eGain - Earnings Call - Q1 2026

Executive Summary

• Strong start to FY26: revenue at high end of guide ($23.5M, +8% y/y), non-GAAP EPS $0.17, and 21% EBITDA margin; AI Knowledge Hub ARR grew 23% y/y to $45.9M and now 60% of SaaS ARR.
• Broad-based beat vs S&P Global consensus: revenue $23.51M vs $23.22M (+1.2%); non-GAAP EPS $0.17 vs $0.105 (+$0.065); EBITDA above internal guide (21% vs 16–19% outlook); estimates from S&P Global marked with asterisks below (Values retrieved from S&P Global).*
• Margin expansion was the key driver: GAAP gross margin 75% (from 69% y/y) and non-GAAP 76% (from 70%) on product/cost efficiencies and mix shift toward SaaS; adjusted EBITDA $5.0M (21% margin) vs $1.4M (6%) y/y.
• FY26 guidance maintained on revenue and profitability ranges but EPS ranges trimmed by 1 cent on higher expected diluted shares (~28.8M vs prior 27.5M), while Q2 guide shows a sequential revenue dip from sunsetting the legacy messaging platform (~$0.6M headwind) and government-shutdown-related PS delays.

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

What Went Well

• AI-led growth and mix: AI Knowledge Hub ARR +23% y/y to $45.9M; now 60% of SaaS ARR, supporting higher SaaS gross margins (81% vs 77% y/y) and total gross margin (76% vs 70%).
• Profitability and cash: Adjusted EBITDA $5.0M (21% margin) vs $1.4M (6%) y/y; operating cash flow $10.4M (44% margin) with strong collections; cash rose to $70.9M despite $1.5M buybacks.
• New products and adoption: Launched three AI capabilities (AI Knowledge Method, AI Agent 2, and modular eGain Composer) with positive customer/partner interest; management emphasized “trusted knowledge + agentic AI” as differentiation.
  • Quote: “We unveiled three new AI products… customers and partners are showing significant interest… drives superior CX operations at scale and delivers strong AI ROI.” — CEO Ashu Roy.

What Went Wrong

• Legacy drag and near-term headwinds: Q2 guide down sequentially (to $22.3–$22.8M) due to ~$(0.6)M messaging sunset impact and government shutdown delays on PS engagements.
• Professional services contraction: PS revenue declined y/y (Q1: $1.61M vs $1.98M), reflecting lower attach by design but still a topline headwind; services margins a continued focus to trend toward breakeven.
• Non-GAAP reliance and adjustments: Non-GAAP adds back warrant-related expense (press release reconciliation shows $1.35M “issuance of common stock warrant for services”) and SBC; investors should track recurring vs one-time adjustments.

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Good day, and welcome to eGain fiscal 2026 first quarter financial results call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on the touch-tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Jim Byers, PondelWilkinson Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Jim Byers (Investor Contact)

Thank you, Operator, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to eGain's fiscal 2026 first quarter financial results conference call. On the call today are eGain's Chief Executive Officer, Ashu Roy, and Chief Financial Officer, Eric Smit. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that during this conference call, management will make certain forward-looking statements which convey management's expectations, beliefs, plans, objectives regarding future financial and operational performance. Forward-looking statements are generally preceded by words such as believe, plan, intend, expect, anticipate, or similar expressions. Forward-looking statements are protected by the Safe Harbor Provisions contained in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are subject to a wide range of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ in material respects. Information on various factors that could affect eGain's results are detailed in the company's reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

eGain is making these statements as of today, November 12, 2025, and assumes no obligation to publicly update or revise any of the forward-looking information in this conference call. In addition to GAAP results, we will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures such as non-GAAP operating income. The tables included with the earnings press release include a reconciliation of the historical non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures. eGain's earnings press release can be found by clicking the press release link on the Investor Relations page of eGain's website at egain.com. Along with the earnings release, we will also post an updated investor presentation to the Investor Relations page of eGain's website. And lastly, a phone replay of this conference call will be available for one week. And now, with that said, I'd like to turn the call over to eGain's CEO, Ashu Roy.

