NowVertical Group Inc.

Good morning and good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Now Vertical's first quarter 2025 earnings call. On the call today are Sandeep Mandirata, our Chief Executive Officer, Christine Nelson, our Interim Chief Financial Officer, Glenn Axelrod from our investor relations firm, Bristol Capital, and myself, Andre Garber, our Chief Development Officer. So after markets closed yesterday, the 21st of May, we issued our Q1 2025 results, our press release, our MD&A and financial statements, which are now posted on our website at nowvertical.com, as well as CDAR+. We are absolutely delighted to be joined by our new and prospective stakeholders and existing shareholders, and proud to share our phenomenal results today. After our presentation, we will be joined by our analysts for a Q&A session, as well as open up questions to the general, time permitting. Today's call, you can flip to the next slide. we will be making statements related to our business that may be considered forward-looking. These statements reflect our views only as of today and should not be regarded as representative of our views at any subsequent date. These statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could result in different results. All figures today, just to be clear, are expressed in U.S. dollars and will be on an IFRS basis unless otherwise noted. We will refer to specifics like non-IFRS measures such as adjusted EBITDA. And with that, let's get to the fun stuff and let me turn over the call to Sandeep Mandirata. Sandeep?

Thanks very much, Andrej. Very excited to be presenting our Q1 2025 results, another great quarter at Now Vertical. So welcome to this forum. Just as the refresher for our existing shareholders and just giving a brief background for the investors who may be tuning in new, just a little of a background about Now Vertical first of all, and then we'll get into the results. where I'll give a bit of a summary about what the results have been for Q1 2025. And then we will also have Christine, who will take you through some of the details of the key metrics and the KPI. And then we are going to have some business updates where we will highlight some of the changes and great things that we are bringing about in the business. So what do we do as a business? We help our clients transform data into tangible business value with data and AI technologies. And we do it really fast. Let me just break it down for you. What do we mean when we say we transform data? All the industries have gone through phenomenal evolution and changes, and they are generating more and more of data. The problem that they face is how do you unlock the real value that's residing or hidden in their data sets? And this is where we come into picture. We help unlock that value for our clients from the data that they have gathered over so many years. What we also specialize in, because data is a very vast subject, and it's getting bigger and bigger, what we specialize in is the customer and finance data. That's where now vertical specialization is. And because of that, you can also already see that our alignment, because of the specialization, is more with the marketing teams, the customer services team, The way we do that is we are laser focused on delivering the business value or the business outcomes for our clients. So we are not just the technologists. We understand the data and the landscape of data in the complex environments of very large businesses. And when I say we are laser focused on delivering the business value, just as an example of the business value, we delivered 9% increase in the subscriber retention of a business called The Economist, which many of you may have come across or maybe the subscriber of already. We also helped a financial services company, Niranka X in LATAM to increase their product activation. They've got multiple products in their portfolio. We helped for one of the products, we helped them increase the product example. One of the technology sector companies, very large business, multi-billion dollar business, we have been working with them and we increase the partner activation or the partner attribution of the leads by 50% or more. These are just some of the examples of the business value and the business outcome we deliver for our clients. And What we leverage is the data and AI technologies, very specific technologies that we bring to our clients. These are the technologies that are right for them and not just things that we believe boxed and we just force on them. So these are the technologies These are the technologies that are not just the generalist. These are not just the technologies that are, you know, you basically bring in very specific outcomes, the business value that I talked about, and you structure, you architect, you transform their technology landscape and the data landscape to deliver those business value. The specific technologies that may resonate with you Google Cloud is one of those technologies, Microsoft Azure. We work with Qlik. Anaplan in the finance area is one of the other technologies. We work with Amazon Web Services. We also work with Snowflake. These are the six key technologies where a lot of revenue is influenced or is directly coming from for Now Vertical. So that's what we do. Who do we do this for is very large enterprise-grade clients. These are FTSE 500 type of businesses, multi-billion dollar revenue businesses in various industries like financial services, media and entertainment, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, retail, e-commerce. We also have some horizontal solutions that are based on, say, the subscription model or the SaaS model for, say, the technology sector or the other sectors as well. These are the kind of enterprises or the clients that we have on our portfolio. We have more than 100 enterprise clients, which we will talk a little bit more about, but more than 100 enterprise clients that are on our portfolio. And that we consider as one of the major assets we have, where we are continuously unlocking the value from. So that's a bit of a background on Now Vertical. The