Crexendo, Inc. (CXDO) Q3 2026 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

Greetings, and welcome to the Crexendo Third Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] And please note, this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference call over to your host, Mr. Jeff Korn, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Crexendo. Sir, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Tom, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the Crexendo Q3 2026 Conference Call. As Tom said, I'm Jeff Korn, Chairman of the Board and CEO. On the call with me today are Doug Gaylor, our President and COO; Ron Vincent, our CFO; and Jon Brinton, our COO. In a moment, Jon will read our safe harbor statement. After that, I will give some brief comments on our performance for the quarter. Ron will then provide detail on the numbers before handing the call over to Doug to provide a business and sales update. After that, we will open the call up to questions. Jon, would you please read the safe harbor statement?

Thank you, Jeff. I want to take this opportunity to remind listeners that this call will contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 provides a safe harbor for such forward-looking statements. All statements made in this conference call other than statements of historical fact are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, words like believe, expect, anticipate, estimate, will and other similar statements of expectation identifying forward-looking statements. Investors should be aware that any forward-looking statements are based on assumptions and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed here today. These risk factors are explained in detail in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the Form 10-K for fiscal year ended December 31, 2025, and the Forms 10-Q as filed. Crexendo does not undertake any obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. I'd now like to turn the call back to Jeff. Jeff?

Thank you, Jon. I am exceptionally pleased with our results in Q3, and I am very proud of how the team has been performing. Ron will provide details on our financial results, but I think it's highly impressive, the results we attained, particularly total revenue of $25.2 million, up 44% year-over-year, putting us squarely on a $100 million run rate. Our adjusted EBITDA of $4 million compared to $2.9 million for the third quarter of 2025 is also highly impressive. And I am really pleased with our cash and cash equivalents of $22.8 million. These results and our progress gives me complete confidence in Crexendo's future. Providers are choosing our platform and growing numbers. Our technology continues to advance, and we are building customer relationships that we expect to support substantial growth for many years to come. Through the third quarter, we have already won more platform logos than in all of last year. And last year was a very good year. I view this as one of the strongest indicators of our growth potential. Each win represents a provider choosing Crexendo and the NetSapiens platform as the foundation for its business. As these providers migrate customers and add businesses, they will need to add more capacity. Each new relationship creates opportunities for upgrade orders and further recurring revenue, expanding our foundation for future organic growth. A much larger group of new licensees gives us a broader base from which those upgrades can emerge. As those provider migrate users and grow, we believe the new customers we are winning today should generate substantial additional revenue over the coming years. I have tremendous confidence in that opportunity. Our sessions-not-seats model remains a powerful advantage. That combined with the ability to use our Oracle Cloud or your own facilities for hosting as well as the capabilities of the open APIs, which is a core of the NetSapiens platform, gives providers amazing flexibility, compelling economics and greater control over how they grow their businesses. There is no better telecommunications hosting platform than the Crexendo NetSapiens platform. In Q1 and Q2, initial licenses were smaller than historic levels. We saw a nice uptick in initial license size in Q3, and I am hopeful that trend will continue and expand. Upgrade orders have not been as large as historical in Q3, which I believe is interest rate driven as many of our licensees use financing to purchase larger upgrade licenses, which end up providing the most savings. There will be a compelling reason to add to those upgrades to incur the savings when interest rates stabilize. In general, upgrade orders have tended to be approximately 50% larger than the initial orders. And again, I have no reason to doubt that, that trend will not continue once there is some clarity in the economy. The economics of our offering makes it compelling to add capacity. We are also advancing NetSapiens Flow, which will modernize the platform's appearance and capabilities, make it more intuitive and give licensees a stronger product to demonstrate and sell. We are targeting a release in the first half of 2027. We previewed Flow at our user group meeting in Austin last week, and the response was exceptional. The UGM was our largest and most successful UGM and it brought together licensees, technology partners and our team, and there was unmistakable enthusiasm for Flow and the entire NetSapiens platform. There was excitement about our road map and the opportunities ahead. That direct feedback reinforces my confidence in our direction. Our expanding AI ecosystem creates additional opportunities. Recently announced partnerships bring AI and conversational intelligence across voice, video meetings, team chat, e-mail and in-person conversations, turning interactions into summaries, follow-up actions and CRM updates that licensees can offer under their own brands. With more than 8 million end users supported by our solutions, we have a substantial base for adoption. Our goal is to help providers deliver greater customer value, differentiate their offerings and generate additional recurring revenue for both them and us. Licensees were particularly impressed by the breadth and quality of AI offerings in our Ecosystem Vendor Program or the EVD program. Through our company store, they can add advanced capabilities with nearly seamless integration, bringing new services to market without building each solution themselves. CAIRO, our AI receptionist and orchestrator continues to impress and gain adoption. As I pointed out previously, I do not expect meaningful revenue contributions until the second half of 2027, but I believe CAIRO can accelerate organic growth as adoption expands. We continue to see solid growth on the telecom side of the business, and Doug will discuss both EVP and CAIRO in more detail. Our growing cash position gives us flexibility to invest and evaluate acquisitions from a position of strength. We remain focused on strategic fit, successful integration, accretive growth and protecting our existing shareholders, exactly our ESI model. I am carefully monitoring the economy, and we continue to manage the business based on fundamentals. Economic caution has contributed to smaller upgrade orders as providers protect cash and buy capacity closer to what they need when they need it. We expect this to be a short-term trend because exceeding allotted sessions carries substantial cost, giving providers an incentive to add capacity as usage grows. The timing, of course, will remain influenced by economic conditions, but we will manage the business based upon the facts in front of us. As we assess the effects of inflation and broader economic conditions, we are limiting or deferring certain expenses and hires while continuing to support customers and advancing our platforms. I have the flexibility to increase investment when our growth and opportunity justify or further limit spending if conditions warrant. That discipline keeps us prepared while preserving our opportunity to execute as we need. I remain exceptionally positive about our future. Record new logo wins, the Q3 improvement in initial license size, flow and our expanding AI ecosystem give us clear opportunities to strengthen organic growth. We are managing costs carefully while building on all the opportunities in front of us. I expect Crexendo to remain strongly profitable, continue growing and build lasting shareholder value. We have the platform, the customer relationships and the team to deliver, and I have complete confidence in our direction. With that, I will turn the call over to Ron to walk us through the financials in more detail.

