Hello and welcome to Virtual Investor Conferences. My name is Eric May, and on behalf of OTC Markets, we're very pleased you have joined us for our Technology Virtual Investor Conference. Our next live presentation is from NowVertical Group Inc. Before I introduce our speaker, a few points to note. Please submit your questions in the question box left of the slides. If you are interested in scheduling a meeting with NowVertical Group, please click on the Schedule Meeting tab found on the platform navigation bar. You'll be able to view the company's availability and submit a meeting request. On a final note, all of today's presentation should be recorded and available for 24/7 replay. At this point, I am very pleased to welcome Daren Trousdell, Chairman and CEO of NowVertical Group Inc., which trades on the OTCQB Venture Market under the symbol N-O-W-V-F and on the TSXV under the symbol N-O-W. Welcome, Daren. Thank you. Welcome, everybody. I'm pleased to introduce our company, NowVertical, to you. NowVertical is a global AI software and services leader. We are enabling our customers to turn their AI investments and ambitions into our product outcome, which is called Vertical Intelligence. Our business has been built through 12 foundational formative acquisitions, TTM 2022 revenue estimate in a range of $60 million USD, 500 employees on five continents, and 250+ global customers, very much an enterprise customer focus in our group. Our company is working in a very large market that's growing in the tech sector, largest market opportunity exists here around AI and big data. Humongous addressable market opportunity. Also in a global purview, it's a market that has, you know, in all the core markets around the world that matter, a similar approach and a similar need to innovate and deliver solutions in this space, and we're at the forefront of that. We have a maturing market here where investments are being made rapidly and quickly. You know, this is the next phase in the tech space after cloud. This is sort of beginning to take cloud investments to the next level, and we're, you know, we're a happy and growing participant in that market. What our real product is for industry is Vertical Intelligence. The problem is artificial intelligence, as it stands in a general sense, provides limited value to enterprise customers because on a general basis, it can't really do anything. Everything in a vertical, whether it's financial services, oil and gas, automotive, aerospace, et cetera, they all have very specific data assets that power AI, and those things need to be utilized and understood by experts to deliver success and achieve time to value with a solution. What our Vertical Intelligence platform brings to the market is industry-specific applications in core industries that we focus in and unlocks that value and time to time to value for the modern enterprise. That's comprised of software assets that we own, build, and maintain, managed services to deploy those software assets, and industry expertise so that what we're deploying is providing value day one. Some of the barriers in AI today, you know, are pretty significant detractors from you know, investments or generating value. Those include lack of skilled people and difficulties in hiring those people for roles internally. Even bigger than that is an enterprise customer's lack of data or data quality issues. If you don't know where your data is, you don't know how it exists, it becomes very difficult to power these solutions. Technical infrastructure challenges, IT, you know, this is cutting-edge, very important work. If IT is not ready or they don't have internal capabilities, that could be barriers. Legal concerns or risk and compliance issues. Not knowing where your data is, not ensuring it's compliant, not only makes these investments and ambitions hard to activate, it puts the enterprise at risk for other, you know, for other very serious, you know, potential issues, whether they be civil or criminal penalties in certain jurisdictions. What our Vertical Intelligence model addresses, we have a global expert team with deep technical skill sets that can deliver these solutions the right way, and at scale globally. We have proprietary data discovery technologies and processes that help our customers understand what their data is, how it exists, and how to use it in this context. We are already servicing 250 global customers that are at the forefront of leveraging their data assets to drive their AI ambitions. We have a modern data stack, which we call VIOS, so Vertical Intelligence Operating System, that integrates with existing legacy systems and drives our customers to operate a modern data stack. We have proprietary data governance technologies and practices to ensure risks are mitigated for our enterprise customers. What's really exciting about this industry and this business is if you can start with an enterprise customer in the earliest days, so just you know, the real starting point is helping an enterprise customer understand their data assets, where it exists, how it exists, and making it compliant and usable. You can help them grow along a maturity process that when they become vertically intelligent and they're doing