All right, well, welcome everybody, and thank you for joining the webinar today. My name's Sean Peasgood, and I work with Sophic Capital, and we handle IR for.
Recording in progress.
I want to thank you all for joining us today to get an update on the company following the corporate update we released this morning before the open. Plurilock trades on the TSXV under the ticker symbol PLUR, and on the OTC with the ticker PLCKF. The company is currently trading with a market cap of CAD 50 million and sells cybersecurity solutions to governments and Global 2000 companies.
Today on the call, we have Ian Paterson, CEO, and Scott Myers, CFO. I'd like to remind everyone that this call is being recorded and that everyone is in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we'll take questions. Questions can be submitted at any time via the question box at the bottom of the screen, and we'll try to answer as many as we can. Before we start, I'd like to remind everyone that today's webinar may contain forward-looking statements.
These forward-looking statements reflect the company's current views regarding future events and financial performance and are based on assumptions and subject to risks and uncertainties. Our actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied by those forward-looking statements. These risks may include, but are not limited to, financial performance, market and industry conditions, strategic initiatives, operational developments, regulatory, and legal considerations. We caution you not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of today's date.
We undertake no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of information, future events, otherwise, except as required by law. For a more detailed discussion of the risks and uncertainties that may affect our future results, please refer to our filings, including our most recent annual report and quarterly reports on SEDAR+. Okay, with all that out of the way, I'd like to now introduce Ian Paterson, CEO of Plurilock. Go ahead, Ian.
Thanks, Sean. I just want to say thank you to everybody who's joined us. It's been a very busy first half of the year. Given the high volume of calls that we're receiving and the interest from the investment community over the last month, I wanted to take some time to update shareholders and the investment community at large. Hopefully, this is an efficient way to inform you all and allow you to ask questions about Plurilock. We are hoping to keep the initial presentation reasonably short so that we can have plenty of time for Q&A afterwards. To start, we'll talk about an update on our journey, paint a clear picture of the future. We're also going to talk about the cybersecurity market overall because there's been a lot happening.
So to start, we'll talk about the market we are serving and the tailwinds we have in the cybersecurity market. As the digital economy continues to expand, so too does cybercrime, as our online mobile interactions are creating billions of potential vulnerabilities. It feels like every week we get news of a new high-profile breach. For example, just in the last couple of weeks, AT&T reported a data breach of tens of millions of its wireless customers and paid almost $400,000 to the hackers to supposedly erase the information. This comes on the back of a report earlier that indicated that we are up to 1 billion data records that have been breached year to date, and we're only just past the halfway through the year mark.
Geopolitical tensions, shifting regulatory compliance, proliferation of generative AI, and a lack of skilled workers provide further tailwinds for us, for the business, and for cybersecurity at large. Now more than ever, it is imperative for enterprises, organizations, and individuals to protect their sensitive information while safeguarding critical networks and infrastructure. Plurilock is a trusted cybersecurity provider across North America and NATO countries.
We operate a portfolio of mature brands with strong name recognition in the marketplace who trust Plurilock to keep them safe and help them stay compliant. We have three lines of business. We have our solutions business, where we resell products and software to some of the largest companies and organizations across North America, including both the U.S. federal government, a number of states, Canadian federal, and Fortune Global 2000 commercial organizations.
We also have a software business, which we call Plurilock AI, doing approximately $1 million a year. This initial offering really established a strong reputation within the Canadian and U.S. government sectors. Finally, we have our newest line of business, which is a big focus of growth for us and one which we're going to be talking about a lot today, which is Plurilock Critical Services. This business segment was up 66% last quarter at approximately $1 million in the quarter. Critical Services carries reasonably high margins in the 40%-50% range and is growing, as we mind our existing relationships within the other parts of our business to cross-sell and upsell these capabilities. We expect that this aspect of the business to continue to expand.
We've already added additional sales resources to focus on growth here, and this should positively impact financial performance as we continue to see revenue growth. We'll talk now about some of the orders that we've announced since the beginning of the year, which have totaled over $20 million in new orders since January 1st. The consistent order flow from both government and commercial clients across a diverse set of industries, as the company continues to support critical infrastructure that underpins society.
