AvePoint, Inc.

Good day, and welcome to the AF.INC Q1 2026 earnings call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist for pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then one, on your telephone keypad. To try your question, please press star, then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the comments over to Jamie Artesia and Vector Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, and welcome to AvePoint's first quarter 2026 earnings call. With me on the call this afternoon is Dr. T.J. Jiang, Chief Executive Officer, and Jim Cassie, Chief Financial Officer. After preliminary remarks, we will open the call for a question and answer session. Please note that this call will include forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from management's current expectations. We encourage you to review the safe harbor statements contained in our press release for a more complete description. All material in the webcast is the sole property and copyright of AvePoint with all rights reserved. Please note this presentation describes certain non-GAAP measures, including non-GAAP gross profit, non-GAAP gross margin, non-GAAP operating income, and non-GAAP operating margin, which are not measures prepared in accordance with US GAAP. The non-GAAP measures are presented in this presentation as we believe they provide investors with a means of understanding how management evaluates the company's operating performance. These non-GAAP measures should not be considered in isolation from, as substitutes for, or superior to, financial measures prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP. A reconciliation of these measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures is available in our first quarter 2026 earnings press release, as well as our updated investor presentation and financial tables, all of which are available on our investor relations website. With that, let me turn the call over to TJ.

Thank you, Jamie, and thank you to everyone joining us on the call today. Q1 was a strong start to the year. Our leadership at the critical intersection of data protection and security, combined with a growing demand for AI-ready solutions, allowed us to again exceed our guidance on both the top and bottom line. Q1 also marks our 12th straight quarter of double-digit growth in organic net new ARR. which we delivered while driving more than 730 basis points of GAAP operating margin expansion. Importantly, we're delivering strong results during a rapid shift in the market. It wasn't long ago that AI discussions with customers focused entirely on models and productivity gains. But as AI is becoming deployed more widely and evolves from assistants to autonomous agents, data access increases exponentially and data governance becomes top of mind. Today, when I meet with customers and partners globally, the question is no longer what can AI do for my organization, but rather, can I trust, govern, and operate AI safely and at scale? In short, the conversation has pivoted away from productivity and towards something far more important, enterprise trust in this new, enormously powerful technology. This is where I would like to focus my time today. How organizations can achieve this level of confidence and why AppPoint is uniquely positioned to deliver on this demand. To answer this question, it's first important to understand the AI stack today. which starts with infrastructure, energy, chips, physical compute hardware, and so on. These components are important, but it's also fair to say that they are table stakes today and are quickly becoming commoditized. The real center of gravity, not surprisingly, has shifted to data. The knowledge that powers AI and fuels the next two layers, AI models and agentic AI. For every organization, it's here where value is created. but it's also where risk multiplies because every AI system inherits and leverages what sits underneath it. And weak data governance and poor data controls lead to bad decisions and security risks, in turn destroying trust. Ultimately, once trust is lost, AI doesn't scale. This is critical because as AI agents operate more autonomously across enterprise productivity apps, companies truly need a trust layer. so that they can scale AI adoption without losing control of data security, privacy, and compliance. It's equally critical to understand why it's different now and what exactly has changed for enterprises seeking to govern data. At a high level, the most commonly leveraged productivity tools today, like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Salesforce, and others, were originally designed for human productivity and not autonomous AI execution. As a result, with a rapid emergence of AI tools that are processing more information at greater speeds and scale than ever before, data governance must also evolve. This is exactly where AppPoint comes in. And the customer demand for this trust is the real AI opportunity we see. It's why we're building the trust layer for AI, spanning data, governance, risk, and operations so that organizations can deploy AI security responsibly and with confidence. We believe that organizations can only trust AI when they prioritize three things. First, precisely control what AI can access. Second, govern and audit every action AI takes. And finally, recover instantly when something goes wrong. This trust layer must do all of these continuously, all while maintaining data lineage across both unstructured and structured data sources. The resulting contextual data is an enormous competitive advantage for AppPoint and truly distinguishes us from legacy point solutions and backup first vendors. And this differentiation was also recently validated by Gartner, who specifically cited Apple's comprehensive set of capabilities and platform strategy as superior to native offerings like Microsoft's Agent 365. Let me bring this to life by discussing our integrated approach, along with some specific capabilities and recent enhancements to our platform. First, C. We offer unified real-time visibility across the entire data estate, including what AI agents touch and how access patterns change. New this quarter, organizations can now see across their entire agent stack, including CodePilot Studio, Microsoft Foundry, SharePoint Agents, and Gemini Enterprise, all within one screen in Agent Pulse. Second, Govern. Our platform provides automated policy