Welcome to the Verici Dx plc investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. The company can review all questions submitted today and will publish those responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to the management team. Sara, good afternoon.
Thank you very much. Welcome, everybody. I'm going to just flip over the first couple of slides, given that they are the disclaimer slides, not sure how much everybody's going to be able to read those on the fly. Just a reminder of the company's products here. We have a suite of three blood-based tests. They are all addressed for kidney transplant patients. It's based on the technology of RNA sequencing with an AI algorithm attached. Just as a reminder to everybody, what is RNA? RNA is like the messaging of the body. It enables clinicians to pick up signals at a very early stage, we call this an early biomarker, make a distinction between this and the competitive technology of cell-free DNA, which is effectively a late biomarker. It's an injury marker. It picks up the debris in the blood.
This is something that is enabling us to effectively have a very proactive messaging, signaling system of the body. We have three products. If we think about them in terms of order in the patient journey, the first one was a pre-transplant test. Effectively, the RNA signature test that we've developed there answers a specific clinical question, that says how aggressive or benign is the patient's immune response likely to be on getting the transplant. Highly significant for clinicians to know that ahead of time, how they can modulate the level of drug treatment. The drugs are immunosuppression. They suspend the entire immune system of the body. They're very large.
Obviously, as the clinicians are balancing up their needs to stop rejection on one hand, and yet manage infections on the other, finding that kind of sweet spot in terms of drug management is key in transplant management. That's the pre-transplant test that got picked up, as everybody remembers, a few years ago by Thermo Fisher. They actually licensed that product from us. They picked that up very early in the product development cycle, just after the validation study because obviously it is their core business in the pre-transplant space with their HLA testing. They recognized the importance of having a patient-based test, where no one else have any other technology in that area. The second one, if you think about the continuum, you've had the surgery. Now you're looking at the post-surgery management of that patient.
That is our flagship product called Tutivia, and we will spend most of this presentation talking about that. Just so you know, that answers the question for the clinician that says, how likely is it that the patient is having a rejection event that the clinician needs to intervene in? It is a real call to action, and we will talk about that in a little bit more detail about how it is offering advantages in that space against the competitors of cell-free DNA through this kind of advance in the base technology. That gives us some sort of rare space in terms of an entry point into that market.
Then long-term, a product called Protega. Most significant of the long-term outcome factors is the progression of fibrosis. This is a test that we have been in development for some time. Obviously, you have to validate it for a number of years.
We did a two-year outcome study on that that finished this year, and we are looking to launch that by the end of the year. Very much focused on the research market initially, before we go for clinical adoption, mainly because the progression of fibrosis, there are a number of drug development activities that have been put on the shelf. We think it is there because it needs to be segmented. We think our test is the answer to that, and therefore, we are looking at that kind of clinical research field to launch into at the end of the year. Those are the three blood-based tests. We also have a urine program based on proteomics that is in the works to complement that.
There is a large number of patients that live more than 50 mi from their transplant center, so having an easier biological material to work with, such as a urine collection rather than a blood collection, is advantageous in the overall management, and that is where we are looking. We do have some revenues projected, and in reality, from our level of expertise in the lab in these areas. Obviously, the work that we do with the transcriptome and with the proteins, the proteomic work, those are both fairly cutting-edge technologies. There are few companies that can do it within a regulated environment. Ours is obviously CLIA lab. CLIA Qualified, so we offer advantages with a level of expertise within that kind of framework that is attractive to other players. Obviously, we attract incoming tests from that. Let us talk and focus on the flagship product, Tutivia.
That is the one, just to remind you, that is for the post-surgery patient care and offers a number of significant advantages from being that early biomarker rather than a late injury marker that is currently being offered. If we take a step back, when we calculated, this is just for the U.S. market, not global. We are launched in the U.S. at the moment, so we will look at that addressable market. We calculated that to be about $900 million kind of on a tranche of patients. There are 28,000 transplants done every year in the U.S. Looking across the protocols of testing, we did a weighted average. If you look at some of the sub-conditions when they are managing something that is actively putting that patient at high risk, obviously that is an intense testing environment rather than a low-risk patient they are just monitoring.