Thank you, Jeff. As Jeff mentioned, we reported $25.2 million in total revenue. That's a 44% increase over the third quarter of the prior year. This achieves our goal of hitting $100 million run rate by the end of the year. Consolidated organic revenue growth came in this quarter at 5% over the prior year. Year-to-date organic revenue growth of 9.1% is slightly below our goal of delivering double-digit organic growth for the year. However, we still have the fourth quarter to go, which is historically a strong quarter for us. Service revenue increased 75% to $15.1 million, and our gross margin was 67% for the quarter, consistent with the second quarter of this year. Software Solutions revenue increased 2% to $7.7 million, and our gross margin improved to 71% for the quarter compared to the second quarter of this year. Product revenue increased 78% to $2.4 million, and our gross margin was 41% for the quarter. Operating expenses increased approximately $7.9 million or 49% compared to the prior year. The ESI acquisition contributed $7.1 million of that increase. We maintained our operating margin of 4% for the quarter, consistent with the operating margin for the second quarter of this year. We reported net income of $1.1 million for the quarter. That's $0.03 per basic and diluted common share. On a non-GAAP basis, we reported non-GAAP net income of $4 million for the quarter. That's $0.12 per basic and diluted common share, and we reported EBITDA for the quarter of $3 million and adjusted of $4 million. Our adjusted EBITDA margin was 16% for the quarter, a slight decrease of 100 basis points compared to the second quarter of this year, but consistent with our expectations. Our cash and cash equivalents at the end of the quarter was $22.8 million. That's compared to $31.4 million at December 31, 2025. During the quarter, we increased the cash balance by $4.5 million from our June 30 balance. Operating activities for the nine month period provided $9.7 million in free cash flow from operating activities, an increase of $4.9 million during the third quarter alone. Investing activities for the nine month period utilized $26.2 million in cash related to the cash portion of the ESI acquisition. Our financing activities for the nine month period provided $8 million in cash, primarily related to $4.9 million in proceeds from the term loan with Wells Fargo and $3.4 million in net proceeds from stock option exercises and RSUs. Finally, our remaining performance obligations at September 30 was $139.6 million compared to $139 million at June 30. With that, I will turn it over to Doug Gaylor, our President and COO, for more additional comments on operations.

