Good morning, everyone. I'd like to introduce our next presenter of the day, Louis Hoch, President and CEO of Usio. Usio.
Yeah. Usio.
Yeah.
Thanks everybody for joining us today. Usio is listed on Nasdaq. Symbol is U-S-I-O. Should be easy to remember. Usio's been around for a long time. This is our 28th year. Our client base demonstrates that tenure. We are a fintech payment processor. Everybody in this room's probably used our company two or 3x this week and didn't even know that you were using us. We have four business lines.
They all work well to each other, and they are all in the payments ecosystem. One of the core tenets of our company is we believe in diversity, and diversity to us means the industries that we serve. We're across almost all industries except for retail, something that we avoid because retail is affected by macro events.
We have all payment channels. Any way you can facilitate a payment, our tech stack is delivering those payments. We'll start with the business lines. Payment facilitation is card-based payment acquiring. What makes payment facilitation unique, and there's not many of payment facilitators in the U.S., very hard to become one, is that it has a great go-to-market strategy.
We sell primarily to integrated software vendors, companies that have that write software for industry vertical. We spend our times making one sell to the software vendor, we get access to their whole client base, they continue to add more clients, and we get more. Hopefully their clients grow organically. It's kind of our business unit, the gift that keeps on giving.
Every night we wake up to 30, 40 new accounts that have been sold, with 0 touch points from our sales staff. ACH is Traditional bank account, Bank-to-bank payments. We have significant volume in ACH. We'll talk a little more about each one of these as we go through on a detailed slide how we make money. We have a unique tech stack here, if we were a bank, we'd be the 50th largest bank in the United States, based upon the volume that we pump through the Federal Reserve in a given year. Card Issuing, we are a program manager and card processor. We issue primarily Mastercards for many different use cases.
In this segment, we have over 200 cities and states that we do their disbursement for, and you'll see some more of our clients here in a little bit. Output Solutions, we operate a print and mail house. In that segment we only do first-class mail. That's statements, invoicing, tax notices, and healthcare type of notices. Our clients are primarily financial institutions, utilities, insurance companies, and healthcare-related solutions.
We have a diverse set of clients on mostly our integrated software vendors. We're, again, we're in 200 different cities in the U.S., including L.A. County. In L.A. County, we're the company that sends you those nice notices about your fees and fines not being paid, your parking fees, things like that, we'll mail you a letter.
Enclosed in that letter will be a QR code that you can scan, and it pre-populates all your information for you to make the payment. For L.A. County, if you happen to pay the county too much money, we're gonna be the company that mails you a check for that refund. L.A. County also uses our technology to operate 13 different active card programs where they hand out Mastercard with a certain balance for different uses for their citizens.
We do have the who's who of clients. You know, some of the clients on here that are missing that are well known is, you know, Verizon, T-Mobile, AIG. You know, those are the names that maybe you would know. Payment facilitation, a little deeper dive.
These are card-based transactions, and they're typically, the client is typically a integrated software vendor. One of our clients that's really easy to understand is a client named Practice Suite, and they have their software is run in about 20,000 doctor's offices through the United States. Those doctors use the software to run their whole practice, and part of that software is billing and collections. We're the engine in their software that allows the doctors to collect co-pays.
How we make money on payment facilitation is we make a percentage of the transaction that's made on a card. It's typically ends up being about 25 basis points. Out of that 50 basis points, and we share 25 basis points with our customer, the software, integrated software vendor.
We end up being a substantial source of new revenue for the software companies, as you can imagine, that relationship with the new revenue and being embedded with our technology, it is very sticky and lasts a long time. ACH is our highest margin business. Again, we have significant volume in this segment. Again, we'd be the 50th largest bank in the U.S., to give you idea about how much volume we have in a given year. We have so much volume.
We're certified by the regulator, Nacha, the government regulator, that we have our own bank routing number. We have direct connection into the Federal Reserve, just like we're a bank. We're only aware that we have that set up in PayPal. We don't compete against PayPal. We have significant volume.
That also allows us to mine our own data. We pretty much have everybody's personal checking and savings accounts in our database. We can tell our merchants upfront, "Hey, we've seen Louis' checking account 10x in the last month, and the last two transactions have gone bad." That merchant may not wanna do business with me. Card Issuing, we do some really cool applications here. The majority of our transactions are government-based disbursements.
We recently did a program for the State of Connecticut where they handed out $100 payments for various I don't remember what the reason was, but for those payments, we sent out letters, we sent out emails, we sent out texts, and we redirected them to a site that was branded for the State of Connecticut, and the consumer got to choose how they wanted to get paid.
They could choose a virtual card, which would load real-time into their phone. They could choose a plastic card that got mailed to them, which is very popular. A lot of people take that plastic card and give it to a family member for like a birthday or just a gift.
They could actually request a check or ACH payment or even a real-time payment directly into their bank account through like a PINless debit rail, which is how Venmo operates. We use PINless debit for disbursements. We also use it for all of our mortgage servicing clients that need to accept payments through a debit-based scenario. Card Issuing, we have in every one of our segments, we have innovative technology.
In Card Issuing, we're able to do some really cool things. We're able to tie a token of your retina to actually your payment wallet. You can attend a event like South by Southwest in Texas and use your eyeballs or your retina to get into the as your ticket.
