Teneo AI AB (publ) (TENEO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

October 17, 2022

Nasdaq Stockholm SE Information Technology Software earnings 54 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Per Ottosson

executive
#1

Good afternoon, all. Just going to hold another 2 or 3 minutes to see if we get some more participants. It's the first time we do this on teams, which is a cheaper way for us to do this and it is also, of course, in line with our partnership with Microsoft. So it's the first time we do it. Hopefully, this will work out just fine. But we're going to wait another 3 minutes to 5:03 and then we'll kick off. Okay. So I'm going to go ahead and start. I want to advise you, first of all, that this meeting is being recorded. Second of all, the presentation is also available on our Investor website on artificialsolutions.com (sic) artificial-solutions.com under Q3 report. So very happy to present this report today. It's been a really nice quarter for us. We've hit all the KPIs we were wanting to hit. And we now definitely know that the model that we're taking to market is the right one, and we're showing exceptional growth in this model. So I'm going to go through some of the -- overall 2 slides about this. Some of this is to frame a bit of what we are and who we are for those of you who are new to the company. And my name is Per Ottosson. I'm the CEO of Artificial Solutions. I've been in this industry for a long time and I have also been in this particular industry that we're talking about today for at least the last 10 years. And then we have Fredrik Torgren who's going to join us to talk a bit about some of the financial results. And he's our CFO with a wide background from both private equity backed and public companies and SaaS companies, also from the corporate finance side of the world. So I'm going to jump straight into it and just give a very brief introduction to what Artificial Solutions does. We are in what's called the conversational AI space. And what that means is that we have a piece of software where you can build a system that understands what your customer, citizens or employees are asking you. It could be a service request, it could be an information request, a request to get something done. The system will interpret this, understand what it is that the person is saying. And then it will just move along and do what the person is asking in the best case. That's what we perceive as being Generation 3, which many of our customers are doing today or just simply answer a simple question, which more like if FAQ case, which would be a Generation 1 in this industry. And what's happened in this industry in the last few years, and I would say this started in the mid-2020 is that the contact center market has really taken off. So this is where customers come in or employees or since it's come in, there could be e-mail, chat, voice, WhatsApp, but somehow they come in with a request into your organization, and this market is really ripe for a change right now. And the two things that are driving that change is the cloud and artificial solutions -- sorry, artificial virtual assistance, which is, of course, what Artificial Solutions provides. The contact center software market as a whole is set to reach USD 165 billion by 2030, and it has a CAGR of 21%. So it's a very -- it's a market that's really taking off. It's really growing quite rapidly, which is also why a lot of companies are in this market. We are in this market together with Microsoft. So we're selling together with Microsoft in this market into the enterprise space. And we also already have references such as AT&T, O2 Telefónica and Swisscom, which are, of course, very large contact centers in a global sense. And we have a very large contact center which is a national health care provider, which is symbolized by that stethoscope that you see at the bottom there since we're not disclosing the name of this provider. The Artificial itself in this market is a company which I would like you to focus at the bottom right of this slide to start off with. And we provide a solution which in Swisscom has proven to be a better experience than speaking to a human. So it's a plus 18 transactional NPS points when the bot picks up the phone versus when the human picks up the phone. That's a big deal because that means that the drivers in the right direction are actually creating better customer satisfaction. And that's key for this whole transformation that the industry is going through. Now the reason, of course, you'd rather have a bot pick up the phone is because it's immediate and you get your service immediately, your -- whatever request it is, you will get that serviced immediately by the