Thanks, Ron. Crexendo delivered another strong quarter with revenue increasing 44% year-over-year and reaching an annualized run rate of $100 million. We added five new NetSapiens licensees during the quarter, bringing our year-to-date total to 16 already exceeding the 14 added in all of 2025. Two of our five new licensees in Q3 migrated from Metaswitch. Year-to-date, we have won six Metaswitch migrations and one migration from Cisco's BroadSoft platform. We also received six add-on orders from existing licensees during the quarter. And our pipeline for new licensees is very solid as we continue to see strong demand for our award-winning software platform with our disruptive pricing model and robust feature set. We continue to see larger transactions closing on the Telecom Services segment of the business and had our two largest sales of the year occur during the quarter. Bookings through our Technology Service Distributors or TSDs, increased 41% year-over-year in Q3 and 41% for the first nine months compared to the same period in 2025. We continue to see great momentum in this area of the business and are excited about the number and size of opportunities that we're seeing brought in by the TSDs. Our ESI acquisition continues to exceed our initial expectations. We recognized $6.8 million in revenue for the quarter from ESI, down just slightly from the $6.9 million in the previous quarter as we build a consistent cadence model for that division. We continue to see strong momentum with ESI resellers and are excited about the results that we have seen in our first two quarters of ownership. We continue to work on synergies and cost savings from the ESI acquisition and are confident these synergies will continue improving our bottom line. Our remaining performance obligation currently sits at $140 million, a 59% increase over Q3 of 2025. And as a reminder, our remaining performance obligation number is the sum of the remaining contract pays for all of our telecom services and software solutions customers that will be recognized over the next 60 months and is a strong indicator of our future revenue stream. We continue to see strong gross margins on both sides of the business. On the software solutions side of the house, gross margins improved to 71% for the quarter as we continue to see cost benefits from our hosted Oracle Cloud infrastructure. Our Telecom Services segment saw service gross margins remained strong at 67% on the strength of higher margin sales from our ESI acquisition. And product margins were 41%, down from the prior quarter, but overall gross margins for the company were up 200 basis points year-over-year. Higher gross margins and disciplined cost management supported free cash flow, and we ended the quarter with $22.8 million in cash. As we successfully scale both segments of the business, we expect those gross margins to continue to improve. CAIRO, Crexendo's AI receptionist orchestrator, which answers calls in response to frequently asked questions and routes callers and schedules appointments. CAIRO revenue increased 20% sequentially, and we are seeing early adoption amongst licensees signing up to resell the offering, and we are extremely excited about the trajectory that we're seeing with CAIRO sales. During Q3, we also introduced conversational intelligence for our direct customers and our licensees. This solution uses AI to analyze recorded calls and provide actionable insights to agents, supervisors and executives. We see tremendous opportunities to sell this capability to both existing and new customers. Our Ecosystem Vendor Program, or EVP program as we refer to it, now includes 66 vendors, including 22 offering AI applications and solutions. These vendors serve our licensees and customers through revenue-sharing arrangements and program revenue increased 12% sequentially in Q3, although similar to CAIRO revenue contribution remains in its early stages. We set a goal three years ago to reach $100 million revenue run rate by the end of 2026, and I'm very excited that we have now eclipsed that target. I'm thrilled about the future direction and opportunity for Crexendo. Our strong organic and inorganic growth, combined with our 13 consecutive quarters of GAAP profitability, strong positive cash flow and growing remaining performance obligation have laid a great foundation for our future success. The additional opportunities to drive growth and innovation that our new AI offerings are generating will drive even more demand and higher revenues. As the fastest-growing platform solution in the country, now supporting over 8 million end users and nearly 400,000 businesses, we are laser-focused on growing our business, enhancing our solutions, improving our efficiencies and continuing to return strong results. I will now turn it back to Jeff for any further comments.

Doug. I don't have anything to add at this time. Tom, let us open the call up to questions.

