Probably, since the money from the previous round has been burned quite a bit and the stock price performance is what it is, it’s easier to raise that kind of money from the US than from Finland. A couple of things come to mind:
The first thing is, of course, the sufficiency of the funds, i.e., what will the current assets + that $15 million be enough for? In other words, what is that $15 million based on, what will be achieved with it, and when will they be coming back to raise even more money?
And the second, smaller issue - listing and being listed in the US is not a free endeavor. A small company incurs all kinds of administrative costs, etc., for the sake of the listing indefinitely. On the scale of a normal public company, this wouldn’t be a huge amount of money, of course, but a likely small six-figure sum per year is a lot for Spinnova. Everything costs money and there isn’t really any revenue, so in that sense, it would have been better to raise the money through the Helsinki Stock Exchange.
Then there is the competitive situation + the “megatrend”; how strong is the megatrend of environmentally friendly fibers, i.e., are people willing to pay for that? And the competitive situation: in Asia, they are indeed developing similar products with technologies suited to the local cost structure.
So, the importance of price may be emphasized even further, meaning it’s worth following the price competitiveness of Spinnova’s product particularly closely. Even a brilliant product is not enough if a competing product can be obtained significantly cheaper.
Edit: I haven’t owned / don’t own the company, but I follow it from the sidelines; there could be the makings of real success here, but so far it hasn’t looked very good. So let’s hope for success; Finland could use some new industrial success stories.