Kinaxis Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the Canaxis Inc. Fiscal 2025 Fourth Quarter and Year-End Results Conference Call. Currently, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. Instructions will be provided at that time for you to queue up for questions. I'd like to remind everyone that this call is being recorded today, Thursday, March 5, 2026. I will now turn the call over to Rick Wadsworth, Vice President, Investor Relations at Canaxis Inc. Please go ahead, Mr. Wadsworth.

Thanks, Operator. Good morning and welcome to the Canaxis Earnings Call. Today, we will be discussing our fourth quarter and year-end results, which we issued after close of markets yesterday. With me on the call are Rizat Gharab, our Chief Executive Officer, and Blaine Fitzgerald, Chief Financial Officer. Some of the information discussed on this call is based on information as of today, March 5, 2026, and contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those set out in such statements. For discussion of these risks and uncertainties, you should review the forward-looking statements disclosure in the earnings press release, as well as in our CDAR Plus filing. During this call, we will discuss IFRS results and non-IFRS financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA. A reconciliation between adjusted EBITDA and the corresponding IFRS result is available in our earnings press release in MD&A, both of which can be found on the IR section of our website, canaxis.com, and on CDAR+. The webcast is live and being recorded for playback purposes. An archive of the webcast will be made available on the investor relations section of our website. Neither this call nor the webcast may be re-recorded or otherwise reproduced or distributed without prior written permission from Kinaxis. We have a presentation that accompanies today's call, which can be downloaded from the IR homepage of our website. It'll let you know when to change slides. Over to you, Rizat.

