Ladies and gentlemen, good day, and welcome to the Latent View Analytics Limited Q4 FY 2026 earnings conference call. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen-only mode, and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need assistance during this conference call, please signal an operator by pressing star and then 0 on your touchtone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Miss Asha Gupta from EY LLP Investor Relations team. Thank you, and over to you, ma'am.
Good evening to everyone, and welcome to Q4 FY 2026 earnings call of Latent View Analytics Limited. The results and presentation have already been mailed to you, and you can view them on the website www.latentview.com. In case anyone does not have the copy of press release and presentation, or you're not marked in the mail, please do write to us, and we will be happy to send you the same. To take us through the results today and to answer your questions, we have the CEO of the company, Rajan Sethuraman, to whom we will be referring as Rajan, and we have the CFO of the company, Rajan Venkatesan, to whom we will be referring as Raj. This is just to avoid confusion while doing the transcript.
We will start the call with a brief update on the business and financials, which will be then followed by the Q&A session. As usual, I would like to remind you that anything that is mentioned on the call that reflects any outlook for the future or which can be construed as forward-looking statement must be viewed in conjunction with the risks and uncertainties that we face. These risks and uncertainties are included, but not limited to, what we have mentioned in the prospectus filed with the SEBI and subsequent annual report that you can find on our website. Having said that, I will now hand over the floor to management. Over to you, sir.
Thanks, Asha. Thank you all for joining the call. I'll take some time to cover four topics, on which I thought I'll provide some additional color, in addition to the information that's been already made available to you as part of the press release and the investor presentation. Then I'll hand it over to Raj for further commentary on the financials. The first topic I want to talk about is the whole AI thrust for the organization, as well as what you all have probably been hearing about in the external media and within the IT services world. We are seeing a fairly strong traction for all the AI work that we have been doing.
Internally, we have been looking at AI work as work that we do using traditional AI, generative, as well as the new agentic solutions that are being implemented. We did an internal check on the work that's been done last year in relation to all these three: traditional, generative, and agentic. We are happy to share that about 28% of our revenues for last year involves one of these three, where the AI aspect is clear and visible to the client, which means that they can experience the generative AI interactions or the agentic solutions directly in the implementation that we have done for them. Which we feel is a fairly strong traction for the work that we've been able to do on that front.
We call this primary AI, where the AI solution is directly visible in the hands of the end customers that we are working with. In addition to that, there is a fairly good chunk of work where the AI is kind of under the hoods, but it is still powering either the decision-making or the modeling or the workflow or the process aspect, as the case might be. That is to the tune of another 21% in the work that we did last year. Overall, almost half the work that we have been doing has been involved, has involved AI in some shape and form. A good chunk of it, being directly visible right in the hands of the end customers.
There is a fairly broad spectrum of work which we are doing within the agentic space itself, and I'll touch upon that in a few minutes. In terms of the tooling and the technology that's used, it's covering all the major names that you're familiar with, whether it's Codex from OpenAI or Claude Code and Claude CoWork from Anthropic, Gemini, Google Antigravity. All of these are being put to good use in the work that we are doing. We are also doubling down significantly on the AI partnerships and the work that we are doing, and I'll come back to that in a minute. Before that, just giving a bit more color on the nature of the work that is being done using generative and agentic in particular.
The work that we are seeing, the payments, invoice reconciliation space where agentic flows are being implemented. There is quite a bit of work that we are doing on market intelligence gathering and orchestration and making it available in the hands of decision-makers. Running campaigns in an automated fashion using agentic frameworks that have been implemented. Significant amount of work being done for marketplaces and platforms around fraud analysis, counterfeit detection, and quite a bit of work also, again, in the manufacturing space in relation to warranty claims handling.
These are some examples where full agentic workflows and orchestration have been implemented, and that is actually starting to yield business impact that is directly visible to the client. From our perspective, we are really doubling down on further strengthening our AI capabilities, both on the GTM front, go-to-market front, as well as on the internal capability building. There is a cloud certification program that's currently underway, where over 200 people have signed up and almost 40 people are week of launch. There's a great deal of enthusiasm for all actions related to that. I was in the U.S. the last three weeks, and I had the opportunity to meet a lot of clients and also our partners.
One of them that we are starting to work with is Anthropic and had the opportunity person who leads the Anthropic partnership. There is a good amount of traction on that conversation as well. From a capability standpoint, we are going to be building further strength in terms of the agentic focus, especially senior architects that I will be hiring. The entire model, you are probably also hearing that it's kinda like shifting to what is being termed within the industry as forward-deployed engineers, where people with full spectrum skills. In some sense, it's a bit of full stack engineers from the past, but with additional AI capabilities and domain understanding and customer interaction capabilities, right? All that rolled into one is what is being termed as the forward-deployed engineers.
We are, again, looking at building capabilities around forward-deployed engineers who are able to bring the data engineering, BI, data science, as well as AI skills together in designing and implementing the solutions, right, that make a difference in the client organization. One final point on the AI, the announcements by OpenAI and Anthropic that they are gonna be forming joint ventures to create services arms, extend their capabilities, you know, beyond just the models that they are building to directly getting into enterprises. While there has been concern around that in terms of what it means for services companies, I think it's also a validation that a very strong services layer is required.
Just the models by themselves cannot deliver value unless the services layer is available to take care of a lot of the orchestration, not just the business process and the decision-making and the embedding within the workflow. More importantly, topics around transparency, governance, evaluations, validation, provenance, ability to prove something, right. All of these things are important questions. This is what a strong services layer can help accomplish so that AI solutions are not just some model that's sitting in an ivory tower, but it's actually seeing practical application with very defined business benefits. I just wanted to give you that perspective from traction standpoint. The second topic is our partnership with Databricks. Again, a lot of traction on this trip to the U.S.
I had opportunity to meet multiple people on the partnership ecosystem. Our partnership in the consumer goods manufacturing and technology space continues to evolve and strengthen. I also had a chance to meet with the person who heads up the professional services partnership. We have a small foothold there, and this conversation helped push that further in the right direction. We are also evaluating potential inorganic acquisition opportunities, where these firms come with a much stronger professional services partnership with Databricks. That is something that, again, validated with the Databricks leadership team on whether that'll actually help propel us right into the, into the next orbit. This is something that we will double down on in the coming months and quarter.
