I'd like to introduce our next presentation here at the Planet Microcaps Showcase Toronto in partnership with MicroCapClub . Up next is a fireside chat between Suthan Sukumar from Stifel with Andre Garber from NowVertical .
Thank you. It's good. It's a pleasure to be here. Good to see everyone. Just quickly, on me, I lead coverage of the Technology Square in Canada for Stifel. It's my pleasure to introduce NowVertical. This is a relatively new name in my coverage, but one that I've been following for some time. There's been a lot of changes in the story since I've been following it, the shift from an M&A focus to one on organic growth. There's been a lot of structural improvements that I think position the company well for what I see as a massive groundswell opportunity with the data opportunity underlying AI. You guys are doing some positive things on that front. With that, I'll hand it to you. Maybe it'd be helpful to kind of give a quick overview of what you guys are doing at NowVertical for those who are new to the story.
Great. Thanks, Suthan. Thanks for your support and thanks everybody for taking the time to attend the presentation and fireside chat. For those listening as well, can't see us, but you know, I'm glad we found our way to put our undergrad photos up here. So I'm Andre Garber, Co-founder, Chief Development Officer of NowVertical. NowVertical is a data and AI company helping large enterprise clients transform their data into business value with AI. What that means is we're taking the complex, disconnected data environments that our clients operate in and turning that into measurable business outcomes, whether that's increasing revenue, reducing costs, and generating efficiencies within their operations.
We all know, as Suthan mentioned about the groundswell opportunity that we have in front of us, clients, you know, and the research is showing this too, have yet to really see the kind of ROI on all of their cloud and data and AI investments. We view ourselves as that kind of, that, you know, implementer that helps them bridge that gap. The partnerships that we have with our technology partners like Google Cloud, Azure, AWS , you know, bringing their AI into our clients' environments is what we excel at with that business outcome focus. That could be, you know, work we did with The Economist, and you know, we talk about that a lot, but we went in there and it was that classic, you know, disorganized, siloed data systems. We created a unified data platform for them.
With that, they were able to increase their subscriber retention by 9%. The work we did with Palo Alto Networks, they needed the real clarity on how they were investing in their partner channel. We helped increase their partner attribution or identify that by 50%. That allowed them to spend their partner dollars more effectively. Work we did even in the financial services space with one of our clients, Naranja X in LATAM, you know, they wanted help identifying their high-value clients so that they can engage with them in a more meaningful way. We deployed AI to help them identify who those high-value clients are to increase that engagement. Now we've been deploying generative AI so that their marketing teams and whatnot can chat with their data and get more insights about their customers.
We're doing this, we have 250 clients globally, but the likes of 100 or so enterprise clients within that portfolio. We're doing this supported by a lovely team of 500 or so data and AI experts across North America, U.K., EMEA, and LATAM. That's just a little bit about NowVertical.
Perfect. Thanks, Andre. To start off, I just wanted to touch on operational momentum. You know, since you guys made the pivot to an organic growth model, and there's been back-to-back quarters of consistent operational momentum here. The last quarter you had a little bit of a setback. Could you give us a little more color on the moving pieces that impacted revenue growth and EBITDA on the quarter? You know, as investors, how should we think about these as, you know, are they structural headwinds or are they more transitory in nature as we think about the upcoming quarter and the quarters ahead?
Yeah, thanks, Suthan. I like to look at it a bit more transitory, but there are three, essentially three things that happened in Q2 that changed the revenue momentum for that quarter. The first is a portion of our business is reselling technology. We historically had one-year, typically one-year engagements with our clients on the reselling side. We moved to this multi-year engagement model with these clients. Under IFRS, you have to report that revenue right up front when you sign a reseller contract if it's a multi-year contract. It just looks softer from a comparative basis. When you sign three-year deals, it's going to look a little softer the following year or so. The cash flow, etc , that's all stable from an operational perspective.
The other thing that happened was some of our public sector reseller contracts in Brazil, while they're still budget allocated, the procurement processes have been a little bit delayed. That affected the revenue timing a little bit there. The third thing is, as a management team, we are not afraid of making hard decisions to impact the benefit of the business. One of the things we did was in Q3 2024, we restructured our Chile operations. We just knew that throughout 2025, as we build the operation in Chile from a ground-up perspective with this one brand, one business strategy, that's where the revenue was a little soft in Chile for 2025. Those are really the factors. I would say though, one of the things that was fantastic about Q2 was cementing our program with strategic accounts and how we're actually growing our strategic accounts. I can kind of get into that now, or we can talk about it a little bit later, but up to you.
Yeah, just on the topic of strategic accounts, I think when I think about your organic growth strategy, it's clearly one of the key pillars that underpins that. Frankly, for where I sit with my investment thesis, the traction that you guys have been having there, just for context, strategic accounts is what NowVertical defines as blue chip enterprise clients, where they've been seeing a track record of wallet expansion. For me, that was really a key consideration in my investment thesis here, and just the fact that you guys are having success consistently in being able to grow that. Despite the missed last quarter, if you look past those one-time, those moving pieces, the reality is you just made continued progress on the strategic account front, growth of 40% year- over- year, which is impressive.
