Welcome to LeadDesk's half year presentation live from Stockholm. Welcome everybody to LeadDesk half a year report presentation live from Stockholm. Today we're hosting for the first time outside of Finland, in Stockholm, which is, of course, as you know, a vibrant capital market city. As well as that, of course, it was our first market outside of Finland. Now after the recent signing of ACE acquisition, it's going to be our largest market then by the end of the year as well. I'm happy also to be here as we see that the Swedish market has performed well, and for example, European sovereignty has been a big topic here for quite a few years already, while other European countries are picking up on that trend.
Today we are looking at the growth journey we've been taking and the latest steps there, and of course, then focusing on our first half year this year. On the agenda, we have many topics, but before that, I would also, of course, like to introduce my CFO, Teemu Rautiainen, who's here together with me.
Hello.
With him, we're going to be presenting firstly, of course, the first half a year takeaways. I'm going to be presenting LeadDesk in brief, so looking at the things that we've been doing on the first half, as well as then, of course, deep diving on the ACE acquisition and opening up the logic behind that. Then giving up to Teemu to present the financials, and then looking at the outlook for the rest of the year. As typical for our release casts, we'll be having a fireside chat together with Lotta Backlund then at the end of the session, so you have the chance to ask your questions at the end then and post them on the Q&A section in the meeting. But then moving along first to a short executive summary and the key takeaways of our first year.
Looking at firstly profitability, this has been a big topic we've been discussing. On the profitability, we're happy to say that we're improving quarter over quarter our LTM. We are steadily on track to our target of 20% of EBITDA. Our overall revenue declined a bit, but on the other hand, looking at the Nordic own software side, we were growing, which I'm super happy about. As we've said, we are doing portfolio management, and we're looking at our portfolio, and we have been downscaling on resale revenue that we've had previously to a small extent, but we're downscaling on that at the moment, focusing on our own software, our own AI IPR, where of course, we have the best business and the happiest customers.
Lastly then, of course, as I said earlier, the Telia ACE acquisition that we announced after the period, that's a big topic. It has a big strategic meaning for us, and I'll be happy to share a little bit more later on on that. In general, the two large numbers I would like you to remember is we grew by 5% with our own software in the Nordics, which is our home market. On the other hand, we've been growing LTM EBITDA quarter-over-quarter, now reaching 18%, just 2 percentage points away from our target of 20%. With those words, I would then like to jump on to present LeadDesk and some of the great things that we've been doing firstly on the vision side. On the vision side, AI is naturally a big topic, and the positioning needs to evolve by that.
I'm just going to jump into that now. For some reason, the mute didn't work there. Sorry about that. On the vision, so we are working towards becoming Europe's most trusted AI-driven, voice-first customer interaction platform. That's the target. What we want to achieve is that we want to be Europe's most trusted AI-driven customer interaction platform. Just want to pause here for a sec. I'll explain what this means now. On this, so if we look at what it means to be Europe's most trusted AI-driven, voice-first customer interaction platform, what it means is that firstly, as we all know, European sovereignty has become a huge topic across Europe. As I said earlier, for example, in the Swedish public sector, this has already been a big topic for quite a few years.
But we have been built in Europe for Europeans, and we've always relied heavily on European suppliers and been very much European. This now is something that is brought also to the vision level. We want to be European by heart. Then, on the other hand, what we are doing, and especially now looking at the acquisition of Telia ACE, this takes us even further there. We are working with mission-critical organizations and with very high demands on the quality of service that we must provide. This has always been the case, but this is just now underlined by the fact that we are serving Nordic customers on all sectors, public sector, enterprises, and so on, and we need to have that trust. On the other hand, then, AI is something that's transforming the world, and it's transforming how organizations communicate with their customers.
