On Wednesday, D2L (TSX:DTOL) discussed first-quarter financial results during its earnings call. The full transcript is provided below.
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Summary
D2L reported a strong start to fiscal 2027 with a 10% increase in Subscription and Support revenue, reaching $52.7 million, and an ARR increase of 9% to $225.2 million.
The company is seeing positive momentum across its core markets, particularly in higher education and corporate learning, and has displaced major competitors in North America.
International growth remains a strategic focus, with a 15% annual growth in ARR driven by digital transformation in global institutions.
D2L’s AI capabilities, including D2Lumi, are gaining traction with over 40% attach rate in new higher education agreements, contributing to ARR growth.
The company maintains a healthy financial position with $100 million in cash, no debt, and is actively engaging in share repurchase programs.
Management reiterates confidence in their fiscal 2027 outlook, expecting revenue growth and adjusted EBITDA margin improvements, especially in the latter half of the year.
Full Transcript
OPERATOR
Mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. Instructions will be provided for you at that time for questions. If anyone has any difficulty hearing the conference, you may press STAR zero for operator assistance at any time. This morning’s call is being recorded on June 10, 2026 at 8:30am Eastern Time. I would now like to turn the call over to Craig Armitage, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Craig Armitage (Investor Relations)
Thank you and good morning. Listeners are reminded that portions of today’s discussion will include statements that contain forward looking information. Any such statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from a conclusion, forecast or projection in the forward looking information. Further, certain material factors or assumptions were applied in drawing a conclusion or making a forecast or projection as reflected in the forward looking information.
For identification and discussion of such risks, uncertainties, factors and assumptions, as well as further information concerning forward looking statements, please refer to the Company’s Annual and Interim Management’s discussion and analysis and the most recently filed Annual information Form in each case as filed under the company’s profile on [email protected]. in addition, during this call, reference will be made to various non IFRS financial measures including adjusted ebitda, adjusted EBITDA Margin, adjusted Gross Profit, adjusted Gross Profit Margin and free cash flow.
These non IFRS financial measures do not have any standardized meanings prescribed by IFRS and may not be comparable to similar measures presented by other public companies. Please refer to the Company’s MDA for the quarter ended April 30, 2026 and year ended January 31, 2026. For more information about these and certain other non IFRS financial measures, including, where applicable, a reconciliation of historical non IFRS financial measures to the most directly comparable IFRS financial measures from our financial statements.
I’d now like to turn the call over to John Baker, Chief executive officer at D2L. Please go ahead. John thank you Craig and thank you everyone for joining us for our Q1 earnings call. We released our financial results after market close yesterday and you can find those materials on the Investor Relations section of our website. Please note that the results we’re discussing today are in US Dollars. I’m joined this morning by Josh Huff, our CFO, and we look forward to taking you through the results and answering your questions.
The first quarter of fiscal 2027 represented a strong start to the year with good execution across our core growth markets. Subscription and Support revenue grew 10% to 52.7 million. ARR increased 9% to 225.2 million. We generated 8.3 million of adjusted EBITDA and our financial position remains very healthy with close to 100 million in cash and no debt at quarter end. Importantly, we’re executing very well across our largest growth markets. We Higher education, corporate and international ARR from these markets increased approximately 13% year over year and we saw ongoing strength in both new customer bookings and pipeline generation, which supports our growth expectations for the year ahead. In North America Higher education it was a good quarter for new customer activity. Our competitive positioning continues to strengthen, which is translating into consistently high win rates, high renewal rates and pipeline growth. This past quarter we once again displaced all three of our main competitors. Notable new customers included Humber Polytechnic, one of Canada’s largest polytechnic institutions focused on career oriented and applied Learning to over 86,000 students Loyola University Chicago, a premier private research university with nationally recognized academic programs Midwestern University, a leader in medical education that’s been training the next generation of healthcare professionals for more than 125 years Wiley University, which has been expanding access to more inclusive and high quality educational opportunities for more than 150 years and straighter Line, a leading provider of affordable online general education courses that support college pathways. In K12 we saw a number of new logos, strong renewals and a healthy pipeline.
