NowVertical Group Inc.

Thank you for joining us. and on the CDAR website www.cdar.com. All figures discussed on today's call are our newest dollars and will be on an IFRS basis unless otherwise noted and will refer to the specific non-IFRS measures including but not limited to adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA percentage and net debt to trailing 12 months adjusted EBITDA. Please refer to the cautionary note in the presentation and to the non-IFRS and other financial measures section of the MD&A for more detail. Today's presentation will be led by Andre Garber, the company's interim chief executive officer, who is also joined by Philip Jones, the company's chief financial officer. We'll break for questions at the end of management's formal remarks. During the question and answer session, we'll take questions from analysts over the Zoom audio and all other questions from our listeners through the webinar portal Q&A chat box. will remind analysts to use the raise your hand feature within the portal to ask a question. Once again, thank you for joining us today. And I'll now turn the call over to Andre to begin the presentation.

Well, thank you very much, Stefan. And good morning, everyone. And thank you for joining now Vertical's second quarter 2026 call. I'm Andre Garber, Interim Chief Executive Officer, and I'm joined by Phil Jones, our Chief Financial Officer. I want to start with the management update. During the quarter, the board made a change of chief executive officer. And as a co-founder of this business, I stepped in as interim CEO, and the board is conducting a search for a permanent CEO. But I want to be clear about what interim means here. I'm not a caretaker, and I'm operating this business every day with full accountability for the results we're reporting today and going forward. An important thing I can tell you about Now Vertical today is that our global team is here. Our key leaders are all with a business, including co-founders who sold their companies into Now Vertical and rolled their equity in, and they are integral to how we operate, and we are integrating the business more deeply together, rowing in the same direction. The results you hear on this call belong to that team. Sandeep Mendiratta, Santiago Trógolo, Pankaj Ghag Christine built our financial reporting engine and the team behind it and was instrumental in strengthening our balance sheet. Christine, we are deeply grateful and we wish you every success and well-deserved time with your family. And taking over as CFO is Phil Jones. Phil is a CPA with more than 20 years of CFO experience across public and private companies. And he has been inside Now Vertical since June as an advisor to management. So this is anticipated and a transition that has been smooth. So you'll hear from Phil shortly on the financials. But for those newer to the story, Now Vertical makes enterprise AI work. Thank you so much for having me. Sandeep Mendiratta and you cannot deploy AI on top of that. And that is exactly the problem we solve. Our specialty is setting the correct data foundations across all the systems and all the data flows in your business. It's the groundwork for the measurable outcomes. And the way we work, we start small, we prove fast, we prove our value fast and we grow with the client. Many of the logos on the slide started as small engagements and are now multimillion dollar lifetime relationships. and we have more than 30 of these accounts with lifetime values above $5 million. And in terms of the shape of our business, 89% of our revenue is core data and analytics solutions and services. Our people, our methodologies, our delivery is in this bucket. 11% is reselling third-party technology. So almost 90% of our revenue is what we build and deliver ourselves and that share has been rising. Pankaj Ghag 85% of this quarter's revenue came from our top 30 accounts and 92% came from clients who have been with us for more than a year. So it's not really a business of small, short contracts. It's a business of enduring client relationships that expand over time. And with this, let me pass it over to Phil to give an update.

