Bridgeline Digital, Inc.

Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Bridgeline Digital First Quarter of 2026 earnings call. At this time, all participants are placed on a listen-only mode, and we will open the floor for your questions and comments after the presentation. It is now my pleasure to hand the floor over to your host, Thomas Windhausen. Sir, the floor is yours.

Thank you. Thank you, everyone, for joining us this afternoon. My name is Thomas Windhausen. I'm the Chief Financial Officer of Bridgeline Digital Inc. We're pleased to welcome you to our fiscal 2026 first quarter conference call. On the call with me today is our president and CEO, Ari Tan, who will begin the call with a discussion of our business highlights. Then I will update you on our financial results for the quarter, and we'll conclude with some questions. Before I begin, I'd like to remind listeners that during the conference call, comments we make regarding Bridgeline that are not historical facts. Our forward-looking statements are in the meaning of Section 27A of the Spheres Act of 1933, in Section 21E of the Sphere Act of 1934, and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause such statements to differ materially from actual future events or results. The statements are made pursuant to the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, and the internal projections and beliefs upon which we base our expectations today may change over time, and we expressly disclaim and assume no obligation to inform you if they do. The results we report today will not be considered an indication of future performance. Changes in our economic, business, competitive, technological, regulatory, other factors could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by the projections or forward-looking statements made today. For more information, you can review our filings from time to time on the Securities and Exchange Commission website. On the call today, we'll also discuss some non-GAAP financial measures, and we have a reconciliation of our GAAP financials to those non-GAAP measures in our earnings release, which is on our website. I'd now like to turn the call over to Ari Kahn, Ridgeline's President and CEO.

Ari? Thank you, Tom. Good afternoon, everyone. Ridgeline's core products, led by Hawk Search Suite and our AI products, continue to lead our growth, and our customers are having an outstanding experience, as they've proven with their pocketbooks, when they repeatedly increase their investment into their Hawk Search subscription and purchase add-on products as well. Enhanced hosting, expanded usage packages, and the AI suite are all upsells to our existing customer base. Search is the heart of the online shopping experience for both B2B and B2C sites, with Hawk Search acting as our customer's online salesperson who intelligently interacts with their customers to increase traffic, conversion, and order size. Core products at Bridgeline are now 60%. of our total revenue, growing 17% to 2.4 million this quarter from 2.0 last quarter, and was 9.2 million on the trailing 12-month basis versus 8.8 million for the prior 12 months. HawkSearch is an even larger percentage of our subscription revenue, now representing 63% of the subscription revenue, 2 million of revenue versus 1.9 last quarter. Net revenue retention, which includes renewals and license expansion, was 107% for our core product line. This demonstrates best-of-class customer satisfaction and how quickly our customers are adopting our new products. These new products include smart search, visual search, smart response, and our latest AI agents, such as the search assistant, analytics assistant, and merchandising assistant. New customer acquisition continues to grow with an average ARR per customer increasing by 12% this quarter to 28,000 from 25,000 last quarter. After customers make their initial purchase, they tend to subscribe to additional HawkSearch products. We have more than 200 customers in HawkSearch. with an average subscription per customer of $33,000, up from an average of $30,000 last quarter and up from $25,000 in Q1 of our fiscal 2025. This quarter, we sold 13 new licenses with $1.2 million in total contract value for over $350,000 in ARR and $700,000 in professional services. More than half of our new license sales include one of our AI products in their initial purchase, with many customers adding AI capabilities to their license after they go live with HawkSearch. In our first quarter of fiscal 26, we won several new customers, including many B2B manufacturing and distribution customers, where we're growing so quickly and where HawkSearch was ranked number one in Gartner's 2025 critical capabilities report. Some recent new customers include a national closeout retailer with more than 170 locations and a rapidly expanding e-commerce presence who selected HawkSearch to power their online store. The retailer replaced their previous search software with HawkSearch to increase online revenue because of HawkSearch's AI-driven relevance and filtering capabilities. A leading U.S. distributor of specialty lighting products is leveraging HawkSearch's SmartSearch so their customers can search with images, concepts, and questions and enhance their ability to find items quickly and accurately. A Midwest B2B distributor using the Optimizely e-commerce platform launched HawkSearch to elevate its online product discovery and delivery with an exceptional digital experience to its customers in the construction, industrial, plumbing, and HVAC industries. And a leading wholesale supplier serving both B2B and B2C selected HawkSearch to power product discovery across five e-commerce sites. This supplier chose HawkSearch for its B2B foundation, multi-site support, and AI-driven recommendations. Also, a national industrial B2B supplier selected HawkSearch to improve search relevancy, engage logged-in customers, and enable stronger merchandising capabilities. This industrial B2B supplier used HawkSearch's AI relevance tuning and boost and vary rules to enhance product discovery by providing precise control over how products are ranked and surfaced to customers. Because we made early investments in AI and have a clean product architecture, we're able to rapidly release new products that drive revenue for our more than 200 customers and to win more new customers against less nimble competitors. In Q1, we released Spark, our next generation user experience platform for administrators. Spark natively integrates Hawk AI capabilities with advanced analytics, including merchandising and analytics assistance. Spark represents a significant step in modernizing the user experience while enabling scalable AI innovation across the platforms. We've also introduced contextual fields for Hawk Search. Contextual skills enable franchises and chains to provide customer-specific pricing and availability per store. This quarter, a customer leveraged contextual fields to provide contextual information across 120,000 products and 7,000 stores with more than 1,000 real-time updates per minute. HawkSearch Advanced Analytics API was released this quarter, and it allows AI agents to integrate with HawkSearch Analytics for greater visibility and the customer behavior for automating merchandising. And HawkSearch launched AI content extractor to accelerate customer adoption by having an agent examine the customer's product catalog and marketing materials to automatically configure HawkSearch. With our pipeline of new products that drive value to existing customers and increase new customer wins, we expect HawkSearch and our core products to become over 70% of overall revenue this year, and that will drive faster, more profitable growth for Bridgeline as a whole. Because of outstanding customer satisfaction, our growth is expected to continue to be efficient, allowing us to invest more in new products that drive customer and shareholder value. Now, with that, I'll turn the call over to our Chief Financial Officer, Tom Winhouse, and he'll share additional details. Tom? Great.