And in corporate learning, we continue to expand our footprint across professional associations and employee learning, including the Royal Conservatory of Music, a globally recognized leader in music education and certification the American Traffic Safety Services Association, a prominent industry body that represents close to 12,000 professionals and the world’s leading professional body for plastic surgeons. Our international growth strategy is an important driver of our performance and we’re encouraged by our win rates and strong demand signals across key markets.
Globally, many institutions are advancing their digital transformation vision which includes modernizing their learning platform. This shift away from legacy systems is creating significant long term opportunity for D2L and we’re capitalizing on this growing international ARR at 15 percent annually. Recent customer additions included one of the largest private education groups in Mexico, a growing education organization in the Middle east focused on delivering modern digital first learning experiences, and a leading trade and investment agency in the Asia Pacific region.
We continue to see both new and renewing customers commit to longer term agreements consistent with historic trend of 5 year contracts in education and 3 year contracts in corporate. One Canadian higher education customer recently renewed with D2L for 12 years after conducting a deep analysis of the learning platform market. This speaks to the durability of the BrightSpace platform within our customers environments. Their confidence in our AI roadmap and their trust in D2L as a long term strategic partner.
Recently I had the opportunity to spend time in Europe, Asia and Australia meeting with customers and partners, and it’s very clear that many of these institutions are operating at the leading edge of where learning is going, particularly how they’re approaching digital transformation and the application of AI. That perspective reinforces our confidence in the direction of our platform and our strategy. We continue to see increased alignment globally around the need for more intelligent, personalized and efficient learning experiences and as a result we’re experiencing growing adoption of our AI capability, including D2 Lumi, supporting both new customer wins and deeper engagement with existing customers. D2Lumi is attached on over 40% of new customer agreements in higher education and ARR growth continues to accelerate. This success reflects the growing body of evidence that D2Lumi is significantly enhancing learning outcomes and improving operational efficiency for our customers. With each new success story, we’re building meaningful momentum and strengthening our leadership position in AI.
This AI leadership is something that we’re excited to showcase more fully at our upcoming user conference D12 fusion, which will take place in July in Phoenix. We look forward to hosting leaders from around the world to explore the future of learning together, from AI and innovation to learner engagement and human connection. I look forward to connecting with many of our investment community contacts there as well as we scale AI capabilities across our platform and customer base.
We believe there’s a growing opportunity to drive greater efficiency within our own operations. We’re beginning to realize early productivity gains and expect this operational leverage will become increasingly visible as these improvements take hold, supporting margin expansion and increasing profitability in the years ahead. Now, before I hand it over to Josh, I also want to briefly touch on capital allocation. We’ve been more active on our NCIB program in recent quarters, reflecting our confidence in the business.
In addition, we announced a $20 million Canadian substantial issuer bid, which we view as an attractive opportunity to repurchase shares at current valuation levels while maintaining flexibility to invest in growth opportunities at this important time in our market. I would also like to acknowledge and thank Ian Giffen for his leadership and and meaningful contributions during his tenure as Lead Director. We’re grateful for his thoughtful guidance, strong governance, leadership and commitment to D2L’s long term success as Ian steps down after 10 years.
Following this week’s annual General meeting, I look forward to working closely with Bob Courteau as he assumes the role of Lead Director and continues to contribute his experience and perspective to D2L’s growth. With that, I’ll turn the call over to Josh to walk through the financial results and outlook in more detail.
John Baker (Founder, CEO, and Chairman)
Thanks, John and good morning everyone. As John noted, we had a solid first quarter, highlighted by healthy bookings and continued strength in pipeline generation. Total revenue increased 8% in Q1 to 57.1 million, led by a 10% increase in subscription and support revenue to 52.7 million, driven by new customer growth and expansion from existing customers. This was partially moderated by previously disclosed churn. Within the US K12 market, annual recurring revenue increased 9% to 225.2 million.
Excluding the K12 market, Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) increased approximately 13.2% year over year and constant currency Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) grew approximately 11.4%. Turning to margins and profitability, adjusted gross profit increased 7% to 40.4 million and adjusted gross margin was 70.7% compared with 71.3% in the prior year period. As we discussed previously, margins in the quarter continued to reflect the impact of of the database technology migration, which did not affect the comparable period last year.