Then as you go through and you buy things, you can just pick it up and walk away. Then we know that you're there and we've tied the payment wallet to your retina. We also do a lot with wearables. Wearables, there's so many use case for wearables, and you can put them on anything. We actually have a video where we've embedded a chip into somebody's fingernail, and they can just tap their finger to make payments. So, Consumer Choice is an application that we've got a lot of traction with.
The example was like State of Connecticut, where the consumers are directed back to a site, and they actually choose how they wanna get paid. We're a payment processor, a card issuer, and we brand the cards.
The branding flows through not only on physical cards but on virtual cards. We have top 30 universities that we process cards for. We recently did all the football bowl games, where all the players receive their per diems on cards. You know, card issuing, the way card issuing makes money is that we make a percentage of whatever transaction that goes through the card that's spent.
On average, we're earning about 2%. On a $100 transaction, we're paid 2%, and that's paid by the merchant, not by the consumer. Consumers will sometimes leave money on the cards. Depending on the card program, that spoilage may come back to us. That's another way we make money.
Then we make money from transaction fees when our cards are used at like ATM. Print and mail, we have just a huge operation for print and mail. We're only printing the first-class mail. This division literally prints money, and we love it. It brings us new business. When we go out there and sell a print and mail account to a utility, then we get to have the discussion about payments because utilities' pain point is print and mail.
They hate it. If you can solve the print and mail pain point, then you get to talk to them about payments. If you can't print for them, you're not gonna be able to have that discussion about payments. In this division, we print a lot of checks, typically overpayments.
Like here in Los Angeles, if you pay too much on your tax, property tax, you're gonna receive a check from us. We do a lot of bankruptcy distributions. Our print and mail platform is super advanced. When we print something for a healthcare statement, we know when every page printed.
We know that if page three folded or got ripped and we had to, it sends a message back through the system, and it'll print page three, you know, five minutes from now, hold that envelope, and then be able to report back to the customer, "Hey, Louis' statement had eight pages, and every page was printed correctly, and here's the time it went into the envelope.
Page three was printed five minutes later, but did make it into its envelope." This type of detailed tracking is very important, especially in healthcare accounts, and we just do tons and tons of mail. Our majority of our customers are financial institutions, but we have almost 200 utilities that we print and mail for and getting a larger group of healthcare as well.
Hello, everyone. I'm Michael White. I'm our Chief Accounting Officer. I'm gonna walk you through some of the financials of the business. As you can imagine, both dollars and number of payments are really important to us. On, on some, like ACH, we're charging a per transaction fee, but on, as Louis said, on PayFac and Card Issuing, we're earning a percentage of the transaction.
You can see in 2025, we processed $8.4 billion in payments. That's really our second highest year. 2021 was our highest year, and we're getting back to those levels. Transactions processed, we processed 61 million transactions in 2025, our record year for number of transactions processed. Here you can see our revenue. In 2025, we reported $85 million in revenue.
Our guidance for 2026 is 10%-12%. We've recently released Q1 financials, and we recorded just over $25 million in revenue. We're really looking forward to the rest of the year. We have high expectations. Here's our profit line, profitability by our product, by product line, excuse me. We show gross revenue and then our margins on gross revenue and our margins on net revenue.
On some products like PayFac, Card Issuing, and Output Solutions, there's some pass through costs like interchange or postage. You can see on PayFac, our lowest margin business, we earn 8% on gross revenue. When you take out the interchange revenue, we're earning 35% margins on that. ACH average about 60%. All that technology's in-house.
There's no pass-through cost there. For Card Issuing, on gross revenue, we average 30%-40% on margins. If you take out the interchange, you're around 35% margin. In Output Solutions, as you can imagine, a large piece of the revenue there is postage when we're mailing the actual pieces. We typically see 18%-20% gross margins.
You know, accounting for postage, that jumps to 73%. Here's a quick snapshot of our P&L basically. You can see in 2025, $85.5 million in revenue with an adjusted EBITDA of $1.3 million. Our adjusted EBITDA margins for the year were 1.6%.
Already we're seeing some improvement in the Q1 of 2026 with $25 and a half million in revenue and adjusted EBITDA for the quarter of $800,000 and margins of 3%. We also were profitable in the quarter of a net income of just under $200,000. We're expecting, you know, to continue positive adjusted EBITDA for the year. As we expand, we're expecting those adjusted EBITDA margins to continue to expand.
We've reached a point of operational efficiency where as we continue to bring on more revenue, we're not having to increase our SG&A in the same level. As you can see, we have a strong balance sheet. We ended last year with $7.4 million in cash.
We've already increased about $300,000. We are buying back stock. In the Q1 , we purchased $250,000 worth of shares. You can see on the restricted cash and settlement funds, at any given time, we have between $80 million-$120 million of cash in our accounts that are in the process of being settled, and we do earn interest on those funds, and we consider that to be a core part of our business as well.
We have essentially no debt, less than $1 million left on an equipment loan for Output Solutions, the printer and sorter. Really strong balance sheet. We have, as of the Q1 , we have 27.7 million shares outstanding. 5.2 million of that is insider holdings.
Really what our investment thesis, we have innovative proprietary technology. We build our own tech. We have unique and attractive end markets. We sell to a specific set of customers who have a unique use set for all of our products. Like Louis said, we have companies who are want print and mail, and then use our payments, and then some companies that want payments and end up using print.