The amount of clients that you have now generating over $1 million is now nearly double- digits, and that was literally single- digits about a year ago. It's a good progress on that front. Could you give us a little bit of background on sort of the playbook there? What's been driving that growth and how have you been able to do that consistently? Really, what's the opportunity longer term? Is there, you know, can that be transferable to the remainder of your base over time?
I usually say 100%, but in this context, I got to watch numbers. 100%, I mean, there's a huge opportunity in how we're approaching our strategic account program. You may have seen this morning, we were looking at our data and one of our net new strategic accounts that we signed, we got them to $1 million of signed revenue in record speed. This was a six-month sales cycle to $1 million in contracted revenue, and that hasn't happened in our company's history before on the solution side. That was a huge win for the team, and I'm really, really proud of how that team delivered so nicely. Just taking a step back to what Suthan's saying for everybody's benefit, our strategic accounts program is targeting some of these large household brand name type clients with over $500 million or more in annual revenue.
A lot of them are way in excess of that, but also that have the appetite to transform their businesses using data and AI technologies. The strategic account program is the golden nugget within our business. As Suthan mentioned, at the launch, we launched this program at the start of 2024, and in the prior year, we only had three clients generating $1 million in annual spend. Now we have eight as of the end of 2024. Excited to see that continue to grow. It's also how we cross-sell and upsell into that group and how we also work with these clients globally because these are clients that have global operations and so are we. The other piece about strategic accounts is leveraging our technology partnerships to do more work for them. Our ability to work across the cloud spectrum is a huge advantage for us.
Just for everybody's benefit, we specialize, just to be clear, in how we compete and how we have this right to win against the kind of sluggish incumbents, etc , is we specialize in customer and finance data. That is our swim lane. We stay in that swim lane and that's how we work with our clients. We don't do all things for all clients. We focus on their customer and finance data sets and adding business value to them in that regard.
Okay, great. Next, I want to touch on partners because they’re clearly driving a more meaningful impact on your strategy going forward. Specifically, Google, which is what’s really caught my eye. I mean, the fact is you guys have had tremendous success in the Latin American region where you’ve been basically their top partner and you’ve transferred that success to the U.K. market, which is basically a net new opportunity for you guys. Can you talk about the role of partners today? What’s driven the success with Google and are there other partners in the fold where you could see similar success?
Yeah, I mean, just to kind of start from the end of it, we definitely see the ability to expand and do the same thing we're doing with Google with other partners. I'll just focus on Google for now. There's so much good things to talk about there. I know we don't have a lot of time. I'll give you one example. Just one of our strategic accounts. The way we typically work with clients is we start with an advisory and consulting type of engagement out the gate, six to eight week type of project. That is usually $75,000- $100,000, $150,000. All my numbers are in USD. One of the clients we worked with, the initial discovery kind of project was about their Azure cloud environment. That was a $150,000 engagement. Now, two and a half years later, we've done over $5 million of spend with this client.
What's so significant is we brought our competencies with Google as a Premier Partner for them in multiple geographies. We beat out a large consultancy, a Big Four consultancy, on a Google Cloud implementation for them in another region, a region we were never even working with this client in the first place. Just the ability to work across cloud, right? Again, 85% of large enterprises are looking at multi-cloud environments. They're not looking at kind of single cloud solutions. That was a big deal for us. Google, it started out in Argentina, that relationship. Once we started to cement ourselves as being good partners of theirs, driving consumption on Google Cloud, they recognized us with the Google Cloud Premier Partner status. That took a few years to get.
What's been interesting is because we're now an integrated business across our markets, we were able to bring our Google Cloud Premier Partner status to the U.K. Now we're working to deliver that into other markets. In H1 2025, Google sent us 12 leads. We've converted three of them so far. What's interesting is we've shown a year-over-year increase in partner marketing funds or, you know, PSF funds or different cloud providers have different names for these. Google every year is increasing how much they're spending on us delivering POCs to our clients and theirs to drive consumption on Google Cloud. Obviously, we have a ton of certifications with, you know, agent space and other things like that. Google is a phenomenal relationship for us. We're just getting started with them.
Okay, great. I want to turn to the balance sheet now. Now you guys have made significant progress cleaning up the balance sheet, paying down debt, cleaning up the convertible debt, which effectively took a, you know, a major, what could have been a major overhang on the shares. You've also locked down some new debt with the very strong lender at very attractive terms. Could you talk a little bit about, you know, the balance sheet today, where it sits, that relationship that you have with this new lender, and what does this optionality mean for you guys going forward? How do you plan, you know, what are your priorities, I guess, from a capital allocation perspective going forward?
It is good to talk about the balance sheet for sure. I have our CFO in the audience. I'm going to behave. We've really cleaned up this business. You know, we were born out of acquisition. We acquired 12 companies in about two years, a small team that did that. You go on a big acquisition spree with multiple lender arrangements. Obviously, we're shareholders in the business as management. We want to protect our cap table as well, along with you guys. It was time to, you know, once we cleaned up the business operationally and started generating the kind of EBITDA that we knew we could generate. You know, industry 15%, 20% is best in class. In Q4, we started to deliver double-digit EBITDA numbers. Now we're kind of in that sustainable, you know, anywhere between 10%- 20% range as well ourselves.
