Earnings call transcript: Cirata Q1 2026 sees record growth, stock rises 4%

Cirata PLC reported a transformative financial performance for Q1 FY 2026, achieving its first-ever cash flow positive quarter and a 77% revenue growth in FY 2025. The company’s stock rose 4.08% to 14.8 USD, reflecting positive investor sentiment towards its strategic achievements and future outlook.

Key Takeaways

• Cirata achieved a 77% revenue growth in FY 2025, marking its strongest performance in recent history.
• The company reached positive cash flow in Q1 FY 2026, a first in its reporting history.
• Cirata Symphony, the flagship data orchestration platform, gained traction with early customer engagements.
• The stock price increased by 4.08%, indicating positive market reaction.

Company Performance

Cirata’s performance in FY 2025 and Q1 FY 2026 highlights its successful transformation and strategic focus on data orchestration. The company achieved record revenue growth and positive cash flow, driven by significant operational milestones and product innovations. This performance places Cirata in a strong position within the competitive enterprise data integration market.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue growth: 77% in FY 2025
• Positive cash flow achieved in Q1 FY 2026
• Annualized Contract Value (ACV) increased to 4.9 million USD
• Remaining Contract Billings (RCB) totaled 5.8 million USD

Market Reaction

Following the earnings call, Cirata’s stock rose by 4.08% to 14.8 USD, reflecting investor confidence in the company’s strategic direction and financial health. The stock’s movement suggests a positive reception to Cirata’s achievements and future potential, despite being closer to its 52-week low.

Outlook & Guidance

For FY 2026, Cirata aims to achieve cash flow breakeven and continue its momentum from FY 2025. The company plans to focus on expanding its market presence and demonstrating repeatable deployments of Cirata Symphony across various industries. Management anticipates improved sales activity and pipeline conversion, particularly in the latter half of the year.

Executive Commentary

Stephen, CEO of Cirata, emphasized the company’s strong position, stating, "The business has never been in better shape." He highlighted the record bookings and revenue growth as part of an improving trend, not isolated events. The introduction of new KPIs, such as ACV and RCB, aims to provide investors with better visibility on future commercial activity.

Risks and Challenges

• Potential delays in closing large enterprise deals due to longer sales cycles.
• The absence of new customer logos in Q1 may indicate challenges in acquiring new clients.
• The need for continuous innovation to maintain competitive advantage in the data orchestration market.
• Economic uncertainties and budget constraints within target industries could impact future growth.

Q&A

During the earnings call, analysts inquired about the company’s confidence in its business turnaround. Stephen responded by highlighting the continuum of improving KPIs and the strategic focus on data orchestration. Questions also addressed the importance of the newly introduced KPIs, which provide a clearer view of Cirata’s commercial activities and future prospects.

Full transcript - Cirata PLC (CRTA) Q1 2026:

Stephen, Chief Executive Officer / Leader of the Business, Cirata: Today, Cirata released its trading update for Q1 FY 2026. Following the release, I wanted to give an overview of the first quarter and take a moment to provide some additional context on our performance and how we’re seeing the business develop as we moved into FY 2026. Over the past almost three years, we’ve undertaken a significant transformation of the business, simplifying our operations, reducing our cost base, and refocusing the company on data integration and orchestration at enterprise scale. This is a category where we believe we can win. FY 2025 was another important milestone in the transformation. We delivered the strongest data integration bookings performance since 2017. We secured our largest direct contract and signed our largest IBM OEM agreement in the company’s history. Importantly, with 77% annual revenue growth, we achieved positive EBITDA in the second half, another important milestone for the company.

We’ve set multiple records for the company in FY 2025 on less than 1/3 of the company’s historic peak cost base. By any measure, this is an indication of significant progress. We entered 2026 as a more focused and operationally disciplined company. We recognize, however, that progress inside the business has not yet translated into excitement and support from new investors, and that’s something we need to earn. We believe we will earn that through continued execution. It’s the context of the ongoing transformation that we launched Cirata Symphony in FY 2025, our data orchestration platform. Cirata Symphony is designed to solve several immediate high-value problems for the largest consumer companies in the world, specifically, migrating and replicating data at petabyte scale, enabling disaster recovery across environments, and supporting data modernization initiatives. These are not theoretical use cases. They are areas where customers already have budget and urgency today.

