Data Storage Corporation Q1 2026 Earnings Call - Pivots to Sovereign AI Continuity with $10M War Chest
Summary
Data Storage Corporation (DTST) emerged from the sale of its CloudFirst business with a debt-free balance sheet and $10 million in cash, using the proceeds to retire 72% of its shares. The company is now pivoting from legacy connectivity services to a new wholly owned subsidiary, Sovereign AI Solutions, targeting the unaddressed gap in compliance-driven recovery and behavioral validation for private, on-premise AI deployments. While the Nexxis connectivity business provides a stable, growing foundation with 10.9% revenue growth and expanding margins, management is betting the company's future on a multi-billion dollar market for AI infrastructure resilience that currently has no purpose-built players.
The strategy relies on a two-phase rollout: initial hardware and runbook-based continuity followed by proprietary software that ensures models behave correctly during recovery. Management plans to fund the development with existing cash, targeting a statement of work by Q2 and initial customer reservations by Q4 2027. The Q1 results reflect the transition, with a net loss driven by non-cash stock-based compensation and professional fees, but the company maintains significant liquidity to execute its pivot without diluting shareholders further.
Key Takeaways
- DTST sold its CloudFirst business in 2025 for $40 million, generating capital to fund a 72% share tender offer and maintain a debt-free balance sheet.
- The company is launching Sovereign AI Solutions, a new subsidiary focused on building an AI continuity control plane for regulated, on-premise AI deployments.
- Management identifies a critical infrastructure gap in compliance-driven recovery and behavioral validation for sovereign AI environments, a market they estimate could be multi-billion dollars annually.
- Nexxis, the remaining connectivity business, posted Q1 2026 sales of $347,000 (up 10.9% YoY) and gross margins expanded to 53.7% from 45.0%.
- Q1 2026 net loss was $631,000, primarily driven by a $425,000 increase in non-cash stock-based compensation and higher professional fees.
- DTST holds approximately $9.7 million in cash and marketable securities, providing a runway to fund the new AI initiative without immediate equity dilution.
- The Sovereign AI platform will be developed in two stages: initial hardware-based continuity and runbooks, followed by proprietary software for behavioral validation.
- Management plans to hire a CTO and subcontract software development to multiple firms rather than building a large in-house engineering team.
- CEO Chuck Piluso estimates initial development costs will be modest ($250,000-$300,000) before major capital expenditures for hardware deployment.
- The company targets initial customer reservations by Q4 2027, leveraging its legacy disaster recovery expertise to capture a nascent market before incumbents adapt.
Full Transcript
Operator: Greetings and welcome to the Data Storage Corporation First Quarter 2026 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow a formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce David Waldman, Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.
David Waldman, Investor Relations, Data Storage Corporation: Thank you and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Data Storage Corporation’s 2026 first quarter business update conference call. On the call with us this morning are Chuck Piluso, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Chris Panagiotakos, Chief Financial Officer. The company issued a press release this morning containing its 2026 first quarter financial results, which is also posted on the company’s website. If you have any questions after the call or would like any additional information about the company, please contact Crescendo Communications, LLC at 212-671-1020. Before we begin, please note that today’s call contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially due to various risks and uncertainties described in the company’s filings with the SEC.
Except as required by law, the company assumes no obligation to update or revise forward-looking statements. I’d now like to turn the call over to Chuck Piluso. Please go ahead, Chuck.
Chuck Piluso, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Data Storage Corporation: Thank you, David. Good morning, everyone. We appreciate everyone joining us today. The first quarter of 2026 marked another important milestone in the strategic transformation of Data Storage Corporation. Over the past year, we have repositioned the company following the successful sale of our cloud solution business in 2025. Today, we are operating from a position of financial strength, strategic flexibility, and operational focus. As many of you know, the sale of the CloudFirst business was transformational for Data Storage Corporation. That transaction not only validated the value we created over more than two decades, but also provided us with the capital foundation necessary to reposition the company towards what we believe are significantly larger long-term market opportunities. Following the transaction, we completed a substantial tender offer that reduced our outstanding shares count by approximately 72% while still maintaining debt-free balance sheet and substantial liquidity.
