Tern Plc (TERN.L) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary
January 7, 2026
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Tim Metcalfe
attendeeWell, good evening, everybody, and welcome to the Tern Investor Webinar. We've got quite a lot of people joining this evening. So if you can just bear with us a few moments while everybody joins, that would be much appreciated. Well, I can see the attendee ticker is starting to slow down, and it is now 5:30, so we will kick off. Well, good evening. My name is Tim Metcalfe. Welcome to the Tern Investor Webinar and Happy New Year. With me this evening, I've got Jane McCracken who's Chair of Tern; Al Sisto, CEO; and from Tern's portfolio companies, Jo Halliday from Talking Medicines; and Darron Antill from Device Authority. Jo and Darron are going to run you through presentations on their businesses and followed which we'll have a question-and-answer session. Those questions are both on the Talking Medicines and Device Authority businesses, and on Tern more generally. We'd all like to thank those who've taken the time to submit questions and comments ahead of the presentations. Really helpful. Hopefully, some of those will be addressed in the presentations themselves and comments that are made. Others, I will put to the team after the event. But also, we do welcome questions during the session. Q&A button at the bottom of your screen because there's too many people here to try and go to you individually and ask you to unmute. So please do use that Q&A button. If you've got any questions, type them in, and we'll put them to the team after the presentations. Everybody will try and be as open and honest as possible but recognizing there are commercial sensitivities and also things that public companies can't say. So without further ado, I'm going to hand over to Jo. Jo, please take us through your presentation.
Jo-Anne Halliday
attendeeCool. Thank you very much. So I will just share my presentation, so I'm just moving around a few things. And just checking that you can see the presentation.
Tim Metcalfe
attendeeYes, that's great, Jo. Thank you.
Jo-Anne Halliday
attendeePerfect. So thank you very much. Good evening to everybody here. I've spoken to some of you before. Delighted to be here again to give you an update on progress since we last spoke. And I'll be covering after the really tight focus that we've had this year and the results from 2025 and really how that heads into our outlook for 2026. So starting with a question, Talking Medicines, what if you could ensure that you could plan for every key message that is launched about a drug that you can actually tell whether it has an impact on physician, that's doctor behavior. Very simply put, Talking Medicines solves for the blind spot that exists between pharma companies who make the drugs and the doctors, physicians who prescribe them to patients. There's a sizable problem in the market in measuring the impact of messaging. And we at Talking Medicines have cracked the code on that. It's our unique ability to predict the impact of marketing messages to physicians through data intelligence. That's before the multimillion-dollar campaigns that educate on scientific campaigns launched and that's way before the static rearview analytics on drug shipment data kicks in to show what has and hasn't worked. And all of this is good news for patients. We at Talking Medicines passionately believe in patients. They need the right medicine, prescribed at the right time, in the right way, and they need their doctors to be able to drive that for better patient outcomes. So it's a big money problem. The U.S. pharma is actually a marketing operation. They spend $24 billion a year through their global health care agencies to influence doctors on accurate, persuasive scientific communication. It dwarfs the $4 billion that companies like Coca-Cola spend on marketing every year. But remembering this is deep scientific communication. Pharma relies on their global medical communication agencies to manage all of this messaging. There are a few, if any, real-world metrics that work at scale to assess whether that spend is actually influencing physician attitudes and behavior in near real time. So the agency marketeers are left to base success on anecdotal evidence. It could be a few focus groups with doctors or to react when [ SHARx ] pharma shipment data shows that there's an increase or a decline in prescriptions and they're left to work out why. So they're flying blind, and it's a situation that needs a solution. And Talking Medicines has it. We deliver real life, near real-time metrics on the impact of pharma messaging from the actual voice of the doctor to help agency marketeers understand the impact of messaging. And there's billions of dollars at stake for both the agencies and their pharma clients. Spend in this area is our sweet spot. This is where we get excited. It's a big market, and it's growing. Growth of $43 billion is predicted for messaging. So very, very sizable. But it isn't just about the volume, the amount, it's about what is changing, what is launching from a drug's perspective. And in 2025, the strongest concentration of launches has been in oncology, rare disease and metabolic conditions such as GLP-1s. This is a rich space for us at Talking Medicines with huge growth opportunity. These launches are categorized by targeted -- very tightly targeted patient populations, very complex clinical differentiation, which has to come across in the messaging I'm talking about and rapid approval of new indications and new combinations. At the same time as there's a change in the kind of medicines being launched, there's social and political pressure that includes a potential ban on U.S. TV direct-to-consumer advertising and it's accelerating the shift in spend away from mass market promotion towards accurate, credible medical communication to physicians. And as a result, marketeers are doubling down on the channels and the partners like us who can demonstrate scientific precision, relevance and trust. This combination of high science launch plus constrained promotional routes is reshaping the landscape for our agencies. And there's a new type of medical communication agency that's emerging. They're AI, they're data first and they're often private equity backed. They're built to support these precision launches rather than winning creative awards. And what we've done in 2025 is deliberately aligned ourself to this shift. We've doubled down on supporting the next-generation medical communication agencies and their pharma clients by enabling them to understand, target and, most importantly, evidence how physicians actually engage. And that focus from 2025 is already translating into measurable commercial impact. So let me give you an example on how modern medicine needs real-life intelligence. Using publicly sourced data, we can see that Novo invested nearly $10 billion to bring GLP-1 Ozempic to market. They aimed squarely at what they thought was then an $88 billion diabetes space. But the kicker was they didn't just launch a diabetes drug. They inadvertently unlocked a phenomenon that became the $150 billion weight loss market. Did they see it coming? Not quickly enough. In today's tech-forward world, patient demand and physician prescribing isn't just shaped by the traditional channels. It's fueled by real-world conversations with precious clues but they're a messy, very unstructured, very human data, and it's hard to decode it. But the financial cost of not protecting the market was high. You can see the figures, letting competitors in before they got to their peak market cap. So let me walk you through our sweet spot. This again is where we get excited. Our addressable market is the MedComms agency. Our total addressable market, the $24 billion I've spoken about, when we narrow this down to the market that Talking Medicines can serve today, specifically the U.S. independent MedComms agencies, we get to a $2.1 billion segment. This part of the market is growing fastest, huge growth, driven by the ambitious PE-backed agencies I've just spoken about who are winning against the slower holding company giants. Our serviceable obtainable market is to target 500 of the MedComms agencies in the U.S. The firms have got capital, growth pressure and a strong need for differentiated physician intelligence. They're data driven. They invest in AI, and they're growing fast. This positioning also aligns us to adjacent segments that potentially the health care agencies handle, particularly around the insurance market, so we can see where the next markets come from this. So it's a clear, credible path for us on obtainable revenue is focused, is winnable and it has strong structural growth around it. A core part of our competitive advantage is that our technology is defensible. Our capability is protected by 2 pending patents. Our first covers the methodology for evaluating drug safety and efficacy using