[Operator Instructions] And your first question today is coming from Joshua Reilly from Needham.

Maybe just starting off with the new NetSapiens Flow platform, I got a little view of this last year at the event, preview, sneak preview. You really modernized the UI now. And can you just discuss your thoughts around how this will help incremental revenue opportunities and cross-sell going forward?

Sure. And Josh, you would have been really amazed that you've seen Flow, the improvements from last year's demonstration to this year's demonstration were both palpable and amazing. But we see Flow as an important growth opportunity. It's a more intuitive modern experience, and it gives our licensees a stronger product to demonstrate and sell. We believe this will help them win more customers and expand existing relationships. There are, to answer your question, several potential revenue opportunities because of this. First is attracting new providers to NetSapiens who did not like the old UI or wanted some of the new functions that we've added. It's going to support capacity to upgrade as our licenses grow, and it will help them sell additional capacity through our AI and EVP ecosystem. Flow should and will make the overall platform more compelling and help customers see the value of all these additional services. The amount of enthusiasm with the UTM reinforced my confidence that licensees could see how this would strengthen their own offerings. As I said earlier, we're targeting release of Flow by the middle of next year. And just the initial impression that Flow will have on people looking at it should make -- should help us substantially all of the new -- all the products we can add and all the new functionality is going to be amazing for us. I'm very excited about it.

Awesome. And then in terms of the UGM event itself, can you just discuss how the event helped build pipeline maybe on a year-over-year basis? Was your pipeline exiting the event up this year versus last year?

Sure. First, let me say something about the UGM, and I mentioned this at the UGM. All of our licensees are essentially competitors, but they all sit down, they share ideas, they show how to make everybody better. Walking out of there gave me increased enthusiasm and made me even more encouraged. This was our largest and most successful event and the enthusiasm for Flow and our AI offerings were frankly off the chart. What really impressed me was the number of licensees who are willing to pay for Flow sandboxes so they could really learn and start testing live before [GR]. That's a meaningful indication to me of the interest because they're committing both time and money to grow with us. The commercial event was clear. It gave us opportunities to advance conversations around the platform, around adoption, expansion and additional services. Combined with the new logo wins through Q3, which already exceed all of last year, it gives me considerable confidence in the foundation and the strength of the platform and the substantial growth I expect to see in Flow.

Got it. Last question for me is other peer vendors in the space have been highlighting strong AI product cross-sell. Is that what you're seeing as well? And as you think about additional SKUs and add-on products, will you be building these organically or primarily partnering with other vendors?

Well, we do not have a large AI development team. So we will be developing AI products with other vendors and outsourcing with us doing the final testing and design as to how we want it. We're seeing growing interest in adoption and the response we had at the UGM reinforce our confidence in the cross-sell opportunity. Our licensees were impressed by the breadth and the quality of the many AI offerings we already have and the ones we're going to be added. And the fact that they are available to us and to our licensees through the EVP program can show how quickly these can start to add up. Our strategy, as I started, is to do both. We're going to develop capabilities where we believe we can create differentiated value as we're doing with CAIRO and partner where we can bring excellent products to customers faster. The open platform we have gives us the flexibility to pursue both approaches for us to have products developed, for us to develop products and for third parties to develop product. With more than 8 million users supported by our solutions, we really have a substantial base for a potential adoption. We have a strong opportunity to help licensees deliver more value to their customers while creating additional revenue opportunities for us. So we remain disciplined about the timing --excuse me, I used to be able to speak English. CAIRO continues to improve and gain adoption. But as I said before, I don't expect to see substantial and meaningful contribution from CAIRO until the middle of 2027. We may start to see more of an uptick on other AI applications through the EVP program sooner than that.

Your next question is coming from Eric Martinuzzi from Lake Street.

Yes. I wanted to go a layer deeper on the new platform logos. Congrats on that 16 year-to-date. That's a nice milestone reaching -- exceeding the 2025 number just nine months in here. Of the five that you did sign in Q3, are they -- could we characterize them as large, medium, small? Are they kind of typical size sign-ups versus the other 11 that you signed up in 2026?

Yes. As Jeff mentioned in his comments, Eric, we saw an increase in our average revenue per transaction on those new licensees. I think the average total contract value of those new licensees was over $400,000, which was up significantly from what it was previous quarter. So that's a positive sign. As we've highlighted on previous calls, we're happy when we get any new licensees knowing that they're going to be a long-term customer. Our lifetime value on a traditional software solutions licensee is over $11 million. So when they start out smaller, they start out medium size, we know they're going to grow into a very, very substantial contributor to our revenue stream over time. So we're real pleased with the uptick that we saw in the average revenue transaction. But again, probably more impressed with the fact that we've got a great pipeline of opportunities out there and don't see that slowing down anytime soon.

Eric, I was going to say the large logo wins to me, verifies that we are winning the conversion to the NetSapiens platform. While I'm pleased with the increase in the size of the initial logo order from Q3 from Q1 and Q2, the number is still the most impressive number to me because we know that these people will be adding upgrades. They will be moving more and more of their customers to the NetSapiens platform, and it's going to be a huge win for us going forward. But it's all very exciting. I think Ron wanted to add something.

Yes. I think more importantly, over the last two quarters prior to Q3, we were averaging $175,000 to $230,000 for average deal size and coming in a little over $400,000 average deal size showed us improvement. And our concerns that we had during Q2 that we thought the order sizes were slowing down because of the economy, we actually saw some pickup. So we're encouraged by that pickup in the deal size.

Okay. And then second question for me. It was good to see the cash number come up sequentially. We're now at the $22.8 million. What are we targeting for the use of that cash? Do you have a certain number that if you want to finish out the year, a certain balance would be pointed at potentially paying off debt, share repurchases?

Eric, I still think the highest and best use of any cash we have is to use it for acquisitions. So that's what I'm targeting the use of cash. I'm not going to give you a number of what I'm expecting at the end of Q4 because we're going to have to see what's going on with the economy after the election tomorrow and going forward from there. But I don't, in the short term, intend to use the cash for anything other than to fund acquisitions.

Your next question is coming from Mike Latimore from Northland Capital Markets.

Great to see the profit, that $100 million run rate. That's great to see. I guess first on the new logos, are they coming online under a license fee model or subscription at this point?

Black Cube is a breakup, but they're primarily professional licenses. We had one subscription and four professional.

Got it. And then on Flow, I guess when it's live and people are adopting it, will it be easier to -- for them to also adopt new applications out of your ecosystem? And then of those 66 EVP in the ecosystem, are there any that seem to have the best prospects at this point?

Yes, that's a nice part about Flow is that it gives a single pane of glass to the administrative of all the capabilities that a customer or licensee is utilizing. So it will definitely enhance the ability for them to bring other applications into the ability to sell to their customers and have that single pane of glass. So we think it's going to be a huge opportunity for us to have upsells of all these applications. So when we talk about those 66 vendors in the EVP program, a lot of them have multiple applications that they're offering to end user customers. And so it will be very similar to the App Store with Apple or the Play Store with Samsung that you'll be able to have the capabilities to be able to go in there and pick and choose what applications you want to install and use for your customers or for an end user. So we think it's going to be a tremendous uptick in excitement and opportunity for us to sponsor more of the applications.

And Mike, this is Jon. Can I add two more dimensions just to add to that is in NetSapiens Club, we've also made some significant improvements in the API, so it becomes much easier for third parties to integrate into the platform. So they could just have more rapid deployment time when we go for interop between us and them. And then we've also announced support for the vCon standard for -- which takes your post conversation media and packages in a standardized format for things like conversation analysis. That makes it much easier for ecosystem partners with those type of applications into the platform. All of those are opportunities for us to just continue to monetize the base.

Okay. That makes sense. Great. And then lastly, how about just in terms of the telecom service business, any update on just attrition or churn? Is that kind of normal? Or how are you thinking about that at this point?

Yes. It's been relatively consistent. I think we're down a little bit this quarter [indiscernible].

Well, we are smart. You have to be prepared. I think we are guess where you put everything.

So our telecom churn rate is -- monthly average is 0.62. So that's an improvement from last quarter.

Your next question is coming from George Sutton from Craig-Hallum.