At this, we are AI-driven. We're not hoping to be a fundamental AI bedrock, such as the OpenAIs and so on. We utilize the technology. Here also trying to be sovereign European, and then bring that benefit and help our customers in their AI transformations. We see this as a huge topic. We are in the right place to carry out this exercise with our customers. We have the data and the conversations flow through our platform. We are the natural partner for our customers to implement AI in their customer interactions. Then moving along to voice first. This is one of the superpowers that we have. Our history is from voice. We have a lot of investments into voice. We can provide mission-critical level voice services to enterprise and public sector.
This is really something that sets us apart from many of the competitors as well. We, for example, have a very strong CPaaS platform of our own. We do not fully rely on others, but we have that inside the portfolio. This is also a big differentiator towards many of the competitors. Customer interactions, that is where we thrive and that is where we are best, so we help organizations with their customer interactions, and that is where we want to succeed and we want to prosper. Lastly, we are a platform. We are utilizing other technologies naturally, and we are helping our partners provide services to our customers. We are gaining the scale where other companies now integrate to us to be able to provide services to our customers. Europe's most trusted AI-driven, voice-first customer interaction platform. That is our vision 2030.
Looking at LeadDesk in brief for the ones of you who have not participated earlier. Firstly, what does LeadDesk do? We provide a cloud-based communication platform for customer service and sales enablement. The use cases being, for example, customer service, and sales organizations across enterprises, all public sector. We service the most demanding organizations like, for example, banking, finance, insurance, also the public sector, and especially the healthcare sector. These are in the fundamental core of our offering. We operate across Europe, so our home market is Finland, Sweden, and Norway. That is our home market. Then we span across the continental Europe, reaching down to Mediterranean and Spain. As said, we aspire to be the most trusted AI-driven, voice-first customer interaction platform for European companies to trust on and have their custom operations run on.
Looking at a bit of the numbers, not stealing the thunder from Teemu, but if we look at our growth journey, we have been growing heavily since 2014, 22% CAGR. Since we listed in 2019, we have been also focusing quite a bit on our profitability. As said, have to say that we have been able to increase it quarter-over-quarter, now reaching 18% LTM for the first half. As earlier communicated, this is a bit of repetition, of course, but what we are focusing on now is the Profitability part, that is our core focus. We want to focus more. We do portfolio focusing, operational focusing, focus, focus to gain better profitability. Then by having that better focus and alignment, we can reach then to the higher growth phase and investments in the growth while maintaining that profitability. SaaS business is all about scale.
Of course, scale matters here, and we believe that we can then profitably grow also in the future. That is briefly about LeadDesk. Then I want to move on to the Telia ACE acquisition, which significantly strengthens our Nordic position and enables then a larger market for our AI offering. On this, I just want to give a bit of a background to our previous acquisitions as well before diving into the logic behind ACE. If we look at what we have been building throughout the years, we have a repeatable M&A model here, where we gain scale and can create value. That is the idea. Firstly, we have been consolidating the market. That is the first pillar. So we have vertical solutions that we have been consolidating the market on.
And now these vertical solutions sit on top of our foundation, which is our Cloud Ops and CPaaS. What this means is that in a mission-critical communication platform, the SLAs are 20 minutes. That's not 20 minutes for replying to inquiry. That's 20 minutes from problem to resolution. That's something where really operational excellence matters. That we've built and that we can utilize across our vertical solutions. On the other hand, we have our CPaaS platform, as I said. We're really happy about being voice first and about our voice platform. Here, we can of course provide the same guarantees on the availability and quality. This is the fundamental layer that connects our verticals, help our customers achieve. That's done by expanding the LeadDesk offering across all these vertical solutions.
A great example of one of the acquisitions here was, for example, Fluentic, which we did at the beginning of the year, providing the capabilities of multilingual customer service and sales to all our platforms. That's a great example. For example, providing multilingual live translation to all the platforms that we can then offer independent of the underlying vertical solution. This is a big opportunity for us going forward. Then moving on to actually Telia ACE. What is Telia ACE? Telia ACE is a trusted platform for mission-critical customers. So it's a communication platform for mission-critical customers. It's built for sovereign European. So it's sovereign European, and it can also utilize, together with us, it can utilize our AI functionality. For example, the Fluentic live translations then in the future.
