Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Pivotree Inc.'s third quarter 2021 earnings call. All participants are currently in listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will open the line for question answer session with the analysts. To ask a question, we would ask the analyst to click on the icon to raise their hand. Before we begin, Oops, sorry. My script just disappeared from my screen. Before we begin, Pivotree would like to remind listeners that certain information discussed today may be forward-looking in nature. Such forward-looking information reflects the company's current views with respect to future events. Any such information is subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. For more information on the risks, uncertainties, and assumptions related to forward-looking statements, please refer to Pivotree's public filings, which are available on SEDAR.
During the call, we will reference certain non-IFRS financial measures. Although we believe these measures provide useful supplemental information about our financial performance, they're not recognized measures and do not have standardized meanings under IFRS. Please see our MD&A for additional information regarding our non-IFRS financial measures, including for reconciliations to the nearest IFRS measures. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Pivotree CEO, Bill Di Nardo.
Thanks, Dennis. Morning, everyone. Obviously the Thanksgiving background, we're celebrating with our American customers and employees and are hoping everyone has a safe week. Thank you for joining us on our third quarter 2021 conference call. With me today is Moataz Ashoor, our Chief Financial Officer. It's been almost exactly one year since our IPO. This morning I issued a CEO letter to reflect on where we are, where we intend to go, and to help our stakeholders have a more in-depth understanding of how we interpret our results and opportunities. Again, I've put it out there, I'm happy to take feedback on it, and if it's something that folks find useful, I'll continue to do this going forward.
Just given it's the one-year anniversary and given how much has changed this year, I thought it was important to get some things down, and really help people understand what's on my mind as well. The letter is filed on SEDAR, and it's also on our website. Again, if you're inclined, please read it. We're gonna cover some of it here today, and you'll hear it in my own words. Those are very much my words in the letter. It's been a significant year of investment for us, and we're pleased to see some of the fruits of that labor start to come together in this third quarter. The first and probably most important thing for us is the sequential revenue growth in Q3 on the back of strong year-to-date bookings.
We've been signaling that for a while, that the bookings were strong, we'd start to see it convert. I think even in Q1 I told everyone, you know, expect Q3 to start to see the turn. Again, I'm really pleased to see the overall results come in as planned. We had 12% growth versus Q2. I think one of the really important things to note in there too is there's only one month of Bridge in there, and our organic growth was also positive. We were up about 7% quarter-over-quarter organically, 12% when you include one month of Bridge. Again, the year-to-date bookings remain very strong. We're 27% year-over-year, and our ARR continues to be 65-ish% of total revenue.
Again, we continue to maintain our recurring revenue nature. We've had good bookings quarter- over- quarter, and we've had a great year-to-date now, and we're really starting to see that turn as we suggested. Really, I think the things that I'm most excited about, we're gonna talk a little bit about it today, are some of the capabilities that we've been acquiring. I maintained at the time of the IPO we needed to round out some of our skill set, and we needed to reach scale in some key categories. The most recent announcements of those two acquisitions have really helped accelerate that. Now again, we understand we had our challenges this year. It was reflected in some of the bumpiness of our stock price over the last 12 months.
We're pleased that we're gonna be exiting the year with depth and scale in those three categories, and that we're really set to expand the business based on what we talked about at the time of the IPO. Digital commerce, data management, supply chain, all have really solid bases to grow from and great teams that are gonna drive those outcomes. I think this continues to set us up in the marketplace as a unique offering. I know one of the things that, you know, folks still wanna see is that turn on the recurring revenue. We're gonna talk a little bit about that today too. Again, we had a flattening out, and I know what you've seen repeatedly so far has been some declines in that area.
Again, I'm happy to see the recurring revenue is starting to stabilize there. Again, when we look at what the leading indicators tell us, and again, this is really back to about our frictionless approach, we're growing all aspects of our business. We are absolutely thrilled at having now Bridge and Codifyd in there. Even before them, we were really starting to see the bookings grow, right? We saw the turn of the corner, and we really saw the impacts of those bookings in this quarter. You can see the recurring revenue and the non-recurring bookings, 73% year-to-date non-recurring bookings. That's the growth over Q3 2020. The non-recurring bookings, 11% Q3 over Q3.
Again, we're seeing good, positive trends in areas that are leading indicators for the long term for us. These frictionless journeys start with these types of projects. Again, you'll see all these numbers in all of our financial reports. The one thing I will point out in this is that our consumption revenue that we bill each quarter is not represented in our recurring bookings. This is, again, something that'll show up in the revenue, but just the nature of consumption is it doesn't have a long-term contract. We've tried to maintain some integrity around defining bookings of recurring revenue as those with long-term contracts. There is gonna be some seasonality, as you would expect.
This is the busiest time of year for our customers and for us, and as a result, you know, our revenues in recurring always tend to buoy up with that consumption revenue. Again, a strong quarter. The one thing I'll point out, too, is shortly after the quarter ended, our bookings year- to- date already surpassed what we booked in all of 2020. I think that bodes well to kick 2022 off with a strong end of this year. Obviously we'll have more news on Q4 bookings, but again, we've ended this quarter at the very beginning of the fourth quarter. We've got some strong indications it's gonna be a good year of bookings.
Now, as we've all observed, I think one of the important things to keep in mind, because everybody talks about e-commerce and everyone talks about how all boats rise in this rising tide of e-commerce, and we have seen some really interesting growth, particularly led by the pandemic. You can see some of the spikes, online sales growing through the course of the year. One of the things you also notice is as the year started to normalize, you actually started to see the growth start to slow down a bit. Still growing, again, we've maintained this is gonna be a decade-long journey. We still don't think the digital assist penetration is at its peak. It will continue to be a journey for every retailer to leverage more of the technology in the customer experience.
We did see this massive lift during COVID across the entire industry. You saw that reflected in our MRR last year. A lot of consumption as people were really relying on that infrastructure and those environments, and you've seen the growth continue, but it's certainly been displaced again by a bit of a return to retail. I think what's really important though, if you're paying attention to the industry buzz right now, this holiday season is gonna be one of the most challenging logistically in recent history. The search, find, buy, get that we talk about, that relationship of finding and buying and getting that product or service that you were looking for, search and find is done fine.