bot. I'd also like to highlight that we're now setting some financial targets. This has been -- we wanted to have a run-in with the model to see how it grew with different customers. And we're setting those financial targets. One of them, which you see at the bottom at the middle left here is SEK 200 million ARR, which is our target in 2025. That's quite a growth from where we are now. If you look to the left, you can see that we have -- the left scale is the bar graphs. The blue is our SaaS revenues. So in Q2 '21, they were SEK 600,000, and then moving to SEK 5.6 million in Q3, great result. And the red is our non-SaaS, that's what we also call our legacy. And that's shrinking but not shrinking in the same way that the SaaS is growing. So overall, we are growing the business quite a lot. Of course, we do not provide professional services anymore, which means that a large portion of the revenue that we see -- that we saw a couple of years ago is no longer done by us, but it's done by our partners. What you also see is the scale on the right, and that's the yellow line with the little boxes in it and that shows the ARR. So this month, times 12, what we would be at in an ARR perspective from the Software-as-a-Service perspective. And that's SEK 23.6 million in this quarter, very healthy growth in our ARR. And what you can also see is that we're capturing more than the market growth because within that subsegment contact center on the software market, there is yet another subsegment, which is the one we're addressing. And here, we have data from Gartner which came out during the summer, which shows that this segment of the market is going to grow to $47 billion in 2031. So the growth over the next decade is 48% CAGR. So it's a very strong market that's really taking off. We see, for example, in Spain, that there's even legislation coming where you're going to have to pay a fine if you don't pick up the phone within 3 minutes or if you don't pick up a WhatsApp or a chat, whatever contact message it might be that somebody is sending you. So what's happening in this market is that we now see a specialist landscape, there's competitors that work in a stand-alone mode towards the market. And then there's a few very large cloud vendors, which is Amazon, Google and Microsoft. And within the Microsoft space, as I move to Slide #7 here, within the Microsoft space, we are their default solution when it comes to Microsoft positioning something for a large enterprise. So we then are the conversational AI platform were we manage a portion of this very interesting virtual assistant build-out in these stacks. If we look at how the market has transformed over the last few years and what's really enabling this right now, I think it's easiest to focus on the examples, which are the rounded boxes you see here. The Generation 1 of our software, which is where we were up until 2011, 2012, when IKEA was one of our big customers with Ask Anna. If you then take the example from a telco then it would come in and you would say -- and you would probably say something like, I have problems with my connection. The system would recognize the world connection and then say, a, for connectivity-related problems, visit the following link, and it will take you to a link on the web page. That's still the majority of chatbot implementations today. I would say from my frame of reference, in the market, 90% to 95% are in that Generation 1. Generation 2, we started seeing multichannel, so you could come in through different channels, chat, voice and bot -- chat, voice and messaging. We deployed this in IKEA as well at the time with Ask Anna. There were some integration capabilities and now all of a sudden you can maybe integrate to the web shop and actually open up the shop for buying a sofa if you were interested in living room furniture. You had a basic understanding of the natural language. So you could actually now pick up maybe more intense. You could also do a reasonable multi-language deployment during this time. But it was very difficult to manage these solutions. This is where the rest of the stand-alone field are today. So you will come in and you will basically get basic routing. So I hear you have connectivity problems, I'll pass you to the technical team. So now you have a way to see what the customer wants, and you will route that customer to the right person. Generation 3 is where we are today. And the cases we're deploying right now are the ones you see at the top in the rounded box, what we call proactive support. So same type of issues. So dear Ms. Smith, I see you have missed a recent payment. So the system now already because Ms. Smith dialed in, has checked and sees that she has not paid her latest