That allowed us to work with, you know, essentially high-grading our lender relationship to work with HSBC. They've been a phenomenal partner. We've brought them on board to significantly reduce our cost of capital and give ourselves the ability to grow organically and inorganically using their funds, leveraging our EBITDA profile. The future's bright with them. I wish we could do some work for them. I think we could add a lot of value to HSBC. It's a great lender relationship. On the converts, look, we want to protect the cap table. We want to watch out for unnecessary dilution. We did a convertible debt raise in October 2022.
Because of all of the cleanup and restructuring we were able to do to the balance sheet and bring our leverage ratio so low, we just decided to pay off the converts with cash because there was a 10% coupon and we're sub 8% with HSBC and interest only for five years. How could you not?
Okay. Next, I want to touch on sort of the inorganic growth opportunity. I think with this, with your balance sheet and the state that it's at and the capacity that you guys now have, and the fact that this is an industry that is actively consolidating. I'm seeing the M&A theme both on, you know, from the mid-market all the way to the incumbents. They're pretty active and they're consolidating assets that really have capabilities in this square that you play in, which is data and analytics and AI. I can't help but think there's an opportunity for you to be more active on the M&A side. Again, how does that play into your overall growth strategy? What's your priorities there if you were to get active on M&A again?
Yeah, I mean, thanks. Look, M&A is in our DNA, if you will, as a business. We've done 12 of them. We've divested a few too. We've either done, you know, net 9 or 15 deals, however you look at it. The key to the M&A strategy going forward is to integrate the assets within our platform. When we initially acquired the businesses we did, they were left on their own islands. What we're doing now is focusing on looking at targets that we can integrate within a quarter or two. This one brand, one business strategy we brought to bear at the start of 2024, that was that integration-led growth strategy. That's where we'd want to plug our M&A into. The markets we'd look at are North America, U.K., Central Europe. We feel like we have enough asset base in LATAM to both scale delivery as needed.
There is also a commercial engine down there as well. It's really in those markets that we'd focus on it. It's really an M&A, you know, it's really an integration-led strategy for our M&A, a revamped M&A program. HSBC is fully behind that.
Maybe we'll just pause there to see if there's any questions from the audience.
Thank you. You talked about the organic growth focus at this time. Could you talk about some of the trade-offs that you're looking at in terms of investing in additional sales capabilities, and what sort of paybacks you may be seeing where you do so?
Thanks. Yeah, it's obviously, you know, looking at managing our EBITDA levels is important to us for sure. Our sales cycles, we've demonstrated very short sales cycles in the past, but you know, we can pretty predictably count on that kind of six-ish month sales cycle for these enterprise clients. It is that kind of, call it about a year or so payback period that you're looking at, and you know, even longer, especially because of the tail on these clients. It's so long in terms of, you know, the longevity of the revenue. You know, when we bring these clients in, we keep these clients an average of 7+ years now for our strategic accounts. These clients are extremely valuable once we start working with them. I mean, it is going to be a balance and we've started to kind of turn that spend on.
There are also other operational things we're looking at improving that may kind of create a bit of a wash from a growth kind of investment perspective. It may look like our costs are similar, but they're just reallocated. I think there's, you know, yeah, I mean, I definitely think there's a balance to be had there, but now we're starting to put, you know, into that growth spend. There's that direct side. The partner-led growth side is something that is really a priority for us, right? Suthan was talking about, you know, the partnership with Google Cloud, the partnership we're cultivating with other hyperscalers as well. That's a huge priority for us and that's quite an efficient sales process.
As you're working on these projects in the customer and financial swim lanes, are you seeing any opportunities to productize these projects and, you know, build up some IP in the business?
Great question. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, we're not a product-led business, but we do, first of all, we do have some proprietary products already, really around the data classification, data discovery, sort of if you think about AI enablement, you can't, you know, you got to secure your data. You have to make sure it's governed properly. It's got to be organized, and the storage has to be optimized. There's absolutely a ton of productization around this. We're looking at our hyperscaler partners and their product roadmaps and knowing those product roadmaps intimately. As those product roadmaps develop, we're helping unlock the value of that within our clients' enterprises. That's kind of how I'd probably look at our sort of balance.
That said, of course, we build these little, call it accelerators, these mini products that we're deploying in our clients' environments all the time, right, to help connect data sources faster, etc . Hope that helps.
When you were in the midst of turning around the business, you had sold part of an acquisition you had made in 2021, I believe, called Affinio. If I remember correctly, part of it was done in shares of a company called Audience. What's happened to those shares and to Audience?
They've been sold. Yeah, it's part of that divestiture. We took some cash and then it was a startup company we sold to. They've recently exited to a private equity firm. As part of the deal, we took some equity. It's all public anyway, but we took some equity as a kicker to just kind of enhance our deal value on exit. We just participated in the sale.