Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the PAR Technology first quarter financial results. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Chris Byrnes, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations and Business Development. Please go ahead.
Thanks, Antoine. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for PAR Technology's 2026 Q1 financial results call. Earlier today, we released our financial results. The earnings release is available on the investor relations page of our website at partech.com, where you can also find the Q1 financials presentation as well as in our related Form 8-K furnished to the SEC. Before we begin, please be advised that our remarks today will contain forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, and other factors, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. For additional information on these factors, again, please refer to our earnings release and our other reports filed with the SEC.
In addition, we will be discussing or providing certain non-GAAP financial measures today, which we believe will provide additional clarity regarding our ongoing performance. For a full reconciliation of the non-GAAP financial measures discussed in this call to the most comparable GAAP measure in accordance with SEC regulations, again, see our press release furnished as an exhibit to our Form 8-K filed this afternoon and our supplemental materials available on our website. Joining me on the call today is PAR's CEO, Savneet Singh, and Bryan Menar, PAR's Chief Financial Officer. I'd now like to turn the call over to Savneet for the formal remarks portion of the call, which will be followed by general Q&A. Savneet?
Thank you, Mr. Byrnes. Good afternoon, everybody. I'd like to start today with a core conviction. PAR has fundamentally been miscast in the public market. Historically, we've been heads down, but starting today, for the first time, we'll be providing additional forward-looking financial guidance along with our previously stated mid-teens ARR growth target because we believe in the power of what we've built and how we are building to drive true shareholder value. Today, you'll see that we're not focused on sleight-of-hand announcements, financial engineering, or AI-washing results. We're focused on execution, and we're focused on the dollars and cents that are going to drive real value to our investors and to our customers.
We fundamentally believe that our business is in an amazing position to capitalize on our future AI vision of PAR Intelligence, that we have a strong foundation shielded from perceived AI market incursions, and that the pipeline we have ahead of us is going to drive material upside to our financials. Turning to our Q1 performance. Q1 marks a good start to the year and a purposeful shift in PAR's operating strategy and execution. Our goals are clear. 1, materially improve PAR's profitability via sustained operating leverage. 2, utilize PAR Intelligence to expand TAM and long-term growth. In Q1, we scaled our AI-first restaurant and retail platform, eliminated structural cost inefficiency, expanded recurring revenue, and delivered meaningful year-over-year improvement in profitability. Total revenue for the quarter was $124 million, representing 19% year-over-year growth, driven primarily by strength across subscription services and hardware.
Importantly, we improved adjusted EBITDA by nearly 2x year-over-year, reflecting tighter cost discipline and stronger operating leverage. This theme will continue throughout the year. OpEx will decline sequentially every quarter in 2026, while ARR, gross profit, and EBITDA all continue to grow simultaneously. In Q1, ARR reached $330 million, up 16% year-over-year, with organic growth of over 11%. This performance reinforces the durability of our SaaS-based model and the increasing strategic value customers place on our omni-channel data-driven platform. Importantly, we continue to grow year-over-year while managing out the low-price customers we referenced last quarter. While gross margin was impacted by hardware-related tariff and cost pressure, we're making real progress expanding profitability. Further, we are seeing improved success employing AI across G&A functions.
OpEx as a percentage of revenue declined from 50% to 43% year-over-year, with sales and marketing at 9%, R&D at 16%, and G&A at 18% respectively. As we scale and improve our fundamentals, our progress with AI has become an increasingly important driver of momentum, especially on the product side. PAR serves multi-unit restaurant and retail operators competing in complex, margin-sensitive environments. That's exactly where our Better Together and PAR Intelligence strategy is focused. What's driving our competitive wins is not any single feature. It's the combined value of a core platform with expanded feature depth via Better Together integrations, as well as a premise of PAR Intelligence functioning as an agent harness that drives profitable actions. Together, we see our PAR Intelligence AI vision as an amplifier of our platform and future growth.
In particular, we are more bullish than ever in our ability to drive sustained profitable growth through AI. Brands moving away from legacy solutions consistently tell us the same thing. Fragmented technology stacks slow them down. When your core data lives in one platform like PAR's, you unlock the ability to deploy agents across the entire tech stack, not just with a single siloed product. PAR's multi-product enterprise deals are precisely possible because of the binding power of a modern point of sale tying together all the facets of the data tech stack. That's a structural advantage. Context equity is the cornerstone of winning in the AI era. Customers are signing near decade-long multi-product deals with PAR precisely because they know the difference between an agentic platform based on deep workflows and shallow dashboarding.
