Ladies and gentlemen, up next, we have Peter Londa with Tantalus.
Good morning. Thanks for allocating some time. For those of you that may be familiar with Tantalus, thanks for joining. For those of you that are new to this story, I'll try to walk through a very high-level summary of who we are and what we do, with the goal of trying to leave as much time as possible for Q&A. My name is Peter Londa. I'm CEO of Tantalus Systems. I have been in this capacity as CEO since 2014. At the 12-year mark, certainly have outlived my welcome in a leadership capacity, but have the fortune and the benefit of representing our organization at this event. Certainly as a publicly traded company on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol GRID. High level, I'll dive into what we do.
We are a technology company that is solely focused on helping the electric utility industry modernize their distribution GRID. When we think about the utility GRID, there is generation, transmission, then distribution, which is the delivery of electrons and power to homes, to buildings, to industrial plants. That's where our focus is on the delivery of electricity. To give you some sense of our scale, we support today over 330 utilities, almost all of which are in the U.S. As you look at our financial profile, we report U.S. dollars because that's where 99.9% of our revenue is generated today, even though we are headquartered outside of Vancouver in British Columbia and on the Toronto Stock Exchange. To give you some perspective, on a trailing 12-month basis through March 31 of this year, just over $57 million of revenue.
That's up over 20% on a like-for-like period. The trailing 12 months is relevant for us because electric utilities tend to be very deliberate in their buying decisions. While we certainly report and track quarterly progress year-over-year, from a management perspective, we kind of focus what the trajectory is over a 12-month cycle, especially as that ties into the budgeting process of our customer base. Just under $4 million of positive adjusted EBITDA, again, USD. Within our revenue mix, as I get a little bit deeper to what we do, our revenue profile is split between physical devices. We refer to those as connected devices, which are edge computing devices that get integrated into a variety of different types of products that utilities put into the field, like a meter or a line sensor or equipment inside the substation.
You can think of us like the intel inside in terms of what we do. From those devices, we access data, and we run that data through a suite of software and AI-enabled analytics capabilities. Today, that represents 35% of total revenue from software and services. The way our model works, and I'll get into a little bit more detail on that, every time we put a device in the field, it triggers recurring revenue. Devices are in the field for 12- 15 years. Today, 25% of total revenue, about $15 million , is recurring in nature. In terms of why we exist and the growth trajectory that we're on, electric utilities are facing no shortage of challenges.
While you can categorize those into a variety of different buckets, the big three drivers that we see that have been driving growth for us, again, over 20% for the last two years or so, fall into one of these three big categories. The first is electrification. Anybody drive an electric vehicle here by any chance? Oh, good. An increasing number of people from where we were last year. You are deliberately contributing to the degradation of transformers like I am on my block. I live in Connecticut, just outside of New York City. Going to miss the parade tomorrow for the New York Knicks, unfortunately. My kids will be there, hopefully they make it home safe. Every time I charge my vehicle, I am doubling the amount of power that I consume at my house. That puts pressure on the meter.
It puts pressure on the line. It puts pressure on the transformer. Not only do we see the rise in electric vehicles, which is a little bit more regionally based in the U.S., we also see the electrification of everything. In traveling today, and being here at Las Vegas, I've got nine devices in my backpack that all need power. Not to mention the fact that with the sun streaming in from my window, I'm turning the air conditioning unit down as low as possible in my hotel room, right, driving more power that NV Energy has to deliver here to this facility at the Bellagio. We're also seeing the implications of data centers. Great example for us that was shared at our users conference a few weeks ago. We support a lot of utilities in the rural footprints of the United States.
We had a utility present from Kentucky, relatively small utility of 30,000 people, about 200-megawatt system, very small in the world of utilities. They are in the final throes of securing a data center from one of the big seven, one of the magnificent sevens, that will take their system over the next several years from 200 megawatts to two gigawatts. That 10X increase in power is not only a generation issue, it's a fundamental issue in terms of variability and control at the distribution GRID. While we are not directly involved in delivering power to data centers, as the utility customers we support secure contracts with data centers, it's putting immediate stress on the distribution GRID. Electrification is a huge driver for us. Extreme weather events, unfortunately, continue to unfold across the United States, Canada, and much of the world.
