Qoria Dec Q2 FY26 Earnings Call - Record ARR Growth and Strong Pipeline Amid AI Integration

Moderator: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our December Quarter for 2025, for the Quarter Two of Financial Year 2026 webinar, on our December Quarter results. Tim will kick off, as usual, and I’ll step in on the financial sides, and then we’ll go to question as usual. Tim, over to you.

Tim, CEO, Qoria: Right, thanks. I see there’s a few people in the waiting room. They’re coming in now. Okay, great. Well, cool. Thanks, Ben. Thanks, everyone, for joining us. The December Quarter isn’t typically the highest selling period for us. For a lot of our business, particularly the northern hemisphere part of our business, it’s really about focusing on execution. It’s delivering good services to customers, you know, getting, in particular in the U.S., getting kids back to school and getting their devices protected. But it is a big period, the December half and the December quarter, particularly for Australia, New Zealand, and our Qustodio business. And you’ll see that reflected in the numbers that we’re about to show you. Very pleasing results, actually. In fact, it was the best sales December quarter we’ve ever had in our history.

From a guidance perspective, we’re really pleased that we’ve hit all our guidance numbers and are very confident for our guidance for the rest of the year. So, look, I’ll quickly run through the highlights, then I’ll go through the meat of the presentation, then I’ll hand over to Ben to talk through the numbers, and then we’ll answer questions at the end. So, yeah, man, some massive milestones, actually, achieved in the December quarter. We were, of course, buffeted by the FX movements, the Australian, U.S., and euro. But if we forget that, let’s make some celebrations. Firstly, we passed through AUD 100 million of ARR, which is a substantial achievement. And in constant currency terms, that meant AUD 154 million of Australian ARR. We’re reporting AUD 149 million of ARR at the end of the calendar year.

We also passed 20% of students are on our platform in the U.S. That is an amazing number. 20% of our students, essentially all of those students, are organic. We entered that market in 2018. That is an amazing achievement. We have also passed 30 million kids that are protected by our platform. Okay. Substantially more kids on our platform than there are Australians on Earth. They are achievements that we should celebrate. Now, from financial results, we added AUD 5.1 million of net ARR. That is a great result. Over AUD 4 million in the education business was an outstanding result. Again, given it is not the key part of the selling part of the season, and over AUD 2 million in Qustodio. Qustodio is an absolute flyer, growing now at an annualized rate greater than 34%.

Our top line is growing, better this time of year than what we were doing last year. Last year, if you recall, we hit the ball out of the park for the financial year. Cash receipts, AUD 79 million, 20% up on PCP on the same half last year. Great result on guidance, and we’re expecting that to continue comfortably, actually, for the financial year. Free cash flow positive, up 46% for the half. Then probably also really another big highlight, right? Obviously key to our financial results is the North America K12 business, and our pipeline is on fire. Nearly $40 million in pipe, $14 million on a weighted basis, which is 30% up on the record pipe of last year. The stage is set for a fantastic end to the financial year.

Reiterating guidance and we think of anything that’s upside in particular on our ARR. So let’s go through some of the numbers. 32,000 schools, that hasn’t changed. But 30,000, 30 million kids on a platform, 9 million parents using our tools is up, more than 100 countries, accessing our products. As I said, AUD 154 million, I think I said, on a constant basis, but we entered the half of the AUD 140 million, AUD 149 million of ARR, growing at 20%. Again, that is, it would have been much higher than 19%, but for the FX, free cash flow positive for the half, and, for the year, we’re expecting free cash flow break even or better, so I’ll let Ben talk more to that.

Again, a big highlight is that $14 million of weighted pipeline, which sets us up for a fantastic crack at the second half of the financial year. In fact, a big chunk of our team are in the U.K. right now because their big sales event is called the Bett Conference at the end of January every year. All parts of our business are growing extremely well. These numbers here, in local currency, the U.S., U.S. K-12, and 30% Qustodio on a last 12-month basis, 27%. Based on the first half of this financial year, over 30%, that business is flying. Australia, New Zealand, growing at north of 30%. Now, the U.K. is still a little bit retarded, let’s say, because they haven’t got access to all the products, but that’s literally happening now.