Jeff, you expressed a very similar commentary as you did on the call today at your annual meeting relative to the economic challenges and the higher rates and that some of that having the impact on your upgrade orders. I just want to get a little more granular if possible. I don't see the struggle in the economy you're seeing from a GDP or from an employment perspective. I certainly see the rates. Is it more the rate dynamic than the economy overall that is having this influence? Just curious what we need to...

Yes, George, sorry [indiscernible]. It is more the rates, because many of our licensees finance upgrade orders. Last year, when interest rates were much lower, they were willing to take much higher upgrades. Right now, they are holding cash because they are concerned about interest. I think, the economy is going to be where the economy is, but I think there is a little more uncertainty as to where we are going to be next year, that some people are holding back cash for that reason too. But I would agree with you, George, that it is Mike, excuse me. That it is primarily [indiscernible] that it is primarily interest rate driven because of a large number of our licensees who finance upgrades.

Okay. And then just one other thing on the -- it seems like a lot of the licensees that you're bringing over from Metaswitch specifically versus BroadSoft. Can you just give us an updated analysis of what the opportunity is by both those groups?

Well, we cannot give you the total number of what the opportunity is because both of those are private companies. So the amount of people on their platforms, we don't know. I'll let Doug answer that, but we think the opportunity is probably larger for Metaswitch because they are going through many changes. There are clearly opportunities on BroadSoft but they are not updating their platform. But Doug can give you a little more detail.

Yes. The statistics that we used, George, are the statistics that were out there when both were acquired. So I think when Metaswitch was acquired 1.5 years ago, they talked about 800 licensees that are using the Metaswitch platform. And BroadSoft when they were acquired versus talking about 1,200 licensees using that platform. So those are the numbers that we think are probably fairly close to those numbers now. And both of those numbers may have seen some losses over the course of the last two years with migrations, especially since we picked up quite a few of them from both platforms. So there's still a tremendous opportunity out there in the pipeline that we're talking to, has got quite a few from both platforms.

And, this is Jon. Let me add one quick dimension on the Meta versus BroadSoft to amplify your first question, which is what we're seeing a little bit more now with the order sizing from those partners is they're -- they're coming over with full intent to migrate their base over time. Those projects take longer. But because they are being a little bit more conservative financially, the initial order necessarily does not include all of the sessions or the capacity that they would need to migrate their base. When you are asking the second-level questions about what has impacted the order size and upgrades and things like that it's not the -- it's the timing and sizing-related question. It is not a lack of opportunity or lack of addressable base. Some of these that we have added have substantially very large addressable bases that they intend to move to us over time. They are just starting with a smaller tranche in their initial order to get started on the platform, and then plan to incrementally add licenses to move that base over time.

George, I could speak from experience. We have two platforms running and the cost to manage two platforms is excessive. You almost need two staffs. You need two groups of people, you need different customer service, you need different engineering. So make no mistake, when a customer has decided that they're going to put all new customers on the NetSapiens platform, they are fully intending to migrate their existing customers onto it. They know the period of time, I do not. But I do know it is not a sustainable economic model to maintain two platforms.

Your next question is coming from Scott Buck from Titan Partners.

First, on R&D spend, picked up a little bit in the quarter, but I'm curious, is that enough to fund Flow, CAIRO and the AI road map? Or should we expect R&D intensity to rise as we move into 2027?

I would not expect R&D to rise significantly. It may rise a slight bit, but we have already put all the resources that we deem necessary into Flow.

Okay. Perfect. That's helpful. And then I wanted to ask about equipment financing receivables and contract costs have both risen fairly sharply. One, is this financing a deliberate strategy to win deals? And how should we think about its working capital and cash flow impact?

Yes. So the equipment financing receivable is related to the desktop device. So when we rent out or lease out, if you will, the device with a monthly reoccurring payment, we equate for that and account for that as a sales-type lease. And so we have sold the device, but they're paying it over time. So we recognize the revenue upfront as a sales-type lease and we have a receivable for those payments that are coming in with the monthly service. So they're paying $2 a phone each month for that device. And so over time, we'll recognize -- we'll collect that receivable. So as we put more phones out there, that's why that balance continues to grow.

Okay. That's helpful, Ron. And then last thing, I just want to follow up on the Flow preview at the User Group Meeting. On monetization, the model there, it's a new SKU. It's just an upgrade provide some pricing uplift. What is the monetization model, I guess?

I'm not fully sure I understood your question answer.

I got it, Scott. So NetSapiens Flow is the next major release of our platform. But one of the quotes we had was from one of our licensees with that's not an upgrade. It's not just another version, it's a new platform. There's monetization. So all of our licensees will be eligible to receive this under their universal session licensing. However, we built into the platform several opportunities for additional monetization, the things we've talked about in this call with the improvement of the integration into third-party applications that have additional costs associated with an integration of our marketplace that we released earlier this year that makes it really frictionless for people to do things like do a mobile number, mobile device integration with one click from -- to a native SIM on their mobile device and much more. So kind of part of the -- everybody will have the ability to deploy NetSapiens Flow as part of their agreement with us. But within that, there's many areas that we've looked at how do we get much more uplift in our average revenue per user through AI applications and other things, and we've made it easier to enable those.

Your next question is coming from Josh Nichols from B. Riley Securities.

This is Matthew on for Josh. To start off on a higher level, I'm just wondering what you're thinking about organic growth heading into 2027 and what the biggest levers there are?

Well, as I've said previously, Matthew, the biggest unknown is what interest rates are going to be, because that has a big impact on organic growth. When I get a little more clarity on the economy, I'll answer that question. Right now, I'm not prepared to give guidance on 2027 organic growth until I see where the economy is going. I don't want to be one of the hundreds of CEOs this week who had pulled back guidance. So -- we're going to take a wait and see. But do understand that everyone in this room and everyone at this company continues to target double-digit organic growth. That is our internal goal. I'm going to have to wait to see where the economy goes before I'm going to make a projection on.

And in terms of AI and conversational intelligence, I'm just wondering how that's priced and does it bundle with CAIRO?

Yes, it's going to be a usage-based type pricing structure. So for our average size customer, that could be anywhere from a couple of hundred dollars to a couple of thousand dollars per month if it's heavy usage. So if you look at what conversational intelligence allows us to do, it records all the conversation to give you call summaries. It uses AI to have trigger -- actionable triggers based on what's going on in the conversation. So depending on how large the company's organization is, how many calls they're receiving, how many calls are recording and summarizing, it's going to determine that price point. But it could be very similar to CAIRO, where it adds upwards of 35% to 50%, or possibly even more, depending on how much traffic that organization is getting.

Great. Great color. And on ESI, ESI looked like it was a touch lighter sequentially. Was there anything timing related there? And how are you thinking about that looking to get ESI back to a strong grower?

For ESI, the business historically has grown similar to our telecommunication services segment prior to the acquisition, in that 7% to 8% growth. One-time items, though, do fluctuate from one quarter to the next, as we've discussed many times on this call. Usually the variable is the one-time components that fluctuate from quarter to quarter. And they can take it down a percent or they can take it up a percent. It's just going to fluctuate. No, we're very pleased by the sales activity and the strong bookings during the quarter, and we think it's still a great acquisition.

Okay. Great. Last one for me is just on M&A. I'm wondering if there's any update on the pipeline and if the user group meeting have sparked any acquisition conversations with potential licensees.

I obviously won't get into specifics, but yes, it did spark some additional conversations and the pipeline is strong. It's more on us determining what is the best fit and the best economic impact for us.

Your next question is coming from Inigo Alonso from Stoic Capital.

Congratulations on the very strong results for the quarter. I have two questions on the NetSapiens side and then two more on the AI side of the business. On the NetSapiens side, due to the opportunity created by BroadSoft and Metaswitch, what are you seeing among the smaller players? Has the competitive landscape become tougher over the last year? I'm seeing incumbents that are very well funded. So I wanted to get your sense on that. And the other question that I have on the NetSapiens side is how many of your licensees have a run rate annual revenue of more than $10 million currently with the latest additions?

Okay, let me start backwards. Are you asking us what our licensees' revenues are? Because we don't track that. We don't have that information. Of course, if you are asking if any of them have done $10 million in revenue with us, I can answer that, but I can't answer what our licensees' revenue is unless they were a public company and had to disclose it.

Yes, let's just focus on that end. That's like, how many have done more than $10 million revenue?

I don't think any of our licensees have done $10 million a year in revenue with us. Is that accurate, Ron?

With us?

With us, yes.

Okay. I meant that if you have visibility to their own revenue.

Again, as I explained, we do not know what our licensees do in revenue. We only know what they use on our platform.

We have 250-plus licensees using our platform, and they range anywhere from a couple of million dollars in revenue to our largest, which is probably larger than that. So, there is quite a few in between there. So, we think, just guesstimating, we think that our average licensee is probably doing in the range of around $10 million a year.

Okay. On the first side of the question, about incumbents on the smaller side of the SaaS offering due to the opportunity created by the two biggest players, how has the landscape changed in the last two years among those smaller players?

Yeah. Inigo, this is Jon. Thanks for that. We track our wins and losses really closely, and we actually still continue to see a lot of the smaller platforms that maybe don't scale as well, and the incumbents as being a place where we get a lot of our licensees from. We said before in the call, virtually nobody starts down on this journey toward unified communications as a service with us. They're all coming from somewhere else. We don't see increased losses to any -- I can just straight out, to any incumbent. What we see is just the timeframe in which people are choosing to make a decision, and if they delay a decision, or whether they choose to move forward. So we've actually had a pretty favorable improvement in the competitive landscape with, as we've discussed in this call, licensees that are coming from much larger platforms than ours historically choosing to deploy the NetSapiens platform. We've seen growth in the upper end of the market that we're addressing and not seeing as significant additional competition at the lower end of the market.

On the AI side, two questions. The first one, of the new revenue that you are signing on the UCaaS side, how much is the percentage of revenue coming from CAIRO? And I also want to know about the rationale for having an external AI development team.

Okay. We have not disclosed CAIRO revenue yet because we are just now moving it to our base. So I've already -- as I said several times, I don't expect it to be material. I expect we should have some numbers for you when we meet to discuss year-end results. At this point, I don't have any numbers we're ready to disclose. And I'm sorry, what's the other part of your question?

The rationale for having an external AI development team for your applications.

We have a small AI team who works with the developers we have to detail what we need, to do the checking and to check the security on it after it's been delivered to us. For us to employ an entire AI development team, it would completely wreck the budget and doesn't make economic sense for a company of our size. We have licensees in our AI teams, and those end up going on our platform. We have outside developers work with our AI developers, and those will end up on the company stores, just like CAIRO, and will end up being released to our customers.

Yeah, as we mentioned earlier, we've got 22 of our 66 vendors in our EVP program today currently developing AI solutions. We get the best of both worlds. We're developing some solutions in-house. We've got 22 vendors currently developing AI solutions -- specifically for our platform, so it's a win-win for us.

Just to be clear, Inigo, our developers are leveraging AI tools for their work, and there are also, in NetSapiens Flow, several components and items that are, I would say, AI-driven, that maybe they're not significant standalone applications, but just in the improvement code, the way it works, the way customers can find things, the way our licensees can give us feedback. We're leveraging all of that. It's just that standalone application. We have a lot of folks that are interested in developing and targeting our licensee community because it is growing, and they continue to grow at a substantial rate that is greater than the rate of the market. People want to bring their offers to the NetSapiens platform to deliver AI applications to our licensees and users.

But keep in mind, our business model, which is very useful in this regard, when we have engineers who work directly with customers and engineers who are developing products, they talk to each other. We know what our customers want, we know what our customers need, and that is what our AI development team is working both with internally and our external developers.

Thank you. There are no further questions in queue at this time. I would now like to pass the floor back to Mr. Jeff Korn, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Crexendo, for closing remarks.

Thank you, Tom, and thank everybody who took the time today to join us on election day, and listen. I think it was an exceptionally strong quarter, with, more importantly, indications of what can be an exceptionally strong growth metric for us. I look forward to sharing our results with you when we meet in March for our Q4 results, and for any additional information that we disclose along the way. Thank you for your time, thank you for your attention. Have a great afternoon.

Thank you. This does conclude today's conference call. You may disconnect at this time, and have a wonderful day. Thank you once again for your participation.