Thank you, Andre. It has been great joining Now Vertical as the Chief Financial Officer. Earlier this year, I had announced my retirement on LinkedIn, but with the caveat of keeping my options open if I was presented with a great opportunity to work with a great team. Having decades of experience as a senior finance leader in both public and private companies at various stages of growth and evolution, I see the potential in what the team at Now Vertical is building, and I wanted to bring my skills and experience to the table to be part of the Now Vertical story and to help unlock the values in this business. I'm looking forward to connecting with our investors and partners over the coming months. But for now, let me walk you through the key financial highlights of the second quarter of 2026. Revenue for the second quarter of 2026 was $9.7 million, an increase of $1.5 million or 18% from the $8.2 million recorded in Q2 of last year. For the six months ended June 30, 2026, revenue was $19.4 million, up 4% year over year from last year. The first half of 2025 had included an exceptionally strong first quarter. So achieving year over year growth for the first half of 2026 over 2025 is meaningful to the company and highlights the momentum we're achieving. Looking at the revenue breakdown for the second quarter of 2026 and comparing it to the first quarter of 2026, we note the key drivers of revenue growth. Core Data Analytics Solutions and Services grew $600,000 or 7% from the prior quarter and 13% from the same quarter in the prior year. Data Analytics Solutions is also the highest gross margin product or service provided by NowVertical. We also achieved growth in revenue derived from our top 30 accounts as the company continues to nurture long-term revenue Sticky relationships with his clients, leading to and driving repeatable revenue. With respect to reselling revenue, we experienced a quarter-over-quarter decline of $600,000, but a doubling of the revenue achieved in the same quarter in 2025. Reselling revenue tends to be quite lumpy, as the revenue recognition rules of IFRS require all revenue and costs associated with a reselling contract to be recognized for the entire term of the contract upon signing. Reselling Revenue is also a lower margin product, so the change in revenue mix in the current quarter versus prior periods is also a positive contributor of the overall margin increase realized in Q2 2026. One of the revenue source channels for both data analytics solutions and reselling revenue is the Google Cloud Platform, which drove $2.5 million in revenue, up about 10% sequentially, and up 77% from the prior year. Just to clarify, Google Cloud-related revenue is included within our two revenue streams and it's not an additional revenue but merely a source channel of driving the revenue of the company. Gross margin was 50% in Q2, 2026 up from 47% in the same period last year as a result of both change in the product mix but also reflecting delivery efficiency and pricing discipline throughout the company. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $1.5 million, up 41% year over year, and achieving an overall EBITDA margin of 15%. For the first half of 2026, or the six months ended June 30, 2026, adjusted EBITDA was 3.2 million, which is down 10% from the same period in 2025. The change reflects future growth related investments we made in the first half of 2026, which we will discuss later in this presentation. A major achievement of the company in the first six months of the year is positive net income in consecutive quarters, which has not happened since 2024. Net income in the first half of 2026 was $0.2 million compared to a loss of $1.3 million in the same period of 2025, an increase of $1.5 million in net income. Cash flow from operations for the first half of 2026 generated $1 million in positive cash flow compared with $4 million of cash consumption in the same period last year, a $5 million improvement year over year. Overall, the balance sheet has strengthened as the company generates cash from operations while also servicing and paying down its long-term debt. Thank you for joining us today. Thanks so much, Phil.

Great to have you on board. Just a brief word on our market. Gardner forecasts worldwide AI services spending to grow roughly 30% this year to nearly $600 billion. So for us, demand is not our constraint and neither is delivery. We can deliver more than what we currently sell. But what's been missing is the growth infrastructure to reach more clients and more markets. And that's exactly what we're building. You'll also likely hear noise about AI disrupting service businesses. However, the messier data gets and the faster AI moves, the more foundational our work becomes. So now Vertical gets busier because of the shift to deploy AI in an enterprise context, not the other way around. And our growth is coming from three engines. First, going deeper in existing accounts, which you've heard before and you'll see in the numbers today. and second is new client acquisition. There are early signs showing and I'll come back to that. And third is Google Cloud. We are a premier partner and a two-time data analytics partner of the year in Latin America. And I do want to be direct about this opportunity because we're a global firm. However, we haven't formally established our Google go-to-market in every region where we operate. So bringing those markets online with Google is a concrete near-term growth lever, and we're working on that now. Just before I go into questions, There are two things about how we report to you. First, we did rework our MD&A this quarter, how we describe the business, the client analytics behind it. And starting now, we are basically reporting a defined set of client KPIs every quarter. So that's core services revenue, top 30 account revenue, Google Cloud related revenue, and revenue by client tenure and size. So I do encourage everybody to read it. But what those KPIs would tell you is that we're an enterprise services business. The significant majority of our revenue comes from clients where we are billing them over $100K a year, and most of our revenue comes from clients who have been with us for more than two years. So it's a durable and repeatable revenue base, and there's real wallet share opportunity inside of it. And then on the pipeline, Phil mentioned the growth investments we made in the first half of 2026 that went into commercial capacity, right? People Propositions Pipeline. The place you'll see the return on that spend is the under one-year revenue line on the 10-year table. New clients converting will show up there. So for this quarter, that line is 0.7 million, and it is a key number we're most focused on moving. And we're doing that through the commercial capacity that the investment is funding and the Google markets we're aiming to bring online. And we're actively working on that. And if our funnel's converting, you'll see that too. Just to close, it was an 18% revenue growth quarter at a 50% gross margin, EBITDA 41%, positive net income, positive operating cash flow, and a cleaner balance sheet. And it's delivered by a team that's fully engaged. There's work ahead. There's a ton of work. And we've told you exactly which numbers to watch. So with that, just want to say thanks very much. And we'll take your questions.