On top of that, we see that our voice platform is well-developed and integration to our CPaaS platform will benefit the existing customer base and enable also future customers. ACE in itself fits very well with our core industry focus as well, as much of its customer base is in public sector, healthcare, and financial services. That's a very good add-on to the mix. On the actual acquisition deal that we signed in July. In July, we signed a deal to acquire, subject to of course regulatory approvals and the normal things to acquire the Telia ACE platform, the IPR, and the engineering department and everything that's needed to really handle ACE. Through that, then of course, we gain a fantastic platform and a great opportunity. But at the same time, of course, there are commitments and revenue involved.
By this then Sweden becomes our largest market, our single largest market then in the group, surpassing Norway that was previously the largest. It also enhances our reseller network as then Telia will become our reseller in the markets it operates in. On ACE itself, some numbers, over 100,000 users across the Nordics and over 90 really committed communication professionals primarily in Sweden, Lithuania and Finland. Lastly but not least, then if we look at the pro forma revenue for the combination of LeadDesk once this deal is concluded, then on the pro forma side we will reach over EUR 50 million in revenues, thereby giving the scale that's fundamental to any SaaS business that I also mentioned earlier. So here if we look at the other strengths that the scale then brings.
On that side, at the moment, of course we have good offering, but with this team and the added capabilities, basically what we foresee is that we can now start competing in all the even the most complex tenders across the Nordics and Europe in the future. Of course, then there is also economics of scale to be gained here and I believe that in the midterm, this would also be very beneficial for our profitability and revenue growth going forward. Lastly but not leastly, the opportunity to provide our AI solutions to these customers. To the existing Telia's customers, I am really enthusiastic about going and meeting with those customers as well, hopefully then later on and really providing then opportunities for upgrading on the AI path and really getting, for example, the multilingual capabilities from our offering or AI-based chatbots, AI insights, analytics and so on.
Super excited about being able to bring AI into the mix. As you know and you have seen from our releases as well, here we are really excited about being now able to work together with Telia to continue the success of ACE. Also at the same time, it is very important for us to be able to bring these other functionalities to the markets together with them. On the other side then we are getting over 90 great professionals developing the product platform and that is something we need to also pick up on and we need to constantly develop and make it even better in the future.
Naturally on the other side, we do have an existing partner network also across the Nordics and we are remaining committed to an open partner model and we do foresee that the open partner network works in our favor and we have been able to have some great successes for example in Norway there. Lastly but not least, we have done quite a few acquisitions in our past. The one learning from those to share is that it is all about the people. Nothing works without the people. I have a saying that companies, they are just VAT numbers. Synonym for a company is fellowship in English and a fellowship is what we are. We need to be on this journey together. We need to get one team together. We are going to be about 300 customer interaction professionals.
We need to work as a fellowship to really bring that sovereign European AI-driven trusted platform to our customers. That is what we now need to do and that is the number one thing also on my agenda. It is all about the people, and we need to now succeed together after the transaction is concluded. We need to build one team and work on one target and one goal. Super excited about getting so many long-time professionals in the communication space on board. Here, I will conclude my first session and give it off to Teemu for some of the financials to share with you.
Thank you, Olli, and nice to be presenting here in Stockholm also on my behalf. I will start my presentation discussing our top-line performance and the revenue mix. Then I will discuss the increased profitability and end the presentation with the balance sheet structure. Let us start with the top line. As you have read from the release, while our aggregate revenue came slightly down in the first half of the year, our own software revenue in the Nordics grew in this period. We are happy about that because that is the core of our business. In H1, our revenue declined by 3% to EUR 19 million, and in the LTM period that we like to look at, the revenue was EUR 38.8 million, and the decline was 1%.