This margin impact is expected to materially conclude by the end of the second quarter of fiscal 27. Adjusted EBITDA for Q1 was 8.3 million or an adjusted EBITDA margin of 14.5% compared with 9.3 million or 17.6% in the prior year period, and net income for the quarter was 1.7 million compared with 3.3 million in the same period last year. In terms of cash flow, cash flow used in operating activities were 16.8 million compared with 1.9 million in the same period last year, and free cash flow was negative 16.9 million compared with negative 1.8 million in the prior year period.
The year over year increase in cash used was primarily attributable to working capital movements, including lower collections following a strong fourth quarter and higher payments to vendors during the period. These impacts are timing related in nature and we expect year to date results at the end of Q2 to represent more normal year over year patterning cash flow from operations typically have a seasonal low in the first quarter and are expected to improve meaningfully in the second and third quarters.
Consistent with our billing patterns and historical results in the business. In terms of capital allocation, we have increased the use of the NCIB. As John highlighted in Q1 we repurchased and canceled about 444,000 subordinate voting shares, and for the trailing 12 months we repurchased and canceled close to 1.3 million subordinate voting shares representing 4.2% of the opening SBS shares outstanding. The recently announced SIB is a natural extension of this approach, allowing us to repurchase an even larger number of shares while maintaining a strong balance sheet and investment flexibility.
Looking Ahead, we reiterated our guidance for fiscal 2027. As we have said previously, we expect revenue growth as and adjusted EBITDA margin to improve as the year progresses, with stronger performance in the second half of the year relative to the first half. This progression will position us well for accelerating revenue growth and margin expansion in the fiscal 28 target operating model we are executing against this plan while continuing to invest in the evolution of the business both for internal productivity gains.
External Market Leadership as we continue to see great opportunities in our core markets overall, we are encouraged by the strength we are seeing in our competitive positioning and across our business, and remain confident in our ability to deliver on our strategy as the year progresses. With that, we’ll open the call to questions.
OPERATOR
Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press Star one To raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press Star one. Again. We ask that you pick up your handset when asking a question to allow for optimum sound quality if you are muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by while we compile the Q and A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Doug Taylor with National Bank. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Doug Taylor (Equity Analyst)
Yeah, thank you. Good morning. I’ll start with a question for John. Seeing the slight uptick in ARR velocity in the growth markets here year over year, especially excluding the K to 12. You referenced the strong pipeline growth as well. Can we dig into that a bit more perhaps to talk about the pipeline velocity and the budgetary picture for those higher education organizations to the extent you can paint that with a single brush.
John Baker (Founder, CEO, and Chairman)
Thanks very much Doug. Good to speak with you again this morning. When we’re looking at the pipeline, we see now more than a year of consistent building of great pipeline across the organization. You know, we’re still not at the stage where we’re seeing a really big rebound in the number of Requests for Proposals (RFPs) in our core markets yet, but we certainly are seeing that early interest in exploring our products and we’re hopeful that at some point we’ll see a bigger bounce back in buying activity in that market later this year based upon what we’re seeing in that early stage pipeline.
You know, if you look at our announcements this quarter too, what you’ll see is very strong indication that we’re getting very good at converting clients from all three of our main competitors now and historically people would have thought about this as a multi year journey to switch from one platform to another. And our team is now on average for the last few moving clients in about five weeks. So we’re trying to get to the point where the market recognizes it’s no longer three years, it’s more like a three month process.
It’s no longer a big technology change, it’s much more of a smoother transition that’s really around change management for students, for faculty and no longer big technology integration hurdle. So we’re optimistic that we can build some momentum given all the factors that are playing out in the market right now. We just haven’t seen it yet show up in the numbers. So just want to be clear on that. But we’re definitely very optimistic about the year ahead.
Doug Taylor (Equity Analyst)
And maybe one further question on that. I mean, given the typical seasonality, I mean for the education organization’s school years, I know that is more of a factor in K-12 perhaps than it is in higher education, but how much visibility do you have now into future pipeline conversion or your assumptions around that, you know, through the summer here and into the next school year?
John Baker (Founder, CEO, and Chairman)
Well, I think a key point to underscore is, you know, our win rates continually have been showing to be very good and continue to expand. So I’m very confident in our team’s ability to take the existing pipeline and convert it to one opportunities and again from all of our competitors now, not just one or two. And so that, that bodes well for our ability to continue to put us on track for our plans for next year as well as for the rest remainder of this year. Which is why we are confident reiterating the guidance that we put out. Q1 as you as you know, Doug is seasonally a low quarter for bookings, so it’s not usually as good as what we probably posted this quarter.