We’re launching a substantial integration filter and monitoring by the end of this quarter. The Qoria filtering technology will be valued in the UK and more and more stuff to come. I’ll talk more about that in coming months, but you’ll see the UK really a step change in growth in the UK in the next 12 months. Very exciting what’s happening over there. These, you know, stats that haven’t really changed, I guess, if I could highlight anything, gross margins are over 90%. Again, that excludes acquisition costs, but that compares with most, you know, that most SaaS businesses report. So our margin, our gross margin is incredibly strong. And as we, you know, are now maturing and integrating our businesses and our costs are stabilizing, that’s what’s delivering the operating leverage in the business.

and our marketing efficiency, particularly in Qustodio, where we’re generating return on investments of anywhere between 300% and 400%. It is expensive to put money into Qustodio because it does drop straight to our, through our P&L, but it is really important because for every dollar we invest in that Qustodio business, we’re getting three or four dollars back in short order. It is the right place to be investing our money. Okay. So this is a waterfall of the contributors to our growth. K-12, new customers, you know, new logos are still the engine room in our business. We’re getting better and better cross-selling, and we delivered 1.5 million of cross-sales. I think cross-sales now over the half, it’d be 30-plus% of our new ARR is from cross-sales to existing customers. Last year, it was just over 23%.

So we’re definitely getting, with more products to sell, we’re getting better at selling products to resistant customers. Qustodio, as you see there, $2.1 million. So they’ve nearly added $5 million of ARR for the financial year together. But of course, a big chunk of hit there with the FX movement. Now, of course, there is a cost impact of that as well, which again, I’ll let Ben talk about, but in round numbers, around about $3 million of improvement in our costs from the FX movements. Sorry, bear with me. Just lost my screen. Okay. So K12, what’s the, I mean, a big net add for the quarter of $3 million, $4.6 million gross. That is a, it’s not quite our record for K12, but it was a little bit surprising how well it came in.

You know, this time of year, it’s hard to predict what sales are because it isn’t the biggest selling period, but we had some outstanding results. Again, particularly in the U.K., they really delivered in that quarter. Average revenue pursuit continues to go up. Average sales price, as you’d expect, as we’re kind of getting into the selling season, that’s picking up, but the real highlight in the education business is the building of the pipe into the second half of the financial year. You know, nearly $40 million of deals in that pipeline and 30% growth in the way that pipe is remarkable. Qustodio, all indicators in this business are going the right way, so the first half, again, 34% annualized growth. I’ll draw your attention to the charts at the bottom, the yellow column being the most recent result or this financial year’s result.

You see not only net ARR growth, that’s substantial, but you’re seeing subscriber growth. Prior to this year, for the last two years, most of our ARR growth in that Qustodio business has come through price optimization. But now that we’ve delivered price increases, feature enhancements, and a little bit of investment, we’re talking literally $4 million of extra investment over the year in that business. We’re now seeing that turning into substantial lifts in ARR, subscriber numbers, and that really good return on investments. You know, our average order value and our cost to acquire customers essentially break even. And so it’s not burning cash to grow that business, but of course, the way the accounting works is to acquire a customer, take that to their P&L immediately, and then you take the revenue over the life of that customer.

But that is good business, and we’re carefully investing in that business to make sure that we hit our guidance, but do not miss the opportunity of the financials, the unit economics of that business are tremendous. So cash flows up 20% for the half. We’re expecting that and more for the second half. We’re feeling really comfortable with our, you know, inflows. Again, I’ll let Ben talk more about that, but you see quite clearly in the charts here the cycles that our businesses go through, but we’re stepping it up, you know, every quarter, every year. Operating leverage. Look, I guess I could highlight some things that are important. You’ll see it through our 4C, and you see it on the slide.

One, as we’ve been telling the market for some time now, at the beginning of the financial year, through our budgeting cycle, we make investments. The bets we’ve made this year is the main one we’ve made this year, two of them, sorry, is to put more money into Qustodio marketing, around about AUD 4 million, and to invest in building out the engineering team in Sri Lanka. Those investments were being made now in this first half of year to deliver results going forward. You’ve seen that, a lift in our costs and, of course, pay raises, which you did in that October period. You’ve seen that lift, but as we have also gone to the market on our ARR, and revenue is expected to be at least 20% higher than last year. That can be easily accommodated.

Those modest increases in cost can be, and bets that we make can be easily accommodated in ARR and revenue growth. Now, on the bottom chart on the right-hand side, what we’ve done there, for comparison purposes is show our, year-to-date result for net ARR versus cash costs. So essentially, it’s a run rate view of our business on a constant currency basis. So using our FX rates at 30 June. As you can see, these investments that we’ve made in Sri Lanka and Qustodio marketing, comfortably covered by the growth in revenue in our business. So again, leverages in our business is growing. Gross margins are great. We also have flexibility in these bets that we make, particularly around marketing costs. So we can optimize our expenditure to make sure we hit guidance.

