Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining the call today. We'll jump in right away. I think Kanav covered some of these. Quickly reintroducing the company for everyone. Capillary plays in the loyalty and customer engagement space globally. We are regarded to be a market leader by any analyst globally in this space. What do we mean by loyalty? Any kind of a long-term retention program for consumers or small businesses. In terms of markets, we today are fairly present across markets globally. U.S. is our largest market. About 60-odd% of our revenue comes from the U.S., 15% comes from Europe, and about 25% comes from Asia today. In terms of scale, we work with about 465 brands globally. 25 of these are Fortune 500 customers. Lots of scale on the platform. About 2.7 billion consumer profiles on the platform today.
We have customers live in about 53 countries, 19 offices globally. In total, about 750 employees. We have an infrastructure-like product. We sit in every transaction that hits our customers, whether it's in the store or online or at the airport or wherever. Uptime is important, so we are at almost a five nines product uptime, again, for this quarter. In terms of our monetization model, more than 90% of our revenue comes from long-term subscription contracts. Typically three, five, seven-year contracts with these very large global enterprises. It's a cloud-native product. All our implementations are across four colos globally. We're fairly well-recognized by all analysts. Pick any analyst in the marketing space, Forrester or Gartner or Everest Group or QKS, as you will see us either in number one or very rarely in number two in what we do.
Moving ahead, I thought we'll just spend a minute on this. This is The Forrester Wave, the most recent one, which came about nine months ago. Forrester is the main leading marketing analyst globally. They have a report on loyalty for the last 10, 15 years now. They call it The Loyalty Wave. If you look at Capillary, we are both from a current offering as well as what we are building and strength of strategy, we are well ahead of the rest of the market. Like I'd mentioned last time, we have a five on five score on 22 out of their 27 criteria, a three on five on the rest of the five criteria that they have. We're definitely the most AI-first platform out there in the space. Pick any analyst, they will talk about our AI use cases being very ahead.
We'll talk a little bit more about aiRA in some of the slides going ahead. What we also excel with is in supporting very complex programs for very large enterprises. That's our niche. With that, let's move ahead. Quickly spending a minute on the product. The intent with the product is to deliver loyalty and retention as an outcome. Hence, unlike a lot of our competitors, where they tend to have just a loyalty stack, some of the major agencies that you saw here, Epsilon, Kobie, et cetera, which were there on the earlier slide. Capillary tends to be more broader as a product so that we can deliver loyalty or retention as an outcome. Now, at the base of the product is a data platform where we integrate into all kinds of data sources from a customer.
If they have a CDP, we just plug into that right away. We don't monetize the data platform side of the stack. Loyalty is our bread and butter product. That's what we are known for globally. Over 90% of our revenues globally today come from the loyalty stack. Think of loyalty as any kind of a retention mechanic. Could be membership, subscriptions, points, rewards. Differs by industries, differs by mechanics that a business wants to use to retain their customers. Then we have the Engage stack, which is a one-on-one personalized customer communication platform. Roughly about 5% of our revenue comes from the Engage stack today. Insights is all kinds of dashboards that are available for the business users to look at all kinds of loyalty use cases. We don't monetize insights. It's a layer on top of the product. Finally, Rewards.
More applicable to banks and to telcos, where they generally rather than give points or coupons, it tends to be an additional reward that you get for being loyal. That's the Rewards stack. That's about 5%-7% odd of our revenues there. Again, across the platform, we have our AI assistant, which does a lot of stuff. We'll talk about it in the next few slides. Right. Okay. We'll get to aiRA in a few slides. In the interim, I think we've had a pretty decent Q1 and a good start to the year. Like we always talk about, really three levers of growth and three levers of profitability. On the first part, I think, on NRR, we've had roughly 111% expansion from our existing customer cohort. Three levers there, more platform usage or inflationary increases, product upgrades, and new brands and geographies.
If you take out one, the largest customer we have, if you take them out, then the NRR has actually been 116%. Tends to continue to be in that good range for majority of the customer cohort that we have. The second axis of growth for us is new customer wins. We continue to win large enterprises across globally. If you take the last 12 months of performance, our new ACV, which is the new annual recurring contract value that we've signed up, has grown about 75% year-on-year, excluding that 1 large healthcare customer that we had won the year before. Right? Very good momentum on new logo signups across markets, whether it's Asia, U.K., Europe, or U.S. Good momentum there. Finally, coming to M&A, we had announced the SessionM acquisition, which we had bought from Mastercard on May 1st.
We've had two full months of the integration of the SessionM numbers into the overall plan. Like I had mentioned on the last call, this acquisition strengthens our footprint across markets, North America, LATAM. It adds to our APAC portfolio as well. SessionM, that product stack is known for its QSR and airline customers. Those two categories are places where we had customers, but not as much penetration. It got us a good presence there. Finally, some very good talent that has also come from SessionM over. As you might remember, we had done the Kognitiv acquisition in May of last year. It closed on May 1st, 2025. We've started the process of upgrading those customers over to Capillary, and this time we're using a lot of AI to do it.
We think it'll be far more faster and far lesser effort on the customer as well as our side to get these upgrades done. Right? With that, moving ahead. Again, three large profitability levers for the firm. As we've always mentioned, any net retention rate-related expansion comes at a higher gross margin. Right? Because the cost of the servicing is already taken care of. Our subscription gross margin, for the entire business, including the organic part and the inorganic part, is today at 66%. Our organic gross margins are upwards of 75% now. So they've been consistently upwards of 75% for the last few quarters. So a lot of this NRR expansion on the organic side is fueling better gross margins on the organic side of the business. Coming to the second lever of profitability.
This is around about 60% of our costs are not linked to customer revenue. So not related to COGS. So these scale at a much lower pace than the revenue scales. Right? If you look at year-on-year non-COGS cost for FY 2021, is at least 12%-15% lower than the revenue increase that you're seeing here. Right? And hence, as revenue keeps scaling, below the COGS cost will continue to scale at a much lower pace. Finally, the third lever of margins is upgrade of customers from the M&A side. Now, like we had mentioned earlier, typically the acquisitions we do are more around the 30% gross margin mark. And as we migrate, they get to the platform margins of 70%-75%, and that drives the increase. So this quarter, for example, same quarter, last year, we were at roughly a 10% EBITDA margin.
