IXICO plc (IXI) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome back, everyone, to Vox Markets. My name is Paul Hill. I'm delighted today to host this webinar with CEO, Bram Goorden; and CFO, Grant Nash, of IXICO, a leading AI-powered medical imaging analytics firm that helps biopharma companies develop new treatments for neurosciences diseases such as Huntington's, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's. So welcome, gents.

Thank you very much, Paul. Glad to hear you.

Yes. Well, just to let everybody know, this webinar was split into 2 halves. First of all, Bram and Grant will run through today's numbers, the outlook and the company's operations, and then we'll switch to Q&A. So anybody wants to ask any questions, please put them into the chat box, and I'll read them out after the presentation is finished. We already had plenty beforehand. So it should be a pretty lively discussion. So without further ado, I'd like to hand over to Bram and Grant to run through today's slides.

Thanks, Paul, and great to have you all here. Thanks for making the time to listen to our numbers. I'll maybe quickly introduce myself. If you know IXICO, you may not have seen me before. I joined the company over the summer. It's been a great onboarding at IXICO. My background was originally in pharma for the likes of Eli Lilly and UCB, which are names that you may see coming through sometimes because they're very much operating in our space of neurology and psychiatry. And then later on, I moved on to helping companies with data-driven platforms very much like IXICO, where I work for Foundation Medicine, which was later acquired by Roche, and then help a Swiss company, SOPHiA GENETICS, go public on the NASDAQ. And so I'm delighted to now be here at IXICO. IXICO, which really has that data-driven platform, that helps in that neurology space, which is very much where my heart is, but which is also where we see the momentum now in terms of novel drugs coming to the market and really seeing that uptick, and we'll talk a little bit about that today. So with that, let's move to the next slide. Just a few words on IXICO as a company. If you're less familiar with us, we have a track record of more than 15 years, as you see there on the slide. We're actually close to celebrating our 20-year spin-out originally from London Academia, but now very much established as a global commercial players, and you see some of the numbers there with more than 1,250 sites, which we are managing. And then maybe important to keep in mind as well, if you look at the right-hand side here, how we are serving both pharma and biotech. We do that as a clinical research organization, which means that both our platform and the teams that we have help them with their research and development, very specifically in neuroimaging, which I will come back to as well. Just keep in mind, 25 studies with 18 clients. Those 18 clients are big pharma and biotech. Next one. So what we do is basically helping pharma at some of these critical stages in their clinical development programs. So as they develop the novel wave, the new wave of drugs in Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, which are sort of core areas that we focus on, as they develop novel drugs, they obviously need clinical outcomes, they need safety outcomes. But today, we can really go and look in the brain and see what do drugs actually do in very specific areas of the brain. We do that with radiology, methodology such as MRI and PET scans that you may have heard of maybe in other areas as well. And so really, we, as IXICO, take those images, we manage those sites for pharma. We take those images, ingest them into our AI-driven platform, and then derive insights that help pharma conclude, do we actually have a winner or should we make what we call a fail fast decision and move to other solutions for -- that can come to market. So it's a high-stake business, as you know, pharma, especially also in the area of neurology, and we really help make those decisions at those critical points. Next