We're looking forward to talking you through some of the highlights and having some Q&A at the end. As normal, Q&A can be asked in the Q&A functionality, or at the end, I'll turn on the ability to raise your hand and unmute microphone. Over to you, Tim.
Thanks, Ben. I'm just seeing people still jumping in, so I might give a moment. All right, cool. I think everyone's in now. Let's go. Let me just quickly start with the highlights and position it and then I'll go through solvers. It was a massive end to the financial year in so many different ways. Let's start with top line. We added something like 29, just over AUD 29 million of recurring revenue in the year, which is 50% more than the prior year. It grew our customer base, our ARR, by 25% year-on-year. Those are outstanding figures. Massive contributions at Walmart, particularly U.S. and the UK. We added AUD 14 million of net ARR in that course, up 55% on the record of AUD 9 million in the same quarter. Consumer business is flying at AUD 18 million or more of ARR. I'll talk more about that moment.
Cash collections, there's been movements given the sale of business and movements in our billing cycles, but now underlying grew 24% against the prior year. Gross margins are now over 90%. Despite all that growth, our operating costs grew at less than, which is an outstanding result the first time. We've now started to provide guidance on some measures outside margins. We're expecting really on the visibility that we have in the business we're now providing. We're starting conservatively, but we're starting to provide guidance on things like revenue at AUD 140 million or more next year, EBITDA margins of 20%, being free cash flow positive for the year and for the half. We're expecting cash collections to be very strong, particularly in this coming half and the same year-on-year improvement, at least. They're the highlights. Huge, huge end of the financial year.
Unaudited accounts, financial accounts in this result as well, which Ben Jenkins will go through in a moment. Let's go through it a little. Some big numbers here. We now look after 27 million kids, which we had more kids on our platform than there are Australians, which is an achievement. Eight million parents use our services. It's actually 32,000, 32,000 schools are on our platforms. We intervene in a life-threatening situation every two hours with calls being made to safety schools. That's something that we all should be acknowledging, being proud on the financials. Past AUD 145 million, knew that was negatively impacted by the weakening U.S. dollars. We would have otherwise been just under AUD 150 million of ARR, which we made a multiple. Yeah, we're close to that now.
As I said, we added AUD 14 million of ARR in the quarter, which is 55% higher than the AUD 9 million we did last year. I mean, think about that AUD 14 million added in this quarter. It was only in 2021 when we acquired Smoothw all, our entire business was AUD 14 million and we added that in one quarter, adding AUD 29 million off a base in the year. Now, something I really think investors need to look at is this new markets growth. It's probably a confusing metric, but it's something that I look at deeply. This is the amount of growth in our business that comes out of the IT K-12 IT Persona. All of our competitors are selling to the commoditized IT buyer in schools and 50% of our growth is outside of that buyer.
That's the reason why we'll dominate this industry because we've got legs beyond just the commoditized side of our industry. Let's touch on guidance. We had an outstanding quarter. We've also over quarters talked to and shown, demonstrated the certainty out of our exit ARR and how revenue and cash flow and based on that history, that confidence inside our numbers, we're now confident to talk about the next year. By extrapolation, I think you can start thinking through in your own quiet moments where that takes us in the coming years. For this financial year, we ended with AUD 145 million of ARR, AUD 117 million of revenue, which compares to AUD 117 million of exit ARR last year. Now, ARR grew 25%. EBITDA margins were at the top end of our guided range of 10%- 15%.
It would have been high, we would have been just up if we hadn't made some extra investments in marketing spend, which I'll touch on in a moment. The free cash flow was negative over the year of AUD 11 million, but a big chunk of that was our movement from multi-year billing to annual billing cycles, which cost roughly half of that. All those numbers were on or better than any expectations that we would be given. We expect to move comfortably. Free cash flow positive is half free cash flow positive for the year. Revenue will be north of AUD 140 million and ARR growth at 20%. EBITDA margins of 20% means that we are comfortably a rule of 40 company from 1 July going forward with a strong balance sheet. It will only be going upwards from 1 July.
You know we've, I feel very confident to say that we've turned the corner and we're presenting ourselves as a very different business to where we were two years ago. Let's drop into the numbers. As I said before, growth in all regions, but in particular very strong growth in our U.S. K-12 business, which added, I think it was like AUD 9 million recurring revenue on their own in that June quarter. They're growing faster than anyone in the States. Done a tremendous job. Custodio business is, I'd say, I used to say metronomically growing, but they're actually starting to accelerate. I'll talk more about them. UK business is doing okay. All the products will be available to the UK market in Quebec in January next year actually. Sorry, I think that's March next year. Our Australia New Zealand business grew 41%. They're doing an amazing job.
We've kind of reorganized our go-to-markets in these markets based on the success of the U.S. model and that's now actually, yeah, certainly exceeding our budgets. Where we are financially, we've got more than AUD 15 million in the bank at the end of June. As I said, that number is only going up. A net deposition of AUD 37 million negative will never be as that low again. As I just mentioned, we're expecting cash collections to be well north of at least 20% higher than what they were last year. In this half last year, if I recall, we collected just under AUD 70 million. We're in a really good position from cash flow. I saw some commentary about capital raisings, that's ridiculous, we're not doing capital raisings. Balance sheet's good.