People's ability to go online or go to any sort of omni-channel endpoint and be able to find something, put it in a cart, and purchase it is doing just fine. The thing that's challenged at the moment is the supply chain. You don't have to look too far. It's on the news constantly. It's in every periodical. Supply chains have been disrupted globally by everything from raw material shortages, transportation and network constraints, and labor shortages. The chart on the right shows you the coverage ratios, and this is inventory to sales. What you can see since January 2020 is a continuous decline on that coverage to its actual all-time low right now. This is really important because this is about the ability to get that product from its point of manufacture into a customer's hands.
What this is telling us is this is gonna be a really challenging quarter. To put it really simply, our clients are not as worried about search, find, buy at the moment. They're very worried about the get. It's a distressed part of their supply chain at the moment, and it's one of the reasons I couldn't be more thrilled about having acquired Bridge when we did. Being able to bring supply chain capabilities into the conversation, and already we're starting to reap the rewards. We're in a number of conversations with existing customers, and one of the things we're hearing from them is that for every dollar they spend on front-end experience, they're spending four dollars improving their back end on the supply chain systems. That's why that acquisition was so timely.
Candidly, I wish we could have got it done earlier. We won't have as big an impact on this year's holiday season, but we know, just given the conversations we're already in, we're gonna be very engaged, this time next year. Again, generally, our expectations today are getting what we want or need in days, not weeks or months. This is gonna be a decade-long journey. This is not, you know, 15 minutes or just this year. This is gonna be a decade-long transformation of supply chains on many of the enabling technologies I've talked about since the time of the IPO. But again, I just wanna reinforce, you know, this is the journey we're on. This is why we've been careful about what we're buying, why it's so strategic, and how it fits in this journey to frictionless commerce.
Now, we've had some wins beyond just these acquisitions. We've had some really good success in e-commerce. We won a multi-phase, multi-year customer experience project for a $20 billion holding company. We've been working with one of the biggest fashion retailers to make enhancements to their drop ship and to modernize and move the program to AWS. A lot of what you're seeing in our e-commerce is about transformation, changing from certain applications to newer, more modern ones. Some of the slippage we had at the beginning of the year was not having the platforms for the customers at that time that they needed. We really think we've turned a corner on that now with our investments in VTEX, our greater work in SAP Cloud, and some of the work we've been doing in Shopify.
We've had some really good success with SAP in particular, doing some upgrades and internationalizations on some global business service firms. This is, again, a big market for us. It'll continue to be big, and it's gonna be all about transformation. Data management was having an exceptional start to this back half of the year. We had great bookings organically, and then on top of that, we brought Codifyd in. We signed three multi-domain MDM projects. We had an exceptionally strong quarter in bookings, and I'm really pleased with what we're seeing for the back half of the year. The other thing that we've talked about a lot is the future MRR is really coming from our digital products.
One of those is DIVE, and that's our machine learning tool to help automate product onboarding. We just signed a very large aftermarkets parts distributor that carries millions of SKUs who we're able to demonstrate we could save almost a month of work, bring it down to a day or two using the DIVE product. We're starting to see real interest in this data automation, and we've got some great products that are gonna help us really accelerate MRR and IP-based MRR. Now, we still don't disclose a lot of these independently because frankly, they're too small at this stage to have a real impact on top line, but this is part of our future. We'll talk about it, and as it becomes more material, we'll start sharing some of the numbers on how they're performing and accelerating.
On cloud transformation, we completed two projects to design and implement cloud-based disaster recovery solutions for retailers. Now, this is big. This is not, you know, simple DR and backups. These are very complex commerce environments that we're using native AWS tools to help create an accelerated recovery in the event of a disaster. When you think about friction in the world of commerce, having a site go down either under load, duress, or external attacks, the ability to get that up quickly again is one of those things that reduces friction. This is a big solution that we've now entered into the market and will extend the life of Oracle as an example for some of our biggest customers.
We've also done some e-commerce app cloud migrations for some flagship customers in time for the holiday peak. Cloud transformation continues to be a big part of our overall path towards frictionless. The supply chain was starting to do some work before we arrived with Bridge. There were some legacy OMS migrations to cloud with two of our large global retailers, and we were able to leverage some of the skills of Bridge for some projects we'd already started. We just transitioned a global wine producer, a client from a project completion into a managed service. Again, you know, you've been asking us, "When does PS turn into MS?" Well, here's a great example. One of the things that excites us about our acquisition of Bridge is that they do have strong MS. They're not just a PS business.
The PS they do, as we love about PS, converts into managed services in a long-term relationship. Again, some really good wins across all of the different business units that we run, and all of that leading to a great quarter and a great start to 2022. Let's put a bit of the Codifyd acquisition into context. You know, why are we excited about this? Well, this provides instant scale to MDM. Now, you're not gonna see any of these results in the quarter because we closed after the quarter, but it falls exactly in the parameters we've been articulating, and what we said we would be doing in the form of acquisitions.
This business more than doubles our current data management business unit, and that's really important because you've heard us talk about investments into new that are a drag on our gross margins. When you're scaling up organically and hiring teams of people in advance of the revenue, that can be a drag on your gross margins, and we've demonstrated some of that this year. By getting instant scale, by doubling that business, we immediately get to scale margins. You're gonna see a dramatic change in this particular area on our gross margins starting in Q4. Again, that's important. It's not just about the margins, it's also about the quality of people, the team.
This is a great group of individuals who have a really strong track record on delivery in this space, and as we know, this is a really important space. It really underpins everything we're doing in frictionless. It's the data, and data drives that frictionless experience at the end of the day. We were already starting to experience double-digit growth. We had an organic bookings that was quite remarkable towards the back half of this quarter. We were starting to see this really accelerate, now we get the benefit of a full and complete global team that can really help us operationalize.
The other interesting part of this that I wanna point out is that if you look at our current MDM business without Codifyd, it's actually a two-thirds, almost 70% recurring revenue and a 30% PS business. Our MDM was, in fact, a lot of after-market support. It was a lot of hosted and managed services already. For every CAD 1 of PS we did, we were generating CAD 2-CAD 3 in recurring. With Codifyd, we bring depth, skills, and customers, and their revenue base is mostly PS, which we can deliver post-production support, managed services, and managed applications to their customers.
