Good afternoon all, and thank you for attending today's H1 FY '26 results presentation. Today we'll be taking you through a number of items, looking at the business overview and our strategic position, going through a bit around the business model and the financial performance that we've had in the half-year, and going back to our organic growth pillars and acquisitive pillars, we can kind of talk about the organic growth that we've had across those three pillars, and then a recent acquisition that we did which ties very nicely into the acquisitive pillars in the areas that we really wanted to add from a dotdigital platform perspective.

Then we'll spend a little bit of time looking ahead and what we are seeing and why we are confident in achieving in-line results. For the investors that have joined us in the past, thank you so much for following the story, and we will quickly summarize some of the areas.

For the new people joining us, I'll take you through the intro of the business. For people that have been following the story for a number of years, this will just act as a summary of where we are today.

We exist really to help brands reach their customers and thrive. The market continues to move our way: 86% of consumers will pay more for personalized experiences, 72% of companies are now integrating AI into their marketing, and nearly half of all MarTech leaders say stack complexity is their number-one barrier to value.

That complexity is the problem we've been solving for over 15 years. While others are scrambling to bolt AI onto legacy platforms, we've built Winston AI into the foundation natively.

While others are stitching together point solutions, we offer a single unified solution: CXDP with web personalization, with influencer marketing and loyalty, all in one place with over 250 off-the-shelf ecosystem integrations. Today around 9,000 brands trust us.

We power over 100,000 campaigns every single day across 150 countries, and with very high customer satisfaction rates and delivery of that return on investment. We're not new to this space.

We've been operating for over 20- 20 years within the space, and we've been really busy building more, which we will tell you about today. Moving on, and as we go through the presentation, I'll go through these four pillars of growth and why we believe our revenue stream or growth quality is certainly stronger now than ever before.

If we go back to our organic growth pillars, we've continued to deliver against the geographies that we operate in, we've continued to expand our partnerships, continue to expand on product both through organic development as well as new acquisitions that we've completed, and M&A execution, where we'll certainly talk about Alia, which is our recent addition to our platform suite. I just wanted to take you guys back to where we started three years ago and where we are today.

I think there's been a significant transformation over the last three years. We started with just shy of £50 million ARR to today well over £81 million.

Through that period, we've acquired three different businesses from an adjacent technology that expands the product suite. Also, one of our visions as dotdigital was to diversify more revenues outside of the UK, and today 40% of our ARR comes from international.

We also, in a fast-growing TAM and a larger TAM in the US, wanted to build more market share, and today ARR is greater than 30%. The other area is around partnerships.

We believe partners really help drive that brand awareness within the ecosystem that we operate within, and over 60% of our customers are connected with one of our connectors. That allows our customers to really bring data in easily into the platform, but also the characteristics of those customers are slightly different: they come in with a higher average revenue per customer; as more data goes into the platform, they adopt more of the functionality; and thirdly, they are a lot more stickier.

Over that three-year period, over 60% of our customers are now connected. If we go back to those organic growth pillars, we've delivered against the geographies, we've delivered against product and continued to spend 12% to 14% of R&D and really monetizing that, and the partner network that we operate within.

What does the platform do? For the new joiners, I tend to visualize our platform in three main areas.

It starts with the data. It's all about understanding your customer, your prospect, your recipient, regardless of whether you're an e-commerce company, or commerce company, or a non-commerce.

When we describe commerce companies, they have a shopping basket attached at the end of the journey. We make it very easy for customers to bring data in regardless of business systems, and that's all about capturing those behaviors.

The middle layer to the platform is around the orchestration, and that's where you can start to create from drag-and-drop technology one-off campaigns that you may want to do or really start to build on the customer journeys within the platform. Within that, you've also got AI that helps you construct your messages, helps you deliver the returns on investments customers are looking for.

Then thirdly, we have all the different channels that you can communicate in. Going back to the 4Rs: it's the right message, at the right time, through the right channels, to the right people.

What really brings it all together is the reporting and analytics, which you can then continue to expand your ROI and build on the experiences based on what you know. How does the different acquisitions fit in?

Alia, our most recent acquisition, really helps capture more zero-party, first-party data. Fresh Relevance, which we completed in September '24, really helps you home in on the channel of website, understanding from the customer data platform about the person that's visiting, helps you de-anonymize that traffic, and then really build content for that experience.