What makes Cirata Symphony different is its ability to move and synchronize large-scale data across systems without disruption. Historically, in many cases, organizations either have built these capabilities themselves or relied on a services-led approach. In an AI-centric world, these approaches fail to meet the requirements for automation, interoperability, and critically, time to value. Cirata Symphony responds to these demands and provides a software-led alternative designed to be repeatable, scalable, and with the lowest total cost of ownership. As enterprises increasingly look to adopt AI, one of the key challenges is making existing data infrastructure accessible and usable. Cirata Symphony supports this by enabling data to be made AI-ready without requiring re-architecting of existing environments. I would strongly encourage investors to look at the Cirata Symphony demos available on the website.

As one of our major investors told me last week, Cirata product capabilities with Cirata Symphony is night and day from where it was in 2023. Cirata is a critical ingredient of AI enablement. However, it needs to be said that our focus is not selling AI as a concept. It’s on solving the underlying data challenges that make AI possible. Now, turning to the first quarter, the company delivered positive cash flow for Q1, representing a significant operational milestone and the first such period of positive cash flow in its reporting history. This reflects the benefits of growth and the actions undertaken in FY 2025 to streamline the business and improve efficiency. As we highlighted in our quarterly disclosure, no new logos were signed during the quarter.

However, I want to be very clear, this reflects timing within a number of the enterprise opportunities rather than any change in underlying demand. This is very much in line with our expectations coming into the year and underpins our outlook statement delivered in the 14th of January trading update, where we shared that management expects an improvement in sales activity levels with our direct sales efforts and via partners as we move through the financial year. With the changes led by Dominic Arcari in the go-to-market function, visibility is anticipated to improve by mid-year FY 2026. For me, as the Leader of the business, what is important is the underlying trajectory, and that remains positive and stronger than I’ve seen in my tenure with the company. Our immediate priority remains execution.

We are focused on converting the pipeline into signed contracts, expanding within existing customer accounts, and demonstrating that Cirata Symphony can be deployed repeatably across use cases and industries. To support this, we’ve evolved a set of KPIs for investors. These critical metrics allow us to assess the business, including Annualized Contract Value, or ACV, which gives a measure of our contract run rate, Billings, which reflects the value invoiced in the period, and Remaining Contract Billings, or RCB, which provides visibility into future contracted cash flows. These KPIs taken together provide a clearer view of our underlying momentum and forward visibility. In the first quarter, ACV increased from $4.8 million-$4.9 million, reflecting the net new contract activity in the quarter.

We invoiced $2.3 million of billings in the quarter and had $5.8 million of RCB, of which $3.4 million is expected to be billed within the next 12 months. We end the period with $4.7 million of cash on the balance sheet, representing the first cash flow positive quarter for the company. We’ll continue to return to the market on a quarterly basis to provide updates on these important KPIs. In conclusion, we believe the opportunity in front of us is significant. The Q1 outcome reflects the timing of deal closures after a record Q4 and a record 2025. The underlying momentum in the business remains strong. Our partner relationships continue to deepen, and we are confident in our outlook for the year and our path to profitable growth. We understand, however, that the market is looking for evidence, not potential.

Our focus in FY 2026 is therefore simple, to demonstrate consistently that we can sell, deploy, and scale Cirata Symphony.

Unknown, Moderator / Interviewer: Welcome, Stephen. Great to have you back. What gives you the confidence that the business is turning?

Stephen, Chief Executive Officer / Leader of the Business, Cirata: Well, thanks. It’s good to be back as well. We hope that it should be obvious to investors that the business has never been in better shape. The outcome for FY 2025 and the transition into FY 2026 is part of the continuum of improving KPIs for the company. We don’t see the record bookings and the 77% revenue growth in FY 2025 in isolation, but part of an improving trend of engagement. The evolution of the new KPIs, which carry forward components to allow investors to have better visibility on our future commercial activity, signals our increasing confidence.

Unknown, Moderator / Interviewer: Can you talk a little bit more about the KPIs you introduced? Why are these important?

Stephen, Chief Executive Officer / Leader of the Business, Cirata: Yeah. Any software business has some timing differences between when contracts are signed, when revenue is recognized, and when cash is collected. We wanted to give investors a clearer view of what’s happening commercially. Annual Contract Value, ACV, shows our contracted annualized run rate. Billings show what we’re invoicing, and RCB shows future contracted cash flows. Together, they provide a more complete and transparent picture of the business. In addition, we will report on revenue at the statutory checkpoints for reporting.

