Albert Technologies Ltd – Final Results
Albert Technologies (AIM: ALB.L) today announces its audited results for the year ended 31 December 2018. The Company has made continued progress in deploying Albert, the world’s first and only fully autonomous Artificial Intelligence (AI) Marketing Platform, as a SaaS product for brands and agencies, underlining the potential of this ground-breaking proprietary technology. Supported by a growing number of enterprise clients and increased activity with top global agencies, the company expects continued growth in the coming year.
Financial Highlights:
- The Board is pleased to report 2018 financial results met its budget expectations
- Revenues increased to $4.6m, an almost threefold increase on the $1.7m achieved in 2017
- 50% increase in average monthly revenue per customer, year on year
- Adjusted EBITDA* loss of $12.2m (2017: $11.4m)
- Operating loss of $12.7m (2017: $11.8m)
- Net cash of $15.4m at year end (2017: $11.1m), following successful fundraise of $16.8m, net, in June 2018
* Non-IFRS and unaudited, excludes share based compensation expenses of $434K (Cost of revenues-7K, R&D-$303K, S&M-$51K and G&A-$73K) and $361K (Cost of revenues-$10K, R&D-$197K, S&M-$99K and G&A-55K) in 2018 and 2017, respectively, and depreciation expenses of $106K (R&D-$78K, S&M-$21K and G&A-$7K) and $80K (Cost of revenues-$1K, R&D-$66K, S&M-$5K and G&A-$8K) in 2018 and 2017, respectively.
Operational Highlights:
Significant progress with enterprise clients and agencies in the period:
- Fourfold increase in the number of enterprise clients
- Progress in direct activity with top global agencies
- Continued expansion of activity with existing enterprise clients
- Headcount increased to 114, mainly in connection with account management functions, to support enterprise client activity
- Transition from a tech-centric focus to a broader sales and marketing culture to provide enterprise-grade service to our customers
Current Trading:
- Strong enterprise pipeline to support continued growth
- Industry recognition for Albert – recent Forrester and Gartner reports include Albert as one of the top AI transformational solutions in the advertising industry
- Continued strict cash control and focus on key areas of investment
Or Shani, Chief Executive Officer, said: “2018 was an important year of progress for Albert Technologies. During 2018 we began working with a significant number of new enterprise clients, each of which have meaningful growth potential. The performance data from early client campaigns has clearly demonstrated to our customers how Artificial Intelligence can drive significant improvement in results while also providing previously undiscovered insights, compared to manual execution.
Our progress in 2019 will be determined by our success in securing new enterprise clients and our strategy is geared towards achieving that aim. Pleasingly, we start 2019 with a dozen active enterprise clients and an additional dozen in the current pipeline, in various stages of discussion. Our experience to date reinforces our belief in our strategic goal of building towards a critical mass of active clients during 2019 and 2020.
In addition to progress with enterprise brands, we made significant steps forward on the agency front. Recent engagement with some of the top global agencies has successfully demonstrated how autonomous, cross channel marketing AI can create more efficient and productive operations and deliver increased returns on digital marketing spend for customers.
During the second half of 2018 we strengthened our market-facing presence by building out our customer support and success functions, in order to be able to better support the needs of our enterprise clients and also facilitate expansion. We have created dedicated account management and professional services teams to enable smooth onboarding processes and enterprise-grade services. With this team in place, we believe we have the right talent and resource to meet our key strategic goal of growing our enterprise footprint and the current pipeline reinforces our optimism.
As part of this transition we launched a new brand identity, emphasizing Albert’s unparalleled impact on the complex digital landscape by processing, analysing and acting on audience and tactic data at scale, across omni-channels (paid search, social and programmatic).
With our current enterprise client base and pipeline of opportunities, coupled with our strong and focused team, the Board is confident about the future. By the very nature of a new emerging technology, it is difficult to accurately predict short term revenue outcomes, but Albert’s proven effectiveness coupled with growing and tangible interest from large enterprises, give us growing confidence about the market opportunity for Albert and our Company’s future prospects.”