real-world nonclinical health data combined with advanced data science, the kind of data that I've spoken about, the very human data. Our second patent protects the novel approach for identifying behavioral and interaction patterns between people and medicines. Again, really, really important that we're using that real-life data alongside our AI techniques. The patents, combined with our proprietary data assets that includes our in-house training data, plus our domain and trained models creates a really strong moat around our technology and forms the foundation for our defensibility as we scale. So what about competition from LLMs? Generalized AI models are not optimized for pharma. Hallucinations from GenAI cannot be tolerated in health care. The language of science and drugs is too technical. The context is too nuanced and the regulatory environment requires an accuracy and a precision that generic LLMs are just not built for. Talking Medicines takes a very different approach, and we've really advanced this in 2025, moving the branding of our platform to DrugVoice to differentiate away from AI and GPTs-only solutions. We curate real-life conversations from physicians through health-trained data science models to feed our natural language interface. We calculate what we call the Message Resonance Score. It's a single metric that we've developed this year that quantifies how strongly a scientific message is likely to influence physician behavior. The value of this is very practical. We show how messages land by therapeutic area. We've got lots of experience working across cardiology, oncology, immunology and rare, which is in high demand in terms of rare drugs, and we can do that by communicator type or specific brand names. And this gives our MedComms customers very clear evidence-based guidance on how to optimize their scientific communications. I'm going to give it and bring this to life with a use case from a recent client, a major MedComms agency came to us with a problem from one of their clients, a top 10 pharma. They launched a new scientific message, heavily data-rich, and they were expecting an uplift in prescriptions after a major congress, but it didn't happen. Despite strong creative, strong planning, strong execution and really strong early indications in what we would call vanity metrics where people were saying, actually, this is going to really change the prescribing environment, the scripts didn't move. There wasn't any change in terms of prescribing. So they asked us at Talking Medicines to figure out why. Using the voice of physicians in peer-to-peer conversations where doctors are speaking to each other. They provided us unstructured source data. Some of it was from closed communities with permissions, some of it was from congress discussions, and they also gave us the messaging that they wanted to test against. Our role is to use our models to isolate how the message was landing in real physician conversations and understand where the resonance is breaking down to identify what was blocking behavioral change across physicians, but more importantly, for specific personas, we're able to work out where the clusters are between physicians so that we can really, really drill deeply into what, why and how. And what we uncovered and the uplift that followed shows exactly why message resonance matters are positive for us. We've retained the agency, a positive for them, they've retained the pharma as a client. Again, another example from a recent quote from one of our customers that they put into the public domain or LinkedIn, their quote about us, what has been powerful about working with Talking Medicines is the ability to move beyond surface-level metrics and really understand how scientific messaging is landing with health care professionals in real life. That level of intelligence helps us make more confidence, evidence level-led decisions for our clients, and that's come directly from one of our current customers, which was great to see. So I've talked a bit about customers. Why are they excited? What is it that they're buying into? And into this disrupted space, we're creating a category for predictive intelligence in pharma marketing. We've developed, as you've just heard, and we own Message Resonance Score. The Message Resonance Score has a very clear value proposition to our customers. They can predict resonance before campaigns. They can measure how behavior changes during campaigns. They can compare impact to baselines that they can set from external messaging, from regulatory sources or from internal metrics. And most importantly, they can explain why behaviors have changed. And we have the natural language questions built into our platform, DrugVoice, so that they can ask questions of safe, curated data, no leakage to the web, no training from the web and very private data vaults, which adhere to all of the standards that are needed in this sector. And that's how we've created this predictive intelligence for pharma marketing. Today's alternatives, what's out there that they could use or have been using don't measure resonance in scientific messages to physicians. Prescribing analytics are kind of the bedrock of the industry. It's so important to them to report shipment data, but it does not give them the why. Doesn't say why behavior changes, and it is a rearview mirror. It's weeks, months after prescriptions have been made. Social listening is kind of where clients have been in the past. It has a different role. It doesn't have domain-trained models. It doesn't interpret messages at the level of diseases, drugs and authors, and it doesn't offer a predictive view on resonance. So it does not play the same role as we do. And conversational intelligence platforms has lots of chat about. But again, they have a very different use case. They rely on generic models. They are limited to chatbot Q&A, the Q&A that patients and doctors are asking, and they have a narrow clinical framework that they're trained to. So again, very, very different. So in short, none of these tools can tell you whether a scientific message will resonate with a physician and none can explain why. We've built Talking Medicines with a mix of expertise in the market that's needed, marketing, life sciences, data science and product innovation. We have to be able to rinse and repeat for our customers. To update you here tonight, more recently, we've launched TMLabs. This separates out our [Technical Difficulty] and we've grown our models with training data for ourselves. We don't use customer data and that drives our natural language processing, machine learning and predictive intelligence. Really, really importantly, this separates the issue that the data vaults are protected and private, which in the pharma sector is so, so important. TMLabs also [Technical Difficulty] opportunity to get into ongoing scientific publications and to have a role at the front of thought leadership. We also collaborate with leading academic institutions to stay at the front of the science and the technical development. Scotland is currently a hotbed for AI infrastructure investment, and that's led to real centers of excellence, particularly around the universities and a very highly skilled talent pool, which really helps us in terms of building our resource around TMLabs. We're gaining good traction across top global MedComms networks, and that includes some of the largest in the world with repeatable revenue opportunities in play. Our data partnerships are an important part of the equation, relationships with the likes of Sermo and Socialgist that we've spoken about in previous presentations continue to grow to remove sales friction in sourcing high-quality real-world conversations for our customers. If our customers don't have a lot of first-party data that they can bring to the party, they want to look to public sources. So it's important for us to have those relationships in play, and they've been growing over time. And importantly, the U.S. market recognizes our fit. In 2025, the team won a place in the Silicon Valley MarketBooster Programme, spending time in California, really building our presence, which has continued and deepened our relationships and opportunities on the West Coast of the U.S., alongside our existing base that we've spoken about before on the East. Our agency and pharma customers increasingly, when we sit in meetings, we have people from London, from San Francisco and from New York. And it's so important that we have an ability to have impact in all of those bases. And they're all important in our plans in terms of West and East Coast whilst most of our customers are working out of Manhattan. So as I close and look ahead to 2026, this is our year, we see it full of evangelism. It's a year we take this category leadership in predictive intelligence to the MedComms world with conviction. Our focus is twofold, to scale with the customers that we've already successfully onboarded in 2025. And to win new relationships with these growing MedComms agencies that recognize the precision that is needed in MedComms and that becomes their commercial advantage. 