way to look at Now Vertical as a business now, just a little bit of a background, first of all, the phase one, as we call it, of Now Vertical was all about acquisition and growth from acquisitions. We went public in July 2021 on Toronto Stock Exchange venture. And we have acquired 12 businesses, some really great businesses delivering phenomenal value to the clients across various countries and geographies. We acquired these 12 businesses and gained that critical mass in the business. driven primarily by acquisitions. And I came in through one of the acquisitions that I sold my business when I sold my business to Now Vertical in January 2023. And that's when I came to Now Vertical. I was brought in as the chief exec in January, 2024 to run this one business, one brand strategy that was driven by integration and organic growth in the business. So now the way you would look at Now Vertical is we have created that foundation already in the business. We are no longer those 12 acquisition and fragmented business. We have started with those collection of 12 businesses And what we have created out of that is a business, one Now Vertical. That's our foundation now that we are working with. And one of the key things as a change that we brought about in the business when we integrated the business was this operator first model. What that meant is we brought in some of the most successful leaders that came to Now Vertical from the acquisitions. We brought them to the right seats, the right positions in the leadership team, in the management team. And they are the people who are now running the business. And I'm one of them, like I said, which I was brought in as the chief exec of the business in January, 2024. So that's the foundation we are working with. Now, what are the opportunities we have created in the business as what we consider as the growth drivers in the business. So one of the things I mentioned was the 100 enterprise clients that we have. That's one of the key assets in the business. And there is so much of headroom for us to keep growing within those enterprise accounts. And it's becoming more and more possible and more feasible because we have now integrated ourselves as one business. So earlier, when we could only sell one solution or one service to our client, now we can offer them a much wider, a much more comprehensive set of solutions and services on data analytics and AI for our clients. So that's one of the key growth drivers we have in the business. We are also embedded in the key growth markets We are not seeking a new market. We have already embedded in the geographies like the U.S., in the U.K. That's within our North American and India market. And then Brazil and Argentina, which are, again, growth markets within LATAM markets for us. So these are the four countries that we are considering as the growth market. present large enough target addressable market for us to keep growing within. So we don't have to look for a new market. Really, there's so much of potential for us to keep growing in the existing markets. We also have high value client contracts. Some of our solutions that we deliver to our clients, they are so high value, their contract value for us could be somewhere in the range of, say, quarter million to half a million, even more than a million particular solution. That availability of high value client contracts is such a growth driver and asset for us, which we are amplifying further. The other part is the operational scalability. Now, many businesses struggle to scale. Even if they have one of the best products, one of the best solutions, one of the best services, what they fail to do is scale their growth and their operations. And this is another thing that we have already sorted. And as an integrated business that has become even more powerful, and we call it as our delivery powerhouse, which consists of our team in Argentina and in India. that presents such a nice elastic and scalable delivery model for us that we can, even if we get a $5 million contract tomorrow, we can very quickly scale to support that or start billing. The enabler for us, which is another growth driver and a brilliant opportunity for us, is the expertise and the relationship that we are developing and nurturing with our technology partners. or the Microsoft Azure and Qlik. We are already enhancing our relationship phenomenally, and I'll cover some of those updates in the business update section. But the other technologies as well, which we will also get into is the Amazon Web Services, very strong expertise there. Snowflake is another one. We were some of those early partners of Snowflake and we have done some phenomenal work with that software and Anaplan as well, which is very specific, you know, connected planning type software, which brings the right forecasting for large enterprises to fruition. So these Technical expertise around the technologies that we are partnering with and how we are nurturing these partnerships is one of the key assets and the growth drivers for us, and it presents phenomenal opportunities. Just to give you one specific insight, 60% of our revenue in 2024 came from our top 30 accounts. And we grew our average contract per year in the top 30 accounts per client to $724,000. This was just phenomenal growth and the testament of our focus and the discipline that we brought about in the enterprise accounts that we call as strategic accounts, the top 30 clients that we focused on. How do you encapsulate that into three things. We are focused on the account integration, which is all about scaling our existing enterprise clients, these strategic accounts that I mentioned. And you can already see how that is already delivering results, and we'll talk about that more. That's one of our key pillars of our strategy, which we can keep working on for years to come. The other pillar is the partnership integration. So the technology partners that I talked about, we are working towards nurturing these relationships in ways that it becomes a very scalable revenue channel for us and very reliable revenue channel for us over a period of time. And it not