We are more at 17%-18% adjusted EBITDA margin overall, and roughly a 20%+ EBITDA margin for the organic side of the business. Right? A big move there actually comes from the successful migration or the upgrades from customers for Brierley, Persuade, and Rewards+. Those three acquisitions that we had done before June of 2023, all of them have been migrated over. Right? Which is driving that big move on margins. That's the last part there. I think in the last six to nine months, we've also now built a very AI-led upgrade platform where it really simplifies the amount of work needed to shift from one of these acquired platforms to Capillary. We think it will continue to deliver good margins for us over the next year or two. Yeah. With that, moving forward.
We spoke a bit about this in the last thing as well, last analyst call as well. In terms of AI, we think it's a net positive for us. Today, for example, we actually sit in the system of record. The loyalty stack is like a banking ledger for all your points, rewards, all of that stuff. So it is a system of record, and hence, AI or no AI, you will still need a system of record to keep that going. It's also priced like a system of record. It's a per transaction or a per member base pricing that we have on that side. So not much change on this part of the business. What we've done over the last year or so is try and expand beyond that into a system of intelligence, which is our aiRA stack.
Typically, work that goes to an analytics agency or to manual dashboards, things like that. Solve that through conversational analytics and GenAI. Fairly wide space in the loyalty marketing space. It's priced on outcomes, like number of queries you ask, number of questions you're asking. We're seeing very good adoption for this. Today, out of our 150 customers, about 26 customers are actually live using the product. About just a little less than 10 of them are actually paying us for it. It is a use, and then over a few months, you sign up for the outcome-based pricing type approach. We're seeing very good adoption as well as commercialization start on aiRA now. Even in all our new deals, the very large ones that we're winning, aiRA is now tending to be that big differentiator over the market.
Our win rates continue to be upwards of 35% across the globe now. Thanks to some of this AI stuff that's there in the product. Finally, coming to the actions piece, which is you've got your insight, you've got what you want to do. In simple English, you can then go tell it to run a campaign or tell it to update a CRM or tell it to create a dashboard for you or create a game. That's the action agents piece. Again, as I had mentioned, Engage, which sits here, the Engage product is only 5% of our revenue. This is an attempt at increasing that spread of revenues for us. More newer in terms of the action agents, I think we're still building out this part quite a bit.
Overall, we're seeing very good traction to what's happening on the aiRA side, both in terms of the analytics agent and the action agent in the business. Moving ahead. We spoke about this last time. The intent with aiRA is to provide intelligence and actions across the marketer's life cycle and go from that system of record overall. What we've been able to do well now on aiRA is a good learning loop as well. We now have thousands of queries being I think we're at roughly about 10,000 queries now, which our customers are asking this to do. That acts as a very nice learning loop for the product to improve by itself. With that, I will move ahead in the interest of time. This is a quick update on the SessionM acquisition. Things are on plan.
I think it's been two months, we had projected about a $ 32 million ARR of customer contracts that we had acquired through this. There've been no surprises on that side. All the entire $ 32 million have agreed to sign our paper, move over to Capillary. That's been a good positive moment. Secondly, we've been able to turn SessionM fully profitable. The first two months have generated, although small cash, just a little around the INR 5 crore, INR 6 crore type mark is what we've been able to generate as free cash from the acquisition. The business is at a break even. It's profitable now. I think what we're also very excited about on the SessionM side is the quality of customers is really good.
A lot of them have shown a lot of interest in buying the aiRA stack, in trying to go beyond just the loyalty platform that SessionM is into, and taking the other products we have as well. We do think it is going to be a big driver on the NRR side going forward as well. Next is, I think we also now have a very good view of what we've actually spent to buy SessionM. Net of all the adjustment, we've actually paid about INR 17 odd crores for buying the business. It's also been a very good financial deal. You've essentially spent $1.5 million to buy or probably a couple of million to buy a $32 million ARR business. It's been a very good deal. We think we'll break even on this in a few quarters. The business is already profitable.
It's already started generating cash. We do think it will deliver a payback possibly within this year. With that, moving forward, we did a very small tuck-in, not material in terms of financial numbers on what we spent, it's a platform called CustomerGlu. It enables front-end experiences. Capillary is very known for the back-end scale that we have. What CustomerGlu does is it enables front-end experiences in a mobile app or on a website for loyalty-like use cases. Like you can quickly launch a game, click, click. You can launch, you don't need to write code. You can quickly launch experiences, things like that. We're rebranding this product and calling it Experiences Plus. Sits very well with what aiRA and Engage+ can do. We're also pricing this again on a usage-based type model.
We're already seeing a lot of our very large customers liking this because they don't need to depend on their IT teams to launch new interesting stuff in the app. Again, not material from a spend or a revenue or an EBITDA. More acqui-hire, IP-led acquisition. Yep. With that, I will hand over to Anant. Anant, over to you.
Thanks, Aneesh. Great. Am I audible?
Yeah, you are.
I'm glad to share our financial performance for the last quarter. We closed the quarter at INR 256 crore revenue, which is 43% growth over Q1 last year. This revenue growth coupled with the scale leverage and other cost initiatives, the EBITDA for Q1 stands at INR 44 crore. That's a 132% improvement over Q1 last year. PAT stands at INR -9.5 crore for the quarter. Adjusting this for one-time exceptional loss, which happened due to a cyber fraud incident and a one-time deferred tax liability. The normalized PAT for the quarter stands at INR 25 crore. Can we go to the next slide?
What you see on the slide is a year-on-year business growth of 43% and year-on-year profit growth of 132%. A great metric to look at for product companies is Rule of 40, meaning growth rate plus EBITDA is equal to 40. That's kind of gold metric where product companies are valued on. On this metric, Capillary today stands at 60, which is 43% growth and 17% EBITDA. If you look at only the organic business, the organic business grew at 17% year-on-year at about 23% EBITDA. again, at about 40 on a Rule of 40. What drives this margin expansion or what drove this margin expansion from a year before? This improvement from 11%-17% comes through combination of growth through NRR expansion, operating leverage on non-COGS cost, as well as from M&A synergies. Next slide.
