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Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-05-15Research Solutions Inc. (RSSS) Matches Q3 Earnings Estimates
Zacks
Research Solutions Inc. (RSSS) Matches Q3 Earnings Estimates
Research Solutions Inc. (RSSS) came out with quarterly earnings of $0.04 per share, in line with the Zacks Consensus Estimate . This compares to earnings of $0.03 per share a year ago. These figures are adjusted for non-recurring items. A quarter ago, it was expected that this company would post earnings of $0.03 per share when it actually produced earnings of $0.03, delivering no surprise. Over the last four quarters, the company has surpassed consensus EPS estimates just once. Research Solutions, which belongs to the Zacks Commercial Printing industry, posted revenues of $12.12 million for the quarter ended March 2026, missing the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 2.87%. This compares to year-ago revenues of $12.66 million. The company has topped consensus revenue estimates two times over the last four quarters. The sustainability of the stock's immediate price movement based on the recently-released numbers and future earnings expectations will mostly depend on management's commentary on the earnings call. Research Solutions shares have lost about 14.6% since the beginning of the year versus the S&P 500's gain of 8.8%. While Research Solutions has underperformed the market so far this year, the question that comes to investors' minds is: what's next for the stock? There are no easy answers to this key question, but one reliable measure that can help investors address this is the company's earnings outlook. Not only does this include current consensus earnings expectations for the coming quarter(s), but also how these expectations have changed lately. Empirical research shows a strong correlation between near-term stock movements and trends in earnings estimate revisions. Investors can track such revisions by themselves or rely on a tried-and-tested rating tool like the Zacks Rank, which has an impressive track record of harnessing the power of earnings estimate revisions. Ahead of this earnings release, the estimate revisions trend for Research Solutions was mixed. While the magnitude and direction of estimate revisions could change following the company's just-released earnings report, the current status translates into a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) for the stock. So, the shares are expected to perform in line with the market in the near future. You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here. It will be interesting to see how estimate...
Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-05-15Research Solutions Q3 Earnings Call Highlights
MarketBeat
Research Solutions Q3 Earnings Call Highlights
Interested in Research Solutions Inc.? Here are five stocks we like better. Research Solutions posted a better bottom line in fiscal Q3, with net income rising to $860,000 and adjusted EBITDA up 14% to $1.6 million, even as revenue slipped to $12.1 million from $12.7 million a year earlier. Platform subscription revenue grew 7% to $5.2 million and now makes up a larger share of sales, but transaction revenue fell to $7 million as management said churn and lower volume from a few large customers continued to pressure growth. The company is leaning into AI-driven products and its “headless” strategy, with new MCP connectors for scite and Article Galaxy already generating a pipeline of more than $1 million as management works to stabilize churn and improve fourth-quarter results. Research Solutions (NASDAQ:RSSS) reported improved profitability in its fiscal 2026 third quarter, even as revenue declined from a year earlier and management said business-to-business churn remained a drag on growth. The company, which provides cloud-based research workflow tools including Article Galaxy and scite, posted total revenue of $12.1 million for the quarter ended March 31, 2026, compared with $12.7 million in the prior-year quarter. President, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Roy W. Olivier said the quarter showed “improving EBITDA and net income” but acknowledged that top-line growth came in below expectations. → Micron Investors Face a High-Stakes Moment After the Latest Rally “Churn continues to be an area that needs action,” Olivier said on the earnings call. Chief Financial Officer Dave Kutil said platform subscription revenue increased about 7% year over year to $5.2 million, driven by a net increase of 15 platform deployments and expansion within the existing customer base through upsells and cross-sells. Platform revenue represented about 43% of total revenue, up from roughly 38% in the same quarter last year. → How Bad Could Tesla’s Cybertruck Recall Be for Shares? The company ended the quarter with $22.1 million in annual recurring revenue, up 8.5% from a year earlier. That included approximately $15.7 million in B2B ARR and about $6.4 million in normalized ARR associated with scite’s B2C subscribers. Kutil said B2C ARR was down 7.5% year over year but had shown signs of improvement in recent months. Transaction revenue fell to $7 million from $7.8 million a y...
Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-05-15Research Solutions Reports Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2026 Results
PR Newswire
Research Solutions Reports Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2026 Results
Reports 8.5% Increase in ARR to $22.1 Million, Net Income of $860,000 and 14% Year-over-Year Growth in Adjusted EBITDA HENDERSON, Nev., May 14, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Research Solutions, Inc. (NASDAQ: RSSS), the leading AI-powered research workflow platform, reported financial results for its fiscal third quarter ended March 31, 2026. Fiscal Third Quarter 2026 Summary (compared to prior-year quarter) Total revenue of $12.1 million, compared to $12.7 million in the prior-year period. Annual Recurring Revenue ("ARR") up 8.5% to $22.1 million, which includes approximately $15.7 million of B2B recurring revenue and $6.4 million of B2C recurring revenue. Net income of $860,000 increased 297%, or $0.03 per diluted share, compared to $216,000 or $0.01 per diluted share. Adjusted EBITDA increased 14% to $1.6 million. On a trailing twelve-month ("TTM") basis, the Company has now generated Adjusted EBITDA of $6.0 million, which represents a 12.3% margin. Platform revenue increased 6.6% to $5.2 million. Platform revenue accounted for 43% of total revenue as compared to 38% in the prior-year quarter. Fifteen net new deployments in the quarter and 10% deployment growth over past 12 months. Cash flow from operations was $1.0 million, compared to $2.9 million in the prior-year period, reflecting timing of billings and changes in working capital. On a trailing twelve-month basis, the Company has generated $5.7 million in cash flow from operations. Total gross margin improved 220 basis points to 51.7% on gross profit of $6.3 million. "We introduced a pair of new AI-based products in recent months, giving Article Galaxy and Scite users the ability to search, review and acquire scientific literature within their existing AI tools. Simplifying the process is critical in an ever-changing research environment, and these tools help us remain an integral partner with researchers. We remain focused on executing over the long term to drive value for our shareholders." said Roy W. Olivier, President and CEO of Research Solutions. "Our third quarter results reflect the improving profitability and growth prospects of our business, even within a softer operating environment. The continued focus across our Platform business is expanding consolidated gross margin and our strategic investment in sales and marketing is helping drive upsells for existing customers and signing larger deals with...
TranscriptFY2026 Q32026-05-14FY2026 Q3 earnings call transcript
Earnings source - 55 paragraphs
FY2026 Q3 earnings call transcript
Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for participating in today's conference call to discuss Research Solutions' financial and operating results for its fiscal 2026 third quarter ended March 31st, 2026. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I'd like to now turn the conference over to your host, John Beisler, Investor Relations.
Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for Research Solutions' third quarter fiscal year 2026 earnings call. On the call today are Roy W. Olivier, President, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer, and Dave Kutil, Chief Financial Officer. After the market closed this afternoon, the company issued a press release announcing its results for the third quarter of fiscal 2026. The release is available on the company's website, researchsolutions.com. Before Roy and Dave begin their prepared remarks, I would like to remind you that some of the statements made today will be forward-looking and made under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied due to a variety of factors.
We refer you to Research Solutions' recent filings with the SEC for a more detailed discussion of the risks and uncertainties that could impact the company's future operating results and financial condition. On today's call, management will reference certain non-GAAP financial measures which we believe provide useful information for investors. A reconciliation of those measures to GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release as well. I would like to again remind everyone this call is being recorded and made available for replay via a link on the company's website. I would now like to turn the call over to Roy W. Olivier. Roy?
Thanks, John. The third quarter represented improving EBITDA and net income but was certainly lower than our expectations in terms of top-line growth. Churn continues to be an area that needs action, which I will talk about in more detail later in the call. New bookings were good at 61 new or upsell logos, representing $961,000 in ARR. Unfortunately, churn was 46 logos, representing $398,000 in ARR. Most of those were smaller accounts. However, there was one large account in that total that represented about $130,000. As a reminder, about one-third of churn is uncontrollable. That category is primarily driven by one of our customers being acquired, going out of business, or experience a reorg that includes eliminating the research function.
Two-thirds are controllable, and that's where our focus is, and none of it is related to, quote, AI usage, end quote. There was a lot of good news in the quarter. Academic and corporate sales were both strong. We signed sizable academic deals in Johannesburg, Singapore, and several with top U.S. universities, including my alma mater, Texas A&M. These deals are primarily scite deals. We also signed several large corporate deals at levels well above or at historic average sales price, or ASP. This is a good mix of both scite and Article Galaxy deals. About 70% of those deals are AG deals. The point is that new bookings are executing well, and I feel good about our new bookings growth. We have been using AI internally in virtually every area of the business. The product teams have seen a nice uptick in productivity as a result.
Due to this, we can now assign software development issues to AI and then have a developer check that work. This has accelerated the number of new items in each release. In addition, during the quarter, we released two new AI-based products. These are called MCPs, which stands for Model Context Protocol. You can think of an MCP as similar to a software API, but it is a connector to integrate an AI-based LLM, like ChatGPT or Claude, or an internally developed LLM into Article Galaxy or scite. This is part of our headless strategy, which means we want to be where our customers are working. I'll talk about that also more later in the call. I'll discuss all this with you in a little bit more detail, but for now, I'll have Dave walk you through the results in more detail. Dave?
