Good morning, everyone, and, thank you for joining the earnings call for, the second quarter for Upsales. My name is, Donal Wiekberg. I'm the CEO and founder of Upsales, and I will be doing the presentation today together with my colleague, Ehrli Lundstrom, who is the CFO of Upsales. If you wish to ask a question, you can do so throughout the presentation by simply using the q and a button, which you find in the toolbar at the bottom of the Zoom window, and we will answer all questions at the end of the presentation in the q and a section.
So I will start by talking a little bit about upsales, introducing the company, talking about what's going on in our very exciting investments and developments in the product, and also talking a little bit about our our growth strategy and and do a short growth update. And then, Yalen will cover the, financials and the financial highlights from from the second quarter. So the mission for the team at UpSales, is to build the best AI model to help CEOs and executives create revenue growth. And why we we have this as our mission is all companies most companies start out with with great ambitions. You create a business plan, you want to create growth, you want to grow the business, you want to get customers.
But in reality, if you look at the data, of all the companies founded ten years ago, less than 10% ever reach a revenue of more than 10,000,000 SEK. And the number one reason for this is it's very hard to scale and execute sales, and that's where we come in. So Upsales, we are a software as a service company. We were founded in 02/2003, so we have a long track record of profitable and organic growth. We are currently at our ARR is currently 146,700,000.0.
We have a very scalable business model. So more than 95% of revenue is recurring subscription revenue. And I will talk a little bit more about this. This is very appreciated by customers to to be able to use such a scalable scalable product. We're a net cash company with zero debt.
The company is still 43.8 management owned, and we've always been able to run the company creating growth with profitability. And the the last twelve months, we had an EBITDA margin of 21.5%. So I will just talk a little bit about why do customers come to Upsales. Why do do customers buy the product? Why do they keep using it?
And why do they stay? And in our industry, typically, when you purchase this kind of product, you you you typically end up with a an implementation project, and it's very common that it takes a lot longer time than than than you initially planned. And it's also very common that it cost a lot more money to implement the product than than than the initial initial plan. And this is, of course, not popular amongst the customers. And I think there are there are several reasons to this.
Many products out there are are legacy product that that that are not scalable enough. But there's also the fact that a big part of the industry works with with channel partners. So most of the people who buy most large companies who buy these kind of product buy them from consulting companies. And the consulting companies, their business model is is not to make money from from selling software, it's to make money from from selling consulting projects. So our approach is very different.
Our approach is to to talk to to a new customer, identify the problems they have, and get them up and running as soon as possible. And actually, more than more than half of the new customers that start to use upsells already have their data in the product before they sign the contract. So we put a lot of effort into to having the product able to to be used by the customer in in a matter of of of ten, fifteen minutes of configuration, which is, of course, highly appreciated by by customers because seeing is believing. And we are in the midst of our pivot from from a CRM and marketing platform to a to a fully fledged AI revenue platform. So we have a very ambitious AI project at Upsales, which we have been been running now for almost two years.
And my view and and the view of my colleagues in the tech team is that if you're a SaaS company and you're not transforming into an AI company, you won't exist in three to five years. Not all people believe that. I very firmly believe that. What I see in the market is a extremely high paced development. And and and now all of the we are still in the beginning of this of this development, I think.
But now you really see that the the the market and the customers are really starting to to to wake up and talk about this. So AI is on the agenda in in in probably probably every board meeting in in every company right now. So so and we're part of this, and it's a very exciting time for for upsells. So what are our differentiators? Because any any software company can can build an integration to OpenAI or any of the other model providers to to to to add AI features or AI functionality.
And the mantra we had in inside of upsells is that AI is not the feature. So we believe that it's not enough to to add AI here and there in an existing product. You you need to to look at the product as if you were a start up launching a company today to to with a mission of of having upsets going bankrupt. So if you were that company, what kind of product would you build? So these are the kind of questions we are asking ourselves every day in the in the product team.
And some of the things that that that sets Upsells apart is that we we have a long, long history of including proprietary b to real b to b data, annual reports, financial data, and stuff like that. And this is data you you can't scrape it off the Internet with AI, which is a very popular method to do it. So that's one thing because AI with real data works a lot better than than AI with with with broken data, which in the is the case in many CRM systems. So that that is the primary driver, I would say, that that makes these use cases really come alive when we are introducing them to our customers. Okay.
Let's talk a little bit about growth from the from the second quarter. So q two was the the fifth consecutive quarter with with ARR growth. So we are really back to growth, and it's very nice to see this trend continue. And we continue to see a very exciting runway for growth for our sales, both when it comes to new customers, but also in the existing customer base. When we are out there talking to to our existing clients, we see a lot of exciting problems to be solved, a lot of exciting opportunities that that customers are having related to to our space where upsells can be a big part in helping them.
