Morning. Good to go? All right. All right. Can you hear me in the back? All right. Amazing. Good to see folks. We're going to be talking about cybersecurity today. My name is Ian Paterson. I'm CEO of Plurilock. Plurilock is a TSXV company. We're listed on the venture under PLUR and on the OTCQB as PLCKF. Just take a minute, go through, or take a picture, screenshot the disclaimers as needed. We're going to be talking about Plurilock as it exists today. We're also going to be talking about the opportunity within cybersecurity more broadly. I actually don't know of any industry that is more relevant today than cybersecurity is, because it touches every single part of our daily life. Plurilock has been public since 2020. We have grown both organically as well as through acquisition.
We have a number of trade brands that we operate. Plurilock is the parent company. We also operate Aurora, which is the U.S. public sector entity, and then Integra, where we have operations in Ottawa. The company has grown revenue quite rapidly since we listed in 2020. You can see there that from 2020 to 2023, we have grown revenue, top line revenues to approximately $70 million. We will be reporting our 2024 revenues in the next week or so. Stay tuned for that. Certainly send us a ping afterwards here to get added to the investor newsletter so you can get notified when those do come out. Part of the story for us has been—excuse me—part of the story for us has been about growing not only top line revenue, but also growing Gross margins.
You're going to hear me talk today about what that strategy is, how we've been performing on that, and some of the opportunity in the future. Cybersecurity for us is, like I mentioned, is something that touches everybody. Each individual consumer that I talk to has a story about a gift card scam or their father-in-law who got taken for $500 or their colleague who clicked on a link they shouldn't have and they lost some of their crypto. This is something that happens to everybody. Our focused market, though, is really helping larger enterprises. That's both in the public sector, so federal governments, and some larger state governments. Commercially, we sell to what's called the Global 2000. It's pretty much the Fortune 2000, although we have a handful of European clients as well that we service.
Some of the examples of who we sell to include the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy, U.S. Department of Defense, Canadian Defense, Canadian Federal Law Enforcement, as well as a whole host of civilian agencies, both in the U.S. and Canada, as well as others. With cybersecurity, it's sometimes difficult to name commercial clients. Rest assured, you would certainly be familiar with some of those names because they are blue-chip household enterprises that you would typically see in the news. Part of our competitive advantage is that we have truly a world-class team. I think a lot of companies talk about having a world-class team. I think we're actually one of the few companies that does have it. For us, part of that is comprised both of our leadership team, our board of directors, as well as our industry council.
On this slide, this is a subset of the folks that we have affiliated with us. It includes people like Ed Hammersley, who was formerly the head of Raytheon Cyber Products, Vice Admiral Mike McConnell, former director of the National Security Agency, and also the director of National Intelligence. He would be somebody who reported to the U.S. president on a daily basis in the Oval Office. Admiral Jan Tai, former director of Naval Intelligence, current board member of Goldman Sachs, General Motors. The list actually goes on. Not listed here, although an announcement that we made earlier this year also includes Beth Seislund. She was former COO at GCHQ, the British intelligence agency, and also the deputy national security advisor to the British Prime Minister. This is a snapshot of who we have in our ecosystem.
It is part of the reason why we have been able to grow so rapidly. We also have a competitive advantage when it comes to talent, which I will talk a little bit more about. Our corporate strategy has been to acquire sales channels or distribution. We have made three acquisitions in 2021 and 2022. Those acquisitions really gave us the sales force, the customer relationships, and also the contract vehicles or the master service agreements that we are able to leverage and sell products and services into larger enterprise accounts. We identified very early on that it was easier and cheaper to acquire these as opposed to build these. Actually, a recent statistic from a leading analyst, I think last week or two weeks ago, cited that 90% of all technology procurement happens indirectly through channel partners like the three that we have acquired.
This is how most of the industry operates. Larger companies will buy through channel partners. We acquired those channel partners to give us the sales force. From there, our strategy has been and continues to be that we are cross-selling or upselling what we call critical services. Critical services for us is where we're providing very high-end cybersecurity consulting work and also managed security service work for our clients. The key difference here is that typically when we're doing technology solution sales, gross margins are typically thinner, so anywhere from 1% to 20% gross margin on average. As soon as you start to move up to critical services and our managed security service offering, there you're looking at 30%, 40%, 50% Gross margins, and typically also longer-term contracts or recurring contracts. If I break this down in a nutshell, we are effectively buying distribution.
