Order and good afternoon. On behalf of the Board, management, and staff of ikeGPS, thank you for attending our 2025 Annual General Meeting. My name is Alex Knowles and I'm the Board Chair of ikeGPS. We welcome you as online participants through our virtual meeting platform provided by our share register, MUFG Corporate Markets. A special welcome also to the many new shareholders who have joined ikeGPS since our last AGM. We note that you can vote and ask questions online, and we encourage you to do so. I'll provide you with further instructions as we progress through this meeting. If you encounter any issues, please refer to the virtual meeting guide or you can phone the helpline on 0800 200 2200 from New Zealand or 1-800 990 363 if you are in Australia. I would encourage you to send through your questions as soon as you can.
This will allow us time to answer these questions at the appropriate time. In the meeting today, we have Fred Lax, Ross Bjork, and Glenn Milnes. We also have an apology from Mark Radcliffe, who is unable to attend. Also present today, and welcome to your first AGM, Paul Caudicio, our new CFO, and also representatives of our auditors, Grant Thornton. Ladies and gentlemen, with the introductions out of the way, let us now move on to the formal part of the meeting. In this position, I will make some opening remarks, and then our Managing Director and CEO, Glenn, will present an outline of some of the performance highlights of this year and some of our plans for the future. After that, the resolutions that are before you today will be put forward. Part of our formal requirement is confirmation of the quorum.
The company's constitution prescribes a quorum requirement of three shareholders. I can confirm that this requirement has been met. Proxies have been appointed for the purposes of this meeting in respect of 63.1 million shares, representing over 32.5% of the total number of shares. I'd like to thank shareholders for their level of participation in today's meeting. My fellow directors and I intend to vote all discretionary proxies we have received in favor of resolutions one and two, as set out in the notice of meeting. Voting on all resolutions in today's meeting will be conducted by way of poll. You will have the opportunity to ask questions. In order to do so, you will need to click "Ask a Question" within the online meeting platform, select what item it is regarding in the drop-down window, type in your question, and then submit.
I encourage shareholders who are attending to send their questions through as soon as possible. The annual requirements for financial statements for the 12-month period to the 31st of March 2025, together with the auditor's report, are set out in the company's annual report. The annual report has been made available on the ikeGPS webhouse since 27th of June 2025. I'd like now to just take some time to thank you for attending this session. We intend to have this session today more of a discussionary style, very much focused on the future of the enterprise rather than just the past year, as you already have those details available to you. That said, 2025 was a very strong year with some highlights worth noting. We achieved over 48% growth in the financial year for annual subscription revenue exit run rate.
Our total recognized revenue of NZ$25.2 million is over a 19% improvement from the prior year. Cash and net receivables of NZ$15.4 million, being the March 2025 cash position of NZ$10.3 million, was consistent with the position 12 months prior. Therefore, we remain in a very sustainable position. In the period, we have also received an unsolicited non-binding acquisition approach at NZ$1.00 a share or equivalent of NZ$165 to NZ$170 million enterprise value that we declined to accept. Market highlights indicate that we're very fortunate to be in the right place at the right time in terms of macro market tailwinds. The electric utility sector in North America is perhaps at a once-in-a-lifetime moment in terms of investment scale, and this is expected to run for at least two decades or longer. The reasons for this are driven by an aging infrastructure.
We have a grid that we are focused on ensuring doesn't fail in a storm or cause the next wildfire, and power capacity requirements to meet data centers, electric vehicle needs, and changes in consumption requirements mean that the capacity of the grid needs to double in the next 25 years. If ikeGPS continues to win, we will be a long-term part of the required market expansion. As a board, we're excited about the years ahead based on a few fronts. The market we are in is growth. New market opportunities ahead of us, driven by customer demand and the team we now have in place centered here in the U.S. Notwithstanding the political and tariff chaos that surrounds us, ikeGPS remains largely unaffected. We are not materially affected by any of the tariffs as we ship our software to U.S. customers as a U.S. business.
Investment in the grid in the U.S. continues to grow at an incredible pace, and Glenn will talk more about the billions being invested and where ikeGPS can excel and be a strong part of this expansion. Lastly, as you're mostly aware, we recently raised capital so we can invest in organic growth with new incremental product modules based on defined customers' demands and some additional go-to-market resources that will potentially improve our inorganic opportunities. Thank you for supporting these initiatives, which we've received overwhelming demand for. We're living in a growth sector at an exciting time. We are totally focused on delivering outcomes that meet our customers' expectations and that deliver for all ikeGPS stakeholders. We extend our thanks to you, our shareholders, for your support and belief in our vision as we continue to innovate and grow. Thank you.