Thanks, Rick. Turning to slide four. I'd like to start by saying how thrilled I am to be a part of the Kinaxis team. It's a company I've admired and competed against for several years. Here are my top three reasons for joining Kinaxis. One, getting back to my roots in supply chain software, where I've spent over 20 years of my career, particularly at this time when organizations are experiencing unprecedented levels of demand and supply volatility. Two, to build and scale a company that is already a market leader in AI powered supply chain planning and orchestration. And three, the tremendous talent and culture in the organization that is rooted in innovation and customer success. I am truly excited to build and scale the business while delivering unprecedented value to our customers. Turning to slide five, I couldn't have joined Canaxis at a better time. The team performed really well, and we had a record-setting fourth quarter to the end year with ongoing momentum in two key growth metrics. Our SAS revenue grew by a healthy 19% in Q4 and 17% for the year, significantly higher than our initial guidance range of 11% to 13%. Perhaps more importantly, our ARR balance grew by 20%, accelerating from 12% growth at the end of 2024. Incremental bookings hit record levels in the quarter and year. This momentum sets us up really well to target higher SAS revenue growth in 2026, as Blaine will explain and speak soon. This growth momentum, combined with operating efficiency, also translated to significantly improved profitability. Full year adjusted EBITDA was at a record level and grew by 30%. The margin in Q4 was 26% and was 25% for the year. at the high end of our initial guidance range and a year early at our mid-term targets. We see room for ongoing improvements in coming years. Moving on to slide six. The new business we won in the quarter and year demonstrates excellent execution on important go-to-market strategies. Let me give you some color. In Q4 and fiscal 2025, we won roughly a third more new business. than in any previous quarter and year in our history, measured by the total average annual contract value in the period, or ACB. The number of contracts with one plus million dollars in average ACB was at record levels in Q4 and the year. We won 21 deals over a million dollars in the year versus six in 2024, and over 30% higher than the closest result. looking at total contract value or tcb over the committed term we won over 100 deals above a million dollars our pipeline suggests that 2026 could be another strong gear in this regard together these metrics reflect the growing market need for companies to develop agility and adaptability as they navigated as they navigate unprecedented levels of supply and demand volatility we continue to be the market providers, the go-to-market providers for AI-powered supply chain planning, decision-making, and orchestration for the world's largest and most complex supply chains. Going to slide seven. We want some world-class companies in Q4, which are distinguished not just by their size, but also by the role they play in the global AI transformation. As investments increase in the build-out of data centers, and related AI infrastructure, Kinaxis Maestro is becoming the default choice for supply chain planning and orchestration across this value chain. During G4, we won a top five global semiconductor foundry, which manufactures highly advanced GPUs for the world's AI infrastructure leaders, mobile device leaders, massive players in the digital economy, and others. You'll recall that in the first quarter of 2025, we also want another global leader in the semiconductor ecosystem. In Q4, we also want a major player in the global storage business, serving the world's largest cloud providers, consumer electronics companies, and other device makers. Last quarter, we talked about winning a material science company that is also a key part of the global data center infrastructure. We have continued our amazing run in the oil and gas sector by earning the business of Marathon Petroleum Corporation, a leading integrated downstream and midstream energy company headquarters in the US, and operating the nation's largest refining system. The AI economy is energy hungry, so our success in oil and gas continues to position us really well. We're also seeing increasing demand from energy utility companies that are expanding their operations to service the surge in data center needs. We're performing very well in other growing markets, like aerospace and defense. Companies in the sector are seeing significant growth in demand while leading with complex bill of materials, engineer to order operating models, and capacity constraints. In the fourth quarter, we won one of the world's largest aerospace engine makers, which fires defense, civil, and business aircrafts worldwide. We already support Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, L3 Harris, and several other leaders in the aerospace and defense space. In consumer goods, we won the Magnum Ice Cream Company. With revenues of roughly 8 billion euros in 2025, the Magnum Ice Cream Company is present in 80 markets around the world. and is home to icons like Magnum, Ben & Jerry's, Cornetto, and the Heart brand. If that wasn't enough, we also won a top five global chocolate company in Q4. At the end of 2025, roughly 85% of our AOR is split between our top four vertical markets, life sciences, high tech, consumer products, and industrial manufacturing, including aerospace and defense. Maestro's ability to offer comprehensive AI-powered supply chain planning and orchestration for such a diverse set of major manufacturing markets, all without custom coding, is unparalleled. There are still 14,000 prospects remaining in our markets, and we have never been in a better position to win them. Moving on to slide eight. Despite outsized success winning major new accounts in Q4, 55% of gross additions to ARR came from expansion business with existing customers. For the year, that number was 53% compared to 45% in 2024. It was our biggest year ever for expansion business. We revamped the structure and goals of our installed account teams at the end of 2024. The impact has been meaningful, immediate, and lasting. The contribution of expansion business from applications hit an all-time high with newer products like enterprise scheduling, machine learning-based forecasting, and supply optimization making notable progress. We have over 400 customers and a growing set of capabilities to take to market to them. There is still massive room for growth within the install base. Going on to slide nine. I'm excited to tell you more about our ongoing journey with AI, the commercial launch of Maestro Agent Studio. This is a next generation capability that gives supply chain teams a no-code way to compose AI agents grounded in their real operating context to reimagine the ways of working and delivering the next level of value outcomes. The agents are proprietary, use proprietary data, workflows, resources, and tools in our Maestro platform and can leverage the context of the most comprehensive digital representation of the complex and interconnected physical supply chain. Working within Maestro's trusted supply chain planning environments, the agents help teams concurrently evaluate trade-offs and coordinate decisions and actions as business conditions change. And the business conditions are changing at unprecedented levels as we speak. Maestro Agent Studio embeds leading large language models, including OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google Gemini, with others like Anthropix Cloud in testing, and keeps agent behavior anchored in Maestro's trusted data, intelligence, and governance. The agents call on and complement our existing decision automation capabilities that are anchored in decades of deep domain expertise and sophisticated mathematical models that LLMs aren't designed to replace. This includes advanced machine learning capabilities, deep optimization algorithms, and heuristics algorithms. Together, these capabilities create a practical foundation for more autonomous supply chain operations that deliver faster, better decisions with confidence and trust. To date, early innovative customers are using Maestro Agent Studio for exciting use cases. For example, a major global electronics manufacturing services company is autonomously analyzing forecast quality and outside-in demand signals across business units to recommend improved forecast quality. A prominent consumer fashion company is analyzing demand changes to help planners understand the impacts on production and distribution and determine mitigation strategies. A global life sciences company is eliminating steps in inventory risk assessment to surface insights in seconds instead of hours. And several early adopter customers are streamlining reporting processes to reduce manual effort and tons of hours per month. Our progress is exciting, but the best is yet to come. So far, Maestro agents are focused on working with data within our own platform. As we continue our AI journey going forward, we are expanding Maestro's reach to the broader ecosystem with an expanded data fabric and an abstract semantic layer to enable composable agentic orchestration right across the supply chain. In 2026, our plans are the following. Orchestrator agents that coordinate and sequence multiple agents across concurrent supply chain workflows. securing connections between maestro agents and external agents and systems through emerging protocols like MCP and A2A, expanded data context and semantics with an extensible optology layer, enabling agents to reason consistently across larger data sets and analytical environments beyond maestro. Through agentic connections to other systems that can provide relevant data, and insights, we can leverage our context-sensitive, real-time, concurrent planning engine to help customers make better, more informed decisions and achieve unprecedented positive outcomes. Moving on to slide 10. Maestro Agent Studio and our pre-built Maestro Agents are fully available today. Monetization will happen through our next-generation pricing structure, an evolution that we've launched with customers and which introduces the maestro activity units. Our new pricing structure remains subscription-based and still reflects a platform fee based on customer size and fees for individual functional modules, like supply and demand planning, inventory optimization, production planning, enterprise scheduling, and so on. However, now the subscription also includes bundles for maestro activity units, or MAUs, which expand the basis for usage-based pricing in our structure. Customers will commit for the full term of the contract to a quantity of MAUs, bundles, that reflect anticipated usage. The size of MAU commitment grows with the number of scenarios, AI tasks and automations and plan calculations and data exports a customer expects to engage through our MCP server. This more fulsome notion of usage achieves some very important goals. First, over time, we anticipate a bigger share of Maestro work to be conducted by AI agents, so our pricing needs to reflect that important value. If efficiencies result in fewer users, we are compensated by the growth in AI tasks and automations. Second, since we expect Maestro to interact more with a broader network of interoperable agents, we need to capture the value of the intelligence and analysis we share out. The data exports aspects of MAU compensates for that. Finally, embedding plan calculations in the MAU better reflects the value that customers receive and the costs we incur through normal plan iterations. Maestro now has the instrumentation to track MAU usage, and persistent overages require additional MAU subscriptions. We will learn a lot more about MAU usage and our next generation pricing model over the next few quarters and fully expect some tweaking along the way. I am confident that it better aligns pricing with the value we create for customers in an even more AI-forward world. The new pricing model is getting thoughtfully rolled out in a phased approach. I see AI as meaningfully expanding our TAM in the long run. As with all meaningful innovation, we encourage you to both avoid overestimating its impact in the short term and underestimating it in the long term. Our customers run the world's most important, complex, and innovative supply chains. By necessity, they move carefully and thoughtfully, but they undeniably move forward. I'll pass the call to Blaine to discuss Q4 and 2025 results and our 2026 outlook.

