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Good morning, everyone. Before we begin the official remarks, I will read the cautionary note regarding forward-looking information. Certain information to be discussed during this call contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable security laws, including, among others, statements concerning the company's objectives, the company's strategy to achieve those objectives as well as statements with respect to management's beliefs, plans, estimates and intentions and similar statements concerning anticipated future events, results, circumstances, performance or expectations that are not historical facts.
Such forward-looking statements reflects management's current beliefs and are based on information currently available to management and is subject to a number of significant risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated. Please refer to the cautionary statements and the risk factors identified in our filings with SEDAR and EDGAR for a more detailed explanation of the inherent risks and uncertainties that could affect such forward-looking statements. Following the presentation, we will conduct a Q&A session.
I would now like to turn the conference call over to Tal Hayek, the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer.
Good morning, everyone. My name is Tal Hayek, and I'm the CEO and Co-founder of illumin. Well, I'd like to welcome all of you for joining us for our Q2 2023 investor presentation.
As always, I'd like to thank the illumin community for delivering such an amazing quarter. This is a quarter that we saw 17% year-over-year growth, and this is a time that we're seeing other companies in our space shrinking in revenue, and we're still growing at 17% year-over-year. So I'm very proud of our team for delivering that. This is a quarter that we did a complete rebranding into the illumin name, but most importantly, an outstanding quarter for Self-Serve. We've added 51 new logos, and we delivered $5.4 million in revenue, which is a 145% increase from Q1 of this year. This is the focus of this company. Our focus is on bringing in new logos to our self-serve system and growing that revenue quarter-over-quarter. And we delivered absolutely fantastic results. Thank you team for doing that.
illumin is a journey advertising platform. It solves 2 huge problems in the industry. Problem number one, the consumer journey. Marketers get around a whiteboard and they plan a consumer journey. The problem is that when they're done, they have to execute it in silos. With illumin, they can plan it right on the system and then execut it right from the system, not in silos, it all works together, right down to execution.
And the second problem that it solves is that you need to be an experienced expert in order to operate any DSP or programmatic system out there. With illumin, you do not need to do that. illumin is a very, very simple to use, highly intuitive system, drag-and-drop system that any average person can use. And is this the only platform that can execute on a consumer journey. illumin is changing the world of advertising.
Now let's look at some of the numbers for Q2. As I said, Q2 total revenue was $33.2 million, which is up 17% year-over-year. And again, what we are mostly focused on is the illumin Self-Serve revenue numbers. As you can see, we've delivered $5.4 million in revenue which is up 145% from Q1. This is exactly what we've been talking about in the past. We're looking for the stacking effect on the revenue, which means we have existing clients, they spend. And as you see every time you add new clients, they spend every month, we see new revenue coming from it. So that's been great. In fact, we did exit Q2 now at close to $22 million run rate for illumin Self-Serve.
So if you guys remember, last quarter, we delivered $12 million at the end of Q1 at the run rate. So great improvement there.
From the amount of new logos that we're bringing in. In the beginning of last year, Q1, we delivered 2 new logos, Q2 delivered 8 new logos, Q3 17 new logos, Q4 27 new logos, 40 new logos last quarter and 51 new logos in Q2. So that is a number we're tracking on a regular basis, and it's a greatly good indicator about the future revenue.
And now I would like to call on our Chief Revenue Officer, Nadeem, to share some of his thoughts.
Thank you, Tal. I'm going to delve deeper into our second quarter numbers and give you a sense of how our pipeline is progressing. First of all, I want to give a heartfelt thanks to the entire team, all of our illumin customers. I'm so proud and we are so lucky to be blessed by this incredible team and by the incredible customers. Collectively, they delivered double-digit year-over-year growth at 17%. They delivered triple-digit growth quarter-over-quarter at 145%. And almost grew quadruple digit year-over-year Self-Serve growth at 900%. It proves that illumin is resonating in the marketplace, is unique and has a differentiated value prop and customers will spend money on this platform.
Last call, we discussed our goal and our mission of having balanced between our managed service and self-service business. We are beginning to see that occur. The 17% overall growth rate demonstrates we were not deprecating our managed service business. That is largely being driven by new logos. And without eroding our managed service business, we're closing the gap. We're providing balance to the business. We're able to preserve and grow our managed service business while aggressively growing our self-service illumin business. And self-service and managed services coming into balance.
