NLG.L Share News (NLG)

With technology described by Shell as a "game changer" for the oil industry, Arria NLG has floated its shares on AIM without raising any new funds as it looks to improve its profile and win new clients. The company had a market cap on admission of around £102m at a share price of 100p, but this quickly soared to £162m as the shares hit 159p just after midday. Developed by the University of Aberdeen, Arria's software is based around the concept of natural language generation (NLG), whereby it transforms large sets of data into manageable reports. For example, with one meteorological client the software takes a huge data set of weather information from all over the globe and can write a 5,000-word location-specific weather forecast in under one minute. "The software understands the company's rules for writing reports and turns this mass of data into forecasts - it understands rules better than humans," explained Chairman and Chief Executive Stuart Rogers.Perhaps more lucratively, the company has a contract with Royal Dutch Shell for Shell's platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, where Shell have described the technology as a "game changer" for the oil industry.Rogers said the software acts as a "force multiplier" on the oil and gas platform, where if there are any significant changes detected by the hundreds of motion sensors that monitor pumps, gears and other equipment a senior engineer usually will need to take between two and five hours to write a report for the platform operators. NLG completes the report in one minute.The stock market listing is designed to raise the company's profile and support the development of the Arria NLG brand internationally, give access to equity capital as needed, facilitate the recruitment of high calibre employees and provide liquidity in the company's shares."The increasing growth in 'Big Data' in recent years has led to the significant expansion of our target markets," said Rogers. "Our listing at this time is therefore highly appropriate."OH