Conference Transcript - NYAX 2026-06-02

Chris Kennedy, Analyst — William Blair

All right. Great. Well, thanks everyone for joining us today, both in person and online. My name is Chris Kennedy. I'm a research analyst at William Blair covering the fintech and payment space. For a complete list of research disclosures and or potential conflicts of interest, please visit our website at williamblair.com. Next up, we have NIACS from the company. We have the CFO, Sagit Menor, and the Chief Strategy Officer, Aaron Greenberg. NIACS was founded in 2005. They came public in Israel in 2021, and they were listed in the U.S. in 2022. The company is a leading provider of software and payment solutions that's primarily focused on the unattended retail market. We've been tracking this company since 2018. Internal execution has been strong. It's been fun to watch the company evolve. So with that, let me pass it over to the

Sagit Manor, CFO

team. Hi, everyone. Can you hear me well? I hope you do. I'm Sagit Manor, NIAX CFO, and with me, Aaron Greenberg, our Chief Strategy Officer. We'll take you through the company overview, and later on, if you have any questions, we'll be happy to answer. So NIAX, who we are? We are the only global company in the unattended space. And what do I mean by unattended? It's when you stand in front of a machine it's a vending machine massage chair kiddie ride laundromat car wash ev chargers parking and many many more we are actually in more than 44 different verticals and you can see some of the pictures on on this slide so this is just a view for 2025 i'll share a few points from q126 as well you can see that we are almost in every country possible we're We're selling our product more than 120 countries. We have today 120,000 customers. We have one and a half million devices out there. And we'll talk about the market opportunity later on. We reached 400 plus million dollars of revenue in 2025. And I'll share in a second a few more items about the beautiful 30%-ish growth year over year that we're able to show in the last five years since we went to the IPO and become public both in Tel Aviv and on NASDAQ. We are very proud of our margins, 48%. We finished Q1 with almost 49% margins. We'll talk a little bit later on about the business model and how we reached the hardware as well as the carrying revenue. In 2025, more than $6 billion of transactions went through our devices. So you can understand the volume and the number of transactions that we need to deal with. And you still, when you go to a vending machine, you want to get the Coke that you're trying to buy or the snack in a nanosecond. We have a very high net retention rate of 120% with a very low churn rate of less than 3%. So the stickiness with the customers is very high. A little bit maybe more about the revenue. So you can see the significant growth that we were able to achieve year over year. As I said, around 30% year over year growth. both we have the hardware that we sell on a one-time basis, but it's the lock-in, the enabler for the recurring revenue, which you can see it's around 75% of our revenue. Coming again from 120,000 customers, we bring almost 5,000 customers a quarter, creating one and a half million devices that creating that recurring machine, if you will. so very predictable and now profitable business that we are very proud of if i look at the jumping to the adjusted so as chris mentioned from you know from a um or will mention uh from a loss that we we were um or adjusted negative in a few years we were able to turn around and not just to talk about growth, talk about profitable growth. And today we are also profitable on a net income basis. We finished the year last year 2025 with 15% adjusted EBITDA. We are aiming the guidance for this year is around 17%. And we have a very high aspiration to get to 2028 and to be a billion dollar revenue company with 50% margin and 30% adjusted EBITDA. And we will talk later about the way to get there. So a little bit of who our customers are. So most of our customers, and you can see that on the left side, are small businesses. And when I say small, I mean they have 1 to 15 devices. So very small. Usually it's their passive income. So they work during the day somewhere. And then this is kind of their pension retirement plan. and the reason why they come to us because we provide them the end-to-end solution they come to niax and they get everything they need the hardware the management suite and telemetry and of course the payment processing and we take a portion of of those edge a revenue stream and that becomes a revenue on the right side you can see the global reach so we are as i said the only global company in this space, around 40% in the US of our revenue, around 30% if you take Europe, and we call it Europe plus UK. Recent acquisition that we have done a couple of years ago in Brazil is now around 7% of our revenue. We have around 10% in, here it's 8%, in Q1 it was 10% Australia and New Zealand and the rest of the world. So really, again, selling our product in more than 120 countries. We accept more than 80 payment methods. Our product speaks more than 50 languages. So really relevant to the different 44 verticals we are providing. Thank you.