Thank you, Roy, and good afternoon, everyone. Total revenue for the third quarter of fiscal 2026 was $12.1 million, compared to $12.7 million in the third quarter of fiscal 2025. Growth in platform subscription revenue was more than offset by decline in our lower margin transactions business. Our platform subscription revenue increased approximately 7% to $5.2 million. The growth was primarily driven by a net increase of 15 platform deployments over the prior year, as well as expansion within our existing customer base through upsells and cross-sells. Platform revenue accounted for about 43% of our total revenue for the quarter, compared to approximately 38% in the prior year quarter, as this mix continues to move towards the higher margin platform business.
We ended the quarter with $22.1 million in annual recurring revenue, or ARR, up 8.5% year-over-year, consisting of approximately $15.7 million in B2B ARR and approximately $6.4 million in normalized ARR associated with scite's B2C subscribers. Although it was down 7.5% year-over-year, B2C ARR has shown signs of improvement in recent months. As the MCP launch that Roy mentioned earlier has increased both conversion and retention. Net incremental platform ARR for the quarter was approximately $317,000. Please see today's press release for how we define and use annual recurring revenue and other non-GAAP items. Transaction revenue for the third quarter was $7 million, compared to $7.8 million in the prior year quarter.
The softness was driven by a previously discussed churned account and volume reductions from a small number of larger customers. It is notable that the monthly trend inside the quarter showed meaningful directional improvement, and while not a full recovery, it is an early sign of stabilization. Our total active transaction customer count for the quarter was 1,346, compared to 1,380 in the same period a year ago. Gross profit for the third quarter was $6.3 million, essentially flat with the prior year quarter from a dollar basis standpoint on lower revenue. Gross margin was 51.7%, a 220 basis point improvement over the third quarter of fiscal 2025. The increase was driven primarily by the ongoing revenue mix shift towards our higher margin platforms business.
On a trailing 12-month basis, the company's blended gross margin now stands at 51.4%. The platform business recorded a gross margin of 86.4% compared to 87.4% in the prior year quarter, reflecting modest hosting and infrastructure investment to support our AI and integration roadmap, and is still well within our high to mid 80% target range. Gross margin in our transaction business was 26%, essentially unchanged from the third quarter of fiscal 2025. Total operating expenses in the quarter were $5.2 million compared to $5.7 million in the prior year quarter. The improvement was driven primarily by lower G&A expenses and lower stock-based compensation, partially offset by continued investment in sales, marketing, and product.
This is further evidence that the company's profitability improvement is not just emanating from margin mix. It is also a function of our operating discipline. We are being deliberate about G&A spend, keeping it contained while we put resources to work against growth initiatives. We expect the discipline to translate into continued operating leverage. Net income for the quarter was $860,000, or $0.03 per diluted share, compared to net income of $216,000, or $0.01 per diluted share in the prior year quarter, an increase of approximately 297%. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $1.6 million compared to $1.4 million in the year ago quarter, a 14% increase.
On a trailing 12-month basis, our adjusted EBITDA margin was 12.3%, a 220 basis points increase from the prior year quarter. Trailing 12-month adjusted EBITDA now stands at $6 million. Turning to our balance sheet, cash and cash equivalents as of quarter end were $12.1 million, essentially unchanged from our 2025 fiscal year-end, even after funding the scite earn-out payments made during the first nine months of fiscal 2026. That consisted of approximately $3.7 million in cash and the issuance of approximately 739,000 shares of stock. We ended the quarter with no outstanding borrowings on our revolving line of credit, providing additional flexibility on the balance sheet.
Cash flow from operations for the quarter were $1 million compared to $2.9 million in the prior year quarter. The decline reflects the timing of customer billings and strategic prepays rather than a change in underlying earnings power or a change in the collectibility of receivables. Trailing 12-month cash flow from operations was $5.7 million. We are entering the final quarter of fiscal 2026 with the aim of delivering adjusted EBITDA growth over the prior year, driven by continued platform subscription growth, improved retention, growing stabilization in transactions, and disciplined expense management. We expect to exit fiscal 2026 with stronger earnings power and cash generation, reinforcing the durability of our software as a service platform model and our ability to invest behind the next phase of growth. I'll now turn the call back to Roy. Roy?
Thanks, Dave. By the way, Josh, who normally attends these calls, is out today. He and his wife had a baby last week, and he's home taking care of the baby. Turning back to B2B bookings, the academic and corporate teams are doing well. As a reminder, we built out the academic-focused team back in 2025 or fiscal year 2025. The corporate team has been around for many, many years. The corporate team did well during the quarter, booking around $400,000. The academic team generated about $265,000, even though it's a seasonally slow time for them. The remainder or the balance of the new bookings was generated by the CSM upsell renewal team. While many reps on those teams are still new or in their first year, the performance on those teams is on track and improving.
As I mentioned earlier, B2B churn is the primary drag on top-line growth. We are doing several things to improve churn, including reorganizing the team, adding additional resources to that team, installing new technology to move us from reactive to proactive, as well as identifying low usage users and kicking off workflows to reengage with those users. Finally, we are improving our onboarding and training to ensure that we improve customer adoption. While this is not something that gets fixed in a quarter, I feel very good about our plan to get this back to historic levels. We'll report more on this during our next call. Turning to B2C, we have started to see some improvement from previous quarters. Product enhancements and the new AI-based solutions I previously mentioned helped reverse what was a steady decline in that business.
We saw less new trials on far less digital spend, have kept MRR about flat quarter-over-quarter. We've reduced our CAC by about 24%, and we've increased our lifetime value or LTV. We have had a good start to Q4, but keep in mind that we'll be entering the low season as universities let out for summer. That said, we have some exciting new versions of the B2C product and those are growing nicely. Product strategy and innovation are the drivers of all things for us. We've continued to improve the scite and AG products. As a reminder, we deliver scite and AG's value three ways. First is to customers that literally license the software and use it daily.
Second, we provide that same functionality and value via software APIs for customers that have internally developed their own solutions but need our unique capability at points in that workflow. The third option is the new two AI-based products that connect AI LLMs to the product. These, again, are called MCPs, and they are one-click connectors that allow the value of scite and AG to work within an LLM. They are working now with ChatGPT and Claude. We have this running for all B2C and some B2B users today. Back to our previous quarters where we talked about our headless strategies, headless strategy to be where the customer is, many of our users are starting to work in an LLM. They can ask a question of that LLM and interact with scite content in a copyright compliant way.
Once they get a fully cited answer, they can ask that LLM for the articles, and it will talk to Article Galaxy and go get that content for the user in a copyright compliant way. This basically allows an LLM to work with Article Galaxy and/or scite, again, in a copyright compliant way. This will be a big part of our future growth. The scite MCP was launched about two months ago, the AG MCP one month ago. We already have a sales pipeline of more than $1 million in opportunities for these new products. These MCPs will work with academic or corporate customers. In addition, we have integrated the Resolute databases into these MCPs. As a reminder, we purchased Resolute about two years ago, and one of the assets in that acquisition was access to over a dozen curated databases relevant to research.
We have integrated those into our MCP, so when a user asks a question in the AI tool, the tool's answer today will include patents, clinical trial, and major grant data. This means users can start and end their research journey in the AI LLM of their choice. There's a tremendous amount of excitement internally and across our customer base about these databases being integrated. We'll announce additional datasets as we add them. Integrating the unique value we can deliver with where our customers are doing research will remain the cornerstone of our strategy. In short, AI will not eliminate research, but it will change how it is accessed. Regarding document delivery or DocDel, we expect to see improvement in Q4 in terms of year-over-year performance.
As noted on earlier earnings calls, most of this decline is driven by a handful of customers. We have a large customer churn impacting the year-over-year decline, and a few other customers are doing less research than they did a year ago. Other than those customers, we are seeing increases in DocDel, particularly in OA or other free DocDel, but paid is slightly down. Regarding M&A, we continue to look for interesting opportunities and are progressing with some of those opportunities. That said, we are currently trading at 2.7-3.4 based on TTM enterprise value to revenue, depending on how you value the DocDel. This makes it challenging to pay the multiple sellers expect, which are still based on pre-SaaS software values declining due to AI concerns.
To summarize, I'm happy with the cash flow, net income, EBITDA, sales execution, and product work we did in Q3. I don't think our numbers reflect the great work we are doing in those areas. I do believe that progress will show up in future quarters and in FY 2027. Now I'll pass it over to the operator for questions. Operator?
Thank you. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star one on your keypad. To leave the queue at any time, please press star two. Once again, that's star one to ask a question. We'll take our first question from Jacob Stephan with Lake Street Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Yeah. Hey, guys, I appreciate you taking the questions. Roy, I guess, first, I just wanted to touch on the, on the B2B churn a little bit. You know, obviously, it sounds like a great new logo quarter, hindered by some of that churn. I guess what are the pain points of customers? You know, what are you hearing from them as reasons for the churn?