The Databricks Summit is coming up in June, and we will have a very strong representation there with many of our leaders being in attendance. We have also organized several exclusive dinner events with several of our clients and prospects, and I'm expecting more traction on the back of that. Finally, we are continuing to make investments both on the go-to-market front as well as on the back-end capability experts, architects, and so on. This action will continue in the coming quarters. This year, two strong pillars of growth will continue to be the AI traction and the partnership with Databricks. We are expecting that these will yield benefits, right? Not only in this year, but in the coming years as well.
The third topic I wanted to briefly touch upon is the investment that we made in Healtheon AI. You would have seen the press release that came out earlier in the last quarter. It's a small investment, but we are the first investor into Healtheon AI. Healtheon AI, when we started looking at them and evaluating them, they came with an exceptionally strong business problem and a use case, but more importantly, a very, very well-thought-out technical architecture and an agentic framework that can solve the revenue cycle management problem within the healthcare space using largely, right, 80%, 90% of it being done using an agentic orchestration. Of course, there is a human in the loop aspect to that as well.
The solution that they had built and conceptualized and designed was something that resonated with that, with us a lot. They are currently in the process of building out the agentic suite and the technical solution. They have also signed up two charter clients with whom they are working to build out these agents. Access to the full suite of agents that they will be building, which we can then leverage and use in other conversations, both from a showcase perspective as well as using them as components in the solutions that we deliver. The revenue cycle management solution that they are building will be available in a composite fashion, if we intend to take it into other healthcare flags.
I'm expecting that there'll be more traction in the coming months and quarters, and we'll keep you posted about it as we move forward. Finally, the last topic I wanted to cover was the technology industry and some of the headwinds that we have talked about in the previous quarter. We did start this new fiscal with a bit of a gap down because of the headwinds that we witnessed in the last quarter. I'm happy to report that there are several strong opportunities that we are pursuing, especially on the back of the AI push that we are in these accounts.
In fact, in our largest account, as part of this trip, I was able to participate in three fairly large deal conversations, and one of them is almost at the point of fructifying, which will be a $3 million+ deal, right, in total. The other two are also $1 million, $1.5 million in size. While they've not completely covered the gap down that we had, they do bring us back to a reasonable level of confidence. We are expecting that if the momentum continues through the course of the year, we'll be able to claw back much of what was lost because of the headwinds in the last year.
One other thing is that we're also engaging with their vendor ops organization, and we are providing analytics supports to them, bringing us closer to the procurement organization and getting us more visibility with what is happening, right, within the rest of the organization. These are the four broad topics I wanted to cover. Otherwise, as an organization, we continue to double down on our client partners on hiring the right go-to-market people, making some internal tweaks as well, so that we are fostering greater collaboration and cross-pollination across our entities.
These are things that will pan out over the next few quarters, and we'll keep you posted, right, in terms of any specific mentions that are all very happy about how we closed out last year and seeing a reasonable amount of optimism as we step into the new year. With that, I'll hand it over to Raj for further commentary on the financials.
Thank you, Rajan. Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the last investor call for the fiscal year FY 2025/2026. One of the, I would say, big positives for this year as we close the year, you know, was going past the INR 1,000 crore mark, which is a fairly significant milestone for us. Even in dollar terms, compared to the year in which we IPO'd, we've roughly grown about 2.2x in about, you know, the three-year timeframe, right? It's, I would say, you know, from the sort of growth that we've delivered and consistently with profitability. We were fairly happy with the numbers that were achieved for the last fiscal.
This was also in line with the guidance that we had given earlier in the year, where we had indicated that on a full year basis, we'll deliver between 19%-20% growth with an EBITDA of about 23%-24%, right. Pretty happy with the way the year has turned out to be. In terms of, you know, specifically what's happened in this quarter, of course, Rajan already touched upon the fact that we did start the year with some level of shrinkage in one of our large accounts, technology accounts, right. Where there was a fair bit of consolidation that happened within this one large account, as well as deprioritization of some of the work that we were doing, right.
We are fairly happy to note that despite the shrinkage that happened in this large account, we were still able to grow in dollar terms by about 0.5% on a sequential basis compared to the previous quarter. This was, of course, driven largely by the strength that we witnessed in the BFSI as well as the CPG retail practice. We'll talk a little more about what drove growth in these accounts. BFSI continues to sort of deliver fairly strong numbers. Even as we head into the next year, we expect this practice to continue to deliver strong growth. For the last year, we're very happy to report that the BFSI practice grew in excess of about 80% compared to the year before that.
In terms of the year-over-year growth, of course, for this particular quarter, in USD terms, the revenue came in at about 17% higher than the previous year. In INR terms, of course, because of the INR depreciation, the year-over-year growth came in at about 24.3% compared to the same quarter in the previous year. I'll talk a little bit about, you know, what, you know, sectors specifically. You will see that the technology vertical for us historically, if you see, used to contribute in excess of almost 70%. I mean, if you go back almost eight quarters, right?
If you go back to Q1 of FY 2025, the tech vertical used to contribute almost 70% of our revenues at that point in time, right. From there to now, you will see that the share of technology from the 70% has come down to about 55%. While technology has continued to grow, what is happy to note is some of the other verticals, which is primarily BFSI and CPG retail, their share of revenue has grown substantially. One, obviously, based on the organic growth that we witnessed in BFSI, but two, also the Decision Point acquisition, which has led to the increase in the overall CPG and retail business, right. We're also happy to note that share of revenues from the rest of the world, right.
I mean, at one point in time, I mean, maybe eight quarters back, U.S. used to contribute 94% of our overall revenues, right? The rest of the world, including Europe, was about 6%. We're happy to note for the most recent quarter, our share of revenues from the rest of the world has increased to about 15% compared to 8%, you know, the 7% or 6%, eight quarters back. Right? Both from a geographical concentration standpoint as well as from a vertical concentration standpoint, we have seen some of the other verticals as well as geographies expand, and that is again heartening to note. Okay. I'll talk a little bit about the profitability itself for this particular quarter.