Aaron Greenberg, Head of Investor Relations

So maybe if we talk about the actual opportunity now. Now, with regards to the total addressable market, we think that there's still a lot of white space with regards to this industry. It's one of the few remaining payments industries that is still operating either on a cash environment in many parts of the world, given the micro ticket transactions, or does not have an actual cashless reader on the machines. From what we've seen, about 45 million plus machines are out there right now today, of which we only see, you know, call it 10, 12 million machines that are actually penetrated today with connected devices, meaning that there's significant growth opportunity still in this segment. And we show on the left-hand side the cashless growth opportunity over the next several years. But this only captures one part of the actual value chain, which I want to talk about a little bit more. We are one of the few players, if not the only player, that is truly vertically integrated in this segment across the sphere. meaning we have our own hardware it's our own ip it's our own server infrastructure our own payment gateway our own software everything is end-to-end being managed by niax and what does that mean why is it important because we are able to be that single source uh to the customer that single partner to the customer which is so important right now especially in the ai age you know where the customers want to have fewer and fewer partners to deal with and the person who can provide the full value chain is generally coming in as an advantage even if they end up being a little bit more expensive so what are some of the barriers to entry there's a lot of barriers to entry in this industry first and foremost we're hardware enabled company so while 70 you know almost 75 percent of our revenues is recurring revenue we do have a hardware aspect to our business each of these machines are connected we've connected with over 3 000 different types of machines around the world over the last 20 years and this is not something that happens overnight this is something that we have to go with each individual oem manufacturer each individual customer and make sure that these that the communication protocol is happening in the correct way because once you put a credit card reader one of these iot devices on one of these machines, you have to assume that it can sit there for seven to 10 years and not break. If it breaks, you lose revenue, unlike in a retail storefront where if the credit card reader breaks, you go and flip it out for another one and you mail it back or whatever. You could be without any revenues for days or weeks. So reliability and uptime are incredibly important. We also, unlike most fintechs out there, we have really embraced the compliance regulatory aspect of the business of being a payment institution. What does that mean? We've spent a lot of time, a lot of money, and a lot of effort building the compliance infrastructure across the world, having electronic money institution licenses in places like Europe, UK, and other jurisdictions. And what does this do? It allows us to control the money flow at the end of the day. Again, it goes back to being fully vertical as a segment, because if we can manage and onboard the customer and provide all the services to the customer, it allows us to be much more efficient, which is a win-win to the customer at the end of the day. It allows us to be cheaper with the customer, but also allows us to provide higher quality to the customer. So with respect to how are we selling in general, the payments is first and foremost. What are we trying to do? We want to make it really easy for the operator to accept any type of payment method imaginable. We don't want them to think about, oh, can I accept PayPal or can I accept Klarna or UnionPay or Venmo or whatever the case is? Can I take Discover? you know these are questions we've already dealt with over the years and have spent the time to actually get these integrations done so that the only thing they need to think about is do I want to accept cashless payments yes or no after that though we provide a whole suite of additional services on top to the operator to allow them to better operate their business and you know just to give a little bit of perspective we have found that in some of these segments we can decrease their operational costs by up to 20 percent while increasing their revenues by 25 percent why is that because like i said each of these credit card readers are an iot device meaning that in the vending industry for example we can help them with route management with supply chain management give them instant insights if the machine is going offline uh you know if a kid goes and pulls out the plug in the back of a ice cream machine that they get instant notification that it went offline. Otherwise, after a few hours, you lose hundreds of dollars of inventory, right? So these are things that, you know, they might sound really simple, but it's really helped operators over the years. You know, we have another case, you know, a company in the US that we've worked with now for many years where prior to them working with us, it took an average of five to six days for them to even know that the machine was broken before it got fixed and that's because you know when a machine breaks you have two ways to know otherwise you either show up and see that it's broken or you hope that someone goes and calls customer support which never happens you know to go and say that this machine is offline right when it was cash exactly when it was cash only exactly so once it's become an iot device now they get this more actionable insight they can know in real time they can get it fixed much sooner so with regards to uh you know the foundation of niax we are an automated self-service company at the core meaning that most of our business operations is payments for the unattended industry whether it's vending or ev charging or fueling or parking however we're providing ecosystems essentially so best way to think about it is think if you're at a gas station you have a lot of different ways to do unattended payment it could be a car wash it can be the fuel pump, it can be the decharging station, it can be a vending machine outside, it can be the air vac, or it could be inside the convenience store. These are all points of sale that we're one of the only people that can say, you know what, we can supply you all of that. One reconciliation, one pay in, one pay out, instead of having to manage multiple contracts, which, you know, enterprise customers, larger enterprise customers might have a lot of back-office resources but these small medium-sized businesses don't. If I have a gas station chain of 10-20 gas stations the operating cost of going and managing all the payouts and everything and making sure these all reconcile and making sure everything is managed properly it's a nightmare and it costs a lot of money. So this is what we're trying to solve basically for our customer. With regards to the value chain we provide a suite of different products for our customers like Sagit mentioned we're in 44 plus different unattended verticals but we also have a suite of hardware products to meet all of these vertical needs both for larger machines and for smaller machines and depending on the region so we have on the bottom we have the embedded Uno mini which is more meant for low power and lower cost units think like a slow AC charger EV charger or a power bank machine for example where a sub $100 cost reader is important to be able to meet the requirements of the OEM to make sure that their bomb is cheap enough that they that they can sell to their customers and then you have the vPost series above which is more like a $300 to $400 average cost device and And this is a full suite of full payment services, contactless, EMV chip, etc. But also being able to support loyalty in advertising and being able to support pin on glass, which is the new device there as well for some markets like the European market where pin on glass is a requirement in a lot of cases. EV charging is a really interesting one and it's one that often comes up in conversations with us this is a segment that we got involved with close to 10 years ago at the very beginning we took a stance that EV charging was going to become important at some point in the future and we decided to do integrations with public fast charging OEMs very early on you know with big partnerships such as Electrify America and EVgo that have been customers of ours for many years and and many others around the US and the rest of the world. But what is our strategy here? It goes back to all the other segments that we're looking at. How can we further verticalize in each of these segments so that we can provide a suite of end-to-end services for the customer? And not every customer is going to want the full suite of services. Some of them might only want the payment. Some of them might want the payment and management. Some of them might want financing solutions. But what we want is to be able to give them that offering and allow the customer to choose exactly what services they want as long as they're doing payments with us, which is, again, the core of the business. But this is a very fast-growing segment for us. We did an acquisition at the end of last year as well that's helped us in this industry a lot with having a more mature software solution. And we believe that EV charging will continue to be a growth driver of our business for years to come. You know, I'll go now to the financial outlook for Sagit. Yes.