Basically, it comes down to customers that have limited engagement. In other words, we don't see a lot of usage of the platform, or they don't purchase enough articles, in Article Galaxy's case, to make the ROI work for the platform. Some cases in this economy, customers are simply looking for ways to save money. They may not be a big research organization, but they wanna cut costs associated with doing that. For us, the priorities moving forward are improving onboarding and training to ensure that at the end of a 90-day window, we have a majority of the researchers logged in, having used the product and been trained on the product.
Number two, we wanna monitor usage of the product so that when we see a cohort of customers that are not using the product, we can automatically kick off a three or four-point communication to that customer via in-product messaging and email to reengage them and get them to use the product. Number three, we know there are certain features in our product that are very high renewal features. In other words, people that use certain features in the product use it heavily, and they very rarely churn out. Just like usage, we will monitor cohorts of customers that are not using those features and kick off workflows to help them know those features are there, help them know how to use those features.
For us, a majority of that churn is related either to lack of ROI, which can come from lack of usage or can come from lower DocDel purchases, and lack of engagement on users' parts. In other words, they're not using the product as much as they had hoped.
Got it. Very helpful. Maybe just touching on the B2C side then. I know we're kinda entering a seasonally, seasonal slowdown, kind of on just as students are, you know, leaving class and everything. Maybe, you know, help me think about the improving CAC metrics. Are you spending less on marketing and still seeing better conversion? I guess, you know, numerator versus denominator, type question.
Yeah. We are spending significantly less on digital ad spend, even though we are seeing our conversion rate out of the funnel. In other words, that creates a trial user. The conversion rate's actually improved, which leads to, you know, flattish MRR on much less digital spend. Some of the things we've released, like the MCPs we've talked about, have really had a big impact on retention. We're seeing those customers stay longer, hence the improvement in lifetime value there. I think if we continue to execute there, you know, we may be able to get that thing growing again.
Got it.
Yeah.
Maybe just one. Oh, go ahead.
I was just gonna say, on the advertising spend side, we are able to, I think I mentioned in the last call as well, we are able to really manage that on a week-to-week basis. We can turn it on as we get into the fall, you know, the fall season returns, academic cohort, and then as we approach, you know, summer, we can be a lot more deliberate on that advertising spend. We'll continue to do that, and really having visibility into that and how that's converting has helped us, you know, manage costs and also, you know, tow that line where we're still keeping the MRR growing.
Got it. Maybe just last question for me. I know you guys are kind of innovating on the AI front, making scite and Article Galaxy integrated through MCPs, but and also the integration of Resolute. Maybe if you could look, you know, 12 to 18 months out, I guess what does your AI roadmap look like for kinda new product launches? Where are you seeing, you know, maybe pockets of opportunity for new product development?
Yeah. I think, you know, obviously scite as a platform was developed as a hundred percent AI. I think Article Galaxy has some opportunities within the Article Galaxy platform to implement AI in a copyright compliant way to do several things that take kinda friction out of the research process. For those customers that use AG on a daily basis, they'll be able to get summaries of stuff that are in a folder, assuming they have the rights to do that. They'll be able to get a summary of an article, assuming they have the rights to do that. They'll be able to extract tables and other information, again, assuming they have the rights to do that.
We'll continue to add I think there are several points in Article Galaxy we can continue to enhance by layering AI in on top of that workflow. Both the MCPs are 100% AI, and I think the real value add there is we have another roughly nine or 10 curated databases out of Resolute that we can integrate initially with those MCPs. An MCP user will see, "Here's patent results to your question. Here's clinical trial results to your question." Then ultimately, we'll add those other databases which you know, include drug databases and other research associated databases that'll be helpful to those researchers that they can add, turn on, turn off. Those are also revenue opportunities for us.
Once they're in the MCP, which will happen actually very quickly, then we'll circle back and be able to integrate those into scite AG or both, so that you can have that access as part of your search results in scite or in AG. It's continuing to add curated unique data that gets added into the answers of the questions that you're asking, if you want them added, and, you know, giving you a broader view of all information related to your query instead of just scientific research.
Got it. Very interesting. Thank you, guys.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Thank you. Again, if you'd like to ask a question, please press star one now. We'll take our next question from Derek Greenberg with Maxim Group.
Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. My first is just on the scite B2C, 2B pipeline. You guys had highlighted that in past quarters. I was just wondering if there's any progress on that front, just in terms of what you're seeing in the pipeline build-out from those opportunities.
You know, I didn't pull that specific slice of our pipeline. I was looking at the MCP part that I mentioned in the call. I mean, that continues to be a driver of a lot of our B2B sales, but I cannot tell you here whether it went up, went down, or was flat during the quarter.
Yeah, I think I can give you a little color on that. It increased a little bit, we were talking about sizing it up about $100,000, and it went up probably about 50%. We are, as Roy kind of alluded to, starting to look at some of the newer products in the B2C side that will give users a little more MCP usage over the basic plan.
We think that some of the power users as well, and, you know, in the future teams, you know, two to 50 seats, we think we can capture those, kind of those cohorts in the B2C platform and then, you know, let them see the value of the MCP and other features on the B2C side and then convert them into B2B as well. We have a lot more of a roadmap on the B2C side. And like I said in my remarks, the retention and the engagement is much improved once we release the MCP. That is a pathway from B2C to B2B as well.
Yeah. Thank you. That's helpful. My next question is just how to think about usage right now on the headless strategy. Like, what you're seeing in terms of, you know, percent of polls and usage that are coming outside of your core platforms and within their own workflows versus on the platform, and what you expect that mix to be over time as these new technologies gain more usage.
Yeah, usage of the MCP products, we see a multiple higher than our own products. Once they're integrated, you know, they're integrated into all users that are pounding on an LLM, whether they're Claude or ChatGPT all day, every day. We definitely are seeing usage that are literally a, some cases, a pretty big multiple over what we would see in a typical enterprise customer of the same size or same number of user seats. I will say a byproduct or related to what Dave commented on is that, you know, we are positioning the product of usage-based pricing. We're not doing MCPs that are basically unlimited. There is a limit, and when you hit the limit, you have to move to the bigger limit from a pricing point of view.
Because we do believe that while we're going through this transition from, you know, our historic kind of SaaS software and API business to more and more, MCP-associated revenue, that revenue is going to be derived based on usage, which is a multiple of the SaaS software platform, as I mentioned. We want to make sure we're not trying to sell a seat product into an environment that's 10x the usage without capturing the value in revenue to us of that usage, if that helps.
Yeah, that's very helpful. Just my last question. You previously said that, you were considering potentially selling into new segments such as like financial institutions, hedge funds, investment banks for their research, I was wondering if you've seen any traction in those segments or in any other new segments or if you had any comments on that?
You know, we have a few cats and dogs, in those segments, but right now we are very focused in the new sales groups on corporate and academic. I hesitate to really pull people off of what appears to be a pretty good pipeline and a pretty good TAM to go after these other verticals other than react to inbounds from those other verticals. If we see one that we really think will yield results, then we may hire additional salespeople to focus just on those markets, but we have not done that at this point.
Yeah. Got it. That makes sense. All right. Well, thanks for taking my questions.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Thank you. At this time, there are no further questions in queue. I will now turn the meeting back to Roy Olivier for any additional or closing remarks.
All right. Well, thanks everybody for joining us. As a reminder, we will be attending the Three Part Advisors IDEAS Conference in New York on June 10th. Qualified investors that are interested in attending, please reach out to Three Part Advisors to get scheduled. We look forward to speaking to you in September and to discuss the fourth quarter and full fiscal year results. Have a great day.
Thank you. This brings us to the end of today's meeting. We appreciate your time and participation. You may now disconnect.
Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-05-06Research Solutions to Announce Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2026 Results on Thursday, May 14, 2026
PR Newswire
Research Solutions to Announce Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2026 Results on Thursday, May 14, 2026
HENDERSON, Nev., May 6, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Research Solutions, Inc. (NASDAQ: RSSS), the leading AI-powered research workflow platform, will hold a conference call to discuss its financial results for the third quarter fiscal 2026 ended March 31, 2026, on Thursday, May 14, 2026, at 5:00 p.m. ET. A press release containing the company's financial results will be issued following the market close. Management will host the conference call, followed by a question-and-answer period. Date: Thursday, May 14, 2026 Time: 5:00 p.m. ET (2:00 p.m. PT) Dial-in number: 1-203-518-9708 Conference ID: RESEARCH Please dial into the conference 5-10 minutes prior to the start time. An operator will register your name and organization. The conference call will be broadcast live and available for replay via the investor relations section of the company's website at http://researchsolutions.investorroom.com. A replay of the conference call will be available after 8:00 p.m. Eastern time on the same day through June 14, 2026. To access the replay, dial 1-412-317-6671 and use replay ID 11160801. About Research Solutions Research Solutions, Inc. (NASDAQ: RSSS) is a vertical SaaS and AI company that simplifies research workflow for academic institutions, life science companies, and research organizations worldwide. As one of the only publisher-independent marketplaces for scientific, technical, and medical (STM) content, the company uniquely combines AI-powered tools—including an intelligent research assistant and full-text search capabilities—with seamless access to both open access and paywalled research. The platform enables organizations to discover, access, manage and analyze scientific literature more efficiently, accelerating the pace of scientific discovery. For more information and details, please visit www.researchsolutions.com View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/research-solutions-to-announce-third-quarter-fiscal-year-2026-results-on-thursday-may-14-2026-302764368.html
Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-02-16Research Solutions Inc (RSSS) Q2 2026 Earnings Call Highlights: Strong Platform Growth Amidst ...
