Good morning, everyone, and welcome to this first-ever earnings call for Oneflow. Today, you will meet myself, Anders Hamnes. I'm the CEO and Founder of the company. Next to me, I also have Ilona Prander, which is our CFO. In the lower left corner, you can see a Q&A button. No, I think it's in the lower right corner, actually. You can see a Q&A button. If you have any questions, please feel free to submit them there, and we will get back to those in the end of this meeting. Don't use the chat because everyone will see it. Use the Q&A button in the lower right corner. First gonna say a few words about the listing.
As you know, we have only been listed for a few weeks now, got listed on the 8th of April. Then we raised SEK 275 million in equity issue, and we also had a loan, a bridge loan of SEK 30 million, where we converted 17.6 of those in the same round. On the 5th of May, which was yesterday, we also had another issue of slightly more than 300,000 shares due to the over-allotment option that we did not use all of it. In the IPO, the cornerstone investors that came in were Swedbank Robur Ny Teknik, Handelsbanken Fonder, Andra AP-fonden, and Humle Fonder, SEK 218 million in total they contributed with.
A few highlight KPIs, starting on top to the left, ARR, which means annual recurring revenue. This is our North Star KPI. Actually, for every SaaS company, this is the most important KPI. We closed the quarter at SEK 65.7 million, which was up 73% since last year. Very strong growth. To the right, we have NNARR. It means Net New ARR. If you take New ARR and you add upsell and cross-sell, then you get gross New ARR. And if you subtract churn and downgrade, you get ARR. Closed in at SEK 8.6 million, all-time high for the quarter, up 64% since last year. If you move down, high ARR on net sales ratio, 134%. We are an ARR-first company.
We don't chase one-offs, and we don't do consulting normally for the customers. We only love recurring revenue. Since we're growing so fast, that's why this metric is so high. Retention rates, super important. Net retention rate 119% for the quarter, which means almost 20% per year without adding new logos. I'll get back to that later. The gross retention rate, 94%. Does not include upsell and cross-sell. This is only churn and also downgrades, of course. Very strong metrics. Get back to that later. The LTV:CAC, around SEK 15 or SEK 14.6 payback rate, which means that for every krona we invest, we get SEK 15 back. That's a quite nice deal, actually.
I'm gonna quickly, just one slide, for those of you that don't know the company, present what we do. We are an eContract platform, where you can do all kind of contracts, sales, purchase, HR, and so on, and all the steps in the process. Not only the signing stage. As you know, there are hundreds, maybe even thousands of eSigning vendors out there. That's a commodity today. That's, like, the purple box in the middle. We also do eSign, of course, as a, like a wheel on the car, but Oneflow is much, much, much more than just eSign. We are about pre-sign and post-sign and all the steps in the process.
You can build contract templates, you can collaborate in real time, make changes, audit trail, comment, and you can manage your contracts post-sign, so you can get notified, and you can do stuff with the data in the contract. Throughout this process, we analyze stuff, we give our customers, our users, insights, information, we help them, and so on. Since we also work with web-based, HTML-based contracts, you can do so much more with the data and integration than what's possible if you go with a pure PDF-based eSign tool. Now enough about us, or the concept, and before we dive into more numbers, just quickly explain the revenue model.
We have a very traditional SaaS revenue model, where you buy a number of seats, and you pay a fee per month per seat, and the standard is that you pay 12 months up front. If you want, let's say, 10 seats, and you go for the business tier, we have four tiers, one freemium and three paid tiers, and business is middle, starts at SEK 380 per seat per month, and you buy 10 seats, then the total ARR will be around SEK 46,000 . Direct sales, where it was started, we've always done direct sales. That's a very high touch, I would say approach. We have the people calling and prospecting. We have different teams.
We have outbound, inbound, and so on. Roughly from the prospect, we can see that roughly 90% of all ARR comes from direct sales historically. Partner sales around 10% by the end of last year. We have different partner programs, as you can see here. This is a medium touch process because we do get assistance from the partners. Then the third leg, what we call self-service, which is low touch or no touch. Two parts. You have the sales we do that comes from marketing, that they drive traffic to our homepage, and then they sign up for a freemium, and they convert to a paid plan. Or the product itself also actually can drive this traffic. This is a new leg started last year. Very exciting.
We have a team working dedicated on self-service right now, so we are very enthusiastic about this going forward. W e don't report a split on revenue from these three legs, actually going forward. What we said in the prospectus was that direct sales, partner sales 9%-10%, and self-service was new at that time, so less than 1%. Numbers. ARR 65.7%. I guess most earnings calls start with net sales. For a SaaS company, I would say that ARR is much more interesting to follow because net sales is a lagging metric. In our world, there are like the two most important KPIs that we follow every day in and out are the ARR and our cost base.