Cash flow is in a really good place and in a place where we can actually start making some very sound decisions around where we allocate capital to maximize growth and make sure we achieve these strong guidance numbers that we've offered. Our growth again highlighted not only by the regional store. We're now getting serious contributions from things outside of new logos. We've very much been a new logo sales business, but now we've got significant contribution from cross-selling new products. That's only going to accelerate as, in particular, our Insights and Content Aware products become more well known in the market. The Custodio growth is outstanding. This is the key selling period for Custodio. You'll see the selling in this half of the Custodio app consumer business. We were negatively impacted by FX. That goes both ways.
We have guidance at the back of this slide which Ben might touch on, which shows that whilst the FX movement cost us in top line ARR by AUD 4 million and has a revenue impact, it also has a cost impact because a lot of our cost of sales, data, and hosting of course, and a big chunk of our staff, about 90 staff. The net effect of that isn't massive, but it does impact our headline ARR number. Crispin Swan's on the call, who runs our K-12 business. He's available for questions, and yeah, we are literally killing it as they say. The U.S. business in particular has had an immensely successful period. Not only the highlights of the ARR growth of AUD 12 million in that business, which is astounding. Some really key things. We've won our first district inside the top 10 school districts in the U.S.
by student number. That's huge. We added 1.5 million students, more actually than in the quarter, which is amazing. We grew our every order value or average sales price, which is over here, by 20% in the quarter. That means that we are building a reputation and selling to bigger and bigger school districts. Enormous figure. We're maintaining our net revenue retention, our tidbit churn under 5%. We've signed another state deal, which I'm really excited about. Pennsylvania has selected us as one of their preferred partners in that region, which is a huge achievement. All metrics in our education business are doing focus as well, particularly in states and Australia and New Zealand. As I said, we'll have the entire courier platform, all of our capability will be available in the UK in the first quarter of next calendar year.
Gab, who runs that business there, will actually start to accelerate our cross-selling into 2026. That's super exciting for everybody. Consumer. We tried some investments. I think we invested about AUD 1.5 million above budget given our understanding of our into that Custodio business and achieved unbelievable results. Cost of acquisition of less than the average order value. Actually cash flow creating growth, albeit it costs us in our P&L sense because we have to write off the cost of acquisition and we take the revenue over time. We cut that back. We pulled back on marketing investments in the Custodio business to hit our EBITDA guidance. From 1 July that's now taken off again and I'm sure you'll see very exciting results in that business.
Now, just to put in context, Life360, which people often compare us to, they spend AUD 90 million in marketing every year and we spend in the consumer business I think five or six. If we spent like Life360, we'd be a multi-billion dollar business. I think in time we'll get there because of the performance of this business. You see here the evolution of the product, the experience of that product is evolving rapidly and is without question the best parental control product. It's now becoming much easier for.
Non.
For the users who are kind of less anxious about controlling their kids. These are the parents that we're now trying to target through our schools program in the U.S., which is clearly making impact on our cost to acquire, which is coming down very, very fast. Outstanding business. You'll hear a lot more, you'll hear me talking a lot more about Custodio business in this half, which is their key selling period. I think these are really interesting slides to highlight the efforts that we've put into maintaining our cost structure. Fixed cost % of our ARR is falling very nicely. As I said, our service margin or gross margin excluding marketing costs is over 90% now. There was a 0.3 increase there in the quarter and our, sorry, in the year and our net ARR.
Essentially, our forward cash collections, the next 12 months collections, which net ARR is essentially analysis of as compared to our CAC costs, is showing heavily positive figure. Unquestionably, we're at that inflection point or through the inflection point. The predictability, and I know I'm probably going to get a question from Owen about this, the predictability of our sales from pipeline to converted deals to revenue and collections is a feature of this business. We've obviously reported AUD 145 million of arrangement at 30 June. If you look at the chart at the bottom, our ARR highly correlates with our next 12 months revenue. That's why we're now confident giving guidance of AUD 140 million of revenue in the next year. We've also given guidance on growth that we're expecting the next year. You can start doing your sums about where revenue will go going forward.
As I said, every dollar that we add is adding 91% to the bottom line. We grew AUD 30 million last year. We're expected to grow higher than that in this coming year. You can do the maths and see that we're not only free cash flow positive, we're paying down our net debt very quickly from the 2027 financial year. I won't dwell on these metrics because Aussie investors don't seem to be that interested in our SaaS metrics. Metrics are without question industry leading and this is a really important chart. I know people kind of flick to the back of our, called the update, and look at the 4C report. What's missing is the nuance of understanding what's transforming.