And I think it just speaks to our team’s, you know, focus on execution and really delivering results. And I think as the team continues to dig in and really strengthen their go to market motions, not only in North America, but around the world, I think it positions us well to be a very clear leader globally. And we were just focused on the execution right now for the remainder of the year.
Doug Taylor (Equity Analyst)
Okay, perhaps a question on the K to 12. I know it’s becoming a smaller part of the overall mix. You referenced the elevated churn there. Now for a couple quarters, maybe you can just refresh our understanding, depending on timing of that What I’m getting at is, you know, how much longer you expect that will remain a, you know, a year over year or you know, negative impact, a one time sort of phenomenon versus a more, you know, permanent headwind.
John Baker (Founder, CEO, and Chairman)
So the churn that we spoke about in the past couple of earnings calls comes out of the system for us in Q2. So that’s one time what we’re seeing with our core K12 business. It’s solid. We put up a number of new logos as well in the last quarter, which is very encouraging. And the retention issues with existing clients seems to have been isolated to just those small number of clients that we talked about in the past quarters. So now that will still have a revenue impact, which is in our guidance. But in terms of the impact on our business, that all comes to an end in Q2 from what we can tell.
Doug Taylor (Equity Analyst)
Yeah, that’s very helpful. I’ll ask one last question probably for Josh. Follow up on your cash flow comments. You mentioned some of the puts and takes here and the typical seasonality. I just want to clarify that what you’re saying is, the question is, is there any reason we shouldn’t expect free cash flow margins to mimic the 15% EBITDA margin guide over the course of this entire fiscal year inclusive of Q1? Yeah, thanks Doug. There’s no reason why free cash flow margin wouldn’t mimic adjusted EBITDA margin.
To your point, that’s historically been true with our business and Q1 really was just a sort of timing thing on the working capital front. We expect that to iron itself out by end of Q2, where the kind of year to year to date, year over year comparison will be more in line with normal trends that we would expect. All right, thank you for clarifying. I’ll pass the line.
OPERATOR
Your next question comes from the line of Gavin Fairweather with ATB Cormark. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Gavin Fairweather (Equity Analyst)
Oh, hey, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. You know, your comments on the on the pipeline and bookings picking up. Curious if you could just speak to spare capacity in the sales organization and higher ed. If we can extrapolate that trend further, you know how much more damage the sales team can do. And then maybe also touch on your plans to ramp up the corporate team as your employee training solution progresses.
John Baker (Founder, CEO, and Chairman)
Well, I think. I’m not sure the sound just trailed out at the very end there, but I think I caught the question. In terms of capacity for the pipeline conversion, we’ve got great capacity in our sales organization. They’re working incredibly hard they’re largely onboarded group so I feel very good about their ability to work the existing pipeline that we’ve got. That said, you know, we are looking at additional markets globally. We are planning on doing some additional investments in headcount and so, you know, we see this as a good opportunity to make some investments to accelerate growth.
Gavin Fairweather (Equity Analyst)
Yeah, the second piece is just around. What do you need to add to the.
John Baker (Founder, CEO, and Chairman)
Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, we’re still seeing very strong performance on the training organization side. So that continues to be a really good growth driver for us as a company. We’re starting to see some traction on the employee training side of the business as well too. But I gave us there’s going to be more of a back half of the year into next story for us on the employee training side. But you know, corporate again remains one of our fastest growing markets in the company. So very excited about what we’re doing there.
Gavin Fairweather (Equity Analyst)
Appreciate that. And then maybe for Josh, we did see the subscription gross margins tick higher sequentially this quarter and the language was pretty clear that you expect the database migration to be largely completed in Q2. So maybe you can just help us understand if the impact in Q1 was still at 200 basis points or if it starting to moderate as the year goes along.
Josh Huff (Chief Financial Officer)
Yeah, it’s starting to moderate. So I think at its peak in Q3 of last year, it was more significant. We’re talking 100 to 150 basis points in Q1 and then we’ll moderate even further in Q2 and then come back half of the year. We’ll be back on sort of our normal cadence of year over year comp improvements in the gross margin profile.