You would have noted that our EBITDA for this quarter came in. This I'm talking about adjusted EBITDA. The adjusted EBITDA came in at about 24.1%. Right. There was of course a benefit of Forex, which was to the tune of about 1.1% on the overall EBITDA for this quarter. This particular quarter, we also had some benefits in terms of certain costs that were there in the previous quarter, which did not recur in the current quarter. Right. You will all recollect that the last quarter we had made corrections to our wages to comply with the labor code.
And also there was severance pay that was paid for some level of headcount rationalization that we had done in the last quarter. Those two items contributed almost 1.5% of costs in the previous quarter, which did not recur in the current quarter, right? We did get some of those benefits. However, the positive impact of Forex and the labor code related restructuring was offset by higher spends on travel as well as SG&A, you know, other items like visa. Even though our visa costs on a comparative basis compared to the previous year has come down.
We did have a fair amount of visa costs for, you know, for H-1B filings that we had to do, and those costs were incurred in the end of Q4. Both of those meant that our the consolidated impact of the higher travel plus visa costs was about 1.1% on our overall EBITDA. Of course, we continued to sort of spend on certain other aspects around, you know, we still want to increase some of the leadership hiring specifically as far as the AI COE is concerned. Hiring client partners for some of our key accounts as well as continuing to build our Databricks practice, right?
We had some level of higher agency spends in relation to some of these hires that we had to make. Net-net, from the 23%, you know, the items that I spoke about meant that for this particular quarter we came in at about 24%. On a full year basis, again, in line with what we had guided before, our business EBITDA for the full year came in at 23% in line with what we had guided. This is also the last quarter in which the transaction-related retention cost expense that we were adjusting, you know, for the purpose of reporting EBITDA, that would be incurred. Going forward, you will not see that line, right? Because you will not have this cost going forward.
Happy to report that as well. Coming to the PAT and the EPS, this quarter also had a small benefit coming through on account of deferred tax asset that was created in relation to unexercised ESOPs that were there in the U.S. Please note that this is only for the U.S., and this was an accounting charge in some sense. This was an accounting asset we had to create, which resulted in the ETR dropping from the typical 25% to about 22% levels for this particular quarter. Going forward, we will not see any such impact. And this, I'm talking about the current ESOPs that have been issued to the employees, right?
On the EPS line again, EPS for this quarter, while you did see a small degrowth compared to the previous quarter. That is, the degrowth is largely on account of lower, I would say, other income that you would have seen. Compared to the same quarter in the previous year. You will see that for Q4 of FY 2025, the EPS came in at about INR 2.59. Against that we are at about INR 2.55. Please bear in mind for the last two years, there was almost a INR 4.5 crore Forex gain that we had really recognized in relation to some intercompany loans and advances that were given out.
Stripping that out, if you were to strip that out, the EPS for on a even on a comparative basis has grown by about 8%, right, compared to the previous year. With that, what I would like to also close my opening remarks is that, you know, we're happy to note that FY 2026 concluded on a fairly strong note. While there has been some level of headwinds in the technology vertical, we are particularly impressed by the strength in the BFSI and the CPG practice. Our Databricks practice again continues to generate significant traction in terms of deal pipeline and, inbound sort of reference.
We're also fairly excited about the transformation and the winds of change that we are seeing on the AI side. Close to about 28% of our the projects that we had delivered in the last year had a significant AI component. We believe that this number is only bound to increase even in the current year as we continue to execute through this year, right? With that, I will hand it back to Asha, and we can open up for Q&A.
Thank you very much. We will now begin with the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and then one on their touchtone phone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and then two. Participants are requested to use handsets while asking a question. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. Again, to register for a question, please press star and then one. Your first question comes from the line of Aditi Patil from ICICI Securities. Please go ahead.
Thank you for the opportunity. My first question is on the technology vertical. The sequential drop in technology vertical appears to be higher than what we had called out in Q3. Correct me if I am wrong, we had called out around $5 million-$6 million annual drop we are expecting in our one of the top tech clients. If we consider that, then the sequential drop in Q4 seems to be slightly higher. Is my understanding correct? Is there any other client-specific issue in the technology vertical?
Yeah. Rajan, I can take that.
Yeah, go ahead.
Aditi, specifically in this particular account, while the initial estimate was the drop will be closer to about $5.5 million , $6 million. That was the estimate that we had given out in the last quarter. In reality, some of the rationalization that happened subsequently as well or continued to happen meant that the total value of shrinkage was closer to about $6.5 million- $7 million. That is the total value of shrinkage that happened in this particular account. With this, the one thing that we want to confirm is all the renewals, all the rationalization are all done, right? It was not $5.5 million- $6 million. It's closer to about $7 million, right?
This, you know, to Rajan's point, I think, we are in active discussions even with this particular account on several other threads, at this point in time, which definitely gives us confidence that we will be able to recoup more than 50%-60% of the revenue lost in this account in the next one to two q uarters. In terms of the overall book of work that we have recruited then. There are already some very advanced discussions that we are in with this particular client to recoup the revenue lost.
Okay. Okay. Got it. Sir, apart from this client, what is the traction we are seeing in other clients, and therefore, like, what kind of growth should we expect in technology vertical in FY 2027?
I can cover the traction. Raj, you can comment on the.
Yeah.
percentage on the number.
Yeah.
The other two large accounts that we have in the tech space, in general, with one of them, it's been a fairly even keel, right? At this time. They have also gone through some leadership change right at their end, at the very top. The third one, they are going through, I mean, they've been going through some consolidation and related exercises over the last couple of years. At this point in time, again, the interactions that we've had so far indicate that we will actually in the, in the next year. Other than these three top accounts, in general, the sentiment in the tech space, given the amount of activity that is happening in relation to AI seems to be more positive rather than negative at this time.
Of course, clients want to do a lot more on their own. There is also the general feel that whatever initiatives were kept on the back burner, whatever was shelved earlier can all be picked up and there could be a movement on many of them because the economics of getting initiatives done has improved significantly. I mean, you can do many of these things with much higher velocity with lower effort, and that is creating a revival of interest in exploring and doing a lot more things in comparison to budget-constrained approaches, right? That were there in earlier quarters. In general, I feel more optimistic. I mean, the percentages and stuff we will obviously see as things pan out over the next one, two quarters.
At this point in time, that's the headline view.
