Skkynet Cloud Systems, Inc.

Overview

Skkynet is a Nevada corporation headquartered in Mississauga, Canada. Skkynet operates its business through its wholly owned subsidiaries Cogent Real-Time Systems, Inc. (“Cogent”), Skkynet, Inc. (“Skkynet (USA)”), Skkynet Corp. (“Skkynet (Canada)”). Skkynet was established to enhance Cogent’s existing business lines through the integration of cloud-based systems (“Cloud”), and to deliver a Software-as-a-Service (“SaaS”) product targeting the Industrial Internet of Things (“IoT”) market, often referred to by the term “Industry 4.0”.

Boston Consulting Group issued reports on Industry 4.0 and how the future of productivity and growth in manufacturing industries will be impacted by the convergence of nine new technologies 1, and how it will transform the industrial workforce 2. Of the identified nine new technologies (autonomous robots, big data analytics, the Cloud, cybersecurity, the Industrial Internet of Things, horizontal and vertical system integration, simulation, augmented reality, additive manufacturing), the first six fit within the scope of Skkynet’s core technical expertise. Specifically, Skkynet provides software and related systems and facilities to collect process and distribute real-time information over networks. This capability allows our customers to both locally and remotely manage, supervise and control industrial processes and financial information systems. By using our software and web-based assets we provide our clients and their end-customers, the ability and tools to observe and interact with these processes in real-time. We give our customers the power to analyze, change and control their local and remote systems to meet regulatory requirements and exceed target objectives.

We believe there is a steady movement of manufacturing facilities from developed countries to underdeveloped countries because of the economic advantages of lowering production costs; however, this relocation process should not be viewed in traditional frameworks alone. In the United States there is a movement from high to low-cost states such as Alabama, and, for other reasons, European and Asian manufacturers are locating their own manufacturing facilities within the United States. The tendency is to relocate physical plants while preserving the overall engineering skills, process analytics and related intellectual property and management systems at home. This geographical distinction between production and engineering requires the ability to remotely monitor these systems during operations to control processes in real-time while preserving the safety, confidentiality and integrity of the manufacturer’s process and information. There are other aspects of the same remote capabilities: we have determined a growing need for large enterprise to have the ability to safely share information on operations to third parties (e.g. suppliers, or contract manufacturers), and to access this data for Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) applications. Our products and Cloud-based services are designed to address these issues and concerns, and to enable these AI applications.

Although we are primarily involved thus far in the areas of industrial processing and financial services, the concepts and software underlying our existing products and services are applicable to a variety of areas including fleet tracking**,**energy usage monitoring and control including wind power, solar power and agriculture. Our products are modular in design and are therefore well-suited for use in OEM and embedded products. We have obtained existing clients in some of these areas, but to date we have not had the resources to pursue systematically the marketing and sale of our products and services to these industries.

1 https://www.bcg.com/publications/2015/engineered_products_project_business_industry_4_future_productivity_growth_manufacturing_industries/

2 https://www.bcg.com/publications/2015/technology-business-transformation-engineered-products-infrastructure-man-machine-industry-4

Our acquisition of Cogent

In March 2012, we completed the acquisition of all of the issued and outstanding shares of common stock of Cogent from Sakura Software Inc. and Benford Consultancy Inc. in exchange for a total of thirty million (30,000,000) restricted shares of our common stock, as a result of which Cogent became our wholly owned subsidiary. As part of the exchange transaction, we also issued 5,000 Series A Preferred share to Sakura Software and Benford Consultancy. Prior to the closing of the exchange transaction, we did not have any operating revenues. At the acquisition closing, Cogent’s business consisted primarily of providing connectivity and data acquisition to a wide variety of industrial and office hardware and software products and then making that data available over a network using industry-standard protocols. Cogent currently markets its products and services primarily to systems integrators, OEMs, resellers, and end customers where we do not have a distribution partner in industrial processes and financial services companies. Cogent received $2,484,315 in annual revenues from its operations for its fiscal year ended October 31, 2025 and $2,561,745 in annual revenues for the fiscal year ended October 31, 2024.