The weighted average we came up with was 12 per patient. That's over an 18-month period. Taking the 28,000 times 12 times our Medicare reimbursed price of $2,650 gives us the kind of $900 million addressable market. When we looked at how to break that down, we said effectively it's sort of going into about a third, a third, a third split, a third already being addressed by those injury biomarkers of cell-free DNA and existing technologies in the field. About a third is currently what we might call unaddressed centers that have not used biomarkers in their management to date. Due to government-initiated policies, there's something called the IOTA initiative, which is effectively the Medicare system encouraging clinicians to increase those numbers of transplants.
To the whole healthcare system, it's more advantageous to have patients with a transplant rather than on endless years of dialysis. There is that push to increase that 28,000 kidney transplants to a higher number. That means taking on more risky organs that have been used to date. Part of that initiative was also to say you can't increase your rejection events, so you're going to have to more closely manage those patients. Realistically, the way to do that is through biomarker monitoring. That's a third of the market that we think has been unaddressed to date and is probably fair game for all biomarkers to present their data. There's a third of the market that we think is unaddressed and is unable to be properly addressed by the existing competitors.
Let me give a little bit more color on where we came up with that third. There are high-risk patients or high-risk situations that the clinicians need to manage. One of them, the one called delayed graft function, is effectively a slow-starting organ. If you think about the transport, it may go cross-country. It's going to be on a very sophisticated medical-grade cool box, as it were, to keep that organ kind of alive but slowed down. It takes a while for it to, if you like, warm up in the body. That's what they call delayed function. In those early stages, which is just post-surgery, most clinicians feel that they can't use other tests because they get confounded by the injury markers of the surgery itself.
They're looking for a technology that helps them work out whether that organ is just delayed or whether it's suffering rejection. This is an area that we have shown very clear, precise data and is a huge use case for us. We've put the percentage as about 26%. Anecdotally, since the industry has been taking on more risky organs, we've been told unofficially that centers are seeing rates of anywhere between 40% and 60% of their patients. Obviously a significant part of those patients with a high need for a biomarker test and regular testing as they work out whether it's failing completely or whether it's just sluggish. Obviously that's something that we can address. In the management of patients in transplants, it's obvious that the clinician is managing rejection. Is the graft likely to be rejected by the body?
Actually, at the other end of the spectrum, there is infection. In managing rejection, they use immunosuppression drug therapies. These are huge drugs. They suspend the entire immune system of the body That the immune system does not reject that organ. At the other end of the spectrum, and I think we all personally felt this through COVID, that when you've got a compromised immune system, you are subject to any passing infections or the progression of oncology events, et cetera. It's a big scary time to have your immune system suspended in that way. They're looking for reasons to be able to very quickly titrate down that level of drug therapy. In the case of when they're managing something called the BK virus, where they actually need to excuse me, reduce that level of immunosuppression therapy.
At the moment, the current tests are telling them there's something going on, I can't tell you what it is. That sort of tends to drive clinical behavior to increase that level of drug therapy. You need to be able to distinguish between the two, and we can. There's been a number of follow-up presentations demonstrating the efficacy of our test in that area, and that level of precision. We're looking forward to some further real-world evidence publications coming out on that. If you've had a transplant before, they don't actually remove the old organ when it fails, generally speaking. They'll leave it in the body. Obviously, that shedding off those distress signals that cell-free DNA will pick up. It can't distinguish between old and new organ. We can, and therefore, that's also a very good case study for us.
Same with multiple organs. The list goes on. These are kind of high-risk patients. They're complications, and they need a level of precision and the ability to catch these conditions early enough that the technology that we offer on an RNA signature offers complete competitive advantage there. We call it the low-hanging fruit. It is a good way for us to get adopted into centers. Obviously, healthcare doesn't discard technology very lightly. If we go into a center that is already using biomarkers, it's good to be able to say, "Well, you can't use them in this case." It's an entry point for us to say, "Well, you've got no biomarker test that can address those conditions. Why don't you use this on those circumstances?" It's a pent-up demand.
