ACCESS Newswire Inc.

Company History

ACCESS Newswire Inc. and its subsidiaries are hereinafter collectively referred to as “ACCESS”, “ACCESS Newswire”, the “Company”, “We” or “Our” unless otherwise noted.

We are a Delaware corporation formed in October 1988 under the name Docucon Incorporated. In December 2007, we changed our name to Issuer Direct Corporation, and then effective on January 27, 2025, we changed our name from Issuer Direct Corporation to ACCESS Newswire Inc.

Our principal executive offices are located at One Glenwood Ave., Suite 1001, Raleigh, North Carolina, 27603, and our main telephone number is 888-808-ACCS (2227). Our website address is https://www.accessnewswire.com.

Company Overview

Both the Company and its executive officers, announce material financial information to our investors using our investor relations website, SEC filings, investor events, news and earnings releases, public conference calls, webcasts, and social media. We use these channels to communicate with our investors and the public about our company, our products and services and other related matters. It is possible that information we post on some of these channels could be deemed to be material information. Therefore, we encourage investors, the media and others interested in ACCESS to review the information we post to all our channels, including our social media accounts.

We offer a dynamic customer platform that empowers businesses to connect, engage and build their brands. Our platform streamlines Public Relations (PR) and Investor Relations (IR), helping organizations manage events, enhance communication and strategically distribute their messaging to key stakeholders, including investors, media professionals, markets, and regulatory systems worldwide. Today, thousands of customers—from emerging startups to multi-billion-dollar global brands—trust our ACCESS platforms to elevate their reach and impact.

Specifically, the core products that encompass our platform are the following: Press Release Distribution, Media Monitoring, Database and Pitching, as well as Investor Relations Websites and Earnings and Event technologies.

We focus on selling to small and mid-market businesses, which we define as companies that have between 2 and 2,000 employees. In late 2024, we launched our new subscription platform to existing customers only, and at the beginning of 2025, officially released it as part of our rebrand to ACCESS Newswire. As of December 31, 2025, we have 974 subscriptions with an annual recurring revenue (“ARR”) of approximately $12.2 million.

Sale of our Compliance Business

On February 28, 2025, the Company and Direct Transfer, LLC, its wholly owned subsidiary, entered into and closed an Asset Purchase Agreement (the “Purchase Agreement”) with Equiniti Trust Company, LLC (the “Buyer”). Pursuant to, and subject to the terms and conditions of, the Purchase Agreement, the Buyer purchased certain assets related to the Company’s Compliance business (the “Purchased Assets”). The Purchased Assets consisted of certain accounts receivable, prepaid assets, contracts and intellectual property, among other things, related to the Company’s services of providing i) disclosure software and services for financial reporting, ii) stock transfer services, iii) annual meeting, print and shareholder distribution and fulfillment services and iv) virtual annual meeting services (but not the intellectual property relating to the virtual annual meeting services). Revenue related to these services was previously included in the Company’s “compliance revenue” stream as reported with the SEC in previous filings, except revenue related to virtual annual meeting services, which was previously reported in the “communications revenue” stream in previous SEC filings. Additionally, revenue related to providing SEDAR services and revenue related to our whistleblower hotline, which was previously reported as “Compliance revenue” was retained by the Company. The Buyer only assumed certain liabilities related to the Purchased Assets, which includes certain accounts payable, accrued liabilities and deferred revenue. As a result, assets associated with our Compliance business, and revenue and expenses associated with the assets, have been categorized as discontinued operations in our financial statements for the years ended December 31, 2025 and 2024, while the remaining assets associated with our Communications business are included in continuing operations.

Our Platform

In previous periods we have sold our products in different bundles and names, such as Media Suite and/or as a Communications platform. As part of our rebrand, in January 2025 we consolidated the naming conventions, product sets and subscriptions to be less onerous on the customers, easier to subscribe to and significantly clearer to the investment community.

Our communications platform consists of the following subscriptions:

**ACCESS PR –**a subscription that includes press release distribution, media monitoring, pitching and database.

**ACCESS IR –**a subscription that includes investor relations website, quarterly earnings calls, and press release distribution to cover the announcement of your earnings date and actual earnings releases.

**ALL ACCESS –**encompasses the best of both ACCESS PR and ACCESS IR into a customized platform for each customer.

As an option, the Company provides customers with the ability to purchase stand-alone solutions to try each of its products before subscribing to our platform. For example, a small company looking to build their brand and tell their story would utilize the press release distribution product from ACCESS Newswire in a pay-as-you-go option.

Products in the Platform

***Press Release Distribution.*Our flagship press release distribution service—marketed under the brandsACCESS Newswire, Newswire.com, and PressRelease.com—**offers comprehensive news dissemination and media outreach solutions for both private and public companies worldwide. We believe ACCESS is emerging as a competitive force in the newswire industry, leveraging advanced technology to provide customers with greater control and flexibility. Users can choose self-publishing or AI-assisted creations of their press releases, which is reviewed by our expert editorial team for compliance and professional review. We continue to expand our distribution network, refine targeting capabilities, and enhance analytics reporting to maximize impact.