ARR is a good leading metric for the business. It has consistently grown from INR 600 crore, INR 608 crore in FY 2025 to INR 765 crore in FY 2026 to INR 1,026 crore in Q1 FY 2027. It's a year-on-year growth of about 34%, with a strong contribution from SessionM acquisition, NRR, as well as new ACV. Trailing 12 months new ACV, if we exclude one large healthcare customer, we see a growth of about 75% year-on-year to about INR 90 crore-INR 92 crore. This is further supplementing our growth and efficiencies. The trailing 12-month Q1 FY 2026 base included exceptional new contract value from one large healthcare customer. That's what we have normalized to give you a figure on a like-to-like basis. Next slide. We talked about year-on-year performance. At a quarter-on-quarter performance on profitability.
Adjusted EBITDA improved from INR 35 crore-INR 44 crore in Q1 this year compared to Q1 last year. This is in spite of Q1 being a quarter when you have annual hikes. Normalized PAT improved from INR 19 crore-INR 25 crore from Q4 to Q1. This also includes increased amortization from SessionM acquisition. Understanding PAT and normalized PAT here. The delta between INR 25 crore PAT and -INR 9.5 crore normalized PAT. We had an exceptional loss that happened due to a cyber banking fraud. A one-time deferred tax liability. That's what has been the adjustment over here to give you a view on the normalized PAT. Next slide. If you look at our business over the last many quarters or years, EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA are nearly equal, given adjustment of finance income and ESOP expenses.
If you look at the trend over the year, depreciation and amortization is at INR 20 crore for Q1 this year, which is up from INR 17 crore for same time last year. This higher amortization reflects recent acquisitions of SessionM in this year and Kognitiv last year. Perfect. With this, would be happy to take any questions.
Thanks. Thanks, Aneesh and Anant. I would request the participants to raise their hands in case they have questions. The first question was coming from Vinay Menon. Please go ahead, Vinay. Vinay, unmute yourself and go ahead.
Hello. Congratulations, sir, on a great set of numbers. A couple of questions from my side. If you can call out the percentage of clients who migrated from SessionM already and what kind of run rate are we seeing across FY 2027, that would be grateful. Thank you.
Anant, you want to take that? I'll take that. Vinay, we've just done the SessionM acquisition, right? You shouldn't expect any Usually the way it works is, we spoke about it, I think in the analyst day as well, that it typically takes about two to three years for all the customers to get upgraded. We will not start any SessionM migrations till probably end of this year or early next year, right? There are some customers who want to move irrespective of an upgrade that, "Look, we just want to move to Capillary." That we are fast-tracking. That's about three, four out of the 45 odd customers that have come from SessionM. There is a lot of operational efficiencies that we are already seeing in SessionM. Better run in terms of server costs, all that.
You will see more margins coming out over the next few quarters from SessionM as well, even without the upgrades piece. I think their infrastructure and the way they ran it when it was part of Mastercard was definitely very excessive, right? There is enough. We do think we can get that business to a 5%-10% margins even without any upgrades.
Okay. That's helpful. Vinay, as clients migrate, will our subscription revenue go up? Is that how we are looking the SessionM clients to be for our company?
Yeah. Two parts, right Vinay? Usually when you're upgrading a customer, you don't actually charge for more, right? Because there's already an existing contract. You bought the company, you can't charge for more. Let's say we're seeing a lot of these customers wanting to buy aiRA or buy Engage+, or buy Experiences Plus. Those are opportunities to charge more, right? Those are opportunities where the customers are willing to pay more because additional functionality, it's something that they were not using today. All of these books of business, the 110%-116% NRR we keep talking about, right? That is the place where this bigger book of business, this INR 32 million, does have a potential to add another 10, 11, 10%-15% additional revenues each year through the NRR motion. Did I answer your question, Vinay?
Yeah. That helps, sir. Just one more thing on aiRA. Any kind of monthly run rate are you seeing? Last time, last quarter, you were mentioning that a lot of POCs were happening. How are you seeing aiRA scale over FY 2027?
Yeah. We right now, I would say at INR 2 million-INR 2.5 million in terms of revenue run rates on aiRA. My hope is that we'll try and get to probably at least 5%-10% of our revenue coming from aiRA this year, right?
Okay.
Look, it is a new AI product. The adoption is very good. I think the thing that we have to deal with here is that these are all large enterprise we work with. They really are very distinct about their budgeting cycles, right? In terms of adoption and in terms of as people turn over to their new financial year, can they put more budgets to it? I think we're seeing good traction there.
Okay. One last thing. On the acquisition, you mentioned that it will give you some kind of coding ability in the platform where clients can create something. If you can just elaborate on that and give what functionality we wanted from this acquisition. That would be helpful, sir.
Yeah. Today, Capillary is a loyalty platform, right? A customer can go in and configure, saying, "This weekend I want to give 3X bonus points on this airline," right? Or this route or whatever. It's the back-end configurations, the back-end coupons, all of that promotions becomes very easy with the Capillary platform. We also allow you to run games and give bonus points for running games and all of that stuff, right? The front-end experiences of a scratch card, a game. I'm sure you've played some of these on the various apps. Today, for a lot of our customers, if they have to do it, they have to go work with their IT team to actually build the front end out, right? Like in the app, go get a page done. Usually all of these IT teams have their own roadmaps.
Although the loyalty manager can use our platform to run the back end very quickly, the front end would take them two, three months to configure, get in the pipeline of the IT development and stuff. What CustomerGlu, what Experiences Plus does now well is, it's an SDK that you plug in into the website or into the app once, right? Once you've done that, like how you're just in the back end configuring a new promotion, you could also go configure a front-end experience, right? It really helps take out the dependency on the IT teams. Think of it as a low-code, no-code platform to spin up games, experiences, front ends. Kind of make the dependency on IT teams less and make the marketers more independent in that sense. I hope I answered that for you well.
Yeah. Done. Thank you so much, sir. I'll get back in the queue and all the best for the future. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks, Vinay. Next question is from Shaurya Yadav. Please unmute yourself and go ahead.
Hello, am I audible?
Yeah, we can hear you.