Recently, we've secured orders from U.S. public institutions, hospitals, the U.S. Department of the Treasury, major healthcare and pharma laboratory data firm, as well as a multinational and Nasdaq 100 semiconductor company, as well as other government agencies in the United States and Canada. I'd like to highlight one of our recent wins, and that is our contract expansion within the semiconductor company that I mentioned.
This client is a great example of an ideal customer for us, in so much as they have both a business problem, a technology problem, and a geopolitical problem, and one for which Plurilock is very well suited to help address. This is a perfect example also of how we are penetrating deeper into the customer operations, following on from initial work that we had done, and providing them additional Critical Services that they need for business resiliency, continuity, and cybersecurity operations.
It's also a perfect example of our strategy moving forward, which is leveraging the trusted relationships we have, upselling and cross-selling higher margin, higher value solutions to both better serve our customers and also to maximize profitability. Critical Services for us is a high-growth engine, and I'd like to take a moment to dive more deeply into this part of the business.
It isn't that we do not expect our reseller business to continue to thrive and add new customers and see continued growth, but investors have been focusing on operations which provide higher margin businesses. So I want to talk to you about what we do in Critical Services, why it is important, and why it is both a growth and a profit engine for Plurilock moving forward. Plurilock has the deep government security technology expertise to ensure regulatory compliance and really provide comprehensive solutions to address the critical needs of U.S. government, Canadian government, and large multinational enterprises. Recognizing the increased need for specialized security services, which many companies and organizations we sell to lack internally the capabilities to perform, Plurilock shifted some resources towards Critical Services by launching a dedicated line of business in February of 2024.
Our strategic plan involves building on established client relationships, those of which I've previously discussed and more, to convert initial one-time engagements into recurring, repeatable, and sticky services. Historically, gross margins for our solutions business have been anywhere from 5%-15%, whereas historically, gross margins for our services are anywhere from 35%, 40%, to 50%, with some projects extending even higher. Ultimately, by identifying complementary higher margin and higher value offerings, Plurilock is able to utilize our network of clients to introduce new capabilities, new solutions, and new services that address the security needs. Now, this not only expands the client value, but actually improves client retention while boosting profitability. Now, I'd like to invite Scott Myers, who is CFO, to talk a little bit about some of the past revenue and financial performance of the company. Scott.
Thank you, Ian. In 2023, Plurilock achieved just over $70.4 million in revenue. That was with a gross margin of 8.3%. In comparison, the year before, we did $64.5 million with 7.7% gross margin. The progress here on gross margin illustrates that our strategy towards higher margin Critical Services is starting to work. Critical Services is driving our ambition to achieve sustained profitability. Critical Services margin now is 14% of the overall gross margin, and as we grow in this area, we are expecting Critical Services will account for more and more of our margin dollars. Recently, our stock has received a re-rating with the closing of our recent financing for $5.5 million. We were coming off an extremely low valuation for a company with $70 million of revenue and a strong customer Rolodex.
We now have a strong platform to execute on the business and drive sales, particularly in Critical Services and using that Rolodex. This focus area experienced 66% year-over-year growth in Q1 2024, and we anticipate this growth to continue as evidenced by our recent expansion contract with a leading semiconductor company. Q1 saw gross profits of $2.5 million, which is 19% growth year-over-year. We are prioritizing high-end consulting and services above software sales has led to faster sales cycles with improved margins. Q1 also had gross margins roughly of 22%, up from 13.6% in Q1 of 2023, and this was a direct result of Critical Services' division becoming a larger portion of total revenues. Our dual approach to product resale and high-margin services delivery enables us to capture volume while driving numbers towards profitability, which is a near-term goal for management and the company.
In addition, we've also streamlined operations across all of the business units. We've integrated all of our four acquisitions, as well as we identified and implemented cost-saving measures, which should realize CAD 2 million in savings annually. We are reinvesting these cost savings back into the company and particularly in the Critical Services area and hiring key and leading talent.