At the moment, we’re feeling very comfortable with our, with our growth, and our guidance, particularly around cash flow and balance sheet, which again, I’ll let Ben talk about later. Now, I know there’s gonna be a lot of questions about balance sheet and finances, but I do think it’s important, if I could just steal five or so minutes of people’s time to talk about AI. There’s been a lot of chatter that we’ve seen recently about the impact of AI and what that might mean for SaaS businesses, so software as a service type businesses. What I’m gonna do now is quickly talk about the investments we’re making in our business to, to take advantage of AI for internal costs, but also deliver value for customers. Also talk about what’s the broader implications for businesses like ours with the advent of, agentic and generative AI.

So firstly, a quick, I think, focus on us. There’s really three areas of investments in our business with AI. One is enhancing offerings, you know, adding, essentially adding AI features to our products that customers, you know, may enjoy. And we’ve been talking about this for a while, and it’s generating now literally millions of dollars of revenue in our business. We were the first in, in the kind of mainstream filtering provider space to provide real-time content to web filtering. We can now intercept the kid’s website, look at the images that they’re looking at, look at the videos that they’re looking at, and blur them if there’s inappropriate content. And we can also now look at the text, every single, line of text hidden or otherwise, and make a determination about whether that should be shown to the child as is or not.

In particular, that stuff is focused on, you know, our content, of course, but also kids who are brilliant at finding their ways around filtering technologies, using technologies like VPNs and proxies. So we can now scan in real-time these pages without the child noticing and make those determinations. There’s a whole host of other things that we’re doing behind the scenes with categorization and classification, and there are also some really cool things that we’re doing with automations and, you know, AI chatbots and, you know, let’s call it AI agents that can help you with your navigation and your journey of using our products. We’ll be talking more about that in the second half of the year, but big investments may be making there and not specifically if these things are actually delivering real contributions into our business today.

You know, constant work across the business. We’re all getting better and better at integrating AI into our day-to-day activities. And of course, all of our vendors of various customer relationship management type systems are adding our features in there. And that’s saved. We highlight here about $2 million of reduced support costs, and we’ve reduced the amount of workload in our human moderators for our monitoring product by about 30% with tons more to go. You know, we’ve. I won’t go over the details, but there’s literally millions more dollars of savings I’m expecting out of that, as customer support and human moderation by the end of this calendar year. And then, going to this question that I keep hearing about, you know, can people code in their basements and replicate the sorts of features that you offer? And now we’re doing that internally.

Product development teams globally are now being expected to use Vibe Coding and AI tools to not only prototype but to be able to build, alpha-ready, products that customers can use and then move into the development, proper development cycle, production cycle, they call it, so we do that today. And it’s something like, I think 90% of our, 88% of our teams are now using generative AI in their day-to-day activity. We’ve saved 15 FTEs, 15 roles, engineering roles in our business, and these are expensive resources, $120,000-$200,000 resources. 15 of them have been effectively saved through the use of these tools, and it’s not just at the grassroots, even people like myself, using AI to build applications in this business now. So it’s now running rife in our business. Okay.

What is the impact of AI gonna be on SaaS businesses? Unquestionably, the ability to code is accelerating. The ability to take an idea, put something in front of a customer, and turn it into a feature that’s being used by customers has moved incredibly quickly from, you know, nine months to a year to get a feature out the door three, four years ago to, you know, three to four months. We’re actually now doing that. We’ve actually got a feature that shipped a couple of weeks ago that took less than three months to deliver. Now, does that mean that people can start Vibe Coding their way and competing with us big companies?

What Ben and company say is that with the right playbook, which includes deep AI integration, strong data moats, and leadership on standards, incumbents can shape and not just survive the next wave of SaaS. Now, let me go into a bit more detail what that means. There’s a number of references here to third parties that have been investigating this question about what is the impact of AI gonna be on dedicated SaaS businesses. One thing that I’ve brought attention to is we don’t sell really just software. What we’re doing is selling mitigation of risk. A customer of, you know, private school in Australia, they might be spending AUD 20,000 a year with us to make sure that kids are not watching pornography at school or making sure that they’re compliant with their obligations around safeguarding and privacy.

