NowVertical Group Inc. (NOW) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the NowVertical Second Quarter 2026 Results Conference Call. My name is Stefan Eftychiou with Bristol Investor Relations. And I'd like to thank everyone on the call for joining us this morning. Before we get started, I want to remind everyone to read the company disclaimer and forward-looking statements that you can find on Page 2 and 3 of today's presentation and on the presentation materials related to today's earnings, press release, financial statements and management discussion and analysis that are available on the Investor Relations section of the company's website at www.nowvertical.com and on the SEDAR website, www.sedar.com. All figures discussed on today's call are in U.S. dollars and will be on an IFRS basis, unless otherwise noted, and we'll 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 web portal chat box. [Operator Instructions] 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 NowVertical'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 NowVertical today is that our global team is here. Our key leaders are all with the business, including co-founders who sold their companies into NowVertical 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. And on the finance side of the house, as we announced, Christine Nelson has stepped down as CFO and has decided to resign from the company for family reasons. Christine has been with NowVertical for 4 fantastic years and the last 2 of them, her being the Chief Financial Officer, and she remains with us as an adviser through the end of August. 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 NowVertical since June as an adviser 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, NowVertical makes enterprise AI work. We start with the picks and shovels of enterprise AI, the foundation work that has to happen before any AI tool actually works inside a business. From there, we work alongside our clients in their day-to-day operations, helping them turn that data into better decisions and measurable business value. Now everyone on this call has seen this problem somewhere in their own day-to-day organization. The multiple copies of the same document sitting in SharePoint, the customer data in one system and the finance data in another and the two don't talk. What's going into the data lake? How is it secured? How is it governed? Every business' data is some form of mess, and it gets messier as companies get more complex. 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 this 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. That's where the margin and differentiation live, of course. And our gross margin this quarter was 50%, up from 47% in the same time last year. We deliver with senior domain expertise on a global cost base, and we use AI in our own delivery. So we are getting more efficient at the same time as we grow. And this is durable revenue. 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 NowVertical 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 NowVertical is building, and I wanted to bring my skills and experience to the table to be part of the NowVertical 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 6 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 sticky relationships with its 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 2 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 6 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 6 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. The company has positive working capital of $2.3 million while reducing leverage with net debt at only 1.8x trailing 12-month adjusted EBITDA. NowVertical has not raised operating or growth equity since 2023, with any shares being issued since that time for the purpose of settling existing obligations. Our total debt facility has declined to $16.9 million from $17.6 million as the company continues to service its debt obligations, both principal and interest from its operating cash flows. I'll now turn the time back over to Andre.

Thanks so much, Phil. Great to have you on board. Just a brief word on our market. Gartner 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 in 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 NowVertical gets busier because of the shift to deploy AI in an enterprise context, not the other way around. And our growth is coming from 3 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 2-time Data and 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 2 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 $100,000 a year, and most of our revenue comes from clients who have been with us for more than 2 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 1-year revenue line on the tenure 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 is 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, I 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. [Operator Instructions] Okay. It looks like we have a question here from Rob Goff with Ventum Financial.

Okay. 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, yes, I mean, I'm not here to keep the seat warm. So my mandate is to accelerate execution of a strategy, right, 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 nonnegotiable and aim to launch our Google Cloud propositions and offerings into new markets that we're not currently doing that in right now. Phil?

Yes. In terms of the organic growth, we are certainly making that a 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, 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.

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

Yes. I've been involved in a number of businesses, both public and private from start-up to turnaround situations. I've been very involved in M&A, both on the acquisition side and on the divestiture side and have 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, et cetera. It's all things that I've got a lot of experience in and very comfortable doing. And yes, I've been in businesses that have seen magnitude growth of 5 and 6x revenue within a single year. So the -- not that I'm predicting that for NowVertical, 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.

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?

Yes. 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 a higher-margin product versus reselling of software and software services. We do anticipate that the margins will continue to, at the very least, remain stable, if not improve over time.

Very good. And just a call out, please extend best wishes to Christine, and it's nice to see you helping in the transition. All the best.