only gives us that revenue with the technology partners too. One of the other pillars is our capability integration, the technology expertise. That has been built over many years. That technology expertise was existing existed in different areas of our business. What we are doing is now bringing all of that together within that integration strategy. And we are now democratizing that capability, the technology capability across our business. This is already happening. And like I said, you know, I'll talk about that again in the business update section. And just to give you one context on the technology partners and the revenue from the technology partners and what it means for now, every dollar that is spent on the cloud platform by our clients, every dollar they spend, we get about six to eight times of the on that cloud dollar spend. And that's the scale that we are, that's the growth and the scale that we are aiming to achieve and get that, you know, enhance our share in that pie. So that's just one of the key insights about what kind of opportunity really lies in front of us in this technology partnership. Our short-term goals. Near-term goal is what this whole thing translates into is achieving that 50 million US dollars revenue run rate and a $10 million EBITDA run rate. That's a near-term goal, which also must have a composition of very rich, that revenue streams by bringing in different solutions and services from one part of the business to another. And that's our near-term goal These are just very small numbers for the potential that we are unlocking in the business and the potential that relies here. This is just a near-term goal that we are focusing on so that we can really prove to ourselves that this kind of a growth with an integrated business is absolutely possible. And this will mean a lot for our confidence and how we unlock the further opportunities and the value in the business. This is all about our very sustainable organic growth engine. I have not even talked about the inorganic growth channel, which is absolutely going to be on the cards in the coming times. But what we believe in is always crawl before you can walk, walk before you can run, And what we are doing right now in the business is all the transformation we have gone through in the last 14 to 15 months, we are ensuring that it's buried properly. It's stabilized very nicely and we are able to deliver the organic growth with this engine. Once that's done, we will absolutely be reigniting the inorganic growth channel, which presents another avenue of growth. And that's why I keep saying this business has got unlimited growth potential. This is what we are unlocking in the business continuously. And hopefully this is going to be reflected in the results that you're going to see shortly. So what's our performance overview and the KPIs? Some of the key ones I will go through. The most important ones, what's our revenue? 10.4 million this year, which is 23% year-over-year growth. Absolutely phenomenal. Very pleased with the whole management team, everybody in our whole team that has been working towards and growing in the same direction with us. 10.4 million as a US dollar revenue distribution. businesses um you know so this is this is pure numbers of the business that we are today and we are comparing with apples to apples of our last year also so 41.6 million of us dollar run rate already achieved in revenue and on ebitda very pleased Very pleased to see another quarter where we have got 2.5 million of the revenue, well above our expected margin of the 20% as the target that we have set or the goal we have set for ourselves. This is the second quarter where we have delivered 24% EBITDA margin. That's the consistency that we are bringing into the business. Once again, the 10 million US dollar run rate of EBITDA achieved in another quarter. Last year, last quarter as well, we had surpassed the 10 million EBITDA level. We haven't done that again. So very pleased with this consistency of the growth and the KPIs that we are bringing to our shareholders. Our gross profit is rock solid at 50%. If you remember, I have been saying that our goal is to be better than the best in our industry with 50% of gross profit and 20% of EBITDA. And we are consistently delivering that. So gross profit of 50% with 5.1 million US dollar gross profit, which is 15% increase year over year. Very critical metric, which is income from the operations is very positive, very profitable. That's 1.5 million US dollars. And we are no longer a loss making company. That's the consistency that we are delivering in the business. That's how the business should be. That's what we said. We are going to be bringing this consistency and sustainability with organic growth that's driven by profitability. That's exactly what we are delivering time and again. Just to give you the context of how we have evolved in the last few quarters, and you have to appreciate that this is the management team completely changed, completely new management team that has now spent five quarters in business and we have been able to deliver as a management team five consecutive quarters of consistent year-over-year growth. That's just phenomenal. Three consecutive quarters with $2 million plus EBITDA. That's the consistency. That's growing. And three consecutive quarters of 19% EBITDA margin. And that's very important because this is way better than the best in class EBITDA that our industry has. And that's why we are just mentioning this to you that this business and the growth we are experiencing. And like I said, very important metric for us when we came to the seat as the management team is the positivity. come from the operations. This is all phenomenal work from all of the management team and everybody in the business that has been working so hard. This transformation was not easy and we are continuously delivering on this growth and consistency completely heads down on that. And so pleased, so proud of the management team to be bringing these results to our shareholders. With that, Christine, if you could please take us through some in-depth KPIs here.