one. So how we do that? This is a bit of a busy slide is through our platform, as I already mentioned. The platform really has 2 key components. The one is that you see on the top here, which is really the backbone of our platform, we call it TT, TrialTracker, and we've just launched the newest generation of it. I'll show that in a minute because that is a very important achievement for the past year for our company. And then we equip that platform, and that's what you see at the bottom with algorithms, so with very specific scientific plug-ins as we call them, that will then actually help do readouts in these specific disease areas that I already mentioned, such as Alzheimer's, for example. So we really have a platform that helps our teams, but also the pharma companies that work with us have these very specific insights. We call them biomarker insights in their drug development programs. Next one. So I spoke already a little bit about the time line. This is what 2024 looked like. You see that it was a calmer H1. If you've looked at the numbers before this webinar, you probably saw that indeed, H1 was below expectations. The good news is that H2 really saw an uptick. Obviously, as you see, a few changes were made to the company, not in the least to the team. I'm very glad to be here. I'm also very glad to have as my colleague, Grant, Robin, those are key figures for the company. Grant is our CFO, Robin is our Chief Scientific Officer. But then you also see that we made some changes in the Board. And so Mark Warne is my Chairman; Dipti, who joins us from IQVIA, the world's biggest CRO, are really very important new elements, I would say, to the company. At the top end of this line, what you see is TTNx platform live. So that's what I already alluded to. We basically press the button on a completely new scale [Technical Difficulty] that has all the bells and whistles, if I can call it like that, in terms of regulatory, cybersecurity and what have you to make sure that we keep being on the forefront when we support these clinical trials. And then as you go down this time line, you see that we actually did some partnerships as well to continue to equip our platform with novel algorithms, more functionality to make sure that we can actually serve these different disease areas that I already alluded to. And so what you saw in the latter half of the year is that, that also resulted in some important new contracts, contracts in Alzheimer's disease, Parkinsonian, Huntington's disease. Huntington's disease, for those that know us a bit better, is really where we have an enormous stronghold and where we dominate the market. So those have been very good signals that make us believe that we are really now reversing that trend and especially as we go in 2025, actually go back to growth, which, as you know, from the numbers was not yet the case in 2024. I think important to mention here as well is that as soon as I came on board, we actually went back to our investors, did a capital raise. Maybe those here today were part of that. And then hopefully, we're happy about the initial successes that we see there. But I will also show you a little bit how we started to use these proceeds of what was a largely oversubscribed capital raise. So that was a very nice signal to see from all the investors. Next one. I don't want to dwell too much on ourselves. I think I already introduced myself. You see it here written on the slide as well. Mark, very much a partner for me as Chairman because he's also the CEO of deepmatter. And so I think also in the Board, we very much have a hands-on approach. And then with Dipti, we really get that global clinical research organization expertise added to the Board, which has been instrumental. Next one. So with that, I would like to hand it over to Grant, who will take you through some of the important numbers, of course, especially highlighting also the difference we saw between H1 and H2 of 2024. And then I'll take it again and then give you a little bit of a view also on what that means for 2025.