The decline was due to the fact that we announced already earlier in our outlook for 2026 that we are reviewing our portfolio, and we are reviewing some unprofitable customers and products. Now we have indicated that that is roughly 8%, and the impact will last until the end of 2028. We estimate that maximum half of that will impact this year. Part of that impact in the H1, and there will be some impact also in H2. Additionally, also what we have communicated earlier, the Spanish telemarketing regulation has intensified, and that has impacted our CPaaS communication platform as a service revenues in Spain. On the other hand, and positively, like I said, our own software revenues grew by 2% globally and by 5% in the Nordics.
This was driven by the positive Nordic momentum, especially in the customer service software, for example, in our Zisson products and also the recent acquisitions we have done. Looking at our ARR, we changed our ARR KPI or metric from the beginning of the year. Currently, we report the revenue-based ARR instead of the ARR contract-based. That is because that is more comparable to our peers, and we believe that that also is a better indicator of our performance in the period. The impacts in the ARR obviously are same as with the revenue, but since the ARR measures the last three months of the period, the impact was slightly higher because they happened in the middle of the quarter, so measured at the end, slightly higher impact.
Positively, and what we have discussed earlier, we have been focusing on our net revenue retention, NRR, and that improved in the first half of 2026. We have not disclosed that number, but we can say that number improved, meaning that we have been able to grow with our existing customers. Olli already highlighted, but I also want to highlight the Telia ACE acquisition. That is taking us when closed the end of the year to above EUR 50 million revenue. That is a step up in our revenue and taking us to a new scale. That is important and making Sweden as our largest single market, making us even stronger in our Nordic home markets and increasing the momentum in the Nordics. It is also increasing our revenue in customer service software, which is also important and core of our business.
Looking at the revenue mix, LeadDesk has three businesses. LeadDesk has software business, LeadDesk has the CPaaS business communication platform as a service, and a services business. Our software represents 76% of the total revenue, while CPaaS is roughly 20%, and services a couple of percentages. Our software further breaks down into our own software, which is the blue part in the graph, and some third-party resell software revenue that we are reselling to our customers. That is the gray part. That is roughly also the part, 8%, that we are reviewing currently. When looking in more details to our own software revenues, it comprises of customer service and AI revenue and sales enablement software revenue. LeadDesk started with the sales enablement focus, so software to sales improve the productivity and efficiency of sales processes.
LeadDesk started building a customer service software in-house, and through the acquisitions has increased the share of the customer service revenue and AI to higher than the sales enablement. Most recently, the Zisson acquisition took that revenue higher than the sales enablement. Now the announced Telia ACE acquisition will make the customer service and AI revenue more than half of the total revenue of LeadDesk and roughly two-thirds of our ARR. That is a significant step up in the customer service revenue. Why is it important? It is important because customer service software is usually bought by bigger companies, bigger customers, meaning that net revenue retention dynamics are better. Usually, retention is higher. We have more upsell opportunities, so we have better growth opportunities, and we can build a scalable business based on that.
It is also an area where we have built our own AI, especially for the customer service. As Olli outlined, we have now a bigger customer base, and we have opportunities to take our own AI software products now to this bigger customer base. So that gives us growth opportunities going forward. Thirdly, also, the regulation is more stable in the customer service. So that enables us to build or gives us better growth opportunities and enables us to build a more scalable business, which also then drives our revenue and profitability up through the scalability. Moving into the profitability. As Olli also said, our profitability improved in the first half of the year.
In the LTM period, the profitability, EBITDA was 18%, while in the H1 it was 15%, roughly 1 percentage point higher than last year and at the lower end of our guidance. Looking at the last year, we increased throughout the H2 because of seasonality. So that is what we believe that will happen also this year. How did the profitability improve? It improved through our systematic work on increasing our productivity efficiency. We have a lower headcount at the moment than a year ago. We did a lot of work with Zisson on the integration and synergies and then also the portfolio refocus. So better revenue mix, which also contributed to the increased profitability. In H1, the one-time items impacted roughly 1.5 percentage points on the EBITDA margin, mainly coming from the first quarter of the year. Looking at the operative cash flow.