Gavin Fairweather (Equity Analyst)
Maybe one more for John. I’ll squeeze it in here. Can you discuss your view on perceptions of D2L and in the market? Obviously there’s been some noise around your competitors recently as you’re going around and chatting with higher education institutions. What’s your perceptions on how that has changed?
John Baker (Founder, CEO, and Chairman)
Well, I think, you know, in our case we’ve really driven a strategy of building on a foundation of trust, responsible AI and making sure that we’re providing our clients a really reliable platform to support their demands all over the world. And I think, you know, especially over the last few months, that’s really come to help us a lot in terms of driving our win rate up even higher. I think a lot of our clients really are partnering more closely with us on the innovation agenda. So if you think about higher education today, in particular across all sectors, actually learning is changing in this Age of AI. And so what we are seeing is new demands for things like formative assessments versus summative.
I know that’s into the weeds a little bit, but really has a big impact in terms of making sure that students are still learning, even if they’re using some AI tools on the side. And so these are big changes for these institutions to implement. And so leaning into us to not only provide the right technology that can be trusted, provide the innovation to adapt to these new AI models, and then also partner with us to help them build the new programming and take these new models and implement them in all of their courses or programs across their entire institutions. You know, we’ve become very strategic for many of these clients globally.
Gavin Fairweather (Equity Analyst)
Thanks so much. I’ll pass.
John Baker (Founder, CEO, and Chairman)
Thanks, Kevin.
OPERATOR
Your next question comes from the line of John Shao with TD Cohen. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
John Shao
Good morning, guys, and thanks for taking my question. I understand you have strong win rates and pipeline activities. I just wanted to shift gear a little bit and ask about customer renewals. So what percentage of your customer base is up for renewal this year? Maybe in the next 12 months? And any directional guidance regarding how we should think about a contract value at renewal, specifically around, you know, student headcount and maybe AI adoptions?
John Baker (Founder, CEO, and Chairman)
So what we’re seeing on the renewal side, you know, typically in a year we might see like somewhere between a fifth to a third of our base up for renewal, depending on the year, usually not much more, usually in that range. And so this is a pretty typical year for renewals other than the K12 turn that we’ve already talked about, we’re seeing a good indication that our renewal strength is very strong this year. And then in terms of, like, our utilization of our, of our product for clients, you know, learner seekout continues to be strong folks who are adopting our technology in more meaningful ways. And one example, you know, in Singapore when I was there, you know, there’s a big shift in assessment from, you know, taking quizzes at the end of a unit to embedded assessments on the page.
And what they’re saying is, you know, our product, if you will, has become essential for them. You know, they want to create hundreds of these in every single course that they’re offering. And unless they had our AI technology and our platform, it would have been very hard to impossible to get their faculty to actually do this work. And so we’ve become a critical factor for driving new ways of doing learning. And, and I. So I do think that that’s a good indicator for all of our clients globally to see an increase in adoption of our product. So very heavy utilization. Yeah.
John Shao
Okay. Thanks for the colors. And if I compare this quarter’s partial weeks to the previous one, some of the macro headwind language is no longer there. I’m just curious whether there have been some changes in terms of the macro setup you’ve seen out there.
John Baker (Founder, CEO, and Chairman)
I still think there’s still some headwinds that are in the market. They just haven’t really changed much. If you look at the pressure on our institutions globally, there’s still budgetary constraints, there’s still transitionary issues with international students in particular. But a lot of our clients are digesting those issues and pulling through it. And so what we’re seeing now is some of those clients that were making those adjustments to their own internal practices budgets, teams are now starting to actually buy. And so that’s a good indicator, I think, for the future. Maybe.
John Shao
One last question to Josh. So could you give us some color regarding the Fusion related costs and maybe the impact on Q2 EBITDA? Yeah, absolutely, John. So in line with historical patterns, fusion occurs in Q2 and has about a sort of $1.5 million net cost impact in line with what we’ve seen historically. And we would expect something similar this Q2. So it does bring down the EBITDA
Josh Huff (Chief Financial Officer)
margin in Q2 relative to the rest of the year. Thank you. Popalon.