Then Social Snowball, that was an acquisition we completed in June '25, and that's really about creating those advocates, whether they've purchased with you and they are a micro-influencer, whether it's about referrals, or really driving traffic either through product awareness or brand awareness at the start of that journey. Let's have a look at the market itself.

It's pretty large market, and growing very rapidly. As we've added to the platform suite, we've continued to expand into new addressable markets.

We continue to see the tailwinds of platform consolidation, as I mentioned earlier, the adoption of AI both for marketing efficiencies as well as predictive capabilities to drive return on investment, and that shift to build more zero-party, first-party data. We've got a proven track record across the three regional hubs that we operate, whether it's in North America, whether it's in EMEA or APAC.

Whilst we're continuing to grow both organically and through acquisitions, we have low penetration in some of those international markets, which really gives us that opportunity to push further from a market-share perspective and look to accelerate growth into the future. We look at where we are from a product standpoint, we've really built out that multi-product strategy that we had a vision to start three years ago.

Let's talk about a subject everyone is talking about today around AI, because it's worth being direct about what it means for us and our customers. AI agents are increasingly doing the work of marketers, but they don't need to operate within a vacuum.

They need data to act on, infrastructure to run on, and guardrails to really operate within. We've spent many years, or over 10 years, building exactly that foundation: a unified customer data layer across thousands of brands, owned sender infrastructure that we control, and then Winston AI embedded natively, not layered on top, but woven into how the platform actually works, really built for the marketing executives to use.

We've built the standard across security, privacy, and environmental responsibility. For the enterprise customers that we serve, that's increasingly a procurement requirement and a risk-management decision, and we're one of a small number of platforms that have credibility and answers to those questions.

Owned infrastructure is increasingly a strategic differentiator for us against the competitors. When you really rely on third-party delivery networks, you lose that visibility, control, and ultimate trust.

We own our delivery infrastructure. That means our customers can scale with confidence, and so can the AI workflows running on top of that.

The AI era rewards orchestration platforms with data, compliance, infrastructure built-in. That's us, and we believe we are in strong position to benefit from these tailwinds.

I'll pass you over to Tom to talk about the business model and financial performance.

Thanks, Milan. It's good to be here talking to everyone everyone today.

Thought I'd start by talking about the the financial model as a as a whole, and you will have seen this slide for those of you who have been at our our investor presentations over the last year or so. Ultimately, we're we're driving high-margin, sticky recurring revenues with strong cash conversion, and that's what this slide is really really showing.

We take the top section: that's our total group revenues. We here we're we've broken it down by our non-recurring business, we which is in the core business, but is the the we'll we'll talk about in a bit more detail in a moment; our repeating business, again that we'll talk about a little bit more in the moment in a moment, that is our lower-margin business; and contracted recurring.

That contracted recurring piece is the is now 84% of our total group revenues and carries 90% group margin. That's what we're really interested in in growing.

That's where our acquisitions are focused. The other the other revenue streams are very much there to to support the growth in that that core key business.

If we then drop down to look at that forward-looking contracted ARR, so that contracted recurring, but taking it and looking at what we'll recognize in the next 12 months, we we can see what the the the level of growth we have there. We can see the the the the the organic growth with the acquired growth layered on, and we can see strong contribution from both elements of that acquired growth and the and and the organ- organic growth.

That gives us a gives us confidence in the future and predictability in our business to be able to to reinvest with reinvest with confidence knowing that we have certainties of of a step-up in in revenues as we enter a new year before we even we we even get there. That three-year CAGR in forward-looking ARR is is is 14%, very healthy.

If we take this to the to the next level down on the cash-generation side of things, yeah, yes, we've made some acquisitions over recent years that very much flow into the the core CXDP business, but we have very strong cash generation. Half-on-half, it does move around a little bit in terms of our free cash flows, and we'll have a look at that in a bit more detail, but those free cash flows have ultimately funded our three acquisitions over the last three three and a half years.

To move on a little bit and just look at the look at the that same commercial model just in a bit more detail and see how it drops down to gross profit. Sections on the left-hand side here, the core CXDP and related business lines, salmon-y pink type color on as I say, on on the left-hand side, that is the high-margin business.

That, in terms of the the dark-colored piece, is the contracted recurring revenues from the fixed part of our contracts, the fixed-value parts of our contracts. There is also some variable elements to that that I'll talk about in a bit more detail as well.

That in turn makes our forward-looking ARR. The the slither in the end of the pink section, that's our non-recurring elements.