We offer all types of disbursements, diverse payment offerings. Louis mentioned Consumer Choice. People can choose how they want their funds, how they get their funds, and when they get their funds. Because we offer every payment channel, we have multiple levels of future growth.
Whatever payment channel really takes off, we offer it and are able to step in to fill those needs. With that, we have just a few minutes left to open up for some questions if anyone has any.
You know, how's the whole shift in the technological shift in the banking industry kind of impacting your business here? Because like checks are becoming obsolete, and debit and credit cards, they're, you know, about to become obsolete. Have you kind of seen certain you know, the role the shift that's the technological shift that's taking place in the banking industry?
We're still seeing actually quite a bit of check transactions, checks printed. Yes, we are seeing, you know, a shift to specifically the real-time payment offerings. You know, people want their money quickly, whether that's on the consumer side or the business side. You know, people are willing to pay maybe a small fee to get their money instantly.
You can see that on a Venmo, you know, disbursement. You can get your money in three days for free, or you can pay a 2% to get it instantly. We're seeing a shift to that. You know, we're offering those products to fill that need. I would say that the real-time offerings are really where we're seeing the most growth. In real-time payments, in January we processed 2,000 transactions.
In April, we processed 250,000 transactions. In three months, you can see the scale of, you know, that traffic's moving from ACH that takes, you know, roughly three days to something that is an instant.
In our business model, we have all channels, right? We don't really care what wins. We felt it last quarter where we the people were moving payments from PINless debit, which is Venmo, right, like transactions, to FedNow. If we weren't in every payment channel, obviously we would've lost 200 and something thousand transactions.
There's some payment channels that people think are going away. They're just not gonna happen. Checks aren't gonna go away any time soon 'cause there's all these laws that says certain payments need to be made by check. Same with paper. Utilities, they're all under regulatory scrutiny that says you have to have the ability to send out paper. Tax notices, same thing that we print a lot of.
There's regulatory rules that says you have to make 1099s and W-2s available by paper. ACH, which is the cheapest way to send money, that's not going anywhere either. It doesn't really matter to us because we have them all. We don't have the ultimate vision to say, "Oh, this one's gonna win. Let's focus on this." Our tech stack, you have all of them.
Quickly, we didn't mention, but in Q4 of 2025, we made a software acquisition of a company called PostCredit, and it's basically allowing us to offer banking services to all of our clients. Similar to like if you were to use a Square and you process transactions, it goes into your digital wallet, and then you have to, you know, ACH it to your account, or you can disperse it to other, you know, other ways on Square.
We're basically gonna have a similar platform that keeps the funds in the Usio ecosystem longer and allows for easier access for our customers to access all of our products to disperse funds. We're excited about that. I think in June we're gonna be doing a demo of that.
On card issuance, do you mostly do prepaid card?
Card Issuing is all open loop cards. They all have a Mastercard logo on them. We've recently started locking those down to make them merchant specific. What we've found is a lot of merchants will have disparate POS systems. Maybe they have Square, you know, in their swag store. In the restaurant, they have Toast, and maybe they sell T-shirts online.
Our customer also sponsors a music festival, so he had four different POS systems, and he wanted a, you know, kind of a closed loop card, like a Home Depot or a Lowe's type of offering. The only way to bridge those POS systems was to issue a Mastercard and lock it just down to that merchant's brand.
If it's a credit, who's issuing the loan effectively?
Yeah, it's not credit.
It's not credit, it's debit.
Yeah. It's prepaid cards.
Okay. Prepaid cards. Right. Thank you.
Yeah. Yes?
I know you've been investing in the business over the last four or five years, so free cash flows are pretty modest. Can you give us some kind of insight to what free cash flow might look like in 2026, 2027? Will it up tick now that the?
Going in the direction?
Yeah. That we definitely are planning to see, you know, expansion in our free cash flow. I mean, as you can see, the margins really vary by product. You know, it's gonna depend on the mix of the, you know, how that flows to the bottom line. We don't have any major investments planned at this point. You know, we'll continue to, you know, invest at the current levels into the business.
As far as like, how to look, you know, two years from now, you know, it really does depend on the mix, but you can kinda see how our growth by product line from Q1 year-over-year and we're kind of expecting those trends to continue, so. I think that cuts the time, appreciate everyone.
Like three seconds left.
Close enough. We'll get started. I'd like to introduce our next presenter of the day, Ken d'Entremont. Did I do it okay? All right. CEO of Medexus Pharmaceuticals. Good morning and welcome.
Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for the organizers for the opportunity to present Medexus here. Medexus is a orphan drug, rare disease company that is publicly traded on the TSX under the ticker symbol MDP. You can find lots of information on our website at medexus.com, including our forward-looking statement.
Let's start with who we are, what we do. Literally, Medexus is a company that is saving patients' lives. We've got products that are working in some very specialized areas that literally extend and save patients' lives. As you look at the base business, last year, we reported $108 million of revenue, US dollars. Everything I'll present is in US dollars, except for our share price.
$108 million of revenue produced about $20 million of positive EBITDA from a base business that's pretty stable and mature. We've got 14 different products that generate that revenue, and a lot of it's coming out of the U.S. currently. On top of that, we've got a new product, which is called GRAFAPEX, which will provide significant growth into the future.