Our business

We are an industrial software and services vendor that specializes in providing secure connectivity and data acquisition to a wide variety of industrial and office hardware and software products and making that data available over a network using industry-standard protocols. We have introduced a number of innovations to our real-time data products including a high-speed redundancy facility and a web-based user interface providing desktop quality graphics, and more recently, inclusion of high speed storage capabilities. We have patented and patent-pending technologies that address the data transmission problems of data rate, latency, redundancy, and security in Cloud-based systems with a unique push-pull system that insulates both a plant and a remote user from opening their firewalls to the Internet.

Our system can operate as a simple add-on to existing Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (“SCADA”) or as the basis for new deployment. SCADA is a system that collects information from various sensors installed at a factory or other remote locations. All of the collected data is sent to a common or central computer for further processing and storage and is used to describe control processes in various industries such as water treatment, manufacturing processes, and environmental procedures.

Skkynet’s Cogent DataHub™ service for Microsoft Azure is compatible with our existing Cogent DataHub and Embedded Toolkit (ETK) software. Current customers of our DataHub software can easily configure it to immediately take advantage of our Cloud services. Our DataHub software includes applications for all of the following uses:

These DataHub® features make our existing customer base a logical first marketing source for the adoption of our Cloud services. Our Cogent DataHub service for Microsoft Azure, which is a fully managed service, is now available within the Azure Marketplace. The DataHub service connects seamlessly to Azure IoT Hub for real-time remote monitoring, control, and data logging, as well as offering many of the same features as the standalone DataHub software. Security is based on Skkynet’s patented technology that uses outbound-only connections to ensure that no attack surface is exposed on a local plant network. It requires no IT policy changes, no open inbound firewall ports, no VPNs, and no extra hardware while allowing real-time bi-directional data flow through DMZs and network proxies up to the cloud. Additional enterprise-focused security features have been introduced for robust permission granularity and multi-factor authentication (“MFA”).

Our Cogent DataHub service for Microsoft Azure provides the following additional functionality and features over the DataHub®:

The Cogent DataHub service for Microsoft Azure is DataHub technology provided in a Microsoft Azure Managed Application for secure, real-time industrial data communications. With it, our customers can make secure connections between machines, applications and embedded systems that utilize real-time data.

A diagrammatic example is shown of an implementation of Cogent DataHub on-premise in an isolated process network, a secure connection to a de-militarized zone (“DMZ”) network, a secure connection to an instance of Cogent DataHub service for Microsoft Azure, and a secure connection from a user or third-party network employing a variety of data sources or clients.

This example implementation provides the following unique advantages to our customers:

Our customers

The Company, including the historical operations of Cogent, have provided our products and services to more than 3,000 customers in the following industries: Aerospace, Automation & Control, Chemicals, Communications, Education, Engineering, Energy & Utilities, Financial, Food & Beverage, Government & Municipal, Healthcare & Pharmaceutical, Instrumentation, Manufacturing, Natural Resources and System Integrators. We are well-diversified across these industries such that cyclical swings in any individual industries does not expose us significantly.

The Company sells to their end-user customers both directly and indirectly, through resellers. In the twelve months ended October 31, 2024, 7 resellers accounted for 51% of sales, of which 1 reseller accounted for 25% of sales. In the twelve months ended October 31, 2025, 11 resellers accounted for 50% of sales, of which 1 reseller accounted for 20% of sales. The Company maintains all the information on their end user customers, and should a reseller discontinue operations, the Company can sell directly to the end user. No reseller has exclusivity in their territory. In the twelve months ended October 31, 2024, no end user customers were responsible for more than 10% of gross revenue and 35 end user customers were responsible for approximately 50% of gross revenue. In the twelve months ended October 31, 2025, no end user customers were responsible for more than 10% of gross revenue and 25 end user customers were responsible for approximately 50% of gross revenue.

Our products and services

Our business is organized such that we license our software under a variety of packaging and financial arrangements.

Our software is designed to be modular, with a set of over 51 different features. We offer license packs (“Product Packs”) which represent common customer use-cases and individual add-on licenses (“Add-ons”). The combination of Product Packs and Add-on licenses allows the customer to fully customize a solution based on their own project requirements.

In addition, we offer customers the ability to license our products for use as a Subscription which is a recurring revenue model. We also offer our licenses with upgrades in the form of an on-going maintenance and service program for which we charge additional fees depending upon the package of services requested.