Importantly, the period following the sale was not a pause in activity. It was a period of evaluation, of analysis, of strategic development. We spent considerable time assessing emerging infrastructure trends, regulatory developments, competitive positioning in areas where we believe meaningful structural market gap existed. What became increasingly clear, experimentation into mission-critical software deployment environments. Across industries such as healthcare, financial service, insurance, organizations are beginning to deploy sovereign AI in AI factory environments. On-site equipment designed to run proprietary AI models on highly sensitive datasets. These are not public AI cloud environments. These are private enterprise-grade AI infrastructures that organizations increasingly rely upon for core operating workflows, security, decision-making, compliance functions, and customer-facing processes. As we studied this market, we identified what we believe is a critical infrastructure gap.
As these systems are deployed today, we believe there are no widely adopted purpose-built platforms designed specifically addressing recovery, resilience, behavior validation, and regulatory compliance to these AI factory environments. After two successful decades operating CloudFirst, we understand the client’s requirements as it relates to meeting their expectations surrounding business continuity. Traditional data storage systems focus primarily on restoring hardware or infrastructure uptime, but AI introduces an entirely different challenge set. Enterprises will require a business continuity service and will increasingly need to validate those models are behaving correctly when a situation occurs. That output remains compliant, that inference consistency is maintained, and that recovery procedures themselves satisfy the client and regulatory standards. We believe this creates a significantly new category of infrastructure need.
To address this opportunity, we plan to establish Sovereign AI Solutions, a wholly owned subsidiary focused on developing what we describe as an AI continuity control plane for regulated enterprises. Our intention is to create a platform capable of serving as a resiliency, recovery, validation, and compliance layer for sovereign AI infrastructure environments. The platform we envision is designed to detect behavioral anomalies, execute validated recovery sequences, and generate audit-ready documentation that regulated industries may increasingly require as AI becomes embedded into critical business operations. Importantly, we believe our approach is differentiated because it focuses not only on infrastructure restoration, but also on preserving operational integrity compliance posture at the model and behavioral levels. We also believe the market timing is compelling.
Earlier this month, several leading AI developers announced multi-billion dollar initiatives designed to integrate AI deeply into the enterprise-wide workflows, further validating large-scale AI deployment across mission-critical environments is accelerating rapidly. This market remains early stage and rapidly evolving, we believe long-term opportunity could be substantial. Based on our preliminary analysis, regulatory-driven enterprise AI infrastructure spending could ultimately represent a multi-billion dollar annual market opportunity. At the same time, we are not currently aware of any other purposely built platform targeting compliance-driven AI recovery for regulated enterprises in the manner we are pursuing. Our focus throughout 2026 will be advancing the platform architecture, redefining our go-to-market strategy, continuing industry engagement discussions, and progressing towards potential initial customer opportunities. We expect to provide additional commercial and operational updates as these initiatives advance throughout the year.
At the same time, our Nexxis business continues to provide an important operational and financial foundation for DTST. Nexxis remains a stable recurring revenue business, delivering VoIP, dedicated internet access, SD-WAN, and data transport services. During the first quarter of 2026, Nexxis sales increased 10.9% year-over-year, while gross profit increased 32.1%, and gross margins expanded to 53.7% compared to 45% in the prior year-period. We believe these results demonstrate both the continued demand for our connectivity services and operational discipline within the business. Just as importantly, Nexxis provides us with a recurring revenue base and operating infrastructure that supports our broader strategic initiatives. Financially, we believe DTST is well-positioned relative to many companies pursuing emerging technology opportunities.
We ended the year with no long-term debt, substantial working capital, significant market securities, and a highly flexible balance sheet. That strength gives us the ability to remain patient, strategic, disciplined on how we allocate capital while SAIS remains our primary strategic initiative. We are also continuing to evaluate complementary opportunities, including partnerships, strategic investments, mergers and acquisitions, and other transactions that could strengthen our competitive position and enhance long-term shareholder value. Ultimately, our goal is to position DTST at the intersection of enterprise AI infrastructure, resiliency, compliance, and mission-critical continuity areas where we believe demand will continue to expand significantly over the coming years. We appreciate the continued support and confidence of our shareholders. We look forward to updating everyone on our progress as we move throughout 2026.
