Verve Group Aktie

Good morning to everybody in America, and good afternoon to everybody joining us from Europe. Thank you for joining us today, whether you're here with us in New York City or joining us online. My name is Ingo Middelmenne and as Head of Investor Relations of Verve Group, I would like to cordially welcome you to this year's Verve Capital Markets Day.

Once again, we have had intense weeks behind us and the whole team and I are really thrilled to finally have you with us. As usual, we have prepared a focused and a hope, very useful program for you. A business update from our management team, a closer look at Verve's commercial and financial development and a set of expert sessions on some of the topics that are shaping our industry right now.

We will also make sure we leave enough time for your questions, both here in the room and from our audience online. Before we start, and to make our legal department feel a little better. Please enjoy the usual disclaimer on forward-looking statements. Okay. Now I think we all feel a lot safer.

The Internet is a powerful alternative to the walled gardens, and it lives in your pocket. Your mobile phone, ladies and gentlemen, is probably the most powerful marketing tool in the world. Consumers around the world look at its display 3, 4, sometimes 5 hours a day. And the industry is only just beginning to use this potential for targeted advertising with outcomes superior to those of any other advertising channel.

Today, you will receive deep insights into how Verve transforms underleveraged mobile signals into premium advertising outcomes, ultimately aiming to be the first company to unlock the full potential of the open Internet by creating closed loops and that so far, have only been seen within the walled gardens. But first, let me briefly introduce today's speakers to you.

We will start Part 1 with Remco Westermann, our CEO, followed by Christian Duus, our CFO. After the coffee break, we will then move into the expert sessions of the day. I'm very pleased that Dr. Usama Fayyad, will join us for today's keynote, Usama, thanks for making that possible. After that, it's Raimund, President Verve Retail Media, who has built a truly phenomenal thing together with his team over the past 11 months. He will talk about the closed loop we created in Retail Media, a key driver of our future revenue growth. And finally, Mishel, our Chief Business Officer, who is always fascinating to listen to. Mishel, great to have you back on stage this year as well.

Mishel will talk about how predicting consumer intent will fundamentally change how consumer targeting works in the future. So how will this all unfold today? We're now starting with Part 1, the Verve business update. In a moment, Remco will welcome you and introduce you to Verve's general business model followed by his commercial update.

At 10:00, Christian will take over for the financial session followed by our first Q&A at around 10:30. At 11:00, we will then enjoy a quick coffee break, and let me highlight already now, please be back in the room at 11:30 sharp because then we're going to continue with part 2 of our day. Those are going to be the expert sessions. First, the key note by Osama, then Raimund on Retail Media and then Mishel on predictive targeting.

We will close the expert sessions with a second Q&A session at 13:00 and then enjoy some lunch at half past 1 p.m.

With that, let's get started. Remco, the stage is all yours.

Thank you. Thank you, Ingo. Yes. Welcome, everybody. I also see some people from Europe that made to far travel to visit us here. Yes, we had some discussions where do we do our Capital Markets Day. The last years, we did in Sweden, and now we decided to do it in New York in the U.S. to really emphasize how U.S.-focused we have become and how much opportunity we see in this market here.

I'm going to talk about or let's say, take you into our equity story, our commercial update. We've been building or have -- I've started this company 13 years ago. And if I look where we are today, I'm proud, but I'm also seeing a lot of opportunity to even get much bigger, much stronger. And how we want to do that, where we are focusing, that's what I would like to take you through.

Ingo mentioned it already, the mobile open Internet market, open Internet, not being walled gardens, Facebook, Amazon, et cetera, Google. There's a huge opportunity here. Mobile Internet has been underserved and underestimated for years, when you talk to an agency, they said, mobile, that kids playing games, sitting in the basement. That's changed. That's changing. So there's a huge window that's open now. And I would like to first take you through the market.

Why mobile? Mobile is the only advertising channel with a one-to-one consumer relationship. It's always on. People used on average 5 hours per day, 90% of the time inside apps, no other channel comes close to that. It's more persistent than any other medium and it travels with you. It goes everywhere where you are, unmatched signal depth. Because it's always with you, we have a 1:1. It's not one to many, like with CTV or many other channels.

It's very good in capturing intense signals because it knows what you want. And with an SDK integration, software development kits that we technically integrate into the apps. And with that, we get the signals, we can play ads, et cetera. We are really very deep into that. So there's a direct trusted connection between platform, publisher and consumer that we create.

And real intent signals, we'll cover that later in more detail. And especially Mishel will go deeper into that are really great to see what people want to do and to target your advertising on that. Closed loop outcomes. Yes, one of the big issues of the advertising market overall is measuring. When I was at university, I learned from $1 spent, 50% is wasted. I would say that it's much more than that. And it has to do with attribution who organized the sale or who organized the action, it has to do with where do you spend your media for what price do we buy them, how many intermediates are there. There's a lot of stuff there. But in the end, it's about measuring outcomes. Did I really accomplish with my dollars what I wanted to accomplish.

A bit about market size. Yes, we're talking about the global mobile ad spend of $670 billion. If we take search out, which is a big part, then we still have a $450 billion addressable market. And search is interesting because of LLMs, search markets are changing. There's a lot less surge happening. So there's budgets that are coming available from there. But if you then take this $450 billion addressable market and take the open Internet share, then we talk about a TAM of roughly $68 billion, which is big compared to our revenue. So there's ample possibility to grow. And why is it only 20% or less than 20% of the total market, it's cheaper. Cost per reach is better. Budget just hasn't followed the action, but I'll come to that in a minute.

If this market would grow faster if, let's say, if we take a bigger share of the total, so the open market, and that's what the parties in this open market have at their reach, then it could be a much bigger TAM actually. And that's one of the issues that I also cover here that the open -- sorry, I'm going one slide fast, that we see that, let's say, the walled gardens take an enormous amount of spend compared to the reach of consumers, but I'll come to that in a minute.

A bit about LLMs. LLMs, yes, important. LLM's have really taken over a big part of search. They're disrupting consumer behavior. How many of you are using LLMs daily, I guess, everybody, and yes, it's changing the market. It's changing where ad dollars have to go. And what we see happening in this market is that basically consumers are moving in two directions, away from search, into an AI Answer Layer where they gets dialogue, questions being answered. I'm interested in the car. What kind of car, how many people these kind of things, so you get an interactive kind of intent behavior.

And there is a lot of traffic also going into the high intent player, apps, deep utility, real-time data, trust and compounding personalization. 60% of searches now end inside LLMs, traditional search is projected to fall by 25% by 2026. Special interest apps show 15% to 20% increases in session depth and in retention. AI is not our enemy, it's our tailwind.

Now comparing the open Internet with the walled gardens. There's a huge mismatch between spend and ad dollars, between -- sorry, time spent and ad dollars spent. The Internet, 96% of online time, but only 20% of ad spend, walled gardens, 31% of online time, but only -- but 80% of the ad spent. Also, if you look at the cost side, ad spend per user hour, $0.07 for the open Internet and $0.14 in walled gardens. So there's a huge opportunity here that's inefficient and arbitrages as large as this one, don't persist for long. A rebalancing should be coming, and we are well positioned to take part of that.

Why is there such a large discrepancy? Open Internet is not perfect. There are several challenges. The 1 -- the first one is scale. I had a discussion 4, 5 years a year ago, and that was really, let's say, opening my eyes with one of the Holdco bosses, Holdco big agency advertiser agency in the U.S. And he said, I've $6 billion that I need to deploy every year. And then they go to Google, they take $2.5 billion, they go to Facebook or Meta, they take $1 billion. And then I have to work with nuisant small parties like yourself where everybody can take $20 million, $30 million, whatever million dollars. And I think that's one of the problems of the open Internet. We are over 500 companies and people are not really able to run big budgets. That should change, and we are working on that.

Then cost efficient in transparency, we see ads that go over 14 platforms, everybody taking his margin, totally inefficient, not transparent. Quality and depth of data, if you want to target, you need good data, great data. The big advantage of a Google or a Meta, they have such deep data. We have been concentrating on this in the last years to also build a data set that's comparable. We'll cover that later.

Then targeting and segment quality. If I have the data, I need to use them. I need to target. I need to make sure that they don't waste advertising money. And then measurement and outcomes, I need to really prove afterwards that I reach the right people and that the money was well spent. The players who solve these challenges will define the next era of the open Internet advertising.

Now coming to the next part, what are we doing? So we have a huge market that has a lot of opportunities, a lot of disruptions and what are we doing. Go deeper in where we focus at and how we built Verve to win. Verve makes walled gardens performance to the open Internet. So what are we addressing? We are addressing the scale. We are -- you have all had as an investor, the pain of that, we are integrating what we have. So we have SSP, DSP, the whole tech stack vertically integrated, very important.

The closer you get the advertiser to the publisher and to the consumer, the more efficient the whole thing is and more transparent. The depth of data and curation, last years, we have been talking a lot about idealist targeting, but the world is more complex than that. It's idealess and ID-based targeting and a lot of other stuff. That's what I would like to talk about. Then the targeting and measuring of the outcomes. How do we do that? How do we get better? How do we make sure that the advertiser gets more efficient. And the last point is corporate development and balanced growth, of course, very important as a company. We're still a small company in the space, even though we've been growing substantially, but we need to balance our investments versus cash generation, et cetera.

Christian will talk much more about it, but I'll just touch the top of it. Skill matters. We have, and I'm pretty proud about that, built a top 15 ad tech platform in under 6 years. We started 6 years ago when we were still a publisher. We started as a publisher 30 years ago. But we said we are totally frustrated about advertising. We see a huge opportunity, and we started building our ad tech platform by acquisitions. We did 15 acquisitions, then we didn't do acquisitions for two years or a bit over two years, then we did three more acquisitions, and that really built our platform.

We're connecting -- directly connecting advertiser publishers. We did over 500 -- or let's say, we did $579 million of revenue in the last 12 months to end Q1 with over 4,000 software customers. over 1,100 of those are large substantial customers doing over $100,000 per year. We integrated over 65,000 apps. We reached 2.5 billion consumers. We served 1.2 trillion ads. That's a huge number in the last 12 months, and we have over 1,000 -- a bit over 1,000 employees at the moment.

We have reached scale, substantial scale. We can run budgets. But we can also get stronger and we can further build and that's what we're aiming at. So what are we doing? Let me start with the advertising agency side. We focus on midsize agencies, selective direct customers and Holdco agencies. With over 4,000 agencies alone in the U.S., that means that we need to have a substantial sales force. We're building our sales force. We were 54 sellers, Q1 2025, 117 by end of Q1 2026 and we're targeting 200 -- over 200 by mid-2027. Otherwise, we cannot talk to all those agencies and it's lost potential.

Very important. We also need focus. We are not covering the whole world at once. We are focusing on our core markets, which are U.S., by far, U.K., Australia, Germany and Scandinavia. And yes, we could start other markets, but we have so much potential in the markets where we're focusing now that it doesn't make sense to go further at the moment. But also, the quality of relation is important that ensures grown the share of wallet. So further optimizing our quality of service, unique product offerings, and Mishel will talk about a few later. Raimund as well, by the way. It's about curation, it's about ad manager. It's a lot of things that we offer to our customers that makes them happy with our service.

And then it's the other side, the publisher side. So we have a ton of publishers. We have one of the largest in-app publisher basis in the ad tech world. But we still can grow. We can grow with some larger apps that we are still missing, but we can grow also with specialty apps. Like, for example, going down into sectors, we're focusing on sectors, retail and CPG is one. So we need cooking apps because that's a great place to catch people that later go shopping, those kind of things. So that's what we working on. And we're also working on other channels.

Yes, In-app is core and Ingo started with it, mobile phone first because that's where you have the data, that's where you start the journey. But still, it's very strong to enforce consumer behavior, by Connected TV, by digital out of home, also a screen in the supermarket, for example, digital audio, even web. So what we want to do is to really be able to run larger budgets, scale again, but also to reach the consumer starting from the mobile phone also in other channels.

And what's very important is, again, to mention here on the publisher side, SPO, Supply Path Optimization. We built this via acquisitions. So quite a bit of our traffic is still also indirect, where we don't have directly the publisher, and that's what we are at the moment with high energy work on-- Dave is also here, who's heading our marketplace. And it's one of the big tasks here to really make sure that we become the prime quality exchange in this part. That means we have cleaning that we're doing lower margin, not so great, let's say, pubs, indirect pubs, we want to get them exchanged for direct publisher relations. That was skill.

Now we get to vertically integrated. We built 18 acquisitions or we did 18 acquisitions that made us build this platform. Last year, you had the pain of it. In Q2, Q3, we had our last two SSP integrations. We acquired five SSPs. We integrated them into two. And last year, we integrated those two into one. We have problems with load balancers. It really hurt our revenues last year. But the result is a single unified platform, and that's a good basis to work from. So we have a DSP, we have an SSP. We have the data part. And if you open an app, in less than 100 milliseconds, the ad spot that's on there needs to be filled.

And we do that. We technically integrated in the app. We get the signal. Here is an ad for sale. We get some data with it. We enriched the further data that we have. We sent it to the demand side. The demand side has put in, who we want to reach, what's their target, their KPIs, their budget. And then the bidding process happens, highest bidder wins. If we are the highest bidder, we serve the ad. It's like a stock market. But important to be the winner, of course, and yes, only where we serve the ad, we also make the money.

What's next? Now after we integrated everything, and I need to make one carve out here, but after we integrated everything, we are now really working on how can we improve it, how can we get much better. You see some of our peers in the market who have really been good at that. And would say AppLovin is really extremely good in, let's say, optimizing their platform, they're bidding algorithms and things like that. But you need a well-running platform for that, and then you can really work on those things.

So that's what we're doing. But let me first start with final integration step. We are not fully done CTV as was mentioned also in earlier presentations, is still not fully migrated, but we're almost done in the slide is we are finishing it by end of Q2. That's only two weeks to go, and that will happen. So we will have a fully integrated, no CTV running on an old platform anymore. Yes, routing more demand through direct supply. Now with one integrated platform, we can also start working on optimizing the platform for the demand side.

Our DSP performance -- has performance customers. They would like to run a certain apps. There are certain features, certain scan features has to do with Apple, I think, that need to be met. That demand is not yet running on our platform fully. It's running a bit, but we have a lot of potential there. And of course, that's not really giving us extra revenues. But if we run our demand on our own supply, it gives us extra margin. So that's one of the big focus points.

And then the third, as just already mentioned, it's super important that we further improve the -- how do you say, the quality, the technology of our platform, we call it at intelligent platform and a lot of it is about AI. And we have Usama also here to talk about AI later, and we didn't want to go too deep into AI to split the topics a bit. But this is one of the core, core, core things to further drive revenues in this company. And just to give you an idea and don't -- please don't calculate this as the revenue multiplier. But we roughly get 1 trillion ad requests per day on our platform. And we serve 1.2 trillion ads per year. That means that 1 out of 300 ad request roughly, we only built into a served ad.

Now you have to deduct from those 1 trillion ad requests that we get, ad requests that come from countries where you cannot make money, comes from, let's say, places in the app on the part or certain apps that you don't want to sell. It might be in the invisible area. But still, even if it's not 1 out of 300, it might be 1 out of 100 or something like that, where we are still at the moment.

So there's a huge opportunity there. That means that we are investing and focusing a lot on improving our AI capabilities because that is a very, very strong opportunity for this company. Apart from that we also work in Agentic. Agentic is big. There will be more automated buying. You can do a lot of things with Agentic. You can also prepare your platform for Agentic buying, so those things we avoid now. And yeah, there is lot of opportunity. Then come into data and curation. We feel work in the last few years on really becoming top notch in data.

Because data in the end is what we need to do. You are targeting and to measure the outcomes and all these things. And data has become more and more complex over the years. Advertising started, we're just doing some ads, not measuring. Then the cookie came. Are you used to cookie to really build a profile, an ID graph. Can I match this cookie with this mobile ID? And is this person interested in football or buying a car or things like that.

A lot of the industry is still working with cookies and cookies can be very polluted. Your daughter burst the phone and son you have a different kind of profile of it or that's even more waste. How often do you buy a car, once every 3 years, once every 4 years. But there is -- he has a car is in the profile, she has a car. That means that you get car ads all the time, but as an advertiser, as a car manufacturer, you only want to advertise if the person is interested in the car at that moment. You might do a brand campaign around it, but the real time to be there, what you add is when the intention is there to buy a car. That's super important.

So we have split our data into 5 tiers. The first one is cookies and opt-in. That's the top one. Then contextual intelligence is the second level. So are you in context? Are you on the car side? Are you in a weather situation, whatever? Contextual intelligence, geolocation, app category, those kind of things, is level. Then Level 3 is that we have built at them on device intelligence. So we are with the SDK, we have put an extra piece of software on the phone that can really build segments on the phone, that information doesn't leave the phone, so it's privacy compliant. But if an ad request comes, we can attach the category, the interest category, and that works well.

Then with active search intent with the acquisition of Captify, which was a great acquisition, we were able to acquire the search intent capabilities and search intent integrations for a lot of U.S. publisher properties. We get intent from people. What are they looking for? And then the last year, number five, is conversational intent, 0 party data, asking questions, are you interested in buying a car, yes, no, et cetera, so that's circumstantial.

And also LLM data, especially lately, we have done a lot of progress on getting LLM data, opted in, but it gives us very, very deep information, what the intent of people is. This is the basis for being successful in this market. The more data you have, the better you are, the more you can target, the better you can target, the better you can also measure your results because data also translate your results. So this is super important.

What are we doing now? What are we further doing? So we have all those data. Now we are working with that. We're improving it. We have one of the richest proprietary data sets in the mobile advertising industry. Now it's really making sure that we even get more data, store them right, and there's also negative effects on data because data cost money to store, how to say, to work with them. But still, we need to pick the right ones. We need to save the right ones. We need to build the right profiles, things like that.

We further focus on LLM-derived intent signals because that's where we have really good results. And we're working on this flywheel, more publisher integrations, more signals, better predictions, better outcomes and in the end, more revenue, more advertisers. ***A lot about spending money, **but in the end, the advertisers interested what really makes the sale, what really makes a person, buy a product in the end in the store or online.

And this measuring has become more and more difficult. So cookies are disappearing, as I just mentioned already. They're not disappearing. There's still a lot of cookies, and there's also still fingerprinting. So the industry has become more complex. There was a time that we thought cookies are disappearing. Google said we also deprecate the cookie. It didn't happen. So what do we have now world with cookies, without cookies and a lot of, how to say, confusion in between.

So the industry has become more complex. But just to say, Apple with 50% market share roughly in the U.S. ask people, do you give consent that your data are being used? 80% is saying no. So 40% of the market for sure doesn't have a reliable cookie. Sometimes they have printing. There is some fingerprinting, which is not allowed, and it will probably also further disappear, but the market has become complex. So what are we doing? We're not saying we do only idealess, we do wherever it fits best, and we use the signals combined, because that gives the best result. We operate across ID and ideas environments with ideas as the baseline and ID data enriching where it exists.

LLMs reach contextual intent at the moment of decision without persistent in identifiers. And creative signal match pairs the right format and the message to the intent. That's what we didn't talk about. Very important also in advertising is creative. A good and a bad creative can make a factor 3 of difference in effectiveness of your advertising. But with the data we have, male-female is already very important.

A car is very often advertised in a different color for male and female. So also all those things work together. So we're talking about a super complex industry where a lot of things has to be in place, and we're now with an integrated platform, we're really working on fitting those things and making something that's really working very well.

Sector-specific closed loops are, in the end, bring the most value, and that's what Raimund will also talk about later. Yes, targeting and measuring. What are we further doing there now? We did a lot already. We are very far, but we want to make media better. We want to support our customers to get better ways to target and to measure their outcomes, closed loops, sector focus. We have decided you cannot do that for the whole industry. That's just too big. You need to go deep. You need to have sector experts. If you want retail and CPG is one of our largest sectors.

You need the expertise. You need people that understand the market and you need to build your solutions for that. So we are hiring sector experts, adding sector-specific data sources also. And for example, point-of-sale data. We want to know if people really bought a product in the store. We are continuously improving our targeting capabilities and benefit from improved measuring capabilities. Then corporate development, balanced growth, very important.

As you saw on the previous 4 points, this company is not ready. We are a work in progress. There's so much that we need to do. That means also that we're investing. We are investing extra salespeople. We're investing in our technology stack in AI. And we grow our verticals also with expertise. So that's money that's, I think, well spent, well invested, but it takes time to get the yield out of that. And Christian will show the numbers later. I think with over 30% revenue CAGR and so much opportunities, we are really well positioned for the future.

But it's not only about growth. It's also about controlling costs. It's also about internal efficiencies. And with AI, we have a lot of opportunities there. Also without AI, we have focused our people more on where we think the growth is. So that's also that we cut quite some countries out. But with AI, we can really build strong efficiencies. And there's some examples in the company now, and there are only first examples. We have a regional sales team that is selling ads from local advertisers, where we increased the efficiency tenfold. So one person is doing tenfold the output as before by fully automating their processes with AI.

And we have another department where Raimund is working on at the moment, where we are just working on the 25% personnel cost saving and expecting minimally the same output after that. So with AI, we really see big progress and AI, and Osama will say more about it. It's not just a -- it's a no-brainer, but it's not that easy. But still, we see really good use cases in the company. So focus on internal efficiencies is very important.

And organic growth, yes, we had a lot of discussions in the past and especially, I like to do M&A to grow, to build critical mass. But I think we have really come at a stage now where we have all the tools, all the technology in-house. On the data side, we've really done good things. I don't see a lot that would make sense for us to buy. It would more distract us than really bring us further. One exception, I believe that this market still has two small parties. So we need to see bigger mergers, bigger combinations, business combinations in the future.

So if there's something really accretive and very big, it might make sense to do it. But for the rest, we, as a company, want to and will focus on organic growth. Very important. I showed the opportunities that we have, and there are so many. Coming to the last slide of my presentation, and I've seen that I'm a little bit too fast actually, but the Christian can start earlier. Yes, we want to bring the same performance that the walled gardens has proven that they were able to do. We bring that to the open Internet at scale.

We have been working on exactly the things that you need to be comparable to walled garden to be able to really have the scale to be vertically integrated, be efficient in that sense, have the depth of data, have the targeting solutions and able to measure the outcomes and also having a balanced financial profile where we invest, but also make sure that we control our cost and further become more profitable. That brings me to the end of my presentation, and I would hand over to Christian for his...

Thank you. Thank you very much, Remco. And now to an overview of our finances. My name is Christian Duus. I'm CFO of Verve, and I'll try to bring you kind of an overview where we are now and also what lies in the future.

If we start very overall and here depicted behind me, our revenue growth and our growth in adjusted EBITDA over the five past years, you will see that we are, in essence, a growth company. We've grown, on average, 32% of our revenues each year and on average, 36% our adjusted EBITDA. That's a phenomenal performance, and it really think talks to the success of the company.

We continue to have strong ambitions to grow beyond market rates also going forward. And I think here, we have also showing the ability we've gone through various investment cycles through those years where we have demonstrated that we are able to convert our investments into revenue -- top line growth and profit growth. We've also been through a number of different challenges through those years. We've gone through COVID. We've gone through trade tariff wars last year. We've gone through FX headwinds for the same time. And we've also, last year gone through the unification of our platform. And I think it talks to the robustness of our business model that we're actually able to over the years to combine all that into a profile like this.

So we remain very ambitious on part of the company. We are looking towards -- if we take the midpoint of our guidance for a lift on a reported basis of 28% on a like-for-like basis, [ 17% ] and we have a lift in our midpoint guidance for our EBITDA of 19%. So we continue on a path of growth. Then you might ask, what is going to drive that growth? What is driving the growth?

Well, there's a number of opportunities in the market. Remco already mentioned some of it. Some we'll hear more of there's. But I think the way that we like to present it and we think about it as basically in 4 layers, these 4 layers. Number one, tailwind from the markets that we're in, we are in mobile in-app. It is one of the places where people use most of their time, and that's where also most of the investment dollars goes. So just by being in this sector and being the right place in the market, we have a natural tailwind of something like 10% growth from the market. Then there's customer expansion.

We have typically been very successful in landing customers and expanding customers and growing the share with customers and also into new verticals as Remco was talking about, and we will also hear more about that later today. Then of course, new products, being it AI-based or other products that try to expand, what is our share of wallet with each customer and also being relevant for each customer. And fourthly, in this industry, there is a number of platform synergies. The bigger you get, both from scale but also the more relevance and the more inventory you have, the more relevant you become from buyers, vice versa, the more buying power you represent from the demand side, the more relevant you become for publishers.

There's also other benefits which are significant, which is that you actually can extract all the learnings from all the data that you're treating, the more data you have, essentially, the better you are to train your algorithms and benefit from that.

So through those 4 layers of growth path, that's really what underpins our growth journey. And I think what's important to note is it's not just one. It's not a singular catalyst that is driving our growth. We are basically working on all 4 levels to underpin our growth.

If I take a step closer and just to take -- give you an overview of how things going now, what's the current financial momentum? Well, you'll see here our revenues and adjusted EBITDA for Q1 and the 4 preceding quarters, we had a very good Q1, a very solid Q1. We had a strong organic growth of 6.4% and that was, by the way, up from the previous quarter from 5.3%. So we are accelerating. We did EUR 132 million compared to -- EUR 137.2 million in Q1 versus EUR 132.3 million in the preceding year, which is a like-for-like growth of 3.7%.

We did EUR 28.3 million of adjusted EBITDA. That's slightly down from the prior year, where we had EUR 30.2 million. And I will come to speak more about that, but that's basically because we are in an investment phase of the company. We are expanding our sales capacity and that means there is a drag on our EBITDA for the first -- for Q1. We will see similar in Q2, and then it will flip in the second half of the year. But we are consciously taking investments to expand our relevance in the market. And our coverage in the market, as Remco talked about, there are numerous agencies out there that we simply do not have the firing power to cover.

So that's a little bit the financial performance. If you look at what are the -- and I think that's interesting to the sources of growth that we have right now, and I'll just take Q1 as an example, because we land at a numerical number, which is maybe perhaps a bit smaller 3.7%. But actually, that's the combination of 6.4% organic growth, plus 6.9% in acquisitive growth, and then we have -- we saw in Q1 a very significant headwind from FX.

The majority of our revenues are denominated in U.S. dollars, but we report in euros. And because of the depreciation of the U.S. dollar, we basically get a headwind of 9.6%, which then lands at 3.7%. So a strong entry into Q1 continued somewhat drag into Q2 from our investments and with a good insight into second half of the year, we will see a good traction for the year, which is, by the way, also the big season of the year. So our seasonality of our business is normally that Q2 is bigger than Q1, Q3 bigger than Q2 and Q4 is by far the biggest quarter for the company.

Underlying this is basically the growth of our customers, the growth of our business. Here you see the four business KPIs that we normally report on, which is a blend of our impressions and our number of customers and also our ability to grow our business with customers. And just trying to break it down for a second. Here on the top hand right side, you see our ad impressions. We grew 25% year-on-year or ad impressions, doing 25% more impressions, which is a significant growth just tells you how more -- how relevant our platform is with our customers that has a uniqueness and the relevance that is appreciated by customers. 25% is quite a big number when you think about where we are in the economic cycle.

We've also been very good at growing our number of customers. We are right now at 4,086. You can be that precise. And we're roughly taking onboard a 1,000 customers, if you take it on a full year basis. Granted that is a mix of organic and inorganic growth in number of customers, but we see that as a real opportunity to also grow these customers to become scaled customers and reach the level of software clients, which is defined as customers that use more than 100,000. That number has been stable. We see the possibility and the opportunity to grow all the customers we've now onboarded to add to that number going forward.

As you can also see client retention has been strong through the period. So customers might have -- some customers might have used us a little bit less, especially in Q2 and Q3 last year, but they remain loyal to us and with the possibilities to expand further. So all in all, very strong customer metrics. Are they all perfect, not picture perfect, maybe not. But I think it shows really the potential of the business where we can go with the business and what we -- how we performed over the last year or so.

Gross profit margin. We've started to report our gross profit margin. I'm super happy to report that the uptick -- the very strong uptick we saw in Q4 from having our unified platform has carried into Q1. We see a gross profit margin of 41% -- excuse me, that's 2.7 percentage points lift versus Q1 2025. You'll see here in the dotted box the comparison, and we do the comparison towards the same quarter of previous years because there are seasonality effects that also impact the gross profit margin. So that's the best and most clean way to actually look at gross margin.

We've had a significant lift both in Q4 last year and now in Q1 and it's really to do -- it's really the results of three things. Number one, we have a unified platform. This unified platform has a much richer feature for us to do dynamic pricing. So it enables us to -- on a much more rigid and nuanced way to manage and extract margin from the impressions that we serve.

We've also been much better. It has -- we've been much better at managing our hosting costs and bringing down our hosting cost. Remco also talked a little bit about just the possibilities of making sure that you actually address the parts of the request that you want to address and not receiving too many requests and you can work a lot with that. And we are also doing different exercises in looking at, let's say, the more low-margin inventory, the more noncore long tail to prune out that.

So we have a lot of things going on that supports our gross profit margin. And we really think this is a key indicator for how we see the future, but also to improve our cash flow generation for the company. Remco mentioned -- I've mentioned we are in, right now in these quarters, at least in a bit of an investment phase. We have a very strong scaled sales machine -- sales team. We have 117 people right now in customer-facing sales roles. It's working well, but it also gives us -- and it's been growing quite significantly since -- with 54 in Q1 2025. But we still see the possibility to add more salespeople on an already well-working foundation. And for that, we have set aside for this year, EUR 10 million in OpEx investment that we will support adding more sales people towards the target of 200.

There's naturally or at least in our business, there is a lag from bringing salespeople on board and just of somewhere between 9 to 15 months before a salesperson really proves out and starts adding back to the company. And there's different realities. It takes time to hire these people. It takes -- and you will also have some salespeople that work out, and you might also have some that don't work out. And therefore, it can be a bit difficult for us to precisely exact what is the inflection point, when will all this investment pay off.

We started this journey already last year. We're seeing good results, and we're progressing very well, and we will see the effects here in second half of the year, perhaps mostly towards Q4. Cash flow. Cash flow is, of course, an important point to talk to as a CFO. I'm super happy to report that we now on an LTM basis, with Q1 managed to rebalance, so to say, our net working capital and perform well on cash flow.

So for on an LTM basis, March '26, we report EUR 105 million in operating cash flow before working capital and EUR 94 million operating cash flow after net working capital. Those two bars that you see here is ideally equal height, that means that we're not investing too much in our net working capital in this. For LTM basis, we have invested EUR 11 million. But you will also see a marked difference from the prior reporting where there was an imbalance in our investments in net working capital.

So we're back on a rebalanced way for our cash flow. And you can see here on the right-hand side, also our cash conversion. If you look at our cash conversion before working capital, it's actually pretty stable and at a high level, around 80% -- plus 80%. What we've had -- we have had certain periodic swings, which is basically a result of our net working capital.

I wanted to dig a little bit more into it because I think the cash flow is a super important part of this business. We are at a phase where it's important that we generate cash flow also to repay our bonds and generate free cash flow for all stakeholders. And you can really see here with this chart a little bit what is going on. So we have depicted our trade receivables in dark blue.

Our trade payables in light blue, and the green line is the net working capital, the difference between the two. And you can see here the imbalance that we saw in Q3 and Q4 end of last year. And you can also see that it's been rebalanced not fully but rebalanced to a level of EUR 22 million for the Q1 2026.

Why does this net working capital need happen? That happens because structurally, if you look at the company, we essentially, on average, and per payment terms, we will pay our publishers, our big suppliers 45 days on average, but we received money from our customers on a 90-day basis. And that creates this gap of 45 days. We've historically been very good at managing this. You can see the green line has been close to 0 through the different quarters. We've done that through mainly our securitization program, which I'll come to in a second, that has really been instrumental in managing our working capital needs. But overall, you can see the profile. And when we grow, we will have certain investments in net working capital because of this gap of 45 days.

Just to come a little bit into this part around our securitization. So we have a receivable securitization program of EUR 100 million. And it's in place both to manage our net working capital needs, but also in place for us to be able to really offer good payment terms to our publishers, to our customers. We use that as a moat. We use that as a way to be attractive and also build our position with smaller customers and the more flexible you can be with that beyond also, of course, having a great product helps us win new business.

The unfortunate thing or from -- at least from a pure finance angle is that it creates this cash gap of 45 days. So higher growth means higher working capital tie in. We have a securitization program in place through very well seen providers, Finacity and NORD/LB, who are very active in this area and offer similar solutions for other companies. And what we have there is a possibility to sell. We sell our receivables on a nonrecourse basis, and we receive a funding until up to a frame of EUR 100 million on very lucrative terms. Euribor plus 2%. And that's because it's a Grade A client portfolio.

So we really use this securitization program to manage our net working capital needs but also to be -- or intensify our relevance in the market and use it as a moat. I'm happy to report that we are also expanding the coverage of the program to further two entities that have just been approved and we are adding to the program.

Turning now to CapEx needs for the business. And I think if you look at Verve historically, we've always said we are -- our maintenance and investment CapEx is roughly in the order of EUR 40 million to EUR 45 million. You can see it's quite stable, the dark blue and the light blue here and has been very stable over the last past years. And that really means that we have a fairly low recurring maintenance CapEx of roughly EUR 9 million a year and the ability to scale our revenues while keeping CapEx low is, of course, very interesting from a -- to help us generate the operating cash flow for the business.

So in many ways, we're quite asset-light in our scaling model because we continue to reserve roughly these EUR 40 million to EUR 45 million in CapEx going forward. You can also see here on the left bar that this year, we will have with the acquisitions that we did in '24 and '25, we will have payments for deferred payments out of roughly EUR 34 million, taking our total CapEx to EUR 74 million, somewhere between EUR 74 million and EUR 79 million.

Maybe just to mention that out of the EUR 34 million that is on deferred, we have already paid out Jun Group of EUR 23.8 million. So the only part that is remaining from a cash-out perspective is EUR 9.9 million for Acardo and Viewento, which comes in October 2026.

Remco mentioned it we are really now focused on organic growth and very selective in looking at any M&A. And the main focus here is organic growth for this year. Brings me to balance sheet KPIs and how we're doing on net interest-bearing debt and especially net leverage ratio, you'll see -- we actually did a tap of our bond here in Q1 of EUR 50 million tap on top of our EUR 500 million bond. But actually, as you see, the net interest-bearing debt is basically the same between Q1 and -- or [ LTM ] Q1 and 2025 -- ended 2025, EUR 146 million versus -- EUR 446 million versus EUR 448 million. We are now at a net leverage ratio of 3.1%. It is elevated. It is elevated because of the acquisitions that we've done through the last couple of years, and we are working and are -- do have focus on bringing it down.

It's always a question of focus -- trying to balance the growth with also having a sensible leverage ratio, and we target 2.5x in net leverage ratio, which will come in place, I would say, within the next 12 months. Maybe just to mention, I think, when you look at our bonds, we have EUR 550 million outstanding in bonds. Here is depicted the three last bonds that we've done. We are now at a company that has quite a lot of experience and also quite a good reputation in the bond market and we use the bond market, I think, on quite attractive and favorable terms to fund our growth.

In that way, we have -- when you look through the past history, we have actually been very successful in refinancing our bonds well in advance of any maturity walls. Our current bonds go until 2029. We will continue that practice of refinancing well ahead of any maturity wall. Number two, and as you see here from Bond 3 and 4 to the current bond, we actually also managed to reduce our funding terms or credit margin quite significantly from an average -- we had two existing bonds one on 3 months Euribor plus EUR 625 million and one other one on EUR 725 million, and we have reduced it to three months Euribor plus 4 percentage points -- the last 50 has slightly higher interest rate, but basically a significant drop in our credit margin. And this helps us, of course, to reduce our interest payments for the year.

Now I come to guidance. And before I maybe just go into the specific numbers on guidance, let me just come back to this picture of the 4 growth levers that we have for the company. You will remember that I went through it, the market growth tailwinds, the customer expansion, product strength and also platform synergies. The way that we think about guidance for this year is we expect growth from our market growth of somewhere between 7% to 9%, plus 5 percentage points growth coming from customer expansion and new products. And that's basically the basis for our guidance for this year.

With the traction that we had in Q1, solid growth and also solid performance, and with the outlook that we see into Q2, we're happy to confirm and reaffirm our guidance for the year, which is EUR 680 million to EUR 730 million on our revenues, 17% growth on the midpoint and also adjusted EBITDA of EUR 145 million to EUR 175 million which is a 19% pickup on EBITDA. These are -- by the way, those percentage points are calculated like-for-like, so you can see here in the guidance exactly because we've had a change of revenue recognition for some parts of our business, we've here provided on a like-for-like basis. So that you can see that revenues for full year 2025 would have been at EUR 602 million within similar EBITDA of EUR 134 million.

Maybe important to note that we will be talking a lot about retail media. Later today, we have included some pickup in the Retail Media business in our guidance, but not, I would say, the full expansion is still to be formally included in the guidance. And that's because -- and as Raimund will talk about, it is a bit difficult to always predict the exact inflection point. So that is upside to our guidance.

Then last, I wanted to touch on the topic of relocation to Ireland. Why are we doing it? Well, it brings a number of advantages for us. First and foremost, it brings us into a legislative and corporate governance structure, which is more agile, but also more comparable to our U.S. peers. That's number one.

Number two is that by being in -- by being in Ireland, it actually gives us the opportunity to report in U.S. dollars versus now where we are reporting in euro. Reporting in Euro when the majority of our business is in U.S. dollars always gives us some challenges around explaining growth and what is the growth in local currency versus in euros and all this noise can be eliminated from our reporting, which is a huge benefit for us in providing clear communication to the markets.

Further, it also provides us some flexibility and an option to do a direct listing to the U.S. And that option, of course, has quite good value for us, and we want to maintain that optionality for later on. So when I close here on the financials, I really see Verve entering the next growth phase. We are confidently investing into very targeted -- in a very targeted way where we see returns are highest, but with a very strong focus on also preserving capital discipline, cash flow profile and financial strength such that we have the support and the basis for long-term shareholder value. So it's balancing those two elements.

Thank you very much.

Great. Thank you, Christian. Please stay right on stage with me here and Remco please join us on stage -- it's time for some action, some interaction I can literally see in the eyes of our guidance here. They're screaming Q&A. So you want it, you're getting it. We're moving into the first Q&A session of the day.

For those of you here in the room, who want to ask a question, and we would really welcome that. Please just raise your hand and one of our microphone runners will come up to you so you can ask a question. And also for those of you joining us online, please ask your questions via the chat. I have already received some questions. This Q&A session will be addressed to Remco and Christian. So in this session, we will cover the business commercial and financial update, as just heard. And later on, we're going with the tech Q&A.

So are there already any questions here in the room? Not yet. So we're jumping into the first questions from the chat. I would say first question probably best to Remco. Sounds like you're placing quite a significant bet on retail media. Why should investors believe that the walled gardens will not start targeting retail chains as well and use their enormous financial power to push players like Verve out of the market.

Good question. Thank you. Maybe first to start one step back, why are we doing Retail Media and CPG? It's the logical further development of what we have been building over the last years. We've been building a very strong exchange with a very strong demand side, having the relations with advertising and the publishers. But we have found out or let's say, as a conclusion, that you need to focus much stronger on the sector to really get the results that advertiser wants.

And if we look at our larger sectors than Retail Media and CPG, they go hand in hand, of course, are, let's say, one of those sectors where we really see a big opportunity. And I don't want to take all the answers away from Raimund. He's going to show quite a bit what we're doing there. And we've been building that up over the last years or so, just to make that clear, but we have built an extra close loop on it.

So in that sense, it's a logical further evolution of where we're coming from. Why are we not afraid of the walled gardens. As I showed before, the walled gardens take 80% of the spend with 30-something percent of the views of the time used. There is so much room next to the walled gardens. This market is so big that even walled gardens would get in, there's enough room. And if we deliver better results, better outcomes, better service quality, there's no reason to be afraid. It's a huge growth opportunity, I think, also for walled gardens. But look, for example, at Walmart has built a very strong position in there and also builders retail media. It shows the potential of it. And Raimund is also going to show some numbers, I think, in his presentation.

It's a hugely growing market with a ton of opportunities. And yes, we, as an open Internet need to organize ourselves and need to focus more and to deliver a better product I think that's what we're doing and therefore go full forward for us.

Great. Thanks, Remco. So then one question I actually received..

There's a question in there.

Oh, there's a question over there. Great. Please, Matt.

I'm Matt Weber, Canaccord Genuity. I appreciate all the color. Remco I just wanted to ask about on the -- I think you said that it's 1 in 300 ads you're serving today, and you see an opportunity to sort of be more efficient with that by leveraging AI. Could you just expand upon that? Is that leveraging these tools to sort of identify ads that your systems today would deem unprofitable, but they -- in reality, they could be profitable at a certain level? Or just maybe talk about that a little bit more.

Thanks for the question. Good question. Difficult to answer in every detail, but I'll give some examples to maybe give a bit more clarity there. If you receive 1 trillion of ads, at requests per day. So that's people that open the page where there's an ad potential needs to be sold. You need to decide what to do with it. If we would send all those trillion ads to all our demand partners, DSPs, other advertisers, et cetera, it would cost so much money that you wouldn't see a positive EBITDA here.

So first of all, we need to reduce that amount. The question is, how do you do that? That means you need to have a probability measurements like which ads we most likely can make money out of, and we need to decide to who do we send it. We don't want to send it to everybody. So we first try to reduce the number of, let's say, we get 1 trillion in, we need to reduce that with 90%, whatever and filter out the ones that we think are not going to get money for us.

Then we need to send it to the right party because if you send it to everybody, then you send it to people that don't want that ad. And if you give bad results for them, they will accept less ads from you. So they limit the incoming ads also because also they don't want to have the cost. And then we only have to ads to the certain party basically. Then what comes on top of it is what data are in the midstream. So is there data that the buyer is interested in? Is there a cookie in? Is the contextual signal in there, things like that. A lot of that, you also have to agree basically with the demand-side partners. What are they looking for? And how can you optimize that? So that's not only technology, it's also working together with those.

And then you come to things like the pricing. What's the minimum price you want for that ad, often the publisher doesn't want to sell it too cheap, but if you sell it too expensive, you don't sell it, if you make it too cheap, you don't make the margin. So that's a very important point. So there's a lot of factors basically that are going hand in hand with how you optimize an exchange. And let's say, there is a very nice example of a few examples in the market that have really been investing in the exchange a lot. And it's yes, AI, very high tech and not LLM technology is really had to say, algorithm machine learning and in the end, also neural networks.

We are working with Google on using their neural network know-how and capabilities and really, yes, I mean, 1 out of 300 is not a great score. It's not as bad as, let's say, 1 of 300 as I tried to explain before. But if we can only double that efficiency, that makes a huge difference, of course. But it's a lot of variables and it's not that easy, and you work with so many data that you really -- yes, between all the trees, you need to find the forest kind of.

So that makes it difficult, but there's also the opportunity. But if you look what AppLovin did at a certain point, they got, I think it was them top people from a quantum trading company, which are really specialists in machine learning and things and with that, built their platform. Those are things that we can do now. We were not able to do that before because we had to do that on several platforms, which are, let's say, not combined doesn't make any sense. But that's something that only works if you have data.

We have a ton of data. That is what we have been working on. And then you need to have the right machine learning capabilities and doing everything itself is super expensive, but especially now with -- yes, working closely with Google that gives us a lot of opportunity there. But it's -- now what I wanted to show with it is really the potential of this company if we get that better under control, and that might take quarters. But if that really gets better under control, this company can make so much more revenues.

And yes, what I tried to build in my story, we need to really get all the parts that we've been building in the last years, which we're basically aiming at what we're doing now, getting an integrated tech stack at scale with a ton of data, and now we need to make more out of that. So I hope that answers your question.

Thanks, Matt. Next question, right next to Matt.

My name is Dan Medina. I'm with Needham. I have a question for both of you. And I'm just kind of curious as to the road and timing and critical steps necessary to get to, say, an EBITDA margin of like 30%.

Shall I. Certainly. I can also start and then you can add your comments to it. So clearly, we are in a phase of investment right now, and that is putting a drag on our current profitability. But when you see that, and we are through that, we will start to see an uptick in our margin in the second half of the year. This will not bring us to the margin levels that you are alluding to that will take longer time, it will take into the coming year. But I think with some of the potential that Remco was just alluding to, I think there is a clear potential to take the operating margin up by 2 to 3 percentage points, just simply by being much more efficient in the company because we are kind of exactly, as Remco mentioned, we are kind of at a scale now where we can kind of extract the first level of scale benefits out of.

We have one unified platform. I'll just give you a very concrete example. That means we can have all our developers work on the same platform, on the same project instead of trying to hold two platforms alive and also developing on two platforms. That's just one example. The other example is, for instance, now that we are also scaling on our sales capacity, which is building on top of a sales engine that we already have.

So I would say within the next 12 to 15 months, there is definitely potential to raise the margin from just operational improvements of 2 to 3 percentage points. On top of that is just the pure scaling effect then as the bigger you grow, you also get the scaling effect, which is further margin improvement on top of that.

Yes. Maybe to put a bit of salt in the wound. The more we invest, of course, the less rebated margin. And this is an industry where you need to invest because this industry has every two years, something that disrupts. It's LLM now. It has been the cookie disappearance. It has been several other things before. So this is a market where you need to invest. And we have this balanced act of how much do we invest because if we invest, we grow faster and if you go get bigger, we get more efficient, and we get to the margins that you are talking about. .

So it's rather -- it's a bit, yes, short-term pain versus long-term benefit versus, let's say, a bit less sort of pain, but therefore, dragging it out longer. And it's a platform business, which with all the other elements that I described before. But the bigger we get, the more efficient it gets. But one of the things that's super important for this growth is really building moats, building differentiation. And if you look at the total ad tech industry, there is not so much differentiation. AppLovin has built a very nice closed loop in, let's say, the gaming sector. They are now copying that into the commerce sector. But there's not many companies with a strong moat. And that's what we're trying to do.

I'm not saying we're there. But if you look at this retail media story, which is really something really special in this market, which doesn't exist in that one. That's things that we try to accomplish. It costs money. Not everything will work. That's also a fact. But by building those moats, we assume or we expect that we can grow faster and get faster to the profitability levels that you're talking about. And yes, being a tech company, being a platform company, those margins are possible. I'm not going to give you any kind of time line on that or something like that, but it's -- of course, we are -- this company is ready for growth, has the possibility to grow, and it's a balance between, yes, how much do you invest. We have also our leverage. Leverage is too high at the moment. A lot of investors, especially in Europe, don't like that, over 3 or slightly over 3. So we need to balance that a bit. But with investing on the one hand, but on the other hand, also looking at efficiencies, especially AI-based. I think we have a good recipe to get to the margins that you are talking about. I hope that answers your question.

So I think we go with Ellis Acklin from First Berlin Equity.

Here live from Germany. Yes, thank you very much for the color and the access this morning. So right now, I'll just go with a financial question probably for Christian. Both you and Remco this morning emphasize that you really want to focus on the organic growth side of the business rather than M&A going forward? My question is now that you've sort of unlocked some of the cash flow with the ramped-up securitization, would it not make sense to maybe work on the leverage profile.

You could pay me pay back that EUR 50 million tap up? Or is that something you want to maybe keep in your pocket. If so, what would be the reason for that? So just it seems like you could remove one of the things that investors point out, Verve that needs to work on.

Sure. That's definitely an option and also one that you could consider that to take some of the outstanding loan back because we have, as you say, quite strong cash position. We ended last quarter. We had EUR 147 million in cash. Right now, we are also looking at -- we want to make sure that we have the firing power to bring the business over this investment cycle, but it's certainly also something that we could consider and thereby addressing the net leverage ratio. So I wouldn't rule it out. But it also depends a little bit on how the rest of the year goes through and we also have it, there's a bit of a firing powering, should the markets not turn out that we expect, then we have that as a bit of a firing partner -- firing power to absorb that.

So we are financially strong to absorb any kind of short-term swings. But certainly, on a longer-term basis, it makes sense to delever and also with the cash flow generation that we expect for this year in general, we expect to deliver.

That was it? Thank you. So I think we continue one question there, but one moment, we have to take turns. So there are so many questions dropping in from the chat here. I think the next question should go to Remco. Verve Group still has a gaming business as a result of past acquisitions. What are your plans for these segments going forward? Do you continue to rely on data generated by your gaming assets? And how important is that data to your advertising business, also any plans of selling gaming part to become a pure ad company.

Good question. We try not to talk about games because investors don't like to have too many businesses under one roof. Now games is what we -- what enabled us to build the ad tech, the cash flows of gaming enabled that track record data we had also helped us also the spend of the gaming companies of media was helpful. But that is, let's say, 6 years ago, 5 years ago, and then the advertising part has been growing so fast and is so strong now that gaming has become with, yes, under 10% of revenues now and kind of not so important part anymore.

And we have seen that also with other companies in the sector that came from being a game publisher towards becoming an advertising platform that gaming at a certain point, you get so many other data, and we have a lot of gaming data also from other apps that it's not playing such a big role anymore.

So in that sense, I wouldn't say it's noncore because it's still substantial from also generator revenues. It helps us. One big thing that's important that helps us also testing and SDK is a very difficult piece of technology for an app. And if you have our own mobile games or own mobile properties, you can do your testing cycles much faster. So there is synergy. But on the long term and depending a bit on valuations, we might consider to sell it.

And yes, at the moment, no decision on that taken. The valuations in gaming at the moment are not really great. The atmosphere and gaming is not really like everybody is celebrating. But that changes, as we all know, over time, so at a certain point, it might make sense to sell it. And would that also free up some extra cash to further continue our growth or to delever.

Thanks, Remco. So then maybe next question here from [indiscernible].