Thanks for the opportunity. I have a couple of questions. First one, in last phone call, you said we are upgrading Kognitiv customers to Capillary platform. Where are we in that journey, and what challenges we are facing in that journey, if you can elaborate? Post-upgradation, how much incremental margins can flow in our consolidated financials?
Right. That process has started. I think the first customer will fully migrate on September 1st. Like I said, the way we are doing this migration is using an AI platform. The first customer is also an attempt to fine-tune the AI platform to do further migrations, right? Let me spend a minute on what this AI platform does in terms of helping migrations, right? Because these are very old companies that we're buying, right? Kognitiv, I think is a 1980s set-up company. Their oldest customer is 30 years old on that platform. What the AI pieces do is look up the code, look up the implementations, and automatically come up with what is it that has to be migrated. It goes configures the Capillary platform, builds up any middleware that needs to sit in between the Kognitiv implementation and the Capillary implementation.
All of this is done in a AI-first approach without doing it with humans, right? Without doing it with people. With that, we're looking to have the first customer going live on September 1st. Once that happens, and that's proven, then you can. Kognitiv has about 20 customers in total. Actually, not even 20. It's about 16, 17 customers in total. You could accelerate the next 10 in probably, like a two, three quarter timeframe, right? What took us, like three years with a Brierley or a Rewards or a Persuade, actually took us like four, five years. The intent is that with this AI stuff, we should be able to see the same gains in probably like an 18-24-month type upgrade cycle. Like we said, May 1st last year is when we bought this.
The goal is that can we get the upgrades done by latest September of next year, right? By 2027. All the acquisitions that we do typically work at a 30% gross margin. Post, we can get them to a 65% or 70%+ gross margin. Kognitiv was roughly about INR 75 crores of revenue. I think there's at least another INR 10 crores-INR 15 crores, INR 15 crores-INR 20 crores of EBITDA that will come through as the migrations happen, right? We've already realized some of the gains, with like better server costs, better all of that. There's more margins to see for sure. In fact, we had detailed this out a little bit in our last deck where we kind of broke our revenues down as saying, look, this year we're doing INR 1,065 crores.
Out of that, organic, which is the core Capillary platform revenues at 75% gross margins, is about INR 670 something crores, INR 673 crores, I think. The rest was acquired revenues, which were barely at a break-even. We were projecting about INR 20 crores of margins that the acquired revenues. That INR 20 crores from the INR 390 crores revenues that we're talking about, has the potential to deliver INR 120 crores, INR 130 crores incrementally as the migrations happen. As the upgrades happen. Even in Kognitiv, probably in the next year, on that INR 80 crores, you will at least see a INR 20 crores of more margins coming through. Did I answer that question, Shaurya?
Yeah, Aneesh. Thank you. Second question is on the organic NRR of 111%. Can you bifurcate how much is coming from upsell, cross-sell, and the price increase? How we are upselling and cross-selling our services? What areas of rooms we are targeting?
Anant, do you want to talk about it?
Sorry, am I audible now, Aneesh?
Yeah, we can hear you. I was asking Anant to-
Sorry, can you repeat the question?
Yeah. I was saying, out of the organic NRR of 111%, can you bifurcate how much is coming from upsell, cross-sell, and price increase? How we are upselling and cross-selling our services? What areas of rooms we are targeting?
Got it. Shaurya, we typically divide our NRRs into a few categories. One category is essentially inflationary price increases as well as overage-linked expansions. The other is through upsell, cross-sell. The category three expansion for us is through entering into or expanding into newer geographies or newer customer cohorts. On that, you would then further have any churn in the business. Net of churn is what you see as a final NRR of 111. In terms of, I don't have exact numbers, but rough bifurcation would be, I think about 4% or 5% would be through inflationary increases and overages. Then probably another 10% between upsells and entering into new customer cohorts with the customer.
Got it. If you can tell, what will be our churn rate in this NRR?
About 5 %-ish.
5%-ish. Okay, got it. Just one more question. There was some cyber fraud incident maybe last month. Was there any customer data or employee data breach due to that incident?
No. There was no exposure to any customer or employee data. It was a banking fraud where the bank account of one of our subsidiaries was impacted.
Got it. Thank you and all the best.
Thank you.
Thanks, Shaurya. The next question is from Jayesh Agharkar. Please go ahead, Jayesh.
Hi. My questions are twofold. First of all, thank you for this update and congratulations for performance on revenue. Two questions. One is the loss that you suffered due to fraud fully covered by insurance? Question number two, if you could elaborate a little bit on how a customer, while transitioning from the Kognitiv platform or the other platform which you are acquiring to Capillary platform, will entail a higher gross margin?
Sure. On your first question, we do have insurance policy, and we have initiated work on that. Our insurance provider is working on that. In short, yes, it is covered by insurance. How much and when it would be recovered, I think that we don't have clarity on. That work is in progress at this point in time. On your second question, Jayesh. A little longish answer here. Most of our traditional competitors that we end up acquiring operate more in an agency model, where there is a huge T&M, like a big team is involved in delivering loyalty as an outcome in the form of services. What predominantly changes from these companies to Capillary is that you're moving them onto a tech platform.
For doing a work where you, in the past, used to have a lot of people, now you are able to just do that through some configurations on the tool. Think of it as, we have shown a demo before that, a process which would take, say, a couple of weeks where you have developers creating a campaign, doing segmentation of customers, executing something which would require QA, all of that, can happen on Capillary platform through just configurations within an hour. That's a big delta in moving from a T&M model to a tech platform. A large part of the cost, which was people cost, which brings your gross margin down to 30s, changes drastically when you move onto a tech platform and get to late 60s or early 70s.
All right. Thank you.
Thanks. Thanks, Jayesh. Next question is from Rishi Jhunjhunwala from IIFL. Rishi, please go ahead.
Yes. Thanks for the opportunity. Aneesh, can you give firstly on the ACV that you have talked about, does it include anything from the SessionM part also, or is it only your older business X of the large healthcare client that we talked about?
It doesn't include any SessionM, Rishi.
Understood. Okay. The other thing is, just want to understand, in terms of organic versus inorganic growth split up, how do we measure it? Because there would be two months contribution from SessionM in this, and I am assuming you have benefited from currency as well. What would be organic-inorganic split, and do we in any way hedge our currency exposures?