predictive and prescriptive analytics and they're automating tasks and using machine learning techniques and becoming AI, you know, AI ready and efficient, it's very sticky. These are long-term contracts. They are larger in value. They can, and over the years, become very ingrained in the enterprise. That's why we really like this space, because it's not a discretionary, you know, technology sale. This is very important foundational data. How we go to market with our platform is, you know, we have data engineering assets that we own that are proprietary, our Reveal product, our Privacy product, our Fusion product, that sit on top of existing cloud and on-premise technologies that our customers utilize and have invested, you know, millions and millions of dollars in. They don't need a new IT infrastructure investment to work with us. Very important. Our data engineering apps make the data available to power data science applications that then turn into models that become the ML AI outputs, whether that's churn analysis, text analysis, video analytics, predictive prescriptive analytics. Our system is powering that for our customers. To give everyone an idea, when we say enterprise customers, we have some of the best global enterprise customers using our software and service offerings globally. They cover industries where we're expert in from CPG, media and entertainment, government, mostly U.S. government, transportation, financial services, technology, and energy and infrastructure. These industries are where we're focused at the moment. We scale the business over time by adding new industries, whether it be pharma. There's other industries we're going to enter, you know, that will come on board as we grow. These industries are on the forefront naturally because they need technology to power their futures. We're a part of that fabric with these great customers. How we view the world is in our industry, because the TAM is so significant, the market is so large, it's not a winner-take-all industry. In fact, we partner with our competitors in certain instances. S ome of the large consulting groups in the world, you know, an EY, a Deloitte, they've leveraged working with us and our companies globally to deliver solutions. In reverse, we've brought them into engagements to help in areas that unlock enterprise opportunity. It's an interesting industry because it's not, you know, we need to build a product and we need to become the most dominant person in one product set. It's such a large industry that everybody can work together and build massive multi-billion dollar businesses and operate in a symbiotic industry in a manner. How we view the world is there's three elements that make a company vertically intelligent. It's the data governance engineering and infrastructure. We go up against or partner with the likes of the Snowflake, AWS, Elasticsearch, Google Cloud, where we're doing deployments together or we're helping our customers choose one of these partners. We're allowing them to now integrate our technology or other third-party technologies in the data science and analytics world, competing with the likes of, you know, a Tableau or an SAP providing other solutions that are more efficient, cost-effective. Then into the more advanced machine learning AI, we're definitely competing with some of the, you know, some of the leaders there, whether that be a C3.ai who have been growing through to Palantir and in certain instances even partnering. To give a couple illustrations of what we do with our customers, GM has been a customer with our group for a long time. The situation with GM was they had cars on the road a few years ago that were having the ignition switches turn off as cars were in mid-drive. They couldn't solve the problem through their usual process of diagnosing physically in the car. GM was very wise on the forefront of their data. They knew they had a lot of data assets that could solve problems, but they didn't have a system or a technology in place that unified their data in one view. Our data fusion product called Fusion allowed them to fuse their data together. They had a lot of data, 2 billion records across 50 disparate databases that took them from the silos into a fully fused data set, took them from finding safety issues in, you know, years, potentially never, into days and weeks. They streamlined their vehicle safety program using technology, automated machine learning, natural language processing technology to help them to this day still working using the system to find issues. In this particular instance, what was transformative is their analysts were able to connect three data points that was a YouTube video, an OnStar audio call, and a spreadsheet to identify why the ignition switches were turning off, which ended up saving lives, saving massive penalties, and deferred criminal prosecution in this case, which was, you know, well public. It doesn't always have to be life or death. It can be very opportunistic. One of our other customers is Adobe. Together for over 10 years, we've been working with them to understand the LTV of a customer and helping them understand how the LTV of a customer across their product set can increase revenue for the group so they look