Research Solutions, Inc. ($RSSS)

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for participating in today's conference call to discuss Research Solutions' Financial and Operating Results for its Fiscal 2026 Third Quarter Ended March 31, 2026. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I'd like to now turn the conference over to your host, John Beisler, Investor Relations.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for Research Solutions' third quarter fiscal year 2026 earnings call. On the call today are Roy W. Olivier, President, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer; and Dave Kutil, Chief Financial Officer. After the market closed this afternoon, the company issued a press release announcing its results for the third quarter of fiscal 2026. The release is available on the company's website, researchsolutions.com. Before Roy and Dave begin their prepared remarks, I would like to remind you that some of the statements made today will be forward-looking and made under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied due to a variety of factors. We refer you to Research Solutions' recent filings with the SEC for a more detailed discussion of the risks and uncertainties that could impact the company's future operating results and financial conditions. Also on today's call, management will reference certain non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe provide useful information for investors. A reconciliation of those measures to GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release as well. Finally, I would like to again remind everyone this call is being recorded and made available for replay via a link on the company's website. I would now like to turn the call over to Roy W. Olivier. Roy?

Thanks, John. The third quarter represented improving EBITDA and net income but was certainly lower than our expectations in terms of top line growth. Churn continues to be an area that needs action, which I will talk about in more detail later in the call. New bookings were good at 61 new or upsell logos, representing $961,000 in ARR. Unfortunately, churn was 46 logos, representing $398,000 in ARR. Most of those were smaller accounts. However, there was 1 large account in that total that represented about $130,000. As a reminder, about 1/3 of churn is uncontrollable. That category is primarily driven by one of our customers being acquired, going out of business, or experiencing a reorg that includes eliminating the research function. 2/3 are controllable, and that's where our focus is, and none of it is related to "AI usage". There was a lot of good news in the quarter. Academic and corporate sales were both strong. We signed sizable academic deals in Johannesburg, Singapore, and several with top U.S. universities, including my alma mater, Texas A&M. These deals are primarily Scite deals. We also signed several large corporate deals at levels well above or at historic average sales price or ASP. This is a good mix of both Scite and Article Galaxy deals. About 70% of those deals are AG deals. The point is that new bookings are executing well, and I feel good about our new bookings growth. We have been using AI internally in virtually every area of the business. The product teams have seen a nice uptick in productivity as a result. Due to this, we can now assign software development issues to AI and then have a developer check that work. This has accelerated the number of new items in each release. In addition, during the quarter, we released 2 new AI-based products. These are called MCPs, which stands for Model Context Protocol. You can think of an MCP as similar to a software API, but it is a connector to integrate an AI-based LLM like ChatGPT or Claude or an internally developed LLM into Article Galaxy or Scite. This is part of our headless strategy, which means we want to be where our customers are working. I'll talk about that also more later in the call. I'll discuss all this with you in a little bit more detail, but for now, I'll have Dave walk you through the results in more detail. Dave?