Anant, do you want me to take that or will you?
Yeah. Rishi, in terms of growth, as I was mentioning, it's a 43% year-on-year growth from Q1 versus Q1, which actually considers two months of SessionM. In this year, there's two months of SessionM revenue versus zero in last year. Now, if we remove that, and just remove that as well as Kognitiv, like any other inorganic revenue, organic growth is at 17% versus same time last year. The other question you asked is the benefits through currency. That's about 6% on it.
Do we hedge our currency exposure or everything flows down from top line to bottom line?
If you look at half of our cash actually is in USD and about half is in INR. Given about 60% of the business is U.S., and you kind of keep cash over there. There is sort of a natural hedge in the business in that manner.
Got it. Lastly, just the expectation on ESOP expenses for this year and next, if you could give some color.
Sure. Our ESOP expenses for this year would be about INR 12 crores-INR 15 crores. You would see that our ESOP expenses will sort of remain in this range. We would typically look to maintain it between 1%-2% of the top line, and that's been the trend. We are looking to continuing on that.
Understood. Thank you so much.
Thanks, Rishi. The next question is from Akshay Jogani. Please go ahead, Akshay.
Hey. Am I audible?
Yeah, Akshay, go ahead.
Super. Thank you. Hi, Aneesh. Hi, Anant. A couple of questions. During the call, you spoke about how when you acquire a company, the customer does not necessarily migrate right away, and it's a journey, right? Now, historically, you always Hello? Yeah. Am I audible?
Yes, there's a disturbance, Akshay. Can you-
Sure. Is it better now?
Yeah.
Yeah. Historically, you've spoken about how you are buying agency-type businesses, then sort of transitioning them to a software platform that you have, right? Now, when you are owning this business in the transition where they are still agency-type and you're transitioning them to software, logically an agency-type business would have people on the rolls doing the work for the company. When you give them a software, it actually transitions to the company employees or the marketing teams doing the same work. In the period of transition, how does it work? Like they've took up the platform, but the people in, say, SessionM are doing the work for the marketing teams. Can you help me understand how this exactly works as you kind of materially change the business, right?
Marketing team using a software is so different from marketing team telling an agency that, "Can you help me with this?
I'll take this, Anant. Right. Akshay, I have two, three points. You're right. I mean, the first few acquisitions we did, Persuade, Brierley, even Rewards+ to a large extent, were agency-like. SessionM is a SaaS company, so was Kognitiv, right? Both are SaaS-ish. Now, they are different issues, but let me answer your question first. What happens in an agency is, let's say you want to run a campaign. Now, because they don't have a great software platform, they will have someone go do a bunch of this, like go build right code to come up with that campaign. It takes two months, et cetera. Now, a lot of those companies that we bought didn't have an India presence.
The first thing we do even before you migrate is that some of these low-level works of just keeping a platform updated, being able to run promotions, you can do that very well from here. Especially when these are very back end-like jobs. They're not even customer-facing. In fact, in none of our acquisitions do we change the customer-facing teams. All of these companies are, keep SessionM aside, are subscale. Are like INR 10 million, INR 11 million, INR 12 million revenues.
They can't have a setup here in India, right? They would typically work out of. That gives you the earlier momentum margins. Even in Kognitiv, when we bought it was probably at 5%, 10% margins. Today, they're already at a decent, because we've done some of these changes through last year already. Right? Essentially for the customer, it's not just using the software. There was a lot of stuff which should ideally have been no code or a configuration, which people ended up doing in some of these older companies.
That's the piece that you're switching. For example, Brierley is a good example I can give you. When we bought Brierley, or a year before we bought Brierley, it was, I don't know, 200 something people. Today, for that same revenue, we have 12 people.
Wow.
It's the same customer-facing people that we have. We haven't changed that side of the angle at all. It's more you don't need to write code for running campaigns. You don't need to write code for pulling a report out. You don't need to do all of that, which is what agencies end up doing. For everything, they will send you a bill and put some five people to do something. The two steps to margins are, one step is you move to an India center for the back-end type work. The second step is you fully move to software. Those are the two steps to get to better margins in each of these cases. Yeah?
Sure. Just to be sure, for example, let's say a customer has not transitioned, and let's say in the case of a SessionM, it was very simple. They were already using a different software, and now they have got a better software. I would imagine with some bells and whistles. In that case, they would just take up a new software and learn how to do it, or you would keep people on your roll, say, in India or elsewhere, who would do the work for them?
Let's take SessionM and how the margins will come there.
Yeah.
I'll explain that to you. Today, if you look at Capillary on our book of business, our server costs are roughly about 7%, 8%, 9%. Less than 10%. Depending on which colo, et cetera. Some are seven and some are 10. At SessionM, their server costs are 50% of revenue, because it's just a badly architected platform. The first initial set of gains that we are seeing on SessionM is just by getting that architecture right.
Obviously, we are far more cost-conscious and much more frugal in our company, we are getting that act together. In SessionM's case, like I said, it's already a SaaS business. There's already a software that customer use themselves. It's not an agency. In SessionM's case, what we are doing is some of the UIs that they will use will also be available in our platform. It's not much of a change of experience or relearning for our customer. Should I answer your question, Akshay?
Yeah, I have one more question. That was super helpful. One more question is, just this definition of NRR, ACV, it's sort of super confusing in the sense that. Can you help us understand what exactly do you mean by an NRR at a given point? What exactly do you mean by an ACV at a given point? When you say organic NRR, does it mean that if a customer moves from Kognitiv to your platform, does it get added there or not? If somewhere you define this, it'll be very helpful.
Should I take a shot at it, Anant, or-
Yeah.
Up to you. Sorry?
Okay. Let me take this. I'll add to it. Akshay, NRR is net retention rate. Think of it as all the customers that are present on Capillary platform on 1st April 2026, how much revenue they contributed in 12 months period before that, and how much revenue they'll contribute in FY 2027. In FY 2026, let's say you made INR 100 from them. In FY 2027, if you make INR 111, then the NRR is 111%.
Sure.
So same-
Akshay and everyone else on the call, when we're saying organic, we're basically saying it's only Capillary platform revenues. Organic for us is essentially revenues that are on the Capillary platform. Anant?
