Mr Tomisich said Trajan he and his wife have no plans to exit, despite the windfall.
“It’s not an exit story, which IPOs are sometimes, it is very much about a growth story,” he told The Australian Financial Review.
“Angela and I remain the strong majority shareholders and that’s the intention for some time to come as we now go to that next level.”
Mr Tomisich met Mr Eales in 2017 after winning Westpac Businesses of Tomorrow award and was assigned the ex-Wallaby as a mentor.
“On the surface you can’t find two more different people: I’m interested in AFL and he is interested in rugby. Johnny is six foot seven and I’m five foot seven! It was quite humorous but I think at some point we discovered that we have very similar views, and importantly similar values,” Mr Tomisich said.
“After the Westpac award period, he proactively was involved with us and engaged with us. It just seemed really appropriate for him to chair Trajan.”
The float its first outside funding round since Trajan was founded in 2011.
The co-founders both have a background in applied science, with Mr Tomisich having spent his career in the marketing and executive management sides of the industry, while his wife practised in biomedical science and worked in the clinical trials field.
“We actually were driven by that corporate experience, and realised that what we needed to do was look for both acquisitive and organic growth in ways that would be cash generative that would create our own internal economic engine, where we could then redeploy the proceeds to build a platform,” Mr Tomisich said.
Trajan has made seven acquisitions pre-IPO, and is eyeing more targets, which is part of the reason it tapped public markets. Proceeds will also be used for manufacturing modernisation to drive margin gains and accelerate commercialisation of a suite of new technologies such as its hemaPEN micro blood sampling device and a miniaturised instrumentation that is now the prototype inside major US pharma players seeking how to monitor the next generation of pharmaceutical manufacturing.