We believe these long-term contracts are a key proof point that we are becoming the trusted AI partner for our category. Let's dig into the Q1 performance in detail. On the Operator Cloud side, momentum was led by PAR POS and Data Central, with continued execution against the Burger King rollout and wins such as &pizza, Tijuana Flats, Sarku Japan, and Pizza Factory. The PAR POS Burger King implementation is running at a sustained pace of over 400 sites per month, and we have a strong plan into more than 3,000 additional sites that will go live this year.
We continue to work in lockstep with our most recent tier 1 win, Papa Johns, as we kick off their dual POS and Data Central implementation plan late this year for all of their U.S.-based restaurants. The full system will be live by the end of 2027. We are seeing exciting pipeline traction in pizza vertical, with this sector poised to be disrupted as the market is fragmented, lacking new entrants, and primarily run off legacy custom-built tech stacks. PAR POS is the foundation of our platform. We are quickly progressing with agentic OS capabilities. Across the portfolio, attach rates are the story, as nearly 90% of new operator deals in Q1 were multi-product. The average customer still uses fewer than 2 of our core software solutions. PAR is not reliant on home run tier 1 deals to meaningfully drive growth.
The continued expansion of multi-product cross-sell into existing accounts by itself provides meaningful runway. On the engagement side, ARR growth is driven by cross-sell, up-sells, and pricing actions, as well as the initial contribution from Bridg. In the quarter, Punchh had a one-time strategic contraction that we previously called out on last quarter's call. This upboarding of customers was necessary due to the materially unfavorable legacy pricing deals in place and the lack of pricing flexibility amongst a very small set of customers. In most cases, the pricing was an 80% discount from our standard subscription pricing. The proof point is that our organic ARPU and engagement increased by 27% year-over-year. Another long-term benefit will be the reduced OpEx and more efficient gross margins over time. This represents another shift in our mentality from revenue at any cost to profitable growth.
Excluding this, Punchh had a solid growth quarter with a greater than 50% win rate on competitive deals. More than 80% of engagement deals this quarter were multi-product, and the exciting thing is that is becoming the norm. In Q1, PAR Ordering closed three brand-new deals, all including multi-product attachment. The quality and scales of these wins matter. One of these wins is particularly notable. This was a competitive win, taking share directly from the largest legacy ordering provider. It's a 70-plus unit brand driving meaningful ARR. That's exactly the profile we want. Scale, intentional platform selection with the ability to sell an additional functionality and meaningful economics. Another important example is the selection by Pizza Factory. This was an all-PAR full platform deal across 100-plus locations. Adding ordering to our bag gives a strategic weapon versus POS or loyalty-only players.
Full platform plus pizza is a powerful combination, and it's a strong validation of how well our solutions work together in a high throughput, complex environments. We continue to see strong demand from brands migrating off legacy online ordering providers and standardizing on PAR Ordering. Moving to retail. We continue to see strong momentum in our retail business in the fuel and convenience space, most notably with the success of Q1 launches of Stinker Stores, H&S Energy, and Parker's. Our pipeline for the remainder of the year remains strong with several tier 1 enterprise brands in active negotiations. In Q1, we released our TouchPoint self-checkout checkout, including loyalty extension, and we're excited about the market opportunities as we expand our footprint inside the 4 walls of a C-store.
On the AI front, PAR Intelligence is now alive across nearly 1,700 retail sites, including enterprise-scale deployments at Parker's Kitchen and Cumberland Farms. We are currently in discovery mode, using real-world operator data to refine our models and eliminate hallucinations. Our roadmap is aggressive. Following this initial scale-up, we will move into the action phase, introducing agentic program management and automated campaign creation, combining the agentic insights with the autonomous ability to act instantly, showcasing the power of AI orchestration, the agentic operating system, and our vertical software. Looking further ahead, we'll add a strategy layer, incorporating external signals like weather and market conditions to guide site-level management automatically. We are exceedingly confident that we'll be the AI partner for our customers in this vertical.