Sure. Thanks, Sandeep. We'll start off with the revenue performance. So we went from 8.4 million in Q1 2024 to 10.4 in Q1 2025. a 23% year-over-year increase, which we are absolutely over the moon proud of. This is a huge increase completely from organic growth. So this is us building consistency off the revenue growth we saw throughout 2024 to reach this 10.4. And it's also really representative of what a positive impact this change in strategy has been. Q1 2024, huge change in management. We're shifting strategies. We're focusing on the integration of all the acquisitions, the operator first model. So huge, huge change here in 2024. And so we've continued to build on that consistency and that growth to get to 10.4. So really proud of this metric. And it really just is a representation of all that hard work that we've put in over that past year. A couple of the key strategic shifts that we did was that focus on the enterprise and the strategic accounts. So really focusing on increasing our account value with those clients. And we, everyone, now we're not just, you know, one acquisition is focusing on this. We're one business, one brand. Everyone's sharing the same goals. We're aligned across all markets, across the globe. And these results really speak for itself on the execution of these strategies. So we're going to continue in the future to focus on those strategic accounts, focus on our enterprise clients, as well as also deepening our technology partnerships and, of course, account integration, which is going to be scaling our existing enterprise clients globally as well. Next, we'll talk about EBITDA, which we're just really proud of. I mean, this is just huge, huge for us. This increase of 119% year over year from 1.2 million to 2.5 is absolutely fantastic. We're incredibly proud of this. This hits a few metrics for us, a few targets, right? So it's hitting a $10 million EBITDA run rate. it's also exceeding our target of 20% EBITDA margin. Industry standards are generally between 15 and 20%. We're targeting 20, so hitting 24% to start off the year is fantastic for us. How did we get here? So, you know, previous slide, I spoke about our strategies with our strategic accounts, enterprise clients, increasing those, those account footholds. And then as well, of course, the operator first model, which I've spoken about before, you'll hear me say it again, but it really allowed us to reduce our overhead costs. So big focus, we started looking at all of our costs, both in the market, at corporate as well, the beginning of 2024, to reduce wherever we could. And moving to that operator-first model really allowed us to do so by capitalizing on the existing expertise that we had in the markets. And so really our admin costs, we're looking year over year, a $1 million decrease. And about half of that was actually corporate costs. And these kind of aren't like one-time decreases, right? Like this is a sustainable admin cost level that's going to be able to provide consistency going forward and help, you know, help increase our profitability going forward with consistent admin costs. And then next we'll go to income from operations. So this is obviously another one we're incredibly proud of year over year going from a loss of about point 1 million to a gain of 1.5 million. You know, this speaks to speaks volumes about. how successful the strategic shift has been over the past year and all the hard work that everyone has put in. We didn't put the number on here, but I just would like to say that this is a 1,253% increase year over year. It's also the fourth quarter we've had positive income from operations, just going to show that consistency that the change in management and the strategic shift that has had throughout this past year. And once again, this is also a direct result from the things I've spoken about previously, reduction in costs, the increase in revenue, the increase in profitability on our gross margins, all directly related to this amazing year-over-year performance. Next, we'll talk about debt, something else that we've really been working hard on and reducing our overall debt. So our reference to debt here is actually including a few things. It's including our institutional long-term debt, It's including our convertible debt and any acquisition related liabilities as well. So like deferred consideration, that type of thing. So if we're looking at, you know, the progress that we have made in, you know, from beginning of 2024 to, you know, end of Q1 2025, which is not a long time, we're going from 28.1 to 15.6 million. I mean, this is absolutely incredible, incredible progress. um and for the business for the business cash flow you know just it's absolutely fantastic um and even in q1 we were able to reduce this by a further eight percent but 1.3 million and we were able to do that make these you know significant changes within this quarter a couple different ways we obviously continue to make cash payments for our acquisition liabilities we are continuing to make our you know our debt principal payments to reduce our long-term debt As well as the prior shareholders of Apertrend, we reached additional settlement with them. So they agreed to settle about $800,000 of deferred consideration that would have been payable in cash, mostly the beginning of 2026. They agreed to settle that for shares. So that is a huge, I mean, that's just a huge win for us, a huge win for our cash flow, and also obviously reducing our debt as well. So overall, if we're looking at our debt to EBITDA ratio from beginning of the end of 2023, we're looking at five times and now it's about 1.5 times. I mean, it's just an absolutely fantastic improvement that we've been able to make and something we're really proud of. And we're continuing to work on this as well going forward. Back to you, Cindy.

