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Ansarada Group Ltd
ASX:AND

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Ansarada Group Ltd Logo
Ansarada Group Ltd
ASX:AND
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Price: 2.3 AUD Market Closed
Updated: May 10, 2024

Earnings Call Analysis

Summary
Q1-2024

Strong Growth Amidst Diversification Efforts

In Q1, the company delivered a robust 22% EBITDA margin with growth in non-deal customers by 34%. ARPA (average revenue per account) rose by 8% despite no price increases for 6-7 years until this quarter. Cash flow from operations was a positive $1.9 million, while overall revenue growth was 3% YoY, with delayed revenue up 14% to $18.6 million providing predictability for FY'24. 40% of revenue was digitally acquired, up from 15% last year, and the net dollar retention was 102%. Despite a decrease in deals revenue by 3%, non-deals revenue surged 28%, suggesting a successful strategic shift. In addition to Australia and New Zealand making up 58% of revenue, growth was noted in almost all territories, especially in the U.S. The company aims to maintain positive cash flows and expects ARPA growth to continue.

Earnings Call Transcript

Earnings Call Transcript
2024-Q1

from 0
S
Sam Riley
executive

All right. So we'll get going. Yes, you don't want old results, you want new ones. So I'll get on to that in a second. I'm Sam Riley, one of the Co-Founders and the CEO, joined by James Drake, our CFO.

J
James Drake
executive

Good morning, everyone.

S
Sam Riley
executive

Look, yes, the main story today is, in Q1, we delivered growth, positive cash flows. I'm pleased to say a 22% EBITDA margin, and we've made a lot of progress on achieving the milestones required for our growth products. Our non-deal customers grew by 34%. So our team did a really fantastic job, and I'm super proud of them, especially in what remains a challenging environment, to perform like that is great.

So if you don't know about Ansarada, like what gets us out of bed every day is this belief that every business has a purpose and every business has potential that can be realized. And we want to see that happen in business. So we help them with a lot of their critical information and processes that are required for them to achieve their potential.

And as they do that, they can increase their value and achieve better outcomes. So that's kind of why we do what we do because we see a lot of stress, a lot of risk, a lot of waste and time, energy, money, and we think we can help with that.

So how we do it with software? We bring order to the management of critical information and business processes, things like deals, capital raising, refinancing, insolvency, M&A, IPOs or anything critical around due diligence and deal making. We do that.

We help people with their risk and compliance processes and systems, so they don't have a plethora of spreadsheets or lack of control. We help people with board management and committees. We help with procurement of large infrastructure as well.

So where Ansarada is really at its best in simplifying and securing complex, high-value, high risk processes? So as a result, people feel very calm, confident and in control when they're using our product versus not having it there. And that's why we're valuable to them, and that's why we keep growing.

I would say, on the screen here, you've got a lot of numbers. But basically, over many, many years, the interactions and listening and development we've done with more than 0.5 million users, 600,000 users, in our software, we've ended up with features and content that has been refined to manage risks, protect information, protect reputations and ultimately, get people the outcomes they want from these processes.

We've been trusted in trillions of dollars of deals across more than 170 countries. Our risk and compliance products are trusted by banks and leading financial institutions. Our procured products has been utilized on hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure, like new roads, light rail, ports, airports, energy, battery projects, renewables, water, health, sporting precincts, stadium. So this $40 trillion of forecast infrastructure development globally, and we're at the forefront of trying to capture as much as that.

So all of that adds up to Ansarada is a trusted brand with a strong reputation globally. And our global reach and growing digital strengths gives us a constant flow of opportunities, new customers and new wins.

So here's a quick snapshot of our Q1 performance. I won't spend too long because James has got some good detail, but we did provide guidance a few months ago that Q1 could be challenging for us from a cash flow perspective. Last year, we saw negative cash flow. So it's really pleasing to see EBITDA at $2.9 million, 22% margin. Cash flow is positive from operations of $1.9 million. And I might add, this is a really clean result. There was no financial origami done where we folded cost into another period. We ran the business and cash flow pretty clean there.