I’d like now to turn it over to Chris Panagiotakos for a review of the financial results. Chris?
Chris Panagiotakos, Chief Financial Officer, Data Storage Corporation: Thank you, Chuck. Good morning, everyone. As previously discussed, on September 11, 2025, we closed the sale of our CloudFirst business for $40 million. As a result of the transaction and in accordance with auditing and reporting standards, our ongoing financial reporting now reflects only our continuing operations, specifically our Nexxis subsidiary. Sales from continuing operations were $347,000 for the 3 months ending March 31, 2026, an increase of $34,000 or 10.9% compared to $313,000 in the prior year. The increase was primarily attributable to continued growth in our Nexxis voice and data solutions business, driven by the addition of new customers and increased spending from existing customers. Revenue growth during the period reflects continued demand for our voice and data connectivity solutions and expansion of services within our existing customer base.
Gross profit for the three months ending March thirty-first, 2026 was $186,000, an increase of $45,000 or 32.1% compared to $141,000 in the prior period. Selling general and administrative expenses for the three months ending March thirty-first, 2026 increased $615,000 or 71.8% to $1.5 million from $857,000 for the three months ending March thirty-first, 2025. The increase was primarily driven by a $425,000 or 311% increase in non-cash stock-based compensation as a result of grants to certain employees during the three months ended March thirty-first, 2026.
Professional fees increased by $135,000 or 73.6% attributable to higher fees paid relating to legal and consulting services during the period. Net loss attributable to common shareholders for the three months ending March 31, 2026 was $631,000 compared to net income of $24,000 for the three months ending March 31, 2025. We ended the quarter with cash equivalents, and marketable securities of approximately $9.7 million at March 31, 2026. We used $29.5 million of the proceeds from the sales of marketable securities to repurchase common stock from our shareholders in connection with the tender offer, which closed on January 15, 2026. Thank you. I will now turn the call back to Chuck.
Chuck Piluso, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Data Storage Corporation: Thanks, Chris. Let’s open up the call for some questions.
Operator: Thank you. At this time, we’ll conduct a Q&A session. To ask a question, press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate that your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. 1 moment, please, while we pull for questions. Your first question comes from Matthew Galinko with Maxim Group. Please state your question.
Matthew Galinko, Analyst, Maxim Group: Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking my question. As you pursue the AI strategy, I’m curious how you’ll pursue, I guess, developing technical solutions to support the go-to-market. Do you expect to bring developers in-house to the current structure? Just curious how you’ll approach that.
Chuck Piluso, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Data Storage Corporation: Good morning, Matt. Thank you for the question. What we’re doing right now is that, just to cover it across the board, essentially, is that we have a recruiter working on finding us someone to run the subsidiary. We are hopefully lining up CTOs that we can interview that may wanna start off as a consulting basis and handle the overall project. We’re talking to three, four other companies, essentially, that wanna participate in everything from, you know, us subcontracting to them, to partnerships for them to, you know, do the installation. You know, we came across this because we put out a letter of intent to a company and found out a while ago about sovereign AI and looking into this and seeing where the holes are.
In doing that, you know, we started finding out, okay, who are the folks that are installing this sovereign AI? As we started looking at this very seriously, we said, "Well, okay, these are companies that we can use to sub out." From a U.S. basis, Eastern Europe, and from Indian basis, companies are looking to develop this software that today does not exist. You know, you can do what we did at CloudFirst for over 20 years, protecting someone’s information and having a runbook to get the companies up and going because regulated companies using the cloud with proprietary data, they’re pretty much building it themselves.
