Edinburgh-based spherical display company Pufferfish is seeking fresh investment, the company’s recently appointed CEO Elaine Van Der Berg told DIGIT.

With a target of £600,000, the new funding will help the company on the next stage of its growth.

Pufferfish, which creates immersive display technologies, recently brought Van Der Berg onboard as its CEO, in May this year. She has more than 25 years’ experience of driving international expansion for leading technology businesses.

“It’s because of our position as the market leader in a growing market, that now is the right time to secure additional investment so we can expedite our refreshed and new, exciting product launches,” Van Der Berg notes.

Founded in 2004, Pufferfish secured its first funding round with the support of the University of Edinburgh’s incubator scheme.

For its latest funding round, Pufferfish will approach existing investors to give them the first opportunity to increase their shareholding. After that, the company will approach new investors.

“We will officially open the book build in September with a view to closing it quite quickly within four to six weeks,” she adds.

Timing

The company has seen increasing demand for its products as the world begins to move past the pandemic.

“We’ve all been locked up for the last two years, pretty much looking at flat screens,” Van Der Berg says. “Now, people are getting out and if you look at the market, people are after more interactive and engaging and even immersive experiences. They’re looking for more than staring at a flat screen, so the display market is growing at a phenomenal rate.”

For 2021, the global electronic display market was valued at $551.8 billion, according to a Zion Market Research report. Over the next seven years, it will show a compound annual growth rate of around 10.9%, reaching over $1 trillion by 2028.

Going to Market

To a certain extent, Pufferfish has never taken an aggressive marketing stance – Van Der Berg notes that the company generally sells its products as fast as it can build them.

“In the previous stages of the business, there hasn’t been as much focus on the go-to-market and outbound activities. It’s been very much reactive – very small marketing function, very small sales teams catching what came in and relying on word of mouth.

“And I think that has meant that the business has not grown and been as profitable as it should have been in the past. There wasn’t necessarily enough aggressive outbound and go to market activities.

“So no longer will we be reactive and wait on them coming in. We’re going out there to really promote the product. And we’re global. We’re international, we sell all over the world.”

Meeting Demand

The fresh investment will be used to develop and sell its new products. Over the pandemic, the company developed new versions of its flagship products, the PufferSphereTM and the PufferTouchTM.

In addition, it also has three new products currently in development. These are designed to meet growing demand for more personalised experiences, more spectacle, and more immersion.

“We’ve become all very used to our devices,” Van Der Berg says. “We control it, we personalise it. So we’ve had a lot of requests for a more one-on-one intimate device. It’s very much putting the control in the hands of the user.

“For the second one, we’ve all become a bit demanding in our user experiences. We don’t want to just walk around and look at dusty artefacts, we want big, we want the wow factor, we want to be impressed.

“The third product is like peering into a new world. It ties into the experiential – we want to be transported into a new environment.

“So, it’s all about tailoring the journey, tailoring the message for the users and leaving a lasting impression.”

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With the new funding, Pufferfish will finalise the R&D on its new offerings and productise its extended range.

The release of these new products will be driven by the latest investment round.

“If we weren’t to secure the investment, we would still continue to grow and we’d still develop the products,” Van Der Berg notes. “But the market’s right now, and we’ve seen more demand than we’ve ever had.”

The company also works alongside its customers to co-create its products, constantly developing them and tailoring them to meet client needs. This has helped prove their product use cases and get them ready for market.

“These products are already in development because we’ve been developing them for clients,” Van Der Berg says. “But I need to expedite that. I want to expedite the activity and productise these offerings so we can get them out the door much quicker.

“The sales team are struggling to handle the number of inbound inquiries we are receiving. Our team is also at capacity in the software and creative side of things and we don’t have enough building the systems to deal with the demand.

“So that’s what the investment is for, to get more growth, because there’s demand out there, and ramp up the team to be able to deal with the product launches and the building of the solutions and get them out the door,” Van Der Berg adds.

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