Thank you all for joining us today. I am pleased to report that the first quarter of 2026 progressed in line with our stated strategic plan. We've delivered a solid quarter of top-line growth while making deliberate, targeted investments to support our multi-year growth strategy. For Q1, overall revenue reached approximately CAD 6.7 million, up 6% from CAD 6.3 million in the same quarter last year. This was driven by 11% growth in our SaaS revenue and 5% growth in our recurring services. We achieved overall revenue growth with every single product line contributing to this growth. While Q1 growth was modest, it's a solid step forward as we track toward our goal of being north of that 10% growth for the full year. You'll notice our adjusted EBITDA was down this quarter compared to last year. As we've guided in recent press releases and presentations, that is entirely by design.
We are in a deliberate investment cycle. In fact, we're willing to trade near-term profitability and even operate at a loss in the coming quarters to fund our commercial expansion. Of course, we will remain within our current cash flow and credit facilities, and we have no intention to raise capital to support this organic growth. We are not doing this blindly. We are doing this because the immediate market opportunities sitting in our pipeline right now are simply too big to ignore. We are prioritizing top-line growth and market share today because we have a good understanding of what our unit economics look like. We have a high recurring revenue base with growth margins hovering around 50%. What that means is we have inherent operating leverage. Right now, we're investing in growth, building the sales, marketing, and tech infrastructure required to handle a much larger company.
As we scale and fixed costs are covered, the incremental revenue will bring in and drop profits to the bottom line more efficiently. We are suppressing our profits today to build that powerhouse of earnings potential for tomorrow. Let me highlight a few key operational milestones from the quarter and recent weeks. First, on the software and the SaaS front, we are seeing our investments in technology pay off. We recently negotiated an agreement with a major North American quick service restaurant, a QSR brand, for a paid pilot of our IntouchCheck software. This is a testament to our SaaS potential. Furthermore, we're continuing to invest in AI automation and intelligent workflows to improve both our internal operational efficiency and our client outcomes. Second, talk about the merchandising business. Following our acquisition of ClearPoint Solutions US last July, we have officially commenced generating revenue for merchandising.
We recently renewed a ClearPoint client on the petro-convenience industry and added a dedicated salesperson to build our active pipeline. Large-scale enterprise rollouts in this space involve extended sales cycles. The ramp-up has been slower than a SaaS deal would be, but the size of the prize is exactly why we are being patient. We have active opportunities and potential scope expansion with key customers that are highly lucrative. Because of that, we remain laser-focused on our target of generating over CAD 1 million in merchandising revenue just this year. Third, I know that when a company says they're investing in the future, it can be tempting for investors to sit on the sidelines and wait to see the profits return before jumping in. However, we are already seeing the near-term payoff of these investments. Our pipeline is converting.
We recently signed a few agreements, including one to deliver a high six-figure annual program for a prospect we've been working with for over a year. Additionally, our sales team has identified a potential seven-figure RFP within our core petro- convenience industry, and we expect to be included in a seven-figure SaaS RFP for IntouchCheck within our core QSR industry. The momentum is here today, and it's driving us toward our goal of that double-digit growth for the full year. Fourth, let's talk about our expansion into new markets. While we have a proven track record in QSR and petro-convenience, we are now making a major strategic push into the grocery sector. To support this, we brought on dedicated grocery channel salesperson in January.
We also recently partnered with Informa to produce a proprietary grocery research study. I'm thrilled to announce that we have been selected as a featured speaker at the GroceryNEXT conference in Chicago this August, where we will present this data on the main stage. This puts us directly in front of key decision-makers in this new addressable market. Finally, on thought leadership. We continue to prove our value as industry experts. Over the last few weeks, we released our 2026 On-Premises Study highlighting the transactional gap in QSRs, as well as our 2026 Emerging Experiences Study on mobile order-ahead. These are just the beginning, as we have a number of additional studies coming out, including our drive-thru study, our grocery study, and our annual study in the petro-convenience industry, where we provide an award at the Outlook Leadership Conference in conjunction with CSP Magazine.
These insights are vital for our clients and serve as powerful lead generation tools for our sales teams. In summary, we are executing on our vision. As these larger contracts close and our revenue visibility improves throughout the year, we believe the market will properly rate our stock and recognize the inherent value being built within this company. We are already seeing increased block buying from investors taking positions, which is highly encouraging. I will now hand the call over to Cathy to review our financial results in more detail.