We’re really on all fronts at this point, and so we hope to start building a statement of work, probably over the next 30 days, and that might involve probably 3 separate companies, each one having a different discipline. Right now, a number of companies, as I’ve gone around talking about this, and I’m kind of being somewhat quiet to a degree because, you know, you turn them into competitors. For the most part, we would say there’s probably going to be 3 companies involved with putting this together in the 2 co-location centers is what our intention were to be.
Overall, you know, we have to start with someone that’s gonna be project management, and that’s why we have the recruiter going on, because there’ll be a lot going on, but we’ve done it before with 10 data centers in 3 countries. It’s very similar to that, but the software to flip it over when there’s a disaster of some sort. Even though people can say, well, Tier 3 data centers, but everybody that’s in Tier 3 data centers today still has to be geographically diverse if they’re gonna be compliant and a whole list of other things. That’s where we’re headed. Stage 1 will be to make it look like it was almost CloudFirst, but on the GPU side and everything that goes along with GPU and storage.
The stage 2 of it will be building the software, you know, all along to be able to have it flip over and act behaviorally the same way. You know, behavioral point objective, behavioral time objective. This is very much similar to what we did with CloudFirst, but it’s GPUs, and they are different. There’ll be multiple companies involved. I’m sorry. You know, a short question, a very long answer, there’ll be multiple companies that we’re talking to today.
Matthew Galinko, Analyst, Maxim Group: Sure. No, I appreciate all the color. It’s helpful to kinda, you know, conceptualize what you’re doing. Maybe just as a follow-up. You know, obviously, I think you’ve a better sense of timing than we do, but will we start to see expenses ramp up maybe in the second quarter or more in the third quarter around the initiative? Will we see that starting to hit the P&L, or would investments be capitalized, and we won’t necessarily see it on the P&L? Just curious how the participation might look or as it’s looking today and if that’s the right timeline to think about.
Chuck Piluso, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Data Storage Corporation: Sure. Well, rounding our money, we have, let’s say, $10 million in the bank. You know, we have some escrows going on still from the Innovis sale. We just settled one on the networking capital with them and have, you know, $700,000 that, you know, we have come in or coming in over the last week or so. We do have some cash. The board approved at a recent board meeting for us to go out and explore this and line it completely up with all the pieces that are needed. I think that it will hit the cash, but, you know, it won’t be I don’t wanna use the word significant.
I can’t imagine us spending more than $250,000-$300,000 on being able to get it to the point of our statement of work part before we say go. When we say go, it’s gonna, they’re gonna be capital expenses. Those capital expenses will be depreciated over five years for the most part. The big hit on the cash, you know, I think most of it would be capital. The software development and all of that, we’ll see how we can make arrangements, but that’ll probably be the part that’ll be just unknown at this particular point, frankly, on the software side. This, you know, there’ll be capital expenditures going on.
I think we have enough money, you know, to implement this and still have a 2-year run if revenue wasn’t generated. We’re hoping to take, you know, hopefully taking agreements in the first quarter of 2027, maybe earlier, of which I’ll call reservations versus subscription, but they’ll all be recurring revenue.
Matthew Galinko, Analyst, Maxim Group: Yep. That makes sense. Last question, then I’ll jump back in the queue. With, you know, I guess referring to that, you know, not a subscription, I guess that kind of speaks towards, you know, figuring out what capacity you need, in, you know, relative to how many customers you have, and what their demands are. Can you talk a little bit how you’re thinking about, you know, how far ahead of, you know, demand that you need to build out capacity and how access to GPUs and data center space might look as you know, progress over the next few quarters?
Chuck Piluso, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Data Storage Corporation: I’m going to say the next 1-2 quarters, we’ll just be setting everything all up, hopefully having it in all in place, you know, by the end of the year. What’s interesting about it is that we wouldn’t be into this, let’s keep buying more and more GPUs, spending $50 billion that you’re seeing, you know, that’s going on. That’s not the play here. The play here is essentially to use just an example, take a mid-sized hospital. A mid-sized hospital, let’s say they’re going to spend $1 million and set up their environment. They’re gonna run logistics for an operating room where their pharmaceutical and their building is critical. They might have subscribed to software. They didn’t build it. You know, they install it, and it keeps learning and becoming more intelligent.
