Okay, so ready to go. Welcome to Aiforia's earning announcement from 2024. Today I'm here with Veli-Matti Parkkonen, our CFO. First I will go through the highlights of the year, then we go through the numbers and the last points. Of course we go through what is ahead of us, so strategy and execution. We have some time for Q&A at the end. Let's get started. It was an interesting year and a very good year from our perspective. Our order book was growing nicely.
We actually were able to close multiple significant deals from our perspective, especially on a clinical side, because as you may know, we decided to focus on a clinical market, of course not neglecting the preclinical part, but focusing from a kind of a research type of deals to more kind of a clinical type of deals. We made this decision in 2020 and started building a portfolio for the clinical side. That meant that, okay, we moved from 10-K deals to potentially kind of hundreds of thousands of a year or even millions of a year for bigger clinical customers. On that kind of plan, we've been moving ahead nicely. Our growth was mainly happening from a clinical side. We maintained the research business, and that's where we are at the moment.
I will go on the details on this journey a little bit later. We also, at the same time, when we started to get in the first bigger clinical customers and having in place replicable products so that we can scale up, we were also kind of building up a distribution channel, reseller partners. Of course, previously we've been working, of course, a long time with all the strategic ones in the cloud side, from a scanner side, from an image management, laboratory information system type of partners. Last year we also started to expand through the partner network who are actually reselling our products in particular countries. Of course, we did a nice investment on product development. A significant amount of our cost went to building new products, and we got good traction on that side as well.
I think this is a familiar slide, but now there's more customers, and I think it actually, from our perspective, is the most important one. Because I said about the company's history, started about 10 years ago building a platform so that we enable pathologists to build their own AI models. That's Aiforia Create tool. With that tool, we actually gained a lot of success in the research community with the pharma customers who are building their own products using our research on drug development. With that, we gained a lot of users, over 5,000 users. In 2020, we made a decision so that we use our own tools to start building ready-made products for the clinical side, where we saw that, okay, there's a bigger business opportunity because we go and start automating huge workflows of hundreds of thousands of samples a year.
That clearly was an area that there was lacking in automation. We did a small pivot on that direction in 2020. In 2021, we started to get the first products out, and we won the first customer, which is Mayo Clinic on a clinical side. As you may know, it is the number one hospital in the world, so the best reference you can get. In Mayo Clinic, our breast cancer AI models are already in production for a couple of years, and now they are adding more AI solutions, which is really good news for us. On top of that, there are over 70 pathologists using our platform. From that exercise, we will get more kind of tools for the clinical side as well. That is really interesting and important for us, getting scientific proof and documents out as well.
We do some joint development work with the Mayo as well. Maybe one to mention is the QuanCRC for the colorectal cancer area, where they use our AI to collect a certain number of data points from samples, combining that with the patient data. Actually, over 8,000 patients from eight different hospitals. With that model, they can predict the patient outcomes. It is really important so that you can make then a decision, so what type of a treatment and what level of a treatment the patients are getting. In this particular case, they can lower the treatment categories and give less chemotherapy for 30% of the patients. My point is that, okay, with the Mayo Clinic, the collaboration and the partnership is really strong and it is growing. That was the first entry to the clinical side.
Fast forward after that, we got a lot of interesting opportunities. Every year we have been doubling or tripling the amount of customers on the clinical side. Let's say PathLAKE from the UK, that is an NHS-linked project. We got the first phase of that two years ago, and just recently they also chose the PathLAKE NHS number two. We are part of that initiative as well. I think that was a really good entry for us, and we got our AI models in the kind of list of NHS-approved solutions, and we have closed the first deals as well. NHS was, I think it was a 2022 deal. First Mayo in 2021, NHS in 2022. We have got, of course, the Turkish deal, the Memorial Hospital from Istanbul.