2026 will already be and I'm sure you'll hear it from so many different sources, the defining moment for AI and particularly AI in health care. Last year, 2025 was all about experimentation. Now that's moved to a clear-eyed understanding of what matters. And what matters in health care is deep domain expertise. Protecting against hallucinations and inaccuracy and the ability to measure impact. Crucially, agencies can't just assess planned communications, the ones that they planned through. You heard that earlier in the Ozempic story. Companies and agencies in pharma have got to understand what physicians and patients are actually reading, what are they trusting and what are they acting on, to reduce the risk and prevent misinformation from shaping clinical decision-making. Recent press on our own doorstep here showed that 1 in 4 doctors is already using LLMs in their work. It's so important to be able to work out what is actually out there and measure the resonance to planned messaging. We start our thought leadership next week at JPM in San Francisco, where the industry comes together to really set the direction, particularly from a pharma and drug launch perspective. We've got many, many meetings set up with key players and a chance to be at the table in the industry at such an interesting time. And we're building on the actions that we really took during 2025, converting them into momentum for 2026. So we're entering the year from a position of strength. We onboarded new global clients in December that we were delighted about, and we're really validating that out through our proposition and our execution. This year, 2026 is about expansion of our U.S. customer base, scaling DrugVoice, our platform, and specifically Message Resonance Score with commercial traction, powering our domain expertise and insight that you've heard TMLabs is really firing up. This momentum positions us to really move into being embedded as a repeatable value for our customers. And in terms of what's up next, that growth in turn will lead to increased U.S. presence on the ground, ensuring we can service the demand that we are creating. I spoke about thought leadership and the growing reputations. We want that demand generation to really drive our uptick, and we're really building on that already. So to answer our original question, how you can ensure that every message from your blockbuster drug has the desired impact on physician behavior. You basically measure it with Message Resonance Score for predictive intelligence. So we're entering 2026 with a lot of confidence, a lot of focus, and our strong start is already underway. So thank you for listening to my update. I'm going to stop sharing, and I believe, hand over to Darron from Device Authority.
Darron Antill
attendeeThank you, Jo. A wonderful presentation. Just checking that everyone can hear me, Tim?
Tim Metcalfe
attendeeYes, we can, Darron. Thank you.
Darron Antill
attendeeLet me screen share. Give me a second. Okay, well, good to go, I think. Fabulous. Thank you, Jo. Appreciate the introduction. So I guess I've done a few of these before, so I know probably some of you and you've heard from me before, but hopefully, today's update is a bit of news insightful to you and shows you some of the progress we've made as a company. But for those who don't know, I guess, so much about us, I'll try not to repeat what I've said before, but I just wanted to give you, I guess, a perspective of us as a company, what we do, where we operate. By way of, I guess, just recognizing Tern inviting me today to do this, firstly, thank you very much. Tern continues to be one of our key leading investors in the company. And whether you know or not, but we have other investors in the company alongside Tern, with Ten Eleven, a cybersecurity fund based out of North America, and Alsop Louie that has been with us in the early -- in the very early days when -- well, indeed, Al and myself in Tern put a company together with 2 technology companies, one of them being formed originally by Alsop Louie. And of course, CyberArk who acquired Venafi, you saw that big market play last year. Venafi invested in the company. We know CyberArk is an active investor, and I'll talk a bit more about that partnership as we go. And Victor Charlie, who rebranded and changed its name from Mercato last year. So for the benefit of people who might have seen that name before, that's just purely a company change. Also came alongside Ten Eleven just over 2 years ago. So let me just jump in a bit more in terms of where we're at. Now questions come up all the time. I actually saw one which I thought I'll answer this straight out of the gate. But Gartner is an industry-leading analyst. So hopefully, everyone's heard of Gartner, if you haven't, they typically are the leader alongside Forrester. But if you look at the identity space, the area we operate, it is a very broad market and is evolving quite quickly and is being segmented. And this is a taxonomy. Think of it really as a way that Gartner tries to define and segment the market. The red circle bit is the bit that we do. We grew up from really working with helping people manage or onboarding devices and then managing the security credentials and through the life cycle of those devices. We're very much their OT or IoT devices. And so that market is now called out separately by Gartner. It's an ever-evolving and growing piece. It's also deemed by the industry analysts as a subsegment of the machine identity. So often you hear things like human, us and how our identities are managed in the enterprise or how our identities are managed on servers, laptops, et cetera, and there's been many a company that have dealt with that challenge. But when you look at machine identities, that really is rapidly growing and includes AI identities as effectively as part of that. So think of human and nonhuman and machine is a big segment or a key segment within the nonhuman space. And within that, you have OT and IoT. So I just want to give you a picture. This is what Gartner, the industry analyst, this is what a number of the large strategic vendors look at and how they think about their business and how they look to increase or develop their strategy. And it's also often how end enterprise customers refer to the market. By way of just touching on some of the metrics around Device Authority because I think, again, really important. And I will touch on the device counter that we have on our website, what that means, right at the end of the presentation. So not to jump straight into that. But just a couple of key metrics. When customers engage with us, we do save them significant money specifically around automation and replacing human activity that, frankly, they either don't have the skills or they can't scale the skills to manage these OT and IoT devices. So that's -- so the ROI is compelling once they scale to production. We operate a number across -- sorry, a number of countries, nearly 60 now. So this number comes from because we can see where the devices are operated by clients in their enterprises, in which parts of the world, which countries. So why am I telling you that because it's got global scale, it's got breadth and depth in the terms of the way the product is managed and deployed by clients as well. And we have delivered a significant number of keys and provisioned a number of keys on devices. And again, I'll talk about that a bit more later and why that's important. So scalability is important. The customers buy into you because you've got scale, robustness. And frankly, we take away a large amount of complexity that becomes very difficult to manage on a global basis. If I just talk to some of the shifts in the market, and I think this information is publicly available and is from Microsoft and SailPoint and others. But I thought I would just share some of the drivers we're seeing. And I thought it's quite compelling where people are talking about compliance issues tied to machine identities. So I think people have got a lot of the human identity areas locked down, albeit some of those have been very visible in the last couple of years and have caused significant data breaches or company breaches that have been well reported. But machine identities now is acknowledged as a real critical area that needs to be addressed. Organizations don't have it solved and they have to. 50% of organizations have reported now security incidents or breach that's been compromised around identities in the last year. And what's really important is 81% of security leaders, so CISOs or CIOs, Chief Product Security Officers, all now believe securing machine identity is vital when it comes to having to deal with AI. And we don't just mean securing AI, we mean using AI. So it's a combination of both. So it's a real challenge