-promise and over-deliver. When you make bold claims you really just create a rod for your back, imo.