invoice. To avoid connectivity issues, let's process your payment right away by replying to this message. So Ms. Smith actually didn't even have to say that this was the case because the system is now integrated to the back-end systems. And this is very much enabled by the cloud platforms. There's scale, there's integration and there's advanced cognitive systems, so advanced artificial intelligence that we can utilize within the cloud ecosystem. So our prime competitors in the market today are Azure -- sorry, together with Azure is Google Cloud Dialogflow CX and AWS with their solution, which is called Amazon Lex, it's also called Amazon Connect. I see that it sort of disappeared on the slide here, we'll try to fix that. So there's 3 ecosystems you can choose from, and we are with the one that grows the most in the market today with Microsoft Azure. So when it's a large deployment, we do them together when it's complex like in this Generation 3. So that's the space that we're in. Some of the operational highlights from Q3 of this year. So we took 3 new solutions for existing customers live. That's quite important because our business model is that we get paid for the API calls that are consumed as the customer deploys conversations into the platform. So somebody places a phone call that typically uses that -- this is an average, but let's say as an average, that would drive 5 API calls in our platform. And the customer will pay, it happens to be $0.008. So actually, in Sweden money, the customer for one conversation on average would pay 40 öre or SEK 0.04. So when they go live, we get the revenue that we are looking for. And that's also why we now see with lots of customers live, I believe it's 12 customers -- 11 customers live in the new SaaS solution, we see that this drives now revenue, and that's why we can start making projections for the future. We also had a presentation in July of Telefónica's IVR solution, the one that they've done in Germany. Great presentation, which also you can find on our web page and on my LinkedIn. We also just recently won the Microsoft Swedish Independent Software Vendor Partner of the Year Award for 2022. This is quite important for us. It positions us in a very good light towards the integrators, which are our prime targets. So we go direct to our large enterprise customers that are targets, but we always have a partner with us because the partner stands to make a lot of professional services consulting revenue. And these partners tend to, of course, work more with the large ISVs. So the ones that we are now, the ones that have been recognized by Microsoft. So it's a very prestigious award for us. It's going to have a large impact for us again on how much we can work together with Microsoft. We also launched the SaaS version, so the Software-as-a-Service version of Teneo, which is the one that we put all new customers on and are migrating most old customers to. And now you can end-to-end encrypt your solution. This means that you can now use it in a highly regulated environment, such as the health care vendor that we also was -- has gone live during the quarter. This is very important also for some of the certifications which we will be coming out with towards the end of this year and the beginning of next year, which will enable us to many more implementations in the regulated industries. Of course, telco is highly regulated. Health care is a bit of a -- we do the business process side of health care, not health care specifically. And we also have now some banks, which are going to be able to move over to Software-as-a-Service platform. What we also saw was very high growth in the SaaS API call volumes. This is, of course, our prime driver. Remember that part of our revenue is what customers pay to use the software to build and then when their customers start to use the software, we get these API revenues. And the API revenues then are driven by the volume, and that was plus 1,508% year-over-year. So quite an aggressive growth in this. And we do perceive that this is going to keep growing. That's why we can now put new financial projections on the table as well. And our ARR, which is both the subscription and the API calls. So the API call volume is still a portion of that has gone up to 321% year-over-year. So this is a completely new model that we took to market last year, started deploying in June -- end of June of last year. And you can see already now the uptake in that model. And we're quite proud of this and really, really happy with this result. So fantastic job by R&D to put this into place and of course, by our partners to have the customers up and running at this pace. So with that, I'm going to leave it over to Mr. Torgren, our CFO.