for companies. So the landscape and the complexity of managing these potential identity of cost of spectrum is becoming really important. And what's good is what we've always done and focused on our biggest value to clients is around automation. And machine identity automation is an ever-evolving complex piece that people are having to get their heads around. So there is a gap, and we can help solve that. So again, our partnerships that we'll talk about a bit later become ever increasingly important. So you've seen this slide before, but the reason I put this in because people talk about identities and I gave you the view earlier that Gartner showed. But if you then look at, okay, well, how do organizations break this down? Or how does some of the other cybersecurity vendors break this down? You've got people on the left. You've got developers in the middle. It's evolving to workloads from machines and bots and other interesting aspects. But the right-hand side is the piece that Device Authority takes care of. It's all about that subsegment of the machine identity. And I'll share that with you, so you understand the spectrum. There are different solutions for the other areas, many that we have to integrate with and many of that clients look to, and this really is a view that many clients look at and break up their workforce or their workloads and then look at how they buy into solutions or vendors that are helping them solve this problem. If you then boil that down to 3 areas, and I talked about the subsegment, the complexity goes up to the right. The volume goes up to the right. And so people haven't figured this out yet, and it's one of the areas that they absolutely need to do in terms of through that forward-looking lens. And I think we're well positioned, and we have exactly the right partnerships to make the most of this. And you can see, as I've talked about, the complexity volume goes up, but therefore, so does the potential for human error. So how do you remove human error, especially when it's at scale across all those countries, across different device, multiple device types, difficult cycles in terms of how you manage those devices, and I'll talk to that a bit more in a minute. How do you do that when you've got humans? You can't. You absolutely can't, so you need to buy an automation platform. So if you then take a step back, and I'll try not to make this slide too busy, but think of the key market drivers. I've touched about before, you've got a complex attack surface that is growing and has more complexity being brought to you by IoT devices. And in many cases, these aren't just new devices. We have customers who are building us into new but we also have customers who actually have the same problem in the field already, and that's referred to as brownfield. So how do you deal with your existing legacy devices and your new devices. There's a operational burden. People talk about certificate management that often gets referred to on that counter that I talked to. But it's costly, it's error-prone. We see clients buying devices without certificates. We see clients having devices with certs that expire, and they didn't know. Then once they expire, how do they manage it. So -- and then you've got regulatory compliance. And why I would say since the last time I did this, and it feels like every 3 to 6 months, the crank definitely is turning up in terms of people, customers who are now talking about, the Cyber Resilience Act, for example, it's very much an EU driven initiative. That comes up more and more and more every month now than it did 12 months or so ago. So compliance is a big driver forcing organizations to take note. You've got new frameworks like NIS2 and others, and the NIST framework, but compliance is a big driver, and we take note of it, and it's really important that we align ourselves to that as much as possible. So then you refer to our solution. We talked about coming out of the discovery tool, I think, early last year. Discovery is important, but a tool isn't good enough. People want to understand what devices they have out there, either that are managed by KeyScaler, for example, or there are other platforms or that are unmanaged. It's the unmanaged threat that is often the biggest threat to these organizations. So how can we help people discover what they've got? How can we help people use our discovery tool into other discovery tools that they've got? So plumbing into other discovery options is really important to provide that holistic view for life cycle and life cycle management. The reason that becomes really important, by the way, is we all use iPhones. We have laptops. We use, whatever it is, 3 to 5 years, people probably change their iPhone less than that. But devices are typically deployed for 10, 20 or 30 years. Some never come back. They have to be managed and compliance is driving that as a significant factor. And now I'll just touch on this reflecting on what Jo has talked about, how people gain insights from the device. They don't just want to connect devices. They want to be able to manage them. Either save money and do it efficiently or provide better service that could be maintenance or warranty based, but it's actually to get insights and get AI-driven insights from that information they could share and build new business models. And that's becoming really important. And so how you tap into people's frameworks or regulatory requirements around AI is also becoming important. So when you look at our -- boil that down to it's our value, it's reducing risk, lowering their costs back to that human element and making sure people have got compliance readiness. And the compliance readiness is the important extension of what we're looking to address. That makes our value higher stakes conversation with C-level people in the organization. We're seeing that for real. That's what the industry analysts are demanding and guiding and helping people with. So it's really important that we align ourselves. So if you look at our platform, and one thing I would say, we are building and have built a software platform. We continue to evolve. We are a software solution, really important that we do multiple things. You do not want to do just point solutions. Going back to my Gartner analysis, it's very -- and I think I've shared this, it might have been last year or the year before. But if you go back a few years ago, people were buying 50 or so of cybersecurity solutions across the enterprise to solve mainly the human and the server side. Now you got this machine spectrum. And now people have rapidly increased and they look at -- they're buying 85 solutions, which is far too many. So people want to buy into a platform, platforms that interconnect, interoperate, and Gartner is indicating to large enterprises, they need to get that 85 down to 15 to 20 to be able to manage that complex landscape that's going to include the machine identities piece that I talked about before. So the depth of what we offer in our platform is really important. The road map in terms of how we're looking to build that out to include visualization and AI capability, again, really important. And we continue to build on the patents that we've had for a number of years as a company. So think of it as a software platform. It's got breadth, it's got depth, but it does a number of things. And I think that's really important, and you'll see more of that. So how we help people transform their OT, IoT into actual insights is important. How we reduce mundane, manual and costly and error-prone is really important. And we have evidence to show that. Helping people identify and discover is becoming increasingly important and tapping that into the life cycle that we've always been good at is ever important. But making sure we align with significant compliance standards is becoming really important. And then the fourth point really here is giving people the readiness and the ability to deploy zero trust for OT and IoT. So that compliance readiness is important. They need to have visibility and have the ability to tick or some form of scoring that forms into their current dashboard. I mean I've had people say to me, the last thing I want is another visualization platform and another dashboard. It must plumb in. And if you talk to some of our partners like CyberArk and Entrust and others and indeed Microsoft, they're all talking about that compliance readiness and having that compliance framework, and we need to interoperate very much with them, which is great news because we've already done that work. And then finally, how you integrate. Integrate is key. People won't be able to consolidate down from those 85 to 15 platforms, if you can't integrate. And companies, end companies, enterprise users of our software do not choose you unless you can integrate into their cloud platform, into their IoT or OT application or their certificate providers such as DigiCert or Sectigo as others. So they're making