Now they what are they gonna spend to get to the other side to have the compliance in Sarbanes-Oxley and all these things that no one’s talking about yet. Now are you gonna double that CapEx, or do you wanna go to a service bureau? We don’t believe NVIDIA is gonna build a service bureau, by the way. You know, you know, CoreWeave and people like that, they could do it. They’re not really focused on it. For the most part, they now need to have the ability to be able to recover. When we talk about this recovery piece, the return on investment seems significant for them. I would say that when we’re looking at this, a mid-sized hospital is gonna need to be able to be compliant.
Their confidential information is sitting, you know, on their storage remotely, and we have run books. At some point, it needs to flip over and act the exact same way and recover. You know, it’s I don’t know if I’m answering that question completely, but that’s kind of the model that you’re looking at. That could be insurance companies as well, financial institutions, Martin. Does that answer your question, Matt? I’m not sure.
Matthew Galinko, Analyst, Maxim Group: It helps. I guess to clarify, you know, I guess when you were hosting, you know, CloudFirst and disaster recovery there, you had an idea of how much capacity you needed, but, you know, taking the $1 million environment at a mid-sized hospital, what would be the, you know, I assume you’ll have enough capacity, you know, are you spending 1 to 5, so your environment would support 5? You know, how do you, how do you balance the investment of, you know, customer needs to fail over in the GPU environment versus how much, you know, overcapacity you wanna build?
Chuck Piluso, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Data Storage Corporation: The first thing I think we know by now after all these years, providing business continuity is that a hospital is gonna run this application or multiple applications to improve efficiency and, you know, and all of that, and they’re gonna depreciate this equipment over 3 to 5 years. That hospital is not gonna be in the race to add more and more GPUs and more and more GPUs. We don’t see the growth there. When you don’t we don’t see them continue to build upon that at the rates that we’re seeing, you know, folks spending $50 billion. We can match their equipment on our side. Let’s just say, for example, that they wanna recover within 15 minutes. That’s gonna be a higher level service, and that’s not gonna run a ratio.
That’s gonna be one-to-one for them, and that’s gonna be, you know, what we would call high availability in a regular sense. There’s another layer underneath there, like you’re mentioning, Matthew, where you’re gonna run a 5-to-1 ratio, an 8-to-1 ratio. The one things we learned during 9/11 with CloudFirst and, you know, and then other disasters and storms that all happen, is that things can happen geographically within a particular region. If you run too high of a ratio, you can’t support it. It needs to be coming from different geographies on that. I would assume that a 5-to-1 ratio would be successful, as long as you could probably run a 10-to-1 ratio as long as the 10 are in all different parts of the U.S.
I would say if on standby type service where you have run books and all of that, I would say that probably 5 to 1 would be a good ratio.
Matthew Galinko, Analyst, Maxim Group: Very helpful. Thank you.
Operator: Your next question comes from Ellen Litzaw with Fourth Capital. Please state your question.
Ellen Litzaw, Analyst, Fourth Capital: Yes, fine. Thank you so much for taking my question. Can you elaborate on the market opportunity you see for the Sovereign AI Solutions and, you know, why you think now is the right time to enter the space?
Chuck Piluso, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Data Storage Corporation: Sure. Thanks, Ellen. The right time. It could be early on it, but if it takes us six months, when all of a sudden we believe that when everyone starts, everyone looks at AI as a general population of the world now, as they go into ChatGPT and they ask a question or Claude and say, "Design this and design that." The fifth layer of this AI is the business process, and that’s the software being developed. These 150 executives that OpenAI is putting in place that was in a press release, you know, is going out to actually build this software. As this software gets deployed, they’re gonna need to be compliant the same way all the CPUs have to be compliant in, you know, in industry, that they’re using best practices. Today, that’s not in existence.