Okay.
Yeah.
That's helpful. My next question is on the BFSI vertical. We had a very strong growth in this vertical for last few quarters, but in Q4, if we see the sequential growth, it was flattish. Was there any, like, 1x revenue in Q3 which was not there in Q4 or what can explain this?
Aditi, even in relation to what we delivered for the last quarter, the share of BFSI revenue from 14% has gone to almost 16% in this particular quarter. On a sequential basis, there is a definite increase.
In this particular quarter, in relation to the previous quarter.
Okay. I will just check my numbers on that.
Yeah. Yeah. No, and happy to answer this offline, but, you know, at least for this quarter, there was fairly strong momentum even in BFSI. Of course, as we see, as BFSI continues to scale, right, and becomes its, you know, the last year, they ended the year with a close to about $18 million in revenue. As the business continues to scale, you will see the incremental rate of growth dropping, right, because obviously they're on a higher base as well now. That is something that we will start to witness. In absolute terms, the business will continue to grow.
Okay. Okay. Got it. Okay.
Yeah.
Thank you for answering. I will get back in the queue.
Thank you.
Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Karan Uppal with PhillipCapital India. Please go ahead.
Thanks for giving me the opportunity. Rajan, you mentioned about the AI impact on the business. You said that almost half of the work has, you know, some bit of AI is involved. If you can give some examples in terms of the nature of services which we are delivering, as well as the deal sizes. If you can also comment how, you know, deal sizes are different from the traditional deals. Our deal size of around, you know, INR 0.5 million-INR 1 million or maybe INR 1 million-INR 2 million. How much of it is, let's say, the token cost, which could be a part to the revenue and how much is retained by Latent View. That is my first question.
The last question is easy to answer. Whatever revenue that we are reporting, this is all our revenue. It's got nothing to do with the token cost because the model that we use with pretty much all the clients that we're engaging with is that they take care of the infrastructure tokens, whatever, right, LLM access and all that. Everything that we are talking about is our revenue. I did give some examples when I did my opening remarks, right? Around the agentic workflows and processes, right, that we are impacting around payments, invoice reconciliations, market intelligence orchestration, campaign analytics, fraud, counterfeit analytics, warranty claims, and so on.
It's fairly broad-based, in the sense that any area where the process is known, the parameters are understood and guardrails can be established, there is good. Guardrails in the sense that, you know, you want to make sure that there isn't a hallucination, there is transparency, traceability, right, all of that stuff, in terms of what is the decision that is being made and why is the decision made, right? You can clearly connect the dots, especially in a multi-agent orchestration framework. When agents hand off from one to other, it's important to have that kind of recognition. In those type of situations where there is a good understanding of the traceability parameters, there is enough traction.
Of course, simpler ones, right, where, when I said traditional, when I gave those numbers, it included the combination of all three: traditional, generative and agentic. A lot of the work that we are doing is having some AI component in some shape and form. Going back to your question on deal sizes, it is the full spectrum. I mean, we are seeing examples where a particular use case or something simple is being done with a $1 million spend. But we are also seeing examples where the initiatives are fairly larger. In fact, the initiative that I the 3 initiatives that I referred to with our largest account, all of them involve AI in some shape and form. Because I mean, with technology, clients are pretty much a given.
I mean, you cannot do any work without the AI either under the hood or directly being implemented in the form of either a generative AI interface or an agentic orchestration of the workflow. The spectrum of work from a deal size also ranges all the way from $250,000 to, you know, $2 million, $3 million or so.
Okay. Thanks, thanks for the detailed color. Second is, on this OpenAI and Anthropic, you know, launching their services arm. It is very recent phenomena. Any anecdotal evidence of, let's say, enterprises maybe giving more work to these services, arms of OpenAI and Anthropic and maybe, rationalizing a third-party vendor? Not Latent View, but anyone else you have seen in the industry, some observations there.
It's too early to comment on that. I mean, obviously, they just have announced these launches. I think OpenAI acquired a company, if I remember, I think called Tomoro. That was the name I saw.
Right.
The others are in the process of setting up their JVs and hiring people. Anthropic plus OpenAI probably had put out recruit 500 odd people, okay. Of forward-deployed engineers, right, that I mentioned earlier. They will be building out these teams. Obviously they will focus more on the areas where they see friction with respect to the model usage. There is a fairly large amount of work that needs to be done. See, by any stretch of imagination, that an OpenAI or Anthropic will be able to do everything. Because the model is just one aspect of it. Everything that I talked about, that needs to sit on top of that, right? That all needs to be done by some services company or the other.
Of course, these can range all the way from all boutique firms to the OpenAI and Anthropic's service arms, right, doing it themselves. I'm sure that they are also announcing multiple partnerships. Anthropic has received applications for some 40,000 people, right, partners, and they're working through the mechanics of areas. These two firms are also taking very specific approaches. I mean Anthropic has been more enterprise-focused, OpenAI has been more consumer-focused. I'm sure that there will be some amount of meeting point, right, that'll happen over the next few quarters. In general, my feel is that pieces play will be a significant play in the scheme of things. I mean, that is the point I wanted to make. That is not going away.
Of course, the nature of the work will change, in terms of, the forward-deployed engineering model coming into play. There is a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done on all the points that I mentioned, right. Whether it is eval, observability, traceability, right, all of that stuff.
Okay. Got it. Got it. Next is on FY 2026. In dollar terms it is 20% of growth, but if you can clarify what is the organic part in it. For FY 2027, how should we think about the overall growth for the company?
Ask your-
Sorry, Karan. Karan, sorry, what was your question? Sorry, can you just repeat that again?
I was asking if for FY 2026, if you can clarify the organic growth in USD terms. That was one. For 2027, how should we think about the growth for the overall business? The puts and takes.
The organic growth for the business would be 18%, I think 18.2% or 18.3% because you please recollect that only there was one quarter of Decision Point revenue which was not consolidated last year. We started consolidating Decision Point revenues from 1st of July last year. Okay? We had three quarters of revenue. It was only one quarter that was missing. The rest of the business of course delivered 18% growth, right? In terms of your growth guidance for the next year, maybe Rajan, do you want to take that or do you want me to take that question?
Yeah, you can take it. I can add in the colors. Go ahead.