It's unmet need, and an environment where they know they want to use a biomarker, they just haven't really felt that they had anything to offer. That's how we think about it. It's about a third of the market. That's be GBP 300 million in addressable revenues. That certainly, if we did nothing else but address that segment of the marketplace, would give us significant revenue growth there. If we look at the performance in 2025, we were just about $3.7 million in revenues. What do we look at this year? Obviously, last year, we did a fundraise to support that growth to build part of our sales team out. How was that manifesting into this year? We always say it takes about six months for a salesperson to come on and be operational in their territory.
The most significant growth was our first quarter growth of this year, where we saw a 32% quarter-over-quarter growth from the fourth quarter in the previous year. We are already in what we call 29 consolidated ordering centers, and those centers account for about 20% of all the transplants done annually in the U.S. Obviously, a significant penetration into that marketplace. You can see that as we're going through that, we're going in on this kind of low-hanging fruit, the areas that they don't think are being addressed, and being able to offer them our test as something that is of real clinical benefit to adoption. We've managed to get into 29 centers. Obviously, we got our Medicare coverage determination last year.
That's, if you remember, Medicare has three aspects, a code so they can identify you, a price, our price is $2,650, and then a coverage determination that says, "We know you're useful. We will pay for you." Which obviously, in cash collection terms, is highly significant for us. Not only is there Medicare, but there's Medicaid that's state-based, and we're approved in 17 states in our territories. If I think about the sales funnel in the adoption into a center, we think about the hunting activities, which is to get a new center on board. Generally speaking, that means that we're talking to one clinician, your champion, who then wants to try it out, see what it's like in their own hands, see where they would put it into their clinical care management. Most often, it's either in a DGF patient base or a BK management area.
That's where we start. You start with the kind of onesie-twosies, and then we go into what we call farming, which is now I've got a center up and running. We've gone through the approvals to get it as a send-out test. I've got a clinician that's started to order it. They can now talk to their peers. There's multiple clinicians usually in a practice, in a hospital centers. They can start using it. Where you're really trying to drive those clinicians to adopt Tutivia into their care pathway is that kind of recurring basis. "Okay, I know where I want to use it, and I'm going to use it across many patients and ultimately many times." What we're trying to drive is multiple clinicians in ordering it on a recurring basis. The icing on the cake for us is a protocol.
That's where they say, "Right, we really do establish that we want to use it in a regular way here." It's like the prescription. We're going to put it into the center. What we've got here is in the quarter we had seven new centers come on board. The hunting from the new salespeople was successful, but we also saw a progression all the way through that funnel in our other centers. In fact, we increased our protocols by one. We had another center in that quarter put us on protocol. You can see that across the board we saw growth. When we talk about the sales team, we'll talk about the number of centers in the U.S. We start with 236 centers, I think officially. Actually, there's probably only about 180 that are addressable for us nationwide.
We work on a basis that the lead in any commercial team in any territory will be the salesperson, and that salesperson can probably handle 15 centers at maturity. We have a kind of 15 :1 ratio. That would mean for a national sales force, we would be looking anywhere between 12 and 15 people. We have five at the moment. Where we looked to was to split up the country into territories. You'll see on the left, this is where we've had an ordering center. In the middle where we've divided those territories up, it says that there are four addressed there, and now five that are being addressed since the raise. You can see how we split those up, and you can see how large the territories are if we split it up in that way.
I think what's significant, if you see on the right, you see the split in those territories by the numbers of centers. If you work on a 15 :1 ratio, you can see by the bar graph underneath that even if we have a rep in a territory, they're not designed to cover the entire territory. That first bar on the graph is a good demonstration of that we would actually, for full coverage, we would need three reps in that territory, we have one. We have to obviously measure our growth in that terms. We have a system of adopting, or how we would like to go into each territory and get adopted into that territory from the leading centers. Each salesperson then needs some support. The first one is a Medical Science Liaison person.
That's a person that goes in and talks clinically, clinician to clinician, about how they might use it in their patient. In a regulated environment, you have to make a distinction between your sales activity and your clinical discussions. That's what medical affairs does. We work on a ratio that we would need one MSL to every two salespeople. Obviously we work on that ratio as we grow. Field support, there's quite a lot to do in terms of getting adopted into a center and managing it. I'll talk about that a little bit later on. We do need some, if you like, more junior staff to go in and do some of the field support. Obviously, lab techs and customer service are pretty self-evident as you grow.