What school is gonna entrust that to a backyard provider for maybe half the price? They’re not gonna do it. What’s really important to understand in enterprise platforms, particularly in markets which are high trust and heavily regulated like we operate in, there is a transfer of risk inherent in that production process, which is really what we’re selling, plus of course the features. Now, according to Andreessen Horowitz, durable moats come from restricted proprietary regulatory sensitive dynamic data sets, not the model. So yes, there is a lot of data everywhere, and you can build AI tools that leverage that data. But if you think about a business like ours, we have access to very unique data.

We, in fact, we’re the only ones really globally that has the ability to see what kids are doing at home and see what they’re doing at school and bring all those contexts together. We also, through our acquisition of Octopus last year, we can now see through schools, other systems, attendance systems, academic records, teacher notes. We have more visibility across the data sets of schools than I think anybody in our space. The ability to bring all that together and add value to decision making of schools is a significant moat that is very, very hard to replicate. The third point, Bessemer, of Best of Adventures is that you’re seeing this across the internet, there is much more now a focus of vertical integration.

What was previously feature providers, you know, little expense-type management systems and project management systems that could apply to everybody, that world’s collapsing, and now people are focusing on particular industry segments, which is a vertical integration, a greater approach. We’ve been talking about this for three or four years about all those entry points and all those personas that we’re trying to support inside the school. So we’ve been talking about vertical integration for a long time. Outcome-based pricing is where McKinsey sees this world going. So it’s less about the subscription per user or subscription per service, but it’s, are you delivering value? And again, we’ve been talking about this for a long time. How do we make sure that customers pay the minimal money amount they’re spending on our services, maybe $7 or $10 per student per year? And how do we turn that?

How do we prove the value that that’s delivering to customers? So again, our acquisition of Octopus was in large part to make sure we can deliver measurable outcomes for the modest investments that schools are making in our technologies. And the final piece, and I think this isn’t talked about enough, accelerating time to value is really important. And that can of course be done with great user interfaces, which can be Vibe coded, but in the complex type systems that we do, it also requires the addition of wrapped professional services, which is something that we do in particular around professional development for moderation, safety leads, and of course for online safety education. That is something that’s unique in our business.

So we’ve been thinking about this challenge of protection, building a moat around your business with the, not just AI, but just the acceleration in software development for a long time. So if I can reiterate, Qoria operates in a high trust, safety, critical environment, very regulated, subject to privacy policies, compliance obligations, and of course, we’re dealing with human lives. This isn’t an area that’s naturally ripe for, disruption by, you know, backyard coders. Customers are not purchasing off-the-shelf software. They’re purchasing assurance, compliance, accountability, and professional services. I guess the comment on the right-hand side is the key points I’d like to make. I think the SaaS businesses that are at risk are those single feature and undifferentiated workflow type businesses, those particularly with low switching costs. And that is not our business model.

The winners will be platforms with proprietary data, which we have, regulatory drivers, which we have, and a customer locking, which we have because we are invested across the school stack, and we have relationships with parents within these schools. So for businesses like ours, we see that AI is an accelerant and certainly not a threat. Look, that was a very quick overview. Happy to provide some, you know, dedicated sessions on this over time, and I’ll maybe leave to the program list here on this call to see if they’d like to do that. That was very quick. Let me quickly hand over to Ben Jenkins. Thanks, Tim. Good morning again, everyone. Just jump to the next slide, please, Tim. Sure. Thank you.

So as you can see on the page here, free cash flow for the quarter was just over negative AUD 2 million, broadly in line with what we’re expecting across the whole half. When you consider the Q1 result and the Q2 together, just under AUD 9 million positive. As we mentioned at the September quarter, we collected cash really well in the September quarter, and the collections over the half were in line, almost exactly in line with the guidance we provided at 20.2%, which is really pleasing. Something probably worth calling out here. It is called out on the next slide, but you know it is mentioned here, so worth talking to the other one-off costs. They are all related to acquisitions that we were looking at, diligence costs, other bits and pieces.

There was three different acquisitions across the half that we looked at in a significant amount of detail. For various reasons, we have walked away from all three of those, or been outbid on those. So they are genuinely one-off in nature and corporate costs related. Outside of that, I think jump to the. I’ve got control now. I can jump to the next slide myself. Going into a little bit of detail on the cost line across the board, Tim talked to the investments that were made in the business over the year. Most of that is done now, so I expect costs to be broadly flat across the half, if not down in some cases, particularly in relation to fixed other costs where you have some seasonality within that.

