The winner of the FINANCE Private Placement Deal of the Year 2008 was the €40 million fund raising of OpenHydro, a Dublin-based renewable energy firm. The deal raised €40 million in private equity. This brings total funding raised by OpenHydro since 2005 to over €50m. Peter Corcoran, the chief financial officer of OpenHydro, said the firm would raise ‘significantly more than the level of investment to date’.
Davy Corporate Finance and BCM Hanby Wallace advised on the deal. Des Carville, director, Davy Corporate Finance, said, ‘The key benefit of the deal is that the firm is fully funded for the next two and a half to three years. It is also good that the deal was backed by a combination of shareholders and institutional and private clients from Davy.’
The quantity of the funds raised for the renewable energy industry makes the deal noteworthy, said Carville. ‘Investing €40 million in a pre-revenue company in a cutting edge technological industry would not be to everyone’s taste.’
The deal was very straightforward, said Carville, with no setbacks and was over-subscribed. ‘The deal went pretty much to plan, it was a very conventional fund raising. There was a little bit of scale back on some aspects of the deal. We tried to give preference to existing shareholders where possible and scale back other areas.’
The funding will be used to support the commercial development of the company’s Open-Centre Turbines. |
