Thank you, everyone, for joining us today, and welcome to Wishpond's 2025 Fiscal First Quarter Financial Results Conference Call. My name is Paviter Sangha, Investor Relations, and joining me on the call today is Ali Tajskandar, Chairman, Founder, and CEO of Wishpond, and Adrian Lim, the company's CFO. This call is being recorded. We will be having a question-and-answer session at the end of the call, which will be limited to analysts only. I trust that everyone has received a copy of our financial results press release that was issued earlier today. Listeners are also encouraged to download a copy of our quarterly financial statements and management discussion and analysis from sedarplus.ca. Please note portions of today's call, other than historical performance, include statements of forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws. These statements are made under the safe harbor provisions of those laws.
Please refer to today's press release and in our management discussion and analysis for a disclosure of risks and uncertainties. We provide forward-looking statements solely for the purpose of providing information about management's current expectations and plans relating to the future. We do not undertake or accept any obligation or undertaking to release publicly any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statements to reflect any change in our expectations or any change in events, conditions, assumptions, or circumstances on which any such statement is based, except if it is required by law. We use terms such as adjusted EBITDA, annualized Revenue Run Rate, and Monthly Recurring Revenue on this conference call, which are non-IFRS and non-GAAP measures. For more information on how we define these terms, please refer to the definitions set out in our management discussion and analysis. With that, let me turn the call over to Mr.
Ali Tajskandar, Chairman and CEO.
Thank you very much, Paviter. Good day, everyone. We truly appreciate everyone for joining us today. On today's call, I will first provide some commentary about our overall vision going forward for the new AI-driven Wishpond. The marketing and sales landscape has been fundamentally reshaped by artificial intelligence. AI has completely changed how organizations are doing their sales and marketing. We are entering a new era for how businesses attract and engage with customers. We imagine a time when marketing and sales teams would not have to waste precious hours on repetitive tasks and when data-driven decisions could be made in an instant. Today, as the power of AI becomes more accessible and sophisticated, that future is quickly becoming our reality, and Wishpond is leading the way. Wishpond is building a fully autonomous AI-enabled marketing and sales engine that is reshaping how businesses grow and thrive.
Picture a business where every step of the buyer's journey is handled automatically and intelligently. No manual work required. That's the vision driving us at Wishpond. We are aiming to build a fully autonomous AI-enabled marketing and sales platform that takes a prospective customer from the moment they show interest all the way to a finalized deal. By freeing professionals from tedious tasks, we aim to empower them to spend their energy on strategic thinking, creative ideas, and building genuine relationships. Wishpond's fully autonomous marketing and sales platform will be fully automated. The platform will be able to work 24/7 and will greatly reduce manual work, require minimal human intervention, and the platform will not require marketing expertise. The platform will provide data-driven recommendations and decision-making powered by AI. Any professional, entrepreneur, or business owner will be able to use the platform without having to be an expert in marketing.
Also, the platform will be scalable and cost-effective. Our platform will handle increasing demands without requiring an increase in resources, providing the same capabilities as large marketing teams and agencies at a fraction of the cost. The platform will be powered by Wishpond's AI agents. Wishpond has already built foundational components of the platform and will continue to leverage its revolutionary AI agentic technology to build out more AI-powered marketing and sales solutions. Together, our AI products will connect and synchronize marketing efforts across multiple tools and campaigns, leading to the most comprehensive marketing and sales platform for businesses of all sizes. The following AI tools and agents are already live and in use by customers today: AI Website Builder, AI Ad Manager, SalesCloser AI, and AI Email Responder.
We're also beta testing the following AI agents for new customers and partnerships: AI Customer Support Agent and AI Call Receptionist Agent. We have plans to build additional tools such as AI Newsletter Generator and AI Analytics. This vision is more than just a technology roadmap. It's our commitment to helping businesses of all sizes grow faster, reduce costs, and achieve more consistent results. We believe that the best kind of technology doesn't replace people; it elevates them. When AI handles the routine, it gives humans the freedom to do what we do best: connect, innovate, and lead. Our AI agents are a key component of our fully autonomous AI-enabled marketing and sales platform. I want to demonstrate how Wishpond can be involved with the entire customer acquisition journey, from website creation to lead generation, closing the deal, and delivering exceptional customer support.
