Research Solutions Inc

NASDAQ:RSSS

Earnings Call Analysis

Strong Revenue Growth and Strategic Sales Changes Position Research Solutions for Future Success

Research Solutions reported a 20% increase in total revenues to $12 million and a remarkable 67% rise in Platform revenue for Q1 2025, driven by acquisitions and strong customer demand. Adjusted EBITDA climbed to $1.3 million, improving margins, and annual recurring revenue grew by 60% to $17.6 million. Despite lower B2C growth impacted by seasonality, early signs in Q2 indicate recovery. The company is enhancing its sales strategy with a new Chief Revenue Officer, aiming to strengthen execution in a competitive landscape. Management remains optimistic, projecting continued revenue growth and higher profitability, with expectations to push gross margins above 50% within 12-15 months.

A Promising Start to Fiscal Year 2025

Research Solutions kicked off fiscal year 2025 with a strong performance, reporting a remarkable 20% increase in total revenues, climbing to $12 million compared to the same quarter last year. This growth is a clear sign of the company’s ongoing financial scalability and its ability to adapt to market challenges. Importantly, platform subscription revenue surged 67% to $4.3 million, driven by strategic acquisitions and an increase in deployments.

Recurring Revenue Grows Significantly

Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) experienced substantial growth, rising 60% year-over-year to $17.6 million, with business-to-business (B2B) contributing $12.2 million and business-to-consumer (B2C) at $5.4 million. The consistent rise in ARR reflects strong customer retention and upselling initiatives, despite facing some seasonal fluctuations particularly in the B2C segment where summer months pose challenges due to academic cycles.

Gross Margins Set New Records

The company achieved a record blended gross margin of 47.9%, marking a 780 basis point improvement over last year's first quarter. This improvement stems from the company’s shift towards higher-margin platform services. With a strong forecast, management expects blended gross margins to surpass 50% within the next 12 to 15 months. Platform margins stood impressively at 87.4%, driven by reduced personnel costs and lowered hosting expenses.

Adjusted EBITDA Improves Sharply

For the quarter, Research Solutions posted an adjusted EBITDA of $1.3 million, translating to a margin of 10.6%, a remarkable turnaround from a negative EBITDA in the previous year. Over the trailing twelve months, adjusted EBITDA approached $4 million, reinforcing the operational efficiency and profitability of the company. Management anticipates a sequential decline in adjusted EBITDA for the second quarter due to anticipated holiday seasonality impacts on transaction revenue, but expects a rebound in subsequent quarters.

Customer Activity and Churn Management

Despite some setbacks, Research Solutions is seeing early signs of improvement in its customer acquisition strategies. The company faced challenges with higher churn, primarily linked to customer acquisitions closing their operations, but notably, losses to competitors decreased significantly year-over-year. Management emphasizes ongoing efforts to enhance customer retention and reduce controllable churn factors, anticipating further improvements as the organization aligns its executing strategies.

Strategic Vision and Sales Enhancements

With a commitment to growth, Research Solutions recently appointed a new Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), aiming to standardize sales processes and drive accountability. The initial focus includes training sales teams and establishing a comprehensive sales framework. Additionally, the company is intent on leveraging its strong sales pipelines, forecasted at $2 million, to enhance B2B sales activity and capitalize on its competitive advantages.

Market Opportunities in Acquisitions

Management acknowledged a favorable shift in acquisition valuations and an increase in potential M&A opportunities. This strategic pivot allows Research Solutions to consider companies that align with its product strategy and can generate high cross-selling potential. The focus remains on acquiring businesses that can amplify organic growth and enhance existing service offerings.

Guidance for Future Growth

Looking ahead, while the company expects some impact from seasonal fluctuations that may affect the transaction business in Q2, management remains optimistic about achieving a record year. They anticipate adjusted EBITDA to improve further in Q3 and Q4, capitalizing on traditionally strong performance periods. Moreover, the robust performance metrics, such as the $5.1 million cash flow from operations over the past 12 months, underscore the strong financial foundation for upcoming growth strategies.