Thank you, Rizad, and good morning. Q4 was a great record-breaking quarter for Canaxis, and 2025 was also beyond expectations in key areas. We are positioned well for even more progress in 2026. I'll start with slide 11. As we look at the numbers for the fourth quarter and compared to Q4 2024 results, total revenue was $144.2 million, up 16%, or 14% in constant currency, driven largely by very strong SAS revenue growth. SAS revenue was $97.2 million, up 19%, or 16% in constant currency, thanks to strong momentum winning new business throughout 2025, including record levels in Q4. Subscription term license revenue was $1.7 million, up 8%, and consistent with expected renewal cycles for on-premise customers. Professional services revenue was $40 million, up 14% and stronger than expected due to higher realized rates as we work to ensure that pricing fully reflects our premium services. We continue to successfully shift work to system integrator partners and will continue to focus on that in 2026. In 2025, partners participated in almost 70% of new customer implementations, one by our direct sales team. Maintenance and support revenue was $5.4 million level with comparative period. Our gross profit was up by 26%, $94.3 million, for a 65% gross margin, greatly improved from 61%. Our software margin was 78%. up substantially from 73%, largely due to more efficient delivery of our software. We see room for ongoing improvement as we complete our migration to the public cloud. Professional services gross margin was 32%, compared to 29%, reflecting the higher realized rate in the quarter as mentioned. Adjusted EBITDA was up 19%, to $37.6 million, a record level. This reflects strong revenue growth, a higher gross margin, and strong control over operating expenses. Adjusted EBITDA margin was 26%, up from 25%. Our profit in the quarter was a record $19.5 million, compared to a loss of $16.3 million in the fourth quarter last year, which, as you remember, reflected some one-time items. Cash flow from operating activities was $29.99, up 24%. Cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments were $324.7 million, up $26.2 million from last year, despite a very active share buyback program. Moving to slide 12, key aspects of full-year results were beyond our expectations. SAS revenue, our most critical gap measure, grew 17%, compared to the initial guidance of 11% to 13%. and came in at the top end of our most recent guidance range. Constant currency SAS revenue grew 16% versus initial guidance of 12 to 14% and at the top end of our most recent guidance range. Total revenue was $548 million, up 13% and at the top end of our guidance range, despite shifts from subscription term licenses to future SAS revenue, as well as lower professional services than expected as we shifted more work to partners and faced a challenging pricing environment earlier in the year. In constant currency, total revenue was $540 million in line with recent guidance. Adjusted EBITDA grew an impressive 30% from 2024 to a record $138.4 million. The 25% margin is the highest since 2019 and a big step from 22% in 2024. Our adjusted EBITDA margin was at the top end of guidance and hit our mid-term profitability goal a full year ahead of target. We're pleased with the progress. On slide 13, our trailing 12-month free cash flow margin remains strong. One-time payments were made in the first quarter relating to tax planning, and a litigation settlement reduced the results by 5.1 percentage points. So the normalized result is 25.6 percentage, similar to our adjusted EBITDA margins for the year and trending positively. If you flip to slide 14, annual recurring revenue growth in 2025 was impressive, growing by 20% year-over-year compared to 12% in 2024. In constant currency, ARR growth was 18% compared to 14% in 2024. We added $73 million to our ARR balance in 2025, with $26 million of that coming in the fourth quarter, both records. This dramatic progress reflects improvements in go-to-market strategies and personnel over the last year, as well as the benefits of an increasingly differentiated and AI-centered product. As Razat already mentioned, some drivers of growth included many more deals above $1 million ATV, more large enterprise accounts wins, and more focus in execution on expansion business. On slide 15, SAS and total RPO balances and growth remain very robust. Both measures show a healthy three-year category of 18%, and our total RPO is rapidly approaching $1 billion. This metric continues to highlight robust growth in our subscription business. Loyal customers drive in gross revenue retention completely over 95%, and is also influenced by normal renewal cycles. Looking at slide 16, I'm very pleased to introduce 2026 guidance. Given our strong momentum, we expect SAS revenue growth of 17 to 19% in 2025, which at the midpoint is consistent with our constant currency ARR growth rate exiting 2025. We expect total revenue of $620 to $635 million. Underlying this guidance, we assume that professional services revenue will grow in low single digits, as we expect success enabling partners to handle more work, which is a key strategy to achieve scale in the visits overall. maintenance and support revenue should be flat to slightly down from 2024, given a recent convergence on premise contracts to SAS. The remainder of total revenue will be made up by subscription term license revenue, which should see growth in the 60% range versus 2025, and then the decrease into 2027 by roughly 25%. For 2026, approximately 60% of subscription term license revenue will be recognized in Q1, roughly a quarter in Q4 and the remainder in Q2. Ongoing demand from on-premise customers who are moving to our hosting infrastructure could change the assumptions and we will advise if that happens. We view 25% adjusted EBITDA margin as a new floor for the foreseeable future and are guiding to an adjusted EBITDA margin of 25% to 26% for 2026 as we make strategic investments in the year, primarily to drive exciting growth initiatives in AI, and go-to-market activities that Razat will speak to shortly. Our business model and strategy allows for even higher margins in the coming years. I'll add some other color to help you with your models. We expect our total gross margin rate to continue a steady growth in 2026, driven by a more favorable revenue mix and a slightly improved professional services margin. We expect our subscription revenue margin in 2026 to be similar to 2025, as the benefits of moving North American customers to public cloud will be offset by one-time costs related to those transitions in the year. With respect to operating expenses, we expect sales and marketing to grow by high single digits relative to 2025. We expect research and development to grow in the high 20 percentage range versus 2025. And excluding stock-based compensation, we expect roughly 10% growth in general and administrative expenses compared to 2025. Including stock-based comp, we expect growth to be above 25%, reflecting some senior hires. Finally, we expect CapEx will be in the $8 to $10 million range as we make office improvements to support growth in Japan and undergo internal IT refresh. I'll leave you with slide 17. As we exit our quiet period, we will be maximizing the size of our normal course issuer bid by roughly doubling the repurchase limit to approximately 2.8 million shares, or 10% of our float at October 31st, 2025. We've already invested $54 million under the buyback and repurchased roughly 448,000 shares. At the average price paid for those shares, our new commitment to disruption an additional investment of up to approximately $284 million throughout the term of the buyback. We see tremendous value in maximizing our share buyback while public markets continue to miss value, complex AI-enabled software companies like ours. Connect's business has never been in better shape over my six years here. ARR growth has reaccelerated, and we are winning more industry leaders than ever, including in markets that have huge AI and other tailwinds. We have room to improve SaaS revenue growth and adjust the EBITDA margin in the coming years. We have a revitalized go-to-market team and the market's best product that continues to lead the AI transition in our space. All this made my personal decision to take a new opportunity extremely difficult. I'll be joining an exciting private company with a path to go public ahead, which is a really exciting place to be for a CFO. I'm sure my departure raises questions that senior management changes always do. Let me address them right now. First, I believe Kinexus will be a huge AI winner, and we have a great new pricing model to monetize the inevitable evolution of how Maestro will be used. Second, Rizab will be a fantastic leader for Kinexus, and I truly wish I could have partnered with him a lot longer. There is no better time to have an industry veteran CEO with such impressive qualifications on the product side of the business, as well as such strong go-to-market and overall leadership chops. Finally, 2026 is set up to be a great year, and overall the future looks exceptionally bright. So I'll be cheering from the sidelines. I want to thank the entire senior team for their support over my time here, including past leaders like John Sicard, Richard Monkman, and Bob Curteau. They taught me a lot and created a truly special culture. And thanks to you, our shareholders and analysts, for years of partnership as well. I've learned a great deal from you and enjoyed getting to know you all. We may meet again. For now, I'll let Rizat make some concluding remarks.