Thank you, Cameron, and good morning, everyone. As Cameron noted, Q1 2026 total revenue was approximately CAD 6.7 million, an increase of 6% compared to CAD 6.3 million in Q1 of 2025. Geographically, revenue from our U.S. clients increased by 6%, while Canadian revenues increased by 3%. Turning to profitability, our gross margin for the quarter was 49.7% compared to 50.5% in Q1 2025. This slight decrease is in line with expectations and fluctuates based on product mix and revenues. Consolidated gross margin increased by 4% to CAD 3.3 million, up from CAD 3.2 million in the prior year. Our operating expenses reflect the strategic investments in the company that Cameron discussed. Selling expenses increased to CAD 658,199 compared to CAD 551,554 in Q1 of 2025, driven by an increase in salaries and benefits as we expand our sales organization to target petro-convenience, grocery, and QSR verticals.
Product development expenses increased to CAD 583,853 compared to CAD 431,501 in Q1 of 2025, reflecting our investments in AI, platform functionality, and the lack of previous government contributions. General and administrative expenses increased modestly to CAD 1,888,690 compared to CAD 1,836,109 in Q1 of 2025, primarily due to technology infrastructure improvements. As Cameron mentioned, while we remain modestly profitable this quarter due to some light timing delays in our hiring and marketing spend, our operating expenses reflect our deliberate investment cycle. Operating income was CAD 183,535 compared to CAD 371,351 in Q1 of 2025. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was CAD 352,624, compared to CAD 557,748 in the prior year. Net income was CAD 107,305, or breakeven on a per-share basis, compared to CAD 212,602 or CAD 0.01 a share in Q1 of 2025.
Looking at our balance sheet and liquidity, we remain in a strong position. We ended the quarter with over CAD 1.5 million in cash. To further support our growth initiatives without diluting shareholders, we recently refinanced our existing loan with BDC Capital. This provides us with up to CAD 1.4 million in additional growth capital, bringing the total facility available to CAD 2.6 million, with principal repayments deferred until February 2028. We have not currently drawn on our CAD 3 million demand operating loan. With that, I'll pass it back to Cameron.
Thank you, Cathy. Before we turn to your questions, I want to briefly touch on our outlook for the remainder of the year. Our 2026 milestones remained unchanged. We are targeting double-digit organic revenue growth for the full year, merchandising revenue exceeding CAD 1 million, and continued expansion of our SaaS recurring revenue. As Cathy highlighted, we are funding these growth initiatives through our operating cash flow. Consequently, investors should be prepared for the potential of operating losses in the coming quarters. I want to put those anticipated near-term results into perspective. We have a fundamentally sound business model, and we could easily manage this company to maximize quarterly profitability right now. Doing so would mean pulling back on sales and marketing, just as our pipeline is strengthening, and leaving significant market share on the table in our core and emerging verticals.
The near-term pressure on our bottom line is not a byproduct of structural inefficiencies. It is a deliberate, calculated allocation of capital. We are choosing to absorb these costs today because the lifetime value of the enterprise contracts we are actively pursuing far outweighs the short-term optics of an operating loss. Our willingness to invest right now is a direct reflection of our confidence in what we're seeing in the field. For those looking at the long-term trajectory of Intouch Insight, these next few quarters are exactly where the underlying value of the business is being transformed. With that, we are ready to take your questions.
Thank you. We will now begin the question- and- answer session. Please enter your question into the chat to ask a question. Okay. All right. We have the questions starting to roll in here. I'll go ahead with the first question. Hey, Cameron. SaaS was up 11% versus 6% overall growth. What's driving that? Does the IntouchCheck RFP in QSR you mentioned point to a continuation of SaaS growth outpacing consolidated growth in the second half of 2026?
Answer: that's got a couple of facets to it. First of all, the RFP I mentioned is not part of the current growth. That's obviously going to be future business. We haven't even looked at securing that yet. If we do win that RFP, we'll have obviously impact significant growth in the future. The SaaS is up partly because of just general growth of our existing business, where they're expanding with us, and partly due to a couple of new things like that pilot that I mentioned where we have a paid pilot. It's a significant paid pilot, and that helps.
