Hi, welcome to today's event where we have the pleasure to present Agillic. To help us through today, we're joined by CEO, Emre Gürsoy, CFO, Claus Boysen, and a special guest today because I think if you are a shareholder, you knew that Viking Venture has invested into Agillic and are a big shareholder. Of course also Joar joined as a Chairman. Very welcome also to you as a guest today, and I guess you will have a small part of the presentation and maybe also to clarify some questions. Today's event, we will cover the Q1 results. To me it looked a little bit muted on the customer growth, but a very big step in the trajectory to being cash-adjusted EBITDA, and thereby self-running neutral. Congratulations with that.
As always, do not hesitate to ask any questions in the box down below. Do it in Danish, do it in English. I will try and translate to the best of my ability. For now, I will hand the call over to you, Emre.
Thank you very much. Thank you very much for the invitation, Michael, and for the introduction. As you mentioned, we are now today we are three of us giving a quick update. What we are planning to do is running the typical update from our side for the quarter, but try to reserve as much time as possible for Joar to have an interaction around both the updates from his side as well as the questions that we'll get. For those who are not familiar with Agillic, what we are, we are an omnichannel marketing automation platform. We work with data-driven insights and content, and we try to create, automate, and send personalized messages via our platform on behalf of our clients.
The main focus that we focus is basically customer experiences. The reason for that one is via these customer experiences, our clients get to work with higher conversion rates, enhanced customer satisfaction, higher retention, elimination of churn, increased customer lifetime value, and operational efficiencies. All together, we actually help our clients to have greater return investment on their efforts. A quick update on our company, facts and figures. We are operating in 10 markets with clients, 118. They're all in Europe. 100% of our business is SaaS business. We do not do professional services. This is driven by our partners. We are 46 employees, and since 2018, we have been on the First North Nasdaq stock market.
On the right side, what you can see is the number of industries where our 118 clients are coming from. What is the red thread across the board with all these different industries that we are operating? We have a single platform. We use the same platform across the board in all industries because they're all customer-centric companies working with data, working with content to increase their customer experiences. That makes it very unique for us so that we are flexible enough to be in new industries, in new geographies without actually adjusting our platform in any new custom solutions. Single platform across the board. Quick update on the numbers for the Q1. On total ARR, we are DKK 71.5 million. That is year-over-year. That's a 22% increase.
On our revenue, DKK 16.3 for the quarter versus last year, 17% increase. On the EBITDA side, we are just 0, and compared to last year, that is DKK 1.7 million better than last year's same period. If you look at the Q1 results altogether, I will say before we go into the details together with Claus, I will say against all odds, I'm actually quite pleased with the overall performance that we have delivered, with both the ARR growth and the revenue growth, mainly because the market out there is quite different than what it used to be. Business has not been as usual for a while, the quarter that we also went through has been quite interesting in the perspective of decisions are being postponed.
There's insecurity and unknown environment that allows most of the companies. It pushes them into a kind of aware of what the next months will be situation, which is basically everything is being delayed, not canceled, but delayed. That puts a kind of a different perspective, but I'm very glad that we have delivered a very strong result against all odds.
If we go a little bit deeper into the numbers here on the revenue side, as Emre mentioned, Q1, we ended up with DKK 16.3 million. Quarter-over-quarter for the last three years, we can see a steady, solid growth on our revenue. If we look at our committed future revenue part, it was DKK 26.3 million at the end of Q1, rising from DKK 24.1 million last year in Q1 and DKK 20.6 million. The DKK 26.3 million is the committed and paid revenue that we are registering at a later time during the year. On our EBITDA side, we can also see strong improvement from last quarter where we ended with -DKK 1.7 million, and this quarter we are at 0.
At the last 4 consecutive quarters, we have been positive on the EBITDA side. In general, our ARR has grown 22% since last quarter, or since Q1 2022, with a stable growth on the ARR from subscription and a growth on transactions from last quarter of DKK 10.3 million to now DKK 17.3 million. However, a small decrease from Q4 2022, which is explained by the seasonality, and we will go a little bit more into details on that on the next slide. If you look at the ARR from transactions, quarter-over-quarter from the different years over the last 3 years, seasonality-wise, Q1 is the smallest quarter. If we look at the increase since last quarter, since Q1 2022, it's a 68% increase.