During COVID many schools were paying multi-year upfronts, the money was aplenty and so they'd commit to three-year contracts, even five-year contracts to get filtering and firewalling and so on. That's not so much the case anymore. Obviously, to get those multi-year deals you discount in the order 15% up to 25%. Now our business trends are moving away from these multi-year billings into annual billing cycles. That kind of working capital hit that we've been enjoying to help fund this business going forward we're moving away from. Our margins are improving very rapidly, as I said, into the 91% range, but it's impacting working capital now and you can see it clearly on the June section of this chart, the right-hand three columns. June 2023 to June 2025 we've seen a very significant fall in the amount of multi-year upfront cash collections that we're getting.
Essentially, we're borrowing less money from customers but it's translating to higher margins. That had a big chunk, that and the loss of and the sale of the McGirry business last year negatively impacted our cash collections this year by AUD 4.1 million on a PER comparison comparative period basis. If you do the sums, actually billing, underlying billing and underlying annualized receipts were 24% up year-on-year, which is exactly what our ARR growth was the year. The underlying business is only strengthening and that is translating into cash flow pipeline. Obviously, we emptied the pipe surprisingly well in that June quarter. You're seeing our red column here shows that the pipeline's come off a lot but it is still a record pipeline into the December half. Our marketing team, who are exhausted and they're coming back to work now, they've got busy again.
Back to work trying to refill that pipe to make sure that we're kicking goals and hitting records again this quarter. We're in a fantastic position with nearly AUD 9 million of weighted pipe into the December half. Remember, a big chunk of U.S. sales are still in that September quarter, albeit we did do a cracking job at converting those in June. The Australian New Zealand team, who are on a tear as I said, their key period is the December quarter. Some good things happening for the December half. Generally though, the U.S. and UK teams are focused on back to school, you know, delivering outstanding experiences for customers. The Custodio business will be a big revenue period, revenue growth period for us. Okay. Less financial. I think it is worthwhile that investors realize the impact that we're making or from time to time hear about it at least.
In the last year we flagged 26 million risky behaviors by kids on our platform. 26 million times kids did something on a platform that was so notable it had to be flagged for further analysis. Of those, 2 million of those concerns, so just under 10% of those concerns, were handled by our human moderation team in the UK who deal with some very harrowing moments. You know, life threatening often and sexually charged frequently too. Of those, 4,400, four and a half thoU.S.And concerns, required a call to be made to a safety lead with the authorities. That's a call every two hours to deal with a child who's at risk to safety. That's an extraordinary achievement. These pie charts in here, these circles in there, show something that's quite intriguing, which is the distinct difference in level five, which is the most serious concerns that we capture.
The distinct difference between UK and U.S.A toxicity, porn, sexualized content in the U.S. is the dominant concern that is raised. The configuration of the tools are the same. It's just that the incidence of highly concerning access to pornography in the U.S. is two times as big as the UK and Australia. New Zealand and Australia and New Zealand is much more about incidents of risk of self harm and that's the purple parts of these charts. We're seeing remarkable data now and we're actually also starting to see clear data that shows the efficacy, the evidence of the safety outcomes, and soon to show the learning outcomes adjacent to the things that we do. I'll be reporting more of that coming soon. I just mentioned that we won this deal.
This is the third state that's picked Victoria, or Limewize is the name of our product set in the UK, as a preferred partner. This is an outstanding achievement. U.S. team, this gives us preferred access to 1.7 million students in that market, in a market that's essentially half the size of Australia, which is such an outstanding achievement. The agreement encompasses all of our products, including EdTech Insights, which is our brand new product line. That's the high level overview. I think it's an amazing result, both the top line growth, maintaining our cost structure where it is, improving our gross margin, improving our underlying cash collections by 24%. Every single line was an outstanding result. We're now cash flow positive into the future and growing strongly. I couldn't be more proud of the team. I think we're set up for success and continued domination of this segment.
I'll now hand over to Ben, who'll go through the numbers, and we'll then hand over for questions. Over to you, Ben.
Thanks, Tim.
We decided to include an unaudited personnel to show people where we landed again on an unaudited basis for the full year against the guidance we provided. Looking at that, we landed at about 13% EBITDA margin. Tim's talked about the Custodio investment. That was the conscious decision, right? You would account for that and adjust back. We're at about 14.4%. Towards the top end of the guidance range that we've given. As I say, it was a very conscious decision. It wasn't something that was out of our control. It's an easy one to, I guess, isolate and identify as a normalization. In the months where we made that commitment, made that spend, the ARR added in that Custodio business was more than double what it was in prior months. The impact it had was really significant.
I think I'll just take the opportunity as well to reiterate Tim's point around capital raising and marketing and Custodio, because I've had a few questions on conferences over the last little while. There is zero intention to raise money to fund Custodio marketing. It'll be funded out of excess cash flow and we can tweak it up and tweak it down within a day's notice if we need to, depending on how the business is operating. We will manage that spend through the financial year with the guidance we've given around FY2026 in mind. I think it's just an important thing to reiterate the really pleasing thing.
Outside of markets, our ability to keep.
Costs under control throughout the financial year. Again, I think it's been a really big achievement and just shows the leverage that's within this business. Quarterly cash flow, things touched on the customer collection, so I won't labor that.