multiple decisions to build a complex solution that has longevity and we need to be part of that. So integration is key. So here's an example. I touched on some of those names. But this is really a cloud example. So we have a SaaS cloud platform that people can consume for us and pay as they go, pay as they grow on a monthly, annually basis, and we have clients who do that. And typically, it's really important that we integrate into an enterprise application. It's not just about Microsoft. It's often in industrial world, it's about PTC. And you've probably seen recently, PTC has sold off its IoT application ThingWorx into a separate company that's had new financial backing, which I think is great news, so that they can really drive that market hard. And also, they want to be able to plumb and integrate to their identities of how they manage users. So you've got people like CyberArk and BeyondTrust who have got privileged users who typically have managed password, security vaults, secrets, people, et cetera. But now those people want the ability to tap into the OT world, where they have privilege access to make changes and be able to provide security governance into those devices. And we are the answer to that, and it's really important that we can provide the plumbing to allow that to happen. So this just gives you a visual picture of how we do that. So this is a complex picture deliberately, because I wanted to show you, it's a platform we're building. And some of the new pieces that you'll see come out around the compliance piece that very much involved KeyScaler AI tapping in or integrating into people's Copilots, again, really important. The core piece in the middle, you've seen before where we do KMS solutions, identity provisioning, private PKI, public PKI, PAM now is a regular thing I just touched on before with BeyondTrust and CyberArk. But having the ability to build a platform where people can then buy our software, they can buy the core piece in the middle or they can buy an extension, which will be an additional revenue stream as we go into next year for the AI piece. But it's critical that we also plumb into people's existing cloud services, and they want to use their existing visualization. So for example, our leading client has already invested in Splunk and Splunk visualization. But what we're looking to do is to make sure they have our software on-premise in this example, but we plumb into their visualizations and they can see the value that Device Authority's KeyScaler does in their factories. And we can see that the tens of millions of identities that we are managing on the devices that they are shipping out to their automotive supply chain, to give you an example. So visualization is key. Integration is key and us building a platform is key. So on that point, and this is a slide I wanted to share with you, so -- and I would refer, this does not get external distribution. But this is a Microsoft internal slide that talks about how Microsoft deals with its manufacturing sector, which is over half of its business, it focused -- it has a focused industry go-to-market and teams, including delivery teams, and you can see here how operation partners are really important to working with Azure. You can see how systems integrated are important, and some of those are very important to us already from the relationship we have with Microsoft, such as Accenture. But you can also now see how they're thinking about how managing OT and IoT is also very important. And Device Authority is called out as one of the key partners and you can see other people on the right-hand side and CyberArk, clearly a great partner of ours. And actually, we took them with us to this conversation with Microsoft. And this becomes an integrated go-to-market. And this is how Microsoft effectively deploys it and looks to engage and work with their existing clients. So very exciting for us. Very important to be part of it, and we shouldn't underestimate how hard it is to get into this because we've got a very capable product that integrates like I showed you before. So where does our roadmap go? And I've talked about discovery, and we've done the automation as a key. So the middle piece is what we've been very good at. But the enhancing pieces and the new pieces around compliance and visualization, we'll be able to charge extra for our new licenses for. And we -- it just gives you a bit of a snapshot there of like a remediation dashboard where we can score people's devices in line with their trust score. Can they trust them or can they not trust them? And if they can't trust them, what do they do? How do they automate the reprovisioning those devices? How do they block those devices? What criteria goes into being trusted? So for example, does it have DigiCert certificates on that or some other certificate that isn't part of their corporate policy. We'll be able to discover that, provide that evidence for both managed by KeyScaler and in the future unmanaged by KeyScaler. And of course, we will be encouraging clients as much as possible so that they start focusing on a complete managed suite. But at least they can see the risk by having visibility of the unmanaged devices and then how do they really tighten that up and make sure they've got the right platform in place. But the really important thing, again, is how we then tie in and work with the existing providers. So just to touch on clients. I know people always are interested in this. So medical is a big sector for us. Automotive and transport, big sector. Industrial IoT, and I think that's going to be further amplified with the reinvigorated Microsoft strategy, which we're part of, which is great. And we have initiatives working with government based in North America. But just to touch on like GE Healthcare. So GE Healthcare, we've been working with for a couple of years. And that's a great example where they evaluated the market and looked at best-of-breed IoT applications. And they, after years of review, decided to build their own. So they've been working on a project now to build their own IoT application, then they needed an IoT security operation platform to connect to that, which they decided after several reviews externally, they chose us. They then run a POC and then a pilot for 2 years. And they have multiple product divisions and they are now finally. And just over Christmas, we saw it, they finally have started populating into their platform, medical devices that are in production out in the field with their clients. So I share that partly to the decisions they have to take, but the journey but also at the time, and they -- so they now have one platform, one solution we're baked in. This ties back to one of the stats we talked about earlier, retention and net retention and now they're going to start to grow and scale as they add in production devices, which is fantastic news. And it's great that we're seeing other organizations like. So for example, only recently, we've been selected by Tata Motors Commercial Vehicle. They are now baking into their pilot. They're going to run for a year and then they are looking to scale to hundreds of thousands of cars after year 1 consecutively from years 2, 3, 4, 5 onwards. So hard fights to win. We've got great technology. We've got large global scale enterprises, and they scale over time, and these all become very significant contracts. So I just thought I'd share -- to give you some of the insight and to some of the background of those. They often are quick wins, but they also don't scale as quickly, but when they do, they really scale and very hard to be substituted effectively. So the go-to-market is evolving. The primary sectors for us remain the same, but I just wanted to touch on the MSPs, some areas that we invested in last year. We now have 4 MSPs in North America that we've signed up that we were working with in addition to someone like Optiv, for example. But in addition to that, we're working very closely with people like Accenture and Avanade, partly because of the Microsoft relationship, but in Europe, also really because of the value we bring, especially to the energy sector around some of the OT plays and some of the existing clients who have already got where they're looking to rinse and repeat that. So MSPs are important, so are the IoT applications. Identity partners like CyberArk and Entrust, I've already had an introduction meeting with CyberArk's new acquirer Palo Alto. So just think about that. Palo Alto has acquired a massive company in CyberArk, not just to breed its network capabilities, but now it's got its identity spectrum, and they acquired Venafi for its machine identities. And they've invested in us for our OT, IoT. So there's a whole spectrum working with these partners that we look to deal with identity partners, and we must continue that because I think there will be massive markets consolidation, driven by customers and what Gartner want customers to do and by the market