Thanks, Blaine, for your countless contributions to Kinexus. You've strengthened our business foundation, built a great finance team, and successfully steered the company through great growth, opportunity, and change to leave us in tremendous shape today. I wish we could have worked together longer, and I hope our paths cross again soon. I'm very pleased that Blaine will be with us through our Q1 earnings call in early May. In the meantime, we're actively searching for a new CFO who still has big shoes. Going on to slide 18. Kinexus has a long history balancing rapid growth with strong profitability, and that will not change. A 25% adjusted EBITDA margin represents a solid floor and will also allow us to invest in exciting growth opportunities. We are focused on accelerating the transformation of Kinexus from a supply chain planning solution provider to an AI-driven supply chain decision-making and orchestration platform. I'll highlight four key areas of investment in 2026. First, We're going to accelerate our roadmap for building out our core planning capabilities and turbocharging the leverage of agentic AI, including an extensible data fabric and semantic layer to enable our full supply chain orchestration vision. Second, we're going to keep our foot on the gas for even greater go-to-market success. We will add quota carrying capacity to expand account coverage and develop the go-to-market operating model for our new and exciting agenda capabilities. Third, we'll increase the leverage of key partners to both give us bigger edge in winning new business and to scale and help deliver the customer successfully with an increasing share of the implementation services. We are expanding our investments in training and enablement of our partner ecosystem and ensuring strong collaboration with solution assurance during implementation cycles. Finally, we are mobilizing a team of forward-deployed engineers to accelerate the go-to-market usage, adoption, and value realization from our agentic capabilities. This team will work across the lifecycle of our relationship with customers with a mix of deep supply chain domain knowledge, data science, and data engineering skill sets to compose agentic solutions architected to deliver valuable outcomes while still leveraging the core foundation of Maestro. We've already hired the leader for this group, a highly respected executive who rejoins Canaxis after roles leading go-to-market and customer engagement teams for supply chain at Palantir and Solonis, as well as senior roles at Coupa and Lomasoft. I couldn't have asked for a better person to spearhead our agentic solutions initiative. Internally, we have a company-wide program to identify use cases for AI to transform our ways of working in an effort to gain velocity and productivity as we scale up the business. In our product teams alone, roughly 90% of pull requests, which is the way that new code goes from testing into live environments, includes AI-assisted code, helping us gain speed and freeing up more time for innovation. Roughly 80% of engineers and growing are using AI in their work, and half of those are power users. I hope these priorities give you a sense of how strongly Kinexus continues to lean into the AI transformation opportunity. Evolving from a market-leading supply chain software solution to a composable, agentic supply chain orchestration platform is a unique opportunity for Kinexus and is why I am here. As you know too well, there's a lot of confusion in the public markets about who the winners will be in a more AI-forward world. We are working hard to prove that all the innovations in AI, data, and agentic architectures are a significant tailwind for Kinaxis as we build the future of supply chain decision-making and orchestration. In the meantime, we're focused on delivering quarter after quarter, as we did in Q4 and throughout 2025. Thank you for your ongoing support. I will now turn the line over to the operator to start the Q&A session.

