Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining the conference call for the Upsales interim report for the first quarter. My name is Daniel Wikberg. I am the CEO and Founder of Upsales, and I will be doing this presentation with my colleague, Kristina Fridheimer, who is the new CFO at Upsales. We will start by doing a short presentation for those of you who are not familiar with Upsales. I will cover some of the growth, do a growth update for the first quarter, and then Kristina will cover the financial highlights. We'll talk a little bit about the proposed separation of the AI company, Aira, and finish off with the future outlook for Upsales. There will be a Q&A section. If you wish to ask a question, you can do so by using the Q&A feature at the Zoom toolbar.
You can ask questions throughout the presentation, and we will pick them up at the end of the presentation. All right. Introducing Upsales. We are a Nordic SaaS company. We've been in business since 2003, listed on Nasdaq First North since 2019. We're in the business of helping B2B customers, B2B companies to increase sales, to generate leads, and to drive growth. We do this by providing a sales and marketing platform, a revenue platform specifically for the B2B mid-market. We're working with around 1,000 customers across the Nordics, and we have a long history of profitable growth with zero external capital raised. What we sell and what we deliver, how we help our clients. Upsales is a unified platform that assists with the sales process, with the marketing process to generate leads.
We also added customer service features a while back, and the platform also has support for doing subscription billing and quite advanced analytics as well. What we hear from our customers, our unique selling points, and our way of positioning Upsales is by adding a lot of data with the software. Clients who use Upsales can access financial data and a lot of other data from all registered companies in 14 European countries, which enables them to get more value faster from when they start using Upsales. The second part, which we talk a lot about, is our deep integrations, specifically for the most common Nordic ERP and accounting and invoicing software. Some examples are Fortnox, Monitor, and Visma where we spend a lot of time and resources to have the absolute best integrations for our target group specifically.
Increasingly, the last few years, we see the trend with a lot of companies reevaluating should they continue using the U.S.-based providers of software, and where, of course, Upsales as a Swedish company with European data sovereignty, is very well positioned to capitalize on that trend. Talking a little bit about the growth in Q1. We saw in Q1 the strongest revenue growth in several years. Net sales grew by 13% year-over-year. We continue to see a continued inflow of new customers joining and starting using Upsales. If you look historically, you see some seasonality in both our growth rates, but also in our cash flow, which is explained by we have a very high concentration of renewals in Q1, which also means in absolute numbers, we have the highest churn in Q1. ARR was essentially flat in Q1.
As I wrote in my CEO note, we don't see any changes, overall changes in retention numbers or churn or anything like that. This is primarily a timing effect. What's driving our revenue growth, we had a strong sales momentum in the second half of 2025. We continue to deliver AI capabilities to our customers. A lot of customers are already live using different kind of agents inside of their Upsales account. We have the partnership we started working with another Swedish software company called Monitor, where we integrate to their ERP. This has specifically for new clients, we've had several quarters where new sales was very strong and a big part of this is our customers in the industrial sector. Monitor is a niche ERP for manufacturing companies.
All in all, we continue to invest in the product, in the platform which enable us to address more use cases and just solve more problems for customers. Looking forward, we continue with the strategy we have with the niche. We think we have a very good positioning. I think when looking at the trends with AI, I really believe that Upsales is on the winning side of the AI transformation. I think we're very well positioned to help our niche to start working with agents and start using AI. We see a very bright future and a long runway of growth going forward. We expect full year 2026 revenue to stay somewhere between 10%-15% in terms of net sales growth. All right. I will hand over to my colleague, Kristina, who will cover the financials from Q1.
Yes. Thank you, Daniel, and good morning. Let's start by looking at revenue and ARR. Net sales ended up at SEK 40.8 million, up 13% year-over-year, our strongest quarterly growth in several years, as Daniel mentioned. ARR landed at SEK 152.9 million, up 5.6% year-over-year. A quick note on why ARR growth looks lower than net sales growth. One-off revenues such as onboarding and customer projects grew strongly in the quarter, lifting net sales more than ARR. Recurring revenue is 94.4% of net sales on a trailing 12-month basis, reflecting the quality and predictability of the revenue base. Moving to profitability. EBITDA for the quarter was SEK 7.2 million, a margin of 17.6%. Excluding Aira, EBITDA was SEK 11.4 million at 27.9% margin, a strong level of profitability alongside 13% growth and a good starting point before the step-up we're guiding for from Q2.
That figure is the more relevant one on the underlying business going forward, since Aira probably will be separated. EBIT came in at SEK 3.9 million or 9.6%, and net income at SEK 3 million. The trailing 12-month EBITDA margin is 25.2%, which gives a cleaner view of underlying profitability across the cycle. As we'll cover later, we expect the margin to step up significantly from Q2 once the Aira cost has been removed and the December restructuring in the product team has landed. Slide 13. Let's see. Finally, the balance sheet and cash. Net cash at the end of March was SEK 42.8 million. We remain debt-free and net cash positive. This reflects more than 20 years of consistent profitability without raising external capital, as Daniel mentioned before. Operating cash flow for the quarter was SEK 9.8 million, and free cash flow was SEK 6 million.
As noted on the slide, we expect cash flow to improve in line with EBITDA, so as margins expand from Q2 and onward, we expect cash flow to follow as well. That was all from the financial highlights.
All right. I'm going to talk a little bit about the proposed separation of the AI company, Aira. What we are proposing is to distribute the shares in Aira, which was up until recently a part of Upsales, but has recently been put into a separate legal entity. The proposal is this will be structured as a Lex ASEA dividend. One Aira share for each Upsales share held will be passed as a dividend. This replaces the previously proposed cash dividend, which was mentioned in earlier reports. This is subject to approval at the AGM in the middle of May, and the board is currently evaluating a suitable listing venue for Aira once the separation has been approved. What is Aira? Aira started as an innovation project almost 18 months ago inside of the existing Upsales business.