itself. And you've probably seen that just recently over the Christmas break when you see the acquisition of Armis, for example. And co-selling is also really important. So I don't want to downplay our relationship with Microsoft. In fact, I absolutely want to up-play it because playing with the key vendors and having the ability to co-sell and being able to influence customer spend on Microsoft is really important, and they get credit for Device Authority if they go through their co-sell agreement with Device Authority, so that again, is great news. And I touched on the device drivers, so I wouldn't repeat. But I just wanted to say, this is similar to what we've had before, but it's evolving, and it's really important that we stick to it. Okay. And then just moving on to my last piece. So -- and I guess I just wanted to -- there's been some confusion, I know this is an important area that I know some of the Tern investors are keen to track and observe. And we put this up on our website really because clients expressed an interest, but also so do some of our strategic partners. And it's actually very valuable to us. But what does it show? It does not show in total, the number of devices that connect. So it can't be directly related to revenue, and it can't be direct related to a number of devices, but it does include the number of devices into our actions. People use our software really at a holistic level in 2 big scenarios. They either are connecting devices that are doing a number of transactions. They could be deprovisioning. I use my GE example. They're adding in new devices. In their examples, they want to be able to ping the service all the time and always retest the identification and the quality of that and the security of that on a very regular basis. In other examples, people don't. So when it's regularly, the transaction counts go up. So that's a good example. And when they're testing through a weekend as they were doing through the autumn period, specifically around Thanksgiving, the numbers shut up because they were doing rigorous testing before they went live with their production. So these type of things get counted. So I just -- so the other area is when people insert our technology in their manufacturing process in their facility. That isn't cloud-based, that's on-premise in the cloud. They report some of that information to us and we get to see the number of devices that they are using our software to provision and deprovision identities that they are selling out to their supply chain to other Tier 1 manufacturers, for example. So we are adding that data to try and show the scale and again, the depth and the type of things that people are doing with our product. So that's what it shows. So apologies if that's been misguided. We've tightened up the language. We are going to regularly try and keep this up to date on a monthly basis. It has various sources where the information comes to. But hopefully, that helps people understand that a bit more. So on that point, Tim, I have finished and hopefully, not used up too much of your time. Thank you very much.
Tim Metcalfe
attendeeWell, thank you very much, Darron. Great presentation, as always, and thank you very much, Jo, for your presentation. We've had various questions coming through. I think best to do them in the order of the presentations, Jo first and Darron and then the more sort of general Tern questions. So Jo, if you don't mind, I've had a number of questions around the revenue model. And the focus at the moment being on global medical communications agencies, what 1 or 2 people have been struggling to understand, me included, is how those agencies actually monetize what they're paying you. So how -- what's their relationship with their clients? Why should they spend money? Running a PR agency, I spend money on data sources, but to give a good service to a client, you try and minimize it to maximize your margin. How does it work in your business?
Jo-Anne Halliday
attendeeNo, it's a really good question. And we've really got 2 camps. So as I try to really make the point that, a, the pharma companies outsource their messaging. It's so regulated, it's so deep in science, it needs that level of kind of management around it. So the agencies are in the driving seat. They are generally retained and they're generally agencies of record. Agencies are very, very keen to keep their clients quite understandably. So they may invest in our services themselves and pay for it themselves. Now as you say, agencies are lean, they're hungry, but they know they need to be the best. So we have examples where agencies will build a vault for cardiovascular. They'll build a vault for immunology because they want to be on top of watching effectively what the real-world conversation is and how the resonance is changing. So that's one example, pay themselves. The other is they pass it on to their clients. Within the $24 billion that's spent, there are large budgets. We are a line item in that budget. And effectively, they are passing it on to pharma. We get pulled in, we get named. So we have full transparency. We generally fill in the pharma procurement forms as well. So they're very aware that we're in the mix. But we are a line item, and we know because we've done it multiple times that pharma will pay for our service. So there's 2 ways to do it. The advantage for the agency is they keep the client. Every time the resonance changes, they're changing their strategy. So there's a nice virtuous circle in embedding. The other very quick thing for me to add, build or buy. Should they build it themselves, should they buy from us? If they build it themselves, they need to be product experts. Agencies are not product orientated, they're service orientation. They don't have the models that we've developed over a number of years, and they don't have that ability to be able to rinse and repeat. So it is a really, really interesting one. And you do have to get your head around why do we do it that way, but it is absolutely the right thing to be doing.
Tim Metcalfe
attendeeNo, that makes a lot of sense. And I think it's the -- it's not obvious how the structure of the industry works. And I think it's very different, obviously, in pharma than many other areas, if not most other areas. So thank you for that. I had another question. You mentioned patents in your presentation. The questioner says he believes that one of those patents have been pending in the U.K. for 5 years. Is that of any concern? Or is it normal to have patent pending for that long?
Jo-Anne Halliday
attendeeYes. No, we have chosen the way we are progressing our patents through and particularly into the U.S. So no, we are absolutely managing our time lines and the way that we do it. Everybody knows that patents have their own life stages and the importance to us, as you all know, again, you splatter your patents to get the bit that you want. We have the bit we want and we know where our moat is around that. And Message Resonance Score is effectively one of our ways of bringing that out and the commercial value of us doing it again comes the build versus buy. Why would you build it yourself when we have spent the time around the patents and the models to be able to do that.
Tim Metcalfe
attendeeAnd presumably, patents are a relatively modest part of what you have in terms of Brad and I have the experience...
Jo-Anne Halliday
attendeeYes. The IP moat, they are so important in there, and our customers expect us to be public, having R&D separated is such an advantage because they expect us to be experts in our fields, and we are an expert in our field. The patents are part of that IP moat, an important part of it, but one of many things that we do to keep our IP on the front.
Tim Metcalfe
attendeeExcellent. Thank you. I've had a question and comment from a long-standing Tern shareholder here. Probably best if I read it out as he typed. He said, recently on LinkedIn, a significant shareholder in Talking Medicines made the following comment. I appreciate kind words and supporting the amazing company that you're building. Can you find me advise if you agree with the word amazing and provide your thoughts on its applicability. He also says he has been following your progress and everything leads me to believe that you do have an excellent company. You're a great leader, and thanks for your commitment. So a difficult one to end on, but...
Jo-Anne Halliday
attendeeA nice one to end on, no, we are very appreciative of all of our shareholders, including Tern, the support we get from Al is exceptional. And we -- all of our investors have followed us at every stage, which is a really, really important thing to talk to, including 2025. And one of those shareholders, yes, is extremely well respected, has just received an OBE and has mentioned in the comments, how much he respects our company. So we absolutely -- yes, absolutely are committed to all that we're doing and those that support us. So yes.