OPERATOR
Your next question comes from the line of Aaron Kyle with cibc. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Philip Stevanovich
Hi, good morning. This is Philip Stevanovich. Sean, for Aaron Kyle, I’ll just ask a question on the international segment. So growth was Strong again in Q1, up 17.5% year over year. And you mentioned in the prepared remarks, ARR growth of 15% plus annually. Can you talk about what you’ve seen in terms of pipeline activity? And are you seeing higher win rates in these markets? And finally, do you see this growth as sustainable going forward? Thank you.
John Baker (Founder, CEO, and Chairman)
Yeah, so in international markets, we see a much bigger window of opportunity for us to continue to accelerate growth in many different countries around the world. Our win rates in international markets, depending on the market, can be far in excess of what we’re seeing even in the U.S. and so, you know, the same three competitors are global. We see them all as legacy platforms today, position them as legacy technologies. And, you know, for us, it’s really about building a great relationship with all these clients in each of these different markets. And so that’s a combination of building great partners as well as a direct force in each country. I’m really proud of the team. We’ve invested a lot in the leadership and the people, a lot of training and in many of these markets we’re seeing good traction.
Now some of them are now getting to the point where we got over 70%, over 70% market share in some countries like the Netherlands or Singapore. And we’re starting to expand out into neighboring countries. We’re expanding into other different markets within that same country. And so we’re quite excited about the motion that we have in front of us. And, and again, it’s a blue ocean in terms of opportunity because almost everybody is using one of these legacy platforms.
Philip Stevanovich
Thank you. And I’ll just ask a follow up. I’m just curious, in terms of attach rates for add ons within these markets, are you seeing that trend higher recently or like how should we think about that versus North America for example?
John Baker (Founder, CEO, and Chairman)
Yeah, normally when folks look at this market, they think international, they’ll just be buying more of a light version of the technology. That’s actually not the case. Most of the clients that we’re seeing adoption with, they tend to be the leading edge clients in these markets and they like to buy almost everything that we offer because they’re looking for an edge. They may not have had the same sort of the capacity build out that we would have seen in Canada or the U.S. and so they don’t have a lot of people to build content or to build courses. And so they’re looking for all the tooling, including lumi, including Trader plus to support their ability to move faster and almost leapfrog, if you will.
What they’ve seen historically in that market gives them a significant advantage over other neighboring universities that have not yet implemented Brightspace.
Philip Stevanovich
Thank you. And I’ll just squeeze one more in on capital allocation. So with the 20 million SIB announced, how should we thinking about, how should we be thinking about capital allocation priorities at this point, specifically in terms of M and A versus internal investment? Yeah, it continues to be a balance. So we’ve been using the NCIB program more significantly the last 12 months.
Josh Huff (Chief Financial Officer)
And then the SIB is, you know, another vehicle to achieve similar outcomes. And we continue to see M and A as an opportunity to complement our organic momentum and growth. And so, you know, from quarter to quarter it’s just evaluating opportunities and trying to optimize the capital allocation optionality that we have available to us. And so it continues to be a balance of those two things in this quarter, making more meaningful use of the buyback program and you know, just balancing our options. Thank you. I’ll pass my line.
OPERATOR
Your next question comes from the line of Sutan Sukumar with Stifle. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Sutan Sukumar (Equity Analyst)
Good morning, guys. For our first question, I just wanted to touch on the canvas security breach. What are you hearing from customers and prospects around that? Just wondering if you’re seeing more of a digestion period for the industry and customers start to play out here as they rethink vendors and security requirements, or are you seeing that drive a more immediate sense of urgency and motivation, move and make changes?
John Baker (Founder, CEO, and Chairman)
Yeah, great question, Susan. You know, similar to the blackboard situation, you know, these events tend to take time to play out over multiple years and you know, in our case, we’ve been winning at a high win rate against all of our competitors. Again, the pipeline is strong and growing. I think ultimately this puts us in a much stronger competitive position. You know, as you know, we’ve invested heavily over the last 25 years in a very strong security and trust and responsible AI posture. You know, we believe that’s the foundation for how we should be building our technology. We’ll continue to stay vigilant on the security side. We’re making additional investments to expand our competitive strengths here.
But we certainly see it as an opportunity to continue to take away business from these legacy platforms that maybe have not invested as much as we have.