Thank you, Roy, and good afternoon, everyone. Total revenue for the third quarter of fiscal 2026 was $12.1 million compared to $12.7 million in the third quarter of fiscal 2025. Growth in platform subscription revenue was more than offset by a decline in our lower-margin transactions business. Our platform subscription revenue increased approximately 7% to $5.2 million. The growth was primarily driven by a net increase of 15 platform deployments over the prior year, as well as expansion within our existing customer base through upsells and cross-sells. Platform revenue accounted for about 43% of our total revenue for the quarter, compared to approximately 38% in the prior year quarter, as this mix continues to move towards the higher-margin platform business. We ended the quarter with $22.1 million in annual recurring revenue, or ARR, up 8.5% year-over-year, consisting of approximately $15.7 million in B2B ARR and approximately $6.4 million in normalized ARR associated with Scite's B2C subscribers. Although it was down 7.5% year-over-year, B2C ARR has shown signs of improvement in recent months as the MCP launch that Roy mentioned earlier has increased both conversion and retention. Net incremental platform ARR for the quarter was approximately $317,000. Please see today's press release for how we define and use annual recurring revenue and other non-GAAP items. Transaction revenue for the third quarter was $7.0 million compared to $7.8 million in the prior year quarter. The softness was driven by a previously discussed churned account and volume reductions from a small number of larger customers. It is notable that the monthly trend inside the quarter showed meaningful directional improvement, and while not a full recovery, it is an early sign of stabilization. Our total active transaction customer count for the quarter was 1,346 compared to 1,380 in the same period a year ago. Gross profit for the third quarter was $6.3 million, essentially flat with the prior year quarter from a dollar basis standpoint on lower revenue. Gross margin was 51.7%, a 220 basis point improvement over the third quarter of fiscal 2025. The increase was driven primarily by the ongoing revenue mix shift towards our higher-margin platforms business. On a trailing 12-month basis, the company's blended gross margin now stands at 51.4%. The platform business recorded a gross margin of 86.4% compared to 87.4% in the prior year quarter, reflecting modest hosting and infrastructure investments to support our AI and integration road map, and is still well within our high-to-mid 80% target range. Gross margin in our transaction business was 26%, essentially unchanged from the third quarter of fiscal 2025. Total operating expenses in the quarter were $5.2 million compared to $5.7 million in the prior year quarter. The improvement was driven primarily by lower general and administrative expenses and lower stock-based compensation, partially offset by continued investment in sales, marketing, and product. This is further evidence that the company's profitability improvement is not just emanating from margin mix. It is also a function of our operating discipline. We are being deliberate about G&A spend, keeping it contained while we put resources to work against growth initiatives. We expect the discipline to translate into continued operating leverage. Net income for the quarter was $860,000, or $0.03 per diluted share, compared to net income of $216,000 or $0.01 per diluted share in the prior year quarter, an increase of approximately 297%. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $1.6 million compared to $1.4 million in the year ago quarter, a 14% increase. On a trailing 12-month basis, our adjusted EBITDA margin was 12.3%, a 220 basis point increase from the prior year quarter. And trailing 12-month adjusted EBITDA now stands at $6 million. Turning to our balance sheet. Cash and cash equivalents as of quarter end were $12.1 million, essentially unchanged from our 2025 fiscal year-end, even after funding the Scite earnout payments made during the first 9 months of fiscal 2026. That consisted of approximately $3.7 million in cash and the issuance of approximately 739,000 shares of stock. We ended the quarter with no outstanding borrowings on our revolving line of credit, providing additional flexibility on the balance sheet. Cash flow from operations for the quarter were $1.0 million compared to $2.9 million in the prior year quarter. The decline reflects the timing of customer billings and strategic prepays rather than a change in underlying earnings power or a change in the collectability of receivables. Trailing 12 months cash flow from operations was $5.7 million. We are entering the final quarter of fiscal 2026 with the aim of delivering adjusted EBITDA growth over the prior year, driven by continued platform subscription growth, improved retention, growing stabilization in transactions, and disciplined expense management. We expect to exit fiscal 2026 with stronger earning power and cash generation, reinforcing the durability of our Software-as-a-Service platform model and our ability to invest behind the next phase of growth. I'll now turn the call back to Roy. Roy?

Thanks, Dave. By the way, Josh, who normally attends these calls, is out today. He and his wife had a baby last week, and he's home taking care of the baby. So turning back to B2B bookings. The academic and corporate teams are doing well. As a reminder, we built out the academic focus team back in 2025 or fiscal year '25. The corporate team has been around for many, many years. The corporate team did well during the quarter, booking around $400,000. The academic team generated about $265,000, even though it's a seasonally slow time for them. The remainder or the balance of the new bookings was generated by the CSM upsell-renewal team. While many reps on those teams are still new or in their first year, the performance on those teams is on track and improving. As I mentioned earlier, B2B churn is the primary drag on top line growth. We are doing several things to improve churn, including reorganizing the team, adding additional resources to that team, installing new technology to move us from reactive to proactive, as well as identifying low-usage users and kicking off workflows to reengage with those users. Finally, we are improving our onboarding and training to ensure that we improve customer adoption. While this is not something that gets fixed in a quarter, I feel very good about our plan to get this back to historic levels. We'll report more on this during our next call. Turning to B2C. We have started to see some improvement from previous quarters. Product enhancements and the new AI-based solutions I previously mentioned helped reverse what was a steady decline in that business. We saw less new trials on far less digital spend, but have kept MRR about flat quarter-over-quarter. We've reduced our CAC by about 24%, and we've increased our lifetime value, or LTV. We have had a good start to Q4, but keep in mind that we'll be entering the low season as universities let out for summer. That said, we have some exciting new versions of the B2C product and those are growing nicely. Product strategy and innovation are the drivers of all things for us. We've continued to improve the Scite and AG products. As a reminder, we deliver Scite and AG's value 3 ways. First is to customers that literally license the software and use it daily. Second, we provide that same functionality and value via software APIs for customers that have internally developed their own solutions but need our unique capability at points in that workflow. As mentioned previously, the third option is the new 2 AI-based products that connect AI LLMs to the product. These, again, are called MCPs, and they are 1-click connectors that allow the value of Scite and AG to work within an LLM. They are working now with ChatGPT and Claude. We have this running for all B2C and some B2B users today. Back to our previous quarters where we talked about our headless strategy to be where the customer is, many of our users are starting to work in an LLM. They can ask a question of that LLM, and interact with Scite content in a copyright-compliant way. Once they get a fully cited answer, they can ask that LLM for the articles, and it will talk to Article Galaxy and go get that content for the user in a copyright-compliant way. This basically allows an LLM to work with Article Galaxy and/or Scite, again, in a copyright compliant way. This will be a big part of our future growth. The Scite MCP was launched about 2 months ago, the AG MCP a month ago. We already have a sales pipeline of more than $1 million in opportunities for these new products. These MCPs will work with academic or corporate customers. In addition, we have integrated the Resolute databases into these MCPs. As a reminder, we purchased Resolute about 2 years ago, and 1 of the assets in that acquisition was access to over a dozen curated databases relevant to research. We have integrated those into our MCP. So when a user asks a question in the AI tool, the tool's answer today will include patents, clinical trial, and major grant data. This means users can -- nope, sorry, wrong page-- can start and end their research journey in the AI LLM of their choice. There's a tremendous amount of excitement internally and across our customer base about these databases being integrated. We'll announce additional data sets as we add them. Integrating the unique value we can deliver with where our customers are doing research will remain the cornerstone of our strategy. In short, AI will not eliminate research, but it will change how it is accessed. Regarding document delivery or DocDel, we expect to see improvement in Q4 in terms of FY -- I'm sorry, in terms of year-over-year performance. As noted on earlier earnings calls, most of this decline was driven by a handful of customers. We have a large customer churn impacting the year-over-year decline, and a few other customers are doing less research than they did a year ago. Other than those customers, we are seeing increases in DocDel, particularly in OA or other free DocDel, but paid is slightly down. Regarding M&A, we continue to look for interesting opportunities and are progressing with some of those opportunities. That said, we are currently trading at 2.7x to 3.4x based on TTM enterprise value to revenue, depending on how you value the DocDels. This makes it challenging to pay the multiple sellers expect, which are still based on pre-SaaS software values declining due to AI concerns. To summarize, I'm happy with the cash flow, net income, EBITDA, sales execution, and product work we did in Q3. I don't think our numbers reflect the great work we are doing in those areas. I do believe that progress will show up in future quarters and in FY '27. Now I'll pass it over to the operator for questions. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] And we'll take our first question from Jacob Stephan with Lake Street Capital Markets.