EBITDA converted to operating cash flow and before working capital changed, that increased by 2% from last year and now in H1 due to the negative working capital impact, the actual operating cash flow was lower than last year. The negative working capital impact, EUR 0.9 million compared to last year, was due to the timing of payments both in and out of the company and something we are working on constantly to improve. It is, of course, crucial for us to improve that also. Then after the operating cash flow, we invested in product development roughly the same amount as last year and also paid back our loans. The loan repayments lightened our balance sheet. Moving on this slide, our balance sheet was total assets were EUR 3 million lower than at the year-end, and half of that is coming from the liability side.
Loan repayments and also the working capital impact is visible there. Then half of that coming from the equity side. That's because of mainly the goodwill amortizations contributing to negative net profit in the FAS accounting. Our indebtedness, net debt to EBITDA on LTM basis was stable, and that gives us a good basis to continue executing our strategy, when approved, continuing the integration of the Telia ACE platform to our organization and continuing the plans we have outlined earlier. Overall, we are well-positioned to go towards the future. I'll now let Olli to talk more about our outlook.
Thank you, Teemu. Looking into the future. Of course, what we're doing now is we're building Europe's most trusted AI-driven, voice-first customer interaction platform. That's the vision and mission we're on. How we achieve that is by following our strategy. We're now halfway to our target of EUR 100 million in revenues with the ACE acquisition. At EUR 50 million, we're halfway to our target there of EUR 100 million for this strategy period. Of course, there's a huge AI opportunity that also lies ahead. As already communicated on the call quite a few times, we are now in the search phase of strengthening profitability. We want to get to the 20%, which we see is in sight. We had the LTM of 18% now, and we are then preparing and are already starting to prepare for the next phase of focusing more on growth.
Our guidance for this year remains unchanged, and as said, we are doing portfolio management, and that's why we've given the guidance on the profitability, and that remains unchanged. Here we foresee that in the long term, there's opportunities to grow organically, both in the Nordics and continental Europe. As we saw also from the first half, the Nordic own software, not the resale software, which is declining by design now, but own software. Own software is growing, especially in the Nordics, which we are very happy about. Just concluding on the summary, LTM EBITDA improved quarter-over-quarter, up to 18% now. The overall growth was a little bit put down because of the discontinuation of certain resale products, which we've outlined in the release as well, as well as then the telemarketing regulation in Spain pressing down on the telecoms revenue there.
Own revenue from own software. Own software revenue in the Nordics grew by 5%, which we are super happy about. Lastly, of course, we signed the acquisition of Telia ACE in July, which we are really looking forward to and are working towards closing right as we speak. That's a short summary of the release. Next up, we'll have a fireside chat together with Lotta Backlund, and we'll get great questions from her and hopefully from you as well. See you in a small bit.
Hello, and welcome to the LeadDesk H1 results webcast fireside chat. My name is Lotta Backlund. I'm joined here by Olli Nokso-Koivisto and Teemu Rautiainen, and we're going to get started in just a moment. I do want to remind you that in the chat you can post your questions. Let me tell you, the viewers of this webcast have done their homework. They posted a bunch of questions immediately, so we have a lot to get through. We're going to get through all of your questions and some of mine. Obviously, I did want to note that we are here in Stockholm, which is great. We're going to talk about the ACE acquisition, which has now made Sweden one of your biggest markets, if not the biggest market, which is why we're also here at Nasdaq in Stockholm.
We're going to try to aim for 20 minutes or so, but gentlemen said that they're ready to answer all the questions, so if we go a little bit over, then that might be the case. All right. Let's begin with the big picture. If we were sitting here again three years from now, what would have to have happened so that you would say that 2026 was a defining year for LeadDesk?
Yes. In three years, I think what has happened and what I believe will happen is that we'll really be able to transform our customer communication into the age of AI, bring the joy of our software to a really large, broad audience, and be the de facto standard for being the most trusted European provider for AI-driven services in customer care and sales.