Our suite of AI marketing and sales tools can cover every stage of the process to streamline the customer journey, starting with building a website with Wishpond's AI Website Builder, then launch ad campaigns with our Braxy AI ad management solution. Businesses can then use Wishpond to quickly build high-converting landing pages. To keep leads engaged, businesses also leverage our email marketing tools with personalized and automated email campaigns. Our AI Email Responder instantly delivers personalized replies. When it's time to convert the lead to a customer, Wishpond's Calendar Booking Tool allows businesses to schedule appointments with their leads easily and effectively. Businesses can use our SalesCloser Virtual Sales Agent, which can take a prospective lead through a sales call or even a virtual product demo using the power of AI.
Now, with payments integrated directly into the platform, businesses can process transactions smoothly, making it simple for customers to make a purchase. After the deal is closed, our AI Customer Support Agent can step in to provide round-the-clock assistance, ensuring that customers are always satisfied. Lastly, our Referral marketing solutions simplify the creation and execution of referral promotions across platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, websites, and more. Together, these tools create a cohesive AI-powered ecosystem that helps businesses automate, scale, and thrive, all while reducing operational costs and increasing efficiency. With Wishpond, businesses don't just manage the customer journey; they perfect it, creating smoother, faster, and more profitable experiences at every touchpoint. Wishpond has undergone a remarkable transformation over the past year. The company is evolving from a traditional digital marketing software provider into an AI-powered marketing and sales platform that can drive customer acquisition and sales automation at scale.
Furthermore, the transition to AI is enabling the company to grow its target market from SMB customers to businesses of all sizes. This has been a multi-year effort requiring significant resources, time, and energy. I am proud of the significant progress that we have made as Wishpond evolves into a fully AI-driven company with an eye on long-term growth. Let's look at some of the accomplishments that the company has achieved through this transformation to an AI-driven company. Over the past year, Wishpond has taken several strategic actions to transform into an AI-driven company, including developing and launching our AI Website Builder, Braxy AI, and AI Email Responder. We also launched our AI-powered SalesCloser product, which quickly achieved $1 million in Annual Recurring Revenue, ARR. We deployed over 2,600 AI-powered agents for more than 150 customers, a trend that is just accelerating.
Successfully integrated SalesCloser into internal sales processes, leading to greater profitability and ability to scale the organization without significant cost increases. A strategic shift towards AI customer opportunities and away from lower-margin legacy customers. In fact, with SalesCloser AI, we already see significantly higher margins than we've seen historically with our other products and offerings. A refocused sales strategy centered on AI agentic products, leading to the development and beta testing of AI Call Receptionist Agent and AI Customer Support Agent. Also, significant investment in AI technology, including time, capital, and resources dedicated to innovation, all towards the goal of building a fully autonomous marketing and sales platform. In addition, we've strengthened our go-to-market strategy with a focus on improving profitability, reducing churn, and maximizing long-term customer value. Collectively, these initiatives have positioned Wishpond as a more profitable, forward-looking, and AI-driven business.
I would now like to provide an update on the success of SalesCloser AI. SalesCloser AI is Wishpond's virtual AI sales agent that can engage in conversations and presentations in real time through various meeting applications. It can deliver personalized, round-the-clock sales calls and product demos 24/7 to engage leads, close deals, and deliver insights in 10 different languages. Actually, I think it's 15 and growing now. SalesCloser can also be adapted for use across a diverse range of industries such as software as a service, professional services, financial services, education, travel and hospitality, insurance, and more. We are pricing SalesCloser between CAD 250-CAD 2,000 per month for anywhere from 16- 200 hours of virtual sales agent usage.
Already, we have clients that we've onboarded that are gradually increasing to substantially higher revenue per month than those amounts, something that in the past we haven't had large clients like that. Importantly, SalesCloser AI operates at gross margins at over 85%, which makes it highly accretive to our overall margin profile. As customers use more hours, the MRR also increases. We believe SalesCloser will have a positive impact on our overall MRR in the future. As we announced yesterday, I'm proud to announce that SalesCloser has achieved $1 million in ARR, and we continue to see strong customer adoption. The solution has quickly become Wishpond's fastest-growing product to date, with the majority of its growth occurring in 2025. Of the $1 million, roughly $700,000 of it was achieved in the past four and a half months.