They have cascading implications as to the resiliency of the GRID. Disruption of power is not only economic loss, it unfortunately can also lead to property damage and loss of life. Utilities are very focused on building up the distribution GRID to be more resilient and pinpoint where they have the highest levels of vulnerability as mother nature surfaces. The third, and I think one of the ones that's the least understood, is not only aging infrastructure, which is well documented, it's aging workforce. 50% of the engineering staff in the U.S., for those of you that live here like I do, 50% of the engineering staff for utilities is within five years of retirement. There is no way to replace that workforce fast enough.
Whereas those individuals that are about to retire, when they came out of school in the 1970s and 1980s, going to the utility industry, locking in pension, healthcare, and a lot of other benefits, was deemed to be an attractive opportunity. Utilities are struggling to attract the next generation of engineers today. It's just not a sexy place to work. So that's where advancements in data analytics and certainly the use of artificial intelligence and iterative machine learning becomes paramount to try to help utilities address what is otherwise a significant flight of information and data inside people's heads. In terms of our market segmentation, for those of you not familiar, there are almost 3,000 electric distribution utilities across the U.S. About 160 of those get the attention in the press. Pacific Gas and Electric Company, NV Energy, excuse me.
Con Edison in New York City, that's going to have a field day tomorrow during the parade. The large Investor-Owned Utilities that are publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Those IOUs represent about two-thirds of the 150-plus million meters across the U.S., so roughly 100 million meters. A third of the U.S. power GRID is managed by almost 2,800 public power and electric cooperative utilities. Very disaggregated. The likes of EPB of Chattanooga, which delivers power to all of Chattanooga, over 1 million people, owned by the city of Chattanooga. That's public power. Fleming-Mason Energy in Kentucky, a rural electric cooperative utility, or Appalachian Electric Cooperative in the Appalachian Mountains in Tennessee, cooperative utilities. That's the market segment that we have historically focused on.
To that extent today, we have about 330 of those 2,800 utilities and scaling at about 20 new utilities per year on average since 2014. The reason why utilities are selecting us is a combination of technology, customer support, and innovation. Let me walk you through sort of where we focus. We offer a technology platform. That platform includes everything from edge computing devices, so a Linux-based computing platform under the glass of a meter. We don't build meters. We build the intelligence inside. An edge computing Linux-based computing platform and a line sensor that's tracking power quality, or RTUs in the substation. Again, we don't build those devices. We build the edge computing capabilities. From that data, we help utilities deploy out a communications network. Not all utilities are comfortable using public cellular networking. Some are, some are not.
We leverage tools like fiber, radio frequency, cellular, WiMAX, RF capabilities with the intent of accessing data from any device, regardless of where it's deployed. We're very opinionated about it and design networks that meet the needs of utilities and then over decade-long relationships, expand that communications technology as advancements are made in things like 5G or as fiber is deployed all the way to the very edge of the grid. Across that communications network, we are sending and receiving data. That data funnels into a grid data management platform. For those of you familiar with the enterprise software world, think of the TIBCO Message Bus plus a Google Translate. Any data from any device integrated into any system. The focus is interoperability to support devices that have been in the field for decades, and some of which don't talk to other types of systems.
Our goal is an interoperable platform. From that platform and from that data management software capabilities, a suite of applications and data analytics on top of that. Where that fits within the distribution grid and where the historical focus has been, on my right, your left side here, from substation down to meter. A lot of folks sometimes confuse us as in the smart metering industry. We do partner with, and we compete with, the likes of Itron, Landis+Gyr, Aclara, multibillion-dollar global businesses that, to their core, have manufacturing facilities and are driving volume in terms of physical devices and hardware, meters. Our focus is on a custom ASIC that we design. We have not gone down the path of an off-the-shelf chip from the likes of a NVIDIA or another semiconductor company.