Nowhere is this more evident than looking at our forward-looking pipeline. You see in Q3, 30% of our pipeline is Self-Service. When we look into next year, in the first half of next year, almost 50%, 55% of our pipeline is self-service illumin. That's exactly what we want to see. Now again, I caution you, pipeline does not equal closer one. There's a lot of complications, close rates, deal progression, new logos take a lot longer to close than existing managed service renewal logos. But we love what we're seeing as we look into 2024.
It's important to note that the sales team year-over-year has not grown dramatically, not grown significantly. It's largely driven by a shift in focus and productivity gains across the sales team. So I'm incredibly proud of them.
On the last call, I mentioned we're tracking over 25 KPIs, and we're going to delve deeper to a couple of those KPIs. And I hope you see what I see that we're demonstrating that we're establishing the fundamentals of the sustained long-term growth business.
Late-stage demo growth, for example, is a great metric to track the interest in our business and our pipeline progression. What does it mean? A late-stage demo, unlike an initial demo, an initial demo is when a sales rep gets on the call for the first time with the customer, and they see the product. If the customer then says, "I want to see more, I want to bring more people to the equation. I want to bring my boss to an equation. We actually want to look at buying this." That next demo is called the late-stage demo. And we continue to see this metro grow.
We actually recently demoed at an investor event. One of you asked us to come and show your various folks within your organization, illumin. And they stated that illumin was the best and most differentiated product in the portfolio. That is exactly what our customers are saying. illumin is highly innovative, it's highly differentiated, and it's a niche they did not -- it's a niche they did not even know existed. I invite each one of you and every one of you to come and request a demo if you can see it for yourself.
So how many of those demos are turning into new logos? That's where the rubber hits the road. And again, we continue to see this graph up to the right, almost a 28% increase. 51 new logos, that's 51 new contracts signed with either an agency or a brand. Our job is now to get them to onboard, train, enable and spend on the platform. We're going to expect to see a bit of a lag this time around. We got summer holiday season coming up. It's hard to get a train. A lot of those logos were close toward the end of the quarter, and so we need to get them onboarded, trained and spending. So we expect that to start happening closer to September.
Last quarter, I mentioned we were entering -- ended the quarter with 208 deals in pipe. Once again, we're seeing continued momentum. We're entering Q3 with 245 deals in pipe, continued momentum, exactly what we want to see.
Now I also want to talk about a new focus we had in Q2 on brand direct and brand direct pipeline growth. Brand direct is a great opportunity for us. It provides so many challenges and incredible opportunities. We want to diversify our business between agency and brand direct business. So we're not subject to the agency brand relationship for as much as our revenue as we are today. And you see that growth occurring in these numbers.
It was an initiative we only kicked off at the beginning of Q2, and we're already seeing progress against that initiative, helping provide balance to that part of the business, increase our total addressable market and provide more predictability into the future.
Finally, I want to touch on our Self-Service illumin run rate. At the end of Q1, we talked about how our Self-Service illumin run rate had reached $12 million. Coming out of Q2, it's at $22 million. We added an incredible $10 million worth of run rate in one quarter alone, an absolutely magnificent accomplishment, I want to congratulate the whole team. I am so proud and so honored and so lucky to be part of this team.
A consumption-based model, as you know, is not a model where you have standard contracts we have the same amount of revenue coming in every quarter. Our consumption fluctuates based on the advertisers' desire to advertise in that season, their particular product where they're looking to reach in the market. And while we do have minimums in most of our contracts, they are sometimes quarterly or annual in nature. And so we'll see that fluctuate based on seasonality and needs.
One segment we're incredibly proud to serve is the travel industry. As you know, vacation is a considerable purchase and one that folks like you and I make usually in Q2, so you can actually be on vacation in Q3. We expect that same thing to occur. And we see -- expect some of those dollars to lessen as we ramp up. And of course, they're going to always come back next travel season.
Once again, I want to thank everybody. We're excited about the progress we've made in Q2, what it means for the future. I'd like to now turn it over to Elliot to update you on our business financials. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Nadeem. Hello, everyone, and thank you again for joining us today on our Q2 2023 earnings call. Today, we reported second quarter 2023 total revenue of $33.2 million, an increase of over 17% year-over-year and 25% sequentially.
