eSignLive Announces Successful Privatization

– Silanis Technology Inc. (“Silanis”) is today pleased to announce that shareholders of Silanis International Limited (“SIL”) have overwhelmingly voted in favor of taking their company private, effective June 24, 2013. A minority shareholder of Silanis, SIL was formed in 2007 as an investment company to raise funds and invest in privately held Silanis. SIL’s near-unanimous decision to leave the Alternative Investment Market of the London Stock Exchange (“AIM”) will see the Silanis group uniformly returned to private status. The reasons for this decision include:

• The lack of meaningful trading, liquidity and visibility offered on AIM; and
• To re-allocate administrative listing costs and resources into value-added research and development, sales and marketing.

Joining a growing number of other successful companies, Silanis is moving away from AIM at the right time. The number of companies listed on AIM has fallen every year since 2007, from a peak of nearly 1,700 to approximately 1,100 today. During this same period, long-standing directors and employees have taken on an increasingly larger ownership position in SIL, such that less than 10% of the Silanis group was ultimately in public hands. The changing profile and suitability of the AIM exchange, combined with the majority of equity being locked in with long-term investors, were key considerations for shareholders. The cost-benefit analysis was unequivocal, as evidenced by the over 98% of votes cast for going private. “The entire AIM process was a great financing milestone for Silanis,” says Silanis CEO and co-founder Tommy Petrogiannis. “Not only were we successful in meeting our funding objectives, it made us a better and more mature company. We stepped up to meet the governance and regulatory responsibilities of a public company. We also left behind the volatility of venture capital financing with its attendant high-risk business models, outrageous cash burn, multiple classes of shares with competing rights and interests - all challenges that ultimately put customers, employees and shareholders at risk,” continued Petrogiannis. While Silanis competitors have needed to take in repeated VC funding rounds during this period, most having never made a penny of profit, Silanis continues to run its business on internally generated cash and the AIM proceeds from 2007. The Forrester Wave™: E-Signatures, Q2 2013 report stated “Silanis is the strongest vendor with both an on-premise and cloud offering”. Shareholders are looking to capitalize on and extend this leadership position, now as a fully private entity. About Silanis Silanis is the most widely used e-signature solution in the world, responsible for processing more than 600 million documents annually. Founded in 1992, Silanis’ solutions e-Sign Enterprise and e-SignLive enable thousands of organizations, including four of the top 10 North American banks, eight of the top 15 insurance companies and the entire US Army to accelerate business transactions, improve customer experience and reduce costs while improving compliance with legal and regulatory requirements. Silanis provides the most flexible deployment options with its on-premise, cloud and SaaS e-signature solutions, eliminating manual, paper-based processing and enabling e-commerce and e-government transactions to be electronically executed from start to finish.