Overall, Q1 reflects continued progress in retail as we scale our customers, extend our product capabilities, and embed intelligence to the platform in ways that support ARR expansion and long-term value creation. Briefly on hardware. Q1 was a remarkably strong quarter. We are ahead of plan, and the full year is tracking nicely. While tariffs continue to pressure margins at the edges, demand remains strong, and our PAR Wave terminal continues to serve as the enterprise standard during a major refresh cycle. Crucially, we are seeing continued partnership velocity with McDonald's across both hardware and services sales. I also want to update you on our acquisition of Bridg, which is an integral part of the PAR Intelligence platform. Bridg is an identity resolution platform that enables multi-unit operators to unlock the value of first-party data by resolving identity across their entire transaction base, not just loyalty members.
Today, most retailers only see a fraction of transactions through loyalty programs. Which limits measurement, personalization, and ultimately monetization to a fraction of a retailer's customer base. The value Bridg delivers to customers is best evidenced by our work with a large national retailer with over 15,000 sites, where our identity resolution supports a marketable base of 100 million customers and contributed to a reported 44% sales lift. Even in the brief time since we closed on the deal, we now have a strong pipeline across tier 1 restaurants and other national retailers and existing PAR customers. Bridg is crucial in our ability to drive AI outcomes for customers that we can monetize versus the basic dashboarding of our peers.
Before turning the call over to Bryan for a deeper dive into the numbers, I want to emphasize the importance of PAR Intelligence for our customers. PAR Intelligence is not a new point solution, and it's not a generic AI tool. It is an agent of harness that sits across and above the PAR platform, unifying data, reasoning on real operator economics, and orchestrating outcomes across the business without adding additional headcount, hours, or manual effort. Where traditional platforms stop at dashboards and alerts, PAR Intelligence moves from data to outcomes. PAR Intelligence unites data across point of sale, ordering, loyalty, payments, back-office, retail, and third-party systems. All this is powered by something incredibly hard to replicate.
PAR's ability to process more than 12 billion annual transactions, 640 million guest profiles, and over 20 years as a data backbone of the largest restaurant and retail operators in the world. PAR Intelligence leverages enterprise-level context for its reasoning, unit P&Ls, labor constraints, menu performance, and guest interactions. It executes actions through A- agents always within the defined rules of the operator. Adoption of PAR Intelligence is accelerating because the use cases are clear. The platform is moving from reporting what happened to recommending, and in some cases, automating what to do next. Customers like Parker's Kitchen, a 100-plus unit C-store chain, are seeing immediate ROI, with Parker's CEO highlighting, quote, "Better outcomes are being driven by PAR's agentic operating system." Because PAR Intelligence sits across and above the PAR platform, it is ultimately enhancing value, thereby the stickiness of our beachhead products.
Importantly, PAR does not have the same pricing exposure as some of our SaaS peers, who have a per-seat monetization construct that can be undercut by AI and its potential impact on customer team sizes. PAR overwhelmingly contracts on per store basis. The viability of this model is tied to enterprise site counts, which remain stable versus customer staffing levels. AI is not a separate initiative for PAR. It's an embedded capability that expands our platform value and supports long-term profitable growth. PAR Intelligence will not cannibalize existing per-site software revenue. Rather, the continued introduction of intelligence-driven capabilities serves as a fully incremental revenue stream. Our confidence here comes strictly from the deep engagement we have with our customers and their rapid early adoption of our first set of tools. With that, Bryan will dive into the numbers in greater detail.
Thank you, Savneet, and good afternoon, everyone. Q1 marked a strong start executing to our 2026 operating plan. We continue to drive organic growth across our products and the verticals we serve, and our disciplined management of OpEx allowed the margin contribution to flow through to the bottom line. For the fifth quarter in a row, adjusted EBITDA has grown sequentially with reported Q1 adjusted EBITDA of $8.9 million, a $4.4 million improvement compared to Q1 for the prior year. We are well positioned for accelerated trajectory as we continue to refine our operating model. Now to the financial details. Total revenues were $124 million for Q1 2026, an increase of 19% compared to the same period in 2025, including 15% subscription service revenue growth.
Net loss from continuing operations for the first quarter of 2026 was $16 million or $0.39 loss per share compared to a net loss from continuing operations of $25 million or $0.61 loss per share reported for the same period in 2025. Non-GAAP net income for the first quarter of 2026 was $3.9 million or $0.10 earnings per share, an improvement of $4.2 million compared to a non-GAAP net loss of $0.2 million or $0.01 loss per share for the prior year. Adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter of 2026 was $8.9 million, an improvement of $1.9 million sequentially from Q4 2025 and $4.4 million compared to Q1 2025. Now for more details on revenue.