Earnings Call Transcript 2025-Q1

[Operator]

Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the Research Solutions, Inc. First Quarter Fiscal 2025 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Also, today's call is being recorded. Now at this time, I'll turn things over to Mr. Steven Hooser, Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

[Steven Hooser]

Thank you, Bo, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for Research Solutions First Quarter Fiscal Year 2025 Earnings Call. On the call with me today are Roy W. Olivier, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Bill Nurthen, Chief Financial Officer.



After the market closed this afternoon, the company issued a press release announcing its results for the first quarter fiscal of 2025. The release is available on the company's website at researchsolutions.com. Before Roy and Bill begin their prepared remarks, I would like to remind you that some of the statements made today are forward-looking and are made under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.



Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied due to a variety of factors. We refer you to Research Solutions' recent filings with the SEC for a more detailed discussion of the risks and uncertainties that could impact the company's future operating results and financial condition.



Also, on today's call, management will reference certain non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe provide useful information for investors. A reconciliation of those measures to GAAP measures is located in today's earnings press release as well. Finally, I would like to again remind everyone that this call will be recorded and made available for replay via a link on the company's website. I would now like to turn the call over to President and CEO, Roy Olivier. Roy?

[Roy Olivier, executive]

Thank you, Steven. Our first quarter results reflect the financial scalability of our model as our net income and adjusted EBITDA growth outpaced our top line on a year-over-year basis even when factoring in some onetime expenses from the prior year. Deployments in the quarter were below our historical range, but we are seeing growth rebound in the second quarter.



I'm particularly pleased to report a 20% increase in total revenues and a 67% increase in Platform revenue for the quarter, a 60% increase in ARR with B2B contributing $12.2 million and B2C contributing $5.4 million, an outstanding improvement in adjusted EBITDA and cash flows generated from operations of $1.3 million in EBITDA and $800,000 in cash flow, resulting in almost $4 million in adjusted EBITDA on a TTM basis and $5.1 million in cash flow in the same period.



Our first quarter deployments and incremental ARR were lower than average due to several factors, including lower B2C subscription revenue growth during the summer months when universities are out of season and the impact of the traditional European vacation period. As we enter the fall, our B2C subscriptions have materially picked up and our B2C subscription ARR is currently approaching $6 million. Net Platform deployments continue to be affected by a longer sales cycle where customers are increasing their due diligence periods and extending budgetary reviews. Under the surface, the new logo team hit their quarterly targets, but that was offset by higher-than-normal churn and lower productivity from the upsell team.



We saw higher-than-expected noncontrollable churn driven primarily by acquisitions of our customers and customers closing their business. That was over half of our churn. On a positive note, we lost fewer customers to competitors in Q1. My hope is that at the conclusion of this election provides some clarity for the near term and will allow for companies to make decisions as we approach the window for 2025 budgets to be finalized. I'll review some of the steps we're taking to improve our sales performance. But first, I'd like to pass it over to Bill to walk through our fiscal first quarter financial results in detail, and then I'll wrap it up with some comments and outlook for fiscal 2025. Bill?

[William Nurthen, executive]

Thank you, Roy, and good afternoon, everyone. Before I start, I would like to make a couple of reminders regarding year-over-year comparisons. First, for our prior fiscal year 2024, we had approximately 2 months of activity from Resolute AI, which closed on July 28, 2023. Second, in that same quarter, there was no impact from Scite as that transaction closed on December 1, 2023. Total revenue for the first quarter of fiscal 2025 was $12 million, a 20% increase from the first quarter of fiscal 2024. Our Platform subscription revenue increased 67% to $4.3 million.



The growth was primarily driven by the acquisition of Scite and a net increase of Platform deployments and upsells from last year. If you look at that growth from a pro forma perspective, assuming we had Resolute and Scite for the full quarter last year, the growth rate was roughly 27%.



Platform revenue accounted for about 36% of our total revenue for the quarter compared to approximately 26% in the prior year quarter. We ended the quarter with $17.6 million of Annual Recurring Revenue, or ARR, up 60% year-over-year which is comprised of roughly $12.2 million in B2B ARR and approximately $5.4 million in ARR associated with Scite's B2C Platform subscribers. On a pro forma basis, the year-over-year ARR growth was roughly 22%.