In fact, we know, part of what, you know, had tipped us off to this was we were in some conversations with customers who were very happy with Codifyd, didn't wanna talk to us about professional services, but Codifyd wasn't gonna be doing managed services, and they were coming to us to ask for the managed service component. We're really excited about a couple of customers we were both pitching, each for different parts of the relationship that we can now go in and talk to cohesively about both the professional service and the after-market support.
I'm not expecting that this is gonna pop overnight, but even if we don't get to the ratio I described as the base Pivotree, even if we only get to a one-to-one relationship, we see a large amount of recurring revenue coming off of this, these set of relationships that we've got now through Codifyd. Much like Bridge, we acquired Codifyd in a single multiple of revenue and a single-digit EBITDA multiple. It was very strong in that respect financially. The most important reason to do this really was to accelerate our frictionless. It's great that the economics added up, and it made it a bullseye, and this is what we mean by bullseye.
We had the strategic value, we had the right economic drivers, and we can sit confidently in front of the market and say, "These are the kind of deals that we wanna do." This is the kind of discipline we wanna demonstrate, and candidly, you know, this is not for us just about a land grab. This is why we're patient. These don't show up every day. You have to work hard to find them, build relationships. Frankly, one of the things that, you know, I believe the board and the company is quite pleased with is the accelerated integration that's been happening. Culturally, they're great fits as well. While I know the market likes hearing the news about acquisitions, we live with these, you know, for the next decade.
Making sure they're right culture fits are equally critical to make sure the results keep coming. This is about revenue synergy and driving to frictionless, and I think these first two have been really strong demonstrations of how we're gonna do that. I'm gonna pass it over to Mo to talk about our financials.
Great. Thanks, Bill. I'll start with the top line. The total revenue was CAD 16 million, and as Bill mentioned earlier, a 12% increase sequentially from the second quarter of this, the same year, was up 7% organically when you exclude the one month of contribution, or CAD 700,000 from the acquisition of Bridge. Recurring revenue was CAD 10 million in the second quarter of this year, going up to CAD 10.3 million, and even excluding Bridge was stable quarter-over-quarter. We are still seeing pressure from the Oracle side of the business, and we've talked about that last quarter, but the investments we've been making in new technology platform and services is setting us up to offset this.
Non-recurring revenue in the second quarter was CAD 5.8 million, and we saw the expected lift on the back of record bookings we had in the first half of this year. Next quarter, we will have a full contribution from Bridge and partial contribution from Codifyd. This will increase the mix to non-recurring side further. As I'll explain on the next few slides, both of these deals are immediately gross margin accretive, and our objective will be to expand their book of business, as Bill just described to managed services over the coming year. Moving to the next slide.
Last quarter, we went through a waterfall of our revenue and gross profits, and we got feedback from the investors that this was a very helpful discussion as we try to continue to be transparent about the factors that have impacted our business. On a year-over-year basis, revenue declined CAD 200,000 from the third quarter of the prior year. This was primarily driven by recurring revenue churn from Oracle and legacy data center hosted customers that we've talked about in previous quarters. However, we're pleased to see the contribution of new investment grow significantly this quarter with a CAD 1.7 million lift from the new technologies and existing customers that helped offset the decline in Oracle and legacy revenue. Also included within here, you'll see the addition of Bridge of CAD 700,000.
The bottom boxes, in terms of how the format of this chart is set up, is the gross profit. In terms of gross profit, it declined 1.3% year-over-year to CAD 7.1 million, and gross margins were 44.5%, compared to 51.6% in the third quarter of last year. The two biggest factors, we've talked about this before, is reduction in managed service Oracle and legacy hosting customers, and some of the investments we've made to grow our professional services in business and new technology. Excluding the new investments, gross margins on an adjusted basis would be 48% for the third quarter. I'll note despite being a majority PS business, the one month of Bridge revenue was accretive to the overall margin. Move to the next slide.
We thought it's also worthwhile to draw attention to the waterfall relative to our most recent quarter, our second quarter of 2021. As we said, revenue improved sequentially. We saw the increase of PS billings this quarter, largely from continued ramp-up of our new services off of the strong bookings and the Bridge acquisition. Those helped contribute some to the gross profit margin improvement and profit improvement of CAD 900,000 to CAD 7.1 million of gross profits in third quarter. That improved our gross margins from 43.6% in the second quarter to 44.5% in the third quarter. Again, the primary contributors being the ramp-up in some of the new areas that we've seen growth organically in Bridge. The next slide highlights the summary of the change in our operating expense year-on-year.
Operating expense of CAD 10.5 million was an increase from the CAD 9.7 million we saw the prior year. There's a few puts and takes in there, and you can see the investments we've made in sales and marketing being the most significant investment, which we've covered in prior quarters, which now as a percentage of revenue is 10.9% of revenue. We expect that number to improve over as a percentage of revenue over the next year. That's some expectations on how we'll be managing that. Well, of course, we'll also continue to make sure that we budget and prioritize through our sales and marketing and products to continue to make sure that we take products through the process and get them to market and to our customers.
Slide 14 shows our Q3 P&L in more detail. I've summarized most of the changes. The additional takeaway here is adjusted EBITDA CAD -1 million. We don't show it on this slide, but in comparison to the most recent quarter, it's an improvement from CAD -1.7 million we saw in Q2. Really on the back of improved revenue and gross margins. Our adjusted free cash flow was CAD -1.4 million, and you'll see that in comparison if you look at the Q2 sequential numbers, again, not on this page, it's an improvement from CAD 2.2 million to the CAD 1.4 million you see delivered in Q3.
As we think about our investment plans in 2022, we're going to continue to invest strategically in the technologies and areas we believe will drive the highest return. We believe that we have a solid foundation in place now, and we'll look to drive greater operating leverage to support our continued investments. Lastly, turning to our balance sheet, cash at the end of the third quarter was CAD 40.8 million. There was approximately CAD 5 million related to the closing of the acquisition of Bridge. Subsequent to the quarter, we have approximately CAD 15 million due on closing of the acquisition of Codifyd.