It's a really interesting one because it's an 80 million people country, and this is the biggest private hospital in the country, fully digitized. Now they took all of our CE-IVD-marked solutions on this first deal. That's really kind of a huge opportunity to grow and a really important customer for us. Interestingly, the European area has been picking up really nicely, 2023, 2024. Last year we did a lot of really important deals here. Sardinia deal was actually announced yesterday, so that's a smaller, maybe 1.5 million person region, so maximum seven hospitals in that region. That's an interesting one as well. I think the big ones here are the Lombardy region. That was closed in December last year. We haven't booked any of that to revenue yet, but it's on a kind of order backlog already.
That is a big one. The whole region is 10 million people, 31 hospitals, and it is a three-year contract, and it is moving nicely forward. For that particular region, we were able to use our good reference from Italy. The first big one was Veneto, and that is already delivered, and now they are in a phase of ramping up the volume. They took all of our five CE-IVD-marked clinical AI solutions at that point of time. Now the same concept has been kind of replicated for Lombardy region, and it will be going on a delivery phase this year. It will start showing on revenue this year as well, and possibly this year and next year from a revenue recognition perspective. Those are really big ones because Veneto was and is a 5.5 million person region, so it is big.
There are 12 hospitals, and now Lombardia is 31 hospitals, 10 million people. It is like winning a kind of one country, Finland 5.5 million people, or Lombardia, Sweden, about 10 million people. It is really significant for us. Of course, where we are extremely happy is the AP-HP Paris hospital region. We closed a deal last year. The first hospitals there and the first AI models. We start with the one and in a couple of hospitals, but it is the largest hospital group in Europe, and there is an opportunity to grow to 38 hospitals. That is really interesting. In all of these cases, they have been comparing us to competition, so we have been winning, and we are really happy about those.
We got the big deal from Spain as well, and also very happy that we got the deal from Finland, Fimlab, so leading laboratory in Finland. That is a six-year contract, and they were choosing solutions for actually they have a tender for 10 different lots, and they chose vendors for nine, and Aiforia was chosen each one of those nine, and now we got the order for the first three ones, and we are in a delivery phase. My point here is that, okay, we really put the focus on entering the clinical side, building the first flagship hospitals, and winning those deals. On that journey, we are moving forward really as planned and really positively at this point of time. As said before, we are investing quite a bit on R&D and customer acquisition.
Of course, the main thing is that, okay, if you think about the company, you need to have something to sell, and you need to sell, and then you manage the other processes. We have been investing on building more AI models because we think that, okay, you need to have a good portfolio, you need to build the proper interfaces. We have a fantastic viewer, that is clearly the best in the market, so that we can show AI-driven results because they are really rich. We do quantitative analysis, what we show in the image where the problem areas are. We also kind of populate the ready-made report so that we really put an automation and efficiency in the process and then link that back to the laboratory systems. All of those interfaces and AI models and further developing those is really important.
I mentioned about the colorectal cancer model, so that's something that we jointly developed with Mayo, and we have exclusive rights to commercialize that globally. Of course, all the integrations to surrounding systems. When you go to a clinical environment, we are not there alone, so we understand that it's a bigger play. There are multiple software elements that you need to build an integration, so multiple hardware integrations. I'm happy to say that we have done integrations with all the kind of main scanner manufacturers, interoperabilities, and testing with the slides. We are working with all the main image management vendors and also with the LIS systems. Of course, on a cloud side, we work with Google and Amazon and Microsoft. That is something that you need to have in place in order to sell in a clinical.
On a preclinical side, we just recently closed the first good deal with Aiforia studies. That is a workflow tool, and we expect that is an interesting market to be in, and that will grow. Going forward, we have been leading the technology and innovation. We were the first company back in 2015 to start using the deep learning-based AI in pathology. We have been following, of course, what is going on in the technology side, and we have a fantastic team in place, mostly here in Finland. Now, of course, all these GenAI, ChatGPT, and all of these kind of latest technologies. The big thing in our industry is a foundation model. That means that you can use a huge number of slides to train a model to recognize things.