Yeah. Karan, right now what we definitely can see, you know, and beginning of the year, of course, you know, when we've been looking at planning for the next year, we actually want to split that answer into a couple of sort of data points, right? Right now, the way we are looking at our current order book as well as pipeline, right? We have a reasonable level of confidence in terms of high visibility pipeline and order book to deliver about 12%-13% of growth, right? That is of course at the beginning of the year, right?
As we see in any year, typically, whatever you have visibility for, you will end up adding more to the order book and pipeline through the rest of the year. And that is where we obviously are making investments in the go-to-market side as well as capability building side. All those investments are obviously targeted to deliver a growth rate which is very similar to what we delivered this year. This is all organic that I'm talking about. I'm not talking about including inorganic over here. Right now, the level of visibility that we have is to deliver a 12%-13% growth. With investments that are being currently made to deliver a similar growth to what we delivered, which is 18%-20%.
Yeah, the only data point I'll add is that in the previous years, compared to when we start the year to when we end the year, this high visibility number that Raj talks about has typically gone up in the range of 8%-10%. It kind of like adds up, okay. I mean, we are targeting a 20% kind of a growth. If things pan out well, then we should be able to get there.
Okay. Okay. Just one clarification.
Sorry to interrupt. Sorry to interrupt, Mr. Karan Uppal. We request you to enter the question.
Sure, sure. Cool. Thanks. Thanks.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, in order to ensure that the management is able to address questions from all the participants in the conference, we request you to limit yourselves to two questions each and rejoin the queue for any follow-up questions. The next question comes from Vimal Jamnadas Gohil from Alchemy Capital Management Pvt Ltd. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Thanks, gentlemen. My first question is on the overall outlook that you just provided. Partly you answered my question. I just wanted to get a sense, what are we building in terms of tech and non-tech verticals. Are we building the headwinds to continue for the tech verticals? You mentioned that despite a strong conversations around with our top clients, we'll still see the revenues won't fulfill the decline that we've seen. That essentially means that the non-tech verticals will do the heavy lifting. Correct me if I'm wrong. I just want to understand the nature of the decline in the tech vertical.
Is it because of absolute cancellation of projects, or has there been a severe deflation in the amount of work we've done? Basically what I mean is the volume of work that we've done has possibly increased, but the deflation around that has been higher than our volume growth. Has that been the case?
I'll take the second part of the question, and Raj, you can comment on the percentages.
Yeah
being questioned. The nature of the decline is twofold. One is consolidation, where they have decided to work with one of several partners. This has led to some amount of the decline. The second part of it is taking the work in-house. Specifically, in this account, there was a new leader who came in to head up a big chunk of the work that we were doing. Their preferred model is to work with internal full-time employees as opposed to work with the vendors. That's what they are familiar with and comfortable with from their previous organizations, right? Therefore, the moment they came on board, they very clearly made their intent known to us, right?
This is the direction in which they're going to move. There is no impact on account of work staying the same, but revenue falling or anything like that. I mean, the way the whole industry anyway is moving is that budgets are either staying the same or going up in general. They're just getting more work done because of the increased productivity that is now possible through the use of AI, right, in all shape and form. If you take a baseline two years back and compare it to today, across the board, right, in all industries, all sectors, and more so in the technology sector, you'll feel that for the same amount of budget, 30%, 40% more work is being done.
There has not been any shrinkage of budgets itself that we have seen. Either been a reallocation to internal mechanisms or consolidation with other partners. We haven't seen instances where clients have said that, "Do the same work for us, but we're gonna pay you less." In general, they said that, "We are paying you gonna pay you the same amount, but more work can be done with the money that's available." Raj, maybe you can give a color on the percentages.
Yeah. Yeah. Vimal, in terms of percentage, your assessment is right that it will be the non-tech verticals which will have to do the heavy lifting this year, right? Having said that, I think that right now the visibility or I would say, the sort of confidence that we have is that tech will deliver anywhere between I'm giving you a range over here because right now we are working, you know, on certain pipeline opportunities. Depending on, one, the size of these pipeline opportunities eventually and also the timing of when we close them, the revenue that we'll be able to book for the year may sort of change, right?
Tech vertical for this year should probably deliver between, our sense is that it should be between 5%-8% of growth on a year-on-year basis. This is adjusting for, of course, the loss. They will still be able to recoup some of the losses. Of course, also there are some new conversations that are going on with some new logos as well in the technology vertical. Adjusting for the losses that we've already witnessed, we should be able to deliver a Y-o-Y growth of about between 5%-8%. That's the confidence that we have. Consumer should, our sense is right now should grow anywhere between 18%-22%. That's the sort of range that we're looking at.
Deep Health should Obviously, the growth rates for this year, for the next year will come down compared to the previous year. For our senses, they should at least grow at about 40% for the next year, right now, where we stand.
Understood. Understood, Raj. Raj, just on margins, you know, we've had benefits around, of course, the USD. We've also had some employee adjustments that we've done. Plus we have had our utilization levels around 90%. I do understand, I mean, the utilization going up because of employee adjustments, but, to some extent, I feel we've sort of stretched our levers in terms of, you know, margins. In case there is any normalization, as far as these levers are concerned, how should we think about margins going ahead? I mean, I don't see any levers that we can sort of leverage at this point in time.
Your point on utilization for this particular quarter going up from the 85 to almost 89 levels is very valid, Vimal. The only point that I would want to reiterate is one of the reasons why the utilization levels have significantly gone up in this quarter is owing to some one-off. When I say one-off, this is certain large initial project that we have won with consumer, certain consumer clients, okay? They are actually cutting across two different quarters. Some of these projects were won in February and March, okay? They continue to be delivered through May and June as well, right?
In order to deliver these projects, of course, we had to deploy all the people that we had on the bench, and therefore that's the reason why you are seeing utilization levels going up. Having said that, I think one of the things that we continue to work through is this large client consolidation that we spoke about. A lot of the work historically used to happen on-site, okay. One of the things that we are actively pursuing with the client is, as we open new threads with the client, we want to do a lot more work either offshore or nearshore, right. That is one lever where definitely, from a margin standpoint, we will be able to make better margins on some of these projects.