Beyond the sales team or the commercial team investment in headcount, we recognize that we do need to raise awareness, this is something we've talked about extensively over the last few presentations. Essentially, in healthcare, the most significant aspect is when you can get a peer-to-peer recommendation. We spend a lot of time with key opinion leaders, that's KOL abbreviated, talking to them on an individual level and also at conferences. When we have our last conference, we had two presentations from clinicians reporting to other clinicians about the utility of their tests in real world, how they've used it in their practice and the benefits they've seen. It's obviously highly significant word-of-mouth recommendation. Something that we are focused in on is what we might call the easy button, the logistics side of the business.
As you grow, you can fail just as much from rapid growth as no growth at all. This is why. You can see that realistically, we've got a fairly simple workflow. They take the blood at the hospital, they send it to us, we do the hard stuff, and then send them back a test result. If I break that down a little bit in terms of the complexity within any hospital system, you can see that the ordering clinician actually is only the starting point. They talk to a transplant coordinator. They're the ones that actually place the tests and manage that test environment for the clinician. That order will go down to a phlebotomy department, so the phlebotomist draws the blood. That's different. It goes to a send-out lab for that blood to get to our lab.
On the other side, when you think about getting the result back in, you're talking to a nurse and a transplant pharmacist who will probably review the test before having a consult with the clinician. Even in quite a simple process, you've got multiple stakeholders in that hospital center being involved in that process. There is a level of complexity to those logistics that we manage. We do what we call a white glove service, very personal attention to each one of those stakeholders. Ultimately, the hospital centers are looking to be integrated into their own systems. I think something like 90% of all transplant centers use a system called Epic, long term, this is something that we're looking to be integrated in. At the moment, we do it very much with our own portal and our own management.
You can see the need for field support in a commercial team from that. Obviously, if we were in real estate, I would be saying location, location. We're in healthcare, I'm just going to say data, data, is highly significant to the adoption of the test is that not only do you have existing data, which we do from our clinical trial, there is more to be gained from the data that we collected at that time, there'll be subsequent publications beyond the validation paper. Also you're looking to collect what we call real world evidence. Okay, the clinicians are trying it. What do they think? What did they see? How does it impact? How was it useful in patient management? Ultimately you end up in formalized utility studies.
These are very formal studies to say, okay, I want to take a usefulness case, for example, how the test was used in titrating the levels of drug that have been given to a patient to be finding that sweet spot for each patient. That would be a trial for drug monitoring. These are very useful for us in terms of you continually feeding the clinicians new information on how useful the test is. We can see that as we're thinking about this for the future, obviously mining our own data that's coming in from real world or from our validation study is the obvious one to supplement that with little small studies, center-based, for usefulness, case studies for conferences.
Ultimately where we'd like to go is funding major studies that really support us being able to move out of the niche area of the first third into directly competing with incumbents in the other 2/3 of the market. Being able to have ongoing publications, conferences, abstracts, et cetera, the constant stream of data supports test adoption. Obviously, I just want to touch upon the others. We do have the Thermo Fisher publication out now on PTRA, that enables them to go into the clinical community and set up what we call the early adopting centers. Those will be ones that generate this real-world evidence, seeing how it's used in clinical management, and showing the usefulness of that. Ultimately from us, this is a Thermo activity. We do support them. We do a lot of joint marketing, for example.
The base technology is the same, even if the clinical question and therefore RNA signature answer are different. We see some benefits of obviously doing joint marketing activities, and sometimes joint approaches into centers. That is something that we actively work with them on. We've got most of the milestone payments from that deal already in the business, but there is one more to go, which is volume-based, and obviously then there'll be a royalty income as they get into their full-blown commercial activities. Protega, to be launched at the end of this year. Again, that's the kind of research market, and obviously we see ongoing interest from other parties of using our specialty lab services and building that up. Obviously as we build our urine-based product, those will be seen in the next few years as accretive as well. David, let's just move on to finances.
Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. In terms of the year to December 2025, we recorded revenues of $3.7, split $2.9 on Tutivia that we mentioned earlier, although $3.2 based on tests ordered. I'll come to that distinction in a minute. A final milestone payment from Thermo Fisher of just $0.8. We did a fundraise back in July of 2025, raising net $7.9 million. Just to give a loss for the period, $6.2, I'll break that down in the following slides. Similarly, on cash flow, outflow from operations, I will split out. Cash balance at the end of the year was $3.3, with an accounts receivable balance of $1.5. We just closed, last month, a further equity raise of GBP 2.6 million gross, which takes our expected cash runway through to the end of this year.
In terms of revenue, there is complexity to the calculation of revenue in terms of how we recognize it, I just want to make the point that there is this complexity. The first distinction is between ordered tests and resulted. It's the resulted test. When the result goes to the clinician, that's the point at which we recognize revenue. The delta between an ordered test and resulted is generally where, at the center, too little blood has been taken, we can't use the test tube of blood that's sent to us, therefore, there's that delta. The other parts that come into the calculation of revenue is what we get from Medicare. That's our biggest payer. They pay us $2,650, less a 2% charge. We net $2,597. How much are we getting from commercial payers? What's the denial rate?
There will always be a level of denial rate. That's nothing to do with the efficacy of the test. That's everything to do with the business model, if you will, of the commercial payer, whereby they will seek to deny payment, then we go back and argue the case. There's always going to be a level of denial. The split between your Medicare and your commercial payers. The point really there is that there is a complexity to the way revenues are recognized. It's not simply test times price equals revenue. Just going into the primary statements. The net cash flow out from operations of $8.2 versus $6. Biggest driver there being that we had a $1.5 million receivable at the end of the year.
That's obviously, we recognize the revenue, but we don't have the cash yet because there's that receivable. Investing activities is a combination of what we spend on our assets and interest income. That financing is the cash inflow from share issues, less what we're spending on rent and capital payments. In terms of the income statement, I've talked about revenues. That cost of sale relates to the Tutivia revenues only because the revenue from Thermo has obviously got no cost attached to it. In terms of administrative expenses, our biggest cost continues to be payroll. We had 18 people in the business at the end of 2025. We've currently got 23 people, which includes 10 within the commercial team, of which five of those are on the sales side, as Sara mentioned earlier.
In terms of our R&D spend, that's continuing to fall as the clinical trials end, and we're doing just more sort of follow-up work rather than core R&D expenditure. We are spending more in terms of sales support. That's everything to do with everything that is supporting the sales force, like conferences, et cetera, and KOLs, and all that stuff that supports them in their efforts out in the field. In terms of the balance sheet, that trade receivables, biggest item of that is the receivables at the end of the period. In terms of our non-current assets, that's really our portfolio of patents. The core license and what we do to augment it. In terms of the trade and other payables, that's fallen principally as a result of, we were always carrying a large accruals.
This was costs that had been incurred by the centers as part of the clinical trial, but they had not invoiced us. That balance was $750 at the end of 2024. That's dropped to $157. That's accounting for that delta there in terms of that trade and other payables number. Lease liabilities is mainly to do with the rent on our premises. Back to you, Sara. Thank you.
Thank you. This is really just the summary slide. I think, and I will refer back to, I see some of the questions looking over the last five years, and I will come back to that question. What did we achieve in those last five years? Out of the three products, we have validated two of them and commercially launched them. Obviously, one under a licensing deal with a partner that obviously brings a lot of credibility to the company in terms of the underlying science, the performance, the usefulness of those tests. Thermo Fisher licensing deal not only was a revenue generator, but obviously a credibility factor as well in our overall valuation. We kept Tutivia. That is with our direct sales force. Obviously, we are taking that step by step in its growth, and we are seeing that growth.
That 32% quarter-on-quarter growth, I think, was highly encouraging. We have gone through all the steps that you need to take. In a healthcare company in the U.S., there are a number of steps that you have to go through. If we look at the five-year horizon, we took a technology out of research, out of Mount Sinai. We developed the products, we applied the most current mathematical models to it to refine those signatures to give the best performance. We then put it through a validation study, and got the performance out of that. In the background, we looked at the regulatory environment, and are getting CLIA approved. Obviously the latest news on the company was that we finally completed that with New York State approval, so we are now nationally approved under CLIA.