Plurilock is committed to achieving cash flow breakeven, and we are using our existing client base to provide a solid expansion platform for higher margin services, minimizing the need for additional CapEx, presenting an opportunity to convert one-time sales into sticky managed service contracts, generating more and more stable and predictable revenue streams. Looking to our capital structure, in April 2024, Plurilock welcomed Ali Hakimzadeh as our Executive Chairman, bringing extensive experience and his proven track record of successfully growing and exiting tech companies.
Most recently, he was the chairman of HS GovTech that was bought by private equity. Also, we've completed a 10-to-1 share consolidation to optimize the capital structure. We then announced a CAD 3 million financing to grow Critical Services and expand the sales team. However, we had such demand that we closed the round for an upsized CAD 4.5 million, and then due to that demand, we also undertook an additional private placement for CAD 1 million with total gross proceeds of CAD 5.5 million. We are now cashed up and have hired three new salespeople and are looking to add a fourth. The company also settled outstanding payables through share issuances and convertible debentures over CAD 1 million to conserve working capital. These steps position Plurilock for long-term financial stability and shareholder value creation. Now I'll flip it back to Ian. Thank you.
Thanks, Scott. I think in addition, Scott was just highlighting some of the new operational additions to the team. I think some of the other ones that I would also want to note. We're also gaining attention in the industry and attracting very strong leadership for our Industry Advisory Council. We made two announcements last week. The first, Joe Sexton, who was president of a company called AppDynamics, which was acquired by Cisco for $3.7 billion. He was also a former CrowdStrike board member and actively on the board of a number of cybersecurity technology companies, including Menlo. Bryan Cunningham, who's the other name that we announced last week, former White House cyber and national security lawyer, was a longtime Palantir senior advisor and has been involved in all aspects of cybersecurity over the last two decades.
So we're very pleased with the notoriety that we're gaining and the type of talent that we are attracting, and we are excited to start working with them. I think we're going to get to questions here in just a little bit, so I would encourage those who do have questions to fill them out in the Q&A function, and we'll use that moving forward. I think, Bryan, I see that you're actually on the call and would invite for you to maybe say a few words about your perspective on cybersecurity and perhaps Plurilock's position within it.
Hey, thanks, Ian. Scott, great to speak to all of you. I'm just going to give you three bullets about my background real quick because I think it's helpful to understand my perspective. Also, sorry, I didn't get the sport coat memo, guys, so next time I'll be better prepared. So listen, I was a career CIA officer. This is how long I go back. I was a KGB, Soviet KGB analyst for the CIA, which is a skill set I thought would never become relevant again, but in the Putin era and the Xi era in China, I think it is.
I also was Condoleezza Rice's lawyer for intelligence and counterterrorism operations and then cybersecurity when we began looking at that after 9/11, and so advised the National Security Council, President, Secretary of Defense, National Security Advisor Rice, and most relevantly, was involved in drafting the first national strategy to secure cyberspace, which I'm happy to say for those of you who are fans of bipartisanism in the United States has held up pretty well over the last 25 years, very similar to the current strategy.
So look, for the last 20 or so years, I've been a cyber national security lawyer, law of war lawyer, and consulting expert, and I've been a senior advisor to Palantir since 2006 when they had 15 employees, and my main role there has been and is to run an outside advisory council helping Palantir see around corners, future world developments, future technology developments since around 2010. Why did I mention that? Well, the reason is that as I look around the corners right now, what I have seen has led me to leave my current position at the University of California, Irvine, where I run a cybersecurity institute and focus on what I believe is the most important security mission for the coming decades.