Thank you, Bram, and good afternoon, everyone. So I have 4 slides that I'm going to cover this afternoon. Those slides are first on the financial performance in the year, but then our financial position as we look forward. And then a couple of slides looking at our contracted order book to give a feel of where the -- where that sits and why that gives us confidence as we look forward. So this first slide reflects the financial performance of IXICO in the last 12 months and also compares it against the last couple of years, looking specifically at revenues, at gross margin, and at EBITDA. I think the key point here is that compared to the market guidance, the market expectations for this year, we've outperformed across all these areas. So we did better than expectations in revenues, gross margin, and EBITDA. But of course, you can see at the same time that our revenue levels have been lower than in the last couple of years, which has impacted on gross margin and EBITDA. And I think the key takeaway from this slide, and I'll go into a bit more detail, is that actually in the face of some fairly strong headwinds in the market, in the clinical trials market over the last couple of years, we've delivered a strong set of -- a solid set of results that really reflect the fact that we've kept a very strong handle on cost and actually made some difficult decisions, particularly in the early part of 2024 in terms of rightsizing the organization, but then put ourselves in a position where we were able to access the opportunities as they arose in the second half of the year. And starting with revenues on the left, you can see we delivered GBP 5.8 million of revenues in the year against a market expectation of GBP 5.5 million. But key to this is that we had a significant improvement in revenues in the second half of the year, where we had 27% increase in revenues in the second half compared to the first half. That was driven by a significant uplift in contract wins in the second half of the year, meaning we delivered just under GBP 9 million of new contracts in the year, and I'll come back to that shortly. The impact of that is also seen in gross margin. So we achieved a 47% gross margin in the year. As you can see, we largely retained the gross margin that we had seen in the previous year despite the fact that revenues have come down a bit. And that really comes down to the fact that we did a good job in managing our cost base. So again, this was clear across the 2 halves of the year. In the first half, we did a gross margin of about 40%. As we drove those revenues up in the second half, we saw that come back just over 50%. So there was a good accretion across the year in that respect. Our gross margin really is driven by 3 factors. Firstly, there's revenue volumes themselves. So we are operating slightly subscale at the moment. So actually, any increase of revenues, or conversely decrease, will be seen very clearly quickly in gross margin and EBITDA. So the opportunity there is as volume -- as revenues grow, which we expect them to do over the next 12 months, that should come through to both these metrics. The other element for us is the mix of clinical trials that we support. It's a factor of our industry that earlier-phase trials, Phase I and Phase II tend to be lower-margin trials because they have less analysis, which is where we use our artificial intelligence-driven algorithms to measure changes in the brain. Those are very high margin. They can be 80%, 90% margin, but they tend to come more with larger later-phase trials. So -- but you have to go through the Phase I and Phase IIs to win those Phase IIIs. And then the third element of what drives our gross margin is cost, cost management. And having done some restructuring in the first half of the year, we saw the benefit of that in our gross margin in the second half, where we were able to stabilize our gross margin at that 47% overall despite lower revenues in the year. In terms of our EBITDA, the EBITDA position of GBP 1.7 million loss, that is down compared to previous year for a number of factors. And it's important to explain this so that there's an understanding of where this comes from. Firstly, there is a reduction in revenues, and that does have an impact. But also what is very important to understand is actually there is a -- it's not an apples-and-apples comparison to compare our EBITDA from last year with our EBITDA from this year. And the reason for that is that in the previous year, we are investing heavily in this new TrialTracker platform that Bram talked about. That allowed us and required us to capitalize costs we're incurring in the business onto our balance sheet. We actually completed that investment largely by the end of 2023. So the capitalization of costs reduced significantly in 2024, which meant that, that cost came back into our P&L, and so therefore, impacts on EBITDA. But actually -- as I'll show on the next slide, there's actually a big positive to that, which means that the big investment the company need to make has now been made. We have, at the same time, managed that cost by -- we reduced our FTE levels. So the line graph at the top here shows the number of FTEs in the business. And you can see that we brought that down sharply at the beginning of 2024 such that we ended the year with about 70 staff. We reduced our salary costs by about 12%, and we maintained non-salary costs steady despite some fairly inflationary increases from -- that we saw across the board. So that was our financial performance. As we then turn to look at where we're positioned going forward, this slide really focuses on our balance sheet. Firstly, on the left, in terms of cash, you can see that the cash position at the end of the financial year was at GBP 1.8 million. That was then subsequently augmented by the capital raise that Bram referred to, which meant that at the end of October, our cash was at GBP 5.7 million, which is a strong cash position for a company of our size and gives us the financial strength to make the investments that we know that we need to make to accelerate our growth. What is also, I think, important to draw out here is that we obviously utilized cash across 2024. But actually, the volume of cash utilized in the first half of the year was about GBP 1.5 million within the second half of the year, that -- the cash burn being reduced to about GBP 700,000. And whilst there are a couple of timing factors in that, that shows the impact and