beyond new business. Over time, we helped them take their data from disparate sources that nobody can access to a centralized, unified model. We had unclear customer views. We were able to integrate the customer view so that somebody in one division can see the view of the other division and use that in the decision-making process. Then the communications became very segmented by customer type to drive ultimately an additional $815 million of incremental value for the company. The engagement continues today. It's expanded exponentially. We use this example to illustrate how understanding what your data is, using your data in the correct and compliant way, understanding privacy, and then using it to drive communications can drive absolute financial results, quantifiable financial results. In a similar example, using machine learning on, you know, The Vitamin Shoppe's direct mail marketing program, which is their largest and most important value driver, you know, they didn't have sophisticated direct mail targeting, and they were doing it by hand. You were using humans to, you know, build models that were inefficient. They weren't moving at the speed of real-time. There was a lot of waste in the program. There was limited revenue to show for it. After we put our solution in and really tuned it to drive the program goals, we were able to take The Vitamin Shoppe to find another $2.8 million of additional revenue in the program, which really helped them drive their, you know, their goals. Our company has two significant growth drivers for 2023. Historically, we've talked about mostly acquisitions in our company. That's how we started the company. For those who don't know, we've been around 24 months, around there, building through acquisition. In 2023, the company is going to talk about organic growth, and it's an important driver for us. With 250+ customers, five continents, 500 people, we are gonna do the following within our existing business to drive an organic growth goal. We're gonna expand relationships with our current customers to do more. Most of our customers in our group are doing one, two, three things with us. They could be doing five to 10. If we expand to five to 10 different elements in the engagement or expand them on the maturity chart, they're going to drive significantly higher revenues with our group, which that's a goal for our teams to drive higher ACVs within existing customers as the core organic driver versus new business. We're going to improve margins in this group by offering our software solutions to service customers. We have customers that use our software. We have customers that use our services. For those using our services, we are going to migrate more software sales into those groups, and that drives a much higher gross margin for the group, which will improve the overall margin. On the M&A side, we are continuing to drive strategic acquisitions in our group. You'll see new acquisitions coming online in short order, using the same formula that we've used historically. For those who don't know, we buy companies really with a three-element kind of deal structure, some equity, some cash up front, typically funded through debt. We're really looking at accretive acquisitions right now, those who can drive real free cash flow into our group. The third element is a three-year earn-out. We've been very successful financing those acquisitions because they're accretive, and we've been using Schedule I bank and government debt historically. We've announced in the last three acquisitions, work with TD Bank and EDC, Export Development Canada, have been financing these acquisitions with us, that's at excellent terms, prime + 1 range kind of debt, no extraneous covenants on the EDC debt with five, six-year amortization schedule. It fits really well within our, in our value model. Ultimately, if all of our acquisitions deliver on their targets and earn and meet their earn-out targets, it ends up being an average 6x multiple on EBITDA per total purchase price. We're grabbing great businesses, driving real cash flow into the business at great prices, and that's important because we think over time, as our share price moderates and grows, you know, EBITDA is going to, you know, the Collective EBITDA is going to drive our share price higher where we can get that arbitrage opportunity. Just for those who don't know the history of the company on our financial growth, you know, from a quarter or from a year perspective, if we're just looking at 2021 to 2022, up to Q3 reported, it's been 648% revenue growth, significant revenue growth. We're reporting Q4 next week, so you'll be able to, you know, you'll be able to analyze kind of how we've maintained that or grown that. We have set very simple expectations in the market. We telegraph what we're doing in the market the best we can. It's very important to us that we continue to show growth and sustainable growth. The delivery and what we've done in the business, I think, has illustrated that, and we've had a lot of support in the story around what we deliver every quarter. We're excited to see the market reaction after next week to what we're doing and beyond. In terms of our focus, if you've tracked the margin side. What