Sagit Manor, CFO

So maybe just to, you know, talk a little bit about the future. So this year we are guiding for $5, $10 to $5, $20 million of revenue, which is around 27% to 30% growth year over year, with 22% to 25% organic growth, which is a beautiful for growth compared to, you know, to even other companies in the space. And then speaking about adjusted dividend, we're talking about 85 to 90 million dollars, which is around 17%. And we also guided free cash flow. So that's a 40% ratio to adjusted dividend. And we do have, as I said, the 2028, we now call it midterm. we actually talked about it for the last almost five years since we went to the IPO so it was a very you know kind of a vision knowing the industry knowing the company knowing your product right in the ability and and and as as Aaron presented really a blue ocean in that sense from a market opportunity standpoint we just need to get to all those cash machine and convert them to cashless um so we're speaking about to reach in 2028 a billion dollar revenue company with 50 margin and 30 adjusted EBITDA and there's a few things that we are doing you know over the years and in the next few years in order to get there I think with that um maybe we'll open it for questions

Chris Kennedy, Analyst — William Blair

great Chris yeah feel free to don't be shy feel free to ask questions but maybe I'll just start it out i mean as you said you operate in over 40 different verticals you think about traditional vending you think about very low ticket items but now you walk around an airport and you can buy 200 headphones out of a vending machine and then you have ev or smart coolers what have you just talk about those different dynamics what does it mean to your business and the growth

Aaron Greenberg, Head of Investor Relations

yeah so maybe i'll start uh you know we have been trying to find ways to you know continue to expand horizontally our expertise and unattended and most of these newer verticals are higher ticket transactions than what our historical average has been you know we used to be about two dollars a transaction now we're close to around 240 per transaction and growing uh and that comes from going more into areas like EV charging that can have an $18, $20 ATV. It can be car washes. It can be arcade gaming. Some of these other segments that are continuing to raise the ATV that we're doing. But from our perspective, we're agnostic to the transaction value of the product. What we really specialize in is high frequency micro ticket transactions across the unattended space and trying to build an ecosystem around that.

Chris Kennedy, Analyst — William Blair

Thank you for that. Device growth has been very strong over the last two quarters. Can you just talk about what's driven that strength and then when will that kind of transfer into recurring revenues?

Sagit Manor, CFO

So from a device perspective, indeed, you know, I always say don't look at the one or two quarters, look at a year because we do have seasonality a little bit and we have some cyclicality as well, but we're very proud of almost 44%, 46%. I think there was Q1 hardware revenue versus the previous quarter. Some of it relates to, so maybe a step back, every three to four years, there are tectonic changes that happen in the industry. Our product can live nine, 10 years even. However, there's always new regulations that comes. If you think about it yourself, from a swipe to a chip to a contactless, these are hardware changes. We call them tectonic changes, that even if the same machine operator has to touch the machine and replace the device, and that's more hardware revenue for us. So specifically, Q4 and Q1 of this year were heavily influenced by the Vipos media, our new flag product, a pin on glass product for the European market penetration because there was a 2G, 3G conversion to 4G. So it was a perfect timing to introduce our new product that has a lot of other features and stuff that relevant for the European market. It's probably three or four years to go until it reaches the US simply because of market needs.

Aaron Greenberg, Head of Investor Relations

And I'll just say that the pin-on-glass is also really important for higher-value verticals because over 30 euros in Europe, you need to have a pin-on-glass device. So for EV charging, for example, it's incredibly important, and it's kept us from really accelerating growth in some of these higher emerging segments in Europe historically, but over the last few quarters, we've really started to see a pickup in the European and UK markets, which is really nice to see so far.

Sagit Manor, CFO

of course. So sure. So from a go-to-market perspective, if you are, you know, we kind of look at it as a, you know, as a, as a pyramid. If you have 3000 and more devices as a customer, you're going to probably be reached by one of our 12, 13 offices. One of our sales executives will be speaking with you. If you are between 15 to 3,000, you're gonna be reached out by our distributors, which is our extended hand. We have around 40 that are dedicated to the annotated market. They are sitting in the countries and they are highly trained, highly, you know, kind of probably they only sell NIACs and they're gonna give our customers the same love and support and attention that the large customers receive. And lastly, if you're a small business, a nano merchant, right? When you buy one or two or five, you can actually go to the website and buy that. Having said that, what we have done, if you saw what Aaron presented from a market opportunity standpoint, so there's 48 million machines out there today, growing to 60 million by 2028. how do we approach the net new machines that are coming mostly from China is that we have a large office in China that speaks with more than a thousand OEMs so when the machine the vending machine the massage chair the kiddie right the laundromat comes from China it's already come from the NIAX device so we have for existing retrofit right the people on the ground you know selling doing the the cash to cashless conversion. And if it's a net new, we already have that covered through China. So when you walk to, let's say, an airport, okay, I joined NIAX in June of 21. And 4th of July, I went with my spouse to his family in Cleveland, Ohio, we landed. And there's, you know I step out of the plane and there's a vending machine of CVS next to it there's a vending with the NIACS device next to it there's a Lego vending machine with a different NIACS device as you can see there's a few so I called our NIACS LLC a CEO NIACS US and I'm telling you wow I saw the NIACS everywhere and she said oh you missed the massage chair with with the NIACS device now in that case you don't know if the machine was already coming from China with the NIACS device is it the CVS or the Lego company contacted us and bought from us right they are the customer and all it's even regulation the airport made them only by NIACS because of regulation and security and whatnot so I always say that we are all over the same in all over the place in a good way we're gonna capture the sale and as much as we can and now we have you know for for a few years now we have the infrastructure we are in all of those countries we are in all of those verticals to really capture that a