momentum starting to be built over the second half of the year where with a bit of an uptick in revenues, we see improvement in gross margins, improvement in EBITDA, and a reduction in cash utilization. So then moving to the middle graph, and this comes back to the investment that we have made in our TrialTracker platform. We have invested a significant amount over the last 2 or 3 years in bringing this platform live. But -- and the completion of that towards the end of '23, early 2024 means that the capitalized element of that has come down a lot, which is what you can see here with only GBP 0.5 million being capitalized in the year. Of course, part of the difference there is now in our P&L, which is why we see that impact on EBITDA. But what's really critical here is that we have now made the key investments in our platform. And actually, what the incremental spend we need to make going forward to enhance our platform further for new therapeutic indications for new opportunities in the indications we're already working in is actually small. A few tens of thousands of pounds allows us to augment the analytical tools that we can -- that we have that we then plug into our platform and delivers value. So we're very pleased to be in this position. And then finally, and for completeness on the right, you see our net asset position. We have a strong balance sheet for a company of our size. At the end of the year, we had GBP 2.8 million of working capital. We've augmented that with a further GBP 3.7 million of net proceeds from the raise. We have no debt, and we have very few long-term liabilities. And the balance of our balance sheet is then made up with the value that sits in our platform that -- which really we haven't leveraged yet at all. So there's a significant nascent value that sits in our balance sheet as we win new trials will start to come through. And again, we feel very positive about that. Then, I'm just going to spend a couple of slides on our order book. So as a reminder to those who heard us before or for those who are new, when we refer to our order book, this is the book of signed contracts that we have, so where we signed contracts with clients and yet we haven't delivered revenue yet. So this is the book that shows us the revenues that we expect to deliver over the coming years. The good news in 2024 was that we increased the size of this order book across the year, moving it from GBP 14.8 million at the end of the previous year up to GBP 15.3 million. And perhaps to give a stark view on the second half of the year, at the end of the first half, it was at GBP 12.7 million. So we actually increased our order book by 20% in the second half of the year. Why is that important? It's important because that's what gives us visibility of the company's ability to grow as we go forward. With a higher order book, we've got high visibility of revenues looking forward. It's a leading indicator that growth is coming. And at the end of 2024, 75% of the revenues that we've got as the market expectation for '25 were already contracted. So that gives us good confidence that we can hit the figures that are in the market, and obviously, [ IT ] needs to pass them. The graph on the right just gives the movement in the order book across the year. So starting at GBP 14.8 million, we recognized those revenues of GBP 5.8 million. Then we signed GBP 8.9 million of new contracts. That's contracts with 11 -- new contracts of 11 clients and contract extensions with 15 clients, which shows that we sign a contract with the client, but then there's opportunities to extend that contract and we more work on that contract going forward. And we saw that in the last 12 months. And then the middle block in this graph is GBP 2.6 million of trial descopes. This happens in our industry. Developing drug for neurological diseases is challenging and some trials don't succeed. And so we do sometimes have descopes when client trials don't pan out as they hope. But that's what led us to the GBP 15.3 million. And then my final slide before I pass back to Bram, again, just focuses in on that order book. So what this is showing is the constituent part of that order book. So the bar on the left is the GBP 15.3 million of order book split by project. So we have an order book that is made up of 25 projects across 18 clients. And what you can see here is that order book is very diversified, much more diversified than it was a few years ago, which is an important factor for a company in our space. With the biggest project being about 13% of our order book, we are well-diversified. That means that if a client fails -- if a trial fails, sorry, then we have resilience in our order book should that trial not succeed. So there's a risk management element to having a well-diversified order book. But then moving to the middle pie chart, what you can also see is that we have an order book that is more than 65% split in early-phase trials, so Phase Is and Phase IIs. The reason that, that is important is because that's where opportunity sits in our order book. Not only do we have those contracts and are able to deliver those revenues, but if those trials are successful, they will move on to become Phase II and Phase III trials, and we will be well-positioned to follow those trials through and win those trials. So we have a pipeline of opportunity that sits within our order book. And with a highly diversified order book with trials that sit in there with a Phase I, Phase II, we have a resilient order book, but we also have an order book that contains opportunity. And that's an important message for us to communicate today. And then the final pie chart on the right shows the mix of that order book, that GBP 15.3 million order book, split by therapeutic indication. We are known, as Bram said, to be the leading experts in Huntington's disease, which still makes up about 50% of our order book and also in rare neurological conditions, which is what sits in the orange other portion of this pie chart. But we are very focused on accessing those larger therapeutic indications of Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. And what you can see is we have a foothold, about 20% of our order book is in AD, and we have a foothold in Parkinson's disease as well. And so this is the basis on which the investment that we are making, the investments that we raised that capital for will build upon. And with that, I'll pass back to Bram, who will talk a little bit more about that.