Sequential ARR growth in the quarter was modest with B2B ARR growing about $128,000 and B2C ARR growing roughly $68,000. We mentioned on our prior call that we expected lower growth to occur this quarter and that some of this was related to seasonality, primarily in our B2C business.



As Roy mentioned, I am happy to report that from a B2C perspective, we have seen that seasonality reverse as we entered the fall academic semester, and we are off to a strong start in B2C ARR growth for Q2.



Please see today's press release for how we define and use annual recurring revenue and other non-GAAP items. Transaction revenue for the first quarter was $7.7 million, a 3.4% increase from the prior year quarter. Our total active customer count for the quarter was 1,390 compared to 1,395 in the same period a year ago. Gross margin for the third quarter was 47.9%, a 780 basis point improvement over the first quarter of 2024 and once again, a new company record for blended gross margin. The increase is due to the ongoing revenue mix shift towards higher-margin Platforms business. In Q1, the Platforms business contributed almost two thirds of the gross profit.



As this mix shift continues, we are starting to see the reality of being able to push our blended gross margin above 50%, which we expect to happen in the next 12 to 15 months, if not sooner. Platform business recorded gross margin of 87.4%, a 210 basis point increase compared to the prior year quarter. The increase is primarily related to lower personnel costs and some steps we have taken to reduce our hosting costs. I will say this is a high result, and we may see this fall back slightly in future quarters. All things considered; however, we expect it will remain above 85%.



Gross margin in our Transaction business increased 140 basis points to 25.7%. The increase was primarily attributable to increased copyright revenues and pricing initiatives. Similar to Platform, this result was very strong for the quarter, and we may experience slightly lower results in future quarters, but still expect results above 24.5% in the near-term.



Total operating expenses in the quarter were $5.1 million, relatively flat to the prior year quarter. Last year's first quarter included approximately $1.2 million in acquisition and proxy-related expenses, but also did not have any impact from Scite and only 2 months of activity from Resolute. When you offset these two things, it basically translates into some very modest year-over-year growth in the SG&A expense base.



Our revenue mix shift continues to move in favor of the Platforms business and our blended gross margin continues to improve, and we are seeing that fall to the bottom line and generate cash flows for the business. Net income for the quarter was $669,000 or $0.02 per diluted share compared to a net loss of $988,000 or negative $0.04 per share in the prior year quarter. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $1.3 million, a 10.6% margin compared to negative $441,000 in the year ago quarter.



It is important to note that with respect to adjusted EBITDA, on a trailing 12-month basis, we have now generated just under $4 million of adjusted EBITDA, an 8.5% margin, and we expect that result to improve as we complete our second quarter.



Turning to our balance sheet. Cash and cash equivalents as of September 30, 2024, was $6.9 million versus $6.1 million on June 30, 2024. We generated $843,000 in positive cash flow from operations compared to a cash burn of $756,000 in the prior year quarter. Also important to note is that over the last 12 months, we have now generated over $5.1 million in cash flow from operations.



On a trailing 12-month basis, our cash flow is outpacing our adjusted EBITDA by a factor of approximately 1.3x, which we believe is a good indicator of the strong quality of our earnings. As of quarter end, there were no outstanding borrowings under our revolving line of credit, and we have no long-term debt or liabilities.



As we look ahead, I think Q2 will be another strong quarter for earnings. I will note, however, that there is some seasonality negatively affecting the Transactions business in Q2 given the impact of the holidays. And we should also see some increase in SG&A expense from Q1 as we had some delays in hiring newly budgeted headcount in the quarter.



As a result, we will likely see an adjusted EBITDA result that while being an increase year-over-year is sequentially down a bit from Q1. This will step back up again in Q3 and Q4, which are seasonally our strongest quarters for Transactions as well as overall profitability and cash flow. Overall, we feel like we have reached an inflection point in the SaaS revenue mix shift of our business. In addition to demonstrating the profit potential of our business model, this increasing profitability and cash flow is better positioning us to take advantage of strategic opportunities such as M&A going forward.