Between our cash balance and access to undrawn BMO credit facility, we still have plenty of room to drive accretion in the business through a few more acquisitions at the valuations we've been getting. I'm going to turn it back to Bill now for a closing summary.
Thanks, Mo. I think to cap it off as we're now getting close to the end of the year, I wanna touch on some of our priorities heading into 2022. The two acquisitions we completed, I was very excited about the potential to cross-sell their customers and introduce new products and capabilities to our customer base. That has already started. I would say it, low-hanging fruit, things that we knew were going on, you know, we were immediately pulled into. We have to institutionalize this process. This is really a big part of our investment thesis, is that cross-sell and up-sell and managing the customer relationship on the complete journey. That's really gonna be a focus of Q1, is getting those integrations accelerated after the holiday season, and really starting to get the teams to work more closely together.
We're really gonna be focused on that integration ingestion to drive those revenue synergies. Really, again, I think what's been most inspiring for me is when I have been asked to participate in some client conversations, it's not a strong push. You know, when we talk about our capabilities, we're being invited in. I think that's really exciting to see. Customers still may not use the word frictionless, but what they understand are all the different capabilities we bring and the journey it puts them on, or they're probably already on. I think really what we're going to be doing is framing that as a frictionless journey. This past year we've also been ramping up our efforts around new products in areas like cybersecurity and MDM. These are our digital products.
We're gonna continue rolling out a menu of recurring revenue services that give us greater visibility and operating leverage as we scale the business. There were a lot of things last year that we were doing for the first time, new things that we were introducing. When I look at this year's budget and planning, we've got more experience with those new things. We have existing customers now. We think they start to become more predictable. Really it's about increasing our leverage on those investments and driving their commercialization. We will continue to add new things, but as we get bigger and bigger on the stuff that we've already launched, our new will be a smaller percentage of the total.
Again, we're really excited about some of the interest that the new things we've been building are garnering, and now it's about starting to accelerate those into 2022. A large piece of what you saw in our sales and marketing was, in fact, product management investments. I'm really excited about what they're gonna do as a group next year. We've built a corporate development team that I believe, and you'll read it in my letter, has produced some pretty good results, you know, given it was almost a standing start at the time of the IPO. They're continuing to generate funnel and evaluate opportunities that have the return characteristics like the ones we've described.
Again, I expect to continue our acquisition trend next year, and I believe we've got the capital to do it. We also have things to both scale some of our existing categories, but also that journey towards frictionless. There's still some gaps we wanna fill. I think this year one of the things our team really learned effectively is when it's strategic to do, you start it organically. If you can find an acquisition opportunity to accelerate, that makes sense economically, you do it. It means even if you can't find an acquisition, you are continuing to work on building it organically, and you're gonna see that again this year.
There's some areas where we're investing in some, particularly around commerce. We'll look for some acquisition opportunities, but one way or another, we'll be in that space by the end of the year. I think this is an important part of that dynamic. You heard us talk about VTEX last year. We looked at a dozen VTEX acquisitions. In the end, we ramped up acquiring a complete team, and we did it in about nine months. Frankly, I'm really impressed with the team's ability to do organically what an acquisition may have accelerated, but in that particular case, it proved to be more cost-effective to actually just do it ourselves. That said, our focus is gonna continue to be on growth.
We're gonna deliver greater operating leverage in the business as we begin to turn the corner on some of the investments we made. Most, you know, putting pressure on the team to be smart about this. Again, our focus is gonna continue to be prioritizing investment for growth and the strategic areas that will drive long-term growth. Lastly, again, as a parting thought, I go into this in greater length in the shareholder letter that I released today. I wanna say that as a management team and board, we believe that long-term shareholder value we create will be driven by the long-term decisions we make, the ability to capture greater share of this incredible long-term opportunity around frictionless commerce. That's a lot of the technologies, a lot of the skills.
It's gonna be, you know, some movement between professional services, managed services, and our own IP. I really encourage, you know, everyone out there to think about this, as long journey towards frictionless commerce, and we'll be making decisions as if we're going to be running this business for a decade or more into the future. I think that's an important signal for everyone. You know, while I will continue to try to impress you with quarterly results, I wanna make sure that the most important thing we impress with is leadership in the next decade. That's what you should expect to continue to see from us. We are very conscious about how we deploy our capital to accelerate growth and minimize dilution. Again, you've seen that in the way I've done these last couple of deals.
We reduced the amount of equity we offered as part of it, because I didn't feel at the price it was at, it was wise for us to use our equity in that way, and so we used cash. On a pro forma basis, if you add the trailing 12 months revenue of Bridge and Codifyd to our third quarter trailing 12 months of revenue base, we've added to our revenue per share by over 40%, which is again a testament to how the patience in the deals we do will pay off. Again, that's revenue per share is gonna be up 40%. I'm gonna leave it at that. I'm happy to take some questions from our analysts, and I thank everyone for joining us this morning.
I can see some folks from all across the country. It's early in some parts, and I know some of our friends south of the border I'm sure are gearing up for their own holiday celebrations. Thanks for joining us today. Dennis, I'll turn it over to you to manage our analysts.
Thank you, Bill. We'll now take questions from the analysts. As a reminder, to ask a question, please click on the icon to raise your hand. Our first question comes from Jesse Pytlak from Cormark Securities.
Hey, good morning, everybody.
Hey, Jesse.
Hey, Jesse.
Bill, just first, you know, nice letter. I think it's just super helpful in terms of understanding some of the dynamics, and opportunity underway the business that is maybe a little less obvious in the formal filing, so thank you for providing that. You know, for my first question, just, you know, kind of coming back to some of the melt that we experienced earlier this year, it sounds like there's some good potential now to win back that business through Bridge and Codifyd. I guess, are you confident based on the pipeline that you're seeing at those businesses that you can backfill that entire amount, quite quickly now?