Fredrik Torgren

executive
#2

Thank you, Per. Good. Just checking in that my voice is -- you can hear me? I presume, yes. So looking into a graphical illustration basically of SaaS API call volumes quarter-by-quarter and also the same for SaaS ARR. And I will not go much more deeper than Per already kind of mentioned. But we are, of course, very happy with the trend that we are seeing in the SaaS business and how our API call volumes are really scaling and ramping up. So very satisfying numbers that we see and continue to see going forward as well. So SaaS API call volumes up, as Per said, over 1,500% year-over-year, also increasing quarter-over-quarter, which is also important for us as a SaaS company that are planning to grow quite a bit going forward. And that also is the same case when it comes to SaaS ARR. So fantastic growth also year-over-year, 321% and then also quarter-by-quarter. And these are 2 key metrics that we are very closely monitoring and following and taking actions on. And of course, are aiming at really growing from this level as well. I think we'll go to the next slide, please. Looking then a bit kind of on our revenue model. So we have a high operating leverage in our revenue model. And we -- the graphical illustration, I think we already a year ago or even, I think, 18 months ago, we illustrated this in small and large customers. And this is also what we see materializing with our bigger customers that we see that we have the subscriptions coming in on a monthly basis. And where we also now have increased the pricing from EUR 7,500 and dollars up to EUR 10,000 and dollars for 5 seats. So that will also have an impact on our revenues going forward. But this is more -- I mean, the starting point when we bring in a customer. And then, of course, the key element for our kind of long-term success will, of course, be the more kind of variable part, which is linked to the API called volume ramp-up. And as an illustration, you can also see then that the more kind of dark blue part of the graph is also what we see in the big clients that are really ramping up as we speak and where we also expect them to continue to grow. So all in all, we can say that the reddish part, which is the subscriptions together with the API called volumes. Those are the key revenue type drivers for us going forward. Then we also have the third bucket, which is data, which is also part of the recurring revenues, but that's also a very kind of small part of the total revenue composition and that will also be the case going forward. Then we also have expert services, which is basically our customers' success team providing services to customers. And that we also kind of decided 2 years ago to take professional services out and just focus on becoming a pure software company. Every now and then, we also get some revenues on this part. But usually, we actually try to form professional services assignments to our external consultants. So sometimes we contract with the customer and then just get more or less a kind of pass-through margin on that sale. But that is not the key part of where we are steering the business. It's more on the recurring revenue pieces that we are focusing on. If we go to the next slide, please. Then this is quite a bit of a tricky graph. So I'll try to just kind of summarize that in the key elements. What we have done here is basically to try to illustrate 2 examples or 2 existing customers that we have on SaaS and also the scalability in the model, but also the impact on our gross margin as the API call volumes scale. And as you can see on the bottom part of the slide, you can see 11 million, which is the starting point for these 2 customers. So in July 2022, we have done the numbers on these 2 clients. And then we have assessed okay, what if the API call volumes increase 2x, 4x, 5x, 10x, 15x, 20x the current levels. These are actually, I mean, volumes that we think are likely or that there is a potential to actually get to this level with these clients. That's also why we are highlighting the potential in this way because what we also experienced is once we have the customers on our -- on the current levels in terms of API calls, we already now have, I mean, a gross margin of 80% to 85% of those clients. And when we then add extra volumes from API calls, we also see that the marginal effect is, I mean, 95%. So that basically means that, like the light turquoise line is showing, with increased volumes we also increased the gross margin quite a bit. So we are reaching 95% when we are actually reaching high API call volumes. So I think this is very much kind of the operational leverage that we see in our model and where we also see some of the large clients month by month increasing at a pace, which is really interesting and where we also want to guide a bit on what is actually the potential in terms of gross margin with high volume customers. I think we'll leave it for now there Per, and go to the next slide, please. Then just summarizing, I mean, the key financial highlights. I think we have mentioned quite a bit of them already. So -- but what we see is, of course, that we are very happy with our sales metrics. We continue to grow on all metrics, and especially our SaaS business is growing even more than our kind of non-SaaS business. And what we also see is that the SaaS business is increasing in importance for the company. And that's also, I mean, what we have set up since we started the transformation to go into a pure SaaS company 2 years ago. So it's -- yes, now we really see the proof points of what we have actually done the last 2 years. So the fact