Okay, thank you, Andre. With that, we will go into the Q&A session with analysts. Once again, if there are any of us on the call who would like to ask a question, please use the raise your hand feature and we'll pause for a moment to allow analysts to get into the queue using that feature. Okay, it looks like we have a question here from Rob Goff with Ventum Financial. Rob, it looks like your line is live. Please go ahead.

Okay, thank you very much. First would be for Andre, if I could. As a co-founder and now interim CEO, how are you prioritizing your focus? What are your key items? And then looking forward, how do you see organic growth looking into 2027? should we look for baseline organic growth consistent with 2026 or perhaps stronger?

Perfect. Sure. Thanks so much, Rob. And maybe I'll pass the second part of your question off to Phil. But as the first part, I'm not here to keep the seat warm. So my mandate is to accelerate execution of a strategy. And pull on the immediate levers ahead of us. That is the priority. There's work to be done. There's still work to be done to improve efficiencies within the business. But the real key is to pull on the immediate levers that we had just talked about, right? Finish rebuilding the commercial engine, keep the financial discipline non-negotiable, and aim to launch our Google Cloud propositions and offerings into new markets that we're not currently doing that in right now.

Yeah, in terms of the organic growth, we are certainly making that our priority in the short term and over the next year. Any M&A activity will be, we would describe as opportunistic, with our growth focus really being driving from organic growth to both adding new customers but then further expansion into our existing customers as we've seen with the growth of our top 30 accounts year over year and we expect that to continue.

And perhaps further with Phil, could you speak to your past experiences? Did they involve M&A? Did they involve the efficiency drive? Did they involve organizations with double-digit growth? Just to give us a bit more depth of perspective there.

Yeah, I've been involved in a number of businesses, both public and private, from startup to turnaround situations. I've been very involved in M&A, both on the acquisition side and on the divestiture side, and I've had a few successful exits in my career as well. In terms of growth and geography, I've been involved in companies that have expanded organically globally and set up multiple offices around the world with staff and things in different jurisdictions. So dealing with different cultures, different reporting requirements, currency matters, etc. It's all things that I've got a lot of experience in and I'm very comfortable doing. And yeah, I've been in businesses that have seen, you know, Magnitude growth of five and six times revenue within a single year. So not that I'm predicting that for now vertical, but I'm very comfortable with preparing a team and an infrastructure that is poised and ready to take on the large levels of growth.

Thank you. And perhaps could you comment on how you see the revenue mix evolving and the sustainability of gross margins relatively consistent with the current quarter?

Yeah, our emphasis is continued. Well, we want to grow all revenue in terms of how the mix grows. We believe that the services portion of our business, the data analytics and solutions, will continue to be the driver of growth versus our reselling. And given that that is... Thank you. And just a call out, please extend best wishes to Christine and it's nice to see her helping in the transition. All the best. Yes, thank you. And Christine has certainly built a fantastic finance team and been a key part of this business. And that certainly made my decision to join the organization much easier, knowing I was coming into a role that had been led from a position of strength with a fantastic team assembled to make my life and the company's efforts much easier.

All the best.

Thank you. Thanks very much. I'll just read the questions out. Wondering how we are dealing with Argentina hyperinflation. Are we hedging the currency?

We have not been hedging the currency specifically in Argentina yet. One of the key is a lot of the costs, etc. The company itself becomes a natural hedge. Its suppliers are in region as well as the revenues. And we'll continue to monitor that very closely. The currency has somewhat stabled itself this year compared to prior years with the impacts in our Q2 financials much less than they had been in prior quarters and prior years.

Okay, great. Thank you. Let's see. What is preventing Now Vertical to improve its growth rate? And this was a related question about when can we expect to see results on the commercial engine? I would just simply answer that by just saying, look, we're not really reporting on pipeline metrics. It's partly competitive, but what we have put in now is this revenue by client tenure and showing that revenue, that under one year revenue line so that people can see conversion on a trend basis. So that's the number we're really most focused on moving. That's gonna be the key for us. We also got a question about which markets will push into Google Cloud. And again, I'd rather announce that once it's done, sharing the intention here. There was a question we had about the, I believe it said M&A, but I think it was MD&A mentioned about winding up some of the countries. Why are we winding up there? I think we have lots of operating entities in lots of countries. We also have some entities that are non-operational even in the countries that we operate. So some of that stuff is more We have in the past done some country restructurings, but I'm not sure that's exactly what you were getting at with the question.

Yeah, Andre, if I could add to that as well, I think the key is while there may be a windup of a physical location, it wouldn't mean the ending of customer relationships in any countries. Any profitable customer, we will just simply serve it from one of the other locations.

Yeah, perfect. Question about CEO. Why not have a permanent CEO? Why intern? I think... The board has, I think just even looking at the results of this quarter, it's showing that there shouldn't be a rush to search. The board is, that search is underway. But giving the board the time and the business, the time to find the right leader is gonna be critical and something we're all looking forward to. There was a question that you mentioned in a previous call that cash taxes in LATAM occur primarily in Q1 and Q2. Is that still accurate?

Yes, that is still accurate and we are compliant with all of our tax filings, tax payments, tax obligations.

Question for Mr. Jones. To benefit now, if you have to bring anything from your past experience, what would it be and why?

One of the key things that... Thank you so much for having me. is really helping with the forecasting and the business planning moving forward. At the same time, I have a lot of experience in multinational environments. Most of my companies have had branch offices or locations or teams scattered around the world in a global customer base. So that comes sometimes with some challenges in trying to integrate operations and improve process flows across borders, which is another key initiative that I've been working on with the business unit leaders and market unit leaders in the company in terms of increased integration of sort of the overhead finance and various other functions of the business.

Shailesh Mallya, Sandeep Mendiratta, Santiago Trógolo, Pankaj Ghag

Yeah, I think in Q1 we'd announced we'd spent about $300,000 and that's been consistent again in Q2. And that's a function of both marketing tools, travel, improving awareness and outreach, as well as people and the tools to create capacity to allow us to deliver more and fund our growth with existing levels of staff.

Thanks. Question we just got, and if anybody has any more questions, please put them in. What is the likelihood of significant growth in the United States over the coming quarters? So I think, I mean, the United States is a pretty incredible mature market. And so it's definitely an ambition of ours to look at that U.S. market again and ways in which we're going to go about thinking about the U.S. market expansion and looking forward to expanding on that in future calls. So we don't have any more questions here. Just wait 30 seconds for anybody else. And if not, we can look forward to having everybody back for our Q3 call. Okay, well, thanks again, everybody. Thank you, Bristol team for helping facilitate this. Thank you, Phil. And thanks everybody for attending. And we really look forward to engaging with you again in the near future.

Great. Thanks, Andre. Thanks, Phil. And thank you to our audience for joining today. We look forward to updating you on future calls. And yeah, this concludes today's second quarter 2026 conference call.