REG - Cirata PLC - Q1FY25 Trading Statement

CirataAnnouncement

16/04/2025 07:00

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RNS Number : 1609F  Cirata PLC  16 April 2025

16 April 2025

Cirata plc

("Cirata" or the "Company")

 

Q1FY25 Trading Update

 

Total Bookings $3.0m up 330% YoY

Strongest Q1 bookings since Q1FY19

Cash burn reduced to $1.4m (Q1FY24; $4.9m, Q1FY23; $11m)

 

Cirata plc (LSE: CRTA) today announces an unaudited trading update for the
quarter ended 31 March 2025 ("Q1FY25"). A recorded video with Stephen Kelly,
CEO of Cirata, can be found here.
(https://stream.brrmedia.co.uk/broadcast/67fd096dfdbe6e1fd6015667)

 

 

Summary

 

·    Bookings Metrics

o Strongest Q1 bookings quarter since Q1FY19

o Total bookings in Q1FY25 of $3.0m (Q1FY24 $0.7m) a rise of 330% YoY

§ Q1FY25 Data Integration ("DI") bookings of $2.4m (Q1FY24 $0.3m), a rise of
700% YoY

·    Commercial Momentum

o Strategic partnership

§ $2.0m 3-year DI contract signed in Q1 with leading UK retailer,
representing the first implementation of an enterprise-wide licence agreement
for both static and live data

o First data migration as a service ("DMaaS") contract win through our partner
Databricks with a new Telecommunications customer in the UAE

o 14 contracts signed, of which 5 contracts relate to DI

·    Financial Discipline and Governance

o Q1 cash burn was $1.4m (Q1FY24: $4.9m)

o Q1 cash overheads reduced to $4.6m (impacted by $0.4m non-recurrent costs)
(Q1FY24: $6.2m)

§ Cash overhead annualized run rate exiting Q1FY25 between $16m-$17m compared
to $25.1m in Q1FY24

o Cash position as at 31 March 2025 of $8.3m

 

Trading Update

Total bookings in Q1FY25 grew significantly to $3.0m (Q1FY24: $0.7m),
representing a 330% increase YoY and the Company's strongest Q1 bookings
quarter since Q1FY19 driven by an enterprise-wide DI contract with a leading
UK retailer.  Cash burn of $1.4m represents a significant improvement against
the previous quarters.

 

 

DI bookings in Q1FY25 were $2.4m, a rise of 700% YoY. Business mix continued
to improve with DI accounting for 80% of bookings and DevOps software
accounting for the remaining 20% of bookings (Q1FY24 DI 57%: DevOps 43%), with
DI being the Company's core growth driver. In total, 14 contracts were signed
in the quarter of which 5 were DI (Q1FY24: in total, 17 contracts signed of
which 5 were DI).

 

The actions taken in January 2025 to address poor execution in the
International region have had an immediate impact, resulting in close plans
hitting expectations. However, DI bookings in North America were disappointing
relative to plan. Improvements will be a function of continued pipeline build,
and improvements to close planning. This will be achieved through increased
training and further investment in sales personnel. The sales model is
evolving away from hiring 'Partner centric sales' to new business enterprise
solutions executives. Sales and Marketing productivity improvements are a
continuing priority for management in FY25. Whilst progress has been made,
establishing greater sales cycle predictability remains a key priority for
management to enable Cirata to enhance growth potential, shortening its sales
cycle and reducing customer acquisition cost.

 

Cirata's "land and expand" strategy continues to gain traction for DI. The
Q4FY24 win with a top 3 global bank announced 16 December 2024, followed in Q1
by the landing of our multiyear contract with a leading retailer announced in
March 2025, is validation of our strategy and Cirata's technology enabling
data automation and orchestration within the enterprise. The leading UK
retailer plans to leverage the power of hybrid cloud and deploy Cirata
enterprise wide at scale as the standard to make data available for analytics,
GenAI and for the innovation of edge use cases. The enterprise-wide licence
agreement enables data automation at petabyte scale, allowing for migration
from multiple sources to multiple targets. For this innovative customer,
Cirata will support the implementation of open table formats (such as Apache
Iceberg) to enable platform interoperability and avoid vendor lock-in. Apache
Iceberg has emerged as a leading standard for an "open table format," offering
a streamlined and scalable framework for organizing data and metadata. This
structure enhances data interoperability across computing platforms.

 

These important strategic relationships will provide an environment for
collaboration on future Cirata data orchestration platform functionality. Data
orchestration represents Cirata's future vision for addressing the challenges
of data modernization within the enterprise. In addition, Cirata is deepening
its collaboration with partners and customers a key initiative for Cirata as
we continue to evolve the product beyond Hadoop migration, to multiple use
cases for large scale data modernization.

 

During the quarter we also announced the Company's first Live Data Migrator
("LDM") implementation under the DMaaS solution offering. This is a contract
win with a new telecommunications customer in the UAE. This will also be the
first project win with Cirata's partner Databricks to enable Hadoop
distributed file system data migration to the cloud. DMaaS is part of Cirata's
market offering to accelerate the onboarding of 'new logos', proving Cirata
LDM at small scale. DMaaS projects are expected to be in the range
of $50,000-$100,000. This will be an important additional leg to the
Company's GTM 'land and expand' strategy. Further details of the Cirata DMaaS
offering can be found here.
(https://cirata.com/news/article/cirata-launches-data-migration-service-dmaas-simplify-large-scale-hadoop-cloud-migrations)

 

Cash and Overheads

Cash burn in Q1FY25 of $1.4m is a reduction of 71% against Q1FY24.

 

The Company's cash balance was $8.3m as of 31 March 2025.

 

Management continues to focus on improving operating leverage and
sustainability. Management is pleased to have achieved its goal of exiting
Q1FY25 with a reduced annualized cash cost overhead of c. $16-$17m, a more
than 50% reduction from the annualized run rate of more than $40m in early
FY23.

 

Key performance indicators

 

 KPI                               FY22 Q4  FY23 Q1  Q2     Q3     Q4     FY24 Q1  Q2     Q3     Q4     Q1
 Headcount                         177      193      127    109    112    116      107    92     93     71
 Overhead                          $11.1m   $9.4m    $8.2m  $7.0m  $5.7m  $6.2m    $5.5m  $5.3m  $3.8m  $4.6m
 Bookings                          $2.2m    $2.1m    $0.7m  $1.7m  $2.7m  $0.7m    $1.7m  $1.7m  $3.0m  $3.0m
 DI Bookings                       $1.2m    $0.2m    $0.4m  $0.5m  $1.5m  $0.3m    $0.6m  $1.4m  $2.3m  $2.4m
 DI Growth                         -43%     -87%     -69%   0%     25%    50%      50%    180%   51%    700%
 DI Contract 1  (#_ftn1) Activity  2        2        4      4      3      4        1      8      6      5
 Cash Burn                         $10.3m   $11.0m   $6.3m  $7.9m  $5.5m  $4.9m    $4.2m  $3.2m  $3.2m  $1.4m

 

 

Stephen Kelly, Chief Executive Officer, commented:

"As we signaled in January, FY25 represents a growth year built on solid
foundations. This Q1 delivers a strong start to the year and represents a step
forward in Cirata's recovery plan and drive towards growth. A much lower cash
burn combined with the strongest Q1 bookings figure since 2019 give us
increasing confidence. The validation from a leading UK retailer coming on the
heels of our Q4 win with a Top 3 US Bank is a strong endorsement that
customers are seeking petabyte-scale data automation with the freedom from
vendor lock-in. The' land and expand' strategy is working, and our DMAAS
contract with our partner DataBricks for a regional Telecom services provider
is a great first step in driving new logo acquisition. Cirata needs to
demonstrate more new logo wins. These are important strategic relationships as
we move beyond Hadoop migration to deliver data automation and orchestration
in a hybrid world. Cirata's vision is to support Global 500 companies
automate petabyte scale data supporting open table formats.  Conversations
with our customers and partners are going deeper and I am delighted with the
early success we have seen through this collaboration with some of the largest
companies in the world. Clearly there is more to do, I am not satisfied with
our execution consistency, for example our North American plan fell short this
quarter with slippage. With the significantly reduced cash burn and the best
Q1 for over 5 years, the green shoots of all our hard work across the company
are beginning to show. "

 

 

This announcement contains inside information under the UK Market Abuse
Regulation. The person responsible for arranging the release of this
announcement on behalf of Cirata plc is Larry Webster, Company Secretary.

 

For further information, please contact:

 

 Cirata                                              +1 (925) 380 1728
 Stephen Kelly, Chief Executive Officer
 Ricardo Moura, Chief Financial Officer (Interim)
 Daniel Hayes, Investor Relations

 FTI Consulting                                      +44 (0)20 3727 1137
 Matt Dixon / Kwaku Aning / Usama Ali

 Stifel (Nomad and Joint Broker)                     +44 (0)20 7710 7600
 Fred Walsh / Brough Ransom / Ben Good / Sarah Wong

 Panmure Liberum (Joint Broker)                      +44 (0)20 3100 2000
 Max Jones / John More

 

 

About Cirata

Cirata, accelerates data-driven revenue growth by automating data transfer and
integration to modern cloud analytics and AI platforms without downtime or
disruption. With Cirata, data leaders can leverage the power of AI and
analytics across their entire enterprise data estate to freely choose
analytics technologies, avoid vendor, platform, or cloud lock-in while making
AI and analytics faster, cheaper, and more flexible. Cirata's portfolio of
products and technology solutions make strategic adoption of modern data
analytics efficient and automated.

 

For more information about Cirata, visit www.cirata.com
(http://www.cirata.com)

 

 

 1  (#_ftnref1) Data Integration contract signed included renewals, growth and
new

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