Thanks very much, Christine. What do you see on the screen in terms of just our leverage ratio is so phenomenal and we are so proud of this. You know, this really creates such a headroom for us to grow further. You know, our email margins are much higher than the best in class. We are under leveraged company from the market standards, if you consider 2.5, you know, as the leverage ratio, which is kind of standard. For a rightly leveraged business, we are at 1.5. That just creates more opportunities for us to grow here. One other thing like Christine mentioned, there is a convert loan, which is part of our 15.6 million debt that's pending now on our balance sheet. We are actively working on the strategies to deal with the convert loan. We've got a little over four months left. It's due and matures in October 2025. We are actively working on it and we will have a strategy to solve this for sure. So stay tuned on that one aspect. I know this has always been a question from our investors, so I thought I'll just address that proactively. Getting into the business updates, we, like I said, that's the kind of engine of the organic growth that you should look at for Now Vertical. This is how the business is operating. One of the key things, like I said, is the key pillar is the account integration where we are scaling our enterprise accounts that we call as strategic accounts. We focused on 30 strategic accounts in 2024. And in Q1 24, our revenue from these 30 strategic accounts was 4.1 million US dollars. What we have been able to do with the focus and the discipline that we have brought on these strategic accounts and growing those strategic accounts is we have now for those 30 strategic accounts, which proves our belief in the strategic accounts or the enterprise accounts being one of the big assets where we will continuously keep unlocking the value from, and we are not going to stop here. There is so much more headroom that we have available. So that's just one update. I get this question also about how much of a focus is on the net new business and just the existing business. What we have also done is added 10 additional accounts to our list of the strategic accounts that we are focusing on. In Q124, the revenue was only $32,000 from those strategic accounts, 10 strategic accounts. What we have been able to do is grow that to $716,000 in Q1 25. And out of these 10 strategic accounts, there are six new strategic accounts that we have added. Net new strategic accounts where we did not have any relationship with them in Q1 24, they have been added to our bucket as well. So that's one of the things that... represents our focus and the balance that we are having to grow the existing accounts, existing strategic accounts, and bringing in some net new strategic accounts also to the board. So that's our account integration and some updates on that in very specific revenue terms and the growth terms. What we are really excited about is you may have seen these press releases, but this is such a phenomenal shift We started focusing on our technology partner relationships last year, a lot more focus on that and nurturing those relationships. You would have seen, we were given the premier partner status with Google Cloud in LATAM. We have also earlier this year been given the partner of the year award by Google Cloud for Latin America results. This means a lot to the business. And what we have been able to do is leverage that success and that positioning and bring that status in the UK also. By the way, we have already democratized that status within all of LATAM. So all of LATAM has now got the premier partnership status with Google Cloud. And within the UK also, we have got the premier partnership status, which will help us grow the revenues and scale this revenue and accelerate that growth with the partners much faster, with Google Cloud much faster. Another star on the jacket here is the Qlik partnership. We have recently been awarded the channel growth partner of the year. We have been Qlik partners for many years. 2023 was a very difficult year in that region. In 2024, we have been able to turn that around completely business successfully and this there's a lot of concentration in our brazil uh region uh for the click partnership but just receiving this channel growth partner of the year award is uh is just a phenomenal uh thing to be proud of uh so that's another uh really key uh change that we have we are seeing and development that we are seeing in the business One of the things is the depth in the solutions that we are bringing while working with these technology partners. Data Catalyst is one of the solutions, enterprise-grade solution that really helps integration of data and fast and agile ways. We have been able to bring this data catalyst as a solution to a couple of really large enterprise clients. And what we have turned this into is a proper packaged solution, which is now on the Azure marketplace. And Microsoft Azure has approved this after going through hundreds of the validation points, checkpoints, and this solution now exists as a B2B integration, data integration solution on Microsoft Azure Marketplace, which is another, what it means for the business is that we will be able to work much closer with the Microsoft commercial team and take this to many of their other clients through this channel. So these are some of the updates about our partnership integration and what's happening. these updates to you from now onwards in every quarter capability integration one of our clients really large very successful client in their own industry this is in the technology sector we have been working with them for many years now what we have been able to do after all of the integration that has happened is Our relationship was concentrated only in the US with this client. What we have been able to do now is expand the capabilities, offer them more solutions and services, and at the same time, serve them from the other countries as well. So we are now not only working with working with them in the UK in the Asia pack and we are also delivering with much wider capabilities and our teams that are also working from India as well as in Latin from Colombia and Argentina so that's just the reflection of how this integration strategy and just one of the examples of how this integration strategy is already working really well for now vertical That's all about the business updates. I will let Andre open up the Q&A here, please.

