All right. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the NowVertical fireside chat. My name is Robert Blum, managing partner at Lytham Partners. Up next, I will be moderating a Q&A discussion with Andre Garber, NowVertical's co-founder and Interim Chief Executive Officer. NowVertical trades under the ticker symbol NOW on the TSXV and NOWVF in the U.S. All right, let's get started. Andre, welcome.
Yeah. Well, thanks so much for having me, Robert.
Yeah, no, greatly appreciate your participation here. For investors new to NowVertical, can you provide an overview of the business, the value you deliver to customers, and maybe a little bit about your background as well with the company?
For sure. And yeah, again, happy to be here. As a co-founder of NowVertical, my initial focus was really on executing on the acquisitions that form the basis of today's operations. What you are seeing in the numbers. And I have helped with the integration, and I have led the financing efforts around these acquisitions. Simply put, NowVertical represents the picks and shovels around the AI enablement for business. We have been helping organizations for decades to build strong data foundations. At our core, what we do is we help our clients turn their data into business insight and measurable outcomes using AI. That means building and running these data foundations that allow the AI to work properly. You cannot have insights working on fragmented systems that does not have data that is connected properly and governed and working properly together.
So that value, it comes from combining our domain expertise, our global delivery, and our agent-assisted methods to maximize our clients' ROI on their spend with us.
All right. Very good. You recently stepped into the Interim Chief Executive Officer role here. What are your immediate priorities, and how do you see the company evolving under your leadership?
Yeah. Well, look, we're in an exciting market that continues to see growing demand, right? My immediate priority is making sure we stay focused on the opportunity directly ahead of us. Expanding our enterprise accounts. We've consistently demonstrated how we've been able to expand the wallet share of our existing clients, and you can see that in all of our statistics. We win new customers across our geographies, and the other priority is to deepen our Google Cloud relationship. I'm sure we'll be talking about what we've been doing with Google. Super important to us. But just to give one example, Robert, despite being a Google Cloud premier partner, we don't yet have a formal go-to-market launched in every country where we operate for Google. Our team is changing that now and expanding the surface area of actually where our Google go-to-market coverage footprint looks like.
The most important thing is that we move this business forward. We improve our top line, and we do that by executing on these opportunities immediately in front of us. My job is really to sit in this chair and do my best to accelerate it.
All right, very good. You mentioned at the beginning, NowVertical was built through several acquisitions and has since integrated under one brand. Talk a little bit more about what the company looks like today and what benefits are you seeing from that integration.
Yeah. Well, that's right. The acquisitions gave us this broader set of capabilities, right? The enterprise relationships and a bigger global reach. The integration on those acquisitions brought all of that together under one brand and one operating model. Right? We're starting to see some of those benefits. The capabilities that are developed in one market can be taken into clients elsewhere and support more of the local endpoint delivery. We're also using our partner relationships globally. Right? We've talked about GCP a little bit, but that's another huge example of our global scale and what we can do by porting the benefits and our credentials and our achievements in one market into another market. Right? What's exciting, I think, is what comes next. Right?
As we enhance our own AI-enabled delivery capabilities, operating as one integrated brand means that those capabilities can ramp up globally much faster.
Very good. Let me ask this way. How should investors think about your business model and the mix between-
consulting, technology, cloud licensing, and just sort of
Yeah
recurring services?
Yeah. I think investors should look at us as having two main lines of revenue. First is data and analytics solutions and services, and then the second one is reselling. Those two lines can work together, but particularly at the larger enterprise end of the market, our strength is in the solutions and services. As you'll have seen in our Q2 results, the solutions and services bucket represents the vast majority, over 89% of our revenue. Because our engagements are long-tenured and expand over time, that revenue sort of behaves in a repeatable or recurring way. Our top accounts, they do have multi-year relationships with us, despite being sort of solutions and services-oriented contracts. Anyway, that's where we see the strongest wins.
The enterprise client demand for our capabilities to unlock the value of their data in the business is really on the solution and services side.
All right. You've often talked about strategy, sort of starting with a focused customer engagement and then expanding over time. What drives that expansion, and what makes an account strategically important?