Q1 is always minor than the remaining quarters. Normally we are growing by 100% during the year, if we look at the past couple of years. All as planned. We move into some cash flows highlights. Q1, we have provided a cash flow from operation of DKK 1.2 million positive versus Q1 last year, where we had minus DKK 8.3 million. That is an improvement on our cash flow from operations of DKK 9.5 million. We have kept our steady investments, as we have mentioned the last many quarters, that this is where we expect to remain on our investment side.
Our cash flow from finances, if we look apart from the capital increase, they were minus DKK 0.9 million versus minus DKK 1.6 million in Q1 2022. The improvement on the cash flow from finance is a part of what we announced last summer, where we paid off one loan in order to secure lower recurring payments for the next year.
If we look at the cash flow in total, we started this year with DKK 7.4 million, and with the capital increase from Viking Venture of DKK 22.5 million, we ended Q1 2023 with DKK 26.9 million at the bank. All this leaves us to a situation where we maintain our financial guidance that we provided to the market in February, and where we also announced our strategic financial goals towards 2024, which was added by positive cash-adjusted EBITDA by 2024. Beyond the growth, the cash position that we are in, if we also look a little bit into our operational excellence-
We have provided now a solid platform for how our gross profit per employee has grown over the last three years. If we compare Q1 2020 and all the way up to this quarter, we have increased our gross profit per employee by 52%. We are 100% focused on sustainable capital efficient growth and have a solid platform to drive future EBITDA margins from growth.
Right. In addition to the operational excellence that we are looking very much into our strategic initiatives to support the sustainable growth. A couple of highlights that I want to mention very quickly. On the left side, what we have highlighted here that Forrester recently published the Cross-Channel Marketing Hubs Landscape for Q1, and we have been mentioned as one of the leaders in the report. This is a very strong position for us because this is a confirmation of our position within the space that we're operating. In addition, couple of highlights that I will also bring some of them into your attention in a couple of slides in a minute. First of all, we have established a new department in our organization called Center of Excellence.
The second is, we have brought in two key positions into our organization for future stable and strengthen our organization for the future. This is VP of Sales and VP of Customer Success and Support. In addition, all these two department launch new team members are all focusing on driving up our net revenue retention, keeping our clients and Partner Growth Programs. These are all kind of activities that we are accelerating right now. In addition to that one, we have also our Chief Experience Officer, Rasmus, together with co-writers, he has published a book, which is all about what we are talking as benefits that we are adding to the market. The Center of Excellence department, why is this important?
The reason is this is pure, tied into our purpose. I mean, the purpose of this department is to advise and inspire our clients. We do not do professional services, but we create value. We show value and inspire our clients whether they are doing well enough or they are living up to the top value that they can get from our platform. This has been so well welcomed by all our clients and all our partners. It's a main drive right now behind many of our initiatives. I would like to mention one important market movement, and this is a couple of days ago, McKinsey has just published a new survey where they're speaking to the organizations regarding their marketing organization, regarding their data accessibility, and their ability to work with data to create value.
It basically says that those who can actually work with data in a personalized manner, they can increase their 10% to 30% of increase of their efficiency and 2% to 3% of their bottom line effectiveness. These are very, very big numbers when it comes to real return investment conversations, this is one of the way that we actually go out and meet our clients. We do not sell technology, we sell value. This is something we have been talking about for quarters. Going forward with that, this is the book that Rasmus and his co-writers have written. It's Hello $FirstName: Profiting from Personalization. We are actually preaching how you can measure your activities, what you should work with, very specific hands-on examples and operational guidelines.
The very important thing is we even personalized. I mean, Rasmus have worked really hard behind this one, personalizing to the different geographies. This book now is written in multiple new content depending on the geography together with our partners. In Norway, we have written this together with Arild from BAS Kommunikasjon. In Sweden with Mattias Andersson from Miltton. As we go to the new geographies, we'll be going forward with that. What that brings us is true value to the market, to the clients with, or the prospects, true value of what you can level up with our platform. I will very quickly touch base on this one. Those of you who have seen our previous presentations, you will remember this.