Glenn, would you be kind enough to now take over and give us more details of the performance and the future directions being undertaken?
Great. Thank you, Alex. Jacob, if you can have the presentation up and showing, please. I appreciate everyone taking the time to meet today. As Alex mentioned, the intent is really here to focus on the future rather than looking back at the FY2025 year. FY2025 was a super strong period for us. We've continued to grow the business at 35% to 40% CAGR in terms of subscription revenue. The first half of this year has started very strongly as well. We feel confident about the future. Before I go into those details, which is what I'd like to focus on, I did want to address a couple of points. We have a very talented but small Finance and Compliance team.
This year we missed REC 8.5 of the Corporate Governance Code, which is around notice of meeting timelines, which unfortunately was marked internally as 20 calendar days rather than 20 business days. I just wanted to acknowledge that miss. The other question that came in from a compliance perspective is my participation on the Audit and Risk Committee. Just for clarity, after the audit completed this year, I've stepped off the Audit and Risk Committee, Alex stepped in in terms of requirement for three independent directors. I just wanted to acknowledge those items. I'll step through. There's an important notice here around the data that we're referring to. I will pulse through the FY2025 result headlines quickly because everyone's seen this, and it's, you know, this data's, you know, four or five months in the market.
Mostly I want to talk about the future, but you can kind of see that you can see the really solid growth across the business. The chart on the left, subscription revenue, that's the real value driver for all of our shareholders, has just continued to grow. We hit a bit of an FX headwind in Q1 of this year. We're a U.S. company, we generate U.S. revenue, but we report New Zealand dollars, and it creates some noise. On a constant currency basis, that's continued to travel really well. As Alex mentioned, last year, close to 50% growth in terms of our exit run rate of subscription revenue. The number of users on a per-seat basis has really exploded with some of the new products. It was more than 100% growth in terms of the subscription seat side of the business.
Again, this data has been in the market and we've talked to it at year-end and we've talked to it through Q1. I'm not going to spend a huge amount of time there. I think we've kept cash in the balance sheet at a relatively constant level for more than 18 months, which has been great. It's been propped up by some long-term contracts from some of the biggest utilities in North America who have paid us up front. The balance sheet has stayed strong. We obviously were lucky to get really strong support from you all as shareholders through this recent capital raise, which means we can do some organic growth items even faster based on customer demand. I'll talk to those more as we walk our way through. Our FY2026 outlook remains consistent with what we've communicated.
We're expecting our subscription revenue to grow at a level of 35% or greater through this year and for us to be either direct or even on a run rate basis, it's through the second half of FY2026. A question we always get is around international market expansion, but we're wholly focused on the North American market because of some of these tailwinds that we'll talk about in terms of the U.S. in particular and what's happening with the electric utility market here. These have all been pre-released a couple of times. I won't dwell on the P&L, the balance sheet, or the cash flow statements, but they've all just continued to improve in terms of performance. The balance sheet now is just very strong. We're in a great position, I think, at a great time in terms of this industry. We always report our key metrics table.
In the middle of October, we'll be out with a new key metrics table. One of the interesting things is we've added through the first half of this year, close to 50 new customers. That's almost double the pace that we target internally in terms of winning these new enterprise customers. Although they start small, so they don't necessarily flow through to immediate impact on the P&L from a revenue perspective, it really matters because these customers grow over time. You've got to win them first and then you build them over the subsequent years. Things are tracking well on the key metrics side of things. Most interestingly, I think, is looking at, for anyone that hasn't become too familiar with ikeGPS, we're looking to build a data-centric platform for the distribution side of electric utilities.
The distribution is when power gets to a power is going to businesses and to homes. Think of the power poles in the streets. We have three products at the moment. One for digitizing the network, assessing what a utility has. We've got a design system called IKE PoleForeman and IKE Structural. We're putting AI, which is a hopelessly overused term, but it's around putting automation into aspects of these engineering tasks. We plan, thanks to the investment we received recently, to build two new modules that extend the offering. It is around whole-of-life cycle network management. Excited about where we sit. We think the opportunity to become a whole platform standard is to go in through these really brilliant applications and with great people and sort of grow from the inside out in terms of our customer base. The market in the U.S. is huge.