We will now begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, press star 1 again. Please pick up your handset when asking a question. If you are muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by now while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Richard C. with National Bank Capital Markets. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Yes, thank you. And great results, guys. Just before, Blaine, congratulations and all the best in your new job. It was a pleasure working with you over the years. For that, like, really great color on AI. And again, I've got a really sort of basic question I'll ask here, because we're getting a lot of inbounds on this. And so, when you think about Kinaxis, why is it that, you know, a sort of high-powered, sort of small team could not come in and build an AI-native platform to compete directly with Kinaxis here? I know it's a basic question, but it's certainly one that we're getting a ton of inbounds on.

Yeah, Richard, thanks for asking that question. And we think about this very deeply. And I think the underlying facts are, you know, what are the types of problems we are solving for our customers? The types of problems we are solving for our customers requires a very deep understanding of the supply chain domain. And the supply chains that our customers operate are highly complex, highly interconnected. And you need to understand the physics of the supply chain before you can use AI or agents to do anything with it, right? And that's what we built in Maestro over decades long. And that platform is the single richest representation of that complex interconnected supply chain that our customers operate. And then on top of that, we, like everyone else in the enterprise software space, are leaning in in leveraging generative AI to transform the user interface to a more conversational interface, which is democratizing the usage of our solution, but also we are leaning in on all the new data architectures and the semantic architectures to create a composable agentic platform, right? So, you know, when you think about the kinds of customers we have, these are customers like Ford Motor Company and Unilever and Schneider Electric and Merck, you know, they rely on the trust and the robustness and the industrial strength and the understanding of the physics of the supply chain on our underlying platform. And then we are layering the intelligence and the automation and the prediction layer with agents and with AI. So we feel very confident in our ability. We're clearly seeing the demand for it in our customers. And we have every intention to continue performing to prove that out.

Okay, great. I just wanted to follow up question and I'll pass the line after that. So with respect to the new pricing model is sort of I think the bias here that it will be sort of incremental to the existing growth profile here of the company, because obviously it sounds like that's kind of what is happening here. And when it comes to profitability, can you maybe provide some color because obviously you know it's sort of transaction based and there's a lot of sort of pings with tokens like i imagine you know the cost won't be fixed they'll be obviously sort of variable so how are you thinking about sort of those two things and then i'll pass the line every draw i'll start um you know as we're going through this it's somewhat exciting in terms of uh we think that the a potential to

accelerate growth and revenue while keeping our costs actually at the same levels. As you know, there are some AI modules that we have that are a little bit more costly than others. But overall, what we've done is we've covered that with this actual almost variable cost that is actually committed. And that's the one thing that I think people need to realize for what we're doing here is that although it's consumption and use and phase, we are obviously going forward with a committed revenue scheme. So at the end of the day, it won't look too much different from what we have today. However, there are areas of revenue opportunities and value that we're giving to our customers that we think that we should be monetizing on. And so we think this is going to be both beneficial to overall EBITDA, but also very much the revenue side. I will say that in any of our guidance we've given today, because it's early days, we have not put any of that upside in our guidance at this stage, just because it's too early to tell how that's going to play out.

Yeah, let me just add a little bit to that as well. So the biggest driver for us to really evolve to a usage-based pricing structure is to better align our offering going forward and the substance of the value we're bringing to our customers going forward to the way we price our offering, right? And so a lot of the metrics that form the basis of the MAUs, the Maestro Activity Units, are anchored on those usage patterns. You know, I fully expect that the initial phase of adoption, and we're seeing this with early adopter customers right now, is really around making the key persona that interface with our applications, whether it's a planner or it's an extended part of the supply chain organization, or even senior executives within supply chain organizations. It makes them more productive. It makes them leverage our platform and gain insights from our platform and take action on our platform in a far, far more efficient way and a far easier and simpler way as well. So that's the first phase of adoption. As we keep building out our platform and we get into a more expanded agentic orchestration there, I fully expect we'll be getting into more and more use cases that are developing digital personas, right? And so we don't want to tie our pricing to just users because I think we're going to scale across our customers' organizations in a very nonlinear way from a user perspective. And so that's the whole emphasis and the trust behind our MA use function.