Roy, I guess, first, I just want to touch on the B2B churn a little bit. Obviously, it sounds like a great new logo quarter, hindered by some of that churn. But I guess what are the pain points of customers? What are you hearing from them as reasons for the churn?

Basically, it comes down to customers that have limited engagement. So in other words, we don't see a lot of usage of the platform or they don't purchase enough articles, in Article Galaxy's case, to make the ROI work for the platform. Some cases in this economy, customers are simply looking for ways to save money. So they may not be a big research organization, but they want to cut costs associated with doing that. But for us, the priorities moving forward are improving onboarding and training to ensure that at the end of a 90-day window, we have a majority of the researchers logged in, having used the product, and been trained on the product. Number two, we want to monitor usage of the product so that when we see a cohort of customers that are not using the product, we can automatically kick off a 3-or 4-point communication to that customer via in-product messaging and email to reengage them and get them to use the product. And number three, we know there are certain features in our product that are very high renewal features. In other words, people that use certain features in the product use it heavily and they very rarely churn out. So just like usage, we will monitor cohorts of customers that are not using those features and kick off workflows to help them know those features are there, help them know how to use those features. But for us, a majority of that churn is related either to lack of ROI, which can come from lack of usage, or can come from lower DocDel purchases, and lack of engagement on user parts. In other words, they're not using the product as much as they had hoped.

Maybe just touching on the B2C side then. I know we're entering a seasonal slowdown just as students are leaving class and everything. But maybe help me think about the improving CAC metrics. Are you spending less on marketing and still seeing better conversion? I guess, numerator versus denominator type question.

Yes, we are spending significantly less on digital ad spend, even though we are seeing our conversion rate out of the funnel. In other words, that creates a trial user. The conversion rates actually improved, which leads to flattish MRR on much less digital spend. And then some of the things we've released like the MCPs we've talked about have really had a big impact on retention. So we're seeing those customers stay longer, hence the improvement in lifetime value there. So I think if we continue to execute there, we may be able to get that thing growing again.

And maybe just one -- go ahead.

I was just going to say on the advertising spend side, we are able to -- I think I mentioned in the last call as well -- we are able to really manage that on a week-to-week basis. So we can turn it on as we get into the fall season, the return of academic cohort. And then as we approach summer, we can be a lot more deliberate on that advertising spend. So we'll continue to do that. And really having visibility into that and how that's converting has helped us manage costs and also pull that line where we're still keeping the MRR growing.

And maybe just last question for me. I know you guys are innovating on the AI front, making Scite and Article Galaxy integrated through MCPs, and also the integration of Resolute. But maybe if you could look 12 to 18 months out, I guess, what does your AI road map look like for new product launches? Where are you seeing maybe pockets of opportunity for new product development?