Our platform also includes a seamless e-commerce experience, allowing customers toself-select distribution options, register, and upload their press releases for editorial review within minutes.These innovations have contributed to thehistorical growth of press release distribution products, a trend we anticipate will continue in the coming years.

Additionally, we maintainhigh gross margins while offeringflexible pricing options, enabling customers to pay per release or opt for long-term contract commitments. Our corepress release distribution service is integrated into all threeACCESS subscription plans, ensuring greater value for our customers.

Media Database. Our media database is based on the idea that pitching the media should be a targeted endeavor. Our dataset includes only the journalists that are actively writing and publishing articles. We built this component in reverse, looking at the tens of millions of articles published annually and sorted articles by industry, publication and journalist, then curated the most accurate data of each contact and made it available within our media database. Additionally, within the interface we made it easy to see each article published by every journalist a user may want to connect with, making our media suite a compelling combination of the right features and intelligence between database, pitching, and monitoring.

Media Pitching. Pitching is a critical part of our media suite because it allows the user to contact and connect with the most active journalists in their industry. Our media suite not only gives the user the professionals to pitch, it also offers AIMee, our AI writing and recommendation engine, to enhance the user’s message, write a new message and highlight engage-able content to help bring their pitch to the forefront.

Media Monitoring. A brand monitoring solution is extremely important, and every company should consider monitoring not only their brands, but their products, executives and competitors mentioned in all mediums – print, broadcast media and television, web, radio, video, blogs and social media. Our monitoring solution offers many of these mediums and we will continue to undergo expansion in each of these mediums with a goal of being a comprehensive media monitoring solution within the next year. Our media monitoring solution ties together our journalist contacts and mention analytics into and with a customer’s dashboard of daily activity.

Media Room*.*A natural addition to our public relations and investor relations website business. This product offering can be an add-on to any customer’s subscription. The media room suite includes a custom newsroom page builder, a brand asset manager and contact manager.

Press Release Optimizer (”PRO”). Our PRO offering, formally Media Advantage Platform, automates media and marketing communications for businesses seeking to deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time for the right purpose. Through the PRO offering, we provide content and media communications services that provide customers the opportunity to optimize their content and increase their media visibility, therefore building their brand awareness and engaging a larger audience. With the flexibility of these offerings, customers have the ability to now choose to add a PRO solution to any of their ACCESS subscriptions.

Our media room addresses the needs of our customers looking to build connections with media, journalists, customers and if applicable the investment community. According to TekGroup’s latest survey in 2023, a majority of journalists and media professionals indicated the importance of media rooms that include digital media, press kits and video. We believe our media room accomplishes this by making it a part of our subscription platform or stand-alone offering, giving us a further competitive advantage in the market. This also allows our customers to have one media platform to manage all their assets, brands and outreach.

Webcasting & Events. Our webcasting and events business is comprised of our earnings call webcasting solutions and our virtual meeting and events software (such as deal/non-deal road shows, analyst days and shareholder days).

Our Webcasting Platform is a cloud-based webcast, webinar and virtual meeting platform that delivers live and on-demand streaming of events to audiences of all sizes. Our solution allows customers to create, produce and deliver events, which we feel has significantly strengthened our webcasting product and overall offering. The platform architecture gives us the ability to host thousands of webcasts each year, expanding and diversifying our webcast business from our historical earnings-based events to include any type of virtual event.

Traditional earnings calls and webcasts are a highly competitive market with the majority of the business being driven from practitioners in investor relations and communications firms. We estimate there are approximately 4,000 companies in North America conducting earnings events each quarter that include a teleconference, webcast or both as part of their events. Our platform incorporates other elements of the earnings event, including earnings date/call announcement, and earnings press release. There are a handful of our competitors that can offer this integrated full-service solution today, however, we believe our real-time event setup and integrated approach offers a more effective way to manage the process. As we expand our platform, it is vital for us to have solutions that service both our core public companies but also a growing segment of private customers.

Professional Conference and Events Software. Our professional conference and events software is a subscription offering we currently license to investor conference organizers. This software, which is also available as a native mobile app, offers organizers, issuers and investors the ability to register, request and approve one-on-one meetings, manage schedules, perform event promotion and sponsorship, print attendee badges and manage lodging. This cloud-based product can be used in a virtual or in person conference setting and is integrated within other offerings of press release distribution, media rooms and webcasting and events. We believe this integration gives us a unique offering for professional conference organizers that is not available elsewhere in the market.