I'll pass it over to Glenn for this.

Thanks, Andre. We do have some questions coming in from our analysts. So the first individual to ask this question is going to be Rob Gopp with Ventum. Rob, your line is open.

Thank you very much and congratulations on the quarter. One of the things that I was looking for was a return to growth in the UK and was very pleased to see it. Could you perhaps dive into that growth?

Thanks very much, Rob. First of all, yes. we are very pleased with that. You know, the UK market is something where we already had many of these enterprise clients in. And a lot of our leadership team, management team also is here in the UK. So it was quite natural for us to bring in more focus in the UK region, just because it's much easier for us to do that. And it's a very mature market from the the net new business here in the UK. So these were some of the drivers, basically, that are bringing in that growth here in the UK. And one other thing I must also mention is, I think I mentioned this last time, we now grew the $1 million plus accounts to eight accounts in 2024. when we were only getting 1 million plus revenue from only three accounts in 2023. So we have been able to grow that number to eight accounts and five of them are coming from the North America and AMIA business. So that's one of the key things

good and with your you know now expanded record of consistent organic growth are you at a stage where you're looking to invest in either additional sales capabilities account management capabilities or service capabilities 100 rob one of the key challenges for me for the business is how

in the North America and EMEA. We will be doing that in LATAM as well, but North America and EMEA is where the business is already screening for that commercial engine to be established and scaled. And that's where we will absolutely be investing more time, more money. We are already doing that and I will bring in some more updates in the next quarter about it. So that's not only on the cards, it's already in flight, Rob. Very good. Thank you and congrats.

Super, thank you. Our next question will come from the line of Suthan Sukumar with CIFL. Suthan, you're live.

Thank you. Hey guys, good morning. Good to see the solid progress here against your full year targets. For first question, I wanted to touch on what you talked about with your average spending with top strategic clients. Can you speak a little bit about the typical cross-sell levers that you are having success with in driving that increased share of wallet?

Absolutely. First of all, thanks for launching the coverage on us, Sutan. I really appreciate that. In terms of our growth in these strategic accounts, There is now the kind of growth drivers that exist for us. They are of multiple nations. So one is, you know, we have got the wider solutions in an integrated business now. So if we were able to offer our clients only one or two solutions earlier as one small company, now as an integrated business, we are able to offer a lot more value to them. are once we go into a client, once they start seeing the value we deliver and of evidence so many cases where our journey begins small with a with an enterprise clients but then we have say six plus years of average relationship in our top 30 clients what that means is we are able to not only embed ourselves in the transformational programs that are driven by data and AI technologies but we are also able to bring business value to various functions so if we are if we We were initially engaged with, let's say, only marketing function. We then are able to move into these sales. We are able to move into customer services, to digital functions, to finance function, because many of the platform work that we do or the foundational work that we do with the data and AI, especially with the customer and finance focus, it unlocks many of the use cases in these functions that I mentioned earlier. And then what we are able to also do is not only the transformation in these functions, but we are able to bring in the managed services component of it, where we bring in the depth of the expertise and the breadth of the expertise to run all of their data and AI capabilities, which otherwise for them to stand up would cost a lot, not just in terms of money, but also in terms of time. So you will see that managed services kind of revenue coming in from these clients also. And then the sweet spot we have is the partnerships with these technology vendors, as well as our own software and our own technology, which is very nicely and naturally embedded into the solutions and services we offer to our clients. So these are the things that really generate that association, that tenure or the longevity in the relationship, which is based on complete value for our clients. the growth and the strategic bounce.

Thank you for that color. That was great. I want to dig into the Google relationship next. You guys are obviously building on your relationship in the LATAM region and moving into the UK, which feels like a bit more of a crowded market than LATAM. But you are seeing some strength there. And having a partner like Google feels like a unique advantage. Can you speak to your progress there with Google to date? Granted, it's early days, so I'm just kind of curious what you're seeing on the ground.

You're absolutely right, Susan. This is a very crowded space, but the key advantage now Vertical has, or the key advantage we have created for ourselves, is we are now the premier partners with Google, where only 3% of the Google Cloud partners really make it in those specific specialized areas like data and AI, there will be only 3% of all the partners that offer data and AI type of solutions and services, only 3% get to the premier status. And we are already there. And this is the advantage we have created to come out of the crowd, first of all. What this also means is we are engaged with the Google sales team and they have the trust in our capabilities and ability to deliver the programs to our clients. risk-free. That's why we are the premier partners with them. So what happens is when there are certain conversations going on around a particular solution and Google, the sales team or the commercial team is aware of that, they then walk us into those opportunities with these enterprise clients. And that's how we are creating more and more of the growth opportunities for ourselves. Just to give you an example, some specific in LATAM. And this is exactly what we are replicating now in the UK. We are strengthening our relationship by bringing in the right team members and the right capabilities here in the UK too. And the LATAM team has been extremely helpful for us to enable this in the UK. So that's how that relationship is developing, Susan.