That's professional services, that's health checks, that's training, that's sponsorships, all things that ultimately help our customers be successful in gaining value from our from the software they license license from us. That's the business that in in its entirety that drives gross margins of 90%.

That is the the the area of our business that drives value for for for our shareholders, and that's the area that with this presentation is very much focused on. To say a few words about the the the section on the right-hand side, this is our standalone API-only transactional messaging CPaaS business.

Thi- this business does move around in terms of headline revenues, but is far lower-margin. It drives gross margins in the region for that whole business segment of around 15%.

Yes, the vast majority of the value in our business, again, comes from that core CXDP business. Just a quick word as well on why that why that lower-margin business remains of some level of importance to us, albeit diminishing, is is that the the the volumes that that gives us with the telcos enables us better pricing when we are sending SMS-type messaging in the core business, where it drives a far higher margin because there's value add for our customers, as it's a marketing-related message.

Again, just to drop in and have a look at the the forward-looking ARR and how that's grown year year-on-year, or in fact half-on-half here. We talked about the three-year CAGR of of 14% that doesn't include the acquisitions.

If we take that on a pure organic basis, that's at 9%. We we'd love to get that to double-digit digits and see a see a route there, but right now it's at 9%.

You can see the impacts of the two acquisitions in these periods. This is obviously prior to the Alia acquisition that was made only last week.

We can see Fresh Relevance dropping in there in H1 '24, and you can see Social Snowball that actually has two elements to it, because it has a a volume-based element as well as a fixed-based element, dropping into the the the ARR at the end of last last fiscal year. Looking at the bridge from H1 '25 to to H1 '26, across that 12-month period, you can see the breakdown in growth with 4.5 coming from the core CXDP net growth, £0.6 million coming from Social Snowball since the acquisition, which is somewhere between 8% and 9% of organic organic growth on a constant-currency basis.

Social Snowball upon acquisition was £4.1 million, again on a constant-currency both- gro- growth rate, that brings it to 14%. Then, of course, we do have the impact of FX, being a a global business, and that's had a negative impact of £800 grand in the in in the across that year period, bringing us to to the £75.4 million that we can see there at the end of the period.

Milan alluded to an ARR of £81 million. Of course, that's including the Alia acquisition that was was announced last week, that's in the region of £6 million worth of forward-looking ARR.

Dropping this down to take a look at the income statement, you can see the that the history there half-on-half of very, very consistent margins. Th- this is showing adjusted EBITDA and adjusted PBT.

You can also see that pandemic period of '21 and and '22, where margins were jumping around a little bit, but if you average them out across the year, they were slightly higher, as many software and tech businesses experienced with with with the lower cost base, with lower travel, etc., across that that period. That normalized rate of sort of 30% to 33% of adjusted EBITDA, and 20% to 22%, 23% of adjusted PBT has been delivered, not just across this period we're seeing here, but actually across at least 15-year period of of of the company be- being listed.

They're the what I'd say are the headline metrics that we operate operate within, and we manage our capital deployment within those levels of of margins. They do move a little bit half-on-half, but across the board, we we we we look to ensure that we're we're maintaining those levels.

Again, I won't necessarily read each each bullet point on on the left. You can see that the the recurring revenue growth in the core CXDP business being 12% on a constant-currency basis, 5% on an organic constant-currency basis.

Also worth worth just mentioning that we made the decision not to renew a contract that would have become loss-making at the end of last fiscal year, that had a value of about of about £4 million annually. Of course that's having an impact coming into FY '26.

That's also having an impact on our gross margins. Gross margins have improved on that half-on-half from 78% to to 80%.

As the balance of the business continues to shift to that core CXDP business and and away from the lower-margin CPaaS business, we expect to see not step change in margin, but certainly incremental change in that gross margin there. Milan's talked about the average revenue per customer increasing half-on-half.

That's what certainly one of our our KPIs. Just want to drop down and talk about sort of admin expenses generally.

You will see, whilst we've maintained our sort of target-level margins cross across the business, there has been a slight drop on the on the previous period, which isn't unusual. Just a word on why that has happened: we we have we have consciously made or accelerated some go-to-market investments in the Social Snowball business to accelerate to really drive growth in in H2 and beyond.

We've got such confidence in the the the the growth rates in that business that it made sense to to do that. In actual fact, we are funding that longer term through some reorganization in the cost space of the EMEA go-to-market business, but our first half of this year is just seeing some dual-running costs there that in turn is just driving the margin down slightly, although not materially, in that period.