We continue to focus on growing our illumin platform, including adding new Self-Serve logos during the quarter in performing 178 customer demos. These efforts led to a 54% sequential increase in illumin Self-Serve clients this quarter, positioning the company for further Self-Serve revenue growth in 2023. We are excited by the overall organic growth we have achieved through illumin sales to date, and we continue to remain bullish on the long-term growth prospects for illumin given its revolutionary technology and our planned enhancements to the platform, including new capabilities to enhance the customers' experience. And on that note, I'll now review our financial results for the second quarter of this year.
As noted earlier, total revenue for the second quarter was $33.2 million, up 17.3% compared to Q2 2022 revenue of $28.3 million. For the 6 months ended June 30, 2023, revenue was $59.7 million, up 15% compared to $52.1 million in the same period last year. And as I noted earlier, year-over-year increases in revenue for both periods were mainly driven by the illumin Self-Serve sales growth.
For the 3 months ended June 30, 2023, revenue from managed services was $20.1 million, up 11% from the same period last year. For the 6-month period ended June 30, 2023, revenue from managed services was $37.7 million, up 9% compared to the same period last year. Revenue from Self-Serve was $13.1 million this quarter, up 29% on a year-over-year basis and revenue for the Self-Serve for the 6 months ended June 30, 2023 was $22.6 million, an increase of 24% on compared to the same period last year. The year-over-year increase was mainly a result of illumin Self-Serve based client growth.
Gross profit or net revenue, which is defined as total revenue less media and related costs was $15.9 million for the second quarter of 2023 compared to $14.7 million in the same period last year. Net revenue margin for the second quarter was 47.9% compared to 51.9% in the same period last year. The year-over-year change is mainly due to changes in geographic mix of revenues with more revenue coming from markets abroad with lower margins as well as the larger component of Self-Service revenue as a percentage of our total revenue that I mentioned earlier.
For the 6 months ended June 30, 2023, the net revenue was $28.4 million compared to $26.6 million in the same period last year. The margin for the first 6 months of 2023 was 47.5% compared to 51% in the same period last year. And again, the year-over-year change reflects the factors I described earlier.
Total operating expenses for the second quarter of 2023 were $19.2 million compared to $16.5 million in the same period last year. As a percentage of revenue, operating expenses were 58%, both in Q2 of this year and Q2 of last year.
Total operating expenses for the 6 months ended June 30, 2023, were $35.8 million compared to $30.7 million in the same period last year. As a percentage of revenue, operating expenses were 60% this year compared to 58.9% for the same period last year. This slight increase could be attributed to the increase in research and development costs, sales and marketing that are associated with expanding the illumin platform.
Adjusted EBITDA for the second quarter of 2023 was $21,000 compared to $1.5 million in the same period last year. We remain positive for the quarter with the year-over-year change reflecting ongoing strategic investments in research and development, sales and marketing and other costs to support illumin's growth. For the first 6 months of 2023, adjusted EBITDA was a negative $1.3 million compared to adjusted EBITDA of $1.7 million in the same period last year, due mainly to the reasons I talked about for the 3-month periods.
Net loss for the second quarter of 2023 was $5.6 million compared to a $1.2 million income for the same period in 2022. For the 6 months ended June 30, 2023, the net loss was $9.2 million compared to a net loss of $3.1 million in the same period last year. The biggest driver of the net loss in this year versus prior year was the $2.4 million FX period ending restatement loss on our U.S. cash position. In Q2 2022, the company recorded a $3.2 million gain.
Turning to our balance sheet. As of June 30, 2023, our cash and cash equivalents stood at $65.7 million compared to $85.9 million at December 31, 2022. The change from year-end was due in part to costs of $4.4 million related to full repayment of our outstanding debt, $1.5 million for the completion of our normal course issuer bid, $1.9 million for the annual insurance renewal and a $2.4 million FX impact I mentioned earlier. In addition to these and other normal course impacts, working capital was lower due to lower accrued liabilities and payables at quarter end. This has largely normalized in recent weeks, and our current cash balance is at approximately CAD 72 million.