Sutan Sukumar (Equity Analyst)
Gotcha. Thank you. For my second question, I just want to touch on LUMI and more so the broader upsell motion that you have with Creator plus and Achievement plus and so forth so on Lumi. I believe you guys mentioned that you are seeing a 40% plus attach rate sustained here, which I think is great, especially when considering that I believe AI still has yet to show up more meaningfully in client requirements as part of RFIs RFPs currently. But as you think about the near to midterm here, How are clients making decisions around AI today? Because it feels like the backdrop’s gone a little bit more noisier with all the AI labs starting to starting to push hard into the education environment. How are you guys compellingly positioned here and how do you think attach rates trend from here as institutions get smarter on their AI requirements?
John Baker (Founder, CEO, and Chairman)
Well, I think, Susan, you’re hitting it right on the head for us. This is the most important thing for us to work on this year is driving attach rate for AI within our client base. And so, you know, we’re seeing LUMI scale nicely. As we mentioned at the last update, at the end of the year last year we had 3.5 million in ARR that continues to accelerate in terms of growth. We’re seeing now north of 40% attach rate with new higher education customers.
We expect that to continue to expand. We also saw some nice large upsells to existing customers. You know, I think we’re at the very early stages of a pretty massive adoption curve. You know, if I look at our clients, they’re still doing the homework, if you will, putting in place policies, putting strategies for how to leverage this. But there was a very important article that came out, one of the journals really analyzing the impact of AI in higher education. And I think it’s compelling for us. You know, they looked at just simply using AI as a student and students cognitively offloading. If they’re just simply using ChatGPT or one of these other models on the side of the system, that’s actually having a negative impact on the quality of the educational experience for the students.
Whereas if you look at the Lumi model where we’re embedding AI into the learning platform, scaffolding and changing how we do assessment, changing how we do learning, changing how we do tutoring, the study actually shows a very big positive impact on the quality of the educational outcomes for students. And so I think our clients were waiting for some of this research to happen so they can actually choose like do you pick just simply an open model just to use it generically, or do you use one that’s embedded in the learning platform? And I think it’s very clear the research is now showing me model is the right way forward because it has a positive impact on learning. And I think, you know, education is a little different than other markets.
We’re not looking to offload all work to an AI. We want students to actually still learn. And so we want to scaffold these AIs into the learning platform to have a bigger impact. So you know, we’re still running a bunch of efficacy studies that are showing really positive results from this strategy, but for clients still at that early experimental stage. But you know, in the last three years, I can’t think of any institution that I’ve talked to that doesn’t care about it. So it’s. So I think this will translate this year. We just need to work hard on driving that demand cycle.
Sutan Sukumar (Equity Analyst)
Okay, thank you. And just one last one for me guys. Just on the international front, you know, it sounds like this still remains very much so a strategic growth area. I know you guys have made substantial investments in this opportunity by way your go to market strategy. But just Given all the, all the changes and shifts in the industry with, you know, between canvas and AI, do you guys anticipate sort of refining how you guys are attacking this opportunity here and how might that translate to by way of increased growth investments globally?
John Baker (Founder, CEO, and Chairman)
So we, I think we see a tremendous opportunity internationally, you know, so what are we doing differently this year? We’re opening up new markets is the primary motion, so going deeper in existing ones. And that seems to be playing out well with our increasing market share gains and all of our markets that we’re competing heavily in. And what’s interesting is these new markets that we’re going into, in some cases we’re actually having to, you know, for example, we’re doing a roundtable this week, and in one country, we had to literally change venues three times because of the demand. You know, the, the registrations from prospects in an event just kept going and going and going.
And so I, I think we’re at an interesting spot where many of these countries are waking up to the idea of, hey, a real investment into learning is important right now in this new era, and we’re well positioned to win that market.
Sutan Sukumar (Equity Analyst)
Okay, great. Thank you for taking my questions, guys. I’ll pass the line.
OPERATOR
We have reached the end of the Q and A session. I will now turn the call back to John Baker for closing remarks.
John Baker (Founder, CEO, and Chairman)
Thank you, everyone, for joining us for today’s call. We’re hoping to see some of you at our users conference in July in Phoenix, and I look forward to updating you again after Q2 results. Have a great day, everybody.
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