Matū Iramoe has made a decision to withdraw its recent capital raise offer on the Catalist Public Markets, and all funds committed by potential investors in this round (which are currently held in trust by Catalist) will be refunded as soon as possible.

This fundamentally does not impact our portfolio companies or their achievements, and we remain committed to the cause of advancing Kiwi science and deep tech.

On the afternoon of Friday 1st, a Matū Karihi investor raised a potential technical issue with the valuation of its units, primarily relating to how future receivables and costs are considered. There is no impact on the valuation of the individual portfolio companies, only on the aggregation into a single value for the fund overall. Matū Karihi notified Matū Iramoe within an hour of discovering the issue, which could lead to a different purchase price for Matū Iramoe than advised as part of the offer, and took the precautionary step of withdrawing the capital raise. Catalist was notified and the capital raise was halted within two hours of the issue being identified. This should have no material impact on existing shareholders in Matū Iramoe that invested in November 2021.

It will take Matū some time to resolve this technical issue, and given the live context of the capital raise, we feel that it is important to act quickly and in the best interests of our retail investors. It is important for us to be doing the right thing, and we thank the Matū Karihi investor who raised the potential issue. We also thank Catalist for acting swiftly in halting the capital raise and issuing notices and refunds promptly.

We had already scheduled a review with our external auditors in April to give us confidence about the valuation of Matū Karihi and therefore Matū Iramoe, and will now suspend capital raise activities until that valuation is more certain. We have also now planned for an independent peer review to further ensure that our fund valuation methodology follows international best practice.

We thank everyone who has supported the team at Matū, through both Karihi and Iramoe, in our mahi to make early-stage science and technology investing more accessible to a wider group of people. We aim to relaunch capital raising activities once the annual audit is complete. Until then, any questions for Matū Iramoe should be directed to Independent Director Adam Hunt ([email protected]), and any questions for Matū Karihi or Matū Group should be directed to Greg Sitters ([email protected]).

Update: The audit was completed successfully and the auditors confirmed that the financial statements were true and fair. Gilligan Sheppard has also subsequently reviewed the accounting for Matū Karihi and confirmed that our calculations are appropriate.