Aeries Technology, Inc.

Greetings and welcome to the ARIES Technology Fiscal Second Quarter 2024 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. And with that, we'll begin today's conference call.

Good afternoon, and welcome to ARIES Technologies' second fiscal quarter 2024 earnings call. Joining us from the company is Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of ARIES, Sudhir Panikasri, Chief Financial Officer, Rajiv Nair, and Chief Investment Officer, Daniel Webb. Today's call will begin with scripted remarks, and it will open the call to participants for questions. As a reminder, this conference call contains statements about future events and expectations, which are forward-looking in nature. Statements on this call may be deemed as forward-looking and actual results may differ materially. For a full list of risks inherent to the business and the company, please refer to the company's SEC filings. Areas undertake no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances that occur after the call. Today's call and webcast will include non-GAAP financial measures from the meeting of SEC Regulation G. When required, reconciliation of all non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable financial measures calculated per sentence in accordance with GAAP can be found on the company's website. And with that, I would like to turn the call over to Sudhir. Sudhir?

Thank you, operator. My name is Sudhir Panikashyadi, and I'm the CEO and co-founder of Aries Technology. I would like to thank everyone for joining us here today on our first earnings call as the company began trading on NASDAQ under the symbol AERT on November 8, 2023. We are addressing what we believe is a greater than $420 billion PAM with an incredible LTV to CAC of approximately 15.9x for calendar year 2022. Today, we employ over 1600 professionals around the world and are adding to our already impressive talent pool. Rajiv Nair is an experienced public company executive who joined the Aries team as CFO this month. as well as Daniel Webb, former CEO of World Wide Web Acquisition Corp, who joins us as chief investments officer and brings with him deep M&A and capital raising experience. You'll hear from them both on this call shortly. For those who may be new to the story, Aries Technologies is a global professional services and consulting partner for businesses and stakeholders seeking a partner during transformative periods of operation, including private equity sponsors, and their portfolio companies. ARIES deploys distinctive, custom-tailored engagement models that are designed to provide the right mix of deep, vertical knowledge, functional expertise, and the right software and systems to help clients scale and optimize the tangible results that can be felt in the organization and seen on the bottom line. The end result is a flexible bespoke engagement that can potentially produce up to 65% labor savings versus hiring talent locally while bringing in tailored emerging technology solutions to the businesses. As a reminder, ARIES is profitable today and has been operating cash flow positive since 2013, our second year of operation. To our understanding, before the founding of ARIES, There were two main ways to outsource tech enabled services, neither of which were ideal for our target markets. The first was to use a legacy outsourcing vendor, which provides the flexibility and labor cost savings that private equity firms and their portfolio companies are looking for, but have a number of disadvantages. These include a minimal ability to innovate due to a lack of strategic alignment and visibility into internal operations, an outside mentality, among those assigned to the account, and the implementation time of strategic decisions, which can be a major roadblock to a successful deployment of new solutions. The second approach is to create a subsidiary overseas and in-house the process, which largely solves many of the issues mentioned by outsourcing, but presents a new set of very complicated challenges. While this approach succeeds in creating a team that is aligned with the goals and culture of the company, it is very costly to start and to scale. It creates a litany of facts and regulatory requirements, and it eliminates the unique viewpoint that outside contractors working with multiple companies can bring. ARIES solves these problems with our innovative approach in which our operations are fully integrated into the business of clients. Our customers use our services to get top talent in India and across the world into all areas of their organization, including software development, IT, cybersecurity, finance, HR, customer service, and operations. Our customers will interview and hire candidates we source, set the pay and bonus structures for the candidates in active guidance and collaboration with us, and treat them as if they are their own employees once they are hired. Our talent becomes an extension of our clients' team with the opportunity for promotion, recognition, and career path progression, resulting in higher employee satisfaction and lower attrition. We manage the regulatory, PACs, recruiting, compliances, administrative, IT, and legal for the outsourced talent. We believe this disruptive business model delivers overall cost and operational efficiencies with the ability to deliver digital transformation solutions tailor-made for our customers' growth strategies. Coupled with the inherent flexibility the arrangement offers our customers in evolving and implementing these strategies effectively. The purpose-built model is crafted to create a more flexible, more specialized, and less expensive labor pool for our customers and a better work environment with more opportunities for the employees. We believe it creates significant innovation through strategic alignment and increased visibility at senior levels. It insulates our clients from regulatory and tax issues, and it provides the flexibility to scale up or down as the business needs change. By utilizing proven business and implementation plans tried and true software and automation support, and the highest level of data integrity and compliance policies, we aim to ensure consistent quality results across our deployments and deliver significant value to leadership teams. Our solution is designed to deliver all the benefits of alignment with our client goals with the visibility into winning playbooks from multiple companies that only ARIES can deliver. We are committed to our medium to long-term strategies on organic and inorganic growth with the clear objective of seeing us as a significant player in the emerging tech-driven outsourcing industry with differentiated solution matrices that are geared towards meeting the challenges our customers face in today's ever-shortening business cycles. We believe we have today a strong, validated, and referenceable foundation in terms of business model, differentiated service offerings, and customer base. With a strong team, we are committed to our growth path and being a trusted partner to our customers. Now, I'd like to hand the call over to Daniel Webb, Chief Investment Officer of Aries Technology. Daniel?