Importantly, on cash collections, I think the most important, and you can see this in the chart earlier in the deck where we comp the cash collections quarter on quarter over the last three years. Last year, we’re comping receipts in the March quarter were only up 9%, and receipts in the June quarter were actually flat. They weren’t up at all year on year. So we’re comping a very favorable period, and that’s largely due to the runoff in multi-year cash upfront that happened last year. That’s washed through. You can see that’s washed through in our first half results and cash collections. But in the first half of the year, we’re actually still comping it a much tougher period.

We’re pretty confident that receipts will be comfortably over 20% for the second half of the year, up year on year. I guess the other data point that we can point to is last year. If you look at the half one, half two split, it was 60% receipts in the first half of the year, 40% in the second half of the year. A lot of people are probably going to that as the baseline. Again, due to the profile of the cash flows last year and the flat nature of it in the second half of the year, that’s probably the wrong split to look to. If you look at FY24, the split was actually 57% half one, 43% half two. I don’t expect it to be that far to the right this year, but it’ll be somewhere in between those two.

And if you back solve through that, that gives you a number of comfortably above 20% in cash receipts growth for the second half of the year. On that basis, net debt is mentioned on the previous slide and all the cash on hand of AUD 21 million. We’re comfortable there’s enough cash in the bank, from now through to 30 June when we start collecting cash really, really strongly again in the July or September quarter to see us through. So, free cash flow for the full year should be broadly in line, with guidance that we’ve provided before. So we generate AUD nine million in the first half.

We will chew through a bunch of that in the second half and end up the year with a cash balance similar to what we started the year at, probably slightly lower, in line with what we’ve discussed in the previous quarterly updates, and just FX exposure. Tim spoke to this earlier. We’ve updated this slightly, a little bit more in the business related to US dollars, so the sensitivity to the US dollars is a little bit higher than what it has been. The other area where there is a little bit of impact is within the Qustodio business. Their majority of their revenue is in US dollars, whereas the majority of their cost is in the euro, and there’s been a little bit of a disconnect there.

So there’s a little bit of cost related to that that’s captured in the sensitivity analysis earlier in the pack. On that basis, we can go to questions. We’ll let Laugh in. Laugh, you should be able to unmute now and ask your question. All right, there we go. Thank you for the detail you’ve given us on the free cash flow. Can I just dive into a little bit more on the cost side? So, I can see that you’re now more confident on the March and June cycling at least 20% up. Can you just talk through the timing of some of the cost savings around AI? And I think from the last couple quarters you talked to it being first half heavy. Is that right? And can you just talk about the trajectory of the cost base going into FY27?

Yeah, I think the cost savings will really be an FY27 story. I think FY26, the cost base is fairly set now, so I’m not expecting any significant increase from here. And then through to FY27, we’re reasonably confident that we’ll be able to keep costs flat. So not CPI increase. We should be able to offset any wage increases, with savings within the business. So, that’ll further extend that leverage. And if you forecast out the growth that we’re expecting in the business in ARR, a lot of that comes through this half of the year, then you can see a path to fairly significant cash generation in FY27. Yeah, sure. And can I just clarify for the second half? I mean, I think Tim talked to some of the AI savings. You have AUD 2 million in your presentation, in savings.

Is some of that coming in the second half, or is that all really in FY27? Some of it’s cost avoidance. So, an example would be, the moderation team, the moderation product’s growing significantly, 25%-30% year on year, yet we actually haven’t grown that team much. So rather than having to put new human moderators on, we’re able to deal with that through advancements in AI. And Ari, thank you. Lindsay, you should be able to unmute now and ask your question. Okay, hopefully that works. Can you hear me? Yep, you’re good. Yep, brilliant. Yeah, thanks. I was a couple of questions. First one on the U.K. So like, looks like a pretty modest kind of quarter year over year, up 6%, something like that. I mean, you’ve talked about that being soft until you can launch new products post unification.

Questions are like, one, just remind us again where we are in that unification process. And then two, like, once you can start cross-selling into the U.K., could you just talk about like where firstly, like where the big opportunities are, but then also where the early opportunities are? Because I think people are gonna kind of wanna see some runs on the board. So like, where are you gonna focus first? And then where’s the opportunity in the U.K.? Yeah, well the sequence is to take our cloud filtering offering from the U.S. and integrate it with the, into the monitoring product. So you essentially have a cohesive monitor and cloud filtering for our cloud-only customers in the U.K., and that’s happening right now. The next step is to integrate our cloud filtering offering and monitoring offering would be inline appliances.