From the revenue point of view, I would like to add that given the AI opportunity and the customer base, that obviously AI revenue is much higher than currently.
The ACE acquisition, obviously that was a big part of the report, and the topic today, and let me tell you, it is also a topic of many of the questions that we have gotten here. You have described that the ACE acquisition as a major step in building a Nordic home market. What do you think is the biggest opportunity that this deal creates that maybe not all investors see yet?
I think the opportunity for transforming the customer interactions with AI. This enables us to address now an even larger audience with our native AI solutions. I think that is something that is maybe hard to grasp, how big actually that opportunity is.
There are some very specific questions, and actually they came in very early on. Some of these questions sort of already got answered in your presentation. But one question is, ACE has a pro forma revenue of EUR 13.1 million. What is its current EBITDA level, and what EBITDA margin do you believe the business can achieve once it has been integrated into LeadDesk?
That's something we haven't disclosed yet because the Telia ACE acquisition will be a carve-out acquisition. It's not the business unit, but it's a carve-out of operations. Then there are no historical numbers. Also how we do accounting also differs a bit. Then we communicated that it's a quite low profitability search, but it's excluding then the R&D capitalizations, which are then, in this kind of business, quite big, and then obviously the synergies and the economies of scale and things. We haven't disclosed, and we will come back to that later.
All right. For our regular viewers, you'll remember we've been talking about the Zisson acquisition for many webcasts or many results calls before. How does the ACE integration compare to your previous major acquisitions, such as Zisson?
Yes. What we've been doing is that we've been building on these vertical solutions, and we've been focusing also on the markets. Historically, the markets have had different solutions built for those purposes and those needs. Here, I think it makes very much sense. On the Zisson platform, really strong platform for certain use cases, and then on the other hand, ACE is a great platform then for certain other verticals. This all boils down to having the right solution in the right market. Good example is one of the first acquisitions, Capricode, now called LeadDesk Callbox. It's a solution for the Finnish healthcare industry that is also quite usable now in Sweden. But basically, the focus, because of the requirements of the market, it fits well there. So we have these vertical solutions which fit well together and can work together.
Now we have one more in the family, which I'm super happy about. Then we can utilize AI across all these. For example, the Fluentic multilingual system, as well as then, of course, our Cloud Ops and CPaaS, which bring them all together.
There is actually, specifically connected to that, another question, which is the ACE platform. Are you planning to convert the existing Telia customers to your call center as a service, or should we expect the synergies mainly to come from the AI offering upsales? Telia ACE has 100,000 users. How are you planning to commercialize and price the AI offering?
We are committed to the Telia ACE platform, servicing the existing customer base and new customers on that platform. It is a really strong platform. The synergies come more from the fact that we have the know-how on how to do this. We have our Cloud Ops, our CPaaS, which we can utilize to bring benefits to customers, upsale opportunities. AI is a big topic. There is a big transformation happening. Existing functionality being maybe deprecated then through upsale, then converted into AI, and so on. It is all a mix of course, there are scale benefits, naturally. As we know the business, we have knowledge here, but it is mostly then about how can we help those customers in their AI transformation journey going forward. How can we bring that multilingual capabilities? How can we bring better chat capabilities, automatic email routing?
There is so much AI in the customer interaction space.
All right. Let us stop here in Sweden for a moment. With this acquisition, Sweden will become your largest market. What growth opportunities do you see in the Swedish market going forward? The question asker also says, historically, your competitive position has appeared relatively stronger in Finland and Norway than in Sweden.
Yes. That is true. We have been much stronger in Finland and Norway, and those have been the markets also where we have been focusing. Looking at the Swedish market, I think there is a great opportunity there. We have existing customer base here. Now at the moment, it is our third largest market. Then it is going to be our largest, and the amount of investments into the market that we can put is, of course, going to be on a totally different level, thereby then, of course, bringing the growth opportunities also higher. I think that on the Swedish market, if we just look at purely on the meta level, there is 10 million people in Sweden, 5 million in Norway, 5 million in Finland.