Keep in mind that growth percentages in our SaaS versus our services are. We have to be a little bit careful because one's a much smaller base. If SaaS gets, if we get any kind of traction with a new customer or new things in SaaS, that growth can outpace the CAD 20 million business on the services side. We expect ups and downs. Which one's going to outpace who? I don't know. I hope that SaaS does continue to outpace because that's clearly, they have the potential given the smaller base on that. It's really just expansion of our previous pipeline and existing clients.
Great. Thank you. I see some more questions rolling in, and just a reminder to our listeners, there is a Q&A tab on the bottom. You may have to hit More. You can enter your questions, and we'll be sure to answer as many as possible today. The next question I'm seeing is, you did 6% growth in Q1, still calling for double digits this year. What gets you from here to there? Is it the deal you just signed, merchandising ramping, or the RFPs landing?
Can I just say yes? Obviously, we're going to need a number of things to kick in for us to get from 6% to double digits over the full year, because that means we have to average higher than double digits for the balance of the year. Yes, the deal we just signed is going to help, as well as some other things in our pipeline that we've been closing are going to help. We also do need merchandising to kick in. Is there a risk to that double digits? There always is. That's life. I don't think there's risk to growth necessarily, but the exact amount of growth always has risk. I do think what gets us there is a combination of that pipeline closings, the deals that we have signed, the deals that we're planning to sign.
Yes, absolutely, getting some of that merchandising revenue kicking in as well. The RFPs, on the other hand, are not really the big ones or we're not counting on for this year. Because really anything that's of the magnitude that I was referencing there, those are typically things that would start in a 2027 kind of January time period for the big ones there.
Excellent. It looks like the next question is actually on merchandising, which you were touching on a second ago. You reaffirmed the CAD 1 million target. How has the pipeline changed in the last few months, and what could scope expansion with existing customers look like?
Merchandising's an interesting business from a prospecting, the pipeline standpoint. It has the potential to go from CAD 0 to CAD 2 million in a week, right. It is not quite the same as our core business in terms of how the pipeline works. A lot of the upfront prospecting is done building relationships, making sure people understand what you can do and how you can do it. In our case, we're targeting our core verticals where they know us as Intouch, they know us from our core services side, we have credibility. It just takes a while to get them to understand your additional capabilities, to get kind of into their buying cycles. When they start hitting programs, they'll tap you to do maybe one to test you, things can expand from there.
The client that we have right now, that was the re-sign that we talked about in the petro-convenience industry from ClearPoint. We started a little bit of work with them right now. They're already talking to us about additional work, and so we're expecting that. It's basically additional programs. You might go in and do 10 stores of a reline that they're doing in the center store. Okay, you did a good job, so now they want to do a larger market, they want to do 50 stores. They're building some new stores, and they want somebody to go in and make them look proper before they open in. Those jobs will come, and we're having a number of conversations with that one client. From an expansion standpoint, which was part of that scope expansion you asked about.
Also with the dedicated salesperson that's been working hard for the last few months, we're starting to see some of those relationships build, and we've got a couple of additional clients who we're in some significant conversations with around potentially taking over some of their merchandising business. It's one of those things where it can be zero to slow growth, and then all of a sudden, a program will kick in or be given to us, and things will just kind of start clocking overnight. We're very happy with how the pipeline is growing in terms of those relationships.
Excellent. Thank you. Next question I see here is, you have CAD 1.5 million in cash, and you're guiding to possible operating losses. If the big RFPs slip and merchandising comes in light, how should we think about cash burn, and does the non-dilution commitment still hold?
First of all, 100% on the non-dilution commitment. To support our organic growth, I have very consistently said we are not going to dilute. I will tell you, that is still the plan. If merchandising takes longer than we expect to get off the ground, if we don't see the business coming in to get to that double-digit growth, we are a healthy business. We have lots of cash flows that we can manage within. We are not going to burn cash to the level where we would have to dilute. We're not going to become a cash need. We're just simply investing the available cash to get to that growth number. If there's a delay in the timing, which of course, when you're doing these things and things can happen outside your control.
If it's simply a case of the delay, we'll manage to that delay. We're not going to manage to where we burn cash to the point of needing to secure additional cash.
Great, next question I'm seeing here is, you secured some additional debt facility with BDC, but you're not using your CAD 3 million TD line of credit, and you still have room on your BDC facility. Why was the additional credit required?