We actually fabricate our own ASIC with an organization called Faraday, among the top five fabricators in the world, with intellectual property that is specific to extracting data from devices and analyzing data at the edge. As the world evolves for us, depending on the computing power necessary, some capabilities right under the glass of a meter or a line sensor, some capabilities up in the cloud, depending on what the most efficient area is or technology is to leverage data. The focus has historically been at the substation level, and then certainly with the advancements in metering capabilities, down to the meter level. In between is a set of power lines and transformers. What we do is we capture data around power quality inside the substation, voltage and current. Most folks are familiar with that.
We capture voltage and current data all the way down at the individual meter. From there we triangulate anomalies. Where are there millisecond disruptions in voltage? Where are there millisecond disruptions in current, and why is that happening? That's where machine learning and AI come into play for us in terms of extracting that data, looking at a variety of different parameters as it may relate to weather, the existence of an electric vehicle, the installation of solar, the implementation of batteries, down to vegetation management. Where are trees hitting power lines based on a certain amount of speed from mother nature on the wind side? We take all of those anomalies, and we jam that into a suite of analytics to pinpoint where are transformers at risk, where are power lines vulnerable.
As we expand and as we think about innovation inside this industry, certainly for Tantalus, we have recently launched, a little over a year ago, our TRUSense Gateway, this device in the middle. It sits inside a meter socket. To try to explain that in 20 minutes here is complicated. It is a first-to-market opportunity for us, a first-mover advantage to ultimately extract data at a very advanced level in terms of power quality and not have to replace a meter. As we think about a differentiated approach and why we believe Tantalus is well suited and positioned to continue to drive 20+% growth per year, it's because we're coming at the market in a different way. Historically, utilities, when they think about edge computing, they think about upgrading metering infrastructure. If utilities want to do that, we can support it.
From our view, there's a better way in today's world where you do not have to rip and replace all existing infrastructure. That's where the TRUSense Gateway comes into play, that allows utilities that may be stuck or not fully depreciated on some infrastructure, accessing advanced data capabilities, from there, advanced analytics to prioritize where to make investments. Fundamentally, utilities cannot upgrade everything from substation to meter at the same time. Incremental to that as we think about advancements, certainly I personalize, those of you that have met me over the years, or have joined webinars or previous presentations, I drive the F-150 Lightning. I was disappointed to hear Ford had discontinued it. It was one of the first vehicles that not only you could charge at home, but also discharge into the home and power some portion of a house.
It's not really a whole home backup generator, but it's close. It's a 19-kilowatt battery. That's the equivalent of what Generac is putting in with a propane tank. Every time I charge that vehicle, which is random, it's a function of where I am, how far I drive, how fast I drive the vehicle in and of itself, I'm doubling the amount of power, from that, I'm stressing the transformer.
As we think about the advancements that are coming, GE Appliances, one of our partners in water heating, smart thermostats, much more advanced air conditioning, heat pumps, electric baseboard heating, all the advancements that are being made by the appliance companies, how do we help the utility have more granular control behind the meter to shift peak load, to deal with affordability issues when people really struggle to pay their bills, which unfortunately is an increasing percent of the U.S. with inflationary pressure that we're seeing yet again? How do we help utilities aggregate load house by house, appliance by appliance to ultimately protect the grid? I'll give you an example. Big storm coming in Texas. How do we pre-heat homes in the winter?
How do we pre-cool homes in the summer and then take those homes or take those appliances off the GRID to reduce the amount of stress? As we see in the Tennessee Valley Authority, the largest utility in the United States with 154 distribution entities across seven states in the Southeast, for the first time in 50 years, they are predicting blackouts this summer. For those of you within the TVA territory, something fundamentally different. They not only have peak rates, they now have max peak rates that they're charging down to the consumer level. How do we help them aggregate load and take that load off the GRID to ride through what otherwise is what's referred to as peak demand or a max peak circumstance that could lead to a rolling brownout or blackout?