We offer OEM customers the ability to re-brand our software to integrate it with their own product offering. This re-branding can be “shallow” or “deep.” Shallow rebranding modifies the icons, images, name and contact information our software presents to the end user. There is no attempt to hide the fact that the software was developed by us. Deep rebranding attempts to remove all visible indications that our software is being used by the OEM customer. This requires more work and ongoing maintenance, as well as formal agreements with regard to our intellectual property.

Industrial automation systems require expertise to configure properly. Generally, the customer has in-house IT expertise regarding its particular process but may have limited experience with our software or the details of communication integration. We offer consulting services to assist customers in configuring their systems and our software to smoothly integrate into their processes. We provide a limited amount of assistance at no charge as part of the sales cycle. Where the customer requires more involved assistance, we offer consulting services at market rates.

As part of our expansion into Cloud services, we provide three types of configurations: remotely hosted Cloud systems, locally hosted systems, or a hybrid of the two. In the remotely located case, we maintain and manage the operating system infrastructure that allows users to access their industrial automation data via the Internet. We subcontract the Cloud hardware infrastructure from Microsoft; a large, established vendor. In the locally hosted case, the customer is responsible for the hardware and data connectivity, and we will provide the software. A customer who wants a remotely located Cloud system will still be required to run some software locally. Our existing on-premises software acts as a bridge between the plant and the remote Cloud system, making a hybrid implementation possible. If the Cloud system becomes unavailable due to communication outage or hardware failure, the customer’s plant will still continue to run in isolation from the remote Cloud system, simply reconnecting once the remote system becomes available again. In effect, our Cloud offering acts as an extension of the local process to a wide-area network or to the Internet. For reasons of speed, security, and resiliency we do not anticipate that customers will accept a purely Cloud-based system for their immediate industrial automation data needs. We believe that this may change in the future as technology and market expectations change, as they have done in other markets that have adopted purely Cloud-based services, such as, for example, Salesforce.com and customer relations management (CRM) software.

Our on-premises software is available for download from our product website, https://cogentdatahub.com. Our Cloud-based service is available for registration at the Microsoft Azure Marketplace 3. A customer can install and use the on-premises software in demonstration mode for a limited time, after which they can re-start the software to reset the time limit. This allows a potential customer to configure and test the software in their system before purchase, both to ensure that it meets their needs and to determine which product features they will want to purchase. Similarly, the Cloud-based service is available to potential customers to sign up and use it for a paid trial to configure and test, as well as other service levels for full system implementations.

To ensure smooth implementation of our software in a customer’s environment we have organized approximately fifty (50) different technical partners and resellers in different geographic areas with whom we cooperate. Some of them also sell related hardware and software products of their own, and assist us in the installation, monitoring, and maintenance of our products within their customer base. These technical partners may be listed on our website. We continuously seek to recruit new technical partners. We have made recent progress on partnering with world-class hardware companies such as Microsoft (world’s largest software vendor), Siemens AG (world’s largest industrial automation vendor), AVEVA (wholly owned subsidiary of Schneider Electric, the world’s largest industrial software market channel).

Our service supports potential and existing customers

The nature of our market and our sales style demand timely and thorough customer support both before and after a sale is made. Because a potential customer can download and test our software, we provide service support even before the sale is made. This provides the customer with a no-risk mechanism for ensuring that the software will work in their system and gives us early feedback from the customer. If the customer has questions or concerns, they are answered immediately, making the subsequent sale and installation process simpler.

During the sales process, we work with customers via telephone or email to help them understand which product features are necessary for their projects. This starts with asking the customer to fill out a short questionnaire explaining their project needs when they ask for a cost quotation. If the customer is unsure about their software requirements, we assist by asking pertinent questions regarding the intended application and by providing clarification on the types of features they need.

We offer customer support via telephone, email and Internet instant messaging on our websites during office hours. Where appropriate, we offer live desktop-sharing sessions with customers via video conference. This dramatically reduces the time to resolution when the customer’s network and security policy allow it. We have distributors in different parts of the world who offer support in the customer’s time zone and language. We place a high priority on support of distributors, including joint phone calls and video conference sessions with their customers to arrive at quick and satisfactory resolutions.