Okay, that's great. Thanks again.

Your next question comes from the line of Thanos Moschopoulos with BMO Capital Markets. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. I'll let go of the congrats to Blaine on the opportunity. Maybe starting off with a question for Blaine. When I look at your SAS backlog at year end relative to your SAS revenue guidance, it's a higher coverage ratio when we start to the backlog than we've seen some prior years. Is that because of conservatism or is there some other dynamic?

Yeah, it's a good observation. So our CRPO is about 80% of what our midpoint on our guidance is, which is a good thing to point out. I think we are having a healthy amount of confidence in what we're landing at, 17% to 19%. I think there is always opportunity that I just mentioned one of them with NGP where we could start next-gen pricing, which could show that we could maybe potentially beat that. Obviously, if you look at our past and then look at 2025 in particular, we did much better than the 88 percentage points. I think that's something that we are continue to evaluate. I'm hoping we'll be putting some smiles on people's faces throughout the rest of the year and beating that 17 to 19 percent. But right now, I'd say 10 months, I guess 9 months to go in the year. It's a long way to go. We'll see how things play out. Hopefully, you'll be hearing some increases in that guidance over the years.

Great. And then for Razat, how would you characterize the year-term spending environment? Clearly, you had strong bookings in the quarter, but is that a function of better execution, better competitive performance on your part against the stable markets, or has there been some improvement in the demand environment with supply chain being more topical with tariffs and the like?

Yeah, I think it's a good question. Look, I think it's a few reasons. I'll fill in sort of three buckets there. First, I do think there is growing levels of supply and demand volatility, which creates a better need, even a bigger need for our platform, right, for our customers, because customers are trying to gain agility, gain adaptability, and through sort of high degrees of uncertainties and volatility, they need a platform like Maestro that enables scenario planning, enables intelligent decision-making while incorporating all the physics of the supply chain. So I think the overall macro environment has been a tailwind for us. The second is definitely our execution has improved significantly. Our go-to-market execution in the last 12 to 18 months has significantly improved. We have revamped the makeup of our go-to-market engine. The way we are engaging with customers has been significantly improved. And then we are going to continue to add, you know, capacity and coverage in the field to make sure we can continue to scale up. So that's the second big reason. And I think the third big reason is I think there's a deeper interest in organizations that have had, you know, legacy systems and processes and supply chain planning and decision making to really look for the next wave of productivity improvements. And that's causing a significant replacement cycle of old legacy systems. And we are one of the preeminent providers that is replacing all the legacy systems right now in an effort to really architect processes and operating models and applications that help companies get the next wave of improvement in working capital efficiency. Next wave of improvement in supply chain operating cost efficiency. So these are the three big reasons, I would say, that is driving the growth momentum we're seeing in the company. And by the way, as we've come into this year, we continue to see our pipeline growing along the same dimensions.

That's great to hear. Thanks, Pat Thorne.

Your next question comes from the line of Kevin Krishnarante with Scotiabank. Your line is open.

Please go ahead. Hey there. Good morning, and also congrats, Blaine. Great working with you, and good luck on the future. Question on your R&D. Did I hear that you plan to grow that line 20%? And if so, can you just comment on the moving pieces there? I noticed in your slide deck you talk about the – addition of forward deployed engineers. I'm just wondering, you know, sort of what you're seeing, is that driven by customers? Are some of the decisions taking a bit longer on their side requiring you to kind of step up, you know, the FTEs to help drive that adoption? Just wondering if you can unpack the growth in R&D.

Yeah. Great question. And so what I said is that we'll be in the high 20 percentage range for that growth year over year. And there's a great reason. I mean, we're seeing unprecedented momentum in the business at this stage. We had in 2025, we had the biggest deal ever. We had the biggest day ever. Every quarter had the biggest amount that we've ever seen for the demand coming in and the wins that we had for every single region. We had adjusted EBITDA, net income, basic EPS, like everything was off the charts records for us. That demand makes us believe there's a bigger opportunity that we could actually go after at this stage. And R&D, with the innovations that we see in front of us with the Gentic AI, with what's happening on trying to get access to the machine learning that we have in place, and the tool that we have that our product is built We just see that there's so much more than this. A lot of the discussions we're having right now between Rizad and myself and the other leaders of this team is that we're not okay with just being a supply chain planning company. What you're probably going to see is a company that may not even have supply chain in it at some point in the future and be more focused on enterprise AI. I think that is the eventual vision of where Canaxis will do extremely well. And I think we have Now this leadership team, which is part of the reason why this isn't so tough, is that we have a leadership team that's all coming together and creating a huge opportunity. So the R&D fence, yeah, it's going up. It's going up because there's a huge, huge opportunity, and we're seeing that today from every single customer that's asking for more and more and more. Yeah, let me just add a little bit more to that.

