Research Solutions (RSSS) Planet MicroCap Showcase: VEGAS 2025 summary

Market opportunity and business transformation

• Operates in a large, growing market driven by AI and changes in research methods, with a $15B TAM and focus on research-intensive organizations.

• Shifted from a literature access platform to a vertical SaaS and AI platform, increasing SaaS revenue from under $6M to over $19M and top-line CAGR from 5% to 15%.

• Gross margins improved from 32% to 47%, and EBITDA rose from $700K to $5M, with SaaS recurring revenue now 36% of total.

• Expanded customer reach by 50%, now serving 1,500 organizations globally across 13 verticals and 60 sub-verticals.

• Academic segment is fastest-growing, now 23–24% of revenue, with B2B and B2C segments targeting advanced degree researchers.

Product innovation and AI differentiation

• Platform covers discovery, access, management, creation, and analysis of research, with Scite as a key AI-driven discovery and analysis tool.

• Scite focuses exclusively on STM content, minimizing AI hallucinations and providing full-text search and citation metrics, unlike most AI engines.

• Article Galaxy connects users to 200M+ peer-reviewed articles from 2,000 publishers, enabling efficient access and management.

• Scite offers unique citation context, showing agreement, disagreement, or mentions, akin to a FICO or Rotten Tomatoes score for research quality.

• Platform enables access to 85% of global content instantly, with the remainder available within days, supported by deep publisher relationships.

Customer value and business model

• Delivers significant time and cost savings by optimizing research access, reducing duplicate purchases, and improving subscription decisions.

• SaaS platform offers 85%+ gross margins, high renewal rates over 100%, and stable, predictable cash flows.

• Transactional business (individual article sales) is low margin but funds SaaS growth; platform business is high margin and growing rapidly.

• Customer base is highly diversified, with minimal revenue dependency on a few clients and long-term relationships spanning up to 18 years.

• Research demand is non-cyclical, with resilience through economic downturns and ongoing engagement from both academic and corporate clients.