As of today, the platform serves over 150 customers and has deployed more than 2,600 AI-powered agents. This significant milestone reflects the growing demand for AI-driven sales automation solutions across industries. The continued success of SalesCloser AI underscores its value in helping businesses improve efficiency, reduce customer acquisition costs, and scale sales operations. To continue accelerating SalesCloser's adoption, we have been actively exploring new sales outreach initiatives and strategic channel partnerships. One of the standout initiatives has been our recently launched SalesCloser White- Label Reseller Program, which has quickly gained significant traction. This program allows agencies and businesses to brand and resell SalesCloser as their own, opening up new revenue streams for our partners while simultaneously expanding our market reach.
The White- Label Program has proven to be an effective way to scale adoption across a variety of industries, from marketing agencies to e-commerce platforms and B2B service providers. Partners have been able to leverage the power of the powerful capabilities of SalesCloser , personalized sales calls, product demos, and multilingual support under their own brand, enhancing their value propositions to clients and accelerating their growth. The success of this program is reflected not only in the increasing number of new partners joining, but also in the expanding diversity of the industries adopting SalesCloser . We've seen a notable uptick in demand as businesses recognize the potential to enhance their sales processes with AI-powered automation while retaining control over their brand identity.
The program will allow us to significantly extend our market footprint without bearing the full responsibility of direct sales and marketing, creating a win-win scenario for both Wishpond and our partners. One of the key areas we've also been focused on is developing a strategic patent portfolio around our SalesCloser AI technology, which will be essential in strengthening our competitive edge and ensuring long-term market leadership. In particular, we have been developing and filing a comprehensive set of patents around the conversational AI technology behind SalesCloser. Let me walk you through some of the critical patents that we filed. First, we have filed a non-provisional utility patent entitled Virtual AI Representative to protect the underlying technologies of our SalesCloser AI platform that can perform automated demos, calls, and presentations.
Second, we have filed a non-provisional utility patent entitled Enhanced State Manager in a Virtual AI Representative. This technology improves the ability of AI systems to manage complex real-world conversations, addressing challenges such as interruptions, tangential topics, and premature conversation endings. Third, we have filed a non-provisional utility patent application entitled Human Takeover in a Virtual AI Representative, which allows human operators to seamlessly assume control of a call from an automated AI call agent when necessary. As we continue to expand and refine our patent portfolio, we're confident that it will not only enhance our product offering, but also increase the overall value of our company. These patents protect our innovations and ensure that we are well-positioned to capitalize on the growing demand for AI-driven sales solutions. I will provide additional insight into our forward-looking outlook later in the call.
For now, I'd like to turn it over to our CFO, Adrian, who will review the financial results for the quarter. After that, I will return to discuss our 2025 outlook. Adrian?
Thank you, Ali, and thank you to everyone for joining us on the call this morning. I am pleased to report that we achieved strong results for the quarter ended March 31st, 2025. Wishpond achieved quarterly revenue of CAD 4.1 million during Q1 2025 compared to CAD 6.1 million in Q1 2024. Our revenue was impacted by the transition to an AI-driven company, including a reduction to our legacy sales team, adjustment to our sales processes, and the reduction of a lower-margin legacy customer. However, these changes were necessary to position Wishpond for long-term success as an AI-driven company.
We are confident that we will see renewed revenue growth in the second half of 2025 as our AI solutions gain traction with the expanding adoption of SalesCloser AI, the success of our White- Label Program, and the ongoing development of new AI-driven solutions. Our strong customer demand, a growing sales pipeline, and strategic partnerships will contribute to this acceleration as we continue to scale our business and capitalize on emerging opportunities. Wishpond achieved gross profit of CAD 2.7 million in Q1 2025 compared to CAD 4.1 million in Q1 2024. The reduction in gross profit is primarily due to lower revenues in the period. Wishpond achieved a gross margin percentage of 67% during Q1 2025, in line with 68% in Q1 2024. During Q1 2025, Wishpond achieved adjusted EBITDA of -CAD 177,000 compared to +CAD 290,000 in Q1 2024.