Tim Metcalfe
attendeeThat's good to hear. Thank you. We'll move on. Darron, few questions and sort of clarifications. One thing that you brought up in the presentation was the ARR, annual recurring revenue level that you've reached in 2025, obviously showing the progress of the business. But presumably, that's part of your revenue. The annual recurring revenue builds as the client base builds, but your revenue model includes a lot of one-off fees as well.
Darron Antill
attendeeYes. It has additional, but the leading metric and the one that creates value for shareholders is the ARR metric because that's really a way that shows customers are paying on a regular basis and that your sticky revenue, I guess, is a way of categorizing it. So the answer is yes, but without going into detail. I mean we actually try to optimize ARR all the time at the expense of other revenues just to try and create value for the company.
Tim Metcalfe
attendeeYes. No, look, I completely understand that being 30 years in private equity.
Darron Antill
attendeeProfessional services is great because it helps short term, it gets customers to put skin in the game, which is real, and it helps sometimes people want feature advancements, for example. We don't like doing those things for free. We like to charge for it, but preferably, everything is charged for. But ARR is just one of the components, yes.
Tim Metcalfe
attendeeYes, I think that's the important message. I understand the importance of the multiple that people apply to it when they're looking at things. But just for the audience here, just so we're absolutely clear, that is not the revenue of Device Authority?
Darron Antill
attendeeNo.
Tim Metcalfe
attendeeThat's good. No, that's all we need to do to clarify a number of questions. You -- I've got a couple here. Excellent presentation, clarification on the revenue. You talked about a number of clients in the presentation. The question asked about the defense sector. That's obviously becoming more and more important. Is that a focus for the business?
Darron Antill
attendeeIt's a really good question. I think -- so if you -- I don't know some people may have watched the recording, but we have a person on our Board, a lady called Grace Cassy, who is well connected with the U.K. defense. In fact, she was one of the several people that was part of the U.K. Strategic Defense Review. And at the IoT Software Foundation's annual event in London in November, her and I were on stage actually talking about the Strategic Defense Review. Why is that relevant, I'll answer to the question. So that alongside things like initiatives like the U.K. MissionLink. There has been a U.S. MissionLink, and now it's in the U.K. Those type of programs are all to try and help drive and educate the U.K. government to stop buying the way it used to buy and to try and engage innovative technology companies that can help solve some of the challenges. So any introduction, if you can, would be great. I saw that. But I'll be honest with you, the U.K. government has been slow, and that's why the strategic events, one of the outcomes in the paper that's listed that's readily available. You can get it off the HMRC -- sorry, the government website. It specifically call that out. So I talk to Grace all the time. So it's a slow process. We know we can add value. It's about how you get access. Ironically, over here, you have significant large SIs that have significant hundreds of million dollars of contracts. So again, we have to work up to those, the likes of Accenture and others. So the market opportunity, absolutely, yes. It's slow progress. I would like as much help as possible if we can get to accelerate. But Grace, one of our Board members is definitely helping with that. And the Strategic Defense Review is really opening up, but that's only just got announced last quarter.
Tim Metcalfe
attendeeAnd talking about other sectors, automotive, electric vehicles, something close to my heart and given businesses I'm involved in. There are obviously effectively devices that are connected to the Internet. There's concerns about what can be done. That's maybe another issue. Is that a growing area for you?
Darron Antill
attendeeI think EV vehicles is just a subsector of -- apart from Hyliion, it's a subsector of all of the car manufacturers. It's actually irrelevant whether it's EV or not now because even hybrid or petrol cars have all got sophistication in them. And so understanding the ability to be able to trust those devices and the data from them, it doesn't matter if it's EV or not. But in terms of the sector, you're absolutely right. I mean as a combined, the automotive is important. It's more importantly, I'd say it's the supply chain. The supply chain now is being forced to do it by certain markets. So I mentioned the manufacturer earlier, they're looking to sell into the European market. Unless they update and increase their level of cybersecurity, they're unable to because of compliance and mandate requirements, which is fabulous for us, just forcing people to do it. But EV is just a subsector. It's noise if I'm honest, the issue is bigger across the board.
Tim Metcalfe
attendeeVery good. Any other sectors that you would like to highlight as being sort of growing, not quite there yet, but targets for them?
Darron Antill
attendeeWell, I think energy is one. I think part of that -- and that's really because it's critical infrastructure. So at one level, you can call that defense and government, but it's also people talk to C&I as one of the areas, critical. Energy -- and again, we work with Accenture on a couple of opportunities there. Smart energy, then it leads to smart agriculture, and it leads to a number of key areas. So anything was smart in it, there I say smart buildings because we've been there before, but that feels too much of the consumer end rather than the sophisticated end. But anything I would say related to industrial really, manufacturing and industrial, energy, automotive, at one level, if you talk to Microsoft, all of those are subverticals of their manufacturing segment. Yes, we like to break them out, right? So yes.
Tim Metcalfe
attendeeMakes a lot of sense. Well, thank you, Darron, again, very much for the presentation, and thank you, Jo, for your presentation. We got a lot of questions on sort of Tern more generally. So we'll move on to those. And Darron, if you want to turn your camera off, we understand. The first one actually is dealing with one of Tern's other portfolio companies. So probably, Al, you're the right one to answer this. The question says, encouraging to see FundamentalVR announcing occasional partnerships with well-known tech companies, such as Meta. Hard to picture what these mean, just looking at their social media post and adverts. Could you tell us a little bit more about what those mean in practice and what FundamentalVR is doing?
Albert Sisto
executiveSure. It's actually a really good question about what Fundamental is doing. The whole augmented reality, the virtual reality space is really a big market, but historically focused in the gaming area and things of that nature. The relationship with Meta and the advertising program and some of the things that they've done together in key markets has all to do with the applied surgical training using Meta products and virtual reality and augmented reality as a vehicle to -- in one of the commercials, teaching an eye surgeon in Nigeria how to do a cataract surgery with 30 other doctors around the world, but participating as if they were in the theater. So the work that's happening at Fundamental Surgery is really taking advantage of the changes in technologies that support what they do, for example, the glasses now that are no longer big headsets, but actual glasses that are light and easy to work with. And now haptic gloves that are providing a substantially better haptic feel for the surgeon in terms of the realistic practice and capabilities that are being developed there, particularly in the area of optometry where it's very difficult to create soft tissue practice areas and they're succeeding in that area. So that support of Meta has been really helpful for them as well as they're integrated into some of the advanced thinking for products coming down the road. So Fundamental's LinkedIn post kind of reflect some of those changes.
Tim Metcalfe
attendeeThank you. And just moving on to other bits of the portfolio and questions I've received. I suspect the answer to this first bit might be no, but is there any update on Tern's investment in SVV2? The question is -- a number of questions, actually, have you successfully addressed Tern's future obligations with SVV? And is there a possibility of recovering some value there in the future?