that we are also kind of increasing our recurring revenues as a percentage of total sales to 88% is also a kind of important metric in showcasing that we are a pure software -- SaaS software company. So the recurring revenues, they increased from -- to SEK 10.9 million in Q3 '22 versus SEK 8.6 million in Q3 '21. So up 27%. And this is, of course, very satisfying as this is one of our key KPIs. And also I mean, we have won a number of customers in 2021 and 2022 on the SaaS model. And now we also see that they are all starting to ramp up, and that is also kind of evidenced in the numbers that we are reporting. So I mean, as Per mentioned, I mean, SaaS ARR increased to SEK 23.6 million and up 321% versus Q3 2021. So yes, really happy about the numbers. We also see that the SaaS business is now bigger than the non-SaaS business. So SaaS recurring revenues amounted to 52% of total recurring revenues and also increasing from Q2 2022 as well. So we really have kind of the trajectories in our favor going forward. And we also expect this number to grow as we add more customers to the SaaS model and also increase the volumes on our bigger SaaS customers as well. We can also see then that net sales increased with 12% only. And this is also an effect of the fact that our SaaS business is growing, our recurring revenues are also growing at a higher pace. But then we also have from previous years, we also have the impact from professional services. And we also have some professional services in this quarter negatively impacting gross margins quite a bit, but it also showcases that we are actually switching to a pure software company and the kind of old professional services revenues have less and less impact on us overall. So very satisfied with that. And then we can also see that we continue to keep cost control. We are increasing OpEx somewhat, but we have also guided for this in previous reports, and our EBITDA in the quarter was minus SEK 20 million, up versus minus SEK 12.5 million last year. And as I also mentioned, in Q3, our gross margin was negatively impacted by some formed out professional services business. And I think the -- or the gross margin would actually have been 6 percentage points higher if we would have excluded the impact from this professional services form out sell basically. And we also had a strong cash position when we left Q3. We had a cash position of SEK 39 million, and we also received just one -- the week after closing of Q3 numbers, we also received the cash payment from one client, which adjusted then would have taken us to SEK 42 million end of September. So overall, very positive revenue trajectory and we keep growing our recurring revenues and also the SaaS ARR are growing in a steady pace, which is very much in line with what we have planned for in the company. Next slide, please. This slide, I will not go into details on this slide, but it's basically showing that we are growing the recurring revenues with 27% versus the same quarter last year, which is a very satisfying number. And the recurring revenues is the key metric for us together with the SaaS ARR, of course. So very happy about that. What we also see is that we are growing the recurring revenues when we also look on an LTM or a rolling 12-month basis, so increasing from SEK 29 million a year ago to SEK 37.5 million this quarter this year. And this is, of course, also kind of backward-looking numbers. And that also means if we then also compare with the note we have on this slide that our total ARR is actually SEK 45.1 million. And at the same time, we have also increased the SaaS ARR from SEK 5.6 million to SEK 23.6 million. So that basically means that we are growing at a steady pace and also looking forward and as we are growing our ARR will also continue to grow at a quicker pace than the LTM numbers. So overall, I think the ARR, SaaS ARR but also the total ARR is more interesting from an investor perspective in looking at our business. So very happy about the development on revenues basically. I think we can go to the next slide Per. Cost-wise we have guided for somewhat increased costs from Q2 onwards to Q3, and that we'll also see in the numbers. So what we are showcasing here is the annual OpEx run rate level, so increasing from SEK 134 million to SEK 136 million on -- excluding extraordinary items and so on. So this also means that if we then compare with the total ARR of SEK 45 million on the previous slide, we also see that we have a kind of cash gap, which will be required to fund with other sources of funding. But also when it comes to the cost increase, we see that it's fading off. It's not increasing close to how we are growing the revenues. The recurring revenue is 27% up, right. So that also means that we are closing as we grow -- closing the gap between cash in and cash out as we grow the revenues in a faster pace than our OpEx. And also, we, as a guidance for coming quarters, we also see that -- we expect the OpEx to flatten out from the Q3 level that we report now. And investments, I mean, is basically coming in areas such as marketing and sales together with, of course, R&D. So slightly increase in cost but very modest increase, I would say, going forward. Then we can also say that, as we also announced in the Q3 report today, we have also appointed a financial advisor where we are working together with the advisor in finding alternative financing for the company's growth ahead. So that is an ongoing work task that we are working on and very confident in also finding a good solution for. With that, I'm leaving over to you, Per, for some new financial targets.