Chris Kennedy, Analyst — William Blair

cash-to-cashless conversion maybe just to follow up on that can you just talk about new geographies and how you enter new markets generally sure so we we

Aaron Greenberg, Head of Investor Relations

enter new markets in a few different ways I'd say that most of the time when we enter a new market, we start with the distributor that we trust to work with, build out the market. Eventually, in some cases, we'll strategically buy the distributor and bring that distribution in-house as well, like we did in the Netherlands last year. And we've done in many countries actually, including the US where originally it was a distributor and then we bought the distributor in 2014 and been a direct sales office since. uh we've also uh gone the path of buying a foundational company with a strong management team on the ground like we did in brazil is a really good example uh two years a little over two years ago now uh we bought vm technologia uh for the strong management team and the uh you know in the device space and the uh and the presence and uh brand reputation and then over time we bring our technology or payments etc into the market and you know the question there generally is you know could we speed up a few years by getting into that market by buying you know by buying someone there that's you know not a huge company that someone that comes with the presence or you know or should we build it more organically and we we make that decision depending on the country you know we've also decided the third avenue is just deciding to open up the office ourself which we did in Singapore you know at the beginning of this year we're working on the UAE right now that should be done very soon have a direct sales office there. And we've been working on other countries as well. Real quickly, it looks like we have two

Chris Kennedy, Analyst — William Blair

minutes left. Embedded finance is something you guys are focused on. Can you just talk about kind of how you're thinking about that opportunity and what you guys are doing to capture it?

Aaron Greenberg, Head of Investor Relations

Yeah, so again, like I said at the beginning, payments is at the center of our business. You know, our customers, our core customers are payments customers first. That being said, we're trying to be able to offer the full suite of financial products basically to those to those customers we already provide you know the software services for analytics provide you know financial pains and payouts and reconciliation but if they want merchant cash advance for example or they want to be issued a prepaid card or credit card they have to go to either you know you know a traditional bank like a JPMorgan Chase or a credit union or whatever the regional bank, whatever the case may be. We think that we have the opportunity to capture more of the wallet share with each of these existing customers. The idea of embedded banking for us is not to go and set up a completely new vertical that is going to be going after a new subset of customers. It's actually the opposite. We want to be able to provide additional services to our existing customers, which we feel is a win-win for those customers because of all the data that we receive on the payment side of the business, and we understand our customers very well, we can offer them more attractive rates, we can offer them more attractive pricing, and the risk will ultimately be lower because we have the receivables, you know, the payment receivables as collateral.

Sagit Manor, CFO

Not mentioning that it will obviously help us with reaching the 2028 targets because because these are additional revenue opportunities that basically upsell to our existing customers, more features, more functionality, more services, and so it's a win-win situation for both of us.

Chris Kennedy, Analyst — William Blair

Last few seconds, real quickly on margins, your long-term target, 30% EBITDA margins, you've made a lot of progress towards that, just what gets you to that 30%?

Sagit Manor, CFO

So, it's a combination of continuing to grow the 30 plus percent in the revenue, cost efficiency we already have shown in the last few years how we can control cost and cost cannot grow more than 15 to 20 percent on an annual basis, continue to improve also margins. We showed between hardware margins that went from 25 to almost 40 percent the quarter before to margins of a payment that went, again, from 27% to around 40%. So really working on all expense areas, both on the gross margin to the cost efficiency and continue to do what we do.

Aaron Greenberg, Head of Investor Relations

I'd just say that adding more efficiency per headcount as well. So, you know, trying to get to the, you know, million dollars per revenue per headcount, per employee headcount, which has been a goal of our founder, CEO for a few years now, which we're making steady progress towards. But, you know, we're taking a lot of measures to get there, to build efficiency in the organization, including a lot of implementation of AI over the last year or two now. And we're already starting to see a lot of the results of that.

Chris Kennedy, Analyst — William Blair

So with that, we'll leave it there. There is a breakout upstairs. Thank you very much, everyone.