Pivotree Inc

XTSX:PVT

Q3-2025 Earnings Call

[Operator]

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Pivotree Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions]

Before we begin, Pivotree would like to remind listeners that certain information discussed today may be forward-looking in nature. Such information reflects the company's current views with respect to future events. Any such information is subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements.

For more information on the risks, uncertainties and assumptions relating to the forward-looking statements, please refer to Pivotree's public filings, which are available on SEDAR. During the call, we will reference certain non-IFRS measures. Although we believe these measures provide useful supplemental information about our financial performance, they're not recognized measures and do not have standardized meanings under IFRS. Please see our MD&A for additional information regarding our non-IFRS measures, including for reconciliations to the nearest IFRS measures.

Now I'd like to pass the call over to Pivotree's CEO, Bill Di Nardo. Bill?

[William Di Nardo, executive]

Thank you, Peter. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us on our third quarter 2025 conference call. With me today, as always, is Mo Ashoor, our Chief Financial Officer. As we normally do each quarter, we already published a CEO letter in conjunction with our earnings results. It's available on our website, filed on SEDAR. I'll be covering some of that material today.

So we've now delivered our fourth straight quarter of positive EBITDA. We reported adjusted EBITDA of $1.8 million and just under $1 million of net income, making Q3 our third consecutive quarter producing positive net income. We're committed to operating in the 7% to 10% adjusted EBITDA range annually and expect to see us reinvest anything above that range in our go-to-market efforts. As a reminder that the current EBITDA is net of investments that we're making in R&D and product-based initiatives.

Our MIPS and Professional Services total contract value bookings totaled $14.4 million. Due to the somewhat lumpy nature of both PS and MIPS, we tend to look at a longer horizon to see what our trends are showing, and we're up about 6% on a trailing 12-month basis. MIPS and PS revenues totaled $13.4 million this quarter. The MIPS Q3 revenues actually reached their highest since Q2 2024 at $3.9 million, but we're still down on a trailing 12 despite bookings being up significantly.

Some of that can be explained by longer-term contracts starting to make up more of the MIPS bookings mix. So the MIPS sequentially was up quarter-over-quarter. But again, we do tend to look at things on a trailing 12, and our PS is pulling us down a little bit on that front.

This earnings call, I really want to take a moment to really help remind people about the business we're in and share a little bit about how it's changing. I have seen some stuff getting published recently on folks trying to explain our business, and I thought it best that we take a moment just to do a little bit of a refresher and an update.

Our business really is built on a foundation of helping clients with creating cleaner, more accessible data. That's that first run. We call that part of our business SDS, or strategic data services. This is also where we deploy many of our MIP solutions. You've heard me talk about SKU build and SKU enrichment. This is the area we do that in. This layer is also the layer that we've been leveraging machine learning and AI for many years to help automate that process of clean data.

The next level is where we integrate systems. And this is somewhat to communicate accessibility of data. We integrate systems to each other and ultimately help move data between systems. It's generally done in the form of PS, but we do have managed services that are around managing the micro service framework we use to do integration. In fact, some of the work we're doing now is independent of the platforms that we deploy, which is that next layer up.

We design and build enterprise applications generally in the commerce ecosystem, and we integrate them through our integration services. Many of you will be familiar with the enterprise applications we specialize in. Again, I think people tend to think about us mostly at this layer and mostly in retail, and it's not really a good description of what we do. We have the managed services layer that sits on top of that, and that's the observability layer. It is, again, where we do managed services. We've also built and deployed our MIP solutions in this layer.

And this is the layer where we've started to introduce agentic AI. These solutions sit on top of the clean accessible data. They sit inside our control tower databases, and they allow us to do some things that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do without the benefit of AI. But increasingly, AI is finding its way into every one of these layers, and that's going to really continue to evolve and increase in importance in our business, particularly, as I say, we've been doing it in Layer 1 and Layer 4 for quite some time, but it is now increasingly finding its way into the other 2 layers.

I think it's important to reframe a little bit of what we're doing in part because of the changing landscape that's going on. And I'm going to share some observations about what we've seen. But what is really becoming clear to us is how important AI is becoming in the conversation, how it's shaping the discussions and even how it's shaping some decision-making. So we had a really strong quarter for new logo acquisitions, and our entry point solutions are helping really overcome what I'm still seeing is budget pressures.

Folks continue to refer to budget constraints. We hear about that a lot in the market still. And it's our entry point solutions that have really helped us overcome that, smaller starting points. A lot of those conversations are now really including where does AI fit in the mix. So what we're seeing really is that the commerce landscape is shifting from a rules-based automation. So again, some of the software that you hear us talk about and deploy. And again, what we integrate and stand up for customers.

But it's moving towards a more autonomous and semi-autonomous decision-making landscape. And this is really where AI and AI agents are starting to play a more prominent role. As a result of folks still being somewhat uncertain about how AI is going to play, I think we are going to continue to see folks reluctant to do really big, expensive long-term projects because they're still not really sure how AI is going to affect that ecosystem. So we're seeing experiments. We're seeing POCs. And I think as a result, we're also seeing some delays in making big decisions to do wholesale platform shifts.

The data high level continues to be super relevant to what we're doing. Many of our data discussions are turning into AI. But ultimately, it means we're actually in the data conversation already and it is allowing us to seamlessly shift into an AI conversation about what is going to happen to that data in the AI world. As I said, there's lots of experiments, not just us, but many of our customers doing experiments with AI as feature enhancement.

Again, I think what we're seeing is people taking AI and applying it to their existing infrastructure. But what we're starting to see are more questions about AI agents being more foundational. Rather than put it on top of an existing infrastructure, the questions are starting to get asked, do I redesign this process to start with AI in mind? Again, it's early days. I don't expect this to translate into overnight boom. I think there's a lot -- it has practical application, and it's going to increasingly become more critical and central to many of the functions that we perform in the commerce transaction.

Now we've been doing the data cleaning piece for over 5 years. We acquired a business that really allowed us to entrench ourselves in there, but it's foundational. And it's not just operational. It is creating potential moats. When you think about the 7 million SKUs, clean SKUs that we have in our library, that number grows 7 figures a month. This really has the potential to create a moat, with clean data, what can you do with it? It's also allowing us to demonstrate to customers what they could do with it if they had the clean data.

The last thing I'm going to really chat about, and I'll share a little bit more in the next couple of slides is our client profiles. We really have a couple of key distinct segments. Now retail, which seems like what most people think of us exclusively as, but that's not the case. Retail is an important segment. There's a lot to be learned in there. There's a lot of things going on in the AI realm in there. But we're very active in industrial manufacturing and distribution. And one of the subsets in that is automotive.

Now these categories represent significant revenue and margin contribution. They are more than 50% of our total revenue now. And we love these categories as they have catalog complexity, many operating with millions of SKUs that are driven by technical specifications and compatibility requirements. And that demands very specialized solutions, but it also really lends itself to AI and machine learning. There's a lot of white space here, and we're investing a lot of our go-to-market dollars to win in this space.

One of the things we wanted to really socialize the market to is [Technical Difficulty] about frictionless commerce. But really, what's happened with the...

[Moataz Ashoor, executive]

Bill, can you hear me?

[William Di Nardo, executive]

Yes.

[Moataz Ashoor, executive]

Maybe just turn off video. It's getting choppy. We can hear you, but maybe video is kind of impacting your bandwidth.

[William Di Nardo, executive]

Okay. Is that any better?

[Moataz Ashoor, executive]

Right now, we can hear you. Keep going. I'll let you know.

[William Di Nardo, executive]

Okay. Thanks. The evolution of our frictionless commerce strategy is really being accelerated by the large language models. If we think about our frictionless commerce path, it's always started with the foundation of good, clean accessible data. We've spent 5 years really in understanding readable data. This is about product information that's in a format that both your existing system use, which is why we've been busy for 5 years, but making sure that it's AI-enabled. And so really, it's a two-pronged approach today. You need clean data to do the business right now, and you're going to need even better cleaner data to create a foundation of AI on top of it.

And that's really the second gate, that AI is in it. Again, you're probably not going to see a lot of revenue in the next 6 to 12 months and it starts to accelerate. The importance of AI and you expect as you deploy more agents and as there's more AI in the systems we're doing, you need more orchestration of those AI layers. And as a result, we're building layers on top of the AI.

Ultimately, for us to achieve frictionless commerce success in the long term, we're really going to need to establish trust and that strategic operational shift of moving to AI as a feature to AI driving the way we do transactions. So we're moving quickly. And I think over time, real success is going to come as...

[Moataz Ashoor, executive]

Bill, I think we might have to have you dial.

[William Di Nardo, executive]

Strategic operational shifts occur. And the last thing...

[Moataz Ashoor, executive]

Bill, we might have to have you dial in. It's getting choppy and worse.

[William Di Nardo, executive]

I'm going to pass it over to you, Mo. I think we've covered most of what I was going to cover.

[Moataz Ashoor, executive]

Yes, if you want to switch to the Slide 10. I'll get started with revenue, but then I'll actually shift to bookings to explain how you could interpret those results as a leading indicator of our business. Total revenue was $15.5 million in Q3. It's down 10% sequentially and down $3.3 million or 18% year-over-year. Of that $3.3 million, as expected, legacy contributed $2.8 million of that decline as that segment continues to become a smaller portion of our overall business.

MIPS was $3.9 million in Q3. It represented 5% growth on a sequential basis and up 2% compared to Q3 of 2024. Within our MIPS offerings, I think it's important to kind of highlight, as a result of our focus on SKU build go-to-market and SKU build delivery and continuing to find faster, cheaper ways to deliver SKUs to our customers in high quality, we're pleased to share that within there, there's double-digit growth in our SKU build offering as we deliver the SKUs faster to a customer than originally planned and contracted. This helped offset a decline in some application and infrastructure support contracts that drove us to a net growth percentage.

Professional Services were $9.5 million, down 10% sequentially and is down 7% year-over-year, largely related to project completion and ramp downs in this category. And as Bill has mentioned, we are seeing momentum in new logo acquisitions, and that obviously provides an opportunity to get professional service back into a growth trajectory, which I'll touch on shortly in bookings.

If we move to the bookings slide, MIPS and Professional Services bookings were $14.4 million, and that's down modestly compared to Q2 and up 6% on a trailing 12-month basis. MIPS bookings were $2.2 million in Q3. And as we've shared before, it demonstrates some of the volatility we see in this category. When you look at this at a trailing 12-month basis, it's delivering 35% growth.

Professional Services grew 8% quarter-over-quarter to $12.2 million. This result is one of the best quarters that we've had in PS category over the last 2 years. A significant portion of that Professional Services booking represents 12-month contract terms, which helps secure backlog and visibility into 2026. Also within our Professional Services booking, it's one of our stronger new logo bookings, which supports my earlier statements of positioning PS with opportunities to change its revenue trajectory into 2026. New logo will continue to be an area of focus for us given our history on being able to continue our relationship and expand on some of those beyond a single year.

Legacy Managed Services bookings were $2.8 million in Q3 related to a renewal, which is helping our customers extend the life of Oracle into 2026, but that continues again to be renewals, but that revenue stream, as we've shared in the past, will continue to be on its trajectory down as we shift more and focus more on our strategic offerings.

Moving on to the margins. Q3 gross margin was 46.8%. It's up from 38.7% last year, and it's maintaining that improving growth trajectory we've been on to support our commitment to profitability. This is one of our strongest gross margins that we've delivered, thanks to the discipline and effort to deliver on our commitments to our customers.

Looking at the chart on the right, Q3 adjusted EBITDA was 12% of total revenue. That's $1.8 million, up $2.6 million compared to Q3 last year. This improvement was due to the gross margins mentioned and the restructuring that mitigates against some of the revenue decline we've experienced, and it's transitioned our P&L to a cash-producing model.

We also saw an FX benefit in Q3, which didn't hurt, that helped that contributed to the quarter's results. This is now the fourth quarter of strong bottom line performance, resulting in $8.8 million EBITDA and $7.2 million of adjusted EBITDA on the trailing 12-month basis. Net income continues to be positive, reaching the $1 million mark in Q3. And this now includes some of the benefits from amortization and depreciation that we mentioned on our last quarterly call.

Now on the balance sheet. We ended the quarter with cash of about $11.8 million. That's an increase of $3.2 million of cash. It's one of our strongest cash-generating quarter, thanks to the discipline that we've been operating with and strong collections through our receivables. The core operating activities generated about $1.7 million of cash in Q3. Our working capital had a positive impact of $1.9 million, the driver being strong AR collections. And overall, working capital continues to be healthy for us with no concerns within our balance sheet.

The business is operating cash flow positive, while continuing to make the necessary investments to grow our business. As a reminder, we have access to $8 million from our credit facility with National Bank, plus an additional $15 million through an accordion.

So now I'll turn it back to Bill for a closing summary.

[William Di Nardo, executive]

Thanks, everyone. Based on my current Internet challenges, I'm going to keep it brief. The team is continuing to find ways to operate efficiently. We're seeing really good leading indicators with our new solutions. We're continuing to invest in the growth of our managed and IP solutions. We're really focusing in '25 on accelerating agentic POCs to set us up for '26. And our continued theme is maintaining that 7% to 10% EBITDA and positive cash flow.

So with that, I thank everyone for attending the call. And if we've got some questions from the analysts, we'd be happy to take those now.

[Operator]

Thanks, Bill. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Daniel Rosenberg at Paradigm Capital.

[Daniel Rosenberg, analyst]

My first question just comes around, I guess, the efforts towards growth initiatives as we think about '26. It sounds like you're making headways with new logos and proof of concepts. Maybe if you could just dive a little bit deeper on specifics around the types of proof of concepts that you're doing? Are these consistent with the automotive industrial type success you've had? Or are you exploring new opportunities with some of that?

[William Di Nardo, executive]

No, we're staying very focused, Daniel, on the segments we just described. We have AI initiatives going on, both on platforms. There's opportunities within our existing platforms to help our customers leverage native AI. We're building our own product overlays on top of some of our previous capabilities like control tower. We now have a new initiative called Tower Talk that's in production for a couple of customers, which is agentic capability sitting on top of control tower.

What's exciting about a lot of these two, I just would highlight is, they're not just AI features. It's not just prompt engineering to get an answer to a question. The nature of the architecture around the things we're building and experimenting with this AI, making information readily available, but then also through that same AI channel that we've built, being able to affect changes to the ecosystem.

So we're, in effect, being able to use AI not just to capture and share information, but to perform functions within the ecosystem. And this is, again, what we talked about earlier, moving just further along from simple feature enhancement, tell me about my business or write something for me to, "Hey, perform this business function, work within these set of goals or objectives," and giving AI a little bit more decision rights, some of that semi-autonomous capability that we were describing earlier, but all within the three segments we were talking about.

[Daniel Rosenberg, analyst]

Staying on the topic of AI, I was just curious in the conversations you're having, like is there a type of customer who is like an early adopter type, or are these conversations more broad-based? And I guess the follow-on would be, what do you see as the tipping point here to somebody saying, okay, I see the value, and I need to rebuild my infrastructure to be able to deliver on that. Any insight would be appreciated.

[William Di Nardo, executive]

We generally ask our questions almost categorically whenever we meet what their thoughts are around AI. And you will get a fairly broad range of dismissive and fatigue about the number of people bringing forward AI ideas to the other end of the spectrum where entire teams are being stood up inside organizations to drive AI throughout the company. So there's definitely an AI maturity scale companies fall on.

But I think you actually said it yourself when you said with the tipping point about value, that will be the tipping point. When customers see actual value, I still hear a little too often even from my own team, this is cool. I don't think cool is going to drive the tipping point. I think what's going to drive the tipping point is when CEOs and CFOs see material gains in automation and efficiencies, reducing human touch points to complete transactions.

We've seen a lot of that in our data cleaning. And so when you get those kind of financial results, you tend to invest more and go harder. I think those are the tipping points. Trust that you're getting the correct answers and the processes are working effectively and ROI in that these efficiencies are going to show up in the bottom line, that will be the tipping point.

[Daniel Rosenberg, analyst]

Maybe just one more before I pass the line. So you had strength kind of in the gross profit. It sounds like some Professional Services work was higher value. But it's been a couple of quarters now that we kind of see stronger margin profile. So just how should we think about the baseline going forward? Or were there any onetime things that might -- project work that might roll off that might change that? And how should we think about it going forward?

[Moataz Ashoor, executive]

Yes. I think versus history and versus where we were in the past, I think the team is driving a sustainable margin. I would say Q3 was slightly better than what we could expect. That's probably, call it as, an outlier. But I think we still expect to be kind of north of 40% for PS versus being in the north high 30s in prior years and quarters.

So I think the team is operating really well. We want to make sure we balance so that we don't -- if we go too high, then we essentially miss managing and maintaining the talent to support the next opportunities. But I would say kind of in the 40s in terms of what we've -- low 40s where we've been delivering is probably what you could expect going forward.

[William Di Nardo, executive]

The only caveat I would put on it, Daniel, is we're seeing margin expansion in some of the MIP Solutions that we're developing. I'll even go as far as to say we're pricing deals at the start to win them and the pace at which we're evolving the automation by the time we get into the deals and as we start cresting the peak of the deals, our COGS are declining, and we're actually expanding margin on them.

And I think this is going to be a bit of a recurring theme for us is those entry point solutions, we're not trying to drive high margin. We're trying to get in with the customers. And then over time, the R&D results are actually starting to come a little quicker, and we see expansion on the tail end of those deals. So there's some good things happening there. The challenge, of course, is they aren't the majority of our revenues yet. So you're not going to see massive immediate impact on our gross margin line, but this is the long transformation we're going through, which is much higher degrees of automation in the way we deliver services.

[Operator]

Our next question comes from Jesse Pytlak at Cormark Securities.

[Moataz Ashoor, executive]

It looks like Jesse actually put his hand down. I don't know if he's having Internet problems.

[William Di Nardo, executive]

I can relate.

[Jesse Pytlak, analyst]

Can you hear me?

[Operator]

Yes.

[Jesse Pytlak, analyst]

Sorry about that. Just first, just kind of sticking to the topic of AI. Can you just speak to if you've seen any interesting shifts on the competitive front as AI has become more topical and starting to be more broadly adopted?

[William Di Nardo, executive]

Yes. I think as we've been constantly monitoring what we would consider the competitive landscape, I think if you asked me 2 years ago, we said we didn't have any really direct competitors. I think why combinators pumping out a new competitor every week in the data space. Like it's a hot topic, there's no question. I think the difference, though, is we're ground in real customers. We've been solving the problems for customers for years, and now we're showing them we can bring new technology and capability.

But I think it's hard for start-ups to break into large enterprise with anything other than POCs. I think, again, we're going to keep an eye on them. They're obviously venture-backed and they're going to be unencumbered by the large business like we have that we have to protect.

But I would say our strength is existing customer relationships, deep knowledge of data governance and data management and frankly, the interconnectedness of why do you clean data in the first place in order to push it through those systems and deliver commercial transactions.

So I think where we're a little bit more general and with some deep domain expertise, they're super specialized, and we'll see how the landscape evolves. But yes, it is remarkable how fast the number of competitors are growing.

[Jesse Pytlak, analyst]

That's helpful context. And then just in terms of some of the new logo wins that you got this quarter, was it generally broad-based across all your target verticals? Or is it more concentrated in 1 or 2 particular verticals?

[William Di Nardo, executive]

Trying not to blur the line of what's going on in Q4 with what happened in Q3 because across Q3 and Q4, the new logos are coming in across all of them. I think Q3 was a little bit more in the industrial goods, and we're seeing a little bit more retail show up in Q4. But a lot of it is really coming in on the back of our dirty data campaign. And so I think this is really resonating with the market.

We're really trying to shift away from partner-centric lead generation to more industry-specific problem solving, and data is clearly a problem everyone is resonating with. And now we have a lot of things we can talk to people about within that data space.

And again, by the way, I'm just going to reinforce, I talk about data, and I think people think about it as just one category of what we do. But when you think about the enterprise applications that we're standing up in the different domains, it's data management, right? It's data management in a commerce system. It's data management in an order management system. So our clients have data challenges across all those systems. And what we're seeing is leading with a dirty data campaign is bringing in opportunities across all the domains we play in.

[Jesse Pytlak, analyst]

That's great. It sounds like that campaign has been really, really beneficial for you. One last question for me. Just on LMS, obviously, some good booking activity there, but this is a business that's in runoff. Can you just maybe give a sense on the number of customers that you're still serving in that business line? And then how should we think about the type of revenue decline we should be thinking about for 2026?

[Moataz Ashoor, executive]

I mean we are starting to look at a much smaller group of customers. I know it looks like a single large bookings, but that was largely driven by one customer kind of going into, I would say, mid- to late to third quarter of 2026. But it is starting to become a smaller number, and you're starting to look at kind of this year's revenue to next year's revenue for this business. It's probably going to be half in that range. Who knows? Some people might still want to extend and surprise us like they have in the past. But you could see that Legacy Managed Services revenue year-on-year being about half of what it was versus 2025.

[Operator]

I see no further questions. So Bill, back to you for a closing statement.

[William Di Nardo, executive]

Again, thanks, everyone, for attending. I'm really thrilled with the way the team is operating. Again, like there's been no surprise. Our team knew what the revenue profile was going to look like for this year. They built an operating model to deliver profitability and to allow us to invest in our future.

Our future is coming faster than we thought in many respects. The role of agentic in AI is certainly driving some acceleration. But again, I want to reinforce there's practical application of. I don't think this is going to be an overnight hyper acceleration. We're not changing our name to pivotree.ai tomorrow, and we're certainly not going to overhype this. It's a tool. It's a really good tool. I think it's going to allow us to drive our vision faster, and we've got a bunch of cash that are going to help us move that along that spectrum that we've been chasing for a number of years now. So I'm excited about how we're positioned for '26. Thanks for coming and showing an interest in the business.