Adjusted EBITDA was negatively impacted in Q1 due to the lower revenues in the quarter and accounting, audit, and tax-related professional fees that occurred in the first half of the year. Taking a look at the balance sheet for the company, as of March 31st, 2025, Wishpond had CAD 928,000 in cash and debt of CAD 1.8 million compared to cash of CAD 1.1 million and debt of CAD 1.3 million at December 31st, 2024. Wishpond renewed its CAD 6 million secured revolving operating credit facility with National Bank of Canada on August 1st, 2024. Wishpond has solid monthly recurring revenue and a very good visibility of revenue and cash flow. The company is currently able to continue growing without the need for additional equity or debt capital raises. As of the end of the first quarter on March 31st, 2025, the company had 58,542,920 fully diluted securities issued and outstanding.
In addition to selling SalesCloser to external customers, we see an enormous opportunity to use SalesCloser for our own purposes and lead generation and sales development for Wishpond sales. Traditionally, Wishpond has relied on increasing the number of salespeople to drive growth, which has come with its challenges. Hiring, training, and retaining sales staff is time-consuming, expensive, and inefficient. Furthermore, employee turnover and the need for continuous training also creates additional burdens. The salesperson-dependent growth model posed headwinds that slowed down our ability to scale efficiently. Utilizing SalesCloser AI for our own internal sales processes allows us to scale without the need for a large sales team. Internally, we have begun accelerating the use of SalesCloser for Wishpond's own product demos and sales.
SalesCloser is now capable of handling most of the initial sales development and demo work, freeing up our salespeople to focus on finalizing and closing the deals. Overall, our sales capacity has the potential to increase significantly, reducing the need for additional hires. Where a salesperson used to handle around two qualified sales calls a day, they can now potentially manage up to 15-20 calls, thanks to the automation provided by SalesCloser . Not only is this more cost-effective as the AI virtual agent is much cheaper than hiring additional staff, but it also improves gross margins and enhances our operational efficiency. We believe this continued implementation will allow us to further streamline operations and reduce the need for additional headcount. Looking ahead, our vision is to transform the traditional salesperson function, enabling businesses to leverage AI-driven sales capabilities.
Going forward, we are not expecting to make any more cuts to our sales team. Our SalesCloser and salesperson hybrid sales model is highly scalable, allowing Wishpond to increase sales capacity without the proportional increase in costs associated with expanding a human sales team. We believe the combination of highly effective sales personnel with SalesCloser is the best solution to achieving profitable growth going forward. We expect the increase in productivity of our sales team, paired with the acceleration of SalesCloser , to be a critical growth driver for our business in 2025. Looking forward, we are excited about the future. We believe that our transition towards an AI-driven model will continue to drive strong growth and profitability. This concludes my financial update, and I will turn the call back over to Ali.
Thank you so much.
Before we proceed, I think one of the comments that you just covered was about the use of SalesCloser AI for augmenting our own sales capabilities and allowing each of our sales team members to be as effective as maybe five to 10 account executives of the past. I'm going to quickly share my screen and play a two-minute segment of an actual interaction on a demo that was led by AI. SalesCloser AI actually gave a demo of SalesCloser AI to someone. And then you see towards the end, there's going to be a segment where an account executive actually joins the call and takes it over and closes the deal. I think it might put things in more perspective. Can you see my screen?
Yes, Ali, we can see it.
Sure. One of my colleagues might join us too.
We'll cover how it can fit your business needs, from automating calls to scheduling. To customize the demo, can you tell me a bit more about your business?
We provide IT services and cybersecurity.
That's a great area to use AI. What got you interested in learning more about SalesCloser AI?
I saw ads on social media.
Let me tell you a little more about us. SalesCloser AI helps businesses like yours maximize opportunities and grow cost-effectively. It can handle outbound calls, inbound inquiries, and schedule meetings, making it perfect for your IT and cybersecurity services. Our agents can work 24/7, engaging. I'll quickly show you how you can create a new agent. For this demonstration, I'll go ahead and choose from templates. We'll choose the inbound call template. Since you're ready to proceed, the next step is to set up the agent's details.
You can give it a name, choose the language and voice, and even click "Interested in most of what we offer." The next step is to schedule a follow-up call with someone from our team. They can answer any remaining questions and talk about the next steps. When would be a good time for you to meet for a kickoff call?
Thanks, Morgan. I'll take it from here. Hi, Anil. How are you?