Again, most of that being derived from the U.S. market. The story is becoming very much a U.S. driven story. As you look at our product portfolio, we have been diversified into 3 specific areas, but that is now consolidating around hematology and more specifically, stem cell transplantation. I'll describe exactly what that drug does in future slides.
Currently, half our revenue is coming from hematology, and again, that's where the growth is going to come from. We've got a stable portfolio of products that generate around $100 million flat, slightly declining, generating good profit. We have a very strong growth asset in GRAFAPEX, which could be bigger than the current portfolio is today at a stronger gross margin.
I'm gonna spend a little bit of time on that drug. Our products are very complex, our business model is dead simple. What we're doing is licensing and acquiring pharmaceutical products for specific therapeutic areas in the U.S. and Canada. We're leveraging the infrastructure that we've built in those two territories to launch more products.
As we build the portfolio on top of the 14 products that we already have, that becomes extremely accretive because infrastructure's in place, and as we add products, you know, in the case of GRAFAPEX at an 80% gross margin with infrastructure in place, obviously as revenue ramps, that becomes extremely accretive. The business model is dead simple. We're going out licensing, acquiring products in U.S. and Canada.
Business development is really important 'cause that's how we acquire them. And then we will do a little bit of product development, and that is really about extending the label for existing products. There's no drug development risk here. The risk you would be taking as investors is commercial risk, and obviously, that's much, much less.
The infrastructure that we have built is this. As I mentioned, about 73% of revenue is currently coming out of the U.S., and about two-thirds of our infrastructure is in the U.S. But it is a North American business, meaning U.S. and Canada. This is the infrastructure on top of which we are adding more products.
The exciting product development is really GRAFAPEX. There it is there. GRAFAPEX is interesting in that this is a drug for a rare disease orphan drug indication, meaning AML and MDS, two forms of leukemia that have very bad mortality outcomes. You know, with these patients, the goal is to get them into remission and then get them to a transplant.
A transplant for these conditions can be curative. Obviously very, very good outcomes for these patients. The drug that we have, treosulfan or brand name GRAFAPEX, is a conditioning agent. What it does is prepare the patient for the transplant. It's an integral part of that transplantation process. When that transplant engrafts, it produces a whole new immune system for that patient.
That's a curative modality, you know, very, very good outcomes for these patients. Our drug, GRAFAPEX or treosulfan, is the first drug approved by the FDA for the condition of AML and MDS patients, so very, very well positioned. The early commercial response has been excellent.
We have got it already either approved, meaning listed, or under review in two-thirds of the hospitals already within the first year. We've received an NTAP registration by Medicare. An NTAP is very difficult to achieve. It's called a new technology add-on payment, basically where the government is paying for the difference between the old drug and the new drug.
The reason they do that is because this new technology is leading to excellent outcomes. Currently about 30%-40% of patients are Medicare patients, so that NTAP payment is really, really important. Last year in the entire year, there were only 13 applications for this designation. Only five products received the designation, treosulfan was one of the five. Basically what that does is provide $21,000 of funding for that Medicare patient.
We are already seeing a large number of hospitals purchasing the product, and we have guided that we do expect GRAFAPEX on its own, last quarter, which was ended in March, to be accretive. We have launched and got the drug to be accretive within the first year of launch. We're really pleased with the early going.
We have guided that this drug will be peak sales $100 million-$175 million at an 80% gross margin. Our current blended gross margin is about 60%, GRAFAPEX coming in at an 80% gross margin. With that sort of revenue profile, you would expect to see margin improvement in addition to obviously, strong revenue growth and EBITDA growth.
This is the reason, or part of the reason, why we're so excited about treosulfan. We launched this drug ourselves in Canada, three or four years ago, and have had tremendous uptake of the drug. The $100 million-$175 million peak sales basically reflects a 29%-42% market share of allogeneic transplants. That is being achieved in Canada, and is being achieved in every country where the drug has been launched in Western Europe.
A very, very realistic expectation for the U.S. marketplace. The other reason that we're so bullish on the drug is that the clinical outcomes are excellent. This is a retrospective study that we conducted at Princess Margaret in Toronto.
Princess Margaret is one of the largest transplant centers in North America, the largest transplant center in Canada. They did a retrospective study in MDS, one of the indications, and demonstrated basically a 30% improvement in overall survival relative to the old drug. This is a massive increase in overall survival, and that's the reason that Medicare has funded it.
That's the reason that the hospitals are putting it on the formulary, because they want to have access to this drug for U.S. patients, because the outcomes are far, far better. The drug is more expensive than the product we're replacing, but survival is far, far better, and the cost to the hospital is less because there are fewer complications associated with our drug. Really, really strong outcomes for our drug.
Thus, our confidence that this is going to be $100 million-$170 million at peak sales. We're really, really pleased with the early going of this drug, but we do have a broad portfolio of products. When we describe the $108 million of revenue last year, about 30% of it is associated with this drug here, IXINITY, which is another hemophilia product, another rare disease orphan drug indication.
This drug is for hemophilia B, of which there's only 4,000 to 5,000 patients in the entire U.S. that have hemophilia B. Our drug basically replaces what's missing from their own drug. This has performed very, very well. It's been very, very steady over many years, and we would expect that to continue.