A word on the exciting stuff: taxation and EPS. Really just a word on the the the difference between the the adjusted and and and statutory focus on PBT, the top left-hand chart there.

What we can see is what whilst we've sus- sustained those margins of at least 20% on an adjusted PBT level, once you layer in the amortization on acquired intangibles, once you layer in the, usual sort of exceptional-type items that come with acquisitions, and it has been a acquisitive period for us over the last three years, that creates a just a divergence between the statutory and the the adjusted ones that you can see coming through there. Nothing nothing to be concerned about there at all.

The the other the other piece that's that's worthwhile just touching on as we've been going through the across this period that's that's reflected here is the increase in effective tax rate, rising from mid-teens to actually a peak, and and it is it is absolutely the peak, the peak of 31% in this most recent period. Now, fundamental reasons for that across that that longer term are the core the UK core tax rate increasing, the significantly adverse changes to the UK R&D regime.

We've equally, to all for all to all material degrees, utilized all of our tax losses ac- across the group, which are which are things that won't sort of come back. There was one one-off item in- impacting that tax rate in the first half of the year, and that was the adverse impact of the deferred tax charge due to share opti- or share awards that lapsed in the period just off as a result of the the share-price performance across that particular particular period.

Going forward, I'm sort of effect- expecting that effective tax rate to be 20- 27% to 20- 28%, coming down from that peak, and we are in in the throes of the UK Patent Box application and also applying for international equivalents that will look will certainly look to to to make that tax rate as efficient as possible. Touch on EPS as well.

Whilst that does move around, particularly half-on-half, the continued long term we have are seeing continued long-term improvements in that despite some of the tax pressures, and we are expecting to see some fairly significant actually improvements in in the second half, again, as that that adverse one-off tax impact unwinds through EPS as the diluted for the period for the full half of that diluted share count takes effect. Just a word on the cash flow.

Don't want to spend too long on this. The the key thing to to draw out on the left-hand side here is that we are traditionally second-half-weighted when it comes to free cash flow.

You can see the differential there typically 3 to 9, 3 to 10, been 3 in this the this first half. Then just a word on how I'm presenting free free cash flow here: there is one additional adjustment that that that I'm putting through compared to that that some of the analysts are are putting through really to just present it for things that truly won't reoccur, and that's the working the movements in working capital that are fundamentally based around the Social Snowball acquisition, and in particular were were amplified because of the timing.

We we acquired the business 4 days, 5 days before our year-end, and then settled some of the payments post-year-end, but some of those payments went through had to go through the balance sheet as a result of the accounting rules there. I'm just showing those separately.

Obviously do with those as you as you wish, but I wanted to show them show them very clearly because they don't come out in the statutory cash flow statement. Just to take a step back and think about our key financials when we think about dot- dotdigital, yeah, we we have a 15-year successful delivery of those baseline financial metrics: yeah, strong growth, yeah, typically around the 10 10% level.

Look we're looking to drive that higher. Adjusted EBITDA margin exceeding 30%, adjusted PBT margin exceeding 20%, and free cash flow margins getting towards that 20% level.

Certainly with the opportunity to to grow them should we wish to wish to go down that route, but we're consistently balancing, margin versus growth, and typically we're thinking fit about things as against the Rule of 40. The the the higher-value area of our business is what we're focused on: three-year CAGR of 14%, it's accounting for 97% of our group gross profit, yeah, that's where the focus should be.

What we are looking to do, we've always looked to do this, but as we've grown as a group, particularly post the Alia acquisition of of of last week, we're we're really focused on being a bit more agile with our capital allocation within those profitability metrics that we've talked about to ensure that we're always we we're always moving that spend around to ensure that we're we're focused on the high-growth segments, that the high- would be that the international regions, be that recent acquisitions, or be that taking advantage of some other sort of market market opportunity. With that, I'll pass back to you, Milan.

Thanks, Tom. We like to keep things simple, and I'll take you through some of the organic growth pillars as well as acquisitions.

From an organic standpoint, we continue to expand within the geographies. We spend about 12% to 14%, as I mentioned earlier, on R&D, and really to monetize that, we look at functionality recurring revenues, which has grown 20% in the period.

Strengthening our partnerships really helps us drive that brand awareness within the different international markets, but also in the domestic market. If we look at the growth through acquisition, about 3 years ago you would have heard me identify some verticals that we really wanted to plug from a product suite perspective, whether it be around web personalization, and that was through the acquisition of Fresh Relevance.