Hi. Good and you?
I'm good, thanks. What do you think of the demo?
Oh, it was a surprise. How Morgan conducted herself, and she made questions, and I answered, and then she kept that information that I provided. It was impressive.
It's pretty cool, right? Yeah, we've gotten pretty great feedback on it so far.
Right now, I'm doing everything. I was in the process of recruiting someone as a part-time commission-based salesperson.
Oh, yeah.
I saw this in an ad on social.
In here as well. Yeah, I'm looking forward to, yeah, to getting this project off the ground with you. I think when we look at a sort of a project like yours, when there's just like the only thing that's kind of missing is that lead generation and sales piece, we get pretty excited because that's really what we specialize on. I think we've got something here.
I hope the comments that Adrian was making became a little bit more clear about what exactly this vision is and already is becoming a reality in terms of how SalesCloser can be used to augment our own sales and allowing each account executive to handle a lot more loads.
In the case that you saw, the account executive was notified, and they joined for 10 minutes, closed the deal, and moved on, allowing them to get on a lot more opportunities, not waste time on no-shows or anything like that. The other thing that was also very interesting, as you saw from the comments, was how the prospect was saying how impressed they were, how engaging it was. Someone who would have hired someone else for sales now is saying, "Well, I can actually do more with less," and that's quite effective. Last thing that was of note in this video that we watched together was how people who use SalesCloser also there's an overlap with the rest of our products and services around lead generation and marketing.
This person was saying, "I also need help with generating leads and sales," and that leads into the integration of SalesCloser with the rest of our platform. Moving on. The use of AI technologies is rapidly changing the digital marketing landscape, and Wishpond is at the forefront of utilizing these new innovations to provide companies of all sizes with new advanced AI capabilities. I believe that artificial intelligence technology is disrupting much of the way people and businesses operate, and I firmly believe that AI applications are here to stay and will revolutionize the marketing industry. Our AI strategy is to launch a fully autonomous AI marketing and sales platform. We are transitioning from an all-in-one marketing suite for SMBs to a fully autonomous AI-enabled marketing and sales platform serving businesses of all sizes.
Providing advanced AI solutions to customers, we are improving SalesCloser and developing additional AI agents for call reception and customer support and other use cases, expanding Wishpond's AI product suite. Using AI to scale customer acquisition, we are streamlining the entire customer journey for our customers and internally for ourselves, as you saw, from lead generation to deal closure, using AI to enhance scalability, cost efficiency, and customer conversion. We are committed to continuous innovation. We are investing in AI-driven capabilities with new patents, platform enhancements, and specialized AI solutions. Sales team to maintain leadership in AI-enabled marketing automation. These are just some of the exciting developments that are taking place at Wishpond.
We are in a very fortunate position to be able to lead the charge in applying AI to marketing applications and to provide our clients with powerful tools that will help them grow their businesses more efficiently and profitably than was ever possible in the past. We are optimistic about the company's growth prospects, and I'm pleased to share Wishpond's key goals for 2025. Goal number one is to accelerate organic revenue growth and increase monthly recurring revenue. Two, increase utilization of SalesCloser in internal sales processes to drive sales of Wishpond's own products. Three, accelerate revenue growth of SalesCloser and other virtual AI agents to external customers. Four, improve margins, decrease churn, and increase long-term customer value. As we look ahead to the rest of 2025, we are confident in our ability to return to historical growth levels while building on the strong foundation we've established.
Our investments in technology, product development, and customer acquisition are all aligning to position us for a year of strong expansion. With the momentum we have built, we expect to see a return to growth in the second half of 2025, driven by the ramp-up in sales of SalesCloser AI and increasing sales of our Wishpond products. The demand for AI-driven sales automation is growing rapidly, and we believe that Wishpond is well-positioned to capture a significant share of this market. We expect to see higher gross margins in 2025 as we scale our business, improve operational efficiencies, and increase the value of our product offerings. We are also in a position where we can continue to fund our growth and new product launches without the need to raise additional equity or debt capital.