The 4,000 Smoothwall appliances that are in schools and council schools and mats across the U.K. The final piece is to extend that suite of features to the larger mats, which are what’s called a multi-tenant deployment. Essentially think about multiple corporations that are managed by a single MSP. That’s the final stage of the integration roadmap, which should be around about September, kind of worst case end of this calendar year. To answer your question more directly, then, the objective of this year is really an existing customer, you know, journey, getting all of our customers acquainted with the future of our platform, the singular platform. Your experience has been rebranded as Qoria. It has got brand new user interfaces, much more modern and user-friendly interfaces, the same that our customers in the U.S. enjoy.

So a big part of it this year is about bringing those customers on the journey, making sure that they’re happy. It’s gonna reduce any churn that we have. So our kind of gross retention’s gonna improve this year in the UK. And that gross retention, I think, has been at, you know, 86%-90% for the last year or two there. So that will improve. And it then gives us the opportunity to chip away at selling things like printer controls and classroom management and data analytics and so on. So very much an existing logo story this year, graduating from the less complex to the more complex schools over time. And that’s done deliberately for technical reasons, but also those bigger clients will appreciate that this product is tested in the field before, you know, they’ve moved to it.

And then, yeah, in 27 for us is then, you know, accelerating new logos in the U.K. market, going up a lot of the business that Lightspeed has taken from us in the last two or three years. Okay, brilliant. And then I’ll switch on to Qustodio. Like, again, pretty good quarter, you know, 2.1, I think is what you called out. I suppose my question would be was a little bit on my numbers, looks a little bit slower than Q1. I think traditionally this has been like the strongest quarter for consumer, that kind of Q4 calendar year period. So one, could you just like remind us of the seasonality in the consumer business? And then two, looks like there was a huge marketing spend in this quarter. It jumped up to like north of $4 million from two something in Q1.

Just wanted to confirm that marketing spend is seasonal as well and we shouldn’t expect AUD 4 million a quarter going forward. Do you have to tackle that one first, Tim? Yeah, that’s right. It’s timing effectively and where it landed either side of 30 September. So if you take the spend over the whole half, average it, that’s more what you’d expect in the second half of the year. But yeah, don’t analyze the December quarter. Yeah, that’s right. So, yeah, sorry. For the half, they, you know, added just under AUD 5 million of ARR and spent under AUD 5 million of ARR. That’s what we’ve told Victoria to do, you know, grow within your, you know, the amount of money that you bill your customers. And if you need more money than that, talk to Ben Jenkins.

That’s really the message. All right. And just might, maybe I’ll sneak in like a third question. Just an update on the B2B to C part of the Qustodio business, like you’ve kind of maybe scrapped that from the deck. Yeah, look, we’ve got around 200,000 accounts now, connected through U.S. schools to U.S. homes. And that’s now a customer base. And we’re getting better and better, actually. We don’t, you know, you’re right. We don’t talk much about it now, but we probably should. We’re getting better at signing on these schools and proving to schools that there is efficacy, that there is benefits. There was material reductions in toxicity in schools for bringing on these programs. I should present this to the market, actually. It’s pretty amazing.

So we’re now signing up more and more schools and getting better at, you know, connecting those accounts. Those schools that follow our marketing plan are typically getting 20% take up comfortably. We’re still getting around 1% of those upgrading to the pay product. But just again, to reiterate, we are still not marketing to that group of customers. We’re not sending newsletters. We’re not sending, you know, monthly emails or aggressive, you know, upgrade now type, three months off type things. We’re not doing any of that. But that program is about to start. So this quarter, we’re expecting to do marketing communications to those 200,000 parents. And we’re also gonna start, you know, doing some innovative pricing. So rather than annual plans, which is the only way Qustodio goes, it’s all upfront annual plans. We’re gonna start doing monthly plans.

