Good morning, everyone. Before we begin the official remarks, I will read the cautionary note regarding forward-looking information. Certain information to be discussed during this call contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable security laws, including, among others, statements concerning the company's objectives, the company's strategy to achieve those objectives, as well as statements with respect to management's beliefs, plans, estimates, and intentions, and similar statements concerning anticipated future events, results, circumstances, performance, or expectations that are not historical facts. Such forward-looking statements reflect management's current beliefs and are based on information currently available to management and are subject to a number of significant risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated.
Please refer to the cautionary statement and the risk factors identified in our filings with SEDAR for a more detailed explanation of the inherent risks and uncertainties that could affect such forward-looking statements. Following the presentation, we will conduct a Q&A session. I would now like to turn the conference call over to Simon Cairns, Chief Executive Officer.
Thank you, Steve. Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us for today's First Quarter 2025 earnings call. I'll begin by reviewing some of the highlights from our quarterly results, where we posted 17% revenue growth, supported by 148% revenue growth in our recently reinvigorated Exchange services line. I'll also discuss our improving marketing and sales initiatives. As our quarter started slower than we targeted, we adjusted our marketing and selling tactics on a week-to-week basis, and by the time we exited the quarter, these initiatives had successfully contributed to our growth in Q1. Those adjustments primarily showed up in progress we made in self-service, such as onboarding new customers, as well as increased customer adoption and self-service spend performance. I will also highlight advancements we made in our platform, noting that we are on track to launch our AI forecasting tool in Q2.
I will turn the call over to our Chief Financial Officer, Elliot Muchnik, who will review the highlights of our first quarter financial and operating results. After that, we will be happy to take your questions. In the first quarter, we had strong year-over-year revenue growth of 17%. This improvement was driven primarily by exceptional growth in our Excsange services segment, as well as increased customer adoption and spend performance in our self-service line. While we did experience some softness, especially in managed services, the strength of our Exchange Services and the better resilience of our self-service clearly highlights the success of our targeted investments in our platform. Managed service, by its very nature and spend profile, is more responsive to market conditions. We are encouraged to see that the increased momentum in managed service in the latter half of Q1 continues into Q2, reflecting continued demand and continued interest.
At the core of our strategy is a commitment to supporting our customers in a flexible way, as opposed to forcing them into one product or to commit to contracts with enterprise-level minimums. We have seen that our customers are responding very positively to that customer-centric approach. We are maintaining this customer-centric approach that we launched in the second half of 2024 across every touchpoint, ensuring we are delivering real value and meaningful outcomes for our clients. This approach was reflected in our ability to add new self-service clients during the quarter. In Q1, we onboarded 18 net new self-service clients, which is in line with our goal of adding new, higher-spend clients in this specific growth area. While self-service revenue showed modest growth year over year, this business also exhibited several solid underlying trends, such as increased customer adoption and conversion.
This includes improved average revenue per customer, largely due to our customers finding more value in new features we launched in the latter part of last year, such as programmatic guarantee, or PG, and our consistently improving support for connected TV, or CTV. This was also driven by enhancements we've made to the platform, including our integration with walled gardens like Meta, resulting in better customer stickiness. Our integration with Meta bolsters our ability to drive greater campaign performance across both open web as well as through walled gardens, which in turn drives better overall conversion for that customer with much less effort in comparison to using multiple traditional single-channel campaign planning tools. In addition to these platform enhancements, we are also extending our platform support to deal types such as programmatic guarantee, or PG, with CTV channels.
We are also preparing to launch our new forecasting tool in Q2, which will add tremendous value to several channels, including CTV, and when coupled with more automated reporting and our PG support for CTV, collectively positions our self-service product as a very compelling offering to challenge our brands and agencies alike. It is important to note that our AI-powered forecasting tool has typically been reserved for only large clients with significant budgets and only from premium vendors. Our launch of our forecasting tool democratizes this premium solution previously only accessible to marquee clients or those with large budgets. With illumin 's AI forecaster, we are delivering equal or better forecasting insights and making that tooling available in a flexible way to any illumin customer, all without forcing them to commit upfront to massive minimums.