Two, I think, while on a full-year basis you may not have seen the impact, we definitely the favorable dollar to INR ratio right now as we see it should continue to positively impact us. I mean, if they continue to stay at these levels, for sure I think there will be a positive impact on margins for next year. I think there is enough sufficient cushion both in terms of the movement to doing more nearshore and offshore work for tech clients, plus the favorable INR USD ratio right now.
The CPG vertical should see normalization next quarter, Raj? Because there was a one-off this quarter.
There will be some level of, I would say, normalization for the next quarter because some of these large projects that we executed, they will start sort of tapering off in the next quarter. Of course, there are some conversations in the pipeline for follow-on work, but you will see a little bit of tapering off for at least the next quarter for CPG.
Fair. Thank you so much. I'll fall back in the queue.
Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Pritesh Thakkar from PL Capital. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Thanks for taking my question. Referring to the earlier questions of Karan, I mean, you were indicating that 12%, 13% of revenue that we were anticipating is majorly coming on the existing accounts or the qualified deal pattern that we have. Is that right understanding?
Sorry, I couldn't hear you clearly. Can you repeat the question, please?
Yeah. Am I audible now?
Sorry, your voice is-
Yeah, there seems to be some disturbance. Sorry, it's coming garbled.
Is it fine now? Hello?
Let us-
Yeah. It's fine again.
Okay. If you are using a speakerphone or something, may we request you use the handset, please.
How is it now? Is it fine?
Yeah, go ahead. That's fine.
Yeah. No, I was referring to the earlier question of Karan. You were indicating 12, 13% of, you know, revenue that we are anticipating. That is majorly on the existing accounts or the qualified deal pattern that we have that's what we are referring to, right? As per my understanding.
It's not just existing accounts. When we say we have visibility of 12%-13%, it'll be a combination of growth we are expecting from existing accounts, as well as the high-probability opportunities that we see in the pipeline.
With the new stakeholder groups in existing accounts, as well as completely new logos as well. What Raj referred to is the ones where there is high probability and high degree of confidence. The full pipeline will have many other opportunities that are at a lower level of probability, right, which we'll want to progress. In addition to that, we still have more than 10 months available, right? We'll keep adding new opportunities. The point I made was that in general, in the past, compared to the high visibility number that we talked about at the beginning of the year to where we will likely end up, we have seen a 8%-10% kind of an addition, okay? If things go well. That's what we are expecting for this year as.
Understood. Thanks a lot. Next on the, you know, I was just looking at the client additions that we had on our $5+ million band. If you can provide some color on the industry profile and the scope of engagement with this account.
Raj, can you take that? I think he's asking about the split of the accounts in different buckets.
Sorry, Pritesh, what is the question? Split of which accounts in what bucket? Sorry.
Sequentially, we've added, $5+ million band. We added one account in there.
Yeah.
If you can provide some color on the industry profile and the, you know, scope of engagement with that particular account.
Just one second. This particular account. One second.
The top account, $5+ million band.
Yeah, yeah. This actually is a financial services account that we added.
Okay. Okay, understood. Understood. Okay. Lastly, on the, you know, bookkeeping side, two years back, if I look at, our DSO was around 65. In FY 2025 it was, 73 a year back, and now it is 80 in FY 2026. If you can provide some color, why it is inching up and what should be the steady state going forward?
Yeah. Pritesh, just on this, one of the reasons why, like I told you, right? I mean, there were a few, as I would say two things. One, as the share of Decision Point's revenue to the overall company's revenue increases, you will see a small uptick. I think we are already maxed out in terms of what that impact is. Decision Point, because they do a lot of work with CPG companies. CPG companies in general tend to have credit terms ranging between 90 to 120 days, okay? And for this particular quarter, specifically because of the uptick in CPG revenue, which is largely driven by Decision Point, you did see that DSO days go up.
Having said that, you know, purely from a housekeeping or a bookkeeping standpoint, we're very well aware of the fact that the DSO was high at year-end, but we've realized a lot of those collectibles subsequent to the year-end as well, right? Some of those were billed out or were in unbilled revenue, which has been subsequently invoiced. There has been a fair bit of progress as far as the, even the collectibles are concerned.
Okay. Understood. Fair. Lastly, on the margin side, given our appetite for investments, even if I look at last year, there was a lot of rupee deposition benefit that come into our bucket, but we made a lot of investments there. Even if I were to include quarter three one-offs that we had, on adjusted basis, if I look at FY 2026 margins are, I would say marginally lower than what we delivered in FY 2025. Can we expect FY 2027 to replicate a similar trend of yours, or you believe investments are largely done and dusted? I heard Rajan saying that we have some seniors onboarding process and at the same time we are hiring forward-deployed engineers there.
Just wanted to understand the investment strategy that we have in FY 2027.
Yeah, I would say, you know, consistent with what Rajan already alluded to, there will be some senior level hiring that we will continue to make, specifically in the AI space, right, including a potential hiring of a Chief Technology Officer. Some of these investments will be made to obviously future-proof the organization. We will continue to add people on the AI side, across all industries as well, because that is something that, I think from a, you know, from how we lead conversations with clients, I think an AI-first narrative is absolutely important. We need to hire people who've delivered some of these projects at scale, right, for large enterprises.
We will continue to make investments in bringing some of these senior level folks, Pritesh. I don't think from an investment standpoint, you know, all the investments that we had to do, it's not like we've done all of them. Specifically on the capability side, we will continue to invest. Maybe on the go-to-market side, we don't need to do a lot more investments. I think there is a fair amount of, I would say, investment that is already there. Here and there, you know, depending on It could be geography-specific investment, could be in Europe, right? Specifically, we may do one to two hires. On the GTM side, we are largely done as far as the investments is concerned.
Databricks, again, we will continue to invest in this partnership channel for growth. I would say the two big areas of where we will continue to make investments would be Databricks as well as the AI Center of Excellence.
How much is our revenue from Databricks currently this year, if I look at 2027, 2026 full year? Absolute terms.
On a full year basis, our revenue from the Databricks ecosystem put together, is closer to about INR 17.5 million.
Y-on-Y growth, how much that will be delivered in yearly terms?
The previous year, the similar number was close to about INR 12 million.
