All right, why don't we get started? Thanks, everyone, for joining us today, both in person and online. My name is Chris Kennedy. I'm a research analyst here at William Blair, that covers the fintech and payment space. For a complete list of research disclosures and/or potential conflicts of interest, please visit our website at williamblair.com. Next up is Nayax. From the company, we have the CFO, Sagit Manor, and the Chief Strategy Officer, Aaron Greenberg. Nayax was founded in 2005. They came public in Israel in 2021, and they were listed in the US in 2022. The company is a leading provider of software and payment solutions that are primarily focused on the unattended retail market. We've tracked this company since 2018. The internal execution has been solid, and it's been fun to watch the company evolve.
With that, let me pass it over to management.
I'm sure you can hear me. Can you? So thank you, Chris. Always great to be here again. Excited to share our story, the Nayax story. With me... Or maybe we'll start here. I'm Sagit Manor. I'm the CFO, and-
I'm Aaron Greenberg, the Chief Strategy Officer.
Okay, so we'll jump from one another, and hopefully it will make it a little bit more interesting. So who we are, right? So think about the vending machine, massage chair, kiddie ride, laundromat, parking, EV charger, and whatnot. The yellow device that you will see, this is the Nayax device, and our mission is to simplify life of our customers. How do we do that? We bring commerce into their lives. We've helping them to increase their revenue, decrease their cost, and create the loyalty with their customers, so, you know, the stickiness that everyone wants. We founded, as Chris mentioned, in 2005, in Israel, the first office is in Herzliya, and then we grew through the years. We have nine offices around the world. Usually, we don't start the business from scratch.
We work with distributors, and when we find the right time, we will acquire them, and that's how we grew to the nine offices we have today. I'll talk about that later. We grew the number of managed and connected devices over the years. Now, we have a million devices, but you can see how it was 200, to grow to 500 over the years. We did the IPO in Tel Aviv in 2001. We did the listing on Nasdaq in 2022, and we've just finished a follow-on on the Nasdaq just a couple of months ago. So again, who we are, nine offices around the world.
We accept more than 80 payment methods, selling our product in more than 120 countries, accepting more than 50 currencies. So really the only global company in the unattended space. A little bit about the scalability, 1 million devices, more than 1 million devices, 76,000 customers. We actually bring 4,000-5,000 customers a quarter, so that's very impressive. And when I'll talk in a second about the composition of our customers, and you'll see that more than 70% of our customers are small businesses, you will appreciate this even more. One billion of transactions went through our devices just last quarter in Q1. Maybe the most important thing to take from this slide is the 134% net retention rate and the very low churn rate.
So again, when you think about small businesses, you can see how the business model, which I'll talk about that in a second, is very strong, and we are able to bring more and more stickiness with our customers. So who we are, a little bit from a global perspective. So let's start with the composition. As mentioned, around 70% of our customers are small businesses, and when I speak about small, it's between 1-15 devices, very small customers. If you look at the bottom right, around 40% of our revenue comes from the US, around 40% from Europe, and around 13% from Australia, and 10% from all over, from the rest of the world.
High net retention rate and low churn rate is something that we always had, and are very very diligent about that. We love our Tier One customers. You can see on the left, names from the U.S. to Europe to Australia, and many more. So what's the problem that we're trying to solve, right? You have the consumer, you and me, right? And we want everything. We want the online to the offline. We want to be able to connect the mobile to the e-commerce when we go and buy. We want to be able to pay in every payment method that exists, whether it's our Apple Pay, the Google Pay, the credit card or whatnot.
We want to be able to pay in every currency and obviously to be appreciated as a loyal customer. And then you have the retailer, which is our customer, that needs to supply the consumers change of behavior and needs, but also wants to have a full visibility to their business, right? To manage inventory, manage employees, manage the business itself and whatnot.