I believe that the U.S., Canada, and all Western democracies and Israel, Australia, etc., so not just Western, are already in a global conflict with authoritarian regimes, principally the People's Republic of China and Russia, to determine whether democracy will be replaced with authoritarianism in the 21st century, and I see it exactly that starkly. I'm not using hyperbole. This competition, I believe, is going to determine our great-grandchildren's future and whether our children will have to fight a hot war or this competition will be resolved through technology and expertise. And this is why I'm leaving my job at UC. I've been working with the White House and Treasury on a number of cybersecurity initiatives. I took a position as general counsel to a startup on quantum encryption a few years ago, and now I'm honored to support Plurilock's vital mission. Why?
Because in my view, whoever gets there first, whether it's us or whether it's the bad guys on artificial intelligence, on cybersecurity, on quantum computing, and on chip security, semiconductor security, will have the best chance of winning this war without any shots fired. As we learned last week, our cyber infrastructure remains riddled with single points of failure, and while the CrowdStrike Microsoft incident does not appear to have involved a cyber attack, it does show the folly of relying on a single technology or a single approach to defend our critical infrastructure's most vital capabilities and information.
Instead, reliable cybersecurity depends not on a single tool or a single approach, although technology is important, but including Plurilock's behavioral biometrics-based constant authentication, but no technology, including AI, can replace qualified experts to triage threats, set up and constantly improve a cybersecurity program, and respond to attempted or successful attacks. And we're looking at millions of unfilled cybersecurity jobs right now and for the foreseeable future, and these cannot be replaced with machines. So critically, in my view, real durable cyber and data security requires a team of bona fide experts who understand not just the cybersecurity aspects, but the legal and regulatory environment clients are operating, the global threats they face as they evolve, the true needs, real business priorities, and vulnerabilities of each individual client. And again, and sometimes most importantly, the current and emerging legal and regulatory landscape and requirements for each client.
Human experts up to date on all available technical tools, best practices, and legal and regulatory environments are critical to any critical infrastructure or other business to develop solutions tailored to their specific business needs. And in my estimation, having had some very deep conversations with the Plurilock team, their critical services folks excel at this. I'm just going to give one important example of what I'm talking about, then I'm going to shut up unless people have questions. An important example of the critical infrastructure challenges we face in what, again, I think is probably going to be a century-long conflict, is winning the semiconductor race. This is why the president and Congress who can't agree on almost anything passed the CHIPS Act. This is why we're so focused on reshoring a lot of our chip manufacturing.
I predict that the combination of skills and technologies developed to defend semiconductor manufacturing and their supply chain will be highly relevant to protecting quantum computing technologies and other capabilities in the future. So think of it like this. If you go out and hire a Deloitte or an Accenture, you might get the very best people they have, but odds are you won't. If you hire a team like Plurilock, you will always get the A team, if you want to say the special operations forces, as opposed to the regular army who can throw hundreds of thousands of bodies and very brave soldiers, but can't do that targeted capability of attack and defense. My CEO boss at Palantir, Alex Karp, likes to say he would rather have five world-class engineers than 5,000 very good engineers. That's what we have, I think, at Plurilock.
I could talk a lot about the potential for the need for offensive cyber capabilities, hackback capabilities, and the legal and regulatory landscape around that, but I think I'll just end with this. One thing that's very important to me, and if you Google me, you'll see that I've been very outspoken about TikTok and the Chinese government and things like that, is that Plurilock is entirely made up of infrastructure and employees outside of high-threat adversary areas like the PRC and Russia, and that is not always the norm. So thanks. If there's any questions, I'll be happy to take them, and if anybody wants to follow up, feel free to get a hold of me.
Thank you, Bryan. Very much appreciate your jumping on today and appreciate your willingness to support the mission that Plurilock is on. I'm going to conclude here with just a few remarks, and then I'm going to invite Sean to help moderate the Q&A section. Cybersecurity is a massive industry. Spending on it is not discretionary. It is a must-have. And what we're seeing with our customers is that budgets might be getting cut, layoffs might be happening elsewhere in the business, but they are reinvesting it back into cybersecurity. So cybersecurity is just a key area to be invested in. Second, Plurilock as a company, we're focused on organic growth. We're focused on the road to profitability. The reset and transformation from the spring allows us to focus on scaling the core business.