You know, I think I've been burned too much in the past to ever use the words quite quickly ever again. I'm gonna be just cautious and conservative and say, we're again on the long journey, Jesse. We're getting the right kind of skills, we're participating in the right categories with our customers, and we are seeing our customers stay with us and shifting spend across these dimensions. You know, am I confident we've got the right mix? Yes. Can I tell you exactly when, you know, you're gonna start to see accelerated, you know, revenue MRR replacement? No, I can't and I won't be specific, but I'll tell you I'm very confident we've got the right mix of products and capabilities for the long term.
Okay. Understood. Maybe kind of segueing from that, as we think about 2022 and kind of the evolution of your revenue mix, obviously PS has become a heavier component given how your backlog's grown, and now with Codifyd, to a lesser extent Bridge, all in the mix. You know, it could remain a larger piece than it has been historically. Kind of given the opportunities for revenue synergies, like, is there potential that you can unlock, you know, through unlocking those synergies, drive, you know, managed services back up to a high 60s% level?
Yeah. Look, I think it's not just managed services. I wanna reiterate that it's a combination of things. We have managed services in Bridge. You're gonna see more of the managed services I think start to accelerate in the MDM space. We have lots of opportunity to grow and convert the projects in Codifyd into the recurring revenue stuff that we do. You know, again, if you look at even why MDM wasn't growing faster on the recurring, it's 'cause our PS wasn't growing. Our PS just was starting to turn now, and now we're gonna, you know, drive $12 million of PS on top of that platform. Yeah, I'm very optimistic over the next 12 months you're gonna see more of that convert to MRR. You see it with Bridge.
They're already doing managed services. We mentioned one of them that just went. You know, the winery that went from PS project to the managed service recurring as it exited. Yes, managed service is part of it. But I really wanna draw people's attention back to the products that we're building. They're IP and assembled products. You know, bringing together collections of capabilities, packaging them up, and selling them as a recurring revenue service. Those, we made a lot of investments in those this year. They're starting to accelerate. We have a number of fronts that are gonna help contribute to growing our recurring revenue, and you're starting to see it already hit. How quickly will it accelerate?
You know, I think the next couple of quarters are gonna be interesting for us to start to better predict that revenue trajectory, but I hesitate right now 'cause, again, you know, I'm not jumping up and shouting, "Look, you know, we already jumped 20%." I'm saying we're turning the corner. I think the next couple of quarters, which I did say at the beginning of the year, Jesse, I think if you remember, I said we're gonna lead with the professional services. You're gonna see that turn this year. And then on the back of that, you'll start to see the turn on the recurring. I think we're being pretty consistent, and we're being pretty conservative and cautious.
Got it. Thanks, guys. I'll pass the line.
Thanks. Our next question comes from John Shao at National Bank. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. Congratulations on a nice organic growth from last quarter. My first question is regarding the Bridge Solutions. It seems like that acquisition just came at a great timing given that everyone's talking about supply chain obviously. What do you hear from your customers lately regarding their demand for supply chain related services? And if I look at it, how does that demand different from, let's say compared to normalized environment prior to the pandemic?
I mean, John, where I would start, and thank you by the way for noting the changes, and I think this is a great question around our strategy. I think what you're observing is a number of areas inside the supply chain that the pandemic has exposed, right? Our big customers are not like the folks you're used to talking about, you know, with the SMB marketplace and some of the big platforms you've noticed hyper-acceleration on. These are folks that have stores. They have inventory spread globally. Their supply chain is massive and complicated.
What the pandemic exposed was how that supply chain was working and how agile it was, and they're realizing simple things, you know, that you didn't have to experience before the pandemic that showed up, you couldn't deal with easily. You know, a great example was stores that you had to actually book an appointment to get into. Who would've thought of that? Who would've contemplated that? You know, we don't usually stand in lines. The pandemic exposed us to lines again. Again, folks didn't have the kind of logistics in place to be able to manage your entry into a store. These are just scratching the surface of everything going on all the way up through to the manufacturing and sourcing of product and vendors.
When you add into that the network itself, one of the first calls I got on with the Bridge team with a client, very, very big global client who is in the business of same-day deliveries and have been for a decade, and one of the things they told me right out of the gate was, "Hey, we got a real problem here in that our network is telling us they cannot handle our predicted load." What did the pandemic expose? People were getting checks to stay at home. Folks weren't getting in cars and trucks and driving and making deliveries as much as they were. They weren't working in the facilities and the plants to the same level they were before.
They had identified already their biggest vendors, the FedExes, the UPSes, the DHLs, were predicting a real labor gap in their delivery network. This just has a huge cascading effect because when your entire supply chain is built around an existing set of vendors and someone tells you, "I can't handle your load," you're now scrambling to figure out how to create the new connectors, how to be able to track that inventory as it makes its way through the system. This is not an overnight fix for customers like this. Again, they're gonna be looking at all kinds of alternatives. I got a notice this morning welcoming Indigo to the Uber delivery network.
These are the kind of things you're gonna start to see more and more of, is alternative distribution channels that's about managing the backend infrastructure and the constantly evolving delivery part of that. Yeah, I mean, this is huge, John, and it's not an overnight thing for our customers. This is gonna be an area you're gonna see rapid evolution and rapid change over the next, I'm gonna guess, five years.
Okay. Thanks, Bill. With two acquisitions in supply chain management, the other one is in MDM. Now you evaluate Pivotree's skill set, and what other opportunity do you see that a company could potentially build or acquire down the road?
Great question. I would say one of the things I've done, to date now is try to simplify the business. We're not talking about five categories. Right now, we're in three business units that we really wanna ramp up and scale. There's a couple of things that we think we can add into existing business units to broaden what they do inside the business unit, and also create more scale. I think we're gonna double down in supply chain. I think there's more things we can do in that area, more platforms that we can support and build out the capabilities. The biggest challenge that business has is scaling the human resource part of it as we start to transition into more of their recurring revenue, more of their IP. It's gonna take a little while.
