We will be focusing on recent and upcoming UK IPOs listed on the LSE and what they do. The investment opportunities covered are Windward Ltd., 4GLOBAL PLC, Ondine Biomedical Inc. and LADbible Group Media.
Windward Ltd.
Opening date 06 December 2021
Issue price 155p
Market cap £163.28m
Ticker WNWD
At the helm Ami Daniel
Daniel has been the co-founder and CEO of Windward since April 2009. Prior to founding the company, he served as Naval Officer from 2002 to 2008.
He was previously nominated as one of the ’40 Most Promising Businesspeople Under 40’ and ’40 Most Promising Managers Under 40’, as well as received awards like The Ilan Ramon Award for Leadership and Excellence and the Israeli President’s Award for Social Activism.
What they do
Windward is a predictive intelligence company fusing artificial intelligence and big data in the maritime industry. This IPO marked the first time a maritime technology company was ever publicly traded. The company benefits from its annual subscription-based business model and generated an annual contract value of US$ 19.7 million (unaudited) as of 30 September 2021.
Windward helps organisations make decisions in compliance, logistics and security by providing actionable predictive intelligence, and covering real-time insights into ownership structure, cargo and vessel behaviours. The firm’s partners range from banks, energy companies, governments, insurance to ship owners, with renowned global customers such as BP, Shell, HSBC, the US Department of Defence and the United Nations. The company creates value by assisting its customers in KYC, due diligence, vetting and law enforcement processes and by providing immediate actionable recommendations with 4 times fewer false positives.
The capital raised in the IPO will be used to accelerate growth, which will entail acquisitions of complementary products and improvement of its platform. Recently, the company has also won a £4million contract with Sports England for access to its data platform.
4GLOBAL PLC
Opening date 07 December 2021
Issue price 91p
Market cap £24m
Ticker 4GBL
At the helm Eloy Mazon
Mazon is the CEO and Senior Partner of the consulting arm of 4GLOBAL. In the past 20 years, he held an array of positions for various games and tournaments, with most of the roles targeted at risk and security assessment. For instance, he served in the UK Government Sector Advisory Group for Major Sporting Events between 2013 and 2020 and worked as an independent advisor for World Rugby’s tournaments around the world from 2017 to 2019. He completed an MBA at Imperial College London as well as holds a Bachelor of Engineering and a Master of Engineering.
What they do
4GLOBAL is a sports and activities data, services and software company based in the UK. The company converts its proprietary data into actionable insights, helping clients promote sports participation and reduce physical inactivity. 4GLOBAL generates recurring revenues from licensing its platform to clients as well as service revenues related to its data platform.
The company is one of the biggest physical activities databases in the world. Although only founded in 2002, it has assisted in many sporting events, such as the Tokyo, Rio and London Olympics, 2020 UEFA European Football Championships and the 2015 Rugby World Cup. The company supports governments and cities in tackling physical inactivity problems. Some of its clients include the U.K. Government, Saudi Arabia and Manchester. Additionally, 4GLOBAL offers services for activity providers like the Football Association (FA) and The Gym Group, helping them predict customer behaviour and identify new opportunities.
Ondine Biomedical Inc. (“Ondine”)
Opening date 06 December 2021
Issue price 53.41p
Market cap £103.9m
Ticker OBI
At the helm Carolyn Cross
Cross is the founder, Chairman and CEO of Ondine since 2000. She has more than 30 years of experience in public market securities. Previously, she worked as a Vice President in managing institutional and private client funds at Royal Bank Investment Management Inc. She is a CFA and holds an MBA from York University and an HBA from the University of Western Ontario.
What they do
Headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, Ondine is a life sciences company that develops and commercialises therapies for bacterial, viral and fungal infections. Specifically, it focuses on its patented light-activated technology, namely, photodisinfection. Recent research suggests the use of nasal photodisinfection as a potential method of rapidly destroying COVID-19.
Photodisinfection destroys target pathogens painlessly and without encouraging the formation and spread of antibiotic resistance. Ondine’s lead product, Steriwave, has been deployed by Canadian hospitals for ten years and has since significantly reduced hospital-acquired infections. The two-step process is minimally invasive, easy and suitable for repetitive use. Approved in Canada, Europe and a few other countries, it is still going through clinical trials for approval in the US.
Currently, the company has numerous anti-infective products in the pipeline, including topical antiviral therapy for the upper respiratory tract (COVID-19, influenza, RSV, etc.), treatment of chronic rhinosinusitis and decolonisation of burns and wounds.
UPCOMING: LADbible Group Media (“LBG”)
Opening date Mid December 2021
Issue price TBC
Market cap Expected to be £360m
Ticker LBG
At the helm Alexander Solomou
Solomou is the founder and CEO at LBG. The entrepreneur co-founded LBG with Arian Kalantari when he was still a business management student at Leeds University in 2012. He is now the top shareholder of the Group.
What they do
LBG is a group of prominent UK digital media and youth content publishers with around 28 billion content views every year globally. The company operates in both in-house and third-party content across many mediums, including video, editorial, image and audio as well as new technology like virtual and augmented reality.
The company has a portfolio of ten specialist brands targeted at different interest points, all of which are designed to improve engagement and relevance on social media such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, YouTube and Tik Tok. The Group had a record year in 2020, doubling profits to £4.1m with sales at £30.2m. Its commercial clients include NHS, Disney+, Ford, Microsoft and Netflix.