enforcement, compliance standards, and access controls across every environment and workload, including AI agents acting as virtual employees. This quarter, we launched a new risk definition for AI agents so organizations can better access more information about agent security and correct problems automatically. This is especially critical because unmanaged agents can lead to runaway costs and expose sensitive data without proper oversight. And lastly, recover. We ensure granular, automated recovery from any failure, whether caused by ransomware, human error, or autonomous AI activity. And the speed with which we can do this is unmatched, as we can often recover several petabytes of data per hour. Lastly, we made significant investments into Google Cloud protection this quarter and recently added multi-SaaS backup sources like Okta, Confluence, Jira, DocuSign, Monday.com, GitHub, and Smartsheet, adding to our growing library of protected data. This integrated approach, see, govern, and recover, is powerful because it transforms AI risk into a manageable variable and ensures that the trust layer is a foundation for AI-driven growth. And it is resonating across the market, firmly cementing AppPoint as a foundational infrastructure that enables safe AI deployment at scale. A great example of this is a US pharmacy benefits manager that became a new AppPoint customer in Q1. They wanted to roll out Copilot, but knew they faced data sprawl issues with little visibility and control over 500 terabytes of unclassified data. Seeking a single vendor who could address multiple strategic use cases, they purchased our highest tier control bundle along with Opus from our resilience suite, ultimately choosing AppPoint because Our automated governance, lifecycle, and access controls would enable them to deploy Copilot with confidence and streamline the regulatory audits they face on a regular basis. They also plan to use our modernization suite for future data consolidation efforts aimed at reducing their tech debt and retiring their on-prem footprint. The customer need to rapidly address multiple strategic use cases is extremely common today, given the number of ecosystems and applications our customers are using. And the ability of our platform to protect and govern data, regardless of where it resides, is a unique competitive advantage. This was the driver for a large transportation and logistics conglomerate, which initially engaged AppPoint during the pandemic to decommission a on-premises data center and migrate roughly 50 terabytes of file share data to Microsoft 365. This effort went beyond the basic migration. The customer needed to preserve permissions, retention policies, and governance while modernizing their environment. AppPoint supported this transformation with capabilities spanning modernization, control, and resilience, enabling a secure transition to the cloud with strong governance and operational oversight. As the customer's environment matured, the relationship expanded to include broader governance and data protection. In 2025, when the customer began planning a shift from Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace, AvePoint's multi-cloud capabilities became increasingly strategic. The platform helped prepare data for transition through classification, policy management, insights, and cleanup, ultimately leading to a Q4 2025 award for data transformation services supporting the move. Rather than being displaced, Applin's role strengthened, providing consistent governance and resilience across cloud environments. This foundation also supports the customer's AI readiness as they adopt Google Workspace and Gemini. ensuring data is trusted, controlled, and recoverable. And lastly, the foundation enables real-time situation awareness for the customer, where our platform's advanced reasoning can identify and surface urgent logistics action items, such as a delayed shipment or an unread thread about critical rate change, before it is too late. Looking ahead to a planned 2027 migration into the parent company's Google tenant, The engagement exemplifies Outpoint's land and expand strategy, evolving from modernization to a strategic platform for multi-cloud governance, resilience, and AI-enabled collaboration. This need for integrated platform solutions that deliver rapid automated value against multiple strategic use cases is only growing, especially in the highly regulated industry that represents the majority of our business. For example, effective data governance in the healthcare industry is more than better visibility and oversight. It's about patient safety, regulatory compliance, and operational resilience. One of our largest customers recently shared that bundling agent pods within the broader governance capabilities of our control suite has provided them visibility into thousands of agents without having to make a separate business case related to their MCC5 deployment. And we're hearing similar feedback from partners. Our latest report conducted in partnership with Omdia, the leading global channel technology market research firm, revealed that nearly half of MSPs want a complete platform integrated with other core tools. And 91% say that integrating data backup and disaster recovery delivers stronger data governance than offering them separately. We saw this many times in Q1 with existing customers who added to their AppPoint deployments and we continue to believe that our nearly 30,000 customers still represent an enormous growth opportunity for us. For example, an Austrian luxury goods conglomerate that already owned Opus needed to ensure business continuity as well as tailored, lengthier retention policies for their data in MCC5. With native capabilities not allowing for this level of customization, They purchased cloud backup from our resilience suite in Q1, and we're now discussing the many strategic use cases that can be addressed with our control suite. Despite the noise across the software space for the last few quarters, our strategic priorities have not changed, and our growing conviction in our 2029 goal of $1 billion in ARR remains as strong as ever. The relentless growth of data and the growing demand for platform solutions that enable AI deployment at scale will ensure that AppPoint remains a top priority for enterprises around the world. And we're excited for a strong 2026. Thank you again for joining us today. I'll now turn it over to Jim.