The straight answer on that is it wasn't. We had enough credit available for everything we're planning to do. The challenge we had was that in Canada, with our banking structure, the way it works is that they're very risk-averse. We had a covenant that with our plans, we were going to break a covenant. We knew we were going to break a covenant. We asked the existing credit facility to just change the covenant. Here's our plans. Here's where we're going. We're going to break this covenant. Can you change it so we don't start missing our bank covenants? With the risk adversity, unfortunately in this country, and we don't always work well with certain sizes of business and risk appetites, they didn't want to change the covenant. We simply got a new facility that allowed us to remove that covenant.
It's not about total credit, and we don't expect to use, by the way. We have no intention of using the total credit available to us. We had to stay on side with our banks and our covenants. We had to restructure for that reason, and not because we needed the additional funds, as you can see in our usage right now.
Got it. Thank you for that. I see a few more questions here coming in. Next one is, "You've talked about a tipping point on operating leverage. Roughly what revenue level does the business need to hit before margins start really expanding?
To answer that, I'll kind of adjust a little bit the question in my head, because it's not really about margins expanding. Our margins are dictated by the product line, so we make a lot more margins on, for example, on our event marketing or our SaaS business has higher margins than our services business, than our merchandising business. The product mix has a lot to do with the ultimate margin. The expansion of margins, which we are working towards, is actually not being driven by revenue. It's being driven by AI and costs. We are working very hard to become a low-cost producer in the industry. We're using a lot of technology to get there. We're investing right now. It's part of the investment we're making is into the technologies and processes that will allow us to reduce our costs, which will help our margins.
The reason that revenue helps us is not really because of the margin or margin percentage. It's because it gets us leverage against the other costs, right? Even the ongoing development costs, ongoing sales and marketing costs, ongoing client support costs. There's certain things that we get leverage on as volume grows. You kind of attack the future profitability in two ways. One is that we're investing now to improve our ability to be a low-cost producer, but also as we get that revenue up, we start to see more money drop to the bottom line, not necessarily in the margin line, but in the profitability line, because we leverage the after-margin areas. In terms of when does that really start to drop, it really depends on how much we're investing. At the current investment levels, we get to CAD 30 million, and we see money dropping.
It really comes down to how much we want to invest or not invest relative to the cash flows that are coming in.
Excellent. Thank you for that answer. I see a couple more here. The next one is, "The grocery push looks interesting. How big is that opportunity compared to QSR and petro-convenience, and when do you expect grocery to start moving the revenue line?
QSR is, by sheer size, the largest kind of customer opportunity we have in terms of industry, that's just because if you drive down the street, you see how many quick-serve restaurants there are. There's a lot of very much chain-driven, and they're very process and procedure-driven, and so what we do really fits well in that industry. That's always probably the biggest. Petro-convenience is not as big, but it's also very, very large. Because of our history, we have the largest penetration in petro-convenience, so we still have quite a bit of room in QSR, is what that one says. Where grocery fits into those two is that grocery is more like petro-convenience. It's around the same-ish size as the petro-convenience industry in terms of opportunity, not as big as QSR.
There are lots of grocery stores, obviously, but there's also a lot of smaller stores, regional chains that's not quite as concentrated from a chain standpoint as the QSR industry is. There's lots of opportunity there. The revenues don't, unfortunately, happen overnight. We start the thought leadership processes, and the pipeline, the prospecting, we do not expect it to move the needle in 2026. We would expect grocery to start picking up some pace in 2027, we would probably see it coming into its own in terms of having some concentration in that area in 2028, would be how it would probably flow. Now, that's not to say we're not going to be picking up business along the way, in terms of it becoming a more significant industry player for us, that's probably the timeline.
Got it. We have one more question here. Please, listeners, feel free to click the chat Q&A if you have additional questions. You could always email me if you're listening to this on the webinar record at james@haydenir.com, and we'll get you answers to any questions you may have. Last one I'm seeing at the moment is, "Why do you think the stock is trading at only 1/3 of revenues?"
Yeah. Well, whoever asked that's a great question. We were trading at a much higher multiple before the pandemic, we had a lot of good things going on. The pandemic took our knees out from under us. We pulled all of our focus away from investor relations and other work along those natures. We focused on saving the business. We did so in a very strong fashion. We came out of it financially strong. We're now CAD 25 million of stable recurring revenue and growing from here. I don't think that with everything going on in the world. First of all, I'll start by saying I think there's probably 10 different reasons, and I don't know what they all are, and I wish I knew. I would speculate that it's partly just everything going on in the world.