I think it's gonna continue to be a people-dependent business. This is, by the way, the global challenge. Finding skilled technical people in these areas is a global challenge. It's why people are coming to us, is we now have bench strength in these critical segments. One of the other ones I'll throw out as an example, and it really, it speaks to the core of our frictionless future, we're gonna be getting more into integration as a service. You know, this is that ability to more seamlessly on-ramp, that agility to switch applications. Some of the investments we're looking at are either organically building it ourself, with a couple of our vendor relationships, but we've also been engaging in a number of M&A acquisitions or M&A conversations.
I think that would probably fall into either our commerce or our MDM space initially, but that could be an area that becomes its own business unit in the longer term.
Okay, thanks. The last question is also a modeling question. Like, how do I look at the seasonality of the two acquired business? Do they follow the same pattern as the Pivotree's professional services? Or how to look at the seasonality, just for the modeling purpose?
I'll turn it over to Mo, who's been spending a lot more time in Excel spreadsheets looking at those things.
Yeah, thanks, Bill. Thanks, John. I mean, in professional, they are largely professional services businesses as we had described, so there's typically gonna be the ebbs or flows that we, you know, we have visibility for a certain period of time. I think as you go into Q4, typical professional services, kind of closer to the end of Q4, you start seeing the holidays kick in, so we try to manage that, and we try to find resources to fill some of the gaps to keep the revenue stream going. We have that as a headwind, and as kind of budget approvals and contracts probably don't get signed closer to the end of Q4, they probably start in Q1 and kick off end of, you know, start ramping up in Q1.
You'll see that seasonality probably more in Q4, Q1, and probably some summer months in an impact in kind of Q3 range. You'll see it. I think you can probably assume it's typical industry type professional services trends. Nothing materially different.
Thanks, guys. I pass the line.
Thanks. Our next question is from Daniel Rosenberg from Paradigm Capital. Please go ahead, Daniel.
Thanks. Good morning, Bill and Mo. My first question was just around the momentum you're seeing. It was nice to see sequential growth, but we're already, you know, well into Q4. I was just wondering how your thoughts are around keeping that momentum as we look into the holiday season and early next year.
Why don't I take it, and then Mo can pick up on the back of it. We had great Q1, Q2 bookings. We had a good Q3, but I think, you know, one of the things you'll note if you dig into it, we had about CAD 6.8 million in bookings in Q3, and part of the reason was a couple of really monster deals slid into the beginning of Q4. They closed fairly quickly at the start of Q4. If we look, you know, second half of the year, I think we're gonna have an equally strong bookings half. I think, you know, as we mentioned, we're already pacing at this point in the year ahead of last year's total bookings.
The bookings momentum has remained pretty solid. I think one of the things I just want to get everyone sort of cautioned and conditioned for is you're obviously going to see a bit of a pick up in the pipeline in Q4. You're gonna see the benefits of you know multiple months of acquisition revenue showing up. You're going to see the seasonal benefits. I mean this is always our peak period on kind of the recurring revenue. The Q4 is going to look quite strong, but again you can all run your own math and realize you know why that is. I would say that you know just temper that a little bit with all of that happening in Q4, not all of it when fully normalized.
We're still gonna have a great Q1 compared to, you know, last year, but I think this is one of the areas you wanna be cautious about, you know, seeing all the acquisitions and Q4, everything converging, all at the same time in our peak season. Obviously, Q4 will be strong. It shouldn't be a surprise 'cause I'm sure all of you can do the math on, you know, what we just bought, and a lot of it hits in Q4.
Okay. You know, you do highlight that there's some degree of you know, just conservativeness in terms of when things turn and you know, we could see strong growth in managed services. As far as our KPIs go, it's really the bookings number that's the leading indicator, or how do you see other KPIs evolving, like net revenue retention, and that balance between new logos and current customers?
Let Mo handle that.
Yeah, I mean, obviously bookings is one indicator, and I know it was lighter than we have seen in the past, and then in the recurring side. I think the other leading indicator that we are seeing momentum in is our pipeline. We don't share that number, but some of the pipeline that we're driving around our own products, we've had, again, some that Bill mentioned, not material enough that we're gonna kinda call out and quantify and share. But some of our digital products and solutions, they're starting to pick up. We've put them through.
We've invested. I think this year and in prior years to build some of our digital solutions, and those investments in the product team that we made this year, the team's done a great job to put them through the process to commercialize them, work with the sales team, get them ready to market. We're seeing that pipeline grow, and those are really the ones that we're looking to. It aligns with our frictionless commerce journey, aligns with where we're looking to support our customers, and they'll be critical for us to also deliver revenues at very strong gross margins. That's the other leading indicator that obviously we're looking at. Look at the net revenue retention number.
It's improved from last quarter, and I mean, within there, you could point to, you know, one or two clients that just melted. Not gone, melted, that have just reduced some spend, but we sold them some supply chain services recently. Those are some of the headwinds that we saw in the net revenue retention. Pipeline is a leading indicator for us that we watch very carefully and continue to grow in areas that will drive future recurring business. We're just really waiting to get it to scale before we start sharing and quantifying numbers and the timelines on them.
I think one of the things I'd kinda pick up on, Daniel, is this challenge we've had probably since the IPO. Folks really wanna identify us as one or the other. If you know, if we're a SaaS company and a recurring revenue company, then it's MRR and it's net revenue retention, and it's those things. If you're a professional services company, it's these other things. The reality is we're not one or the other. We've been consistently both, and we've maintained from the beginning our professional services leads us to great insights from customers. It helps us understand where their biggest challenges and gaps are, and we look for repeatability, and that's been a consistent theme. We're not inventing products in a vacuum in an ivory tower.
We're inventing those products with the help of our customers. You need to do both. Over the next decade, I think we're gonna constantly be moving between the PS being more important and the MS. As categories start to mature, you would expect to see more recurring revenue as you stabilize the kind of work you're doing for customers in those areas. As you do more new, as you're introducing more change, it's always gonna lead with PS. I think this is what's materially different about us than anyone else in the market, is we're not investing in a single product. A lot of the folks that, you know, you may have tried to compare us to in the past as a group that are pure recurring revenue software businesses, they're invested in one product.
