Israeli tech outfit to land on ASX

Gefen Technologies’ co-CEOs say that COVID-19 has provided a boom – not a bust – for their tech platform.

The co-CEOs of Israeli technology outfit Gefen Technologies say their plans to list on the ASX by year's end remain on track despite COVID-19 pandemic, with the pair confident that Australian investors still have a strong appetite for high-growth technology stocks.

Gefen was founded in 2014 and offers a tech platform for distributing marketing and communication to end customers, and current customers include insurance, finance and real estate companies, including TAL Life Insurance in Australia.

Speaking to The Australian, co-CEO David Nash said that Gefen had seen a significant spike in business due to the COVID-19 pandemic, given companies globally were choosing to prioritise digital transformations of their entire sales agent networks.

"We do feel there is an appetite for this among Australian investors," Mr Nash said. "COVID-19 has created a psychological effect where sectors have moved towards remote communication, remote learning and working, and that helps us.

"We are still en route to doing an IPO towards the end of the year.

“In the past, we would first go to a multinational company’s innovation lab, then perhaps they would deploy our solution in one country with a few thousand agents,” Mr Nash said.

“Now our customers are looking to scale up to 100,000 agents worldwide in just three months.”

His co-CEO Mr Daniel said that the COVID-19 crisis has created two kinds of companies that stand to benefit most from the pandemic: those that provide short-term requirements such as respirator manufacturers and those that offer long-term solutions for a world in which social distancing measures and prolonged lockdown periods become the norm.

"Gefen is positioned among the latter group of companies,” Mr Daniel said. “We enable global companies to adjust to the ‘new normal’ very quickly, accelerating the inevitable digitisation that was already underway prior to the crisis." \

He added that the company is preparing to lodge a prospectus with ASIC in the third quarter of 2020, and is seeking to raise about $15m.

Mr Daniel said over $US15m had been invested into the company's proprietary technology to date, and that last year the company posted revenues of $US4m and was on track for $US20m this year.

“The ASX is an attractive bourse for our company,” Mr Daniel said. “In recent years there has been an increase in high-quality technology companies listing in Australia and we saw that the ASX recently created an index of tech stocks similar to the Nasdaq.

"We feel like the ASX is a great fit."