Overall, we are pleased with the result for Q1 and look forward to posting another record year of earnings.



I'll now turn the call back to Roy. Roy?

[Roy Olivier, executive]

Thanks, Bill. As we approach the 1-year anniversary of the acquisition of Scite, we continue to be pleased with its growth and the upsell opportunities it presents within our platform. We recently hired Sefton Cohen as our new Chief Revenue Officer. Sefton comes with a proven track record of building high-performance sales teams generating significant ARR growth. He will help us create a strategic and standardized framework around a common language, improving sales process and accountability as a professional sales organization.



Our entire team will go through training starting in January as we roll out the new process. We're excited to have Sefton join us, and we're very confident in his ability to help us execute moving forward.



Turning to M&A. We have started to see valuations come down and have seen an increase in opportunities, including multiple inbound opportunities we've recently evaluated. This increase in deal flow is primarily due to more realistic valuation expectations and the recent Transaction executions of Resolute and Scite demonstrating our ability to get deals closed as well as our stronger balance sheet, thanks to our increased profitability and cash flow. We continue to evaluate M&A opportunities and remain highly focused on looking at businesses that have the right valuation and fits into either our product strategy or something where we can unlock cross-selling opportunities to create higher organic growth. Confidence in our organic plan remains high.



Turning back to B2B sales. We did have some nice successes in the quarter. A few of those include Nkarta Therapeutics, which is an Article Galaxy Pro Plus Scite deployment. It was a competitive takeaway initiated by a past Article Galaxy user who suggested that Nkarta look at our solutions.



The win was due to the trust and past experience with Research Solutions. Vaxcyte, which is an Article Galaxy Pro deployment, this was also a past user that had used AG and our true previous companies. They looked at competition during the trial period and ended up choosing us due to past positive experience.



We also closed a large academic deal with the University of California for our Article Galaxy Scholar product that will cover 11 libraries. In summary, despite the longer sales cycles we are currently experiencing, we remain well positioned within the research process, and I believe there is significant opportunity to further strengthen our financial position as the economy improves.



We've seen our strongest sales pipelines in the company's history and feel confident in our future. From a product perspective, we continue to focus on developing the capacity as a SaaS and AI company by enhancing our core offerings in Scite, Article Galaxy, and References. Today, all of our applications are SaaS-based and include an AI assistant to help researchers as natural language questions and get results based on peer-reviewed STM content with limited hallucinations or bad results. Scite has unique capability in terms of a citation index on steroids when compared to competition and a powerful AI assistant that focuses on near full tech search of most of the content outside or behind paywalls. Scite is unique in both of those areas.



Most of the newly announced companies that claim to do this only have access to OA or free content and do not have the rights to search behind the paywalls. The Article Galaxy family of products is unique in that it is one of the only publisher-independent solutions that offers access to the world's content in one system, including access to electronic or print sourced materials. Print source means the article can only be found in a printed book. In addition, our reference management product continues to develop its overall feature set and AI capability, which is helping us appeal to our core customer segment and helped with the competitive takeaways like Nkarta, which I mentioned earlier.



We will continue to focus on expanding our capability in AI by continuing to work on integrating Scite and AG products. We have signed several new publishers to the Scite indexing agreements, which allow us to provide near full-text search on those articles. We will continue to focus on adding additional publishers to the Scite platform. In addition, we started offering publishers an amendment in which our customers can purchase the text and data mining rights or TDM rights for articles they've already purchased in addition to rights when they purchase new articles.



We believe we're in a great position to offer the long tail of small and medium publishers to help our large customers achieve their AI objectives by delivering that long tail of TDM rights with one offering. With that, I'd like to turn the call back over to the operator. Operator?

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] We'll go first to Richard Baldry of ROTH Capital.

[Richard Baldry, analyst]

When I look into the... Spending in the quarter, it looked like the Platform cost side actually fell, and we haven't really seen that ever go down. Sort of curious, like was there a reversal of some prior costs? Or how does that fall? And is that sustainable forward?

[Roy Olivier, executive]

Will?

