Shares in artificial intelligence company FortifAI Ltd (ASX: FTI) surged to a new 12-month high north of $1 per share earlier on Tuesday, after the company announced it has raised new growth capital.
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New capital the accelerant
The company said in a statement to the ASX on Tuesday that it had raised $15 million in a strongly supported capital raising at 71.5 cents per share.
The company's shares took off on the news, racing to $1.01, up 41.3% and a new 12-month high.
The shares have traded as low as 2.5 cents over the past year, meaning some shareholders are sitting on very impressive gains.
The company said the money would be used, "to accelerate technology, marketing and business development of Nol8 Technology, support business development programs for existing assets, strengthen commercial initiatives and general working capital''.
FortifAI non-executive chair Shannon Robinson said of the raise:
We are delighted with the exceptional support for this Placement and welcome a number of highly credentialled institutional investors to the register. The demand achieved, and the at-market pricing secured, are a strong validation of the market's recognition of Nol8's world-first technology and the scale of the opportunity ahead. As we look to engage enterprise design partners in the coming quarter, this capital positions the Company to accelerate that process whilst continuing broader business development and growth objectives at Fortifai. We look forward to putting these funds to work and keeping the market informed of our progress.
The company's No18 division is, it said, "building the foundational AI Data Plane for the era of Autonomous Agents''.
Next-generation technology
The company added:
By combining Neural Network-Based Algorithms with FPGA hardware acceleration, Nol8 delivers unprecedented speed, efficiency, and scale for the world's most demanding AI data environments. Nol8's world-first technology has unlocked a previous ceiling to data processing and scalability — enabling enterprise AI systems to operate at the speed of the data stream itself.
The company recently said in a separate release to the ASX that, "testing has demonstrated that a single Nol8 FPGA appliance has been benchmarked to replace the equivalent compute capacity of up to 60,000 CPU's under AI-grade workload conditions''.
No18 founder Dr Alon Rashelbach said at the time:
These results reframe how enterprises should think about AI infrastructure investment. The question is no longer around how many CPU's do we need? It is about why are we still using CPU's at all for this class of workload. A single FPGA appliance replacing 60,000 CPU's is not an incremental efficiency gain. It is a structural shift in the economics of data infrastructure.
FortifAI was valued at $229.3 million at the close of trade on Monday.
