IXICO plc

Good afternoon and welcome to the Ixaco PLC investor presentation. Throughout today's recorded presentation, attendees will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted via the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand side of your screen. Before we begin, I'd just like to submit the following poll, which I kindly ask you to submit your responses to. I'd now like to hand over to the executive management team. Bram, good afternoon.

Good afternoon and thank you for this introduction. I don't think Bram's needs introduction, CFO and Chief Operating Officer of the company, and then myself, Bram Gordon C, Chief Executive Officer. We're reporting out our first half of the financial year 26 results. which we are very proud of. I hope you will agree with that as we go through this presentation. And as usual, Grant and I will both present the numbers, some elements of our strategy, of course, as well. Also following a recent capital raise, which I'm sure some of you might be interested in hearing what exactly we are doing with these proceeds and how this is going to change. We believe also the trajectory of this company in the near and somewhat more distant future. So with that in mind, For many of you, probably the company doesn't require an introduction, but just to sort of level set, we consider ourselves the leading imaging CRO focused exclusively on neurology. And also with this recent capital raise, you will see that neurology is still very much going to remain our core market because we also know that we are operating on fertile ground when we talk about neurology. One thing that I do want to call out besides sort of the usual numbers that you see here to the right hand side in terms of the size of our company, our customer base, and obviously more importantly, the data that we've been collecting throughout the past 20 years is that we have rebranded our technology platform, calling it ICSI. And some of you may have seen that we recently also published or publicized a new release of that ICSI platform version 10, which as you will see later during this presentation, comes with novel features, comes with additional capabilities, but also capacity and speed, which of course is very important for the customers that we're serving. So with that in mind, let me just sort of summarize for you what are the highlights of this first half of 26 and coming out of what we thought was a successful 25 already, we really see consistency now. We believe in that financial performance of the company. I might remind you that we did a smaller capital raise a little bit over 12 months ago in order to really get that company into a new trajectory, especially focusing on some of the bigger disease areas in neurology as well. And so with that in mind, we have now got a revenue trajectory for H126 of 23% growth compared to H125. is 15%. So the first half of this year clearly is outperforming that trend. And that comes off an order book increase of 31% vis-a-vis the end of last year, 25. And that is actually 38% compared to H1 of 25. And that order book, of course, is very important because everyone who knows our business and who knows the business of serving clinical trials for pharma and biotech knows that that order book really gives visibility on future revenues for the company. And what it means for the immediate future, so the end of year 26, is that this order book now fuels 95% of the revenues which are out there with a guidance of 7.5 million. So it gives me definitely confidence that we will achieve at least that 7.5 million guidance that we have in the market and then again reminding everyone that we did conclude recently a 10 million capital raise which obviously is a big number for the company that we are and as you will see and as I will remind those who haven't seen the capital raise announcement yet I'll give some more details on why we did this and as well for the company. Staying for a moment in those past six months and what we believe excellent performance there, pipeline diversity is one of the key drivers. And when we say pipeline diversity, obviously we mean therapeutic areas first. You may remind that we focus especially on Alzheimer's and Parkinson's in addition to some of the rare neurodegenerative diseases, which we've always been focusing on. Grant will give some more details in a minute. be presenting in terms of volume around 50% of that pipeline. Obviously, that pipeline still needs conversion into order book, but that is very much the expectation for the foreseeable future. I also want to highlight multimodality here. What we mean by multimodality is that we've now really become a trusted partner, not only for biotech and pharma, but also for the diagnostic players, so that's sort of a bit of a different vertical in the life sciences industry, helping them validate some of their solutions which also translates for us in much shorter FDA validation trajectories, and hence also revenue recognition for us as a company. Expanding of the geographic footprint, that was something that was central in that previous capital raise, so a little bit over 12 months ago, which also resulted in, I would say, more feet on the ground and a bigger footprint, especially stateside in the U.S., and it also resulted in me hiring my first executive report in the US with my chief commercial officer now based in Boston. And then significant KOL endorsement. I will come back to that, but we are in the business of, of course, commercially making a bigger impact into some of these important disease areas. But that comes with, of course, the endorsement of thought leaders and academics in that space. And you will see that our chief scientific officer and chief medical officer Robin Walls has made major inroads there, and we now have some European leaders around the table that really endorse also that innovation that we have brought on platform. And so to end this summary slide, which I think sort of really gives a good overview of the performance of the past six months, novel algorithms on platform. That was very much what we set out to do, especially in Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. I'll bring that to life in a minute. But then also the latest release of our platform with especially some of these new AI-driven capabilities that also increase the speed, as mentioned, and the capacity at which we can now analyze and treat the raw imaging analytics. And then the TechBio component, obviously now that we have raised the money, we are in full execution mode and are starting to make some of these investments where we already validated the opportunity. So with that in mind, I'm going to pass the word to Grant who will give you some more details.