GuruFocus.com
Research Solutions Inc (RSSS) Q2 2026 Earnings Call Highlights: Strong Platform Growth Amidst ...
This article first appeared on GuruFocus. Release Date: February 12, 2026 For the complete transcript of the earnings call, please refer to the full earnings call transcript. Research Solutions Inc (NASDAQ:RSSS) reported a 14% increase in platform subscription revenue, driven by 47 net new platform deployments and expansion within the existing customer base. The company achieved a 6% year-over-year increase in gross profit, with gross margins improving by 350 basis points to 52.4%. Annual recurring revenue (ARR) grew by 14% year-over-year, reaching $21.8 million, indicating strong performance in the B2B segment. The company reported a net income of $547,000 for the quarter, compared to a net loss of $2 million in the prior year quarter. Research Solutions Inc (NASDAQ:RSSS) is making significant strides in API and AI integration, transforming from a document delivery company to an 'answers and access' platform, which is expected to drive larger and stickier contracts. The company experienced a decline in year-over-year transaction revenue, primarily due to churn from a large account and volume reductions from a few larger customers. B2C revenue softness was noted, driven by a pullback in certain marketing channels and lower trial-to-subscriber conversion rates. The company expects continued decline in transaction revenue in the second half of the year due to ongoing churn issues. Increased competition in the B2C segment is expected to remain a headwind for the second half of the year. Despite improvements, the overall sales growth rate remains a concern, with efforts ongoing to return to a 20+% growth rate. Warning! GuruFocus has detected 4 Warning Sign with RSSS. Is RSSS fairly valued? Test your thesis with our free DCF calculator. Q: Can you provide insights into the B2B pipeline, particularly regarding the API and AI model deals? A: The pipeline has grown consistently, both quarter over quarter and year over year. Many of these are API deals where we integrate with larger customers in their workflow, resulting in larger deals. - Roy W. Olivier, CEO Q: How is the B2C segment performing, and do you expect it to return to growth in the second half? A: We are facing more competitive digital marketing and lower conversion rates from trials to users. We are focusing on improving conversion rates by adding new features and functionalities. - Roy W. Olivier, CEO Q...
Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-02-13Research Solutions Reports Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2026 Results
PR Newswire
Research Solutions Reports Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2026 Results
Reports 14% Increase in ARR to $21.8 Million, Net Income of $547,000 and 36% Year-over-Year Growth in Adjusted EBITDA HENDERSON, Nev., Feb. 12, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Research Solutions, Inc. (NASDAQ: RSSS), the leading AI-powered research workflow platform, reported financial results for its fiscal second quarter ended December 31, 2025. Fiscal Second Quarter 2026 Summary (compared to prior-year quarter) Annual Recurring Revenue ("ARR") up 14% to $21.8 million, which includes approximately $15.3 million of B2B ARR and $6.4 million of B2C ARR. Forty-seven net new deployments in the quarter reflect one of our best results and sustained momentum in new B2B customer acquisition. Net income of $547,000, or $0.02 per diluted share, compared to net loss of $2.0 million or ($0.07) per share. Adjusted EBITDA increased 36% to $1.3 million. On a trailing twelve-month ("TTM") basis, the Company has now generated Adjusted EBITDA of $5.8 million or 11.8% of revenue for the same period. Net B2B ARR growth of $560,000 represents the best organic second quarter performance in Company history. Gross profit up 6% to $6.2 million. Total gross margin improved 350 basis points to 52.4%. Platform revenue up 14% to $5.2 million. Platform revenue accounted for 44% of total revenue as compared to 39% in the prior-year quarter. Total revenue was $11.8 million compared to $11.9 million in the prior year, as strong B2B revenue growth has not yet fully offset softness in transactions revenue. "Our second quarter results reflect strong growth within our B2B Platforms business through forty-seven net new deployments in the quarter and Platforms continues to represent a larger portion of our total revenue mix. In addition, the average sales price for our Platform increased more than six percent year-over-year as we signed larger deals and as existing customers adopt more of our SaaS and AI solutions," said Roy W. Olivier, President and CEO of Research Solutions. "Our business continues to generate strong operating cash flow and Adjusted EBITDA, allowing us to reinvest in sales and marketing to accelerate growth while maintaining financial flexibility. We continue to manage the business with a long-term focus to drive value for our shareholders." Fiscal Second Quarter 2026 Results Total revenue was $11.8 million, compared to $11.9 million in the year-ago quarter. Platform revenue growth was o...
Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-02-13Research Solutions Q2 Earnings Call Highlights
MarketBeat
Research Solutions Q2 Earnings Call Highlights
Total revenue was essentially flat at $11.8M, while platform subscription revenue rose about 14% to $5.2M (driven by 47 net platform deployments) and transaction revenue declined to $6.6M largely because of a churned large account and volume reductions from a few customers. ARR grew 14% to $21.8M with $560K of incremental ARR in the quarter, but management flagged B2C softness—fewer trial-to-paid conversions after a deliberate marketing pullback despite lower churn. Profitability and cash improved: gross margin expanded 350 bps to 52.4% (platform margin 88.1%), net income was $547K vs. a prior-year loss, adjusted EBITDA rose 36%, and the company is shifting strategy toward higher-value B2B/API “infrastructure” and AI integrations that management says produce larger, stickier deals. Interested in Research Solutions Inc.? Here are five stocks we like better. Research Solutions (NASDAQ:RSSS) executives described fiscal second-quarter 2026 results as “a bit of a mixed bag,” pointing to year-over-year pressure in transaction revenue and softer trends in the company’s B2C subscription business, while highlighting continued strength in B2B platform growth, improving profitability, and increasing emphasis on API-based integrations tied to AI workflows. Chief Financial Officer Dave Kutil said total revenue for the second quarter of fiscal 2026 was $11.8 million, compared with $11.9 million in the year-ago period. Platform subscription revenue rose about 14% year-over-year to $5.2 million, driven by a net increase of 47 platform deployments versus the prior year and expansion within the existing customer base through upsells and cross-sells. → Once Upon A Farm: Buy the $1B Growth Story? Transaction revenue declined to $6.6 million from $7.3 million. Management attributed the weakness largely to a previously discussed churned account and volume reductions from a small number of larger customers. President and CEO Roy W. Olivier said that excluding the churned account and a few large customers with significant volume declines, transactions were down about 2%, which he characterized as within a “normal” range for a business influenced by corporate research intensity and academic budgets. Kutil said the company ended the quarter with $21.8 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), up 14% year-over-year, including roughly $15.3 million in B2B ARR and approximately $6.4 mi...
Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-02-13Research Solutions Inc. (RSSS) Q2 Earnings Meet Estimates
Zacks
Research Solutions Inc. (RSSS) Q2 Earnings Meet Estimates
Research Solutions Inc. (RSSS) came out with quarterly earnings of $0.03 per share, in line with the Zacks Consensus Estimate . This compares to a loss of $0.07 per share a year ago. These figures are adjusted for non-recurring items. A quarter ago, it was expected that this company would post earnings of $0.03 per share when it actually produced earnings of $0.03, delivering no surprise. Over the last four quarters, the company has surpassed consensus EPS estimates just once. Research Solutions, which belongs to the Zacks Commercial Printing industry, posted revenues of $11.79 million for the quarter ended December 2025, missing the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 2.78%. This compares to year-ago revenues of $11.91 million. The company has topped consensus revenue estimates two times over the last four quarters. The sustainability of the stock's immediate price movement based on the recently-released numbers and future earnings expectations will mostly depend on management's commentary on the earnings call. Research Solutions shares have lost about 14.6% since the beginning of the year versus the S&P 500's gain of 1.4%. While Research Solutions has underperformed the market so far this year, the question that comes to investors' minds is: what's next for the stock? There are no easy answers to this key question, but one reliable measure that can help investors address this is the company's earnings outlook. Not only does this include current consensus earnings expectations for the coming quarter(s), but also how these expectations have changed lately. Empirical research shows a strong correlation between near-term stock movements and trends in earnings estimate revisions. Investors can track such revisions by themselves or rely on a tried-and-tested rating tool like the Zacks Rank, which has an impressive track record of harnessing the power of earnings estimate revisions. Ahead of this earnings release, the estimate revisions trend for Research Solutions was mixed. While the magnitude and direction of estimate revisions could change following the company's just-released earnings report, the current status translates into a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) for the stock. So, the shares are expected to perform in line with the market in the near future. You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here. It will be interesting to see how estimat...
Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-02-13Research Solutions, Inc. Q2 2026 Earnings Call Summary
Moby
Research Solutions, Inc. Q2 2026 Earnings Call Summary
Performance was characterized as a 'mixed bag' with B2B platform growth offset by a known churned account and volume declines from a few large transaction customers. Management is pivoting the business model from selling individual software seats to providing mission-critical infrastructure for enterprise AI systems and internal research tools. The 'Answers and Access' strategy aims to capture value earlier in the research workflow by providing verified citations and claims before fulfilling document delivery requests. B2C softness is attributed to increased digital marketing competition and lower trial-to-subscriber conversion rates, prompting a strategic shift toward cohort quality over volume. The company maintains that its unique access to data behind paywalls and rights management capabilities provides a moat against general Large Language Model (LLM) hallucinations. Operating leverage improved as labor and hosting costs increased at a slower pace than revenue, leading to a 350 basis point expansion in total gross margin. Management expects the year-over-year decline in transaction revenue to continue through the second half of the year due to the impact of the previously identified churned account. The company is targeting a return to a 20-plus percent SaaS growth rate by leveraging higher-value API-driven enterprise deals and product improvements like patent data integration. Guidance assumes traditional seasonality where the second half of the fiscal year typically outperforms the first half in terms of adjusted EBITDA and cash flow. Future pricing models are expected to evolve from seat-based licensing to usage-based metrics, such as the number of API calls, to align with AI engine consumption patterns. The company plans to fund all remaining earn-out obligations for the 'site' acquisition entirely from operating cash flow while maintaining a growing cash balance. A $2.4 million charge in the prior year related to contingent earn-out liabilities for 'site' created a favorable year-over-year net income comparison. The B2C segment is facing softness primarily driven by a concerted pullback in certain marketing channels where trial-to-subscriber conversion was lagging, leading the company to prioritize cohort quality and retention over short-term growth. Management identified a 'zero-click' phenomenon where researchers read less, potentially impacting...
TranscriptFY2026 Q22026-02-12FY2026 Q2 earnings call transcript
Earnings source - 45 paragraphs
FY2026 Q2 earnings call transcript
[Operator Instructions] Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for participating in today's conference call to discuss Research Solutions' financial and operating results for its fiscal 2026 second quarter ended December 31, 2025. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I'd like to now turn the conference over to your host, John Beisler, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for the Research Solutions Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2026 Earnings Call. On the call with me today are Roy W. Olivier, President and Chief Executive Officer; Dave Kutil, Chief Financial Officer; and Josh Nicholson, Chief Strategy Officer. After the market closed this afternoon, the company issued a press release announcing its results for the second quarter of fiscal 2026. The release is available on the company's website, researchsolutions.com. Before Roy, Dave and Josh begin their prepared remarks, I would like to remind you that some of the statements made today will be forward-looking and are made under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied due to a variety of factors. We refer you to Research Solutions' recent filings with the SEC for a more detailed discussion of the risks and uncertainties that could impact the company's future operating results and financial condition. Also on today's call, management will reference certain non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe provide useful information for investors. A reconciliation of those measures to GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release as well. Finally, I would like to remind everyone this call is being recorded and made available for replay via a link on the company's website. I will now turn the call over to President and CEO, Roy W. Olivier. Roy?
Thank you, John. Our fiscal Q2 was a bit of a mixed bag in terms of results. We experienced a decline in our year-over-year transactions resulting results primarily because of one known churned account and a few larger customers that saw significant declines in volume. Excluding those accounts, we were down about 2%, which would be in the range of what we consider normal in the business driven by our corporate research intensity and academic budgets. We expect that decline to continue in the second half of the year. We do have some levers to pull in this segment that we think will improve the results, and we're working hard on those initiatives. We also continue to see increased competition in the B2C segment as reflected in our Q2 results and expect to see that headwind for the second half of the year. I'll also remind you that we focus on annual or multiyear agreements in the B2B versus the B2C business being primarily a month-to-month subscriber-based business. We will continue to focus on B2B annual and multiyear agreements as our primary growth driver going forward. All that said, we are making product and sales process improvements to increase our conversion rate in this business neatly. We are shipping improvements, both software and new data like adding patent data faster than we ever have. We'll continue to innovate and improve our sales process and marketing investment to improve results in this area. Josh will speak to some of those product improvements later in the call. We did see strong results in our B2B segment in both ARR bookings and net ARR bookings. The 47 net new deployments in B2B underscores that customers are excited about our current and future product development. The results reflect a better product sold through a disciplined and focused sales team. We saw good results across our corporate, academic, and upsell teams. We continue to see very strong year-over-year ASP growth at the pipeline stage. And as noted in our earnings release, we saw a 6% ASP increase during the quarter. To be clear, I'm very happy with our results in terms of operating and net income, EBITDA and cash flow. We do have work to do in terms of the overall SaaS growth rate, and we'll work hard to return that rate to 20-plus percent. I'd like to pass the call over to Dave to walk you through the fiscal quarter and full year 2025 -- I'm sorry, the fiscal quarter and FY '26 year-to-date financial results in detail, and then I'll wrap up with some comments and outlook for 2026. Dave?
Thank you, Roy. Good afternoon, everyone. Total revenue for the second quarter of fiscal 2026 was $11.8 million compared to $11.9 million in the second quarter of fiscal 2025. Our platform subscription revenue increased roughly 14% to $5.2 million. The growth was primarily driven by a net increase of 47 platform deployments from the prior year as well as expansion within our existing customer base through upsells and cross-sells. We ended the quarter with $21.8 million in annual recurring revenue, or ARR, up 14% year-over-year, which consisted of roughly $15.3 million in B2B ARR and approximately $6.4 million in normalized ARR associated with sites B2C subscribers. Total incremental ARR for the quarter was $560,000, the highest organic second quarter in company history. While we did experience softness in B2C ARR, this was primarily driven by a concerted pullback in certain marketing channels where trial to subscriber conversion was lagging. We are prioritizing cohort quality and retention over short-term B2C growth, which we believe positions this part of the business for more durable and profitable contribution over time. Please see today's press release for how we define and use annual recurring revenue and other non-GAAP items. Transaction revenue for the second quarter was $6.6 million compared to $7.3 million in the prior year quarter. The softness in transaction revenue was largely driven by previously discussed churned account and volume reductions from a small number of larger customers. Our total active customer count for the quarter was 1,321 compared to 1,384 in the same period a year ago. Gross profit for the first quarter was $6.2 million, up 6% from the prior year quarter. Gross margin was 52.4%, which constitutes a 350 basis point improvement over the second quarter of 2025. The increase is due to the ongoing revenue mix shift towards our higher-margin platforms business, which was also enhanced by expanding gross margins in the Platforms business. Platform revenue accounted for 44% of the revenue in the quarter compared to 39% in the prior year quarter. On a trailing 12-month basis, the company's blended gross margin now stands at 50.8%. The Platform business recorded a gross margin of 88.1%, a 160 basis point increase compared to the prior year. We have been able to continue to expand gross margins in the platform business as our labor and hosting costs continue to increase at a proportionately slower pace than our revenues. Gross margin in our transaction business was 24% compared to 25.2% in the prior year quarter. The decrease was primarily attributable to lower fixed cost leverage due to the reduced revenue base and some pressure on copyright-related margins. Total operating expenses in the quarter were $5.4 million compared to $5.7 million in the prior year quarter. Lower general and administrative expenses and lower stock-based compensation more than offset an increase in sales and marketing investments. We have been very intentional about keeping general and administrative costs contained as we allocate more resources towards growth initiatives, and we expect to continue driving operating leverage as we scale the business. Net income for the quarter was $547,000 or $0.02 per diluted share compared to a net loss of $2 million or $0.07 per share in the prior year quarter. The prior quarter's results included a charge of approximately $2.4 million that was related to the projected contingent earn-out liability for site. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $1.3 million compared to $963,000 in the year ago quarter or a 36% increase. On a trailing 12-month basis, our adjusted EBITDA margin was 11.8%, a 230 basis point increase from the end of calendar '24. I would also like to point out that historically, Q3 and Q4 are typically our strongest quarters for adjusted EBITDA. Turning to our balance sheet. Cash and cash equivalents as of December 31, 2025, were $12.3 million versus $12.2 million on June 30, 2025. This includes 2 payments related to the site earnout, which consisted of a total of $2.6 million in cash and the issuance of approximately 487,000 shares of stock. Cash flow from operations was $1.4 million, a 35% increase from $1 million in the second quarter of fiscal '25, reflecting both higher profitability and disciplined working capital management. We continue to believe we can grow our cash balance in fiscal '26 while funding the remaining site earn-out obligations entirely from operating cash flow. We also ended the quarter with no outstanding borrowings on our revolving line of credit, providing additional flexibility in our balance sheet. As we move into the traditionally stronger back half of our fiscal year, we believe our balance sheet is well positioned to capitalize on high-return growth opportunities through a strategic approach. Looking back at the first half of the fiscal year, we delivered a meaningful year-over-year increase in net deployments, cash from operations and EBITDA. Even with top line pressure in B2C and transactions, we grew gross profit and improved our overall profitability profile, demonstrating the operating leverage inherent in our business model as we scale platform ARR. For the back half of the year, our objective remains to exceed fiscal 2025 EBITDA levels in each of the remaining quarters and to drive further growth in the cash flows generated by the business. We expect this to be supported by ongoing platform subscription growth, a more stable trajectory in transactions and continued rigor around operating expenses, even as we make targeted investments in sales, marketing and product. Taken together, we believe we are positioned to exit the fiscal year with a stronger earnings and cash generation run rate while also maintaining balance sheet flexibility to fund disciplined high-return growth initiatives. I'll now turn the call back to Roy. Roy?