Thanks a lot, Grant. Maybe before I go into the next slide, so you heard Grant speak about our order book, about where we stand. To give you a little scoop into what's going on today, 2025. Obviously, I'll talk a little bit about how we're actually advancing with the proceeds of the capital raise, which hopefully, it has become clear to you why we wanted that capital raise in order to make sure that we can actually maintain that momentum, make some of these investments. But if you look at how the order book is now furthering and especially also how we see the new pipeline, we've got a pipeline today, which is across sort of a couple of dozen material potential deals, where we do see 45% already in that Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease space. And that's an important one to keep in mind because growth really will come from expansion of our platform into new disease areas. And obviously, with that also comes global footprint, and I'll talk a little bit more about that in the following slides. So if we move to the following one. If you were part of the capital raise or if you looked at some of our most recent strategic updates, you may have heard or seen the Innovate, Lead, Scale strategy. And basically, what it means is that at the one hand, we want to equip to innovate our platform to make sure that it can actually make a difference compared to competition in especially Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, as I already mentioned. The good news, as you will see on the next slide, is that, that's actually not such a heavy lift for us, definitely not as heavy as what Grant alluded to, which was really the revamping of our platform, which we now have behind us. The second one is Lead. Lead is very much about making sure that we actually have that share of voice that we're part of that global scene and that we are being heard and seen also for that expertise, which we have. IXICO is very well-known, which is also one of the reasons why I was delighted to join the group as an expert in neuroimaging analysis. But we want to make sure that, that is also known everywhere across the world, including North America, which is where we're making some extra investments. And so Scale is actually about making sure that we don't only do that from a medical perspective, but also from a commercial and from an operational perspective, and that we are as close as possible, not only to our sites, but also to the decision-makers who are often in -- at the other side of the pond, if I can call it like that. Maybe one last thing on this slide here is you see accelerate growth and increase value. Grant already mentioned sort of how that comes to life in the order book, but accelerating growth very much has to do with expansion into new disease areas. We do also believe that in the midterm, our platform can actually go into other revenue streams than the one which we're currently pursuing as a clinical research organization, which is a fee-for-service business. We do think our platform can really also be part of clinical decision-making, which would more be in the hospital field or, for example, post-marketing surveillance, which is when drugs actually come to market and inform further prescription. And then increasing value has to do very much with making sure that we are accessing bigger programs, longer programs in bigger disease areas. And that's where Alzheimer's and Parkinson's come in. Next one. This one is a bit of a busy slide. It's the only sort of scientific slide, if you wish, that we have here in the deck, but I think it's quite self-explanatory. You see 3 themes here: Vascular fingerprint, neuromelanin, and inflammation. Those are the 3 algorithms, the themes that we know we needed on the platform to really make that difference, especially in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. And the investments we had to make were relatively low because the proof of concept, as we call it, so the development work, most of the development work had been done already in collaboration with consortia with big data sets that we have access to. And so this is really about making sure that we now actually scale it, put it on the platform, commercialize it and bring it to our customers. And what you see on the right-hand side in this table is how this then translates into novel markets that we can access, which is this estimated market potential column. And then to the right, how that actually translates into our activation of our pipeline, as we call it, which is basically those opportunities that we have lined up, making sure that we convert them into actual wins and hence, revenue later on. And so on the next slide, you basically see a little bit what that means in terms of scale. On the left-hand side, you see sort of this pie or this pond in which we have been playing quite a dominant role. When we say Huntington's disease, for example, we're serving 80, as in 8-0, percent of the market. And so it means that obviously, in order to further expand, we need a diversification. But the good news is that, that diversification actually goes into bigger markets such as PD and AD, where you see bigger numbers of trials, but also bigger numbers of high-value trials as in Phase II and Phase