It's all about our growth strategy is focused on our market expansion, partner growth programs, pricing strategy, and platform utilization, which is the Center of Excellence team, and all the focus behind that, and our technology and product strategy focus all together. All this been strategy that we have been working on for a while, it got attention. If you remember, earlier, I mentioned this too, that the attention that we brought has reached out of the Danish borders in Norway, Viking Venture has reached to us. As they reached and start the conversation with us, also... Excuse me? There's a, what's that?
As they reach to have a conversation with us, showing their interest of their knowledge within the SaaS business to business, SaaS businesses in the Nordics, expansion beyond Nordics to the international markets, all that conversation that we have had with them, the board of directors on behalf of the company has taken decision to have these conversations even further, which has resulted with a very unique and a very, very strong new relationship establishment. Hence why we have asked Joar to join us today because I think that is the best way to share his perspective and their strategy with you. Joar?
Yeah. Thank you, Emre, and thank you for having me. First of all, I'm very pleased to be here as the chairman of Agillic, and not at least being as that Viking Venture has become a large shareholder of the company. The only thing we in Viking do is to help Nordic company scale, like Nordic B2B SaaS companies. Over the last 2 years, we have been involved with 7 public B2B Nordic SaaS companies, where we have been one of the largest investors. As of today, we have a portfolio of 16 B2B SaaS Nordic companies, and on a daily basis, the only thing we do is to help them to scale. When we look at Agillic, why did we find interest of Agillic?
There are quite a few things about that. First of all, we like the product, the business model, how they operate towards their clients. We have been very impressed by the management team and the way they have developed the company going forward. The market, we believe, will continue to grow. We believe that Agillic is a very good foundation for future growth. We believe that with the knowledge that we have from this space, we could help the company grow faster with us as an investor. That's the reason why we invested. Hopefully, this will be a journey that will go on for quite a long time.
Can you express a little bit what you are seeing in the MarTech space, and why you believe this is one of the good places to be and then maybe with some good backwinds behind you?
If you look at the market today, the first of all, it's a struggle to get for a company to get your first client on board. Also, how do you sell further to the clients you have as a company? Which means that if the more data you have, and if you're able to use that data, you could use that data intelligently and use it to sell such that a client receiving the message feels that it's huge value perhaps. That's what we see in the market now. If you are using data that you have on an intelligent way, that will help you to scale the business.
That what we feel Agillic is doing, towards the client that are using their software.
Maybe to ask in a little bit different way, and I know you're also the chairman, so I. You go in, you help them scale up. Which capabilities? Is it network you can bring Agillic? Maybe on the other side, was there something you were seeing that maybe if Agillic twisted a little bit on their business model, that they might be able to scale up faster?
Yeah. We were not bringing any magic to the company. The to developing a company is hard work. I think the having been involved with more than 35 B2B SaaS companies, there are a lot of knowledge to help to scale the business. Scaling comes everything from growing the organization, how to enter a new market, how to develop your partners.
Also to attract, good, people to start to work for the company. I think those are the elements that we are working on. From Viking is, so Agillic. It's not only the board members, it's access to the full Viking team, which means that we have a operational excellence team that go in and could help the company if they, if they want. You get also access to the Viking community where all Viking companies are together. You could get knowledge from the rest of the group.
If I look through a couple of your companies, some of them have actually been quite successful in the very hard thing that is to do scale out of the Nordic area. Is that something you can bring the knowledge or bringing those CEOs together and kind of share the knowledge on what next steps to be? Is that one of the things that you think might help?
That's one of the things that we know helps.
Yeah.
We have seen that from other companies and, as you said, quite a few of our portfolio companies have been very successful, scaling in, both Europe and in the U.S.
Perfect. Thank you. I will see if there's other questions, but, else I think I will take it the back to you, Emre, if you have some closing remarks, or else we go to the questions.
No, I think we can go to the questions.