That's about really using the customer data platform to optimize the experience of the person hitting your website and serving the right content. Secondly, it was around loyalty, and we decided to build the loyalty platform, which will be launching in early July.

We also added influencers as a channel, as the market uses lots of different channels in order to interact with a particular brand or campaigns. We felt, as we look into the future, that's an area of channel adoption that will continue to increase.

The other area was around the customer data platform, and we really built that organically within the business. For us, we always assess whether we build it, whether we buy it, or whether we partner.

In terms of the execution, and we touched on these different pillars, from a growth quality perspective, it's the different pillars and the successes that we've had in these different pillars that really create the growth within our organization. We've continued to see growth across all regions.

Japan in the half-year was a standout, that was, albeit from a smaller base, that's continued to expand very nicely as we play within the local market. From a cross-sell perspective, if you heard the presentation at the year-end, it was really about taking that go-to-market of web personalization into the international arenas.

We've continued to do that. We see that demand continuing to build within those regions.

From a partner, which is an equally important pillar of growth, we've seen 17% increase in revenues. Shopify has been the standout performer within that, which really gave us confidence as we did the acquisitions of both Social Snowball and also Alia, which predominantly today play within the Shopify space.

We see that as the, prior to Alia, second-largest partner that we have from a strategic partnerships perspective, and for us, strategic partnerships either represent 10% of our group revenues or have that opportunity to represent 10% of our group revenues. In the period, we've seen 44% organic growth and 118% growth in Shopify.

From a product delivery perspective, we've done lots around AI. We've been building on the capabilities, as I mentioned at the start of the presentation, it was really to drive more efficiencies within marketing departments, creating our own algorithms from a predictive capability to help our customers really drive that return on investment.

We've already talked about the functionality recurring revenues. Loyalty product has been going well.

It's currently in private preview, and full launch will be in July. The other channels that we talked about, some of the newer channels that we've built, like WhatsApp, where you can have those two-way conversations, store that into the customer data platform, and really get that recipient within the customer journey, has been performing really well.

Tom touched on it, I touched on it, we recently, last week, actually, completed the acquisition of Alia. What it effectively allows you to do is really build on the profiles that you have within the data platform, but more importantly, the subscribers within the marketing campaign.

Alia has demonstrated phenomenal growth in the 2 years, 2 and a half years it's been operating. If I look at December '25, they generated over £8 million of $8 million of ARR; in the previous 12 months, $1 million of ARR.

You can see that rapid pace, the product-market fit that they've created, and over 2,700 customers within the Shopify space. Social Snowball was an integration we did at the start of July, and that's been performing really well.

We've integrated the areas that we wanted to. We've continued to work on the go-to-market from a standalone basis, but also creating that cross-sell, upsell opportunity.

We've seen that ARR increase by 30% in the period. Let's talk about Alia.

It's a very exciting acquisition for us. This helps us really look at the opportunity, but help us complete that life cycle our customer would have with their end customers.

I won't go through the whole deal overview. We've already talked about it in the RNS, but you can see that on screen.

For me, it was really to strengthen that CXDP vision, building that multi-products and allowing our customers to capture more data on whether it's traffic to site or enriching that data within the platform. It was also around making sure that we can accelerate our product roadmap from creating the suite across the whole customer experience, and also deepening that Shopify ecosystem presence.

You can see that coming out in the Shopify growth through the acquisition of Social Snowball. We really created that brand awareness within that ecosystem, which has really helped with that organic growth we've seen in the last 6 months.

This will continue to enrich the brand awareness within that Shopify space. Also with Alia, creating pop-ups as a way or using AI to have the right content served to whether it's unique visitors or repeating visitors, and using all these different data points to make sure they're capturing the audience at the right point.

We've seen the lead-capture market or audience growth market move from about $2.87 billion and continue to expand quite significantly. How does this all fit together?

This is what our suite looks like today: becoming more multi-product, being able to have a toolset that our customers can use at different touchpoints. For me, I guess product strategy means a lot to us, but let's reflect on how that works with our customers' life cycle.

If you're a e-commerce company, you generally are looking for customer acquisition. Within customer acquisition, you're driving traffic to your site.

That could be through paid ads, that could be through traditional marketing efforts like trade shows, like white-paper creation, etc., or content creation. It could be social.

Social Snowball fits very nicely to drive traffic to site with anonymous visitors as well as repeating through either expanding your product awareness or your brand awareness. Alia fits very nicely as you start to get the traffic, really de-anonymizing that either by giving you information and using clever gamification tactics, could be discounting rules, it could be behavioral rules to capture more of that data.