Thanks, Dave. I'd like to remind our investors that we typically outperformed the first half of the year in the second half. We expect that seasonality to continue with B2B and transactions. One of the reasons we have seen strong B2B growth is due to where we are going from a product perspective. We believe we're on the right track and customers are voting with their wallet, confirming our belief. I think we've all seen the recent market response to AI over the last 10 days, which impacted our stock price like many others. We are clearly in a sell-first reaction to AI news. In our view, enterprise software that accelerates work does face some level of disruption. We continue to believe that our unique capabilities and data are not exposed to those tools or LLMs in general. We offer less hallucinations and better search results because we can search behind paywalls. We also offer rights management, which includes what rights you have with articles you have purchased, things like AI rights, reprint rights, et cetera. We manage the company or library's entitlements, which is what articles they buy one by one, what they subscribe to, what they have discount packages for and what their library already has in it. We offer unique tools to help researchers understand the quality and efficiency of articles they're looking at. While we continue to develop a full workflow tool like the Bloomberg terminal, but for researchers, we're also focused on delivering that unique capability within whatever workflow the customer has. That sometimes is their own tools. And moving forward, we will support companies that standardize on an LLM. We have that working now. I can use Claude or ChatGPT to ask a research-focused question, and Claude will use our site connector to generate a fully cited answer using only peer-reviewed articles, leveraging our unique data, our citation graph and our rights management data. The user can then ask Claude to talk to our products directly in the tool to get those cited articles and we will integrate within the rights management, the company library and their entitlements to deliver those articles. We can even report what rights they have for those that, in many cases, help them acquire the rights to do what they need to do. For example, they may want to summarize several articles in AI to prep for a meeting. We can help them do that in a copyright compliant way. Josh will speak to our new products shortly. In fact, I'll turn the call over to Josh to talk a little bit about our thinking on product strategy and usage. Josh?
Yes. Thanks, Roy. Hello, everyone. So today, I want to talk about 2 fundamental shifts happening in our business that represent not just operational improvements, but a transformation in how research solutions creates value. These shifts center on our move to API and AI integration and our evolution from a document delivery company to what I call an Answers and access platform. These shifts have been ongoing, and I've discussed them in previous calls, and I think position us well for all the macro events happening with regards to AI. I'm going to talk about 2 things here, API and AI integration sales becoming infrastructure and then another theme later. The biggest change in our business is how customers are buying from us, both new customers as well as many of our original customers instead of just purchasing seats for researchers to log into our platforms, customers are now integrating our services directly into their own systems and AI tools. We're no longer only selling seats to a platform. We're selling infrastructure. top pharmaceutical company doesn't want their researchers to switch between 10 different tools. They want citation verification and Article Galaxy rights cleared content accessible from wherever their researchers already work, whether that's an internal AI system or a proprietary drug discovery platform. This is what we call API sales and is driving some of our largest contracts to date. These deals are typically 2x to 5x larger than traditional seat-based sales and they're stickier. When we are embedded in a customer's core infrastructure, we become mission-critical, not just another subscription they might cancel. Here's why these matter. Every company building AI tools for research faces the same problems. They need accurate citations, copyright compliance and access to scientific articles. Instead of each company solving these problems separately with thousands of publishers, we're building the solution once and making it available to all of them through simple integration. This leverages and repositions our partnerships with publishers, which have taken over a decade to form in some cases. We now provide access to more than a dozen specialized research data sets spanning different disciplines and regions from life sciences to physical sciences, from research articles to patents and to clinical trials and more. When an AI platform integrates with us, they're not getting access to one database, they're getting comprehensive coverage of global research. That breadth is what makes us valuable infrastructure. We're already seeing strong traction with this approach. Multiple enterprises are beginning to use our technology to power their internal AI research assistance. While still early, publishers are also in discussion with us about using our infrastructure to offer their subscriptions with AI access to their customers without having to build the copyright and citation systems themselves. The bottom line, we're moving from selling seat-based software subscriptions to selling infrastructure. Infrastructure businesses have better economics, higher contract values, lower churn and more expansion opportunities. One large pharma company is already making over 1 million calls to our API per year. Second stage I want to talk about is from documents to what I call Answers and Access. This brings me to this bigger picture. Research Solutions is evolving from a document delivery business to an Answers and Access platform. The old model is straightforward. Researchers need articles, we deliver articles transaction complete. The new model is different. Researchers don't start by thinking, I need this specific article. They start with questions. I need to understand this mechanism. I need to validate this hypothesis. I need evidence for this claim. They're looking for answers first, not documents. Our job is to provide both. We give them answers through site, helping them find relevant citations, verify claims and understand what the research says. When they need to go deeper, we give them access through Article Galaxy, delivering the full articles with proper copyright clearance. That's what I mean by Answers and Access. We're not abandoning document delivery, we're making it part of a complete solution that starts with answering research questions. The market is validating this approach. Customers who only used us for article fulfillment are now deploying site across their entire organization for literature view and research validation. Academic institutions are expanding from researcher access to broader applications and publishers who just saw us as a fulfillment vendor are now asking how we can help them create new revenue from AI usage of their content. Here's why this matters. These 2 ships, API integration sales and Answers and Access work together and reinforce each other. Our API approach makes it easy to embed our services wherever researchers need answers and our Answers and Access model means we're not just a commodity service, but mission-critical infrastructure for research decisions. This is why we're building integrations and developer tools, including a new API for Article Galaxy, which we have recently deployed. This is why we believe the long-term value of research solutions come from being the infrastructure that makes AI trustworthy for scientific research. No longer just in the document delivery business. We are in the research intelligence business in a world where AI is becoming the primary way people access information, the winners will be the companies that provide verified compliant citation-backed infrastructure that researchers and companies can trust. That's the future we're building for research solutions is going, and we're excited by that. Thank you, and I'll turn it back to Roy now.
Thanks, Josh. There was a recent post on X talking about there being 2 kinds of software companies. Type 1 is software humans click on, things like dashboards, CRMs, project management, other tools, basically products that provide a human interface to do a task. If all you do is automate a task, then AI is a threat. Type 2 is software bots. These include APIs, databases, authentication, infrastructure and more. These are functions that are unique like curated data, data behind paywalls, customer entitlement information, customer library information, rights information, et cetera. These have unique capability and typically have tolls or charges associated with usage. Our company started by having unique access to the world's peer-reviewed scientific content. We still have unique capability in this area today in many ways, including capability to help customers find obscure or hard to obtain content. We then added entitlement capability, rights information, the ability to store a corporate library, et cetera. From that, we created Article Galaxy to use these unique databases, authentication capability and rights information to service our customer. What's happening now is we're going full circle by applying our unique core capabilities to AI and LLMs. We continue to believe that we're well-positioned to take advantage of this transition to an AI world. Our strong B2B results give us confidence that we're on the right track. With that, I'd like to turn the call back over to our operator for Q&A. Operator?
[Operator Instructions] And we'll take our first question from Jacob Stephan with Lake Street Capital Markets.
Maybe just first to start off, really nice B2B results. I'm wondering if you could touch a little bit on the pipeline there. Maybe kind of compare and contrast are the larger deals specifically related to the kind of headless API, AI model that you guys have been working on the last few quarters here?
Yes. The pipeline has grown consistently quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year. And a lot of the pipeline now is these "API deals" where we're integrating with larger customers in the workflow. Therefore, they're much larger deals.
And maybe from a B2C standpoint, obviously, you have kind of the favorable student enrollment trends working back in your favor. Any kind of early anecdotal comments you could give us on how that business is maybe returning to growth in the second half?
Yes. I don't think we knew if it will. That's why I specifically excluded it when I said second half of the year, we'll see transactions in B2B business be stronger than the first half. What we're seeing today is 2 things. One is much more competitive digital marketing spend to attract trial customers. So somebody is out there doing Google search, they find us. Now they also find everybody else that's entered this space in the last year or 2, and we're all competing for the same keywords. So we're seeing a lot more competitive to get users to the platform. More importantly, we're seeing the conversion rate of trials to users lower than it was a year ago. In other words, we actually still attract as many trials as we did a year ago, we're just converting at a lower rate. And that's where Josh and his team are doing a lot of great work to add things like patents, patent data on top of the peer-reviewed scientific research data, new features and functionalities in order to try to move that conversion rate up. Anything you want to add there, Josh?