So look, R&D investments are growing in 2026, and that's a very deliberate, approach to this, right? And I would say that it's in two big buckets. One, investing in our core Maestro platform. You know, given the new architectures, given the new performance and scale expectations of our customers, we need to continue to expand and build on the core platform that we have and build out further the broader planning footprint that we have with our customers. So that's an important area. There's a lot of investments happening there. In addition to that, as I talked about earlier, you know, there's a new architecture evolving with agentic AI, and we want to be leaning in and shaping what that means to the world of supply chain decision-making and orchestration, right? And so we're leaning in and building out this data fabric, abstracting the semantic layer, building out the agentic infrastructure around it, and working with early adopter customers in faceted cycles. So these things are important investments. to really future-proof a sustained growth path for us in the coming years. On your question about the four deployed engineers, look, this is a really important operating model that we're putting in place, because unlike taking our traditional planning footprint, where the customers had a strong understanding of the feature functions and requirements, and then we would be evaluated by those customers based on the fit of our platform against those feature function requirements. In this new world of agentic AI, it takes a different shape and form where the customers are more anchored on their pain points and outcomes, and then we together formulate what is the solution set required and how to architect the feature set required with a combination of our Maestro platform and agentic architectures to create a tailored and composable solution. That requires a very different engagement model, and that's where the Ford Deployment Engineering skill set becomes really, really important. We're going to be investing in that. We've hired the leadership for that. We've got some internal skill sets. We're going to be hiring additional resources in this mix to really scale this business in a discovery-led, consultative model so that we can really harness the power of the platform we're building out and deliver the outcomes throughout the lifecycle of our customers.

Great, great. Thank you for all that color. In the interest of time, I'm going to pass the line. Thank you very much.

Your next question comes from the line of Paul Traber with RBC Dominion Securities. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Thanks. Good morning. Question for Raza. You talked about one of the reasons that you joined Kinaxis is building and scaling the company that you see as a market leader. you know, what do you, as you look forward to in the next couple of years, what do you see as the largest challenge to scaling that you're looking to address as you grow?

Yeah, it's a good question. What I'll say is it's a unique moment in time for Kinexus and frankly for me to come in and to really build and scale. And I'm very bullish on the market need, on the market opportunity, the market size. You know, I'm very bullish on on the domain problems that we're solving and the hard complexity and the value generation potential of those problems. I think the biggest barrier for a company like us would be to continue to scale in terms of retaining and attracting the talent that is required for us to realize the potential we have and to realize the expectations our customers have. That continues to be the biggest sort of thing to focus on is the talent You know, what doesn't keep me up at night is the market potential. I'm not too worried about the competition because we really have amazing customers and we have a lot of momentum. It's really about scaling the business in every dimension with the best talent because we solve hard problems. We're not solving easy problems for our customers. And so we need the top caliber talent. And so you're going to see us continue to expand the talent. You know, we've got, you know, we add good, you know, with some amazing talent in Ottawa, Toronto, uh, Dallas, we've got, you know, um, uh, a rapidly growing team in India, in Chennai, in Bangalore, or you can fully expect us to create new hubs of talent as we continue to scale up the business.

And an interesting point that you made that you're not worried about competition. Uh, you mentioned earlier that the new hire from time here, I think this is one of the first times I've heard Capaxis mention Palantir. Can you speak to the competitive environment? If you're seeing these new entrants get traction in the market, or still do you see the traditional competitors?

The net story there is it's a very fragmented market. You've got a mix of a lot of old legacy players, including some of the ERP players, where we're actually driving replacement cycles. You've got some players that have emerged more so in the last 10, 15 years that we see in different cycles in different industries or different verticals or different geographies. And then you've got some new entrants that are coming in, right? But through all of that, our win rates have been very high throughout 2025, and maybe David can talk a little bit more about the win rates there.

Yeah, that's a great point. Obviously, it's a common question, is the competitive landscape changing? The short answer is yes, but only slightly. SAP 09 Blue Yonder are still the main competitors we see. We have extremely high win rates. I think we talked about the past, over 60% against those three, which we can say is the same. I would say one of those, they almost landed the goose egg in terms of trying to win dollars from us, which is a pretty incredible, I guess, achievement to be almost 100% against one of those big three competitors. But those are the big three that we continue to see over time. I think there's going to be more new entrants that are going to come in, but at this stage, a very, very small percentage of the competitors that we do see.

Thanks for taking the questions, and best of luck, Glenn.

In the interest of time, please limit yourself to one question. Your next question comes from the line of Lachlan Brown with Rothschild & Co. Redburn. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hi Rosa, Blaine, congrats on the strong results and Blaine, congrats on an excellent tenure as CFO. I would like to dive into the regions. Asia was pretty successful throughout 2025. Europe was a good driver of growth, while North America was a laggard. Could you run us through why we're seeing different outcomes in the different regions, do recent bookings over the last couple of quarters tell a different story, and just any initiatives you're doing to push growth into the North American market?

Yeah, sure. Well, number one, I'll just reiterate, we had records every quarter for the full year for every region. I would say, though, the one that's outperformed by a significant, significant amount was EMEA. It was well beyond our expectations. I won't say the percentage, but they were extremely much higher than their target they had. The APAC team also did extremely well. They had a Q1 and Q2 that was much higher than our expectations. And then North America, they set the all-time record right now. They are the ones that are the champions for us in terms of those records for the full year. So it's one of those situations where people look for the bad news. We don't have the bad news in any region at this stage. We're very proud of those regional leaders and how they performed. If there's one that kind of stuck out is way over the target that we had, that was EMEA. They did extremely, extremely well.