[William Nurthen, executive]

Yes, sure. Yes. There was a couple of things contributing to it. One is we removed some labor in that area. And the other is that we basically did some things to rework some of our hosting costs to bring that hosting cost down, which have been running kind of high, especially in the Resolute business. So I do think there are some sort of permanent reductions there from what we've seen before, but you could see it tick back up a little bit. We might add a little bit of headcount back in.



And there's also some time to time where we need to run some things from an experimental basis to drive our hosting cost up. We just didn't have a lot of that this quarter. So it was just an unusually light quarter. And that's why I said in my remarks, you could see this result where this margin that we had of the 87.4% does fall back lower than that. I still think it will be above 85% easily, but it was just sort of a unique quarter where we were able to keep the hosting costs way down.

[Richard Baldry, analyst]

I look below into the OpEx side. The G&A was fairly level sequentially, but kind of flipped, sales and marketing went up a decent amount and the R&D came down a decent amount. How do we think about what those levels should look like on sort of a steady-state basis? Is first quarter sort of indicative of where you think you'd be? Or is there something sort of unusual there?

[William Nurthen, executive]

Yes. I think for first quarter, the only thing you'll probably see some step up as we move into Q2 and beyond in sales and marketing and a little bit less, so to speak, maybe in tech and product development. In the sales and marketing side, we got into some of those summer months, we did cut back a little bit on the advertising spend on the B2C side. So we are sort of ramping that up as we head into the fall here and are gaining ground on subscribers. And then on the other side of things, as Roy mentioned, so we did hire a new CRO. So that will be some additional headcount in the business as well, which will drive some of that. Product development, I think you'll see some modest increase as well. So I think overall, if you look at SG&A, it's probably going to look probably more like Q3 from last year, just in total with some of the caveats I mentioned in the buckets there. It could be a little bit higher than that, but that's kind of where it's targeting right now.

[Richard Baldry, analyst]

Then the commentary around expectations of M&A valuations sort of coming in, can you talk about hat where you would have overlapping customer bases? Is that where you'd have complementary sort of opportunities to cross-sell? Or is it pretty much across the board? And I think there was a comment around some more inbound inquiries or directionally people coming to you. Do you think that that's still a decent way to find things that fit properly? Or are these people that you've done business with, and that's why they're familiar with you, so the fit sort of makes sense from the get-go?

[Roy Olivier, executive]

Yes. This is Roy. I made a couple of comments. I think part of the inbound is just we've been recognized as somebody who does do deals with companies in this space. So people reach out to us as a result of that. Part of it is also related to the founder, Josh, of Scite, who is very high profile in the industry, especially among start-ups. And so a lot of folks saw what he did and want to explore a similar path. To your other question, what we're looking for specifically is primarily things that enhance our product strategy.



So when we think about the research workflow that the various user personas that we sell to utilize, we look at that workflow through the lens of what steps are we providing today, what steps are other people providing today, where should we partner, where should we acquire? And for me, the acquisition has to fit a few criteria. It has to give us a clear strategic advantage. It has to be something that from a valuation point of view makes sense, and it has to have a very strong cross-sell opportunity into our base because I think a lot of value creation out of these acquisitions, very little of it is going to come from expense reduction, a vast majority of that value creation is coming from cross-selling into the base. We'd certainly like to look at direct competitor takeout, but there's just not that many of those left that are actionable. So it's primarily what I mentioned a minute ago.

[Operator]

We go next now to Jacob Stephan of Lake Street.

[Jacob Stephan, analyst]

Roy, you noted there are some lower deployments in the quarter. I'm just curious what was kind of the driver despite the comments about the new logo team hitting their targets?

[Roy Olivier, executive]

Yes. I had mentioned in the previous call that one of the new segments we're pursuing much more aggressively than we have historically is academic and that is on the back of a strong Scite academic product as well as us continuing to enhance the Article Galaxy Scholar product, which is our academic product. And to give you some idea of numbers, in the first quarter after we acquired Scite, we did about $240,000, $250,000 of ARR growth. That was off of their base when we acquired them of about $400,000.