That's the most important for a SaaS company. That's why we start with ARR. Strong growth. You can see we are like in a span between 70% and 80% year-over-year growth. This is because the increase here is related to we building a better and better product every day. We have releases every week. We're getting better at what we do. We are actually. It's a very interesting time right now because we are in a stage where so many companies want to convert from Word and PDF and mailing contracts back and forth and into a more frictionless environment. Yeah. Move on. Next slide is about the net new ARR.
All-time high last quarter, SEK 8.6 million, up 64% since last year. It looks like we had a drop last in the third quarter last year. Actually, we did not. I decided to add a graph to the right just to explain a little bit about the seasonal fluctuations in software sales in general, I would say. For most software companies, the second and fourth quarter are the best, and the third quarter by far the worst. First quarter somewhere in between. If you look at the pink staples there, I would say that's a quite good pattern on how the seasonal fluctuations are.
The reason why of course we had an even stronger Q1 is because we're growing so fast. That's why we expect to see the same pattern of course this year. Move on to the retention metrics. Net retention includes upsell, cross-sell, churn, downgrade, everything. What this means is that we increase our ARR every year by as of now 19%, roughly, from existing customers without bringing in new logos. It's a very healthy metrics. Our ambition of course is to increase it and have it in this range at least. If you go to the gross retention, 94%, also very strong metric.
This includes churn and downgrade. It's a mix of if you take out the downgrades, the churn, it would have been like much higher actually. If you only look at the churn, it would have been much higher. We include also the downgrades of course in the gross retention rate. We had close to 21,000 paying seats end of the quarter, which is a growth of 65% since the year before. To the right, you can see how much we make per seat on average. Today it's around SEK 3,100 per year per seat on average.
There's a potential here for further growth. LTV: CAC is also one of the main SaaS metrics out there. The reason why it is so high for us is because we have a very low churn. When the churn is low, then the LTV goes up a lot. Actually, you can calculate the LTV: CAC in different ways. We decided to do a more like what we internally call a simpler version because that's the most common way of calculating the LTV, the LTV: CAC. The simple version, just take the ARR value today and multiply by gross margin and divide by the churn, then you get the LTV. What is wrong with that is that it does not include upgrade and cross-sell, expansion sales.
There is a more, I would say, advanced formula out there that we can use to also include expansion sales. Because as you remember, we had a net retention of around 120% or 90%, to be accurate, the last quarter, which means that we do a lot of expansion sales. In our case, it would have actually been more accurate to use this more advanced formula. But we decided to keep it simple. This is the most common formula out there. It's simple. To make it comparable to other companies we stick with. Yeah. 15, around 15 LTV:CAC would have been much higher if we used the correct formula in brackets. Then I pass the mic to Ilona.
Hi. Net sales during Q1 was SEK 14.5 million, which represents a growth of 65% compared to the first quarter last year, when we had a revenue of SEK 8.8 million. The growth is totally organic, and 95% of the net sales comes from recurring revenue in forms of long-term subscription agreements related to the software. The high proportion of recurring revenue, together with the low churn results in a good stability and drives the growth. Other revenue are professional services, and they are sold when we believe it will ease customer onboarding and adoption to the product. Our main focus is, and will continue to be, on ARR and recurring revenue, which always comes first.
We will continue to have this high proportion of recurring revenue in the future. The ARR is significantly higher than net sales, with a ratio of 134% during the first quarter, compared to 129% last year. This demonstrates high growth and also that we don't trade quick wins for long-term profitability. Another important focus for us is globalization. The share of net sales outside Sweden continued to grow during the quarter and ended up at 22% of the total net sales, compared to 19% the first quarter last year. This actually gives us the growth of 134% from countries outside Sweden compared to the same period a year ago. Next slide, looking at the costs.
Our cost to maintain the service is very low. COGS consists of operating costs to keep the platform active. The gross margin has been stable at around 95%-96% and enables high scalability potentials. Looking at next slide, EBITDA. EBITDA for the first quarter was -SEK 6.7 million, compared to -SEK 5 million first quarter last year, which gives an EBITDA margin of -46%, compared to -57% same period last year. EBIT was -SEK 11 million, compared to -SEK 7.6 million first quarter last year, which gives an EBIT margin of -75.4%, compared to -85.5% same period last year. The company is still in an early stage, and we are investing in the future with a focus on growth and market shares.
The large majority of costs, around 72%, is personnel due to our organizational investments in product development and sale to both improve the product and expand the business. We have a heavy focus on both product development and also to take a position as the global thought leader of digital contracts. At the end of this year, we were 108 employees, compared to 75 same time last year, giving an FTE of 101 employees during the first quarter.