We expect to continue funding strategic initiatives, including product innovation and expanding our sales efforts without diluting shareholder value or taking on additional debt. In summary, we are extremely excited about the prospects for 2025. Our strategy is focused on returning to historical growth levels, further improving our profitability, and ensuring that we can fund our growth internally. We are confident that these efforts will position us for continued success in the years ahead and deliver significant value for our shareholders. Finally, I want to thank the entire team at Wishpond, whose hard work continues to elevate the company to higher levels. We want to thank our customers who rely on us to help them with digital marketing needs. Also, I'd like to thank you all for joining us on this call today. We look forward to providing an update next quarter.
I will now hand it back to Paviter for questions.
Thank you, Ali. With that, we will now open the call to questions. Just a reminder that questions will be given to analysts for priority first. To ask a question, analysts can raise their hand using the feature at the bottom of the screen. The first question comes from Daniel Rosenberg of Paradigm Capital. Please go ahead.
Hi, good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for taking my question. My first one is just around the productivity per person. I appreciate the demonstration you gave around SalesCloser and applications on using it internally. I am just wondering how you think about that resource count in your sales team right now, given the added productivity. Are you kind of at a steady state? Do you see room for adding to headcount? How do you think about deploying resources to capture that productivity gain?
Yeah, that's exactly it. Last year, at the beginning of last year, we had 40 account executives, and by the end of the year, we had decreased that number to 25, and we held off from hiring more account executives. That, as we shared in the last quarter, helped us with getting more productivity from the remaining salespeople that we had, and they were the best performers. Obviously, as the number of account executives decreases, it does put negative pressure on top-line revenue and growth. Since December to now, we've hired more account executives, and that headcount for account executives has increased to 30. Where we are right now, our strategy is to more or less maintain that and not increase a lot of headcount on sales.
Instead of that, rely on exactly what we're talking about here is use AI to get more productivity from the sales team members. That was the reason that we were also holding off from adding a lot of headcount to sales to make sure we nail a method, a mechanism to use AI to make our sales of 30 people have the productivity of 120 people, 150 people. That's precisely what we see possible right now. We're still at the early stages of it, but what we see gives us a great deal of confidence that it is the right strategy, and it's a breakthrough for us.
Thanks for that color. I was curious about the light labeling and channel partners.
I was wondering if it requires a lot of standing up from your end in terms of training the partners, getting them to understand the product, and just how are you thinking about it in terms of specific verticals or number of partners that you may be seeking out, or is there one key partner that's really kind of go forward? Just any additional color there would be appreciated.
Yeah, I think soon we'll probably have a separate update just focused on that. Since the question came up, I think it actually is probably a good idea to mention some of those updates now. Most of the resellers that have signed up for the platform so far have come inbound.
A lot of the marketing initiatives that we're doing, a lot of people are coming to us, and we see a good percentage of them being those who want to actually resell it. They're very impressed by it. They see the value. When they find out that there's a White-Label solution that we have, they get very excited about that, that, "Oh, okay, I've been selling cloud services, and I know that we need to be more active with AI, and this is exactly the right solution that I can bring to larger enterprise customers, and I would love to do that under my own brand." Those are the types of white label partnerships that we are getting right now. They're from different industries.
I think we're approaching—Adrian, correct me if I'm wrong—but I think we're approaching 20 White-Label partners as of right now. Is that about right?
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, we're very close to getting about 20, which is great. The good thing, too, is that there's a lot of diversification within that group of resellers that we're seeing. It's not just core to one vertical. It's allowing us to really diversify that as well. It's showing some very promising traction.
Perfect. Great. Just last one for me. Part of the 25 goals was return to growth, and you obviously discussed kind of having an AI-powered marketing and sales platform. I'm just wondering about the product set, as you think of it.
What is required in terms of adding functionality and further integrating AI into the platform to return to the growth levels that you want from the kind of core business, let's say? Or are you already there?
Yeah. In terms of going back to historic growth levels, with the product set that we have, we are more than covered to do that. The innovations are going to continue, and they will only add to that. We have the product set necessary for that. I think a few things ended up being headwinds for us. One was, as I mentioned, reducing the headcount on account executives kind of caught up with us. We were very hesitant in adding more headcount because we knew what we were working over the AI. Now we're at a place that we can actually leverage it. That one affected us.