In the second quarter, which is our fiscal Q4, we did about $280,000, $290,000 in growth, and about half of that growth was academic. In our fiscal Q1, that academic growth number was tens of thousands. It was less than $50,000 because in the academic space, a lot of decisions were made around the December, January time frame, a lot of decisions are made around the June, July time frame, and so we expected and actually budgeted for Q1 to be materially lower from a deployment point of view than Q4 was. That said, the 2 other things that affected our numbers negatively during that quarter was underperformance by our upsell team and more churn than we expected. So there's various things hitting that. Some of it is seasonality, some of it is sales execution and some of it is just a general slowness that we've seen in the market in the last few quarters.

[Jacob Stephan, analyst]

Okay. Got it. That makes sense. And maybe just kind of contrast that with the comments you made about the demand rebounding here that you're seeing in Q2. Would you say that's kind of the demand is rebounding back to above baseline or not quite the baseline or at kind of what you'd expect?

[Roy Olivier, executive]

Yes. On the B2C side, I think we did somewhere like $50,000 or $60,000 in ARR growth in Q1. I think I made a comment, we're approaching $6 million, so that means we're around $500,000 in ARR growth on the B2C side as of now, and we're halfway through the quarter. I wouldn't flatline that to a 3 number because we'll see slowness and some churn in December as students no longer are in school, but I think we'll have a very good quarter from a B2C perspective.



Early indicators are we're seeing some nice activity on the B2B side. I mentioned we've got record pipelines. We just have to execute. And I think the other thing we need to do is do a better job managing churn. We've made some changes to how we run that process. And I think the combination of improving execution there, plus our new CRO plus some of the leading indicators we see to me, give me hope that we'll see a nice bounce back as we get into toward the end of this quarter. I'm also really excited to report, I mean, for the first time since I've been here, we've got $2 million pipelines, which is a pretty nice pipeline for us, and that's all being generated by the new marketing VP, who joined us a little bit less than a year ago. He's doing a nice job filling those pipelines and driving conversations, which ultimately for us result in a sale.

[Jacob Stephan, analyst]

Great. And maybe just one last one. With the new Chief Revenue Officer coming in, maybe give us top 2 or 3 priorities as they kind of look at their role.

[Roy Olivier, executive]

Yes. He walked in with a 90-day plan. His first month is really just to learn. So he's spending a lot of time with a lot of our people learning how we do, what we do. As we get into January, as I mentioned in the call, we'll have a standardized training that not just addresses sales, it will address sales, the CSMs, the executives of the company and anything that kind of touches sales. And his successful track record is coming in, whether it's a new company, whether it's a turnaround or whether it's just trying to accelerate growth in an existing sales team that does a pretty good job. He has a very structured process and has done a nice job fairly dramatically increasing ARR growth in the companies he's joined. So I'm excited about what we think he can do here because I think sales execution is something we do pretty well, but I think we can do it better.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions]. We'll go next now to Derek Greenberg of Maxim Group.

[Derek Greenberg, analyst]

I wanted to touch on adjusted EBITDA, the margins, the cadence there. You noted that there'd be a little bit of a sequential decline in the second quarter, but then we should see improvement from strong performance in the third and fourth quarter. I was wondering if you think third quarter may be an improvement upon first quarter even or if you think it will still be a little bit under what we saw this quarter just due to the ramp in costs.

[Roy Olivier, executive]

Will, do you want to touch that one?

[William Nurthen, executive]

Yes, sure. No, I think traditionally, our third and fourth quarter have been our best quarters of the year, if you kind of just look back, and so it's a bit early, but our goal is to have that quarter be an improvement over the first quarter. Typically, we will have a nice Q1. You might take a little bit of a step down in Q2, like I talked about just because of some of the seasonality. And usually, we are bringing some additional costs in for the New Year. But then our goal in Q3 would be definitely to outperform what we've done here in Q1. Okay.

[Derek Greenberg, analyst]

Great. That's helpful. And then I wanted to touch on you were talking about how some of the B2B just sales, day sales is kind of being extended by longer review processes and other factors. I was wondering, I think you had cited a metric on the last call that days to sale had expanded to over 120, whereas historically it had been closer to around 90. I was wondering if there were any updates there or if we're still kind of seeing similar levels to what we saw on the last quarter.