We incentivize distributors and resellers to develop their technical support capabilities by offering a price discount structure on software sales based on the degree to which the distributor can handle technical support requests from customers. Our goal is to have our sales occur through a combination of our direct efforts and reliance upon our global network of distributors, where the distributor provides support to the customer, and we provide support to the distributor.

3 https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps/cogentrealtimesystemsinc1581352149215.skkynetdatahub

Our marketing

We have a variety of marketing activities. We maintain a website athttps://skkynet.com focused on general company information, updates, and press releases regarding the general operations of the business. We maintain a product-focused website athttps://cogentdatahub.com that includes a complete library of product information, manuals, blog articles, whitepapers, how-to videos and industry news on implementing real-time data communication and access over the Cloud.

Our primary means of contacting customers is through direct telephone and email contact; appearances at trade shows, publications in recognized industry magazines and periodicals, social media platforms, our websites coupled with multi-channel advertising and marketed web-based presentations, including joint promotions with key partners and resellers. We use ad-words and search engine optimization to draw the attention of customers in our market. Some of our website materials can be technical in nature, and may include live demonstrations, training videos and instruction manuals. We invite potential customers to download free trial versions of our software prior to purchase.

We maintain distribution relationships with approximately 35 companies around the world. These companies perform their own marketing and promotion to varying degrees, using both original material and material that we provide. We continue to seek new qualified distribution partners, and in 2019 we partnered with Siemens Mobility to co-market a hardware/software combined solution that includes our DataHub software,4 and we also became a Certified Technology Partner to AVEVA, where our DataHub software is made available directly from AVEVA’s website for download and evaluation.5,6

In addition to the foregoing, we engage in the following activities as part of our marketing efforts. We have previously retained ARC Advisory Group and Gartner to promote our new version of the Cogent DataHub and the security model of our Cogent DataHub service for Microsoft Azure. This is augmented by product features within industry email publications (e.g. Automation.com), and various industry-specific conferences in which direct client meetings are arranged. We send a monthly newsletter to an opt-in mailing list of over 10,000 customers and contacts. We produce periodic press releases through a press release service. We maintain LinkedIn, X (Twitter), and YouTube accounts for outreach to our customers and to draw attention to aspects of our software and market.

We write and publish case studies of successful implementations of our software. These are sometimes produced in cooperation with distributors and are occasionally published in industry trade magazines. We publish white papers on technical subjects and send them to prospects and distributors, as well as distribute them on our website and through trade magazine websites. These activities are focused on education rather than promotion.

Our revenue sources

Our revenue comes from the following sources:

4 https://skkynet.com/siemens/

5 https://skkynet.com/aveva/

6 For example, https://www.aveva.com/en/products/datahub-tunneller-for-opc/

More than 70% of our revenues are derived from software licensing for industrial automation systems, while financial trading, software support, custom development, and legacy system support account for the remainder.

Our expenses

Our typical expenses are primarily incurred in the following areas: wages, benefits, and contractors, of which about half are for software development; office and general; sales, marketing, advertising, and promotion. In future years, we expect the proportion of expenses in our operating budgets allocable to the categories of programming development and sales personnel to increase, as well as the expenses associated with maintaining and improving our Cloud-based service for our customers.

Our business plans

We believe that we have substantial room for growth in three primary areas of our business. The first is the expansion of our current lines of business providing real-time data software to the industrial automation markets. Second, is the deployment of our products and services through Cloud-based SaaS products. Third, is the application of our products and services to new business lines such as AI-focused providers, embedded products or combination solutions (such as our recent partnering with Siemens); where “edge-processing” is required (e.g. remote AI-enabled monitoring, analysis and control of assets over third party networks). We have limited resources to apply to marketing and sales in these areas. We believe that this revenue can be improved through dedicated marketing and sales effort.

As stated above, we expect the second area of growth to be in the provision of Cloud services for real-time data. This is a market that is still in its formative stages around the world, and our technology is well suited to its development. We will expand and focus our software development on modifying our existing products to provide a smoother and more secure user experience for real-time data handling in the Cloud. Real-time Cloud systems require two components – a local component running at the customer’s site, and a Cloud component running on a managed Cloud infrastructure system. Our software development will focus on improving security and reducing the friction for users to deploy the local component on their systems. At the same time, we will improve the user experience and automation of the Cloud component to reduce the cost of management, deployment and scaling as the number of customers grows. We rent Cloud server space from Cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, and/or run and maintain our own servers. In the future, we may transition to our own servers as resources permit, and if there is an economic rationale to do so.