Perfect. There's a question. What are your strategic plan with the capital injection from Viking Venture? You are closing in on being cash-adjusted EBITDA . That means self-sufficient, especially when you look at growth versus profitability. You're really hitting the profitability target. Will you scale up the growth after this investment? Are you looking at consolidations? Are you looking at other ways of, again, maybe going a little bit more after growth with-
I mean, if I may start with a strategic perspective, we can also combine that with a financial perspective. I mean, first and foremost, we are not in the business of spending money. We're in the business of making money. We are always looking into opportunities to accelerate our strategy. Right now, together with the Viking Venture Operational Excellence team, actually, just a bit as Joar mentioned, we're working on how to accelerate our current strategy beyond what we have already planned in our organic growth for the last couple of years. We are looking into different opportunities and evaluating what will be the best option for us to take, depending on the markets, depending on the acceleration, and still taking full sustainable growth perspective.
It's not about emptying our cash. We take very good care of our money.
It's more about how do we accelerate the top. Living up to our guidance, I mean, we have a guidance that is higher than the previous year, so we of course, are very much keen on delivering on that one too.
If I may add, you can say with the capital injection, it gives us a solid platform. Last year we spent approximately DKK 13 million over the year in investment finances and operations in total. We are moving towards a cash positivity by the end of 2024. That's the journey we are on. It's stable. It gives us the flexibility and the workspace to do this and work for this goal There's also a question here. Can you tell us anything about the current sales plan, pipeline, and if it's possible to reach the current guidance for subscriptions? You know, it seems that it will be a little bit back-end loaded. A little bit comments on why maybe, despite a Q1 that I know seasonality is low by you, but why you still believe in on the subscription part that.
you can also reach that guidance.
Absolutely true. First and foremost, we believe we can achieve our guidance. Otherwise we would make an adjustment. Our focus is that we use data. We work very much with the data, and we work with very detailed pipeline evaluation. For the current time being, what we have seen is that it is always the same start for the Q1. It's always been like this. Q4 has always been the highest. That is a fact for the last 5, 6 years of involvement. That doesn't mean that we will be sitting and waiting for Q4 to bring miracles, but we are pushing really hard for accelerating our opportunities beyond what we have already planned. It is a constant push, but that is the main focus.
Now, what is very important to mention here is that that is the only focus we have, growth. We are running a very profitable company. We have, as mentioned, running a very operational excellence structure, and we have increased our gross profit per employee almost 52% in the last three years. We are not trying to squeeze our team members or get more out of the organization. That is settled. All our focus is on growth. We are going to invest for the more salespeople. We are going to invest more partner enablement team members and invest on the new geographies.
to accelerate growth. That's the only focus we have.
There's a little bit of a bookkeeping question. Is there anything one time in this cash flow that you have? It's a remarkable, like, Q1 that you are making compared to last year, I think almost DKK 11 million or DKK 10 million plus. Is there anything one time that drives up your cash flow to be that positive in Q1? Or is it actually this is a new way of seeing the cash conversion rates, if I may use a analyst worth?
If I go back to the previous presentations we had, we have increased our revenue throughout the quarters, which is driving the gross profit and maintained and even made it more efficient with our cost structure, leaving us to a more profitable also on the cash side.
Perspective. Last Q1 2022, we had a little bit of a seasonality, that's not the main issue of the differences. The main difference is the growth that we have performed over the last 12 months and the operational excellency that actually impacts the numbers here.
Perfect. There's a question here. Do you see any trends in which type of customers you win and lose in the current market? M aybe on the retail side, and maybe talk a little bit about the macro, you are seeing from your customer side. Are there any who are less affected, and more affected about the uncertainty? Any signs on your win and loses by the customers?
Yeah
I t's easier to talk to them. Maybe a little bit on your perspective on what you are facing out there, by the customers, how they feel, about the economy right now.
Absolutely. I mean first and foremost, what we have done is we looked at the last 6 months and looked at the number of type of clients that we are gaining, what kind of industries are we gaining more? The same exercise that we have done it, and we found out that it's actually a very spread 6 different industries that we have gained clients in the last period of time. What actually that tells us is that it's rather than the industries, it is more about the specific company's maturity and their readiness for acceleration or focus on their first-party data, how they can leverage and get. There, what we see right now in the space of the different industries is not the industry itself, but the companies and their maturity.
