Toronto’s ViXS Systems the latest Canadian tech to opt for public listing

Is Canadian tech’s move to the public markets finally becoming something more than a trickle?

On Friday, another established tech, ViXS Systems, announced that it would go public in a capital pool transaction. The move follows the recently announced IPO of Halogen Software and the reverse merger listing of Terry Matthew’s Magor Corp.

The output nearly matches the TSX activity level for tech over the past couple years, with Avigilon and NexJ standing out as notable IPOs. The story of the public tech sector in recent years has been about the companies that have been subtracted, not added, to its indices. Stalwarts such as MOSAID, Zarlink, Gennum, and Miranda Technologies have all exited stage left after larger companies found their valuations more compelling than investors did.

But ViXS CEO Sally Daub says the timing is right for the nearly teenaged concern.

“ViXS was founded in 2001 and since then it has matured into a leading semiconductor company with a comprehensive portfolio of products to meet the diverse needs of the global media industry. We are extremely excited about the Company’s prospects and believe the time has come to take ViXS public,” she said.

Toronto-based ViXS is a semiconductor company that has 390 video processing patents issued or pending. The company serves the consumer electronic and personal computer spaces. ViXS delivers compression, encoding and transcoding technologies to multinationals such as Sharp, for their Sharp AQUOS Blu-Ray recorders, and to Pioneer, for its HDD/BD recorders.

ViXS says a brokered private placement will be co-led by GMP Securities and Stifel Nicolaus Canada, with the help of a syndicate that will include BMO Capital Markets, Cormark Securities and Byron Capital Markets.

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