You would expect that product just to continually grow and develop over time. We're talking about multiple business units, multiple products, and really transforming and changing with the marketplace. It's always going to move between PS and recurring revenue. The type of recurring revenue will change between our IP, assembled products and solutions delivered as a service. We're always gonna be managing a balance, and I think that's been hard for the market to really evaluate because it seems like the tools and multiples seems to lend themselves to one or the other.
I think, you know, we had a shift for a little while where people said, "Oh, maybe we should be using PS multiples for you guys," but I don't know too many PS companies that run 60% of their revenue as recurring and invest as much as we do in product development. But I also appreciate that some of our NRR numbers and some of our recurring bookings have people concerned, "Well, are they really a recurring revenue business?" You know, again, we encourage you guys to keep asking the questions, but the answers aren't gonna change materially around it's gonna shift between the two. It's by design, it's part of the strategy, and we're gonna continue to build both PS and recurring revenues together, and they'll shift in importance.
Again, I think we're still 65% recurring right now, but we've made a bunch of investments to accelerate the PS to get more insights and give us more, you know, fuel to build our next set of recurring revenue initiatives.
Great. I could appreciate you taking the long-term view there. My last question was around the Oracle platform. Just as an industry,
You know, it's nice to see you yourselves kind of retool and, you know, the VTEX partnership and look towards new technologies to replace, you know, legacy businesses. How do you see that technology evolving? Is this something that ultimately, you know, one of these new technologies is gonna take over the entire thing? How long does that transition take? You know, when does stabilization in the market occur for a platform like that?
I think that's the $24 million question, Daniel, and I think that's part of why we've chosen to do what we're doing, which is I think you're gonna see a lot of ebb and flow in the world of technology and converging technologies. I think one of the increasing trends you're seeing now is a shift away from monoliths. You're seeing a shift away from these walled gardens of software that do everything to what we call a microservices architecture, and that starts generally by being headless, which means you really separate some of the front-end experience from some of the back-end processes. You know, our thesis is, yep, these are the technologies that are working today, and they'll continue to evolve and grow and mature and increase market share, but there will be more advances, more change in tech.
One of the principal reasons that we are in the data management business is because we view all of these different applications as just structured data with orchestration layers. I think you're gonna increasingly see that as more and more capabilities around data automation and data ingestion, transformation, and orchestration. I think you're gonna see an increased emphasis on those data flows and less investments in massive structured application migrations because they're expensive, they create huge technical debt, and they reduce your agility. You know, there's probably another generation or two of these, but our long-term view is really starting to get a handle on orchestrating data movements, leveraging machine learning and AI. You know, that's the next decade.
That's where we're building foundations today, building thought leadership around it, but then maintaining our capabilities to help our customers transition through their current incarnations. Yeah, today it's VTEX, some more SAP. I wouldn't be surprised if you see us in BigCommerce this year. We're hearing a lot of that, which is very much a MACH Alliance, microservices architecture, and a headless, you know, number of our big customers. Even some of the acquisitions we've done, talking to their customers, they've already started going through some transformations, and I think we'll be engaged in some of those discussions. I think what you're going to see change is, you know, that was like a 15-plus year run for Oracle. I don't know that these things are gonna survive 15 years anymore.
I think these timeframes of transformations are gonna be shorter. That's why part of our philosophy is to adapt relentlessly.
Very interesting. I appreciate the color.
Thank you. Our next question's from Rob Young, Canaccord Genuity. Please go ahead, Rob.
Hey, Rob.
Hi. Good morning. Hopefully you can hear me. I don't wanna rehash too much because you already covered a bunch of this, but I just think I'm a little bit confused around the cadence of the professional services and managed services. As I understand or what I've gathered is that, you know, Q4, there's a bit of a lockdown dynamic, and so maybe a little MS heavy, but then a resurgence in PS in the first half of next year, and then managed services sort of coming to the fore in the second half. Is that a good summary, or did I misread?
Yeah, Rob, I would kind of say, you know, I think the PS's resurgence as we're seeing it today, we saw it on the results for Q3. We're seeing a very strong Q4. I think we're hitting record levels organically in professional services off of the strong record bookings that we had in the first year, obviously just time for it to convert to revenue. Then you're gonna get the added impact of, you know, not quite a full quarter of both, but definitely a full quarter of Bridge and partial of Codifyd and largely professional service. No, I think just a bit different where professional services is hitting strong levels, you know, on the back of the bookings.
Managed services will have some seasonality in Q4 that you know is typical. For managed services, we help them through the holiday season. That's probably what you should expect. Obviously we go through some of the seasonalities and stuff that we just discussed in answering a prior question. Managed service is really around back to the digital services, the products that we're talking about and how we're gonna drive those, continue to scale the pipeline and convert them to managed service. We've got the Codifyd opportunity, which brings us a portfolio of customers that currently aren't supported from a managed service perspective by Codifyd, and that's where we saw the partnership really well. They do professional service as well.
We have a large portion of our data management business being, you know, with managed services. Those are the upsides that we see and the opportunity for us to turn it around on the managed service side.
Okay. Great. Thanks. That's really helpful. I guess last year you suggested that Q4 is a time when a lot of your customers lock down, and there's a lot of, you know, excitement going into Black Friday. Is this a different year given all of the supply chain issues? I think Shopify said that, you know, Black Friday could be a drawn-out, less of a single point in time. Like, does that change how you're thinking about Q4 this year?
Yeah, I think it's a good question, Rob, and one frankly, you know, I kind of alluded to it in our, in the letter I wrote. Nothing's been normal for a while. Like, last year, the lead-up to Black Friday was drawn out. I mean, people were pushing online much earlier. We saw bumps, you know, far before the traditional Black Friday. We saw it sustain for a while, stores started to open, things started to change again. I'd say the reverse is starting to happen this year. One of the things we're hearing from folks is promotions are gonna be less because the inventory's not there, so they don't need or wanna promote.
The amount of spike that you might have seen in the past we're hearing may not be the same kind of spike this year, most of it having to do with supply chain. It's gonna be interesting, 'cause again, I don't think there's anything normal about this year for our customers. The supply chain has really gotten messed up. I think they're still gonna have a strong quarter, and I think we're hearing they're gonna have decent years overall, but we're hearing that they are gonna have supply chain issues that'll affect the way they promote and how hard they promote, which ultimately will then impact how much infrastructure they need and how much services they need just to manage that demand. Most of our customers amped up in anticipation of some increase.