Per Ottosson

executive
#3

Excellent. Thank you very much, Fredrik. So it's something that has been asked by me since I started here, but we haven't really had the confidence to understand the development of our revenue in our new model until now. So I'm very happy to be able to present these financial targets now in this investor call today. So 4 targets that we're setting. The first one is that we're going to have more than 1 billion API calls on an annualized rate during 2024. So somewhere in 2024, there's going to be a month where we pass -- were 12x that month gives us 1 billion API calls. Of course, you'll remember API calls are a prime driver of revenue as we grow. It's also the one with very high gross margin. As we approach these type of numbers we're well above 95%. And we also have a target to reach an ARR, so an annual recurring revenue over SEK 200 million in -- during 2025. So that lags a bit behind the SEK 1 billion, of course, since it takes a while for all those API calls to have effect in the ARR. We're also now saying that we will be cash flow positive from operations during 2024. I know that's quite key and something that's been a quite keen discussion when we've had investor calls and investor meetings, but we now know and see the path forward to being cash flow positive from operations in 2024. Also, we have the EBITDA margin or you could say, EBITA margin DA, but of course, we don't have any real depreciation since we're a software company, but it's going to be over 30% in the long term. So what you basically see now is that we are comfortable with our revenue growth without really adding a whole lot of new customers. So all of this is built on very conservative assumptions in terms of new customers. It has a lot to do with the growth that we see in existing customers and the potential to committing that growth. So very happy to present those. They are, of course, published as well on our website on the Investor pages. So some highlights summary from today. Artificial Solutions, we've been around for 20 years, which means we're a Generation 3 software in our industry. This industry is really taking off as we speak now. We're very happy, of course, that we have been funded during this whole period where we spent a lot of money to build this solution that we have today, but we have the foundational patents that are key in this industry and we really now are a prominent player since we have the largest references. We have the multimillion calls coming into a call center per month customers, and they're talking about our solution. And you see this with the 48% CAGR that Gartner is projecting. We're growing even more, and we intend to take more and more of that market, which is really an interesting and profitable market. So gross margins on fully onboarded customers when they reach those millions calls per month is 95%. We have very low production cost for additional API calls. Of course, that also means that we have cost upfront for the customer, but that needs to be recouped over time, which, of course, explains some of that cash flow negativity that we still see. We have a technology that's really made for enterprise solutions, and you see that we have blue chip customers in the key industries, the industries that have the most interaction with customers. Those are the ones that are our clients as well. So the quality of our offering in terms of providing something that's 40 öre per phone call is then what's the industry average, which is SEK 12 if somebody is going to pick up the phone. You see that between 40 öre and SEK 12 there's a huge difference in cost going back to the human approach. But there's also material switching costs, if you were to move from our platform to somebody else's platform and say, from Microsoft together with us to Google together with their Dialogflow platform, there would be a material switching cost. And with the types of costs that you now have if you're a fully onboarded customer per next phone call, per next chat, per the next iMessage, WhatsApp, there really is very little incentive to change unless there's a large strategic drive to do something else. We are today the main enterprise virtual assistant software in the Azure ecosystem. Azure -- Microsoft does have other virtual assistant software, which are then provided, for example, their, what I would call, Generation 1.5 software, which is part of also Office 365 and part of the Azure ecosystem. But together with us, now Azure also and Microsoft gets a massive reach in the enterprise segment because getting all this data onto the Azure platform is, of course, key for them. Now -- and customers also like to move this into Azure because they trust Microsoft. Microsoft does not compete with its customers, like, for example, Amazon does and Google has had a few incidents over the years where customers no longer really trust them with their important data. So we're in with the right supplier together with us in this industry. So very happy with today's report. Since we're doing this on teams, if you have a question at this point, you need to use the hand, which you see at top. So you can raise your hand by hitting that, and you'll see that my hand is waving here. And then when you click it again, it goes away, there will be a double-up mute. I will unmute you and then you will unmute yourself as well if you want to ask a question. So I'll go ahead and look for some hands here.

Per Ottosson

executive
#4

I see a hand from Forbes. I will now unmute you Forbes, and now you can unmute yourself as a 2-step approach here.

Forbes Goldman

analyst
#5

Great. Well, we can start with your SaaS ARR, which grew 18% quarter-over-quarter despite no new customers. So could you talk a little bit about what is driving this growth? And also why you are still at 13 SaaS customers? You haven't added any new ones in the past 2 quarters.