So what we're trying to provide our customers is a one-stop solution for the unattended segment at its core, and that's what we've been doing over the last two decades. Really, where we start is being able to... Let's say you're a vending operator. We want the vending operator to be able to go and accept all forms of cashless payment, any currency around the world, no matter where you are, if you're in Germany, the U.S., Australia, with the same device, same infrastructure, same technology platform. That's what we're able to provide. We're able to give them a unit that they can go and install in a couple of minutes onto their vending machine. We give them an actual management platform that they can go and look at on their phone as they're going and walking around to their vending machines.
They can see supply chain management. They can see when things are going out of stock. They can forecast. They're able to get red flag alerts. It's not just a payment device, but it is an IoT platform that is sitting on whether it's the vending machine or the EV charging station or the laundry machine or any of the 45 different end verticals that we're in. And that's where really the stickiness comes within our platform and why we're able to maintain such a low churn rate for our business. We're able to add not only that actual management platform, both on a web application and also through our MoMa application on our phone, but also we're able to provide loyalty and marketing services for those businesses, whether you're a small business or an enterprise customer.
We can do, you know, punch cards, rewards, et cetera, on a mobile application, which is our Monyx app, as well as being able to provide financing solutions for the customer. So whether they want to pay in CapEx or if they want to pay over time in OpEx, as a rental-based model.
This one.
So basically, the idea here is that we want to be able to increase the sales for the customer, and what we've seen is that in the vending industry, for example, that over 25%, or there's an over 25% increase in the sales, by moving from cash to cashless because of further acceptance, able to accept not only open, open-loop platforms like Visa and Mastercard, but also closed loop as well. In the fueling space, for example, being able to accept from, like, fleet management services, which we announced back in the last couple of months with the DKV partnership. We're also able to decrease the costs, operational costs, for our customers, which are the retailers.
For example, by moving to cash to cashless, being able to remove the operational cost of handling the cash, bringing it to the bank, going in, you know, running around, trying to collect everything, reconciling and accounting, et cetera. But also making it more efficient and easier for people to be able to run their passive business, because these are all automated self-service businesses. It's all passive business. So the less time that the human has to go and spend, the retailer has to go and spend going around, the more money that they're making, generally speaking, or the more profits that they're making, rather, which is what we're trying to provide our customers.
I like to call this one the bottom line, where we are able to show that if the cost to implement this, the Nayax solution, is the same as if you have a cash solution. So the move from cash to cashless basically cost you the same, but then you immediately see an increase in revenue and decrease the cost, so it's a no-brainer. And I also like to call it to call it as from basically being blind, right? You need to touch your machine in order to see what's going on. You get the 20/20 vision, right? From now on, on your mobile, maybe even from the sofa in your house, you can actually see everything that's happening in your business.
And if you're a vending machine operator, let's say you have, I don't know, 20 vending machines around Chicago, where we are. We have the ability on a mobile application, on our mobile MoMa app, to be able to see, not only see where, you know, there's stock that's out, you know, maybe there's no Coke left in, you know, vending machine three, but also being able to help them map what the best routing is and be able to understand how they should go and restock, forecasting when they should be restocking in the future. This is all saving on operational costs because they don't have to wait until they get there in order to understand what they need to do next. So why does Nayax win? There's several reasons. I think that first and foremost, we're a global company.
We're the only global unattended player, as Sagit mentioned, that is in this industry. We also have a very horizontal landscape in terms of the types of, you know, automated self-service devices, that we're able to go into. We've built everything off of the same foundational technology, and essentially built Delta, you know, Deltas off of the foundational technology to go and integrate with all of these different end segments. But our big value add has been able to adapt, or the ability to adapt to any of these end segments, including some of the most complicated ones, like electric vehicle charging, for example. We have a very unique business model. We're a vertical software company. We have the payment, from the hardware. We make our own hardware.
We have our own software solution, which we've talked about, and we do our own payments. We have our own payment gateway. We have our own server infrastructure. It's our own infrastructure. It's not a third-party server infrastructure. We are able to handle redundancies and able to keep very high uptime as a result because everything is built in-house, and everything has been designed by us. We're not relying on third parties to be able to operate the solution. We have our own gateway. We tokenize ourself, and then we route in smart routing techniques to one of the 48 acquiring banks that we work with globally. The last is, you know, we have a targeted expansion strategy that allows us to enter into new markets.