Based on initial feedback, we believe that our flexible approach to this premium feature may accelerate trends we are already seeing where more up-level premium brands are searching for flexibility in their DSP partners, and AI forecaster makes illumin a very viable option. We also continue to focus on driving adoption and scaling growth through targeted marketing and sales efforts. Our efforts to market and sell more effectively and efficiently continue to yield initial positive results. First, it is helping us advance our illumin 's self-service roadmap, as I noted earlier. What also helps us is our ability to offer our clients solutions ranging from self-service, managed campaigns, and exchange service, or a hybrid approach if that is what is best for their needs.
We continue to invest in our illumin 's self-service platform and Exchange service offering, but as a result, our adjusted EBITDA declined slightly during the quarter despite higher revenues reflecting these investments. While we continue to make these strategic investments in product stickiness, sales, and marketing to position us for long-term growth, we are also balancing this with a focus on maintaining liquidity and improving operational efficiencies throughout our business. This emphasis on operational discipline continues to be a priority as we look to grow our adjusted EBITDA while preserving our substantial net cash position, which was CAD 54 million at the quarter end. To give a brief recap, our strong growth in the first quarter was the culmination of actions we initiated in the latter part of last year to expand revenue, improve efficiencies throughout the company, and to build a strong infrastructure, processes, and tactics for sustainable long-term growth.
Even in areas where we saw modest revenue growth, such as self-service, we are continuing to see patterns of customer adoption, stickiness, and spend performance that validates our focus on these initiatives. While we do not necessarily like today's challenging market conditions, we are pleased with the fact that we now have a messaging, product, and selling flexibility to pivot and adjust in real time in this environment and still deliver on growth. Going forward, I believe there is still considerable room for us to improve our marketing, selling, and product strategies. Further investments, including and especially relaunching our brand, will be a priority for us during 2025.
Another priority will be our team and how to utilize a more solution-centric approach versus a product approach when we sell to larger, higher-spend clients, turning us from vendors into key partners for them, as well as removing any friction that remains in how we execute on any and every sale. Complementing this, we will continue to balance these efforts with an eye on ensuring we have ample liquidity to support our continued growth, as well as to explore other opportunities to increase our growth trajectory. Lastly, I want to note that our team clearly recognizes the current economic uncertainty that we are all facing related to tariffs and inflation. While we can't control the economy, we can focus on what we can control.
Our shifting to more upward brands with bigger spend habits has helped us in Q1, as these challenger brands have more durability when it comes to market fluctuations. With that in mind, we intend to continue leveraging our customer-centric approach, which to date has served us well. For us, this continues to be the best course. It is clearly working for us, and that has been demonstrated in our financial results the past few quarters. Taking that into account, we are really just getting warmed up, and we will keep updating you as to our continued progress. For now, I'll turn the call over to Elliot to give a detailed review of our financial results.
Thank you, Simon. Good morning, everyone. Again, thank you for joining our First Quarter 2025 earnings call.
Today, we reported our First Quarter 2025 results, which included a strong overall company revenue growth led by a 148% year-over-year growth in our Exchange Service revenue. This was achieved despite persistent uncertainty in the larger geopolitical and macroeconomic environment. I will now provide additional details on our First Quarter results. Our First Quarter revenue was CAD 29.1 million, up 17% compared to CAD 25 million in the first quarter of last year. As I mentioned earlier, this year-over-year improvement reflects substantial growth in our Exchange service segment. Specifically, our Exchange service business grew 148% over a year to CAD 12 million, reflecting the addition of new customers, expanding our partnership with new suppliers, and investing in key technology enhancements to the platform, as well as growing our customer support team.
Experiencing measurable success in this area since the second half of last year has sharpened our focus and helped us concentrate more on this part of the business, leading to growth in this segment. As Simon noted, our self-service revenue increased 1% year-over-year, but we are pleased to have added 18 new customer relationships in the quarter while we continue to see increased average revenue per client. This self-service growth was offset by a large client that reduced spending by CAD 2 million during the quarter due to their own specific circumstances, including undergoing a business restructuring. We expect that the new clients we added during the quarter will mainly offset this impact going forward as these customers ramp up their spend. Excluding this particular large client spend, our average spend per client increased 30% year-over-year.
We continue to refine our focus of targeting customers with higher spend potential and a greater likelihood of benefiting from these unique attributes of our platform. Due to our increased focus and enhanced sales efforts, as well as our investment in brand product management, we expect this underlying momentum to continue as we see further adoption and utilization of our self-service platform. Turning to managed service, revenue for this segment was CAD 8.7 million in the quarter compared to CAD 11.8 million in the prior year's Q1. Based on our ongoing discussions with our customer, this year-over-year change was mainly indicative of the larger macroeconomic environment and the resultant reduction in some customers' marketing spend until they gain greater clarity on the situation.