Great. That's helpful. For my last question, guys, I just wanted to touch on your proprietary software strategy with your offerings like NowPrivacy, NowHub. Can you speak to what the recent level of engagement and attach rates are for these offerings within your broader solution delivery? And are there other solutions, use cases that you are working on currently? And could M&A help accelerate that?

Yeah, so one of the things I think I'll touch on the M&A in a second, Susan, but you know, on the now privacy side, now privacy, just in 10 seconds, it's basically a software that goes and crawls across the data estate of a large, complex enterprise. and uncovers the hidden risks that could be leading to data breaches by exposing say PII data or the credit card information data, the HR type data and all that. And this is how the NowPrivacy software helps by uncovering that risk. What we have done in the last year is encapsulated that now privacy as a software to expand it into more of a value-driven solution. So now we not only are able to uncover that risk and showcase that risk to an enterprise client, but we are also able to mitigate that risk for them with our solutions and services in there. And not only that, we can actually say in this three-month period, we can reduce all of you by doing these things. So that's how we mitigate. We can now also provide them the managed services, and you can view that as just a CCTV that's scanning their data estate all the time. And as soon as the risk appears or the potential of the risk appears, it flags it to them. That's how we have expanded that particular solution, which we believe is the right enterprise-grade solution and is the need of the hour when all these enterprises are already experimenting a lot with the AI democratization of the data that's underway. And this becomes even more of a powerful solution when you have to think about the AI readiness in your business. So that's the now privacy part, which now has been encapsulated in a solution. The M&A part, we would like to continue our exploration on the solutions and services side first, rather than trying to do an M&A on another software product. That's where we see a lot of value in. We are creating many of these accelerators and frameworks and methods that are proving to be very successful for our clients. And AI journey as it evolves will then lead us into what are the right kind of software. Either we buy some software really in the future or partner with some of these softwares as well to bring in the right value for our clients.

Perfect. Thank you for taking my questions, guys. And congrats on a solid quarter. I'll pass the line. Thank you.

Thanks so much, Rob and Suthan. So I'll just get into, I know we don't have a ton of time, but I'll get into the questions. And first question is from us mentioning 724K USD per account for the top 30. Does that represent growth from a prior period? And if so, what does that growth look like percentage wise?

That growth is from, so just to give you some specific numbers on those top 30 clients, before 2024 or in 2023, our growth in those top 30 clients was less than 3%. In 2024 alone, our growth there was almost 20% in those top 30 accounts. That's just the focus and discipline. And keep in mind, what we all need to appreciate is we were going through massive transformation in the business. And while going through the transformation, we created this kind of a growth, organic growth in our top 30 clients. That was about 20%. So that's the shift we have been able to bring about. And that's the shift that we saw year over in just those top 30 clients. So that's why I'm bringing in these metrics, which really embeds that confidence in the belief that we had, which we said, we will be focusing on our strategic accounts and the growth in these strategic accounts. We see the value, we see the potential, and that's what we are able to deliver. So it's really proving our belief and our thesis right.

Great. Thanks so much. So just a question on unbilled receivables. And we've had a few questions actually about unbilled receivables and how that has changed over the last few quarters, increasing as so much as of late. Maybe that's for Christine, if you could perhaps touch on that question.

Yeah, for sure. This is directly related to the reselling subscription revenue that we have, which is also broken down separately in our revenue note on our financial statement. So under IFRS, we are actually required to record 100% of the revenue that's related to these subscriptions. specifically because we are reselling these subscriptions. So normally in subscription revenue, you'd be recognizing it monthly over the course of the period of the subscription, where in this case, we have to recognize 100% of the revenue on delivery of the service, of the subscription. So that may mean if you've got a three-year subscription, 100% is going in on day one. And generally for these subscriptions, we are billing these over the period of the subscription. So if you're having a really strong quarter with a lot of reseller contracts being closed, you're gonna really have a big spike in your accrued AR. Now, of course, that's gonna come down depending on how much you're billing for those subscriptions. But if you've got a really big, strong quarter that has maybe some more multi-year contracts being closed, you're going to see a spike. And so this is an expected increase for us. And as well, we've also recently started closing multi-year contracts. So generally, historically, we had these one years. And now starting in 2024 and 2025, we are seeing an increase in, say, three-year contracts being closed. So that's kind of what's causing an even bigger spike in the accrued AR.

Great. Thanks so much. Another question was about U.S. revenue now being greater than a million. Are you seeing more upside in the U.S. going forward?