We are, of course, using those and partnering with the people who have those foundation models. We have something really good and valuable things to build in order to build on such a model. We have annotated slides. We have actually own slides that have been annotated, tens of thousands of those. Those are the ones that you can use to enrich the foundation model and really build a working solution. We are studying this technology. Today, of course, we are using those to improve our productivity in the coding and development team, and making the AI models more robust and also making the AI models more efficient way. We are actually investing on this side nicely as well. The regulation. In the clinical side, yes, you need to have a good solution. You need to prove that it works.
You need to have enough scientific studies, and you show that, okay, they can trust the results. We have successfully kind of done those things. With our kind of investment on preclinical and Aiforia Create and working with the research, that's done. The next step is that if you really want to sell in a very regulated environment in hospitals, you need to have these regulations in place. In Europe, earlier it was a CE-IVD, and then they changed the regulations a couple of years ago so that you bring a new one, which is called IVDR. First, they did not have the notified bodies, but now those types of things are sorted out. We spent some time on getting our things certified and a company certified because it's quite a heavy process, actually.
We have done all of those things, and now, of course, we have kind of regular checks on companies, ways to operate, and so on. It is done. It was a heavy lifting, and we also brought the first three models in the market. Most important was the HER2 for breast cancer because that is a biomarker and AI model that, based on that information, you actually kind of make a decision what type of kind of treatment you are giving to the patient. That is a significant thing for us. Plus then, of course, a couple of additional prostate features as well. The point is that with this regulation, once it is done, now we can speed up on bringing kind of a new IVDR regulated CE-IVD solutions in the market.
This is a bit of a kind of barrier of entry for competition as well because some people are saying that, okay, yes, building an algorithm is something. Seriously, when you go to a clinical environment, you need to have these regulatory approvals in place, and then you need to have all of these integrations to your surrounding systems, and you need to be able to maintain and deliver and maintain it as a real software solution. That is what Aiforia can do. That is it. I will hand over to Veli-Matti to go through the numbers from last year. After that, I will start ramping up on our next steps going forward. Up to you, Veli-Matti.
Thanks, Jukka. 2024 was a big year for Aiforia. Many features developed, everything went forward. I would kind of give three points that would give more color for the figures presented a little bit later. First, the decision we made back in 2020 to enter the clinical market, as Jukka mentioned earlier, was a good one. It was proved to be the right one last year. The revenue from the clinical business grew to cover 50% of our total revenue. In zero to 50 in three years. In 2021, we did not have any clinical revenue.
The second, the success in the clinical market meant that our product portfolio is good. Actually, it is excellent. Even the most demanding clients, they have approved our portfolio and user experience as well. The beauty of the business is that with these demanding clients, we are able to develop and expand the portfolio even further.
Third, inside Aiforia, we trimmed our processes to be more efficient, and that is shown in the figures. Work well done, people in Aiforia. Here are some of the key figures from the report. The revenue increased by 19% to EUR 2.85 million, and the order book growth was a whopping 118%. We still invest heavily in product development, so approximately one third of our cost goes to creating new products and features in our portfolio. EBITDA, that was an improvement by almost EUR 1.5 million from the year before, and the number of employees pretty much stable at the same level, 75%. We still had a pretty healthy cash position by the end of last year, EUR 11.5 million.
The revenue came pretty equally from different places like in Europe and the US, but Finland picked up quite a bit, and thanks to the Fimlab deal that we got last year. This is an interesting picture, and it's going to be interesting to see what Antti is writing about this. Order book and revenue. Order book, healthy growth over 100% per annum for the past couple of years. Not too many data points, but obviously, I mean, this is kind of like according to the IFRS accounting system, so we don't have access to similar type of data for a longer period. Anyhow, I mean, this gives a pretty good idea of what's happening with Aiforia. Back in 2022, we had an order book of EUR 1.1 million, and that is basically only preclinical order book, no clinical order book at all.