Subscription service revenue was reported at $79 million, an increase of $10 million or 15% from the $68 million reported in the prior year and represents 63% of total PAR revenue. ARR exiting the quarter was $330 million, an increase of 16% from last year's Q1, with Engagement Cloud up 20% and Operator Cloud up 12%. Total organic ARR was up 11% year-over-year. Sequentially, Q1 organic ARR was flat versus Q4 2025. The incremental ARR from our continuous successful rollouts of tier 1 Operator Cloud customers was offset by planned exits in Engagement Cloud. As we previously messaged, this quarter we managed planned exits for select legacy Engagement Cloud customers who are using a portion of our engagement platform as a component of their solution.
This has enabled us to increase ARPU and de-risk forward churn by exiting these low-priced non-platform customers. As a result, organic Engagement Cloud ARPU increased 27% year-over-year. To connect overall ARR, please note at the end of Q1, we completed the acquisition of Bridg, which includes approximately $14 million of ARR. Hardware revenue in the quarter was $29 million, an increase of $7 million or 34% from the $22 million reported in the prior year. The increase was driven by both client refresh programs and partnership expansion with our legacy customer, as well as additional penetration of hardware attachment into our expanding software customer base. Professional service revenue was reported at $16 million, an increase of $3 million or 19% from the $14 million reported in the prior year.
The increase was primarily driven by an increase in installation revenue associated with the rollouts of tier 1 Operator Cloud customers. Turning to margins. GAAP gross margin was $54.5 million, an increase of $6.2 million or 13% from the $48.3 million reported in the prior year. The increase was driven by subscription service with gross margin dollars of $44 million, an increase of $4 million or 11% from the $40 million reported in the prior year. GAAP subscription service margin for the quarter was 56% compared to 58% reported in Q1 the prior year. Excluding the amortization of intangible assets, stock-based compensation, and severance, non-GAAP subscription service margin for Q1 2026 was 66% compared to 69% in Q1 2025.
As we've discussed previously, our subscription service margin continues to reflect the impact of a fixed profit contract we acquired from one of our 2024 acquisitions. The year-over-year decrease in margins reflects a shift in revenue mix driven by growth in this contract in 2025. Excluding margin related to this contract, which is not reflective of core operational performance, non-GAAP subscription service margin was 71% for the quarter, in line with what we've seen consistently in recent quarters. Hardware margin for the quarter was 22% versus 25% in the prior year. The decrease was driven by a shift in hardware product mix and higher costs related to tariffs and increased demand in processor and memory chips. Pricing enhancement plans initiated in the back half of 2025 have partially mitigated these cost increases.
We continue to expand the pricing plans in Q1, and we'll continue to evaluate our pricing strategy on a quarterly basis. We expect hardware margin % to stabilize in the lower twenties moving forward. Professional service margin for the quarter was 28% compared to 25% reported in the prior year. The increase in margin year-over-year was primarily driven by improved margin as a result of reduced third-party spending and improved cost management. In regard to operating expenses, GAAP sales and marketing was $12 million, relatively flat from the $12 million reported in the prior year, as the benefits of cost reduction actions implemented during the quarter were largely offset by non-recurring severance costs related to the restructuring events. GAAP G&A was $30.7 million, an increase of $1.4 million from the $29.3 million reported the prior year.
Increase was substantially driven by non-recurring severance costs. GAAP R&D was $22 million, an increase of $2 million from the $20 million reported in the prior year. The increase reflects continuing investment in product development, including acceleration of PAR Intelligence innovation. Operating expenses excluding non-GAAP adjustments was $54 million, a modest increase of $2 million or 4% versus Q1 2025. Exiting Q1, non-GAAP OpEx as a percent of total revenue was 43.3%, a 650 basis point improvement from 49.8% in Q1 of the prior year, demonstrating our ability to scale efficiently and drive operating leverage. As mentioned in our prior earnings call, the realignment of our business teams into 2 verticals and the accelerated adoption of our operating AI tool set across our organization has enabled us to rethink the operating model within our OpEx teams.
The realignment plan is 2-pillared: simplify the organization and simplify the operations. We finalized the realignment plan at the beginning of Q2. The phasing of this plan will predominantly be in Q2 with the remaining transitions in Q3. Operational efficiencies and additional scale are already being realized. As such, we expect operating leverage to continue to improve throughout this year, driving continued expansion of adjusted EBITDA trajectory. Now to provide information on the company's cash flow and balancing position. As of March 31, 2026, we had cash and cash equivalents of $77 million. For the 3 months ended March 31, cash used in operating activities from continuing operations was $17 million, unchanged from the prior year.