I think that after this acquisition, they are proportionally now correct. We are on an equal footing in each of the markets, and now we can really excel and bring those new customers in each of the markets. There is a lot of market there still to be taken. It is just the first steps now.
Well, that is what it means for LeadDesk, but we actually have a question what this means for Sweden, which is, how are you seeing your significantly larger size in Sweden impacting the local market dynamics? Does the transaction imply now that there is one competitor less in your tenders since you have acquired ACE?
I would not say so, because if you look at the amount of this on the tenders we see, there are many competitors there. There is a huge amount of competitors there still. It is some local smaller ones, and then, of course, there are larger ones like Genesys, for example, which we are happy that we can, for example, compete on an equal setting with in the Nordics. There is a lot of competition out there, so I do not see any. No.
No worries that you're monopolizing the Swedish market. All right. A couple more questions related to ACE. You said there's a bunch of stuff you can't disclose yet, but there's a question: On what timeline do you expect Telia ACE to reach a profitability level similar to LeadDesk's today? Is that a question you can answer?
Well, I guess the thing there is that it's going to be one of the business units. Of course, on that side, going forward, the first part is, of course, in a carve-out acquisition. It's super important, even more important than in a shared deal that we really are there with the people building one team. Carve out is always a lot more problematic because of the internal system carve-outs and process carve-out. There's so much things going on in these kind of processes that I think the next 6-9 months, we really need to concentrate on securing that that happens well. Of course then we need to always look at the whole. Of course, we need to look at the profitability on the LeadDesk level. So it's not about this or that, but it's rather the whole.
Of course on that, we continue striving for the 20%. As said, we are doing at the moment even, we are doing work on the portfolio management, which you see now, for example, letting go of the resale revenue where we see that it's not worth investing in, but rather investing in our own software. Now this is just a new own software.
Just one third that we have now signed the deal. We haven't closed it, so we need to go by the process, get the regulatory approvals, and then do the integration planning together and so on. Even we would like to, we need to come back to that later.
Okay. There is a question, and the question asker hasn't actually specified what this is connected to, but I'm assuming it's to the ACE acquisition. Could you shed more light on the earn-out parameters? What kind of revenue development is required for the earn-out to materialize?
They are very realistic. Of course, we are reaching for growth. Naturally, that's typically what in a typical setup you would see, and there are those elements here as well. But on the specifics, I can't go into specifics.
All right. Connected to this a little bit, you've done a lot of M&As. We saw your M&A model in the presentation. How would you describe your M&A capacity after the ACE acquisition?
Firstly, operationally, it is the largest acquisition, and we're super happy to be able to welcome over 90 new colleagues, taking our headcount to nearly 300. I think there's quite a bit of work to be done. That's of course something that restraints are in the short term. But in the long term, I see that the market is still consolidating. It's consolidating also in Europe. We see that what's happening in the Nordics happens a few years later in continental. There's been consolidation happening there, and it's picking up as well. Let's see then what the future brings. But for now, I think that we need to really focus on welcoming our new colleagues.
All right. Well, moving on from the ACE acquisition, H1 investments amounted to EUR 2.55 million, compared with EBITDA of EUR 2.87 million. What do you consider to be a normalized annual investment level, and what level of EBITDA to free cash flow conversion do you target over the long term?
There are a lot of details, but we have earlier said that we are roughly on the previous year's investment level because last year we invested in our ERP process and tools, and now that's done. We are not doing that anymore on the R&D capitalization. So investments are roughly on the same level. Now need to remember that Zisson is contributing a bit to the increase, but overall, I would say that it's the same level. Then cash flow wise, we have been on the positive free cash flow. We are targeting positive total cash flow, meaning that we can finance the loan repayments from our cash flow. That's our goal. We are not there yet. We need to increase our EBITDA. We need to increase our conversion to get there, but that's where we want to be at some point.