We recognize that not all customers will be willing to entrust some of their data transmission to a third party, or to an Internet-based server. In these cases, we offer to deploy our software on private servers managed by the customer or local Cloud infrastructure providers. These “private Cloud” systems will require IT professionals to maintain them and will further require the attention of experts knowledgeable in real-time data systems. We offer our expertise on an ongoing basis to partially or completely manage private Cloud systems on behalf of our customers. For this reason, we are currently working to partner with Cloud infrastructure providers in other countries where there is sensitivity over customer data remaining inside those countries.

The third area of growth is also related to Cloud systems and AI. For the past 30 years, commercial activity on the Internet has been dominated by business-to-consumer or business-to-business applications. The advent of extremely low-cost and low power consumption sensors will change that, making the Internet into a viable medium for machine-to-machine applications. That is, sensors, machines, appliances and other devices will become directly connected data transmitters, numbering in the billions. This rise of machine-to-machine communication will require the kinds of real-time data distribution that will be at the center of our Cloud activity. In combination with recent advances in AI-enabled analysis, we believe that our Cloud services will be positioned to take advantage of the future development of this “Internet of Intelligent Things.” Some examples of applications that need this kind of data access are home energy monitoring, commercial building energy management, agricultural monitoring, weather monitoring, remote seismic sensing, fleet tracking and asset maintenance.

Industrial AI Platforms and Security

Goldman Sachs 7 issued guidance that over $1Trillion will be put towards AI capital expenditures in the coming years. A recent survey published by the Economist Group 8 reported that only 22% of organizations say their current architecture can support AI workloads without modifications, and 48% of data engineers spend most of their time resolving data source connections. S&P Global Market Intelligence surveyed 9 over 1,500 AI leaders who reported that data management is the #1 barrier to AI success. With respect to AI adoption in the industrial sector, recent studies have shown that less than 20% of AI pilots end up in production. The key limitations are security, real-time processing and robust data pipelines. In summary, the largest challenge is that companies do not have the architecture and systems in place to support the data demands of AI initiatives.

"Skkynet provides the secure, real-time industrial data pipeline that industrial AI demands, zero-trust OT access, unified live datasets ready for models, and battle-tested reliability to close the loop safely and at scale.

Our products, led by Cogent DataHub™, and the Azure service excel for industrial AI platforms with Zero-attack-surface security; Enables secure, bidirectional OT-to-IT/cloud data flow using only outbound connections (via DHTP, MQTT, Kafka, etc.), no inbound firewall ports or VPNs required, often via DMZ or optional data diode mode, ideal for protecting critical infrastructure while feeding live data to industrial AI platforms and engines hosted on public or private cloud.

Additionally, Real-time, unified data for AI; aggregates diverse protocols (OPC UA/DA, Modbus, MQTT Sparkplug B, etc.) into a single, high-performance unified namespace/dataset, handling 50,000+ changes/sec with low latency, perfect for feeding clean, consolidated real-time data to machine learning, predictive maintenance, anomaly detection, and closed-loop AI systems.

Skkynet’s products are proven & industrial-grade with 25+ years of development, thousands of installations worldwide (used by Siemens, ABB, BASF, Equinor, etc.), secure-by-design for Industry 4.0/IIoT, with redundancy, historian integration (AVEVA PI, InfluxDB), and edge processing.

And for something that is typically difficult to set up, configure or integrate with, we provide low/no-code setup, bidirectional control support, and seamless connectivity to cloud (Azure Event Hubs, Kafka) or on-premise analytics, enables fast deployment for AI initiatives without compromising OT security or requiring a expensive expertise to setup and configure.

In order to pursue all of these business areas, we will require capital to hire the personnel needed to explore and develop a strategy to pursue potential customers in each area.

