Australia’s cohort of software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies is a fascinating and dynamic area of the share market, packed with globally ambitious companies making a splash. Here are two that I think are really good prospects of building profitable global businesses, as they embrace the SaaS revolution and move away from their legacy enterprise software businesses. Both these companies have market-leading offerings that give them a competitive advantage.
1. AI-Media Technologies (AIM, 56 cents)
Market capitalisation: $117 million
12-month total return: 27.3%
Three-year total return: 17.5% a year
Expected FY26 (June) dividend yield: no dividend expected
Expected FY26 (June) price/earnings (P/E) ratio: 56 times earnings
Analysts’ price target: 80 cents, Morgans
Language technology firm AI-Media is a global leader in AI-driven captioning and language technology, riding the demand for captioning, transcription and translation, which has grown far beyond its origin in broadcasting. The company enables many of the world’s leading brands to caption and sub-title their TV broadcasts, live streams, events, virtual meetings, lectures and so on.
AI-Media’s world-class technology provides the only end-to-end captioning solution in the marketplace, from encrypting source data to encoding, captioning and translation. The company works from six offices across three continents, servicing live-streaming in the media, events, corporate, education, municipal and government sectors. It has customers in 25 countries. AI-Media’s technology delivers more than 7 million minutes of captioning, transcription, and translation for live and recorded media content, online events, and web streams every month.
Founded in 2003 and listed in 2020, AI-Media was built its business on human-powered live captioning and transcription services, but it is well down the track of transforming away from labour-intensive human services to scalable AI-based software. The company’s flagship product, LEXI, is trusted worldwide for its accuracy and scalability, but the company has expanded LEXI well beyond its captioning origins, with the LEXI 3.0 platform, which is a real-time captioning engine powered by proprietary AI. It not only delivers transcriptions but can now translate speech into multiple languages in real-time through its new LEXI Voice product, launched earlier this year.
Leveraging the latest in speech recognition and synthetic voice technology, LEXI Voice uses AI to isolate and interpret speaker audio, preserving speaker changes, timing and tone, and delivering natural-sounding, low-latency AI voice translations of live audio into multiple languages, in real time. This technology supports more than 100 languages and is designed for broadcast environments, offering a cost-effective solution for multi-lingual real-time content delivery delivers real-time alternate-language voice tracks. With high transcription accuracy, LEXI Voice enables seamless multilingual delivery without the need for human interpreters.
And with LEXI Brew, also launched in 2025, AI-Media has entered the Generative AI space, by allowing enterprise clients to plug ChatGPT-like models into their own secure data without losing privacy LEXI Brew is an enterprise AI solution, developed with software company BrewAI, that securely integrates advanced AI models with clients’ proprietary data. Running behind client firewalls, LEXI Brew provides real-time insights and automation with full privacy and security.
Over the last three years, AI-Media has transformed its operations from a services-based business to a SaaS technology-focused company, centred around AI-powered language services. This is a core plank of the company’s strategy of moving toward higher-margin, recurring technology revenue. In FY22, technology revenue made up 22% of total revenue; that is now about half, and the company has the stated aim of technology making up 80% of revenue by the end of 2025.
As it transitions fully from services to a technology-driven SaaS business model, AI-Media’s strategic priority is to drive LEXI sales growth to achieve its five-year earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) target of $60 million in FY29 – it is expected to be about $4.4 million this year. The company thinks it can scale its tech sales by 35% annually, at a gross margin of more than 80%, while keeping operating expenses contained.
Broker Morgans says achieving the $60 million EBITDA target would “deliver substantial share price returns,” but even achieving half of this aspirational target by FY29 “should still deliver double-digit total shareholder returns.” Morgans expects a net loss of $2.1 million to be announced for FY25, but AIM to move to profitability in the current financial year, reporting net profit of $1.6 million, lifting to $5 million in FY27. The broker has a price target of 80 cents on the stock.
2. Pureprofile (PPL, 4.2 cents)
Market capitalisation: $49 million
12-month total return: 61.5%
Three-year total return: –3.7% a year
Expected FY26 (June) dividend yield: no dividend expected
Expected FY26 (June) price/earnings (P/E) ratio: 28.4 times earnings
Analysts’ price target: 7.6 cents, Curran & Co.
Although a micro-cap in terms of its value on the share market, Sydney-based Pureprofile packs a global punch. It is a data, analytics and insights business that provides online research solutions to companies, agencies, marketers, researchers and governments, helping all of these to answer crucial questions. Pureprofile securely connects organisations with deeply profiled audiences, gathering data that is otherwise inaccessible.
Pureprofile has built a global ‘panel’ of more than 20 million consumers for market research and data insights. These people build their profile with Pureprofile by answering questions about themselves, their habits and their lifestyles, and sharing their opinions: in doing so, they become eligible for cash payments, gift cards and movie tickets. The breadth of the panel means that the data collected is both high-quality and highly insightful. Pureprofile uses its proprietary and partner panels to build detailed consumer profiles, which are then used to help businesses and governmental organisations understand, target, and engage with their audiences; with valuable data and deeper audience connections, PPL’s clients are able to make more informed decisions, respond to their own customers’ needs more effectively.
Whether it’s a brand wanting to better understand consumer preferences, a company looking to test a product concept or advertising campaign, or a government body looking to gauge public opinion, Pureprofile says its insights enable better decision-making and foster stronger relationships with target audiences. The company is also seeing an emerging new business with AI companies as clients:
third parties who need its data to feed their large language models (LLMs).
The SaaS ResTech (research technology) offering is aimed at equipping clients with actionable intelligence into their markets, audiences and customers. AI-empowered ‘social insights’ tools help brands decode online discourse and unlock deeper consumer insights.
In FY25, Pureprofile completed studies for clients in 93 countries. It has more than 920 clients around the world at the moment, up from 798 a year ago, and serves them through 14 global offices. 91% of its business is repeat business. Just three years after expanding outside Australia for the first time, Pureprofile has built its ‘rest of world’ revenue share to 46% of the total. As the market leader in Australia/New Zealand, Pureprofile identifies the next phase of its expansion is to replicate the same success in the US and UK. These markets are currently 30 times and 5 times larger than Australia, respectively. The global insights industry is worth US$129.2 billion, of which more than half – US$71.6 billion – is in the US.
Pureprofile broke-through into the black at net profit level in FY24, and increased its net profit strongly in FY25. FY25 delivered record full-year revenue of $57.2 million, up 19%; while EBITDA rose 18%, to a record $5.2 million. Australia/New Zealand revenue rose by 12%, while ‘rest of world’ revenue grew by 28%, underpinned by the UK and US, reflecting increasing demand for its solutions across international markets; the company’s offshore revenue is growing well above global industry growth rates. As it launches next-generation insight solutions, opens up new markets and invests in growing its presence in the US and UK, Pureprofile looks to be very well-poised to grow its business. There is not much broker coverage of the stock, but Sydney-based broker Curran & Co. has a price target on PPL of 7.6 cents, while RaaS Research Group, which is paid a fee by Pureprofile to prepare and issue research reports on behalf of Pureprofile, has a base-case valuation on the stock of 12 cents a share.