Two questions for you. First, how you're hiring a lot of salespeople. How are you planning on managing that growth? How are you evaluating those salespeople and how do you layer them in over the course of the year? That's the first question. And the second question is on net dollar retention. What number would you be happy with?

Do you want to take the first question, and I'll take the second question.

The second one is easy to answer. Net dollar cent rate it should be over 100% because that means that it's really the people that we had a year ago are spending more in the quarter. We want to grow our current customers. I want also to elevate it with the acquisitions we did, we've not always got great customers, and there is, let's say, yes, how do you say, it's movement in the market, et cetera. So you always lose a bit, but ideally, if we are done with, let's say, cleaning up the past, to say it should be a strong growing thing. And we had last year with the platform unification, we had some hiccups in there. But it should be over 100%.

Then sales, I don't know, Raimund -- sorry, Michel, I want to say. Are you cabled up already?

So like -- because I would like Michel maybe to answer it, because I can answer it for him, but he's the specialist in hiring salespeople, managing.

Yes, hello everyone. Obviously, there are a lot of metrics that we collect about the performance of our people and especially in sales. Obviously, at the end of the day, we want to make sure that they generate revenues. But there are so many other indicators that we track before we get to the revenue stage. It was mentioned earlier that it normally takes between 6 to 9 months or even a bit longer sometimes for a seller to ramp up.

But before they start generating revenue, you're able to track, how many meetings do they have? How many e-mails are they sending? What's the response rates on those e-mails? How many of the meetings that they are taking are in person versus virtual? Who are they meeting with? When? What frequency? All of those metrics allow us to assess whether a seller has the potential to become a good contributor or not. And obviously, our key is always to sell fast. So if we make the wrong hiring decision, we want to make sure that we're part ways relatively quickly when that's possible.

Does that answer the question?

Great. Thank you. So we are continuing with a couple of questions from the chat. Actually, one question Christian came up twice so. The interest is still on securitization. What is the status of expanding the securitization program? Current amount of EUR 100 million, what can we expect in the upcoming three months.

Okay. So two developments. Number one is that we have actually expanded within the current frame of EUR 100 million, we have expanded the number of entities that we can treat in the program, and we've onboarded two very important contributors to growth in Captify and data set, which we've taken on board into the program. So that's kind of within the frame of the program, and that has already been approved by our partners, NORD/LB and Finacity. So that's in place.

We are working on expanding the program also to -- as our overall frame, I would say that, that -- those talks are progressing well, but I would say that will take into Q3. My ambition level is to raise it in a phased path, so maybe to EUR 125 million and then to EUR 150 million, but it also requires a little bit how the business is doing and kind of trying to get those two -- that phasing in line with business growth.

Great. I think that answers the question. Any more questions from the auditorium currently? No. Then we continue with more questions from the chat. Nice question here regarding a recent IPO. I would say, Remco, how do you see the IPO of Liftoff. AppLovin and Liftoff are much bigger than Verve?How do you see Verve competing to these two big brothers.

Good question. I'm happy that the Liftoff IPO worked out well because it was direct before and delays and the whole sector was kind of afraid that it would be, how to say, to withdrawn again, because it's good to show that this sector is really interesting. And a lot of investors have lost a bit of trust in ad tech. If you look at a lot of valuations, they are low, and it's really great to see that an IPO worked out well. Liftoff is a great company. It's one of our partners also. I mean a lot of companies work together in this market. Liftoff is very focused on performance. We do perform the end brand.

They have built a great company. But as I showed before, in our TAM in our market, there is space for several larger players. And I think it's rather a nice example also they have, let's say, optimized their technology stake in the last year. If you look a bit in their past numbers, they have had trouble years, but also after integrating that technology after, let's say, putting more emphasis on their AI and optimization capabilities, they have been showing good growth. And I think it's rather a nice example to look at what's possible in this market then that I would be afraid of it. It's rather a nice example.

Thank you. So and then our analysts from Inderes, Christopher Jennel has asked a couple of questions, and I'll just pick up the ones that fit perfectly to the upcoming session with the experts and that are not touched in that expert session. Christopher asked on Retail Media. Could you please explain a little more, even though we're not disclosing numbers here yet, but a little bit on unique economics how the take rates could be, how typical companies could look like and where the margin levels could be? And how this could affect potential revenues in '27, '28, like on -- to sum it up, how strong could growth be in that area without giving too much forward-looking statements?

Great question, very relevant. I would actually propose to park it until after Raimund has given his presentation. But saying a few words on that. What we see in the segment that we are in retail and CPG, it takes time. We have built something really great. Raimund will show that, but it takes time to get to budget. And one of the problems in advertising is that any large budgets are mostly decided on in Q4. So we had -- and we have to build things now to get the budgets next year.

So I don't expect big results or big revenue uplift this year. But by being ready in Q4 to get the budget for next year, we have a big opportunity for next year. But Raimund will cover it in more detail and the rest of the questions as well.

I'll just come back with that question on you Raimund later. Then what leading indicators should we to know the front-loaded sales investment is working? And when do we realistically see the cost to revenue lag grow close?

Well, I can take -- I can start out with -- I mean, obviously, one of the absolute key indicator is our overall margin because from gross margin -- gross product margin down to EBITDA margin, that's the key KPI to look at. I think the other thing to look at is looking at our net expansion rate, looking at our growth in our customers, which we report on a quarterly basis, those are the two things to follow. Of course, also our overall ad impressions, but I would focus more on number of customers we are onboarding and how we are able to grow our existing customers because that's really what the sales job is about. It's about land and expand.

Yes, but I would also differentiate a bit with, let's say, we have sales buildup. That's one of our blocks of investment. Then we have technology investments. We have a EUR 40 million roughly of capitalizations per year, which is, let's say, investments in platform and improvement. There, we invested in the past a lot in building features to enable the merge of the platforms or the merger or the unification of the platforms. And a lot of that is now freed up to do real innovation, like what I was talking about before.

So there's a bit of difference between technology investments and more market investments, people investments. And on the other hand, yes, also saving on employees by efficiencies, efficiency gains.

Thank you. And then there's the last part of the question, and I think that's good to highlight our growth track ahead again. It handles the midterm perspective we head out. We didn't repeat that after the new revenue recognition. So we're not giving out a new perspective today on stage now. But could you elaborate maybe a bit, Remco, on how we stand -- like how we see this former perspective that we had of EUR 1 billion revenue to be able to be reached in a couple of years from now, like more as a general statement to the growth potential of this company going forward.

Yes. Yes, we need to grow. We need to grow. And the EUR 1 billion has become a bit easier but also, I wouldn't say cheating, but by changing our revenue recognition. So we're closer to that. We are over EUR 700 million or going to be. But we need to grow. And if that's on -- after we reach EUR 1 billion, the next target will be EUR 2 billion or higher than that. So this company needs to grow. When exactly we reach it, it's less relevant than the fact that we are able to grow fast. And traditionally, let's say, we had a 30% revenue CAGR, part of that M&A that's becoming more and more organic, should be becoming more and more organic. And the more we are able to differentiate with different solutions that really give us a better position in the market to faster, we should be able to grow.

And yes, with this kind of growth targets, it's always difficult. My first job was at an oil company, and we were growing 1% per year. And then if you made 1.2% or 0.8% growth, it was not so far away. But if we look at the growth speed that we have, it's always super difficult to exactly say how fast we will be growing. But I know for sure that my whole team is putting a lot of emphasis and focus on really making this growth happen and some things work better, some worse. Sometimes you have to market against it, sometimes you lose a customer. But overall, this company has -- and that's what we're trying to bring over today a lot of potential for growth.

Great. I could maybe also just add to that perspective. I mean the ambition level for the company is the same. What has changed is that we want to balance that with a more tight management of our financial profile, margin expansion along with free cash flow. And I would say that's the difference maybe from prior times that we are trying to balance both of them and we really do want to deliver better EBITDA, cash flow and deleveraging as well. At the same time, we are growing. So it's a bit more balanced.

Great. Thanks, Christian. Thanks, Remco. I think this concludes the Q&A session. #1. We'll have another one later. I think for the moment, this is -- it's time for a coffee for all of us. We'll be back at 11:30 with a keynote that fits perfectly with the topics we are currently discussing adverse data, intelligence, prediction and outcomes. So see you all back here at 11:30 sharp. Thanks.

[Break]

Okay, everybody. Welcome back from a really extensive coffee break. I hope you all enjoyed some nice cups of coffee, like 10 or 20 of them, and the energy level is now fully up. We are ready for the second part of Verve Capital Markets Day 2026. We're now moving from the business update into the expert sessions. And to open this part, we wanted to bring in a perspective that goes beyond our own company and looks at the underlying engine of the industry. How data becomes intelligence, how intelligence becomes decisions, how decisions become measurable outcomes.

Our keynote speaker of today is Dr. Usama Fayyad. He's Professor of the practice at Northeastern University's Khoury College of Computer Sciences and Executive Director of Northeastern Institute for Experiential AI. His work spans data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence and data mining. In other words, exactly the fields that sit behind many of the changes currently reshaping advertising, retail media and predictive targeting. He has been recognized as an ACM with an ACM Innovation Award, received a U.S. government metal from NASA and his work has also been published in the Harvard Data Science Review among others. So when we talk about turning signals into outcomes, we could hardly ask for a better guy to kick off part 2 of today's CMD. Usama, it's a real pleasure to have you with us today. Thank you for making this possible. Ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm welcome to Dr. Usama Fayyad.

Thank you, and thank you, Ingo, for a great introduction. So my job today besides going through an impossible number of slides really fast is to kind of set the call it, bigger setting around what's happening with AI, especially the recent developments, but then come back and relate it to advertising, branding and other issues relating to kind of the marketing of the future.

With that, I'll start by saying, hey, everywhere you go, you hear about AI. So have we not heard enough? Isn't the hype overblown? It's actually definitely mostly confused and very, very confusing to many companies. And in many cases, believe it or not, it's underestimating the true value, not overestimating it of what this technology could be doing in the knowledge economy. It is simple. This is what many people forget. They think that it's very sophisticated and it's thinking and it's modeling and it's not.

But it's very powerful when you give it the right data. And when you apply it in kind of knowledge economy settings, I think it's going to be -- it has been actually a big force in revolutionizing marketing for the past 20 years or more. The bad actors act faster than the good actors. So we'll see a lot of social harm and other things come out of AI. We're already beginning to see it, but it's going to get a lot worse. But it will have a huge impact economically on this knowledge economy, which is right with repetitive and robotic work.

So what's the biggest setting here, right? Here's a bunch of dots on the screen. Your brain quickly, some people just see dots, some people see, oh, this is a Dalmatian dog, nose to the left. How do we get there? How do our brains do this? And is this relevant? And the reason I show you this is because it is relevant, right? So here's a quick example from banking. You might get a few snapshots of a set of customer actions. And out of them, you need to decide whether this is a good transaction, bad transaction, suspicious, et cetera.

In marketing and advertising, this is a really big deal, right? Because you really see only certain dimensions and certain snapshots. And if we can put them together, can we build the Customer 360, the ability to basically build a digital twin of that customer and really know what they want and what they're looking for. So what's been happening over the last 4 years in AI in 4 years because the clock kind of starts at 2023 with ChatGPT, right? I call 2023 the year of fascination.

'24 was the year of denial. Basically, this is cute technology, but it's not for us or our business. 2025 was delusion, like I use ChatGPT, Therefore, I'm using AI in my business. 2026 is interesting. I call it the year of panic because everybody suddenly realized, oh my God, these agents really work. This technology is very relevant. And then when they try to use it, and this is the panic, the data is not available or in order and the talent, the know-how, how to use it properly is not there.

So successful AI is totally dependent on having the right data. It's not cheap to have the right data. It's even more expensive to label it correctly so that the algorithms know what to do with it or what to make of it. It is growing exponentially between devices, IoT, wearables, cloud, all of that. And it historically has been very difficult for companies to deal with. I have a whole separate talk on the 7 secret of making AI work in business, but one of the central ones is you have to collect data at a very fine granularity, way more than is being collected today. And it's not just data. It's outcomes, it's context, it's things around it that may or may not be relevant.

The majority of this data, of course, is unstructured and Gartner says 90%. I say a heck of a lot more than 90%, but companies -- most companies don't know how to deal with it, except for a few, right? And this brings us to this divide. So these few companies, I call the AI halves, right? And I've listed some examples of them. Maybe there's 100 of them in the world, maybe 150. On the other side, it's kind of the rest of the world, 99.99% of companies watching and saying, what the heck is this? How is it relevant to me? How do I use it? So the question is, how do you bridge that divide?

So let's spend 2 minutes just asking, so what do these data -- the AI halves, what do they do right, right? They actually use data as an asset. What I mean by that is they understand their data. Think Google, like when I talk about this because they're a great example of this. They understand events. They understand context. So what's happening even in the news, the weather, the location. They understand the right action under that event, and they understand and model the outcomes, right? This is not happening in 99.99% of the companies or organizations.

They also implement human in the loop. I could speak for an hour on how dependent Google's business is having an army of people giving feedback, retraining that algorithms, the MLR, the machine learning relevance 4 times a day, every day based on the work of 25,000 search editorial people who just -- their job is to just say move up, move down. This is not relevant, et cetera. They've been doing this 4 times a day, every day, retraining the algorithm for 20 years, right? So think about the consistency.

Same is true, by the way, for OpenAI, same is true for Amazon, all sorts of -- what the AI have nots, what do they do? Like every time we work with a company to help them implement AI, the problem starts first as a data problem like their data is all over the place, different spreadsheets, different -- sometimes on paper. So you spend most of your energy digging through the math to try to get to the right data to enable the AI to be relevant and to work correctly.

So what about data? Well, my point here is -- we have to use it as an asset. The depreciating assets in the AI equation are hardware and algorithms. Data is the only investment-grade asset. And that's the place, in my opinion, to invest, and we'll talk about this today. In addition to that, relevant to what I said before, you have to capture these interventions. What happens when you use ChatGPT and it's wrong, and you said it, it's wrong. It actually doesn't capture that, and we'll talk about why.

So let's talk about kind of intent architecture and customer interactions to drive it more to our topic today. So here's an example from a bank, right? Let's say you're a bank and I ask, how does your customer view you as a bank? And the view of the customer is very transactional, right? They have this kind of nice mobile app. They have branches. I use this service or that from them, et cetera. If you ask a similar question of the bank, how do you view your customer, you get answers that are also very transactional. Oh, yes, they have a savings account. They ask for a mortgage, they did this, they did that. And it's all around transactions and business.

In reality, what's happening to these customers is they're having day-to-day events like I'm trying to commute. I'm trying to pay utility bills. I have health issues, shopping, travel or they're having life moments, right? I always -- when I talk to banks, I always remind them, you have no excuse for not knowing when somebody is trying to buy a home or when somebody is getting married or when somebody got kids. They have the signals. They just don't know how to use them and how to derive them.

Now if you did this, if you were able to kind of elevate that interaction and understand the customer and a strategic value, you can achieve relevance, which is how Google got a lot of its value out. And once you have relevance and you do it right without freaking out consumers, you have the value engine, you have that flywheel that Remco talked about before. By the way, this is more difficult. And I'll give you a few examples of how difficult this is even when you think you hit it.

So with that, let's do just a quick fun video here as an example of something that really works but then really has some trouble. This is an example. Let's play...

[Presentation]

So why did I show you this video, right? It's because it's an example of something that worked and worked so well. The idea was as soon as you buy a ticket, you can craft the message in the voice and image of Jennifer Lopez and send it to all your friends and family. Work amazing -- by the way, is this generative AI? Absolutely, right? This uses generative voice and it uses generative video. And it does it at scale.

The results, these guys sold 1,000 tickets after this campaign in record time, like unprecedented. They had to come up with certain hacks like some people like me have a hard name to pronounce for the AI. So they have a hack that says Jennifer Lopez will say, hello sailor instead of hello or whatever. But despite all of this, why did this campaign not continue? Why do you think if something works so well? Well, it's because -- the team could not stop people from figuring out how to hack this capability and always make JLO say the wrong thing or make the wrong gesture, right?

So they had to take it down. It was just too much to manage it. Now this leads us to another issue, which is very important and central to our meeting today, which is you can look at this and say, okay, this is amusing, right? And fiction, oh, yes, astronaut in space, run a horse, very amusing, aha. The question is, what happens when it's this, right? This guy made Obama say whatever he wanted to say. This group of hack German hackers made Putin to his great anger, say a lot of stuff that he didn't mean. There was a lot of deep fakes around the presidential election that happened a couple of years ago and all sorts of deep fakes and videos and it's getting really bad. It's creating an environment where the bar has become so low now for the bad guys to use it that it is so easy to kind of do fraud and do all sorts of things that fool us. And that's a serious issue that brings up responsible AI.

The main theme I want to give you here is there is a strategic advantage here. As the world realizes how dangerous the technology is and as the regulators crack down on it and policy cracks down, it creates not a headwind, as Remco said, but an actual opportunity if you're doing responsible targeting. And we'll talk about some examples of that. Here's another example. I did a panel at South by Southwest a year ago, 1.5 years ago. We called it enough with the [building]. I'll let you figure out why we called it that.

But we started by saying, hey, and it was a room full of marketers and branding managers and advertisers. And we said, "Hey, AI will disrupt and transform marketing, branding and CRM. Who agrees with that? Almost everybody in the room raised their hand. And these are examples of what you could be doing. Then the second question was, would you, you, brand manager, read an e-mail if you knew it was generated by AI. And only a few people in the room raised their hands. I actually talked to some of them just to figure out why they raised their hand. But I, for example, the minute you tell me that will not be interested. And that's a real problem here of how do you use this technology while keeping the messaging genuine and the interaction human.

So here's an example of a company who got in trouble by listening to AI, right? I honestly don't know it was in the head of the brand manager here, but I suggested this ad for Skechers, athletic shoes. And not only I would look at it, I don't get it, but the reaction was horrible, like people went completely negative on them. And there were a long fortune article, you can look it up written about this. This is an example of how we shouldn't follow this technology blindly, and we should figure out how to use it appropriately.

So key themes, and then we'll go into kind of examples relevant here. Working AI without -- requires machine learning, machine learning requires data. So it's all about data. You want smarter, not larger models. I'll talk a little bit about that. Talent is a big deal and responsible AI, doing it correctly and safely, AI safety in general is becoming very important. So what about marketing? Well, changes and confusion bring great opportunities is the theme here, right? So shifting consumer search patterns, it was referenced a few times. No one really quite understands AI search. What happens in a world when you only get one answer instead of a bunch of possibilities that you can choose from. Can you get the right signals from -- of intent from chatbot conversations? Can you get it from anonymized or pseudonymized chats?

The media is changing. So there's a big move now more back into TV because kind of people are overwhelmed in other channels and of course, digital audio and so forth. Out-of-home advertising screens everywhere. How do you actually manage the right messaging to the right type of audiences at the right time and all of that is a very, very hard problem for advertisers and for the publishers, the screen owners. There's a new content landscape out there, right? Content is changing and your ability to kind of get to it is changing. We're going to hear about retail media for branding, and there's some very interesting things happening in that space.

Mobile in-app advertising, I don't need to say much about it. But like Remco started the whole meeting, mobile is definitely the most powerful medium for advertising and for relevant advertising. The science of anonymization, which is a big deal, it does not exist, right? People have tricks. People try to avoid the obvious trouble, and I'll give you an example. But there's a lot of questionable and breakable anonymization. You think you anonymize the data set, but with a little bit of math, you can kind of triangulate back -- so let me give you an example of that.

It used to be on the board of a company called eXelate that got acquired by Nielsen in 2015. In 2014, they were having an existential crisis, right? Why? Because the cookies disappeared. Apple had iOS 8, and they started blocking cookies. And what was the solution at the time, which at the time, made them look like geniuses and actually led to their acquisition because with a very simple triangulation, take the IP address, cross the browser version, cross the device type, which you get almost all the time, and you can reconstruct essentially identity. It was 95% ID recovery, right, even better than cookies.

This, by the way, is now called fingerprinting. It's a bad practice. It's not accepted. You can't do it in most cases. AI can provide a whole other level of understanding, and I think you've heard about some of it's happening here, and I'll share with you one case study that I came across that really impressed me. And how do we map behaviors and intent into kind of this very relevant idealist targeted ad. All right.

So with that, I actually -- Verve did not point me to this. I actually came across this completely neutrally as I was researching for the stock. And I actually really love this application, right? There was a case study that we got published with LinkedIn, where -- and this is recent. I thought the results were super powerful, right? The cost per install was down 38%. Cost per app activation was 39% and the post-install tracking achieved over 90% event visibility, right?

So these are amazing numbers. But here's what I liked about it. This is a great example of what I call clean innovation, right? Because we have our own test for responsible AI, and I kind of put it through the test and it passed very nicely. It's an example of the proper leverage of the technology, and it's based on analyzing behavioral patterns. And that result for reducing the customer acquisition cost came from being able -- this is not doable by humans, right? 1.5 million ad auctions per second to predict kind of what's going on.

So it's a pretty impressive case study. And I'm not saying it because this is a Verve meeting. It's actually something to be proud of. So changes in confusion bring great opportunities. Well, data is a strategic moat, whether it's zero party or first party. We heard about this before. User opt-in for data collection, it survives all the privacy challenges basically. So can you get it and can Verve achieve it in the open Internet -- the walled gardens, they can do this because they can force you to log in and they can do bad things if you don't log in or degrade your experience. So scaling beyond the walled gardens is a big deal and is a big challenge.

A few minutes on what's been happening with Gen AI. Last year, I would say the models got larger. I honestly don't know why. I'll talk about this. RAG is a hack, retrieval augmented generation to overcome the problem that these models became so large, you can't retrain them. Agentic AI is now everywhere and probably for good reasons. So we'll spend a minute on that. And examples of things that essentially got tracked almost as a problem is computer programming. For well-understood tasks, the machines do it better than humans. And Vibe coding is -- you've heard about the SaaS-pocalypse and the software crisis that's happening because the machines are getting very good at generating code.

So larger models. Why are these larger -- why are these models getting larger? So GPT-3, which is circa 2020 was the last time OpenAI was open. They stopped being open after that. We know exactly it had 175 billion parameters. Those are weight on the neural net that makes what's called the deep learning model. And it was trained on 1 terabyte of data, right? That was highly curated. So OpenAI spent a lot of money just curating data because when they try to use data off the Internet, it didn't work, lots of bad data, lots of inconsistent data.

It went to 0.5 trillion to 3.5 trillion. It went to, we think, about 1.5 trillion for GPT-4. Very reliable rumors says around 12 trillion parameters for GPT 4, 5. And all these models, GPT-4 and onwards have been trained on the same data set from 2023. that's 3 years old data. Why? And that's an interesting question. And why is kind of bigger is better, the rhetoric that's being repeated out there. And why do these models not use knowledge when you have it? It has to reconstruct knowledge even when you know something. So those are interesting questions.

So here's the quandary. You build one model. It knows 90 to 100 languages. It knows every field of science out there. What happens if you try to update it? What happens if you say, "Oh, I want to teach it a new skill, right? Let's say, I want to add the ability to build financial statements in Japanese. There are 3 or 4 kind of mysteries, scientific mysteries when it comes to these large language models. One of them is this one. Once I teach it something new, something completely unrelated degrades, right? So like, for example, your ability to do German tech documentation somehow, which is unrelated to Japanese financial statements. Physics, right, gets corrupted. So here's the problem.

Retraining is very expensive because these models are so huge. GPT-3, remember, the 175 billion on just 1 terabyte of data, every time you hit the retrain button, we're going to ignore hardware, software people, electricity, $3 million of electricity every time you say retrain on that model that's now considered small, right? So imagine what these trillions of parameters cost every time you need to retrain. And imagine what happens when you add -- change the data and now you have to verify, hey, I learned all the skills. Are they still there? That's a very expensive testing thing.

So larger LLMs are not necessarily better. It turns out most tasks you can do with very narrow, smaller language models. I like to combine prior knowledge through knowledge graphs with it. And I'm a big believer in these narrow kind of focused models. So always with my team, I tell them, don't ask me about what's the largest model you can -- we can afford. It's what's the smallest LLM that we can get away with is the right approach here. You get efficiency, speed, privacy, customization, but most importantly, you get the ability to incorporate corrections, right? That's the intervention, the human feedback, which can't happen today with the large models.

The ability to retrain the model and the ability to run on local machines and maybe on the edge, not necessarily the cloud, including your mobile device, which is happening. I'm going to skip some of the things around kind of RAG and what's happening, but RAG is essentially a technique that says, ignore everything you know, just use these documents I'm giving you and don't look at anything else, which means you take like this huge bulldozer and you say, "Hey, I want to push this little needle and that bulldozer is very expensive to operate. And there's varieties of RAG, right, from advanced modular graph, weird stuff is happening, right?

People are doing vibe coding. They're doing a lot of these RAG pipelines, and they have no idea how to maintain them. Like what happens when you come back 6 months later and try to say, why did I use this prompt? Why did I use this keyword? And why is it changing dramatically if I change it? And what happens, the model got updated so my pipeline doesn't work anymore. Agents, you can't avoid talking about them. So I'll just say a couple of things.

First of all, the difference, generative AI, you have to issue a prompt to get a response. With agents, they just detect events and they act on their own and often, they'll collaborate multiple agents. And that's a powerful model. There's many ways to build it. I'll skip that. I'll just mention that this has been going on for a while. Here's an example from a few years back in 2024, where a planning agent would spawn a whole bunch of, in this case, they are LAMA models from Meta, 7 billion models and tell them to specialize and go look for these types of bugs, let's say, zero-day vulnerabilities in the software. You could show -- they showed that there was a lot of speed up and all sorts of good stuff.

But what's interesting here is what's happening recently with Nathos, right? So Agentic AI for cybersecurity built on cloud Anthropic says the model is so powerful, I'm not going to give it to anybody. Only the trusted companies, and there's a whole controversy who's trusted and who's not. I've been spending time researching whether this is real or this is the most amazing marketing scheme ever. Like my model is so good, you can't have it. So you got to beg me for it.

By the way, another example I'd like to refer to is one that's published actually in the New York Times too or in Fortune. This is a vending machine that used Agentic AI. And the good stuff is it figured out which products to order, how to optimize. It kind of repeated attempts to be kind of jail broken by the employees' books. Bad stuff started also happening, right? It started losing money because employees would give it these soft stories about I'm broke and I need a snack and started claiming, I'm a human and I live at, what is it, 742 Evergreen terrace. I don't know if you know that address from the Simpsons. So it's all weird stuff that happens with these agents. Just like you manage human beings, you have to figure out how to manage an agentic workforce. I don't have time to cover kind of the lessons learned from using agentic AI, but we'll make the slides available if you're interested.

The biggest deal here is how do you build that talent and how do you train people. And that's an area where we spend a lot of our energy. And we use experiential education, meaning just lecturing isn't enough. You need to do it in the context of projects being solved and the technology being used. So I'll end with some questions here. Over the New Year break, I came across this quote from Abraham Lincoln. He said it on December 1, 1862, the U.S. was doing horribly the north in the war. But he says something that's really powerful that appeals to me. The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion, which I love that expression with the occasion as opposed to the occasion.

And then he says, we must take a new and act a new. We must disenthrone ourselves. What does that mean? You have to shake this belief that how we did things in the past is how we do them in the future. So this led me to do at the beginning of the year, something I've never done before. You're welcome to download the memo. I did my prediction for what's happening in AI in 2026. You might find them interesting. I've shared them with some of the folks at Verve as well.

So with that, take away themes because I'm over my time. Data is the big asset here. It's the big investment-grade asset. Small language models and narrow solutions lead to some amazing results -- and you can address many of the problems if you kind of approach this rationally. The last thing I'll end with is no data, no AI. So think about that and human intervention is an absolute must. The biggest danger to AI is this the gap, the gap between how powerful the demo is and how disappointing the implementation is. So every time something new comes out, I go, I rush to implement it. And every time pretty much, I am amazed at how bad it is. So with that, I'll end the talk and hopefully, you'll have some questions for me in the next session. Thank you, Ingrid.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for your deep insight and sharing your thoughts on AI. What I can really say is that capital markets are already benefiting big from AI because so far, it was not possible to include Jennifer Lopez or astronauts on horses into IR presentation. So I really love that. So that was a powerful way to open the expert sessions of the 2026 Capital Markets Day of Verve. We now move forward from the broader data and AI perspective into one of the most dynamic areas of the advertising ecosystem, retail media. The promise here is very direct. Closing the loops, sorry, forgot the switch, closing the loop between media exposure, commercial intent and actual outcomes. To take us through this, please welcome Raimund Bau, President, Verve Retail Media with this session, Closed-loop Retail Media.

Thanks for having me. We heard a lot about data from the summer, how important data is, and we heard a lot about outcomes today. What is the ultimate outcome for an advertiser? The ultimate outcome for an advertiser is selling the product they advertise. The reason why this company exists is because we enable advertisers to sell more now or later. It's the only reason why we have advertising and why we have media.

So for advertisers, Remco showed the largest advertising groups we have, CPG, it's pharma. It comes as no surprise that retail media is overtaking linear TV, is on the path of overtaking social media in the U.S. in '28. The growth rates of retail media are unprecedented by any other advertising form. And the reason is because retail media is able to inform the advertiser if advertising actually works. And the second reason is because retail media is happening at the point of purchase. And when we talk CPG, we talk a lot of low involvement products, products that you don't typically think for, for 6 or 9 months. It's not a car purchase. It is a product which you decide on buying at the shelf or in the e-commerce store.

So retail media has seen tremendous growth. And the question is often, will that growth flatten? I believe this is just the beginning because if you see the amount of ad spend that the CPGs and pharma and health care companies do in this space, there's lots of room for retail media. However, I believe retail media is not perfect as it is today. It has seen tremendous growth, but it has tremendous shortcomings as well. A lot of the spend of retail media goes into channels that does not have the properties I described before. It's not where the customer is actually buying. It's somewhere else. It's informed by the data. It's informed by the purchase data, but it's not where the customer is.

Sometimes it's not even combined with the purchase data and still called retail media. 95% of the CPG purchases, and that's our largest groups of advertisers are happening in the store, still in the store, in front of the shelf. The other problem that we see today in today's market with a lot of retail media companies is retailers build those retail media companies and only market, obviously, their channels, their stores with those platforms they build that could be seen as an inconvenience to the advertiser who now needs to go across several channels or use some third party to actually spend retail media spend.

Let me tell you, it's more than that. It's more than inconvenience. It's a political friction that is created between the brands and the retailers. Why? -- because essentially, retail media budgets end up in the yearly negotiations between the brands and the retailers and end up as basically a trading point in how much the goods -- how much the product costs for the retailer to purchase. So that is basically holding back true media spend in the category. The other shortcoming is the full funnel is not connected. It's a lot of is happening off-site retail media. Some is happening on-site. -- little is happening in the store itself in terms of promotions.

But we rarely see a full funnel connection where actually a consumer is tracked through upper funnel media all the way down to promotions to in-store purchases. And this is all despite the tremendous growth of retail media in the last couple of years. We're addressing these shortcomings, which was something which we call Sofa to Store. Sofa to store is more than just a lofty concept. And the video I'm going to show you now is an actual store is one actual store out of many actual stores, which are running this.

Please, the video.

[Presentation]

So what you just saw is actual implementation of how we use our platform. You saw center technology, you saw upper funnel targeting with the woman sitting at your CTV or on a smartphone or a mobile device, actually receiving messages from us, going into the store. Sanders understand social demographics, the same social demographics we use for targeting in the upper funnel, we can now extract inside of the store. You've seen the checkout integration, the coupon integration, the smart cards actually understanding where the person is precisely in the store down to one yard.

This -- all this technology is not some prototype. It's not some POC we ran somewhere. We were able, I say this with pride, less than 1 year to build the largest retail media network in Germany, the largest cross-retailer media network. Consists of more than 5,000 screens that you may say as a financial analyst, there will be a lot of CapEx on the company. It's not. Everything we have built is a platform. This is a platform game. It's a data game. We ingest data. We partner with screen providers that are already in the store. We have very few screens ourselves, but the majority of this is just a platform game. It's understanding which data we need to in-source, which screens we need to play to, which sensor data we use for which targeting, how we bring this all together.

Basically, we have Germany covered after 10 months. There isn't a single city we are not in. There's more stores added every day. It's 17,000 in total where we have ability to target shoppers, some with screens, some about screens, all with integrations into the checkout system to be able to actually convert shoppers. 46 million contacts per week, 85% of the German population targetable. And the most important thing, retail media has 2 aspects. It's retail and media. It has to work for the retailer. That's the one thing we focus on because we consider ourselves as a partner to these retailers.

On average, we're able to lift up store sales by 9% with this by the retailer himself using our platform to drive shoppers to the fresh aisle to drive shoppers to highly profitable sections of the store. We work with over 200 brands on this. As Christian pointed out, we are ramping up sales here. But the platform we have built is extremely powerful and unheard of in that speed. Just to give you a little bit of examples what else is happening in the German retail media market. And this is not an underdeveloped country in terms of retail. If you ask any retailer in the world, what is the hardest retail country in the world is Germany, raises and margins, extremely good players in this.

A lot of in-store activity going on. So we built more than 17,000 stores. That's a nice number. But what's really important is we're going away from a political friction that all these retailer built retail media networks have. We're going away from a friction by creating a cross-retail network, truly independent of the yearly negotiations that the retailers have with the brands. We are a trusted alternative much as we are a trusted alternative to the walled gardens in the other parts of the business. And we don't stop at grocery stores. We don't stop at drug stores. We actually go into pharmacies, more than 9,000. We go into cinemas. -- cinemas advertising in grocery stores. We launched the first major campaign today with this. Next is gas stations. We have gas stations advertising in pharmacies and vice versa. So there's really a retailer network we've spun.

Do we need screens for this? Do we need the in-store part of this? Well, the in-store part is really helpful, really powerful because as I told you, the decision is being made at the point of purchase, but we also developed another technology that we call Add2wallet. We are able to basically put a wallet pass with a mobile app into the shopper's personal iOS, Android wallet and are able to geolocate that wallet and a message pops up as soon as that person comes close to the store.

So again, it's the screen in your pocket that's the most powerful medium, and we connect that screen by actually with coupons and thereby actually be able to have a screen anywhere in any store. The title of this is called the compounding engine. What's compounding here? Well, what's compounding here is we start everything we do with receipt data with an understanding of what are people shopping in the store. And out of this receipt data, we can derive AI models, we can derive targeting models, predictive models to actually drive more impact, drive more understanding of the consumer.

This will, in turn, then lead to higher redemption rates, higher spending of these consumers. And actually, the redemptions of the coupons give us a hint of the elasticity of how much we're able to move inside of a certain store and certain geo location with a certain class of consumers. And we bring all the data together, all the data we have at birth, and Michele is going to talk more about this later. To actually form a deep understanding of ZIP code level targeting dynamics, which regions are losing, which are winning. So for the advertiser and for a lot of brands, we showed this towards mind-blowing. For the first time, they can look in real time at math and understand how their market share for specific products, specific brands is changing. They can then target the individual stores, the individual reason on ZIP code level or H3 clusters, Hexagon, really go down precisely and fix problems or accelerate brand growth where they need to, not like target everything at once, but really precisely allocating budgets where this is needed.

To give you some examples, we ran a lot of campaigns, just some examples here. And the first one is one of my favorite small regional brands. It's a mixture of serup and Coke. It is a #8 brand, #8 brand. That's pretty bad. If you're #8 brand with a retailer, you have a good chance of getting delisted of getting no promotions of basically getting kicked out of the store. What we managed to do, we moved that #8 brand in 3 weeks to #3. It surpassed Coke, the Coke brand in that category in only 3 weeks, and we have lasting effects that we see for this brand. And this means for brands that we are capable of moving them in a rank position within a retailer of actually improving their positioning with that retailer, expanding the number of facings that can place within a retailer.

They precisely, they targeted. And that is precisely the outcome that CPG brands need in order to succeed and grow their inventory. Is this hard to copy? We did it in only 10 months. Maybe it's not so hard to copy, but I will tell you why it's so hard to copy. First of all, in Germany, and I'll talk about Germany first. We have a physical in-store presence is unsurpassed. So no one has more stores targetable than we do in Germany. We have a multitude of different store types that we sell to. We have a network of stores. We have cross-retailer receipt data.

So we understand what is being sold in the pharmacy. We understand what's being sold in the supermarket, oftentimes in the same region in the same ZIP code. So the level of understanding is really deep. The secret sauce is really making sense of all of this, bringing it all together in one platform, making it targetable. Therefore, we use proprietary AI models, which really inform us about the elasticity, about the products, about which brand is losing, gaining market share, where the brands should target.

And the fourth is an independent scientifically backed ups of measurement methodology, which we also developed in those 11 months, and it's completely API-based, works across all of the different brand formats and retailers. So if we take a step further, how would this look like in the U.S.? Is this scalable? Is this a one-hit wonder? I think it's very scalable. And I cannot provide you today with contracts, but I can tell you that we are in advanced negotiations of closing more than -- data from more than 50,000 stores in the U.S.

So sales data from stores in actual stores will understand that. We are in advanced negotiations for contracts for in-store media, where we actually have hardware suppliers, existing in-store media players wanting to work with us. They want to join us on the platform. They're integrating into our platform because it's the best platform in the market. The AI models and the A of measurement, of course, that's exactly the same. So it's a platform game that we can now take to any country.

So to sum it up, in less than a year, we built the largest retail media network in the country. So if you have any doubt about the ability to execute in this company, I think this should be one of the proof points that we are able to execute very fast if we want to, very precise and we succeed. Now we are building the same thing in the United States, geospatial targeting receipt data, insights from consumers, AI-based in-store sensors to sofa to store concept. But we have one unfair advantage in the U.S. that we didn't have in Germany. We have a world-class sales team that's already selling to CPG, health care and pharma in the U.S. And that is what Mishel is going to tell you more about.

All right. I feel like we didn't talk enough about AI today. So we're going to do a little bit more of that. So for those of you who don't know me, me and my team, we spend a lot of time talking to advertisers, understanding what are their needs, what are their pain points. And trust me, they have a lot of pain points these days. When it comes to the agency world, agencies are under a lot of pressure. They need to prove value to their clients, to the end advertisers, and it's not easy to do these days.

We're all seeing the shifts in the industry. Some HoldCos are gaining market share, while others do not. And even the ones that are most successful, for example, Publicis, when you look at their guidance for how much they're going to grow this year, and that's the leading HoldCo, that's 7%. At the same time, they're dealing with vendors that are basically telling them the same story. Everyone gives them the same promises around how they are going to use AI and help them succeed and drive value to their clients and differentiation, as Remco mentioned earlier, is difficult.

So what I'm going to spend a few minutes on -- in this talk is how do we differentiate, how do you use data and how do we turn signals into outcomes. Even that term, outcomes is overused these days in the industry. Everyone talks about it. It could be outcomes, it could be incrementality. But at the end of the day, what you need to show, as Raimund mentioned, is helping those advertisers increase sales, and that's where we come to play. Prediction, intent, all of the terms that I'm going to use during this session relies on data. If you don't have good data, your ability to predict the right outcome is limited. And as Dr. Usama Fayyad mentioned, if you're lacking on the data side, you're not really going to accomplish a lot.

By show of hands, who used AI today? LLMs. Keep your hand up if you use it in the last 30 minutes. In fact, there are people in this room, I'm one of them, who have agents running from them as we speak. I was actually seeing some people use their phones interacting with their agents while we were listening to the prior presentations. When it comes to using LLMs and using AI, that really changed the way people interact and consume information. For a long time, search was limited to a tiny search box that was a strong signal for intent.

I'll give you an anecdote. A few years ago, I spoke to one of our clients who told me that if they could, they would deploy 100% of their budget to search. I asked why. And the response I got was intent. That advertiser felt like when a user is looking for something, that's a great signal for intent. Does it make sense? And if they could, they would deploy their budgets to it. And then I asked the obvious follow-up question, which was, so why don't you deploy 100% of your budget to search? And the response I got was scale.

Traditionally, search was limited in terms of scale. That's why advertisers had to expand and go broad. And they were always hoping to find that intent or those intent signals elsewhere. What happened over the past few years is the evolution of LLMs is now giving those advertisers the ability to unlock intent much earlier and in ways that were not possible before. And then it's on us to go and identify those intent signals and turn them into signals -- into outcomes.

What's important here is not getting -- not being overwhelmed by signals. There's so much data out there. It could be overwhelming. And in many cases, it can turn into noise and not to outcomes. The successful players in this market are able to turn those signals into outcomes. And what I'm going to show is not just a presentation. I'm actually going to show you later a live demo of what we've built and how we're going to go with that to market because it's not just about talking the talk, it's for us walking the walk and being able to show execution in that regard.

The other thing about intent when it comes to traditional search is if you are only focused on the search box at the very last minute of where the user is searching for something very specific, that auction might be too expensive. You might be paying too much for it, and it might be too late. Maybe the user already made a decision between Reebok or Nike. And what we want to do is we want to influence the decision before it happens, in the consideration phase, and that's something that we're able to do by having access to those types of data points.

The other thing that is important to keep in mind is this is not just a story about AI, it's a story about identity. For many years, traditional advertising models were built around persistent identifiers, cookies, mobile ad IDs, triangulation, static audience definitions. And that obviously worked in some ways, but it also created a lot of limitations because a lot of that data was stale. Remco mentioned the example of someone being in the market for buying a car. I could be in the market for buying a car today, but that might not be relevant 2 months from now. So the recency of data, the accuracy of it is super important. When advertisers used all traditional ID-based models, being able to refresh those data sets was limited. And because of that, they were sometimes wasting their money or in many cases, wasting the money because of that.

That entire foundation is under pressure. The opt-in rate of users giving consent keeps going down. There is a lot of pressure around triangulation or fingerprinting in the industry. Apple is one of the leaders of that. They really don't like it, and they're going to continue pushing against it, and that creates a huge opportunity for us. So the question becomes if identifiers are less dependable, how do you still find the right consumers at the right moment with the right message. And that message also depends on the way we present it, and that's the creative aspect that was mentioned earlier.

So our answer to that is we're not going to keep chasing that old model forever. We will obviously continue using IDs when they're available. We're not against it, but you have to evolve beyond that. Our answer is to combine proprietary intent signals from multiple sources, including zero-party data, that's the polling technology that was mentioned earlier. It's the ability to use on-device signals. It's the ability to do AI modeling and to have a privacy-first activation mindset. For many years, Verve has been the market leader when it comes to ID-less. We're not abandoning that. We're going to continue investing in ID-less solutions. In fact, the case study that Dr. Fayyad mentioned earlier with LinkedIn was all based on ID-less solutions that we have, all contextual, and you saw the results. The results were great. And this is not a client that doesn't have access to the best players in the world when it comes to user acquisition. That's LinkedIn. They're owned by Microsoft.

So our ability to perform in an ID-less environment is going to continue being a core part of the way we operate, but we're also augmenting it with signals that were not available before. When it comes to the consumers, they're still signaling exactly what they want. They're not silent. They're just signaling it in different ways. They're not just asking basic questions anymore to AI chats. They're having full conversations with them. They're also in parallel, searching across the web. And we have access to those data points. They're using apps.

When our SDK is integrated into those apps, that gives us a lot of access to understand how users are behaving. They're responding to our polls. So we have the ability to ask someone, are you in the market for buying a car right now? That's a very powerful signal that we get -- that we put together as part of our overall holistic view of the consumer. They are browsing, they're comparing products. We all do that with LLMs. That's one of the biggest use cases out there when it comes to commerce. And there are also -- there are investors in this room. People are now using LLMs to make investment decisions. Now is it the right approach or not? I guess time will tell. But it is becoming a big part of the way consumers interact with LLMs today.

If you are not using a partner that can connect all of those signals that I mentioned, data becomes noise and it becomes noise. And when data becomes noise, advertisers waste budgets. It's like the old John Wanamaker quote, who said 50% of the advertising dollars that they spend are wasted. I just don't know which 50%. That's still relevant today. When it comes to -- I assume some economists in this room -- it's the invisible hand. When you look at what happens to the dollars from the advertiser side to the consumer acquisition or to the outcome, there is still a lot of wastage that is happening in this industry. And we are here to solve that problem by better understanding what users actually want, what are they signaling and turning that into outcomes.

So targeting through broadly is obviously not going to work when you think about outcomes. Optimizing too late is going to result in outcomes that are not necessarily the ones that you're looking for and missing the moments where demand is actually forming is going to result in, again, wasting dollars. And that's obviously, not something that anyone would want. And this is exactly the limitation that Verve is solving. We specialize in capturing and connecting intent across all the signals that I mentioned and then turning that intelligence into audiences and then activating against those audiences and driving the outcomes for clients.

So when people talk about moats, the moat is the ability to do that because some players in the market have limited access. Some will have access to LLM data. Others will have access to search data. Others might have access to polling. But we are the only player in the market that has the ability to have access to all of those signals, connect them and drive the outcomes for our clients.

In this example that you see on the screen here, we're looking at a CPG example. So this is a CPG advertisers selling healthy snacks. The old way of reaching relevant audiences for this brand would involve targeting a broad grocery audience, again, might be a stale list or people that showed interest in similar products and you go and you try to target them. That can work, but it can -- what normally happens is like it's catching users too late in their journey.

What we are doing is, again, going back to all the signals that I mentioned earlier, we're able to identify signals from various sources. So you have from an LLM chat prompt, someone is looking for high-protein vegan snacks. So it's not the direct brand that is being searched for, but it shows that this person might be looking for something that is relevant for this brand. And then we tie those searches with other online searches that this consumer has made on the web. And then we have the ability to go and ask this user, what is your go-to snack in this example.

Lastly, we connect all of that to purchase data. And that goes back to what Raimund said earlier. Your ability to drive outcomes depends on your ability to have access to the right data sets. And in this specific example, it's been able to access purchase data because otherwise, you're not really able to close the loop. The other thing that is interesting when it comes to data is I mentioned noise earlier. Advertisers have access to many dashboards, probably too many dashboards. And what those dashboards normally do is they answer retrospective questions. Why did we spend? What converted? What was the cost per acquisition and which campaigns performed, and which ones did not? Those are important questions. Don't get me wrong, but they're not enough.

I think that the harder questions are the ones that determine the next dollar. Where is demand forming? How does my brand show up in AI conversations? That's a big topic these days. We will talk about GEO. Which competitors are gaining momentum right now? Which audiences are emerging? And what should I do next as an advertiser? Answering those questions are more interesting because they are more forward-looking and not just backward looking. And if you only look at backward-looking data, that's where budgets get wasted. If you're not able to identify intent early enough, the spend will not go a long way when it comes to driving outcomes.

If you over target people that are no longer in market, going back to some of the examples that I mentioned, you optimize towards something that is not going to perform. And the commercial opportunity for Verve is to shift advertisers from backward-looking reporting to forward-looking intelligence, and that's exactly what we're doing. So what I'm going to do next is I'm going to walk you through a few live examples of a platform that we built recently. What it's going to show is how do we read the signals, how do we understand the opportunity as advertisers, and then how do we take those learnings and activate against the audiences that we're creating.

And then lastly, there is the optimization part because again, if you are not able to show the results, the outcomes, the performance, you're not really accomplishing a lot.

All right. So let me just get my glasses on for this. What you're looking at on the screen right now is a new platform that we've built called Verve Intelligence. Verve Intelligence gives us the ability to help advertisers understand how they're doing. When I say how they're doing, I'm referring to many different factors that I'll walk through some and show them the ability to better understand how they can perform. There's something about -- is it a bit blurry for you guys as well? Can we fix the blurriness? Yes, I was wondering if this me...

Let's try again. Okay. So in the meantime, I'll give you some more context on what you're going to see. So basically, if you're a brand that tries to promote a product or a list of products in the market or some services, you're kind of limited with what you can do, especially if you're SMB. What normally happens is SMBs go default to social media, the walled gardens that were mentioned earlier. And that's kind of what prevents you from being able to gain access to more advanced targeting and activation of campaigns.

When we thought about building this product, we try to address exactly that. How do we democratize access to advanced advertising and help indie agencies, mid-tier, smaller tier agencies gain access to more advanced advertising. I see the screen flickering. And the idea behind it was exactly to follow what I just mentioned, which is help brands identify the market, the market opportunity, intent signals and then turn that into activation in a single self-service platform.

That's going to help us not only better serve our clients, it will also allow us to unlock new revenue streams that otherwise would not be unlocked. Because when you think about it, yes, we are working on building a bigger sales team that will give us better coverage of the market, especially in North America, where I was telling someone outside anecdotally, the person who is covering Canada for us, they currently lives in Florida. And obviously, that's something that we need to address by having a bigger sales team.

But we won't be able to serve all 4,000 agencies in the U.S. just with hiring sellers in every single market. We will obviously focus on the more important markets when we determine our sales growth strategy. But there will be parts of the market that would benefit from using a self-service platform like this where seller interaction is not necessarily needed. So that's a big part of our growth. The other aspect that I will mention is, should I -- the other aspect I'll mention is -- when it comes to the performance, some of the agencies that I mentioned, in the SMB, et cetera, they are not -- they don't always have the right tools in order to be able to perform.

And in order to help them be successful, we need to make sure that the platform that we're building is helping them show up with their clients and perform for their clients in ways that they don't currently have access to. When I think about our positioning right now in the market in terms of product, in terms of the team, the quality of the team, I've been with this company for almost 12 years now, 2 years with Verve. It's the strongest product offering we've ever had and the strongest team we've ever had. So I'm very bullish about what we're going to do next in terms of conviction in our ability to win in the market.

So going back to the demo, it's always risky to do a live demo, but it looks like we now have it running. What you're looking at is Verve Intelligence. What you see in the top is basically a list of verticals that we all operate in. And in the example I'm going to show you, I actually want to look at a very current relevant vertical, which is gyms and fitness. Obviously, summer is coming. So everyone needs to shape up. And the smart gyms will need to make sure that they are winning market share.

