Certara, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Sartara second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to Jay Liu, Investor Relations at LifeSci. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you all for participating in today's conference call. On the call from Sitara, we have John Resnick, Chief Executive Officer, and Saeed Muhammad, Interim Chief Financial Officer. Earlier today, Sitara released financial results for the quarter ended June 30th, 2026. A copy of the press release is available on the company's website. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that management will make statements during this call that include forward-looking statements National results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statement. Please refer to slide 2 in the accompanying presentation titled Second Quarter 2026 Financial Results for additional information, which you can find on the company's investor relations website. In their remarks or responses to questions, management may mention some non-GAAP financial measures. Reconcilations of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are available in the recent earnings press release available on the company's website. Please refer to the reconciliation tables in the accompanying materials for additional information. This conference call contains time-sensitive information and is accurate only as of today, August 4, 2026. Sitara disclaims any obligation except as required by law to update or revise Any financial projections or forward-looking statements, whether because of new information, future events, or otherwise. And with that, I will turn the call over to John.

Thank you for joining today's call. Before I get into our results, I want to highlight the appointment of our new chief commercial officer, which we announced earlier this morning. This reflects our commitment to a new, more impactful go-to-market approach, which I'll cover in more detail shortly. The second quarter was about executing on our commitment. Overall, we are pleased with our progress. We are transforming Sertara into a company we believe is capable of delivering sustainable double-digit growth. We still have work to do, but we are on the right path. We are executing against our plan. Our foundation is strengthening in the macro market condition. Biopharma spending, clinical trial starts, and new regulatory guidance continue to be in our favor. I'll start with our top-line financials, then move to our strategic and operational priorities, our client impact, and finally, how we are leveraging AI. Top-line results in the quarter were in line with expectations and guidance. Overall, revenue growth was modest at 1%, with software revenue growing 4% and service revenue declining 3%. On software, a renewed focus on driving new growth is building momentum. Normalizing for the Comaxone acquisition, trailing 12-month bookings grew 7% exiting the first half, up sharply from 0.8% exiting 2025. Overall, software revenue now represents 53% of our business versus 40% just two years ago. Service bookings lagged in the quarter with a book-to-bill of 1.07. Services bookings were impacted in part by the carve-out of our regulatory and medical writing business. In the quarter, we also began implementing several changes to the broader services go-to-market model, which we will continue to refine. Leading indicators are positive. Our pipeline grew 27% year-on-year exiting the quarter, which we anticipate translating into revenue growth in the back half of 2026. Today, we are reaffirming our guidance range of 0% to 4% for full-year revenue growth. Shifting to the key actions we have taken to improve our ability to drive growth. In February, we outlined bold initiatives to more sharply focus the organization on its ability to deliver. And in Q2, we continued implementing them. May's divestiture was our first step in sharpening our strategy, rebalancing Certara about improving our overall financial predictability and strengthening our software services flywheel. We have reprioritized our product portfolio to focus on key growth areas and adjusted our roadmaps to accelerate AI. Our reorganization around two business units, Model 1 formed Discovery and Drug Development, or MID3, and Accelerated Clinical Evidence, or ACE, is expected to better align our business to how customers consume our products and our services. We have taken steps to streamline our cost base. In May, we executed a reduction in force focused predominantly on overhead, impacting approximately 5% of our global employee base. This action, combined with other steps towards operational excellence, is expected to result in a run rate savings of approximately $13 million. These reductions allow us to address some of the stranded costs from the divestiture and accelerate our investments in innovation. We're also redesigning our commercial go-to-market engine to tightly integrate sales and marketing in support of the business units. This is expected to activate growth across all segments, extend our partnership model, and drive adoption of new customer use cases. As part of that, I'm excited to announce Julian Perrier as our new Chief Commercial Officer

effective August 1st.