Yes, I think that's right. I think we've always focused on having more stable, higher per user basis in B2B licenses. And so a lot of product decisions have been to -- around that, right? And so we're seeing this B2C2B sales motion, which oftentimes someone will come in, test it for a month and then they bring it to their whole team at the large pharma. So I think a lot of this is also us pushing more and with more focus on B2B, where the money is a higher average cost per user and also more stable contracts, yearly by default versus monthly, which is where most B2C is.
Yes. I will say also, in Q2, we did see a reduction in churn year-over-year. and that has continued into the third quarter here. So that trend is going in the right direction. It's exactly what Roy talked about with the conversion, trials to new subscribers that's really impacting us.
Maybe just one last one. Dave, you've been there for a couple of months, it seems like now. Maybe top 3 things that you're kind of looking at and to make improvements at.
Yes. So we are really looking at what we can control. So for me, it's the operating expense rigor I talked about. We're going through. We have a cost savings program that we're looking at all of our vendors, looking for redundancies and really trying to improve that, and we're excited about the results there. So that's the first thing. Second thing is really looking into and diving in with the sales team and really trying to understand the root cause of some of the churn in the business and make sure we're proactively addressing that. And then working capital management is really important to us. Again, one of the things we can definitely control. We're proud of the results that we've had with cash flow from ops, again, funding the site earn-out payments out of operating cash flow, and we continue to manage that and look for cash to increase. So we're meeting on a weekly basis and making sure we're achieving our projections and having a forecast that we can deliver to shareholders.
We'll take our next question from Richard Baldry with ROTH Capital.
You've done a good job talking about using AI sort of at a productized level externally. Talk also about -- it seems to me there's a lot of room for adoption of AI technologies internally to lower costs or improve output speed, efficiencies, whatever in areas like development or back office. So how far into that sort of process do you feel like you are? Do you think you can meaningfully control as you grow or lower costs on the fly?
Josh, do you want to talk about what you're doing in the software area?
Yes. We are fully leveraging the most advanced AI on the product team with the development team, that's AI for software development, AI for review, software that is also automatically looking at accessibility. I've probably become annoying internally just because I'm such a champion of it. And I think it's pretty dramatic in the deployment and how quickly we're moving things. And so that has really opened my eye up, and I think that also builds into our strategy, recognizing how powerful these AI tools are and how we can exist in this world in a very defined way where our strengths are leveraged. And so I think it's making everyone not just on product, I've done a lot of internal trainings even as of today, but across the team, a lot more productive, a lot more efficient and can really extend from product development, better interactions with publishers, better interactions with customers, and I would say, while I'm really excited by it, and we've made a lot of progress, there's still more to do. And so I think there's a big exciting upside on that just because it has transformed the way that I personally work, our team works, and I think that's starting to permeate throughout the company, which is really great.
I was just going to say having the right tools is very important, and that's exactly what Josh has identified within the organization is having the right tools to be able to produce the analysis from our side in the back end of the business that really prioritizes those areas where we can save time and money. And we're still in the early innings of this. Like Josh said, he's doing training this week, but it's expanding rapidly. And you can see the amazing thing is you can see the use cases immediately. And you could see the results in savings in time and money right away. So early innings, but we're definitely -- we have the right tools at our disposal right now.
Yes. I would just add, AI for us so far is really a productivity multiplier. It's not a cost reduction product. It's being used heavily in development. Josh has been training people internally how to use the new QA tool set to develop sophisticated reports that we previously paid an external data scientist to do. And in fact, a project we talked about in the meeting today related to identifying specifically dollars associated with this B2C2B flow that we talk about from a sales perspective, we'll do all of that in AI using basically quad tools. However, on the other side of the coin, like the 60 rough people we have associated with the DocDel business, they do things that it's hard to replace with AI. So there may be some slight savings opportunity there. But most of what we've seen with AI so far has been improving productivity dramatically amongst highly paid softwaregers, FD&A people, data analysts, et cetera, not necessarily a cost reduction at this point.
And then last for me. If you look at where you rise to the level of sort of infrastructure and it becomes a much higher ASP, can you talk about how large that market opportunity is, whether that's -- or what number of verticals it can apply to sort of give us an idea where that can take for you up to over the next few years if that traction continues to grow?
Well, I think we're still serving the same vertical markets and have a similar TAM that we've had before. I think the ASP potentially is 20%, 30% higher than it is now. But quite frankly, we are going to have to explore and develop some new pricing models because of the different way the products work. When we talk about the MCP product and AI, we talked a little bit about -- it's really a number of calls analysis as opposed to users per week per month analysis. So we've historically always looked at how many users are using the product. Looking forward, some of our customers that have implemented this technology are doing 200,000 calls a month, approaching 300,000 calls a month. and that's going to be a different pricing model and how we share that model with the publishers to represent their contact with the MCP, this is going to be developed and probably fine-tuned over the next 12 months. So I don't think we fully understand yet the pricing side. We do know it's going to be a lift from where we are today or we believe it will be a lift from where we are today. And frankly, we are excited about the change because user seat licensing is very different from the massive usage you see from these AI engines and people asking questions of them. Anything you want to add to that, Josh?
Yes. I'd just say on the kind of sales cycle and go-to-market, the trial is really kind of a technical buyer and maybe some executives, they're looking at this. It seems shorter anecdotally where it's, hey, here's a week, you test it out, it serves that, it's plugged in, and then it's used by potentially thousands of people. This is different from, say, "Hey, we're going to invite 30 people. We're going to train people. We're going to repeat that training." Maybe one guy doesn't like it, maybe one person does like it, et cetera. And so I think the sales is a lot more straightforward. It's a lot more repeatable. It's a lot more clear also on what we're serving. And then again, if you build it into what they've already invested internally, sometimes in some of these competitive tools, it really scales. And so I think it's focusing us, and I think that's a good thing. And yes, our tiered model of API calls probably will evolve. We do scale it up with usage. And so that's also a nice thing as it gets used more, it scales up per call. So pretty excited about that.
[Operator Instructions] We'll take our next question from Derek Greenberg with Maxim Group.
I wanted to first touch on just the transaction segment. You had called out you expect further declines in the second half. I was wondering if that's on a year-over-year basis or sequentially from current levels. And I was also wondering in the prior quarter, you had called out that it was due to churn from one large account as well as a pullback from other large customers. I was wondering if you've seen any additional churn or pullback from other customers or if the declines are largely related to that customer set you previously mentioned?
Yes. In terms of transactional business, it is predominantly one large customer churn that we expect to continue. We typically do more DocDel in the second half of the year than we do in the first half. We expect it to do more in the second half looking forward than it has done in the first half of this year. However, we still do expect to post a year-over-year decline because of the churn. I think I mentioned somewhere or maybe it got removed from an earlier draft that if you pull out the churn customer, transactional business was down about 2% year-over-year. That's within what we would consider to be normal seasonality and usage that we see in that business. There are sometimes when we have an unexplained decline because of research intensity. There are sometimes we see an unexplained increase because somebody else has started a research spike into some particular area. And we look at those 1,300-odd customers that are buying DocDel from us, really the top 10, top 20 customers, again, if you pull out the churn, are the ones that are driving most of that variability, like a couple of our biggest customers, they bought less this year than they bought a year ago. And we call them. In fact, one of them is so big, I call them personally because I deal with them and I'm like, why are you guys down? And he's like, "I don't know. I guess we're just doing less research." So sometimes the customer itself doesn't know why they may be up or down on a year-over-year basis. But anyway, so we do expect second half to be stronger. We do expect to continue to show a year-over-year decline because the churn customer. And we'll see what happens with the kind of the normal seasonality where we fluctuate between a slight loss and a slight gain. We'll see how that works.
And then just on the API business, I was wondering if you could maybe talk about if you see potential threat in, say, like LLM providers going out and licensing similar content to what you guys offer or if you're largely insulated from that and benefit from having the long tail of research? Or if you could just talk about that a little bit more.
I mean just to be clear, think about the API business as it's either an API or it's what's called an MCP, which is basically a connector to an LLM. So it's either the customer developed their own internal tool set and they're using our API or we're connecting to an LLM where you're basically asking questions of Claude that's talking to site to get you a better answer than it would get over the general Internet. And then once you get the fully sided answer, you can again ask Claude to get you the articles, and we will check your entitlements, we will check your rights. We'll go get you the articles. We'll not only deliver them to you wherever you are, but we'll stick them in your corporate library so that you have official "ownership of those" and they're in your company library. So when we talk about API, the API and MCP function very, very similar. Just one is targeted toward customers that have internally developed tools and the other is specifically to work with an LLM. To your second question about the -- will the LLMs duplicate that capability? None of them do today. They ultimately will start to duplicate some of that capability or a publisher will create their own MCP to connect to an LLM. And so for example, if you pick the top 5 publishers, they will probably all create their own MCP that you can connect to an LLM that's going to get you a better answer than just abstract data, but not the full article. And as we see that happen, -- what -- where we will play is the long tail of medium and small publishers that don't have the capability or the wherewithal to create their own MCP, #1. And #2, people don't want to have 200 connectors into their LLM, just like our largest customers don't want to negotiate 200 agreements with 200 publishers. So they may have direct agreements with the top 5 publishers, we fill the gap of the next 100 or 150 publishers. And I think the same thing will play out in that MCP space, basically the AI space. Josh, anything you want to add to that?