Point too much more.
We split out the data in the chart earlier in the presentation, so you guys can see it really clearly as to how we've performed there. It's obviously on face value. Cash collections looking flat is something that might raise questions, but when you dig into the detail, you can clearly see that the annual billing has increased significantly year-on-year, broadly in line with revenue. I'll jump more into the detail on the next page. Again, touched on cash collections. Direct costs obviously up there, but that is largely the marketing spend. You strip the additional marketing spend out of that, and direct costs are well under control and being managed excellently by the team on a per unit basis. It's continuing to come down.
We've touched on direct cost before and that it is a variable cost and will increase as the business grows, but the per student number will continue to come down over time, so we'll get efficiencies out of that piece. Staff costs broadly in line with what they've been for the last couple of quarters, notwithstanding pay rises that have come in October month and the April month. I'd expect staff costs over the next financial year to be somewhere in the sort of 5%- 6% increase range. Accounting for CPI and some growth heads, maybe it's slightly higher than that, depending on what FX does, but it should be broadly in those lines. No dramatic increases needed in staffing levels to justify or to deliver the growth that we're talking about from a revenue perspective.
Fixed costs, it can bounce around a little bit and it looks like a big %, but it's a small number. Again, broadly in line with the March quarter and we expect that to continue on. There's nothing significant that we need to invest in in that sense. Hardware costs are largely seasonal. In the increase from March quarter to June quarter, they're in line with last year, in fact, slightly down, so trending in good direction. For the purposes of the normalization of the June quarter, I've actually split out the detail there, so everyone can see it really clearly in the bottom. Tim touched on the FX exposure previously. You can see from an ARR perspective, a AUD 0.01 movement is reasonably significant, but from a net cash flow perspective, it's much, much smaller.
We're reasonably naturally hedged as a business due to the $ and the GBP cost that's going out of the business. FX have moved slightly favorably to us in the last couple of weeks as well. As I say, the net impact of the bottom line isn't massive. We're relatively comfortable there. On that basis, we'll jump to Q&A.
Thanks, Ben.
I just need to turn on microphones. Give me 30 seconds.
You should be able to answer your question now.
Sorry, I had the.
I was not in the desktop. Let's just look at the different screen.
Well done, guys.
Good, good set of numbers. All the leading indicators are very strong. Just a couple of questions for me. One more operational, but just adding AUD 10 million in the K-12 business, like that's a big uplift. Can you just kind of talk through the drivers of that AUD 10 million? How much was, call it the call filtering and firewall? How much was the new products with Monitor and various others that you're pushing through the platform? How much, just talk through the drivers there.
It was 12. It was AUD 2 million of cross and upsell, and the rest was in new logos if I recall. Over to you, Cris.
Yeah, that's correct, Tim. Still the majority out of the U.S. is in the new business. New logos, Owen, and that's come through going up market as well. As Tim mentioned, average sales price went up materially. In fact, the top 10 deals that we did last quarter in the U.S. had an ASP of about AUD 350,000 . There is a greater emphasis moving forward on upsell, cross-sell, and we do expect that % to continue to grow. We're still at 16% of the market on a student basis in the U.S. if we focus there. The new logos will continue to grow and we've got many different levers made to continue to see new customer acquisition as well as new products. Like Tim said, EdTech Insights is hitting the ground and new other modules.
There's a lot of opportunity along with some of the channel deals that we've referenced before with CDW. I'll leave it up there. You'll continue to see accelerated growth in both new business and upsell cost.
In terms of the product drivers, is it predominantly still the filtering and firewall that's driving the new logo growth?
Filtering, firewall, craft and management?
All of the above.
We did close, I think, about AUD 250,000 in the quarter of EdTech Insights for early kind of customers. We are going to expect a much greater contribution from that sort of data analytics products moving forward.
One thing that's of interest is the Monitor product, which we acquired with Smoothwall 2021, had about AUD 5 million of recurring revenue. That product on its own passed through AUD 30 million of ARR at 30 June. That's becoming part of the packages in some big deals, but mainly across sales.
Yes, I'm just trying to understand inside the AUD 10 million of the new, how much was the kind of monitoring, how much was new products, how much was filtering up? If you get a product split of that AUD 10 million, just understand if that's changing over time.
All of that will include filtering, classroom management, possibly some firewall in the UK, and a small portion of that would be initial purchase monitoring, I'd imagine. Most of the monitorings are quite solid.
The mix has been pretty consistent.
The last sort of six to 12.
Months and just shipping to, shipping across to the guidance then. OpEx guidance goes from. I'm assuming that gross margin of 72% will hold into FY2026 just around operating leverage, but around your reinvesting in Custodio. First question, 72% the right number for FY2026 GP?
Yeah, I think as a starting point that's about right. Hopefully we outperform that a little bit. You're right, if Custodio is performing well, we're getting good growth there, we'll look to reinvest.