Another number, our revenue, it did grow at 3% year-on-year. Our deals revenue though year-on-year was down 3%. So what that tells you is our non-deal revenue was up 28%. So that's another clear indication of our strategy to build a stronger, more diversified Ansarada working and another indication that the macroeconomic cycle affecting deals does not have a major, major effect on us. We'd love to see deal volume return. And with our 94% gross margin, we would drop that straight to the bottom line.

Once again, we did see an increase in ARPA. We do expect that to continue increasing modestly over the next 12 months. And lastly, on subscribers, whilst they were down 1% year-on-year, it is worth noting, we did add net subscribers in Q1, and this was the third quarter in a row that we continued adding subscribers.

So we continue to trend up on the subscribers. And with our e-commerce subscribers year-on-year, it was 119% growth in that channel, which means we're not only growing subscribers there, but it's much more efficient and profitable and scalable than last year. So great improvement.

I've just got a few comments on here worth reading. I've touched on some of them already. Record customer numbers, which is a great future funnel with us to convert into subscribers. Non-deal customers, I mentioned, were up 34%.

In the third paragraph there, I talked about some activity we undertook around AI in the business. AI is a major focus area for us. So in the quarter, we did a week long hackathon that we called Advance IT, and we partnered with the experts in AI from AWS. And we've had AI features for several years. So it's not a new thing for us. But with the rapid growth in generative AI, we wanted to bring some business and customer opportunities and candidates for the hackathon. So we had over 10 or more than that, about a dozen, that we focused on.

And the event with such a success, that several of them are already being worked on in our engineering team, and they're part of our formal road maps, and they will underpin a lot of our product features.

So the goal of that event was not only making inroads on AI features, but it's about upskilling our entire engineering team to embed AI more and more into their everyday work practices. So these innovations and the upskill in the team, we will use that as a major edge and we'll continue improving the customer experience with that, so better product, faster to you, faster to use, easier, less risk, all of that great stuff. So stay tuned for some AI releases coming soon.

Lastly, I encourage you to Google Hall & Wilcox, which is a fast-growing innovative law firm, and Ansarada, and you'll find a 3-minute film where we profiled Ed Paton. He's a partner there. Now Hall & Wilcox is a law firm that's known for their smarter law approach. So I love these guys because they look to every part of their business and the client experience.

So how can they be like less risk, more secure? How can they be operationally more efficient? How can they spend more time with the customer? What's an innovative pricing model? How can they creatively resource their work? So they're very driven. And as such, the fastest -- or one of the fastest growing law firms in Australia.

So they've done over 90 deals on Ansarada in the last 2 years. I'm showing you this as an example of how firms that want to do those things trust Ansarada, and they standardized their operations on our platform. So they can do those great things. And as a result, we generate an ARR enterprise subscription, not just one-off transactional deals. So there's a lot of customers like that, but it's a great one if you wanted to understand what we do and the value we provide.

With that being said, I'll hand you over to James just to go a bit more detail into numbers.

J
James Drake
executive

Great. Thank you, Sam. So this slide, hopefully, illustrates that Q1 was really a continuation of our strategy and a continuation of growth in our key metrics, with cash flow generation, revenue growth and 19% year-over-year growth in our ARR. And that's obviously, as Sam said, despite some of the ongoing challenges in M&A markets.

Our customers increased 122% versus prior comparable period, ending at 12,499. Customers are -- those that are acquired through our freemium acquisition channel, plus paying subscribers and paying customers. Just in terms of our freemium acquisition channel, what are freemium strategy gives us is an opportunity for customers to experience value in the product to get started, to get prepared before hitting a trigger event, which triggers conversion into a paid subscription. And that trigger event on deals product, for example, could be the moment in which they go live, which we define as when third parties or guests are invited into the room, which is an indicator that things are about to go to the next stage.