Ashu Roy (CEO)

Thank you, Jim. And good afternoon, everyone. We are off to a good start to our fiscal year with strong first quarter results across the board and ahead of consensus. Our total revenue was up 8% year-over-year. Our SaaS revenue was up 10% year-over-year. And our AI Knowledge line of product business, the ARR for it, was up 23% year-over-year. So we're making progress in the right direction in this exciting space of AI Knowledge that we are now firmly leading. Turning to business highlights, let me share a couple of notable new logo wins in the quarter. First, we signed up one of New York's largest insurers, health insurers. They serve two million members, roughly. This company saw the critical gap in their business operation where lack of trusted knowledge that was available to all their employees and clinical staff was hurting compliance.

They were struggling with their knowledge content fragmented across silos. Some were SharePoint, some were Confluence, and then many other repositories. So following an extensive process, RFP, and so on, they selected us to centralize their knowledge across the business for 8,000 users. Now, what's interesting to us is within 100 days, they've gone live with our solution with a powerful, scalable AI experience that aligns perfectly with their mission to deliver great healthcare to New Yorkers. Another one which is quite interesting is a multinational energy company that we recently won. They serve over 20 million customers across gas and electricity. This company, they've set up an ambitious goal to achieve a top quartile CSAT ranking because that would enable them to compete for millions of pounds of government incentives.

A key challenge for them as part of this is replacing their outdated knowledge experience for something that is spread across thousands of different documents: PowerPoint, SharePoint, Word documents, and so they're replacing that with eGain, a modern solution to support their contact center, their field agents, and their service engineers. Again, this client went live within 100 days. They're already live now with our AI Knowledge solution. They internally call it [WATT], a fitting name for a knowledge tool in an energy company. On the expansion front, we are seeing a nice pattern where existing knowledge clients are increasingly coming to us to add the AI agent product to leverage the trusted knowledge they have in their knowledge base and either going to the contact center to assist the agents or, in some cases, expand it into customer self-service directly.

So, for example, one of our branded manufacturing clients last quarter decided to expand their core knowledge implementation now into customer self-service. And this is a leading manufacturer of premium bicycles. And what we have been able to now do is reduce a lot of their inbound contact center volume, and they can drive a lot more growth without increasing cost of service. So this combination of AI and knowledge is really working for our customers now, and we are seeing more and more of them starting to drive that expansion and build out of agentic capabilities on top of a trusted knowledge infrastructure from us. The other thing, just looking at exciting stuff we've announced recently, is we made a whole bunch of new product announcements at our Solve 25 event last month. It was very successful. We held it in Chicago.

About half a dozen of our Global 2,000 clients shared success stories with pretty much a common theme, and that was the power of trusted knowledge and agentic AI working hand in hand to deliver both contact center improvements in performance as well as self-service improvements. The three new capabilities that we announced at the event. Incidentally, that's our biggest product announcement ever, where we have announced three new capabilities. So that's sort of testimonial to the great work that our team has been doing for the last year and a half in this area of AI Knowledge. So the first product we announced was more a process that we have now translated into a product, and this was our what used to be called the eGain Knowledge Method.

The Knowledge Method was our way, our proprietary way of building out and maintaining enterprise knowledge in a very efficient way for our business clients. And what we've been able to do is to apply AI to that and develop what we are now calling the eGain AI Knowledge Method. This includes comprehensive AI-powered knowledge intelligence, content orchestration, and answer synthesis capabilities. All that put together with expert in the loop to ensure that quality and compliance are always front and center. With these automation capabilities, we are confident that we can accelerate most knowledge management tasks by a factor of 10 and also reduce customer implementation time by 2x-3x. In fact, when I mentioned the other two clients earlier, they were benefiting from some of the early usage of this capability of AI Knowledge Methods.