We do not anticipate the same level of cash outlays in the second half of the year and post substantial issuer bid which I will discuss next, expects to have a material cash cushion well above our working capital needs.
As noted, following the quarter end, the company announced its authorization of a substantial issuer bid to purchase for cancellation up to $15.8 million of its common shares for an aggregate purchase price not to exceed CAD 40 million. The offer commenced on July 27, 2023, and will expire at 5:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on August 30, 2023, unless extended or withdrawn.
As well, the company announced its intention to voluntarily delist from the NASDAQ stock market. The reasons for this decision include high insurance, accounting, legal and compliance costs associated with the continued U.S. stock exchange listing. And given the current macroeconomic climate, we believe this action is prudent as we recognize the challenges many organizations are facing in this environment and want to ensure we are in a strong position to face any potential headwinds such as the environment can create. So also please note that the decision to delist from NASDAQ is not conditional on the making or success of the substantial issuer bid.
Looking at our shares outstanding as of June 30, 2023, illumin had 56.2 million shares outstanding compared to approximately 56.8 million outstanding as of December 31, 2022.
In closing, we are pleased with our results this quarter, including strong total revenue growth, driven by the continued growth and adoption of our revolutionary illumin platform. We continue to believe illumin's rapid growth reflects the increasing recognition of the value add this platform brings to advertisers and marketing agencies alike.
And with that, I'd like to pass it over back to Tal for his concluding remarks.
Thank you, Elliot. Our SIB program that we launched is something that we're very excited about, why are we excited about it? Because we're buying back shares and the best investment that is out there, investment in illumin. The price is great and we love investing in our own company. So that's why we're doing that.
We also announced that we delisting from the NASDAQ, which was personally a tough decision for me because I believe we should be in there. However, the expenses on the NASDAQ are so high. And for the size of the company we are today, it's very hard to swallow. It's not $1 million or $2 million a year, like some people think, it's a lot more than that and believe it's the right decision for now and believe we will be back on it sooner rather than later.
We successfully rebranded the company from Acuity to illumin this quarter. Acuity has been a great name for us and great energy and has been very successful. But it was time to change to what we are focusing on, which is illumin, which is the consumer journey out there, which is the drag and drop system at solving those huge from and changing the world. And we are very excited to start illuminating more and more customers out there in that consumer journey.
We are also focused on bringing more than programmatic into the system. We already brought out-of-home which is not programmatic into it. And we are working on adding other things like social Facebook, Instagram and other things like e-mail marketing and search and a few other things that will be a part of the system in the future, a big focus on what we're doing as well today.
And just before we go into questioning, I would like to say that we're seeing a little bit of caution on the economic side of what's happening out there. And we've seen some clients pull back on the managed spend. We're not seeing a big caution on it or a big concern, but it is something we want to bring to everybody's attention that we've seen a little bit of pullback on that. I still think that we're going to continue showing overall growth. We're still very happy with recruiting new clients on the Self-Serve side and showing growth there, but a little bit of caution on that side.
And now we will open it up for questions.
Congratulations on the quarter. Very good to see the self-service, obviously, just a standout. Could you give us perhaps a bit more of a profile on the customer wins in terms of -- are they agencies? Are they larger accounts? Are they U.S.? Just a bit more color on the logo weighted.
Yes. I'll -- Nadeem, why don't you answer that?
Sure. As mentioned in the presentation, we had 51 total wins, 22 of them came from North America. The remainder came internationally, largely agency. We had 5 brands in -- of the 51 and the remainder being agency. Mostly and primarily in what we consider our ideal customer profile, which is mid-market agencies that are distributed in generally regional players or industry-specific players. A couple of them were in the political space, which is really important as we look to 2024 in the election season.
And Tal, you had mentioned with respect to adding e-mail and social media platforms. Would that be adding a technology or would it come with partnerships? Or how do you see that unfolding?
There's a bunch of things that are planned for the road map. Some of them would be adding technology and partnership and some of them will be adding technology. So things like social, we would have to add the technology to it and then obviously connect with the social technologies out there. E-mail marketing, we may choose to use an existing platform or build a new one. Most likely choose an existing platform, same with SMS marketing.