If we go a couple of years later to 2024, so almost EUR 5.2 million, the growth is basically only the clinical market. The preclinical order book is pretty much the same at EUR 1.1 million. That is something that you have to understand, that our business is shifting towards the clinical market. Obviously, I mean, we want to keep eye on the preclinical market as well, as the Orion deal showed. Jukka explained that earlier. Yet, I mean, the scalable market is in the clinical business. Going to the revenue figures, a little bit smaller numbers, but that hides the fact that actually the clinical business has grown more even than the order book as such. We had a little bit of pickup on the preclinical market in 2023, but it came down towards 2024.
The actual clinical market growth has been something like 150% approximately per year for these past couple of years. The costs are pretty stable. Being able to trim, as I said earlier, the big savings have come from the other operating costs. We have been able to, I mean, two big items are there. It is the software costs and the outside hired workforce. We were able to trim those costs somewhat, something like EUR 1.5 million compared with 2023 figures. I guess, I mean, this work continues. Let's see how we could manage to maintain the good momentum and good development phase in our business. Yet, I mean, obviously, I mean, we are thinking that the cost level stabilizes at these levels. This is a good level, but there might be chances to trim that even a bit further.
Here is finally the cash flow from operations. Back two years ago, H1 2023, we had a negative cash flow from operations, EUR 4.6 million. That has been improving to approximately EUR 3 million the last six months of 2024. That is something that we keep on going on, and I'm positive that we could improve that even further. We have promised that should be a break even by the end of this year. That is a good chance. Not perhaps the last six months, but close to the end of the year, we should be pretty much close to zero level. Back to you, Jukka.
All right, that was good. How do we go forward? This is the area that we are in, the market opportunity. This is something that you need to keep in mind so that we are not building something new demand. The demand is there. We are in a market where there is an active problem recognition. The customers are actively looking for solutions. Now we start being in a phase that we have proven that we have reliable solutions. We have proven that we can deliver, and we are now going to prove that we can scale it up because the products are getting more and more generalized so that they work with multiple different scanners.
They handle a little bit different types of images. We can integrate multiple different things around Aiforia solutions. All of those kinds of things are in place, and the market is there. Yeah, the demand is going up, that is obvious. The cancer cases are unfortunately going up. Same cases are studied more carefully. It means that more slides. There are about 3 billion slides per year. It's a huge amount. If you think about it, all of those slides are 1.5GB-2GB size. It's a huge amount of data. That's why it's an interesting play for the big cloud vendors as well.
Of course, all the kind of big players in the industry are interested in who are providing the devices for the laboratories. Now there are a few, like Aiforia, kind of people who are providing solutions for AI side. It has to be one complete package what we are offering to a customer. The market is there. Demand is there. There are about 100,000 pathologists in the world. That number has not been growing recently.
Now they're actually interested for kind of new students to pick up this topic because of the latest technology like Aiforia's offerings and so on. I think, but still, there's a growing gap between the kind of resources and demand to be diagnosed. This is the simplified picture of the process so that whenever there's a kind of prediction that you might have a cancer, it typically leads to a biopsy and a tissue sample. Those tissue samples are put on a glass plate. They are putting some staining so that you can pull out the information there. Nowadays, it is scanned using scanners from Philips or Leica, 3DHistech or Epredia. You get the digital image. That's really nice. You can share the image with the colleagues in different cities so you don't need to send any more of the slides.
It is still a kind of manual work so that you look at it from a screen and you make your estimates and try to calculate tens of thousands of different cells from that tiny, tiny samples where Aiforia fits in this picture. We actually understand what is in that slide and what do we do. We do quantitative analysis. We calculate all the cells and the distances, whatever needs to be calculated so that you can make a diagnostic decision. We give a kind of a quantitative report, but we also show the picture and where the problem areas are so that you can double-check. The pathology is still in the driver's seat on making a decision so that this is my diagnosis.