We're cross-selling, upselling higher margin products and services. That has been the focus, and that's what we continue to do. Now, I'm pleased to report that we have been successful on that. I have a couple of charts here to show some of the wins. This information is a little bit stale. Again, we're putting out our full year 2024 imminently. Our last public quarter was Q3. What you can see from this chart is on a comparative basis, on a nine-month basis from 2022, 2023, 2024, we're continuing to grow revenue. Most importantly, we're continuing to expand margins. Really, the way that that's happening is we're taking that distribution, those hundreds of enterprise accounts. We are continuing the core business of technology solution sales, but then we are upselling and cross-selling critical services.
That is what is leading to the margin expansion. Specifically, we saw 70% year-to-date critical services growth and also 11% year-to-date Gross profit growth as of Q3 2024. I will not go into too much detail here, although I am happy to dive in on Q&A. Just a couple of different ways to measure the overall growth of the business. Effectively, revenue is continuing to increase. Critical services sales are continuing to increase. Gross margin, both as an absolute value as well as a percentage, is continuing to increase. We are firing on all cylinders. We are showing the opportunity here that we are capitalizing on. You might be interested in some of the key drivers. Why are we seeing such strong growth? Why is cybersecurity so important? The estimates for the size of the cyber industry vary.
$2 trillion is probably the highest estimate that we've seen, which is the sum of a five-year period around the spending and also the damages that companies are experiencing. If I were to break this into why there's such a strong tailwind, I would break it into three main items. The first is that businesses overall are finding themselves vulnerable. One in six businesses were attacked in Canada in 2023, which was a double 2023 over 2022. Companies are being forced to invest in cyber defenses. We're also seeing that international conflicts like war in Ukraine, unrest in the Middle East, et cetera, generally are precipitated by or have some amount of cyber warfare that kind of goes hand in hand.
Incidentally, President Trump, prior to him coming into office, was citing cyber war as a tool of statecraft, which is something that we in the cyber industry knew for a long time, but it is now becoming kind of mainstream. Businesses are vulnerable. They need to defend themselves. As a result, they are spending on cyber. Secondarily, though, there is also increasing regulation. Businesses not only have to stay safe, invest in cyber defenses, but they are also being forced to by regulatory bodies. This is across the board. If you are a publicly traded company in the United States, the SEC is actually mandating stronger cyber controls, mandatory reporting of cyber breaches, et cetera. Most industry verticals will also have requirements around needing to invest in cyber defenses.
Whether that's healthcare with HIPAA or the payments industry with PCI or the public sector with NIST 800-53 or any international business that reaches a certain size usually has ISO 27001. There is a whole bunch of reasons why businesses are forced to comply with cyber standards, which again are precursors to buying cyber tools. The last one, and this one's a little bit more specific to us, is that there are 4 million cyber jobs vacant today. That is up from 2 million cyber jobs vacant a handful of years ago. Effectively what this means is that businesses, even if they have the budget to spend on cyber defenses, they know they need to do so. They may not have the talent to be able to get it done. They are turning to partners like us to be able to affect that work.
That is part of the reason why we are seeing such strong growth in our critical services. I will spend a little bit of time giving an example. We started working with a Fortune 2000-sized organization at the beginning of 2024. As a result of our critical services work, we went in, we did some initial projects for them. It was small in terms of dollar figures. It was six figures worth of initial work. As part of those initial assessments, we identified that there were some material shortfalls and gaps that the company had. As a result of that, we provided a series of recommendations. Not only did we help to realize those recommendations, but we are continuing to work with them to this day.
What's interesting is that this one client alone has spent approximately $22 million of sales with us, which is just a fraction of their overall security budget. There is still lots more that we can potentially go after. Ultimately, what we were able to do for them is we were able to show that there were some gaps, there were some shortfalls. We provided solutions, recommendations. It was a mix of technology sales as well as ongoing services work through our critical services team. As an outcome, they are now leveraging best-of-breed AI security tools. They have significantly reduced risk. They have a lot better visibility internally. They have actually saved money. Surprisingly, or maybe not surprisingly, a lot of the spend that they were making previously was just unoptimized. We have realized around $7 million of cost savings and cost avoidance for them as a company.