The New York State announcement was exciting to us because they take a major element of the transplant patients. About 2,000 of them are done in that region alone. Obviously in the final piece of the puzzle on adoption, that was very useful. It also means that we passed probably what is seen to be the equivalent to FDA processes in terms of their review. Again, it was a kind of value driver for the company for being able to be approved by New York State. We have gone through the regulatory. Obviously the reimbursement, just like to remind everybody, 68% of our claims are under Medicare, very significant for us to be CLIA by them. There are three parts of that process, and it does take a number of years. The first one is to get a code, a price, and then a coverage determination.
Obviously the price we got set to $2,650 some time ago. The coverage determination we got last year, that was after a year of very deep diligence by CMS, the MolDX region. Obviously being able to say, "No, you do qualify as a useful test, and we will pay you," is key for us in terms of our revenue recognition, as David pointed out. Obviously, getting that kind of automatic, we are going to be paid even if they do take the 2% tax off the top. That is significant for us in terms of cash collections. We commercially have started our national adoption. We are already in 29 centers, representing about 20% of the U.S. market.
That is significant with a very small sales team, obviously we look forward to, if you like, farming those, making each one of those centers into a recurring, high-level ordering center for us, the farming activities. We did not stop there with two products. We have a third coming out at the end of the year. We have a pipeline of products and other services, opportunities which kind of capitalize on the expertise within the company. When we look at the U.S. market, it is big enough for us for a number of years. GBP 900 million addressable market, GBP 300 million of that at least is kind of rare space for us, a great entry point. Very rarely with a new product do you get to walk into such a pre-existing pent-up demand. You usually have to create those processes in hospitals. It is already there.
They know they want a test, they just did not have a test that they felt that they could use. For us to be able to address that part of the market is obviously very advantageous in terms of adoption within the U.S. healthcare system. Obviously, we have a very talented team. I want to always give a shout-out to the work they do. Everyone does at least a job and a half, they are very dedicated to making a difference in this space. We also have a number of very supporting, what we call key opinion leaders, KOLs. Our network is growing, I think you can see by the number of advisors that we have now got on our advisory team, the belief from the clinical community in this company and the products that we offer. Obviously we feel that we are just now on a growth trajectory.
We have kind of clicked off all the proof of concept milestones to get to that point, now we are a revenue-generating company. For us, this is now a little bit of rinse and repeat. As we get the resources to grow, we believe that we can address that market very successfully. We know how to do it. We just need to now be on the pathway to bringing in that success. We have a line of sight within a reasonable timescale to what it would take for us to get to break even. At the moment, we are just funding our way to that level where we can then obviously grow and increase the sales force out of operational funds rather than equity funds. A clear line of sight for the company for the future. Okay. I just want to move on to some of the questions.
Thank you for submitting them. I am going to take the operational ones first. The question was, "Surely once a center has adopted, the rep can move on to another center?" No. Actually, that is not the case. It is not a one-and-done sale at all. It is an ongoing relationship and management. Things go wrong. If you remember, I showed you all the stakeholders in that, people move as well. You will see a significant sales force from our competitors, the CareDx, the Natera, it is that frequency of going into the center, working with the clinician to expand where they might be using it, a reminder to use it over again. There is an ongoing relationship that needs to happen, that is why we work on a 15 :1 ratio. Obviously with the supporting staff as well.
Yes, it's very much more of a kind of solution-based selling rather than just a kind of one-off product. When do I expect to announce, you know, we are on a half-year basis, so it's not that we report quarterly. I think that we have reported Q1 just because we were in a fundraise, we wanted people to know that the growth was there. There isn't any set expectations for giving quarterly results, but we do try and give as much information to the investment community as we can. We're balancing up, obviously, the fact that it all becomes very public and that's competitive intel for others, but we try and communicate with the investors as best we can. The follow-up question, is that a sales support function not a sales function? No, it's a whole thing.