Okay, so OpEx guidance around that AUD 73 million mark. The real question here is in FY2027 you're going to give an FY2026 ARR guidance which is quite large, which kind of gives an indication of what FY2027 revenue would be. We kind of know what the GP margin should be or thereabouts. Can we talk through what your view around the OpEx increase will be into 2027? The reason why I ask that is because the operating leverage gets very large. Like if you're growing at 20%, is the expectation that you'll reinvest half of that or do you have a number in mind? Is it a 5%, 10% OpEx growth? Just talk us through that.
That target internally is to just CPI growth, your best only. We're finding efficiencies in particular in front of the house. Cris's driving efforts with AI tools to drop front of the house and the back of the house. Again, AI unification work and the movement of our engineering. A lot of engineering growth is into Sri Lanka. I think we're adding, gee, what's the number, Ben? It's like 30 people this calendar year into the Sri Lankan team. There is a strong emphasis on optimizing our engineering and product expenses, which is the large share of our cost. If you moderate CPI, I'm hoping I can outperform that at the MOL CPI. The doors open up.
The doors definitely do open up. Then Custodio, AUD 1.5 million additional in marketing in that quarter. I guess that was new information that you added AUD 2 million in the quarter. Obviously, just understanding the unit economics here because I thought most of the growth would have come from the better beta C channel, which is obviously much lower CAC. You just talked about the AUD 1.5 million step up. I'm guessing that's in performance marketing. Just talk us through how we should be thinking about unit economics within the Custodio going forward.
Yeah, that's. I'm actually organizing for Victoria, who's the CEO of Custodio, and Tamara, who's the Head of Product, to run a session which is hopefully happening next week. You might get this opportunity to ask these questions directly to Vic. In simple terms, what we found in that trial period, in the first quarter into the second quarter of this calendar year, we were finding average order values of, you know, north of AUD 60 and average cost to acquire a customer of less than that. That's a little bit of performance marketing. What we're starting to play with is in social media investments and brand building. That's layered on top of the B2B2C piece.
Essentially, in simple terms, what we're finding is that an effort in brand building and communication with schools is lowering our average cost to acquire in these key markets that we're operating in in Australia, the UK, Brazil, and of course the U.S.. They've also done a very good job at hijacking things like the Adolescents TV series that came out with Netflix. The team's outstanding, responding very quickly to hijack that news flow and then turn that into eyeballs. It's a bit about performance marketing, but more increasing amount of their investment is now into social channels and of course generative AI type search. What we're hoping to do is obviously hit the guidance number one, not raise capital number two, but tune that business to not invest any more than they generate, and they're seriously profitable now. Ideally, optimize acquisition at around their average order value.
It's cash, zero cash impacting growth. I think at certain times a year, that's going to be very possible. Other times a year, not so much. That's how we're trying to target that business.
Good one. Well done, guys. It's a great setup for the next two years.
Thanks, man.
Ross should be able to participate now.
Anyways, hear me.
Yep.
Great morning. Congrats. Just two for me. Pennsylvania. Can we talk about that a little bit more? You said that it's a panel. Is it fair to assume that's a panel of two like it has been in the past? The second part of that one is you also called out that, you know, four products could be sold into that opportunity. I guess historically, when you've had these.
Opportunities, you've started with one and then shown them the menu, and they can.
They can buy more over time.
Should we read it that you're able?
To sell far more earlier on into Pennsylvania than you have in the past?
Yeah, look, maybe I'll hand over, Cris. Yeah, look, it is, it's a panel. It's essentially that we've been endorsed by the state as a suitable product for that market with a great pricing of that market. It's a big leg up. Cris over here explained North.
You kind of summarized it well, Tim. Yeah, it gives us the contractual relationship of the incentives to work with Pennsylvania for them to promote it out to their districts. You can think of it similar to Tassie and also the Ohio Management Council deal that we've referenced previously, Ross. Yes, in this case, we've been able to from the outset get all of our products onto the pricing list with them. These things take a little bit of time to get going, but certainly my expectation is that this as well as Ohio will start to follow the successes that we've seen in Texas with TASI, where I think since that deal was done, we're now close to 20% of subscriber base in that market.
Is it a panel of two? Did you mention that?
I haven't mentioned it.
We believe it's a panel of.
Three, but they haven't told us to be direct. We're making some inferences there.
Ross.
A low number still, by the sounds of it.
So.
Just the second one, just on free cash flow. Do you think that each quarter in 2026 could be free cash flow positive, and if not, maybe call out the.
One that would be.
Is it more of a 2027 story where you can be pretty confident?
That it can happen?
Yeah, first half. September strongly free cash flow positive. December precaution positive, but less so. March and June we'll still burn cash, but hopefully to a lowering degree, obviously, than this year. On balance, over the whole year, free cash flow positive.
Without getting.
Too far ahead feels like that just gets closer and closer in the 3Q, 4Q, in the 2027 year.
It does. I think Custodio will be a big part of that because it's got a much smoother profile of billing annually. I think the March and the June quarters, from an education perspective, will never be huge quarters because the Australian and New Zealand markets are really the drivers of those two quarters from a cash flow perspective, and they're not.