Understood. Understood. Yeah, thanks a lot. Thanks a lot for asking this question. Thanks. Thank you.
Thank you. The next question comes from the line of V. Srinath with Bellwether Capital. Please go.
Hi, guys. Three questions. I'll just put all the questions together. Raj, first question would be, the growth outlook shared in the call, would that be in USD terms or constant currency terms? If you would clarify that'll be great. The next set of questions are on Databricks. I want to understand the outlook for Databricks for FY 2027. What's the kind of growth you guys are working with? Would it be fair to assume that Databricks-funded or cloud partner-funded projects will start coming in this year? Would it largely show up in CPG and industrials? The last one would be, the financial services business. Could you kind of cover it a little more in detail? The sequential growth, year-over-year growth, you know, momentum seems to continue.
Again, kind of how is the outlook for FY 2027, new logo additions, or is it all coming from these existing set of customers spending more? These are the large three areas. If you could please address, that'll be great. Thanks, guys.
Raj, you can take the first question. I will address the second and third.
Yeah. Srinath, to answer your question, the growth guidance that we put out at the beginning of the call is all in USD terms, right? Not INR.
Okay, thanks.
Yeah. On Databricks, Srinath, the expectation is that the Databricks portfolio of work will continue to grow at about 60% +. Last year, I think, we went from between 11 and 12 to about 17+ , okay, this year. We are expecting continuing. In fact, it should accelerate more on the back of the points that I made at the beginning of the call. There is good traction. There is a lot more engagement. We are talking to all the right people, the senior people. They are bringing us into their QBRs. When they do their QBRs, they call all of their account executives and salespeople, and we are able to showcase the solutions that we are building. In general, there is good recognition.
I talked about the professional services trust as well, right? Where they could bring in partners. Even on that, I mean, professional services in Databricks context in the past has focused more on migration type of work, because that's a fairly big chunk of where Databricks gets its revenue. They are now starting to say in the recent conversations that industry solutions and building on top of the migrated data will be an important component as well. That's where they see somebody like us, bringing in more differentiation than the typical migration-only partners that they have worked with in the past. In general, I'm seeing, I'm expecting that the trajectory of 60% kind of growth, should continue.
On the financial services, it's gonna be a combination of growth with the existing account, the large account that Raj has talked about. There was also a follow-up question, right? Expecting that there will be momentum with that account going into this year. Even as we have started this year, I think we have signed up two other accounts. I had meetings with, like, two more in the wealth management, asset management space as part of this trip. I'm expecting that there will be traction in all those spaces: payments, asset wealth management, and also, the, you know, the credit and, you know, credit card, as another space. I mean, insurance is something that we are looking to get in.
The sectors where we are already present, I'm seeing good conversations in all of them.
Thanks, Raj. Thanks, Rajan. Have a nice day guys.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Rohan Nagpal with Helios Capital Management. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thanks for taking my question. Just a couple of quick questions on my end. The first one, I think you said that you'll be able to recover 50%-60% of the books that was eroded in your top customer by the end of that. Is that on a runway basis, or do you expect to recoup 50%, 60% of that for revenue that you book this year? The second question was, I missed a bit on Anthropic. Have you signed up with Anthropic as a partner on the professional services front or as a customer?
Raj, do you wanna take the first one? I can answer the second question.
Yeah. The first question is obviously, when I meant what I meant was we're looking to sign deals, which will ensure the value of the deals itself, right? Will be, will ensure that we are back to, you know, at least we'll recoup 50%-60% of the total annual contract value with these clients, right? Depending on the timing of when we sign some of these deals, they could sort of have an impact on the revenue for the full year. Right now, as we speak for this particular client, the current projection is that we will be at least at 90%- 95% of the revenue that we delivered with this client for the last year.
That is the target that we've set out for this client on a full year basis.
Yeah. It's in kind of like absolute revenue terms, right? Just to confirm the point.
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right. Yeah.
Not just the ARR. Yeah. This is discussions with Anthropic as a partner, not as a client at this time. I don't know of any requests or anything that is there on that side. I mean, the good thing though is that we are talking to fairly senior people and, in fact, the person with whom we are engaging, he used to be at Databricks before. We had actually started helping him directly, right, on his analytics requirements. There is a possibility that we might be able to extend, but right now it's all limited to the partnership with Anthropic.
Understood. Okay. That is it from my end. Thank you.
Yeah. Thanks.
Thank you. The next follow-up question comes from the line of Aditi Patil from ICICI Securities. Please go ahead. Aditi, your line is unmuted. Please proceed with your question.
Yes. Thank you for the follow-up question. My question was on margins. I think at the start of the year, we were expecting Q4 margins to be slightly higher, maybe 24.5% + adjusted EBITDA margins. Were there any like unexpected cost headwinds in Q4? Given that we will be investing in AI and Databricks and like other capability building, do you expect I mean, the margins could be below FY 2026 levels in FY 2027?
Aditi, I mean, this quarter, like I said, there were a few items on the agenda. Even when I did the EBITDA walk last quarter to this quarter. There were some professional charges that were incurred in relation to some senior level hiring that we are looking to do. For the on the Databricks side as well as the AI COE side. There were some hiring costs that or consultants that we had to engage to bring on some of these senior level hires. That was incurred in this particular quarter, which did have a, I would say, a marginal impact on EBITDA for this quarter.
Adjusted for that, obviously, we, you know, we could have been closer to the 24.5% that you spoke about. In terms of what we would like to guide for the next year, Aditi. Like I said, I think this year will be a year where specifically on the AI COE, as well as the Databricks side, we feel the need to bring in fairly strong leadership to drive conversations with clients. In fact, like I alluded to before, there are some senior level hiring that will be done on both these fronts. At the beginning of the year right now, what we would like to guide. Of course, this is not adjusted for currency.
There will be some benefit of currency. When we did the planning, of course, all this planning was done based off a USD to INR conversion ratio of 92, right? Right now where we are, you know, we are talking about 95, 96 or, you know, even higher levels for the rest of the year. When we've done the planning at 92 odd levels, what we've planned for is an EBITDA between 21%-22% for the revenue growth that we will deliver. Primarily on account of some of these upfront investments that we are making in the leadership hires on the AI COE side as well as the Databricks side.