I think that when you're looking at going into a center, you're not just trying to get a once-off sale. There are 12 times per patient that a clinician can elect to do your sales, to use your test. Those are obviously different situations and what we do is we obviously have an ongoing relationship, an ongoing conversation with the clinician about how they're using the test in their clinical management of patients. It's not just a one-time. For example, when you think about a clinician that may want to use it in the DGF protocol, you also want them to start thinking about, "Well, where else can I use it? Can I use it with a BK patient?" On and so forth. It's not just a straightforward sale, it's much more of a relationship basis.
Do we have a target or best guess when cash breakeven will be reached? Yes, we do. We think about a breakeven revenue point of about GBP 60 million in annual sales. That's the kind of rule of thumb. Obviously, if we were to try and grow our sales faster, with more investment into a bigger commercial team, obviously that dynamic would change. We think our sweet spot is at about GBP 60 million top line. When will Verici become self-funding and avoid the sales except I would agree. The sales progression, I would love to be able to have enough investment to have a national sales force to really put that investment, but it is expensive money up front. We are not in a funding environment that rewards that kind of growth story.
It's very much focused on revenues and profitability, and therefore we have to be a little tempered in how we approach the national market, and look for our best opportunities and best ROI on the equity dollars that we're putting to work. Yes, we have a clear line of sight. Yes, we could grow faster if we put more investment in, but initially that would be quite expensive for the company, before we saw the real return on that. We have chosen to go a little bit more organic in our approach, and to try and get to a profitability figure before having a national sales force. What else is there? Yeah.
I think I'm seeing some comments about past performance, and I think it might be as well to address effectively the progression of the company, and the timescale, and the change in funding environment over those last five years. When we IPO'd, AIM was very much in a growth mentality, looking for opportunities where there was potential to grow, and looking for companies that had the milestones that they could achieve on that pathway to growth. We were such a company. We hit our all-time share price high, ironically at the point where we incurred our biggest expense, which was the clinical trial. When we got first patients enrolled into that clinical trial, in a growth environment where it was looking at those milestones, we got rewarded.
I think everybody is aware that in healthcare, there was a post-COVID hangover, where diagnostic companies had been seen to be very successful. There was a lot of testing around COVID. Then obviously as business got back to normal, there was a retrenching. The AIM market itself, in terms of philosophy, I think moved from going from just milestone-based growth companies to preferring a more traditional reward for revenue-generating and profitable companies, and I think we're still in that environment. You can see how the company is addressing that. Now, over that time, obviously we were still in a growth story. We did achieve our milestones. We ticked them off. It wasn't in an environment that was rewarding for that.
It was in an environment that was now focused on revenue generation and profit. That's exactly where the company has got to in terms of its milestones and our current focus, which is careful management of the cash that we do raise through equity dollars, to be able to get into that sales growth. As I've already said, that it's not the ability to invest as much as we'd want to if we were all in a growth-encouraging environment. This is very much more focused on revenues than profits, and we're seeing that accordingly. As we're talking about funding, although we can see a pathway to that break even, we haven't funded up to that level. I think the sentiment is very much tranching it, some money to get to the next revenue growth targets, and then keep funding as we go.
Whether you agree with that or not, I think that's the environment that we're in. The company has obviously tried to cut its costs accordingly. As I said, I think we've managed to do quite a lot with not as much money as we originally anticipated back in 2020. We've still grown, we're still here, and we are on a very clear path for growth and off to profitability. I think the balance on dilution with funding is inevitable. We don't get to grow without funds. Funds, investment spread over a number of years will, by nature, dilute. Ultimately, the equation for every company that goes through dilution is to say, ultimately, we will grow, and we will grow the value to outweigh that dilution. I think it's been very challenging in this last five years.
Still, the company is on a growth trajectory, and we would like to see that reflected in the overall valuation long term. Well, I hope I've managed to answer all the questions that have been posed. If there are any that I've missed, the company will endeavor to respond to those in writing. In the absence of any other questions, I think we can close the session.
That's great. Thank you for updating investors today. Can I please ask investors not to close the session, as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete and I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation. Good afternoon to you all.
Thank you.