Per Ottosson

executive
#6

So that's correct. I'll start with the first one. So moving the customers over is something that goes along with the contract negotiations. So we are still negotiating for Q4 with at least 2 or 3 additional customers there. And then the others, it's just a question of priority inside the customer, except for one, which we still believe is not going to be moving over, but it's a question of prioritizing resources. So it will be some resources from the customer to change integrations. There's some integrations to other clouds that need to be done, and they need to have those project resources. I certainly overestimated -- or sorry, underestimated the complexity in that than I thought we would have done them all by now. They all want to. Nobody really wants to hug their servers and run it on site, but they're still doing that. So the other comment on the growth at the existing customers. So the way the customers build these out is they start with an area and maybe they start with a chat, maybe they start with the bots app, maybe they start with voice, but they always start in a smaller area. So the large tech company, for example, which we have over in the U.S., a large software company, they started their implementation on a piece where they sell to the public. So it was a sales support. And they just now, after the quarter moved into their core IVR. So their sort of main switchboards, to put it that way, in the U.S. And then they will spread that to other countries in Q1. But it is the pattern that customers keep growing month-over-month. Now obviously, not all customers grow every month. But as an aggregate, they keep growing month-over-month. And we're quite sure that, that's going to continue because we see, of course, the projects since we have governance meetings together with them with our customer success team. And we see that the projects are going to start -- they're going to keep delivering more and more on to us, API calls and to them value, of course, by the bot picking up the phone or picking up a message. So even though we didn't really add any new sets of customers, it's still -- it's growing same-store sales, as you would say, maybe in a financial setting.

Forbes Goldman

analyst
#7

Yes. All right. Let's see. So I have some questions on your financial target and especially the one regarding the ARR SEK 200 million by 2025. So I mean, in a previous presentation, you showed basically that 2 customers could potentially scale volumes by 20x. And I mean those 2 alone would get you to SEK 168 million. So I mean, should those achieve that, that target looks quite conservative actually because, I mean, you have 13 customers already. So one question is on that. And then the other is how many of your existing customers do you expect could scale that much?

Per Ottosson

executive
#8

So the -- when I say that we have confidence in providing financial targets is because the very negative people and the very positive people have been involved in doing it. And what we've done now is basically, we've taken the projections that we have customer by customer and cut them down quite a lot so that we have an aggregate, which we know we can stand behind. So this is -- these targets are really set for a conservative standpoint. Do we believe that only those 2 customers could grow to 20x? Yes. Is it probable that they do it within this time frame. We're not quite sure on that. We believe it is, but we're not quite sure. So that's how this target has been arrived at more than SEK 200 million ARR to have reached during 2025. I don't know if you want to comment more on that Fredrik, been quite engaged...

Fredrik Torgren

executive
#9

Yes. Yes. I mean, I think Per right in how he's describing it. But I think also, I mean, Per also showcased the kind of call center automation market as well. And if we then just, I mean, play a bit with the numbers there. I mean, what we see now is, of course, we have quite a bit of volumes already now in this so-called contact center market. So if you compare -- I think we showcased SEK 11.4 million in SaaS API call volume. So that basically translates into close to SEK 150 million on a run rate basis already there. And then we also, of course, have clients sitting on the kind of non-SaaS part which we, at some point in time, want to convert also into SaaS. So if you combine those things, I mean, we are pretty sure that we will be close to 10% to 15% of the market when we close the year. You can see here on this slide that it's actually showcasing SEK 2 billion as the total market and going down from 150-ish and then adding some growth on that and then also adding some non-SaaS customer volumes to that as well. Then you can also see, I mean, how the math hangs together. So of course, we also expect to grow our kind of API call stock, if you call it that, perhaps a bit Swedish in that sense. But that's our customer base that we are working with every day. So if we then would just compared with growing at a 48% CAGR over the years, you can also see that the numbers are adding. And of course, we want to -- as we perceive ourselves as one leading company in this industry, having 10% to 15% of the market, then obviously, we want to grow faster than the 48%. So I think that is the kind of key metric. That's why we are also highlighting the API calls so much because that is the revenue that actually will make the difference in our profitability long term as well. So that's a bit how we are playing also when we have set these targets. And of course, we also want to add new customers. So we're not saying we are not focusing on that. But we also see that there is a value in also working very closely in ramp -- continue to ramp up our existing customers. And we also have to spend less on marketing, which some of our competitors are spending quite a bit on and not really getting the volumes we have. So we have something which is quite unique, and that's also showcased in the financial targets.

