The Mobileye prospectus, and a vision company's first numbers
On 31 July 2014 Mobileye N.V. issued a final prospectus for 35,589,000 ordinary shares at $25.00, $889.7 million gross. The company itself sold 8,325,000 shares and received $197.7 million before expenses; the other $647.5 million went to selling shareholders. The document was the first to show a computer-vision developer's revenue: $81.2 million for 2013.
Why it matters
Until then there were no public figures for the economics of computer vision in cars. The prospectus gave three years of them at once and showed the curve: $19.2 million in 2011, $40.3 million in 2012, $81.2 million in 2013, moving from a net loss of $13.4 million in 2011 to net income of $19.9 million in 2013. It also stated the deployment — roughly 3.3 million vehicles carrying the product as of 31 March 2014 — and the book: 237 car models from 20 manufacturers contracted by 2016.
The offering price was $25.00 a share with an underwriting discount of $1.25. The gross $889,725,000 divides into $197,718,750 for the company and $647,520,000 for selling shareholders; the underwriters held an option on a further 5,338,350 shares from those same shareholders. Gross profit for 2013 was $60.1 million, of which $47.4 million came from the manufacturer segment at a 74.9 per cent margin. By the end of 2014 the technology was to be in 160 car models from 18 manufacturers. What this record does not assert. The string 74.4 occurs zero times in the prospectus; the 2013 manufacturer-segment margin is 74.9 per cent and that is the figure the document carries. Nor does the prospectus carry a $5.3 billion valuation: that is a press number, and this record does not repeat it. The word DeepMind appears in the prospectus once, in the biography of the director Tomaso Poggio, among companies he had invested in.