There are 106 investors in utilities. This is a pictorial view of the big publicly listed electric utility players. We're touching about 30, 35 of these groups at the moment. Just a huge expansion opportunity over time. The part of the market where we haven't focused on as much to date is the municipality and cooperative electric utility groups. They're also very big companies, but serving smaller cities, smaller areas. They're all, again, delivering power. They're all natural monopolies. They don't compete with each other. They share best practice. We truly feel that market timing is everything here. The opportunity for IKE is to become a standard inside of these groups and to just grow with these customers over decades. We typically don't lose any of these customers if we win them. This is the real focus for the company.
We've had a version of this data in the market over the last quarter or two. Just trying to put the market opportunity in context, just eight of our biggest customers are almost four times the size of the Australian entire electric utility market. The Australian electric utility sector serves about 11 million homes and businesses. The customers that have standardized on IKE, and we haven't penetrated them fully, so there's a lot more growth to come from these groups. They represent almost four times the size of Australia. It really is a very large market opportunity. As Alex mentioned, it becomes super interesting. The state of the grid in the U.S. is its old aging infrastructure, actually an aging workforce. There are more storm events. They've got to double the capacity of the electric grid over the next 20 years. Twice as much power.
All of these things require engineering, and you know IKE plays a part in that process. We really feel if we can get this right, it becomes a very valuable long-term proposition. The shorter-term opportunity comes back to communications networks. A lot of fiber gets deployed onto overhead assets and power infrastructure, and again, we help those fiber networks get deployed faster and better. There is just a lot of capital and a lot of investment coming at the industry. It's a good place to be, having been quite an unfashionable industry perhaps 10 years or so ago. Talking about other macro market drivers, the whole data center construction item is a big driver for more power. I think the amount of power required to run the data centers is going to triple in the next four or five years.
There's a requirement for a lot more electrical engineering and electrical engineering people, and they need to do things efficiently and use technology. We're often replacing old school methods of engineering and network. Our customers are brilliant people, but they are quite defensive in terms of how they adopt technology. We're seeing that change and decisions being made much faster. There is climate change. It's wildfire storms, and power grids are often the weak point for those items in terms of seeing blackouts or fires or worse. Some really interesting tailwinds. You've all seen this data before. We're lucky now to have eight of the 10 largest investor-owned utilities standardized on IKE. They do share best practice with each other. We've got a lot more logos to go and get, like another few thousand to pursue. It's really interesting, obviously, to get proof points in these groups.
I don't mean just selling one license or two licenses. This is where teams are standardizing on IKE software and how they design or how they assess their networks. Ditto on the communication side. This part of the market for transparency has had somewhat of a wobble with all the political chaos and some uncertainty that was put around whether funding was going to go towards fiber companies or towards the satellite groups and other mechanisms. We believe this is going to come back really strongly. It has to in order to get the country connected from a fiber perspective. We have a real focus on the folk that are delivering the fiber networks. Just more data here on the market and the level of capital investment, all of which we're trying to make much more productive in terms of IKE products.
Here, this is from Crown Castle, you know, how people are deploying our software. These little dots show deployment sites where IKE is being used and some of the analytical tools that we provide to our customers. If you zoom out further, this is from AT&T and just looking at the cities that they're using IKE software now to roll out their fiber networks in certain places. I did want to pause and also take a look at our go-to-market strategy. We're a SaaS company delivering software, but we deliver directly. A very purposeful part of our structure is to build a team of experts that we talk about being the partner that our customers cannot imagine living without. We put absolute experts on the ground. We don't just ship software and wish our customers luck. We go in and we get alongside our customers. It's really working.
This is research from actually one of the biggest private equity groups in the world that went and surveyed 50 of our customers. NPS means Net Promoter Score. It's a Boston Consulting framework. You can score from minus 100 to plus 100. If you're at zero, you're good. Then 30, you're great. 50 is excellent. 70, generally speaking, is considered to be, you know, you're best in your industry. You all probably get those same surveys. You know, would you recommend such and such to a friend? That's the nature of these scores. It's really a credit to our team that we're scoring at this level. It is based on that go-to-market model, which we think can be super impactful as we keep building the business and bring some of these new products to market. This is something that we are quite proud of internally.
It's interesting to see, again, from an external survey to see what customers are saying about the business in terms of the quality of products and the quality of people and how we're fitting into existing workflows. We launched that new IKE PoleForeman product a year ago. It sold through unbelievably well. We have that revenue base at probably 20 times where it was when we acquired that asset. It's really great, obviously, to see some of this customer feedback. What I did want to spend a bit of time talking to is some of the new products and new solutions that we're bringing to market. Again, AI, horribly overused term, but it's around, for us, it's around bringing automation and productivity into, you know, very specific workflows for the electric utility market.