Our attendees at the conference were simply delighted with this because for the longest time, knowledge management has been a great ROI, but the investment required has been a lot of manual labor. Now, with automating that with our AI capabilities, that just creates a lot of energy around knowledge and the priority businesses are able to put onto knowledge automation, not knowledge management. The next product we announced was the second version of eGain AI Agent. And so it's a breakthrough approach we have taken now to enhance the first version to automate conversations in customer service. And what we're doing there is we are combining hybrid AI with inbound expert assurance where needed. And by doing that, we can deliver non-trivial use cases which involve transactions, which involve decisions that are compliance-oriented to customers using AI and automation.

That's something which we have seen is a big gap in the industry where a lot of agentic solutions that are out there now talk about automation. But really, when we see the automation in practice, it's all around very trivial use cases because these agentic AI solutions will occasionally make mistakes. So you need to have a hybrid AI approach where you combine deterministic reasoning with model reasoning, and you do that intelligently and with compliance in mind. That's what we have implemented in AI Agent 2. Finally, we announced the eGain Composer, which is our first product targeting developers. It's a modular AI Knowledge platform for developers that leverages trusted knowledge sources to power agentic automation.

And so now what we're doing is these developers can now mix and match the components we have on our platform, including the knowledge hub, the retrieval engine, the agentic flows, and the user experiences. So they can decide to configure what we already have, or they can decide to develop their own components and plug them in to meet specific needs using our extensive APIs and SDKs and connectors that we announced as part of the Composer solution. Now, over the last couple of years, we've been working with many enterprise AI teams in our clientele. And what we have seen is a common pattern where these AI teams are looking to deploy the same sort of reliable, trusted, knowledge-powered agentic capabilities increasingly that we are doing in the customer service groups and CX groups. They want to do it outside of those groups.

But in order to do that, they need more flexibility. They want to use the common knowledge architecture and infrastructure, but they also want the ability to develop their own agentic layer on top of it. And the Composer offering allows them to do just that. So we're seeing some good interest from our existing customers around Composer and some new partner interest in that in the short period of time that we have announced it. Very exciting for us. Looking at the third aspect, which is again very interesting now for us, is the team and how we are adding some key talent as we are growing the business and investing on top of this product-led growth plan that we have put in place. So a couple of new hires I want to highlight. We did a press release around John Copeland, who is our new VP of Marketing.

He comes in from ServiceNow. And before that, he was with Adobe and eBay and McKinsey. He's leading a marketing effort. Our Solve event last month was his public introduction to the eGain stage. The next person that I want to mention, and I'm very happy to have him on board, is Vikas Paliwal. Vikas has joined as our VP of Product Marketing. He comes to us from the AWS AI team. And before that, he was with Intel and Broadcom and a host of other technology-heavy companies. He brings deep experience in the product development, the product management, and now leading product marketing. So at eGain, his first mandate is to drive the GTM for our new Composer product. As I mentioned, we are targeting developers and partners who are looking for a composable platform to operationalize their AI solutions built on trusted knowledge.

And finally, we're very happy to have Gautam Garg, who's joined us as the VP of Finance. He's joined Eric's team and comes to us from BTIG, which is a respected investment bank, and before that with Oracle in a variety of roles, starting in engineering and moving on to business and product. So Eric, I know, is quite excited about having him on the team and looking to kind of further automate our finance and operations as we drive our growth plans. So with a lot going on, just to conclude, we are pleased with our first quarter financial performance and what I see as growing market momentum. Our recent product introductions are resonating in the marketplace, the three we talked about. So that's the time we are now investing in building out the team.

And so we are excited to expand our leadership team with the hires that I just mentioned. With that, I'll hand it over to Eric, our CFO, to provide more detail on the financials. Eric?