Yes. I think, obviously, Scite as a platform was developed as 100% AI. I think Article Galaxy has some opportunities within the Article Galaxy platform to implement AI in a copyright-compliant way to do several things to take friction out of the research process. So for those customers that use AG on a daily basis, they'll be able to get summaries of stuff that are in a folder, assuming they have the rights to do that; they'll be able to get a summary of an article, assuming they have the rights to do that; they'll be able to extract tables and other information, again, assuming they have the rights to do that. So we'll continue to add. I think there are several points in Article Galaxy we can continue to enhance by layering AI in on top of that workflow. Both the MCPs are 100% AI. And I think the real value add there is we have another roughly 9 or 10 curated databases out of Resolute that we can integrate initially with those MCPs. So an MCP user will see, here's patent results to your question, here's clinical trial results to your question, and then ultimately, we'll add those other databases, which include drug databases and other research associated databases that'll be helpful to those researchers that they can add, turn on, turn off. Those are also revenue opportunities for us. And then once they're in the MCP, which will happen actually very quickly, then we'll circle back and be able to integrate those into Scite, AG, or both so that you can have that access as part of your search results in Scite or in AG. So it's continuing to add basically curated unique data that gets added into the answers of the questions that you're asking, if you want them added, and giving you a broader view of all information related to your query instead of just scientific research.

[Operator Instructions] We'll take our next question from Derek Greenberg with Maxim Group.

My first is just on the Scite B2C2B pipeline. You guys had highlighted that in past quarters. I was just wondering if there's any progress on that front, just in terms of what you're seeing in the pipeline buildout from those opportunities.

I didn't pull that specific slice of our pipeline. I was looking at the MCP part that I mentioned in the call. But that continues to be a driver of a lot of our B2B sales, but I cannot tell you here whether it went up, went down, or was flat during the quarter.

Yes. I think I can give you a little color on that. It increased a little bit. We were talking about sizing it up about $100,000, and it went up probably about 50%. And we are, as Roy alluded to, starting to look at some of the newer products in the B2C side that will give users a little more MCP usage over the basic plan. So we think that some of the power users as well, and in the future teams, 2 to 50 seats, we think we can capture those cohorts in the B2C platform and then let them see the value of the MCP and other features on the B2C side and then convert them into B2B as well. So we have a lot more of a road map on the B2C side. And like I said in my remarks, the retention and the engagement is much improved once we release the MCP. So that is a pathway from B2C to B2B as well.

And then my next question is just how to think about usage right now on the headless strategy? Like what you're seeing in terms of percent of pulls and usage that are coming outside of your core platforms and within their own workflows versus on the platform? And what you expect that mix to be over time as these new technologies gain more usage?

Yes. So usage of the MCP products, we see a multiple higher than our own products. Once they're integrated, they're integrated into all users that are pounding on an LLM, whether they're Claude or ChatGPT all day, every day. So we definitely are seeing usage that are literally, in some cases, a pretty big multiple over what we would see in a typical enterprise customer of the same size or same number of user seats. I will say a byproduct or related to what Dave commented on is that we are positioning the product at usage-based pricing. So we are not doing MCPs that are basically unlimited. There is a limit. And when you hit the limit, you have to move to the bigger limit from a pricing point of view because we do believe that while we're going through this transition from our historic SaaS software and API business to more and more MCP-associated revenue, that revenue is going to be derived based on usage, which is a multiple of the SaaS software platform, as I mentioned. And we want to make sure we're not trying to sell a seat product into an environment that's 10x the usage without capturing the value in revenue to us of that usage, if that helps.

And then just my last question. You had previously said that you were seeing -- you were considering potentially selling into new segments such as like financial institutions, hedge funds, investment banks for their research. I was wondering if you've seen any traction in those segments or in any other new segments or if you had any comments on that.

We have a few cats and dogs in those segments. But right now, we are very focused in the new sales groups on corporate and academic, and I hesitate to really pull people off of what appears to be a pretty good pipeline and a pretty good TAM to go after these other verticals other than react to inbounds from those other verticals. So if we see one that we really think will yield results, then we may hire additional salespeople to focus just on those markets, but we have not done that at this point.

Thank you. At this time, there are no further questions in queue. I will now turn the meeting back to Roy Olivier for any additional or closing remarks.

All right. Well, thanks, everybody, for joining us. As a reminder, we will be attending the Three Part Advisors IDEAS Conference in New York on June 10. Qualified investors that are interested in attending, please reach out to Three Part Advisors to get scheduled. We look forward to speaking to you in September and to discuss the fourth quarter and full fiscal year results. Have a great day.

Thank you. This brings us to the end of today's meeting. We appreciate your time and participation. You may now disconnect.