[Roy Olivier, executive]

Yes, that's a good question. I did not look at our days to sales statistic before the call. But I can tell you our CAC, which is our Customer Acquisition Cost, it's running 1 month better than it was in the previous actually 3 quarters. So it's shortened a little bit, which would lead me to believe because we have not reduced expenses that the time involved is a little bit lower. But I'd have to look up days to sale. I think it's still about where it was when we had our last earnings call, but it may be a little bit different, but I don't think it's materially changed.

[Derek Greenberg, analyst]

Okay. Got it. And then my last question is just on Resolute AI, how that's tracking. And I think more recently, you had said you were potentially planning some cost reductions in that segment. So I was just wondering what the outlook looks like there.

[Roy Olivier, executive]

Yes. I mean I think Resolute continues to be a concern. We still see value in the databases in Resolute and ultimately adding them into the combined Scite, AG, Platform. Resolute as a stand-alone Platform has had a few sales in the last 6 months, but it's a bulk of our sales are coming from either Scite or one of the Article Galaxy products. So , Resolute is certainly underperforming to where we thought it would be in terms of new sales. But that said, we have pivoted a lot of our activity to Article Galaxy and Scite and getting that integration done in order to drive growth in those products, which have been much more successful.

[Operator]

We go next now to Avi Fisher of Long Cast Advisors.

[Avram Fisher, analyst]

I wonder if you could talk about 2 different things. One is sort of the difference between academic and a corporate customer. I mean is there a difference in the margin profile at all either way?

[Roy Olivier, executive]

I think the gross margin, Will can comment exactly is very similar. The average sale price is lower and academic customer average sales price is probably between $3,500 and $4,000. And as you know, the average sale price on the business overall is about $11,000. So it's a lower ASP, but has a lot more transactional revenue typically associated with it. but that's the big difference financially. Will, do you have a comment on the gross margin?

[William Nurthen, executive]

Yes. The gross margin is similar. It's just typically a lower price point, as Roy noted. And the flip side being -- as a percentage of their platform fee, they tend to generate a lot more transaction revenue, which is lower margin, but does help the bottom line a bit.

[Avram Fisher, analyst]

Right. And what is the expected transaction revenue from a new academic customer? Is it significant or...

[Roy Olivier, executive]

Well, I think I've mentioned in previous calls that on average, a customer spends about 2.5x their platform fee in transaction revenue. In the academic side, it's much, much higher than that. I mean it's -- sometimes it's 20x. However, there is a lot of variability depending on the size of the library. So for example, we have no idea sitting here today what University of California is going to be. But we'll start to see that in the next quarter and may be able to comment as to what impact that's going to have on the Transaction side of the business.

[Avram Fisher, analyst]

That was my other question. In terms of the University of California, when do we expect that to roll out? And can you talk a little bit about that competitive environment that -- it sounds like a big win.

[Roy Olivier, executive]

Yes. I think it was a good win for us. We -- they look at everybody in the space, but we have a very unique offering in the workflow and library. So there's frankly nobody out there that can do what we do in terms of Article Galaxy Scholar. And so that's been a nice win. And that's also a library that at some point, we'd like to circle back to and talk about Scite as a search solution for them. But yes, it was a nice win, and it was a competitive win.

[Avram Fisher, analyst]

Could you also talk about the competitive environment you're seeing in the corporate side, the corporate customer side? I mean, you sound a little cautious on your -- what you're seeing in corporate new adds, talking a lot about churn, customers going out of business. And you haven't touched on the competitive side, and I'm curious about that.

[Roy Olivier, executive]

Yes. It's interesting. When I was running the analysis for a Board meeting recently, I was very surprised, frankly, to see that churn to competitors is down double digits year-over-year in terms of year-to-date and a forecast for the full year, which for us, we just look at the first 4 months of the year and flat line it out and see where the numbers come out compared to last year, and it's down double digits. Now that is a lumpier part of churn. In other words, there could be a one medium-sized deal that moves that number.