So in this example, it's a made-up gym brand that we're promoting. What they are looking at when they start using Verve Intelligence is basically understanding of the consumers that they're working with in terms of what are they searching for in both traditional search and LLM and sales data because, again, think about, like, intent that drive outcomes. So if you don't have visibility to both parts, both sides of the spectrum, you're not really accomplishing a lot. So I won't go through every single aspect of this tool, but I think you'll get the point fairly quickly.

So I'm able to see -- if you look at the top brands in fitness in the U.S. in this example, who is winning when it comes to share of search, when it comes to share of LLM prompts because, again, like how brands show up in LLMs is super important these days. Giving advertisers this type of visibility is unique and will help them understand how can they win in the market? How do they need to show up in those types of conversations. What's also interesting is like when you think about a gym brand, normally what happens is like January comes, everyone has a New Year's resolution and they want to get in shape.

What's interesting, what we see in the data is that you might want to actually start your advertising in December when the intent is forming because if you wait until January, then you're competing with everyone else that is spending dollars right now to acquire users. And again, it might be too late. Maybe the consumer already made a decision around which gym they we were going to go with. So given brands those types of visibility is really helpful. Then there are lots of other factors, brands for scorecards, what are consumers actually looking for? Is it goals? Is it training?

I'll give you an example, like someone might be looking for comparing between Pilates and something else, and that's where the intent is forming and traditional search would not use that to go and find that consumer or like target that consumer, and that might be a good idea for the advertisers that we're talking about here. There are lots of other factors here. Obviously, geo plays a big role. You cannot assume that the interest in fitness is the same in every single place in the U.S. or even within specific states or cities.

Where it gets interesting is what I mentioned earlier. So you have all these insights as a brand, you're able to review your competition, you're able to understand how do you show up against your competitors and whatnot. But what do you do with that? You don't want that data to just exist in strategy decks that don't really lead to anything. What this platform allows you to do is to take those insights, to take these audiences and then activate against them immediately.

Now what I'm going to show you next is -- I selected a few random segments, and then I'm able to go and queue them up for activation. What I just showed you normally would take days, if not weeks, to figure out, and we're able to do that in just a few minutes. The next part is the activation part. And that's also something that used to take a long time to set up, and we're able to do that in minutes. Every campaign starts with a brief. So the advertiser will come to you and say, "Look, I have $30,000 to spend. I am going to try to target these types of audiences in these geos and these are the flight dates of the campaign." Obviously, there's a lot of back and forth. You make recommendations. And once everything is agreed on, the campaign goes live and there is optimization that will happen.

We are changing all of that, and we're making this process much faster and easier. So what I'm going to do now is, I'm going to -- we just landed on the ad manager, an advertiser will have a view of how they're performing. And if they want to launch a new campaign, they would click new campaign here. And then they're able to upload the media brief aspect that I just mentioned. So I'll select Forge Fitness, media brief. Open it. What's happening now is our ad platform took that media brief and created a campaign already. So all the different aspects that you see here in terms of like the campaign, the target KPIs, what's the cost per acquisition goal, et cetera, those were -- the budgets, those were all taken from the media brief that I just uploaded. So the advertiser is able to do that very quickly.

The audiences that are selected here are from the media brief, but we don't want to just rely on what's the media brief. In the media brief. We actually want to add the audiences that I just created that I showed you. So I'm clicking gear to add these audiences that I just created and then they will be added to this campaign. I scroll down, the creative is already there. And then this section here around frequency cap needs some input. So the AI engine, so I have an AI assistant on the right that you can see, is giving me a recommendation, I trust AI, so I'm going to say yes. And it selected front-loading for the spend. And then I go to the next screen. It will show me some -- the budget allocation that was done based on the brief, and then it will give me some recommendations.

So it's very common that whatever is put in the brief is not really going to be the best approach in terms of optimizing the campaign. So I can either accept or dismiss. I can also ask questions around why a certain recommendation was made. I'll skip that for now and move on to the next page. Then I get a campaign summary. And once I'm good with this, all the settings, I'm able to launch that campaign. So at this point, the campaign is launched. It's actually Q3, so it's queued. And what I just showed you, again, used to take days, if not weeks, and we're able to do that in minutes. So this campaign that I just created is queued, but I have a campaign that has been running for Q2 that I'll click on.

This gives me a summary of the campaign that was previously launched. I'm able to like look at metrics, how is it doing, for how long has it been running. It looks like I'm doing very well in terms of the cost per acquisition target. So we're lower than the target. And then I'm able to also view what kind of changes, what kind of optimizations were made to the campaign. Now one of the challenges working with AI platforms is, in many cases, there are black boxes. You're not able to understand if changes were made, why they were made and what was the outcome of those changes.

We are solving for that black box here. So basically, for every change that was made, it's telling me if it was AI generated or if I made a manual change. And then for anything that I'm not fully sure about, I can ask AI why a certain change was made to get better visibility into how the company is performing. So that's it in a nutshell for the demo. We can go back to the deck. I think that the important aspect to keep in mind from this demo is; a, our ability to, again, understand the signals, use them, then drive intelligence and deliver outcomes; and b, the reduction of friction. So your ability to run campaigns efficiently using a platform like this will lead to many efficiencies in terms of how many people do we need in order to support campaign execution and also the driving of the outcomes, which are super critical for advertisers.

And with that, just as a recap, the future of advertising will not be won by companies with scale. Scale is important. That's table stakes. If you don't have scale, you won't accomplish a lot. It will be done -- it will be won by companies that understand intent earlier, activate it faster and prove the outcome. That is where Verve is building. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Mishel.

You're staying here on stage. Exactly. So click, please. So that is the end of our tech session. That means we're moving into the next Q&A session. Correctly, perfectly. Raimund, please come on stage.

This Q&A session will now focus on the expert session we just heard, so on retail media, predictive targeting and the broader themes around signals, data and outcomes. As before, if anybody would like to ask a question, please raise your hand and one of our mic runners will come over to you. Perfect. Then we got the first one -- and for the online audience, please type your questions into the chat. I will get them directly on my display. Please go ahead.

Great. Laura Martin from Needham. Really interesting product. Is the business model charging a separate data fee for this? Or is it only available through the DSP and you're sort of upcharging on the cost per 1,000 by using all this proprietary data?

So every campaign that we sell has a data component to it. And based on the data sources that we would use, we would price it accordingly. We have different rate cards based on the outcome that we need to drive. Obviously, running a healthcare campaign will involve different execution than running a CPG campaign. So we take all of those factors into account when we decide on pricing.

Is the pricing the take rate or the pricing is like a monthly subscription?

So it depends on the product. So like for managed service, it will be a full pricing that will be delivered. For PMPs, if you activate programmatically, you're able to define a cost per thousand impressions as part of the deal creation. And for DSP, it could be a combination of take rate plus data feed.

Okay. And then I was surprised in the video. My last question, you had a camera scanning a woman in a store. That feels highly invasive. Can you bring that kind of non-permissioned assessment to America?

So first of all, it's not a camera, it's a sensor. That device does not store any information. That device only stores the information of group composition, sociodemographics. It is, by definition, an anonymous pseudonymized device. And yes, there's legal assessments for, I believe, 49 states as of now. But I have to add, we are working with different sensor partners. We don't need to work with that one. We can work with other ones. There's also CCTV cameras that are used by some of our major hardware partners deployed in the U.S. that are already extracting that social demographic information and not making use of it today, but we would be able to access that information. So the key is the difference between the sensor and the camera is that a sensor does not store the image information. So it's noninvasive. It is really much less than the CCTV cameras we have all over the stores actually storing the image information.

Great. Herman, please go ahead.

This is a cynical question now, Mishel. With the software you have developed converting -- I call this instinct data into actions, which means the high speed of converting it to a salable campaign, should the productivity of the sales force not go up dramatically because they have now at a fingertip the data and the demos and the examples, which really means that the onboarding, which we are doing here, that we are spending this EUR 10 million, get these people onboarded and so on. It's a thought I would like to leave with you is should the productivity targets not be higher?

But the question I have is actually a different one is -- where is the value? The value, as our professor has highlighted is data. He said, "The only investment-grade asset is data." That's what was said. So what we are selling in the campaign is data. The technology we have converting what our learnings by gathering the data into actionable campaigns is a software, which I believe others can replicate or others can build as well and it's not really the asset. So to me, the growth relates to how can we scale the data gathering? And how can we differentiate from a data gathering relative to the peers? And what is your strategy to make our data gathering better than the competition?

Yes. So a big part of what we've built over the past few months was exactly that, ensuring that we have access to the right data sources that allow us to build those audiences in the holistic way that I presented. That's an ongoing thing. It's like it's never done. For example, our next phase is going to involve running ads in LLMs themselves, and that will also give us more data around how users are interacting even more than what we have right now. So it is going to be an evolving thing. I agree with you that having access to data is super important, but the execution of what do you do with that data is equally important.

And I think that we are uniquely positioned because we have access to all these different data points that others do not have access to or cannot combine in the way that we do in order to create differentiation in the market. Just to refer to your comment about productivity, it is a big part of what we're doing as a company right now. AI efficiencies is something that we spend a lot of time on. We just had our AI demo day last week on Thursday. And this is a constant thing that we're pushing in the organization.

So just as a clarification also, data being the only investment class asset, I was talking about within the AI equation. If you're talking about the setting, let's say, of serving ads, there's a huge value to figuring out how to do integration, how to work with existing systems, how to integrate with the right publishers. So that's a different equation.

Great. Matt, please.

Maybe just one for Mishel, and apologies if I didn't quite grasp this in the presentation. But I'm just trying to better understand how you effectively unify all these disparate data sources. If you think about the search intent data that you've acquired from Captify, the LLM data, basically, like how do you connect those to formulate the audiences in a privacy compliant manner?

Yes. So in general, in advertising, if you have access to IDs, you normally use an ID graph, and we have an ID graph that we use internally. If you're looking at ID-less, ID-less could involve contextual signals, where is the user, the location, which app they're using, lots of other contextual signals that you can use. And what's important or what's interesting is what can you derive from other users that you saw that you have access to their data about a certain outcome in a way where -- if you get those signals elsewhere, you're still able to make a prediction that, that consumer is going to do something that the advertiser wants. So being able to operate in both ID-less and ID-based is super important in these types of applications.

Thank you. Any other questions here from the room? Then I would say, Simon, we turn to an open question from earlier. So we had a question earlier on the metrics of retail media. What are unit economics? How could take rates look like? What's the typical campaign size? And like overall, a general picture on margin without getting too specific, please?

Yes. I'll try to do that. And I mean, a lot of this information is public in general on retail media. So typical campaign sizes of in-store retail media range anywhere between 20,000 and 200,000. That is the regular ranges we have been seeing as well. That is in line with what some of the competitors, the retailers are running. I have built a large retail media network before with Schwarz Group, the owner of Lidl and Kaufland, and that was in line to what I saw there as well.

Generally, how we sell this is in bundles. So the trade marketing manager would receive a different activation bundle that would be screens, would be some upper funnel activity, would be the passes you saw, the wallet passes all the way down to checkout couponing. Now for media manager within a brand, the story is a bit different. It starts at the upper funnel. It's more CTV mobile-based. And then really goes down to the individual store to the redemption as a proof point and the receipt data as a proof point. So that is how we built this.

Take rates, typically, if you look at competition in that market are between 20% and 30% that are typical take rates. However, if you look at the story with and without data, if you research the typical CPM of digital out-of-home campaigns within a store, you'll find that the CPMs are rather low. But what we've also seen in the industry as soon as this is combined with data, CPMs fivefold, tenfold. It's up to $30, up to $80 CPM rates, which we're seeing in-store data, actual receipt data combined in-store. And there's, yes, ample of public examples available for that.

But what I believe that we build is really a coherent story for the brand, touching all parts of the customer journey and adding data to all of the points. And by the way, this is a coherent platform that we are building on to. So to your question before, can be sensors? Can be no sensors? Can be extensive receipt data? Can be store level data? So that's how flexible we are. And obviously, pricing and willingness to pay of advertisers changes as more data is added. In the end, it's a data play.

Great. Maybe to elaborate a bit on that. On the international expansion, of course, the U.S. market, you said it before, is one of the most interesting markets in the future for us. What would you consider the main differences between Germany and the U.S. in a potential rollout? And also from size and pace, it took us 10 months to do that in Germany. Does it take 5x longer in the U.S.? Or is it possible at effectively similar rate?

So internally, we are super ambitious. So we set high goals. We -- and these goals I'm not going to communicate here publicly. But what you can imagine is that we are far ahead in terms of negotiations with partners. We are far ahead in terms of actually having this platform. You saw what Mishel and his team built as a platform. Obviously, you can connect the dots, all of this eventually comes together into one comprehensive understanding of consumers.

So comparing the U.S. retail market to German retail market, what I tell U.S. retail is often what you see in Germany may be your future in 1 or 2 years ahead in terms of margin compression, private label brands and so on. So -- but the markets are very similar, very comparable. I've worked extensively in retail in both markets. There is not that much of a difference in both markets really.

Great. Thanks. Any more questions from the room here? No. Then we've got another online question. To Mishel here probably, we're seeing increasing regulatory pressure on Google and with that potentially more regulatory pressure on digital advertising in general. How could this increased pressure Verve and how might it affect our revenue streams?

I see it as an opportunity. Being able to run a platform that was built from an infrastructure as ID-less gives us a lot of flexibility when it comes to being able to perform for our clients even with all the regulation that exists out there. I think that the key is what I was kind of alluding to earlier, being able to make the prediction, the best prediction you can make with data that is available to you. And that's something that we've built over the years, and we'll need to continue building and capitalizing on as we proceed.

As Remco mentioned earlier, every year, there is something new, like the breaking of the cookie, wars, tariffs, we have to be resilient and expect that there will be curveballs thrown at us at any given year, and our ability to execute and deal with those types of situations is critical.

Great. Thanks. And then looking at the time, maybe the last question to Usama. Yes, talking about machine learning. So it looks like one of the main differentiators in artificial intelligence will be machine learning. Training new models here appears to be much more time consuming than training large language models. How could a new entrant in the market reduce that advantage of well-established players by using new technology or significantly higher financial resources?

Higher financial resources. So what I would say, first of all, is a couple of things. Number one is you don't have to use the expensive models. You can use the cheaper models. We use, for example, in our projects, a lot of the Chinese models that happen to be very reduced versions of the big models and very effective.

On the machine learning, not everything is an LLM, not everything requires generative AI. The reality is, I know the market is obsessed with generative AI. Most applications of AI in the market are predictive AI kind of traditional machine learning models. Those are super cheap, like too cheap. The hard part is getting the data right and understanding the representation, like figuring out what is the opportunity in the market, how do we model it, and how do we manage kind of this early signal about leads, et cetera.

And that's where the AI models, predictive and generative can help a lot in terms of coming up with strategies for -- how do you nurture a lead? If I know somebody is not going to buy a car for another 2 years, what is it that I want to show them now, right? Or 6 months before or a week before.

Great. Thanks. I would say those are great final words. So thank you all from my side also to the audience. We're coming to the next part now, a warm applause, please, for our Q&A. So we're coming to the closing remarks. Again, thank you, Usama. Thank you, Raimund. Thank you, Mishel, and thanks, everybody, for their questions.

Before I hand back to Remco for the official closing remarks, let me add a few final words from my side as well. A Capital Markets Day is always a moment to zoom out from the quarter-to-quarter noise and to look at the architecture of a business. The market we operate in, the capabilities that we are building and the outcomes we believe we can produce. We hope that today's session has given you a clearer picture on Verve commercially, financially and technologically. So most importantly, we appreciate the time you have invested in us today, the dialogue with us and your direct questions. This really means a lot to me and to our whole team.

With that, Remco, let me hand it back to you for the final closing remarks.

Thank you very much. Yes, Capital Markets Day is for us, it's once a year, and it's always a good kind of point in time to realize the progress we're making as a company. And I'm really proud of the team, the presentations that we saw today, not only the presenters, the whole team actually, but I think it's really good to show what this company is building, is doing. And yes, we are, as I mentioned before, work in progress, which is never a good sale to investors, I know. But this company has a ton of potential, and I see a lot of stuff coming together that we have been building on in the last years. And what you saw here or what we presented, scaled access, that's important. scale is not making you win, but scale is a necessity.

Vertically integrated, efficient with tools that now also go towards advertisers, which go even into stores. So really getting a full integration, vertical integration from the consumer to the advertiser and the other way around. Depth of data, a lot of talk was about data. Data is key. Data is core. Data is an asset, and we have a ton of it. But you need to use it. It's about targeting, measuring outcomes, closed loops. Those things we have been building in the last years via acquisitions, via organic growth and really building all those pillars, and they're now coming together. And that should further result in further growth. I mean we've actually shown good growth in the last years, and we will continue to really show good growth in the future. I enjoy working here.

We are building the trusted alternative to walled gardens, as we say, that delivers business outcomes at scale. So we have a lot of brainstorming about what is the real essence, what are we really going for. But it's basically without having your own walled garden, curating the open Internet. There's tons of publishers out there that all have more and more problems monetizing their inventory. And if we can bundle them to our own open walled garden -- wrong word -- then we really have a big chance of being very successful here.

So we have strong momentum. We're ready to further grow. Organic investments, organic growth is the key. AI is key, data is key, a lot of things are key. But for the rest, it's also a lot of it is about execution and the team. And that's, I think, a very important point here. Without the team, we would not be able to do this. I'm super proud that part of the team is here. And we're looking forward to continue. We hope you like the company. We hope we were able to really give you some more feeling about the company, some more depth about the company. And I'm looking forward to the next Capital Markets Day. Thank you all very much.

Good morning to our guests joining from America and a warm welcome as well to everybody joining us from Europe. My name is Ingo Middelmenne, Head of Investor Relations of Verve Group. I'm pleased to welcome you to our Q1 2026 earnings call. [Operator Instructions] As usual, we have prepared a presentation to provide you with some additional insight and transparency on our performance in the last quarter. After the presentation, we will, of course, take the time to answer your question. Please note that the entire call, including the Q&A session will be recorded and made available publicly on our website after the call. If you have already a question in mind, feel free to queue at any time during the call by clicking the Q&A button. With that, I'm handing you over to our CEO, Remco Westermann, to guide you through the first part of today's call. Remco, please go ahead.

Thank you, Ingo. Dear investors and listen other stakeholders. I would like to welcome you to the presentation of the first quarter 2026. As usual, I will present the headlines and the latest developments, followed by Christian, our CFO, who will present the financials. Let me start with the presentation. Q1 was a good quarter with solid organic growth, a smoothly running platform and investments in further growth that are already starting to show positive results. I will now present our financial headlines. Merch Christian will cover this in more detail in his part of the presentation. Q1 had a like-for-like overall growth of 3.7%, reaching EUR 137.2 million, with underlying 6.4% organic growth and 6.9% nonorganic growth, we showed good growth numbers. But by far, the majority of our revenues in U.S. dollars, we had to overcome the foreign exchange headwinds with 9.6% in the first quarter.

Go to the second point. Looking into the underlying KPIs, our client base remains strong. Our net dollar retention rate was lower at 90%, showing that old customers base was overall spending less based on, amongst other impacts from customers of our latest acquisitions and optimizations of lower-margin customers. that we were able to generate more revenues was based on the strong overall customer growth, adding 9% of new customers. Number three, based on efficiency from our unified platform and the use of AI, we were able to show a continued improved pro item at 41%. Number four, we continued our investments into adding additional sales force and sector focus. This led to higher cost and as a result of 2.2% lower EBITDA.

Number five, after a weak cash generation in Q4, we had a very strong cash generation in Q1 with cash flow from operations reaching EUR 45 million. And the last point on this slide, based on expansion of our business, efficiency uplift from AI, allocation optimizations and yields of our investments we confirm our full year 2026 guidance. Please speak to the next page. Now getting to our position as a leading mobile ad tech company. via our ad tech platform, we are connecting advertisers with publishers. Mobile represents 93% of our revenues out of that InApp is approximately 95%.

We remain heavily North America and especially U.S. focused with 74% of our revenues in that region. The advantage of that is, it's the largest advertising market of the -- its largest advertising market worldwide with a low scale opportunities. There is, however, on this advantage, the U.S. dollar corus our reporting in euros, which we'll later cover in the presentation. We work with well over 1,100 software clients. Those are clients with over $100,000 of revenues per year. We have over 65,000 app integrations. We serve over 2.5 billion consumers. And we are one of the largest platforms in the market with 1.2 trillion at delivered in the last 12 months.

Coming to the next page. Jumping into the headline overview of our revenue, gross margin and EBITDA development, and I'm covering headlines. Christian will do the details. Net revenue increased year-on-year, 4% and reaching EUR 137 million for Q1 2026, taking into account, as I mentioned before already, the 9.6% year-on-year negative currency effect from a much weaker U.S. dollar, we are happy with this number, especially taking into account that last year, Q1 was also a very strong quarter. Our profit margin has structurally improved based on optimizations and improvements following our platform unification, but while profit gross profit margin was up by 2.7%. Our adjusted EBITDA was down by EUR 2 million, respectively, [indiscernible] lower than last year, which is based on our increased cost base based on our investments in our sales team buildup and the retail media area as we mentioned, but also impacted by the U.S. dollar because more of our costs are in euros. And the majority, as mentioned already, the revenue is in dollars.

Coming to our main underlying KPIs. We were able to increase our ad impressions to 25% versus Q1 last year, and we're even able to keep it at the same level as Q4 last year. This, while Q4 seasonality wise is the strongest quarter, but Q1 is the weakest quarter 1. Our net dollar retention rate, the graph on the left bottom side for the quarter is 90%. The net dollar retention rate shows how revenues of the customers from Q1 last year developed versus Q1 this year. The lower percentage versus previous year results largely from new acquisitions as well as from optimizations of low-margin customers. Our revenue growth came from adding new customers. And as you can see on the upper right side, while the large over USD 100,000 per year customer number was stable, we were able to increase our total number of customers by 34%. And while we came new customers, we are also showing a very good retention rate of 98%, also in line with previous quarters. which is on the loyalty of our customers and approved for delivering good results.

Now getting to a selection of some further key indicators. We continue to remain our strategic focus on engineering product and AI. While in the past years, we focused on underlying -- sorry, on unifying our platforms, we now benefit from strong, stable and scalable platform. We are, however, still working on migrating the last bits of traffic. Related to CTV, we still have to do 2% of the migration. So 98% of our traffic now of our revenues have been migrated up from 96% in end of Q4. We are further continuing our focus on growing and improving our ideal solutions. While Androids is still relaxed on privacy, Apple, which has approximately 50% of the market in the U.S. [indiscernible] the application of its identifiers. We were able to grow our iOS revenues year-on-year by 24%.

Also, we continue our strategic focus on commerce and market expansion. We have been growing our clients by 34%. On the supply side, we are connecting more and scaling our publishers and on the demand side, which is becoming more substantial, but still smaller than our supply side. We are further increasing the number of [indiscernible] entities. There's a lot more growth potential in the U.S. market with over 4,000 agencies, big holdcos and many data customers. For this reason, we decided to increase our sales team as communicated earlier. We were able to more than double our sales team, growing it by 117%. [indiscernible] a strong strategic focus on efficiency and financial where we also are seeing good progress. Our gross margin improved by 2.7% and our interest coverage improved to 4.5x.

Coming to the next page, going more into detail with regards to the main events on the commercial side. Starting with the first bullet point here, we accomplished a unified work for advertisers. All demand side offerings are now under one umbrella, uniting June Group Gaptify, Ferrand on Agency as well as data set DSP. The joint offering is strong and combining the strengths also makes us more efficient. Number two, we are making good progress with our improved marketplace. After unification focuses now on optimizing margin management data and AI-based targeting effectiveness as well as pruning less efficient and low margin supply. We are also focusing on further future development of our STK solutions.

As we released earlier in the press release, we are creating a strong moat with integrating LLM signals into our targeting. We are the first open market ad platform that is activating conversational intent from lean and combining it with other data such as first search intent, so party and Adelis data. We're also further working on expanding our leading privacy-first position. We're focusing on product development and proven performance. And as published earlier, linked in validated first privacy-first performance and was extremely happy with 38% lower CPIs and 39% lower cost per activation. We're doubling down on Retail Media. While Retail Media and CPG already were a focus segment for work. We are now extending our focus on this segment. We have been able to establish a first closed-loop offering at scale in Germany. We're linking mobile advertising with retail in-store advertising and with point-of-sale purchase data. We are now ready to expand our offering into other markets, including the U.S.

In Q1, we also further focused on increasing organizational efficiency. On one hand, by focusing on our investments into the opportunities like us and Retail Media and on the other hand, by streamlining operations and creating efficiencies based on strong implementation of AI. A few words about the markets. We experienced a resilient U.S. market. While we see shorter agency booking cycles and some isolated middle East and travel-related negative effects, the overall U.S. market is stable. On the margin side, we see stable net margins in line with user seasonality. However, CTP margins are under pressure.

Coming to the next page. Yes, we are pursuing a relocation to Ireland that has been communicated earlier. We see this as a strategic move to align were with our global ad tech peers, and we think this is a big opportunity. Why are we doing this? Or what are the reasons for this? First of all, Ireland is an EU-based -- sorry, it's an EU common domicile. This enables for us to align its constitutional framework with international technology and advertising peers particularly in the U.S., while remaining within the European Union, so getting the best of both world. Ireland enables us to report in U.S. dollars instead of euros. As I mentioned before, the, let's say, the weak U.S. dollar is really showing -- yes, showing our euro revenues a lot lower than the effect we would have been able to show in dollars.

So reporting in U.S. dollars better reflects the global nature of the digital advertising improves comparability with peers and could materially reduce our foreign exchange volatility and reported results. We are currently evaluating this option. Ireland will also enable greater capital market flexibility. It would increase our accessibility for international investors, but it also creates the optionality for Verve to do a future direct U.S. listing. This is currently under evaluation, no decision or time line has been established so far. And important to mention, there will be no operational disruption. The relocation relates only to the registered office and the corporate dollar sale, first operational footprint, existing listings, bonds, shares remains unaffected.

With our strong U.S. focus and the majority of our revenues in the U.S., we believe that the relocation to islet represents a big opportunity for Verve and its shareholders. For the redomiciliation, we need approval from the AGM, which is planned for June 5. Then I'm getting into the AI topic, which is discussed everywhere at the moment. Yes, consumer behavior is undergoing a structural change. LRM start eliminating the middle web at [indiscernible] app traffic. There's a strong disruption in the market. AI overviews on search page results lead to a sharp decrease of click converts to the open web. So web owners see a lot less clicks on the pages. Also, traditional search volumes are dropping, being partly replaced by AI chatbots commercial agents. In the meanwhile, we have seen increased usage of special interest apps, amongst others, avoiding AI-generated noise.

Open web is losing its role as primary discovery layer traffic is heading into 2 distinct layers, and we show them here. The AI insulin layer, quick factual and information grades are resolved within the LLM zeroing basically. The special interest app layer, high-intent transactional utility-driven fast, they mitigate 2 dedicated apps. Verve is well positioned to profit from this disruption with our strong in acquisition. And with our strong position, we can profit from in-app deep utility mode as we show you. It's about tooling and integrating a functionality. It's about verified branded environment. it's about proprietary real-time data and live inventory signals that they cannot grow. And it's about first-party data community features that create high in-app customer retention. The changes based on AI are a big opportunity for growth.

I would like to also put focus on our receivables securitization program. We have shown part of this slide also before and as mentioned earlier, our strategic priority is working capital management. For that, our receivable securitization program plays an important role to bridge the gap between typical 90-day advertiser payments to us while we paid publishers after 45 days. While we did not optimally use this program in our last quarter, in Q1, we had a strong focus on it. We are able to return to the optimal levels and secured a maximum amount of EUR 100 million. Overall, this helped our store cash flow momentum.

In Q1, we generated an operational cash flow of EUR 45.2 million, which is significantly up from last year. That's brings me to the point where I hand over to Christian for the next slide.

Thank you very much, Remco. Yes. Coming to the financial performance of Q1. I think the 3 headlines of the performances. We see accelerating organic growth, reaching 6.4%. This quarter was really a turning point in our operational cash flow generation, where we've generated EUR 45.2 million. Whereas we saw also that EBITDA profits and margin are impacted by the planned strategic investment phase. I will now dig into some of the details of those headlines. So on this slide, combining kind of our key highlights for the quarter. If we first focus on revenue, you'll see we booked EUR 137 million in revenues for Q1. That should be compared to EUR 132 million for Q1 last year and resembles 3.7% like-for-like revenue growth. I think Q1, in terms of FX headwinds was quite extraordinary. We -- depreciation of the U.S. dollar meant that we had currency translation headwinds of 9.6 percentage points. So of course, you need to isolate that factor out to see what is the actual organic growth, and we come to a number of 6.4% when we normalize for currency translation and for M&A.

That's actually a slight acceleration from Q4 where we noted 5.3 percentage points and really marks a return to growth if you go back and look at the Q2 and Q3 the past year where we were more challenged on the top line. So it's very comforting to see kind of the acceleration continue. I also want to remind you that when you look at the quarter results for this quarter, keep in mind that Q1 last year was our strongest growth quarter with 16% growth. And therefore, it's a bit of a more tough comparable. This will change a bit going into Q2. On the adjusted EBITDA, we booked EUR 28 million for the quarter. That is granted EUR 1.9 million lower than we had in the comparable quarter last year.

And I want to mention here, there's a couple of dynamics going on. Firstly, we are actually looking quite a lot around our -- on our cost structure and our efficiencies and doing different initiatives to optimize our overall efficiency. We did that already from August last year and continued into Q1. But we have also made a dedicated commitment to invest in the amount of EUR 10 million for expansion this year that covers both and by mainly sales force expansion in the U.S. but also some investments in retail media and we're committed to do that. And therefore, you will see a drag on our quarterly performance here in terms of profits and also our margin, which lands at 20.6%.

And -- we should expect that we will continue to have a drag going into Q2 and then a reversal as we go into second half of the year. As I mentioned, one of the highlights of this quarter is the operating cash flow generation, which equated to EUR 45.2 million, and that compares to EUR 300,000 for the comparable quarter in 2025. And -- this was comprised of EUR 11.5 million of operating cash flow before net working capital and then a contribution from net working capital of EUR 33.7 million. We continue to invest in our product and development at the level of EUR 10.2 million, which is roughly the level that we have seen in previous quarters.

Turning now to gross profit margin, which is a key KPI indicator for the business. We're very pleased to see that the structural lift we saw in gross profit margin in Q4 has carried into Q1. You will see here in the dotted box, all Q1 numbers, and we landed at 41% gross profit margin, which is 2.7 percentage points up compared to same quarter last year. We look at it and should compare it on a quarter within a quarter year-on-year as there are significant seasonal effects that can influence the different quarters. So that's why these it's important to look at and compare quarters. The contributing factors were mainly the same, as I mentioned and went through in some detail last time. So we have clearly a better structural margin optimization possibilities with the unified platform.

And we are also doing a better job in optimizing our infrastructure cost and cloud hosting costs. The addition and new part is that we are actually using quite some effort to go through and look at our more low-margin inventory and ad requests and look at the long tail and are there any of the a request and the inventory that we can kind of prune out to give us overall better profitability. So we're using quite some effort to do that this quarter and also next quarter.

Turning then to operating cash flow, which really was a reversal of the situation that we saw in Q4 last year. On the left-hand side, you see the development in our operating cash flow. We had, on an LTM basis for March, we had operating cash flow before net working capital of EUR 105 million and after net working capital of EUR 94 million. And this is actually good because the 2 bars are roughly equaling out, which means we are in a balanced situation. On an LTM basis, we therefore invested EUR 11 million in net working capital compared to operating cash flow before net working capital. And that's a good situation to be in. You will also see that it's in stark contrast to the balance that we saw end of 2025. And it's really a result of better utilization of our securitization, but primarily also all the money that we have built up from high season in Q4 that is coming in now in Q1. As we guided and referred to, we see the money coming in and it's a very good picture for the cash flow development.

In terms of CapEx, we have repeatedly said that we are -- we need roughly between EUR 40 million to EUR 45 million. It's quite stable over the time for investment in our expansion and maintenance CapEx. We estimate that we will be using something in the same vicinity in 2026, which is the gray area here in the stack bar. And then we have acquisition CapEx totaling EUR 34 million, now this is acquisition CapEx for existing M&A, so companies we've already bought June Group Ocado, Vivento, we have EUR 34 million this year. EUR 23.8 million of those have already been paid out to in the last deferred payment for June Group. And what is remaining is deferred payments for Ocado and Vivento in October tolling EUR 9.9 million. So all in all, that will sum up to around EUR 74 million to EUR 79 million as an estimate for the year. so slightly below what we saw in 2025 and significantly basically half of what we saw in 2024.

Digging a bit more into our cash position because there's a number of dynamics going on. And I thought it would be helpful for -- to show some of the key dynamics in our development in our cash position. You'll note that we have improved our cash position quite significantly between the EUR 89 million that we ended 2025, and also compared to where we ended Q1, which was EUR 147.2 million. So EUR 58.2 million increase. I think both would also expect quite an increase because we did a further tap on the bond. Nominal EUR 50 million in net proceeds. You can see here that it brought in EUR 48.2 million. Then we actually also work quite hard to increase our utilization of our securitization program, which brought in EUR 17.8 million in funding. We had interest rate -- interest payments on the bond totaling EUR 7.8 million, which is a minus and then a deferred payment to [indiscernible] Group of EUR 23.8 million for the final payment which leaves a change in operational cash position of EUR 23.8 million.

So a quite nice development. And again, we saw the money that we had built out in Q4 come in, and this is very helpful for the situation. We are now in a situation where we are utilizing the [indiscernible] almost fully and by that, we are therefore also correcting for the macro utilization in Q3 and Q4 last year. I'm also happy to report that we have just received approval to add 2 operating units further to the securitization program. We will be -- it takes a bit of time to migrate because customers need to pay into new bank accounts, and you have to get customers used to that, but that will help us also going forward as we grow some of these businesses.

And then ending on the last slide on the financial update, touching on balance sheet structure for the company. You can see here adjusted leverage ratio here on the left, largely unchanged. We -- from 3x to 3.1x, we had a net interest-bearing debt of EUR 448 million. It's also largely unchanged since the end of 2025. We did, as I mentioned, have slightly lower adjusted EBITDA for the quarter compared to last year. And therefore, you see a slight uptick in the net leverage ratio to 3.1x. Overall, being at the level of 3x or thereabouts, is a result of mainly acquisition-driven debt that we've taken on board to do the acquisitions through 2025 and also back to '24.

It's encouraging to see that our interest coverage ratio is increasing. It's increased from 4.3x to 4.5x, and this is because we refinanced the bond overall in better terms. And that is now getting a full year effect as it rolls out -- it rolls out, we did the bond in Q1 last year, and therefore, we're now getting the full effect of the better terms into our interest rate costs. For those that are interested in interest rate exposure, I can say that we do and might be thinking about if interest rates would increase. We actually have a hedge on EUR 300 million out of the EUR 550 million nominal value of the bond. So EUR 300 million is fixed with -- through an interest rate swap. And thereby, we think we have a balanced hedge versus any spikes in interest rate coverage.

So with the financial performance that we see good uptick in growth -- on organic growth, but also a very encouraging level of gross profit margins and with cash to fund our investments for the year. We are comfortably affirming our outlook for 2026 and so that means revenues in the range of EUR 680 million to EUR 730 million and adjusted EBITDA from EUR 145 million to EUR 175 million. I should perhaps mentioned that we recently -- very recently announced the expansion of our Retail Media business and that expansion is, so to say, not included in this guidance. We have not updated the guidance for any significant expansion initiative in that sort also because it's too early to include it in the form of guidance, but I just wanted to make that clear. And with that, I hand over to Remco for the closing remarks.

Thank you, Christian. That brings me indeed to the last page of the presentation. Yes, Feras shown strong growth in the past years with revenue and EBITDA CAGRs cost consistently over 30%, and we are now building the next phase of our scalable growth. And Q1 confirms our strong platform foundation, target investment priorities and disciplined execution. That brings me to the 3 pillars that we've shown here, first of all, to start with our skilled platform economics. Our unified platform keeps performing flawlessly, supporting scalable growth better than ever. We have managed to get a sustainable structural gross margin uplift, which confirms our improved operating leverage. And we are using the potential of AI to enhance our bidding and bring targeting and efficiency with data signal debt on an hold new level. We also continue to expand our commercial positions, expanding our sales team is well on its way and proceeding as planned. While ramping up takes time and requires a pre-invest, the expansion target of future revenue conversion.

Our sector focus on Retail Media adds a strong targeting and metering mode. The substantial CPG and retail advertising market, we achieved our growth -- we achieved our proven concept and are now ready for further growing our position. And furthermore, our focus on idealist targeting gives us a strong moat as well as our integrated tech stack with data and AI at scale. And last but not least, a strong focus on cash generation, we continue our organic growth path with improved margins. This delivers a strong basis despite FX headwinds, and we are significantly improving our cash flow with liquidity providing flexibility for future growth. Our H1 sales force and retail media investment phase will translate into increased revenues in the coming quarters.

Further positive effects will come from organizational focus and AI-based infrastructure and team cost savings. So that brings me to the final sentence of the presentation, with our performance unified scalable platform, we are now opening the next growth chapter of work, further focusing on building and extending our USPs such as Adelis and LLM based targeting. Our sector-focused offerings such as Retail Media and CPGs and not to forget our strong position as one of the leading mobile in-app exchanges with proprietary data assets and an extensive network of demand and supply partners. I would hand back to Ingo for the questions.

Great. Thank you, Remco. And thanks to the both of you for your presentations. So we will now move into the Q&A session. [Operator Instructions] The first question now comes from Mat weber, our analyst from Canaccord Genuity. Matt, please go ahead.

1 Great. Can you hear me?

Yes. Loud and clear.

Awesome. Appreciate all the color this morning. I just wanted to ask about the new retail media offering. How should we think about the timing of bringing that to new markets. And then more specifically sort of on the building blocks of bringing that to new markets. Do they change materially based on sort of the composition of and retailers, just thinking about, say, in the U.S. where you have several large kind of dominating big box retailers. So just any additional color you could provide there? And then I have a follow-up. .

Yes, we can take that question. Thank you, Matt, for your question. Good question. We built a position in Germany in 10 months' time, which was, let's say, faster than I ever expected. We hired a great manager for that coming from one of the larger discount retailers actually in Germany and started really building the network. We had several challenges because we didn't want to make it asset heavy because that's not our business. It's for us, it's about data, it's we're targeting and it's, of course, we're showing the ads, which we were able to do and build different building blocks. Let's say, the 2 acquisitions were part -- or there were 2 part acquisitions part of that, 1 more with, let's say, in screen in retail and the other one with couponing and the rest was built via partnerships organically, et cetera.

With that, we have really been showing good results for retailers, increasing their revenues as well as for CPGs, where we really are able to lift market shares, which is super important. And we've been able to -- and that was also in the press release to build a quite extensive network of retailers in Germany with Erica raw, which are the 2 large quality retailers but also Mulatogary, which is in [indiscernible], for example, and Confland. So really built a nice network and are seeing extremely good results. And it's very nice to see that we couple our mobile capabilities and we are able with the mobile to drive people to store and have already a lot of data and then in-store are able to influence purchasing behaviors and then are able to prove that it works on the point-of-sale level.

So that's on the German market. So that's what we're now starting to scale. And we are, let's say, looking at the U.S. market, of course, where we have a strong position on mobile and which would be the obvious next market to go into. We are running tests there already, but it's too early to, let's say, to get results or even to include it now in our numbers forecast. But U.S. is certainly one of the markets, also some European markets we're looking into. But we still have enough to do us in Germany to really scale there. So I hope that answers your question.

Got it. Yes, that's very helpful. And then just on the guidance reiteration, just given some of the comments you provided around shorter agency booking cycles. Are the underlying components of your guidance still or assumptions, I should say, still the same as last quarter in terms of high single-digit market growth. And then at least 5 percentage points of share gains? Or are you -- have you -- have those assumptions been updated at all?

Yes, good question. We are still standing, as mentioned, with our guidance, so we don't see any reason to change things. I mean things have maybe changed in details, but not substantially. So we are further taking...

Great. Thanks for your question, Matt. Are there any further questions? [Operator Instructions] There is a question coming in from the chat now. Please, can you confirm the amount drawn on your receivable securitization facility at the end of 2025 and the end of Q1 2026. Thank you. For questions. Christian, you need to unmute yourself?

Yes, I was on mute. Yes. So we have now drawn the securitization facility almost to the max. So a couple of million from the EUR 100 million that is our total frame is what we have drawn by end of Q1. And I believe the draw was in the where it's roughly -- if you look at the bridge that I sent to you, we've drawn roughly EUR 17.8 million more than we had drawn at the point in time end of Q4.

Thank you, Christian. So I think that answers the question. And the next question is a live question coming from Olof from Oksut Olof, please go ahead.

Can you hear me?

Yes. Yes, we can.

Just one very simple question. I'm glad about the free cash flow. -- that after the suboptimal usage of the securitization, basically, customers paid in the money there. The question in hand for me following that is I understand the leverage ratio prohibits you from buying back shares, but the bond, which you increased by EUR 50 million, is at about 92%, 93% as -- so are you going to use that cash that now has been on hand by customers just paying instead of securitization to buy back that EUR 50 million at a discount, which you increased before. I mean I understood it's about 3.5% in costs by the issuance, but at the levels right now that would at least be offset to basically bring down the leverage ratio.

Yes, do you want -- should I take that? So we don't have any imminent plans of buyback of the bonds, it is a possibility and we don't want to rule it out. But on the her hand, we also -- we took on board the extra bond funding to have the financial means to really invest and also withstand should there be any troubles in the market. And that's really what the money is planned for. So no immediate plans in that direction, although I would not rule it out.

Thanks, Olaf. And there is another question coming in from the chat from Bharat from Canteras general. What's the structural EBITDA margin for the DSP segment once Captify/Acado are fully integrated and the sales force investment annualizes. Is the 20% to 30% the right range for the full year 2027 and afterwards or does the mix shift to lower-margin data/retail media assets, permanently reset DSP margins lower.

Can you hear me?

Yes. Yes, we can. .

Happy to take that. As we are working -- thanks for the question, and it's a good question, but a little bit more difficult to answer. -- as we are, let's say, running as much DSP activities or as much demand activities, let me say it in that way. On our supply, we cannot talk about a separate, let's say, demand EBITDA and a separate supply EBITDA. But if I look at overall EBITDA or on margin, there are a few things that play a role there. First of all, of course, our investments. If we are investing in more salespeople, that are not immediately, let's say, generating revenues or let alone margin. That is, of course, let's say, gains going against our EBITDA percentage, everything basically that we ramp up that accounts for. On the other hand, we have, let's say, possibilities to further -- apart from the investments coming with -- I'm sorry, revenues coming with the investments, we have, of course, the possibility to further optimize costs, and we have some really good examples of that already.

With AI, you can automate processes a lot better. As an example, media plans that are made on the demand side, they took 1.5, 2 days for a single person to do that. Now with well trade AI, it on purpose. You can do that with some, I would say, feedback and optimization looks, you can do that in a few hours, so less than 2 offers actually. So we see efficiencies that, first of all, enables us to grow without adding extra people for that. But on the other hand, also allows us, of course, to do gain efficiencies with that. Same is, let's say, now with the unified platform with improving our AI, we can save on infrastructure cost.

So there's a lot of things where we still have potential to decrease our cost and on the other hand, of course, by scaling itself, we also get better because the gross margin, as you have seen, is up, and we actually think that we have further room there. That means that, let's say, overall, we will get more -- yes, more profitable and that our EBITDA margin will go up. With -- if you look historically because we had to change our I'd say, revenue recognition because of the migration, it looks lower now the EBITDA margin than it was before and of course, a lower revenue base. But overall, we are confident that we will further be able to increase our EBITDA percentage. So sorry, no answer, but I hope it answers your question.

Thanks for Ramco. So I think we've got to come back to receivables questions. So there was the -- no, I think we answered that. That's fine. The next question comes from Vincent Atom from Part securities via the chat. Reasonable to assume growth and gross margin gains in Q2 will be offset by OpEx investments leaving EBITDA at similar levels as Q2 last year?

Yes, I can answer that one. We're not giving individual guidance on quarters to just say that. But what we expect, yes, we will further, how to say, invest in the salespeople, et cetera. But of course, if you look at a normal development, the ones that we have hired in Q1 are already last year, of course, start to generate more and more money because maybe to show the cycle, if you get a new seller, we hire experienced sellers who have done sales before. They are not always take old customers, of course, but they can, let's say, bring new customers in and it takes time with a new customer to scale the customer.

So in that sense, we expect Q2 to how to say it, already to start showing a bit of that, but the main effect of it will be in the second half year. Q2 so far also has not a strong dollar to euro negative effect for us. So that also should help -- so yes, we are looking forward to, let's say, staying within our guidance for this year. I think that's the best I can say overall, but there is a positive trend in the whole business.

Also just add to that question. I think it's better to think about Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4 in the light of the guidance we have given. -- given that when you look compare back in time to Q2 and Q3 last year, the business was impacted by the platform unification. So I would recommend to more look around the our guidance and how that would lease out through the quarters.

Thanks, Christian. So the next question also comes via the chat from Axel Johan and also from Pareto Securities and probably goes back to Remco on the market. Ad volumes grew a lot in Q1, but revenue growth lagged somewhat behind, how do you currently view pricing CPM dynamics? And are you seeing any pricing pressure?

Thank you for the question. Yes, as in the presentation, we see that CPMs in certain parts of the market, especially connected TV, but also in web under pressure. We don't see that effect on the, let's say, in-app side, but I have to mention 1 important point that is seasonality. So CPMs are always lower in Q1 than in Q2 than in Q3 and Q4 as the highest that has to do with the demand. There is more demand in Q4 than there is in the earlier quarters. And so as a result of that, it's a simple supply-demand mix thing. So if there's less demand and supply is similar, then of course, you get lower CPMs. So that explains maybe a bit of that effect. We're also working on some optimizations in it.

On top of it, there is, as you saw, our Asia part has increased also as a percentage of our total revenues. Asia in general also works with a bit lower than the U.S. does. So that is -- in the end, it's a mixed combination. I would say that but observation is correct. Our delivery increased faster than our revenue.

Thank you, Remco. So again, are there any further questions for the moment. [Operator Instructions] So it seems there are no further questions at this time. Thank you very much again for participating in this Q&A session. Should any additional questions come to your mind later, please do not hesitate to reach out to the Investor Relations team. With this, we have reached the end of today's call. Thank you for joining us and have a productive rest of the week, and we look forward to staying in touch with you soon. Bye-bye.

Welcome to the Platform Summit. So this second session is dedicated to the Verve Group SE, and I would like to welcome CEO, Remco Westermann, who will give us some insights about Verve's platform business, followed by a Q&A session. And with that, we're excited, and I hand over to you, Remco.

Thank you very much. I'm happy to be here. Yes, I would like to present the company and then afterwards, of course, give time for questions, I would start. I would go to the first page, give an overview of what we do or what our focus is. Let me start with our mission. Let's make media better. We think that in advertising, which is our core market, there is still a lot of money wasted that can be spent a lot better. And that's the reason that we have, let's say, are running this company and see a lot of potential in further growing it and helping advertisers to spend their budgets better as well as help publishers to monetize their inventory better.

So that's the first one of our, let's say, core focuses is really enabling better outcomes for advertisers and publishers. With responsible advertising solutions, as mentioned, there's a lot broken in this segment. Therefore, there's a lot of other things happening. IDs are disappearing. So in that sense, we focus on making it really, yes, quality, good, effective advertising. And then we're focusing on emerging channels. There's a lot of channels where you can advertise, a lot of traditional channels like Linear TV, for example. But we're focusing on the channels where really eyeballs, where people are moving, which is mobile primarily. So we're very strong in in-app, but also CTV is one of our focus points.

Coming to the next page. Yes, a bit of history. I started the company 13 years ago by acquiring a company from a subsidiary from Axel Springer, gamigo it was called, or still is called, sorry to say. Since then, we had a pretty nice development of the company, I would say, which I'm also proud of and really thankful with the great team that I have. So we started with a roll-up in game publishing, then we decided to go public. And as a public company, you need to show organic growth. Organic growth as a gaming company is super difficult.

So we pivoted the company, and that was the reason that we renamed it to Media and Games Invest. We pivoted the company to advertising. We started that. And now, let's say, 6 years later, yes, we are an advertising company. We're successful. We have a CAGR -- revenue CAGR of 30%, an EBITDA CAGR of 36%, as you see here. So we really, yes, growing very nicely and happy with that and a lot more potential to go.

Then on the next page, a bit more in detail what we are doing. On the left side, you see the advertiser. It's basically the advertiser that spends a budget on ads to sell products, to get its brand more known, which in the end also leads to selling products or to have other targets with the advertising. Then on the right side, you have the publisher. The publisher has its content. And on the content, there's, of course, advertising slots to make money or to enable the publisher to really run its business. We have contracts with those publishers. We technically integrated with the publishers. And at the moment, when you, for example, open a page, there's an ad on that page, and while you're opening the page, we get the signal because we technically integrated. We get some data with it, the size of the ad, for example, maybe a cookie, then we enrich it with data as much as we can. If there's a cookie, we can build a profile on it.

And based on that profile, we send it then to the advertisers that we think that are suitable for it or that are most interested in it. And then there's a bidding process, highest bidder wins. So the advertiser is also technically connected with us or its agency. Highest bidder wins. When we have the highest bid, we render the ad and we show it at that space. So we have less than 100 milliseconds to do that because otherwise you would have an empty ad space that would not be good for anybody. And in that sense, that's the process.