we've been doing is delivering declining losses and in a business like ours is expected to have losses. Our business units are all profitable. Our operating model has costs, which is our, you know, our compliance, go public, administrative, et cetera, and that's been declining. As our revenue's growing and our gross profit is growing, our Adjusted EBITDA losses are declining, and we expect through 2023 to be Adjusted EBITDA positive. That's gonna be an important milestone as we start to print those in the quarters for investors to watch this grow. It's an important element of our story that I think sets us apart from a lot of other names in technology. In terms of the company, our management team, myself, I'm from the technology advertising industry historically, worked at a company that I sold mine to called Aegis Media, which was bought by a group called Dentsu, one of the largest advertising holding companies in the world. Dentsu bought Aegis Media in a multi-billion deal. That company, really its foundation was a similar model. It was consolidating performative assets to build a large global enterprise that could serve media and advertising customers, thousands of customers, $multi-billion revenue business. Our President, Sasha Grujicic, he worked there with me, you know, running our M&A program integration and he's doing the same over here and in our commercial program. Alim Virani, our CFO, has come over from Constellation Software last year, so he's coming from, you know, one of the best Canadian roll-up stories that exists, you know, one of our best public companies in this country. He brings a lot of discipline, a lot of operating discipline, and his core responsibility is optimizing the businesses we own to drive more operating leverage and cash to the corporate side. Jennifer Carman runs our global HR, whether that be standards, compliance, hiring, moving people from one unit to another, given how big we've become, Jennifer drives that. Andre Garber runs our internal M&A and corporate development, so we do a lot of our M&A work in-house, from sourcing companies to doing the deal work and then supporting them after. Insider ownership in our company is now just below 40%, so insiders own a significant amount of this company, and I think that's a unique element here. We're excited to be aligned with shareholders that way, and we've done this since the beginning, and we're a very shareholder-oriented driven company. The company, you know, I think has some unique investment, you know, investment opportunities here. It's, you know, an opportunity in every sector and every industry. As we've really focused in and leaned into, you know, five, six core verticals, there could be 10 here in the next couple of years that become priority, and that's, you know, infinite amounts of scale, when you think we can kind of bolt into these industries and launch and then, you know, add logos through acquisition organically. We have a track record of successful acquisitions and integration. We have a track record, as you'll see in our, in our financials, of optimizing these businesses and getting operating leverage out of the process, and that's only gonna get bigger. As, you know, as we continue to run our program and add more, the cash profile for our business will improve and become meaningful, especially as we're, as we're growing it. We have an experienced management team that's, you know, been there, done that, and in this case, doing it from the beginning has given us something very unique, which is we, you know, can get the best practices we've learned from the past and avoid any mistakes that we've been able to see. So far, that experience has come in very, very handy. The market, as I pointed out, is extremely fragmented. It's an opportunity, you know, that is similar to, you know, vertical software or other industries that just have seemed like, you know, an endless amount of opportunity because of the fragmentation. We're ready to pounce. We've already been doing it. Our acquisition pipeline is vast. It's deep. It's only getting bigger, and the opportunities are getting bigger and better with market contraction. The organic growth opportunity. You know, we now have 250+ customers in our world to expand and cross-sell. We have businesses that have great talent that can win new business against incumbents. We have a broader group that gives our companies in the markets they serve, you know, a new silver bullet, which is a global company, a global offering, software assets they didn't have before. This is you know, an unparalleled opportunity, in my opinion, that we're ready to pounce on. That's the, that's the presentation for today. I'm really, thankful that you listen and follow along with me, and now I'm gonna answer a few questions here. Somebody is asking the question: Do you target the same market as C3.ai? C3.ai we deem as a competitor to the company in the market. Yes, they're from what we see and know in the marketplace. In our oil and gas industry, they come up. Couple other industries we've seen them come up, not as deep as we are on the industry focus, but they have come up. I think their engagements are a lot broader than what we look to do. We look to kind of start in