We're able to see and forecast very easily, you know, what is going to be our return on investment going into each new region. We've been focusing on the core, you know, on core segments within the unattended, but also we've been able to, you know, predict with our business intelligence platform, being able to see, you know, what is growing faster than others, such as EV charging, for example, and making sure that we're able to enter those, you know, the regions where it's necessary, to be able to, you know, to be able to target, the demand that is there.
So maybe a little bit about the market. Just to mention that, before we did the follow-on, we actually did it twice. We did it three years ago, and we just recently updated the market research market analysis about the unattended space, and we've learned a few very interesting parts. One is that there's 45 million devices out there as of 2024, growing into 60 million devices by 2029. So one, you know, when I talked about the pricing strategy and how much it costs to maintain cash versus cashless, you can see that, you know, if there's 45 million devices out there, we have around a million, that we have a U.S. competitor that has a million, and there's other players.
But we believe that between 10%-20%, actually, those unattended devices have a cashless solution. And I think that one of the, the genius points, if you will, of our founders, which still today, the CEO and the CTO, is to see the potential that the real competition is cash. The real competition in the unattended space, there's a place to all the other, the other cashless payments because it's the real competition is cash, and then you can see that if we have a million and there's a lot, it's a greenfield, you know, that, blue ocean, no matter how you wanna call it, for us to grow into those other, you know, 40 maybe plus million devices that are out there that accepting cash today. This is one.
The second thing that you can see here is that the verticals of which the payment processing will go through when you think about unattended space. The point here is that to say that we are in every vertical that exists, whether it's the vending machine, the kiosk, the electric vehicle, of course, and amusement parks and whatnot, we are there. We are actually today selling our product in 44 different verticals. Usually, it's a customer that came to us and asked for a solution. They had a laundry machine, and next to it, they had a car wash, and they needed a solution for that. So we grew with them. And so we are well-established and here to continue to capture this market share.
This is where I think it's really important to highlight, you know, 'cause we often get asked the question: What's the barrier to entry into unattended? Because, you know, the you know more traditional attended retail segment, unattended is a very complex industry. It requires different integrations depending on the segment you're in. Vending has a completely different communication protocol than massage chairs, for example, or electric vehicle chargers. What we've built over the last 20 years is not only working and integrating with many standardized communication protocols for those end segments but also built our own proprietary protocols to be able to work with those machines that don't necessarily have a standard protocol.
A lot of the smart machines that are built nowadays are without a standard protocol, and so we've built both a serial integration protocol, which is our Marshall protocol, which allows for easy adaptation through an SDK to the OEM, but also a host-to-host server integration called Cortina, which is another way that we're able to communicate from the payment device to the machine.
These are, integrations that we've created, you know, over the last two decades, and for someone to be able to compete against us on a global scale, they're gonna have to know how to integrate with hundreds, if not thousands, of different OEM manufacturing machines, in 44, 45 different end segments, be able to meet all of these communication protocols, and be able to figure out how to create an actionable platform, behind the scenes for those merchants in that end segment, in each end segment. That's why we've been able to be so dominant over the years, and that's why we haven't been able... You know, we haven't seen competition, you know, from some of the really large, you know, acquiring banks, for example. Instead, we're actually their sales channel of being able to extend into the market.
We work with all of the big acquirers globally. The 48 acquirers we work with, they're oftentimes referring the customers to us, and we're using them as the acquiring bank to go and do the settlement services, but we're the ones that are going out in front of the customer with our unattended platform. So we're actually partnering with them instead of competing with them.
So if you think about the $1 billion transaction value that went through our devices in just Q1, right? So it means that we're gonna finish the year at least with a $4 billion-$5 billion transaction value that will go through our devices in 2024. This wasn't in the acquirers' life at all. We basically brought them that business. So that's the way to think about it. Well, why we are the PayFac, why we are the gateway into the acquirers.