Our clients continue to appreciate and value our broad service offering, and we see continued opportunity to deliver meaningful results for them as conditions improve over the long term. We are now seeing a higher level of activity that continued from the second half of Q1, and we are working to build on this momentum and overcome the slower start to the year. Gross profit, or net revenue for the first quarter, was CAD 13.1 million, up 13% compared to CAD 11.6 million in Q1 2024. Reflecting this higher sales year-over-year, gross profit, or net revenue for the first quarter of 2025, was CAD 13.1 million, up 13% compared to CAD 11.6 million in Q1 2024, reflecting higher sales year-over-year.
Gross margin for the quarter was 45% compared to 47% for the same period last year, which was driven by a change in our product mix with a higher proportion of revenue in service lines with lower margins such as Exchange service. Total operating expenses for the first quarter of 2025 were CAD 15.7 million compared to CAD 14.3 million during the same period in 2024. This year-over-year increase reflects predominantly higher sales and marketing expenses related to increased salaries and benefits, as well as commission and bonus costs associated with the higher revenue we generated in the quarter. Higher technology expenses related to increased variable hosting and data costs, which were more than offset by a decrease in general and administrative expenses as we continue to monitor our overall expenses carefully.
In the first quarter of this year, our operating expenses as a percentage of revenue were 54% compared to 57.2% in the first quarter of last year. The first quarter adjusted EBITDA loss was CAD 400,000 compared to our breakeven in the prior year period. Despite the higher revenues, the decline was primarily attributable to higher operating costs, as we had anticipated, and mainly, again, due to sales and sales support expenses from building out our account management support team, along with higher marketing costs that I discussed earlier. Net loss for the quarter was CAD 1.9 million compared to a net loss of CAD 1.1 million in the same period last year. The year-over-year change reflects the higher operating costs previously discussed, a lower net foreign exchange gain compared to the prior period, which was again partially offset by the higher revenues.
On December 23rd, 2024, the company commenced the new normal course issuer bid to purchase for cancellation up to CAD 3.9 million of our outstanding common shares. No repurchases were made out of the 2024 facility in this quarter. This facility remains open and can continue until December 22nd, 2025, or until we reach our targeted repurchase limit. Now, turning briefly to our balance sheet. At the end of Q1, our cash position was CAD 54 million versus CAD 56 million as of the end of fiscal 2024. The quarter-over-quarter decrease was primarily attributable to investments in our platform, payments on leases, and was partially offset by positive cash from operations. We remain focused on shoring up our balance sheet, and in addition to being a constant source of strength, it also ensures we have the liquidity to support our continued growth.
In addition, our strong balance sheet provides us considerable financial flexibility to explore strategic and increasingly attractive acquisition opportunities in order to expand our capabilities or to increase our growth prospects. We believe that accretive growth opportunities in our space are becoming more available with more reasonable valuations. This will be an important focus for us in 2025. As of March 31st, 2025, the total number of our outstanding common shares stood at CAD 51,704,785 compared to CAD 51,238,056 as of December 31st, 2024. This figure includes the impact of a modest number of shares issued through the exercise of options and other vested equity instruments. On a fully diluted basis, our shares outstanding are approximately CAD 57.5 million, and our insider share ownership is just under 24% at CAD 23.6 million.
In conclusion, during the first quarter, we delivered strong year-over-year total revenue growth, including exceptional revenue growth in our Exchange service business, which in turn was driven by our recent investments in that area. This is consistent with what we said on our last earnings call that we expected to record higher expenses in the first half of the year, mainly from continued investment to enhance our product platform, strengthen brand identity, as well as certain initiatives to increase our sales capacity, efficiency, and focus by our enhanced account management team. This team will be focused on increasing client satisfaction, retention, and incremental spend. Along those lines, we also said we would expect more profitable third and fourth quarters once those investments were largely completed, and this view has not changed, assuming that the short-term headwinds we are experiencing related to tariffs and persistent macroeconomic uncertainty ease.
We continue to believe in our long-term prospects and intend to remain focused on cost management and generating strong, sustainable revenue growth. With that, I'd like to turn the call back to Simon for his closing remarks.