Ultimately, you heard from Bryan, and you'll see also from some of the press releases that we've been putting out, Critical Services is critical not only to Plurilock, but to our customers. And ultimately, the operational efficiencies from the acquisitions that we have made, from the velocity that we are seeing in the business, sets ourself up really well for the opportunity to come. So with that, I appreciate everybody who has stayed on to hear this update. And Sean, I will pass it over to yourself to direct the Q&A portion of the call.
Perfect. Thanks, Ian, Scott, and Bryan. We covered a lot of ground there. That was great. So now we're going to move to the Q&A. If you have a question, we have some that have already come in, but if you have a question, feel free to put it in the Q&A box at the bottom of your screen, and we'll get to as many as we can here. The first question, and there's a couple around this, how is your critical services offering different from a Deloitte or an Accenture or other competitors that are in the marketplace?
Yeah, it's a good question. And I think actually similar to what Bryan was saying, the fact that Plurilock is a smaller organization means that there are not incentives in place for us just to throw people at a problem. The good news is that we have a smaller team, but who are extremely well-credentialed. Plurilock has talked in the past about the credentials of its team. We have multiple data scientists with PhDs in the area of AI and machine learning. We have the ability to go out and recruit top talent, as evidenced by some of the recent press releases. We have some of the most highly credentialed cybersecurity engineers, and these are the people that we are bringing to our customers.
What we're finding is that having a smaller, tighter-knit team of A players allows us to actually win business from the Deloittes, from the Accentures, from the Tata Consultancy Services of the world. TCS, Tata Consulting, as one example, I think that they have somewhere around 600,000 people, and we're regularly winning business from them. We're winning market share from them on the basis of being able to get in and provide a higher value to our clients, as evidenced by the fact that we're getting awarded work. I think the other thing that separates us, Plurilock, from some of these larger providers is that there are certain things that we have said we will not do. We will not open an office in China. We have not started as an accounting firm and tried to bolt on cybersecurity as a second piece of business. We're pure play.
We're bringing the experience that we have working with some of the most critical agencies and organizations in the world in North America, and we're bringing that insight and that capability to our customers, and that's what they're finding is valuable, and that really is evidenced by the revenue growth that we have seen from the services offering.
Great. Perfect. Are there other examples that you can provide around critical services, like some specifics around what you're doing there? Seems to be people are just trying to get a little bit more color.
So, Critical Services is think of high-end security consulting. In many cases, we are working directly at the C-level with either the Chief Information Officer, Chief Information Security Officer, or in some cases, the COO or the CFO directly. And so Critical Services is a C-level sale. We have expertise. We have been proving that we can compete against these larger organizations. In terms of the projects or the things that we are doing, projects include things like insider threat, where we're actually working directly with organizations, not only on their external threats, but also their internal threats that might exist. We are helping with our clients' organizations to be able to acquire and implement and see value from some new AI technologies, specifically cybersecurity AI technologies.
We're also providing, to a certain extent, security operations work, and so this is where we're actually conducting threat hunting on behalf of our clients. Just recently, within the last week, one of our former Marines who's working on one of our clients had identified a threat and had successfully mitigated that threat's ability to do any damage within about an hour of getting an alert. The customer was ecstatic at that type of capability, and all of this happened 12 hours before the customer's official security team actually came online. So these are the sorts of high-impact engagements that we're working on, and this is why these capabilities command a high price and high margins as well.
Okay. Sticking to that theme, critical services seems to be the hot topic. How many people are in your critical services business, and what's the main challenge for growth?
So critical services today, it's approximately 12-24. We have a mix of staff members, so full-time employees, as well as regular long-time collaborators who are on more of a contractor status. Our ability to scale critical services is really a function of the go-to-market resources, I would say. We're beneficiaries of having good past performance. Word is getting around that we're doing good work, and we are getting referred into other customers, sometimes other stakeholders inside the same customer environment, as well as other companies. So for us to be able to continue scaling that, we need to add some additional salespeople. Again, this is not to go knock on doors.