We serve 1 billion ads -- 1 trillion ads, sorry, per day -- sorry, per year. I'm saying it wrong. And I'm calling in from America. It's still a bit early here. Sorry for that. So yes, we do a lot of ads and there's a lot of technology involved. And that's maybe important to say, we are a technology platform, we are a technology company. So you don't see us. We are the ones in the background that help the advertiser to spend its money in the best way and help the publisher to monetize its inventory in the best way.

Go to the next page. A bit about the value chain. So as already mentioned, you have the brands, the advertiser, then you have the agency. And then if you look at the money flow, it goes first to the demand side platform, which helps the advertiser, then you have the marketplace where the auction process takes place, and then you have the supply side platform where the publisher is connected. And then you have the publisher and, of course, the consumer behind it. In the end, an advertiser wants to reach the consumer, and this is the process in between. The process in the middle is often very inefficient with a lot of parties being involved.

We are really big believer in making this much more efficient and having everything under one roof. So having the whole technology under one roof. That, of course, yes, makes a lot more possible. And you see below the money stream, so there's $100 that's, for example, the -- is being spent on media by the agency and on behalf of the advertiser. Typically, 20% of that goes to the demand side platform, 20% to the supply side and 10% for data and matching. So 50% of that goes to the publisher. That can be done more efficient. That means that everybody profits, and that's what we are aiming for with the company.

Go to the next page. A bit of a profile of the company. Now, we work for advertisers and publishers. Ideally, every dollar or every euro that comes in from an advertiser, we run on supply where we directly integrated. That's not yet the case. So there's much more efficiency to gain there. We're now roughly on 1/3 on the demand side, so the advertiser side and 2/3 on the supply side. Ideally, we go to 50-50, but we're growing both sides. And so I cannot say when exactly we'll be there, but that's what we're striving for. Then geographically, yes, we are domiciled in Sweden, in Stockholm. We have already announced that we will be relocating to Ireland. That gives us a bit more opportunities to maybe in the future do a direct U.S. listing. Also, let's say, we are reporting euros, which is -- and as you see here, 76% of our revenues is in U.S., is in dollars, and 12% in Europe and 12% rest of the world. But with, let's say, doing our business in dollars with a weak dollar, we, of course, always showing a bit less in euros than what's really happening on our revenue side.

And then below, I mentioned this early in the presentation, 95% of our revenue is mobile. That's where you have an individual person behind it because all the other screens, TV, et cetera, there's always more people, family looking in there. So we are super happy to be on the mobile side. Most of that is in-app, over 90% of that. And 5% is other, including also connected TV as the bigger part there. Yes, over 1,000 large software clients. It's customers doing more than $100,000 of revenue per year with us. We're integrated in over 65,000 apps. So that's where we serve the ads, reach over 2.5 billion consumers, and as mentioned before, 1.1 trillion yearly ad impressions that we are serving. So where we win it and where we also make the money. We only make money at the moment we win an auction and we serve the ad, then we take a certain percentage, as mentioned before, the 20% for the DSP, for example, for the service that we do.

Go to the next page. How do we differentiate? Because it's a big market where there's a lot of parties also acting. As a European company, we saw very early in the phase that IDs are, let's say, disappearing. Apple is asking, do you give consent that your data are being used? 80% of the people statistically says no to that, and that means that the publisher has problems to sell inventory where there's no ID or no okay for the ID, those people don't know who they are targeting for. And that also advertisers normally don't like to buy that because they don't know who they target. We have developed various ways to cope with that, various technologies. And there's big advantage if you do this in a proper way.

So you buy the inventory cheaper because otherwise they don't sell it. Our performance without IDs is almost as good as it is with an ID. And it has to do -- we built also on the contextual web profiles. We know what the intent is. Search intent, for example, is important. Are people looking for a car? What make of car? We integrated with LLMs, for example. And with those data, we're really able to target people in a very nice way. But overall, let's say, ID-less targeting leads to very good efficiency, and that's one of the reasons that we're growing faster than the market with this company, that we're really strong in this part of the business. We are also able to target with IDs, but this is really where we differentiate the company.

Go to the next page. AI is very important in our business. And I don't know if you saw, but we also issued a press release today, and that's maybe not such a good or nice moment, but we let go quite some people this morning, roughly 50 employees that we let go. Yes, we see, let's say, a few things. First of all, our business has focused more on the U.S., so Germany is less of importance than that. But also, we see that with AI, we're really gaining a lot of efficiencies in this company and more to come. So in the future, we will, let's say, have less personnel in relation to our revenues. And that is partly reduction of revenues -- sorry, reduction of personnel, but partially also further, of course, growing or let's say, that should be the majority growing our revenues.

So what do we use AI for? One, in our core bidding process. Who do we send the request to? What kind of price do we put in there? ATOM has mentioned there that, let's say, an Anonymized Targeting On Mobile device, which we're really good at, as mentioned before, the ID-less targeting. So that's all things where we use AI for targeting purposes, so for our core process. But we also unlock a lot of efficiencies with, for example, the regional sales efficiencies. We have, how to say, really optimized our sales teams. And we see that we get, yes, 10x more efficiency per seller if you really automate around the person everything.

And yes, there's also disruption that's based on AI. With AI, we can build a lot of cool tools for advertisers that really help us to help them much better and also get more part or bigger part of the value chain. So those are a few examples. Because of time, I won't go in every detail, but yes, AI is super important for us. There's different tools, and it's really, yes, how to say it, fascinating and great how fast this is developing. I think it's the biggest disruption that the world's going through since quite some time, and the disruption is very fast. If we see how tools like, for example, a Claude are developing and each next version is so much better. So we see really a lot of efficiency gains. And yes, in my view, we are only at the start of that.

Going to the next page, talk a bit about numbers. The conservative outlook. We did some acquisitions last year. We had last year in 2025, we had also some issues by doing the platform integration. Company is running really smoothly. We're still investing a lot. That's also to be said, but we're expecting EUR 680 million to EUR 730 million of revenues for 2026 with EUR 145 million to EUR 175 million EBITDA. We are saving money, as said before, with AI, probably more than we, let's say, expected that we would be doing. But let's see how we continue there.

But also, we further investing. There's over 4,000 midsized agencies in the U.S. So we're further building up our sales teams because talking to people, meeting people, that's something that AI doesn't do. So in that sense, we are really making sure that the good product that we have, that we can better sell that. As mentioned before, the U.S. dollar-euro relation is, of course, important, so we put that at a certain fixed point because that's very difficult to project, of course. But yes, important point here.

Then going to the next page, online -- all the financials, everything is, of course, online available. This is because of the short session and pretty short presentation. So only going through the headlines here. Then coming to the key investment highlights. Why should you invest in this company or why are we a cool company? Yes, we have built in 6 years really a leading ad tech platform. We're one of the top 20, top 30, depends a bit on the definition, platforms in this market, which is called the open internet. So outside of the Googles, Amazons and the walled gardens, which is in the U.S. an estimated 130 billion market, still with a lot of parties in there. We are strong in the privacy-first advertising, as already mentioned.

But just going through the different points, we have built strong position in this fast-growing overall market, but especially in the market segments that are the fastest growing, which is mobile in-app. Then privacy first, mentioned that first-mover advantage, we really see that our investments in this are really paying off. End-to-end, as already mentioned, cutting the middleman, making sure that you have more transparency by doing the technology on both sides, demand side and supply side, which case makes just the whole thing more efficient. But even more important, you can really have much more transparency in it for both of the sides.

Then attractive financials, proven M&A, as mentioned already before, strong revenue CAGR, strong EBITDA CAGR. And we're running a combination between organic and nonorganic. We did over 40 successful acquisitions overall and are further looking carefully around us. We have leverages on the high side, so at the moment more into really focusing on organic growth. But there are also opportunities that we might take in the future. Short term, it's really focused on organic growth and seeing that we bring this company further and continue our strong growth path. Near-term catalysts, valuation discount to quality. I mean the share prices for mid-cap, small caps are not great or the valuations are not great.

We're looking into changing our domicile. We're also discussing or looking into changing our reporting into U.S. dollars, which would make us much more comparable to our U.S. peers. There's almost no peers in Europe. So in that sense, that makes it much more relevant, especially having 75% of our revenues there. And I would invite you all, of course, to participate in our Capital Markets Day, which will be for the first time in the U.S. We will do it in New York and looking forward to that. But participation is, of course, possible in person but also digital. That brings me to the end of the presentation and to the possibility to ask questions.

Thank you so much for your presentation, Remco. So ladies and gentlemen, we are now happy to take your questions if you have. [Operator Instructions] So with that, let's take a look. By now, we have no virtual hands and no questions, so it seems Remco explained everything very clear. But maybe a question pops up or a topic what you're interested in.

And then we have the first question from [ Mr. Sterner ]. So he would like to know, you have a target for 150 sellers in 2026. How many do you have right now?

That's a very good question, and I don't have the answer here. I mean we're tracking this number, but we are good on the way. We are, let's say -- I don't have the exact number, but we are roughly halfway now. And maybe an explanation to that, it's difficult to hire sellers in Q1 because people get their bonuses or their commissions from last year. So at the moment, we have an extremely well-filled pipeline. So the number now is maybe, let's say, 50% doesn't sound too much yet.

But there's a lot of, let's say, sellers in the pipeline. And this Q2, Q3 are very important quarters to really hire the people. You want to hire good sellers, and good sellers get commissions. And yes, we understand that they don't want to leave that or let it go by switching jobs in Q1. But we have a well-filled pipeline and are confident that we are going to meet that number. But as already also earlier said, maybe to add to that, adding sellers doesn't mean that you're immediately making money. The problem is that it needs to ramp up.

And we see really that, let's say, good sellers sometimes start making their own salary or earning their salary back after 6 months, but it's more safe to go from 12 to 18 months. And also some sellers just -- even though we have a strong selection process, don't function as well as we would like them to. So we need to let them go and then you need to replace them and start all over again.

But yes, as mentioned, we do this because there's a lot of agencies in the U.S. and you need to meet them to talk to them. And even though we build efficiencies in part of our processes, the real human contact to an agency is still required, still needed, and therefore we also didn't change that target. I hope that answers the question. Thank you for asking it.

And in the meantime, we received the second question in our chat. So [ Mr. Jacobi ] wants to know what were the reasons you decided to move to Ireland instead of Germany. Mainly taxes?

The reason that we decided to move to Ireland, thanks for the question. Yes, we originally started as a German company, then we moved to Malta. That was, let's say, for investors not so much liked, but that was the way we did the listing. It was some kind of reverse listing. That's the reason we went to Sweden from Malta. In Sweden, however, we have one big difficulty that you cannot do a direct listing in the U.S., and that's the same problem actually from Germany. If you want to have real shares in the U.S., there's only a few countries in Europe that allow that. One of them is Ireland.

And we also had to look at the current listings that we have in Europe, which is Sweden and Germany listings that we want to keep. And with those, let's say, there is only -- that's even further limiting the number of countries where you can go to, and that's the reason we came to Ireland. So Ireland has the big advantage that you can report in dollars, that you can do a direct listing in the U.S. and still keep all the advantages that you have in Europe. Taxes was not one of the reasons, and even though we, of course, tax-checked, that taxes is not an issue here.

Maybe Remco, if I may add something. This is Ingo Middelmenne, Head of Investor Relations. So if you look at the landscape in Europe, basically having a full listing in the U.S. at the same time as multiple full listings in Europe is only possible for a couple of months, actually. So Euroclear came out with the news about a year ago that this is possible, and we're actually the first company to maybe proceed with the full listing. And of course, if you relocate the company to fulfill a full dollar reporting with the potential to also show U.S. GAAP reporting, then the possibility of a full U.S. listing is, of course, has been one of the keys to doing this decision. So the main reason is really the settlement possibilities of the orders, which is currently only possible from Europe.

And then we have a follow-up. So the question is, but do you expect a change in tax rate from the move?

Thanks for the question. No, we don't expect a change in tax rates. We probably have some advantage from that. We don't expect -- let me rephrase it. We don't expect a negative effect from it. We most likely will have some positive effect.

And now I do not see any further questions. So ladies and gentlemen, if there's anything you're interested about, just let us know. But it seems everything appears to be answered.

So with that, we would come to the end of this Platform Summit slot. Thank you very much for your interest in Verve, and I wish you all a lovely remaining day. And Remco, I hand back once again to you for some final remarks.

Yes. Thank you very much and thank you all for participating in this call. And if there's more questions, we are, of course, happy to answer them. I hope I was able to really show what this company is doing, how strong we are. And I know it's not always easy for investors because there's not many comparable companies like this in Europe. And what we're doing is special, especially also this ID-less targeting. But it's a big market. It has a lot of potential. And yes, we enjoy doing it. And now with AI, as already mentioned, we have a lot of possibilities, additional possibilities to further grow this company. So I'm enjoying it a lot. And I'm at the moment actually in Miami. We are at a big advertising fair here, and we'll go to the meetings here. So thank you all very much, and happy to talk also individually, of course.

Thank you. Bye-bye.

Good morning to our guests in America and also a warm welcome to our participants in Europe. My name is Ingo Middelmenne, Head of Investor Relations at Verve Group. And I'm pleased to welcome you to our Q4 2025 earnings call.

As you can see, we are using our new conferencing platform again today. This system allows our private investors to join the session live in a listen-only mode.

[Operator Instructions]

We have a pretty solid and successful fourth quarter behind us with our KPIs and gross margin significantly improving. As usual, we have prepared a presentation for you to provide you with some additional insight to increase transparency for you. After this presentation, we will, of course, take the time to answer your questions. Please be reminded that the entire call, including the Q&A session, will be recorded and will be made available publicly on our website following this call. If you already have a question in mind, feel free to queue up at any time during the call by clicking the Q&A button.

Now I'm handing you over to our CEO, Remco Westermann, to guide you through the first part of today's call. Remco, the stage is yours.

Thank you, Ingo. And also from my side, happy welcome to investors, analysts, and other stakeholders to our presentation of the fourth quarter. I would start with our highlights of the quarter.

If we look at what happened in this quarter, we just put it in six bullets here. And I think one is making me at least very happy, and that is that our platform is really done, the unified platform, we unified in-app, and we saw in Q2 and Q3, let's say, the negatives of that, which showed a lower revenue and also issues with our customers and higher costs. We are past that. So what we now see is a structurally improved platform with stability, scalability, and efficiency. That's a good basis for further growth.

Then partly based on that, but also on further measures and AI, we were able to increase our gross margin substantially. So in Q4, we had a 44.6% gross margin versus 36.6% in Q3. A bit of it is seasonality because Q4 is always the strongest, but a lot of it is also improvements that we were able to make in the company.

Then number three, I'm very happy to see that our customers or reported our customers were growing, customer base was growing. Our software clients grew with 6.8% quarter-on-quarter. Our large clients grew by 5.3%, large clients being the ones with doing over $100,000 of revenues per year. Yes, investment of sales team is starting to pay off.

Then number four, our net debt increased to EUR 445.9 million, based on our accretive acquisitions of Captify and acardo. And we also had an increase of net working capital, which Christian will cover later in the presentation. Our leverage slightly reduced quarter-on-quarter to 3.0, and our cash interest conversion ratio significantly improved to 4.3.

Then point number five, we put a stronger focus on liquidity management in 2026. So points 5 and 6 are more referring to our 2026. We want to get a stronger cash. We want -- are targeting substantial reduction of our gross impact of net working capital and a significant improvement of the cash conversion overall.

Number six, the guidance 2026, which we already published with our preliminary numbers, has a robust safety margin in it. We are investing in sales. We don't know exactly when the inflection point is. It takes 9 to 15 months for a seller to really start making money instead of costing money. So in that sense, we put a certain safety margin in there, but I'll cover that later in the presentation.

A bit of an overview about the company. Yes, we have been able to build a leading mobile adtech company in the last years. On the left side, you see the split of revenues over the different channels. So mobile, 95% of our revenues. And within that, 95% is in-app. And then U.S., a very important market for us.

U.S. is the largest advertising market in the world. We have a good position there and 76% of our revenues is U.S.-based, 12% Europe, 12% rest of the world. Having such a strong U.S. base, and I'll come to that later also, means that we are mostly based -- our revenue is mostly based on dollars, while we report in euros. That's at the moment not great because we have, of course, headwinds because of the dollar.

On the right side, a bit of an overview of some main KPIs. So over 1,000 large software clients, clients doing more than $1,000 per year, over 65,000 app integrations, over 2.5 billion consumers that we reach. And the last number, I especially want to emphasize, we did in the last 12 months, 1.1 trillion ad impressions that we delivered. So that's a huge amount. And also keep in mind that we are matching advertiser and publisher. But to make sure that people don't see an empty advertising slot, we have to do this matching in less than 100 milliseconds. So we served all those ad impressions with a lot of technology behind it to really make it work.

Coming to the next page, a bit of overview on the main financial KPIs, and Christian will cover them more in detail later. I would start with net revenue. We'll not go into detail now about the, let's say, revenue recognition. That's what we already covered earlier. But happy to see that we did a 10% like-for-like revenue increase if you take year-on-year.

On the gross margin, as already mentioned, yes, we were able to take a larger part of the money, basically, as a gross margin. Important to do that because that gives us more bandwidth, of course, to do investments. And we did investments, and that's what you see in the adjusted EBITDA. That was stable versus last year. Yes, we are investing in sales force. And also keep in mind, the U.S. dollar really changed quite a bit versus last year.

The fourth KPI also already covered earlier presentations. Ideally, we would like to have a dollar demand going also on the dollar supply, so 50-50 which were a year ago, a 22% demand versus 78% supply. We were now able to increase that to 32%. So our demand part really has become a substantial part of the revenues of the business, and we're further planning to grow that.

Coming to main customer KPIs on this page, starting on the left upper side. We are making money with ad impression. So we are only paid if an ad impression is shown, if it's really one, if the auction is won. There is seasonality in the year, as we see, but we were able to increase our ad impressions 13% year-on-year. So a very nice driver of revenue growth.

Then on the bottom, the net dollar expansion rate, which is showing how customers that were there a year ago in the same quarter, so in Q4, how their revenue developed versus that quarter a year ago. Q4 2024 was very strong with 110%, so 10% more than the year before. That was an exceptional strong quarter with a lot of political spend, a lot of, yes, good momentum in the market. Then Q2, Q3 were weak, that were the quarters where we had issues with our platform unification and where because of that also customers spend less on our platform, but we see very nicely that we are getting out of that now with the 92% and as those 2 quarters will be in for 12 months, it will take a bit, but we see a very nice line up going trend.

Software clients on the right upper side. Also there, we see a good increase where Q3, the increase was also due to the acquisitions we did. In Q4, we really see an organic increase, which is, yes, showing good momentum in customer onboarding. Q2, Q3 were hindered also by the platform unification. That's done now.

So also here, we are able to onboard customers faster and are also doing that. And a customer onboarded today is, of course, revenue for tomorrow, so very important. And while onboarding customers is, of course, important to not lose customers. And as you see on the right side on the bottom, we had an exceptionally high retention rate in Q4 2025. We are always very high on the retention rate, but with the 99%, we really do extremely well. Customers are happy, and we are able to also work with them, scale them and keep them.

Yes, this presentation, we made a bit of a change also in the slides. We wanted to focus a bit also on where are we strategically focusing at. And I would like to start with commerce and market expansion. After the platform unification, we now have a strong, stable, and scalable platform. And that means that we now need to further grow our supply and demand to strengthen our market leader position.

On the supply side, we are connecting and scaling more app publishers, as already shown before, is our strongest part, and there's still many app publishers to go, also some large ones that we are still missing, where we're now talking to. And we're also further improving our other supply, CTV, retail media, digital audio. Having that supply is super important because that drives also the demand, of course.

On the demand side, that has now become substantial, as mentioned before. But also there, we have a lot to do. We are further increasing the sales, so the number of sellers that we have. We were able to increase the sales force by 68% year-on-year. So that's showing that we are really investing there. But it's also -- you see it on the number, our demand sales grew by 61%. So that's, of course, going hand in hand.

Why are we extended in sales? Why is it so important? There's over 4,000 agencies in the U.S., and many more customers behind it. So if we want to do business with them, and we have good products, but we need to talk to them, of course, and we need to contract them and to really get into a mode where they start to scale. So for that, we need people.

Sellers are not immediately making their money. It typically takes 9 to 15 months until they start yielding. And also not every seller is good. So typically, after 4 to 6 months, we also have to let go some and start again. So this is where we plan a 10 million investment for 2026, to cover these costs for further growth, but we will see the effects in the next years, and we are actually already seeing the effect from the sellers that we got in, in the last year.

Then some achievements. Yes, demand side grew 61%, as already mentioned. We brought all our demand activities under one brand. So we're now acting as Verve for Advertisers, including Captify already. Then increasing sector focus and specialization. We see that it really yields -- if you're focusing on a sector like, for example, retail CPGs with more sector focus, you get even more budgets. And other focus sectors are, for example, tech companies, media companies and podcast, we've seen really good results as well.

Then coming to the next strategic focus point, which is engineering product and AI. Now if you look at the development of where we engaged our engineers in the past years, there was a lot of focus on unifying the platforms. The features had to be built before you could migrate, before you could integrate. So a lot of efforts went into that. That's mostly done. 96% of our revenues are now migrated to a single platform. CTV is still to grow or actually, we are working on it. It's a lot smaller, and we expect it to be finished by mid of the year. We don't expect the negative things that we saw in Q2 and Q3 on the big integration that we did on in-app.

The good thing about having done most of the integrations now is that it has freed up a lot of development resources. So we were able to reduce costs, but we were also able to focus people on different things.

Main focus now is on AI and targeting. So improving our ID-less solutions, we are strong in that. We have really built a moat on that. And consumers are demanding clarity on data. 97% of consumers clearly want that. And on the other hand, we see players like Apple enforcing it. So we're super happy to show that we're really strong in that. And also, you see it -- I can see it in the numbers, 31% growth on iPhone iOS. That's the part of the market. 50% of the market share of phones in the U.S. is iPhone. And yes, a lot of people don't get the consent over 80%, and that's the part where we thrive and where we really can grow.

Then further improvements, we're continuously focusing on getting more and better data, the Captify acquisition with getting search intent data was one. But we're also working now with LLMs, for example, to get search data from LLMs, making good progress there. Then we are merging ID-less with ID-based solutions. Part of the market will keep IDs. Part of the people will say they don't have a problem with being tracked. So it's for us important to also cover that segment. We mostly did it by working with partners in the past, but we're now building more and more capabilities on, that also in-house and especially on merging the 2 technologies.

Yes, we are moving from tracking to prediction. It's nice to track, but it's even better to predict results, and that's what we're doing with our partners, which will also yield more revenues.

AI, super important always for us, for the platform because you cannot match in demand and supply less than 100 milliseconds manually. You need to have AI for that. But AI is getting more and more important. AI is disrupting. LLM technology, for example, we are using to make life of agencies and customers easier and to automate part of their tasks, but also helping us, of course, to vertically integrate forward. And of course, for further platform efficiency with a cooperation with Google, where we do neural network technology and our platform still has a lot of room to improve on margins, on pricing and on matching. So very important that we further focus or keep our strategic focus on engineering, product, and AI.

Then the third focus area, strategic focus area is efficiency and financial. Operational excellence is super important, unifying the teams, AI to drive better productivity, building a lean and efficient structure, but also keeping in mind, it's people we're working with, so company culture and team motivation are super important. We just had our top 50 together in Madrid. And that was really great to see how the team is developing, how -- yes, good cooperation is in the team. And don't forget, we have acquired several companies. So this is really a melting pot of cultures and super happy to see that that's going very well.

Then focus on finances and especially cash generation. Margin expansion, super important, of course. I mentioned it before, the improvement in the margin, then leveraging and streamlining our cost base, AI-based improvements playing a big role there. Attention at our costs, we are further working with, yes, offshoring, for example, in India, where we have a big team in Bangalore. We do a lot of business in the U.S., but having all the costs in the U.S. would, from a dollar perspective, be better, but it's so much more expensive, and we are so much more efficient if we do that in other areas.

Then last point also here, cash generation already mentioned before, we are really aware that we need to generate more cash. We want to do that. We want to keep investing, but we are also working on improving the cash generation. Smart working capital management is part of that and improving, of course, our interest rate coverage where we see already results with the 4.3 versus the 3.3.

Talking about working capital and cash optimizations. Verve has a receivable securitization program, which we installed a while ago. And why do we do that? Because we are in a business where advertisers, agencies pay after 90 days, whereas the supply side is paid after 45 days. That means we have a 45-day cash gap. In the past quarters, we have mostly been very good in, compensating that by using this program, the securitization program. We can go up to 100 million. We still have a bit of room in it, but it also means that companies that we included in the group need to be enabled for that. That takes time. We do the program. We work together with Finacity, which is a very experienced party in this field and the NORD/LB, which is also a strong bank in this area.

The cost of this is super low actually, with the 3-month Euribor plus 2%. So it's a very nice way of getting money paid earlier that otherwise, I'd say, the advertiser would pay us much later. It has a good risk component on it. But it's not only about bringing money forward, it's also having a competitive advantage out of this, Liquidity as a Moat. We have the possibility to sometimes pay a partner a bit faster or to let the supply side pay a bit later. That gives us the possibility to also get stronger on the side towards the customers, towards the partners. And that's a nice thing to have, of course, as a competitive edge.

If you look a little bit further ahead, then we see that, let's say, by getting stronger, and we see all part of that already now that we are also able to get better payment terms from our point of view. Getting stronger, some publishers really want to work with us. So we are a bit more, how to say, able to get -- to pay them a bit later -- so those things. So it's a super important strategic instrument for us for the future, and that's the reason that we want to emphasize here.

Then going to the last slide of this part, and that's about AI. There's a lot of fear about AI in the market. Investors don't know what's happening. We got a lot of questions from investors. Therefore, it's a bit an unusual slide maybe to say that, but we wanted to address those things.

We got questions like -- is our whole platform obsolete? Is it going to be replicated by AI? The answer is no. Because, yes, you can build platforms with AI, but you don't have 65,000 app integrations and the 5 years or more years of trust that we have with those partners. That's not something that just is easily to be built. So technology can be built, but there's a lot of relations and things behind it.

Then will AI replace the specialized data? Can AI start to scale faster than you? LLMs are trained on a lot of markets that are freely available. But what makes us special is that our machine learning is trained on the 1.1 trillion ad transactions that we do, over 1 trillion daily ad requests that we get on the platform. That's special data. That's not just something where AIs have access and that they work on.

Then as users move to AI search, does your market vanish? And yes, part of the market vanishes, we see that on web, and that's a segment where we have never concentrated on. If we talk to some news publishers, they have 30%, 40% less trade views than a year earlier. But in-app is a part where there's not a replacement of LLMs, at least not on the majority of those. So we operate in a century untouched by the shift of AI search. Then the risk of being bypassed by AI agents; yes, AI agents are fulfilling more important roles and will become even stronger. But AI agents need data to work on, to work with, and that's something that we have. So we think that with AI agents, we can actually use that as a disruptor in our favor and go forward.

So to come to conclusion, Verve is not just another software layer, we are an indispensable network where the AI-driven economy actually transacts.

That's bringing me to the end of my part, and I would hand over to Christian, for the financials.

Thank you very much, Remco. So starting with the headlines for the financial performance. Q4 2025 was a strong quarter for us. It had a marked pickup versus Q3, both on top line momentum and also on our profitability.

We saw year-on-year growth of 9.9% on top line, and we also saw a significant step-up in our adjusted EBITDA to a margin of 25.1%. This was also a quarter where we grew fast and we increased our accounts receivables, and that led to an increase in our net working capital of 25.5 million. And this is a dynamic I will come back to and cover and explain further.

If I now dig into the details, both on the revenue side, but also on the profitability side. On the revenue side, we booked for the quarter 194 million. That should be compared for -- at 176 million in Q4 last year, and that equals 9.9% growth. It's really good to see that we have organic growth again, 5.3% when we adjust for inorganic effects and also FX. On top of that, we had a contribution from inorganic growth of 12.2%. But we also battle the declining U.S. dollar because we are reporting in euro, and a lot of our revenues are denominated in U.S. dollar, and we had headwinds of 7.6 percentage points working against us for the quarter. So 5.3% organic growth plus acquisition of 12.2%, minus the 7.6 gives the 9.9 in like-for-like growth. And all the details on this is in the interim report.

On the EBITDA level, you can see that we booked 48.6 million. It was a significant step-up not only in absolute terms from Q3, but also we reached the profitability level of 25.1%, which is actually a 7 percentage points pickup from last quarter. There are a number of reasons for that, and one being a big lift in our gross profit margin. But it's also because we are -- Q4 is the biggest season for us, and we're doing higher volumes on essentially the same OpEx base. And that, of course, gives scale impact and scale benefits for us and enabling us to come up with a higher profitability.

When you look at 25% EBITDA margin -- adjusted EBITDA margin and you compare it to Q4 last year, you'll note it was at 27. Please keep in mind that we have through the full year invested in sales expansion and continue to do so. And therefore, that remains a drag on our profitability also for Q4.

In terms of cash flow generation, we posted 45.6 million in operating cash flow before net working capital changes. That's quite strong contribution. It's actually 4 million better than we did last year. Now I mentioned that we had investments in our net working capital of 25.5 million and total cash out for investing was 29.7 million, combining CapEx and payment for acquisitions.

Turning now to gross profit margin, which was really a hallmark of this quarter. You can see here the different percentages through each quarter back in time. This denotes our gross profit margin is revenues minus purchase services -- and purchase services is traffic acquisition costs, so the value of the inventory, cloud hosting costs and other revenue-related and driven costs. Here, you see really a pickup from 36.6% to 44.6% in Q4. So an 8 percentage points improvement. If you look across -- compared to same period last year, it's a 4.2 percentage point pickup. So really substantial. There's three reasons for that.

One is we are working on the unified SSP platform. And as shared earlier, this platform really has a much more rich set of features, where we can manage the dynamic -- the pricing -- have dynamic pricing and also in terms of managing margin. And we, of course, use that to extract a good margin for us, but also win more bids. Secondly, we've become much better at managing our cloud cost, our hosting costs, both through better infrastructure, but also especially around peak loads and making sure that peak loads on our hosting cost doesn't penalize us in terms of pricing. And thirdly, which is also an effect in Q4, this is the biggest season for advertising, and that means there is competition. It drives up prices, but we can essentially serve and match the ads on the same cost base, so we generate a higher profitability out of that.

We would equate that roughly half of the pickup, so half of the 8 percentage points pickup is due to seasonality and the remaining 4 percentage points are more structural improvements through our platform and through our hosting cost management. So that would kind of indicate how to think about it going forward. That also means that you should not expect a gross margin -- profit margin of 44.6% in Q1 because there will be a drop from just pure seasonal effects. That was one very key development.

The other key development, as I mentioned, is the net working capital development for the quarter, where we had an increase of 25.5 million in net working capital. In short, we are growing very fast. We are billing more and that is layering into accounts receivables and therefore, also requiring an investment in net working capital.

Try to illustrate the dynamics here on the left-hand side, where we take the trade receivables in the dark blue and the trade payables in the light blue and then with the balance between those shown as the green line here in the middle, essentially showing our working capital from these 2 postings. And then in the top, line purple line, we see we have our total revenues and gross billings. And here, you can really see the dynamics of what is happening. So between Q3 and Q4, we billed 52 million more. So we really had a big significant increase in billing between Q3 and Q4. This layered into also an increase in accounts receivables of 36 million.

Now why is this happening? If we set aside the securitization program for a second, this is exactly as Remco was mentioning and explaining. because we have a typical payment gap between when we pay our publishers after 45 days and when we receive money from our customers, which is typically on 90 days terms, and that creates a payment gap. So in this case, it means the money that we build in Q4, it will come, but it will come in Q1. So it's not gone, but it will come with a delayed cash effect.

So normally, we have been able to use the securitization program, and this has absorbed the majority of this net working capital buildup. You can see that in the green line going back in time. We have a frame of 100 million. There is still headroom in the program of 20 million. Fully, fully utilized, we could extract 20 million more in cash. We also expected to be utilizing it more than we did here at end of the year.

The biggest limitation that we have and the key limitation is that it works -- the securitization work is attached to 5 of our core business operating units, the biggest ones, and it's set up with daily -- with interactions into our ERP system, NetSuite, with daily reporting on the receivables and reconciliations that happens daily. And that means that when you need to have a business unit in this securitization program, it needs to be set up and working.

We are working very intensely to get further operating units onto the program. We have 2 entities planned and slated here for first half of 2026. More to come, but this is the limiting factor right now of expanding our use of securitization program.

We're very committed to aligning our liquidity management as we grow, not only in the short term, but we will also be -- we also need to think about this -- the overall frame of the program as we grow, so we can have a more limited investment in net working capital.

This dynamic that I was showing here essentially also explains the numbers when you summarize on a yearly basis. Here, you have the cash flow development and cash flow generation. The dark blue is operating cash flow before net working capital and the light blue is after net working capital changes.

So you see we delivered 116 million of operating cash flow, which is quite strong, equal to last year, which was a very good year. And I would also say good in light of a soft Q2 and Q3. And it actually, when you compare the 116 million to the EBITDA of the year, it's actually a conversion of 87%. Now because of the swings in net working capital and the investment in net working capital that we've done this year, that lands on 49 million, and that we would, of course, have liked to have been much higher.

Turning now to CapEx development. Overall for the year, and you can see that here depicted in the left-hand side, we land on 42 million in total expansion and maintenance CapEx for the year. It's basically flat versus 2024. It's within our -- what we've said continuously that we need somewhere between 40 million to 45 million to sustain innovation in the business. That's very important. We are supporting a higher top line with the same CapEx for R&D. And therefore, it is as a proportion to revenues, you can see the green bubbles falling as a percentage from 11% to 10% to 9%.

I think it's important to say that within that envelope of 42 million, the -- what we're actually doing is changing. And how can we actually sustain such innovation pace at the 42 million level? Well, number one, we have integrated the engineering teams. We did that early in 2025. And as you know, we also are now working on one unified SSP platform. And those two together essentially enable us to get much more innovation up from the same euro amount. That's number one. Number two, after the completion of the unification, we can also see a shift from functionality and feature development to more, I would say, innovation R&D, especially around applying AI into whole ecosystem -- our whole internal ecosystem and improving matching and data insights from all the data that we process.

In total, we had cash out for M&A of 41 million for the year. We also have -- if you look at our interim reporting, we have 48.7 million outstanding in deferred payments across the coming years hereof 33 million in '26. We've already paid part of that actually now for the last tranche for Jun Group, which means within '26, we essentially have 9.9 million left to pay in deferred payments when we talk just about 2026, and that's in October. All the numbers I'm quoting here now is the discounted value that matches the interim reporting, just to be very clear on that.

Then I come to the balance sheet and how we are faring on adjusted net leverage ratio and interest coverage ratio. We have a net interest-bearing debt of 446 million. We ended the year at 446 million and with a net leverage ratio of 3.0. That's a slight improvement from the 3.1 that we saw at end of Q3 and it is, of course, expression of a year where we did M&A. Very good to see is that our interest coverage ratio is improving quite significantly, actually up to 4.3x. This is a result of a falling Euribor over the years and also a better bond refinancing terms on the bond placement that we did Spring of 2025, and that you can really see is layering off in the interest coverage ratio.

With that, I conclude the financial update, and I will hand back to Remco for the guidance part.

We already published the guidance earlier with our preliminary numbers, as mentioned, but I would nevertheless like to go here in a bit more detail. Overall, our guidance is based on a moderate to slightly positive market environment for the year 2026, as we expected. What you see on the left side, these are a few expectations from some of the bigger advertising companies, research institutes, and they basically come to an expected market growth of 5.1% to 9.1%, which is basically, if you look at them with some differences, more or less in line with 2025.

Now 2026 is a bit a special year. We have a lot of special advertising events, the FIFA World Cup, U.S. midterm elections. the Winter Olympics, even though they're not in the U.S., there's a lot of U.S. people watching. Yesterday, for example, the Swedish against U.S. ice hockey game. So it's important --those events, because those drive revenues. And 2 years ago, the U.S. midterm -- sorry, the U.S. elections drove a lot of revenue. So that's something that is difficult to judge how much it will drive. The strongest of those 3 certainly by potential is the midterm elections, difficult to say.

If we go to a bit more detail, what are the growth drivers for Verve that we expect. So basically, we're looking at a 7% to 9% structural market growth that we expect based on what you saw on the previous page. We expect to take a 5% or more than 5% growth of market share. And then on top of that, we put in strong safety cushion because you don't know exactly consumer trust is not great in the U.S. at the moment, and there's a lot of other factors. But going a bit into detail.

U.S. economy, digital advertiser drivers, so the blocks on the left side. U.S. economy has proven to be much more resilient than we expected at all, and AI and tech investments are actually also driving the economy, while there's also a lot of weaknesses in the economy. Not easy to really judge to see what's going to happen in 2026. But resilience is one thing that we expect. Then mid- to high single-digit growth based on advertising spend, as mentioned before. In-app and CTV are more insulated, while web is pressured by LLMs. We're happy that we are in in-app.

Then looking at consumer trends and tech advancements, AI is, let's say, bringing extra efficiencies, is driving extra growth. So there's a 3% to 5% expectation there. There are new, more and engaging ad formats. Video just has a higher CPM than a banner ad, things like that. So there is improvements that also we can do. Supply path optimization, the more demand supply and the more of our demand that we really run on our supply, the more efficient we get.

Then we have, let's say, the market share gains that we can do. There's a huge TAM, 130 billion that we're working in. We are still small in that. So there's ample opportunity to grow it being so small. Our data moat, which I mentioned before, is very strong. And then SDKs, yes, we are integrated in many apps, have an own SDK software development kit, which gives us unique data and access to inventory. So those things are making us strong.

Then, yes, the last point on the right, investment in sales, I mentioned that before. Continued investment in expansion of our sales capacity, doubling down our unified brand, I mentioned that one, sharpening our sales approach on more sector focus. And as mentioned before, it takes 9 to 15 months till a seller starts making money or starts making money -- enough money to, say, to compensate its own salary. And we have taken into account the 10 million invest into, yes, the sales buildup.

Then a little bit of, sensitivities, key upsides and downsides. As Christian already mentioned and I did before, we are strongly impacted by dollar movements. 83% of revenue that we have are dominated by the U.S. dollar. So at a weak dollar, we're feeling that. Sales productivity inflection, as already mentioned, yes, it takes a while until the sellers pay their money back and also, not all are good and need to be replaced partly. And then on the positive side, of course, upside and scaling effects based on the platform, AI that will, let's say, help us to grow the U.S.-centric advertising events and especially there the midterm elections. So those are a few that we're giving a bit more meat or a bit more background on how we come to our numbers.

So coming to the outlook and the outlook is really conservative, and this company can do much more, but we really want to be -- how to say it -- not overpromising here and be careful. Coming from a 602 million like-for-like revenue in 2025, we are guiding at a 680 million to 730 million. And take into account that, let's say, with the U.S. dollar, that 7% weaker because we took the 31st of December 2025 dollar rate for our guidance, but the dollar on average in 2025 was 3.7. We're talking about 42 million already that we have to compensate -- to just compensate the dollar effect. The difference or the -- yes, let's say, the difficulty of being reporting in euros.

Adjusted EBITDA, [ 25 ], guiding here of 145 to 175. Take into account that we have the buildup of the sales team and also here safety cushion and the U.S. dollar. So those are the numbers that we're guiding for. And also to come a bit and look a bit into the past, we are a fast-growing company, and we have shown that every year, even in 2025, which was really not great with Q2 and Q3 being -- yes, how to say, it hurt by our unification. But we are confident that we will further grow this company and are one of the faster growers in this market.

Looking in the future, looking into 2026 and our growth journey, yes, we were in the last years -- in the last 6 years, able -- we only started 6 years ago with adtech. We were able to build one of the top 20 adtech platforms in the U.S., and we want to further build. And that means that we are prioritizing long-term value creation because we want to grow, we need to look, let's say, longer than just the next quarter. And that means we need to balance our short-term leverage with our growth while being committed to active cash management, as already mentioned before.

Then we continue to invest in product and sales as well as innovation. And we have a conservative guidance based on the front-loaded investment into the sales expansion. So that is the biggest investment that we're doing at the moment is really adding more sellers.

Then building strong differentiators. Yes, everybody is doing the same. It's not easy to gain market share. If you're differentiated, it's easier. So one of them is really ID-less that were strong, but we're combining that with ID-based, as already mentioned before. Verticalization, so really, getting stronger demand supply connections and also just making more margin with it. Then M&A, we have to integrate the companies that we acquired, and that's also important, good progress already made there, further working on those integrations. Then aiming at new emerging markets and segments.

Retail media, I mentioned that before. So that's a sector where we've shown really good results and are further also looking in getting a stronger position, more segments, as mentioned before. And then, yes, the important point of AI, I mentioned that a few times. AI to become more efficient as a company, AI to improve results for our partners to make our platform better and AI to disrupt and gain market share. So with platform unification completed, we have operational challenges, we have turned operational challenges into a powerful foundation for future growth, and I'm very confident this company will show very nice growth in 2026.

That brings me to the end of my part, and I would like to hand over or hand back actually to Ingo.

Thank you, Remco and Christian as well. And now it's time for our Q&A session.

[Operator Instructions] The first question of the day now comes from Matthew Weber from Canaccord Genuity.

Appreciate all the color, it's very helpful. I just wanted to ask about the expectation for -- I think it was over 5 percentage points of market share gains. As your sales reps land new deals, what are the most common types of platforms you expect to displace? Essentially, I'm just trying to get a better understanding of where these share gains are coming from. And then I have a quick follow-up.

Yes. Thank you, Matthew. Good question. Great question. Where are the market share gains coming from? This is a huge market. As mentioned before, there's 130 billion TAM in the U.S. and there is a ton of players in. There's more than 500 companies in this adtech market. And that we were able within 6 years to become one of the top 20 is already showing.

We're not huge yet, how distributed this market is. So gaining is really against, let's say, smaller parties that are not able to use AI, that are not able to use data as well as we do. So that's where we mostly take market share, but also some larger competitors, of course. And don't -- yes, I mean, that's the market share part. And of course, the overall market growing gives also extra opportunities where it not necessarily has to go against competitors, but also can be just additional.

Then just given the emphasis on the sales force expansion, is there any -- how should we think about the mix of demand side versus supply side revenue in '26 and longer term?

Good question and very, very difficult to answer. I mean we are striving to get to a 50-50. And within the 50-50 also to make sure that it's not only the demand revenues that we show, but also that those demand revenues run on supply. But as already mentioned before, if we now hire sellers, we don't know how fast they ramp up their revenues. We don't know how many -- there's some numbers there, but we don't know exactly who is not good and who we have to replace.

So exactly saying this, it's super difficult. But what will be -- yes, what is certain is that we will grow our demand side. But in the meanwhile, we're also, of course, working on platform improvements on the supply side, AI and things like that. So it's not that we try to slow down one of the sites for the other one. But with the investments we're doing in sales, we should grow the demand side faster.

The next question comes from Ellis Acklin from First Berlin.

The main question I have is, I would like to understand a little bit better. You mentioned that the high growth last year put a strain on your cash flow and in particular, the working capital. When I'm looking at the year ahead for 2026, you're also expecting another strong growth year and just wondering how you will be able to prevent a repeat of the issues last year, especially considering you highlighted that you have a 100 million ceiling for the securitization. So is that 20 million in headroom you talked about going to be sufficient to normalize the working capital? Or are there other levers that you can pull to help manage that? So I'll leave it there, but I do have one brief follow-up afterwards.

Yes. Thank you. Let me start with the commercial side. And that is indeed, as I mentioned before, we are getting bigger, and we have possibilities, of course, to also work a bit on payment terms in our favor. While on the other side, we're also sometimes using payment terms to just get a competitive advantage or to onboard a partner. So that's one of the things. But with growing revenues, of course, there will be further demand because of this gap of 90 versus 45 days. And I would like to hand over to Christian, because he's working on expanding the program. Christian?

Yes. Thank you for your question, Ellis. We are working on 2 fronts. So the one I mentioned is adding more entities on the existing program. That's number one. But we are actually also working on expanding the program. And this will be necessary to take on board more of the growth that we will come towards, especially second half of the year. So we're working on both ends.

Sorry, did you have a follow-up question, Ellis?

Yes. Great. I was just wondering if you had any -- were going to add anything else. No, just a quick one. The leverage ratio at year-end was 3.0. Do you have a target in mind for this year? Or are you comfortable with that -- around that level?

So you could kind of see this year was an acquisition year. Next year -- this last year, I mean, was an acquisition year. This year, we have full focus on the core business and developing that. When you look at the midpoint or the upper range of our guidance, this will bring us on a path towards the 2.5. I don't want to extend a guarantee here that we will be at exactly 2.5 by the end of the year, but I can see a path in that direction. It may take a quarter more, but this -- it is firmly our ambition to work towards the 2.5.

Yes. Maybe to fill in that or to add to that, we are aware that, let's say, a dampener on our share price, our stock price is really our high leverage that a lot of investors don't like that. And that is, yes, let's say, also making sure that we will focus on that, and we will make sure that we get our leverage lower because we need to get our stock also, let's say, be more rewarded by shareholders.

The next question comes from Andreas Wolf, our analyst from Berenberg.

I have a couple. The first one is on the guidance. Have you only considered the costs for the expansion or also potential associated revenues? And if yes, to what extent? Question number two, is it fair to assume that the '25 CapEx level will also be maintained in '26? Question number three, how do you expect the number of ATOM integrations to develop in '26? And the last question is on M&A. Could you provide insights into your M&A ambitions for the current -- or is the current focus on organic growth and sales force expansion on the demand side?

Thank you, Andreas. List of questions, good questions. Let me start answering them, and Christian, maybe you can fill in later answered them. Yes, when we are adding salespeople, of course, we're also factoring in not only the cost but also the revenues. But as already mentioned, it is super difficult to predict the inflection point. So in that sense, we were a bit more careful on the revenue side than on the cost side because the cost you know for sure that you have it and when the revenues come, it's a bit less certain. So yes, revenues are factored in. So the 10 million is, let's say, the net investment we're doing already taking into account that also income coming from that.

Then CapEx, as Christian in his description said or showed, we have a pretty constant, how to say, maintenance and investment CapEx of roughly 40 million. We would like to keep it roughly at that level. So as a percentage of revenues, it will go down, but we need to innovate. We are a tech company. And if you don't innovate, that's not good in this sector. Within the 40 million, however, we are more and more focusing now on innovation, on AI, on those things. And the part that we used for platform integration for building features and so that has declined sharply now. So we expect also those 40 million actually to yield better, although platform integration was important as we showed, but it will, yes, let's say, yield more into innovation. So even though as a percentage of revenue, it will remain -- or let's say, it will decline, we think that with the 40 million, we can do more than we did in the past if we talk about innovation.

Then to your question about ATOM integration. ATOM is our extra integration on mobile phones, which gives us the possibility to get a lot of data on device that we can attach to an ad when there is no cookie or no identifier. ATOM is integrated almost everywhere now in iOS in the phones. So it's still -- it always takes time until I say, apps are rolled out because people need to update them and not everybody updates the apps. But we see a very good penetration now on iOS. On Android, we have finished the product also Android phones, where it's a bit more complicated because there's no library on an Android phone. So you have a bit larger part of software there. And I won't go too much in detail, but it's a bit more complex there.

We are also, let's say, using more identity signals, ID signals because on Android, people give consent more often or they are not even asked if they do in the U.S. In that sense, we had to do quite some tweaks on it. But also now on Android, we are starting the rollout or we have started actually roll out roughly a quarter ago, and we expect by the end of the year to have a good penetration and that will also drive further things. And maybe before you asked the question, that's not immediately showing revenue.

We don't charge extra for the signals that we get from ATOM, but it helps us really to help publishers that don't get a lot of money from the part of their traffic where they don't have an ID. And it, of course, helps us towards advertisers because they can reach customers or, let's say, potential customers that they otherwise wouldn't reach or, let's say, only blindly reach by shooting in line basically. So it's a super important part of our business.

Then getting to M&A activity, yes, as mentioned before, we need to bring leverage down. We need to also integrate the acquisitions that we did. So at the moment, there is no focus on acquisitions. That's, let's say, more short, middle term. I'm still of the opinion that we need to grow faster than we organically can to really become more relevant in this market. We are still very small. So if I look a bit further ahead, there will be further acquisitions, and we keep our eyes open. But at the moment, it's a priority to really bring leverage down and to also work more and better with our share price and our investors.

Great. So the questions keep coming in. We have a bit of a traffic jam here. So take your time, guys, please.

Next question comes from the chat from Rasmus Engberg from Kepler Cheuvreux.

Do you expect working capital to recover in 2026?

Okay. So let me take that question. So yes, we -- I think we can think about it both long term and short term. Short term, we can see that the money that we have built in Q4 will come in, in Q1. That's very important to state this is not money out the door. It will come back, and it will have a positive effect on working capital in Q1. And as such, you could say, yes, it would rebalance.

I think was it Ellis who pointed to there is, of course, the overall structural challenge as we grow and depending on how fast we grow through '26, we will have the challenge of putting some of our securitization -- putting some of our receivables on securitization program up to the 100 million and beyond as we expand it, but there may still be a component where we cannot securitize it. So it will -- that you have to have both elements in mind. That said, we are working dead hard to, if not fully neutralize it, then bring it into the most balanced way that we can and still not hinder our growth.

Great. The next question is a verbal one again from [ Orlow Koretzky from OK Consult PE. ]

Two very top line questions. Firstly, regarding sentiment. I was a bit startled. I mean, normally, bond investors are much more careful in their due diligence and risk management, and you got those 50 million in new funding extremely quickly, which should be a sign of confidence actually, which is not reflected in the stock at all. So is that just kind of the AI disruption fears that are mongering amongst the market? Or do you have any other explanation for that disparity? That's the first one.

Secondly, with the last capital increase, you, Remco, showed personally very strong confidence investing quite significantly in the shares in the increase and via the market as well. And as I understand you, the integration of the platform is almost done now. So the company is derisked and the shares are about half as expensive as they have been then. So what are you making out of that situation?