It might be all happening in one data center. I think it’s a matter of time before compliance and regulations start surrounding as more and more organizations, regulated organizations are deploying these types of software and services to make them more efficient, to learn better, reduce staff, whatever they’re thinking. That’s why these 150 people are being hired because, you know, companies are interested. The talent is lacking on it, you know. You know, we’re there to be able to go up to sovereign AI to say, "Well, you put this in place, you know, how compliant are you?" No one, I don’t believe anyone’s asking that question, and we’ve been talking to a lot of people, you know.
Everyone’s focused on, you know, learning, the training the models, installing equipment, testing it, but they’re not there on compliance and all the regulations that went on over the previous years. That’s why I believe it’s a very solid business model.
Ellen Litzaw, Analyst, Fourth Capital: That, that makes sense. That kind of leads into my next question. What do you think really differentiates the, you know, Sovereign AI Solutions from traditional disaster recovery, cybersecurity, or, you know, any enterprise infrastructure providers currently in the market?
Chuck Piluso, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Data Storage Corporation: I think it’s the same thing. You know, essentially, you could say it’s the same thing. None of the folks that are today in disaster recovery that we know, that our research came up with, are doing anything like this. Whether they’re planning that, I’m not exactly sure. There’s enough room in it. You know, some of the ratios I’ve seen is that, you know, this is going to be somewhere around 5%-10% of anyone that’s putting sovereign AI in place.
Some numbers I’ve seen, and it is very tough when you start looking at market numbers, is that it’s, you know, sovereign AI is right around a $50 billion total addressable marketplace, and 10% is what some of the numbers that I’ve seen for this type of thing, but they’re rough calculations, and I wouldn’t hold me to it. I know this is, you know, I have a solid feeling that this is coming. I do believe that the folks that are in this business that CloudFirst competed with will eventually move into this. I think we might have a head start on it, and I think that that’s important, but there’s enough room with, you know, five or six competitors.
Right now, if we get this up by the end of the year and we start talking to people in the fourth quarter, I think we’ll have a little bit of a lead. Because of our background, we know about escalation lists. We know how to do that. We were doing that. We know how to have run books and all the things that went on with that. We do understand, you know, all of that, and I think it fits in really, really well with this. We saw the hole, you know, and we saw that come up because we see what’s going on with sovereign AI and AI factories. I heard some numbers from Dell of proposals outstanding. They were just some large numbers. I’m pretty excited about it.
Ellen Litzaw, Analyst, Fourth Capital: Oh, definitely very exciting. I guess in terms of the development timeline and then the potential commercialization path for sovereign AI, what does that look like over the next 12-24 months?
Chuck Piluso, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Data Storage Corporation: Everything’s about execution. We all know that. Initially, we were going to try to do everything, you know, and then launch. Studying it some more, we felt maybe the thing to do is to do a 2-stage approach. Let’s get this up and going without the behavioral side of it so that, you know, these regulated organizations, they can be protected, but it’s gonna be different. It might not move over the exact same way right away behaviorally. You have the runbook and all of these things, the 1st stage will be to stand it up, start taking reservations, which I wanna call it reservations instead of subscription, and get it moving so they can start testing and coming over to us. From the very beginning, let’s just say within 60 days, software starts to get developed.
By the time everything gets deployed on the hardware, on the hardware side, staffing’s in place, you know, hopefully, it’s not gonna take more than 9 months. There’s some software out there that you can work with, but, you know, a lot has to be developed, so it just doesn’t exist. You know, we dealt with this with our IBM systems with Precisely that did a roll-up of all the software companies we used for 15+ years. And we think there’ll be very, very good value in owning the software as well. That’s kind of the timeline, I think.
Ellen Litzaw, Analyst, Fourth Capital: Got it. Okay. Well, that’s great. Are you currently evaluating any, like, strategic partnerships, acquisitions, or maybe even, like, investments that could potentially accelerate this AI infrastructure strategy?
Chuck Piluso, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Data Storage Corporation: I originally wanted to do, and I still may, a joint venture. Folks that are already set up, that are installing Sovereign AI today, and to do a joint venture because they have the staff already in place and they have the knowledge of it. It’s great for them, and that becomes an automatic partner because, you know, they’re installing AI factories and Sovereign AI. We are talking to folks to be partners. One of the problems, you know, Ellen, is that when you’re small, a lot of times you’re not gonna be able to get larger organizations to go with you because, you know, that credibility is not there. They want to see a billion-dollar company, even though the billion-dollar company can be insolvent.
