Sidetrade posts 22% EBIT rise as AI-native bookings surge in H1 2026
Sidetrade has reported first-half 2026 revenue of €34.8 million, a 21% increase at constant currency, as a sharp rebound in bookings and improving operating leverage drove the Euronext Growth-listed company to a new profitability record. EBIT rose 22% to €5.7 million, representing 16.2% of revenue; on a like-for-like basis, excluding the recently acquired ezyCollect by Sidetrade, the EBIT margin reached 20.7%, a gain of approximately 500 basis points year on year. Net income grew 15% to €4.7 million.
Subscription revenue, which now accounts for 90% of group income, climbed 23% as reported and 26% at constant currency to €31.3 million. New annual recurring subscriptions (ARR) more than doubled, rising 112% to €5.16 million in the first half, already 20% above the full-year 2025 figure. Total Contract Value of signed deals reached €18.71 million, up 194% and 53% ahead of full-year 2025. The average initial commitment period also lengthened, from 44.5 months a year ago to 48.8 months, indicating customers are committing to longer relationships.
AI-native products and sovereign stack
Three months after launching its new AI-native product line, Sidetrade reported early commercial traction. In the second quarter alone, its Aimie Cash Collection Agent, Agent Builder Studio, and Aimie IQ generated €1.02 million in new ARR, representing 33% of the quarter's total new subscriptions. Eighty AI agents were placed on firm order during the period.
The company positions its competitive advantage around what it calls full-stack AI sovereignty: proprietary GPU compute (primarily NVIDIA H100 and H200 processors) running inside a private cloud, a Data Lake covering nearly $10 trillion in B2B payment transactions across approximately 45 million buyer companies, and its own SAFE (Sidetrade Agentic Framework for Enterprise) execution layer, launched on 10 September 2026. The infrastructure holds ISO 27001, SOC 1 Type II, and SOC 2 Type II certifications, and agents are validated against the OWASP Agentic Top 10 before production deployment.
Founder and chief executive Olivier Novasque framed the proposition in pointed terms: "No serious finance department will deploy autonomous agents at scale with a general-purpose AI provider, without guarantees on governance or on production cost, in a market where the token price is likely to soar."
Market context and competitive positioning
Sidetrade operates in the Order-to-Cash automation segment, a niche within the broader enterprise finance-software market that includes competitors such as HighRadius, Esker, and Billtrust, as well as ERP-embedded capabilities from SAP and Oracle. The sovereign-AI framing resonates with enterprise buyers concerned about data residency, cost predictability, and dependency on hyperscaler token pricing, concerns that have grown as generative AI workloads become a meaningful budget line for large finance teams.
North America is now the group's largest subscription region, accounting for just over 27% of subscription revenue, yet it represents 44% of first-half bookings. That gap signals near-term revenue conversion potential, with contracts signed in H1 2026 expected to begin contributing materially from the fourth quarter. Asia-Pacific, boosted by the ezyCollect integration, accounted for 16% of subscription revenue.
The company's longer-term O2C Intelligence 2030 plan targets more than 50% of revenue from AI-native products by 2030, and the bookings trajectory in the first half suggests that timeline is achievable if conversion rates hold. Third-quarter revenue will be disclosed on 20 October 2026.