Bernice Ng
This article is for educational purposes only. It is not a recommendation to buy or sell shares or other investments. Do your own research before buying or selling any investment or seek professional financial advice.
Recycling Technologies IPO 7/12/2021 What happened to them?
Hi Michael, looks like Recycling Technologies have decided not to move ahead with their IPO. You can read more about that here:
https://www.sharesmagazine.co.uk/news/shares/recycling-technologies-bins-ipo-hopes-to-reuse-plan-in-new-year
The discussion in “New and upcoming UK IPOs: Windward, 4GLOBAL, Ondine, LADbible – ShareScope Articles” is clear and useful. The supporting details make the main points much easier to understand.
The “what happened to them?” line on Recycling Technologies is the part I ended up sitting with — those IPO roundups read very differently a couple of years on, and it’s a useful reminder of how many of the names in them quietly stop being talked about.
I’m not an investor, so my version of this is smaller scale: I mess about with product photos for a friend’s shop, and last week I fed imgtoimgai a rough phone snap next to a reference shot to get a plain background with the same light on the label. Took a few tries with the strength turned down before it stopped redrawing the text on the packaging.
The spread of Windward, 4GLOBAL, Ondine and LADbible in one piece is a useful reminder of how varied recent UK listings can be, and the Recycling Technologies line is the one that leaves you wondering what actually happened after that 7/12/2021 date.
Unrelated, but I tried the tiktok broom riding filter ai with one photo of my dog last week. It made the 14-second vertical clip and kept his face and collar the same; I just picked the preset motion and let the sky transition run.
The Recycling Technologies bit is the one that stuck with me — an IPO that quietly vanished from the calendar while the others at least made it to listing. Windward and 4GLOBAL feel like a different era of the same year, back when anything with a ticker looked like a safe bet.
Off-topic, but the only thing I’ve done with a vertical video lately was upload a single photo of my cat to that window peeper AI thing — picked Animal, chose one of the eight room styles, and got a 14-second 9:16 clip of him doing the stare-back. It’s the “tiktok window peeper filter ai” setup, no background upload or prompt needed, which is why I bothered at all.
The LADbible and Ondine parts are the ones I’d want more detail on—UK IPO roundups like this always make me check what happened after listing, especially with the Recycling Technologies question still hanging there.
Separately, I tried the Gangnam Style AI Video site with one static photo of a friend, and the photo to gangnam style video flow kept his face and jacket intact while adding the horse-riding motion; the vertical clip was ready to drop into Shorts.
The Windward, 4GLOBAL, Ondine and LADbible round-up is handy for seeing what actually reached the LSE, and the Recycling Technologies note is a good reminder that not every IPO story ends with a ticker. I’d rather read the post-mortem on those than another list of names.
Separately, I tried a photo to dunk video ai site called AI Dunk after seeing it mentioned elsewhere: you upload one photo, pick person or pet, and it produces a vertical 9:16 clip with the court lighting and camera move already handled in the browser. No timeline or prompt fiddling, which was the part I expected to hate.
The Windward and 4GLOBAL sections are a handy recap, and the Recycling Technologies question is the one I keep coming back to — IPO coverage often stops before the part where you find out what actually happened after listing. Ondine and LADbible fit that same pattern of interesting names with a lot of story left unwritten.
Separately, I tried turning a portrait photo into an ai lip sync rap video with a built-in beat, and the small detail that stood out was how the camera motion followed the rhythm rather than just sitting on a static face. The vertical 9:16 export also dropped into Shorts without needing to crop it afterward.
The Recycling Technologies entry is the one I keep coming back to — a 2021 listing and then the open question of what actually became of it, which is the part most IPO roundups tend to skip. Seeing smaller names like 4GLOBAL and Ondine lined up next to Windward is a decent way to compare what each of them actually sells, rather than just the ticker and the date.
That’s roughly how I end up judging small companies anyway — does the product do the one thing it claims. Which is how I came to AnimatePhoto AI: I had a scanned portrait of my grandmother from the fifties and wanted to turn still photos into video ai without installing anything, so I uploaded it in the browser, typed a slow push-in as the camera move and nudged the expression toward a smile. It came back as a short clip, and since then I’ve used the reference-clip option to copy motion from a bit of old family footage.
The Recycling Technologies piece is the one I clicked on first — odd how a company can file for an IPO and then just disappear from the conversation. LADbible going public is also a strange one to picture.
I’ve been messing around with FacelessReel for short explainer clips on IPO stories like these — typed in a topic, and it spit out a script, voiceover, scene visuals, and captions in one go. It’s an automated faceless video maker, which is handy when I don’t want to be on camera for a two-minute breakdown.
The bit about Recycling Technologies is the part I’d want more on — following up on a listing from 2021 to see what actually became of it is more useful than another preview of Windward or 4GLOBAL, and it’s the kind of thing most IPO roundups skip.
Separately, I’ve been messing about with Outstanding Tiny Desk AI for a small side project. I dropped in one photo of a friend as the lead singer, added a second photo of someone on sax, picked 10 seconds, and got back a vertical 9:16 MP4 that was fine to upload straight to Reels. The photo to tiny desk concert step is really just the two images and a duration choice — nothing to type out, no timeline to fiddle with, which is why I could actually finish it in one sitting.