Cash usage this quarter was primarily driven by seasonal networking capital needs, which included annual variable compensation of $13 million and a sequential increase in current receivables, driven by an $8 million increase in March billings versus December. As in prior demanding macroeconomic climates, we have strategically increased inventory $4 million to lock in pricing of chips and stabilize hardware margins for the year. As previously estimated, our DSO stabilized in Q1. We are seeing meaningful improvement in Q2 as we execute our working capital improvement plan. We expect operating cash flow to improve meaningfully with positive quarterly operating cash flow for the remainder of the year, driven by continued profitability and the benefit from working capital with improved DSO and modest improvement in DIO. Said differently, our cash flow will receive a tailwind from working capital and continued profitability.
Cash used in investing activities was $3 million for the 3 months ended March 31st versus $6 million for the prior year. Investing activities primarily included capital expenditures of $2 million for developed technology associated with our software platforms. Cash provided by financing activities was $18 million for the 3 months ended March 31st versus $11 million for the prior year. The financing activities primarily consisted of net proceeds, the 2031 notes of $257 million, of which $206 million was used to repurchase a portion of the 2027 notes and $33 million was used to repurchase shares of the company's common stock. To recap our performance, Q1 marked meaningful profit improvement while continuing to grow the top line. This momentum is evident across the following key financial metrics.
Revenue grew 19.4% year-over-year, with subscription services revenue up 15%. non-GAAP OpEx as a % of total revenue improved 650 basis points from Q1 2025, and adjusted EBITDA was $8.9 million for the quarter, an improvement of $4.4 million from Q1 2025. Now let me share our expectations going forward. As Savneet mentioned, we are initiating formal financial guidance for the second quarter and full year of 2026. This reflects the increasing visibility we have into our business, the durability of recurring revenue base, and our confidence in the operating model we have built. We are committed to providing guidance that reflects both our visibility into the business and the discipline we apply to our operating plan.
For the second quarter of 2026, we expect total revenue in the range of $122.5 million-$127.5 million and adjusted EBITDA in the range of $9.5 million-$11.5 million. For the full year 2026, we expect total revenue in the range of $500 million-$515 million and adjusted EBITDA in the range of $44 million-$47 million. A few points of context on our outlooks. Our healthy backlog and pipeline provides us with strong visibility into revenue growth. On hardware, we expect continued momentum from tier 1 rollouts and refresh activity, with margin stabilizing in the low 20s as our price actions continue to offset tariff and component cost pressures.
On profitability, our adjusted EBITDA outlook reflects a meaningful step-up from 2025, driven by both continued top-line growth and a structurally lower cost base. The reorganization we executed at the end of Q1 and early Q2, together with a simpler AI-enabled operating model, are expected to drive a step-down in our organic operating expense run rate beginning in Q2 and continuing through the back half of the year. As a result, we expect adjusted EBITDA margins to expand sequentially from the Q1 starting point, with the full impact of our cost actions more meaningfully reflected in the second half. At the same time, we continue to invest in our highest return opportunities, most notably PAR Intelligence and our agentic platform, we are doing so within a disciplined framework that prioritizes durable, profitable growth.
Our full year 2026 guidance also includes approximately $10 million in subscription service revenue from the recently completed acquisition of Bridg. The acquisition will have minimal impact on adjusted EBITDA. I will now turn the call back over to Savneet for closing remarks prior to moving to Q&A.
Thanks, Bryan. At PAR, AI is not just a customer-facing strategy. Internally, AI is fundamentally transforming everything we do as a company. One example is our ability to rapidly enhance our procurement function and pinpoint areas of vendor waste with millions of in-year savings. Crucially, AI is also enhancing our development velocity, and we're now seeing this translate into tangible output across the business. In our engagement platform alone, the roadmap we committed this year is five times larger than last year, and we're delivering roughly twice as many incremental non-committed features quarter-over-quarter. Capacity that simply didn't exist before. At the same time, speed and productivity are improving. Time to ship is down more than 25%.
