Cityzenith Update to Investors during COVID-19
We hope you are keeping well and staying safe in the midst of today’s uncertainty. This is a trying time for people the world over and presents unique challenges for businesses of all sizes and stages of evolution, too. I am sure that you are already reading plenty about the virus and its impacts, real and perceived. I thought I would take a few minutes to address how Cityzenith is faring these days, and what our plans are for the near- and mid-term future.
We are doing fine. We plan to retain all of our team members and indeed add a few more, and none of our projects have been canceled; in fact most have confirmed that they will proceed apace as they have been, with only a couple reporting potential delays. While there will be a general slowdown which indeed will have some short term impact on our business this year, we believe that the virus situation may actually ultimately accelerate the global adoption of Digital Twins, as property owners and operators come to terms with the critical importance of having to manage and maintain buildings completely remotely in a possible new and forever-changed operating environment.
I want to assure our shareholders that I have seen times like this before and am prepared to deal with what’s ahead. I navigated businesses through the difficult recessions of both 2001, and later 2008. Those battles taught me valuable life lessons, and prepared me for what's happening today. A seasoned veteran startup CEO, I made many moves over the past several years to de-risk our company from the shock of a potential global crisis or recession, from
- virtualizing engineering operations, to
- virtualizing sales and marketing, investing over the past 18 months in digital promotion,
- developing and maintaining a remote engineering support team in a low-cost center (India) where I have 20 years of experience, led by a core team of experts in the United States and Europe, to
- staying close to our key shareholders and board members, even saying goodbye to certain board members or advisors over the past two years who no longer serve us, replacing them with better aligned board members and better aligned advisers as we have evolved. To this day, I maintain full control of the Board of Directors, critical in times like these.
- choosing the crowdfunding path for capital raising over traditional VC, angel, small fund, and other routes, which have now dried-up.
—all of these decisions are proving wise in today’s environment.
After the close of the Republic round in November in which you all invested, we jumped right into preparing for our next public crowdfunding round, a Regulation A+, just a few weeks after the formal close of the Reg CF. I am proud to share that after 3 months of solid prep, we submitted our documents to the SEC a few weeks ago and will soon be making announcements about a new Reg A+ crowdfunding round in which you all will be able to participate. We have an extensive waitlist from the Reg CF, and many shareholders who have asked if they could re-invest. Stay tuned for more details. We are very excited about this, and will be welcoming both non-accredited and accredited investors at a scale that we have never seen before. Once we are formally approved and live, we will be giving you information about how to invest directly, and help promote our next capital raise in your circles. The Regulation A+ is expected to go live in May.
My intent is that we will become one of those companies that made of all the right moves during the downswing, only to emerge a strong leading contender as the world recovers from the current situation. Stay safe and stay healthy.