Akerna Releases Additional Information on Their Combination Vote
Akerna Corp., released additional details this morning regarding their shareholder vote to combine with MTech Acquisition Corp., and surprisingly, there weren’t as many redemptions as anticipated.
Per the press release, 4,452,042 shares of MTech exercised their right to redeem for cash at a price of $10.23841733 per share. That means that an aggregate of approximately $45,581,863.96 was removed from Trust. If we try and back into just how many of the MTech public were left post-vote, we can use the estimated Trust Value prior to the vote which was ~$58.9 million. So, $58.9 million less $45.6 million means approximately $13.3 million remained, or 1.3 million shares that are currently freely trade-able. That’s not terrible.
Plus, Akerna also has the $9.2 million in cash from their PIPE investors (an additional 901,074 shares), however, those shares are still not registered and unable to trade. The press release further goes on to say that 10,400,381 shares of common stock and warrants to purchase approximately 5,993,750 shares of common stock of Akerna are issued and outstanding post-close. However, keep in mind that the 10,400,381 and 5,933,750 figures include shares issued to Akerna in the transaction, as well as founders shares and the at-risk private placement purchase by the sponsors.
Given that there are approximately 1.3 million shares in the current float, it’s a little curious that the share has traded as wildly as it has. Clearly it’s not a huge float, but it’s still not the levels we saw with PHUN, ORGO or HUNT. Pre-market is currently showing a price of ~$64.00 and that’s pretty extreme.
Also keep in mind that a float of 1.3 million shares means that Akerna meets the Nasdaq listing requirements of 1 million publicly held shares. So Akerna’s got that going for them.
Let’s see what happens today.