So, you know, from low to high value plans, just to A/B test to see what that sort of market will handle. So yeah, that’s all, that’s the next stage of this journey, Lindsay, is we’ve now got a big enough customer base to start playing with how do we monetize it. So that’s really the Q2 story. So we’ll be talking more about that in coming months. Good stuff. All right, thanks guys. Cheers. Oh, and you should be able to unmute and ask your question. Guys, you okay? Yep. Yep. Good one. Hey, well done on the operating performance of the business. Just to kind of understand something. So ARR growth is 23%, call it, year on year. The weighted pipeline’s up 29% and Qustodio’s accelerating to over 30%. Can I just confirm the guidance is 20% given your expectations?

You kind of tracking at this stage above that 20%? Yeah, yeah. Look, the, I mean, I’d like, I’m feeling confident about that. And if you spoke to our head of North American sales, he’ll, he’ll say he’ll kill that. But the risk in our business, as you know, is that so much of our North American sales are done the last two weeks of June. So we don’t really know for sure. But certainly the trajectory, the underlying trajectory of growth in this business is well north of 20%. Absolutely. And just to kind of hit the nail on the head here, ’cause we’re getting a few questions today. So net debt AUD 33 million, guidance is at or around AUD 37 million, so AUD 4 million for the second half. That includes interest costs, call it AUD 1 million a quarter. So AUD 2 million for the core.

The cost base is running it, if you look at the first and second quarter at around AUD 35 million per quarter all in. So annualize that for the half year, AUD 70 million for the second half. Looking at the cash receipts of last year, around that AUD 44-odd million, talking Ben around that growing at greater than 20%. That looks to like it’s about a negative 16 or 15 around that number of the AUD 7-8 million, between cash collections and cash outflows in the second half plus interest costs. Can you just kind of give us a bit more clarity? It sounds like the cash collections should be much higher than 20% in the second half to kind of get that. That’s kind of where the questions are coming out today, and we haven’t really talked about that. Yeah, that, that’s right.

And I think we’re comfortable to say that we think it’ll be comfortably higher than 20%. Again, points you to the half on half splits over the last couple of years. Last year’s probably not the most appropriate one to use. It’s not 60-40. We’re comping a very friendly period from a cash collections perspective, as I mentioned earlier. And I think reiterate the guidance around in line, you know, we’re talking it should be there or sort of two to $3 million within that level. So, maybe a little bit more burn potentially, but again, going to Tim’s point, it depends on North America. There’s potential to outperform that. If we get the sales through earlier in the period, we can invoice it, collect it, get a good cash receipt result in June.

Maybe it spills over into July, but the pipeline’s there, the business is coming, and the cash will come whether it’s across June or July. And, yeah, I think the big point to reiterate that you’re touching on is that cash collections piece and having a look at it across, I guess, over the last couple of years, not just last year. If we run Owen’s numbers, you know, we’re AUD 21 million at the end of the half. And if we burn 17, including interest, you know, was that what the formula is? Yeah. No, we’ll be doing better than that. Yeah. So maybe another question is if revenue’s running at AUD 145 million constant currency there, what is the cash conversion ratio expected?

Yeah, I think if you went back two, three years, it was converting at a 100% effectively. It won’t be that high because of the fact that we’ve weaned ourselves off those multi-year cash upfronts to a degree. If you look at last year, cash collections are about 109 over opening ARR of 116. So I think if you’re our closing ARR’s 145, it won’t be bank, it won’t be 145, but it’ll be in that sort of five, six, seven million dollar range of that number. Good one. And last one, just the UK, I guess Lindsay was touching on it, running at kind of 6% growth, groups running at 20%, I guess. Is that the expectation if you enter FY 27 for the UK?

Like if all the work you’ve been doing is the acceleration you’re expecting, just talk us through what growth rate is expected to be sustainable maybe this calendar year and into next? Yeah, this calendar year, I think, six plus, you know, hoping to get numbers to closer to double digits and then the year after north of double digits comfortably. Good one. Thanks, guys. There’s no further questions, Tim. So if you wanna wrap up, we can finish it up there. Yeah, cool. Look, thanks everyone. Thanks for your support. Thanks for your attention. A big call. I feel like we’ve, you know, delivered clear guidance to the market about growth, you know, cash flow collections, you know, free cash flow, you know, net debt on the balance sheet.

So we’re well set up now with the right balance sheet, the right team, the right strategy, pipeline’s good. So feeling very good about delivering all of that. And, you know, from 1 July, you know, we never turned back, right? We start paying off debt and we, we’re away. So feeling very good about our guidance for the year, very well set up and, you know, looking forward to delivering. So we’ll see you all next quarter. Thanks a lot. Thanks.