ImageWare Systems has completed a US$10 million equity financing in a private placement to a group of institutional and qualified individual investors. MDB Capital Group LLC, an investment bank that specialises in companies possessing or seeking to develop market changing, disruptive technologies and intellectual property (IP), acted as sole placement agent for the offering.

ImageWare sold 20 million shares of its common stock at US$0.50 per share for gross proceeds to the company of US$10 million. The company also issued 10 million five-year common stock warrants to the investors with an exercise price of US$0.50 per share. ImageWare says it intends to use the proceeds to aggressively market its services, to expand its IP and for general corporate purposes.

In conjunction with this offering, the company’s Series C and Series D preferred stock and remaining outstanding convertible debt were automatically converted into common stock at US$0.50 per share.

"We believe this financing gives us the working capital to successfully execute the company’s long-term business plan," says Jim Miller, chairman and CEO, ImageWare. "For the first time in many years, ImageWare is debt free and fully funded, allowing us to aggressively and competitively bid for new business without the lingering cloud of how our balance sheet appears to our potential customers. We expect this difference to be meaningful and help propel our growth.

"ImageWare starts 2012 with a solid book of business, a strong balance sheet, and an aggressive, sustainable growth strategy. We will continue to grow our government and law enforcement business as we now also target the enterprise and consumer markets. The proliferation of mobile devices and mobile financial transactions are requiring the most nimble approaches to ID management. The evolving future of biometrics lies in identity management for the cloud and we intend to target our open, plug & play, scalable, end-to-end solution as a software as a service (SaaS) business alongside our traditional offerings.”