Thank you, Orlow, very much and good questions and not easy to answer. In the end, let's say, shareholders decide what the company's value is. So it's difficult to, of course, argue against that. But I can give some, let's say, my vision on it or my view on it. If I compare debt and equity markets at the moment, overall, equity markets are not happy about everything that's microcap. Equity markets are super uncertain about AI investments and all those things, what's happening with AI, how is it affecting things. And we have an additional factor being listed in Europe. We hardly have any peers. So that doesn't make our life easier because the business model is not always easy and people want to understand business models better. And for such a, let's say, a small market cap, you often don't do the work to really dive into a company. So overall, that makes the sentiment not easy.

Also, if I look at the share price development of our peers in the U.S., I mean, they are partly a bit better, but there's also quite a few that are worse than what we did. So this whole environment at the moment with AI, with small stocks and a lot of money going into big stocks is not making it easier. I was also super happy with the debt investors. So the bond investors. We were strongly oversubscribed. We did it very fast. And this company is solid. And I think that that's what the debt investors really recognized and the equity investors have -- yes, let's say, there's overall market things.

The one thing that is -- that people don't like with us is the high leverage, the 3.0 now. And yes, that's where the bond investors make their money, but that's where the equity investors see a risk component. And that's something that we are, as mentioned before, working on in 2026, to see that we also get this leverage down. So that's important. But the company is growing. We have shown it in the past years. We are absolutely confident to do it now. And yes, we are a bit hindered by a weak dollar, but so be it.

So I hope that answers your question. It's a bit of fractions that I give as quotes, but it's not super easy to give a black and white answer to your question.

Still, I mean these bond investors also invest into a small cap company. And I understand they don't have any upside for the 80% in interest. And so from a risk/return point of view, that -- yes, sorry, it doesn't make really sense to me. I mean either you believe the company will prevail or you don't. And if you do so for 8% in interest, why don't you do for equity?

I can totally agree with what you're saying. And yes, but it's not to me. I mean, I bought stock. I've never sold stock. I believe in this company, and I further do so.

So you're considering to do that in the future as well?

I'm not ruling that out. [ I don't go with ] my blackout periods, but yes, that one is over now.

So now we have a couple of questions in the chat again. The next ones come from Konrad Lieder from FL AlphaCap. I'll read them one by one, so you can answer them.

First one is on the 10 million investment in sales personnel, are they already on board? How should we think about phasing the 10 million over the single quarters in the year?

I can take that one. No, those people are not yet on board. And we are seeing it's -- let's say, if you hire salespeople, you want to hire the best ones, the good ones. That's not something that you just do overnight. We have been hiring quite a lot. I mean, I showed the over 60% increase that we had already, but part of that actually is also because of the acquisition of Captify and acardo, which brought those extra sellers in. But adding sellers is not easy, and there's also a bit of seasonality in there.

A really good seller is very difficult to hire from mid-Q4 onwards till end of Q1 because that's when they get the commissions over the last year and you want the good ones. So at the moment, we're not onboarding so many in Q1, but we will be onboarding and we're having a lot of talks already in Q2 and Q3. So it is, let's say, in that sense, it's front-loaded, but we are hindered that the real good ones are waiting for their commission before they will quit the job.

So in that sense, this will develop throughout the year. But we got quite a few in last year already, and those are -- yes, let's say, we had success cases where somebody in the first week did a really good deal, but that's the exception and not the rule. So most of them we are investing in at the moment.

That's actually also already answered part of the second question. A similar comment on sales investments that have been made last year. How successful were the investments so far made last year?

Yes, we see good traction on them. And if the sellers that are not good, we let them go, and that also has happened already a few times. So it's really -- yes, it's a buildup. And yes, we had the discussion also internally.

If you do M&A like with Captify, you immediately have sellers that have a book of business that are profitable, but therefore, you pay the purchase price for the company. And if you do it organically, you first have to select them, then you have to train them because they need to learn the product that you have and only then you see them starting to make money. So it's a longer trajectory, but yes, we do both.

I would also add that you see the first indications in our growth in number of customers, especially the total number of customers in Q4, and I think part of that is because we've had more feet on the ground in a more focused way, and we are picking up additional customers. They still need to scale, but I think that's a very good indicator for that the investments we are putting in is really paying off -- starting to pay off.

Then the next question complex is on the C-level personnel changes. End of 2025, both your Chief Revenue Officer and Chief Product Officer left the company. Why? The new Chief Revenue Officer will only begin in March. Does this create any delays?

Good question. I'll take it. The CPO, let me start with the CPO. David, who was the founder of Dataseat company that we acquired, and we made him CPO. He is a very good product focus. Under him, we build up people on the demand and the supply side. But David has a personal issue that made him terminate his job. And we decided because demand and supply really demand different focus on product that we don't replace the CPO on the top level, but therefore, have strong product people in the units. So that's on the CPO.

RO, Sameer Sondhi, who was with the company for 6 years, actually over 6 years. He decided to go somewhere else, which can happen after 6 years, wanted to get some fresh air. And we were super happy to hire Dave Simon, who is indeed going to start formally on the 1st of March, but he has already been working in the background, supporting us, taking already decisions. So that's going in a very smooth transition, and there was a transition also from Sameer to Dave. So in that sense, he will be full time from March 1, but he, how to say, is already on board and help there.

So we have a very fluid transition there. And Dave, as a background, he worked with Media before that with Moloco, which -- Moloco is a very big private competitor that we have, very strong in AI actually and targeting. And before that, he worked with Fyber, which is part of Digital Turbine, which is also a competitor. So he's a very experienced manager and, yes, seeing already very positive traction from the things he's doing.

Thank you, Remco. Then going back to the callers. The next question comes from Christoffer Jennel from Inderes.

Just a couple of questions from my side, and I start with the cash flow. So given that the level of earnings was at similar level compared to last year, is it the right interpretation that the weak that weak cash flow in 2025, was primarily due to the limitations in your securitization program and that the increased use of it and the ability to add more entities to the program is what gives you confidence that the working capital will normalize in 2026?

I think you summarized it very well, to be honest. I think I don't have much to add, but your interpretation is correct. I don't know that we can neutralize all effects in this year. I think there will still be some accounts receivables that we will not put on the securitization program. But in essence, your interpretation is correct, Christoffer.

All right. And I was just wondering also if you could add some color on the receivable impairment that you noticed from the large customer loss.

Yes, I can. So it's correct that we had a quite sizable customer that we have stopped doing business with at the end of 2000 -- or actually in the second half of 2025. This is an account where we still have roughly USD 8 million in payment from. We are pursuing that also by legal channels. We have stopped doing business with them. And I would say, the best protection we have about these type of things is that we don't know if one customer is a significant part of our business. You will have noted also from earlier earnings calls that generally, we don't have one customer that is more than 8 -- sorry, 6% of our business either on the supply side or the sell side, and that's our biggest and best protection against these type of things. They don't happen often, but they do happen once in a while.

Without getting into the details around this specific customer, I would say this is a quite extraordinary behavior even in adtech. And I think I'll just leave it there.

All right. So 8 million in like the cash impact for Q4. Is that right?

That is the receivable that is still outstanding to be paid.

Okay. Okay. And regarding the...

We, of course, expect payment and are working on payment for it. So -- but that is the full amount still outstanding.

Regarding the securitization program, can you give some sort of details on how much you intend to expand the program [indiscernible]?

I think at a level of 150 million, we would be covered for the coming 2 years. I'm not sure you would go to 150 million in one go. It might be a step-wise approach. It also depends on the financing partners and how much they individually want to take. But I would say, at 150 million, we would be covered for the next 2 years, but you will maybe see a gradual in a 2-step approach to get to that level.

All right. And also, did I get that right that you expect to release some of the buildup working capital in Q4 now in Q1 instead? Is that correct?

We expect the money to come in. I don't think we can release it, but in the sense that the 52 million we built extra in revenues in -- well, we built 194 million, but 52 million more than Q3. If you look at the changes, those money will come in during Q1 because they typically are on 90 days payment, and you will see that money coming in, in February and in March, which is also when we look at the projections, we can see the money coming in, of course, with the assumption that the customers do pay and which they normally do.

Last question from me. So in the report, you mentioned that you incurred slightly more interest expenses due to other financial lines and certain effects of the securitization program. And now that you are exploring to expand the program, will -- what type of benefits will we see in the net financials -- sorry, in 2026 in absolute numbers following the refinanced bonds in 2025?

Okay. So it's true that we did have in Q4 more interest costs. We also drew some -- a bit on some of our RCFs. As depicted here and shown by Remco when he went through the securitization, it's actually very attractive from a point of view that -- and from the margin, which is typically when drawn in euros, it's the Euribor plus 2 percentage points. Then there is also an administration fee that is above and beyond that, that also costs. But if you -- the pure financing of it is actually quite attractive because, of course, they have security in the receivables. So in that way, it's a secured program. So that would mean that you can actually finance it with a quite attractive margin compared to, for instance, let's say, using an RCF.

Last but not least, we have Jorg Frey from Warburg Research.

First of all, a bit on Q1, honestly, just bearing in mind that your stock has really had some outsized reactions on quarterly variations. A bit your thoughts on the quarter.

I think we should see at least around 10% currency headwind for the quarter. We have this large customer, which we discontinued, which is probably a headwind of at least something like 3%, which if I judge it correctly what you are telling us and a rather tough comparison base of the prior year of 16% organic growth. So how should we think about the first quarter and the phasing of organic growth throughout the year, just to not disappoint the market or just have unrealistically high expectations for the first quarter.

Yes, Jorg, thank you very much for this question and already, let's say, doing the statements. You're exactly extremely well describing, of course, what we have to come up with in Q1. So we have a lot of positives, but indeed, Q1 is not going to be our easiest because the 16% organic last year in the 10% currency headwind that we have, which is the strongest in Q1 on Q1, the later quarters, it's not so strong, especially in Q3 and Q4, let's say, on the currency, it's not as every -- depending a bit where the currency develops, of course. But -- and we have indeed the customer, which is, let's say, not generating revenue anymore because we don't let him.

On the other hand, we have a lot of things that offset that. So a lot of growth. The platform is running extremely smoothly with better margins and a lot of new customers onboarded. Our demand side is onboarding extra customers. We see a bit of Olympics, not very strong, but a bit of Olympics effect in the numbers. So in that sense, we have a pretty okay start, I would say, in the year. But indeed, it's -- let's say, the Q1 is not the easiest from all the quarters, but that was also taken into account with our guidance, and we didn't give a special guidance on Q1 now. But yes, we are confident about the full year and Q1. If you master that well, you will, of course, see a lot of headroom in the rest of the year because of these points that you just mentioned.

Yes. I think we should all expect momentum to build from Q1. And yes, it's encouraging that you see Q1 starting actually quite well given the circumstances. Another one from me on housekeeping wise, a bit.

Your tax ratio or your tax payments have been quite high in 2025. And how should we view that? This is a bit a reflection of the low earnings base and well indicates a bit that while the earnings quality is actually better than you might perceive it at the first glance or how -- what was there anything special we should bear in mind?

So the tax setup of the company is quite complex with all the entities. We have met certain what we call interest barriers in terms of how you can deduct for interest payments in the different entities, and that has an effect on the tax -- total tax calculation for 2025.

I think -- so in terms of the normal tax rate, it would be kind of effective tax rate around the 30% to 32% level, but we have movements both in deferred tax assets and deferred tax liabilities, which distort that picture. And as I said, there are certainly things that are hindering us in getting a full deduction for interest payments as we look across the different entity groups because there are certain barriers for how much interest you can deduct and therefore, save on taxes. Sorry, it's a bit technical answer, but it's also not an easy question to give full and very clear guidance on. I hope it helps in the understanding. And if you need more, we can... Obviously, I didn't have the details of it.

Particularly that you stick to 30% to 32% long-term tax rate assessment. And probably a last one, just a bit technical as well.

What's your -- if you look at your current bond portfolio and well, the recent upsizing of the bond, what is your current assessment of cash interest payments for 2026, bearing in mind that in the last year, you had quite some special payments for the early redemption of the bonds. So probably quite elevated interest payments last year.

Yes. So that would, of course, be a mix of the margin level that we pay on the original bond places, which was at 400 basis points and then with the upsizing, which was at 497, I believe, 97 basis points. We will continue because -- we will continue to have some of the cost depreciated that was part of making the bond. The way that it works in our accounting is that you take the cost of doing the bond extension and that is depreciated over the lifetime and the maturity of the bond. So I think that will still have an effect into this year.

Okay. So that's it from my side. All the best and fingers crossed for accelerating momentum for the rest of the year.

The next question comes from Andreas Wolf again from Berenberg.

I have a quick follow-up. Christian, maybe you could clarify what is the amount of receivables related to the big client with whom you discontinued the client relationship still sitting on the balance sheet because at least that was my understanding in Q4, there were also impairments which impacted revenues and the bottom line as well.

There is impairments and offsets for it in the total that the receivable is -- the receivable that has not been paid is USD 8 million. Given that we are in legal discussions, I will not give a number out on how much is impaired because that basically tells where our pain point is. But the total outstanding that is still to be received from these customers is USD 8 million, and we intend it in full. I do understand why you're asking. But please be in mind, given that we are in legal discussions by giving out the impairment and the reserve for it, we are effectively then disclosing where our pain point is.

Now we're closing today's Q&A questionnaire with a final question coming from the chat from Christoffer Jennel from Inderes again. A nice question on AI. I think this directly goes to Remco.

Remco, if AI dramatically lowers the cost of creation and floods inventory with content, what is your view on the impact on CPMs, bid density and auction price flows across your marketplace? Do you see downward pricing pressure or greater segmentation of value?

Good question. Very good question, and I need to think a bit about it. Cost of creation goes down. You have, for example, now just Google that launched in Genie, which is making it very easy to develop games or kind of all kind of content also on video. So I share the observation that it's easier to create content. But in the end, let's say, content needs to be viewed. So not all of the content will be successful, but the consumer will be overloaded with more content, which we already -- which is a trend that was there already anyway. I mean, look at YouTube, look at the social media, et cetera.

In the end, let's say, money will still be made with advertising. And if there's more views, if there's more price pressure on it, our purchase will be cheaper, then the value add of data will become actually even more important because how do I reach the right consumer? How do I really target them? So AI is disruptive. I think that's the conclusion that we are all drawing.

The question is how can you use that? And traditionally, I like disruption in the market. We like, let's say, the idealist disruption, less IDs available, people need to do something different. And the same comes for AI. With AI disrupting the market, and I think it's a bit more on the web part than it is on the in-app part, but AI is disrupting, and that's great because that gives opportunities. And we can use AI, and I had a slide on that in the presentation to really make us much stronger, make us more efficient, do our targeting better but AI is great. And yes, let's embrace it, let's use it and go forward with it. And it gives a lot of opportunities.

Great final words, Remco, I would say. Thank you for that. And thanks to all of you for participating in this Q&A session so lively. Should any additional questions come to mind later, please do not hesitate to reach out to the Investor Relations team. We're always happy to answer.

With this, we have reached the end of today's call. Thank you for joining us. Have a productive rest of the week, and we look forward of getting back in touch with you again soon. Bye-bye.

So good morning to our guests in America. Good afternoon to our guests in Europe. My name is Ingo Middelmenne and as the Head of Investor Relations of Verve Group, I'd like to cordially invite you -- I'd like to cordially welcome you to today's earnings call of our company. As you see, we are using a new conferencing system from today onwards. It now allows our private investors to participate live in a listen-only mode. Our institutional investors and analysts will be able to ask their questions live in the Q&A session.

[Operator Instructions] We have had an intense quarter behind us with all of the effects and initiatives for us to explain. As usual, we have prepared a presentation for you to provide you with some additional insight to increase transparency for you. After this presentation, we will, of course, take the time to answer your questions. Please be reminded that the entire call, including the Q&A session, will be recorded and will be made available publicly on our website following this call. [Operator Instructions] And now I'm handing you over to our CEO, Remco Westermann, to guide you through the first part of today's call. Remco, please go ahead.

Thank you, Ingo. Also from my side, a warm welcome to Verve's presentation of the third quarter 2025. As usual, I will present the headlines and the latest developments, followed by Christian, our CFO, who will present the financials. Q3 was a very important quarter for Verve, which laid the foundation for further strong and profitable growth. As a very important milestone, we finalized the unification of our in-app platform, which leads to cost efficiencies as well as revenue opportunities. We also continue to invest in growth by further strengthening our demand side, adding more sales employees and also acquiring 2 demand-side-oriented companies as well as by further investments in our products, data and AI. While revenues and EBITDA for Q3 2025 were down versus Q3 last year, we started seeing the positive effects of the unification and the growth investments by the end of the quarter and even stronger in Q4. Let me lead you through the Q3 presentation.

Let me start with an overview of our main events. As already mentioned in the introduction, as planned, we successfully finalized the in-app platform unification project. This leads to lower cost. One platform requires one team and as such, is much more cost efficient as several platforms. But even more important, the unified platform is better performing platform, which is and further will continue to be improved, showing better performance and as such, leading to revenue increases. Our second strong growth driver is further investment in our main growth drivers. We have a great product portfolio, and we are further investing in product, data and AI with also emphasis on our ID-less targeting. But these products need to be sold. And that means growing our sales team with approximately 4,000 small and midsized agencies in the U.S. plus the holdco agencies, a substantial sales team to address those is required. We are actively growing our sales team organically and also nonorganically. Coming to point 3, acquisitions continue to contribute successfully to our growth.

With the acquisition of Captify Technologies, we had strong positions in the U.S., U.K. and Australia, extending sales, customer reach and adding intent data to our portfolio of contextual and ID-less targeting solutions. With Acardo, we acquired a strong addition in Germany, enabling us to get stronger in the German market with strong CPG contacts and great solutions for retailers and CPGs, among others, with solutions such as couponing and measuring via retail cash assistance. Getting to the financials. Point 4, Q3 revenue was impacted by the unification project, as already mentioned before, temporary lower revenues and higher costs till mid of the quarter.

On top of that, we faced a softer market with our political ad spend and with sectors such as, for example, CPG being weaker. Based on a change in revenue recognition, we are, however, reporting higher revenues than last year. This is based on having more margin and revenue controls on the unified platform. Christian will cover this later. Number five, our EBITDA came also in weaker due to lower revenues, one-offs of efficiency measures and increased cost based on, for example, hiring more salespeople where costs come well before the revenue come.

Also, weaker U.S. dollar did not help us as the majority of our revenues are in the USD, while a large part of our costs are in euros, and we also report in euros. Coming to the last point on the page, while Q3 and Q2 were not strong quarters based on the before mentioned, by end of Q3, we started to see increased momentum. The momentum continues into Q4 with a performance single in-app platform and efficiency measures and growth initiatives starting to show effect. Based on this strong start into and further positive outlook for Q4, we reaffirm and narrow our 2025 guidance. Christian will cover that in more detail. Looking at our main KPIs. What we see here that we -- in Q3, we were also able to further strengthen our already strong in-app position. While LLMs like ChatGPT and the likes put web advertising and web publishers under pressure, in-app is a nice growth area to be in. Mobile now represents 97% of our revenues.

Whereas also CTV is a very interesting segment, we saw CPMs and margins coming under pressure based on more supply getting into the market, while a lot of demand is still stuck with spend on linear TV. First CTV share of revenues is down from 4% in the last quarter to 3% in Q3, which is reflecting this. We are further investing in solutions for CTV that are differentiating and expect CTV to be the growth driver for Verve also in the long term, but don't want to work for low margin and as such, saw lower revenues in this quarter. I'm very pleased with the fact that we were able to increase the share of demand versus supply.

As previously mentioned, the more we directly sell to demand and the more balanced our supply and demand are, the stronger the company gets. Demand now represents 31% of revenues, up from 25% in the previous quarter. Based on our investments towards brands and agencies, we expect the share to further grow. We are also starting to see positive effects of our investments in markets outside of the U.S., with the U.S. now representing 75% of our revenues versus 79% in the previous quarter and Europe increasing to 12% versus 9% in Q2.

Revenues and earnings performance were impacted by investments and changes in revenue recognition. While Christian will go more in detail, I cover the main financial KPIs, revenue and EBITDA on this slide. Revenue is 3.3% down versus last year on a like-for-like basis. And due to the unification and more control on margins, we, however, had to change our revenue recognition and as such, show higher revenues as reported revenues. EBITDA is 22% down versus last year, which results from the lower revenues as well as from the higher cost due to the unification effects and the increased costs for our growth investments. Coming to our KPIs. We saw an increase in ad impressions to 288 billion in the quarter, 18% up versus last year. While revenue was down, this shows that CPMs and margins came down, reflected by a weaker overall market and the mix shift away from CTV. Based on platform unification, onboarding and scaling were slow in Q2 and Q3. However, from the mid of the quarter, we ramped up onboardings with our number of overall software customers increasing by 6% and including M&A actually by 23%.

Our number of large software clients also again started to increase by 3%, excluding M&A and 12%, including M&A versus the last quarter. The net dollar expansion rate with 90% was a bit lower than last quarter based on the onetime effects and market weakness with, for example, lack of political ad spend. Our customer retention rate remains at high levels with our over $100,000 client retention rate at a solid 96%. Looking at growth drivers. Our product innovation continues to be a strong driver. Here, for example, the scaling of our ad formats.

Verve continues to increase impressions and conversions through full screen and video ads. We see a strong 56% year-on-year growth with now EUR 14 million revenues in Q3. Another area of product innovation is our ID-less targeting, as investors know. We continued our product innovation into this area as well. The ID, the old backbone of user tracking and ad personalization continues to disappear. We further invest and scale our ID-less solutions. The acquisition of Captify adds further capabilities with their intent data. We were able to grow our iOS revenues by 29% to EUR 187 million LTM.

Coming to platform unification. I mentioned the word several times in this presentation already. This is also a slide that we have shown previously. We started our business in AdTech by gaining critical mass through acquisitions. But to be successful in this business, a cutting-edge technology setup is key, and that means integrating platforms. In Q2 and Q3, we saw a temporary pain of that. But by end of Q3 and in Q4, we see the benefits. Important to mention that the latest acquisitions, Captify and Acardo are simple cases that strengthen our demand side and don't require technical integrations.

Talking about our acquisitions, we are happy with them. We acquired Captify and Acardo. Captify just being a half month consolidated into the third quarter, Acardo being consolidated from the start of the fourth quarter, but both strengthening our business. Captify strengthened our sales teams in the U.S. and the U.K. and Australia. They have strong agency contacts and contracts that those can be levered. For example, if they have a contract with an agency, we can also start selling our other products into that. So that really adds.

There was only very limited overlap actually from the agency contacts with, let's say, the previous acquisition Jun and the further contacts we have in the U.S. Search intent data for targeting are added by Captify and they are adding substantial revenue, whereas we paid an attractive multiple. Acardo supports Verve in building stronger positions outside the U.S., especially strengthening our German position. The strong relation with CPG brands can also be levered internationally. And also their couponing and cash register data capabilities, we see as a potential game outside of Germany, but also, of course, to further lift that inside of Germany. Coming more towards the future, we continue to invest in structural growth that sometimes hurts as we have seen also in Q3. But if we look at the overall growth of this company, it has always played out in the mid and the long term, and we expect all the investments we do also to do and to already show in Q4.

One area, important area, further improvement of platform and AI performance, a unified platform is the base for further scaling and increased efficiency, and we continue our investments in AI and data as well as further yield improvement of the platform. And as the second, further scaling of our demand side by further scaling our sales organization, targeting a sales headcount of 150 sellers in the U.S. by end of 2026 as well as expanding and improving our product and services portfolio with focus on verticals such as retail, CPG and media companies, but also in podcast, for example, we've seen really nice results. And additionally, we are working on the demand side solutions based on the nice additional possibilities you have with generative AI and agentic technologies. We also expect to be able to show nice progress in that field. That brings me to the end of my part, and I would like to hand over to Christian.

Thank you very much, Remco. So my plan is to cover the financial performance of Q3 in numbers, but actually also spend some time in drilling into some of the underlying dynamics and drivers of the performance, and then I'll end on guidance for the year. So firstly, looking at revenue and adjusted EBITDA. We report 25% revenue growth for the quarter from EUR 114 million to EUR 142 million in Q3 this year. You will note a callout of EUR 32 million here shaded in purple, and this is the impact of the change of revenue recognition, which I'll come back to and explain. If we normalize for that on a like-for-like basis, we had a growth of -- a negative growth of 3%. And if we look at the organic growth of the business, taking into -- adjusting for M&A and adjusting for FX because we also had some headwinds from FX, we declined 4 percentage points, 4.1 percentage points. We report EUR 26 million in adjusted EBITDA for the quarter. This is a decline from previous year of 22% and also sequentially, we are lower with EUR 3.4 million.

Now if we look at the EBITDA margin, with the addition of the revenue recognition and the top line of EUR 142 million reporting, we will report 18% in adjusted EBITDA margin. However, you look here at a comparable EBITDA margin from going back in time here in the light blue line, we would, on a like-for-like basis, be reporting 24% in EBITDA margin. So despite a somewhat soft quarter, we generated operating cash flows of EUR 34 million. That's actually a doubling from last quarter, which was EUR 15.2 million. I should, however, note that we also have a negative impact of working capital of EUR 29 million, EUR 29.6 million, and this is majorly caused by lower use of our securitization program.

All in all, we invested EUR 34 million, and that's a combination of M&A for Vivento and Captify and also continuing to invest in the platform. I'll now try to dig a little bit deeper into the revenue and the top line and the performance of the quarter. So most importantly is probably one effect of the change in revenue recognition, which has an impact of EUR 32 million. As we move our mobile in-app volumes onto the unified platform, new unified platform, this platform has a significantly enriched control features for pricing.

That means we can determine some of the pricing and the floors. And this essentially means that we also bear the burden of making the campaigns work. Now by IFRS 15 standards, that means we need to recognize the revenue on a principal basis, i.e., on a gross basis, where it was for this part, previously recognized on a net basis. As I said, it adds EUR 32 million to revenues. It has no impact on EBITDA. And this will be the principle that we will continue to recognize going forward. Positive impacts. We had -- as Remco referred to, we had very strong iOS growth, 29% growth on an LTM basis. We also had a good contribution from higher video and full screen volumes lifting our revenues, and we had -- we consolidated in Captify from the mid of September with some contribution. In terms of negative impacts for the quarter, the main one I would probably call out is that we did see a continued effect of the platform challenges after the unification until and including July and just the start of August. We also communicated that last time. From there on, we've seen an improving momentum through the quarter.

So it's mainly July and some of August that was impacted, but it does have a negative impact on the revenues for the quarter and therefore, contributions. Aside for that, please keep note that in -- when you compare it to last year, we did have some political revenues in Q3, actually even more in Q4. In Q3, we had some EUR 2 million, EUR 3 million of political revenues, which, of course, we do not have this year. We also see reduced CTVs revenues and continue to have FX headwinds. That brings me on to -- the covered revenue part, brings me on to profitability here showing both gross profit and EBITDA. On the left-hand side, you see a calculation of our gross margin on a like-for-like basis. So it's essentially revenues minus purchase services or COGS and you see an increase from 35% in Q2 to 37%, so 2 percentage points up. And also with 37% level, we are actually above the levels of quarters -- comparable quarters last year.

I think this is very important because it really shows that the investments we're doing in the product is starting to show effect and also that the challenges we had on some -- with the unification of the platform in Q2 is dealt with. When we then look at EBITDA, and I will structure this in 2 components. Firstly, we had a number of one-off payments or expenses through the quarter. This we adjust -- normalized for in the adjusted EBITDA. But just to cover them, we had EUR 1.6 million in personnel expenses. This was mostly severance payments. Given we are now through with the platform unification, we have been able to capture cost savings and also personnel savings and including also different efficiency measures across the organization, leading to EUR 1.6 million in severance payments. We had legal costs, legal and advisory costs for M&A of EUR 1.7 million and also other expenses totaling EUR 1 million. Most of it is share-based compensation. So all together, EUR 4.3 million.

Aside from that, the profitability of the quarter is affected by the lower revenue loss and also continued technical costs that continued into the quarter, and that is probably the main reason why our EBITDA is softer for this quarter. Also, after the completion of the unification, we are capitalizing less for the quarter. We did EUR 3.3 million less in capitalization for the quarter compared to same quarter last year. And as Remco mentioned, we continue to invest in our sales team and sales footprint, and that means we are taking people and costs onboard sometimes in advance of full revenues of a salesperson. All in all, EBITDA for the quarter, which is somewhat softish, but primarily driven by shorter-term effects and continued strategic investments in our sales footprint and product to say. This brings me on to operating cash flow and to CapEx development. Here on the left-hand side, you see the operating -- operational cash flow development for the period. And you will note that we have a -- we are down to EUR 66 million in LTM for operating cash flows, down from EUR 137 million.

This is reflective of 2 quarters now with lower cash generation. And also, we, of course, have the one-off expenses that I mentioned before, does have a cash impact and then with the negative development in our working capital. You will also see that we are realizing on an LTM basis, EUR 38 million in cash interest expenses, that's lower than the EUR 45 million we had in 2024, and this is the benefit of the refinancing of the bonds, which we will continue to benefit going forward. At the same time, we maintain our CapEx investments here illustrated by the purple, EUR 34 million and EUR 9 million at roughly same levels as last year, and we did CapEx investment in M&A across Vivento and Captify of EUR 25 million. This brings me to adjusted leverage ratio and interest coverage ratio. And overall, we are certainly working on bringing down our leverage ratio and continue to focus on that. We have also communicated that in the case of an M&A, we could see periods where our net leverage ratio would increase temporarily.

And here, we see for LTM basis September that we are at 3.1x, up from 2.4 I think this quarter basically sees a combination of outflows for M&A. And then together with the lower cash -- somewhat muted cash generation and together with also negative working capital swings, all these elements come together and reduces our cash position for the quarter and thereby, it also influences our net leverage ratio. Moving then to interest coverage ratio. We see we are actually up 3.5, so at good and healthy levels. The increase is mainly driven by the fact that we are paying less interest on the bonds. Now I focused a lot on Q3 and Q3 performance, but just taking a back -- step back and looking at things in a bigger picture. We have had certain investment phases in the company through its lifetime.

And I think we demonstrate when you look at it in a long-term perspective that we are able to grow our revenue significantly as well as our adjusted EBITDA of 31% here across from 2020 to LTM today. And also we increased our adjusted EBITDA 38%. And I think that is important in -- to also have in mind as we look at the performance of Q3, and we should be evaluated on the long-term performance and Q3. That's really what I wanted to highlight with this slide. Then moving into guidance. So we've had a very strong start to trading in Q4, and that leads us to reaffirm but also update our full year guidance for the year. If we look at net revenues, we are guiding EUR 560 million to EUR 580 million. And if you look at the underlying effects here on the right-hand side, you can really see a year where we had very good and strong growth in Q1, less growth in Q2 and Q3.

But with the acceleration and the momentum shift we saw actually already within here at Q3, but also then accelerated into Q4, we feel comfortable and certain that we will reach EUR 560 million to EUR 580 million in top line. I should note that the EUR 560 million and EUR 580 million -- to EUR 580 million incorporates additions from M&A and also from the change of revenue recognition principle. And we try to do that to be as precise and give as much clarity on where are we actually going to end the year in reported terms. Adjusted EBITDA, we maintain from -- guidance on adjusted EBITDA, we maintain from EUR 125 million to EUR 140 million, taking into account that we continue to make investments also both in sales and in product. That concludes my section, and I will now hand over to Remco for wrap-up and closing remarks.

Thank you, Christian. And that brings me to the last slide of the presentation. Based on the efficiency measures and the investment in our growth initiatives in the previous quarters, we saw a strong end of Q3 and an even stronger start into Q4. The unification of in-app supply platform is finalized. Customers return to former spending levels and beyond. We were able to implement team and technology cost optimizations, and we restarted new customer onboarding in Q3 and saw a good effect from that. Putting more emphasis on the demand side is also leading to organic growth. We will further continue to onboard sales and teams -- salespeople and sales support staff. We see a positive trend with regards to upselling of our combined and continuously improved product portfolio. And as well as on the supply side, we also on the demand side, see a strong momentum in customer onboarding and scaling of the customers.

We continue to focus on launching and improving our products and solutions. We see that AI and yield investments on the unified platform show positive impact. We work on further improvements of our ID-less targeting, video solutions, data propositions and brand and agency solutions. And on top, the acquisition of Captify Technologies and Acardo are adding further critical mass. We started integrating measures immediately after the acquisition and synergies are already starting to show where majority of the synergies will come from 2026 onwards. And as part of the integration, we also implemented selective cost cuts with regards to overlaps and duplicates. The investments during Q2 and Q3 are paying off.

And based on these investments and the improvements we see and further expect we are going into -- we have started into a strong Q4 and also expect a strong 2026. Q4 will be strong uplift versus the earlier quarters, expecting net revenues of well over EUR 200 million and with a strong EBITDA of between EUR 39 million and EUR 54 million, as Christian just showed. So even though we are not super happy with the numbers of Q2 and Q3, like some of the investors also will be, I guess, it is worth it. We are really with that, able to continue a strong growth path like we did in the past. And with all those improvements and seeing the numbers, we are very confident about a very strong Q4. I would like to thank you all and would hand back to Ingo.

Thank you, Remco. And now it's time for our Q&A session.

[Operator Instructions] And the first question comes from Ellis Acklin from First Berlin.

So I'll get things rolling. My main topic really is a couple of questions about the overall ad market. So starting with that, if you could maybe give us some color on how the market is in general developing. I know you hammered home a couple of times about the absence of the political ad budgets. But aside from that, maybe you could talk a little bit about how the overall ad market is developing. And then also looking ahead to next year, we've got a couple of big events coming up with the Winter Games and also the World Cup. Do you see those as good growth drivers for next year? And maybe you could just give us a little bit of insight how you see next year developing with the ad budgets there? And then aside from that, just a small housekeeping question. It would be helpful if you could give the 2024 net revenue figure based on the updated revenue recognition methodology that you've adopted. So I'll leave it with that.

Thanks, Ellis. I think I'll take the first question, and Christian would like to take the second one. Ad market, I mean that's a story we can talk very long about. I'll try to summarize some of the headlines. U.S. is our main market. And the U.S. is with the tariffs and all those things, there's a lot of uncertainty and unpredictability in it. Overall, expectations were that it would be a super weak market this year. That's what we don't see, but there is weakness in some sectors, especially in auto and, for example, CPG, we see weakness. What we overall see is that in the open Internet, there is a consolidation trend, which makes sense because you need to be larger to do investments in AI and to grow. And if I see what we are investing in those sectors, small companies cannot do that. So that makes sense. And we see a lot of companies that are for sale and in that sense, will either sell or will, yes, drop out of the market. Walled gardens, we see different movements there.

Amazon is pretty aggressive, especially at the moment, going in with their DSP and yes, hitting on some of the larger players on the DSP side with, let's say, very low tariffs and also very cheap CPMs on CTV. So that's shifting a bit. Google is withdrawing a bit from the market with all the, how to say, legal stuff that they get on their things, putting more on YouTube. So we see shifts there. And then we see channel shifts. LLMs are really hitting on the web market. So that's, let's say, another trend that we see. Political ads was strong last year because of the elections in the U.S. It was already starting Q3. Q4 was even stronger. We have taken that into account actually with our forecast that, let's say, there's also Q4 revenues in political last year. But those are, I think, a few of the big trends in the market. So it's not a super strong market. It's certainly not even a strong market, but it's also not super soft.

But the shift within the market. Programmatic still winning from linear, also an important point. And yes, we hope that next year will be better. And as you mentioned, there will be some big events next year and big events normally also drive advertising spend. But also having said all this, we are still a relatively small company in this big market. And as such, there's enough growth opportunities. And the weaker revenues were not caused by the market to just say, yes, there were some elements and yes, it didn't help us, but the weaker revenues were caused by platform unification, which really was more painful than we originally expected. But on the other hand, we see now the really positive effects from that. I hope that answers your question as good as I could in the short time.

Christian?

Yes. Your question was what would have been the corresponding revenue back in the same quarter last year? And it would have followed roughly the same path of 3% decline. It would have been close to EUR 145 million.

No. Sorry, Christian, I was unclear about that. What would have been the top line for 2024 based on the current revenue recognition. So you reported EUR 437 million. I'm just trying to get a comparable basis to compare the 2025 full year numbers that you're guiding for.

Okay. I would have to come back with a number on that for you.

Okay. That's fine. You can e-mail it to me, that's all.

Yes, I'll e-mail it you.

Great. Thank you, Ellis. The next question comes from Adrian Elmlund from Nordea.

Yes. I hope you can hear me.

Very well.

Yes, very well. Okay. Perfect. So I have a couple of questions. So firstly, could we get some more detailed explanation here regarding the working capital effects? We're basically seeing 3 quarters now with rather weak cash flows, right, mainly due to working capital. But could you give some comments regarding the kind of cash generation going forward and your thoughts on that?

Sure. So it's correct that we -- in Q3, we had positive operating cash from the business, but we also had a negative swing in our net working capital, which, of course, takes some of the effect out. This was because we had lower securitization roughly of EUR 29 million. So the major effect there is really a lower use of our securitization program also because of some timing aspects. In Q4, we generally always have a good contribution of cash and also from working capital in Q4. So I would expect that it replenishes in Q4 for the year.

Kind of a follow-up on that but could you kind of explain the securitization program? Is that a onetime thing? And what will happen in the comp next year? Will it reverse? Or kind of is this systematic in any way?

It's not systematic. I would expect it to reverse -- some of it to reverse in Q4. The securitization profit is, as you potentially know that we sell our receivables on a nonrecourse basis. And we have utilized that program less this end of this quarter than we normally do, and that explains the change from Q2 to Q3 of the minus EUR 29 million.

Okay. Kind of following up on that again. Okay. So some weak cash flows here, you've seen some accelerated M&A and with that, of course, increased leverage.

Yes.

But you've also stated that going forward, you want to have reduced leverage ratio, right? I think you reduced the target some year ago. Could you perhaps give some comments regarding the leverage ratio and sort of the -- tying up the cash flow question there?

Yes. So that's true. And I -- looking at it from an overall perspective, we have been working and are working on bringing down our net leverage ratio. As I said, we also have been clear about that when we do M&A, they might temporarily move up, and that's what it's done for this quarter. And together with then a lower effect on our cash position, which is with the impact from both lower operating cash, but also the net working capital that depletes some of our cash position, which, of course, goes against the net debt. Looking going forward, with increased cash for Q4, it will improve, but I think it will take into next year as well to improve substantially, and it will continue to be a focus point for us.

Okay. Perfect. Just two more questions, if you will. One will be technical, but sort of given the platform unification here, as I understand it, it mainly affects the SSP segment, right? Could you give some explanation for why we've seen the margin pressure in the DSP? Is that mainly due to the personnel costs? Or kind of what are the reasons behind that?

Yes, Adrian, good question. Thank you very much. On the -- you're right, let's say, on the supply side, marketplace side, we have seen the unification effects that was integrating the 2 SSPs. So that's fully on the supply side. And on the demand side, we see the, let's say, the burden, but also already the positives of adding extra salespeople because if you add salespeople, you first have to pay the salaries and there's nothing coming in. After half year, you see partly things coming in. And after a year, if you're lucky, they are making -- they're starting to make the salary. So we are really investing in salespeople. So that's one point. And the second thing is, which I already said, there's a bit of a mix difference there. CTV, we put less attention on because of the margin so much under pressure. So that's also an effect that's hurting us there a bit.

Okay. Perfect. Lastly here, also a question regarding the kind of revenue recognition. Could you give any guidance what you expect in revenue recognition for 2026 so that we can put it in the model? Is that kind of EUR 30 million x 4? Or how should we view it?

Yes. I think we've been quite clear in terms of indicating -- if you look at the guidance slide, we've been quite clear in trying to indicate that it had an effect of EUR 32 million for Q3, and I think we indicated EUR 36 million for Q4. That's an estimate, of course. And I think you can take a similar proportion going forward. It will have effect for all the quarters for next year when comparing to this year. But it only starts here after July because that is when we move the volumes onto the new platform. So not entirely 3 x EUR 30 million. It will go a little bit up, but probably as an average and with also scaling with revenues, if you factor in and scale with the revenue growth for next year, you will probably have a pretty accurate estimate of it.

Okay. Perfect. That's all for me.

Did I answer?

Yes, yes, yes, absolutely.

Great. Great. Thanks, Adrian, for your contribution. And now the next question comes from Martin Yang from Oppenheimer.

Can you hear me okay?

Yes.

Just want to get some more clarity on the annual guidance. So if we want to compare the guidance this quarter to the prior guidance, should I subtract the adjusted revenue in 3Q and also the implied EUR 36 million revenue in 4Q '25 revenue from the updated guidance to compare apples-to-apples with your prior guidance?

That is correct, Martin. Thank you for your question. And that is correct that we, in our full year guidance for '25 here, that's EUR 560 million to EUR 580 million. We try to take all effects that we know of, both the M&A and the impact of the changed revenue recognition into that number. So you can effectively take the EUR 32 million and the estimated EUR 36 million and deduct that, and you would have it more on a like-for-like basis.

And then the next question on gross margin. It was mentioned in the press release. Can you please walk us through how you calculate gross margin?

Yes. It's not -- it's essentially our revenues -- gross revenues minus the purchase services that will both have elements of inventory, but there will also be certain other cost elements. So it's not exactly one-to-one with TAC which I think means some U.S. companies use, but it is equal to the definitions that we have used. And normally, we've only released the separation of purchased services and other expenses once a year with our annual report. In this case, we give it out here for this quarter. Does that explain it sufficiently?

Yes, because I was doing some rough calculation based on your disclosure, but my numbers is a little off from your published gross margin in the press release.

Okay. That could maybe because what we have provided here has been a like-for-like basis because we also have to neutralize the effect of the revenue recognition so that the numbers that we show is on a fully like-for-like basis backwards in time as well. Otherwise, it would not -- it would be erred pears and apples.

Got it. Last question from me is on the revenue recognition. Can you maybe share with us what percentage of revenues was adjusted to turn from net to gross and what specific business segments or business divisions are most impacted on these adjustments?

So the -- it is the SSP segment that is impacted. It is as we move to one unified platform on the SSPs and it is the volumes that we have migrated onto the new platform, which is the mobile in-app volumes. There are still outstanding some on display and CTV, but those are minor. The majority is this move for the in-app volumes that have moved on to the platform. I cannot give you a percentage out of how it is but those are the impacted areas.

Christian, that's it from me.

Thank you. Thank you, Martin.

Thank you, Martin. The next question comes from Jörg Frey from Warburg Research.

Just quickly on your savings, you alluded to the EUR 8 million that you are going to save from the platform migration next year. How should we think about that? How much is going to flow through to the bottom line? And how much are you going to invest in additional sales or anything else.

Do you want me to take that question, Remco?

Yes, please.

Yes. So it's correct that we have instigated saving initiatives that would have a run rate of EUR 8 million plus. I would expect that we continue to invest in U.S. for sales. And I would -- one way to look at it would be that at least 2/3 continue to have an effect and a roll-in effect of next year, but we will still have some investments in the U.S. That said, that's when you look at pure personnel costs, right? And if you look at the run rate of our personnel cost, the -- however, what you should also factor in is that we have been doing investments in our sales force, and these will now ramp with revenues, so they start to pay off the past investments.

Right. Understood. Is there anything like we've been -- in other advertising companies, we've got a lot of discussions about visibility for 2026. And well, is there -- are you generally seeing what we have seen in some peers that the short-run business that there is very big reluctance on booking volumes just right now and bigger commitments for next year? So any general comment on that side would be appreciated.

Yes. Jörg, thanks for the question. Good question. We indeed see based on, how to say it, uncertainty, unpredictability in the U.S. that also agencies are doing more short-term bookings. We even had bookings in Q3, which were then withdrawn or basically postponed then to Q4. So there is more short-term thinking in the market on the client side as well as on the agency side, but mostly driven, of course, by the clients. So that makes it not easier to estimate. And then in general, it is a growth market but these kind of things make it a bit more unpredictable. But I'm also always saying, I mean, it's markets where companies really grow with double digits. And my first company working was an oil company growing with 1% per year. That's easier to predict those kind of things than these kind of things. But it makes it more difficult also for investors, of course, and for us as well.

Yes. And I hope we -- you continue to manage it well and all the best for these volatile times.

Thank you, Jörg.

Thanks so much, Jörg. So the next question is a question from the chat from Rasmus Engberg from Kepler Cheuvreux, and he wants to know something about organic growth. Can you talk about the phasing of organic growth in Q4 and Q1? Do you think we will see organic growth in those quarters?

Okay.

Shall I take that one, Christian?

Yes, absolutely.

Yes. The simple answer is, yes, we expect to see organic growth with our platforms now really being more efficient than before. A lot of customer onboarding, we will see organic growth. We have not given any, let's say, guidance so far for 2026, also not for Q1. But based on where the company stands, the onboarding, the strong product portfolio, the investments we have done in sales, we expect to show strong organic growth in the next quarters.

Great. Thanks, Remco. So now we've got a question from Christoffer Jennel from Inderes coming up. Christoffer, you were both in the live Q&A and on the chat. I'll now just read your question from the chat. As I understand it, the weak cash flow is mainly a result of lower utilization of the securitization program in Q3. Are there any reasons behind this lower utilization during the quarter and should we expect lower utilization in the coming quarters. Could you also give some more color on what the underlying free cash flow would have been adjusting for this lower utilization?

Okay. So the utilization of the securitization program was lower this quarter. It was partly because of lower revenues but also some timing effects, which means that we are using it more now, and that also means that I expect that we will use it more through Q4, and therefore, replenish from a cash position perspective. I think that was one part of your question. And sorry, the second part was how it would influence our free cash flow, was that the question?

The second was, could you also give some color on what the underlying free cash flow would have been adjusting for this lower utilization?

It would have been -- if you took the Q3 and compared it to Q2, it would have been an addition of roughly EUR 29 million. It would -- it almost explains the whole negative swing in working capital. So if you add that back, then it would have a positive effect of -- in cash flow.

Great. Thanks, Christian. So the next question again comes from Ellis Acklin from First Berlin. Ellis, are you there?

Guys, I don't know if you can hear me, but it seemed like lost connection. So I guess...

It's your turn with the question. I still have one question from you in the chat. Do you want to proceed. No. Obviously, you cannot hear us. Okay. So of course, Ellis, please, if your connection is stable again, then please just queue in again. The next question again comes from Christoffer Jennel from Inderes via the chat. The number of large software clients improved slightly in Q3 but still remained below the level in Q1. How much of this is due to continued mitigation effects from the platform adage in scaling these customers above the $100,000 thresholds versus actual churn?

Yes, it has -- let's say, there's, of course, differences in the customer. Thank you for the question first. The -- I'd say the effect is really mostly based on the unification because we had periods where customers just were able to do less revenues on the platform. And if you do less revenue, you can get under the $100,000. And what we nicely see is, let's say, that the new customers onboarding is really strong, but that's still the over $100,000 showed a positive movement, but it's still, how to say it, not at the level where we were a year before. But we have, let's say, confidence that we will soon see that again based on, let's say, the performance platform now. But really those, let's say, yes, 1.5 months basically in each of the quarters that really hurt revenues, and that also brings people then, of course, under the $100,000. It's LTM revenues, so 12-month revenues. So especially with 2 quarters, it doesn't help.

Great. Thank you, Remco. The next question comes also via the chat from Sebastian Weidhüner from Paladin Asset Management. The delta in working capital changes in Q3 amount to around EUR 60 million. You quantified the securitization effect at EUR 29 million, what are the remaining working capital movements?

Okay. I think you are now comparing to Q3 last year, if I'm not mistaken. And it's true that there is a delta of EUR 60 million. I would have to look into exactly the combination of securitization at that point in time. This was before I took on CFO role. I would have to come back to you and just look into the combination of the different effects back in Q3 to answer that question.

Okay. Fair enough. So then Christoffer Jennel from Inderes has queued in again after his questions from the chat. Christoffer, now the microphone is all yours.

I thought I was missed in the queue so I tried chat instead. But since my 2 longer questions has already been touched on, I just had 2 shorter questions. So the first one is if you could sort of quantify the political ad spending impact in your Q3 and Q4 last year? And I can take the next question after that.

Yes, we can actually. So in Q3, there was an impact of roughly -- a little bit close to EUR 3 million. And in Q4, we had political spend that totaled something like EUR 7 million in Q4 last year.

That's helpful. And just to get this sort of clarified, will you only report the gross revenue going forward? Or will you also show the net revenue for the group?

We will continue to report per the standards at least for Q4 in the way we've done, but we will provide comparison figures as well back in time. We have also done in this interim report just basically to show fully the effects of the revenue recognition. I think there is a discussion of how we would report next year, but we will provide a comparison table so that you can look at it both in terms of the old revenue recognition principle and the new one for this year.

Thanks, Christoffer. So the next question comes from [ Joerg Schwarz from Smile Invest ]. No, he withdrew his question. So I think that has already been answered now. So we have one more question from the chat from our analyst, Edward James from Cantor Fitzgerald. Please, can you provide more clarity on revenue guidance and the impact of M&A? Prior guidance was EUR 485 million to EUR 515 million of net sales. The new guidance is EUR 492 million to EUR 512 million. If it takes -- if we take the Q4 implied figures you provided, how much are the completed acquisitions after the Q2 expected to contribute to the net revenue in Q4? And what does this imply for the change in net sales guidance, excluding M&A?

Okay. That was a long question, but I think I got the gist of it, which is really the contribution of the M&A for the Q4. And here, we would have consolidated in Acardo for 1 quarter, and we would have consolidating Captify for 1.5 months. We would estimate approximately a contribution of revenue combined across the acquisitions of around EUR 15 million. That's not a definitive number that is approximately EUR 15 million for the contribution for Q4. And I think thereby, you can also deduct that and see what that means.