Yeah. If you look at our releases, we now have over 30 accounts that have a lifetime value of CAD 5 million for us. And every one of them, Robert, they started in the same way. They'll spend a small amount with us. We'll prove the ROI quickly, and then we'll scale up and do multiple engagements with them over the years. And look, enterprises will typically spend somewhere between 2%-5% of their data and technology budget on firms like us. So, demonstrating the ROI is what actually unlocks the larger funding. And that's where even with these clients that we're doing over CAD 1 million a year with, there's still headroom to grow within those accounts.
You mentioned AI earlier here. Explain the NowUnlock AI offering, and what differentiates it from the AI capabilities offered by traditional consulting firms.
Yeah. First of all, it's our own domain expertise and our own methodologies baked in here. So it's going to be our own. But essentially what NowUnlock is, it's a structured way to take our clients from an initial AI opportunity into something that operates at an enterprise scale. So it's the bringing together of the business case, the implementation, and the underlying data foundation. That's what NowUnlock AI is all about. And that matters because most enterprises, they don't need another theoretical AI strategy. They don't need more software. They need help moving from experimentation into measurable operating and financial KPIs and value. That's the differentiator, Robert. It's that combination of the domain expertise, the practical delivery, and the use of AI within the delivery process itself. It's not simply advice about what AI could do.
Yeah. Taking it a step further, you've talked about these productivity improvements using the AI agents in client engagements. But how repeatable are those benefits, both obviously for the customer's ROI, but really for your own margins as well?
Well, yeah, we're seeing that with improved margins on our side first and foremost. But more important than NowVertical's own operating margins, which again, we released our results today, so I would encourage anybody to review our financial statements and MD&A that we put out earlier today. But the more important thing is the ROI we're delivering to our clients. That's the benefit. Getting to time to value so much faster, leveraging AI technologies is critical to our business and how our business is evolving. Even in one recent modernization engagement, we reduced our analysis time just to survey a client's data estate by roughly 90%. How can you compete with that?
You mentioned earlier, I think it was, what, 30 accounts, more than CAD 5 million of lifetime value. Your largest strategic accounts represent a meaningful portion of your revenue. How much additional opportunity remains within those relationships, and how do you manage just overall general customer concentration?
Yeah. Even for a business of our size, we're not a very client-concentrated business. We have geographic diversity and just diversity with a large number of clients in the business itself. But I would just say that enterprise data and AI spending per large enterprise client could be upwards of over CAD 200 million per year. Even our largest accounts, there is significant headroom to grow within those accounts, as long as we keep demonstrating the ROI on those investments that the clients are making with us. I'd say about 30 of our clients represent well over 70% of our revenue, which is really indicating that we can do higher end work for a good number of clients. We can absolutely grow that number of clients as well and deliver to a much larger number of clients.
But our go-to-market approach is really designed around the larger enterprise clients as well.
Okay. You mentioned Google Cloud earlier, so let's jump into that a little bit. It's become an important partner for the company. How does that relationship help drive new business, recurring revenue, and sort of broader customer engagements there?
Yeah. Well, it's a genuine win-win, our relationship with Google. We provide the solutions and services that maximize the proper usage on their platform. And in return, they would give us far more go-to-market channel and introductions and opportunities, right? So we value this relationship tremendously, and also, they are a wonderful hyperscaler from the modern data stack perspective, right? And what we need to continue to deliver is the quality of our work, because it helps everybody in the ecosystem. But yeah, and because cloud engagements also involve ongoing consumption and managed services, the relationship just kind of naturally builds together and builds repeatable revenue.
Let's talk geographic focus here. Latin America remains sort of a major market for the company. You're also expanding in other regions as well. What advantages have you built in Latin America, and how transferable are they to other newer markets?
Yeah, I'd say Google Cloud is
again, it is a prime example of that transferability. The premier partnership relationship actually came out of one of the operating countries within Latin America for us. That market has an extremely deep bench of data engineers. We have a really good data engineering team within Latin America. We are doing work, of course, within Latin America, as an end market, revenue end market, but we are also doing work for clients globally with that operation. Beyond that, Latin America gives us fantastic clients and scale, of course. It is really a global business that is well beyond just the borders of that continent.