In parallel, we are investing in what we call an agentic software factory, an internal platform designed to orchestrate planning, development, and testing through autonomous agents, effectively enabling end-to-end backlog execution and improving daily developer output by 20% without sacrificing quality. This just isn't just about adopting AI tools faster than others. It's about building a fundamentally different development engine, one that we believe will become a durable competitive advantage over time. PAR's strategic value lies in the fact that we power some of the most complex, high-volume restaurant and re-retail operations in the world with technology that is both mission-critical and deeply embedded. As the industry continues to consolidate around fewer, more capable platforms, we believe PAR is uniquely positioned to be a long-term system of record for our customers. PAR Intelligence unlocks a fully agentic operating model for every multi-unit operator.
Our in-year adoption target for PAR Intelligence is greater than 50,000 sites. Aligned to this is our progress towards the Rule of 40. This is the clearest external measure that we're building a business that can both grow and compound value over time. For us, it's not about optimizing a single quarter or choosing growth at an expense of profitability or vice versa. It's about steadily improving the underlying economics of the model. The progress you're seeing today reflects deliberate execution, not financial engineering, and we believe sustained improvement in Rule of 40 performance is a strong indicator that PAR is becoming a more durable and higher quality software company. This quarter doesn't mark the finish line, but it does mark progress. We believe the market has us miscast today. We intend to let consistent execution quarter by quarter correct that.
Over the coming quarters and years, we will prove that PAR offers an irreplaceable solution to brands, PAR is adapting to the times of AI, and PAR will deliver transformative results. With that, operator, we can open up the call for questions.
Thank you. At this time, we'll conduct the question and answer session. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please stand by while I compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from Mayank Tandon from Needham. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good evening, Savneet and Brian and Chris. Good to hear from you, and congrats on the print and also the guidance framework. I think that's very helpful. Savneet, let me just start with your expectations on ARR. Could you just unpack the various levers you have? When I'm thinking about ARR, how should we think about pricing, location growth, and then also have you reflected any tier 1 wins into expectations of the re-acceleration in ARR growth over the balance of 2026?
Great question. You know, we continue to sort of target mid-teens ARR growth without the inclusion of any of, you know, large mega deals in there. You know, we continue to be conservative, you know, until those happen. You know, we don't wanna throw it into that target. In terms of, you know, levers of driving our growth, you know, we really have 2 levers today: new site count and upselling to the base, you know, i.e., ARPU. You know, where we're seeing really strong success is now being able to sell multi-product at the time of the initial sale. More growth is being driven by the new customer motion, but that is primarily the driven success of the co-sell or cross-sell motion that we have.
The same time, we're still upselling into our existing base. But, you know, I think it shows just how early we are in our TAM that new sales is still the majority of our revenue growth.
Got it. I have to get an AI question in. Let me ask you talked about the efficiencies with AI, but on the revenue side, as you've launched PAR Intelligence, which I know is very recent, I'm just curious, have you gotten any feedback from clients, you know, what the interest level is? Is there a way to monetize this? Is that something we'll see potentially in 2026, or is this more of a longer term initiative to be able to drive revenue off this?
Yeah, let me answer the second part because I think it's a more important one. You know, we wouldn't be doing it, you know, putting so much emphasis on it if we didn't think we could monetize it. I think what we feel far more convicted this quarter than we did last quarter or the quarter before, is that given our engagement with customers, we think not only that they enjoy the product, but they'll pay for it. The way we kinda think about it is today's products give them, call it AI discovery, the ability to interact, chat, report, you know, pull reports. Tomorrow's products will give them predictions, the future products will give them automated actions, meaning, you know, can you run your store on autopilot?
I think as we get to that point, we'll absolutely get to monetize it. We look at AI as an incremental revenue stream that will happen in this year. Again, we don't sort of assume massive assumptions within our guidance, but the mandate to our product teams, the mandate to our general manager is that that revenue must come this year. The reason we're so excited about it is we believe it's gonna be an incremental lever revenue growth, not replacement, and certainly not something that will cannibalize the value of the core products we have today. I think that confidence candidly just comes with the fact that, you know, we launched our retail product as an example this quarter, and we had 1,700 stores already up and running on it.
You know, when we launch a product, it's adopted so much faster, and it makes the entire base stickier. Long answer, but it's something we'll monetize and something we expect to start monetizing this year.
Great. Thank you so much. Thanks, Mayank.
Thank you. Our next question comes from George Sutton from Craig-Hallum. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Savneet, you talked about an upcoming strategy layer. I wondered if you could just walk through what that might mean for you.