Really, win-win-win across the board. I'm going to speed up a little bit because I do want to leave time for questions. I'll talk to you a little bit about the team at the management level and then provide some commentary around the markets overall. My name is Ian, CEO of Plurilock. I have been at the helm since inception. Not recently actually, so upgraded our management team approximately two years ago. Scott joined us as CFO and Tucker as COO. Both Scott and Tucker come from bigger company background and experience, phenomenal operators. Tucker, incidentally, a former COO at HSBC, and Scott also has both North American as well as international experience. There's been a large level up to the team, and we're very excited with them.
At the board level, I mentioned some of the names, Ed and Vice Admiral McConnell also have Jen Swindell. She was a former vice president at a very large defense contractor called Booz Allen Hamilton, also formerly a special operations officer in the US Navy. In terms of capital markets and M&A experience, our Exec Chair, Ali Hakimzadeh, as well as Blake Corbett, both very experienced on the corporate finance and banking side. One of our strategic advisors, not on the board per se, but certainly we work with very closely, is Joe Sexton. He joined us in 2024 as an executive advisor. He was formerly on the board of CrowdStrike and also held operational roles at McAfee and Cisco and AppDynamics. Very large cybersecurity strategics. In terms of the cap table, we did do a financing earlier this spring.
We're cashed up from that perspective. The financing was done at $0.40. That was right before, I think, the tariff war 1.0 got underway. We've certainly seen some volatility. I think that the opportunity here is that we're trading probably well below certainly the financing price, but also any other price point. From a market capitalization, I had mentioned to you that in 2023, we did approximately $70 million of revenue. Market capitalization today is approximately 0.2 times revenue. It's roughly sort of $15-$17 million. We have about 78 million shares out. We do have a little bit of dilutive securities at the upper end. We did also have some warrants that were ratcheting up in price in April. That also caused a little bit of volatility. That is now behind us.
This slide might be a little small on this screen, although certainly would welcome folks to download a copy. Effectively, what this shows is that comparable companies in our space trade for really between one to four times revenue, depending on how you break it out. We have companies that focus more on the public sector in one group and then companies that focus more on the commercial sector in another group. By and large, the average is one to two times revenue. Plurilock today sitting at a 0.2 times, very much undervalued relative to the average. Obviously, we do not think we are average. We think we are above average. There is quite a delta here between where we trade and where others do.
One of the things that we've found a bit troublesome is that we've continuously had to update the comps table. The reason for that is our comparables keep getting acquired. We've actually seen four comps get acquired. There's one not listed here. These are all larger private equity firms for the most part that have come in and they have taken out three comparables. Proficience, SoftChoice, and Converge all were great comps for us. Over the last four months, have seen large takeouts. Interestingly, Converge actually saw a bit of a bidding war as a result of their initial offer from a PE firm. There were a few others that came in. It is a very active space. For us, it is certainly an indication that there's a lot of interest in companies like us.
I wanted to leave some time for questions. I'll maybe just summarize here by saying, again, we're in the cybersecurity space, world-class team, phenomenal customers, both in the public sector as well as the private sector. We've had strong growth, strong revenue growth, strong gross margin growth. We've historically done some M&A, and we remain open to opportunities that we may want to look at. We're quite underappreciated relative to market peers. With that, thank you. I will actually say, please do sign up for the investor updates because we will notify folks when our 2024 financials come out. With that, happy to take any questions. If no questions, maybe people can share a story of how they've been hacked. Because we all have a story, unfortunately. Everybody has a story. Amazing. I think first presentation where I got it all done in the presentation.
No questions needed. I like it. I like it. Obviously, I'll be around. We've got a couple of our team members here as well. Happy to chat either now or later on. Thanks very much.
This presentation has now finished. Please check back shortly for the archive.
Good morning. Good to go? All right. All right. Can you hear me in the back all right? Amazing. Good to see folks. We're going to be talking about cybersecurity today. My name is Ian Paterson. I'm CEO of Plurilock. Plurilock is a TSXV company. We're listed on the venture under PLUR and on the OTCQB as PLCKF. Just take a minute, go through or take a picture, screenshot the disclaimers as needed. We're going to be talking about Plurilock as it exists today. We're also going to be talking about the opportunity within cybersecurity more broadly.