Thank you, Elliot. In closing, we had a strong first quarter in terms of revenue growth. This was mainly led by outstanding growth in our Exchange services business, which benefited from our targeting investments in this area. While growth in self-service was modest, we continued to see strong input trends into this business line, including dding new illumin s elf-service clients, increased customer adoption, and conversion. Our results in Managed service were less than we were targeting, but given the nature of their higher spend profile, it was not surprising that they were more subject to changing market conditions. We expect these factors may continue to cause delays in marketing spend in the short term.
To address this environment, we will remain highly tactical in our marketing and selling, shifting to where we see green shoots, all while keeping our focus on managing cost and improving operational efficiencies through our organization. At the same time, we will continue to focus on capitalizing on the longer-view growth opportunities, such as platform improvements in CTV, so we position ourselves for long-term success. Thank you all for your time today. This concludes our formal remarks. We look forward to answering any questions you may have.
Good morning, gentlemen, and thank you to everyone for attending this morning's presentation of illumin Holdings' first quarter 2025 financial and operating results. I would like to begin by reminding our analysts that in order to present your question, you must first select the raise your hand icon on your screen. Our first question comes from Daniel Rosenberg of Paradigm Capital. Daniel, please proceed with your question when you're ready.
Hi, good morning, Simon and Elliot. Thanks for taking my question. My first one comes around the macro environment. Obviously, changing and fluid one, but I'm wondering, given what we've seen in your numbers in Exchange versus Managed, how directly impacted were you by tariffs, if you're able to quantify or get some color around that?
From our point of view, we're a small company. We have the opportunity to really drive our own performance. I think it is a tougher environment out there, but we're not using that as any sort of shield or excuse. We're focused on winning customers across the board. We've set up an environment where all of our products should be able to win, but our muscle strength is definitely strongest on self. We saw good to strong influx of new customers coming into self. We saw good, strong flexing upwards in terms of spend on self. Managed, I think there's, from that point of view, that muscle's less mature. I think, if anything, those customers were more wary of just macro market conditions.
In terms of what we saw on the product side and the overall space, my personal opinion as CEO is we are going to determine our success this year largely based on entirely our work, our product development, our sales and marketing strategies, and not really factoring in or remanaging back on some sort of tariff economy.
Appreciate that statement. I guess the follow-on would be, or said differently, would be, if we were to see the tariff environment ease, could we see a reversal in some of the trends we saw this quarter from the managed business?
What I see in terms of when I look at the core inputs, I mean, even going down to the granular level, like number of communications we're getting inbound from customers, number of leads where customers are responding to, say, our marketing. When I look at stickiness on the platform where customers are experimenting with the product, when we launch new sellers, for example, who maybe come from other companies with books of business, their time to ramp up to getting proposals out, all of those inputs are trending strongward and upward to the right in the way that they should be. When we look at the inputs, yeah, I mean, if there's a malaise in the economy out there, from our point of view, we are seeing good customer interest, and we are pulling the sort of right levers to also earn that customer interest.
From our point of view, yeah, if there is a spring back in the economy right now, I firmly believe we have been building the right product over the last year. It certainly seems, when I look at the core metrics on how we are selling, how we are differentiating ourselves, messaging we are putting out there when we test stuff, it is responding. Like I said, we are going to continue down the path. We like what we see in terms of the inputs. We need to translate that into sales. Right now, I mean, that is where all of our effort is going. If the economy springs back, then I think we are well set up to capture that across all three product lines. Of note, we did invest in, just as a minor example, in exchange, we invested in improving the algorithm.
We invested in trying to essentially differentiate the product in an extremely tight marketplace where differentiation is very, very hard. We also layered in some additional sellers, largely to capitalize on some of the trending we saw around exchange in Q3 and Q4 that we previously discussed. It won the day in Q1. We saw a solid 148% points quarter on quarter on exchange. When I look at the process we are going through, let's test this, let's invest in this to tune this, let's flip over some new sellers, let's look at testing this different level of marketing. If we launch this product or feature, is it going to stick?
It looks like our process of taking data, then making smarter decisions versus any decisions, not chasing after every sign of the object, but instead really listening to what the customer and how they want to be supported. Across the board, all those inputs are strongly indicating that there is interest in where we're going with the product lines. Tight economy for sure, but I think we're well set up to win as it snaps back.