We're fortunate to be able to build some of this capability over the top of, you know, we host tens of millions of human-engineered power assets. It's given us the ability to do some very unique things. This is, you're all seeing this first from an external perspective. This is being launched to the whole customer base next week. We're calling it PolePilot. It's the ability for an engineer to look at data, raw data, and, you know, thousands and thousands of assets, and to be able to do things just much more quickly, which support building an electric utility network or maintaining an electric utility network. The way it looks in practice is the photograph here on the right-hand side. This is a pretty typical power pole. You can see how complex that asset looks in terms of having transformers. It's got a cell on the top.
It's got all the fiber communications down the bottom and a lot of power wires. An engineer is trying to understand, you know, which connection is which, who owns it, and where is everything. What we've built and what we're shipping gives, through AI, the ability to sense all of this infrastructure. The AI can go in and grab all of these wires and mask all the assets and measure all of the connections, etc. Just massive productivity gains in terms of, obviously, speed, but also accuracy, also the ability to train new people that might be coming in to help from a network perspective. This is all coming to market now. It's not hype. I've just gone backwards, sorry, rather than forward. Some more examples here.
Obviously, we've released these slides so you can have a look, but just highly standardized network design, highly standardized accuracy, much higher velocity if you're thinking about having to expand your network. There are some other, you know, truly interesting requirements. An engineer that's doing this work might be, they might be $100 an hour. If you can make them go 20%, 30% faster, you know, you can kind of see some of the productivity benefits. These are the kind of things that we've been investing in. An extension of this will be what we're doing next with the capital raise. We have a customer council. We're very fortunate to have 18 of the biggest utilities in the country that sit on our customer council. This is all around product market fit. They tell us what they need and they ask us to build these certain modules for them.
These types of things are what will be coming next in terms of the capital that we raised. We think this is very, very sticky. Once we're inside these groups, we will keep them for the long term. Here are some more examples of how the AI can go in and actually find everything, measure everything, help engineer these assets. It's an exciting time. This is coming to market next week. Four takeaways, I think, for shareholders is we do think we're in an industry at the right place at the right time. Lucky to be here, but this is a once-in-a-generation scale opportunity. We're continuing to grow and feel like we're in good shape. The first half of the year has tracked very well. The market opportunity is not going to go away. The U.S. has probably got 20 more years of just super scale investment into networks.
Alex mentioned we did have an unsolicited approach from private equity early this year, which I think was good to be able to turn that away. We've got a much, much bigger opportunity than I think that was an opportunistic approach. We feel like the growth runway is significant. With that, Alex, I will pause and turn over to you in terms of a Q&A and also the meeting resolutions.
Thanks, Glenn. All right. Let's open the floor and see if there are any questions out there for Glenn's presentation. It's basically, as I described earlier, about how you go about making a question. I guess no further. Paul, do we have any questions?
Yes, we've got a question from Russell James Famelton. Russell asks, do you have staff in New Zealand? Where are the software people located? I don't know, Glenn, if you want to take that.
We do. We have a core software development team in Wellington, New Zealand. We've got 25 staff in the Wellington office. We also have an AI team based here in the U.S. The intention is to keep scaling across those two locations. A centre of excellence in Wellington, but also a team that's very close to customers here in Colorado. We're headquartered in Colorado.
Paul, any further questions?
Yes, we have another question coming from Chris Milne. Chris asks, the market potential and direction of travel is very encouraging. With the recent capital raise completed, what are now the biggest constraints on even faster growth and market penetration?
It's a good question. I think we've continued to grow strongly every year. Essentially, the part of volatility we have in the business is our services business called IKE Analyze. That's the part that's pulsed up and down, but the core subscription side of what we're doing has just grown consistently. The constraint to growth is logo acquisition. It's winning these massive utility businesses. They all start small, but then they grow over time. There's the go-to-market component. We've had our customer council ask us to build two new subscription software modules for the industry. I think that's important because we get across more of the lifecycle of distribution assets. We're doing those two things in parallel. This is an industry that takes, it does take some patience and some best practice to win. It's not something that happens too fast.
I do feel like we're in a good spot at the moment.
Alex, we have another question coming in from Michael Rutland. Michael asks, there have been occasional comments from the current American administration that it tends to make it difficult for foreign investment into the U.S. to get their profits out. Does ikeGPS see that as a credible problem for the future?
I can probably handle it. No, we don't see any significant issues at the moment. There's been no fundamental change in the tax regime for the U.S., and the repatriation of profits should, we desire to do so. I don't envisage any problems that we're presently aware of.