Right. Continuing, there's another question not related to this, but related to CFO duties. One-offs had some 1.5 percentage point impact on your H1 profitability. Should we expect still some one-offs for the second half?
We haven't indicated or planned others. We haven't indicated anything to come. The ones now announced are related to, we had employment negotiations in the beginning of the year, for example, in Finland. Then some related restructuring costs. No, we haven't announced and are not planning.
Right. Some different questions around growth. Excluding the planned phase-out of the software resale business and the regulatory impact on CPaaS in Spain, what was the organic ARR growth of the core business in Q2?
I am talking now more about the revenue. Organic growth is a bit challenging for us because Zisson is also growing organically. How do we categorize that? But in the Nordics, we were growing organically. Overall, the organic revenue was declining, and that was because of the same drivers, obviously.
Another question. Could you shed some light on how your AI revenue developed in Q2?
We did not disclose in this report. We can say that the trend is similar that we have communicated earlier.
All right. Well, talking a little bit more about AI, what has been the take-up of your AI products within your existing customer base? That means how many customers are trusting your AI offering, and what AI features are the best performers?
Yes, if I recall, we've also discussed that over half of our customers are using our AI features. And there's a double-digit number are also paying. I think it might be in the previous reports, but this much we have at least disclosed. This is also something we're working for the future. Now, you saw the revenue mix here, which Teemu communicated, and that's something we're going to be focusing on communicating better going forward. How are we doing on the most important transformational points?
Still coming back to the regulatory changes, organic growth, and annual returning revenue have been declining due to regulatory changes and the pruning of unprofitable customer accounts. When do you expect this cleanup phase to be behind you and organic growth turn to positive again?
As we said in the report, we gave a timeline. We are, of course, making sure that the existing commitments are abided. We want to be the trusted partner, even though we won't be providing those services any longer. We gave a timeline on that, the largest part of this change. Then, of course, when it comes to regulations, the regulatory changes have happened and are now visible fully. But then, of course, like any other regulatory changes, that is something then that is for the regulators.
Maybe to add on organic growth, they are a bit unrelated. We can grow organically even with the impact, but then it needs to be greater than the impact. Of course, we are working on that. For example, further improving the NRR, winning more new customers.
These are the drivers, then we can grow our organic revenue.
You guys did talk about European sovereignty, how that is changing the outlook or that is becoming increasingly more important to a lot of your clients.
Yes. As I said in the very beginning, I'm super happy to be here in Sweden. This was our first market outside of Finland, and it's also been the first market where actually sovereign European has been a topic. So sovereign European systems have been a requirement from the public sector. For example, from our point of view, Sweden has been the frontrunner here by far. Which now is picking up also in Norway or has picked up, so Norway is on the same boat now. Finland, not so much yet. Sovereign European systems are not really appreciated yet as much in Finland as they are in the other Nordic countries and in some parts of continental Europe.
All right. We're running out of time. We're actually one minute over. I still have one question I want to ask you. Your North Star is more than EUR 100 million in revenue and over 20% EBITDA margin. What gives you confidence that LeadDesk can reach that level while remaining innovative and customer-focused?
Yes. I think the last part there is the hardest. Reaching the target, I have full trust there. When we listed in 2019, we were somewhat over EUR 10 million. I got that question quite a lot. Then it was harder to explain, but now being halfway there, it's maybe the easier question. How do we stay innovative, and how do we stay committed to our vision and the AI transformation? That is, I think, the thing that we really need to work on as a team. As I said, in my head, companies are VAT numbers. Instead of a company, we should use the word fellowship. That's the journey we're on together. If we don't manage to gather up the troops and be a good, great fellowship together, then that's going to be the breaking point there.
But I truly believe that as a Nordic, now a fully Nordic company going forward, we can really rock the European market.
Excellent words to end on. Thank you, Olli. Thank you, Teemu. Thank you to everyone who stayed with us. Join us again in six months to find out how the fellowship did for the rest of the year, and hopefully we come back with that really good news. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.