ACT.L Regulatory News (ACT)

20 June 2014

RNS Reach

Actual Experience plc

("Actual Experience" or "the Company")

QMUL wins prestigious business impact award

Actual Experience plc (AIM: ACT), the analytics as a service company is pleased to announce that Queen Mary University of London has won the Business Impact - Achieved Award for its development and spin out of Actual Experience.

The award has been given by PraxisUnico, an influential UK network that supports innovation and commercialisation of research. The award recognises projects that have made an outstanding business impact through successful knowledge transfer, where there is evidence of impact delivered, and is one of three award categories which featured at the awards ceremony in Cardiff on 12 June 2014.

Based on research at Queen Mary's School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Actual Experience provides digital supply chain analytics that measure the quality of digital applications and products for businesses, thereby improving the experience of employees, customers, and partners with regard to important digital products and services. 

Queen Mary Innovation (QMI) is responsible for fostering sustainable high-growth companies from Queen Mary University of London's research and manages the university's equity interests in its spin-out portfolio.

In 2012, Actual Experience won the IET Innovation Award for Information Technology. Since then the Company's customer base has more than tripled, including blue-chip clients in Germany and the US. To support continued expansion, both in the UK and internationally, the Company recently completed a £4m financing round led by one of Europe's largest investment managers - Henderson Global Investors. Other significant shareholders in the Company include IP Group, CEO Dave Page and Co-Founder Jonathan Pitts.

The Company scooped another prestigious industry award for technology excellence when it won the UK Innovation and Entrepreneurship category in the 2013 UK IT Industry awards run by BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.

Adam Daykin, Head of Technology Transfer (Tech & Eng) at QMI said "Actual Experience is a major success story for QMUL. Since 2009, it has managed a period of sustained growth, picking up a number of large global clients. Having recently listed, we see an excellent future and QMI is very proud to have helped the Company to where it is today."

Jonathan Pitts, Professor of Communication Engineering at QMUL and co-founder of Actual Experience, commented: "Research impact is very much a team effort. In the Networks Group I've collaborated with Raul Mondragon, Chris Phillips and John Schormans over many years on the underpinning research, which ultimately led to my work on Perceptual Quality quantification and impairment diagnosis. Successful technology transfer takes hard work and dedication. Adam Daykin and Graeme Brown of QMI were invaluable, helping the Company successfully negotiate the various IP, funding and resourcing challenges of university spinout formation. As for the future, Actual Experience is building a great team to take this research impact into the global marketplace and we have been greatly encouraged by the level of our success to date."

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About Actual Experience plc

Headquartered in Bath, UK, and listed on the AIM market of the London Stock Exchange, Actual Experience's Analytics-as-a-Service enables the management of digital products and services. The Company has developed an innovative business information tool to enable corporations to analyse their digital supply chains as users experience them and thereby improve the experience of their employees, customers and partners with regard to important digital products and services.

Actual Experience's customer base spans numerous parts of the global digital ecosystem, from SMEs and government organisations, to global blue-chip companies across all sectors. The addressable market for Actual Experience includes any organisation which relies on digital products and services or trades online, either B2B or B2C. The Company has been working closely with Ofcom in a project to analyse Digital Britain and explore how well broadband in the UK is supporting the nation's most commonly used services such as iPlayer, Skype, and Facebook. In April 2014, Actual Experience was included in Red Herring's Top 100 Europe, recognising Europe's leading companies and in November 2013 the Company was awarded the British Computer Society UK Innovation and Entrepreneurship Award.