This is really to be able to receive a C-level introduction or a C-level referral and be able to convert the need into a billable project, which then evolves into a long-term project or a long-term engagement. That's how we are able to realize both the repeatability of the work that we're doing, as well as the stickiness of that work itself. We're seeing a lot of growth. We're benefiting from the fact that both Scott, our CFO, as well as Tucker, our COO, both come from big company backgrounds. Tucker, who we have not talked about on this call so far, was formerly COO at HSBC in Europe and so has a pretty broad and vast network to recruit from. In addition, part of the mandate for both our board of directors as well as our board of advisors is to source talent.
People like Bryan, who you heard from earlier, as well as Admiral Mike McConnell, Admiral Jan Tighe. Admiral Mike McConnell was the former director of the NSA and also director of national intelligence, and he was also vice chairman of Booz Allen Hamilton. Admiral Jan Tighe, who was former director of naval intelligence, and she's currently on the board of Goldman Sachs and GM. All of these people who are successful in their careers usually are successful because they have five, 10, 15, 20 people who they've worked with across their career and who have depended on them to solve problems. The access that we have to those experts who are the top of their field then becomes the source of how we're able to continue to grow critical services and becomes one of our key differentiators.
I think the last thing that I would say also that really differentiates critical services from other services organizations or other body shops is the mission that we're on. And so the mission for critical services is to protect the semiconductor industry, to preserve democracy. And that mission is very attractive to people who, frankly, have their choice of where they want to work, but they're looking to work somewhere that really has meaning, has impact, and they believe in the threat and the fight against that threat that exists today in the world.
Great. Can I just add something to that real quick, Ian?
Please, Bryan. Yeah, jump in.
Yeah. As I mentioned, I was with Palantir, actually have been with them continuously since they had 1,515 employees. And one of the ways that we were able at Palantir to acquire and retain the absolutely best available engineering talent was with the sense of mission. It's really important. I have two daughters, so sometimes I get a little disillusioned by what they say about some of their friends' ambitions, but young engineers do respond to this sense of mission, and it's really a huge competitive advantage to be able to get them and hold them.
Great. Well, probably part of this answer is just what you've answered as far as the talent that's at the company. But the next question is, how is Plurilock going to overcome its small size to get market share in the market?
Yeah. I think we're already winning on the basis of having top talent. We talked about how we're sourcing that top talent, and size actually works against a lot of these big companies. I can't reiterate enough how much we're able to win on the basis of being fast and being nimble. I think that that will continue because good people want to work with other good people, and we've got a very strong pipeline of very top talent who are keen to work with us, work for us, and work with our clients.
And in fact, just earlier today, I had somebody who was working at a very prestigious job already, and he was telling me that, "Listen, Ian, I want to come work for you. I believe in the mission, and I want to see impact." So those are the types of people that were fortunate enough to staff our ranks.
Okay. Great. Shifting a little bit to the stock here, question is around U.S. revenues. The majority of the revenue is coming from the U.S., and you have investment-grade clients and government clients. Is the company looking at a Nasdaq listing at some point in the future?
So I think Plurilock has always been a U.S. story. We've always had a good portion of our board of directors be American. U.S. federal government has historically been our largest single customer, and of course, that's made up of Army, Marines, Air Force, as well as DoD agencies. And on the state side, California State, which I think is still the sixth or seventh largest economy of the world. We have a strong state business. And then as well, the commercial clients that we have kind of in that Eastern Seaboard, very strong.
So I think that we've always been a U.S. story. I think that we're looking for ways to maximize shareholder value. And so I think that a possible either Nasdaq or other senior exchange certainly could be something that would do that. Plurilock's board and management are actively looking at and reviewing and assessing the options and opportunities to try and realize that value.
Okay. Great. A couple of people are asking, and I get this all the time, to just the recent stock price spike and what's going on there and just a bit of color. And maybe I'll just make a comment because I get this all the time. So when the stock was down at CAD 0.30, the market cap of the business was only CAD 13.5 million to doing CAD 70 million in revenue in the cybersecurity space, which is an extremely massive growth opportunity for the business, obviously, and has been growing every single year. And so companies, and especially microcaps in Canada, have been so depressed coming into this period. And actually, we've seen a re-rating over the last two months with companies getting bought. There's almost a small cap or a microcap company being bought every single week in Canada because of the valuation gap.