If someone moved from Kognitiv to your platform because you absorbed them, then?
We will consider that into NRR calculations next year, not in this year.
Not in this year. Okay. Yeah.
That you have a like to like. Right?
Perfect. ACV, how should we think of that? In the sense that, again, this simpler explainer would be super helpful in terms of how you want to.
Sure. ACV is annual contract value. The metric that we showed you is new ACV. New annual contract value that Capillary won in that period. That's a leading indicator of how the business would be going forward. Because whatever new we have won, that's the business which is going live on the platform and will give revenue in the following 12 months and thereafter.
In this case, let's say I am already a customer of Capillary, let's say our billing was INR 1 billion a year. Then I decided to buy two more, say, Engage+ platform, I started to pay INR 1.2 million a year instead. The ACV addition, new ACV will be INR 0.2 million, right?
Correct.
Right. Let's say in this case, if let's say you acquired Kognitiv and one of the Kognitiv clients moved to the Capillary platform, do you consider that in ACV or new ACV? We do not consider that in new ACV.
You don't consider that in new ACV, actually.
That's also sort of-
Akshay, I would request you to restrict your question because there is a long queue.
No, I understand, but this would be helpful for everyone, so I'll go back after this.
You don't consider that in the new ACV because you're not signing a new contract.
Okay.
New ACV, even if there is an organic volume-based expansion of a customer, we don't even consider that a new ACV. New ACV is just where we are comping our sales guys, there is a new contract. Right? Only those are considered a new ACV. The way this migrated customer comes over is next year, the revenue on the Capillary platform goes up, and then you track it through NRR.
Makes sense. Super. This is helpful. Thank you so much, Aneesh. I'll come back in the queue.
Thanks, Akshay. The next question is from Achin. Please go ahead, and let's restrict our question to one only because of paucity of time. Achin, you can unmute yourself and go ahead.
Hi, can you hear me?
Yes, Achin. Go ahead.
Yeah. Aneesh, can you tell me, let's say if there is no constraint on funding, can an AI native company create what you have? What are the key things which, let's say younger Aneesh, with all the fundings and all the AI advancements which are happening to write code and everything, still cannot match what Capillary Technologies is today?
Yeah. Look, we play in the enterprise space, right? I've struggled with this myself over many years, when we opened the U.S., whatever, right? Just having a product doesn't mean that a Fortune 500 is going to come and buy from you. We've customers who are in the Fortune 50, right? We have at least five customers in the Fortune 50. They won't buy, right? It's not just matching what's there in the product. You also need to have enough implementations, be very well-regarded by analysts. Let's think about this, right? Even today, enterprise AI adoption is abysmal because it's risky, right? Most large enterprises live on risk. You get fired for taking a very risky decision in a large enterprise. You don't get fired for doing nothing. Right?
Okay
In my head, to your point, I am a strong believer that with AI, what's happening is your ability to build code is just increasing significantly, right? Distribution, brand, analyst view of things, I think some of those end up becoming far bigger differentiators than just the ability to write code. At least in our head, it's both sides, right? We continue to invest on being the best product out there and being at least a year ahead of everyone else. Also in all of this stuff. Because in a very confusing, very noisy world, you would mostly go ask someone else, "Who should I buy from?" Another customer, another analyst, another partner, right? I feel the moat is in as much in brand distribution, all of these pieces as it is in just the quality of the product.
Did I answer that for you, Achin?
Yeah. This is very helpful. Thank you.
Thanks. Thanks, Achin. Next question is from Sanjay Kumar Elangoan. Please go ahead.
Sanjay, if you're saying something, we can't hear you.
Sanjay? I think Sanjay has a network issue. We can move on. Next question is from
I was in-
Yeah, go on.
I just got unmuted. All right. Can you hear me guys?
Yeah, we can hear you, Sanjay.
Okay. If I look at FY 2025 growth, it was 13% because you didn't have any acquisition, now Q1 organic growth is around 11%. Just trying to understand organic growth in a year you don't do any acquisition. If you want to boost it by upselling or cross-selling, does it affect the economics? How should I look at your organic growth in a year where you don't do any acquisitions?
Yeah. Sanjay, the loyalty space is a red ocean, right? Which is why we have this dual engine of organic and inorganic. In the year that we didn't do an acquisition, that 13% number you're saying is actually wrong. It's more closer to 20 because we had done an accounting change in that year. Instead of looking at overall campaign revenues, including SMS cost, email cost, we had moved to a only margin model. Right? Which is why you shouldn't. If you look at our DRHP, it's very well covered in the DRHP.
Okay.
You should look at the net revenue number because then both accounting standards look similar. If you look at that number, it's more like a 20%- 23%- odd growth. I think it's, yeah, INR 498. Yeah, something around that. The number's blanking me out, if you look at the DRHP, the numbers are there. Right?
Even this year, we will do roughly a 20%-23% organic growth this year. Q1 is a little bit of an aberration because this large healthcare customer we had didn't grow. Which is why if you remove that, it's 116% NRR, if you remove that one healthcare customer. Overall through the year, we are looking at a 23% growth including a currency impact of about 6%. You will see about a 17%-o dd full- year organic growth for the business. If you look at, we had again shared this in the analyst day piece that we had done. There's roughly about 90 companies in the loyalty space which are more than INR 10 million in revenues. The INR 10 million- INR 100 million bracket.
Which is where probably our M&A thesis can play. Look, it is a red ocean. Loyalty is an old business. If you look at what we are paying for our acquisitions, it's like 0.3%, 0.5%, 0.1%. M&A actually in Capillary is a customer acquisition cost substitution story. We are not buying new functionality. We are not buying any of that. We are actually buying contracts, which are many-year contracts.
We are migrating those customers over a couple of years and then they become 70% gross margin businesses or revenues for us. I do think, and we've mentioned about this in the DRHP as well. We think the right way to think of Capillary is 15%-20% organic growth business and inorganic. We will continue to do inorganic. It's almost like a sales motion. I have a team which constantly looks for acquisitions. Everyone in the market knows that we buy, so we have a big inbound, and we buy at great prices. That discipline, I think will continue to remain.
