Last week, Denver lost a huge and leading AI company, Palantir Technologies, which abruptly moved to Miami. But another local AI firm, , entered the world as a public company on Friday.
ROC hit the Nasdaq Capital Market at $6 a share under the ticker, no surprise, ROC, raising $24 million. Demand was strong enough to trigger an overallotment option that allows the underwriter to purchase an additional 600,000 shares over the next 30 days.
Shares closed Tuesday at $5.80 a share, which would value the company, which has 16 million shares, at around $95 million. Palantir, by contrast, is a $308 billion AI giant.
Compared to Palantir, which has a much broader focus on data analytics and system integration, ROC has a narrow niche, image recognition, including faces, fingerprints, irises, tattoos, license plates and weapon identification. The company’s Vision AI platform claims it allows machines to not only see the world, but also to interpret and understand what they are seeing.
The company, founded in 2015, has 42 employees and dozens of paying customers, including U.S. federal agencies, state and local public safety and law enforcement organizations, global finance companies and retail and commercial security firms.
Facial recognition and fingerprint reading technology have been around awhile, but ROC claims that its systems are less hardware-intensive and faster than those of rivals. Its platforms can use but don’t require expensive graphics processing units or GPUs, making the technology easier to deploy in the field and to operate within tight government budgets.
In one test, its system could read fingerprints 500 times faster than every other vendor, according to the company.
Foreign firms, especially in Japan and Europe, took an early lead in biometrics. But by combining cloud-based systems and AI analysis, U.S. firms are catching up. Another marketing card ROC has with national security and law enforcement customers — it is based and operates entirely within the U.S.
The company’s Denver headquarters is at 1290 Broadway, right next to the Colorado History Center and a short walk from the Denver Art Museum. The company also maintains locations in Grand Rapids, Mich., and Morgantown, W.Va.
ROC said it plans to use the proceeds from its IPO to hire staff for its engineering, sales, deployment and support teams. It also wants to accelerate the training and deployment of its Vision AI algorithms. The remainder of the money will go for working capital and general corporate purposes.
The splits work out to 40% of proceeds spent on hiring, 35% on training and deploying the platform and 25% on capital and general spending.
ROC’s IPO is the second this year by a Colorado company.
York Space Systems, a satellite maker based in Greenwood Village, raised $629 million after selling 18.5 million shares at $34 a piece on Jan. 28. The company had a market value of $3.54 billion on Tuesday. Its shares trade under the ticker YSS on the New York Stock Exchange.