They just don't shift the dial.
I'd say it's more likely actually 2028 before you get to free cash flow positive in both of those quarters. 2027, you'll be pre cash and.
Just a super quick one.
The weighted pipeline at AUD 9 million is a good number, but also flat year-on-year. Would you have liked that to be higher or is that just an example of just good selling that got the weighted pipeline down, back down to that number? Good conversion.
That's correct, Ross. Yes.
The other thing to point out is in the data that we've used to calculate the weighted average inversion of the U.S. pipe, it continues to build in July, August, and September. One of the years in the last couple, the pipeline actually converted at 110%, funnily enough. Not saying that that'll happen this year, but it's a unique period in the year for the U.S. and with the September year end for Texas and a couple other bits and pieces.
Great.
Thank you very much.
Thanks, mate.
Thank you.
Hey, Wayne, you can unmute yourself.
Hello? Hey, have you got me?
Yep.
Cool. I had a phone call come in.
At the exact same time, I wasn't sure what was happening.
Okay, a couple of questions for me.
Interesting comment about your ROI on marketing spend in consumer and how you dialed it back to basically achieve your guidance despite it being highly cash accretive. What have you baked into your FY2026 guidance for marketing here on the Custodio side?
Yeah, I mean, I won't give you a specific number. Off the top of my head, it's, I guess in simplest terms, it'll be a similar level to what we've got in Q4 spend
Over the.
Full year though, annualized.
Yeah. As I've said, it's an inherently variable spend, and we will manage it accordingly.
Yeah.
Y eah.
What channels do you use to sort of market that?
Oh, it's, you know, the main one historically was obviously, you know, Google AdWords, you know, so paid advertising for those performance channels. It's affiliate marketing through online websites where you can find out about technology or trainer patrol apps or whatever. Now increasingly it's finding influencers who are promoting our product or just general content, our generated content too inside social media platforms, and they're toying with how you get fighting these AI tools as well. It's pretty broad based.
Yeah, okay, cool, thanks.
I guess a couple of years on, as you get more growth and more operations, operating leverage, you're going to go from a net debt position to a strongly net cash position. In your view, what is the best use of surplus cash?
Looking forward to that day when this is a real problem. I was on a chat with a group of staff, 50 staff globally this morning, and talking about this. Ultimately, I think the number one thing for our business is to focus on what our customers need and buy or build products that customers need, make sure it makes sense for them, and the money will then follow from that. I think that really has to be the core focus. If in so doing it's so cash generative that there's a dividend potential, then of course we'll deal with that when it comes to that. I don't want to be in a position where we're just buying adjacency. Competitors say, oh well, you know, you sell to school, so let's do this too. I don't think that's the way it should work.
I think we need to be very conscious and circumspect about what makes sense for customers and extend out there those.
To give the really boring financial answer, you know, leverage isn't a bad thing, but the current debt that we've got is expensive. I guess reading through the lines of your comment, we leave the debt there and continue and invest in the business. That's a possibility, but not with the existing facility. We would look to refinance it at the very least to more commercial terms and then make decisions from there.
Yeah. Cool.
That's all for me.
Thanks guys.
Thanks, mate.
F or sure.
Be good to go.
You found the unmute button, mate.
There he is.
Hey guys, just a couple quick ones for me. I just wanted to follow up on your target of AUD 10 per student ARPU. Which product in particular do you think will drive that in the next few years? If you could just update us on where the AI filtering on videos is at.
Yeah, so I think the number one thing that's propelling us forward is the Monitor product, and that's still less than 40% penetrated in both the UK and the U.S. A heap of white space just for digital monitoring, which is a very established need in both those markets. It's the Content Aware modules, which is at the moment standalone, frightening. It's add-on pricing in our markets, but will probably just be embedded in higher-priced filtering products going forward. EdTech Insights, which is the ability for schools to analyze all their data to look at the efficacy of their hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars of spending on apps inside their institutions, and later stages of this product is then connecting all that data into outcomes. We expect, you know, AUD 1 to AUD 2 price points for those sorts of new products coming in the next 12 months.
The wellbeing analytics and the wellbeing products, which is nascent in our business, I think that there's still a long way to go on that product as well. Heaps of things coming and some we already have and start to show penetration. Cris, do you want to add.
I just think, yeah, you probably overlook the new capabilities that we're delivering over the next half into Monitor. It's by far our highest ARPU product and we're delivering, we have delivered CloudScan, but now we're moving that to the ability to interrogate Google Docs, email, chat. What that will do is twofold. One, it will allow us to increase our pricing and secondly will make us, we already are, but the absolute, the market dominant player in that space. We'll see a far greater conversion ratio of Monitor deals, as Tim said. Across the UK where we've been very successful with Monitor, we've got 40% of our existing customer base, got 4,600 customers, only they have Monitor, and in the U.S. that number's even lower. It's like 24%. So massive opportunity even in our existing base for cross-selling.
Equally, as we get better and better, I think in the, I think we shared that data. The continual growth in how many products we have per customer, you will see more bundling and therefore again, a higher, a higher ARPU.