Eric Smit (CFO)

Great. Thanks, Ashu. And thanks, everyone, for joining us today. Before I begin, I want to mention that we are again using slides to support our earnings call. We believe this will provide helpful context to make it easier for you to follow our results and outlook. In addition to the webcast, you can find the slides in the investor relations section of our website and the updated investor presentation. As Ashu noted, we are off to a good start to our fiscal year with revenue and ARR growth year-over-year, expanded margins, increased profitability, and strong cash flow from operations. Let me share more details about our financial results for Q1 before discussing our outlook and guidance for Q2 of fiscal 2026. Looking at our revenue, total revenue for the first quarter was $23.5 million, reaching the high end of our guidance and increasing 8% year-over-year.

SaaS revenue increased by 10% year-over-year and accounted for 93% of total revenue versus 91% of total revenue in Q1 of 2025. Looking at non-GAAP gross profits and gross margins, total gross margin for the quarter was 76%, up 600 basis points from 70% a year ago. SaaS gross margin for the quarter was 81%, up from 77% a year ago. Total gross margin expansion was driven by SaaS gross margin expansion plus a greater shift towards SaaS versus professional services revenue. Notably, SaaS gross margin expansion was primarily driven by our product enhancements that enabled more cost-efficient deployments and delivered operational efficiencies within our cloud and customer support teams.

Now, turning to our operations, Non-GAAP operating costs for the first quarter were $18.8 million, down 9% year-over-year, as we have streamlined and realigned our business operations because of automation and the continued shift towards a product-led sales model. Notably, we have redeployed these cost savings into R&D, which reflects our ongoing focus on growth and product innovation. Looking at our bottom line, our GAAP net income includes a $1.4 million warrant expense recorded as a one-time stock-based charge during the quarter. As we mentioned on our last call, this expense relates to the warrant we issued to JPMorgan in August as part of the strategic agreement that includes the appointment of a senior JPMC executive as a board observer.

Non-GAAP net income was $4.7 million or $0.17 per share, up significantly from non-GAAP net income of $1.3 million or $0.04 per share in the year-ago quarter. Adjusted EBITDA margin for the quarter was 21%, exceeding our guidance and up from 6% in the year-ago quarter. Turning to our balance sheet and cash flows, for the first quarter, we generated strong cash flow from operations of $10.4 million or 44% operating cash flow margin compared to $1 million or 4% operating cash flow margin in the year-ago quarter. This was ahead of our internal target due to better-than-expected cash collection efforts in the quarter. During the quarter, we bought back $1.5 million in stock at an average price of $6.38 per share. Our balance sheet remains very strong.

Total cash and cash equivalents at the end of the quarter was $70.9 million, up from $62.9 million as of June 30, 2025. Now, turning to our customer metrics, I've broken out the ARR AI Knowledge metrics from the total metrics to highlight the momentum in our AI Knowledge business. Looking at ARR, SaaS ARR for knowledge customers increased 23% year-over-year, while SaaS ARR for all customers increased 8% year-over-year. Turning to our net retention rates, LTM dollar-based SaaS net retention for knowledge customers was 112%, up from 103% a year ago, while net retention for all customers was 102%, up from 90% a year ago. Our LTM dollar-based SaaS net expansion rate was 119% for our knowledge customers and 110% for all our other customers, all customers.

Looking at remaining performance obligations, total RPO increased 23% year-over-year, and our short-term RPO of $58 million was up 7% year-over-year. Now, turning to our guidance, for the second quarter of fiscal 2026, we expect total revenue of between $22.3 million-$22.8 million. The sequential decline is primarily due to an approximate $600,000 reduction in revenue from our messaging platform business, which, as we had mentioned on our last call, we will be sunsetting over the next year. Furthermore, the recent government shutdown has introduced delays and near-term uncertainty for certain professional services engagements with some of our government customers. Turning to the bottom line for Q2, we expect GAAP net income of $1.2 million-$1.7 million or $0.04-$0.06 per share, which includes stock-based compensation expense of approximately $700,000.

