Xirr,

You based your original post on the proposition that some light should be shone on these little companies. I agree with you on that point. Hopefully the new NZXT market is a move in the right direction given the NZX has engaged Edison Investment Research to do quarterly reports on new entrants over their first three years in the market.

In terms of IKE's prospects time will tell if you are right, the next half year update will reveal if they were telling porkies about their FY'15/'16 revenue, a full year should give a good steer on whether or not they are going to succeed over the longer term. While IKE may be a high risk start-up it has a number of characteristics which differentiate it from "packaging any old crap" start-ups.

For the record Galvanized Group was formed in 2003, the name was changed to SurveyLab Group the same year and to IkeGPS Group in 2013, so it's been going for a bit over a decade. Jenny Morel's No8 Ventures invested $2m in 2005, a useful cash injection but wouldn't fund much development. It doesn't worry me they're over ten years old because until recently they were a tiny undercapitalised business and I'm sure like all of us they learnt by making mistakes. Even if the product is crap as you claim, in terms of the time it takes to develop and get new products to market it's hardly "old" crap.

When you say It was licensed with another high profile company the inference is they previously failed to exploit a significant sales opportunity. I assume you're talking about CERL and not the current deal with GE. They did a patent licence deal with CERL for the military version, working with the US military made good sense to get their product off the ground, most start-ups would see it as golden opportunity. But I doubt a US army research lab was ever going to be an effective sales partner, plus being beholden to a single dominant customer is often counterproductive to getting a product with broad appeal to market, the product can easily end up too bespoke. In the end IKE will sink or swim by selling into the private sector.