Exactly. So as we look at, you know, the organic and inorganic strategy, starting with the organic growth strategy, most of our business historically has been organic. The 35%+ growth rate that we've had historically has been almost all organic growth. We expect to continue to see mostly organic growth as we continue to move forward because of that flywheel effect that Sagit has mentioned, has been mentioning throughout this discussion. Looking at some of the building blocks of the organic growth, starts with, you know, continuing to win new customers. We're growing, you know, 4,000+ customers on a quarterly basis. That's been happening for a long time now and has been continuing to happen.
We feel very comfortable with the customer growth, and then being able to land and expand, with those customers, which we'll talk about in a little bit. We're continuing to innovate new solutions, which creates a stickier and stickier customer. This is how we're able to maintain such a low churn rate. They continue to get additional functionality on the monthly service fee. You know, so we charge a monthly service fee to the customer, but we're continuing to add new features for them, and we're listening to the customer feedback and giving them the ability, to go and adopt those solutions with over-the-air updates, which makes it really easy for them to adapt to it. We're continuing to expand internationally, with key focus areas right now being Latin America and the APAC region.
We're entering and expanding in some very high-growth segments like electric vehicle charging, parking, mass transit, and some others. Like I said, our, you know, our intelligence platform has allowed us to be able to really see, you know, where growth is happening, you know, not just globally, but down to the micro level. And then retaining and, and, growing with existing customers. The 134% Net Retention Rate and the very low churn rate has allowed us to have very good visibility in our forecast, be able to understand the customer and, and be able to grow with the customer.
Mm-hmm.
On the inorganic growth side, there's three pillars of how we're looking at the inorganic growth strategy. The first two, is expansion, you know, of customer base, of distribution base. The idea on the bottom is accelerating into new markets. If we don't have a distributor in that country, and we don't operate in that country currently, one of the ways that we can expand to that country for the unattended segment is by buying a company. VM Tecnologia is a really good example, which we bought, and, and closed on at the end of April, which is entering us into the Brazilian market. Leveraging new channels, we have been buying some of the distributors.
We have 120 distributors currently, and we are actively and have actively in the past purchased some of these distributors to have a direct sales office and to essentially consolidate the channel where we felt it to be strategic. The U.S. is a really good example of that. You know, where back in 2014, you know, single-digit million revenues, and now we're looking at, you know, 35%-40% of the business in North America, more than $100 million revenue coming from the U.S. this year. So we've been able to do that in the U.S. and Australia and some of the other key regions that we've been in. And then the third is technological upgrade.
We've been more focused on tuck-in acquisitions here, being able to add additional features to our customers and be able to integrate those technologies quickly, as opposed to bolt-on acquisitions and having a completely separate siloed business.
So this is an example for the land and expand. So you can see that on the left side, right, customers that coming to us, for example, in 2018 or 2019, are now doing 5x more business with us. So our revenue with them is 5x more. So example on the right, where it's a food and beverage vending company, where they have more than 5,000 devices, where in 2020, they had $180,000 revenue with us, and now it's around $6 million. And the same with the distributor, right? That is already. You can see the growth in the revenue as we continue to grow with them as they grow. And then, so what's our business model?
Now that we've told you who we are, a little bit about the business model. So we have three pillars to the very strong business model with strong recurring revenue. One is the hardware, which we start the quarter, every quarter start from scratch to sell our product into new as well as existing customers. But we look at the hardware as the lock-in, the enabler for the recurring revenue side. And then we have the recurring revenue that has two pillars. One is the service. It's a monthly subscription, basically, to-- They pay a monthly subscription fee as a connectivity to the management suite and telemetry. And then there's the processing fee that they pay as a per, a percent of every transactions, every transaction that go through our devices.