Julian brings nearly two decades of international commercial leadership across global biopharma, technology-enabled scientific services, and AI-driven biotechnology. Most recently, he was CEO of an AI-powered diagnostic company. I am also pleased to announce that Eric Yan has been promoted to CIO. Eric will be critical in enabling our global scalability and optimizing internal AI systems to drive growth. Now turning to our unique value proposition and how it translates to customer impact. Certara sits at a rare intersection, regulatory and scientific leadership, proprietary software and AI. We serve more than 2,600 customers in over 70 countries with nearly 160,000 daily users of our software. The ecosystem we sit in amplifies our position. Regulators are accelerating model-informed approaches into policy. This quarter, HHS launched Operation Trial Blazer to speed up early-stage clinical trials, and the FDA issued new guidance backing quantitative systems pharmacology, or QSP, modeling for first-in-human dosing. In July, ICH M15 took effect at EMA giving US and Europe a shared standard for model-informed drug development for the first time. Sertara is at the forefront of helping shape these policies. Our scientists are in direct dialogue with agencies on how modeling can optimize trial design and strengthen evidence. Their leadership is evident in the numbers. 62 peer-reviewed publications this quarter alone, spanning AI and machine learning, rare populations, and the cutting edge of science. That science shows up directly in the products and services our customers buy. In the quarter, every one of the 13 novel therapies the FDA approved came from a Sertara client. One was for Eli Lilly's Orphor Glypron, the first once-daily non-peptide oral GLP-1 therapy for obesity. Sertara's SimSip Simulator supported the drug-to-drug interaction labeling and helped characterize how slower gastric emptying affects dosing. For patients, this means the therapy that can be taken any time of day and no longer requires the inconvenience of self-injection. This product was approved in just 50 days, the fastest new molecular entity approval since 2002. We saw the same pattern in rare disease where clinical pharmacology and pharmacometrics teams partnered with the Biopharma Company on the evidence package behind the FDA's approval of a new therapy for rare autoimmune conditions with historically few treatments. And in oncology, Sertara Sciences partnered with Memorial Sloan Kettering to build a virtual patient model on our QSP platform for CAR-T therapy in multiple myeloma, individualizing treatment and optimizing trials of novel combination therapies. Our software business is seeing strong momentum from AI and the movement for the cloud. Phoenix, our pharmacometrics modeling platform, has won 30 cloud implementations this year across client segments. Phoenix is one of our core launch points for integrated AI capabilities. Additionally, we grew our footprint globally this quarter. Our first major SIMSIP win in China, expanding engagement across the Middle East and in Japan, a full modeling collaboration delivering a first in human dose estimate through Sertara IQ, our AI-powered QSP platform. Speaking about AI, we believe AI accelerates how we deliver customer value. With 25 years of accumulated scientific and operational data, deep scientific judgment, proven algorithms and software embedded in the workflows of both clients and regulators, Surtara has exactly what it takes to optimize how AI benefits the regulated environments we serve. Generic AI tools don't have the same level of specialization and cannot provide the accountability later that Surtara can. Let me highlight three examples from the quarter to illustrate how AI is helping us drive revenue growth and margin efficiencies. We are embedding AI across our product development and operations teams to drive speed and efficiency. Up to 85% of our new code is now AI assisted, and we are seeing a 65% year-on-year increase in the rate of development per software engineer. We are connecting our internal systems and automating workflows across our functions. Agents are cutting cycle times by as much as 90% in areas like legal and IT. And our sales teams now get daily automated signals from our AI platform to drive prospecting and pipeline. Second, AI is enabling new customer use cases, powering new workflows, and enhancing our existing software products. The integration of D360 and Comaxone Design Hub will enable scientists to connect experimental data, scientific hypotheses, and Candidate Compound Design into a single workflow. Our next generation platform will allow customers to leverage our software products alongside Frontier AI models, including NVIDIA's BioNemo Agent Toolkit. We are enhancing functionality across several products, including Phoenix Cloud, Pinnacle, Sertara IQ, D360 and CoAuthor. As an example, CoAuthor, which has been used in more than 400 regulatory submissions, now provides nearly 600 AI agents, driving 40% productivity increase in drafting quality control documents and over 90% accuracy summarizing complex data tables. And third, AI agents are now making our scientific services more productive. Proprietary scientific agentic workflow is accelerating delivery steps by up to 80% for certain tasks. This allows our scientists to spend more time on activities that require human judgment. Importantly, our scientists remain at the center of every decision, creating an accountability layer that AI alone cannot provide. This protects the trust, reproducibility, and auditability our customers and regulators depend on. In closing, today we are focused on growth and instilling operational discipline into our We are aligning the organization behind our strategy, resetting our operational model, and right-sizing our cost base. Our sights are also set on the future. Sertara is well-positioned to drive transformative growth, defining the science needed to accelerate drug development. With a broad customer base, deeply embedded software, we believe we are uniquely situated to lead MIDD adoption and growth that will meaningfully impact our customers and the patients they serve. With that, I'll turn the call over to Faiz, who will go over the financials. Faiz?

Thank you, John. Before I review the quarter, my comments on continuing operations include final adjustments relating to the divestiture of the regulatory and medical writing business. Our bookings discussion also excludes this divestiture. Through the close on May 8, that business contributed $19.2 million of revenue and $7.5 million of adjusted EBITDA, both in discontinued operations. Turning to the income statement. Total revenue for the three months ending June 30th, 2026 was $93.3 million, representing year-over-year growth of 1% on a reported basis. Total bookings in the second quarter were $98.3 million, which increased 1% from the prior year. Trailing 12-month bookings were $405.4 million, increasing 3%. Software revenue was $48.8 million in the second quarter, which increased 4% over the prior year on a reported basis. Growth in the quarter was driven by strength in Simpsons, Phoenix, and Pinnacle 21. Software bookings were $50.7 million in the second quarter, which increased 9% from the prior year period. Trailing 12-month software bookings were $196.4 million, up 8% year over year. Services revenue was $44.5 million in the second quarter, down 3% versus the prior year period on a reported basis. Services bookings in the second quarter were $47.6 million, which declined 6% from the prior year period. Trailing 12-month services bookings were $209 million, down 1% compared to the prior period. Total cost of revenue for the second quarter of 2026 was $35.1 million. compared to 34.3 million in the second quarter of 2025. Total operating expenses for the second quarter of 2026 were 58.3 million compared to 50.4 million in the second quarter of 2025, an increase of 7.9 million. This increase was primarily driven by the absence of a 5.7 million favorable contingent consideration adjustment in the prior year period. Adjusted EBITDA for the second quarter of 2026 was 26.2 million compared to $27 million in the second quarter of 2025. Adjusted EBITDA margin in the quarter was 28.1%. This decline is largely attributed to stranded costs related to the divestiture, which I will discuss in a moment. Wrapping up the income statement, note that GAAP net income and EPS are both impacted by non-recurring items. Net loss from continuing operations for the second quarter of 2026 was $6.1 million, compared to net income from continuing operations of 1.5 million in the second quarter of 2025. The change primarily reflects the absence of a 5.7 million favorable contingent consideration adjustment recorded in the prior year period, a 2.9 million unfavorable swing in currency expense, and a 2.2 million increase in reorganization costs, partially offset by a lower income tax expense. Adjusted net income for the second quarter of 2026 was $12.5 million compared to $12.7 million in the second quarter of 2025. Diluted loss per share for the second quarter of 2026 was $0.04 compared to diluted earnings per share of $0.01 in the second quarter of 2025. Adjusted diluted earnings per share for the second quarter of 2026 were $0.08 compared to $0.08 per share in the second quarter of 2025. Moving to the balance sheet. We finished the quarter with $184.1 million in cash and cash equivalents. As of June 30, 2026, we had $294 million of outstanding borrowing on our term loan and $100 million availability under our revolving credit facility. In the second quarter, we repurchased $17.4 million in shares, which completed a $100 million share repurchase program previously authorized by the board. In the third quarter, our board approved a new $50 million share repurchase program, reflecting our continued confidence in the business and our disciplined approach to capital allocation. Turning to our outlook for the remainder of the year, we continue to expect 2026 revenue growth in the range of 0% to 4%, which translates into full year revenue of $367 to $382 million on a comparable continuing operations basis. This reflects the impact of the divestiture of our regulatory and medical writing business we announced on May 8th. We anticipate full year software revenue to be at or above the high end of the 0% to 4% range for the year. We have greater visibility into the software business than we did last quarter, as we continue to see a shift from desktop to cloud-based product mix. In services, we expect full year to be at or below the low end of 0% to 4% range, As John mentioned, we remain focused on improving performance in this part of our business. Turning to margins, we expect full year 2026 adjusted EBITDA margin in the range of 29 to 31% compared to 30 to 32% range we provided in May. This change reflects the impact of the divestiture of our regulatory and medical writing business and is not related to the underlying performance of our remaining business. As we noted last quarter, The divestiture generated approximately $17 million of adjusted EBITDA in 2025, excluding unallocated overhead costs. A portion of that shared infrastructure remains with us, while the associated revenue does not. The reduction in force we completed at the start of the third quarter offsets a meaningful portion of that impact, and we expect margins to improve through the second half as those savings are realized. Factoring in the divestiture, We now expect full-year adjusted diluted EPS from continuing operations to be in the range of $0.31 to $0.36 per share. Fully diluted shares are expected to be in the range of $155 to $157 million, and we are modeling an effective tax rate of approximately 30%. With that, we will open up the call for Q&A. Operator, can you please open the line?

Thank you, and as a reminder, to ask a question, simply press star 11 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To remove yourself, press star 11 again. Our first question is from Craig Hettenbach with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed.

Yes, thank you. So, John, it's now been kind of a couple quarters since you're realigned kind of the sales and go-to-market strategy. Just would love an update on kind of what's working to date and then just some of the milestones of things to watch out for as you execute on that.

Great. Thanks, Craig. Good morning to you.

So, yes, it's been a couple of quarters. I joined in January. The changes that we've made to the go-to-market model really have come into effect in Q2 and beginning and have fully been rolled out in July, obviously, with the announcement of the new chief commercial officer today. So we're still, I'd say, in kind of early innings in terms of rotating the model itself. I've talked a lot about some of the kind of leading indicators I pay attention to on the software side of the business. We've shined a lot of light on things like ARR and future revenue. We're seeing really good future indicators around that with revenue accumulation. That's been a focus from a go-to-market standpoint on net new sales in addition to renewals. This services side has been a little bit different. It's been a focus on getting our specialists and our experts back out into Markit, and making some of the changes to the model that was put into place in 2024 and 2025. That is early change days, but it's yielding positive indicator. I look at things like pipeline creation, which I highlighted in the earlier remarks, which are up. you know, what 20, 28, 29% year on year, which is a positive indicator around it. So still have work to do. You know, the end market we believe is incredibly strong. We've, you know, made changes both to the software and to the service side and to the overall kind of engagement model that we have. We've got Julian announced today and, you know, tracking where I think you'd expect to be on the positive leading indicators.

Got it. And then just to follow up, you had announced a partnership with NVIDIA a few weeks ago. Considering they've been very active with many life science companies in terms of various partnerships, is there anything you would call out that's most unique for Sitara in terms of what you're looking to do with NVIDIA and how you think about the business implications?

Yeah. There are a couple of dimensions to the partnership. We talked a little bit about it earlier this morning. First of all, we've been talking increasingly about what we call our kind of next generation platform. Our next generation platform is how the software offerings that we have within this business will interface with some of the frontier models and some of the and other existing more generic kind of AI models that exist out in market. The NVIDIA partnership in part is around that point allowing the NVIDIA agents to be an interface with our software system. The second area that we've been focused on and we've communicated externally over the last few months is really around New use cases like things like discovery where some of the high throughput potential will allow us to accelerate timelines and churn through more data to provide and more data to get earlier, you know, earlier indicators to help support earlier decision making. So those are the two dimensions I point to. You'll certainly hear a lot more for us from us in the time coming. The video partnership obviously is great. I think the biggest thing for a company like Sertari, I think it's a signal of a different type of partnering. and a different type of role in the ecosystem. You know, to my knowledge, it's the first major kind of technology partnership, and there's several other discussions as well as we kind of look to take the next step with how we're used broadly by our customers.

Helpful. Thank you.

Thank you. One moment for our next question. That comes from Brendan Smith with TD Collin. Please proceed.

Great. Thanks for taking the questions, guys. Actually, just wanted to ask quickly about net retention rate. I think we noticed in the filing it looks just down a bit sequentially and maybe year over year. So I'm wondering if there's any nuance there in the quarter we should be aware of or any kind of customer feedback you've been hearing just in Q2. And then I guess, you know, you mentioned, John, in your prepared remarks, you kind of right-sided the company to get to that sustainable double-digit growth. I guess, do you have a timeframe in mind over which you hope to kind of hit that and I guess just from a go-to-market strategy, like what do you see as kind of the most important inflections to really supercharge that? Is it like new product rollouts, just the cloud-based monetization, just kind of any thoughts on that would be great. Thanks, guys.

Yeah, thanks, Vernon, and thanks for the question. So on NRR, I don't – no, I don't think there's any particular issue with NRR. Renewal rates of the organization were up in the quarter, actually slightly ahead of our expectation. There's a little bit of kind of time effect that goes in, and there's a little bit of mix effect between kind of ratable and on-prem work that happens that has some changes in the timing of different things that they're hitting, but there's nothing that I speak to that is unusual or, you know, out of expectation. I think on the whole, on software, we're pretty happy with where we sit and pipeline looks good. So it's a focus on, you know, continuing to execute, continuing to get the, you know, that renewal business through and continuing to get net new sales. That's what the team is incentivized and what the team is focused on. In terms of... And your second question, look, I... continue to say what I've said pretty consistently since I joined, which is the end market is strong. Our products are exceptional. We have market leading products across multiple dimensions. What we historically have done less well is execution around it. We're in the process of making significant changes to where this organization works lining up places in the right direction. I'm taking a very midterm view in terms of when that inflection point will fully be able to be realized. We're doing the things that we need to do in terms of setting the portfolio for long-term growth, making the investments, changing the P&L models and the operating models, changing the go-to-market incentives and the go-to-market model, changing the CCO to ensure that we're positioned to be sustainable and to have the structured platform to grow up. So I don't think there's any one thing that needs to happen. I think we've taken the hard steps over the last six months to put those building blocks in the right places. I'm pretty pleased with the progress we're making. Obviously today with the announcement of the new CCO and the new go-to-market model, We talked about the leading indicators around ARR and pipeline creation on the services side. We need execution against that, and I think that will be the thing that will be the early sign for you in terms of inflection.

A moment for our next question, please. come from Luke Sergott with Barclays. Please proceed.

Hey, this is Jake on for Luke. Thanks for the question. You mentioned Synthesit breaking into China for the first time. I was wondering if you could talk about the significance of that, maybe your exposure in the region and the broader opportunity that you see there. Thank you.

Okay, thanks, Jake. So, yeah, so, you know, I think one of the things we would like to emphasize in, yeah, thanks. One of the things that we'd like to emphasize as we think about this business is it's truly a global business. It's truly an international business. When we talk about regulatory trends, I think there's a bias and a tendency to focus on the FDA. But things like, you know, ICHM 15, if you look at the standards that are happening, these are really global effects. And, you know, a big percentage of the pharmaceutical population, you know, biopharma world is obviously here. But we are quite bullish on the opportunities in both Europe and Asia. If we look at those two geographies, those are both attractive growth opportunities for us. And as I kind of sat down and started to do some new planning with our new CCO, those are clear growth options and priorities for us. We have a foundation. We've built businesses out there over the last few months, platforms for teams out there. We see a lot of potential growth potential I think what you're seeing there in China, Japan, and the Middle East is these are not huge contributors to our overall business, but we think on the whole these are going to be outside growth potential for us as we continue to focus on international opportunities.

Great. Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Michael Cherney with Learing Partners. Please proceed.

Good morning, and thanks for taking the question. Maybe if I can tie back to the question regarding the NVIDIA partnership. As you think about this partnership, maybe in construct of the broader offering, how are you measuring timing on returns, and how are you measuring your broader partnership functionality capabilities as you also work to reposition the go-to-market strategy?

Okay, thanks for the question. So, NVIDIA partnership is obviously an important enabler. I think, as I said, I mentioned before, I think you'll be hearing other things from us in the coming weeks and months in terms of, you know, other partnerships. I think we all recognize that this is, you know, a, you know, fast moving ecosystem that we all need to, you know, that we need to, you know, play in multiple dimensions. And I think What you're seeing from us is a modernization of the way we're thinking about this, a relevance of the way that we're thinking about the way our software and our systems can be consumed by clients based on where they sit in a really client-centric way. We haven't put any timeline out against the individual products. We've talked a little bit about the next generation AI platform and the functionality and capability that builds, but we haven't yet provided any guidance in terms of timing for impact. But we certainly look at that as an opportunity to, you know, as we start to look out over the near to midterm as an opportunity to continue to build, continue to find new ways to serve our clients, to figure out new ways for them to do new types of science and to consume our software in new and more innovative ways.

Got it. And just one more follow-up regarding the divestiture. Obviously, capital available. You did some buyback. I apologize if I missed this. Within the guidance, is there an assumption on any incremental share of purchases and or plans for capital deployment with the capital cash balance available to you?

There is no outlined plan of execution. We did Highlight, the board has authorized an incremental $50 million in potential buybacks. Our stance on capital allocation hasn't changed. We're incredibly disciplined in terms of what we do. We focus on a combination of long-term strategic opportunity and what the best use of that cash and capital is. But I think you can take the signal of the incremental authorization in terms of where we see some attractiveness here. But there's no timeline against it, and there's no There's no outline execution path, just clearly that there's an intent to continue along that path of some buyback.

Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question is from Jared Haas with William Blair. Please proceed.

Hi, good morning. It's Christine Rains on for Jared. Thanks for taking our questions. Hoping you can speak to your expected back half cadence for revenue overall and for software versus Services, and overall EBITDA, given the moving pieces here.

Thanks, Christine.

So I think the key thing is our guidance is unchanged.

We're continuing to call out the exact same range that we highlighted we were going to call out at the beginning of the year. In terms of second half cadence, Although we don't guide on sub-offerings anyway, I think the pattern that we've seen over the first half of the year with software outperforming services is certainly a pattern we expect to continue into Q3 and Q4. The big factor for us as we start to move into Q3, I talked a little bit about some of the leading indicators. The software indicators on the ARR side are very positive and give us a high degree of confidence. On that side, services, you know, you go back to kind of basics, first principles on this, build up the pipeline, convert that pipeline, move to, you know, to backlog into revenue burn. Our leading indicators on this are that pipeline creation, and so we're feeling good with the changes that we made. The rate and pace at which that converts, obviously, will drive, you know, potential upside on that services line. You know, but our fundamental guidance hasn't, has not moved, hasn't wavered at all from the range that we, that we put out. And, you know, we, we expect a pattern that we saw the first half of the year to continue in the second half.

Great. That, that makes sense. I'm just double-clicking on the EBITDA margin puts and takes for the rest of the year. specifically asking, given the riff in 2Q, but lower margin guide at the midpoint. And also if we should think about margin ending this year as a good jumping off point for next year. Thank you.

Yeah. So firstly on margin, let me just clarify. I think what you see is not a lowering in the midpoint, but a change to reflect the new composition of the business. The business last year, if you look at excluding the regulatory carve-out that we did, the regulatory medical writing carve-out was a 30% margin business, 30.2% margin business. So coming out of the divestiture and kind of repositioning for the rest of the year, the change is in line with the math of that new business, also factoring in some of the stranded costs that we signaled in the last call that exist. So It's not, I would say, a change in guidance, more just a reflection of the discontinued ops new profile of the business. I would point, as you move forward, obviously, the stranded cost component is something that we're actively working on, whipping out of the cost structure. We're also trying to free up capital to focus in on AI and some of the new offerings that we're intent on pushing into market. Operational excellence activities that we highlighted, the $13 million in run rate and the RIF, which is mainly focused on overhead, were to really address both those points. Obviously, the run rate won't impact fully in the second half of the year. That run rate, by definition, will be into out years. But the intent of that is to protect and to highlight margins and ensure that we're in a good position to hold within the margin and to achieve the margins that we're outlining today.

Great, thank you.

Thank you. Our next question from Sean Dodge with BMO Capital Markets. Please proceed.

Hey, good morning. This is Thomas Keller. I'm for Sean. Thanks for taking the question. John, can you talk about the lag between an improving biotech funding backdrop and when that typically starts to translate into demand on both the software and the services side? Thanks.

Majority of our impact tends to have a slight lag. We're not doing a lot of work in the earliest stage discovery. Our stuff starts to click in as that discovery tries to translate to development, and it's the early stage development work moving towards first in human. So there tends to be a lag. As I've said pretty consistently, and I'll say it again, I think we're not dependent on biotech Funding or market health, at this point, this is an execution component, getting our teams out in front of, there's plenty of market for us to go out and get, and our focus has been on making the changes that we need to make to our engagement model and to our commercial model to fully capture that opportunity. So yes, technically speaking, there's a little bit of gap between when things get funded in terms of where they are in the stage of development, and you can see where we click in, but For Sertara's recovery story and Sertara's inflection story, this is much more about execution, getting out in front of the existing clients, getting out in front of new clients, and not depending on biotech funding in the near term.

Okay, that's helpful. Thank you. And then just a clarification on the cost savings. Is some or all of that $13 million incremental to the $10 million? And you had like a cost avoidance plan you talked about before. Is this completely separate?

Yeah, it's the latest update. We signaled that we would be putting this in place as we kind of look to address the stranded cost the second half of the year and to obviously change the cost base so we continue the path of investment and discipline operating management. So The $13 million is an increase over the former identified plan. So the $13 million is the latest view of run rate savings. We continue to push and continue to do it, and we'll continue to look to optimize to free up capital to spend on things that are going to drive a return for investors.

All right. That's perfect.

Thank you very much.

Thank you. Our next question is from Matthew Hewitt with Craig Hallam Capital Group. Please proceed.

Good morning. Thanks for taking the questions. I'm curious if there's been a fair amount of consolidation both in pharma and biotech as well as one of your peers is getting acquired. I'm curious if there's any type of disruption that that creates from a customer perspective if there's a merger or acquisition occurring. Does that kind of slow timelines to getting deals done with the competitor getting taken out? Does that create an opportunity for you? Maybe while they're distracted, you're able to get in and maybe win some new business.

Thanks, Matthew. Again, there's plenty of market for Sertara. We're not going to point to acquisitions of small biotech companies. Obviously, I saw the same FT article you did this week around potential mega-mergers. Those are a long ways away. There's plenty of market for us. Our focus is execution. Our focus is on commercial operations and getting out in front of our customers. So I'm not going to worry too much about that trend. I understand the rationale for the question. But there's plenty of opportunity for us to continue to grow and accelerate our footprint. In terms of competition, I'm probably not going to comment on that. Look, I think our job is to serve our clients with excellent work, is to lead with science, is to put the best proposals and the best delivery and the best software in front of our clients, and that's where we're going to focus. So this is within our control, not within someone else's acquisition control. This is fully within our ability to execute.

Got it. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Scott House with KeyBank. Please proceed.

Thanks for taking my question. John, I wanted to focus on your pipeline commentary of 25%. Can you give us more color there on what's driving that more services versus software? Is it more smaller SMB or biotech or larger pharma? And then with the new commercial chief commercial officer, how are you thinking about executing on this pipeline? Is there a mandate to get this converted more quickly? Any color would be appreciated. Thank you.

Sure.