Okay, good to hear. I guess on that topic of product, your AI tool for forecasting, you mentioned it's going to be to kind of launch. I'm wondering how you think about, obviously, there's value add to your end customer, but is this kind of a new way to engage customers and start a discussion with new clients, or will it be consistent with the sales pipeline? Is this another value add, another lever to kind of keep retention high and increase spending per account?
It's a really good question and really two answers for you. When I think about AI forecaster and new customers, I think it is a strong driver to bring in new customers. One of the things we've been experimenting with is how do we reach out, connect, then land and help succeed higher spending customers, sort of get into a higher spend range. What we've done so far seems to be resonating. I think we've got a lot of work to do there. I think we're still really in the infant stages, and I want to actually get us up to a much larger level of spend quickly. In order to sort of validate that, aside from the usual attractors around, say, illumin itself, we do need some key features. One of those absolutely critical features is an AI forecaster.
This is a tool that is typically reserved. It is available elsewhere, but it is typically reserved for large upfront contracts and big commitments. When we talk to these brands, these challenger brands, they're like, "Hey, if you had forecaster, we might flip you some of our business, or we might switch all of our business, especially if we do not have to be beholden in tight times to a CAD 5 million, CAD 6 million, CAD 4 million upfront commitment." From our point of view, we know we have the right tech. We know we're building a solid platform, which in the end, I'll get to that in half a sec.
We think that AI forecaster can bring us in new customers because when they look at sort of what they need to be successful, we've got the right AI, we've got the right UX, we've got the right support team, we've got the right track record that they've used to validate us, we've got the right channel support. Can you really help us sort of manage our cash flow and our commitment budget on a week-to-week and a month-to-month basis? An AI forecaster does put us in that game, first and foremost, but puts us in that game in a way that's much more customer-centric. It doesn't commitment to that big spend. We think that's going to bring us new customers.
As for performance on the newly sort of coming into illumin , especially illumin itself, but also illumif managed related to their spend performance and the stickiness in the platform, again, like arrows are up and to the right in terms of stickiness. Again, we think that AI forecaster will also help them because in the end, when you really want to be successful out there in the world, you're going to need a few key tools in your quiver, and AI forecaster is one of them, and we're proud to bring it to them in a way that we think is definitely going to be beneficial. I think it's a two-sided win.
My last note on AI forecaster is it is essential to me as CEO, and I think is to the company in the long term as it builds value for itself and for customers and for shareholders that we do build a robust tech platform where we can start to really create that delta between revenue growth and operating expense. A key to that is longevity and performance of customers who are already on the platform. They come at a lower customer acquisition cost. They have a higher spend performance based on our history. How do we maximize that? An AI forecaster plays a tool in really sort of building up that alphabet that is really going to land them and keep them and hold on to them and help them succeed with us.
We think that that long-term ability to drive that stickiness is another benefit that we can get from AI forecaster. Hope that helps.
Yes, thank you. I guess lastly for me, if I could squeeze one more in, the cash position has been on the balance sheet for a while, and you touched on M&A in your comments. I was just wondering if you could speak to the environment that you're seeing, the discussions you're having. Have there been any opportunities that you've looked at and whether valuations have changed in the conversations you're having?
Yeah, actually, again, solid question. What I am pleased with is we have had discussions internally. We have said publicly that we want to use our balance sheet after we demonstrate patterns of growth. I feel like we're in that position now. We are looking at different opportunities where we could acquire essentially different sort of customer bases. If there's somebody out there who needs a self-service product and they're great in a certain vertical, maybe that's a play for us. We have seen some technology come at us. We're typically shy on unproven technology, but we have actually seen some technology come at us where they actually have a customer base and they have some creative ability. We like that.
At least a little harder on the private company side, but on the public company side where we have seen some smaller opportunities, we have seen valuations changing and favorably for us. Right now, it is a tool in our arsenal to grow this business. I think first and foremost, we win the street cred by building a robust business and growing it organically. We do not want to be shy in this area. If we have opportunities where we can be creative and grow the business and also layer on in key growth channels, for example, then those are things we want to execute on. We are out there in the market, and we are seeing interesting opportunities.
Okay, good. Thank you for that. I'll pass the line.
Thanks.
Thanks, Daniel. I don't believe there are any other questions from the audience. This will conclude our presentation for this quarter. My thanks to Simon and Elliot and our analysts and shareholders for joining us this morning. Please join us next time as we present our Q2 2025 financial and operating results. Goodbye for now.