Okay. We have two questions that talk about or are asking about competition from a couple of shareholders. Let me pitch one of them. The annual report gives us good information on the market potential, the margin, and the $10 million of R&D. Can you give us a clearer idea of the competition in the U.S.? The challenge for SaaS companies is to gain mid and smaller customer sizes. Will these customers accept the standardized model of full format? Really a question about competition and going after mid to small customers.
Another good question. IKE performs one of the three standards for network design in the U.S., and we compete against two other very, very large companies: Bentley Systems and another one called Osmose. We try to differentiate our products through one of our core values, which is simplicity and clarity, and that flows into products and product design. We've got the most—I'm biased—but we've got the most beautiful, simple-to-use product and clear user experience against Bentley Systems and Osmose, and we are winning. We're winning more than they are. We've also had an initiative to hire some of their key people into IKE and kick them in the shins as hard as we can from that perspective as well. I think we have the best product to hit the small, medium-sized municipality and cooperative side of the market.
We've also got eight of the 10 biggest investor-owned utilities. There is lots and lots of white space and customer development work to do, obviously, but I think we've built a product that really fits that requirement. Easiest to buy, easiest to deploy, simplest to use is what we're gunning for.
Any further questions, Paul?
There are no further questions from shareholder fellows.
Thank you very much. All right. We appreciate all that. We now will move to the more formal part of the meeting, that is matters requiring resolution, which were outlined in the notice of meeting. You may ask questions on each matter being put to the shareholders through the virtual meeting website. Please note you will only be able to ask a question if you're registered as a shareholder. Now moving to the resolutions, I propose to call a poll on each of these resolutions. As mentioned, shareholders will be able to cast their vote using the electronic voting card received when online registration was validated. To vote, you will need to click "Get Voting Card" within the online meeting platform. You'll be asked to enter your shareholder or proxy number to validate.
Please then mark your voting card in the way you wish to vote by clicking "For," "Against," or "Abstain" on the voting card. Once you've made your selection, please click "Submit Vote" on the bottom of the card to lodge your vote. Please refer to the virtual meeting guide or use the helpline specified if you require any assistance. Voting will remain open until five minutes after the conclusion of the meeting. The results of the vote on each resolution will be announced on NZX and ASX after the meeting. Each resolution set out in the notice of meeting is to be considered as an ordinary resolution and as such must be approved by a simple majority of the votes cast by shareholders entitled to vote and voting on the resolution. Our first resolution is auditor's remuneration.
This motion concerns the fixing of the auditor's remuneration and the board seeks shareholder approval that the directors are authorized to fix that remuneration. Are there any questions for the board concerning the motion from shareholders? Paul?
There are no questions from shareholders, Alex.
Thank you. Accordingly, if everybody would please vote either for, against, or abstain, we'll take a short pause here before moving to resolution two. Moving to resolution two, which is the election of Glenn Milnes. In accordance with NZX listing rule 2.7.1, a director must not hold office without reelection past the third annual meeting following the director's appointment or three years, whichever is longer. Accordingly, Glenn Milnes, being eligible, has offered himself for reelection. The board considers that Glenn will be a director for the purpose of the NZX listing rules if reelected to the board. The board unanimously supports the election of Glenn. Glenn, would you like to speak to your reelection?
Thanks, Alex. Yes, I feel that we're, again, we're in an exciting and drastically enhanced position as a business. I appreciate the opportunity to serve on the board and enjoy the accountability that it presents. I think everyone's probably heard enough from me earlier.
Thanks, Glenn. Paul, are there any questions for Glenn?
Alex, there are no shareholder questions.
Thank you. All right. Now, if you please select for, against, or abstain on resolution two, and we'll pause for a short while to allow you to do that. Okay. I think it's probably appropriate just to give one last chance for any further questions before we close out the meeting. Do we have any further questions that have gone unanswered, Paul?
There are no further questions, Alex, on shareholders.
Anybody who wishes to can send in a question, and we will get back to you after the meeting. We'd be delighted to answer anything you may ask. If there's nothing further to cover and there's nothing being raised, I'd like to thank you for your attendance and engagement today. We will be announcing the results of the voting on the NZX and ASX this afternoon. We look forward to continue updating you on the progress of ikeGPS as the year progresses. Glenn, do you have anything further to add?
Nothing further. Thanks everyone for taking the time to listen in.
All right. Without further ado, that brings this meeting to an end, and thank you for your attendance.