So people are really trying to figure out what the real valuation is. Really, we're just getting back to something that's something more normal because it was so bad. I don't know if you want to add to anything there, but I get that question a lot, so.
I think one of the other maybe objections that we heard from investors last year was that we did what we needed to do to survive, and so that meant kind of frequent capital raises. So one of the things that we did this past spring was we set out to raise CAD 3 million. We came back with more demand than CAD 5.5 million, but we closed on CAD 5.5 million, and even that last million was done at a higher price. So to a certain extent, we've taken away the objection that, "Hey, these guys are going to go out and finance every three months or every four months." So because we just did a large capital raise, really, if you want to own the stock, then the way to do that is to buy it in the market because we've just done what we needed to do.
And so I think that addresses some of the objections from last year. I think the other thing too is that we have new people, we have new energy, we have new momentum, we have just a lot of new updates. And so Plurilock is coming out of 2023 into 2024, just a whole lot of strength, and we're excited to tell the world. We're holding webinars like this. We're out there, we're telling the story, we're doing marketing, we're organizing road shows, and we're actually only just really just started in the last handful of weeks to really get the word out, and that's something that we're going to continue to do.
Perfect. Segueing here into 2024, and maybe this one's more for Scott, and I'm not sure how much we can answer here, but how do you expect 2024 revenues to shake out?
Well, as we've said, we typically won't be giving forward guidance. I guess what I would say is that we're committed to this path. We've been showing in our Q1s, and we'll be releasing Q2 in about a month or so that we've been performing and continue to march towards our cash flow positive goals.
I think the other thing, Sean, is that we're starting to show in the historical financials our progress towards that. Really, Plurilock Phase One and what we set out to do right when we went public in 2020 was we wanted to acquire distribution, and we wanted to cross-sell higher margin products and services. That's been consistent since day one. I think that we've been successful on the first part, which is the acquisition of four companies. We sourced, identified, qualified, closed, and now integrated those acquisitions. And largely thanks to Scott joining last summer, who in his first 90 days was able to rationalize about $2 million of cost out of the business, and then we've now reallocated into critical services.
If you look at the past set of financials, and particularly most recently in Q1, not only have you seen the revenue growth, which was really the key KPI for that phase one, but you're also now starting to look at the margin expansion and the reduction in EBITDA loss. For Q1 of this past year, even though revenue went down slightly, gross profit went up, and the EBITDA loss shrunk. We're starting to accrue the data now that's out there that we are executing on the strategy.
I think this is a pretty easy one, but are you raising money? I think we've already covered this, but.
Well, I think we just have raised money. I mean, a couple of things that I would say. So we just have raised money. We raised CAD 5.5 million. I think the other thing is that those financings came with technically, it was two financings because one was slightly higher price. Those financing came with warrants. Those warrants are currently in the money. We did publicize in the corporate update this morning that we're actually already seeing some exercises coming in. So cash to a certain extent is already coming in from those warrant exercises. And these are long-term supportive shareholders. We were pretty intentional to really look for high-quality, strong hands, long-oriented investors who believe in the vision, who believe in the strategy, and want to join us on that strategy and are not looking for a short-term investment. So we're pleased with the shareholders who elected to participate.
We're already seeing support from them. And yeah, that's what I would say.
Okay. I think we're going to call it there as far as we've been on for 45 minutes. I think we've covered most of the questions that have come in. So yeah, I think that'll be it. Thanks again for everybody for joining the call. Hopefully, we got to everyone's question. If for some reason you had trouble putting a question in the question box, then please reach out to us. Our information's on the screen here. I'd also encourage you all to sign up for our investor updates at www.plurilock.com/ir. Thank you, everybody, for joining today, and thanks to all the participants.