As we think about advancements three, five, and seven years from now, how do we get behind that meter and control those appliances? That's where the TRUSense Gateway really comes into play. Combination of power quality data, consumption, and control. In terms of our model, we look at multi-decade relationships. When we think of retention rate relative to software companies or other vendors in our market space, we think in the context of decades. When we deploy our technology, it's in the field for 12- 15 years on average. That locks us in and creates a moat around the account for us to then monetize data over that timeframe as we continue to invest in software and analytics, because we are harvesting data every millisecond of every day at this point in time.
From that, we think about how as utility rolls through its deployment, as the world changes, like the utility in Kentucky that's about to have a data center and think about a tenfold increase in their distribution GRID requirements, how do we sustain and how do we expand in an incremental way? Because a utility in that circumstance cannot rip and replace. Then as we get to the end of a 12-` 15-year horizon, how do we ultimately refresh and renew? It leads to 99% retention rate across 330 utilities for the last 20-plus years. Once we effectively get into an account, we're pretty solid in then securing that account to drive long-term recurring revenue and growth for our organization. Our model is pretty simple. Land, expand, and then ultimately broaden what we do, and that's where the TRUSense Gateway comes into play.
Mindful of time, Q1, fortunately, record results for us, almost 25%-plus growth year-over-year at $15 million of revenue. Not only the most amount of revenue generated in Q1, most amount of revenue generated at any quarter in our company's history. Gross profit margins continue to trend north of 50%, driving as we continue to invest in the business, positive adjusted EBITDA. One other element that we really like about our business model as we think about our shareholder base, myself included as an investor in the company, not only are we growing the company at 20%-plus growth, we are also generating free cash flow from operations and free positive cash flow to fund further growth and investment in the business. Cap structure is pretty clean. All common stock. We fortunately have wide coverage on the investment banking side and on the analyst side.
In Canada, some of those organizations are cross-border, both U.S. and Canada. We have a few analysts now in the United States and several up in Canada. All common stock. No warrants or dilutive securities. In terms of balance sheet strength, the strongest it's ever been in our company's history, with over CAD 30 million of cash to support growth, and about CAD 8.5 million of availability under a line of credit with Comerica. Board of directors, beyond our management team, comprehensive. Former CEO of the largest utility in North America, Laura Formusa. For those of you in Canada, former CEO of the Ontario Energy Board, OEB, Susanna Zagar. For those of you in the networking space, Dave McLennan, former CFO of Sierra Wireless. They built that business into a global giant.
Dr. Harvey, former COO of Westinghouse, former Secretary of the United States Army, advisor to a number of PE firms and banks. Very robust group of executives to help ensure that we as a management team are constantly thinking progressively and moving forward. My intent was to leave time for questions. I see we only have a few minutes left, let me stop talking and see if I can answer any questions that might be in the room. I guess I can drop the mic. Oh, we got two, sorry. Yes, sir. In the back row.
Yeah. Do you have any specific goal regarding the meter power generation that's
I'm having a hard time-
Meter power generation. Do you see a significant role there?
Yeah, I do. Keep in mind, distribution utilities are conservative in nature. As we think about sustained growth long term and profitable growth for our shareholders, we are starting to see an increasing number of utilities ask the question, how they can shed load. This goes beyond what historically has been known as demand response. From our perspective, we're laying the infrastructure for what is probably three to five years out in terms of when utilities really need to start shifting peak load and aggregating that. We will not be a source of generation in the context of aggregating that and selling it into the market. The intent here is from an operational and engineering perspective, how to shift peak load. Behind.
What's the plan to cash the other year break even as well, like from your growth by
Yeah, we did a bought financing earlier this year of CAD 20 million. It was oversubscribed. We now have $30 million of cash on the balance sheet. The intent for that cash is not only to support ongoing working capital. As we think about diversifying and expanding our contract manufacturing relationships to support the scale and growth of the business and diversify risk, that'll be an area of focus for sure. I think as beyond some of the organic initiatives with the increased liquidity and benefit of continued support in the markets and higher market cap, I think we're in a position to bolt on some capabilities to deliver what is ultimately Sorry. The vision of the company. Command and control from the substation to the EV charger. There are some things that we are focused on in terms of R&D internally.
There are some things that we will seek to do inorganically through M&A. Thanks for the questions, and thanks for the time.