If you look at the overall sentiment, the macroeconomic uncertainty, the cost consciousness, and companies' interest on increasing their profit line and protecting their cash, there's also something in parallel to that. It is times like this, usually consolidations becomes the name of the game. There is a lot of consolidation going on out in the market that also affects our clients. This could be positive for us because we can grasp a larger portion. This could be a threat for us because the company that is our client could be taken over by a greater entity, and there can be different plans around that.
This whole consolidation exercise is a very hot area right now, and we are spending quite a lot of our time to turn these risk situations to a benefit situation for us, and these are usually happening international basis. This will be a very important other area to mention.
There was as you mentioned, you have created this department that is looking into your customers getting the most out of the system. Is that to increase the stickiness by your customers? If they use your system, get the money out of it, then they will stay by you, or is do you also hope to create some transaction part? You know raising the ARR maybe from transaction because the more the customers use your system.
Oh, absolutely.
W hat are the goals for this department if I say so?
It is basically all of the above because it depends on the client that we're speaking. The system works like this. Well, the Center of Excellence is basically a group of people who are ready to give you any kind of input that you need in any time of your journey, of your customer lifetime with Agillic. Usually what the point is that as they onboard to our platform, there will be a health check exercise, which we are delivering a report to our clients and saying that, "This is you have done well. This you can do a bit more.
This you will do later." Six months later, there's another health check, we tell them, "This is how much you have achieved. This is the benchmark versus the others in your industry or where you could have been, so here's a gap for you." This continues on every 6 months basis. What that means is that we have a tremendous good understanding of what's happening in our clients' utilization of our platform, what can they actually achieve, and we're also teaching them how to measure return on investment. Once we actually achieve that and they understand how to make money out of their activities, then why should they ever leave us?
Yeah.
They're actually making the money.
Yeah. You, I think you mentioned that you are not going in to steal anything from your partners because-
No
I think your model is that.
Yeah
Y ou have your system, your partner earns on implementing that, and they take you out. Is there no way they are going in and taking some of the partners, so that would risk that model.
Absolutely
U nderstood.
This is. Yeah, absolutely. Good question. This is good question. This is something that we have very openly have been engaged with our partners because the reason that we call it partner growth program, because at the end of the day, when we do the health check, when we create the system, we deliver this report to our client as well as their partner so that the both parties know what needs to be fixed. The partner's actually getting recommendations from our side to you know, create consultancy hours. It's good business for them. It's very good business for our client because they're gonna make money at the end of the day. Everybody's happy, and that's why we are very, very.
I mean, what we have seen is as we launched the whole Center of Excellence team and the health check reports, they have already reached out to more than 25% our clients in a very, very short period of time because they are so welcomed. It's a very strong movement, and we're very happy about it.
Finally, I think we have a question for you, Joar. When investing into Agillic, what is your typical holding period for your SaaS companies in your investment funds? Do we have any specific plan considering your, is it a consolidation game or exit opportunities and such stuff? I guess the last one you don't want to comment on, if you can comment on how long are you typical in your investments, and do you see this as we are seeing somewhere in this space you also mentioned it, that there's a consolidation game out going on in the SaaS sector out there.
Yeah. The way we are structured, there is no close end of the investment vehicles we have, so they could continue forever. What I can say is that what we typically say to our investors is that a typical owner period for us is three to five years. However, we have had companies that we had to own more for 10 years, and we have had companies that we have sold before. The way we work is that we are a long, long-term investor, work with the company and develop them and, if there are opportunities in the market, that could be consolidation or there are larger players that want to acquire the company, that could be some, then we need to look into that.
we don't have a set plan for when this company is going to be, or like Overshare is going to be sold. The only thing we are going to do is now work with the company and develop it and, hopefully the company will grow and do better, and the market will do better.
We actually got a final question in. Well, I don't have to ask it, but we will try and ask it. What is your future valuation of Agillic?
Yeah. If I knew that, I think I would have been very successful. If the company continue to develop, the company valuation will increase. However, also as important is the markets. We have seen dramatically drop in valuation for B2B SaaS companies. If both the markets getting better and Agillic continue to grow, it will be a very, very good investment.
I think we will end. I will let you off the hook there, both as chairman and as an investor. You are. Thank you to everybody, Emre, Claus, and Joar for participating, and thank you for people listening in. May everybody have a nice holiday tomorrow.
Thank you very much.
Bye-bye.
Bye.