All right. Obviously, this is a consumer and tech summit here, and one of the topics often has been that many enterprises are investing in AI, but struggling to achieve sort of the measurable returns on those investments. Where are customers getting stuck, and how is that shaping demand for NowVertical services from your perspective?
Yeah, this is the most relevant and pressing issue. This is the first question. See, look, most enterprises, they will have data spread across multiple systems. Big enterprises, could be hundreds of systems, right? Those systems, they were not designed to work together. That is one issue, and then at the same time, there is pressure to deploy AI before the data and the tech and the governance foundations are ready. You have this pressure coming from both sides. That is why, in our view anyway, so many of these AI initiatives get stuck as pilots or fail to produce some kind of measurable return because pieces were missing along the way of the data foundation. The AI model may work, right, itself, in a limited way, but it is not necessarily connected to reliable data or embedded into an operational business process. That is where we excel, right?
When the demand is shifting towards the full journey, establishing that business outcome, fixing the foundation, deploying that initial capability, and then scaling it safely, that's our bread and butter right there.
All right. So I guess very much to that point, the hyperscalers, the large consulting firms, as they're expanding their offerings, how do you then more specifically fit within the ecosystem, and what allows you to compete effectively?
Yeah. Look, we work with the hyperscalers. We deliver the high-quality outcomes that is predicated on using their technology, right? We do that with our pragmatic pricing. We've talked about that a little bit earlier and how we enter, and we do that with global delivery, et cetera, which I talked about before. But clients will find us compelling, first of all, because we are domain experts with customer and finance data. Now, that is a very vast pool and surface area, if you will, of data, but it's extremely important to understand that our businesses, that is NOW One Business , have developed expertise with that in mind, and that's how we can work with our clients, right? So the hyperscalers will provide the core platforms, and they're focused on the usage, of course, which makes them amazing partners for us, not competitors.
And the larger consultancies will tend to have very broad transformation programs rather than bottom up type of challenges that they're, I would say, actually keeping executives up at night. And that's what we solve.
All right. With the integration largely complete, how are you prioritizing investments and growth, proprietary technology, debt reduction, and maybe potential future acquisitions?
Disciplined, disciplined capital allocation. Look, right now our investment is centered around commercial growth, right? That is priority one, right? And we have seen through our client engagements and our ability to scale our delivery, the value of what we deliver is substantial. Every business needs the services that we offer. Every business. I do not care who it is. Every business, their data is a mess, right? This is where we come in and help. So our bottleneck right now is landing more of these initial opportunities, right? Expanding our surface area is the key for us right now. And that is going to be direct and through partner channels, right? Everything after that point is just well proven. I would say, again, discipline, right? On the balance sheet. Continuing to strengthen our position and reduce debt is just an ordinary course item at this point.
We are definitely open to pursuing acquisitions, if you will, but there is a very high bar for that. The organic growth story is the priority right now.
Okay. Very good. Kind of wrapping things up here. As you look out over the next 12-24 months, what additional milestones that maybe we have not touched on should investors watch for, and what is it that the market most underappreciates about the company right now?
Well, just that I think there's nothing more I can add in terms of the milestones to watch for. But to repeat it, I guess it's the core services growth, our top 30 account revenue, client tenure continuing to go up, et cetera. Then just working, continuing to increase our Google Cloud and hyperscaler revenue. But I would say, that's a good question. I'd say what we're most underappreciated for is, it's just the scale of a handful of the right client wins that would just dramatically change the top-line growth. So we are essentially a scaled delivery engine that we've built. We've built that. So a few key enterprise wins can significantly turn the dial on revenue.
And the fact that we've even built a platform, an integrated platform, that can scale up to meet the market demands, provided we do what we need to do on the commercial growth side of things is we're ready to go.
All right. Excellent. Well, we will leave it there. Andre, thank you so much for your participation here today in the summit. Thank you to everybody, of course, for watching. We do have additional presentation and fireside chat coming up, so stick around for more. Again, Andre, thank you so much for the participation today. Greatly appreciate it.
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
All right, Andre. Thank you once again for your participation in the summit here today. We greatly appreciate your insights into what's happening at NowVertical. Up next, it's our final webcast, where I will sit down with the Precision Optics CEO, Joe Forkey, to talk about all things taking place within the satellite and single-use endoscopy market. Please stick around. We will be right back