Thank you, Brian. So we have had a strong first six months of the year. As Graham outlined, we set out a target that we would deliver at least 15% revenue growth year on year. The first half of the year, we've delivered 23%, leaving revenues of 3.9 million for the first six months of the year. And following the trend that we set last year for delivering on that growth, based on the investments that we made in our Innovate Lead Scale strategy, following the raise that we did back in 2024. The growth in revenue has primarily been driven by the signing of new contracts and signing contract extensions and you'll see more detail on that when I come to the order book in a moment. Positively, with the revenue growth, we also see, as expected, increase in gross margin, 53% gross margin for the first half of the year, again, an increase on the same period last year. Our gross margin is driven by revenue volume because we have a relatively fixed cost base, which means that you see operational leverage coming through quickly as revenues increase. Also, we see gross margin accretion coming from sales mix and with increased numbers of projects in phase two, phase three, which tend to come with higher portions of our automated analysis work, that drives higher margins and we would expect that to continue going forward. And both the increased revenues and increased margin deliver improved EBITDA performance, with a loss of half a million for the first six months of this year, reducing our losses on prior periods. That is increased revenues, increased margin, offset partially by some of the investments that we made in the last 18 months following that capital raise to drive revenue growth, but also sustained revenue growth. And so what we see is the first full period with those costs coming through, and we reduced our losses despite that investment. Having just now raised further capital for our tech buyer strategy, we will be making some further investments, which we expect to drive revenues further and quicker in coming years, but in the short term will impact on EBITDA. Moving to the next slide and looking at our financial position, you can see that our cash position at the end of the half was 1.7 million, which was obviously augmented soon after the period end by 9.4 million net proceeds from the capital raise. meaning that at the end of April, we had a strong cash position of 10.8 million, which is sufficient for us to make the investments that we need to make and drive those future increases in revenue, profitability, and value for shareholders. In terms of capital investment in the periods, we have retained, as we have done over the last couple of years since our new ICSI platform was launched back at the end of 23, we have kept the investment at around about 300,000 and a half. You see that again in this half of the year with additional investment of about 100,000 in IT infrastructure and about 100,000 in a refurb of our office, which has actually been largely funded by our landlord as part of the deal of extending our lease, which we have now done. So, in terms of our net asset position, we continue to have a strong net asset position of 10.7 million at the end of the half. That is made up of just under 8 million of long-term assets, which is our platform, the algorithms we run on that platform, and also the data assets that we've acquired and built over the last few years. Working capital of 3.3 million, augmented just after the end of the period with the capital raise, and we still continue to be debt-free and have very small amount of long-term liabilities, which essentially link only to the lease of the office of that half a million. So then we go to the next slide and what you'll see here is the breakdown of our order book. Really want to emphasise the improvement and growth that we've seen in this order book in the last six months, where the order book, as Bram mentioned, has grown 31% since the end of the financial year, 38% since the end of March last year. Leaving us in a recent record order book of 18.1 million. What that 18.1 million order book does for us is firstly it gives us 95% visibility of revenues that we have in the market, guidance of revenues we have in the market for this year. So we have 7.5 million guidance in the market for this year. 95% of that is covered by contracts as of now. But it also gives us good visibility of base revenues for next year and year after, which gives us confidence that the growth that we've seen in the last couple of years can be sustained going forward, at least at that 15% growth per year basis. And then when you look at the graph on the right-hand side of this slide, what you see here is how that order book has evolved over the last 12 months. You can see that we started at 13.1 million. We've recognized 7.2 million of revenues over the last 12 months. We've seen about 400,000 of small fee scopes, of trials, and of FFs. But then very significantly, we have signed 12.6 million of new contracts or contract extensions in that period. That is a book-to-bill ratio of 1.75, which is an impressive metric by any standard, and is a mix of new contracts, bringing new clients as well as existing new contacts with existing clients into the business, as well as extending existing contracts, bringing us back to that 18.1 million order. Now on the next slide, you see that same order book split in three different ways. And the reason that we show this is to give some visibility on how that order book is made up and why we are so pleased to have an order book of this strength at this point in our strategic development. So you see here that the 18, the graph on the left, the 18.1 million order book, split by projects and relative project size, showing that our biggest project at 19% of our order book value, indicates we continue to have a very diversified order book, despite the fact that we continue to grow. So we're growing and we're maintaining the diversification. which de-risks the order book but also brings in a greater opportunity to win more trials and extended trials as those trials that we have already contracted move from phase one to phase two and move from phase two to phase three. And it is exactly that trend of movement in our order book that partly explains the growth in the order book in the last six months. You can see that in the middle graph, where you see that the proportion of phase 2s and phase 3s compared to the same order book at the end of September has increased materially. And that is in part because we've had phase ones that have been successful and we've then succeeded in winning the phase twos that follow that on. We've also been successful in having phase twos moving to phase threes, which really underlines the potential that we have in our order book as we gain more projects that we can deliver on. We have as well won new contracts that have come in and augmented that as well. And then on the right, you see the number of projects in our order book, which is split by therapeutic indication. About 20% of the order book in AD, about just under 5 in PD, which have been the areas that we've been focusing investment on recently, with the balance being in our areas of real strength, HD and other rare neurological conditions. Very positively, these bigger market opportunities in AD and PD, whilst we haven't got those yet in our order book, since the period end we have won a further AD contract which is increasing the number of AD contracts we have. Plus, as Bram already mentioned, we have a pipeline that is increasingly weighted towards those AD opportunities. So we would expect to see continual growth over the coming months, but also increase in number of projects within AD and then more slowly coming PD. So I'll then pass back to Bram for some more detail.