III. Next one. And so what it does for us at the one hand, so innovate is really about differentiation, especially in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. And so the way we're going to measure ourselves is by making sure that, obviously, we deliver those features on time, and that is something that is ongoing. We hired people that we said we wanted to hire after the capital raise. We've acquired data sets, and we're basically on track now to deliver that functionality within that 6- to 12-month time line that we have promised. KOLs, key opinion leaders, making sure that we interact with those that we have the support of them for the new functionality, which we're bringing. And then obviously, AD and PD awards in winning programs and winning clients is going to be a key measure that we will continue to report out, of course, to you all here. Lead, I don't want to dwell on it, but that is very much about hiring some medical people that will help us, especially in North America as well to sort of spread the news and make us somewhat more visible, if you wish, in that clinical space so that we are very much heard and seen also for the new functionalities which we have brought on platform. And then Scale, you see the measures there. Obviously, that is all going to be about growing the revenue, growing the order book, and making sure that we land the projects at scale. Next one. I did want to share for this one my org chart with you. I will probably not always do that, but it is a vital component of what we have done after the capital raise and of what will also allow us to really sort of get into that new chapter in '25, where we're back to growth. For those that know the company, obviously, Grant, he's the CFO, also COO. So he very much oversees also that platform development and has done an excellent job. The CSO, Robin Wolz, he's been there from the first hour. So he's really the scientific mastermind of our company. But I've asked him to also take on that Chief Medical Officer role, which means that he's really also going to be overseeing that Lead component of the investment strategy and making sure that we bring those new profiles on board. And for some of them, you see little American flags, which means that we very much intend and target these people to be based mostly on the East Coast in the U.S. and very much in centers such as Boston, where we know that many of our clients are being based. And then the biggest change is actually that third box here, which is the Chief Commercial Officer, where we are now really carving out a very clear commercial group with a clear leader as well, and again, with a big focus on the U.S. And again, I'm happy to report that since the capital raise, we've actually started to bring some of these senior profiles on board. And so we're really expanding and strengthening our team there. The last one I want to draw your attention to is what we call the corp dev person there that you see at the top of the org chart. That is really someone who's going to be focusing very much on partnerships. Obviously, as you see, we've got a platform for scale. We've equipped it with our own algorithms. We've got our own teams also doing that. But we do think we've got a platform that actually can invite and welcome other modalities as well, other partners. And so we're very actively actually looking at how we can do that so that we can also expand, if you wish, that footprint of access to new customer segments. Next one. So this is really the summary of where IXICO is today. I think from our perspective, where we're sitting, we believe it is still largely an undervalued company, especially also because of the platform and where it sits and that it is really now equipped for scale. We've got a market-leading technology that is not easy to replicate and which customers very much recognize. Hopefully, you've seen that we've really now defined also a very clear strategy to increase the market and to sort of go and fish into a bigger pond, which is vital for our business, and then leveraging the existing technology for new markets. You've heard Grant say a couple of times, those investments have been made, which means that the backbone is there, and now we can, with little investments, make sure that we actually stay on the forefront, again, especially in the areas of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. And that is basically what you see summarized in that box here at the bottom of the slide. So to conclude, you saw a 2024 which was still a painful one. As you just heard from me, I didn't spend much time during '24 in the company, but I know that Grant and his colleagues did a very focused job making some of these cost savings, making sure that from an EBITDA perspective, I would say the damage was sort of minimized. But then really in H2, we saw that uptick. We saw that big difference in order book, and we really saw also how the investments in the platform really started to pan out. And so I think for myself with the team now coming out of H2 in 2024 with this capital raise, we very much are now poised for that growth journey that you will see in 2025. So with that, I'm going to close it, and I'll be very happy together with Grant to take any questions.