different places in the organization, so our sales cycles can be compressed, but we have targeted the same. In terms of another question here: Can you give insights on how acquisitions have been funded in the past and the acquisition strategy going forward? As I mentioned, the acquisition strategy going forward, I'll start with, is to continue doing what we're doing and the format what we're doing. It's working well. We're able to manage our targets and manage the integration very well. There's a discipline in our company that is second to none. How we funded it historically, in the last three transaction is illustrative of the model we will continue to use, is that we trade a little bit of stock, and if you look at our transactions, they have been taking our stock at a $1 premium. It's wherever market is. You know, our share price has been somewhat irrelevant in the transaction because it's typically lower than the premium we put on the shares. So we're trying to keep the transactions as minimally as dilutive as possible. We then have bank debt added to fund the upfront cash component of a deal. I mentioned that, you know, TD Bank, EDC, those are the two primary funding sources that we're working with now, and that'll expand as we grow. The third piece of the, of the funding strategy is a three-year earn-out paid for out of the earnings and cash flow of the company that they generate. That's below EBITDA. Cash is paid to debt to service debt, which is on a five, six-year schedule, and then the earn out is paid, and then we keep all the excess cash, and that's our, that's our model. Another good question here: With the share price where it's at, how does the M&A strategy for 2023 look like? We haven't traded significant amounts of shares in our transactions. We've had minimal dilution last year in 2022 with the transactions. We don't think the share price is gonna impact new M&A. Debt markets are a little more expensive than they were last year. At the same time, we still find the deals we're working on are working in our models. We're gonna continue doing what we're doing, and we don't expect any, you know, any significant impact to our program because of that. Another question is, does your sales strategy remain infiltrated with the clients to upsell or expand opportunities? Can you maybe give an example? I think the question is that's being asked is, does the sales strategy, remain infiltrated? I think what the question's asking is it hard to sell into an existing customer or easier to sell into an existing customer? The answer is I believe what I'm seeing in our company, it's much easier to sell into an existing customer than it is to add a new customer with the sales cycle. In our industry, sales cycles typically are longer because it's such a sticky, very complex world. Its data is like any balance sheet assets, like, as close to cash on a digital base as we can get. W orking within our existing portfolio has faster time to value than new business. Another question, U.S. listing soon? We think, you know, if you look at valuations, if you look at, adoption of these stories, the way AI is interpreted in the capital markets, the U.S. is the, is the premier market for that. Stories from Palantir, Alteryx, C3.ai, they're incredible public companies that have been very successful in the public markets. Even through bad, you know, bad markets, they've definitely lived up to their potential and share price opportunities. We're very interested in what opportunities are available for us given the scale we're at and we will be at next year. How, another question: how come you have the majority of your employees in Argentina? We do not have the majority of our employees in Argentina. We have employees in U.S., Canada, U.K., Argentina, Brazil, probably equivalent size in Brazil and Argentina, Chile, Mexico. We're very well distributed. However, Argentina is an incredible delivery market, and what we drive in terms of margin value delivering solutions out of Argentina is transformative to our future margin profile. Another great question: What are the verticals seeing the most growth? We have great growth in our government vertical right now. The U.S. government specifically has a very long view on AI, machine learning, and adopting and deploying those technologies at scale through all facets of government. We are very long on U.S. government as a vertical. Oil and gas has been strong in terms of opportunity. Financial services, especially with what's going on in the markets, growing opportunity. Compliance and risk management, risk mitigation has never been a bigger topic for us. We are, you know, we're really excited about that. I think I'll take one more question, and then we're done. Do you have a subscription usage revenue model? We have a subscription recurring revenue model with our, with our software products. We also, two of our software products have a SaaS model, and then we have pro serve, managed serve, multi-year recurring revenue contracts. That's the majority of our revenue model. Thank you very much for your time and great questions. I really enjoyed telling the Now story for everyone here. Please reach out for meetings. Would love to see everyone on a one-on-one basis.