Yeah, I mean look, it almost appears you're not too far off your target at the moment.
Right.
You've just called out a whole range of uplift from Monitor, including the CloudScan. You've got the AI filtering components which can add more ARPU, you've got EdTech Insights. In a year's time or so, is it possible that you could be recasting where that potential is? Are you thinking about other business lines that you think are a natural fit to really entrench yourselves within their school ecosystems further?
Yeah, we are, look, and thanks for pointing out that trajectory. The trajectory is fantastic growth in our ARPU K-12 products, but also global products. Yeah, we're really on a really strong pathway, and the insights analytics products from Octopus, I think, is the thing that's going to propel that again forward in the next two years. Beyond online safety and student wellbeing, there's some natural extensions. Some of our competitors are entering real world safety. Things like hall pass management, business management systems to dismiss your kids. Literally, there are schools in the U.S. where you have to register to pick up your kid after school. There's those sorts of things which are safety adjacent security, tons of funding in security because schools have been hacked constantly by threat actors, mental health support services, at least on the data side, but potentially beyond that, heaps of things.
Ultimately, as I said earlier, look, we need to make sure that what we do makes sense for customers. Our view is that what we need to be is deeply embedded in the workflows of schools. We need to provide beautiful experiences, and we need to be part of the decision making of the institution's executive. That's the thing that gives you sustainable advantage. That's how we think about these decisions.
That makes sense. Thank you. That's it for me.
Thanks a lot.
Hey guys, thanks for taking my questions. Just a few from me. Firstly, around the U.S.A market, just keen to understand where your market share is now. I think Crispin, you mentioned that earlier, but then perhaps sort of where it was three years ago and whether that's accelerating and your ability to continue to hold growth looking forward on a headline dollar number or on a % growth basis.
Thanks.
Cris.
Yeah, so that mentioned James, where we're just shy of that 16% market share on a % of the students. I think it's about 55 million in the U.S., but there's still massive upside there, clearly. We talked about some of the tailwinds regarding going up market. I mentioned some of the successes just recently, greater product bundling, EdTech Insights, those other things coming into play. For me, when I look at the U.S. in particular, we've got massive greenfield opportunity, there's significant brownfield opportunity into our existing base for cross-sell. We've got opportunities, there's a big, I'm sponsoring that in the organization, focus on continuing to improve our already market-leading retention, price increases because of the improvements in products.
Even whilst it's not a short-term focus in the U.S., you know, we started to look at markets like Canada that opened up another 5.5 million students, you know, 16,000 schools. The potential there is really just starting. I don't see it slowing. I actually see accelerating in the U.S., and then we get into the UK with, as Tim mentioned before, the full expression of our solution sets coming to the UK shortly, and they're proving capacity to be able to cross-sell, where they were like 44% of their total new ARR was cross-selling and they've essentially only got two products. We'll start to see a real positive turnaround in the UK and we'll start to see their growth getting back into the double digits as of FY2026 and beyond.
Excellent. I mean one of our original premises is when we picked up the stock a while ago was kind of around B2C. Intercepting B2B originally got us excited. Can we have a bit of an update on that and potential for that pillar of growth over time as well?
Yeah, look, I think it's a winner. I guess, you know, it's not turning into direct dollars that are flying from B2B2C upsells, but we're getting, I think we've got 15, 16% of our U.S. districts have now launched the program. The process of launch is taking longer than we'd like. We're working on that. Getting north of 20% of parents signing up to the product, we're getting 1% of them paying for the product, more than 100,000 parents using it now. More importantly, what we're seeing is the brand benefit of it is astonishing. The impact on our cost to acquire is very clear and no more clear than in Australia, where I think we talked about this years ago. James, look at Custodio was outside Australia, was outside of the top 10 of Custodio's highest performing markets.
Custodio is not overweight in marketing in this market, but Australia is now the number three top market for Custodio. The only difference is there are the 130 multiple here talking about parental controls and talking about Custodio as an option, and there's no question we're starting to see the resonance of that in the U.S. market. What's clear is it's this overall play we have of solving the problem, the school community approach, and building a brand and talking about parental controls and school safety all in one breath is improving our business in all parts of our business. Even telco deals have come into us both on the K-12 and the consumer side because of that capability. Yeah, look, I think it's really working. I think it's a massive strength of ours.
Just to add to that Tim, if I may James, one of the other sort of indirect benefits we're seeing of what we call Community is just the increase in, I guess, close won ratios we're seeing across our Filter offering. It is undeniably the market leading proposition where a superintendent can engage their parent community and provide them capabilities on that school owned device outside of school and ultimately pushing Custodio onto their, you know, their children's phones and tablets. That level of capability doesn't exist in any of our competitors and is very hard to replicate in the short term. It is a big reason why these customers that are signing up to us initially for Filter, because Community is a core part of that proposition. We see a very high attachment rate, as I've spoken to in the past, of Classwise.