Investor Relations Websites. Our investor relations content network is another component of our platform, which is used to create the investor relations’ tab of a company’s website. This investor relations content network is a robust series of data feeds including news feeds, stock feeds, fundamentals, regulatory filings, corporate governance and many other components which are aggregated from most of the major exchanges and news distribution outlets around the world. Customers can subscribe to one or more of these data feeds or as a component of a fully designed and hosted website for pre-IPO companies, SEC reporting companies and partners seeking to display our content on their corporate sites. The clear benefit to our investor relations content network is its integration with our other offerings. As such, companies can produce content for public distribution and it is automatically linked to their corporate website, distributed to targeted groups and placed into our data feed partners.

During 2023, we released significant upgrades to our investor relations website that included ADA Compliance (Americans with Disabilities Act) and AODA Compliance (Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act) which ensures that people with disabilities have the same access to all areas of a business's premises, specifically, customers’ websites. This add-on requires a recurring annual subscription and is delivered fully integrated into and with our investor relations website offering.

**Incident Hotline.**Formally our whistleblower hotline offering, this is an add-on product within our subscription platform. This system delivers secure notifications and basic incident workflow management processes that align with a company’s corporate governance policies. As a supported and subsidized bundle product of the New York Stock Exchange (“NYSE”) offerings, we are introduced to new IPO customers and other larger cap customers listed on the NYSE. Since 2014, we have been a named NYSE subsidy provider of this incident response and management solution.

Our Competitive Strengths

We believe that our market leadership position is based on the following key strengths:

Designed to Help Companies Communicate Better. Our platform was architected from the ground up to enable businesses to bring their brand voice and storytelling to life, by using an all-in-one solution that integrates our news distribution, media room, database, pitching, monitoring, and reporting functionalities into and with our investor relations websites and webcasting event technology.

Ease of Use of a Single, Platform that Drives Clear Value. We have designed and built a world-class platform that stands out for its seamless integration, powerful capabilities, and ease of use. We believe customers choose the ACCESS Platform because it offers a unified and intuitive experience, from press release creation to targeting and monitoring, which we believe sets it apart from many traditional point solutions. Additionally, we are continuously enhancing our platform with new products and advanced AI capabilities, empowering customers to work smarter and maximize efficiency

Rebrand and Market Leadership. In November 2024, we launched a rebranding initiative to redefine our identity and ensure continued relevance with our evolving customer base in the communications industry. This rebrand was completed on January 16, 2025, through a phased integration of our brands under our new name, ACCESS Newswire Inc. Effective January 27, 2025, Issuer Direct Corporation officially became ACCESS Newswire Inc. As part of this transition, the ACCESSWIRE and Issuer Direct brands were retired from the marketplace, with all customers seamlessly migrated to the ACCESS Newswire platform. Additionally, the Company continues to maintain infrastructure and serve customers under other brands, such as Newswire.com and pressrelease.com, which have been fully integrated into the ACCESS Newswire brand.

Partner & Reseller Programs. We derive referrals and revenues from our partners and resellers. We engage each partner and reseller in one of two ways, i) we resell our products at a discount for the reseller to incorporate our offerings into their go-to-market strategy and ii) we partner with leading IR and PR firms whereby they refer ACCESS to their customers, who enter into contracts with us directly. In 2026 and beyond, we believe our brand will continue to benefit from these programs, and we will look to continue to invest and maintain our presence across both IR and PR. As of December 31, 2025, approximately 10% of revenues came from our partner and reseller programs.

Our overall strategy includes:

Grow Our Customer Base. We continue to see a significant opportunity in the market for our platform, particularly among small-to-mid-sized businesses that are underserved by existing point-solution vendors. Many of these businesses lack the resources to implement complex systems, making ourall-in-one customer platform an ideal solution for driving growth and expansion. By offering astreamlined, cost-effective, and easy-to-adopt platform, we empower small-mid-market businesses to execute successful strategies with efficiency. Moving forward, we will continue to fuel our growth by leveraging ourgo-to-market strategies, competitive flat-fee pricing model, and strong network of Resellers and Partners.

Increase Revenue from Existing Customers. With over 10,000 customers in more than 135 countries spanning many industries, we believe we have a significant opportunity to increase revenue from our existing customers. We plan to increase revenue from our existing customers by expanding their use of our platform, and upselling additional offerings and features, including future planned adjacencies coming this year. We believe our flat-fee pricing model will allow us to capture more subscription revenues as point solutions continue to struggle in the market.

Keep Expanding Internationally. We believe there is a significant opportunity for our platform outside of the North American. As of December 31, 2025, approximately 11% of our customers were located outside of the North America and these Customers generated approximately 9% of our total revenue for the year ended December 31, 2025. We sell, support and work with our international customers from North American. We intend to grow our presence in international markets through additional investments in partners, resellers and our direct sales and marketing channel.