We expect our freemium customers to continue to increase, particularly through annualizing the launch of our corporate freemium, which we launched towards the end of Q2. And just -- so in the funnel, we keep our freemium customers for 12 months. And if they haven't converted by then, even though they remain in our system, we don't include them in our freemium customer count.

Our subscribers, despite being 1% down, as Sam said, we've added net subscribers over the last 3 quarters. And a lot of that is annualizing the drop in particularly M&A volumes that we saw in the first half of last year. They were down 30%. So we're now annualizing that, and that's why we're able to add over the last 3 quarters subscribers.

ARPA continues to increase, up 8% year-over-year. Even though we've made packaging changes in subscription pricing and packaging, we haven't had any price increase for 6 or 7 years. We did actually do a price increase beginning of this quarter. So within that ARPA increase is not a price raise, but that gives us confidence we can expect to see continued growth in ARPA, but through that price adjustment opportunity that we executed, but also in the focus on enterprise contracts, which usually the larger deals and therefore I have a positive influence on ARPA across the business.

And lastly, as Sam mentioned, the positive cash flow. We guided positive cash flow from operations, but gave a range in terms of cash -- overall cash returns. And we were positive in the quarter, which is a big improvement from last year. There's nothing abnormal in Q1. It's a continuation of our operations, both on the top -- on the cash receipt and the cash payment side.

On the next slide, I'll just call out that even though we saw a 3% revenue growth, importantly, our deferred revenue grew 14%, ending $18.6 million. Our deferred revenue growth is a result of an increase in contracted revenue. But for accounting purposes, we have to spread the revenue over the term of the contract.

So for example, if we signed a 12-month deal in September, we may only be able to recognize 1/12 of the value of that contract in the quarter, with the remaining 11/12 of the revenues going to deferred revenue to be recognized over the remaining 11 months. So that increase and that deferred revenue balance gives us a lot of transparency and predictability in our revenue profile for the remainder of financial year '24.

On the next slide, we had IRR stats. We grew 19% year-over-year to $11.6 million. Within that result, we have GRC, board, procure and deals. Deals in GRC actually grew 30% year-over-year with regards to ARR. While within the Procure ARR revenue, we have at the time of New South Wales infrastructure in place.

Three years ago, we signed an ARR contract with them for $1.2 million. Last year, due to some high usage in projects went up to $1.7 million. But as a result of some of the infrastructure reviews, it's returned to the original contract of $1.2 million, so $1 million ARR. So that's some of the difference in terms of year-over-year and quarter-on-quarter growth.

But the mechanism for increased usage and increased revenue from that contract remains, and we continue to explore new ARR contracts amongst the other departments within New South Wales government and Victorian government other than transport and obviously, other governments around the world.

This meant that our net dollar retention ended 102%, again, influenced by that procure deal. Other net dollar retentions are particularly on deals, but we will continue to monitor that and we expect to see growth across all our products in the coming quarters.

S
Sam Riley
executive

So you're saying that one-off occurring in that deal had more of an effect than what you would see systemically going forward?

J
James Drake
executive

Yes, that's right.

S
Sam Riley
executive

Yes.

J
James Drake
executive

It's important to know that it's a continuation of the deal we signed 3 years ago. So it fills us with confidence that we'll get ongoing revenues and opportunities to expand in the future.

This next slide just illustrates the continuation of building more diversified revenue streams. On the left, you'll see 58% of our revenue coming from Australia and New Zealand. That was slightly ARPA as a proportion of total revenue, mostly driven by ongoing challenges in Europe. But we continue to focus on the regions outside of Australia and New Zealand for growth. And we are seeing growth in almost all the territories and definitely strong pipelines in the U.S. and other regions as well as our core markets, Australia and New Zealand.

Revenue from non-deal sources, which is obviously a focus, continues to increase. As Sam said earlier, even though deals revenue declined 3% in the quarter, non-deals grew 28%. And overall, we've increased our non-deal revenue from 15% last year to 19% as a percentage of total revenue in the quarter.