And and and and just looking at the market in general, there are there are still a lot of companies out there that we we visit and talk to every single week, my colleagues in the sales team, to to to have more companies start use upsales. And of course, we continue doing everything we can, investing into accelerating the growth. In Q2, the quarter over quarter ARR increase was around SEK 2,000,000. And if you've been following upsets for some time, you you see that when we were growing as faster in the past, we we were able to add around SEK 8,000,000 to 9,000,000 per quarter in ARR. We see we still see that opportunity, and and I see a bigger opportunity than that.
So we continue to to invest in in the product and in the sales organization to to accelerate the growth. And I usually get questions about the the market conditions and and everything that's going on in in the global environment. And the way I like to look at this to know is upsets being affected or not by by tougher conditions in the market. My favorite KPI is incoming churn, which is the the amount of cancellations or notices or canceled contracts we receive. That number has actually had a very positive trend in the last eighteen months.
So we actually see churn going down. Of course, we are doing a lot of actions to to make that happen, but but we we are not seeing any material impact from from a more more negative market. And when I wrote in my CEO note as well when looking at at new sales, we we are we have had several quarters in a row now where where new sales, new customer acquisition has been very strong. So so we we we see a very good market out there. And, I mean, it's it's we're a company.
We we have no debt. We have net cash. We have positive cash flow. So I think we have a very strong position to to continue investing in the the things we need to invest in when when some other companies have to have to have to scale down. I'm gonna talk a little bit about what we are doing in the product.
And the most exciting part that that we are working on right now and and that all customers are talking about is our agentic platform, our AI agents. So this has been maybe the biggest investment in the product that we've ever done in the history of the company. So through a combination of of of third party providers, data providers, and our own platform, we have been able to to launch a an agent platform allowing up sales customers to build agents that that actually automate, in some cases, entire roles in the company. So the these are very powerful features that you can use to you can save a lot of time, you can save a lot of money, but but most importantly, you can move a lot more faster and you can get a lot more done. So I will share just some examples of of how our customers are are using this.
So this is an example of the sales agent, which helps you automatically understand your your your customer base, prioritize your leads. It joins your your sales meetings, records them, transcribes, sends automatic emails to customers and and stuff like like that. And if you look at the I mean, the typical use case when a customer come to up sales is usually related to this area. You want to have higher effectiveness in your sales team, which is a problem in almost any company out there. And if you look at the studies that that has been done about how do how do sales people and sales organizations spend their time, you see that they spend a massive amount of their time on doing administrative work.
And this is the kind of task that that AI will be able to to to automate completely. Another interesting use case for this is in finance. So if you look at almost any finance team in any company, you find a lot of these manual routines, things that needs to be confirmed and double checked and and data that needs to go from one system to another system and so on. And with the help of of a finance agent in in combination with smart integrations to, example, accounting and invoicing software, you're able to to significantly reduce the amount of these manual routines that that almost all finance teams have. And, I mean, this has been a use case for a long time in in in the IT industry before AI.
But what's different with AI is that now when you have these large language models, you you don't have to have perfect data, and you can have a you can have a large language model reading contracts and understanding contracts and reading emails from customers and understanding requests for for quotes and questions about invoices and and stuff like that. So so it it becomes extremely more efficient than than traditional IT automation projects. So another use case is in marketing. And I think when you when you use the data that customers have access to inside of upsells, all the market data and and company data that I talked to talked about previously, you can do very, very powerful things because you can do personalization at scale. So you can use AI to understand every single company you want to approach, understand what what's on their website, understand what's in their annual report, and what kind of company they are, and then you can have very, very personal communication.
So that that I I think it's a it's a very powerful use case that enables customers to to generate a lot more leads and book more meetings, basically. And the the last use case is the in service. So, again, like in finance, you find these manual routines in all companies. You know, a lot of companies have entire departments just scrolling through an inbox answering answering emails that that are very simple stuff for for an AI to do. So this is this is also a use case where you can save a lot of time and a lot of money.
And with this platform, since we have the platform connected to all the integrations we already built to to EERPs and and and the data our customer have, you you can build your own agents. So what we are doing now with with a lot of our customers is sitting down in workshops, looking at the org chart, what kind of roles do you have, what what kind of tasks are people doing on a daily basis, and just looking at, okay, which of these tasks can we delegate to an agent instead instead of adding more people to the team. And we are in the in the process of releasing interface agents, which will be a very exciting development. And what this means is that our customers will be able to to have a custom chatbots inside of upsells, inside of the application. So for example, if you're if you're, if you're just been hired by a company that's using upsells, that company is selling 10,000 different products.
Typically, you have to go to thirty or sixty day training to understand the product catalog and the use cases and stuff like that. Now you don't have to because you have an agent in the order form that helps you that knows everything about the product catalog, everything about previous orders and all of the customers and and and and so on. So so that's a very exciting development, and and we're we're hopefully, I can share more in in the in in the next report. All right. So I will hand over to Yealin for some of the financials from Q2.