We expect non-GAAP net income of $1.9 million-$2.4 million or $0.07-$0.08 per share, an Adjusted EBITDA of $2.7 million-$3.2 million or a margin of 12%-14%. Looking at our full fiscal year end of June 30, 2026, we expect total revenue to be between $90.5 million and $92 million, representing a return to growth for the year. GAAP net income of $3.5 million-$5 million or $0.12-$0.17 per share. This includes stock-based comp expense of approximately $3.4 million and the warrant expense of approximately $1.4 million. Non-GAAP net income of $8.3 million-$9.8 million or $0.29-$0.34 per share, an Adjusted EBITDA of $10.4 million-$11.9 million for a margin of 11%-13%.

Looking at our diluted weighted average shares outstanding, with the recent stock price movement, we now expect approximately 28.8 million shares for both the second quarter and full year. This expected increase in outstanding shares has a 1% impact to our EPS guidance for FY 2026. In conclusion, we are off to a good start to the year with solid results that beat consensus across the board. Customers and partners are responding enthusiastically to our expanded suite of AI-enabling knowledge solutions, and we are well positioned to build on this momentum and drive sustainable growth and profitability going forward. Finally, on the IR fronts, eGain will be meeting with investors at the 14th Annual ROTH Technology Conference in New York City on November the 19th. We look forward to seeing some of you there in person. With that, I'd like to open the call for questions. Operator?

Operator (participant)

Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your touch-tone phone. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star, then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. And your first question today will come from Richard Baldry with ROTH Capital. Please go ahead.

Richard Baldry (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Thanks. It looks like sales trends are sort of firming up, but by contrast, the actual dollar spent on sales and marketing in the quarter stepped down sort of sequentially and year-over-year. Can you talk about what your strategy is there, whether you think that it might be time to start investing there more aggressively, or do you feel that you have the capacity you need to address the opportunities that are starting to come?

Ashu Roy (CEO)

Yeah. So two things. One, there's just a summer slowdown with marketing spend. So for example, for this current quarter, again, things will go up, right, because the marketing spend is going up. Second, to your point about sort of building out capacity, I think right now, people-wise, we have good capacity because we are driving, as we mentioned, sort of a product-led sales motion with much more solution expertise-oriented pipeline execution. And so that is working well for us, but we do think that in the second half of this fiscal year, we will step up the sales hiring investment as well.

Richard Baldry (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

It looks like Agentic AI agents starting to highly proliferate them, but generally, but none of them because it seems like integrating a GenAI engine with some of that functionality is okay, easy enough, but they don't seem to have access to the data behind it. So do you think that the proliferation of those, what I think of as almost dumb agents, actually helps you, or does it commoditize that segment enough that it'll push more people to try to have to work with partners like yourself to make them specifically intelligent on a customer-by-customer basis?

Ashu Roy (CEO)

I believe so. I believe so. I think that's what we are seeing. We are seeing people playing with AI, agentic AI, and then we are seeing them talking to us after that, right? And so, yes, to your point, if you want to do something serious, you need to make sure that you're not feeding it garbage, that you're connecting into really critical data systems to solve non-trivial experiences and use cases. That's where we are coming in. And we are seeing that even with our existing customers. They're large companies. They have lots of AI teams that are developing cute little prototypes on the side, but they all are coming back to us to say, "Okay, we need to connect to your knowledge backend." So it's kind of exciting for us.

Richard Baldry (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Last for me, if you look at the Composer product, it's a new set of targets you're going after with developers. How complete is that for them to pull in to be able to work with not only the different components that you can bring to the table, but can they integrate with a variety of GenAI engines, or is it specific to a few you've tuned it for? How difficult would it be to sort of pop in different AI engines on top of your system? Thanks.