And then finally, on the right, the continued transition to utilizing the digital acquisition channel is illustrated by now 40% of our revenue in the quarter was acquired digitally, up from 15% in Q1 last year. This is driving some of our efficiency and operational leverage and a key reason why we see positive cash flow from operations across the business.

This last slide for me is really an illustration of a positive cash flow from operations across -- over the last 9 quarters, with only Q1 last year due to some onetime items and timing of annual payments, proving that could be negative. We expect that it is our policy to continue to generate positive free cash flows, and Q1 is just a proof point of execution of that strategy.

So to take away from this quarter from a numbers perspective is a continuation of some of the key metrics. We continue to add subscribers quarter-on-quarter. ARPA growth is expected to continue, and this is despite investing in our acquisition channel, our go-to-market engine and also product innovation across some of the GRC and ESG and Sustainability, product developments. So we continue to be able to self-fund our growth, even despite some of the challenges in the M&A market.

And with that, I will hand back to Sam.

S
Sam Riley
executive

Thanks, James. Yes. Just repeating our five major focus areas to execute our strategy: maintain that cash flow positivity, rapidly working on expanding our solutions in GRC and ESG. Great progress in the quarter in the second half, I'd expect the customer acquisition, the funnels, the revenue to grow there, and we'd love to invest more and more in that growth. We're getting to that stage.

ARR remains a focus. We've got our long-term aspirations to generate $100 million ARR. We made progress on that, and we continue focusing on it. Operational efficiency, digital automation. In a suppressed deals environment, it's really good because we can capture stuff very nimbly and efficiently. But when there's a return to more volume there, we will capitalize on that even more. So that's great.

And lastly, we've got great freemium sign-ups, and we're always working on ways to convert more of them into paid subscribers and get multiproduct adoption as well from those freemium customers.

So that's it from us, but we can jump into some questions, Zoe.

Z
Zoe Smith
executive

We have a few questions here at the moment. Can you comment on the positive operating cash flow? And whether it was positively influenced by mutual working capital benefits?

J
James Drake
executive

I'll take that one. We've actually already answered it, but the answer is no. There's no abnormal either on the cash receipts or the cash payment side in the quarter.

Z
Zoe Smith
executive

Can you make some comments to any price increases this year across your different products?

J
James Drake
executive

I can do that as well. So on the deals product, what we looked at across the globe and across all of our subscription packages was a few things. Firstly, obviously, across the world, CPI increases are very standing almost across all contracts.

When we look at the range that we offer, we offer obviously, very small sort of, on the deal side, Series A, very price-sensitive versus the very large deals, the high complex multi-region across the global deals, and said, "Where can we -- where do we have price sensitivity? Where do we not? And where can people absorb price adjustment?" So we made decisions across all the different subscription packages to increase more on the higher side and less on the smaller side. And we rolled that out earlier in this quarter. Of course, there are other products in terms of GRC, sustainability, procure. There is less price sensitivity based on the flexibility you have with regards to modules that you choose to include in our upfront package or not.

Z
Zoe Smith
executive

Can you talk to the typical size of the deal on your pipeline for GRC and Procure and the number of opportunities?

J
James Drake
executive

Our ARPA on GRC was that to be around $40,000, even though we're seeing that trending up closer to sort of $50,000 per annum, rather than ARPA that we report, which is per month.

On the Procure side, the ARPA there is closer to sort of $70,000, but the range on that can be a lot bigger. We are doing very large infrastructure projects, and that can be in hundreds of thousands in terms of our fee. And then also, we have entry point solutions for small infrastructure projects, that can be in the tens of thousands, but it does blend to $70,000 annually.

Z
Zoe Smith
executive

From Nick Harris. Thanks for adding adjusted EBITDA in the quarterly. If I annualize this number, Q1 FY '24 adjusted EBITDA to 2.9x4, this implies FY '24 adjusted EBITDA of $11.6 million. Is this the right way to think about the year ahead? Or should we expect your expenses to increase in the current quarters as wages and other costs increase?

J
James Drake
executive

Thanks, Nick. So Q4, we did adjusted EBITDA of $3.1 million. In Q1, we did $2.9 million. So it's -- it averages to $3 million obviously. There's no abnormal expenses or revenue. The deferred revenue profile means that our revenue is much smoother and more predictable, as I said earlier.

We anticipate having a cost base relatively similar to that financial '23 versus '24. So it's a fair assumption to look at 4x the run rate on the average over the last couple of quarters. The only thing I'll call out is if there was an opportunity to accelerate, we may spend more specifically on the non-headcount marketing, if the market or opportunities present itself, and that might be the only swing factor based on our expected annual EBITDA.

Z
Zoe Smith
executive

Are any of the professional services, consulting or accounting firms helping to sell your GRC, Procure or ESG products?

S
Sam Riley
executive

Yes, they are. Procure is the oldest product we've got there, the longest time in market. So there is a lot more of that occurring with that. But in the GRC and ESG space, those advisers are a key channel for us. So we have a lot of activity, including someone leading myself to secure with them as partners ahead of our major launch of those products in ESG. And in the GRC space, it's similar. There are consultants that increasingly want to partner with software firms to deliver their services to customers efficiently. So yes, is the answer.

J
James Drake
executive

I'll just add to that. On the Procure product in particular, some of the advisers are bringing us into new regions around the world. For example, Edmonton and Calgary rail project or Botswana Port. Those introductions all came from advisers recommending us to governments in those regions. So we do have a pretty strong referral network across advisers as well in those products.

Z
Zoe Smith
executive

Thanks, James. From Mike Burn, recognizing commercial sensitivities. Can you talk about how elastic demand for Ansarada services are in relation to price? And how you think about this when it comes to setting the prices?

J
James Drake
executive

So I'll do deals first. We have a number of options for a customer to pick, whether it's monthly, 3 months, 6 months, or 12 months. And we look at subscription packages as measured by complexity. And complexity, we use data. So we have [indiscernible] 1, 2, 4 gig. So we give our customers lots of different options to suit whatever their specific requirements are.

As I said earlier, if you are a very large transaction like, say, BHP Brookside. And your overall advisory fees, tax due diligence, legal due diligence, financial due diligence will most likely be in the millions, if not, tens of millions. So the deal room as a percentage of total due diligence cost there is very small. So there's quite a lot of pricing power in the larger deals that we have. And then as I said earlier, the smaller series A1s, much, much less pricing power just because they have less to spend and less complexity.

So it does differ. But I think importantly, we try and offer the right amount of packages to pick -- to suit the customers' need and the price to flex that. So there's optionality. That's on the deal's product.

Procure, it's much more related to the size of the project and swing as I said earlier, is a lot greater. And then the other products as well, very modular-based, so they have flexibility there.

Z
Zoe Smith
executive

We have questions from [ Nick Harris ]. Are you able to give us a rough percentage of the change from your recent price rises? And maybe comment on it if there's been a change in churn?

J
James Drake
executive

Nick, the first thing is we only did it on our new wins. So we did not change the price of our existing customer base. We will be renewing. So there's no churn impact in that sense. With regards to any change in new wins, it's probably a little bit early. But anecdotally, we haven't heard anything or any complaints. Not at all.

S
Sam Riley
executive

Nothing we know.

J
James Drake
executive

Yes. A lot of that is, obviously, around the different options you can pick. It's not sort of a Netflix one price. You can pick what suits you, and then price accordingly.

In terms of the rough percentage, it did vary, as I said, much less on the small side and much more on the higher value, more complex subscription packages, but probably averaged out to be around 8% -- 7%, 8%.

Z
Zoe Smith
executive

Thank you, James. Does the growing deferred revenue balance means that new sales are increasingly coming from non-deal product sales, which are more likely to be multiyear deals?