It was related to what we're doing on PAR Drive, which is in our retail suite, we'll eventually, you know, I think strategy will respect everything we do. You know, the way we sort of think about AI today, as I mentioned, you know, is you have sort of the first wave of AI tools within enterprise software, which is, you know, ostensibly giving you that ChatGPT-like experience on the front of the product. I think it moves from there to call it, you know, the predictability of your business. Hey, this is gonna happen. Do you wanna do this? It moves to this actions and sort of autopilot where, hey, you know, hot dogs are running out, you know, it'll automatically order those hot dogs for you.
Where I think it gets really exciting is this idea down the road where it becomes more of a strategic partner for you, where it says, "Hey, there's a snowstorm coming next week. Do you wanna load up on hot chocolate?" where it takes into account weather, traffic patterns, competitive dynamics and promotions, and build that strategy layer. We're building that out today. You know, as I mentioned, we're still testing out the models. We're still working through hallucinations. We will be in market this year with a strategy component to our customers. It's really becoming a partner to our customers that live every single day in that store.
Could you give us an update on the tier 1 opportunities in your pipeline in terms of your level of confidence, any sense of timing or move forward from the prior quarter?
Well, we continue to make, you know, tremendous progress there. There's been some good movements as it relates to personnel at these organizations that I think look fairly upon PAR. I think, you know, we expect to sort of have the outcomes in the second half of this year. You know, and we continue to feel pretty good about it. You know, tier 1 deals are always 50-50 in my experience. What I think I'm excited about is we feel very confident about the movement in those organizations. As I said, what I think we're even feeling more confident about is the ability to drive more growth through pushing multi-product to the customer base outside of that.
You know, the revenue growth side of PAR, I think is what's exciting us as we turn the first quarter here.
Awesome. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Stephen Sheldon from William Blair. Please go ahead.
Hey, thanks. I'll echo very good to see some formal guidance now.
As we think about, I guess just any rough sense you can provide on the drag to ARR this quarter from off-boarding those customers you mentioned, was that predominantly around Punchh, or was there any notable off-boarding efforts around other solutions? Are you effectively through that process, or is there kind of more to go in the coming quarters as we think about the ARR trajectory?
We're through it. You know, think about it as deals that were lapsing at the, you know, very end of last year, call it, or the beginning of this year, January 1-ish or February. We're through it. You know, you won't see that impact again. It was heavily levered towards Punchh, you know, one particularly large customer. As you can see, you know, ARPU jumped 27%. That's not because we repriced the base at 20% increase. It's because we removed, you know, multiple customers that were at 80% discounts. We're through it. I think it's, you know, it's amazing we still grew in double digits given the impact of that.
What's great is we don't have any more of that, and, as I said, the growth motion's still moving forward really, really nicely.
Steve, I'll just add to that too, right, is that this was acted like a pull-in of churn for us for this year, right? Over 60% of our churn for this year was like the in Q1, we were able to manage that out effectively. We do not expect to have a higher rate of churn this year than we'd reasonably typically have.
Okay. Got it. That's good to hear. Just, yeah, to follow up, it'd be great to get an update on your overall traction and monetization with convenience stores on the retail side. It sounds like you have multiple tier 1 opportunities there that you're going after. Curious, you know, how convenience store revenue has been trending and the outlook for expanding that monetization beyond the primary source right now, which I think is still just predominantly loyalty.
Yeah. It's an honorable question. You know, I would say we're very bullish to what's happening in C-store. You know, our loyalty product continues to grow. We've got, you know, a strong tier 1 pipeline, as I mentioned, multiple deals in negotiation, including, you know, within the major oil space. That's the business that, you know, I think we are, you know, similar to Punchh, the 800-pound gorilla, where we're, we've got the best product, the best team, and the best outcomes. I think that will continue to grow, you know, at, you know, at or above company rates. What's exciting is, you know, for the first time, we've now expanded beyond that. We launched our TouchPoint product in Q1.
TouchPoint, if you recall, we carved out the assets of a kiosk-like product about a year ago. That brings loyalty in the store. Think of a screen in the store where you can, you know, engage with loyalty, upsell, promotions, so on and so forth. We'll hopefully have our first customers on that this year. That'll be an extension of loyalty, but more in the sense that it can also provide self-checkout. The really exciting part that I think we've discovered within retail is on the AI front, where PAR Retail Drive our first product that is sort of the agentic layer across C-store already has 1,700 stores on it. We are using real data to refine that model.