I actually don't know of any industry that is more relevant today than cybersecurity is because it touches every single part of our daily life. Plurilock has been public since 2020. We have grown both organically as well as through acquisition. We have a number of trade brands that we operate. Plurilock is the parent company. We also operate Aurora, which is the U.S. public sector entity, and then Integra, where we have operations in Ottawa. The company has grown revenue quite rapidly since we listed in 2020. You can see there that from 2020 to 2023, we've grown revenue, top line revenues to approximately $70 million. We will be reporting our 2024 revenues in the next week or so. Stay tuned for that.
Certainly send us a ping afterwards here to get added to the investor newsletter so you can get notified when those do come out. Part of the story for us has been, excuse me, part of the story for us has been about growing not only top line revenue, but also growing gross margins. You are going to hear me talk today about what that strategy is, how we have been performing on that, and some of the opportunity in the future. Cybersecurity for us, like I mentioned, is something that touches everybody. Each individual consumer that I talk to has a story about a gift card scam or their father-in-law who got taken for $500 or their colleague who clicked on a link they should not have and they lost some of their crypto. This is something that happens to everybody.
Our focus market, though, is really helping larger enterprises. That is both in the public sector, so federal governments and some larger state governments. Commercially, we sell to what is called the Global 2000. It is pretty much the Fortune 2000, although we have a handful of European clients as well that we service. Some of the examples of who we sell to include the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy, U.S. Department of Defense, Canadian Defense, Canadian Federal Law Enforcement, as well as a whole host of civilian agencies, both in the U.S. and Canada, as well as others. With cybersecurity, it is sometimes difficult to name commercial clients. Rest assured, you would certainly be familiar with some of those names because they are blue-chip household enterprises that you would typically see in the news. Part of our competitive advantage is that we have truly a world-class team.
Our focus market, though, is really helping larger enterprises. That is both in the public sector, so federal governments and some larger state governments. Commercially, we sell to what is called the Global 2000. It is pretty much the Fortune 2000, although we have a handful of European clients as well that we service. Some of the examples of who we sell to include the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy, U.S. Department of Defense, Canadian Defense, Canadian Federal Law Enforcement, as well as a whole host of civilian agencies, both in the US and Canada, as well as others. With cybersecurity, it is sometimes difficult to name commercial clients. Rest assured, you would certainly be familiar with some of those names because they are blue-chip household enterprises that you would typically see in the news. Part of our competitive advantage is that we have truly a world-class team.
I think a lot of companies talk about having a world-class team. I think we're actually one of the few companies that does have it. For us, part of that is comprised both of our leadership team, our board of directors, as well as our industry council. On this slide, this is a subset of the folks that we have affiliated with us. It includes people like Ed Hammersley, who was formerly the head of Raytheon Cyber Products, Vice Admiral Mike McConnell, former director of the National Security Agency, and also the director of National Intelligence. He would be somebody who reported to the U.S. president on a daily basis in the Oval Office. Admiral Jan Tai, former director of Naval Intelligence, current board member of Goldman Sachs, General Motors. The list actually goes on.
Not listed here, although an announcement that we made earlier this year also includes Beth Seislund. She was former COO at GCHQ, so the British intelligence agency, and also the deputy national security advisor to the British Prime Minister. This is a snapshot of who we have in our ecosystem and is part of the reason why we've been able to grow so rapidly. We also have a competitive advantage when it comes to talent, which I'll talk a little bit more about. Our corporate strategy has been to acquire sales channels or distribution. We've made three acquisitions in 2021 and 2022. Those acquisitions really gave us the sales force, the customer relationships, and also the contract vehicles or the master service agreements that we're able to leverage and sell products and services into larger enterprise accounts.
We identified very early on that it was easier and cheaper to acquire these as opposed to build these. Actually, a recent statistic from a leading analyst, I think last week or two weeks ago, cited that 90% of all technology procurement happens indirectly through channel partners like the three that we have acquired. This is how most of the industry operates. Larger companies will buy through channel partners. We acquired those channel partners to give us the sales force. From there, our strategy has been and continues to be that we are cross-selling or upselling what we.