7 https://www.goldmansachs.com/images/migrated/insights/pages/gs-research/gen-ai--too-much-spend,-too-little-benefit-/TOM_AI%202.0_ForRedaction.pdf

8 https://www.databricks.com/sites/default/files/2024-11/unlocking-enterprise-ai.pdf

9 https://www.aiunplugged.io/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/2023-Global-Trends-in-AI-Report.pdf

Our intellectual property

We have an exclusive license of all of our intellectual property and enhancements thereof, licensed to Cogent Real-Time Systems, Inc., our wholly owned subsidiary, from an affiliated corporation, Real Innovations International LLC, (“Real Innovations”) that is 100% indirectly owned by our CTO and COO. See “Certain Relationships and Related Transactions.” In return for the assignment, Real Innovations required a one-time payment of $30,000 to Cogent. Cogent elected to forgo the payment allowing Real Innovations to offset future expenses against the payment. There is no ongoing royalty payment or other form of compensation from Real Innovations to Cogent under the Assignment Agreement. As a result of this license, we have thirteen U.S. patents and additional patent applications pending for the real-time technologies employed in our software products. The first patent family is directed toward a system and method for providing real-time data to a web browser through use of a Rich Internet Application (“RIA”). Specifically, the graphical and networking features of RIA frameworks allow our software to provide low-latency, real-time data applications in a traditional web browser. The patent family includes U.S. Utility Patent Serial Nos. 8,661,092, 9,667,689 and 10,498,796, and Canadian Patent No. 2,813,076.

The second patent family includes U.S. Patent Serial Nos. 9,100,424, 9,288,272 and 9,762,675 directed towards system and methods for secure real-time cloud services. The system and methods provide a communication framework between sensors, devices, and machinery and the users of that data from any remote location that is connected to the Internet without requiring open inbound firewall ports, while at the same time enabling high data rates, low latency and full bidirectionality. The graphical and networking features of RIA frameworks in combination with the patented system and method provide low-latency, real-time data applications in a web browser securely over the Internet. The patent family includes Japanese Patent No. JP6689838 and Canadian Patent Application No. 2,991,685.

A third patent family includes U.S. Patent Serial Nos. 10,462,206 and 10,558,744 and corresponding Canadian Patent No. 3,062,745 for improved methods to network bidirectional real-time data directly from within Microsoft Excel.

A fourth patent family includes U.S. Patent Serial Nos. 11,627,114, 11,943,205, 12,107,835, 12,107,836 and 12,113,777 for novel methods for tunnelling historical data. Corresponding Canadian Patent Application No. 3,181,369 is pending.

A fifth patent family includes a U.S., and Canadian applications filed to cover novel methods of multi-device support for certain IoT protocols.

Further patents are being sought as new technologies are being developed.

As part of our license, we have the exclusive right to use several registered trademarks including “DATAHUB” and “SKKYNET” which are registered in the United States and Canada. We have trade secrets and technical know-how that we protect through confidentiality and restrictive covenants with our employees and contractors. Finally, under our license agreement, we have exclusive rights to all copyrighted software and written materials, which are stored as backups in several different physical locations, and in secure, encrypted format.

Our competition

We face competition from several vendors who offer products similar to ours in the industrial automation space. Some of these competitors have resources and revenues larger than ours; however, our software is compatible with their products, making it common for a customer to install software from both us and our competition in the same system. There are also a number of large industrial automation vendors who offer SCADA systems to their clients. Examples include Siemens, ABB, Emerson Process Management, Rockwell Automation, Honeywell Process Solutions, Schneider Electric, GE Invensys, and PTC. We view these companies and others performing similar services as potential competitors inasmuch as they have resources to link their SCADA functions to a Cloud based system; however, we are not currently aware that any vendor is doing so yet. Since these companies already have an installed base of SCADA customers whose systems can be easily connected to our software, these companies also represent an opportunity for joint sales or OEM licensing. A number of these companies are already our customers, and two are official partners (Siemens and AVEVA/Schneider).

There do not currently appear to be Cloud system companies organized for the purpose of hosting real-time industrial data and connectivity. One company, LogMeIn, Inc. (previously Pachube and then Cosm Ltd.), provides Cloud storage services for sensor data, but we do not regard them as competitive due to their focus on storage rather than real-time collection and distribution. Cloud infrastructure companies such as Amazon, Microsoft (Azure) and Google offer pre-configured applications or computing platforms for remotely hosting a customer’s IT activities. Their primary purpose is to provide the computing substrate for the customer’s applications. As such, these companies, as presently operated, act as suppliers of computing resources to us, not as competition.

Employees

Currently, other than our six officers, we have eight full time employees and five consultants.