Great. Thank you, Christian.

I think -- but overall, we are within guidance. I think that's what the question is driving at. But we do have all these effects that will come into play in Q4, and that's also why we try to provide the all-in figure for where we're going to report for the year as a whole.

Thanks for the clarification, Christian. So are there any further questions? [Operator Instructions] It seems there are no further questions at this time. Thank you very much again for participating in this Q&A session. Of course, in case additional questions should appear, please always feel free to reach out to the Investor Relations team. With this, we have reached the end of today's call. Thanks for participating. Have a good week, and talk to you soon. Bye-bye.

Welcome to this press conference for Verve Group September 2025. [Operator Instructions]

Now I will hand the conference over to the speakers, CEO, Remco Westermann; and CFO, Christian Duus. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much, moderator. Good morning, everybody. I would like to welcome you all to Verve's investor presentation about 2 acquisitions that we announced in the last 2 days, Captify and acardo. We're super happy with those acquisitions, and we would like to go through the main rationale behind the acquisitions.

First of all, they strengthen our demand side. As already mentioned in earlier investor calls and in our Capital Markets Day, we are very strong in supply side, especially on in-app, but also in CTV and other channels. And the more we can also directly have relations with demand side with advertisers and I would say, the agencies, the stronger the company is and the stronger economics of the company are. So with those 2 acquisitions, we strengthen our demand side.

I would like to go through the acquisitions one by one and start with Captify. Captify strategically enhances first, demand-side business, as already mentioned, by adding differentiated data assets and a proven sales force with deep brand and agency relations. So exactly, as mentioned before, we are getting closer to brands and agencies, getting a lot more [ context ] there.

Going into a bit more detail. What's the company about? It was founded in 2011; has roughly 140 employees; EUR 41 million revenues, that's in euros; EUR 3.7 million normalized EBITDA. It's a very strong position in intent data, so it's also classified as best in search marketing platforms. I can cover that later in a bit more detail. And it has offices in the U.K., U.S. and Australia. And you see on the right side, it's really strengthening our demand side, but also our data part.

Yes, what is the data part or what's the importance there? As you all know, we are strong in ID-less. The market is changing, but more and more IDs are going away between -- respectively, people are saying that -- saying no to if you want to be tracked, and that changes the market. With this company, we buy a very strong search intelligence assets. They have access to over 3 million domains. They have 2 billion connected devices and over 1 billion daily searches that they cover. So they get over 400 active data points, and it's one of the largest search data assets outside of the Walled Gardens built in the last 12 years.

So they've really started to prep data, what are people looking for on websites, where are they going to. And that's, of course, intent, and that's super important in advertising because if you know what somebody is looking for, it's really, how to say it, you can play in with ads on that and you have a much higher, let's say, response rate, of course, on that.

So the aggregate data, they have a lot of AI and machine learning, and it's adding contextual intent to Verve's already strong ID-less data. So we classify the search intelligence data, providing brands with a deep understanding of the consumer interest, motivations and intentions in real time. It's ID-less, so also that plays into what I just said, and very strong in machine learning, so we get also a lot of expertise additionally on board that is really strong in getting the search intent interactional strategies for the brands that it works for.

Then the second very big asset that we gathered with acquiring this company is it contributes to our sales force. And as we've mentioned, we want to strongly grow our sales force in the U.S. but also internationally. Doing it yourself is pretty costly because the seller not immediately yields revenues. And by that, you have to prefinance a seller basically, with, of course, getting immediately a big sales force on board. That's great. That's super helpful. And especially in the U.S. and in the U.K., we had a strong sales force here.

You see the revenues on the right bottom side. So almost 60% of the revenue is North America. Then U.K. is strong with 31%. That's where we are historically not so strong, so that's also helping a lot in U.K. And then rest of the world, 10%. And you see here also, yes, names of the companies they work for, they work for 48 of the [ NH ] top 100 advertisers in the world, and 6 out of 6 holdco agencies. And as I've mentioned also before, we were not so strong historically with the holdcos. Those are the big global agencies, and that's also very welcoming in this transaction.

To put us in a strategic perspective, we presented our strategic road map at our Capital Markets Day, and we're talking about verticalization by industry. And if we just go through the different points, let's say, the verticalization by industry, we're adding substantial agency relations and customers as well as specific, how to say it, audience and intent data, especially for health, travel and retail.

Then talk about our multichannel approach. Verve, traditionally super strong in in-app. With this, we are also adding CTV, mobile web and web offerings to our strength that we have. Then privacy first and quality standards, I mentioned that already, real-time ID-less search data, strengthening our ID-less position.

The platform unification, yes, we have integrated a lot of technical platforms. And in Q2, that was a bit more difficult, as we already mentioned before. The good thing here is it's not getting any big technical integration. It's mostly salespeople and tools. So there is no effort on the technical side, no real effort on the technical side.

Then investments into sales and geo expansion, yes, this accelerates, as already mentioned, the buildup of our sales force in the U.S. and the U.K. without the ramp-up inefficiencies.

Then M&A, yes, this speaks for itself. This is a very highly accretive and synergetic M&A transaction with a lot of post-deal synergies. And it's strengthening the core team. We're really adding a lot of talent to the team and also leveraging better the management positions.

I would hand over to Christian for financials.

Thank you very much. Good. Yes, let me go through kind of the overview of the financials. So in Captify, we are essentially taking over revenues on a run rate on a pro forma basis for '25 of EUR 41 million. The company has had more revenues in the past in 2024, but there has been a divestment of some of the business and also continue some of the business segments, and there was some one-off political campaigns. So in reality, it is EUR 41 million that we're taking over on a pro forma basis for '25 estimated with synergies for the revenues.

On an EBITDA basis, we have a pro forma income of EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA of EUR 3.7 million. We -- with the synergies that we see between the 2 companies, we see imminent synergies up to EUR 5.2 million. This is really a company that has, together with us, we get much more scale. We can be much more efficient, and we can also make the right investments for the companies and for Captify. And therefore, we see quite substantial, both cost savings and cross-selling potential. The integration starts immediately, and these synergies would come into full run rate effect during 2026.

To cover off the purchase price and also the consideration structure, we here provide you with the details how the actual transaction is structured. Overall, it's transacted in U.S. dollar of a total consideration of USD 30 million, that translates to EUR 25.6 million, and with an all consideration in a multiple of 7.

Now let me just break that down a little bit. The timing of the different considerations are, as you can see, and I'll now do reference the euro amounts. We do a cash consideration at closing of EUR 15.4 million. There is then a further consideration of EUR 800,000, 6 weeks after closing. And after 18 months, there's a final consideration -- cash consideration of EUR 9.4 million, altogether, EUR 25.6 million. That means at closing, we are at a multiple -- EBITDA multiple of 4.2, a total consideration of 7 -- a multiple of 7. And after synergies, 4.9. It's funded cash at hand and will be accretive to Verve's EBITDA with some dilution of the group margin until all revenue and cost synergies have run rate impact. So this you should expect. There is not significant capital expenditures, and we -- only have fairly moderate technical integration costs are expected.

All in all, if you think about this year, the company, Captify, will be consolidated from September 16, and that will have an estimated contribution to net revenues of the Verve Group between EUR 12 million and EUR 13 million net revenues, and an additional EUR 1 million to EUR 2 million on EBITDA.

That covers the financial transaction and just summarizing across the strategic rationale. This really, as Remco mentioned, strengthens our demand side business through top-tier accounts and really adds a significant sales force to us. It brings us very interesting and very actionable search data, intent data, outside the Walled Gardens, has a good fit, and that was a prerequisite for doing the acquisition that it was a strategic fit with our road map. And as it just went through, it will increase and contribute on a pro forma basis, EUR 41 million to 2025 and roughly EUR 5 million in EBITDA.

That covers Captify, and then I hand back to Remco to cover acardo.

Thank you, Christian. Yes, then we go to the next acquisition, which is acardo. And also here, we talk about strengthening the demand side business of Verve.

Just to read it here, acardo strategically enhances Verve's demand side business by adding measurability and sales lift solutions as well as proven sales force with deep brand relations, while Verve's supply significantly expands acardo's reach.

So going to the next page. Here on the right side, we see that this transaction adds on the demand side, but also a bit on the supply side, giving us really nice access to data and to also, I'd say, publisher access. The company was founded in 2000, 110 employees roughly, with EUR 14.7 million net revenues in 2025, EUR 4.1 million adjusted EBITDA estimate to 2025, and over 5,000 retail stores that they are connected with, that's the supply side, and a household reach of 85% in Germany.

So we're talking also about transaction here that is outside our core U.S. geo. And as we mentioned at Capital Markets Day and also the other instances, that we want to selectively go into other markets, Scandinavia, U.K., Germany, especially if you talk about Europe, and this is in Germany to also bring forward. We have a good experience, let's say, with the combination of organic and nonorganic. And this also gives us much stronger foothold, of course, in Germany by that. Yes, and they have relations with 200 CPG brands that are advertising with acardo also here. But I'm coming to that on the next page.

So here you see that it really expands our market reach in Europe, but especially Germany, as mentioned, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, to say. You see here the focus on retail, so it's really strong in that segment. And you see basically all the brands that are strong in retail stores and also all the retailers, almost all the retailers that have strong positions, especially in Germany. So super happy with this because it gives us a lot of entries and a lot of possibilities to scale the business.

They have a very strong customer retention rate with 99% plus. 85% reach of households in Germany, as already mentioned, and it's really a launch pad for further expansion into the key regions around us.

To make it a bit more concrete, because driving measurable outcomes is always a bit, let's say, a difficult thing to say -- or let's say, to understand. What is exactly happening? So an advertiser engages customers through our emerging channels. So for example, CTV, mobile, digital out-of-home. Then customers are directly -- directed, sorry, to a landing page. On that landing page, they are immediately getting a call for action, which is a coupon, for example. With that coupon, they go to the store, so they redeem it or they redeem it online, also that's possible, and then the advertiser gains immediate insights, very transparent, what works, what doesn't work.

So super good because measuring is one of the big challenges of the advertising industry. An advertiser, of course, wants to know if the advertising that he does is really yielding, is really working. And with this, you have a really nice tool to do that. So this is, yes, rolled out in Germany at scale, but we will, of course, also internationalize this.

Yes, accelerating our strategic road map also here, just to go a bit more in detail. Verticalization by industry, yes, it doubles down on our high-growth verticals, CPG and retail, through proven customer activation capabilities, so making us much stronger there with all the relations also that I mentioned before.

Then in the multichannel approach, yes, it's enabling shoppable campaigns that we have put in retail media as a strong part of also our strategy. And with this, we get the ability to get shoppable campaigns across mobile, CTV and digital out-of-home, yes, and we can, as already mentioned, get that into measurable outcomes.

Privacy first, quality standards, retailer-integrated first-party transaction data, they ensure privacy, compliance and outcome-driven measurement. So also here, we have a tick-the-box.

The platform unification. Also in this case, we don't talk about supply-side platform or demand-side platform, also no big technical integrations makes life a lot easier.

Then investment into sales and geo expansion, as already mentioned, expands our footprint in the German market really puts a strong basis here, with an experienced team and strong retailer networks and the direct brand relationships. And of course, those we can lever also outside because outside of Germany because a lot of those retailers not only work in Germany, and also the brands, of course, not only work in Germany.

Yes, then M&A as add-on on organic growth. Tick-the-box of course, very complementary ad revenues, technology at a very attractive multiple. And the strengthening the core team, a lot of talent that we get in here. And as mentioned, especially strengthening our German market position.

Then I would hand over to Christian for the financials.

Thank you very much. Good. In terms of covering acardo financials, we see here, this is a somewhat smaller company than Captify. In total revenues on a euro basis is EUR 14.7 million. We -- growing from EUR 13.9 million in '24. So we expect revenue synergies to materialize in the short term of EUR 1.5 million.

On an adjusted EBITDA, the company performs with EUR 4.1 million expected for 2025. So that's an estimate. And also here, we, together with -- mostly on the revenue side, the uptake, we really see an uptake of 40% on EBITDA, growing the EBITDA to 5.7 million on a shorter-term basis. It's a healthy company with strong EBITDA performance, solid organic growth, and we really see strong cross-selling potential in the retail media with -- that can add significant EBITDA accretive to Verve Group on a medium-term time line. The [ cross ], as I said, the revenue potential is the core focus here for this acquisition.

Also here for acardo, I'll go through the consideration structure. Altogether, it's a total consideration of EUR 24.5 million, which equates to an EBITDA multiple of 6. The transaction here is on a debt-free basis, and it's structured with a cash consideration of EUR 17.2 million at closing. Closing is expected to be October 1. And therefore, it would also be consolidated into our financials from October 1.

There is a further deferred cash consideration 12 months after closing of EUR 7.3 million, altogether, the EUR 24.5 million. And that means it has an EBITDA multiple of 3x at closing and 4.3x at full consideration.

Similar to Captify, this is, of course, accretive to our EBITDA, and it has a margin -- EBITDA margin roughly in line with the overall Verve Group EBITDA margin. Low ongoing capital expenditure requirements and also, as Remco mentioned, quite moderate integration cost expected.

When we look at consolidation, and this is, of course, an estimate from October onwards, we expect it to contribute somewhere between EUR 3.5 million to EUR 4.5 million net revenue contribution and between EUR 0.9 million to EUR 1.2 million in EBITDA contribution.

So perhaps a somewhat smaller acquisition, but nonetheless, very, very interesting in that it really expands our market reach and our sales force in Europe, and it gives us an activation solution towards consumers with a very strong coverage and reach in German households. As Remco mentioned, this is part of our vertical focus in doubling down on CPG and retail and strategically aligns with our strategy also in terms of expanding both mobile, CTV and digital out-of-home.

I went through the different financials, but again, to just recap, EUR 15 million of revenues on a pro forma basis, EUR 6 million on an addition in EBITDA after synergies.

And I think that covers basically acardo. If we put all this together, we wanted to also show kind of the relative size of the different acquisitions, but also the totality when we put it all together. So here, we depict the combined pro forma financials full year for 2025. Altogether, Captify and acardo, would add on a pro forma basis full year, EUR 56 million in revenues and EUR 8 million in EBITDA. You can see here the different breakdowns. So on revenue, it would be the EUR 500 million as a midpoint from our guidance plus EUR 41 million for Captify plus EUR 15 million from acardo, totaling EUR 156 million.

And on EBITDA, again, using the midpoint of our guidance, EUR 132.5 million with plus EUR 4 million, plus EUR 4 million, so EUR 141 million. That is on a pro forma basis, we see strong potential to take that up. And when you add the additional synergies that we have identified, that would add a further EUR 3 million EBITDA to our results. These synergies will materialize on a full year run rate into 2026.

Maybe important to say, these M&A transactions are additional to our guidance. Our guidance was provided without M&A, and our guidance remains with M&A on top.

And then I hand back to Remco.

Thank you, Christian. Yes, brings me to the last slide of the presentation, and that's really the summary of both transactions. So we're super happy, and we happily welcome also the teams of Captify and acardo. I was yesterday at DMEXCO, which is a big advertising fair in Cologne in Germany. And we also had the acardo team. There are some people of the acardo team already now [indiscernible] and see also very positive reactions on that.

So yes, summarizing it, the 2 transactions strategically strengthened our demand side business and [indiscernible] of course, the overall business, doubling our sales force, expanding our brand and agency reach, especially also into the holdco area, which I mentioned before. Then grow our footprint in Europe, Germany and U.K., and also, of course, in the U.S., but it's important because we want to really expand our geos in Germany and U.K., the transaction both add to that, so Captify to the U.K. and acardo to Germany. Then adding value, a valuable retail inventory and data assets, as mentioned, the access to retail stores by acardo and the strong search intent data that we get from Captify. And then increase measurable outcomes for CPG and retail clients are really being able to measure what people buy, so does advertising work and that's also one of the important things here.

That brings me, yes, to the end of this presentation, and I would open up for questions. But just want to mention, we are super happy that we're able to close those transactions. And yes, looking forward to further expand our business.

Handing back to the moderator.

[Operator Instructions] There are no questions at this time. So I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.

Yes. Then we had a very clear presentation. I assume. We're, of course, happy to answer questions also further on. Thank you very much for attending this call, and we go, yes, back to working and making sure that we really capitalize on Captify and acardo. Thank you very much, and have a good day. Bye-bye.

Good morning, everybody. Thanks for finding your way to Stockholm today or joining online. My name is Ingo Middelmenne. And as the Head of European Investor Relations of Verve, I'd like to cordially welcome you to this year's Capital Markets Day of our company.

After intense weeks of planning, our whole team and me are really thrilled to finally have you here as our guests today. As usual, we've prepared some sophisticated deep dives into the most recent developments at Verve from an operational and financial perspective as well as valuable industry insight and sessions with high-level tech experts from our group.

First up, let me present today's speakers to you. From our company's executive team, you will meet today Remco Westermann, our CEO; Christian Duus, our CFO; Mishel Alon, our CBO; and Paul Hayton, the CTO of our subsidiary, Dataseat. And then we're very proud to have an international guest speaker with deep industry insight, Eric Seufert is going to do today's keynote. He's a media strategist, quantitative marketer and author, and I'm really looking forward to his speech. He came all the way from the U.S. today.

What can you expect from Verve today on this Capital Markets Day? The day will be split into 2 parts. So we have 2 sessions basically. The first is going to be the business update that's going to be run by Remco and Christian with the commercial update and the financial update. After this, we'll have an extensive Q&A session, which can also be followed online. Then after the lunch break, we're coming up with our expert sessions, the keynote I just mentioned, but as well as deep dives into ID-less advertising and AI in advertising.

And now I'm handing you over to Remco Westermann, the CEO of Verve Group, who will lead you through the first part of today's Capital Markets Day. Remco, the stage is all yours.

Thank you. Good morning, everybody. People here in the room, but also online. Yes, I would like to take you through the business update and starting with our equity story. Most here in the room and also many online know the company. So some of it will be a bit repetitive, but I think it's good always to realize what are we aiming for, where are we and what's our story.

Starting with the market. Advertising is a very diverse, very crowded, I would even say, market. And it's becoming more and more complex, where advertising started with a few newspapers at a certain point, radio, then a few TV stations, the diversity has become enormous. We still have radio. We still have television. But there's a lot of social different channels that have come up. And here, you see basically the life cycle of advertising. A lot of those channels go down. Traditional television, why should you send 1 ad to everybody if you can send it on a digital TV, connected TV individually per household. So you see that, let's say, some channels are going down, some channels are still in a growth phase, and we have the emerging channels.

Emerging channels is that what we are focusing on. The advantage of the emerging channels is market positions are not yet taken or at least are pretty young and the markets are growing. And working in a growth market, of course, is much more exciting than working in a market that's declining. So the channels that we're talking about, mobile, the personal device, connected TV, so the old TV set, but now digitalized. Retail media coming up a lot. Amazon came up, I mean, making losses over many years and now being, let's say, the gigantic online retailer, but also traditional retailers, Walmart, Circle K and many, many others are really getting into this space.

Why not make money from the customer contacts that you have? Why not help the CPGs, so the consumer good producers -- to bring people into the store or to decide or to help them make a different decision on their product choice. Then digital out-of-home, the screens outside. It was also previously, it was somebody going around and sticking those things, and now it is really digital, getting more digital. And then digital audio podcast, for example, also getting in. So those are the channels that we're concentrating on.

A bit about the market. We talk about a huge market, advertising, $1.1 billion spend worldwide per year. In the U.S., over $1,200 -- over $1,200 spent per head per year on advertising. $600 million of that is digital. So there is still a part that is traditional television, especially. And in the digital part, you see a very big part is mobile. Mobile, as you see, is a growth sector. It's growing nicely, the most personal device as already said, and it's 96% of our revenues. So mobile is really where we are focusing on. And then within mobile, it's mostly in-app, but we also do mobile web.

Then connected TV, also a large segment, still smaller. And if you compare to linear, still small compared to linear. And that means also in the future, there will be a lot more connected TV happening. And then desktop, that's already more in the, what we say, the mature segments. So that's also what we're not concentrating on. We can do it because sometimes you need it to fulfill a campaign for an agency, but it's a small part of our revenues, and that's where Google and many others have taken strong positions.

Talking about our main market, the U.S. U.S. is almost 80% of our revenues, 79% to be exact. So important market. Why are we so big in the U.S.? It has a bit to do with how we started via acquisitions in the advertising part, but has also to do in the U.S., scaling is much easier. In Europe, you really have to go country by country, language, rules, agencies, everything is much more local. And the same counts for Asia, where often the CPM, so the prices per ad are lower and also for Lat Am, where have the same, where the countries are maybe bigger, but let's say, the revenues overall country is smaller.

So U.S. is a super interesting market for us. It's growing. You see here mobile expectation growing 10% per year. I'll get to market growth later in the presentation because there's always some hiccups also in growth, even though there is a continuous growth there. And in the U.S., we're super proud that we have been able to build a strong position. iOS, Apple's ecosystem, in-app, we're seen as the #1 market share-wise. That doesn't say that we have 20% or 30% market share. There's still a lot of players there, and we have, let's say, overall market shares are not huge, but we are #1. That helps us to open a lot of doors.

On the Trust Index, last presentation, we were #1. Now we're #3. So it's also -- I mean, measuring is not always easy in those things, but I'm super happy that we are seen as one of the top recognized trusted parties in the market. That helps a lot. Advertising is about trust. There's a lot of fraud, a lot of, let's say, intransparency. And in that sense, it makes a lot of sense to be trusted and to be helped because of that.

To our business model. We are a tech company. We are running a tech platform. We match the advertiser with the publisher. I talk about digital channels. So all the matching is digital. And it's much more complex than this picture, but we want to show basically what we try to do is get the best result for the advertiser, often working with this agency and then the best result for the publisher, which means highest price per ad, which means good fill rate. And for the advertiser, it's really reaching the right target group in the best efficient way. A bit more complex. So what's happening, if you open a page, there is an ad on that page or there's an ad spot on that page. And while you open the page, we get the information that this ad is for sale. We technically connect it to the publisher. We have a contract. So this information comes to us, the ad request comes to us. We enrich it with data and we make it available to the demand side. That's our supply side platform is doing that.

On the demand side, you have a demand side platform where you have several advertisers or the agencies putting in, I want to reach a certain target group, a certain price per ad, certain, how to say, other targets, viewability, attention rate, those kind of things. That's what they put in the system, and then there's a bidding between the 2. The highest bidder wins, the ad of the highest bidder is being rendered. So in this case, it would be adidas the adidas ad is winning. Talk about prices per 1,000 ads, CPM is the kind of term. This all has to happen in less than 100 milliseconds because during the time that the page is loading, we have to do this auction process and to make sure that the ad is shown before the page is fully loaded. Otherwise, you have an empty ad spot, and that's a waste of money for everybody.

It's not only fast, we also do a big volume. We serve 2 billion to 5 billion ads per day. And that's what's all happening there in the heart, in the technology. And I'll come to our migration project a bit later on the slides, but we have really started with buying some companies, we brought them together. We're integrating those to a single platform and that single platform is doing all of this. Supply side platform and demand side platform to just specify.

Value chain. We say we want to do everything between advertiser and publisher, which means that we have the full technology stack. So we have the DSP, we have an SSP, and we have the marketplace and the bidding part in the middle. If you look at the financial part of it, it's the advertiser that pays. The agency that pays the money then for the ads and sometimes they do a markup towards the advertiser, of course, mostly. And from $100 that's paid, roughly 20% goes to the DSP, roughly 20% goes to the SSP and roughly 10% for data bidding, matching, et cetera. So 50% is taken by the chain and 50% goes to the publisher. That's not a lot, you would say. If you then look, for example, at the Department of Justice files for their Google investigation, you see that Google takes 80% of margin on external volume.

So this sector is still not very margin efficient, I would say. And there's a lot of point solutions, parties that only do DSP or only do SSP. If you do the whole chain, you can become more efficient, you can make more margin, but you can also give to the publisher and to the advertiser. So that's an important point. It's a market that is not cost sensitive at the moment. The market is really looking at best matches at selling the ads. There's still a lot of unsold ad inventory and there's still a lot of bad targeting. So that's more important even than the margins, but also margins, of course, play a role.

That's what we're doing. When we entered this market, we were looking, hey, there's many parties here, but there's also many inefficiencies. But what's really changing in this market? And what's changing is privacy. Privacy is becoming more and more important, being a European-based company, Stockholm-based, Sweden-based, we very early became already aware of GDPR. And GDPR in Europe made a lot of, I'd say, emotions. And if you ask a consumer, do you give consent that your data are being used? 80% says no. And there's differences between countries, but that's a rough number. But the majority, by far, the majority says no.

That means that the advertising market is being disrupted. It's changing. The advertising market was -- the digital advertising market was used to targeting with cookies. If I have a cookie, I can build a profile because I see this cookie all the time coming back. I can say this person is interested in sports, this person has a certain profile. And I know when an ad from a phone, for example, of this person comes that they have to send this ad to maybe adidas or somebody else who is going for sports goods. That changes. If there's no consent, if there's no identifier, I need to do targeting differently. We saw that as a disruption of the market. And when we started getting into advertising, we said that's really the big opportunity to go for. Later today, Mishel and Paul will go more in depth.

But ID-less targeting, so targeting without IDs is something that we're really focused on and that has given us a strong market position. It differentiates us. And you see here, iOS, Apple, we have really been able -- you saw the market share before, but we have also been able to really grow our revenues in this part. We have developed ATOM, a solution for this. It's one of our ID-less solutions. But we also see that Android is moving in that direction and also mobile web, et cetera. We see already movements in that direction. So ID-less is becoming more important, and that's where we really focus on and differentiate.

A bit about -- yes, the mix, what are we doing? I said mobile is very strong, 65,000 apps where we integrated. Mobile is 96% of our revenues. Connected TV, we have a lot of direct supply. We have reached 200 million connected TV screens. There's not a lot of differentiation in connected TV. That's not only a problem for us, but for most parties. And we are working on that because we also want to extend our mobile share. It's now 4%, but we want to get it bigger, which means we need to work more on competitive advantages there, especially our strong data position that we get for mobile based on IP addresses, we can use those same data towards the households. So that's what we're working on to also grow our CTV, our connected TV. We reach over 2.5 billion consumers. We have 954 software clients by the end of -- large software clients by the end of Q2. Christian will cover that later in his presentation, customer numbers. And we do 1 trillion ad impressions in -- we did 1 trillion ad impressions in the last 12 months.

Demand supply, we started more supply focused. Supply is where the data are, supply is where the publishers where you get the ad. But we would like, as I showed before, have equality between the 2, demand and supply. Because if you really get every dollar that comes on the demand side or your own demand side or your own supply, you're most efficient, I showed the efficiencies before. We're not there yet. Last year with Jun Group, we did a big move forward on the demand side also organically be growing faster. But it's 25% demand side, 75% supply. Ideally, we would get to 50-50. U.S., I mentioned already, 79% U.S. market, 9% Europe, 12% rest of the world. And mobile, I mentioned already. The other channels, they're there, you don't see them. They are still very small, digital out-of-home, retail media and audio, digital audio, but they're also growing and also we are building positions there.

A bit of history. We started as a publisher, a games publisher, started this almost 13 years ago. We have been growing every year. We have been growing our revenues. We have been growing our EBITDA. We transitioned from a publisher, which is a very difficult position to grow organically towards an advertising company. With that, we named the company from gamigo to Media and Games Invest and to Verve. With Verve now, we are an advertising company, even though we have still a bit of games, but it's under 10%. So we are really focused on advertising company. Last year, 36% revenue growth, 30% EBITDA margin, and we're here to further grow. That was a bit of our equity story, how we go.

Now the commercial update. Coming to the commercial update for Q2. I'll cover the numbers and headlines, and then Christian will go more in detail. And normally, at Capital Markets Day, we, let's say, come here with all the numbers as the surprise or let's say, showed them first time. We already went out on Thursday night with new guidance and on Friday morning with our Q2 numbers. Coming to that a bit in a minute, but we had more issues on our platform unification than we expected. And it lasted longer. It costs a bit more revenue. And that also brought us to the conclusion that we have to change our guidance for this year. Not happy with that. But yes, it's running a company, and it's not always a straight line, but the company is stronger than before. Unification is now done. I'll come to that later in the presentation.

But that's the reason that the numbers were already out. But nevertheless, we did 10% revenue growth, 1% adjusted EBITDA growth. We reached a 28% EBITDA margin, leverage at 2.5x. So on the high side of where we want to be 22% software clients growth. That's overall growth, the large clients didn't grow that fast and 98% retention rate. So our customers did less revenues, but they stayed, and that's very important. So very good retention rate. Christian, as mentioned, will cover that later in the presentation.

What are the main highlights? And I mentioned already before. I would start with #3, platform unification. We are a tech company. And the tech company has a tech platform. And actually, when we started this, we did acquisitions, and we had several tech platforms. And our biggest part of business, as I showed before, is mobile, it's in-app and it's our supply side. And we have been integrating supply side platforms into 2 platforms before of the acquisitions that we did, and those 2 big platforms were being integrated in Q2. And that was not without pain, as you see on the slide. It lasted longer and the issues were a bit more. I'll go further into detail later in the presentation, but it hurt us. And that means that we had less revenues and that we had more costs, and that is what you see in the numbers. So that is basically one point.

The good thing there is that the unification is now done and that we are growing with a single platform, single in-app platform, much more efficient than we did before. And we have always said if we do acquisitions, and we already said that when we did gaming acquisitions, you need to integrate those companies. If you keep them independently, if you keep the platforms, the technology independently, it's very inefficient and it becomes more and more difficult to manage at a certain point. So I'm super happy that we did it. I'm super happy that we're out of it, but it really hurt.

Then Liberation Day impact, number one. Yes, the market is a bit softer. The market is not like, wow, it's all great. And if you look at the guidances or also at the reports from our competitors and from people in the sector, you see that market is not strong. But I'm not here to blame the market for our Q2. We had a onetime effect. And in this market, even though it's weaker, we can grow. Yes, we had some weaker customers. On the other hand, you can compensate it with new customers by other customers. So market is a bit weaker. It's not wow, but it's still okay.

Then as mentioned already, growing our customer base, 22% increase in overall number of customers, 10% organic. And that's maybe also important to mention, our demand side grew. So we had the issues on the supply side. 98% retention rate, I mentioned that already before. So we have customers that are super happy that stay and a company that has a very, let's say, stable customer base, of course, is much easier to grow than if you also lose a lot of customers. So we have a solid base to further grow.

Then integration of Jun, as Mishel is here, he will present later. We acquired Jun Group in July last year or let's say, actually 1st of August. The team is now integrated. We have -- we see the cost and the revenue synergies and we're preparing now also the rebranding. The Verve brand is strong, and it's stronger if everything is under the Verve brand. But also the Jun brand, of course, it was -- yes, it is known to all the agencies that they work with. So this is a process that also takes some time that needs to be well prepared, and we're now working on doing the rebranding and finishing it also this year.

Sales team expansion. We have a good product. It's B2B. There's 4,000 agencies, over 4,000 agencies in the U.S. And if you want to sell it, you need to go to those agencies. We have 35 sellers at the moment in the U.S. with 35 sellers or for 35 hunters. So we have also account managers and other people behind that. But with 35 hunters, you don't have enough people to cover 4,000 agencies. And then we also have the holdcos, the big agencies, the WPs, et cetera. They have also hundreds of thousands of people. So you need to have a bigger staff or a bigger number of sellers to really address those. We have started in Q2 with hiring. That's painful because it means a lot of interviews. It also means that if you hire a seller, the seller is not always good, but you normally don't find out the first week, but it takes half a year and then the sellers to really start making money. And by the end of the year, you know it for sure. But that means also that some hires are not good and you have to redo that.

So this is a painful process, but it has to happen. So we want to add 100 sellers or we want to go to 150 sellers actually in the U.S. by end of next year from the 35 that we are now. Regional adoption of sales strategy. If you have more people, you can go more regional. U.S. is very regional. You need an office in Chicago, you need an office in the West Coast or in San Francisco, in L.A., et cetera. So also there, you are closer to your customers, so that makes life also easier.

Segment focus, another important point. I'll cover that a bit later. But the -- you have different industries, different industries have different experts and also for advertising, there's differences. And then capital market focus, I'll quickly go through and Christian will cover it in more detail. Our uplisting strengthens IR, happy to have Ingo on board, bond placement and our capital increase, but Christian will go more in detail. So those were our highlights and challenges. Normally, I put highlights first on the slide and challenges second. But this case, because of the unification, we put the challenges first and then the highlights second.

A bit about the market because there's a lot of talking about the market is weak, the market is not weak, et cetera. What you see here is the price index and the price index goes with demand and supply. So if it goes down, there is less demand. If it goes up, there's more demand. And what we see here is that there's different -- that advertising is not a straight line from a development point. And we have seen different, let's say, down phases, economy is not working so well. Inflation is going up. Uncertainty is a factor there. I mean there's some names here. What we see now is that it's not going up so fast as we've mostly seen before. But still, as I said before, this is not a reason to not grow.

So there are market dynamics. Programmatic advertising is growing faster than the other parts of the market. We have the ability to further gain market share, and we're doing that. We have a high level of customer satisfaction, 98% retention rate. And we also had 94%, 96% in the past, but we have a very high retention rate. And technology. We see and we further believe that our idealist targeting is really very strong and giving us more market share and giving us more opportunity. What are our growth drivers? Why are we growing? First of all, market growth. Yes, there's hiccups, but there is market growth. And having acting in a market with tailwinds is, of course, much easier than if the market goes down, emerging channels, as I started with in the presentation.

Customer expansion, B2B, I mentioned that before. Add more customers, add more agencies, add more brands, add more publishers, add more verticals, add more geos and have enough account management and a good product to really scale those customers, typical B2B. Then differentiation. There's a ton of companies in this market. New products, innovation ideas, I mentioned that a few times, but also new ad formats. Full screen, video ads, those things, partly things that our platforms didn't have, partly things where we really innovate where we give new formats. Having an SDK, so software integrated in an app gives us the possibility to really show new formats to do things. And new channels, audio, podcast is really something where we're now focusing on and where we see a lot of things. A lot of podcasters don't get enough viewers on their viewers -- sorry, listeners on the podcast. And we help them with that. We help them to generate traffic for that. So that's an interesting market.

And then platform synergies, it's technology. Scaling makes sense. The more you scale, the more efficient you get, the bigger you get, the more efficient. That's also the reason for unifying the platforms because otherwise, it doesn't work like that. But also more size gives you more data and the possibility to invest more in AI. And the combination of AI and data, and Paul will especially go into that later, is super important. That's where you can also differentiate the company. That's where you can gain more, become more efficient, be more relevant.

So those are the 4 growth drivers, market growth, customer expansion, new products, platform synergies. That drives us. What's our strategic rationale, verticalization by industry. So we really go more deep in the industry, and I'll cover these points in more detail. Multichannel approach. We want to do a full customer journey. So yes, we are very strong in in-app, but it makes a lot of sense to also do CTV, digital audio, digital out-of-home, retail media. We want to follow the customer, the consumer where he is and also at the right time, show the right ad to get the most effective outcome.

And then very important, mentioned already, privacy first, high-quality standards. There's a lot of fraud still in this market, made for advertising pages. So pages that are really there to just lure people in to show them ads. A lot of, let's say, bad traffic, that's what people don't like. If you are a brand, you want to show your ad in a good environment. And the privacy thing, you don't want to upset the consumer also. It's not only that there's less data available, but also as an advertiser, as a brand, you want to work with the preference of a consumer and not go against it.

Verticalization, here, some examples and the examples are coming back later in the presentation. So one of our segments where we're strong and which we're really strongly focusing on is digital brands. Those can be brands like Apple and different other ones, but we have Auto here as an example. It's the third largest German digital retailer, where we showed good results. And if we really understand the segment, we can use our standard tools. We can tailor them. We can really bring to the sector. We can really bring sector expertise in there. So that makes a lot of sense. CPG, very important, fast-moving consumer goods. CPG is more the U.S. term. Also there driving incremental sales, making sure that people sell their products, add to cart, for example, is something that we do.

Middleton Health, another example, really making sure that we help Pfizer in this -- to sell their product, reducing the cost to reach customers -- patients, sorry, and providers. So that's really important. And with size, we have the possibility to specialize. We have the possibility to hire experts of those segments. And if you have the experts, it's easier to talk to the agency that sometimes doesn't even have the expertise, and it's easier to talk to the customer who comes from that part. So very important with scaling our sales force, with scaling our team, we have the possibility to go into the segments.

Channels. Mobile, I mentioned already before, that's our strongest, very strong direct supply base. There's a lot of intermediating in this business where there's indirect supply. We have to direct. We are integrated in apps. We have direct integrations to serve the ads. Premium supply, you want to be in a good environment if you show your ad, also very important. So that's what we've been focusing on, and that's the biggest part of our business now. Connected TV, we have a strong position on the supply side. So we reached already 60% of the U.S. households with direct CTV. But as mentioned before, we are working on further getting our sales story, getting our USPs in that part.

It's still a very fragmented market. And if you look at the other players, nobody really has a competitive advantage. So there's a big opportunity that we see and that we're working on. The retail media, a lot of our customers are already from the CPG area or CPG part or even on the retail side. But we didn't very much specialize on it. We are now. And retail media basically means that you want to do the full chain. You want to reach the customer outside of the store or on the -- in the digital store, but you also want to be able to even transplant that into the store. More and more stores are getting media in the store. So also making those available, making sure that you target the right people and that you influence the choice in the store because that's where a lot of decisions are taken. Somebody drinks normally PepsiCoke. Coca-Cola would like to get this person to drink Coca-Cola. That's something that you can easily do in the store.

Digital out-of-home mentioned before, more and more screens. And not only the big ones that you all think about, but also, for example, in Ubers now, you get -- Uber get in the U.S., you have all the screens that you see with ads. So there's more and more space with ads on airports everywhere. The digital, also there, it's important to really reach people in the right way. And audio podcast, another channel, very important, growing, still totally undermonetized, not a lot of ads yet and a lot of podcasters, for example, that also don't have enough reach on the channels. So a lot of opportunity there to also go in.

Also here, because we are becoming bigger, we have the possibility to specialize in those things and to really go in. But we don't do everything at the same time. We're talking here about our 3 to 5 years and beyond. And this is the channels that we really want to serve, but the opportunity is now, and we need to start working where we see really the opportunities.

Privacy first, quality standards. Yes, a lot is happening in that respect. Apple introduced in 2021, ATT, which is really banning or, let's say, making targeting much more difficult, no cookies, no identifier from Apple anymore. Then the IAB, Meta. We have a lot of, let's say, things that are happening in the privacy space. But the trend, the tendency is towards more and more privacy, less and less signals that an advertiser can rely on.

So ID-less targeting is becoming standard. And it takes the time. We see that with agencies. They sometimes very slow adopters. You rather stick to what you know, you rather stick to what you have. But at a certain point, if the targeting is less, you have to change, and we see that happening now. First-party data, we also see that it's more and more important to be close to the publisher to be where the data are or to really build a direct bridge to your consumers, loyalty apps, for example. Also, there's a lot of data, first-party data. Then AI-powered programmatic optimization, you cannot do this manually. This is all too complex. You need AI to do this. So AI is super important. We're covering that later.

And then also, the good thing is if you do it properly, you have a much better result. People like to see ads that are relevant for them. And what we have, it's the cookie apocalypse. Also cookies are not great. If you have a mobile phone and you use it and the cookie is building a certain profile and you have a kid that borrows your phone and is doing totally different things, your cookies is totally, yes, abused, misused, whatever -- sorry, I was looking for the right word. There's a first mover -- we have a first-mover advantage in ID-less targeting. ID-less targeting is really changing this market. And of course, contextual targeting, you can show an ad in the car ads on a car app, that's easy, but then you don't have enough reach.

So it's much more complex, as I just showed. So privacy compliance is a competitive advantage. That's what we're working on. And products, we get to cover that later. ATOM, we have talked about it for many years. It's at scale now. We really see the advantage of it. It's helping us, but we have many more things, solutions on the ID-less side.

Then strategic road map, platform unification for efficiency and scaling. We wanted to really show you what we are doing in that front to go more into detail because it's easy to say, hey, we had issues with platform unification, but we want to go more in detail here. We acquired 16 companies, 1-6, to start our adtech business. Actually, 15 we acquired in the beginning and then Jun Group last year was the 16th. All those companies, almost all those companies had technology. They all had a team. We acquired 16 teams. We acquired 5 supply-side platforms, 3 demand-side platforms, 5 SDKs. So SDKs are the ones that are integrated in the apps, 5 data lakes and 5-plus infrastructures, some had a bit more, some a bit less. But -- so this is what we had to unify. So the target, 1 team, 1 supply side platform, 1 demand side platform, 1 SDK, 1 data lake, 1 infrastructure. And all of those connected to each other and communicating with each other.

We have done a lot of that already. So from the 5 supply side platforms, we were back to 2. And those 2 big ones we integrated, and that's where the majority of our business is in-app supply side platform. And examples of hiccups that we had, a load balance didn't function well. We do almost 1 trillion biddings per day on the platform, on the combined platform. It's so huge, and that's were things that we were not able to test at scale before we did the unification. So there was a lot of preparation. More than a year, our engineers and product people have been preparing this migration. But there are some things that you cannot test, such a load you cannot test before.

And if you have a hiccup in the platform or if you have an issue in the platform, even if it's a small one, on the other side, there's an AI system. So if that AI system, the bid is not accepted or let's say, their request is not accepted, that means that it stops and only start slowly testing at a certain point again. So there is -- with all the electronics that we're working with, all the software, there are things that just take longer to ramp up again. Issues were more than we expected. They took a bit longer. But the good thing is this in-app unification is done now. We still have to do CTV and web. Those are being prepared, but there the volumes are a lot lower. And we have seen also before with other platform migrations. We didn't have these kind of issues. This is a onetime, and we have solved it.

We still have to do the SDKs further. So you see the -- how to say, the accomplished points there. So what's still open on the unification. We still have to further unify our SDKs. That can be done step by step. So that's not one big thing where we have to do everything at the same time. And the as mentioned, web and the CTV platform, smaller things where we don't expect issues. The big one was this in-app unification. The good thing now with a unified platform, we are more efficient. We can further scale it. We can concentrate on building features for 1 platform instead of for several platforms. So the company is really fit for the future with this.

Coming to the next strategic growth point, investment into sales and geo expansion. I mentioned it already before. U.S., our main market, 97% of our revenues. We have 35 people, hunters that go to agencies to get new customers. As mentioned before, that's not enough. We want to go to 150. So U.S. is our biggest market, and we want to really grow strongly there. But also, we want to internationalize. With all the product we have with all the sector expertise, it makes sense to go into other markets. This year, we go into U.K., Scandinavia, Brazil and Mexico, which means also we had already some things there, but we're really focusing on it now, means on the supply and on the demand side and really building it. And for next year, we want to add a few markets to that. So that will be done in the next years. We will -- each year, we want to add some markets and of course, to scale the other ones.

M&A, we have done M&A in the past. The market is consolidating. We see a lot of potential. There is a lot of companies that want to sell. And if you look at the adtech market, there's over 100 SSPs, over 100 DSPs, over 200 data partners, over 4,000 agencies. So it's a very crowded market. Customer demands companies that do more channels, one-stop shops basically. And as such, there's a natural tendency to this. Also the ability to scale, larger company can invest more in AI, in technology, all the things. So it makes sense that companies grow. We can grow organically. That's our main focus and to make that very clear. But there might be, and that's the reason we have it here, opportunities to really scale faster, which can be really more equity hire, getting extra sales teams. And Jun Group is a very nice example of really getting a lot of agency relations, salespeople on board, which we did and revenues, of course. But also for regional access, building up a new market is not always easy because sometimes it makes sense to rather do a small acquisition.

We will be very disciplined. I think that's very important to say because M&A is only the add-on and should be the exception. Then our team, strengthening the core team. We're continuously working on getting a better team, making sure that we have a super motivated team, that we have a very high-performing team. And we did also change in the core team. Christian, CFO; and myself and Sameer and Alex were already in, but we added Mishel, Prasanna and David to really get a few more shoulders to carry the business on and to also get a bit more focus in the teams. Our overall size, so 97% of the revenues in the U.S., 350 out of 850 employees are there. We have a quite large employee base in Europe, and we are building a larger base in Asia. We have a big development center in Bangalore in India. And just as an idea and developer, and that's a rough number, cost maybe 300,000 salary per year in the U.S., 150,000 in Europe and a 75,000 in India. So we also look at keeping our personnel cost down or, let's say, efficient, very important.

Yes, evolving from publisher to adtech platform, I showed the slide already before, the summary slide. So we're coming a long way, and we have a lot of potential for the future. And that's this slide. So we stick to our midterm guidance, 25% to 30% revenue CAGR. This company can grow. This company is very strong, equipped to grow. I hope that I was able to show that. With a strong EBITDA margin, 30% to 35%. Yes, there's some seasonality. And yes, in Q2, we were with 28%, a bit under it, but this company will be doing 30% to 35% EBITDA. 20% to 25% EBIT margin and our net leverage between 1.5 and 2.5. We are on the higher side now. We want to bring that down. And with more cash flow generation, we will do that. So the target is to get the next, how to say, point in the future. We want to get over EUR 1 billion revenues. We want to get over EUR 330 million of EBITDA and the growth should majority-wise be organic.

That brings me to the end of my part. And I would ask Christian to continue with the financial. Thanks.

Thank you very much, Remco. Good to meet you all here today. My name is Christian Duus. And for those I haven't had the pleasure of meeting before, I joined as CFO from 1st of January this year. I'll go through the performance of Q2. But before I dig into the numbers, allow me just to summarize what I think has been a very productive first half of the year in terms of capital market transactions -- capital market milestones and achievements.

Starting in the chronological order. You'll note that we had a bond refinancing in April. We placed a EUR 500 million bond unstructured, refinancing our existing bonds, and we did that at, I would believe, quite attractive terms in the sense of 3 months EURIBOR plus 4% credit margin. That means today, we, with a 2 percentage -- roughly 2 percentage points on EURIBOR plus 4%, we pay 6% on our bond debt. This is going to lower our cash interest expenses through the year as we move forward with an estimated impact of EUR 12.5 million and will help our free cash flows. It obviously also gives us a stability in terms of our financing and our capital structure for the coming years. It's a 4-year duration and a big achievement.

Secondly, we uplisted to the general standard in Frankfurt from the scale segment to the regulated part. This is a key achievement we're very proud of, especially also the inclusion in the SDAX, which has a lot of benefits, both in terms of credibility and awareness in the broader European investor spectrum, but certainly also because of being in the SDAX, you are then automatically included in various funds that mirror the index. So that was a major achievement for the year with a lot of preparation, but with a very successful outcome.

And thirdly, we had a directed capital raise here in June, SEK 360 million, EUR 32 million, well subscribed amongst institutional investors. And this gives us a good structure between debt and equity for the time going forward and also to have proceeds to fund growth, whether they be more organic investments or on more inorganic investments. So all in all, a very successful and very active first half of the year for me coming on board, also with the closing of the 2024 annual report. But I'm very happy to be here today and can show these milestones.

What is not on this slide is we are also with the addition of Ingo Middelmenne. We are expanding and bringing a very seasoned person in our Investor Relations team. And I think it will be evident over the coming 6 months, probably especially for the analysts that are here today that we are seeking to lift our Investor Relations communication and practices.

Now I'll move into the actual performance of Q2. Just focusing here on the highlights. We grew as a group 10% on top line, 10% revenue growth versus last year. This is, however, a mix of developments in that we had a supply side of the business, the SSP part of the business, which declined 3%. This is because of the unification technology issues, and I'll come back to go more into that. On the other hand, we had 82% growth in our demand side activities. So it's a mix of different things that are going on in the business, and we had a very strong growth contribution from our DSP side. And that also I just want to clarify means that the revenue challenges that we had in Q2 is purely from the SSP side and specifically from the marketplace activities.

The performance of the SSP side and especially the market activities was obviously not up to our expectations. It's very clear, and I'll come back to what we look at for the rest of the year. Despite the revenue gap that emerged out of this compared to our expectations, we delivered an adjusted EBITDA, which is marginally higher compared to the same period last year at EUR 29.5 million. And this is, of course, also helped by the consolidation effect of Jun Group compared to this period last year. We continue to invest. We continue to keep our plans to invest in the platform and in our sales capacity. Remco already referenced that, and that's also potentially why you don't see a higher uplift in our adjusted EBITDA.

Good. Let me then dig down a little bit in the business KPIs and how is our business KPIs developing. There's a lot on this slide, so let me try to break it down and just say, overall, we continue to grow the adtech business, year-on-year. This is evidenced here in the right-hand corner with a 15% uptake on ad impressions. That's how much volume that flows through our systems. It's up 15% versus same period last year. And also in the total number of customers that you see here on the top-hand line, where we grew 22%. We actually added 561 customers versus same point last year on total number of customers. So the business is growing from that perspective. We, however, also observed that we were handling less budget from our existing customers. You can see that in the net dollar expansion rate here on the bottom corner, which was 92%. That essentially means that we handle 8% less volume from our existing customers if you compare 1 year back in time.

And the big effect there comes actually from us being able to not scale our customers sufficiently and also from not onboarding customers due to some of these technical issues that we had. We simply do not want to onboard new customers when the platform is not stable. You make a very bad impression. The silver lining and the positive news is we did not lose customers. We actually had a client retention rate of 98% for the customers, the software clients that are above 100,000. We -- you can see here that we -- they spend less -- and for the customers that are above 100,000, some of them spend less to the degree where they went over -- under the threshold of 100,000 gross per year, but they didn't leave us. We have customer retention of 98%, which is 2% churn. That's pretty solid even for a tech company by my standards.

