NLG.L Regulatory News (NLG)

5 December 2013

Arria NLG Plc

 ("Arria", the "Company" or the "Group")

First day of dealings and Admission to trading on AIM

Arria NLG plc, a leader in the development and deployment of Natural Language Generation ("NLG") technologies, is pleased to announce its admission to trading on AIM at 08:00am UK time today ("Admission"). Dealings in the Company's ordinary shares will trade under the ticker AIM: NLG and the Company's ISIN code for the ordinary shares is GB00BGDFC25. The number of ordinary shares in issue immediately after admission will be 102,281,474. The number of warrants in issue immediately after admission will be 9,570,987. The trading symbol for Arria's warrants is NLGW and the ISIN code for the warrants is GB00BGDFLX36. On Admission the Company is expected to have an initial market capitalisation of c. £102m. Allenby Capital Limited is acting as Nominated Adviser and Broker to Arria.

Arria is joining AIM in order 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.

Stuart Rogers, Chairman and Chief Executive of Arria commented: "We are delighted to be joining AIM at this exciting stage in the commercialisation of Arria's innovative technology. The increasing growth in 'Big Data' in recent years has led to the significant expansion of our target markets. Our listing at this time is therefore highly appropriate. Our admission to AIM will raise the Company's profile and support the development of the Arria NLG brand internationally. In addition, our AIM admission will give access to equity capital as needed and facilitate the recruitment of high calibre employees to help us fully meet the Company's many opportunities."

Overview

Arria is a UK headquartered software development business. Its core product, the Arria NLG Engine, originated from research at the University of Aberdeen, a leading institution in the field of Natural Language Generation. Arria's target is to be the global leader in the development and deployment of mission critical, core industrial, enterprise level NLG software technologies.

Its technology is already deployed in a mission critical environment, monitoring large scale industrial machinery located on oil and gas production platforms in deepwater Gulf of Mexico for a major global oil and gas company and is in use at the Met Office.

Arria has engaged in three successful rounds of private fundraising in the past 15 months securing US$40 million of capital. The last round of private fundraising took place at US$1.60 (approximately £1) a share to raise £9.85 million. Approximately £6.1 million of this was conditional on a listing, but otherwise the Company has not sought to raise funds as part of its flotation.

As a result of the private fundraising rounds the Company already has a wide shareholder base of over 200 investors with no single shareholder owning more than 10% of the shares. The University of Aberdeen holds approximately 5% of the shares, and the four NLG scientists who formed the company that developed the Arria NLG Engine own another approximately 17.5%.

The Company's Admission Document is available on its website at www.arria.com.

Arria's Market Opportunity

The market opportunity for the Arria NLG Engine has grown substantially through the emergence of the Big Data phenomenon.

Global corporations have to deal with an ever-growing amount of data resulting from the digitisation of transactions and industrial processes and from technological advancements in data capture. Computer networks are now producing and storing digital data at such a rate that this data is becoming ever more difficult to utilise fully. This development, and the challenge to make optimal use of this data, has become known as "Big Data".

Natural Language Generation is a form of artificial intelligence that analyses large and complex data sets and reports on the content and consequences of this data in natural language, emulating the authoring skills of humans. The Arria NLG Engine has two main components: (1) an analytics component that is programmed to embody the knowledge of experts in the domain in which it operates; and (2) a natural language generation component which embodies the skill required to communicate information articulately using natural language. The combination of these two components means that the NLG Engine can be used to automate the generation of high-quality written reports in potentially any language, tailored to the specific information needs of different audiences. Computational embodiment means that reports can be produced extremely quickly and with potentially infinite scalability and replicability.

Humans constantly apply their knowledge and expertise to make sense of the data presented to them. In every domain of activity, humans compare their past experience with the real time inputs of their senses in order to understand the world around them and to make decisions about what to do next. Over time humans have become experts in making these decisions, so that they can draw conclusions effortlessly. The Arria NLG Engine captures and embodies these decision making skills in the form of algorithms: recipes for carrying out tasks that indicate step-by-step how to achieve the required outcomes. The Group's software teams first learn how experts in a given field analyse and interpret specific data, and then automate the use of these skills in the Arria NLG Engine.

Communication of the results of expert analysis is the other main part of the Arria NLG Engine. To do this, the Arria NLG Engine makes use of codified knowledge of how language works, all the way from how texts should be organised at a high level, down to the specific words that should be used to appropriately communicate concepts to any given audience. The link between data analytics and human-like communication makes the Arria NLG Engine a powerful tool. The Arria NLG Engine automatically communicates results, not in numbers or graphics that may require further analysis and explanation, but in narratives that are designed to be read as if written by a human expert.

 The Directors of Arria believe the Company has the following key strengths:

· it is a prominent leader in NLG science and its commercial application;

· many opportunities exist for commercial application of NLG in the automation of analysis and reporting on large data sets for enterprises, as well as many other applications across a wide variety of industries;

· it has an experienced team with success in software start-ups, change management, global business-to business branding, marketing and sales;

· it has deployed the Arria NLG Engine with a major global oil and gas company and a government

meteorology service;

· it is committed to building a robust and pioneering patent portfolio in NLG;

· the NLG Engine reports in a consistent manner and according to the style and usage appropriate to the recipient, whether an engineer, nurse, derivatives trader or other pre-determined group of people;

· reports can be written in English or potentially any other language; and

· the end product can be delivered to potentially any portal or through potentially any digital means.

Strategy and Objectives

There are many potential uses for the Arria NLG Engine across a wide variety of industry verticals. The Group's focus is placed on those sectors that the Directors believe offer strong opportunities to generate revenue from both Arria NLG Engine licenses and professional services development work, including oil and gas, financial services, healthcare and meteorology. Specifically, the industry verticals of oil and gas and financial services are regarded by the Company as promising targets for early adopters of NLG technology. Both verticals exhibit maturity in the fields of analytical decision support and Big Data analytics. These verticals, therefore, currently form the main targets for sales activity and are likely to do so for the short-to-medium term. Further, the Group's immediate focus is on extending the existing relationship with its existing client in the oil and gas sector, continuing to develop the vision of the "articulate" oil and gas platform and obtaining another oil and gas customer.

To best leverage expertise in the near-to-medium term, the Group's sales team will seek additional customers that exhibit an operational profile similar to that of existing customers. Neither of Arria's customers has exclusivity within its respective business vertical and the Group's intention is to maintain this position.

For further information, please visit www.arria.com or contact: