illumin Holdings Inc.

Good morning, everyone. Before we begin the official remarks, I will read the cautionary note regarding forward-looking information. Certain information to be discussed during this call contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable security laws, including, among others, statements concerning the company's objectives, the company's strategy to achieve those objectives, as well as statements with respect to management's beliefs, plans, estimates and intentions, and similar statements concerning anticipated future events, results, circumstances, performance or expectations that are not historical facts. Such forward-looking statements reflect management's current beliefs and are based on information currently available to management and is subject to a number of significant risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated. Please refer to the cautionary statement and the risk factors identified in our filings with CDAR for a more detailed explanation of the inherent risks and uncertainties that could affect such forward-looking statements. Following the presentation, we will conduct a Q&A session. I would now like to turn the conference call over to Simon Karens, Chief Executive Officer.

Thank you, Steve. Welcome everyone and thank you for joining us for today's second quarter 2025 earnings call. I'll begin by reviewing some of the highlights from our quarterly results where we generated solid revenue growth of 13% -over-year driven by a 114% increase in exchange service revenue and a 5% increase in self-service. I'll also talk about the growth we've experienced in self-service revenue, showing the success we've had in onboarding new customers, raising customer adoption and self-service spend performance. I will also highlight some of the advancements we've made to our platform, including our recently launched AI forecasting tool. Then I'll discuss the challenges we've had in managed service and some of the steps we've taken to address them, including the cost reduction and restructuring initiatives we started implementing late in the quarter to enhance our profitability in the near term, as well as the benefits we expect these actions will have for us in the longer term. After that, I'll turn the call over to our Chief Financial Officer, Elliot Mucznik, who will review the highlights of our second quarter financial and operating results. Then we'll be happy to answer your questions. During the second quarter, we had sustained revenue growth of 13%. This was led by our outstanding 114% growth in exchange service revenue, which was our largest revenue line in Q2. We have been very successful this year in creating and capturing new and recurring customer demand on this side of our platform, due to the investments we've made in our AI and sales that were specifically designed to strengthen our competitive position. In addition to our success in exchange service, revenue growth in our self-service line was 5% in the second quarter, representing 28% of total revenue. We successfully onboarded 31 new self-service clients during the quarter, demonstrating the success our sales initiatives, targeting higher spend clients as we see further progress in the principal factors that drive revenue growth in this business, such as raising customer adoption, conversion and spend management. We were able to achieve this growth in self-service despite a key client pausing spend to address their financial restructuring. Factoring out the pause from that one key client, self-service grew 40% year over year for Q2. The continued progress we've seen in exchange service and the stable growth in our self-service line demonstrates the success our investments in our platform and customer-centric approach that we launched in the second half of 2024. We're continuing to see improved average revenue per customer as our clients clearly recognize the value in the new features we've introduced to the platform, including programmatic guarantee and enhanced support for connected TV or CTV, which grew again by more than 100% versus the same quarter last year. This also includes recent platform enhancements, such as our integration with gardens like Metta, which have improved customer stickiness. Aside from the platform enhancements, we've also introduced new and innovative services such as our new AI-powered forecasting tool that we just launched in the second quarter. Usually this kind of forecasting tool has been reserved for only large clients with substantial budgets from premium vendors. Now, Aluminum's AI Forecaster is changing the game by making this premium solution available to any Aluminum self-service customer without forcing them to pay massive upfront minimums. The initial feedback from customers is extremely positive. We believe this and similar services we plan to introduce this autumn and in time for Q4 will make Aluminum a very attractive and cost-effective option for an increasing number of advertisers and marketers. Even though the tool was launched mid-quarter, we've seen testing usage by upwards of 60% of existing customers and daily usage by more than 20% of existing customers, well within our internal targets for seeding future adoption, spend performance and customer retention. Complementing this, we also continue to focus on driving adoption and scaling growth through targeted marketing and sales efforts. These efforts have helped us advance our Aluminum self-service roadmap, while also helping us offer our customers a wide range of flexible solutions to meet their specific needs, whether it's self-service, managed campaigns and exchange service, or a hybrid approach combining elements of some or all of these services. These investments were reflected in our adjusted EBITDA for the quarter, which was partially offset by higher revenues albeit with lower gross margins as a result of the higher proportion of exchange service revenue we saw during the quarter. Turning to managed service, revenue for the quarter was $10.9 million, down 24% year over year. In part, these results are reflective of the current geopolitical and macroeconomic uncertainty as some customers remain more cautious with their marketing spend or were less willing to shift from current providers. This is not surprising as managed service is typically more sensitive to larger economic conditions. However, despite the tough external conditions, we believe managed service can do better. We need to market the service line more effectively and work more efficiently and we intend to do just that. Partly due to the changes we have seen in managed service, we implemented a significant cost reduction and restructuring program late in the quarter to enhance our profitability in the near term. These include some changes in our workforce, reprioritizing some planned investments in research and development and also in marketing. We are taking a number of actions to realign our infrastructure so it better fits the current industry and economic environment. Importantly, we're revisiting how we do things to better manage our costs and perhaps more importantly, so we can work more effectively to drive sales. We expect to complete these initiatives by the end of the year. Elliot will talk more about these restructuring details later in today's call. On a broader level, these actions represent what I would call an operational expense or a reset, if you will, and directly addresses headcount and operational expenses across the board. We expect these initiatives will improve our financial profile and drive us towards a positive cash flow while still letting us concentrate on enhancing the customer lifetime value of our business. In summary, our second quarter results highlight our strong -over-year revenue and exchange service as our targeted efforts to drive adoption and expand demand continue to gain momentum. At the same time, self-service growth remained firm during the quarter, demonstrating our success in onboarding new clients and our sales initiatives targeting higher spend customers. We continue to see headwinds in our managed service business due largely to a challenging macro environment. To address this, as well as to enhance performance throughout our company, we took restructuring actions across the organization to reduce operating expenses and improve cash flow generation. Looking ahead, we will be prioritizing expense management so we can grow profitably while still advancing key growth initiatives to increase revenue throughout all aspects of our business. Now I'll turn the call over to Elliot to give a detailed review of our financial results.

Thank you, Simon. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our second quarter 2025 earnings call. Today we reported our second quarter results which reflects solid revenue growth overall driven by strong quarter performance in our exchange service as our targeted efforts to drive adoption and expand demand gain more traction. I will present some additional details on our results now. Second quarter 2025 revenue was $33.1 million, up 13% compared to $29.2 million in Q2 2024. As mentioned earlier, this year over year growth includes strong results in the exchange service business and modest growth in self-service revenue which was partially offset by a decrease in managed service revenue. Our growth in exchange service was driven by the addition of new customers in this area as well as an increased volume of spend by our existing clients largely due to enhanced features we've introduced by investing in key technology improvements, working with our external partners to improve these capabilities, and with better service from an expanded customer service and support team. We've been focused on these efforts for the past year and as you can see from our results, we're now realizing the benefits. Turning to self-service revenue, this grew 5% year over year to reach $9.2 million representing 28% of the total revenue for the quarter. We onboarded 31 new self-service clients during the quarter reflecting sales initiatives targeting higher spent clients and positioning the company for continued long-term self-service revenue growth. And similar to last quarter, as noted by Simon earlier, the year over year comparison was dramatically impacted by a large client that reduced spending this year due to their own specific circumstances including undergoing a business restructuring. However, this impact was reduced considerably by the addition of new self-service clients during the first half of the year and over time we expect these new clients to offset this impact further as they continue to ramp up their spend. We are pleased with the continued core strength in this part of our offering especially when normalizing both quarters. Going forward, our focus remains on targeting higher spent clients as we see further progress in raising customer adoption, conversion and spend performance in this segment. In managed service revenue was $10.9 million for the second quarter compared to approximately $14.4 million in Q2 2024. This year over year change was mainly due to larger macroeconomic uncertainty which has been influencing some customers' marketing spend as they await further clarification on matters related to world trade policy. While customers continue to value our broad service offering as well as the insights and results it provides them, we are taking a conservative approach and expect this spend pattern to persist in the near term as our ability to forecast specifically in this segment is impacted by uncertainty. We are already taking measures to reallocate resources in to drive improved sales in this service line as part of a larger series of initiatives. As Simon noted, during the quarter we began implementing cost reduction and restructuring actions across our organization. This includes a net reduction of approximately 10% of the company's North American workforce. I reference net because we still continue to grow and expand our reach and capabilities in our sales and marketing teams. The headcount reductions in hiring freezes took place during the latter part of the second quarter and in addition will be decreasing our real estate footprint, reorganizing sales, technology and administrative activities to lower expenses while identifying efficiencies to continue to drive sales and conduct operations more effectively. We believe these actions will drive higher margins and improve cash flow generation. Turning back to our second quarter results, gross profit or net revenue for the second quarter 2025 was $14.4 million, up 3% compared to $14 million in the second quarter of 2024, reflecting higher sales year over year. Gross margin for the quarter was 43% compared to 48% for the same period in 2024. Due to the year over year change in our product with a higher portion of revenue coming from service lines with lower margins such as our exchange service. As we look to further enhance our efforts towards managed services in the second half of the year, we expect gross margin to recover to a stronger normalized level. Total operating expenses for the second quarter of 2025 were $19.4 million compared to $16.5 million during the same period in 2024. This year over year increase was from higher sales and marketing expenses primarily related to increased salaries and benefits as well as commission and bonus costs associated with the higher revenues for the quarter. Higher technology expenses were due to higher variable hosting and data costs directly resulting from our higher exchange service activity. And the increase in general administrative costs was mainly due to higher severance costs and professional fees stemming from the cost reduction and restructuring actions that mentioned earlier. Q2 2025 operating expenses as a percentage of revenue were .6% compared to .2% in Q2 2024. Second quarter adjusted EBITDA loss was $1 million compared to a positive adjusted EBITDA of half a million in the prior year period. Despite the higher revenues, the year over year decline was primarily attributable to higher operating costs in the sales and marketing technology area as we had anticipated. This was mainly due to the sales and sales support expenses from expanding our account management support team, partly offset by higher revenues which had lower gross margins as a result of the product mix. Net loss the second quarter of was $5.8 million compared to a net loss of $1 million in Q2 2024. The year over year change reflects the higher operating costs previously discussed, a net foreign exchange loss versus a gain in the prior year period and higher severance expenses as part of the cost reduction and restructuring measures. Also on December 23, 2024, the company commenced a new normal course issuer bid to purchase for cancellation up to $3.9 million of its outstanding common shares. During the second quarter of 2025, the company purchased 311,618 common shares under this facility at an average price of $1.76 per share for a total of $548,365. The 2024 normal course issuer bid remains open and can continue until December 22, 2025 or until we reach our targeted repurchase limit. Turning briefly to our balance sheet, we exited the quarter with $48.3 million in cash versus $54 million at the end of March 31, 2025. The quarter over quarter decrease was primarily attributable to investments in our platform, payments on leases and share repurchases. This decline in cash is consistent with the seasonality of our business and industry, which is expected for the first half of the year and typically the trend is reversed in the second half of the year. Maintaining a strong balance sheet continues to be a priority for us in order to support our continued growth. Our strong balance sheet also affords us the financial flexibility to explore strategic and increasingly attractive acquisition opportunities in order to expand our capabilities or to increase our growth trajectory. We continue to see an increasing number of accretive growth opportunities in our space with more reasonable valuations and will continue to evaluate them as we move ahead in 2025. As of June 30, 2025, the total number of our outstanding common shares stood at ,612,725 compared to ,704,785 shares as of March 31, 2025. And this figure reflects our share repurchases during the quarter offset by the impact of shares issued through the exercise of stock options and other vested equity instruments. On a fully diluted basis, our shares outstanding are 57.2 million and our insider share ownership is at 24.3%. To summarize, our second quarter results were characterized by another period strong performance in our exchange service business as a result of our targeted investments in this segment and stable growth and self-service revenue. As anticipated, we recorded higher operating expenses during the first half of the year due to our growth investments designed to enhance our product platform, strengthen brand identity, increase client satisfaction, and efficiencies and drive sales. The majority of these investments are now behind us, which should result in a more profitable growth during the second half of the year. We achieved all of this despite an uncertain and challenging macroeconomic environment. To better align our business with today's industry and economic conditions, we have implemented broad cost reductions and restructuring initiatives. These actions are intended to drive sales growth, enhance our competitive position, and to conduct operations more effectively throughout our organization. We continue to believe strongly in our long-term growth prospects as we remain focused on balancing cost management with investments in key growth initiatives to increase sales and to produce meaningful progress and profitability. And with that, I'd like to turn the call back over to Simon for his closing remarks.

Thank you, Elliot. In conclusion, we posted stable revenue growth for the quarter driven by another quarter of exceptional growth in exchange service. We continue to see steady growth and self-service fueled by adding new Illumin self-service clients, increased customer adoption, and conversion. We achieved all of this even as a larger macroeconomic uncertainty continued to influence spend in managed service. In order to mitigate these challenges, we took restructuring measures across our entire organization to reduce operating expenses, improve cashflow generation, and ultimately to improve our sales performance. We intend to keep making investments in key initiatives to support our future growth. However, we will be prioritizing cost management and improving efficiencies. So while we invest in our growth, the money we spend will be thoughtful and tactical. Bottom line, we will spend wisely to ensure we generate a substantial ROI and position ourselves for long-term success. Thank you all for your time today. This concludes our formal remarks. We look forward to answering your questions that you may have.

Good morning, gentlemen, and thank you to everyone for attending this morning's presentation of Illumin Holdings Second Quarter 2025 Financial and Operating Results. I would like to begin by reminding our analysts that in order to present your question, you must first select the raise your hand icon on your screen. Gentlemen, your first question comes from Daniel Rosenberg of Paradigm Capital. Daniel, please proceed with your question when you are ready.

Thanks. Good morning, Simon and Elliot. My first question just comes around the mix, the revenue mix. I just wanted to better understand, you mentioned in your comments, some of the macro factors that are impacting growth. Are there nuances between how it impacts managed services, self-serve, or programmatic? I was wondering if you could speak to that, please.

Certainly, good morning and thank you, Daniel. So just maybe to summarize for the benefit of all the callers, we saw a substantial increase in our exchange services revenue, a mild increase in our self-service revenue, and a decline in our managed services revenue. In terms of the macro factors that you noted in your question, fundamentally managed service has had two quarters in a row where we've seen some underspending from existing customers and we've seen some slow or unwillingness to move from existing providers. That's largely just due to the fact that while there are many reasons to hire a company like ours to do managed services, a lot of the uncertainty in the economy is driving up a push towards the bottom of the marketing funnel, bottom of the advertising funnel versus a full funnel experience. As a result, more customers pronate a little bit more towards the transparency and the better economics around a self-service product, which means that is one of the contributors on the reverse as to why we saw some growth in self-service for Q2 where we saw an increase in the number of new logos and also an increase in the ARPU. The self-service on a, you know, our reported basis grew 5 percent, but if we factor out some restructuring in any larger self-service customer, self-service grew at 40 percent for the quarter. So on a report basis, just to be clear, 5 percent, but regardless, that's sort of some of the customer shift that we are sort of seeing just related to the environment. In my sort of specific remarks, what I'm focused on the fact is that we need to do a better job of offering a clear benefit around our managed services to attract a customer pool on that side of the house, and because I'm a big believer in managed services, and at the same time, we are looking at different sort of opportunities in our roadmap to increase retention in around our managed services base. Lastly, around exchange, sort of, you know, it is on the other side of the ad tech platform house, and as a result, what we continue to do there is continue to leverage some gains that we picked up in Q3 fiscal year 24. We did some investments through the first half this year in the algorithm and also minorly in head count to sort of capture a lot of what was started as inbound opportunity to us, inbound unplanned opportunity to us. We continue to capture that. We continue to actually capture larger customers in this space, and so we're pleased with the growth that we see in exchange. It's pure good old-fashioned teamwork there in that sense, and they are finding that they can pick up some customers from much larger brands in the space. The exchange side of the industry is very, very tight and difficult to differentiate, but they are picking up some customers from some much bigger brands. I think it's largely due to the fact that the platform has some flexibility and some innovation and just good old-fashioned straight-up good algorithmic-based results, and so people are sort of pleased with our approach, our flexibility. Maybe we're a little less restrictive than some of our much larger brands in the space. That is maybe on a customer-centric basis giving us some differentiating differentiation, and that is giving us some lift in the quarter. I hope that answers your question.

Yes, thank you for that. I appreciate all the context. I guess digging a bit deeper into customer spend, could you please explain how you're thinking about these, if we're thinking through the lens of these kind of three revenue lines, how a customer might shift their wallet spend, whether taking one product, two products, all three. How do you think about managing that going forward with the dynamics you're seeing today?

From within the self-service product, we continue to see a higher ARPU, average revenue per customer essentially, 17% for Q2. This is a combination of factors, but in a fundamental level, we are seeing more channel adoption by new and existing users on a historical basis. If we look back over the last few years, the self-service product has moved from being used fundamentally for one or two advertising channels to now three, four, five. The more we sort of advent self-service, the more new customers come in, the more they're more quickly adopting additional channels. This is due to the fact that we have simplified the user experience. We still have some more work to do there, but we have made it easier than even a year ago. Our focus right now is to really drive towards more attribution and incrementality, just because that's where we see customers driving us in terms of what they want out of us to be a great partner helping them succeed. We believe that will help us in 2026 bring through both new customers and retain the existing customers that we're gaining in 2025 due to a variety of conditions, whether that they were just purely interested in self-service or maybe in uncertain times they're looking for a bit more control versus say a managed services solution. In terms of managed, it spans the gambit of how you want to hire us and use us. It could be awareness campaigns, which on the whole in the market are on the decline right now. It could be just related to conversion campaigns. We see a much larger sort of spread of opportunities there, but for the second half of this year, we do have a focus on trying to pull the managed services results up. As a market, I'm a big believer in it does lend us some very good customer-facing feedback, but also some very good customer support as well. Managed services like Exchange actually helps bring us customers into the platform in a variety of ways. That's sort of, I think, maybe one of the hidden benefits we have yet to even closely materialize. I think that that's some green field for the future, which is can we move from a dialogue of we service you from a method of A, B, or C towards you may know us on one thing, but you may be able to easily try us on another way of service.

I appreciate that. Lastly, for me, just on the cost restructuring, could you speak to timelines in terms of when you expect to see benefits start to accrue and start to be fully realized?

When I look at the environment out there, so the market started this year forecasting itself at somewhere between 10 and 15%. The market is now forecasting itself at below 8%. For this quarter, we're at 13%. Last quarter, 17%. Wanted to implement some hedges against downside risk in the business going forward. We did exit a material level of headcount in Q2 at the very end of the quarter. That shows up mostly in severance costs, appropriately, and that we bear some cash costs and other things in the quarter. But we have exited the headcount that we wanted to exit just to, again, manage the safety of the business. In this quarter, going forward, we're focused on growth with a tight wall. I don't know, Elliot, if there's another angle.

Thanks, Simon. Just a quick add, we still have to reduce our real estate footprint. That's a few months delay for that. And some vendor exits where we're rationalizing our relationships for a reduction in this, obviously, some time. So we believe that all those pieces will be well completed by the end of the year. And we're obviously moving as quickly as possible to make sure that those happen even more quickly than that. But the major part, as Simon mentioned, was our reduction of our workforce, and that has been complete.

Thanks for taking my questions. I'll pass the line. Thank you, Daniel. Thank you, Daniel.

Thank you for those questions, Daniel. Our next question comes from Conrad Ryland of RBC Securities. Conrad, please proceed with your question when you're ready.

Hey, good morning, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. I guess just following up on the last question, with all of the moving parts here, with revenue mix shifts, and you've got the additional cost reduction and restructuring initiatives being implemented, is there any more granularity you could provide on gross margin expectations for Q3 and Q4?

Thank you, Conrad. So our expectation is, as you heard Simon say, that we are refocusing and trying to shore up and improve our managed service results. And if that would, the outcome of that would naturally lift our gross margin, because it's not that we're seeing profound margin pressure, although it's definitely out in the marketplace. It's the fact that we had a bigger proportion of our revenue in the first half of the year coming from the lower part of the margin scale on our offering. And as a result, this cost initiative that we've done is to effectively offset the impacts of the lowest gross margin, lower gross margin, pardon me, and some of the related costs that come with that business. Now, if we were to improve on the managed service, then I think we will have dramatically better outcomes, but we can't depend on that. You know, because of the current market situation, it's very, I think that the biggest difficulty is being able to forecast advertiser commitment to spend and their willingness to spend in a way that they may have spent in the prior year and so forth. So for us, we're taking, as Simon said, a hedge position, but we expect that managed service will be stronger in the second half, and that will lead to modest but important improvements in our gross margin.

Got it. Thank you. And in your release, you did mention a solution being developed to stabilize the managed services business. So is there any color you could provide on that initiative specifically? We have

made several investments in the platform over the last several years, even, you know, obviously prior to my time even being here. And those have set the stage where we can layer in additional products and services that would help both managed and our self-service product and where the customer base is driving us towards is more visibility and more control related to incrementality, which is essentially helping provide clarity on where their advertisers are going in terms of bringing them new business. Also, some more sort of understanding of retail level footfall traffic and just generally attribution about understanding where their market and dollars are contributing back to their business. We have the opportunity to move quickly and extend the value to customers that historically Illumin has not played in. Many DSPs sort of typically play in the space of we help you spend your advertising dollars and you rely on third parties to sort of have insights into your dollars from our point of view where customers are telling us that they really like what they see in terms of some of our transparency and our flexibility in our partnering with them. Can you also help give me some insights? And so between ourselves and also some third parties, we are focused on really sort of delivering some incremental value back to customers as quickly as can and we believe it can benefit both the managed and the self. Furthermore, exchange has a role to play here as well and that because we are getting good customer response from exchange, we are essentially using it as a very mild form of lead generation into the DSP side of the house in the sense that if you like us over here, maybe give us a try on this other side. So I hope that answers your question.

Very helpful. Thank you.

Thank you for that question, Conrad. I will just open it up to see if there are any other questions from the audience. Okay, as there are no further questions, this will conclude our presentation for this quarter. My thanks to Elliot and Simon and a special thank you to our analysts and shareholders for attending this morning. Please join us the next time as we present our third quarter financial and operating results. Goodbye for now.