Nowadays, it starts to move in that direction so that really, if you are in that trade and if you are a pathologist, you need to have AI skills because if you do not have it, use your microscope, you start to be a little bit out of the business, obsolete. AI is picking up nicely, and that is the thing that actually brings the value on this whole process. You need to understand what is on the slide that you can make a diagnosis, and then it goes to a next step, which is a treatment decision.
My point is that we are in the right spot of this workflow, and we add value, and we actually create the demand for the bigger players, all of these scanner guys and Roche and whatever people who are working on this flow because now they want to go digital, and they want to have an AI so that they can put really the efficiency and accuracy on this workflow. From our perspective, we've been recognized as a leader in this industry, bringing the latest technology and, frankly speaking, going also a little bit deeper than most of the competition because most of the competition leave their kind of support on a heat map level, basically putting layers top of the image and showing where the kind of problem areas are.
This is red, this is orange, and this is green so that the likelihood of cancer is higher in this area. You still need to diagnose in a traditional way. That is where Aiforia is starting. We go deeper. We do the quantitative analysis. I think that is the reason why we have been winning those deals. We have been facing always the competition, but we are winning because when the customer is kind of comparing these solutions to each other, we can provide more. We can provide the actionable information. Scalability. We have a SaaS model, so it is kind of a, I would say, sticky business, a little bit like an ERP type of implementation.
Once you have done it, the assumption is that it will be up and running for a long time because you are transforming from a non-digital to digital, start using an AI, and when you are providing a right working solution, it is not likely that the customer wants to change quickly that system. It can scale. Now, when we introduced these three additional AI models, our sales opportunity, like in Veneto or Milano, we sold five AI models. Now we can sell eight. We can sell more from our portfolio to these existing customers as well. As I said also before, the major opportunity is growing for us as well. Interoperability is a key, saying that, okay, you need to operate as a solid software company. You need to work with all the surrounding systems, and that's really important.
As I mentioned before, the certifications and quality, it is important, the security. We are such in a critical environment that there is no way of kind of doing this badly. You have to do security 100%. You need to provide the quality that they can trust on the results because we are dealing with people's lives and the decisions that pathologists and doctors are making after that. From our point of view, we feel that we did the first five years on kind of building the basis, building the Create platform to build those models. We have been building the next 4.5 years. We've been entering the clinical side, building the product offering in a way so that it's competitive and we can win deals.
Obviously now going forward, our focus is on keeping the edge on a product side, bringing more nice solutions in the market and grow. That's absolutely must so that we grow with the existing customers. We start using them as a reference to get the new ones. The market is there so that there's all opportunities to be really successful on this. Of course, people, a key thing of these things. We have a fantastic team in place, both in the science and the research side, on a technology side. Plus, of course, now we've been building up the sales operation as well. All of these kind of people and the teams need to play together. That's where our focus on that, okay, we keep the top people in the team. Short-term business targets.
We haven't changed any of these, so old information from last year. One point to remember is that we did an IPO back in 2021. That was the time that we just started to enter the clinical side of the business. We gave some kind of promises out, what we are planning to do. We've been delivering those things. These are the next steps, of course, expanding the portfolio. We get these regulatory approved AI models. We are in a good process on getting those done. Strategic partnership done. We have plenty of those, big ones, small ones, reselling ones. As I said, the second slide, what I showed, the customer wins what we have done. That has been in the focus.
One is that, okay, so you have a product to sell, you sell, and then you deliver. You keep the customer happy on that process. We have been really successful on kind of doing those things and achieved 15 key accounts that, okay, have an opportunity to provide us EUR 500,000+ ARR per year in the future. It will take a couple of years, a few years to get in that level, but we focus on accounts that have an opportunity to grow. As Veli-Matti mentioned, the cash flow from operating activity should be positive at the end of this year, very end. We are still kind of thinking that this is a doable target, and we have a pretty okay pipeline and a backlog in place, and we are controlling the cost.