This is a biologic drug, we don't expect any pure generic competition even after the IP runs out. It's just simply too expensive to produce a biologic drug. You wouldn't expect to see that here. The second-largest drug in current portfolio is Rasuvo or called Metoject in Canada. You can see again, you know, we've had really strong market share. That's about an 80% market share that we were able to generate from this drug.
Recently, our competitor dropped out of the marketplace, we basically captured what they had. We'd expect this drug also to go along rather smoothly until it runs out of exclusivity, which we would expect in 2028 or 2029. It is a drug device, you wouldn't expect a generic competition to capture all of this.
It's rather a more slow erosion. When you go back to our business model, you know, as I mentioned, we're very much about licensing and M&A. I think these are two examples where we have executed M&A and been very, very judicious with our cash, where we purchase products at less than 1x revenue.
Obviously, in order to do that, we had to convince the partner that they would benefit from the growth of the drug, which we were able to deliver. Their economics are tied to our revenue success, and that's how we have often structured these deals. In the case of GRAFAPEX, we acquired a drug that can do $100 million-$175 million for basically $30 million up front and some sales milestones in the future.
Again, really, really well-structured. If you now turn to our balance sheet, I would say it's quite clean. We have had very steady revenue growth since inception in 2018. Had a bit of a plateau in net revenue for a few years while we were getting GRAFAPEX approved by the FDA. That is now done, and we're expecting to see growth as we go forward.
We have been EBITDA positive, I think, for the past three or four years every quarter, even through the period where we were launching GRAFAPEX, which was obviously on the slides, you can see. You know, we're really, really proud with the situation we're in.
Low debt, strong cash generation, and a multiple, which is, I think, probably below our peers, even in spite of the profile that the company has. Capital structure, as I mentioned, you know, enterprise value is relatively low given the profile of the company. We've got good analyst coverage in Canada, one in the U.S.
We've got a very, very strong capital partner, debt provider in National Bank, where we've got debt that's being provided at basically SOFR + 2.5. Really, really low cost of capital. And that gives us some dry powder, which will allow us to go out and do licensing or acquisitions in the space that we're interested in, which is clearly HSCT or transplant and transplant-related modalities.
We have the wherewithal to be able to go out and do that. Our growth driver is very much GRAFAPEX. If it is going to do $100 million-$175 million in revenue, obviously that's going to more than double our revenue over the next few years. Growth driver is already in hand, and we're looking for additional products for future revenue growth, specifically in rare disease orphan drug, which is a very attractive area.
You know, we do believe that we've created a company that has a profile that is quite attractive. If you think of investment highlights, you know, I think it's really a summary of everything I've just said. You know, we've got this really strong base of business that's very, very stable, produces a positive EBITDA and cash flow.
Then we have this growth driver in GRAFAPEX, which can more than double revenue at a better gross margin. That is really the story. I think good time for investors to be looking at our business. Happy to take any questions from the audience.
After your success with GRAFAPEX, you're kind of becoming more of in the orphan drug area where you're specific on the transplants and everything else. You're kind of becoming a holding company because of the success that you have here. You're going to go out and acquire. Are you going to acquire their management, or are you going to run the platform for them because you were successful doing that?
Yeah
If you look at something, how will you bring it into the company, and how do you see that going?
Great question. I think it's complex in that we certainly see that we've built the platform.
Yeah.
You know, we have got the platform that's attractive to certain parties. As we're looking for new assets, new drug products, we may move a little bit earlier in their development process. I mean, we've been acquiring products that are either registered or pre-registration. We can certainly now look at earlier products. We're never gonna become a drug development company. That's not the plan.
Bigger opportunities will be available from products that are coming through phase III development, you know. That is where we can look for future assets. We're in no rush to do it because we have the growth asset today. We're looking for additional growth assets that will be bigger than GRAFAPEX.
We're looking for much bigger bite sizes in the future to add on to a portfolio, a platform that's already been built. You know, I think that becomes, you know, quite interesting for strategics. You know, clearly orphan drug, rare disease is a good space to be in because you get good pricing. The outcomes are excellent. If you're curing cancer, you're gonna get your pricing, you know, and you're gonna be attractive.
Like the hockey puck comes right now as you get to the next one that's coming in and the potential there, where people will say, "Okay, now they have this too," plus what you're doing already more of a slow 'Cause you've been slow growth. I've been following the company for years.
I think it was rapid growth at the beginning. When we first formed the company, we were about $30 million in revenue. We drove it to $108 million. Been a little bit flat as we're waiting for GRAFAPEX to get approved, and now we're kind of that inflection for the next stage of growth. You know, we very much see ourselves as a growth company. You know, clearly that's what we've done in the past, and that's what the future holds for us. As we do that and execute on GRAFAPEX, adding the next growth asset will be really important.
The other company, just one last thing. Who can we compare this to? Some other symbols or something that we can look at and say, "Their competitors are trading with this. Why are they trading here?" Is it just an industry thing that you believe because there's nobody like you? You know what I'm saying?
Yeah. you know.
You're not getting the valuation you deserve right now. That's what I believe
If you look at Specialty pharma companies, which we are no longer, we're more of an orphan drug, rare disease company, but spec pharma companies, you're seeing transactions done most recently at 2.2x revenue. We're not even trading at 1x revenue, our base business, and we have this growth asset. Yeah, I think we've been kind of overlooked a fair bit. That, that ought to bode well for investors who get in at this point.
Thank you very much. Appreciate your attention.
[Break]
Let me know. Yes. They are streaming.
Not video this, but it is audio.
Okay.
Tell people to kind of stick around. You've got your next slide, previous slide. If you want a laser pointer for whatever reason, or you can go forward, backward, forward or backwards right there.
Okay. Yeah.
Yeah. That should work.
Nailed it.
Yeah. Perfect. Okay, one more minute.
Perfect.
Very good. I'm so sorry.
All right. Chairman, CEO. Yeah, it's working. Thank you.
Many people.
No, of course, of course. I forget myself sometimes.
I'd like to introduce our next presenter, Deven Soni, Chairman and CEO of Vertical Data.
Thank you so much. Great. Thank you, everyone. My name is Deven Soni. I'm the CEO, co-founder, Chairman of Vertical Data. Vertical Data is a full stack AI infrastructure company, and I'll kind of talk about what we do, why we do it, and the sector and the market we focus on. Obviously, safe harbor statements, we may make forward-looking statements.
Please refer to our SEC filings if you need any information about our business. When we think about AI and the AI market, obviously a whole lot of people talk about the sector. When we think about it at Vertical Data, we really look at a lot more granularly than, you know, the AI is a trillion-dollar market.
How I think about it is really the specific chunks of the market that are very large, which players and companies participate in it, and what the biggest opportunities are. For us, I think a whole lot of the market spends almost all their energy thinking about the data center space. If you look at a $1 million AI transaction, only about $150,000 of that $1 million is spent on data center capacity.
The remainder, the vast majority, is actually spent on the GPU side of the equation, the AI hardware. In fact, the financing around that AI hardware is actually about the same size as the entire data center market.
That's an area that we specialize in, and I'd like to spend a little time on talking about, again, what we do, why we do it, and a bit of our history. Vertical Data is a turnkey AI infrastructure company. What that means is we touch every single dollar in the AI stack, and we do so in a really unique capital-light model,
which means that unlike a lot of our peers, we don't need to raise billions of dollars to transact billions of dollars in the ecosystem. What we do is we work with large deployers of AI. Typically, when someone's deploying a large AI deployment, what they're doing is someone at the top has a contract.
They say, "I'd like to go buy, you know, $100 million of AI hardware or AI over a five-year period." They get to give that contract to a cloud provider. That cloud provider's job is to do a few things. They've got to find AI hardware, they've got to find a data center, they have to find a service provider to service that AI hardware, and they actually have to fund the whole package based on the piece of paper that a customer's given them.
That piece of paper might be from a company like Meta, it might be from a startup Silicon Valley company, it could be from a government or a sovereign off-taker. What we do is we basically take those customer contracts and turn them into real live AI deployments.
We sell the AI hardware that goes into these AI deployments through partnerships with companies like Dell and Supermicro and HP. We find data center capacity. Today, that data center capacity we find is other people's data center capacity where we have long-term contracts. Over time, we're building our own network of data centers to service that capacity. I think most importantly, and how we lead our business, is that we finance those entire deployments so that a customer can actually run an AI deployment.
Typically, when you have a $100 million or $500 million hardware deal for AI, you're not using equity dollars, you're not writing that check off your balance sheet. You're going to a network of capital partners. That could be investment banks like Goldman Sachs or Deutsche Bank, it could be private credit firms like Apollo and Blackstone.
What we do is we find the capital for those AI deployments. Because we source the capital, we have the ability to sell the hardware into the transactions to provide the managed services layer and put everything into our own data center. We truly lead with financing. The types of customers we work with are cloud providers, so companies like CoreWeave. CoreWeave's obviously a company that's really zeroed in on working with, you know, three customers, right?
They work with OpenAI, Microsoft, and the U.S. government. That's it. When you think about, there's probably 300 or 400 other cloud providers globally that do sort of the same thing for other types of deployments. These could be global sovereign nations, these could be data centers, these could be, you know, large off-takers or large customers in other parts of the world.
We work with those companies. We also work with data centers. Data centers historically have been traditionally real estate plays, right? You get some power, you build a building, and you make some money by renting it out. Well, I think a lot of data center operators have realized that, well, if you actually put the GPUs and own that part of the stack, you can make 5%-10%, 5-10x more money per square foot by owning the hardware itself.
What we often do is we work with companies like American Tower, like a lot of other large data center providers, to actually finance the GPUs that go inside those data centers, so they can go from a power provider to a full stack provider.
We do all this again in a very capital-light manner without using our own balance sheet. The long-term vision for our business is really building what we consider to be the GE Capital of AI. GE Capital, famously back in the 1990s and 2000s, built a $60 billion business by providing capital for really, really capital-intensive projects, right? Jet engines and MRI machines and hospitals.
Because they provided the capital layer in the most efficient way, they were able to win the hardware business, the high-margin services business, and we are doing the exact same thing for AI. We provide the capital through a network of capital partners, and because we provide the capital, we get every other stack of the AI pie running through our business. That, we think, is where the future is going.
You know, today, there's constraints everywhere, right? There's data center constraints, there's power constraints, there's GPU constraints. Over time, these deployments are only getting more expensive. The minimum viable deployment of an NVIDIA, you know, sort of cluster right now is probably about $100 million.
Those deployments need really strong access to capital. That's where we intend to lead. If you think about the size of the AI market today, it's basically about the same, the hardware market is about the same size as U.S. consumer automotive. If you think about U.S. consumer automotive, there's like five companies that are multi-billion dollar providers. All they do is provide capital to that sector.
There are currently zero market leaders in the AI financing space, and it's an area where we intend to become, you know, a top five player globally. The secret not quite secret, but I think the long-term view of our business is because we provide the capital and we provide long-term capital solutions to the largest customers and the largest consumers in the AI space,
We end up getting a long-term pipeline of customers that want to buy AI hardware, and they want to put it somewhere. Because of that, we become the optimal customer or optimal developer of data centers because we have a long pipeline of customers.
Instead of a lot of companies that are building data centers on spec in a market like today where there's significant demand, as that market normalizes, the key differentiator in value for data centers is gonna be who can bring customers. Because of that, we will be able to build our own network of data centers. We have, we're starting with three that we're building today.
The goal is to really build a network of 10-20 data centers based on servicing our own client demand. We're doing this without putting our own capital at work because we are bringing the customers, we're bringing the infrastructure, we're bringing the GPUs. That's where we get positioned.
Our point of view, we like to say, is we'd rather own, you know, 50% of 12 data centers without putting any of our capital at work versus owning 100% of three or four data centers where we've leveraged the company significantly and raised significant capital to do so. The first deal we announced is a transaction with a company called Alpha 10 Capital.
It was a $43 million hardware opportunity. To give some color on the exact nature of that deployment and how we make money on it, maybe I'll kinda walk through the key steps. Alpha10 is a company that provides confidential computing.
What they wanna do is run AI hardware in a manner where they can't run it on Google or Amazon or Microsoft because they wanna make sure that whatever data stays in the network stays directly on their network. We found them a data center in Sweden, for the provider called atNorth.
We sold them $43 million of hardware. That entire revenue hits our books at about a 10% margin. On the data center side, we earn a fee by basically sourcing that data center capacity, typically a 10%-20% margin on the ongoing data center contract.
The third thing we're doing is for the life of the contract, which today is a five-year contract, we are earning managed services fees along the way, about $100,000 a month at a little over 70% gross margin. We book upfront revenue from the hardware sale, we book upfront revenue from procuring the financing, we book long-term recurring revenue from the data center spread, and we earn long-term recurring revenue from the managed services side.
This is off of, you know, one deployment. Currently, we have about 15 such deployments in our pipeline for 2026, and the goal is to close a large number of them, but also continue to service the same customer. Alpha10 is not a buyer of $40 million of hardware.
They're probably a buyer of, you know, $500 million of hardware over the next two or three years. Our goal is to take a lot of that business from one customer and then add, you know, a dozen or two dozen customers over the next two to three years that we can then scale with in the exact same way. When we think about our kind of business model, it's really full stack, but I think each part of the business model is valuable in different ways. The hardware sales side gives us tremendous upfront revenue and upfront cash flow.
It's typically seen as, you know, sort of a lower equity value driver, but we will take the revenue, we will take the scale, and what it lets us do is build really strong relationships with companies like Dell and HP because we sell a whole lot of hardware. Not only do we sell that hardware, we finance it.
The second piece of the puzzle is obviously a much smaller dollar amount. It's about 5% of a total deal, but the margins can be much higher. They can go from 40%-50% all the way up to 70% when we're using our in-house labor. These are five-year recurring revenue contracts.
This is really when you think about the CoreWeave of the world or the Nebius of the world, these other cloud providers, they make almost all of their money on the managed services layer. We have that as a core piece of our business, which we feel drives the equity value, but maybe not the top-line revenue as much.
The third piece, really the most important as I touched on, is data center ownership. Because we have a large list of customers that need the data center capacity, the power capacity to fill their hardware needs. Today, we're meeting that with available existing data center capacity. We work with companies like American Tower and atNorth and Equinix and all these folks who have existing capacity that we lock up.
Over time, which I think starting in Q1 and Q2 2027, we will start filling our own data center capacity with these customers, which then creates a significant equity value story for us because we own a stake in a whole lot of data centers that are filled with our own customers. Eventually, the 4th piece of it to us is hardware financing. It's a high-margin business because it's almost all you know, pure margin. We earn origination fees on our capital.
Over time, we'll earn spreads on interest. That, you know, that's a bit of a necessity to function around the rest of our business model, which is around hardware, managed services, and data centers. For us, our key competitive advantage from an operating point of view is the fact that we're vertically integrated.
If you're a new company that wants to run an AI deployment, what you generally don't wanna do is talk to two dozen different companies, you know, one that sells hardware, one that sells cables, one that finances deployments, another that finances your data center. It turns into a logistical nightmare when time and speed become really, really important. For us, being a one-phone-call solution for people that are, you know, trusted with running these deployments very quickly becomes a core competitive advantage.
The second piece of our key competitive advantage is that we are global from day 1. 80% of the world's data is generated globally, not in North America. 80% of AI usage is gonna be global over the next 5-10 years. The vast majority of the world is focused on North America.