Yes. I think just to be clear, there's 2 endpoints here. There's really calling site, which is to get an answer and then calling Article Galaxy to get access. And so again, most of our platform customers on Article Galaxy, they're not using API today. Our API was a bit outdated. We refreshed that. We've relaunched that, and we're now starting to push that internally. But I think going to where there's massive amounts of users is going to drive usage across both of those. I think Roy touched upon this, but again, just to expand upon it, we're also working with publishers to say, "Hey, we already have your content, we have the infrastructure. We can handle authentication. We can handle tracking of usage." So the AI usage of articles, which is something entirely new. We can sell articles on your behalf. We can enable entitlements via subscriptions, via tokens, all these different things. we can do very seamlessly with these different chatbots, again, Claude, internal Claude, ChatGPT, et cetera. So we're having active conversations with publishers to try and help them navigate this. They don't have the wherewithal to necessarily build this unless they are one of the big 5. And so we're working as an infrastructure partner. And I think that could open up some potentially interesting new revenue opportunities where maybe there's a cut of subscriptions or there's some other fee. And I think that there's 2 levels there. One is exploring how do we serve current publisher customers and then how do we scale these up to potentially anyone using them, so LLMs from the public. So excited about that progress. And I think, again, very well positioned with our relationships, the technology and then the technology really helps both products. T he last thing I'll say, there was this assay that stood out to me. People have been talking about killing the "PDF" for a long time. I think the PDF is here, but I think what I found interesting is he described this move to research objects, right? When people want to get answers, they will need a full text article, certainly for compliance reasons, but they're starting to get these objects, right? And then these [indiscernible] statements, the chunks that we have are research objects in many ways. And so again, really excited about kind of where we are, and I think that's proving out internally with the B2B and then there's a lot more room to run. I'd also say this is we've seen some new customers outside of the space and so looking at financial institutions, hedge funds, investment banks, things like this, utilizing APIs for some of their own research.
We'll take our next question from George Melas with MKH Management.
I think my question was largely answered by the previous answers, but maybe let me ask a little bit more, and I don't know if you can answer, but how do you see your relationship developing with that long tail of publishers, so not the top 5. But -- and how many have you had sort of discussion about doing this DocDel with all of them? And how are they reacting? What -- how do you see that developing? And what are the hurdles to getting that new functionality and that new service that would benefit both them and you?
Just to provide a little bit of a foundation. I mean that long tail has been our sweet spot for a decade, right? I mean our larger customers -- largest customers we have, they negotiate rights direct for everybody else, and then we typically walk in with that long tail. And Josh, I'll let you talk about our progress in talking with the long tail about AI rights, DMCP, et cetera.
Yes. I think if you look at how things are sold, this is a real pain for publishers, right? They are having subscriptions, their subscriptions are being challenged. They're like, what do we do, right? They have our content being used in AI, et cetera. And so we do have a sweet spot with these publishers, but I actually think there's opening up relationships with new publishers where we haven't spoke to them. Some of those large ones where I think there's cooperation and then small ones that maybe have just been hold out for other -- some other reason. So I have had a slate of calls with small, medium and large publishers on this topic specifically. I have more coming up. And I think what is interesting is that, A, we're publisher neutral; B, we've already done a lot of the processing of their articles. So there's no upfront cost to them. We're already building this. We show them, "Hey, here's how you can monitor usage. You want to turn it on for a customer, we'll handle that. You want to turn it on in a specific way through Access Justice Journal or that we'll handle that. And so there's been a real pull, I would say, because we have this long-term relationship. And because I think it also accelerates that other part of that business where it's not just driving AI reads necessarily, which will help them demonstrate the value of their product, but also in the end, drives DocDel. Because at the end of the day, people will still need full text or they'll need full text for the AI to use based off these chunks. And so I think it's been a good evolution, and I hope that evolution continues because I think it strengthens us kind of in this new world.
And do you see some impact on revenue at this point right now? Or is that just way too small to even significant impact?
I think it's still pretty small, but we're starting to get some traction there.
Yes. And I think that's part of this puzzle, right? There's different ways of someone wanting to use AI with an article, right? There's RightFind, which we had talked about previously, and that's AI rights at the individual article level, but people also want AI rights for a group of articles for hundreds of articles or for thousands of articles, right? And I think this MCP and this work that we're doing with publishers really says, hey, you can sell a subscription and you can sell a subscription with AI on top of it. We are the infrastructure for that, the authentication, the tracking, the usage of that, et cetera. And I think that helps publishers tremendously because they're under budgetary impact and the usage is not just DocDel declining, but subscription declining as people are reading less, right, because of this zero-click phenomenon. And so I think it is too early to kind of tell, but I think we're in the right place. And we do see these big publishers making big announcements with MCPs, but I think we have a somewhat differentiated moat with our citation graph, the DocDel and RightFind aspect of it and the fact that we're not a large publisher that might be off putting for a smaller publisher to work with.
And with the new customers, and you've had real good success with signing up new B2B customers. Are they embracing that in a meaningful way? Do you see sort of a new trend there?
Yes. I think, again, we have a floor for the API pricing, which is significantly bigger than our average contract price already, and that's just the floor. So again, I think some of this wasn't our focus previously. We've shifted a lot of our energy to understanding this. And I think as Roy highlighted, some of the business models around that will evolve, but it's highly encouraging because I do a lot of these API sales because there's some technical aspect of this. But it is almost in some ways, more straightforward because it's easier to test. You kind of see the improvements right away. And then the value is pretty obvious, right? You want to go spend 10 years and talk to every single publisher, go ahead and do that. You want to work with us, get access to patents, get access to research articles, give the ability to buy, rent an article, all in one place, it's significantly easier. And so that pull is there. And I think, again, the larger invoices are going out to reflect that.
At this time, there are no further questions in queue. I will now turn the meeting back to our presenters for any additional closing remarks.
Well, thanks, everyone, for joining us today. As a reminder, we will be attending the ROTH Capital Partners Conference in Dana Point, California on March 23. Looking forward to speaking with you then. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's presentation. You may now disconnect.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-02-04MPS Ltd (BOM:532440) Q3 2026 Earnings Call Highlights: Strong Growth in Education Solutions and ...
GuruFocus.com
MPS Ltd (BOM:532440) Q3 2026 Earnings Call Highlights: Strong Growth in Education Solutions and ...
This article first appeared on GuruFocus. Revenue (Nine Months FY26): INR563.2 crores. Revenue (Q3 FY26): INR182.5 crores. EBITDA Margin (Q3 FY26): 31.6%. Education Solutions Growth (Nine Months FY26): Over 38%. Research Solutions Revenue Contribution (Q3 FY26): 61.1% of total revenue. Research Solutions Organic Revenue Growth (Year-over-Year): 16.2%. Education Solutions Revenue Growth (Q3 FY26): 11.3% year-over-year. Education Solutions EBITDA Margin (Q3 FY26): 40.8%. EPS Expectation (FY26): Expected to surpass INR100. Unbound Medicine Acquisition: Total consideration of USD16.5 million. Warning! GuruFocus has detected 5 Warning Signs with NSE:AWFIS. Is BOM:532440 fairly valued? Test your thesis with our free DCF calculator. Release Date: February 02, 2026 For the complete transcript of the earnings call, please refer to the full earnings call transcript. MPS Ltd (BOM:532440) reported a year-to-date revenue growth of INR563.2 crores, demonstrating successful execution of its long-term growth strategy. The Education Solutions segment emerged as a standout performer, growing over 38% in the first nine months of FY26. Research Solutions achieved a 16.2% year-over-year organic revenue growth, excluding AJE, reflecting strong engagement with STAR Accounts and successful new customer acquisition. The company is advancing its technology focus areas, including transitioning to AI-powered workflows and prioritizing AI models, to ensure non-linear growth and future-proof its business. MPS Ltd (BOM:532440) announced the acquisition of Unbound Medicine, a transformative milestone that expands its presence in the medical and nursing ecosystems with established institutional relationships. Q3 FY26 saw a minor dip in revenue to INR182.5 crores, with a pullback in the Corporate Learning segment. Corporate Learning operated below prior year and budget revenue levels, requiring a reset of foundations for future growth. The company faced challenges in the education business with some volatility in project timing impacting quarterly revenue. AJE, part of the Research Solutions segment, experienced a decline, impacting overall growth. The company is navigating a tough revenue and profitability picture in MPS Europa, requiring strategic adjustments. Q: Regarding the moderation in the education business this quarter, is this a trend or a one-off event? What are the prospects for...