65%-70% of our revenue comes from recurring revenue on a quarterly, annual basis, with a very high take rate of 2.6%. So what you need to see here is basically, that every two years, we doubled ourself, whether it's in the revenue side, that we grew to $235 million of revenue. This is 2023, and I'll get to the guidance of 2024 in a second. To the recurring revenue side, that doubled itself to, the margins that are getting better and whatnot. And if I go to the next slide, what you need to look at is the bottom right, except from being, you know, very moderate expense and putting operational efficiency, is the fact that we've moved to profitability last year, and on the adjusted EBITDA level and continued this year.
But the point is, is that being profitable is not unfamiliar to us. But when we did the IPO in 2021, we really had, we've done an investment in talent acquisition, product innovation, infrastructure, and automation to take us to the billion-dollar revenue company we're aspired to build. And that's something that we put as a, as a vision, as a target, if you will. In 2021, when we went to the IPO, we wanted to talk about, you know, a billion-dollar revenue by 2028, with 50% margins and 30% Adjusted EBITDA. If I go to the next slide, this is you know, we've spoken about the number of customers. So again, 30,000 customers in 2021, we're now with 76,000 customers.
If I look at the number of managed and connected devices, again, in 2021, we had 500,000. Today, we have 1.1 million devices. So very strong. This is, by the way, a combination, and I'll get to the transaction and the number of managed devices. It's both the solution that we bring into the market, but also the consumer behavior change. If you think about it, six, seven years ago, in a vending machine that can accept cash and cashless, 65% of the transactions, sorry, 25% of the transactions were cashless. In today's same vending machine, 65% of the transaction will be cashless. So a consumer behavior change. So we talked about $1 billion of transactions went through our devices just last quarter.
But you need to remember that at the end of the day, in our business, it's $2 of every transaction value. So $1 billion of transaction, 540,000 transactions. Okay, $2, $1.95. It's the Coke you buy in the vending machine, okay? The massage chair that costs you $3, and whatnot. And finally, the outlook that we've put for 2024. So continue to grow beautifully on the revenue. This will be probably the sixth or seventh year that we're growing 35% on the revenue year after year, growing to... We gave the range between $325 million-$335 million of revenue.
To continue to improve the hardware margins, basically coming back to the pre-pandemic, which is 25%-27%, and I'll remind you that nothing went back from a cost perspective to pre-pandemic. Despite the increase of the cost, we've put some serious, supply chain initiatives and whatnot to take us back to those margins. And then Adjusted EBITDA, that will grow to, to $30 million-$35 million and even reach profitability on free cash flow this year. So excited to, to be, first of all, to be here, to present for you the Nayax solution and story, and we'll be happy to answer some questions. Right?
Open it up to anyone in the audience. Got two minutes left. I guess just a quick one. Aaron, you just joined the company. It seems, sounds like acquisitions have always been a part of the story, but you've been doing a little bit larger deals recently. Just talk about how the deals have gotten a little bit bigger, and talk about the integration.
Yeah, it's a great question. So I think that, you know, as we look going forward, Nayax is becoming a bigger and bigger company. We're growing 35%+ a year, and we're trying to be very strategic with the acquisitions that we do, as we move forward. As you become a bigger company, to move the needle, you need to be doing larger acquisitions. However, you know, one thing that I continue to tell people is, you know, we're not really looking for... You know, we're not looking to do 20 acquisitions a year, and we're not looking to do a bunch of transformational acquisitions. You know, we're focused in a consolidating payment industry.
We're focused on those smaller acquisitions right now that are more in the $20 million-$100 million range, where there's not a lot of competition to go and purchase these companies. There's very low liquidity in the last few years. These private companies have been unable to get liquidity. There's, you know, good valuations as a result, and can be very accretive to our business long term. But we're taking bets on, on companies, you know, VM Tecnologia, for example, entering into the Brazil market through a very strong management team that we really trust, to help us, in the Latin American market.
Be able to get them at an earlier stage, not at the final mature stage, but at a very, you know, at a good stage that's not too early and not too late, and be able to help them grow, with our technology platform and our payment infrastructure, and that's really what we're focusing on as we continue to do more acquisitions going forward.