Now you're starting to identify that traffic through the use of Alia, expanding your list sizes and opted-in marketing campaigns. The next part to that is all about nurturing those identified customers.

Within dotdigital Marketing, you can start to put them down different journeys: it could be a nurture program, it could be a retention program, it could be a repeat purchase, it could be a replenishment, and those are some of the examples our customers use from a customer journey side of things. Next is all about conversion.

We've got Fresh Relevance that helps you convert. We've got dotdigital as a marketing platform that is looking things like product recommendation, it could be abandoned basket for some of those customers.

That, once it's completed, that then turns into us having to build a loyalty program, or an advocacy program to really keep those customers coming back. That's where our loyalty platform, as well as Social Snowball, to really create those micro-influencers to build on amplifying your product experience or your brand experience to get more customers coming through.

If I complete that flywheel, it's all around the reporting and analytics to really advance that customer experience as more people enter that flywheel. What brings everything together is around the data, making sure you're understanding who you're speaking to, and Winston AI, having that all these different data points across the platform, really optimizes your AI algorithms to drive that return on investment.

For us, we're really working with our customers to expand that usage, create further innovation from a product development perspective, grow that customer base, and continue scaling and leveraging our acquisitions that we've done. What does that mean?

That really turns into three main areas: whether it be around the growth engine, we have high visibility in recurring revenues, over 90%, over 80% of that is contracted, and continuing to see that ARR grow; strong cash generation, not just in the last period, but just throughout the time we've been a public company, really delivering on those fundamentals; and continuing in retention of our customers, increasing as they adopt more of the platform. From a product strategy, that portfolio or suite of products is continuing to expand and get stronger.

Recent acquisitions we've done really accelerate us pushing further into that space, increasing that total addressable market. We continue to focus around AI, and there's some really cool stuff coming up as we look into the future.

From a market drivers perspective, that expansion of TAM, we've continued to see an emphasis on creating personalized experiences around AI adoption and an emphasis on that zero-party, first-party data. With all that, that really gives us the confidence in H2 and into the future.

Thank you very much for listening to the story, and that brings us to the end of the presentation part of today. We are now happy to take questions.

No problem at all. Thank you for that question.

I think there's a number of other questions, but by grouping these different questions, there's three key points: what is the competitive advantage against the competitors out there, what's the defensibility against AI, and the key barrier to entry. We've answered a number of areas, but just to recap: from a competitive advantage perspective, we probably have the most amount of breadth and depth in our toolset now that can solve our customers' use cases.

Obviously, when you're going up against a particular customer, there are numerous differentiation points that you have in order to win that customer, but generically, we can work across the whole customer base. We have our own message-sending infrastructure.

In terms of expertise, we've been playing in the space over 20 years, and we have a proposition that not only is it about the technology, but it's also about the people that really make it happen for our customers, understanding what they're looking to achieve, and giving them the toolset and the expertise to make sure that they deliver on the return on investments. We've got one of the deepest integration infrastructure out there, we connect into over 250 off-the-shelf integrations, which is maintained by us, built by us, from an ecosystem perspective, and bringing that data in easily.

Some of those are the kind of core advantages, but naturally in a different pitch process, there are going to be areas where you compare yourself against a particular competitor. In terms of defensibility against AI, there's a number of different things that we talked about in this presentation.

However, if I kind of summarize some of the key points, what are our moats and how do we become defensible, it's that proprietary, first-party, zero-party data that we've collected over a number of years, and over 9,000 different brands. AI is only as good as the context that you give it or the context layer.

We've got deep e-commerce and MarTech integrations. Whilst you may be able to do a little bit of vibe coding, we work across all of their business systems, we work across bringing in all of that behavior insights.

Domain-specific AI embedded into workflow, when we built AI, we're not just an application layer, we're deeply wove in into that whole customer experience toolset across these different touchpoints that our customers would have. The actionable behavioral and predictive insights: AI is only as useful when it can really drive real actions, and we've been very good at doing that, but with native AI, you naturally get the output of that.

There are high switching costs when you're across the different departments of our customers or across many different point solutions that they may have, working with one another. You may be able to build a small proportion of it, you're not going to be able to build all of it, or people are not looking to rip all of that out when it's working.

For us, having that full-funnel CXDP or customer experience vision, I guess point solutions or tools can't really match that full customer journey. We are working in a regulated world.