100%. U.S. is a phenomenal market. All sophisticated solutions. countries like the US or the whole of the North American region, and even in the UK, we will absolutely be going after and chasing that growth potential in the US market. But like I said, you know, what we are what we are doing here is be able to crawl before we start walking. And that's the philosophy that we are taking to bed the transformation that we have brought about into the business properly and start delivering that organic growth. There are so many different avenues for us to bring in the organic growth. And then, like I said, you know, even the organic, inorganic growth, but us is going to be absolutely one of the markets where we would love to tap into the potential of the growth for our sophisticated solutions.

Thanks. Maybe I'll just put two, just because of the time, put a couple of questions together. A question around whether we see any obstacles that may hinder our growth and our targets. And also just to talk to a little bit more detail on the 10% of the total revenues from integration and how that is kind of generally tracking.

So 10% integration revenue. First of all, I think... That's tracking really, really well. We have talked about what are those key areas of our solutions and services that are beautifully cross-pollinated or could be beautifully cross-pollinated, and that's what we are bringing to the market. The integration will also happen within the markets and across the market. One of the key example of that integration is like I demonstrated the Google Cloud partnership. We did that all of that effort of four years, many years, that hard work was actually done in LATAM. And because now we are an integrated business, we are bringing that to the UK also. And it's already in flight. We are accelerating our growth and nurturing that relationship here in the UK. So these are just the examples. I also shared the other example of the technology client that we have, who we are now working not just in the US, but also in the other regions. That's another example of that integration. And we are tracking really well against the KPIs for that growth.

Great. So let's get into some of the balance sheet questions that have come in. So just looking at the working capital movements as well on the balance sheet, we got a question saying that there's some differences between kind of trade and other receivables, accrued expenses, and other current liabilities and deferred revenue. So, you know, just kind of looking at outflows versus inflows and just kind of trying to clarify whether maybe some of that has to do with FX volatility or whatnot.

Yeah, none of that has to do with any FX volatility or anything. I would actually refer you to note 17 in our financial statements. there is a reconciliation that gets to that 3.3 million that you were referring to in your question. And it shows all the variances in the movement between all the balance sheet and the changes in working capital there. So hopefully that will provide a bit of an explanation. But generally, the reason is for that change in working capital is really what I kind of spoke about previously, which is that increase in accrued revenue. So We have about 2 million of increase in, I'm sorry, in unbilled receivables related to the reseller subscriptions that we closed this quarter. So those are majority of those as revenue that we're seeing in our financial statements, but we haven't necessarily built all of that yet. So that's a big reason for that as well. We also had a fairly material move in our deferred revenue. So we had done some advanced billings in Q4 of last year, which we actually got paid for right last week of December for bills that were actually kind of covered December all through March as well. So that's another reason for that shift as well.

Thanks, Christine. And just staying a little bit on the balance sheet here, the earn-out obligations from past acquisitions have now been fixed. Whoever wrote that question, thank you very much for saying that, and are no longer generating meaningful re-evaluations. However, this quarter includes a nearly $600K adjustment, according to the question, related to contingent and deferred consideration. Could you clarify what triggered this and whether we should expect future volatility going forward.

Yeah, I can handle this. This is directly related to the acquisition settlement that I discussed earlier related to Acrotrend. So they had about, this mostly relates to this fixed burnout amount that we had previously settled. It was about $750,000. It was due on on January 1st, 2026. This earn out was tied to employment. So after the settlement that happened in 2024, we were amortizing it into our P&L quarterly, bringing up to eventually over the course of 2025, getting to that full 750 by the end of December 2025. So as of the opening balance sheet date in December, we only had about 200,000-ish of this actually amortized into our liabilities. Then in Q1, this was settled for shares. And so we actually had to record, go from 200,000 to 750. We had to actually record essentially that liability, which has now been settled. So now it's going into our P&L. So it's non-cash. It really represents that value of the settlement that we did for the 750 that's going into common shares. So it's a one-time expense, non-cash. will not be repeating in the future. We don't expect to see any more of these revaluations in the future. And so really, it should be like the last time we're seeing kind of these revaluations that we've been seeing over the past year. But really, it's a good thing because really it means that that $750,000, we're not having to pay that out in cash in January of next year. So it's a great thing.

Great.

I'll do it again. I need to jump on to another meeting. But I just want to say thank you very much for your support and the belief in the business. The management team is now 27% holder of the equity of the business. We are completely aligned with the shareholder sentiments and the objectives here. I just want to mention for all of us from the growth trajectory in the business. Thank you very much.

Thank you, everyone.

Thank you.