Unknown, Moderator / Interviewer: Stephen, what evidence do you have that Cirata Symphony is gaining traction?

Stephen, Chief Executive Officer / Leader of the Business, Cirata: We’re already seeing early customer engagement across migrations, disaster recovery, and modernization use cases, including existing customer accounts. We hosted the customer innovation board for our most strategic customers in January. The key focus for us is now conversion and repeatability, moving from initial deployments to broader adoption and multi-year contracts.

Unknown, Moderator / Interviewer: Why should we believe this is different from the company’s previous product cycles?

Stephen, Chief Executive Officer / Leader of the Business, Cirata: That’s a fair question. The difference today is it’s not just the platform and the product, it’s the context around it. We now have a significantly reduced and much more sustainable cost base, a focused product set, Cirata Symphony, which is the most innovative data orchestration platform in the market, and clearer commercial use cases tied to existing customer demand. Most importantly, we’re measuring success differently. We’re not asking for the market to underwrite a vision. We’re focused on demonstrating repeatable sales and expansion within customers. We expect to be judged on that basis.

Unknown, Moderator / Interviewer: Stephen, to what extent are contracts repeatable?

Stephen, Chief Executive Officer / Leader of the Business, Cirata: Yes, repeatability is a key focus for us. We’re concentrating on a defined set of use cases, data migration, disaster recovery, AI enablement, and data modernization, where we believe demand is consistent across consumer industries. Our goal is to demonstrate that these can be deployed repeatably rather than one-off bespoke engagements.

Unknown, Moderator / Interviewer: Right now, many companies are repositioning around AI to attract attention. Should that criticism be leveled at Cirata?

Stephen, Chief Executive Officer / Leader of the Business, Cirata: No, that’s not the case. We’re not going to get carried away with the AI hype, but artificial intelligence is a very relevant tailwind. It’s not the only entry point. Our focus is on solving existing critical data challenges, data movement, data synchronization, data accessibility, and availability at scale. The connection to artificial intelligence is that these capabilities are increasingly required to make enterprise data usable in AI workflows, and that translates directly into business outcomes.

Unknown, Moderator / Interviewer: Stephen, you say you’ve simplified the business, but what does this mean for your investors?

Stephen, Chief Executive Officer / Leader of the Business, Cirata: We disposed of the legacy DevOps business to have a clear focus on data orchestration. With a cost base provided in the FY 2026 outlook statement of between $12 million and $13 million total cash overheads, investors can simply determine that the company needs to generate circa $3 million a quarter for breakeven. It’s fair to say that the new ACV is a reasonable proxy for cash collections within a 30-60-day period, and therefore, we’re focused on growing ACV and the resulting cash collections. Also, it should be apparent to our investors, through our disclosures on ACV and RCB, that we come into FY 2026 with a degree of visibility of future cash collections.

Unknown, Moderator / Interviewer: You were cash flow positive in Q1. How should we think about this going forward?

Stephen, Chief Executive Officer / Leader of the Business, Cirata: Q1 FY 2026 reflects the benefits of the work we did in previous years, particularly FY 2025, to drive quality growth, reduce our cost base, and improve efficiency. While cash flow can vary from quarter to quarter in FY 2026, we remain focused on disciplined execution and to continue to target cash flow breakeven for FY 2026 as a whole, as the Management stated in the FY 2026 outlook.

Unknown, Moderator / Interviewer: Stephen, you’ve said performance will be weighted in H2. What underpins that?

Stephen, Chief Executive Officer / Leader of the Business, Cirata: It’s primarily the nature of our pipeline. We are engaged in a number of larger enterprise opportunities, which take longer to close but are of higher value. One example of the activity in the first quarter was with our strategic partner, IBM, where we’ve been running joint enablement sessions for their sellers and their technical sales team across the U.K. and the U.S. We’re already seeing results from those sessions where we expect to grow pipeline that will mature through the year. At the same time, our expanded sales team is now more embedded across our key markets of North America, the U.K., and Australia and New Zealand, as we expect conversion to build as the year progresses, particularly in the second half.

Unknown, Moderator / Interviewer: Finally, any closing comments, Stephen?

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Unknown, Moderator / Interviewer: Thank you.

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