Atturra's FY26 revenue rises 17% to over $350m

Atturra has released its FY26 results, with revenue rising 17% from FY25 to finish at $351.8 million.

Gross margin was also up 15%, but underlying EBITDA was down 5% to $30.1 million and NPAT suffered a 339% drop, falling from close to positive $9.1 million in FY25 to negative $21.7 million.

This result, however, was flagged by the company back in July and primarily related to historic acquisitions servicing government and defence customers, particularly within the Canberra market.

Atturra CEO Stephen Kowal said that while the company had a "pretty poor first half", he was "very very happy" where the company ended up overall.

"We had really strong growth in cloud, good growth in managed services and our ERP business. It was offset a little bit by public sector revenue, but those other lines of business grew really really well," he told techpartner.news.

AI changing hiring patterns

With the company now sitting at over 1,300 staff worldwide, Kowal said that the current rate of headcount growth is just not needed as much anymore due to internal AI implementation.

"We're not using AI to replace staff, and we've been clear to our staff internally as well [around that]; what we've found is that's actually generated really good staff-generated productivity ideas, because they know that if they 'AI themselves' out of the business, we'll find something else for them, retrain [them] and change their role," he said.

One change that Kowal has observed in the market, however, is the need for talent to possess learning agility, which he stated is "much more of an important skill than it was two years ago".

"As we hire now, that's actually something that we really look for and it's quite hard to look for -  do they have learning agility, because I guarantee the role they're coming in for will be different in four years' time" he said.

"It's creating a real interesting recruiting challenge because historically you don't look for learning agility. The other skill we look for is resilience. That's another one that’s really to hard test for as well."

Looking at the overall market, Kowal said that while "the really good AI consultants with the right EQ and IQ mix" is "pretty hard" to recruit for, the company isn't struggling to find those potential hires across the rest of the technical skill sets and the market is mostly back to normal.

"When we forward plan projects and realise we need some sort of engineer, unlike post-COVID where it's like ‘how are we going to get around that?’, now it's it's not a concern," he told techpartner.news.

"I think what's going to be really interesting for us, and and I'm guessing many others, and this is a challenge for the graduate market - the rate of our headcount growth relative to revenue is going to slow down because we're going to need less people to grow.

"Let's say, [for example], that for every 10 million in revenue, I need to add 40 people, [but] going forward, for every $10 million, I probably only need to add 20 people. Our headcount and revenue has been consistent, they've been linked, but what we're seeing now is that revenue will grow faster than headcount. The really interesting challenge is there's less junior roles."

AI maturity increasing in market

Kowal also noted a broader change in-market when it comes to customers using AI, noting that when asked a year ago whether clients were thinking about AI security and governance, his observation was that nobody was asking for it.

Now, a mere 12 months on, customers want to know how to do it, with the Atturra CEO noting that "it's [now] absolutely top of mind".

"What's happened is over the last year, everyone's fiddled with AI, played with it, done vibe coding, thought it would change their world, realised the reality is a little bit more complicated, and that doing it requires quite a lot of architecting and changes internally, because there’s risks with data leaks and PII," he explaned.

"I’d say 80% of our clients are actually talking about governance, control, management [of AI]."

M&A not a priority for FY27

After four acquisitions in seven months from the end of 2024 through to the end of July 2025 - comprising of Sydney-based manufacturing ERP specialist ComActivity; US-based cloud integration, customisation and services firm Kitepipe; Brisbane-based SAP partner DalRae Solutions; and Melbourne-based Blue Connections - the firm isn't focused on M&A for the foreseeable future.

"M&A is not really a priority in FY27," Kowal told techpartner.news.

"The way I'm looking at M&A this calendar year is unless it's super valuable, we're unlikely to do anything. We will continue acquisitions going forward, but we want to make sure we focus on that steady operational integration.

"We're seeing really good returns on investing in things like AI advisory and our Scholarian school product. I'm not saying no, we won’t [acquire], but the hurdle is definitely higher. Once we get to next calendar year, we'll probably be back to doing an acquisition a year or maybe two a year, but we’ll assess as we get closer to there."