Gross margins, further, with increasing share of AI project revenue and increasing share of offshore and nearshore revenue.
Sorry, sorry, Aditi?
I wanted to understand the gross margin profile of the AI project. AI revenue, versus.
Yeah, yeah.
Traditional revenue. Also, you mentioned some of the work moving to offshore and nearshore. Is there scope for improving gross margins further because of these two factors?
Yeah. The gross margin, you would have seen that we've started reporting the gross margins from this in the investor presentation also we had reported gross margins for the first time in line with what's the feedback that we heard from you folks, right? We've started publishing gross margin numbers. For the full year, if you see, right, One second. Give me a second. Yeah. For the full year, we reported up close to about 50.8% of gross margins for the last year, right? When you compare this with the gross margins that we are seeing on the AI-led projects, we are seeing gross margins in the range of 55%-58% across.
It's a fairly broad spectrum, but depending on the size of the projects as well as the nature of the projects, we are seeing that the gross margins on those projects are definitely higher at about 55%-58%. We do see levers to improve gross margin by doing more nearshoring as well as offshoring work, Aditi. When the planning that we've done and the guidance that I gave out is without factoring any significant change in the current levers, right? We are assuming the current sort of model to continue, right? To the extent we are able to execute better, we should see some upside in margins, on gross margins from these fronts.
Okay. Okay, got it. This is helpful. All the best for FY 2027.
Thank you.
Thank you. We will take the last question from the line of Karan Uppal from PhillipCapital India. Please go ahead.
Yeah, thanks for the follow-up. Just wanted to understand, you know, from the pricing perspective, how much of our work is time and material versus fixed price, and how is the trend of these two line items? Is T&M decreasing as, you know, in last few years? Second part of this question is that, how much deflation are we seeing in the T&M line item because of AI productivity benefits?
Raj, you can go ahead. I will add in some color though at the end.
Yeah, yeah. In terms of our overall share of fixed bid to T&M base. Within T&M, again, the way we internally review or classify contracts is pure staff aug or T&M contracts. There is a concept of managed services, which essentially, again, while the pricing is headcount based or capacity based, and there is a fixed monthly sort of revenue that comes to Latent View. It is still to some extent based off a headcount number. Of course, you have the fixed bid or, you know, we don't do a lot of outcome-based pricing today, but fixed bid you have, right?
Today, the ratio of fixed bid to T&M for us will be closer to about 80 to 20. 20 from fixed bid, fixed scope, type of work, and then T&M would be about 80%. Within that 80%, almost 65%- 68% of that would be in a managed services construct. What I mean to say is, it's not based off timesheets that someone is entering or in the client systems, right? These are essentially people where we are contracting for a certain level of capacity and the client pays us a monthly fixed amount for those resources there.
There is no linkage to, One, the time that is clocked or, two, the sort of deliverables that we have to deliver as part of the projects, right? That's how we internally view it. What was your second question, Karan?
Yeah. I was just asking what is the deflation in the T&M projects because of AI productivity so far?
So, so clearly-
I can take that, Raj, actually.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I will add color to the first question also before I take up the second one.
Yeah.
Karan, the plan though is to shift a bit more to both milestone and deliverable based, as well as outcome based. That 20% that Raj referred to, we want to bump it up. I'll tell you the reason. The reason is that productivity gains that you can get by building an agentic foundry or a suite of agents that can be deployed along with the people who do the work. Or even productivity benefits by building a full-fledged solution, nonlinearity. Or even the pace at which we can do work, these can be accrued to us only if we contract differently.
If we continue to contract either in a managed services model or in a T&M model, the benefit of having a suite of agents that are doing a bit of our own people being more productive, they will all only accrue to the client. Internally, we have launched a initiative where we're incentivizing our project teams, right? In areas that are well understood, where the process is known, and we are able to build good bounded agentic solutions that we encourage the client to contract with us in alternate models, right, as opposed to just a managed services or a T&M model. We'll keep you posted on the results of how that is panning out. Internally, our teams have been incentivized to move a bit more, right, to that model.
The second part of the question, there is no deflation on rates. The way it works is that clients continue to engage our people. In fact, in many instances, they'll be willing to pay a bit more. That's why Raj was referring to an earlier question, you were saying that gross margins could be higher if you are doing agentic or AI work. The expectation, of course, is that though they are paying more for the people, they will expect a lot more work to be done by them, okay, within the time frame. Therefore, in terms of margin, there is no deflation, okay? There are no rate reductions or margin deflation that is happening. It's just that people will be more productive, more initiatives will get done, okay, with the same set of people and same capacity.
Got it. Got it. Thanks for the color, and all the best for Effectinco.
Thank you.
Thank you. As there are no further questions from the participants, I now hand the conference over to the management for closing comments.
Thank you. Not too much to add. I think we covered quite a bit of the stuff. I mean, this will be an important year. It'll be an inflection point year, right, in many ways. Whether we are talking about the whole AI agentic shift that is happening, partnerships with the likes of an Anthropic and so on, or whether we are talking about Databricks and the work that we are doing even with, say, GCP and Microsoft and so on, right? There is a lot more action that we expect to see, right, on those fronts. Of course, everybody is trying to understand how the entire agentic shift will play out.
My own read on the matter is that there is going to be a need for a lot more complex design engineering of the agentic frameworks, which brings in all of the governance and transparency aspects that I have talked about. We need good people who are able to marry not just the technical understanding, right, of how to use a Claude Code or a Codex or how to create agentic orchestration, but people who can marry that with the business process, the underlying risk and the transparency and the governance requirements, and then bring it all together. In some sense, this will be a year where this whole forward-deployed engineering concept, right, that brings together many of those things, will start seeing a significant play.
We are gearing up for that in all ways, on the capability, expertise, certification, hiring front, as well as, how we evangelize this, how we talk about this, okay, to our clients, and show them what needs to be put in place so that they can get the benefits of it. We're expecting traction on all of those fronts. Obviously, we'll keep you all posted, right, on a quarterly basis on how this unfolds. But thanks for your wishes and, hopefully we'll continue the initiatives that we have set in motion.
Thank you. On behalf of LatentView Analytics Limited, that concludes this conference. Thank you everyone for joining us, and you may now disconnect your lines.