Yeah, and look, North America is our largest region in terms of bookings and ARR and revenue, and we have tremendous momentum in North America right now. You know, I think we're going to be off to a great start this year, and they ended obviously Q4 at a very, very strong level as well. So actually, I'm super excited about the momentum in our North America business. Yeah.

Appreciate it. Thanks. I'll pass it on.

Your next question comes from the line of Stephanie Price with CIBC World Markets. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning. Congratulations, Blaine and Rizat. Looking forward to working with you. My question is on the Maestro agents. They've been available more broadly to your customer base. Just curious about early feedback on the consumption bundles for the agents and what customers are saying about the pricing strategy that you discussed? And maybe more generally, how customers are kind of thinking about the pace of AI uptake here?

Yeah, look, it's a good question. First, on the early adoption with customers, right? So we were very deliberate in curating a mix of customers from various industry verticals that we play in. to make sure we could work with those early adopter customers in a very iterative, agile way and continue to improve the underlying agent studio that we've developed now. And the results are exciting. Clearly, there's a lot of learning cycles on the customer side and on our side as we go through that. And what we're finding is the use cases fall in sort of two or three different buckets. There are use cases that are very straightforward and are easy to compose and deploy, and they add additional intelligence and insights and create a much simpler experience for the users that are already interfacing with Maestro today. That's sort of the low hanging fruit, if you would, and provides a lot of quick hits. The second category are use cases that are really oriented around creating a different way of working in creating automation capabilities, in being able to rethink how planning gets done in the enterprise, right? And those, while our platform is an important enabler to that, they also require changes in operating models, in governance structures, in underlying processes for our customers. And that's where we're working with our customers and our partners very closely in in not just enabling it through a system but also surrounding it with the operating model shifts and the process changes that are required to truly uh transform how how business gets done right so that's the second category the third category we are just about to sort of embark on which is the broader orchestration uh you know scope which goes well beyond just the Maestro platform and the data sets that reside in Maestro and go into the extended supply chain, the extended enterprise, right? So I'm very encouraged by the early results. We are working very closely on this. This is a big priority for us as a leadership team and for our customers. And what I'm finding is I've talked now in the last eight weeks to roughly 25 customers, there's a big appetite for customers to really co-innovate. They're looking for the next wave of efficiencies. They're looking for use cases where AI can authentically create value as opposed to just following the hype. And we're very fortunate to work with many organizations that want to be leaning in and be on the front foot on that. So it's really encouraging on that. On the pricing side, it was a very thoughtfully curated pricing structure where we leverage third-party experts, we benchmark ourselves on what other companies are doing, we got some feedback and input from various existing customers, and that's what has resulted in the MAU structure. As we roll this out, by the way, the rollout of this just started last month, right, in February, we're getting additional feedback and input from our field teams, from our customers, And I fully expect that we'll go through those difficult learning cycles in evolving that pricing structure and refining it so it's something that works for our customers and for ourselves going forward.

Thank you very much.

Your next question comes from the line of John Hsiao with TD Cowan. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Yes, thanks for taking my question. Razat, you mentioned semiconductors and new wind. So just curious if this industry is any different from a supply chain planning perspective? Any specific pinpoints you are helping them to address that's just unique to them? And how should we think about your expansion with this new vertical, as you mentioned, top five global foundry? Thanks.

Yeah, look, the semiconductor industry has a very interesting supply chain. I've had the fortune of working with semiconductor companies for many years now. You know, if you think about the high-tech value chain, the semiconductor companies are sort of the top, you know, tail end of that in some ways, right? And so as shifts happen in demand, you know, in downstream demand for various products, right, whether it's chips required in powering data centers, which are on an upswing, or in consumer electronics products like mobile phones and iPads and servers, et cetera, the shifts in demand downstream impact the semiconductor industry in very massive ways. That's the bulwark effect, how demand propagates upstream to that value chain. And then semiconductor companies are always trying to grapple with big swings in demand by the time it gets to them with the capacity that they have. And capacity is not easy to mobilize. They require heavy capital investments. So it's a unique supply chain problem. We're very familiar with it. We're very excited and very fortunate to work with several semiconductor companies. And we're seeing a significant need and demand for really allowing semiconductor companies to develop a more agile paradigm, because as demand is shifting downstream, they're having to figure out how to service that demand with supply and capacity in a profitable and sensible way. And that's what Maestro is helping them do.

That's great, Kalar. Thank you so much.

This will end the Q&A session. The Kinaxis team will reach out to those who did not have a chance to ask questions. I will now turn the call back to Rick Wadsworth, Vice President of Investor Relations at Kinaxis Inc., for closing remarks. Please go ahead.

Thanks, operator. Thank you, everyone, for participating on today's call. We appreciate your questions and your ongoing interest in support of Kinaxis, as the operator mentioned previously. We've run out of time here, but I will reach out to folks who didn't get a chance to ask their question here. And we look forward to speaking with you all again when we report first quarter results. Bye for now.

This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.