That is clearly one of the key things what we need to do in the longer term. It is kind of expanding the portfolio, which is really important that we start making money as well. We have been in the investment phase. When we did the IPO, we said that we will be in the investment phase until that point of time. We have been investing and doing those things what has been planned. In 2027, we should see already kind of black figures on that time. Achieving the revenue of EUR 100 million is totally doable because we see the deal sizes that we are now playing with. As said before multiple times, going from a EUR 10,000 deal to kind of now Veneto was EUR 1.3 million. We did not tell the numbers from Lombardy, but it is clearly bigger than Veneto.
We are dealing with much bigger deals than we did before. The 100 million target is achievable as well. Of course, we need to actively look at what is the addressable market and where do we expand. Those are kind of things that we let you know when we let you know. We are actively looking for areas to kind of bring more value to our customer target group and the number of customers, of course. Next things to come up is the statement next week, Friday. We have an AGM coming up on April 4th. Our next report will be in half a year, so it is on August 28th. All in all, 2024, very, very good year for us. We are moving forward on getting those things done, what we were planning to do. Now happy to take questions.
It's Antti Luiro from Inderes. Starting off with the revenue value, you gave me an opening to that one. Obviously, it's a backward-looking metric. You have the order book, which is significantly higher than your revenue right now. Maybe to just give a little bit of extra color on what's ramped up already or was ramped up in H2. Considering your clinical deals, how many of those were sort of in full run rate during H2?
Those that were received before 2024, so about three, four.
Right. Maybe to go back into the expansion opportunities within those deals. Of course, you mentioned that during the last few minutes, but kind of in the practical terms, you are having more models to sell to these customers. You have an initial deal that you start off with certain models, many hospitals within each group to sort of expand to. How does the process work from the first deal to expanding to more models and more sites?
When you sell, so you successfully close a deal, so then you need to deliver. Typically, they start delivering or they use from one or two models that we deliver, one, maybe breast cancer related or prostate cancer related model. They are testing. After that, when it's because the process is there, the kind of LIS system integration, image management system integration, then the AI model. We can easily kind of add more models on production, but it takes a little bit of time so that they change the old ways of working.
Start getting comfortable with the AI model, and then we start ramping up. There are already plans with the customer, so how do we kind of move forward? We have some particular cases that the customer actually did the implementation for the five models, have been testing so that they are all working nicely. They are kind of ramping up their kind of scanner volume, because they may have a small amount of scanners, so they are buying more scanners, and then it ramps up the volume. Going forward, first we get a little bit fee from a delivery and getting it up and running. Going forward, then it is based on a case volume, so what the money we are getting. It is important that the customer is happy and using.
That is why the customer success management type of a function is really a key so that we keep a good contact with the customer, make sure that they are using it, so they are happy using it, and they expand the usage. It is a typical process on how do you kind of build it up. Right.
I guess some of this expansion is already within the initial order you get. Absolutely. What part of the expansion needs to go through a tendering process? I know it is case by case, but generally speaking.
On ramping up the volume, you mean?
Yeah, expanding within the customer.
I think in the first phase, they buy everything at once. They want to have these and these and these solutions. Maybe we already agree what is the kind of right of use, the volume where they can get up. After that, it is an implementation that has been kind of taking a little bit of time so that they are starting with the one or two or three. Once it is implemented, then we can start invoicing and recognizing as a revenue as well.
You published quite a few new CE-IVDR models after, of course, a long blockage in the regulation processes across Europe. How does this impact your commercial opportunities in general? Have you already had discussions with your customers regarding the new models? Absolutely. It impacts because especially the Italian market has been very good for us. We have multiple hospital regions already in play. They all wanted to have the full portfolio what we have.
We sell to Lombardia and Veneto the five models what we had as a CE-IVD. Basically, if we would have had the three additional ones, then probably we would have sold eight models. Now we can go back and, of course, upsell these opportunities. It is kind of directly linked to the kind of revenue opportunity what we have. Right.
I guess the deal to sell new models is much easier to do than the initial tendering.
That is the assumption because you have done the implementation, all the integrations, and then you add more models.