J
James Drake
executive

I would say it's a combination of a few things. During the last -- the uncertainty over the last 18 months, we definitely saw monthly and 3-month volumes pick up. But for those that continue to do deals, they're doing more deals with us. Therefore, a lot of our renewals are increasing year-over-year. And that's helping to drive, first of all, ARR conversations, but also improvements in our deferred revenue balance.

So the one to watch there is much is the ARR growth that has a big impact. But underneath that, within the transaction business, we're getting more from those that do more deals with us. That makes sense as well.

S
Sam Riley
executive

And non-deal revenue.

J
James Drake
executive

And non-deal revenue.

S
Sam Riley
executive

Yes, contributing.

J
James Drake
executive

Yes, which is a all ARR.

Z
Zoe Smith
executive

EBITDA margin of 22% compared to 16% in FY '23. Is that an uplift -- is that uplift something we can expect to continue over FY '24?

S
Sam Riley
executive

I'll get this checked. The answer is possibly. But what we're trying to do is really go after a $6 billion-plus growth opportunity in the ESG/GRC markets, and we've got a lot of positive things happening in Procure.

So as the year rolls on, and we see stronger validation and stronger metrics through the funnel, we would go after that rapid growth, but it would need to be confident for us to achieve that 20%, 30%, 40% revenue growth from any investments there.

We're obviously working hard to make that possible. As we see it evidence, we would invest into it. So that might mean we run a slightly lower EBITDA margin than 22% in the second half. But if we did that, I would be back talking to you guys about the 50%, 40% revenue growth we're seeing on these products and capturing that major multibillion-dollar opportunity.

So we're not going to do any radical changes there. You could say we're trying to run the business to the Rule of 40, with an emphasis on growth and capture of that multibillion-dollar opportunity as and when we see it.

Z
Zoe Smith
executive

And a question from Mike Burn. Can you briefly describe what the marketing effort looks like, i.e., the timeline, resources, invoiced from initial representation to prospective clients to onboarding to invoicing?

S
Sam Riley
executive

It's different by different products, I would say. But our approach is really around who we are targeting firstly, from a marketing perspective, like which industries, customer types, use cases, getting our targeting right. And then the first -- next stage is how do we create awareness of Ansarada. So there's a plethora of activity around getting people to be where we exist, and then educating them, diagnosing their needs.

Freemium is a big part of that because we will target people that have problems we solve. Part of our marketing tactics is to showcase other people just like them that know and trust and love Ansarada. So we hear our customers, and those customers speak about how we've helped solve their problems and add value to them.

Then we say, "Hey, it's free for you to sign up, no cost, no risk." And that's what we would say is the selection process, and then it's all about the product and our service team showing them the value when they do sign up and then they convert into an active paid subscriber. And we continue that curious approach to understand their other business problems and pains and needs and we use that to talk to them about our other solutions that can help them beyond the original theme they signed up for.

Now if I speak about Procure, like Procure is a multibillion-dollar government, usually government involved heavily consulting longer-term contracts. There is a similar approach around awareness and education, but the sales cycle is a lot more less digital because it's not really a high-volume thing that needs digitizing.

James, you might want to add anything?

J
James Drake
executive

I was actually just going to -- Mike, I point you to Slide 78 of the Investor Day that we put out a deck on March 21. That actually outlines time to ROI, deal size, customer profile. And there's quite a few slides that might help with some detail around your questions. The other thing I'll add just at the end there is the invoicing. We invoiced upfront with 30-day terms. So cash is received upfront in almost all cases, irrespective of the contract length.

S
Sam Riley
executive

Yes. The other thing I'd say in marketing team and broader go-to-market is good at is account-based marketing. So our profile Hall & Wilcox for you here is a customer that we've grown with over the years. So our team from customer success, marketing, sales, they will team up on an account, and they will completely surround that account and nurture them and look after them.

And we find that approach grows our business and grows those accounts much more than the traditional approach of having one sales rep on an account or something like that. So it's a very end-to-end holistic effort. And yes, a lot of it is digital activity, but we do find some non-digital activities work well with accounts as well. But I'd say our marketing team is getting better and better on that, more efficient as well. And that part of the positive EBITDA result is because of that.