I'm not sure that we're the story investors have been following or looking at. I think we've only recently started talking again to the world about us and about our story, I think that's part of it. I think part of it is that we're confusing. We have this SaaS business that is run rate of over CAD 1.6 million, more than CAD 400,000 a quarter. It is profitable, and it is being sold to household brands that you're familiar with. We bootstrapped it inside a services company, and we continue to bootstrap that inside a services company. We're not burning cash, and going to do raises like software companies do. People don't know how to treat the software side.
At the same time, we have a services business that doesn't seem to be profitable because we're investing money in things like building a SaaS business. People don't understand why we've got all this revenue, but we're not making money. They look at that as saying that maybe we don't have leverage on our revenue and that we're inefficient, which of course, is not the case. It's just strong financial management investment cycles, particularly around things like SaaS, and now we're investing in some operational things and growth around even the services. I think that we're confusing, which we will hopefully get to. I would also like to say that while we're talking about the fact we're only trading at 0.3x revenue, I'd probably like to take a moment to thank all of our shareholders.
We've got a lot of long-term shareholders who've been with us, including myself, who are currently underwater. I'm underwater, just like everybody else. We have not had a lot of pressure in terms of for people just exiting en masse. We've had a lot of patience from our shareholders, and I do appreciate that. I think that our shareholders who have been with us for a while understand inherently that the business is worth more than the little bit of trading that you see on the market. We're obviously committed to making that story get out there again. We could get the value for everybody and get the value that I think we deserve and that we need.
Great. Thank you. I do see a couple more questions just come in, so I'll go ahead and ask those. Are you seeing margin expansion with mystery shops re AI, and are you building or buying those tools?
We are not seeing expansion yet because we're overlapping our investment in the tools for the experimentation phases, because we don't want to just do hard cutovers to things, and then if they don't work, we wind up with unhappy customers. Do we expect to see margin expansion? The answer is yes. We're not building the tools. We are absolutely buying the tools. We're building capability to use the tool, I guess would be the best way to put some of it, because we do integrate some things with our own platform. We are mostly looking for ways that we can find tools out there that we can utilize, because the cost of building AI is not something that we're trying to take on in a large way. We're doing it in a small way by using open source.
Mostly, though, we're mostly buying with some integrations and some building that way. We do expect to see that expand margins. We won't see it yet until we get through kind of the overlapping expansion phase. We are comparing AI to business process outsourcing, to internal resources, to independent contractor resources. We're really making sure that we get it right from not only a cost standpoint, but also from a customer standpoint. We'll be in a position to kind of turn off the things that are the right things to turn off to expand those margins.
Thank you. The next question I'm seeing at the moment, which is the last question as of now, is are you seeing any market challenges for mystery shops and any significant churn to IntouchCapture?
No. The answer is there's always market challenges for everything. We're not seeing new market challenges for mystery shops. If there's any challenge, it would be that all of the United States of America was holding its breath for about a year trying to figure out what the new normal was starting last January. People were maybe reticent to get going on some things. They were delaying decisions. I think now businesses have had to kind of decide that the new normal is just the new normal, and they're going to have to move on with their plans and start moving on with their businesses and not worry about the broader socioeconomic things that might be going on.
We have seen some challenges that way, but I think those are kind of leveling out, and we're starting to see a little more activity now in decision-making and in pipeline and marketplace that way. From IntouchCapture standpoint, the clients we had last year, the clients we have this year, and the largest client there, their contract runs through 2027. We're not expecting any major swings. Of course, we're not investing in that either. For those of you who don't know, that's our event marketing automation business that has kind of been around for a long time. We're not investing a lot into the growth in that area. It chugs along quite nicely, and we don't have any visibility right now to any significant changes there.
Great. Cameron, thank you for that. I don't see any additional questions at this moment, so this concludes our Q&A session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Cameron Watt for closing remarks.
Thanks, James. Thank you all for your time today. Look, we're very excited about the foundation we're laying, right, in this year, 2026. By investing in that technology and our sales force, new verticals, we're planning to position Intouch Insight for that sustainable and long-term growth. Create that shareholder value, because I do believe if you create it, you can capture it. We look forward to updating you on our progress next quarter. Have a great day.
The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.