No, I understood the M&A economics, but when you upsell or cross-sell, does it affect the economics? Are you forced to boost growth? Do you have to cut down on your economics?
Upsell or cross-sell, you actually think of it as, let's say whatever revenues that you got they migrated to Capillary. Those revenues continue to show the same 150% odd of net retention rate. Those revenues, once they come in, continue to grow at the same pace because there is no product like aiRA. They didn't have something, so they will buy that or they will buy our experiences stack. That should not hamper. In fact, probably next time we can pull out saying what has been the NRR on the inorganic customers who migrated over.
Yeah.
It's very similar. Once you're on the Capillary platform, there's no differentiation there.
Okay. Last on aiRA, can you give the actual ARR net of cannibalization? Because I think it affects two other products. What is it, ARR and any economics there in terms of, let's say, gross margin after the inference cost? I know it's early days, but anything on churn, retention on the early cohort of aiRA customers?
We're at about INR 2.5 millionish in ARR right now on aiRA, Sanjay. None of this is cannibalized. The action agent side, I think, like we said, Engage+ is a very small 5% of revenue today. That will get from the action agent side, I think we can grow that book of business, but today there is no cannibalization on that side.
Okay. Gross margins in aiRA or contribution margins in aiRA?
Similar, because it's all upwards of 80%.
Okay.
Yeah.
All right. Thank you. All the best.
Thanks. Due to paucity of time, we'll take that as the last question. Whoever has any more questions can reach out to us, either the Capillary Technologies or the EY team. I would like to hand over it back to Aneesh for his closing remarks.
I think we have another five minutes. I know last time also Srinivas UK's question didn't get asked, so we can continue another five minutes. I think we have three more questions.
Sure. Okay. Srinivas, you can go ahead.
Hello, am I audible, sir?
Yeah, we can hear you.
Yeah. My question is about agentic commerce. When a shopper is an agent rather than a person, what will happen to these points and tiers and gamified front ends like experience places that you have talked about? Is Capillary's roadmap is to expose and earn and burn this through agents, which is agent-accessible endpoints?
Absolutely. I think, Srinivas, that's a great question. Like you said, when an agent is shopping, today as humans, the cognitive load. Typically in loyalty, you get 2%, 3%, 4% points. Usually loyalty in today's world is a very subconscious type of, "I get something, so I get 5% points from this airline, so I will go there." It's not a very rational decision. When an agent buys, on the other hand, even a 1% difference, the agent will say, "Okay, this is better than that." In an agent-buying decision, we think loyalty will move to becoming more rational, not just the subconscious preference of, "Oh, I know I get something." We think that both promotions, the value of points, personalizing it to a user, all of this becomes a lot more critical because an agent is not lazy like humans are, right?
It is going to measure to the last rupee, the last penny, and then take a call. That's where we think we actually have a massive edge. When an agent is communicating with a platform or with a customer, like a customer of ours, the turnaround times, the tech needed, all of that needs to be really, really good. If you look at most of our competitors, they're all agencies. Their tech is done and dusted. We do think, in fact, in a lot of our newer wins that we talk about this quite a bit, that the importance of promotions, the importance of coupons, the importance of less than 100-millisecond turnarounds, all of that becomes much more critical in an extremely rational agent-like behavior, than it is actually in when a human is buying. Did I answer that question for you, Srinivas?
Yeah. Yes. Thanks a lot. Yeah.
Yeah.
Thanks. We have the next question from Shankar Narayan. Please go ahead.
Good evening, sir. Thanks for the opportunity. Am I audible?
Yeah. We can hear you.
Yeah. Firstly, you have been calling multiple times that our big competitors are large agencies. Can you quantify the market share in the loyalty program space held by these agencies and an independent software player like us and maybe the large ERP guys?
Yeah, the very large agencies are. I can name them, right? They're all on the Forrester report, which is there on our website, which is also there on the first few slides. It's people like Epsilon. Last reported revenues, Epsilon was a couple of billion INR. Merkle, which is part of Dentsu, last reported revenues was upwards of half a billion INR. We know that Kobie, Bond Brand, all of that gang is again in few hundred million INR of revenues. Software-only is a very, very small part of the, is much more newer. There's us, there's Salesforce. They have a small loyalty product. There's Oracle's CrowdTwist, which we haven't seen in competition for many years now. I would say less than 10% of actual revenues, far less than 10% of actual revenues sits with software today as compared with agencies.
Got it, sir. Just to get an understanding, because they typically deal with the CMOs of Fortune companies, where they deal with the marketing budgets.
We also are in the same budget. Our customers are CMOs again.
Got it. Most of their growth is coming from a shift towards an independent software player like us, right? Is the right way to put?
Correct. More and more, I think teams want to have faster speed, this agency model of everything taking two months doesn't work. That's driving the shift. Yeah.
Got it. Thanks.
Thanks. Next question is from Chintan Shah. Please go ahead.
Hi. Hi, Aneesh. This question is for you. Just one question that I had. Now, considering the sort of capabilities that we have built in terms of different verticals as well as in terms of offerings, in terms of AI, do you think now we're at a stage where we should be able to-
Chintan, if you're asking a question, we can't hear you.
more clients or Okay. Hello? Now can you hear me?
Yeah. We can hear you.
Aneesh, the only question I had was, now Capillary has built a lot of capabilities across different verticals, and now we have more AI offerings as well. Do you think now we're at a position where we should be able to sort of attract more larger clients organically as well? Do you think there still needs more to be done for that to happen?
Chintan, loyalty is a very sticky business here. The problem with a sticky business is it's sticky for everyone, right? Whether it's for us or for our competitors. The problem we see is that, the product slide I showed you, the average number of places you integrate with a customer is about nine different places. Which is the reason why-
Aneesh, you're not audible.
Hello? Aneesh? I think we lost Aneesh here. Am I audible?
Yes, please.
Okay. I'll just take it forward there. Chintan, I'm guessing there are two parts to the question here. One is on the enterprise customer's organic motion on that. There's a slight different data point. If you look at some of our Fortune 50 and Fortune 500 customers, those have all been organic inbound. Like the largest healthcare customer or one of the largest healthcare pharmacy chain in the U.S.