You know, it’s just for the most part, they want to see a very large scope. Typically working through partners, and that’s how we did it at CloudFirst as well. You know, when you get that very large deal, you know, you bring in a partner on it. We are looking at joint ventures. We’re looking at partnerships. We’re not really looking at investments at this time. We don’t feel that that’s necessary, frankly. I think we can do this with money in our bank and still leave a 2-year run rate, because, you know, the public company is expensive. It runs probably around, you know, I’d say $1.8 million-$2 million per year. I think we have enough.
I think we have enough to pull this off, but I’ll know more over the next 90 days. We’re trying to move pretty fast with it.
Ellen Litzaw, Analyst, Fourth Capital: Oh, no, this is super helpful. Thank you so much for taking my questions. I really appreciate it, Chuck. If I have any other questions, I’ll jump back in the queue.
Chuck Piluso, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Data Storage Corporation: That’s great. Thank you, Ellen.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Matthew Galinko with Maxim Group. Please state your question.
Matthew Galinko, Analyst, Maxim Group: Hey, appreciate you taking another one for me. Just wanted to check in on Nexxis and kind of the current revenue generator for the business. I think you had decent annual growth in the first quarter here. Any opportunities to, or, you know, how do you see that business trending over the rest of this year? Do you have an opportunity to, you know, accelerate that in any capacity? You know, do you see it continuing to add to, you know, kinda cut into the burn rate, I guess, as it grows? Thanks.
Chuck Piluso, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Data Storage Corporation: You know, Matt, their gross margins are great. We have put some money into Nexxis. They’re not a large staff. John Canelo, who’s the president of that, he owns 20% of that company. John and his staff do an excellent job. John continues to look for business development types to accelerate it, and I know that he’s trying to recruit, you know, as we speak right now, he’s trying to recruit business development folks to go. It’s very, very difficult, the organic growth, but they’re doing a great job with it. We looked at one or two acquisitions to roll it into that company, and we’re still looking at that. I think if John is successful with getting the right people on to grow that.
I also believe, Matt, that, you know, because they’re very limited with manpower, that getting a digital agency to start getting inbound leads going is one of the things that we’ve been talking about. CloudFirst had a great flow of leads. Harold Schwartz did a great job with the digital agency and everything that he did on that to get significant leads coming in. We need that to happen and then these business development folks to work on that because no one’s answering the phone, no one’s letting you in the building. John does a great job and his staff with association meetings and organizations and sponsorships, things like that.
He, you know, that next step, I think is, for Chris to free up some money for him to get, you know, the website going where he can get an inflow of the way that CloudFirst done. I think that’s the next stage, but he is trying to recruit, you know, the folks in the business development area. He needs the help there. Because he’s got great growth margins and, you know, does a good job, has a great the product is great.
Matthew Galinko, Analyst, Maxim Group: Great. Thank you.
Operator: Thank you. There are no further questions at this time, so I’ll hand it back to Chuck Piluso for closing remarks.
Chuck Piluso, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Data Storage Corporation: Okay. Thank you. Thank you for the questions. They were very deep questions, some of them. You know, Ellen, they were great. Hopefully, with shortly, we’ll be back to everyone. Thank you for the questions. In closing, we believe the foundation we’ve established over the decades of execution and value creation has positioned DTST to pursue a unique opportunity at the intersection of enterprise AI, resiliency, and regulated infrastructure. Our strategy is supported by financial strength, operational stability, and what we believe is a differentiation of a long-term vision for AI continuity infrastructure. As the market continues to evolve, our focus remains on a disciplined execution, strategic flexibility, and creating substantial long-term value for our shareholders. We really do appreciate everyone’s continued support and our shareholders and look forward to sharing additional updates as we progress. Thank you.
Operator: Thank you. With that, we conclude today’s call. All parties may disconnect. Have a good day.