As we progressed the development, first it was just a prototype, and then we started building and started incorporating some of the findings and innovation into the existing Upsales product. Somewhere along the line, we realized that what we have built is most likely the best sales agent in the world. We started looking at what would it mean if we make this a separate product with a separate brand. We started working on that early 2025. What you get when you start using Aira, you download it. It requires virtually zero effort from the user. You connect your email and calendar account, and you pay with a credit card. What Aira does, it builds your portfolio of companies based on your existing network in your email.
It gives you financial monitoring and news monitoring, and it's built on the financial and credit data covering more than 30 million European companies, and it scans more than 3 million news articles daily. In the beginning of 2026, we launched the Aira World Tour. We have been so far to 10 cities, and we have eight cities left to go, which is invite-only launch events across Europe and also Dubai. The purpose of this has been to get feedback, to recruit partners and potential customers. The Aira app was launched commercially last week on the App Store. Android is coming in a few weeks. We already have the first few paying customers in the first week. We are in a very early stage of commercialization. What are the arguments and rationale to separate Upsales and Aira?
What we see two fundamentally different business models. We have Upsales, which is working with mid-market customers, where our go-to-market model and our way of working with existing clients is very relationship based, if you will, where we have a sales team, we have a project team, an implementation team, and so on, because these customers want our help, and they need our help. That's more of a traditional software go-to-market model, where Aira is a company that will never have a sales team, will never have sales appointments. It's more of an e-commerce model. It's product and it's marketing. The target group is smaller teams, entrepreneurs, teams of one, two, three sales reps. It also has a completely different risk profile, growth trajectory, and capital requirements.
We believe that combined structure makes them harder to value, harder to understand from an investor perspective, and harder to manage. Why does this make sense for shareholders of Upsales? A couple of things. We believe that this will give a better visibility into the true earnings potential of the existing business. As a shareholder, you will continue to have ownership in a cash-generating Nordic SaaS business with rising margin, and you will get a direct separate ownership in a global AI company with an independent upside. As we mentioned in the press release that went out last week and in the note, we expect the underlying EBITDA margin already from Q2 to surpass 35% in Upsales. This is driven by the continued revenue growth, the separation of Aira costs, but also the improved profitability from the restructuring that was done in December.
We did a restructuring of our product team, and most of those costs were still active in Q1. In Q2, we will see the full effect on the bottom line from this reorganization that was done. What is the future of Upsales? Again, we expect to see revenue growth of between 10%-15% for the full year of 2026. EBITDA margin exceeding 35% from Q2 2026. Again, I was talking about the drivers, the continued revenue growth, the savings, and the removal of the Aira cost base. That is the financial outlook. Again, I believe that Upsales is really on the winning side of the AI transformation that is going on. I've had some questions from shareholders, by separating Aira, are we carving out the AI features from Upsales?
Are we carving out all of the AI innovation and putting it into a separate company? That could not be further from the truth. We have had a very ambitious AI roadmap for more than two years now in Upsales. We continue to invest a lot in the product. We have had AI agents live in production for many months now. We have a very exciting roadmap with AI features going live in Q2. AI will continue to be a core part of the Upsales product strategy. What comes next? The AGM will vote on the Aira separation in the middle of May. We will continue to execute on what we have in the pipeline in terms of both the product side, but also on the customer side.
We continue to deepen our partnership and integrations with our key partners in terms of other systems where we integrate. Again, we just continue helping our clients get value from AI with Upsales. That was it for the presentation. We're going to open the floor for questions. Again, just use the Q&A button in your Zoom toolbar if you wish to ask a question. Okay, we have one question about who will be the main driver of Aira. Why should I not be worried that split focus will hamper one of the two companies? It's a fair point, and it's not the first time I get this question. I think it's important to keep in mind that both of these businesses are still. Upsales is SEK 150 million ARR. It's still a small company. Aira is an even smaller team.
I'm very confident and proud of the organization we have, both in Aira and Upsales, which are doing a very good job with the day-to-day operation of these businesses. I will continue to run both these businesses. It's not a big difference from how it is today. I think the added workload from separating these companies will be on the finance side, and Aira will have a dedicated CFO to manage that part. Okay, we have another question about the timescale. We haven't been communicating virtually anything about Aira previously because it has been early-stage product development before commercialization. We have always had that philosophy or policy that we don't want to give false expectations of projects that are early-stage, communicate it to the market. Aira, it was and it is still an early stage.
As we got closer to the commercialization phase, we realized that we started talking in the board of doing this separation, and it made sense, so we went through with it. A question about the restructuring costs. About the pro forma P&L, you can see in the interim report. The pro forma is excluding Aira cost, not excluding restructuring cost. The pro forma is purely excluding Aira cost. Next question. Is the plan for Aira to soon try to raise external capital to supercharge the potential? There is no communicated plan about raising money for Aira. Aira will have SEK 20 million, roughly, in cash at the date of the separation. We are already in early commercialization phase. Right now, there are no plans to raise capital.
Okay, we have a question. In the pro forma calculation, how much of management costs are Aira charged? Will you accelerate the development in both companies? In other words, will the old Upsales start to capitalize more development going forward? I wouldn't say so. I think when looking at the investments Upsales is doing, I think we are at a good level. We always try to find opportunities to do more investments where it makes sense, but we don't see a material change on the horizon when it comes to that. There's no kind of management cost related or included in the pro forma. It's just running costs from Aira.
Okay, we will wait another minute to see if we have any further questions. Okay, we have no further questions, so that concludes this morning's conference call. Thank you very much for joining, and we hope to see you next time.