Good morning to IDEX Biometrics Q1 2026 results and business update. My name is Anders Storbråten, and I'm the CEO and CFO of IDEX. Q1 2026 is an inflection point for IDEX Biometrics. We set out a strategy one year ago that we now see the results of. Here are the business highlights and the financial highlights for the quarter and to- date, and we will walk through each of these points in this presentation. First of all, there is an inflection point at IDEX with the launch of Mythos, which shifted the rules of enterprise authentication globally. Mythos is only seven weeks old, but it has created a lot of change in our business. Just to summarize, pre-Mythos, we thought that the way we authenticate ourselves is good enough.
It was fine to find patches to the systems, and budgets needed to be balanced because the risk was not perceived to be too high. Now, in post-Mythos world, software-only authentication has been now exposed. Mythos finds vulnerabilities faster than we can patch them. According to Mythos, we have approximately six months to find solutions that will be protective for the users. Particularly in the U.S., they have established a project called Project Glasswing, where the 40 most important companies have gained access to the model to figure out how they can use it to protect their systems. What has come now is that Mythos is saying that hardware-rooted offline devices to use for authentication is a prerequisite for safety going forward. That is where IDEX fits in.
We have a card that is a hardware, it's offline, and we also have the best biometric interface or the sensor in the world. It is not attached to a network. There is no attacking surface. Very hard for hackers to exploit. We feel that our engagement with our customers have changed dramatically because now they understand that they need to do something fundamentally to protect their business. Hardware-rooted devices, such as IDEX biometric card, which is offline, and with biometric fingerprint fits very well into their existing systems. That's why we're seeing a big uptake in the activities and pilots since the launch of Mythos. Here we see that for the period, we are now up to seven pilots, including Telenor Cyberdefence and StormGeo, familiar names up here in Norway.
Two of them are currently live, and we are launching more pilots throughout the summer. The uptake is, as we said, based on tailwind from MITRE, and also that our products has now been certified by FIDO2. This basically means that we solve problems for enterprises and governments who is looking to eliminate phishing, shoulder surfing, and most importantly, consolidate physical and digital access. Meaning that you have one ID card with you that you use to log in to your computers, but also to access the building physical premises. Previously we had announced pilots with the Norwegian Real Estate Company and also a government institution. They are still progressing, but somewhat delayed because of third-party suppliers, but they will be rolled out during the summer.
Typically, we see that when we deploy a pilot is that it takes two to four months for that to be fully tested and deployed full scale. Our pipeline is both with private institutions and public sectors, and it's primarily here in Norway, but we also have pilots live in the EU. ID Centric partnership has been restructured. The original deal that we had back in March 2027 was a combination between a commercial order and also a private placement. We did mutually agree that we were canceling the investment, but we remained committed to finalize the commercial agreement, and that was signed now in May. There are no changes to the commercial terms of that deal. IDEX is an exclusive sensors supplier for ID Centrics cards in APAC.
Another thing is that even though the margins are thin, the cash flow is good from that partnership, and also that we have working together on the technology, and the supply chain to reduce costs for our components going forward. We did replace now that equity investment with the private placement done in April. We raised gross NOK 80 million, we come back to that a little bit later. Channel partners is important to scale a business like IDEX. We have added eight new channel partners this year. We are up to total nine. This gives us great access to customers both in Europe, Norway, and also in Asia. They have huge customer bases, they are actively deploying our products to their customer base to launch pilots.
The most prominent ones are listed to the one box to the right, Infinigate, one of Europe's leading cybersecurity resellers. Avnet, which is the largest global distributor of NXP Semiconductors' chips, which is fundamental for the MIFARE DESFire. We have Buypass and Cardtech, which is the leading Norwegian distributor of cards. I would like to highlight the partner model is really strong. We have already one, not named here, leading European card manufacturer who is running an IDEX pilot as we speak with a European government institution. Buypass is a value-added reseller, well known up here in Norway. Huge user base, very important, has the highest level of security. They are at the eIDAS level, which is a European standard that now IDEX will be compliant with. We fit very well into their product offering, we are going out together to customers.
On the backlog and revenues, this was an inflection point for us in the order book, standing at NOK 23 million. That was driven by IDC order, also more other orders are following. All of this backlog is to be delivered in 2026. The revenue recognition to the right will be, of course, based on when we are actually sending the shipments and when the pilots are going into a full-scale deployment. We were expecting good growth there throughout the year. Gross margin, as we see, it's standing at 58% for the quarter. It's driven by commercial sensor orders. As we have communicated earlier this year and the reason why we are selling our own access cards will give us a better gross margin profile going forward. OpEx, we set out to reduce costs last year.
OpEx is down 44% year-on-year, flat over the quarter. We have no capitalized R&D in this overview. We do expect maybe some kind of, as we invest into growth, there might be some short-term OpEx changes. EBITDA, lowest in a long time. With the business set up, we have great operational leverage. As we are monetizing our pilots, we should see strong improvement in our EBITDA and also cash flow going forward. Cash position. We started the quarter at NOK 1.4 million. We did the equity raise back in April. We restructured the cap structure with paying off the Heights convertible loan, and also shareholder loans. We are now at NOK 50 million. As you have seen, we also did a private placement this morning, the number post that should be approximately NOK 70 million. Outlook.
This is the first quarter where we have secured pilots. We make sure that our distribution partners have what they require from us to go to their customers with materials, resources, and products. That will scale throughout the year. There are a lot of orders in the process already for Q2. As we are writing here, quarterly revenue recognition will reflect upon when the shipment actually is completed. We are continuing on a weekly basis to sign up more pilots. We see strong interest post- Mythos. We should be able to see a strong growth throughout the year in this one and convert them into full-scale orders. There is a lot of things going on at IDEX at the moment, which we are not disclosing in this call, but there are new strategic partnerships with resellers, integrators, and OEMs.
Each will add to our strength in scaling the business throughout 2026. That finishes today's presentation. Any questions?