But the point is we're not seeing a lot of competitor losses. What we're seeing is customers wanting to dial back on their budget, which means less users, customers going out of business, customers cutting the budget entirely, customers that are being acquired by someone else and forced to use their tech platform. But there is an element of churn that is controllable by us in terms of the ROI, the software or other things they need the software to do. And we're very, very sharply focused on correcting those issues to control what we can control and the rest of it, we really can't control.

[Avram Fisher, analyst]

Are your competitors leading the space? Or are they just not as aggressive marketing in the space? Or -- I mean, as a softball question or have you just improved so much?

[Roy Olivier, executive]

I don't think they're leaving the space. I think we have improved. And I think in some cases, we execute better than them, and there are cases where they execute better than us. But I think all in all, we stack up very well against our competitors because we have, Scite has some unique capability. Article Galaxy has some unique capability. And I think if we communicate effectively to the customer, it's a pretty easy decision. We have lost deals where I get pretty frustrated because when I listen to the call because we record all the calls with an AI engine, I can listen to them. We may not share some of the differentiating features that I think make the difference for us, and that's where I think sales execution comes in. But all in all, I think we execute pretty well. They're not leaving the space. And I think our products are very competitive with our products.

[Avram Fisher, analyst]

I appreciate. I'm just going to ask one more quick question and then jump off the call. You reported about 1,074 corporate customers. Can you sort of paint for us sort of a pie chart of sorts? What percentage of those customers are pre-revenue? What percent of those customers are $0 million to $10 million revenue and different scales, $10 million to $100 million or something like that?

[Roy Olivier, executive]

Will might have some color on that. I don't think we have any left that are pre-revenue. Most of those got killed a year or 2 ago during the economic kind of meltdown because the VC would no longer fund them or whatever. So I think most of our customers have revenue. And my gut feel is most of our customers are significant revenue. We have some smaller customers that are 10 seat, 15 seat. But let me put it this way. I mean, I think 60% of our revenue comes from the top 1/3 of our customers. So there are some small ones there, but they are typically smaller chunks of revenue. Will, do you have anything you want to add?

[William Nurthen, executive]

Yes. I think that, so the metric, I think Roy was quoting was more on the Platform spend, but that 1,074 count is basically, I think the account you're referencing is the Transaction customers. So that is probably more representative of the entire customer base, Avi. And as Roy said, to be in that count, you have to be actively doing Transactions. So there's nobody pre-revenue in there. And I expect the concentration is probably, again, a little bit more spread out than the 60% number that Roy gave, but it is accurate that we have certain customers that are doing a bigger chunk of the business. There.

[Avram Fisher, analyst]

Yes, I always confuse... Customer -- the Platform and Transaction customer, I apologize. But just -- I mean, within the Platform space, do you still have -- are there whale customers you're trying to sell to or like large whale customers trying to sell to? Or are you trying to sell to sort of medium, small-sized business? I'm just trying to understand that process.

[Roy Olivier, executive]

Well, I think if you look at the trailing 12-month deployment number, a bulk of those are kind of medium-sized customers. There's a few smalls in there, but there's mediums. But yes, we are -- we've released a stat that says we're in 70% of the top 20 pharma. We think it's our right to get the other 30%. And then there's a whole another chunk of very large customers below that top 20 line that certainly we chase. Those are longer, more complex sales cycles, but those are priorities for us because those are the ones that really move the needle.

[Operator]

And gentlemen, it appears we have no further questions this afternoon. Mr. Olivier, I'd like to turn things back to you, sir, for any closing comments.

[Roy Olivier, executive]

Yes. Thanks. As a quick reminder, Will and I will be participating in the Southwest IDEAS Conference on November 20 in Dallas. If you're interested in participating, please reach out to Three Part Advisors. Thanks for your time today, and we look forward to speaking to you in February about our Q2 results. Have a great day.

[Operator]

Thank you, Mr. Olivier. Ladies and gentlemen, again, that does conclude the Research Solutions First Quarter Fiscal 2025 Earnings Call. Again, thanks so much for joining us, everyone, and we wish you all a great evening. Goodbye.