We throw in Monitor and shortly EdTech Insights. It is helping us get our foot into the door and then expand. That piece of it for me, when we look at the kind of supporting effects of what Custodio is doing for our B2B, is significant.
Appreciate the detail there, and maybe just a couple more in terms of larger deals. You've won recently: Ohio Management Council, SoftBank, Schools Broadband, and now Pennsylvania. Can we get a bit of an update on where these are at in terms of penetration and potential over time as well?
Yeah, sure. I'll start with SoftBank. That's live online. The next step is, I think I've said a few times, is their retail channels. That's being pushed back for technical reasons from their side. We're ready to go, still waiting on that one. We'll start reporting numbers, I'm sure, within the next three to six months on that. That's a strong commitment from BBSW on SoftBank. Super excited about that. Do you want to talk about the telco, the K-12 one, Cris?
Yeah.
Schools Broadband openly has been frustrating and a disappointment. We actually spoke about it on an internal call last week. James, there's been changes in the Head of Sales within our Schools Broadband. Without going into too many details, we've potentially got, if there's a new Head of Sales on board, we're aligned with David. I think he would have probably attended a webinar we did some time ago now to have kind of monthly executive reviews of progress. Previously, they were not giving us visibility of deal registrations because of their markup methodology that we agreed we're now going to see every deal reg so we can support them more actively in helping them close those deals. It's been frustrating, but certainly expect us to be able to start talking about some more successes out of Schools Broadband.
I think Tassie, we've referenced the growth there and in particular how we've accelerated to close to 20% of Texas students through that consortium relationship. Ohio and we've just mentioned Pennsylvania are just really quite fresh. As I said at the beginning of this call, I'm expecting that we'll start to see similar traction to what we're seeing out of Texas.
So.
More to come, James, more to come on those.
Thanks, guys. We'll explore some of this later. Thanks for taking my questions.
Thanks, buddy.
Ron, you should be able to unmute now.
Hey guys, can you hear me? Yeah, just a couple of financial questions. In terms of the balance sheet, the AUD 52 million Ashgrove facility, can you just pay it down as you go? Are there any penalties? Can you just clarify that?
We can pay it down, but there are make holes within the agreement. We're about two years into a five-year deal, so right now it makes more sense for us to keep cash in term deposits and those sorts of things and offset the net interest margin. Come FY2027, you know, sort of 12, 18 months down the track, it'll make some sense to start chipping away at it and start paying it down as those make holes become a lot more minor.
Yep.
You mentioned FY2026. You'll be free cash flow positive. You finished the year with AUD 15.4 million of cash. Should we expect that to be the lowest point in the cash balance through FY2026, or is it going to dip below that AUD 15.4 million through the year, maybe finishing higher at the end of the year?
No, that should be the last balance, and come this time next year it'll be a slightly higher number.
Yep. In terms of the capitalized cost, you did AUD 21 million of capitalized development costs through the year, but the last quarter was AUD 6.2 million. Are you kind of annualizing more like AUD 24 million, AUD 25 million, or is it nearer under AUD 21 million?
It's an estimate throughout the year, a little bit more accurate at half year for half year reporting purposes. We do a really large exercise of timesheet reviews. The engineering department go through, find tooth comb, identify everything that they've done throughout the year that's R&D related, and finalize the number for full year accounts.
There's always a little bit of.
A true up in the June quarter. I'd expect the number next year to be the same, plus your wages increase. Add 5% or 6% to it and that will be the number for next year.
It should be pretty steady.
Property, plant, equipment, that was sort of AUD 6.5 million. What are you spending that on? That's quite high. You're not just a bunch of computers and.
No, that's almost entirely appliances that go into schools and school districts for the filtering product. That would be 95% of it. The rest would be your staff, laptops, and other bits and pieces. The filtering product we offer is a hybrid system where you have cloud only or there's inline filters as well that are effectively servers that go into the schools and school districts. There has been a huge amount of work put into that to keep the cost flat year-on-year, even though the business is growing. That is just about efficiency in the process, making sure we're not returning appliances that don't need to be and replacing with brand new ones at no cost and all sorts of different things like that.
Going forward, that should remain around that AUD 6 million, AUD 7 million a year, that kind of.
It'll grow a little bit, but not straight line with revenue. No, it should. If it's AUD 6.5, call it AUD 7 for next year and maybe AUD 7.5 for the year after that.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay.
All right, that's it for me.
Thanks.
Great result.
Thanks, Ron.
Thanks, Ron. That's everything, Tim. If you want to wrap up.
Yeah, I will look. Thanks everyone for joining the call.
We had over 100 people.
It's a record. There's a lot of interest in us, which is great. As I summarize my section, I think we're now set up with a business that's growing strongly with high visibility, growing in all of the markets that we operate in, with a whole range of optionality in the business, with new products coming to the markets that we operate in, which is very exciting. Cash generating, profitable. We're talking now on the basis of us being a cash profitable business this year. We're all a 40 company, so really great position to be in. Thank you everyone for their support and helping us get here, and looking forward to speaking to you in the next few months. Thanks so much. Thanks everyone. Thanks everyone.