So net-net, we're growing. Our customers used us less in Q2 because of the situation of the technical setbacks, but we haven't lost them. It just fell under the threshold of how we define a large software client, which is 100,000 gross. I think the KPIs reflects and pretty much reflects the situation that we've gone through in Q2. Nothing surprising in that front. And we do expect the KPIs to improve and this being a temporary impact on the KPIs. The KPIs will improve through Q3 and Q4. You may then ask me after the session by how much and how quickly. And this is difficult to assess. We have to take into factor in that we did have a sustained impact into July and just the beginning of August. We expect improvements later in the quarter, but then you also have to weigh it with seasonality because not every month is the same weight. And therefore, it's actually a difficult question to assess. But I'm confident that we will see an improvement in these business KPIs as we move through the year. That's a little bit about how the business is moving under the motor of the business.

If I then go to actual performance and the key highlights of financial performance for Q2, we see that total revenues grew by 10% as referenced by Remco, it's up from EUR 97 million to EUR 106 million. We had organic growth adjusted for acquisition, Jun Group mainly and also for currency effects, which was minus 4%. We did have currency headwinds, dollar to euro for this quarter. And all those adjustments altogether means that our organic growth was minus 4%. Net-net, while our revenues disappointed, we see personnel costs in line with our plan actually below what we intended to deploy for the year. So those are in check. We did have an effect, and I'll come back to that, of extra technology costs for Q2. Overall, we achieved a 28% adjusted EBITDA margin, slightly up from the comparable period last year, and we achieved a 21% EBIT margin.

When we look at the technology costs that hit us in Q2, it's roughly EUR 4 million. I'll come back to you. That translates into a 3.7 percentage points effect for Q2. And then you can do the math yourself. Still very decent profitability for a company, even for a tech company. And we, of course -- or we expect the operational margin as it was impacted in Q2 by these effects to improve over the year. Cash flow generation was EUR 5 million positive in totality before net working effects, it was actually EUR 15 million, but then there was a negative effect from cash flow from net working capital. So all in total, it is plus EUR 5 million, again, impacted by lower revenues for the quarter. And we continue to invest. We had investments of EUR 9.4 million in total.

If I take a step back, Q2 and put Q2 into the context of a longer time series, just to put it in perspective. Here -- and we illustrate this with the LTM basis of June 2025 on both revenue growth and EBITDA. I think we can see that we continue a track of revenue growth and EBITDA growth despite this lower uptick in performance in Q2 than we had anticipated. I think by all means, you can see we have a strong track record of converting investments, organic and inorganic into revenue growth and attractive margins. And I see no reason why we cannot overcome this temporary setback for Q2 and prove that again. It might just take a little bit more time, but I think the track record of this company is there and proves it.

Moving into operating cash flow and CapEx development. I'll just preface here that now comes a very dense slide, but I try to break it up into its different components. If we look at operating cash flow development here for -- on an LTM basis, June 2025, you can see the operating cash flow generation in the dark blue bars here on the chart. And we moved to EUR 115 million, down from EUR 137 million on a full year basis for '24. This is again because of the effects of the top line in Q2, and therefore, it's not following quite the normal seasonality effect of cash flows through the quarters as you normally see. Normally, Q1 is our lowest quarter and Q4 is our strongest quarter, and it increases over time. And therefore, we also expect an uplift in cash flow generation for the year as a whole, picking up in Q4, in particular, which is the biggest quarter for this type of business.

You'll note a first positive effect on cash interest expenses here in gray. We moved from EUR 45 million to EUR 43 million on an LTM basis. So you see the first effects of lower interest rate costs. And of course, as we move out the LTM number, you will see that the old levels of interest flush out and you achieve the new levels. So it's very positive. We see that we achieved net-net EUR 64 million in free cash flow after interest, which is still at a healthy level. Note when you look at the LTM number also, we did have one-off expenses, one-off payouts in Q1 and Q2. We had fees around the bond. We had a prepayment on one earnout. We had several things that also kind of throws off the normal run rate of the business.

Moving to CapEx development. We've shown this slide a number of times. If you focus here on the blue and the dark blue, which is really our CapEx investments for maintenance and expansion development, we are at LTM basis, respectively, 35% and 8%. We have communicated that we would end the -- we expect this year to invest somewhere between EUR 40 million to EUR 45 million as CapEx. We are tracking closer to the 40 million than to the EUR 45 million, but otherwise, unchanged views on what this business needs of investments going forward.

That was operating cash flow and CapEx development. And I now move to net leverage ratio, interest coverage ratio. We largely maintained our ratios into Q2. You see a marginal worsening from 2024 to a 2.5x net leverage ratio to 2.5x now on an LTM basis. Again, this is the operating cash flows that affect. On the other hand, you saw a marginal improvement in the interest rate coverage here from 3.3 to 3.4 if you compare again the LTM with where we ended the year. And this is the positive effect of the interest savings on -- or the reduced levels of interest rates. Deleverage remains a key point for us, a key focus point for us. Albeit Q2 probably slowed a little bit us in that regard, our midterm target is to achieve a net leverage ratio closer to 2x. And I just want to make sure that this remains a focus for us, and it's clearly understood.

That kind of concludes my financial part as it concerns Q2 in particular. Now I'll move to guidance because this is probably also what you've been interested in hearing about. You will have noted we changed our guidance Thursday. We lowered and revised our guidance for the full year. Let me try to break down the components and contributing factors here. And this here, we use a bridge to bridge from our midpoint guidance, our initial midpoint guidance of EUR 165 million to the midpoint guidance of our -- the revised guidance here given the 15th of August of EUR 132 million and just try to break it down in components.

I think in the big picture, unification challenges, technical challenge and the unification accounts for 2/3. This is illustrated by the gray area. There was a direct impact during Q2, but also in July and just the first days of trading in August, which altogether, when you calculate it through, is EUR 19 million. We then also had additional costs during that time on 2 fronts. One, of course, we used all our powers and we had mitigation costs to address the technical issues. And as Remco was explaining, we also had some problems with the load balances, which meant we had extra hosting costs. And that altogether is EUR 4 million. So that all relates as onetime effects.

And then another thing that has happened is that our expectations, and we can see where we are on the dollar to euro translation is outside the range that we expected when we gave the initial guidance. We communicated when we gave our initial guidance that we would expect changes in euro to dollar to have an effect of plus/minus 2 percentage points on the total impact. We see now that we are outside that guidance, and we have revised the assumption planning assumptions to be on a constant currency basis using a U.S. dollar to euro rate of 0.855. And that altogether would have an impact when you look at the full year of EUR 9 million.

So that's basically the components. 2/3 from the unification challenges, 1/3 from translation -- pure currency translation effects for the full year. We acknowledge that Q2 fell short of expectations, certainly also our expectations. Trading levels are now at the same level -- stabilized, same level as comparable period last year for the marketplace activities, specifically I'm talking about here, and that makes us confident in a sustained pickup for the remainder of the year. When you pull all that together in numbers, I show here our revised guidance compared to the guidance we gave initially on the May 28. Our new guidance is EUR 485 million to EUR 515 million. That represents a 10% downward revision. At the same time, we're narrowing our guidance by EUR 5 million. Respectively, on adjusted EBITDA, we are guiding EUR 125 million to EUR 140 million, representing a 20% revision downwards of our initial guidance. And also there narrowing the guidance by EUR 5 million.

We have good confidence in our revised guidance given the pickup we're seeing in trading and experiencing here in August. We have 4 -- roughly 4.5 months to go. I remind you that Q4 is the biggest quarter for this type of business. So we have some things to do here for the remainder of the year, but we are fully comfortable with this guidance. Important for those that look at currency translation effects, we are giving this guidance with a -- on a constant FX basis. We continue to be exposed. We are quite exposed on the top line towards U.S. dollars with roughly -- actually 89% exposure to U.S. dollar. And therefore, please keep that in mind as we see for the remainder of the year, how the U.S. dollar translates into euros.

That basically concludes the update on the financial performance, background for our revised guidance. And I hope also it provides some insights on what exactly has impacted the business KPIs for this period. And with that, I think I hand back to Ingo.

I'm coming. Thank you so much, Christian, for the color on financials.

You enjoyed it?

I enjoyed it.

So you can stay right up here because now it's time for our first Q&A session. How we're going to do this here in the room. If you have a question, please raise your hand so a team member of us can bring a microphone over. But I think until we have the first microphone transferred to the first question, I'll start with some questions from the online chat.

So to sum it up, we still see uncertainty in the market on our release from Thursday night, which is very understandable. The platform unification has caused a share price decline of roughly 22%. Yesterday, we increased by 6%. This morning, I saw we're plus 10%. So we're regaining confidence in the market.

But to sum this up and a couple of questions here, Christian and Remco, we highlighted that the effects from the unification will be around EUR 34 million on revenues and EUR 19 million on EBITDA. And the question we're having here is now, is that really it for the rest of the year? Is everything in Q2 and Q3 now in these numbers? And are there going to be any further unification steps in the further course of the year?

Okay. Maybe I can take the first part, and then you can take the unification part. So yes, the total effects of what our expectation for the year is included in this guidance. We have obviously tried to model various scenarios for the year. And the EUR 34 million on top and EUR 19 million is included in those numbers.

And on the integration steps, Remco, maybe you?

Yes, I had it in my presentation. So integration is done. That's important. We finished it by end of July. Of course, the effects are, let's say, a little bit going into August, but we see that we are back on track. Platform runs, numbers coming up and onboarding continuing or, let's say, starting again. So in that sense, well in time for the very important Q4 and also end of Q3. Because from basically September onwards, advertising is the strongest, let's say, period -- or it's the strong period for advertising. So happy that we finished this before, even though it took longer.

Great. So maybe the first question from the room here from the audience.

Vincent Edholm from Pareto Securities. First off, I would like to ask a question based on the updated guidance, you showcased a bridge here explaining the financial impact of the issues that you faced here in Q2 and Q3. But how are you taking into account the softer market that you're also experiencing and mentioning here in the presentation?

I discussed or, let's say, I showed that the market is a bit softer, at least if you look at the statistics in the market. But as also mentioned, we don't see that as a reason to not perform or not to perform. And yes, a bit of softness is there, but we have a strong product with delist. We have a strong position in the channels that grow most because that was average numbers for the whole advertising market, so the channels where we are, let's say, outlying that part. So it's not a market where we say, "Hey, wow, we have great tailwinds from everything is growing like hell." That's not the case.

But it's also not a reason to see any issues there. Unless, of course, and that's something -- we don't have a crystal ball, but if something really explodes, I don't know, China goes into Taiwan or something, that's not in. But for the current market conditions, which we expect to go around the same, we see the possibility further to grow and to not be bothered too much about a bit softer market.

And can I just add on the EUR 34 million top line effect we consider in a scenario where there is a tail end of how fast those customers that were affected will grow and scale, which is included in the EUR 34 million. So there's a tailwind effect in that number, not material, but that's how we try to gauge it for a full year consideration.

Okay. That's very clear. And also now we're in August '25. It's been just shy of a year since you announced the acquisition of Jun Group. How would you evaluate the performance so far of Jun Group as being part of?

I would almost say Mishel come on stage, but he's not wired up with a microphone. So he can say maybe a few words later on it. Now we are super happy with the acquisition. There were a few aspects, let's say, a few risk aspects and a lot of positive things. First of all, adding a lot of salespeople, the agency relations, a lot of tools, also the zero party product that Mishel is going to show later. So it was a very -- a lot of accretion, a lot of synergy between the cases, also bringing together. That's what we see now. The biggest risk that we saw then at that time was, let's say, there were 2 actually. The one is the company was not growing. They were milked by the previous owner. So we had to change the mindset, but that was not so difficult actually to get them to growth, to invest to now also hire sellers, et cetera.

And the other one was really the team, a team with a tenure of between 8 and 14 years, at least the core 20, 30 people have such a long tenure. And I've learned one thing, if it's a tight, let's say, team and you start changing things, there's, of course, a risk that the team doesn't like it. And that was where we were really slow in integrating, doing it super careful, first getting people to get used to each other, then slowly integrating the salespeople that Verve already had into the June sales team and now also with, let's say, the changes in our top management and our executive team, really also, yes, basically getting product, technology, commerce split over the different departments. So we took really time for it a year, but it went extremely well. And yes, later Mishel can say maybe a few words about it.

Yes. And then maybe in between until the next person receives the microphone, one question from the chat.

Maybe for Remco here. Remco, can you explain like the future of the unified platform? How will we benefit in detail from the unification? And what are the really important drivers which we're now capable to benefit from?

More complex answer or easier answer? I mean...

I think we cannot comment on financials, of course.

No, no. I think it's about the -- how to say it -- what's the effect of a unified platform? If I have 2 platforms, I have 2 teams that will need to work on features. I have 2 platforms where I have to run an infrastructure tool for, et cetera, et cetera. So 2 platforms is just much more inefficient than one. platform integration has a disadvantage that you have those 2 teams working on each of the platforms, plus you need to get extra manpower to prepare the integration, which means that on one of the platforms, you basically build the features that are on the other platform and that are the condition for migrating the things. You need to work on the loads of the platform, all those kind of things. So you have a phase during the integration where you actually need more manpower than you need for the 2 platforms with a unified platform, you free up that manpower. So that's one advantage.

But with freeing up the manpower, you really can also work on the platform. You can build new features. You can really build new things on the platform. So you can really focus on the market and go with that. So what was not so visible, it was, of course, bring the platforms together is extra manpower, extra cost. But also in that period, you're very internally focused. Well, if you have one platform, you can really external focus, you can really build the things that your customers want that bring you further in the market. So there is this double effect is, let's say, it's more efficient, but it's also bringing us in a much higher speed for innovation going forward.

So the next question from the audience, please, Rasmus.

Rasmus here with Kepler Cheuvreux. I have 2 questions. Can I first start with the guidance? You had minus 4% organic growth in Q2. It seems that you expect organic growth to return in the fourth quarter. But what about the third quarter? Is it negative, positive during the quarter, latter half? Or how should we think about that in your guidance?

I think -- so obviously, Q3 will be a mix. We have said that July is impacted first day of trading. For this part of the business, right, just to remind that the 4% organic growth is for the combined group. But if we talk about the market activities, some impact in July, first days of trading, and we are stable now, but not quite on the growth path. So Q3 will be a mix. Q4, we expect, for sure, the strong organic growth. That's what I can say at this point. Obviously, we run a number of scenarios, both on top line and bottom line, and we try to pull that into what we think is a good reference point and reference range.

No, I think you described it perfectly.

And the second question, obviously, it's probably a question for your more technical people, but have you achieved what you wanted to achieve efficiency savings with the integration? So is it fully up and running on what you wanted to do?

Yes and no. We achieved what we wanted. That's a platform unification, but it took longer. As I've shown on the slide, also, there's still smaller things to go. So that's not ready yet. And you're, of course, never ready. That's the -- so the yes is we have achieved it, the no is you're never ready with these kind of things. So we will work on further efficiency. I mean, AI, we get it later, will bring extra efficiency in it. We bring in the platform, but also in the team. And yes, the question is how -- what's the company of the future? How many people do you need to run a company, those things. So there is always efficiency gains to come. So you're never ready in that aspect. A company that has a standstill is going to die. So you need to innovate, you need to grow, you need to get AI implemented to further get more efficient. So I hope that answers your question. But it's a difficult one to answer because it's a process and not a final thing.

Yes, please, Ellis Acklin.

Yes. Ellis Acklin with First Berlin. Thanks for the detailed presentation so far this morning. Two questions from my side. I'd like to touch on your current M&A posture. It sounds like you're becoming a bit more open-minded about that at this moment. And then also just to tie in what you were talking about with unification. Now that you have everything on a clean single platform, if you go and make another big deal, are you going to have to also integrate that? So is that going to restart in some form or fashion?

The company is a process -- and thanks for the question, first of all, Ellis. Yes, we have an M&A slide in there. We had also some discussion if we put it in because -- on one hand, the market is consolidating. So there are opportunities in the market. We need to grow and we need to grow faster to get bigger. So in that sense, that is rational. But as I said already, M&A needs to be super careful. We don't need it. We are a strong organic growth company.

So in that sense, M&A is a luxury, which basically solve things where the organic way of doing it would take much longer. And the point that you make, of course, if you buy another platform, another technical platform, then you have to do another technical integration. So before we buy a company that has another technical platform with a lot of integration stuff, we will think 4x, 5x, 6x about it before we would do something like that. So I see M&A more in really a hire kind of directions instead of really big technical platforms and things.

And maybe an add-on from my side, let's not forget that this unification represented around 90% of our revenues. So if we integrate further on the CTV side now, this is still ahead of us, but that's a way smaller revenue share, and therefore, the effects will hardly be seen because you might have a hiccup of 5% to 8% or something, again, based on these revenues that this platform stands for. And in this case, that was the majority of the whole company.

Yes, that's the point. I mean it's a good point you're making. This migration was huge. And I mean, if we have done a lot of migrations before that were not noticed or, let's say, that you didn't see the things, but this one was really big and in that sense, very exceptional.

Okay. That was very helpful. And then just a short one. You mentioned that you didn't lose any of your existing customers during the unification process, that was mainly more about onboarding new customers. How did that impact -- did you lose any potential new customers because of that, that needed to conduct their business immediately and can't wait or couldn't wait for you to finish your unifications?

Yes. Thanks for the question. First of all, it's not that we didn't lose customers. We have 98% retention rate. That means that we lost some customers. There were not many, but you always lose customers as a company. So I think that's important to just put it right. But we indeed had to delay, how do you say, onboarding of customers. But as far as I'm aware, they're all patient and waiting, and we didn't lose any of that. And everybody in this market is not dependent on one intermediary. So you have several, so it's not a problem to wait.

The only problem that we would have had, and I don't think we have it, is that if you run towards Q4, that people then will further postpone an integration because nobody wants to do any technical work in Q4 because that's your main quarter. That's where you make most revenues and you don't want to have any risk of disrupting your Q4 with technical work. So in that sense, I'm happy that we now are in the process of integrating well before Q4.

Great. And maybe in between, 1 question from the chat. It's on euro-dollar translation effects. How are we going to handle this in the future? Are we going to do hedging? And what are strategies regarding this topic?

Okay. So let's just put it in perspective. Obviously, we are now in an environment that have been for, let's say, the last year where the euro to dollar translation have had much more swings than if you look back in time. It's just a different market environment and more volatile. In such a case, yes, then you consider should you do hedging. We are exposed on our top line, in particular, with roughly 89% specifically of our revenues, which are registered in U.S. dollars. We also have quite a bit of our cost base, but not to that degree in U.S. dollars. So there's a natural hedge from our cost base that would say, mitigates, or offsets is probably the right word, some of the impact on the top line.

We are evaluating the situation of hedging. To do hedging properly, there's a number of elements you have -- need to have a quite advanced treasury setup to manage it on an ongoing basis. Otherwise, you go into somewhat which is just very large bulk positions and you're essentially also taking a bit of a bet on where the market is going. So we are looking at the -- what is a good level of hedging for our type of business, the complexity and the exposure we have, but I also want to make sure that we have the right hedging strategy and also set up to handle it on an ongoing basis. It's not quite as easy as people might think it is in just doing one forward contract.

Yes. Thank you. And maybe if I may add to that, I think what's very important is currency fluctuations are a very normal thing if you have to shift currencies between euro and dollar, and they will stay. So it's not important that you take out all of these effects, but that you manage market expectations properly. And that's why we decided to -- for the further course of the year and the years ahead to publish our currency ratio, our exchange ratio that we calculated our guidance with.

So in this case, I think it was 0.855. Was it right? For that point, it means all investors know what we calculated with. If dollars go up or dollars go down, you can calculate yourself what the effect will be. Sometimes we're going to be have a plus, then we don't want the bonus on our side, but sometimes we're going to lose something. So we'll see how far we're going to develop into hedging in the future, but I think that is the most important thing that you as our investors and analysts know what to expect.

So please, Jörg.

Philipp Frey, Warburg. Well, you had a nice chart regarding the softness of the market, some price declines of CPMs in your presentation. And in the second quarter, we also saw that the walled gardens had a very decent pricing, Meta, for example, at plus 9%. How do you look at this? First of all, a bit of comment on the difference in pricing regarding the open Internet and the walled gardens. And do you expect these positive pricing of the walled gardens to be more a leading indicator of what is to come for you, more or less some gap closing? Or what's your view on that one?

Yes. Thanks for the question, Philipp. The walled gardens is, of course, something special. We showed before the percentages of margin that the technology takes and what goes to publisher. The advantages, and that's what the walled garden has, if you are the publisher yourself and you have the technology, you have much more spread and possibilities in your margin. To take now Google, for example, Google is under pressure of the Department of Justice to be split up. And they're especially under pressure because they are unfairly playing in the open market.

So if you would be Google, what are you doing? You say, I'm putting everything on my own supply, which is basically YouTube. So you see a lot of tendency on Google that they take market, let's say, revenues out of the open market and some of our peers are really hit with that strongly. They take, let's say, volumes out of the open market and don't put them or, let's say, don't put them on external inventory anymore, but they put them on their own YouTube. YouTube has become super full with ads, if you look at it.

And something similar we see also with other walled gardens where they put more and more on their own properties. There's also quite some criticism on that from advertisers because how really well can you measure? I mean they also deliver their own measuring capabilities. So at the moment, I would say, short term, we see a bit of winning on the walled garden side. But talking to agencies and others, not everybody is that happy with it.

So let's see how it develops in the next quarters. But yes, especially Google is extremely strong in bringing things in-house at the moment. And that's also what you see in the guidance is or, let's say, in the numbers, the Q2 reports, most walled gardens have done pretty well, the big ones. If you look at the smaller ones, Snap, et cetera, it's the other way around.

Very helpful. One additional question on -- you mentioned your targets regarding expansion of your sales teams. How quickly do you expect these to ramp? How much time for profitability? Or should we expect some margin dilution until these guys will hit the ground?

Yes, it will be a continuous -- thanks for the question again, Philipp. It will be a continuous process, of course, you cannot hire immediately 50 people at one go. So we had to prepare for that, which means we have sales enabling people, so people that can really build up sales teams. We hired those first. We increased our, how to say, internal hiring capacity, so on the HR team. Those things had to get in place. Now there's a lot of interviewing happening. I just had my meeting yesterday with Mishel, and we signed up 6 people to start next 3 weeks.

The good thing in the U.S. is if you hire people, they are very fast available. Sometimes they have still a commission that they're waiting for, so it might delay a bit if they get -- have done a very strong Q3. They will not start before, how to say, the second month into the next quarter because they don't want to lose their commission on that. But it's a pretty fast process. Normally, you can hire somebody within 2 or 3 weeks, sometimes with a little bit delay. So we had to first really enable the organization to hire those people that if they come in that we can train them, that we can really, yes, make them productive. We had to split up the teams a bit. So the team structure was changed a bit. And Mishel is nodding in the back. I haven't said anything wrong so far. But it's a process. But it's a hefty target, of course, to get from 35 to 150. That's a heavy target. And we're working on it. And if it's 140, I would not be unhappy, if it's 155, also not. But what we cannot fully estimate, we hire sellers and not all of them will be good.

And the question is, is 20% that you have to replace afterwards again? Or is it 40%? And with respect to the cost, we internally calculate that the seller really starts earning back its own salary earliest after 6 months, latest after 12 months. Otherwise, it has to be replaced. So yes, it will put a bit of pressure, and it did already in Q2, put a bit of pressure on our EBITDA. But that's -- how do you say, investment in the future and you don't capitalize those costs. It's just cost. But I think it's super important for us as a company to do that and to further grow.

And could I just add to that, that we have the interview, the main interviewer in the room today, of course, in Mishel. Of course, from a CFO perspective, what is really important is to make sure that we really set high standards for the people we take on board and not in a rush to get people on board. And I don't think I've experienced yet in my career a more tough interviewer than Mishel and with higher standards. So from a CFO perspective, CFO perspective, I think it's a process, as you say. It's also a balance. We move fast forward, but we also need to secure we have the right quality of people because mistakes on people often is costly, and that's the balance we need to keep.

Next question is over here.

[ Nicolas ] from ABG Sundall Colier. So just one question on your big cash position. You're sitting on something like EUR 160 million in cash after raising some EUR 32 million in equity. That's a big war chest. What do you want to do with that war chest?

Well, first of all, let me just remind that we do have certain deferred payments to handle, which is Jun Group in particular. I believe it's $22.5 million in the first installment and then $25 million -- I have to say, I can't remember if it's euros or dollars on the last payment, and this is coming up within the next 12 months. So already there, you have some payouts. We have payouts for the earn-out for Dataseat. So some of that makes sure that we can pay that. We want to continue the investments that we are doing organically.

And then we, of course, also want to have a good cushion as we move through this somewhat more volatile period than we wanted this year to be. At the same time, have the opportunity to -- if we come across something that is really the right fit, small addition, then we have the flexibility to act on that per your comments. But it also explains a little bit the order of priority as seen from the CFO perspective in the way that I described it here.

Yes. Wonderful. And just on the guidance downgrade, maybe just some additional nuance on that one. When would you say that you saw the necessity to downgrade the guidance? Did you see any risk of that sometime mid- to late June? Or did you see it perhaps during Q3 now? How would you characterize that?

I think where we really saw is in the later weeks of July and our expectations for June. So we could see that we probably have some effects in July, but it was not recovering at the pace we expect it to and then also initially in August. Now of course, I'm talking about one part of the company, which is specifically marketplace activities, then you have many other things to factor in. And then when you start calculating on that type of thing, then you can see, hey, that we would be looking at a changed view. And I think also, as I illustrated, when you then factor in the conversion effect, which is a major part of it as well and combine that, then you see the perspective of the whole thing.

Maybe also from IR side here, it was really the case that Christian approached us in the morning of Thursday that now all hope is gone to recover that in the course of -- in the remainder of the year.

Not all hope.

Not all hope. There is -- you're right. The probability is very small that we can recover that. And then, of course, the whole process was started, and we decided let's bring forward the numbers as well, so the market knows what's happening. So that was really the point when the final decision was made.

But those things are not easy decisions. And the problem here is, of course, that, first of all, the year gets shorter. So the longer something like the unification issue lasts, the shorter the time you have to the recoveries. And on the other hand, the more revenue you lose in the time in between. So it wasn't really -- have the discussion we had internally. And of course, we will do everything to get everything out of this company to go and to really grow. But at a certain point, you have then to say and to realize that it's difficult to really make up.

And what we also had to take into account, we could also have not raised the guidance, for example, but then you get everybody here in this room and online and many other people are all speculating, hey, the numbers are so weak in Q2. We think they have to take the guidance down. That is worse. So it was really a decision that we took -- had to take. And yes, it hurts. But also here, we want to be, as open as we can be and to also give the backgrounds and the reasons -- and I'm happy, really happy that it's not like, hey, it's a terrible market, and that's why we're losing and we don't know when this is recovering. But that is, let's say, majority-wise, it's really an internal thing, and that's over.

And then as an added dimension, you obviously look at the trading every day and try to evaluate what is the signal of that trading for the remainder of the year, which is very, very difficult. So we follow it closely and came to that conclusion when we pulled everything together.

Great. Thank you. So looking at the time, telling me 0 seconds left. Meaning thank you all for participating in the Q&A. Also, thanks everybody online who participated in this. Really good questions here.

Now let's come again to the agenda. It looks like half the fun is over for the day. Part 1 is behind us. We're now approaching for the lunch break. And after that, we're going to have a real interesting tech session with the keynote I'm really looking forward to and 2 executives following in on the hottest topic of the industry.

So we'll all meet back here at 12:45 and also for you online, German [Foreign Language], Yes. So enjoy your lunch, please, and I'm looking forward to see you back in about an hour. Bye.

[Break]

We are now energized for part 2 of our Capital Markets Day of the Capital Markets Day of Verve Group 2025. We're now kicking it off with the part I was really waiting for, the keynote speech by Eric Seufert, a well-known expert to the digital advertising industry. Eric is a media strategist, a quantitative marketer, an author and investor who spent his career working for transformative consumer technology and media companies, including Skype and Rovio, the developer of Angry Birds. He's also the founder of Agamemnon, a startup that built a mobile marketing analytics platform, which was acquired in 2017. He then launched Heracles Capital, an early-stage venture capital fund focused on the mobile ecosystem.

Eric, it's really a pleasure having you here today with us, and thank you so much for traveling all the way from the U.S. Everybody, a big applause, please, for Eric Seufert.

Good afternoon, everyone. So thank you for that very generous introduction, and thank you for having me. It's fantastic to be in Stockholm at this time of the year. Thanks for organizing this in the summer, not the winter. And I'm really happy to be here, and I'm really happy to be discussing one of my favorite topics, which is what I believe is the total transformation of digital advertising through AI enablement. And I've spoken about this kind of on the blog in my podcast and kind of came up with this sort of catch-all description of what I -- of how I see this transformation unfolding, which I call commerce at the limit.

So this is the agenda for the presentation. I'll kind of start with an overview of what I believe is at stake with this. I'll move into kind of where we are, just sort of like a status check on the application of AI to digital advertising. And then I'll kind of talk through where I believe we're headed with this.

A little bit about me before we dive into the content. I run a blog called Mobile Dev Memo. It's a trade blog sort of dedicated to what I call the digital economy, so digital advertising, distribution and merchandising. I am the author of Theseus, which is an open source Python library for marketing cohort analysis. And I run Heracles Capital, which is an early-stage metro fund that is devoted to the mobile economy. And prior to doing those things, I worked for a number of companies that you might recognize, especially those of you that are Europe-based. I started my career at Skype as an analyst. I was a Head of Marketing at a company called Wooga, which made casual games or makes casual games was acquired by Playtika. I was a VP of User Acquisition and Network Engagement at Rovio, which makes Angry Birds franchise. And then my start-up was acquired by a company called Network, which was later acquired by a crypto platform.

So what's at stake? I think if you follow any companies in the digital advertising space, which by definition, you all do. You're familiar with the application of AI to digital advertising and how it's unlocking a lot of value now, right? And I say that now because Mark Zuckerberg says it's happening now. And I think a lot of people look at the application of AI to digital ads is kind of like this far-off opportunity, right, something that maybe will materialize and it's a risk, right? But if you look at the way the largest platforms are applying it, it's actually happening right now, and it's delivering real value right now.

And so this is a quote from Mark Zuckerberg on Stratechery, which fun facts, I was the previous guest before Mark on Stratechery. But he said, and I'll quote it, I'll read it and it's kind of awkward, but I think it's a powerful quote. But in general, we're going to get to a point where you're a business, you come to us, you tell us what your objective is, you connect to your bank account, you don't need any creative. You don't need any targeting demographic. You don't need any measurement, except to be able to read the results that we spit out. I think that's going to be huge. I think it is a redefinition of the category of advertising, right?

And I think when people heard that, there was I think there's kind of like this sort of pulse of fear, right? And that sounds like it's just going to displace a lot of people, right? That's going to maybe put a lot of agencies out of business or that's going to lead to layoffs in marketing teams. But I think there's a flip -- and some of that might be true, right? But I think there's a flip side to this, which is that it's going to enable essentially anybody to become an advertiser. It's going to enable anybody to participate in the advertising economy. And so when you think about the largest platforms, you think about them onboarding kind of any sort of mom-and-pop shop as an advertiser.

But if you think about sort of the entire ecosystem of advertising platforms, everyone can benefit from that, right? And everyone can benefit in sort of like unique and idiosyncratic ways that might not be available to the largest platforms. And so I think for any company operating in the space, there is the sort of looming threat of dislocation just because any sort of new big wave of innovation unleashes that. But I think when I think about the application of AI to advertising, I'm sort of like overwhelmed by all the positive. And I do believe that those benefits, they don't explicitly and specifically accrue to the largest platforms. They will accrue to anybody that sort of finds a way to apply them to their business. And digital advertising is just a massive space, and it's a great space just given the sort of the nature of the ecosystem, it's a great space for this to be one of the sort of entry points for the application of AI commercially, right?

So Dentsu expects the digital advertising market to reach $678 billion in 2025. That's almost 70% of total ad spend. Digital ad spend will grow by 8%, which is faster than the broader advertising spend growth rate of 5%. And a meaningful proportion of this growth will be delivered by channels that don't adhere to traditional measurement methodologies, right? So what do I mean by that? Like I've got this catch phrase, you may have heard it. Everything is an ad network, right? And the idea behind everything is ad networks after Apple's app tracking transparency policy change, you saw this mass proliferation of new ad channels emerge because when you revoked that sort of identity spine that was provided by the mobile ad ID that Apple had called the IDFA, when you revoke that, then any channel, any property with sort of unique proprietary first-party data could spin up an ads business and use that first-party data for targeting in a way that wasn't really viable prior to the revocation of the IDFA because Facebook just owned everything. They were the central store of data for the entire Internet.

And so when these platforms that previously wouldn't have dared to compete with Facebook had the opportunity to monetize this first-party data set because there was nothing else to really target against, then they decided, hey, I've got this asset, let me just monetize it by launching an ad network. And so everything became an ad network. But a lot of the everything is an ad network phenomenon is a result of channels that are not sort of like click-based building ad systems or even if they are click-based, they don't integrate well with other sets of data, right? So thinking about CTV, right? CTV is not measured by traditional measurement methodologies. You can't do last click. You can't do -- you have to kind of focus on like probabilistic attribution, multi-touch attribution. Think about a lot of retail media. You can't measure that with traditional measurement methodologies.

And so as AI sort of -- these methodologies in AI emerge to handle that, you unlock a lot more of that value that SMBs, for instance, couldn't access because they couldn't measure it. And so measurement has become more challenging as the ecosystem grows more complex. So platform policy restrictions, I just mentioned ATT, but there are others. Apple is traditionally more aggressive in the space. As you're all, I'm sure aware, Google was going to deprecate cookies. Now they're not. We'll see where that lands. We've got the everything as an ad network phenomenon, which, again, a lot of these new channels, they're not attributable with clicks, right, CTV, retail media. And then you've got end-to-end automation, right?

So when you have end-to-end automation, that kind of crowds out a lot of the traditional measurement that was just a function of transparency, right? So end-to-end measurement, the platform is making all the decisions on your behalf. Well, you, a, don't have the ability to impact those decisions, right, with, for instance, targeting, right, or placements. But b, they gain by sort of not making a lot of that decision even available to you ex post, right? And so there's just a level of opacity that precludes kind of traditional sort of legacy style attribution.

And ultimately, AI will touch all aspects of advertising value. It's not just measurement, it's not just targeting. Like a lot of people probably think when you say AI and digital advertising, the first place your mind might go is to like all of these tools that the largest platforms have introduced, and I'll sort of list them later. They're all kind of named along the same convention. But the reality is it's going to touch every piece of the value chain, right? So you've got measurement and attribution like I just talked about, but you've also got product personalization and monetization, right?

So if you sort of remove the levers of targeting of even creative production from the advertiser, then all they're really left with, they get this sort of like a amorphous blob of traffic to the property. All they're really left with to drive performance is what they can send to the ad platform to indicate whether that was good or bad traffic, right? And so like this is kind of this emerging topic called signal engineering, right? So like I'm playing around with the onboarding session in an app or the registration flow in some sort of e-com website, and I'm trying to figure out ways to surface intent, surface a signal of intent from that user.

And traditionally, the way this has been done is just looking at what's instrumented on the page or what's instrumented in the app and just sending all of that to the ad platform. But now if that's the only lever that I have, I have to actually be much more proactive in determining what is a signal that this person will become a high-value user, and that's signal engineering. And an example of this, which I found really interesting was this -- I was on this podcast recently called the marketing operators. And we're talking about signal engineering. And after that podcast, one of the people on the podcast is the CMO of a large e-com brand.

And so he wrote on Twitter that as a result of that conversation, he got sort of the gears working in his head, about how could they implement signal engineering into their -- they're like a beauty shop, right? And so how could they integrate signal engineering into the registration process for this e-com brand. And so they built a captcha, that was a math problem that didn't gate access to the site as a normal captcha would. It wasn't really trying to determine whether this person was a bot or not. It just was creating an obstacle for that person to get into the shopping experience.

Because if a person is going to go through the trouble of answering this math problem, they're probably pretty interested in your products, and they probably have a higher propensity to buy than someone who won't answer the math problem or who wouldn't answer the math problem presented with the math problem. And so what they did with that is they just sent that back. The person completed the math problem. They sent that back to the platform. And then the platform knew, okay, this is a high-value user. Now obviously, it has to be tested. There could be no correlation with propensity to buy in doing that. But if there is and you have to experiment with these things and design these things specifically and proactively to determine intent, if that works, that's a really high-value signal that the ad platform just got that it wouldn't have otherwise had that it can then use to optimize the traffic that's being sent to the website, right?

And so that's just kind of like an emerging field of signal engineering, and it's really powerful. And that is left to advertisers currently. But there are any number of ways that ad channels could facilitate that, right? And you can imagine that there are advantages for smaller ad channels relative to the largest, right? Because I might not trust one of the largest ad channels to do that in a way that benefits me. But a smaller channel, I might trust. And so to my point from earlier, there are idiosyncratic ways for AI, call it AI or call it just sort of any of these tactics to be deployed that generate value for platforms outside of the biggest. Then there's campaign optimization, which I think is kind of like the canonical way that AI is applied to digital advertising now. Those are things like PMAX and Google, Advantage+, and there's a whole list of them. Those applications make obvious sense.

And the real value of doing that is, a, you tend to maximize advertiser spend when you take control of all optimization levers, right? So the goal of these systems is not necessarily to like sort of maximize ROAS for the advertisers, it's actually to maximize spend while adhering to some performance target, right? B, you get to do -- you make decisions faster, so you really do sort of optimize faster than like a human being could, which again maximizes spend. But I think one of the other things is that you -- these systems, they can be improved incrementally over time.

And the really fascinating thing about the digital economy, but specifically digital advertising is that since advertisers approach smart advertisers, capable advertisers approach digital advertising with kind of like a ROAS mindset. If you unlock 5%, right, 6% incremental ROAS, that all gets reinvested, right? We were talking last night at dinner about the opportunities with Apple being forced to open up the iOS ecosystem to allow link out but also alternative in-app payments.

And the reality is, there is value in just sidestepping the commission, but there's a lot more value in just bringing a sort of modern approach to the app storefront, right? And if you think about the App Store as a storefront and you compare it to Shopify, for instance, it looks like it comes out of the stone age. I mean it's not fit for purpose. It's not a modern storefront relative to what Shopify can do with like personalized pricing, dynamic bundling, even just A/B testing based on different sort of demographic features, the App store can't do any of that. And so you just promote commerce by having these sort of modern tools there. And so when you unlock 5%, 6% like incremental ROAS, then that just gets reinvested back into marketing. And so who wins from that? It's the ad channels. I mean it's the advertisers, too, but because they're driving higher top line revenue, but it's the ad channels. They're going to absorb more of that.

And then creative production is really kind of the tip of the spear. I think in a lot of ways, and I'll get into this a little bit later, but like creative production, I think, is just more visible as an application of AI. And so people sort of -- they instantly kind of invoke that when they think about, okay, applying AI to digital advertising. But the way creative production is done now through like AI tools, I think it's mostly a cost-saving exercise. It's not really generating a lot of value. The way that you generate value with creative production to my mind is actually just doing more rigorous hypothesis testing and figuring out what kind of concepts work the best and using historical data to inform that. And that's actually one aspect of digital advertising that I think is pretty primitive. And I think AI will unlock a lot of value there.

So again, I think AI will influence the totality of the customer relationship that any advertiser has. So it's obviously customer acquisition, and that's everything I just talked about. So that's where, how and with what messaging customers are reached. Also customer onboarding. I talked about that, signal engineering, getting them into the product, right, making sure that they're primed to be successful with your product, right? Better instructions, better -- just more personalization, linking what they see in the product and their first product experience with what they saw in the ad. These things can be facilitated with AI to create sort of like a more productive customer journey, which probably leads to higher rates of monetization. Then there's customer activation, so the specific moments that are chosen to surface monetization opportunities to customers, right?

So do I show and offer early in the customer's first session? Or do I wait? Do I let them interact with the product more before I try to monetize them, right? Or do I show an ad at some point in a game, like any specific point, when, like what's the best moment for showing the ad? Paul is going to talk a little bit later about a lot of their on-device stuff that surfaces these signals to unlock sort of more surgical monetization. But all that kind of stuff. I mean when we talk about AI, we're really talking about like just like high-dimensional machine learning, right? So just machine learning that can make sense, can parse relationships out sort of like high dimensional data. And so all of that is an opportunity.

And then customer retention and merchandising. So the content and opportunities that are exposed to the user that keep them engaged with the product, right? And that's really just kind of like elongating the retention curve. So who can win? And I've kind of touched on this already, but -- so the largest platforms have natural data and R&D advantages in developing and deploying AI tools. But they face concrete limitations, right? So inventory. So advertisers want to reach audiences on CTV, retail media and elsewhere, not just social media, right? Diversification. So a lot of SMBs are not really sensitive to sort of concentration. They could be fully concentrated. But some won't, right, just for the sake that they don't want to introduce that risk into their business. What we saw in the Google DOJ suit was that there were customers that would allow for lower price floors on non-Google channels for no other publishers, for no other reason than they didn't want to be totally reliant on Google, right?

Now you might say, that's not a rational choice. They should accept the highest bid from whoever is providing it. But for them, it was because they felt that if they were totally concentrated just on Google that they face kind of business risks they went otherwise that they had sort of more demand. And then on-site use cases, right? So the influence of large platforms doesn't extend into the product experience. I talked about that before. Maybe there are trust issues, right? And so there are other channels that could have a better sort of ability to influence what happens in the product experience where that publisher wouldn't trust the same kind of intervention from a larger platform. And that could be for a number of reasons, right? That could be the platform might not have their best interest at heart. It could be that they don't want to expose that data to the platform because it will be used to benefit their direct competitors. There's any number of reasons for that, right, that are totally rational.

Okay. So now I kind of want to go through where we are at the moment. So how is AI being used currently? So there are 2 use cases that are mostly trapped inside the walled gardens currently. So the first is creative production, right? So if you think about using generative AI tools to create ad creative, that's mostly a big platform phenomenon right now. There are a number of SaaS tools that have emerged to try to handle this. The problem with that use case is it's a loss leader. Like it doesn't really make any money. There's no value -- there's no sort of like ability to monetize that if you're just a third-party SaaS tool, right? The way you monetize that is you pair it with the data that you have to drive better outcomes if you're a large platform, right? So Meta announced in Q2 that -- in its most recent earnings that it has 2 million advertisers using its Gen AI tools. That's a lot, right? And there's just a natural advantage there because they have 10 million. So to get -- to scale up to 2 million is -- they're able to do that fairly quickly.

And then the second is campaign optimization. So these are tools like Advantage+, Performance Max, which is Google PMAX, Smart+ from TikTok, Performance+ for Amazon. And then Pinterest has one. These allow advertisers to optimize campaigns automatically. It's an obvious use case. Again, there's attention there because I think it's fairly obvious. It's fairly self-evident that the motivation for this is to maximize spend. It's not really to sort of provide the best possible outcome for the advertiser. It's to maximize spend against some performance threshold. But there are other opportunities beyond that for other channels to embrace AI, and these are totally up for grabs as far as I'm concerned, right? So the first is targeting. So yes, Advantage+ manages targeting on Facebook. What about everything off of Facebook, right?

And particularly the channels that I referenced earlier, right, retail media and CTV, where Facebook has no presence. Google has a large presence for YouTube, but like the largest channels are not necessarily operating there. And they're not -- there's no reason why they ever will, right? So targeting consumers outside of the walled gardens is a really important use case for these tools. Second is measurement. So advertisers want unbiased measurement that accommodates their entire channel portfolio, right? So it's great if a large platform has measurement baked in. But if I'm running on other channels, that singular focus on that platform doesn't help me. I need measurement that accommodates everything. And then creative, right? So creative production, again, is mostly viewed as a cost reduction exercise, but other use cases can be tailored to channel-specific context, right?

So CTV, retail media. I mean these things need the sort of tools to sort of accommodate that exhaustive testing that the large platforms have built natively. And so there's an obvious opportunity there for someone to solve that problem. So none of this is superficial and none of this is temporary. I mean this is sort of a very significant tectonic shift. So direct response marketing teams are embracing the overhaul of media buying process with open arms, right? So if you go back to that quote that I opened with, there was opposition to that idea by brands. And a point that I made was that, well, you're about 5 years too late, right? Because this is not some new thing. This has been happening for a number of years and brands and agencies.

And if you talk to any sort of SMB digital advertiser, have to be a small company, but just a company that operates in a lean way, they are -- their hair is on fire for this. They want more of it. They want it now. They want more AI enablement because that helps them do more with less. And if you talk about the sort of entrepreneurs, they're just very small businesses that are excluded from the advertising economy now. I mean they probably don't know that they don't know this, but they'll be very pleased to have the opportunity to advertise their businesses as a result of these tools, right? So I think the opposition is a little bit misguided. Now I understand it because, again, it's a dislocation, but this is just expansionary, right? This will bring more people into the advertising economy. So while this starts at the top of the funnel, it will only be enhanced bottom of the funnel improvements. So then I'm talking about better personalization to improve monetization. That's kind of on-site stuff and then better signal construction to improve optimization and targeting.

And again, targeting needs to apply to every channel. Outside the walled gardens, too. And a lot of the growth is happening outside of the walled gardens. So ultimately, every ad channel can benefit from these capabilities and advertisers will expect every channel to offer them. And I think that's an important point. It's not just that this adds value to the sort of the customer experience that the advertiser has. It's that advertisers will choose the ad platforms they work with based upon these capabilities. They're going to expect it from everyone. And AI-enabled advertising is already delivering considerable commercial value.

So I mean, I won't read the quote again, but in most recent earnings, I mean Mark Zuckerberg attributed all the growth, I mean disproportionately to the growth was a function of these investments in AI. And these weren't big eye-popping numbers. You mean went through each of the 3 big AI initiatives. You've got Lattice, Gem and Andromeda. And he talked about 4% increase on click-through rate or 5% increase to sort of ROAS, right? These are not 30%, 50% boosts. But again, as a nature of digital advertising, those improvements compound over time, and they result in more ad spend coming back to the platform.

And then just a few thoughts about where we're headed. And just by the way, as a sort of logistical note, I think we're doing a Q&A on like all 3 of the sessions at the end. So there's no Q&A after this one, but we'll have like one big Q&A. So I think AI ultimately delivers what I've called commerce at the limit. And so I did a sort of monologue podcast about this a few weeks ago. And I define commerce at the limit as the fulfillment of complete optimization across every component of the digital advertising process such that commercial performance attains its theoretical maximum, right? And if you think about that, so basically, every ad is, call it, utterly optimized, right, in terms of targeting, in terms of intense, creative pairing, in terms of the placement, in terms of the sequence when the person is seeing the ad, right?

So if you imagine that, -- and then like imagine that along like one axis, right? And then along the other axis, you imagine that every company that could possibly advertise a product is doing so because there's just an ease of onboarding that invites them into this ecosystem. I mean this is massively accretive, right? I mean this is just an enlargement, a considerable enlargement of this economy. And so my sort of this concept of commerce at the limit is that every link in this value chain operates at maximum possible efficiency, right?

And just going back to this diagram before, like measurement and attribution, product personalization and monetization, campaign optimization and creative production. All of these things sort of attain the maximum potential efficiency. And there's just -- just thinking through that, I mean, there's significant opportunity for expansion. So just some of the downstream consequences of Commerce at the limit. So the first, I think the most obvious is increased participation. So Commerce at the limit expands the advertising economy to every business that could possibly benefit from it, right? So the sort of lightbulb moment for this was I was in Houston, where I'm from, and I was flying out to give a talk the next day, and I need a haircut. And I went on Google. And it's almost impossible to find a barber, like there's -- if you go to a barber, you probably like walked by it and I'll try that out through my house. But if you're in a new place, it's really difficult to find a barber and to understand if it's any good, right? And so I went on Google and I found one it was terrible, it's horrible.

But I was thinking this barber shop could be advertising. I mean imagine -- and that's inventory or that's an audience that's probably not being effectively monetized at this moment because it's not having local businesses advertised to it, right? And so you've probably got this uncompetitive audience with very -- that's very cheap to reach that is essentially not being monetized. And you've got an entire group of not just barber shops, but anything, nail salons, businesses that aren't participating in this economy. And so you get more commerce from these companies because they're able to reach customers that they otherwise never would have been able to. And then you've got on the channel side, the ad channel side, you're actually monetizing this group of people with ads that are targeted to them that otherwise just would have seen remnant inventory. So on both sides, you're sort of expanding that economy, which leads to probably price inflation, right?

So as all ads perform to their maximum potential and all advertisers compete on equal footing, bids become the auction focus. So if everyone's ad is sort of like maximally constructed for -- optimally constructed for conversion, then how do you beat someone in the auction, right? So because the auction is just an expected value ordinal ranking. How do you beat someone, you have a higher bid, right? So I need to monetize my product better. That forces me to monetize my product better to have a higher bid to push into the auction and then the ad channel just makes more money.

And then personalization as an imperative. So with advertising mostly automated, advertisers will shift development and analytics resources to in-product personalization. These improvements will surface better quality signals that can be passed to their channel partners for optimization, right? So this kind of puts the imperative. If I historically just outsourced a lot of that optimization to my ad channel partners, and I just had a product. I had my product that I advertised. It's a singular product experience. Everyone had the same experience, right? And I just -- I outsourced a lot of the personalization to the ad platforms based on who got targeted or maybe like which of these dozen creatives got shown. But now that the platform is managing all of that at the very top of the funnel, I -- the only way for me to optimize sort of my own business is to make sure that everyone gets the optimal product experience, right? So that pushes a lot of that personalization effort on to me, whereas before, the ad platform sort of owned that.

Finished exactly on time. So thanks very much, and I look forward to the Q&A after.

Wow, Eric, thank you so much. Really inspirational. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and your insight on the industry. As you see, we're really starting to go down the rabbit hole now. And I would really like you to follow the white rabbit together with me.