Maybe on FDA then, you initially were planning to send out an application already during 2024. Could you just give an update on how you are looking at the FDA process right now and what kind of options are you thinking of?
We have been moving as I think we announced that quite some time ago already so that we are looking for the FDA. We have been having kind of planning sessions with the FDA. We have been moving the first steps forward with that one. We have a clear idea now what we are planning to do. We decided that, okay, we do not take the kind of lowest thing so that, okay, we do something very simple. I think our ambition is to deliver something that is really usable for the end customers, brings the value so we can actually sell. Because we see that some of the competitors have been kind of getting something through in a process, but it is not something that anybody buys. From a marketing perspective, nice thing to have. Our ambition is to have really a model.
Most likely it comes from the breast cancer area because there are reimbursement codes placed in the US. We start from there. We have decided what we do, so that's clear. We know when. Now we're in a phase that we are talking with the strategic partners because whether we choose this or that scanner. There are multiple options who have FDA-approved scanners. We are discussing somebody may pay something for this process and somebody wants to join the process. That's the next decision what we do. FDA wants to have so-called pixel pathway that when you digitize the image, all the different components on that process have to be in the same. Everything has to be FDA-approved. If one component is kind of changing, then it's not anymore FDA. That's a bit of a challenge.
FDA seems to be kind of loosening up that so that it's easier to kind of approve multiple scanners on the same AI model. That is interesting for us. You know, it's a thing that, okay, we move forward definitely this year in some steps.
All right. That is good to hear. Maybe finally on the sales pipeline outlook in general, could you describe a little bit what's happening in the different markets and how many sales conversations you're seeing?
Obviously, I'm not going to give the numbers of the pipeline, but I can tell that we have hundreds of opportunities in a pipeline. As a salesperson, of course, they are not all that we are going to close, but okay, some of them, yes. I think the AI is driving the demand. As I said, AI is driving the demand for the scanners and the other systems around. There's a lot of interest in place. From a market, particularly, we see Italy, a few additional deals coming in. We got a good start in Spain with the Castilla y León region.
In France, it's the kind of, could I say that the mayor of Europe. We got the best possible reference what we can get. That's the AP-HP Paris hospital region. When we start delivering that, we can start rolling it out. I see that there's a huge opportunity in France. We have multiple opportunities in the play already. It's an interesting market. We sold that. Now we've been fixing all the kind of bureaucracy around that so that they could actually order. Now it's in the delivery phase.
I see that as a big picking up market. NORIC is a good one because it's quite well digitized already. Concretely, deals should be coming from the UK thanks to the new NHS opportunity. France, Italy, Spain, surprisingly, those are the markets, so they are picking up nicely. I expect to kind of close some major deals in Finland as well in coming up. All in all, the market is growing. We just need to capture the opportunities and get into those competitions.
Maybe still specifically on Italy, I think a bit over half a year ago, you mentioned that there's around ballpark 15 tendering processes ongoing in Italy. Now you've published wins with Lombardy and Sardinia just yesterday. I assume there's still quite a few tendering processes ongoing in Italy. Have you seen any losses from those processes so far? Is there still sort of many deals in the pipeline from there? I'm happy with the Italians.
Like the Lombardy deal, there were three LIS vendors offering solutions for digitizing the whole region, and everybody was offering Aiforia. We were quite comfortable on that tendering process. We haven't lost anything in Italy. To kind of expand on that, we haven't lost too many deals. I don't think any on a clinical side.
All right. That's all from me. Thanks.
We have one question from our online audience. What is the company's financial position at the moment? Looking forward, you may be planning a share issue for next year.
Yeah, as we told, that's a pretty healthy position by the end of last year. We are happy about that. That would bring us a long way to 2026. Obviously, I mean, as we told in the statement, we are going to screen different types of opportunities in that area. We are pretty kind of confident that we have multiple choices on that side. It looks good.
Thank you. I think that was all at the moment.
Very good. Thanks for the audience and thanks for the nice questions.
Thank you.