Yes. Thank you, Daniel, and good morning, everyone. So let's continue to the next slide, looking at ARR and revenue. So our annual recurring revenue grew by 2,000,000 in Q2 and was SEK 146,700,000.0 at the end of the quarter compared to SEK 137,500,000.0 in Q2 twenty twenty four. This corresponds to a growth year on year of 6.6%.
Net sales was $37,400,000 compared to $35,100,000 in Q2 sorry, 35,400,000.0 in Q2 twenty twenty four. And we divide the revenue between the recurring revenue that comes from our subscriptions and one off revenue such as onboarding and consulting projects. And in Q2, recurring subscription revenue accounted for 95.7% of total net sales. Let's continue to the next slide and look at profitability. We had an EBITDA of 8,500,000.0 compared to 6,700,000.0 in Q2 twenty twenty four.
And EBITDA margin was 22.8% compared to 19% during the same period last year, with an EBIT of EUR 6,000,000 compared to EUR 4,500,000.0 in Q2 twenty twenty four. And our net income of this quarter was $4,800,000 compared to $3,500,000 in the comparison period. Yes. Let's continue to the next slide looking at cash flow. So during this quarter, we had an operating cash flow of 6,600,000.0 compared to EUR 4,000,000 during the same period in 2024.
And net cash at the end of the quarter was EUR 24,100,000.0. And as Daniel mentioned, we don't have any debt. But if you look at the cash flow statement, you can see that we during this quarter, we paid a dividend of SEK 1.5 per share, so a total amount of 25,300,000.0. Yes, that was all of the financial highlights. Thank you, and let's continue to the Q and A section.
So, again, if you wish to ask a question, you can use the q and a toolbar in your Zoom window. I will start with a few questions I got through through email from Philippe Helmrut. So the first one, how's the new pricing for your product being received by existing and new customers? So we we launched a few months back a a new a new pricing structure pretty much at the same time as we started releasing AI feature where we went from previously, we were selling a a module based We had a module based pricing approach where you you bought a license per user, and then you had almost 20 different add ons. And this created flexibility, but it also created a lot of confusion for for customers.
So we decided to go to a more more all inclusive, if you will, where where more features is already included in the in the package, and and we put that at a slightly higher price point. And I I think that for new customers, this has been a game changer. This is one of the reasons why why we have seen so much success in the new sales team. I mean, I I think the main reason is is because of of the the hard work the team is doing, but I think this has really been an enabler. For for existing customers, we are I mean, we we don't do we don't send an email to to to every customer like like Netflix would do just informing them that the price will go up.
That that's not how how we how we do customer relations. So we do it customer by customer. We talk to them. We we we visit them, and and we we find ways to make it work. But we are in the process of you you have to if you want to use the AI features and upsells, you have to buy the new product.
So you cannot buy them as an add on to the to the previous product. Alright. And then next question was regarding headcount. So if you look at the report, you see that there are slightly fewer employees compared to to last year. There's there's not there's not a deliberate, like, strategic answer or anything like that.
One one one explanation is that some people are on parental leave, and those people are not included in this this number. And I think this is just timing effect. Some people have left, and we are in the process of having more people joining after the summer. I think there there was one role where we actually removed the role where we saw that we could replace that role with with AI and and and smarter ways of working. But but, I mean, the strategy is the same as it was twelve months ago.
We we we want to grow ARR, and we we invest in in in all ways, including the organization that that we see necessary. And the final question from Philip was, in 2022 and 'twenty three, you were able to add around $5,000,000 to $7,000,000 in ARR each quarter compared to today's around $2,000,000 per quarter. How do you work differently today compared to then? So I think there are two answers to this question. If you've been following up sales, you see a very long trajectory of, like, uninterrupted growth, and then then you we had five quarters of of very slow and and sometimes negative ARR growth.
And there were two reasons. We had a lot of we did a lot of changes in the in the sales organization. So we brought in a new sales manager. We we we had some some some people leaving and some new people joining two years ago, and that that affected growth. And this was done at the same time as we launched our new sales and go to market strategy, which evolves around working with slightly larger clients, closing larger deals, so on.
And and and both of these things in the short term affected growth negatively, but in the long term was very necessary. So I'm very I'm very happy that we're we're back to growth. And and the number one priority for me, the entire management team, the entire company is to get back to to rapid growth, to the growth levels we we we had in in the past. Alright. We have one more question from Johan Bostrom.
Yeah. That was also regarding the number of employees which I just answered. Alright. Again, use the q and a button in the Zoom toolbar if you wish to ask a question. All right.
So we seem to have no further questions. So I'd like to thank you all for for joining us this morning, and, hope to see you next