We're focused primarily on the rest of the world, where we think there's significantly more margin, significantly more greenfield, and more opportunity. We recently opened our office in India, which is going from basically a $0 AI market in 2025 because they had no data centers and no power, growing to about $100 billion a year in 2027.
We opened a foothold in the industry because we think being local in that region gives us a major advantage, especially if we can bring our flavor of financing solutions and hardware availability to a market like India. Lastly, we work with a network of partners, and those partners are everything from logistics providers to OEMs and hardware sellers like Dell and HP.
Because they see we do every stack of the puzzle, we get referrals from other parts of the business. We currently get hardware referrals and financing referrals from Dell and HP. We get data center referrals and customer referrals from our data center partners, and even our logistics partners send us capital opportunities and our insurance providers. We built this entire ecosystem around our business where customers come to us because they know we can solve every piece of the puzzle they can't solve otherwise.
We've been in business for about three years now. We've built a strong network of partnerships with nearly every key player in the industry. Again, these are customers that are kind of at the pinnacle of the sector, and because of that, we're able to really, again, zero in on broader business. Quick background on the team.
I'll just point out a few people. Myself, I started my career as an investment banker at Lazard, focusing on hyperscalers, doing buy-side M&A for Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Joined Goldman Sachs as a private equity investor, focused on the data center space, so basically investing in AI infrastructure companies with Goldman's balance sheet capital. Left, started a private equity fund buying industrial HVAC and cooling companies servicing the data center sector.
Sold that portfolio to a private equity fund and then started Vertical Data. Our CTO is the former CTO of Dell's AI division who's responsible for their largest AI deployments. We have a giant team that came from Hut 8, which was a giant Bitcoin miner that pivoted to cloud services over the last couple years. You know, we're a pretty lean team.
We have about 25 people today, going to about probably 30 by the end of the year. Pretty global footprint, as I mentioned. Our biggest markets, you know, Delhi is obvious. We're very excited about Sweden is a market with significant power, significant data center usage, and a whole lot of global sovereign deployments for other markets because of the neutrality of the region.
On the capital market side, we went public through a direct listing on the OTC about a month ago. Currently about a $40 million market cap, sitting at about a $3 share price. The intent is really to focus on an uplisting, you know, by the end of the year.
The other focus is really to scale the shareholder base, scale demand for what we're doing. I think the unique part about us is we've done this direct listing strategy, which gives us a whole lot of more concentrated ownership. We've built this entire business with about $2.6 million of capital. We have about $7 million or $8 million of cash on the balance sheet from cash generation and customer deposits.
The intent is to really run 12 to 24 more of these large-scale AI deployments over the next several years. We can do so without raising significant additional capital because we don't use our own balance sheet to scale this business.
I'll stop there and leave some room for any questions. Thank you. Yes.
As you build out to, you know, the 30 employees, I guess, what were you looking to add on?
The biggest gap in opportunity, and we have with our pipeline right now, are people that really understand asset-backed lending. It's a really niche world that not a lot of people are familiar with, but it's, you know, lending on AI and GPUs is very similar to lending on vehicles and, you know, large equipment and cranes and construction equipment.
People that know that space and are able to build the models, the structures, the underwriting are the biggest kind of gap in the company. Beyond that, it's really opening up our sales offices to drive inbound lead flow. Yes.
Deven, what's the headcount at the moment? Can you talk maybe about the growth in terms of the burn and the cash flow kind of thing?
We've got about 25 people on the team today. The vast majority of that office is, you know, what we'd call a middle office or a back office in Latin America. Our total burn on that headcount is our total spend, it's not burn, is about $150,000 a month. That probably says a whole lot about our average, you know, cost per employee, which is probably about $2,000-$3,000 for the vast majority of the team. The other part of that is a whole lot of the sales folks are primarily commission-based, which also helps kind of the cost structure. Our intent is to be a cash generator in 2026.
I think that's where we already are a cash generator. You know, we don't expect our OpEx to exceed our revenue, our gross margin by any point in this year or in the future, which is another reason we don't need to raise significant capital for our business. Yes.
How many customers do you currently have?
We have three active customers. one is Alpha10. Our pipeline is about 15 opportunities with, I'd probably say another 10 customers through 2026. With the deal cycles, which you didn't ask, but they're typically, you know, they historically were like six months. Yeah. Yeah. No.
That's kind of the challenge is, you know, going to run these deployments that are often, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars typically take about six months. We see them compressing to about three or four months now. I think people are aiming to move a lot faster and deploy capital a lot more quickly to meet 2026 goals. Everyone that we're talking to today is trying to build a deployment in 2026.
When you do asset-backed lending on the chips, what period of time is that for? Because each generation.
Is the current generation.
Absolutely. That's a wonderful question. The broader private credit markets today have started looking at AI hardware as a five-year asset. People are typically underwriting. If you look at historically, right, like the first AI chips that NVIDIA ever sold came out about five years ago. They're still running strong. Because of the weird market dynamics, they're actually worth more than when they originally sold them. I think when you think about the current generation, people are looking at it as a five-year asset.
Contracts, customer contracts in the space are typically somewhere between three and five years. You're either, you know, amortizing this stuff over three, four, or five years, depending on the type of customer, the use case, and the contract. Great. Well, I think I will leave it at that.
Thank you, everyone, for.