Search, again, you can build or buy that could be an M&A target for a small company. So it really depends on the type. The biggest one that we will have to build would probably be the creative side, and we're investigating now if it's going to be a build or a buy or a partner. So it really depends on the type of channel that we talk about.
Your next question comes from Laura Martin at Needham & Company.
Let's talk about verticals. Can we talk about like what kind of verticals you found strength in? What kind of verticals you found weakness in? It's sort of been really mixed across your competitors. So what's going on with your [indiscernible]
I believe it's still mix, but it's...
Yes, it's a mix. I wouldn't say there's any particular vertical that we have specific strength in. As we know, mattress continues to be a historical vertical that hasn't bounced back yet, but that's more history. But in terms of new logo growth, it was very distributed in a number of industries, number of verticals. The only one we're looking to have a bit of focus on from a business development perspective, specifically is political, and that's gearing up to make sure we have a number of political clients heading into the 2024 election season.
Okay. Let me make it...
Does that answer your question?
Not really. What happened with autos and what happened with M&.? Most people are saying, media and entertainment is weak, autos is mixed, which way was it for you?
For autos, we added a couple of dealership clients that have large dealership networks in the quarter. So I would say autos was good. In terms of media, we didn't see too much there. So there weren't wins, but there weren't any pursuits either. So I would put that as neutral to negative. And auto is definitely one we're starting to see strengthen. It's a considered purchase and consider purchases, as you know, our sweet spot for illumin. And so that felt really good. And we're also seeing that in our pipeline as we are sitting in Q3 and entering Q4.
Okay. And then, Tal, isn't there a channel conflict when you go direct to brands? And when you try to bypass the ad agency, aren't you giving them incentive not to aid you when you try to disintermediate them?
I think it also depends on the size of the brands. Remember that we're going after the medium brands, they don't necessarily use agencies, medium brands for illumin. They don't necessarily use agencies. And the whole idea is that it's -- illumin is so simple to use that people without experience with programmatic can start using it because it's value [drop] system and very intuitive. So it's not necessarily that we're going after the huge brands out there that have the agencies that we're bypassing them. Most of the big brands that we work with are still going through the agencies.
Okay. And then my last question is for Elliot. Elliot, these margins are extraordinary. Can you keep them up? I mean, are they structural? Or was there something going on in the quarter that made them elevated?
No, we're seeing -- we're certainly seeing pressure on the margins, the -- as we get more of the self-service into the business. But so at this point, we're still quite fortunate to see them at where they are, but we do expect a small decline from here on in margins as a proportion of self-service growth.
We also -- as North America comes back versus some revenue that we received outside of North America, we'll see strength. But our general expectation is that as we find balance in our business between managed and Self-Serve that our margins will continue to decline at a fairly minor rate but decline nevertheless.
Our next question comes from Daniel Rosenberg at Paradigm Capital.
My first one was around the channels that you're pursuing. So the digital out-of-home. I'm just wondering if you're seeing a shift in customer demand via channel, whether it be desktop, mobile, out of home? Any color there would be appreciated.
Well, I would say that we just launched the first out-of-home. And we're starting to see our existing customers taking advantage of it and spending on it, but very early days. But my -- I think all of our assessment is that we're going to see our existing clients starting to spend part of their budgets on the different verticals out there and start increasing budgets or moving budgets to how they're doing it now manually and in a not connected way.
So now all of a sudden, you have a way of doing it from the same platform in a connected kind of way then you're going to start shifting some of your budgets from outside into illumin. So ultimately, we should see a bump in revenue from it.
And then you had alluded to some delayed spending habits that you're starting to see. I was wondering if that's specific to any channels, any structural things? Or is it just the global demand and the environment that we're in?
It's nothing specific. It's just some existing clients that are starting to indicate a drop in spend. But no, I think it's related to the global economy situation. But we're very happy about what's still happening on the illumin side of things and the recruiting of new customers, the new logo and the use of illumin, and this is where we're very, very much focused on. So I don't think it's a huge deal, but just something that we're watching.
Lastly for me. So on the numbers, the success you're seeing with the logos and the pipeline on Self-Serve. Is there anything you're able to quantify in terms of the size of the average contract? Are you seeing continued purchases and bigger size people coming back to the table to use it in bigger quantities?