What I don't have handy is how much, and relative to last year, how much more capacity did they add in anticipation of the quarter. I do sense the level of anxiety is not peaking like it was last year. I mean, we had customers' anxiety levels were peaking around the load that had started to hit it because of the pandemic and store closures. That anxiety does not seem to be at the same levels this year.
Interesting. Maybe the last question I'll ask you is just in the investor letter, which I thought was fantastic by the way, it's always good to get a description of the business in, you know, real world layman's terms, I think, and so appreciated that a lot. The commentary on M&A I got a sense a little bit backward-looking, and so maybe if you could update, you know, what the pipeline looks like. I think you said 50 names in the pipeline, 20 under NDA, but that was all backward-looking, and you said that a bunch of VTEX opportunities dropped out, and so maybe can you just, you know, refresh the pipeline, and then I'll pass the line.
Yeah. Look, I'm being very cautious now going forward about giving too much future-looking, 'cause I don't think it served us well this past year. As you guys well know, I'm still a rookie being a public market CEO, and you know, what's good to talk about and what isn't. I think what's fair to say is we've built a capability. Probably the piece I'm getting more excited about, Rob, is my business unit leaders have now had a year's worth of experience vetting those 50 deals. That wasn't just Bill Di Nardo and the corp dev team. That was the general managers in the business units hands-on, them surfacing their own. Look, candidly, the best deals we're getting are coming from our network.
The deals we're able to get done are coming from, you know, one or two degrees of separation, and our GMs getting out in the marketplace, building relationships and identifying targets. The part I'm more excited about is, it's the ratio that I want to improve. I think, you know, building a funnel of 1,000 to get two done is inefficient, but, you know, I'd love to get another few done next year, and I'd probably love to do it without having to vet 100, because it takes a lot of effort to vet 100. The way to do that is just to have better qualified stuff come into the pipeline. I wouldn't be surprised again if, you know, we're in that kind of 50+ range for next year.
The machine is working, and I would say there's a couple that I really wanna push the team to surface and get done, particularly in supply chain. I think we need to get that business to scale, and we've got a few in the pipeline right now, and I think as the new year starts to ramp up again and we get these digested, you know, you'll start to hear from us more on the M&A. It's an engine now. Like, it's one that we know we can dial up or down. Some of it too will be, you know, in response to available capital. You know, we'll get probably the next one or two deals done before we then have to take a look at, you know, how do we do the third one.
As you know, Rob, 'cause we've talked about it, like I'm not going to dilute the business at, you know, CAD 5 share prices, which means if I have to do acquisitions on cash, then, you know, we've got to get more operating leverage that we can afford to fund it. I'm also not going to dip into that, you know, large amount of credit capacity we have while we continue to run, you know, significant EBITDA losses. I think we've got to be selective about where we choose to invest our cash. Right now we're investing hard to grow, a lot in organic, a lot in ingest. I've got available capital to do one or two more deals, before we then have to reevaluate, you know, what does deal three and four have to look like from a structure perspective.
you know, for now I'd say confidently we've got, you know, probably 20 deals that are in different stages. I'm not worried about whether we could ramp up another 50 to evaluate next year. The machine's working. The question will be more, can we find the next two with a similar profile in the next, you know, 90 days to 180 days? There's stuff in the pipeline. I probably won't say much more than that.
That's great color. Maybe I'll try to push you further on one element there, just around valuation.
Yeah.
You know, the two, it seems like you're pretty happy with the two you've already executed on since you've been public, and so do you think that that type of valuation is out there, or valuation's getting better from your perspective or worse, or is there anything you can share on valuation, whether you can do more like this? I'll-
Look, I think you probably know better than I do what valuations are doing out there. When you look at even what we're trading at, you know, it gets very difficult for us to look at software and SaaS companies. We're seeing guys that are trading at 10x multiples. I'm hearing about companies with CAD 2 million of revenue that are, you know, looking for CAD 40 million, CAD 50 million valuations. I can't in good conscience, you know, where we are right now, come to the market and recommend that we do those kind of deals. What you're seeing us do, Rob, and I think it fits our thesis really well. We're acquiring skills and capabilities in an area, and the immediate overlay that we apply to those is our product management and our managed platform, infrastructure and capabilities.
We take the market knowledge that we find in these PS firms, and we build the recurring. When I can pay 1x in a single multiple of EBITDA for those, and I can build the recurring that the market seems to value at 10x, that seems like a level of accretion that, you know, the market doesn't generally understand. I can build CAD 2 million of revenue a lot cheaper than I seem to be able to buy it when it comes to recurring and software. Now, I'll tell you, there's some amazing software we've been evaluating that I think could be a real catalyst, and at some point, we may end up just having to plug our nose because we won't have those skills per se to build that software.
A lot of the recurring revenue things we wanna build, I think we can build them cheaper than we can buy them. Yeah, we've looked at a bunch of those, Rob, and those valuations right now to buy on the market at our current value seem out of reach, but I'm really confident we can build those, in-house.
Okay. Thanks a lot, guys.
Thank you. There's no further questions, so I'll turn it back to Bill to close.
Listen, thank you again for joining our earnings call. I think this is our fourth one. We continue to you know learn and hopefully improve in terms of the level of information we're sharing. I do wanna thank the analysts and the investors who spend time with us and have been helping educate us. The genesis of that letter was just hearing repeatedly from folks that they still weren't quite understanding the business and the business model. Given the feedback I seem to be getting on it, we'll continue to issue something just again really to help people understand what we're building and how we're gonna get there. I understand the limits of MD&As and the quarterly earnings reports, but I do think it's important the investment community understands the business we're trying to create.
It's a decade-long journey. Thanks to, you know, Robert, Daniel, Jesse, and John. You've all helped contribute to shaping, you know, the way we're communicating, and I'm looking forward to getting your direct feedback on things we can do to improve it. Thanks for joining us, everyone. Happy holidays to those of you in the US, and we look forward to talking to you again in the new year about our Q4 results. Take care.