Obviously, some of you would have heard about GDPR. In a more regulated world, customers are looking for, I guess, privacy-focused and secure AI architectures, which dotdigital is, and has ISO accreditations against, especially with those larger mid-sized businesses and enterprise.

I think I've answered a number of different questions that people been asking around competitive advantage, defensibility against AI, and key barrier to entry, that's the last part. Email sender reputation, absolutely.

We've built 20 years' worth of reputation on our IPs. As I mentioned earlier, we control our own messaging infrastructure, we don't use a third party.

That reputation does act as a barrier to entry. Also, having the full suite of tools, somebody can't just build all these different tools very quickly to come into market.

If you look at most of the market entry within the space we play in, there's always been acquisitions into the space opposed to organic builds of platforms.

Thank you. Good question.

Firstly just to put this all into context. We have said for a number of years and will continue to redeploy our capital to areas that are growing faster or there's faster ROI for us.

Social Snowball is one of those. In the 3 or 4 months post-acquisition, we wanted to ensure that that growth was still there, which it was, which gave us confidence to just accelerate investments, and we're talking here where upon acquisition, approximately three heads is now more than double that, and the return on that investment will come through in the second half of this fiscal year.

Now, I talked about redeployment of capital. What we are actually doing is the EMEA market is growing slower, therefore we are redeploying some capital from EMEA to Social Snowball to fund this, but in the first-half period, there's a bit of overlapping cost there that will flush through in the second half, and we'll see a return in those margins.

Good question there as well. CPaaS for us isn't an area of focus.

When we did the acquisition back in 2017 of Comapi, which did play in the CPaaS space, it was for us to integrate that technology within the dotdigital platform. If we look at Twilio, they've got high volumes of customers across whether they're being small business all the way up to large enterprise customers.

That generally, with lower volume, you have a higher margin; with larger senders, you have a lower margin; and that mix allows them to get to 55% gross margin. For us, we have small number of customers with large volume, where the margin in the large-volume senders is obviously lower.

They also have slightly better, with the volumes that Twilio do, better margins from the telco providers than we would compared to the amount of message sending that we're doing.

Sure, no problem at all. Given that they're full subscription businesses, the run rate revenues almost do equate to ARR, it's almost one and the same thing.

Social Snowball, at the time of acquisition, was just ahead of £4 million worth of ARR. Alia was, as we've disclosed, eight above $8 million as at 31st December, a couple of months before acquisition, it's fair to assume it's grown a touch since then, which equates to about £6 million.

It's not very distracting. There's quite a lot of market sentiment that is weighing on the share price.

I think what we focus as a management team and I guess employees within the business, whilst yes, it's not great having a low share price, we're just fully focused in growing the business, keep delivering the fundamentals, and that sustainable growth model that we've been building across those three organic growth pillars. I think looking at share price on a day-to-day basis with areas that we can't control, we do it periodically, but we don't look at it on a day-to-day basis anymore.

The gross and net retention, I'll refer to net retention first, and it's in excess of 100%, and we called out in the half-year report that gross retention has improved by a couple of percentage points on the first half last year; net retention has improved by a percentage point. Part of that was also with regards to are there any particular higher-churn areas?

Not really, no. It's all fairly consistent across the group and across the contract types, albeit there are some nuances.

There's certainly no outliers that are in permanent decline.

No, we're not anticipating 8x growth again. It would be wonderful if it happens, but no, we're not expecting that.

In terms of what the market has, the market has about 25% growth for both Social Snowball and Alia, actually. If you look at the dynamics of the earnouts that are based upon what the founders believe that they can achieve, they are in the region of the both of those recent acquisitions doubling in size each year for a 2-year period.

It'd be wonderful if they got there, but for obvious reasons, we're not guiding the market to that.

If I kind of go back to the way I visualize the platform, whether it's around the data, whether it's around the orchestration layer or channels, we've focused our platform functionality or build and the depth of the platform on mid-market, larger enterprise, the ability to have more flexibility in whether it be structures that you can set up with multi-brand, multi-territory, so that's an area of differentiation to Klaviyo. Klaviyo is a very good platform for smaller businesses, but when you graduate to a platform like ours, not only do you get more flexibility in data, the ability to create more customer journeys in an automated fashion, but also we have a lot more channels than Klaviyo do and send to.