I think we will. Just the data is -- we're tracking so many numbers and the data is so new, it would be of couple of quarters of real data. And it's just not consistent enough to start sharing it with it. I think that once we see that the numbers are consistent enough then we could start sharing them.Because there's a lot of metrics that we're looking at on a regular basis as well. So -- and it's good. The metrics are like -- the metrics are telling us a good story and also telling us some stories that we need to make some adjustments sometimes, and we're making the adjustments and it's getting us on the right path.
Your next question comes from Drew McReynolds at RBC Capital Markets.
I think we lost Drew.
Drew has dropped. So the last question comes from Dan Medina at Needham & Company.
Why don't you ask a question?
I don't have any great questions. I think we answered them all, okay, between the presentation and these questions we got, I think we're in good shape.
All right. Well, I'll share that we are in the Toronto office. I think there is somebody joining us now. But we are in the Toronto office, and it is a work day, and we're in the open office. So it's starting to come alive behind us. We're ready to see, we're happy to see people back in the office on a regular basis. And our next person is...
Yes. Martin has raised her hand again. If you are open to taking another question from Laura.
Can you repeat that for us?
Can you hear me? Yes, I'm going to do Danny's question because I asked him to ask it but I thought I'll just ask it myself. So buying in -- so you have the illiquidity and now we're buying in more shares. So can you explain is it -- is just because -- like give me the logic for that since now it's going to be even more liquidity and harder for really public market investors to purchase illumin with even less liquidity than there was before?
Yes. So I guess the logic for that. So as you know, we thought about it for a long, long time before we did that. We have all this cash in the bank, which originally was supposed to go for M&A. We feel that we solve the size or the growth issue, and we solved it by creating that Self-Serve engine and the sales engine for new clients. And therefore, we're going to grow organically. So there's not so much a need to for M&A from a growth perspective.
So the M&A -- for M&A and for cash would be for technologies. And usually, it's going to be very small acquisition from a technology side when we're thinking about buying like small techs for -- not for the size part of it. So there's no need for this money to be sitting in an account collecting, I don't know how many percent of interest. So therefore, looked at the current price today of our company, and we thought it's the best investment we can make. And the shareholders are totally aligned with it, obviously, because everybody gets a bigger piece of the pie.
And at the end of the day, I think in the long run, it would make sense for everyone. And right now, we're really, really, really focused on the business side of things and less on the market side of things. And we know the market is important and we know we want the share price to go up in the liquidity and all that. But that will come when we start delivering mega growth and profitability and all that, which is exactly what we're building here. So I think that that's what we should focus on. That's what we are focusing on. And after that, when we start delivering all those things, the liquidity price, all that will come.
And then my last question, Tal, is on generative AI. Are you guys using generative AI at all? And if so, how?
We are not -- we're using AI, obviously, forever since we started the company, one of our founders, Dr. Nathan Mekuz. He has a PhD in AI. So we're using all types of AI and everything we have is proprietary to us. And we're starting to look at generative AI for different things. So things like recommending the path for the consumer journey, build a path for you and things like creative and so forth. So we are definitely in the journey of searching for the right implication or thing to add to, but at the end of nothing at the moment. And one more thing. You remember, the number we talked about, the $15 million of Self-Serve for.
I do.
I was waiting for a comment for you to say a good job for over delivering on what you promised.
Good job for over delivering what you promised.
All right. Thank you. Wow.
I noticed the slide. I've noticed the slide. You're doing great work on the illumin Self-Service, and thank you for answering my questions.
We're very, very excited by where it's going.
Thats it for questions. So I'll hand it back over to you, Tal, for any final remarks.
Okay. Perfect. So again, congratulations to the illumin community for -- and all our shareholders really for delivering such an amazing quarter. Our focus is on the illumin Self-Serve and obviously seeing 145% growth quarter-over-quarter even exceed our own expectation. And we're really, really happy about what we're seeing there and what we keep pushing ourselves to move more and more of our company to focus on the Self-Serve and bring even more clients and bigger clients on it. And working on the product by no means the product competes a lot of things to add to it. But so far, it's delivering great results in the programmatic side and adding more and more items to it, which are not programmatic in connecting the dots. It's extremely powerful. So congratulations to the team. And with that, I'm going to call it a morning. Thank you, everyone.