Albert Sisto
executiveWe're in the process right now of negotiating with SVV2 on the cessation of our continued investment and the SVV2 fund, and there are certain things that they have to review with all the other limited partners that will take about 30 to 45 days as a follow-up. When, in fact, we come to some conclusions or resolutions on how to deal with these things in the future, we'll publish something in an RNS detailing those transactions, but nothing has been officially decided and settled in a settlement agreement with them.
Tim Metcalfe
attendeeOkay. Moving on, it's probably a game one for Al. Jane, we'll move to you shortly. But just a number of people have contacted me over the last week or so. And today, Darron's given one part of the financial metric for DA. But Al, in particular, can you explain in relatively simple terms, why Tern is unable to provide detailed financial information on its portfolio companies?
Albert Sisto
executiveThis is a recurring question and again I'll provide that -- a little bit of rationale and reasoning behind where we are with our portfolio companies. In our portfolio companies, as Darron pointed out and as Jo pointed out, we have other investors and within the framework of these investments, there are shareholder and share purchase agreements, which we have been able to include in these agreements where required by law, we can reveal certain aspects of the performance of the companies. But venture capital investors absolutely do not want the data of their underlying businesses discussed in the public forum. And so we're duty bound by contract to keep performance data, the P&L performance data, in particular, private and confidential. And even when we do, do an RNS, it requires us to get investor majority consent to provide that information. It's very difficult in venture-backed businesses to get specific financial data as a consequence of these agreements.
Tim Metcalfe
attendeeEven what we do announce still has to get approval in many instances.
Albert Sisto
executiveYes, indeed. And begrudgingly, it's not an easy task.
Tim Metcalfe
attendeeNo. Quite. Quite. I promise people that those who ask blunt questions, we'll get them put and we'll put -- and we'll endeavor to get answers. So Jane, the question here, and I've had a number of similar ones, but this one, particularly, the question says, given the lack of success of the company in generating shareholder returns to date, do you believe that you have the right team in place at Tern?
Jane McCracken
executiveI assume this means the executive team.
Tim Metcalfe
attendeeIt means the Board and the executive team. So you, Iain, Al and Bruce effectively.
Jane McCracken
executiveOkay. I'll take the executive team first. I joined the Board just over a year ago. And a part of the reason I joined the Board was my confidence in Al and Bruce to work with the companies that we have in our portfolio, to help them grow, to help them grow in value. That increase in value will help us, the Tern shareholders, which is who is a Board member I'm looking after. The whole point of what we've created here is to invest in growing companies. We are taking a risky investment. We have to invest over time and to realize an increase in value through exits, through liquidations and other activities that can be returned to shareholders. And I have every confidence in Bruce and Al and their abilities to do that. They've spent their career doing it. It was a big part of the reason I joined the Board in the first place. Now I think when it comes to the Board, if you look at both Iain and my background, we come from a background of having run companies like this. So we can -- pardon me, we really empathize, we can really understand what the CEOs are going through as they try to grow the companies, the market headwinds and tailwinds that you have to constantly factor into your decision-making. So the short answer is I'm here. I have every confidence in our executive team. I think we've added Board members that understand the business of the company and that for both reasons, shareholders should have a bit of confidence.
Tim Metcalfe
attendeeThank you. One question that arises from that is one way to demonstrate confidence is obviously purchasing our shares in a company that you're on the Board of. You don't have Tern shares at the moment. Is there any comment you can make on share purchases?
Jane McCracken
executiveTern is listed on the AIM Stock Exchange of the London Stock Exchange. I live in the United States. I am a U.S. citizen. Purchasing shares in foreign stock exchanges is extremely difficult. The laws, whether it's the tax laws or the compliance laws really make it difficult for foreigners to hold shares in nondomestic stock exchanges. It's very difficult for me to purchase shares in companies that aren't listed in the U.S. And that's the only reason I haven't bought shares.
Tim Metcalfe
attendeeOkay. Thank you. Moving on. Obviously, the funding position of Tern has caused concerns with some people. But talking more generally, do you think that the lack of availability of funding at Tern has already impacted the ability to secure an exit at the right place. And do you think it will -- could impact in the future, the ability to exit at the right price?
Jane McCracken
executiveFirst of all, we are needing to exit via our portfolio companies to generate the returns. So I just need clarity around what exits they're talking about in the question...
Tim Metcalfe
attendeeWe're talking about exits of investments in portfolio companies. Obviously, a challenge without funding is maintaining the position because that could then grind you down and do things if you can't follow your money. But is this a concern for the Board that it's already had an impact and if Tern doesn't have the availability of future funding could impact in the future?
Jane McCracken
executiveThe short answer is yes, absolutely. In order to continue to support fast-growing technology companies, you've got to constantly be prepared to follow your money if you want to maintain your pro rata shareholding. And we're currently challenged that way.
Tim Metcalfe
attendeeYes. Okay. That's really covered the main areas. We have had questions on specifics, on funding, for example, but I understand, it cannot be addressed at this stage, but announcement is in due course. But just a sort of final point, 1 or 2 people were disappointed not to see a portfolio update at the end of last year. We've tried to address that, obviously, to a certain extent, with tonight's event. But can you assure people that when there's something to say, we will say it, and there will be regular updates in due course?
Albert Sisto
executiveAbsolutely. I think it's been our process that when there is a significant event that we have the ability to discuss, we bring it forth in Reach or in an RNS. And we will continue to do that and try to do that regularly with some form of communication or Capital Markets Day during the year, during each of the calendar quarters as appropriate. But again, as we said earlier, we're under some significant constraints as to what we're allowed to say or what we can say about the performance of these businesses in ways that would satisfy the requirement of some of our shareholders because I get the e-mails and the questions as well. And I understand the desire. We ask that you also understand the nature of the beast in that we don't control companies. We're not a holder of 25% or more of any of these companies, and we're dealing with syndicates of investors that have a business practice that is slightly different than ours.
Tim Metcalfe
attendeeYes. Understood. Well, thank you very much, Jane. Thank you very much, Al. Just to let everybody know that there will be a recording of this event made available on the Tern website tomorrow. There will be copies of the slides available via an announcement. But thank you very much for everybody who's attending. I'm delighted to see we lost less than 1% of the audience during the course of this event. But most importantly, Jo, Darron, thank you very much for taking your time on a Wednesday evening to join us for great presentations. And yes, we look forward to seeing you again in the future. So thank you, everybody.
Jo-Anne Halliday
attendeeThank you.
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