Ashu Roy (CEO)

Yeah. Great question. So to your point, this is the first version. So by definition, it's not the most comprehensive, but what we have going for us, I believe, is two things. One, we have the trusted knowledge backend and making that available very easily for people to plug into whatever agentic solution they are building. And so that, we have made it very easy with our APIs and SDKs. So for example, we will plug into OpenAI's development environment or Azure Copilot development environment. So if people are building agentic workflows in other places, we are providing a connector into those work environments so that they can use our APIs to get the trusted knowledge. So that is point one. And the second is we are also, to your earlier second part of your question, we are enabling it within what we call the bring-your-own-model architecture.

So if an enterprise says, "No, we are going to use Claude and not use OpenAI," that's fine. We are making it possible for people to plug in their choice model into our platform to do AI stuff. So those are the two things that we have done to make it easy for people to start consuming right away.

Richard Baldry (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Great. I thought it was my last question, but I'll try to sneak in one more. You've got a pretty big cash balance now, and it went up pretty substantially in the quarter despite some buybacks. Can you talk about strategically what you really think that's best deployed against? Is it a more aggressive buyback? Is it tuck-in acquisitions to expand your capabilities in this knowledge management agentic world? How do we think about that asset? Thanks.

Ashu Roy (CEO)

I think you want to talk to that?

Eric Smit (CFO)

Sure. I mean, I think we'll obviously continue to look at the buyback. I mean, as we've disclosed in the last call, we had increased that capacity. So that certainly still continues to be one avenue. But I think to your point of sort of exploring tuck-in acquisitions or inorganic, it's something that we're always open to, but for sure is not our primary focus. But I think more importantly, just having that ability to continue to invest in the business as well is something that gives us that comfort with that buffer so we don't have any distraction around the viability of the business. So those are the items that I would highlight.

Richard Baldry (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Great. Thanks. Congrats on a good quarter.

Ashu Roy (CEO)

Thank you.

Next question will come from Jeff Van Rhee with Craig-Hallum. Please go ahead.

Vijay Homan (Equity Research Associate)

Hi, this is Vijay Homan, on for Jeff Van Rhee. First from me. Just last quarter, you talked about a pipeline of several seven-figure Knowledge Hub opportunities and kind of an increasing pilot conversion rate. I was wondering if you could just give us an update on those opportunities and what you're seeing in those sales cycles.

Ashu Roy (CEO)

Yes. So I think the progress is good. Progress is, I'd say, these large opportunities take time to mature. And so what we are seeing is steady progress. So I'm quite pleased with that because with large opportunities, sometimes they stall along the way. I'm not seeing that. I'm seeing steady progression. So I'm quite excited. And I also see more engagement on the partner side. We are seeing more interest from partners who are starting to see this area as a viable category to add value. So those are two things that are quite exciting for us. First, the pipeline progression, and second, starting to see some good partner activity.

Vijay Homan (Equity Research Associate)

Got it. Appreciate that. And then next one, I know the intent was for JPMorgan to deploy by the late fall. I was just wondering how that deployment's going and any other updates on that rollout or learnings would be helpful. Thanks.

Ashu Roy (CEO)

Yes. So yes, happy to report that they have gone live with what the first phase plan was, and we are actively working the next phase. So I think it's gone to plan, which is great. As I think I've mentioned earlier, we deployed their first phase in half the time that we had originally discussed and agreed with them on. So it's pretty exciting for us. The speed of getting these projects live and used is, to me, a barometer of the interest and priority that enterprises start to place on these kinds of technologies.

Vijay Homan (Equity Research Associate)

Got it. Thanks for the color, and I'll leave it there.

Ashu Roy (CEO)

You're welcome.

Operator (participant)

Again, if you have a question, please press star and then one. Please stand by as we pull for questions. Seeing no further questions, this will conclude our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to management for any closing remarks.

Jim Byers (Investor Contact)

Thanks, Operator, and thanks, everybody, for participating, and look forward to updating you with our Q2 results. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.