When I joined Verve and had my first days at the Berlin office, it was so inspirational to me just like listening to Eric now to see the people working there, having discussions in the meeting rooms. The whiteboards were full. They even started doing paintings on the glass doors because everything was full and they were just so creative. And it's really -- that is the reason why I wanted to work for Verve and why I think we have a lot ahead of us.

And from all the big tech brains that you will meet at Verve Group, I'm now bringing you two further really good tech brains to present to you the next two presentations. One is Mishel Alon, the CBO of Verve Group; and afterwards, Paul Hayton, our CTO of Dataseat. So I can tell you this is going to be intense buckle up, ladies and gentlemen, Mishel.

All right. Thank you so much, Ingo, and thank you, Eric. Good afternoon, everyone. It's great to be here again. Some of you probably remember, I was here exactly a year ago, the same month that Jun Group was acquired by Verve, and it's been an amazing year. I know that one of the questions that was asked earlier was about how is it going? And I want to answer that before we get to the topic of the presentation, and it's all in a way related.

So it's been exactly a year since we were acquired. And if I had to just describe how this year has gone, I would say that it's been a master class of how a well-designed and executed integration should work. And the way I think about it is the team that we brought in from the Jun Group side, which Remco was referring to, is very tight. We haven't lost a single person from that strong team that we've had over the years.

So we -- as Remco mentioned earlier, we had a strong team of individuals, part of the senior management team that have been with the company for 8 to 12 to 14 years. We haven't lost a single person, and that's something that I don't take for granted, and I'm really proud of. It's been an amazing journey with Verve, and we're just getting started.

So let's talk about ID-less advertising. Obviously, it's a big topic. We've been talking about it already today around the moats that we have in the industry and how Verve is well positioned to win in this market that includes IDs and also has ID-less environments, which are evolving. I'm going to cover it from multiple directions. I'm going to talk about it from a demand perspective and also from a supply perspective.

When I think about the demand perspective, the way to describe it is when you work with advertisers, when you work with the actual agency folks that are looking to work with partners on running their campaigns, that's the demand side. And then the supply side is where do you place those ads, where do you find the relevant audiences for your advertising campaigns. And we are in a very unique position where we can work with both, and we work with both, and we're able to show results and outcomes for our clients.

We at Verve, we are very focused on outcomes. And my main goal in terms of outcomes in this presentation is if I ask you what is ID-less advertising after this session, everyone will know how to answer that question. I'm going to use a few real-life examples that hopefully will make it easier to understand. All right. So I'm going to start with a couple of questions.

By show of hands, who here is concerned about privacy when it comes to advertising. All right, the majority of the room. And the second question is, by show of hands, who in this room feels like they have a good understanding of how targeting actually works in the advertising space? Okay, smaller proportion. So again, my goal is that by the end of this presentation, everyone will be able to lift their hands.

All right. Let's start from the demand side of the business. Again, demand is working with advertisers. Verve has made a few acquisitions, a couple of notable acquisitions in the demand space. One of them, obviously, I just mentioned, Jun Group a year ago. The second one is Dataseat. Dataseat, I'm going to talk more about the products that we have, the solutions that we have for our clients. Both of those companies that Verve acquired we're super focused on a privacy-first type of approach to reaching audiences. We're doing it in different -- taking different directions, different angles to it. But at the core of what we do, we want to be in a position where we are able to perform for our clients while also respecting privacy regulations, privacy laws, privacy best practices from the Apples and Googles of the world.

If I double-click on Verve Dataseat for a second, in 2019, Apple released -- introduced to the market a concept called ITP. That concept was around how do you limit the usage of cookies in Safari browsers on mobile. Because the founders of Dataseat, Paul and David learned Apple for many, many years, they knew that, that was just a first indication of what Apple was going to do in a broader way when it comes to mobile in-app advertising and that it would not be limited just to the browser environments on the devices.

And over the years, we've spent a lot of time looking into what Apple was doing, learning their practices. And I'm going to get into that more later in the presentation when we think about the TAM and the future, which are going to just get bigger and bigger as time goes by. So that vision in 2021 became the reality with the introduction of ATT, where, as Remco showed earlier in the presentation, when you install a new app, the app will prompt you a message, ask you, are you willing to share information across apps, to be targeted across apps and 80% of the users say no to that.

This is not stopping. GDPR, the evolving regulations in the U.S. around privacy laws, that's all going to continue. And being strong when it comes to respecting privacy regulations and best practices is going to get, at the same time, more challenging and also create a lot of opportunities for us because we are the experts in this space. So how does it work? I think that it's really important to define both ID-based and ID-less approaches just so you get a full and holistic sense of how this actually works.

Let's start from ID-based. And I'm going to use a simple example to explain how ID-based advertising goes. At the core of ID-based advertising, you have some value, an ID that you tie information to. When you tie that information, you basically create a profile, a behavioral profile that you can then use for targeting. So let's use a simple example.

Let's say, someone is a single person and they're looking to start dating a person. They install Tinder, they start swiping left and right. They schedule a date night. It all goes well. They want to watch a show on Netflix. They install Netflix. They want to order some food, so they will order something from Deliveroo, let's say, some Vietnamese food. And it's all going great. And at some point, they decide to book travel.

What happened there in the background is there are third-party partners called MMPs, mobile measurement partners that will take all these signals that I just mentioned, what did the user install, when, et cetera, and they will build a profile for that user. And you can see the profile that is being built for Alex in that example. And you see what kind of data points will be added to that profile.

Now if there is an ID available there, then they will tie that information to the ID. They will sell it to advertisers and then advertisers will use that information to target the relevant users. So in this example, this person booked travel via Expedia, and the next thing that you'll see is that they are now being targeted by an ad from Booking, telling them to book travel via Booking to the same place that they wanted to go to, let's say, Barcelona in this example, trying to convince them to book via Booking.com.

You can take it one step further and you can use the additional information that you got, for example, the type of food that, that person ordered and use that also as another adjustment to the targeting in a way where the creative, going back to what Eric briefly talked about earlier, where the creative can also be adjusted to also reflect that to drive better outcomes for the advertiser.

Now you're probably asking yourselves, wait. You just heard that 80% of the users on iOS are not even going to say yes to cross-app targeting. So how do these profiles get built? The answer is that those MMPs that I mentioned, the mobile measurement partners, think about them as players in the market that are responsible for aggregating data and creating profiles around users are taking this approach that is called referred to in the industry as fingerprinting.

What is fingerprinting? You basically take the data points that you have about the user and you build a profile around that. So those data points could be the IP address. Every device that gets connected to the Internet has an IP address. So they will take that information and they'll try to combine it with other information that they have. For example, the type of device that the user is using.

Let's say, they're using iPhone 16, Max and you take those data points, combine them and you create a fingerprint for the user. The issue with that is that, it's a gray area right now, and we're going to talk more about what Apple is planning to do down the road around it. And it's also not always very accurate. For example, in this room, anyone who is connected to the WiFi is sharing the same IP address to the external world. So if there are two people who have the same type of device, which is very common, and they click an ad and make an install, for example, that attribution might get conflicted between those two individuals. So you don't know who is the user that is actually the one that installed the app in this example. So it has issues and limitations and also it's not always very accurate. So those are aspects that you want to keep in mind.

On the other side is idealist contextual targeting. And when it comes to contextual targeting, there are many different approaches that you can take in order to find the right context in which your target audience is. What you're seeing here is the way that we're doing it on our end, which is, you basically look at the overall context where the user is coming from holistically. And that includes the publisher that they're visiting, the time of day, the geo. And based on the type of advertisers that you work with, type of campaign that you're running, you will see different attributes, different signals from the context that will have better accuracy when it comes to performance.

For example, if I go back to the example I mentioned earlier today -- earlier in this presentation, if I think about the dating app, time of day will play a bigger role in terms of giving you indication whether it's the right audience to reach. Publisher is always an important part of the context that we use in order to target the right audiences. And it could be language, it could be time of day, it could be geo, many different signals that we take from the context in which the user is at in order to make the right decisions.

Now this approach, the ID-less approach that we're taking, we're going to talk in a minute like who is working with us in this capacity. But if you know what you're doing and you do it right, you're able to deliver great outcomes for the advertisers. So you're able to be in a position where you perform for the clients while also respecting privacy laws. There is something that is happening in the background. I mentioned regulation, obviously, that's an important part, but there is also the overall Apple approach.

As I mentioned earlier, Apple in 2019 started caring more and more about privacy. And over time, that became a bigger priority for them. At some point, they decided that instead of letting those MMPs that I mentioned, the mobile measurement partners do the tracking, Apple wanted to be the source of truth when it comes to attribution. They wanted to be the ones who are giving information to the advertisers about which campaigns are effective and how the performance of their campaign is going.

Obviously, it's also benefiting Apple to be the one controlling the truth and the information. So there is that. So they came out with this concept called SKAdNetwork, where they are the ones who are responsible for providing that information. So let me use another simple example to describe how it works. Let's say, Alex from our team has a pizza shop. And Alex really wants to promote his pizza shop to audiences. He prints out flyers and starts distributing them to individuals. If you take an ID-based approach, then you want to know that Sameer, for example, received a flyer from Alex and he ended up coming to the pizza shop and made a purchase. That's ID-based advertising.

However, Apple said with the introduction of SPI Network, we're not going to allow that. We're still going to allow you to track how the flyers that you are giving out are working, but we're going to do it in aggregate. So what Apple did is basically, Alex delivers, let's say, 100 flyers per day, and he does that with different colors, different phone types, different times of day. Apple will tell them how he's doing with his flyer campaigns in aggregate, but they won't tell him that individual X, Y or Z are the ones that came into the store. They will tell them your campaign or that the creative that you use in the morning was able to deliver X purchases and the campaign that you did in the evening with pink instead of black delivered Y number of purchases. And that's the approach that Apple is pushing for in the industry as a whole. And as part of that, they're trying to continue going against fingerprinting and banning it.

There's another thing that is happening in the background. The introduction of LLMs has resulted in less users, less traffic going to web publishers. Because of that, there is a need, even an increasing need for advertisers to reach audiences on mobile. Why? Mobile is one of the only places where you can reach an individual and not a bigger group. When you run a CTV campaign, you reach an household. When you run a digital out-of-home campaign, you reach even a broader audience.

The thing is, if you want to reach an individual, you need to rely on mobile. So that's creating an environment where mobile is going to continue growing in its size. And that context is even more important when you think about the overall opportunity that we have here in terms of TAM. So in the U.S., over 50% of the users use iOS, whereas in Europe, it's a lower percent, closer to 30%.

Another thing that is interesting about the U.S. market when it comes to iOS versus Android, is that many of the marketers, many of the advertisers are actually trying to reach iOS users. But reaching iOS users is becoming more and more difficult for those who are relying on ID-based advertising for the reason I just mentioned. So if you think about it from that perspective, and if indeed, Apple goes and bans fingerprinting, that's going to at least 10x our opportunity in terms of promoting our ID-less solutions in the market.

Why do we think that, that can happen? Apple did something very interesting in iOS 26, which will become available in September. They banned fingerprinting when it comes to the Safari browser. So they're not doing it in in-app yet. But as we just discussed earlier, when they do something on Safari, in many cases, it's an indicator for what they're going to do in the overall in-app environment. And if indeed, they ban fingerprinting in in-app, that's going to continue accelerating our growth when it comes to our ID-less solutions from a demand perspective.

So I was alluding to it -- to this slide earlier. Who do we work with when it comes to these types of solutions? We work with the largest, biggest names in the world. Just think about it for a second. Apple created the SKAdNnetwork. They are the ones behind all that is happening in terms of privacy laws and privacy best practices on iOS. They work with us to promote their products and apps. So Apple is the one creating it, and they trust us that we are capable in delivering results for them. That's huge. It doesn't stop with Apple. I don't think I need to go into all the names on this slide. It just shows you the strength of the products and capabilities we have in this market.

In terms of the outcomes that our advertisers are looking for, they're pretty broad, depends on the advertiser. It could be as simple as impressions and reach and it could be as more involved in terms of funnel, in terms of installs, subscriptions, post-install events. You want to know what happens with the user after the install happens, and we are able to deliver those outcomes for our clients at scale.

So let's take a look at one example. Auto, Remco mentioned them earlier today, third biggest retailer in Germany, which is very focused on privacy-based approaches to advertising. We've been working with them for almost a year, and the return on ad spend has been significant for them. And Eric mentioned return on ad spend earlier. In the end of the day, it's all about how much do I invest in my campaigns and how much do I get back from an increase in sales or whatever KPI the client has.

So this product is performing for them. And when it performs for them, they continue working with us because it's a no-brainer for them to do that. With Auto specifically, we're also giving them visibility into post-view events. So the user watch the ad, installed an app. What happens next? Are they spending on the app? Are they making purchases? If you are operating in an ID-less environment and you don't have the capabilities that we have and that we have built over the years, you don't have visibility into those. So we are uniquely positioned to deliver those types of insights for our clients, and that's another reason why they want to continue working with us.

Another approach that we take when it comes to ID-less or privacy-first advertising is our zero-party data. You heard earlier today the concept first-party data mentioned. First party is information that you get from the publisher itself. Zero-party is you take it one step further and you get it directly from the user.

So the user is volunteering information that you can then use for targeting. So for -- in this example, you're looking at -- you're asking a user if they are interested in buying new sneakers. If they want to answer the question, they'll answer it. If they don't, they don't have to. And based on the response they give you, you are able to adjust the ad experience for them. We've been doing this at scale on the Jun side for many years, and now it's offered across the board as part of our brand and agency offering in the U.S. and in other markets.

And here, I also have another case study that we did for Mars. It was for a pet product. So we asked the user, do you have a pet? And based on the ones that said, yes, we delivered the relevant ad and the return on ad spend was significant. And in terms of outcomes, this client was able to see a significant increment in sales, which in return, drove them to continue working with us and spending more with us. So I covered the demand side.

Let's spend a minute on the supply side. So when ATT came out, what happened was the DSPs, the demand side platforms, they had less visibility into the users that they were getting requests from. Why? There was no data. They could not use data to target. They were blind to what was happening.

As a result, you saw a big decrease in effective CPMs. That decrease impacted both the demand side and also the publishers. But what's interesting is that publishers still had a lot of access to data. But the key was how do you use that data and how do you create an environment where you still drive value for the consumer and also for the advertiser? So there was a huge opportunity there. And we decided when we saw that opportunity to get into that space in a way that was unique. And that way was ATOM.

ATOM gives you the ability to identify your target audiences on the device without any sensitive information leaving the device. This on-device targeting capability that we have gives us the ability to identify cohorts of users. And when we identify those cohorts of users, we're able to pass it back in a privacy compliant way, so advertisers can use that to target the right audiences. We are, again, uniquely positioned in this -- with this solution, and it gives us the ability not only to look at things from a demand perspective, but also from a supply perspective.

So let's show you a quick video of what is ATOM.

[Presentation]

So you saw a few examples of audiences and cohorts that were mentioned there. So we will take -- ATOM will take the information that we are getting directly from the device without the information leaving it -- leaving the device to calculate the cohorts. So for example, someone who is very active in the morning will be profiled as such. Obviously, we take a lot of data points. We have over 180 signals that we take into account to calculate those cohorts. But there is a lot that is happening in the background.

And what's basically happening is that you have AI that is spread around many devices, and Paul is going to talk more about that in his presentation. So how does this all come together? And what are we going to do next?

AI is really at the core of what we do in terms of what I described from a demand perspective, supply perspective. And we are currently working on the next-generation products where we bring all that together. Our goal is to continue delivering better outcomes for our clients. When we provide those better outcomes, they tend to spend more with us. They trust us, and they rely on our ability to generate the outcomes that they are looking for. And it also creates an opportunity for us to become more efficient. AI has a lot of efficiency promise in it. And again, Paul is going to spend a lot of -- more time talking about it. But our goal is to continue optimizing our campaigns, deliver better outcomes and to do it in a more efficient way.

So just to wrap things up, when it comes to ID-based or ID-less targeting, our approach is to use what we have access to. When we have access to IDs, we will use them as long as it's compliant with the privacy laws. But when we don't have access to IDs, then we will use our secret sauce, which gives us the ability to succeed in the market, and that puts us in a very unique position overall in the market and the opportunity, as I mentioned, is going to continue growing. It's going to continue growing in terms of our ability to deliver outcomes for our advertisers. It's going to continue growing in terms of our ability to strengthen the relationships with publishers by driving better results for them and better revenue.

And it's also going to give us the ability to be in the forefront of what's happening in the industry because, again, our capabilities in this space are very unique, and we're going to continue investing building on them. So we're just scratching the surface. We're going to continue evolving our products and offerings. And I'm going to let Paul talk more about that. Thank you.

Good afternoon, everybody. Artificial intelligence has been part of adtech for over 10 years. It's grown steadily in its importance and its power with each year that's gone by. Over the next 30 minutes, we're going to have a very quick tour through the AI that powers Verve's advertising platform. We're going to look at the AI that allows us to be more productive and more efficient. And we're going to look at the AI innovations that make Verve different, that make us unique, that stand us apart from the rest of the industry. My name is Paul Hayton. I joined Verve 3 years ago. I am the Co-Founder and CTO of Dataseat, our contextual demand-side platform. I began my career in academia quite a while ago now. I was a university researcher for 5 years at the neural networks research group in Oxford University, researching applications of neural networks. I've been part of adtech since 2011. But it's great to be here to talk about a subject that I enjoy so much, which is artificial intelligence.

Before we get too much into our tour of AI, a little bit of some clarifications, should we say. AI is about taking data and training a model that captures the underlying patterns, generalizes what that data is about, learns the truth that, that data came from. And from that, it can make predictions, classifications and make decisions. In the past, AI has usually been about taking a particular set of data for a particular task. You take, for instance, images of road signs and you train an AI to recognize speed limits, and you put them on the dashboard of your car as you're driving along. One particular task-based AI.

Recently, though, we've started seeing large language models come along in the last year or so, and they're trained on language. They're trained to provide an appropriate response to a prompt or a question. And this gives us just a whole new set of opportunities of ways in which we can make use of it to drive better outcomes and efficiency. We do need to watch out, though, because AI is not perfect. There are some -- lots of well-known examples. See, an AI is great if you take some data and you give it another question or input that was similar to the ones it's been trained on, it will do a great job of providing a very accurate prediction if it's inside of that training data that it had.

If you ask it to do something that it's never seen before, it will often fall flat on its face. If you ask ChatGPT for a picture of a person writing with their left hand, you will get a picture of a person writing with their right hand. If you ask for someone -- a picture of someone wearing a jacket inside out, you will just get a picture of someone wearing a jacket. You've asked for something that it's just never seen before, and it just falls over and it does something completely unpredictable. So we have just got to be aware of what AI can do and what it can't do. It often doesn't capture the truth that's underneath it. It just learns from what it's seen.

So onwards, we go into our 3 chapters of our tour. First of all, we're going to look at ad targeting. The -- what's in this -- what's at the heart of Verve's advertising platform, the need for data, how we match advertisers and consumers and how we optimize for KPIs. We're going to look at efficiency. The tools we use, intelligent AIs and how we -- and our strategic Google cooperation, how that is going to enable us to produce better AI models going forward. And lastly, differentiation. The things that make us different, the things that make us stand out, what makes us unique and what gives us that competitive edge, ATOM, Dataseat and Helix.

So going to the first chapter, targeting within Verve. First off, we need to recognize that we need data. In fact, there are 3 things you need to build an AI. You need a lot of data, you need a lot of computing power and you need a team of data scientists to understand how to get the most out of those things. And we have all 3 at Verve. We have a huge amount of data. Trillions of pieces of data from our exchange, millions of [ pieces ] of data from our SDK coming from those devices that have our SDK in, things like, in some cases, from ATOM, gender and age and other SDK signals, how people use their devices. And then we've got ID graphs, links between different devices that a user owns and uses.

We can also take in external data from other sources like Experian. And all that data can come together in what looks very simple because it's just a triangle on the screen of just AI optimization. It's really an opportunity to use all that data and optimize it to provide the best ad served to the best target group, the best ad to the right target group. That's our goal. Now what's inside that triangle of AI optimization is a lot more complex than it looks. So we're going to dive in and have a look and see inside. See, our net revenue that we get out is a function of a whole bunch of things.

The ad requests that we send out, we get back in, the bid rate, which is how often our demand partners are bidding in the auctions that we're supplying, how often they are winning because if they don't win, that means nothing to them or to us, the revenue share that we get. The CPM, which is the prices that they're bidding, the higher they bid, the better for us, the better for our publishers. And the render rates, whether or not those adverts actually show. All of those aspects of this process can be optimized. All of those have opportunities for us to optimize them with AI models. We're going to pick up on just one of them and look at the impact it has.

But there's lots of initiatives on the screen there, demand shaping, bid floor pricing, Helix. We're going to touch on some of them, but we haven't got time to go into all of them in detail. But just picking up one and the impact it has for us. Demand shaping is a question of taking all of the available ad requests that we could have access to and choosing which ones to send to our demand partners. It's like fishing. It's like putting the right base on the right hook. If you do it right, you get lots of bids back at high CPM, high prices. You make lots of money.

If you do it wrong, you get no bids back. We have access to an absolute enormous, enormous amount of available advert opportunities. This is over a 31-day period. There were 1,251 trillion opportunities to show adverts, requests. Of those, we're picking out the 2% to 3%, which -- where there's a very, very high chance that our demand partners will want to show an advert where all everything matches the right geography, the right type of publishers, the right demographics. If that's done well, it's a huge efficiency gain. If we get it wrong, it costs us a lot of money.

So this is demand shaping at its best. And this has had a huge -- we routinely measure the impact of this versus not doing it, has a huge boost in revenue, but we can do better. We can make this more granular. This is a constantly evolving, constantly improving piece of technology because our demand partners change what they do. They're constantly evolving, too. They're doing more subtle bidding on our inventory. So we have to make sure our demand shaping matches that to supply them with the requests that they want to bid on. To do that, we're looking to use more complex models, including, for instance, deep neural networks. They are super complex. They are harder to train, but they provide us with the most complex means of generalizing underlying patterns that you can have.

We're also looking at using a technique called reinforcement learning that will allow us to do -- to have a model that's trained and have that model adapt as new data comes in. It is not static. It actually continues to learn in real time as new data arrives. So if our demand partners change what they're doing, the model will change what it supplies. And this allows us to have more complex models that are trained less frequently because training them is the costly part of it. So we've looked at one example of an AI technique within Verve of quite a few that there are in place.

And these AI techniques allow us to select the adverts that we supply to our demand partners. They allow us to optimize the number of adverts that we show, and they allow us to maximize the revenue and the margin that we take as a business. Now we have to move on to the second chapter of our tour, which is about efficiency. [ We'll ] look at 3 aspects. Team efficiency, I'm going to give you an example of one intelligent AI -- intelligent UI that we've built and our strategic Google collaboration. First of all, team efficiency. We, as well as building AI tools, we also are consumers of AI. We have the opportunity to make use of AI to make ourselves more productive and more efficient. As I'm sure many of you have tried playing around with AI tools, we are the same.

So we've started activating certain AI tools, making them available for our teams in evaluation mode, should we say, because not all AIs are created equal. There have been academic studies that have shown that some AI tools actually decrease productivity. They're more gimmick than they are tool. So what we're doing is evaluating how well these work, how much efficiency improvement we get, where we become more productive and where they're just a distraction. So we have GitHub Copilot, which is an AI for our developers, which aims to lessen the amount of typing they have to do because it predicts what they're starting to code and offers completions, offers highlighting mistakes that miss -- when you mistype.

It's very easy when you're coding just to miss one character, which changes what your software does completely, and AI can pick up on that for you and highlight it. CodeRabbit is an interesting AI tool that does code reviews for you. Now developers like solving problems. They don't particularly like typing. They like solving problems and they like coding. They don't tend to like reviewing other people's code so much. It's a necessary part of the job, but it's not people's favorite piece of their working day. CodeRabbit does a basic review for you. It picks up on occasions of bad practice or imperfect structures. And it can speed up that review process by highlighting as a first pass, things that could be improved.

We would still -- we still -- we're not going to get rid of the human code reviewer, but we can make their life a little bit easier. We also have Gemini, Google Gemini added as to the whole of our organization so that we -- rather than searching through documents, we can ask Gemini to find answers for us. But the way to do this is not just to enable all these tools and hope, we are doing it in a structured way. We have an overview of which our tools are active and making sure we validate that they are beneficial, that they are actually giving us a productivity improvement and giving guidance for best practice to our team.

We need to have a proper rollout of the tools that we agree, the ones we find do give us productivity improvements. And we also need to be careful that we're not disclosing information by using AI. We need to make sure that these AIs are effectively closed. The data we put into them doesn't go and get used for further language model training. And that way, we get the most out of them, ensuring that we benefit and don't get hindered. Another way in which we can be efficient is to take advantage of the new large language model style AIs and build an agentic AI user interface. As an example, this is a media brief or a media plan. These are used by our users to create what's called a deal.

A deal is a segment of advertising inventory chosen for a particular advertiser campaign. It might be set up targeting a particular geography with a particular set of advertising ad formats on a set of publishers targeting a particular type of person. And typically, a media brief will be a document, which will list a whole set of objectives. It will give some dates, as you can see here, an audience that you're trying to reach, some -- in this case, various deals. We want to do some display. We want to do some video. And the traditional way of doing this, we have got a user interface that we've always had a user interface that does this, is to go in and set these up with lots of controls and selectors and date boxes, and it involves quite a lot of time and effort. But understanding a document is what a large language model does brilliantly.

And so what we've got under development is an agentic AI, an intelligence UI. This is our next-generation deal portal, and we're going to demonstrate it. What we're going to show is that we can upload that media plan. The large language model will process it and summarize it because summarizing is a huge strength of these models, pick out the key features and produce the deals. So let's have a look. This is the UI, and we'll watch it go. We select the upload a file button. We're going to select that file, that media plan and upload it. The large language model processes or parses through that document, picking out the key features.

And it spits out, that's maybe not the right word, but it produces the deals that it believes should go along with that media brief. So let's go back to the top, and we'll have a little look at what it found. It parsed the media plan. From the summary, you can see it's picked out the fact that this media brief is to be -- is to take Verve Supply and send it to The Trade Desk. It's picked out the dates, and it's figured out that it needs 8 deals, 4 display deals, 4 video deals. And those are listed below as queries that it used from the deals are available to -- and it's produced some forecasts and suggested price points. And so having reviewed all those, we can either decide that we want to refine it by adding some more instructions to say, change it in this manner or we can -- if we're happy, just say, let's create the deals.

And when we create the deals, we go to our sort of more standard look. We can see all the deals ready to go. And if we're happy, we just hit save. And those are then being trafficked from Verve Supply to The Trade Desk in a matter of seconds, whereas previously, this would have taken at best minutes. So we can use the power of large language models to give us an intelligent user interface, one that makes life easy, that doesn't require huge amounts of training and allows people to get things set up quickly. Third aspect of efficiency is our Google Cloud partnership. Having moved on to Google Cloud, we have lots of opportunities.

And -- we're going to look at 3 of them. The first is we can upscale or upskill our data science machine learning operations. We have access to better tools. We can take advantage of Vertex AI. We can look at and use state-of-the-art notebook environments for our data scientists. This allows them to efficiently prototype, test and put into production a new AI model. So if you can do that, you can try things faster. You can get through the things that don't work and find the things that do work, and then you produce AI at scale in an efficient manner. We're also, as I mentioned, briefly looking at reinforcement learning so that we can take a trained model and adapt it or let it adapt itself as it sees new data coming in. So it isn't just trained, it becomes something that's being trained on an ongoing basis.

It's training throughout its time. This means we can use a more complex model. It gets trained less often and it adapts to the data it sees in real time. The third aspect is to start approaching deep neural networks. These are the most complex architectures of neural networks. We have one deep neural network in production that I'm aware of in Verve, which is within Dataseat. It does recommendations, but it doesn't have to do that in real time. We're looking to see if we can use deep neural networks at scale. It is difficult to get them right because the complexity can be anything from simple to enormous.

So that does take specialist knowledge. The revenue impact that this could have is to be seen. This is something that will take us -- we're beginning the journey now. This is something that will bear fruit. So we've looked at AI tools that allow us to be more productive and more efficient. Our Google Cloud partnership that lets our data scientists go from an idea to a prototype much faster with state-of-the-art machine learning operations. And we've looked at our agentic AI user interface, an intelligent user interface that saves time and allows humans to do the bits that they do best, not just typing numbers into boxes.

And so we'll move on to the last chapter of our tour, which is what makes us different. What makes Verve unique amongst the rest of the industry. We're going to look at ATOM, we're going to look at Dataseat and we're going to look at Helix. So privacy. We've mentioned it quite a lot today. Various people have mentioned it already. And Mishel has mentioned ATOM, but I want to dive into some of the -- just highlight some of the AI parts of what ATOM does. Privacy is super important. We've always believed in it as being important. But it does mean that you're saying to users, do you want to share your data? And if you don't, that's okay. But if users don't share the data, that means you have no data to train an AI.

That means you need to find other ways to optimize other ways to train models. Privacy protects users' data. That means we have to do different things with AIs in response. And the answer, as you've heard a lot about or one of the answers that you've heard about is ATOM. Now what ATOM does is it looks at all the signals. The thing that is amazing about ATOM, just before I dive into what it does, is it's an AI that's on users' devices. It's inside their iPhones or their Android devices. It's running there. So it's there in millions of devices. And it's running all the time. It's listening out for signals, device content, what's going on their device, the apps that they're using, how well or how that user engages with their app, how much attention they provide to different parts of the app and whether they engage in adverts.

All of these features, these 100 signals are going into the AI that's on their device. It's been trained. It's out there in our SDK. It's taken a long time to get there. It's now on its upward trajectory of growth. That AI can provide us with these cohorts, 200 different categorized classified cohorts. That AI is listening to these signals. When it gets to a certain point, it will say, okay, I have a high probability now that this user is currently at home or this user is interested in video games or this user is of a high-income demographic. That data is not -- doesn't breach someone's privacy. It's not identifying the person saying where they live and who they are. You can't link it to other data. But it's invaluable for advert targeting. It's invaluable for showing the right adverts to the right groups of users. And that's -- well, this will be like a drug to demand partners because once you get addicted, you can't get off it. This will be something that will drive up prices because it's going to be super valuable for targeting.

As an example of one of those, I mean, I have a teenage daughter. She uses her phone in a very different way to me. Her fingers tap away at it at a far higher speed than I can ever hope to imagine. So looking at the way people pinch, tap, zoom on their devices are the kind of features and signals that allow ATOM to classify into one demographic, in this case, 18 to 24. Those features -- sorry, not the features, but those classified cohorts get sent to our demand partners. Our demand partners, they can then appropriately choose the advertising campaign that is right for that user. And we get better advertising whilst upholding people's privacy.

ATOM has been scaling up. You've heard about it for a long time because it's been in development and slowly rolling out, but it's now really on the upward trajectory. On iOS, there are 700 apps now with our SDK with ATOM running, producing ad requests with ATOM cohorts, 1.7 billion ad requests per day from 700 apps. Android released much more recently only in June. It's at currently 40 apps sending ATOM cohorts, 3.3 million ad requests per day. And there's a lot more to come as this gets bigger in scale, it becomes more important, and it drives up prices for advertising. So we've looked at -- so yes, we've looked at ATOM.

And one of the customers of ATOM is dear to my heart, Dataseat because it -- we -- Dataseat is a contextual bidder. Dataseat relies on contextual features, things like the publisher app that a user is in, how long they've been using the app, the city that they are currently residing in. And now we can also look at the ATOM cohorts as an extra feature. Those features together are what goes into the Dataseat AI models that allow our models to pick out the optimum bid price or the value of showing an advert to a given user for a given campaign. As the scale gets bigger, the value of this feature, the cohorts get bigger as well. And it's a virtuous circle because the advertising gets better and better.

As well as providing data, we've also talked about -- well, we talked a bit about audiences and deals through our deal portal. When we're looking at providing an audience as a different sort of aspect of what we're doing here, if we're looking at providing an audience and making that available for our demand partners or particular advertisers to use, we now have this split between data that's got IDs in it and data that is ID-less, personally identifiable information and non-personally identifiable information. In iOS, it's at about 75% doesn't have IDs, no personally identifiable information, 25% does.

On Android, it's kind of the other way around. 80% has IDs, 20% doesn't have IDs. And so the challenge is you've got this split. And what we really want is to take the best of both worlds. We need something that has -- gives us a unified view of all of this data, the ID-based and the ID-less. We want to take all of it and put it into one single audience store. That way we get everything. We can monetize all of it, we can provide the best audience possible. And that is what we call Helix. It's an intelligence -- sorry, an audience intelligence engine, covering both ID-based and ID-less. It gives scale where previous audiences would have only been based on IDs.

Helix allows us to have an audience that covers ID-less as well. It covers all of our channels, CTV, in-app and web to give us the maximum view of an audience. I'm going to demonstrate another AI user interface that allows us to get that audience as simply as possible. We can have a look at insights on what that audience will cover, who it will reach, where they'll be, how they interlock with each other, those in the categories. We can optimize that audience as we go along by making changes to it and interacting with the prompts. And we can make that audience when it's available -- when it's finished, available through our Deal portal as Verve supply traffic to a particular demand partner.

So let's have a look. This is the user interface. It is quite small because this is a screen shot that we took on Thursday. We went through various -- well, we had settled on the prompt we're going to use, which is people like me. So I want to target men who are interested in electric cars and a healthy lifestyle. A very, very simple prompts to use. The data that's in this tool at the moment is from the U.S.

And so what we get is a summary of what that audience will be. There can be 21 billion daily matches. That's not users, that's matches, 2.4 billion from ID-less and 18 billion from ID-based, covering mobile, CTV and web. We can also look at how the pieces of this audience interlock together, healthy living, sports, automotive, holidays, the links between those to gauge behavior affinity.

We can see the location of where this audience will be spread and the different pieces that we -- that make up -- that it makes up that are part of it, healthy shoppers, summer travel, healthy living and so on. We can look at the different ad formats that will be part of this audience from some display, some through to video, and we can look at the price point. We can look at what volume of inventory, what volume of our audience will get at any particular price value. So $5, we'll be reaching about 50% of that available audience. It will be the cheaper inventory. If we go higher, we'll get more video inventory at a higher price point.

So we've seen ATOM. We've seen Dataseat, and we've seen Helix. Three parts of that, that are quite unique that make us stand apart from everyone else. Helix addresses audiences across ID-less and ID-based data set, contextual DSP targets in a privacy-centric advertising setting and ATOM providing data from our SDKs that is not available in a privacy based way from any other source.

Going to finish by looking at our vision for the future going forward. This is a diagram of the Verve technology structure. We've got publishers and advertisers on the left. We've got our marketplace, Helix, Control Center, Curation Center and our DSP. Each of these pieces has an opportunity for AI optimization. Within our publishers, we've got ATOM, which provides us with intelligence on the edge, giving us better data coming in.

Our Curation Center is our deals portal that you saw earlier, where we can create packages of media very simply. In our Control Center, we're looking at techniques for anomaly detection, where -- so we don't have to have humans staring at screens and metrics. Instead, we can train AI models of what's normal and let them flag up when we've gone outside of normality.

Our Marketplace. We dove into demand shaping, but there's plenty of other techniques that are already in place, floor pricing and dynamic margins to mention, too. On our DSP side, we have got pacing and targeting, but we're also looking at creative design, bid shading, to get the optimum prices that we're bidding. And finally, Helix that is our content intelligence platform to provide an audience.

The idea of all of these is to use the right tool for the right job to use an AI where -- doing what an AI does best to take data, to generalize that data, to make classifications of predictions and free up all the humans to do what they do best, which is to make strategic decisions and to be in touch with our clients, ensuring that they get the outcomes that they're looking for. Thank you very much.

Paul, great. My head just exploded. Thanks a lot. So now may I ask Mishel and Eric back on stage as we're running for our second Q&A session. This is going to be the tech Q&A session. So we're not going for financials here or anything. And I understand its -- I think we all don't have a PhD in AI. So there is no stupid questions. Please just ask -- for everyone who are asking the question, there will be somebody else in the room celebrating this guy for just asking because he didn't dare to.

I'll start with a stupid question. Well, I like your presentations, and I just wondered a bit giving some context in terms of the competition. Well, you historically won market share when ID-less solutions in iOS were introduced basically. So what are you thinking? What is your closest competitor or best competitor? And how are your approaches differing between your competitors?

I think that a unique position in the market is that we're able to look at it from both demand and supply perspective. There are not many players out there that have those types of perspectives. And I think that one example to highlight there is what Paul just described with the combination of Dataseat and ATOM. So you're able to take information from the supply side, make it available to the demand side on DSP side in a way that makes our accuracy even higher when it comes to our ability to target people at scale.

Another thing to mention there is our SDK. There are many players out there that don't have that direct access to the supply, which gives us a lot of control and visibility into the ad experiences, into how much we pay out, into our ability to protect our margins, et cetera. And when you think about it from those two angles, you understand the unique positioning that Verve has in the market.

That's a good point. You just stated about the SDKs because that seems to be a question a lot of our online audience has. How does ATOM get access to the devices referring to the SDKs? And then how many other competitors in the market are offering similar SDKs? And how is the real competition in this market to bring your SDK into an app?

In terms of who has an SDK, that number of really leading vendors in the space that have SDK is not that large. The reason for that is it takes many years to get your SDK from an engineering perspective to a place where it's stable, capable and also drives the revenues that publishers are looking for.

When you think about it, from an app developer perspective, they don't want to install more than 8 to 10 SDKs in their device. The reason for that is every SDK you add to your platform, you create some risk. If an SDK crashes, that can have an impact on your app. So you want to be very careful about who you integrate and you have to be very selective to only include the ones that are the best performers.

The way that it works is as part of the SDK integration, our developers have the ability to also add ATOM. And as you saw in one of the slides that Paul presented and also I presented where we've been able to scale things up. So we're looking at 1.7 billion auctions just on iOS on a daily basis. So that gives us a pretty robust user base.

And maybe one question to you, Eric, as the visionary on what might happen. There is a cohort of investors, I would say, that do not dare to invest into such a tech company because they say, I cannot really say if not something completely new will come up and then push out all the players that are currently in the market. What is -- what would you answer to an investor stating something like that?

Yes, it's a good question. So I think there's a structural resiliency that you'd want to look at in the company itself, right? So there was -- I mean AT&T was like an extinction level event, right? It's 5 years in the rearview mirror now. But a lot of DSPs went out of business or -- so I mean like it's not -- a company that survived that has proven resiliency, right, and adaptability.

But just going back to the SDK comment because that's actually a really important component. Like if you have the SDK, you kind of have that direct connection that gives you access to data in a way that obviates the need for a lot of the privacy violating stuff, right? I mean you talked about -- so Paul talked about -- well, you both talked about ATOM, but like doing a sort of like edge inference is really important.

And like there's other ways, there's like privacy-preserving ways like things called like federated learning, right? So like you can update the model from just the edge device without leaking any personal information. And so that kind of capability is kind of private. Any sort of like new intervention in the market would not sort of disrupt that being able to do that, right?

But if you look at -- the issue was getting SDK and I can talk about this from the advertiser side, is that it's the bloat, right? But then to your point about like a fragility, like every SDK adds like essentially like some new opportunity for your app to fail. And so like what a lot of advertisers do is, I never do an SDK. Like if you want my data, I'll send it on the back end. That's all MMP based, right? So if you have an SDK, I mean that really is like a very deep connection. So I'd say that kind of footprint is really important in sort of assessing the risk of any new privacy intervention.

I would also just add that, I guess, what sets us apart is we have a demand side platform that's about privacy and contextual bidding and a supply-side platform that's about providing the right signals for that, and that's a great link together. There are other companies with SDKs that just provide data, please bid. And there are other companies that do bidding. But the two together, both with that same synergy, both with that same vision of doing ID-based advertising, that's how it works best.

Can I just get some clarification, this is a little bit building on what just have been said. So if we say ATOM. So A-TOM, B-TOM, C-TOM, so competitors -- so is it your point that we have ATOM and there are no comparables, such as, call it, B, C, T-TOM. Is that what you said before?

There isn't another solution like ATOM in any other SDK.

Okay. So we can tick the box -- we can tick the box here and say, we are unique, and we are market leading. So now you have said before in how many devices ATOM is active in? So is there not a technique to call this installed base that we have an installed base, basically. So if we are in 200 -- I think you said in 2 billion devices, we are active. In one of your -- one of your charts, you said, ATOM is in 2 billion devices.

No. We are getting it in 1.7 billion auctions every day -- requests every day. So we have that data available in that scale. In terms of the installed base, we have about 700 apps on iOS that have ATOM enabled on them.

Okay. But if we are in the device, in the iPhone, is there value in terms of being in more iPhones?

700 apps, each of those apps, they have 1 million users -- daily active users that gives you 700 million people.

So -- and I call this in reach. So we have then the reach into these hundreds of apps, and then billion, million of devices and so on. And is this not value which is difficult for competitors to match because they don't have the reach?

Yes, absolutely.

And then how do we systematically expand that reach? We spoke this morning about investing in the sales force, there's 100 people you want to recruit. But how do we systematically invest in expanding the reach?

Yes, there is an effort on the supply side and on the marketplace side to increase that scale -- to further increase that scale. So that's an ongoing thing. We are at a point where the level -- the volume that we're getting on daily basis is significant. This is not a walk in the park type of volume when you think about it from a daily request perspective.

We are constantly pushing that, so it will be even a bigger part because that increases our addressability. It's always tied to the demand. At the end of the day, the site that needs to act on the information that comes from ATOM is the demand side, which uses that information to target the right audiences on the SDK.

This is understood. But the question, I just want to find out how strategic we are to expand the reach? Because if we have the installed base, the region, all of this, we have a more credible source or quality of information argument on the demand side, which you're going to invest in, in terms of the sales force?

Yes. Our goal is to have ATOM enabled in as many apps as we have direct SDK reach into and also to increase that volume on a daily basis that it will be even higher.

Maybe to add some words to that to the question. Thanks for the question. ATOM took a long time. I mean we have been developing it for a long time. We have been testing it for a long time. And in the beginning, you have to be super careful if you put it in apps because the worst thing is that the app crashes and that the publisher doesn't want to work with you anymore.

So we had to scale it up slowly. And we have now a decent number of apps where we are in and we have our account managers that are talking to the publishers, and they are now really making sure that it gets into, let's say, we have 65,000 apps, so we want to roll it out everywhere.

ATOM, to be careful, we just also still, let's say, just carefully rolling that out. Sorry, not ATOM, on Android, I wanted to say. On Android, we carefully rolling it out, but on iOS, it's proven, it works. It is at scale and the only thing now is to get more scale. So our account managers, Sameer is here, Sameer's team is really extremely much pushing that we roll it out everywhere now and really get an installed base that is even bigger than where we are now.

We are now at a scale where we can prove that it works. We get enough at request that we can make it really helpful and that we really get the results, Paul has talked about higher prices for the publishers, but it's even more about, let's say, more results for the advertisers. And now it's really about further stating that, and we have a competitive advantage with it. Sorry, I wanted to quickly fill in here.

Thank you, Remco for that. And then maybe adding to this the #1 drop dead question that every tech company gets. If what you're doing is so sophisticated, why doesn't Google do it? And what would they have to go through to copy us?

There is a reluctance to let go of ID-based advertising. There are quite a lot of the companies out there who are still hanging on to either the ID segment or trying to do attribution by fingerprinting because that's all they know how to do. Eventually, there will be more of a forced shift over. I mentioned the possibility of Apple absolutely breaking fingerprinting.

It's in their rules that you're not allowed for fingerprints, but people are kind of ignoring that and they're getting away with it at the moment. If that gets enforced, there will be this seismic shift as Eric mentioned, really hitting and then everyone will be playing catch-up at that point.

Any further questions here?

Yes. So a question for you, Eric, maybe if you would like to sort of elaborate or give your thoughts on or opinions on where ID-less targeting is currently in terms of efficiency and overall accuracy compared to the sort of still traditional ID-base targeting methods? Just general thoughts. I believe it can be quite difficult for you to give any firm answers, but where are we currently? I guess it's still early days, but...

Yes. Yes. So I can talk about the potential because I think if you look -- so like I follow a lot of companies -- just to level set, I don't have any relationship with Verve. I was an adviser to Dataseat. But I don't -- I'm here just to give a talk, right? Not to promote Verve. But -- so I think if you look at the potential, I would use Facebook as the kind of guiding example here. And like what they've done with Advantage+ has essentially recovered completely from AT&T.

And I think one of the issues with ID-based advertising, is it kind of created a sort of false trust? Like first of all, there was essentially no deterministic attribution, it didn't really exist. But the presence of an ID made people a lot more comfortable with that idea. And once you pulled back from that and advertisers didn't have access to it anymore. What you realized was there were a lot of interaction effects that I was not giving credit to. Like I was running this influencer campaign that I couldn't measure deterministically and that was actually benefiting all the deterministic -- all the campaigns that I was measuring last click.

And so what I think has happened is the whole market has moved away from the idea of last click. And so there are very specific ways in which ID-based advertising is much more performant. But there are a lot of benefits to moving away from ID-based measurements that broadly, I would say the advertising -- the cohort of like advertisers have embraced.

And so when you embrace those things, you unlock a lot of capabilities that you would never use if you were totally tethered to ID-based advertising and those are unlocked with like probabilistic advertising and things like that. And that is a lot of the like sort of AI-driven stuff. So I would say, certainly, there are downsides to not having any ID.

You can't build a behavioral profile. That's really helpful in a lot of cases. But when you tethered to that, you don't do things like looking at interaction effects with CTV and -- or TV-based campaigns and all that kind of stuff. And so the rise of everything is an ad network set of new channels that couldn't be deterministically measured anyway, has like awoken people to the value of that. So I would say, yes, there are downsides. But I think on net, everyone's sort of better off. And so it has created a lot of value like supporting those use cases with things like attribution and measurement.

Just to add quickly from a Verve perspective, if you consider the slide where I was showing who is working with us and what kind of outcomes we deliver for them. There is a set of advertisers that is more conscious about respecting privacy regulations and best practices. And those are the ones that would prefer to use the ID-less approach because they believe that that's the approach that should be used in the market. And I mentioned Apple is a great example for that.

We expect that, that market will continue to expand because of regulation because of what Apple is doing. But at the same time, when you think about those types of clients, they will not work with you if you're not able to produce outcomes and results for them in an ID-less advertising environment. And if you consider some of the case studies that we showed, we are able to show that performance and deliver those outcomes in a way that makes the clients happy. And at the end of the day, it's all about outcomes when we consider what we can do for our clients.

Great. Thanks. I think we have time for one last question. Do we have any further questions here?

Well, I hope it's not too stupid, but just technologically, we spoke about ATOM in apps. If I have an ATOM integrated in one app, is it automatically also available a solution for other apps? So meaning it's basically on device? Or do I need an ATOM integration for each individual app?

It's -- it's individual app.

It's each individual app? Because each app is [indiscernible] and separate.

Yes.

Crisp question, crisp answer. So thanks a lot again to the tech expert. I think an extra applause for them. It was a real pleasure to listen to you. Thank you all. So we're reaching the end of today's Capital Markets Day. Before I hand you over to Remco, also from my side, a big thank you for attending today's date. It's no fun if there is nobody watching, so also to everybody online, thanks for spending the time with us. And now for the famous last words, I'm handing you over to Remco again to close the session of the day. Thank you.

Thank you, Ingo. And thank you all for staying with us so long and following us. Yes, Capital Markets Day is always a good point. I mean, we do it once a year. It's a good point to really show where we are. I think today, we were also able to show how complex this market is, that's also one of the challenging and we gave you a lot of information.

So our aim today was presenting our Q2 performance, give you an update of what we have achieved since the last GMD, we've given our commercial update, financial update. We explained our Q2 unification issue and went into our strategy and mostly also our confidence about the future. And I hope we were able to also show you our -- not only show you our confidence but also make you as investors confident about the great future that this company has.

With external and internal experts -- thanks to Eric, thanks to Paul, thanks to Mishel that they did deep dives. I hope we didn't confuse you too much because, as mentioned, it is complex but I hope that we rather were able to educate, to clarify and to make you understand the sector better. We continue our focus to make media better. We showed you our strategic initiatives, verticalization, multichannel, privacy, platform unification, investment into sales geo expansion, strengthening the core team and M&A, if it fits, but mostly focus on organic growth and why we really build USPs.

As mentioned before, earlier, this market has a lot of players that don't have clear USPs that just are there because the market is big. If you want to thrive, if you want to really be successful in this market, you need to build USPs. And with our ideal advertising potential with our AI, with our strong supply base, with our strong demand, I think we have really a very strong basis to further grow this company.

In summary, we reached a key milestone with our in-app platform integration and afterward, I don't want to talk too much about it anymore. We further built on our strong direct supply position in app, and we want to scale that to other platforms. We further invest in our sales teams. We continue to invest in our differentiation. And we keep growing, we further grow. The target is really to reach the 1 billion. That's our next target. And after that, there will get another target. We want to do that in the next 3 to 5 years, and we're looking forward to that. Also, I'm super proud about the team -- did great presentations. We see that really this company is making big progress every year.

This year's Capital Markets Day presentation was shorter than last year, even though it still was long. We would really appreciate your feedback because we only want to make also this better. I would like to thank speakers for participating and not only the speakers also the team behind it and also here in the room because they were not on stage today, we have Sameer who's running the marketplace supply side, we have Alex running the strategy part. And we have Tobias Weitzel, our Chairman of the Board, apart from the other people that you saw on the stage.

But the biggest thanks is to investors, analysts, all the people that support us. Thank you very much. Thank you for supporting us. Thank you to go with us through ups and downs, and we had a bit of a down, but we're going up now. And yes, super proud, super happy. And thank you all very much. That's the end of today.