Forbes Goldman

analyst
#10

Right. Thanks. And staying on that question for a little longer. I mean, should you manage to help one of your customers scale volumes by 20x, how many seats do you think this would require for the customer to build a very scalable solution? Because it seems like you're counting on around 5 seats for an average large customer in the standard scenario, but like a very large customer, how many seats should that be?

Fredrik Torgren

executive
#11

We are, of course, adding seats as customers grow. But I would say, I mean, overall, that's not really the main kind of addition into the profitability. So it's much more on the API call volumes. So I think if you look on the profile of the very, very large customers, I think you will see that API call volumes will continue to increase in proportion in the total revenues generated. So of course, we want to kind of -- or we expect the customers to add seats as they grow since it becomes more important for them and therefore, we also add seats in -- when we do assessments. Then let's see how many we will get.

Forbes Goldman

analyst
#12

Okay, great. Because I'm thinking that -- so if you take, for instance, 1 billion API calls against your existing what you're charging 8 öre, that's about SEK 80 million in recurring revenues. So I mean, to achieve the target of SEK 200 million in ARR, you would need to be well above 2 billion API calls. Am I onto something there?

Fredrik Torgren

executive
#13

Yes, I'm checking. Maybe we can come back on this one. I'll check here as we have the call here. I'll check the assumptions and then we can come back to that Forbes, if that's okay.

Per Ottosson

executive
#14

You're right about the API calls [indiscernible], but there's also -- there's a difference in timing there, right? So they continue to grow. We set the first target was when we hit the 1 billion, but then the revenue is the year after, right? So they're separated.

Forbes Goldman

analyst
#15

Yes. That's right. Well, a question to you Per. You've recruited a new head of sales in the EMEA region. Could you talk a little bit about your outlook for new sales in both EMEA and the U.S. for...

Per Ottosson

executive
#16

So in EMEA, we are primarily focused on expanding within the same company groups that we are in. That's the prime focus. So if we're in, let's say, Telefónica, then, of course, we're keen on getting into other parts of Telefónica. So that's one focus that we have there. And then we have the focus of taking some of the U.S. customers over to Europe. So it's a slightly different sales motion than we've been doing before, and it's very much together with the Microsoft partners, which are in Europe, it's CGI, Valcom, Ernst & Young and Tech Mahindra that we're working quite a lot with in Europe. So it's different motions than we've had before. And [ Patrick ] has come in to build a team around that, which is we go direct to the customer, but we work very closely with Microsoft and their partner that will be implementing the software. So our target is to do a lot -- do some more new customers in the U.S. in the coming quarters. So let's -- the U.S. will start to deliver already in Q4, whereas Europe in this new model is going probably deliver more in Q2 since the U.S. started in Q3. So there's a bit of a sales cycle there. But it's a different model from the one we had before. That's why we're building a new sales team.

Forbes Goldman

analyst
#17

All right. Well, thanks. I have no further questions except for what we were talking about previously.

Fredrik Torgren

executive
#18

Yes. So yes, I mean, perhaps not to guide too much, but I think if you think a bit about assumptions, you could potentially then -- which is also kind of rational in many ways, the more important the -- or the higher the volumes, the more important, of course, for the end customers, right? So what we are perhaps then thinking about, we don't know for sure yet. But then if we are just doing some assumptions then up to SEK 20 million we are assessing kind of 5 seats or more. Then for every extra SEK 5 million, we are adding 1 seat that is -- I mean, I think that, that is a reasonable guesstimate.

Per Ottosson

executive
#19

Any other questions? Any other hand raisers? I don't see any others right now. We'll wait another 30, 40 seconds. Okay. I think I'm going to go ahead and close out and just say, very happy with the development. We're now also seeing what growth in existing customers means to us and how that's going to be developing. So great also to be able to present financial targets finally that we're going to start delivering on. So thank you very much for your time, and I hope to see you next quarter.

Fredrik Torgren

executive
#20

Thank you.

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