I, you know, I think we're gonna have tremendous success pushing that through the retail side of the business. You know, our retail leadership is all in on AI. We've rebuilt our product teams, engineering teams to be focused on it. I think you'll see the retail side, if we're successful on this AI endeavor, you know, grow at faster rates than the restaurant side.
Great. Thanks for taking my questions.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Max Michaelis from Lake Street Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. A few from me. First, can we go to Punchh? 50% win rate, I think you mentioned in the quarter. I mean, what's sort of resonating with the customer base right now when you go to market? Can you share historically what the Punchh win rate has been?
Absolutely. I think the core reason we're winning historically always been Punchh is the best product in the market. Obviously, I'm subjective there, but I think objectively through data, we are the largest product and continue to grow faster than the market. That is not only the depth of the product, but the breadth of the product and what we can do with that product across. Loyalty is a very, very robust initiative. It's millions and millions of profiles. If you're a large restaurant organization or a retail organization for that matter, you're not going to go with something you vibe coded or a startup.
You need something that has reliability, stability, and obviously security that you need for that. We think we're the best in the market, and we continue to take share. The other part, excuse me, is, as mentioned on the call, this ability to sell ordering and payments alongside of it. It makes the product far more seamless for our customers. It gives them, you know, a single digital cockpit to manage their menus. It is a real unlock for our customers. What's been exciting about that is I think the ability to have a real retail, a real, excuse me, e-commerce or online ordering product alongside Punchh will help increase the win rates for both because it simplifies the journey for our customers.
Again, in an AI world, you know, I think you want your data for both those products in one place so that you can let agents run wild. I'm pretty excited by the continued success there. You know, to our historical win rates, you know, they're historically at, you know, I'd say 35%-40%. This is definitely a step up, and hopefully that continues.
Perfect. Last one for me. Obviously, you're gonna be monetizing PAR Intelligence, but curious to know how you plan on pricing that when you go to your customers. Is that gonna be subscription-based, or do you plan on instituting sort of a usage-based model?
It's a great question. You know, one of the cool things that I mentioned on our call that we realized is, you know, we at PAR price on a per site basis, so we aren't sort of tied to the amount of humans using a product. In fact, it's one of the reasons I think our AI products could be even higher margin than our core products because, you know, as we deploy AI at the corporate level, you need less and less people to engage with it. Specifically, the first products we're thinking will be a SaaS-like billing 'cause that's what our customers are used to, that's how we can upsell and, you know, bundle it into the existing contracts that we have.
The customers that we are engaging with today, the customers that we're letting us test their data on, we have communicated that that's how we'll be pricing it. I think as we move to this world, as I mentioned, of where we are the strategic, you know, recommendation item to them or running their stores on autopilot, you know, we could explore other forms. Also as we figure out what the cost model will be. Right now, you know, we're thinking about it as a SaaS model.
Awesome. Thanks, guys.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Andrew Harte from BTIG. Please go ahead.
Hey, thanks for the question. Can you hear me?
Yep.
Yeah, yeah. Thanks for the question. Just one from my end. Stephanie, if you could just kinda talk about how you just feel the business is standing on better ground today than it was a few quarters ago even, and what really gave you the confidence to provide quarterly guidance and annual guidance. Thank you.
You know, I think, we feel incredibly confident about our market positioning today. We are, I think without question, the furthest ahead when it comes to AI within the restaurant, within the C-store. You know, we printed a $9 million EBITDA quarter, and as Bryan Menar mentioned, you know, we think that's gonna expand meaningfully for the rest of the year. As Bryan Menar mentioned, you know, we're gonna be cash flow, generating operating cash flow for the rest of the year. That, you know, puts us in a position that we've never been before, where our products are winning at rates they've never won before. Our agentic capabilities are far ahead of our peers.
We've got the cash flow engine that we can use to leverage to, you know, find ways to create shareholder value. You know, as we sit today, I think that confidence comes from market positioning, but also, you know, candidly, the scale of the business, the ability to generate cash, and, you know, nothing feels better than sort of winning. I think winning begets winning in our category. We feel incredibly strong where we are today, and it's all gonna come down to our ability to deliver products to our customers in this sort of AI world that we can monetize and show the value there. That's why we feel so confident.
Thank you. This concludes the question and answer session. I will now turn it over to Chris Byrnes for closing remarks.
Thanks, Antoine, and thanks to everyone for joining us this afternoon. We look forward to updating you and speaking with you further in the coming weeks. Have a good night.
Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect.