Cirata plc

Hi, I'm Stephen Kelly, Chief Executive Officer of Serata.

Thank you for joining me today as we present the results for the general meeting held on the 24th of July, 2026, together with our trading update for the second quarter of FY26. I want to start with the fundraise because it's a foundation for the future. Following the shareholder approval at the general meeting, our placing and subscription announced on the 26th of June has now become unconditional. Together with our retail offer, we've raised gross proceeds of $7.2 million and the round was oversubscribed. Admission of the new shares is expected on the 28th of July. This strengthens our balance sheet to drive new logo acquisition, pipeline conversion and product scale, while giving us the platform to invest with discipline on our growth strategy. We greatly appreciate the strong support from existing investors and many new UK institutions as well as the retail investor base. Since we came together three years ago the company has raised circa 35 million dollars net of fees. With those funds and support from investors we've transformed every part of the company effectively building a growth company from a broken company. With these funds, we have reduced the expense rate by over 70% from the peak. With this latest fundraise, the balance sheet is strengthened and we can shift our focus to acquiring new customers. Turn into the quarter itself. Closing ACV was $5.3 million, up from $4.9 million at the start of the quarter. Driven by 0.4 million dollars of net new ACV from renewals and expansion within our existing customer base. We didn't close any new logos in the quarter and this was disappointing. What gives us confidence looking forward however is the pipeline behind the business. Between January and April, our pipeline grew by 40% to $21 million of annual contract value, ACV, and both volume and quality have continued to strengthen since then. That's the result of our go-to-market team now being fully onboarded following the final hires that joined in June and July. The task now is to shift gears from heroic selling in FY25 that produced record Q4 results to a repeatable, scalable model based on our methodology to facilitate customer buying cycles. In the second half, our goal is to execute with focus, demonstrating that a fully resourced go-to-market organization can deliver new customer acquisition and scale, building on our FY25 growth trajectory. Given Serata has moved circa 300 petabytes of data for customers, We are best placed to help prospective customers through a petabyte scale data project delivery. This quarter also saw real progress on Serata Symphony. We now have our first customer deployed, a major UK retailer running iceberg to iceberg replication, following a successful beta trialing with that retailer. We're also progressing well with Serata Symphony Beta at a large US bank. We also moved to a proof of concept with a new prospective customer in the US. On the OEM side, there was a major announcement on the 16th of June, 2026, when Serata Symphony can now be delivered under our agreement with IBM as Serata Symphony for IBM Big Replicate. That's an important validation milestone for the product and opens up a significantly wider route to market. It's worth noting that the problems Serata solves for the customers are amongst the hardest and the most complex large-scale data use cases for global 2000 companies. Often these data challenges are in the too hard category and ultimately career limiting for CTOs, Chief Data Officers and CIOs to tackle. With the unstructured live data explosion fueled by the increasing volume of contact center conversations, pictures, videos, social media clicks, just as examples, the infrastructure complexity is growing further. Vendors are seeking to lock in customers and exacerbate the customer quagmire. Serata Symphony is the open standards platform that helps customers manage this complexity and take back control. With one customer describing Serata as the Switzerland of data orchestration. Honestly, we need to do a better job telling this story clearly to prospective customers. However, the progress we've made validates our strategy and the foundations are in place for growth. Turn into cash. The recent fundraise will provide gross proceeds of $7.2 million. In addition, as of June 30th, our unaudited cash balance was $2.6 million, and with short-term receivables bringing our cash plus receivables position to $2.8 million. In Q1, we recorded the first quarter of positive cash flow. During Q2, we consumed $2.1 million net cash following a weaker Q1 FY26 bookings quarter. However, we continue our expenses discipline with total overheads at $3.2 million in Q2, consistent with our FY26 annualized range between $12 and $13 million, which represents a reduction of over 70% from the peak. We're reaffirming our outlook shared on the 14th of January 2026. We continue to target cash flow breakeven for FY26. This quarter also marks three years since the start of Serata's turnaround. In just the last year we've divested a legacy business, we've built and launched the Serata Symphony platform, put it into deployment with a major retailer and delivered our first cash positive quarter in Q1. With the balance sheet now strengthened after the fundraise and our go-to-market team fully resourced, our focus for the second half is clear. Execute with discipline and convert that pipeline into new customer wins. Thank you. I'll now take a few questions.

Stephen, thank you for taking the questions. Now, you mentioned the fundraise was oversubscribed. What does that tell you about investor confidence and how will the proceeds be used?