I would like to say a few words about globalization, because this is one of the key efforts at the moment within the company. As you know, we raised close to SEK 300 million, and what we said in the prospectus is that we're gonna use roughly one third of that on developing the product to hire more people in the R&D department, one third on expansion outside the Nordics, and one third on different sorts of strengthening the whole team of the company and other sorts of costs. Globalization. We had 20 customers in 26 countries end of last quarter. We even have customers in New Zealand and Belize in the Caribbean. It's a quite widespread actually. That's one of the beauties with SaaS.
You don't need to have boots on the ground to be able to sell. As Ilona said, net sales outside Sweden was 22% last quarter. We have had a team in Norway and Finland for some time now. The Finnish team was established January last year, and the Norwegian team had been with us for a few years. Very good teams. We are at the moment in the process of opening offices in the U.K., in the Netherlands, and in France. First out is London. We have a team there already actually this week. They are in Stockholm this week on the onboarding. We have started actually with that team.
First out is London, and then second and third is gonna be Paris and Amsterdam very soon. We have communicated some goals before or in the prospectus. What we have said is that we are aiming at an ARR of at least SEK 600 million by 2026, and the same year, an EBIT margin of at least 20%. That's our goals. For the next few years, we don't aim at having any dividends. Focus now is on growth and invest for the future. That was our slides for today. If you look at the Q&A board here, we have a few questions. How much of ARR came from the partner channel in Q1, more or less than in the last year?
We actually are quite generous, compared to other companies in the Nordics, on what we report. As you can see, we report on a lot of SaaS KPIs. We have decided not to report a split on the sales channels. That will be too detailed, we think. Since we already are best in class, when it comes to what we report on. We're quite satisfied with that. What we also said in the prospectus, we disclosed some information. Then we said that direct sales was 90%, partner sales 10%, and self-serve was less than 1%. That was like a new low this last year. Not gonna be that low this year, of course. That's what we have said.
The next question, what is your plan for recruitment this year, and how does the current level track on that? The headcount end of Q1, Ilona, was-
108 .
Yeah. 108. What we have said is that we're gonna spend the new funds we have received on hiring a lot of R&D people, developers, to build an amazing, I mean, an even stronger product and to increase our lead to competition even further. This is a product race, so we have to really invest in the product to be able to capitalize on that in the future. We are expanding also to Sweden and the Nordics, so there will be headcount there. We don't wanna guide on an exact number here, of course, but we will grow a lot.
At the same time, I would say that to build a successful company, as we always say here in Oneflow, it's more about people and culture than the product. We never compromise on the standard because the day you start to hire, I mean, not the best, then that will backfire. Because you might have an amazing product or an amazing idea, but if the team is average, then the outcome product will be average as well. We will grow fast, yes, as fast as we can, but never, ever compromise on our standards. If we can't find talent fast enough, then we're not gonna grow as fast as we would like to. The average revenue per user increased slightly quarter-over-quarter.
What was the mix on price increases? What is your thoughts on pricing going forward? Actually, we have not changed our price that much over the last years. It's been quite stable. That's maybe not fair because we have added a lot of features and stuff to the product. Today, it's a quite complex product that you get, and it's, in our opinion, maybe a little cheap. The mix, if you go further back, as you can see from the prospectus, at some point in 2017, 2018, 2019, the prices per user were falling. The reason for that was not because we were actually lowering the price, but it has to do with the composition of customers.
We were becoming better and better at selling to larger accounts, and if you buy more than X seats, then of course you will get a discount. I mean, if you look at the average seat price, and if it looks flat over time, it doesn't mean that we don't increase our prices. There is more dimensions to it. There is also cohorts of different customers, and if you buy more seats, then you will get a discount. Today we are better and better at selling to bigger accounts. Yeah, we actually do increase in all customer cohorts, we do increase the prices a little bit. You had a question, Ilona?
Yes, I had a question here. How come your net working capital is negative? This is due to our subscription-based sales model with a majority of customers paying a year in advance. This leads to high amount of deferred income. This is the reason.
Yeah. Why don't you have disclosed the CAC? Well, as we said, we feel like we are quite generous already on what we disclose to the market and we decided to go with LTV:CAC. Yeah. That I think actually wrap up all the questions that we have.
Yes.
I would like to thank you all for participating in this first ever earnings call for Oneflow, and please reach out to Ilona or myself if you have any questions. Of course you can find our contact details on the investor page. If not, we meet again in three months.
Yes. Thanks a lot.
Thank you.
Bye.
Bye-bye. Have a great weekend.