One of the largest fuel retailers. Some of these are Fortune 50 customers, have been all organic inbound. That, I think as our presence in the U.S. and the brand awareness is increasing, that has constantly been improving for us. Point to note here is that we are just five year old in the U.S. It took some time for some of this inbound to start happening, but now that we are leader on a lot of these independent analyst reports, a lot of that inbound has started happening now. On the other side, obviously, if somebody is already on another platform, the time that it would take because of the stickiness for them to really get pained with it and do a RFP and come in the market, that is a constraint, and that's where the inorganic motion of buying companies come into the play.
We use combination of both these to acquire more large or super large enterprise customers.
Anant, if I just flip it, is it fair to say that despite all this AI, et cetera, coming in still, it's not going to make a difference for somebody else to use that and acquire clients unless the customers use it in-house?
If you look at AI is not really making things move from a provider to in-house. Rather, what we're seeing more and more is that even programs that were being run in-house, some of those are actually coming in the market to look at the best provider and move their programs to them. I think one of the main reason for that is that loyalty is actually, it's bought by a marketer, right? As in, it's more CMO buy than a CIO buy. Anything to do with marketing is fast-changing. Your requirements today versus your requirements next year keep on changing. In places where some of these have been run in-house, this constant ask from CMO to get things done or ask for newer features, newer activations for their customers. If you think of loyalty is not just point earn and burn, right?
You will have badges, milestones, referrals, a bunch of those features that the team would keep looking for. That's where most in-house programs tend to end up becoming slow or constrained for marketers to try out new things. We are seeing things moving from in-house to tech providers, as well as we are seeing things from an agency world to a tech provider. We're seeing tailwinds on both these cohorts of the time for us.
Got it. Understood. That was very helpful. Just one last clarification on the SessionM acquisition cost. If I'm not wrong, earlier, the cost we paid was around $17 million, right? Now we are saying we have net paid INR 17 crores. What am I missing here? Is the remaining part, there's a huge leverage that we've gotten, or what exactly is the gap here?
Chintan, it's actually a $20 million buy. The enterprise value for the SessionM business that we bought is $20 million. The way we had structured the deal was that, it would be adjusted for any net debt items at the time of closing. Now we had to structure it this way because some business was sitting in SessionM entity, some business sitting Mastercard, there was lack of clarity to the seller as well at the time when we were doing term sheet, they didn't have a clean balance sheet or P&L statement for this portion of the business because of, again, business sitting in multiple entities. When we did the final true-up, on 30th April, this value basically got down to about INR 17 crores.
Just to clarify, there is no debt on the SessionM entities we have bought. It's not like it is INR 17 crores plus some debt or something. These are debt-free entities as well.
Okay. Got it. Understood. Finally, what have we paid for this Experiences Plus, the CustomerGlu acquisition?
Less than f ew hundred K. Not worth talking about, Chintan.
Okay. Got it. Got it. Understood. Yeah. Thanks, Aneesh, and thanks, Anant.
Thank you.
Yeah. Thanks. We have a last question from Kumar Saurabh. Please go ahead.
Hi, Aneesh. Congrats on good set of number and glad to connect again. Two questions. One, this quarter, our ACV is INR 92 crore against INR 53 crore, and FY 2026 versus FY 2025, this number was almost flat. Now it's 80% growth. How should we read it in terms of what is supposed to come in next two, three quarters?
Let me take that, Anant. First of all, Saurabh, the numbers we reported are trailing 12 month. It's not only one quarter. Both the INR 53 and the INR 90-odd number are trailing 12-month numbers, right? Because our average deal cycles are nine months. It's a large enterprise business. Looking quarter to quarter is not the best way for a business like ours. Now, look, we are seeing good momentum on new sales, which is what is that INR 53 to INR 90 something, right? We continue to see very good momentum both in the U.S., Europe and Asia. My belief is that, I don't know if we will do a 75% overall for the full-year, but we will definitely do at least 30%, 40% More will be more new ACV than last year, for sure.
Last year. Exactly. Okay. The other question we had is the latest acquisition, SessionM. This is little different from all the previous acquisitions we have done because of the softer nature of the business. Those businesses, if I remember, it took us two, three years to reach to 44% contribution margin. I don't know if that converts into a 20%+ EBITDA margin, but you can correct me. Given SessionM acquisition is a little different, if you can educate a little bit on how will be the growth trajectory and the EBITDA margin trajectory of SessionM you're planning for?
Even Kognitiv, which was last year's by Saurabh, was SaaS-ish. It was not agency only. Right? Look, I think all of these-- The way to think about it is when you are at a 70%-odd gross margin as a business, you probably have 25% cost of SG&A, cost of sales, and all of this. You should get to about a 40%, like free cash, 35%-40% free cash being generated by that book of business. In SessionM, like we said, the problem is slightly different. Their server costs are 50% of revenue, actually more. Right? Their server costs are a very large part of revenue. That we can bring down even without upgrading those customers to Capillary. Right?
We believe that there is at least, I would say, at least $6 million, $7 million, $8 million that we might save over the next few quarters, the next three, four quarters, by just not focusing on upgrading them to the Capillary platform, but by just bringing this server cost down. Right? My gut is the journey from roughly a break-even now will be to a 15%-odd in an year, and then over another year, we will get to that 35%-40% margin. Right.
Got it. Just to conclude, as I think we are doing better. We are doing very good both on the organic and inorganic side. Will you retain with the same kind of guidance, or do you think now it is looking on the conservative side, or will you wait for one or two more quarters to just have a look at it?
We will definitely beat our 1,065 revenue and INR 172 crores number.
Agreed.
How much and all, I don't think we want to revise any guidances right now. We'll beat those numbers, but by how much, I don't think we should do it now.
Great. Wish you all the best, Aneesh.
Thank you.
That will be the last question for today. I would like to hand it over to the management for their closing remarks.
Thanks, Kanav. I think it's been a good quarter both on the organic and the inorganic side. I think we had this fraud incident, which was the bummer. As a business, I think we are very excited about what we're seeing, both from logos that we're able to win, the kind of conversations we're having, the adoption that we're seeing on the AI products. We do believe that hopefully someday we'll be able to get to being the largest and the best loyalty business out there. Right. Thanks everyone for joining us today. Thank you.
Thank you. Take care, everyone.