So, look, I focus internally on kind of two or three metrics. I focus on AR accumulation on the software side, which continues to build and continues to be very positive. So our software business, we believe, continues to be healthy with the focus on new software, continues to be a significant piece of that pipeline. The biggest single change, though, is on the service side. I have been vocal about and my difference of opinion on the way that you should be moving this business forward. I believe the go-to-market model that was rolled out within Sartara two years ago, which focused on more of a generalist model, was not the right model that we need to focus more on, kind of specialist scientific engagement. We need to get our scientists out in front of the market more directly. They're the lifeblood of this business. We've done a series of things internally to rotate and get the scientists back out in front to hire more of the PhD-led sales teams to get those folks back out in customers. That's really where you're seeing the biggest spike in pipeline. You're seeing a rejuvenation of that model. of that model of engagement leading to a much higher percentage of scientific service in the business, which is exactly what we're positioned to do. So that's, you know, the big kind of change that we've seen year on year, and that's where the disproportionate share is. The rate and pace of burn, you know, the time in which we call that inflection point in terms of, you know, moving from low single digit growth into something stronger, obviously, is the rate and pace of that burn. and so that's what we're focused on in the rest of 2026. Yes, obviously with Julian coming in and new integrated sales and marketing effort, this is going to be a very different approach, much more data-driven, much more segment-driven, much more targeted. We've built a bunch of AI to help enable our sales teams in a different way. We've got a much different view about getting our scientists out in front of customers and in front of conferences, et cetera. So, look, we're optimistic about it. With change, obviously, you always have to signal a little bit of caution. You don't want to get too far over your skis in terms of your ski tips in terms of when you make the call. But yes, this is going to be more focused on operations and implementation of the go-to-market model that we've been changing over the last six months.

One moment for our last question that comes from Joe Brewink with Baird. Please proceed.

Great. Thank you. I wanted to ask about the updated guidance for the year, and sorry if I'm missing something obvious here, but understand regulatory is now in discontinued ops, and that ended up being 19 million. I think the guidance range moved down by about 26 million. What's just the delta between those two numbers?

I don't think that's the case. We'd have to go back and walk through your math. The only change that you saw to our top line guidance range, we've said pretty consistently that the business will grow in the 0% to 4% range over the course of 2026. The discontinued operations from the carve-out of the regulatory business that profile of business in 2025 was $367 million. So if you put the zero to 4% on top of that, you get to the 367 to 382. So I think it probably is the timing in which you're taking in, you know, we are reporting out completely without regulatory medical writing. So we're removing the Q1 and the first half of Q2 numbers from our ongoing compares. So I think that's probably the math issue, but we can work through it with you offline.

Okay, thanks. And then, obviously, there's a lot of just draft guidance and discussion on what's going to be the right approach to models and what's going to be the right approach to data and what the regulators accept. Does that create any hesitancy on the part of customers for maybe how they want to engage with Certara, where they engage with Certara?

I kind of see it as the opposite. There's a handful of very established use cases, and Sertara is the go-to player for those very established use cases. The things that we've talked about the last couple calls is the acceleration of all the new regulatory use cases that are coming out. The maturity of regulators worldwide in terms of not just taking the standard use cases or an MIDD, but really trying to transform, whether it's NAMs or QSP or and some of the other kind of international standardization that's coming. What we believe, and by the way, we're actively involved in discussions with regulators worldwide. Scientists within Sertara are journal editors for the major publications on this front. What we believe is that there's a time lag between when regulators establish a framework and when these start to get built into regular practice. You're seeing that. The number of questions that we are getting is going up exponentially in terms of how do you manage through this. It takes a little bit of time, particularly for the newer use cases, to translate from, hey, there's scientific methods to now there's regulatory pathway, regulatory acceptance to it until when the adoption occurs. That's the rationale for us getting our scientists back out there. That's the more science-led is to help drive that transformation and the adoption. So I don't see it as a point of... Thank you. Go ahead. All right, this will conclude our Q&A session.

I will pass it back to John Resnick for final comments.

Thanks, everyone, for joining. Look forward to some of the subsequent follow-up phone calls over the next couple hours. Thanks, everyone.

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