Brilliant. Thanks, Bram and Grant. If anybody wants to ask any questions, please put them in the chat box, and I'll read them out. We've got one beforehand from David. He was asking about the GBP 2 million Huntington's disease contract, Bram. If you could just provide a bit of color on whether it's typical that sort of size within the pipeline that you see, especially in sort of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

Yes, it's a very good question. I was going to say, no, it's not typical. But yes, it's typical for the Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease trials. So those are bigger-sized trials. And so you will see us make announcements of this size of trial in the future as we further penetrate Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. But this specifically was a Huntington's disease trial, which gives you an indication of sort of the stage of that trial. So this was a late-stage trial and was also a product of us having built already that confidence in the earlier stages towards that client.

And just what you're doing in the actual contract, is it basically Phase II, Phase III digital imaging?

Yes. So this is actually a Phase III clinical -- sorry, digital imaging trial. So basically, what we do is we, of course, immediately provide our fees to the pharma company that is behind this trial, but we also often work together with sort of a larger clinical research organization that will oversee some of the more clinical aspects of it. So what we're doing here is basically worldwide overseeing all the imaging inputs, doing the analysis and then feeding those analysis back to the pharma client.

Okay. Good. We've got one from John is fairly related. He's asking about who IXICO's main competitors are? And what the company's sort of like core differentiators are?

We have -- and we've talked very openly about that also during the capital raise, there are sort of 2 main competitors for us. The one is called Clario, a U.S.-based company, very much came to life through consolidation, which happened in our space over the past years. And the other one is a company that goes by the legacy name of InVitro, which has actually now become perceptive because there's been some consolidation there as well. The big differentiation is that those somewhat larger-scale U.S. players are much more focused on standard technologies, whereas we very much differentiate with a platform that is very agile and that is very specialized. What is going to come though is, as you've heard today, that we are equipping our platform to really be that fierce competitor in the Alzheimer's and Parkinson's space. So I'm sure we're going to be meeting them even more now, I think, in the competitive scene.

Okay. And the second part of John's was just asking about whether it was possible for the likes of Google or Apple to do this because, obviously, they moved into radiology x-ray analysis?

My answer is no. I mean, I've been actually in this space since a longer time, as I said, with precision medicine. I think at some stage, big tech thought that this was an easy one for them to conquer and then they realized that it's such a highly regulated market. If you look at our platform and what we've done with TrialTracker, it's all about actually making sure that from a regulatory perspective, pharma believes and has that confidence that this is a platform that respects patient rights, confidentiality. So from a technical perspective, obviously, Google, Apple, they've got deep pockets, but I don't think they've got the expertise to really bring this to life. So what would happen is that they would basically acquire this. But even then, I don't think there's really any hope for a business that we are very much building.

Okay. We've got one from Rebecca asking about new services. How long is it likely to take to move into or to get the biomarkers developed for Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, and also the sort of time line and what you need to do to move into the marketing surveillance sector?

Yes, it's a good question, and it has 2 very different components. So when it comes to Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and equipping our platform, as I mentioned before, that's a 6- to 12-month time line, and that was a time line that we promised when we actually did our capital raise, which was the September, October time line of this year. So that is very much ongoing. And we do expect to start to see these come live on the platform in the second half of 2025 the latest. But obviously, what it does is since we've now defined this, since we know that we will bring this on platform, we can confidently go out to customers, to prospective customers as well and say that these are functionalities they will see live as we close the deal and as we help them. The second part of the question is post-marketing surveillance. That is -- that's a bit of a different animal, if you wish. Post-marketing surveillance has to do with supporting products that have actually received approval and are now on the market. So we're very much a platform that can easily support that because post-marketing surveillance is basically about using imaging to follow either safety of an approved drug or also further monitor efficacy of an approved drug. And what you will see is that obviously, we first will need to actually help the likes of, as you've seen, some approved products like Biogen or Lilly to really come to approval and then we can start to support it with go-to-market strategy. So it's a bit of a long-winded way to say that we first need to make sure that we actually land those Phase III trials, get these products to approval, and then we will follow them further into the market.

Okay. We've got one from Ben just on the financials here, Grant. He's asking about current trading since September and sort of visibility going forward for the rest of the year.

Yes. So hopefully, you've got visibility of the market expectations that are out. So with our house broker, Cavendish, we've got numbers out for GBP 6 million of revenues this year. We've been relatively cautious with those numbers. Obviously, it's early in the year, still we outperformed our financial guidance for last year. We're on track for that, and we obviously are aiming to do that and do more.

Okay. Good. We've got a follow-up from Robert. He's asking about when IXICO is likely to become profitable, which is obviously important for everybody.

Yes. Well, we hope as quickly as possible. But I think that's the way to answer that question is in terms of what we need to do to become profitable. For IXICO to be profitable, we really need to get our revenues back to a position of around GBP 8 million to GBP 8.5 million. Obviously, we've just completed a year where we did GBP 5.8 million. So there's a little bit of a gap for us to close. But we've done it before. We've shown that in this organization with winning 2 or 3 significant trials very quickly, we can grow. We've done it before and we can do it again. And the benefit that we have now compared to when we did it last time around is that we have a much -- as I said earlier, a much more diversified order book. So we have more opportunities to win trials quicker, but we also have more risk and resilience basis should those trials not ultimately succeed. So for us, we're targeting getting back to north of GBP 8 million as quickly as possible. And the strategy that Bram laid out is the strategy that will get us there. And then it's how we accelerate beyond that, knowing that we have a diversified order book that sits behind us.