Obviously, that large customer has been trailing off over the past year. That affected us. One of the items also is that one of our subsidiaries, Persist IQ, which has been a substantial part of our revenue, was negatively impacted by some of the Google changes related to email deliverability. For the most part, we think we got it under control now. That was a pretty big headwind as well. Basically, the elements for growth are there that we have enough demos and inbound and leads coming to us for all of our products. For Persis IQ and that side and the email deliverability, we're pretty much there in terms of having the solution for that. SalesCloser is also ramping up quite well. Add to it the AI element to accelerate and multiply the effectiveness of our salespeople.
We should be able to go back to our historic growth rates. We obviously have a little bit of a negative or quite a bit of negative momentum to offset. I think we expect that Q3, Q4 would be when we see the uptake and positive traction and positive MRR growth again. Adrian, do you want to add anything to that?
I think you pretty much covered it. I think just to re-highlight, too, the internal sales process that we're investing in right now, we're seeing very promising movement in that. I think that productivity will show and come to fruition in the second half of 2025. It takes a little bit of time before the new hires that we've made in Q1 and those investments will come to full impact on that top line.
That's when we expect to see that renewed growth is in the second half of 2025.
Thanks for taking my questions. I'll pass the line.
Thank you, Daniel.
Thank you. The next question comes from Gabriel Young of Beacon Securities. Please go ahead.
Thanks for taking my questions. Just a couple of things. First, Ali, I'm just curious if you have sort of a timeline in place for when you might expect all the AI functionality to be available to your existing or potential customers. How should we think about that at this point?
It's quite interesting. The CEO letter that I wrote in January, we were talking about basically our vision of fully autonomous customer acquisition platform that we want to build. It's a bit of a longer-term horizon for getting to that.
What we've actually seen in practice is that that future is closer than we thought even back in January. Our rate of progress has increased. Our productivity, even in the dev teams, has increased, some of it because of the use of AI for faster product development. They're going to come gradually, but I expect that full picture where you go in and you don't really want to even interact with the platform. You don't want to learn where things are and how the drag-and-drop editor works and what settings to change. You just want to talk to it as if you have an AI marketing chief marketing officer, and you say, "I don't know. Mother's Day just passed, but let's say Mother's Day is coming up.
I want to do something." It starts talking to you, and you say, "Okay, give me a few ideas of campaigns." It gives you a few ideas, and you say, "I like this one." Great. We need to make this change on your website. We need to launch this landing page. We need to launch this ad. The leads that you get, we need to send them some automatic emails. If someone wants to get on the call, we need to set up a SalesCloser agent for that. Does that sound like the right plan? You say, "Yeah, that's cool." Or you give it some feedback, and then it goes and builds it for you, and you're basically done. You can interact with it for refinements or for getting insights.
I think that is closer to coming to fruition than we ever thought. I surely hope that within the next 12 months, we're going to see that come to life. Obviously, some parts of it are going to come to life gradually and in weeks to come. The whole picture coming together, our hope is in the next 12 months for sure to realize that. It is a massive, massive vision. It is really transformational to the way marketing is done, marketing and sales is done.
Yeah. I'm just curious, just on all the functionality you're planning on adding, is this something that's being requested by customers or maybe asked another way? Are you losing opportunities because customers are going to competitors that might have some of these AI functionalities already?
No, I think what's interesting is that we're not losing customers because we don't have some of these functionalities. We are kind of leading the way in a lot of ways. A lot of times, customers, what they need, and we see that, is they need results, right? For example, some of the fully managed campaigns, they specifically say, "I don't want to interact with the product. Can you just run it for me?" That can be expensive. That onboarding can take a month. There's always issues potentially with human interaction, responsiveness, what the customers want, the cost increases. We know people want results, and people, as much as possible, they're too busy to want to figure out the platform, and especially an all-in-one platform that has so many moving parts. That we know.
As we're implementing these and putting it in front of customers, we're getting a very positive reaction from them. What we know people already want is the results and being able to offload the work. Now, what we're working towards is, how can we optimize it so that even internally, we need to invest fewer resources into implementing it? It's efficiency for us, but also makes it more effective for the customers so that they get the designer, they get the copywriter, they get the marketing specialist, they get the developer, all of them automatically through AI as opposed to hiring them and paying for them.
Gotcha. Just on SalesCloser , are you able to talk about—actually, before I get to that, the $1 million of ARR you've signed today, was that largely direct-driven or influenced by partners?