Z
Zoe Smith
executive

Can you tell us what the conversion rate is from freemium to commercial clients?

J
James Drake
executive

So with regards to the Deals Product, the conversion as a percentage of their ads in a month is around 8% to 10%. But within that, there's quite a range. Adviser freemium converts well over 50% and our corporate freemium brings that average down just because of the volume and also the type of customer and the stage they are in the deal. Obviously, an adviser, they have a deal ready to go. There's high intent, but that's the average.

S
Sam Riley
executive

Yes. And we're very liberal with our sign-up into freemium. We don't exclude nonbusiness e-mails. So we have sign-ups from gmail278 -- sorry, 2787@gmail.com, but we also have cfo@bhp.com. So like there's a wide range and mixture of what James said of intent.

We also partner with Microsoft. And if you sign on to Microsoft's start-up program, as part of the benefits of being in that Microsoft environment, you get free access to Ansarada's tools for the first year. So some of those start-ups do Series A, and they use our product or they set up a Board.

It's great. We get that awareness, like I said, and education across all of those start-up stakeholders and management. But some start-ups, or a lot of them, don't actually survive year 1. So there's 1,000 or more freemium sign-ups from there. But the beauty of it is that process is all digital and automated. So it's not costing us a lot of money to get across 1,000 start-ups by partnering with Microsoft.

And we're actually looking at several other partnerships similar that put a lot of potential customers into our funnel very efficiently. But yes, there's -- I'm just trying to tell you, there's a whole mixture of intent and customer types in our freemium sign-up numbers.

Z
Zoe Smith
executive

What is your headcount purely in product development? And given the Ansarada product has widened its use case and matured a lot over the years, is there a diminishing return on the spend?

J
James Drake
executive

So I'll go through the numbers. Product design and development is around 73, of which product and design is about 17 in terms of headcount. I'll just add for, Sam, probably have some comments on that?

But our Deals and Procure margins are much higher than our overall company margins as we continue to invest in product and innovation. If you were to look at that as sort of a stand-alone mature business, it would have a much higher margin profile. But we continue to invest in innovation, not just on GRC and sustainability, but also in Deals and Procure, things like workflow and AI enhancements in terms of how people interact with the product.

S
Sam Riley
executive

Yes. No, I'd say the diminishing return on the spend -- it's probably the opposite, I would say, because we componentize a lot of our tech. We're able to leverage that across multi-products. So as an example, like stemming from Deals, we built some workflow functionality like task management, due date statuses, or with security built in there and permissions controls.

There is a big need for those things in our GRC and ESG products. But what the team will do is they will make workflow as a service. That can be consumed and utilized by multiproduct. So we actually get a greater return on one investment. Now that, that goes across infrastructure things, QA practices. Even if you look at user management and authentication services, we've got a platform-based authentication service for when people log in and sign up, of course. And that is utilized by multiproducts.

So we're not running several of them. You actually get scale of economy from these features. Our design system is very componentized. So forms, buttons, fields, tables, very rich components like slide-out banners and all this stuff. They are able to build once and leverage multiple times. So it's a smart way of doing development. And I would say that the team using AI more and more on how to approach software development, you would see even more scale and efficiency over the medium to long term.

Z
Zoe Smith
executive

What is the total number of employees now? And how will this change over the next couple of months?

J
James Drake
executive

We have approximately 190 employees, and we expect that to be roughly the same year-over-year. The only caveat to that is if we see a significant improvement in some of the underlying macro conditions, and there's an opportunity to chase revenue. Otherwise, relatively similar year-over-year.

S
Sam Riley
executive

Okay. Great. I think we're at the 40 minutes is the time we gave guidance on.

Z
Zoe Smith
executive

Thank you. And there are no further questions.

S
Sam Riley
executive

All right. Thank you, everyone, and we'll see you shortly.

J
James Drake
executive

Thanks, everybody.