Okay. We've got another one from George on the cash side. Obviously, you've just raised. He's asking about whether you'll need to -- whether that's going to be sufficient for the business going forward to reach sort of cash flow self-payment, yes.

Yes. So we raised the money with that in mind. So yes, that's what we -- that's our ambition. We had discussions with our existing shareholders as to what the right level of capital was that we should raise, and this was the level that we concluded was the right level. We -- there is a significant opportunity out there, I think. And first and foremost, we've got to deliver what we said we'd deliver, and that's what we're focused on. But then always there is a possibility that if there's opportunity to accelerate further beyond that, and we have to invest a bit more to do that, then we would always look at that as an opportunity. But essentially, what we raised was the money we felt we needed to return to profitability.

If you don't mind, if I can chime in. I mean, this was very much a raise that we did for organic growth. And so, Grant is absolutely right that this was oversubscribed, right? So this was really at the top end of what we were hoping to get. And so we feel very well-equipped to really get to indeed that revenue, which will also give profitability. If we want to accelerate that at some stage, that might actually also be inorganically. And at that moment, obviously, we will have another conversation with our investors.

Okay. Good. We've got one coming in from Alan. He's asking about strategic partnerships and how you see that sort of developing, Bram?

There are several layers there. Some of the important partners, as I mentioned before, are clinical research organizations, which are, if you know our industry a little bit, the likes of IQVIA, Fortrea, they are really multibillion-dollar businesses doing all the clinical research for pharma. And we're working with them on a day-to-day basis as that imaging partner. So strengthening those, making sure that we've got clear preferred vendor agreements with them in place, that is sort of low-hanging fruit. And again, a lot of that will happen in the U.S., and that's what we will be focusing on. But then there's also sort of another, what I find very exciting element, which is how can our platform serve potentially in the future other revenue streams. And for that, we need to actually reach out to some of the less-known partners for our current business and really look at new revenue streams. And so there, I'm looking at big data platforms. I'm looking at clinical decision platforms. And that's why you also saw me in that org chart put some resources there because that's something that I definitely will focus a lot of my attention to as well.

Okay. Just a reminder, anybody wants to put any final questions in, please just drop them into the chat box, and I'll read them out. We got one from Tom asking about your pipeline, Bram. How the pipeline is developing? And where you like the business to get to in sort of 3 to 5 years?

Well, where I want to get the business to is profitability. And I know Grant didn't mention it, but that profitability needs to happen in the next coming 2 to 3 years, max. We absolutely want to make sure that we actually get to a double-digit million top line in that period. And so that's what we're gearing towards. You see us put very, I would say, prudent guidance out there because I think IXICO has always been known for prudency. But lately, that faltered a little bit. So we really want to sort of be back and be that sort of that partner that people know that delivers or overachieves. In terms of the pipeline, I mentioned it before, we've got sort of a couple of dozen material deals. Of course, if all of these deals pan out, then I'll be here celebrating and telling you that the numbers were very largely undervalued. So we do need to take into account that we have some competition out there. But I think the good news, as I said before, is that already almost 50% of those opportunities are in those disease areas that we are strategically targeting, which we're also equipping our platform for. So that's that 45% in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. And then what I can also say about the pipeline is that 50% of that pipeline is what we call late-stage, which means that we're really getting to these levels of profitability, which give us confidence that we may actually convert some of these shortly to winning contract.

Great. Okay. Well, just a reminder, if anybody wants to address the final questions, otherwise, I'm going to close it. I think we're probably there. But I'd like to say a big thanks to everyone for your questions, and likewise to Grant and to Bram for taking us through all the presentation. I found it fascinating. So thanks very much, guys, and big congrats, and we all hope -- given the importance of the area you work, we all hope you make it a roaring success. So thanks, guys.

Patients are waiting. I know. Thank you, Paul. Take care.

Thank you, Paul.