The partners are new, so it's not really a substantial part of that yet. Most of them, we released the partner program weeks ago. It hasn't been that long, and they're just launching. No, this has been direct. By direct, it has been a mixture of inbound marketing leads, people coming to us, and outbound. Most of it actually has been inbound-driven, people coming to us through our—whether it's advertising or just finding us because they search for AI sales agents or something like that. That demand is actually increasing every week.
Just on the pipeline then for SalesCloser , do you have a sense of what the total size of the pipeline you're looking at from an ARR perspective right now?
I don't have a specific number. I mean, unless Adrian wants to add something on that.
Before passing it on to Adrian, one thing that I can say, though, is that the numbers that we shared, for example, the CAD 1 million ARR, are even conservative because we already have clients that we've signed up that we already know they're going to grow to multiple hundred thousand dollars over the year. It is a gradual increase. The contract is already signed. We know what we're dealing with. Some of those are already actually in the bank, quote-unquote. I think that also is quite exciting because historically, except for the one large client that we had, it was very rare for us to have clients that pay more than CAD 2,000 a month. It was really rare.
Now we're having these deals that are like $800,000 for a year, $250,000 for a year, and getting more of those going for us, which is quite exciting. Adrian, any color you want to add?
Yeah. I'll just add that it's early to give a specific number in terms of what the pipeline is going to look like for the rest of 2025. What I will say is that just in the last four months, the amount of ARR growth that we experienced, we pretty much three-exited in about four and a half months, which is not a small feat. That momentum has not been slowing down. If things continue, we see that being a very large proportion of the growth driver in the second half of 2025. It's continuing to increase on a daily basis.
We've already exceeded the $1 million just from a couple of days ago, which is very promising. It's got very good traction.
It is the type of revenue that is superior, I would say, to the historic revenues that we've had. I mean, revenue is revenue, but at the same time, margins are greater. Margins are approaching 90% versus the 67%-68% that we've had. I think that's going to also push up the margin profile as a whole.
Gotcha. Thanks for the feedback. I appreciate it.
No problem.
Just before we move on to the last section, we have a few audience questions if we can get to those quickly. What percentage of the total revenue is still recurring revenue?
Pretty much all of our revenue is recurring revenue. We don't really have one-time revenue or, yeah, pretty much all of it.
Okay.
Last question. What was the impact of the previously largest legacy customer's removal in Q1 2025?
Yeah, I can take that one. The amount of the revenue is year over year. It is CAD 266,000 of a drop that is from that legacy customer. It is still a fairly substantial impact on Q1 2025. The good news is that it is kind of now behind us. Looking forward in the quarters ahead, it is going to have a less and less impact on our numbers. It can allow us to focus more on the growth and on the second half of 2025 where we are expecting to see that renewal.
Thank you. I think that is all the time we have for questions. We now pass the call back to Ali Tajskandar for closing remarks.
Yeah. Thank you very much.
I think we've definitely had some headwinds, as we talked about, some revenue decline. It is something that we take quite seriously and are working to reverse course on that. Cash flow is quite important for us. Being financially stable and not in a vulnerable position is top priority for us. I think what is also quite important is that the opportunity that we're seeking is absolutely massive. It's multiple, multiple billions of dollars markets that we're going after and have a real shot at disrupting. We already see in a lot of areas, most areas with SalesCloser , we're leading the pack. We're one of the pioneers of that field. We already see how it's impacting our own internal sales and processes. I am very, very optimistic.
I think what is important is that there's going to be some short-term disturbances, like the quarterly results on the top line not being exactly what we were hoping for. Our focus on the long term and making sure the company is in solid footing, a company that doesn't get left behind in the AI age, but leads the pack is important and we continue to invest in innovation. We're not going to make any cuts, anything when it comes to research and development, as an example. We're going to just only accelerate that. I think those are really important for us to realize what opportunity we're going after and how impactful it is that I don't see a reason why in our future we wouldn't be talking about a billion-dollar company. Obviously, it takes some time. I'm quite confident that we're going to get there.
Other than that, that's it. Once again, I want to thank everyone for joining our call today. Thank you for the analysts and the audience for your questions. Everyone, please stay safe and healthy, and we look forward to providing more updates this year. Thank you.
Thank you, everyone.