In terms of what stops us growing as quickly as Klaviyo, I guess the growth is a factor of how much you spend on sales and marketing. We have kept that balanced, disciplined approach of profitability and having 20%-plus PBT margins, 30%-plus EBITDA margins, whereas obviously Klaviyo has been loss-making for a number of years and starting to get to profitability.

It's about creating that brand awareness across the globe that would allow us to get to the growth rates of Klaviyo.

That definitely. I guess where if we cast our minds 3 years ago, there were a number of areas that we identified, loyalty, around web personalization, around zero-party, first-party data, and that was a key area that we identified as we played in web personalization.

The next kind of evolution to that or maturity of that market would be search and merchandising. We have looked at acquisitions in that space.

The only issues we've had is as a point solution in search and merchandising, they have a higher level of attrition in that space. We've not been able to get the valuations to work in terms of what founders are looking for and what we value that type of technology on.

As the loyalty platform goes into full public release, that is probably an area that we may look to build ourselves, unless from an acquisition standpoint, something comes up which we feel would be a great addition to the dotdigital platform. Thank you.

That's a bit of a difficult question to answer, but what I do know is if you look at, let's say, a Braze or a Klaviyo, and their market consensuses, as they've returned more to profit, or the profit expectations as they look forward, the growth rates have come down. Naturally, investing more in sales and marketing creates a broader top line.

I think with the acquisitions we have with Alia and Social Snowball that are growing a lot faster, as well as some of our international regions, even if we maintained growth at the, let's say, 7% to 10% organically in the core business, accelerating a bit more around redeployment of capital, we could, in the medium to long term, get the business to a 13% to 15% growth rate whilst maintaining the same margins. I know that's not fully answering your question in terms of if we dropped it by 5%, how much more growth could we get from the core business.

I think looking at it a different way, we've got business lines that are growing a lot faster, we can deploy a bit more of the capital that earns a higher return on investment for us, which can help accelerate our future organic growth rate.

Cool. We'll review that.

Yeah. I'd add on that one, actually.

We permanently are reviewing that, and that's why the example I gave earlier that we've redeploying some capital towards Social Snowball from other areas of the business. We do permanently do that, and that's what the company has done for a number of years in terms of redeploying capital to some of the faster-growing markets in the world outside of the UK.

I'd say that is something we do on an ongoing basis,

and we'll continue to. Whilst we review that, I think there is a good investment coming up that will help with the efficiencies of the sales org.

We are looking to put a CRO, chief revenue officer, into the core business as management bandwidth with the breadth of where the business is today or the maturity of the model, they will be looking at that on a constant basis. At the moment, whilst the general managers of each of the regions reporting to myself, as well as the newer acquisitions, only have a certain amount of time from a GTM motion perspective.

We are bringing in a CRO that will help optimize and make more efficient our current sales methodology, process, and efficiencies.

That's a very good question. I think yes, we have done acquisitions, a number of acquisitions over the last 3 years.

We needed to build out the suite. Part of our vision 3 years ago, and it continues, was about making this a more multi-suite product.

One, it defends against AI, but secondly, it gives our customers, as their behaviors have changed over the recent years, which is around the consolidation of platform. If we look into the future, over the next 12 to 18 months, we'll focus on integrating those acquisitions and continue building organically.

We have near completed what we describe as our suite across the whole customer experience, we'll be back focused on that organic growth while we build more of the cash over the next 12 to 24 months, which should obviously improve those metrics.

No problem at all. Thanks again, everyone, for joining today.

I think, for us, H1 has demonstrated strong progress against not only our geographic pillar of growth, whether it be the extra functionality, the AI builds that we've done continuously enhancing our product. Also from a strategic partnerships, we're seeing some very strong growth in strategic partners as we look into the future, and delivery over the last 6 months.

ARR growth has continued to expand quite significantly, and over that 6-month period, we've continued to increase our retention of our customers, and rising and increase in that spend of our customers as the depth of the platform and our customers use more of that platform from an adoption perspective. Our multi-product CXDP strategy is continued to deliver both on the functionality recurring revenue, which has been up 20% in that 6-month period.

We've seen channels like WhatsApp, which we recently launched, we're launching our loyalty platform, and we've completed two acquisitions that we're very excited about as we look into the future acceleration of our organic growth rate. With strong cash generation that we create in our business, and that growing international footprint, more diversification of revenues outside of the UK in high-growth addressable markets, and the recurring revenue nature of our business, we have full transparency into the future.

Tom and I appreciate your time today, and we look forward to updating you on our continued progress.