Continue to Innovate and Expand Our Platform. Small-mid-market businesses are increasingly realizing the value of having an integrated platform for both PR and IR. We believe we are well positioned to capitalize on this opportunity by introducing new products and solutions to improve the functionality of our platform, that addresses the lifecycle of a customer’s storytelling initiatives. As engagement is becoming more and more important to our customers’ it is going to become critical to continually differentiate our offerings and technology by introducing new and innovative ways to express interest in a brand, by bringing real-time engagement to our customers.

Selectively Pursue Acquisitions. We plan to selectively pursue acquisitions of complementary businesses, technologies and teams that would allow us to add new features and functionalities to our platform and accelerate the pace of our innovation, while continuing to stay focused on the customer experience. Our last acquisition was the Newswire brand, which was acquired on November 1, 2022, as part of the iNewswire, LLC transaction.

Sales and Marketing. During 2025, we continued to strengthen our brands in the market by working aggressively to expand our customer footprint and continue to cross sell to increase average revenue per customer in our subscription business. Since our platform, systems and operations are built to handle growth, we have been leveraging them to produce reasonable gross margins and cash flows without a proportional increase in our capital or operating expenses.

Our sales organization is responsible for generating new customer opportunities and expanding our current customers. We ended 2025 with a multi-tier organization of sales personnel, consisting of Client Success Managers (CSM’s), Account Executives, and strategic agency and reseller executives. Our CSM’s are split between those focused on publicly traded customers and private customers and are also responsible for a certain territory or geographic region, with a singular CSM per region that does both account development and new business. We believe this approach is the most efficient and effective way for us to reach new customers and grow our current install base. The total compensation packages for these teams are heavily weighted with commission compensation to incent sales and retention. All members of the sales team have quotas. As of December 31, 2025, we employed 25 full-time equivalent sales and marketing personnel compared to 27 as of December 31, 2024.

Our marketing organization is dedicated to both driving prospects and engaging existing ones through targeted campaigns and industry updates. These efforts aim to highlight the advantages of our platform and encourage customers to enhance their subscriptions by adding additional components. To achieve these goals, our team employs a customer-centric omni-channel strategy, which integrates multiple channels—such as online platforms, mobile apps, social media, email, and customer service—into a seamless and consistent experience. The goal is to ensure that customers can interact with a brand effortlessly across different touchpoints while maintaining continuity in their journey. Additionally, we leverage strategic partnerships and specialized private company marketing activities to expand our reach and strengthen brand awareness. By integrating these approaches, we aim to drive sustainable long-term growth and continuously scale our business in an evolving marketplace.

Industry Overview

Based on information last obtained from the Burton-Taylor Media Intelligence report in early 2023, the global communications technology market is approximately $5.5 to $6.0 billion in annual revenue. This total includes spending on social media solutions, media monitoring, press release targeting and distribution, and investor relations platforms globally. A key driver of growth in our industry is the introduction of new innovative technologies and solutions. We believe by expanding our technology and products will help us gain market share within the industry as well as further expand our news distributions brands.

The industry, along with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLMs), have matured considerably over the past two years, whereby communication professionals are seeking platforms and systems to assist with content creation, analysis, and optimization. With the advancement of Aimee, our closed network LLM, and connectivity into public LLMs, we believe we are well positioned in this new environment to benefit from subscription growth and further advancements of our platform because of what AI has afforded the industry.

Competition

Despite some significant consolidation in recent years, the communications industry remains both fragmented and extremely competitive. The success of our products and services are generally based on quality of service through the ability to service customer demands, as well as, price in certain markets Management has been focused this past year on offsetting the risks relating to competition, as well as, the seasonality of pay-as-you-go services by introducing our recurring subscription platform, with higher margins, clear competitive advantages, higher customer stickiness and scalability to withstand market and pricing pressures.

We also review our operations on a regular basis to balance growth with opportunities to maximize efficiencies and support our long-term strategic goals. We believe by blending our workflow technologies with our legacy service offerings we can offer a comprehensive set of products and solutions to each of our customers within one platform that most competitors cannot offer today. During the first quarter of 2026, we launched ACCESS Verified, a proprietary, AI-driven verification and distribution enhancement designed to improve the speed, accuracy and integrity of content from our press release distribution across the ACCESS Newswire platform and thousands of our distribution partners and licensees. ACCESS Verified leverages advanced AI and LLM-style word and phrase matching to verify content with 99.999% accuracy, delivering what we believe to be a first-to-market, industry-leading speed-to-wire enhancement, while supporting consistency with established disclosure practices and editorial standards. The solution is fully integrated into the ACCESS Newswire workflow and is available at no additional cost to customers. ACCESS Verified acts as an intelligent first line of review, helping ensure our customer’s news is credible, compliant, and newsroom-ready. This evolution evidences our focus on maturing our platform to include advancements that allow us to scale operations, increase gross margin and leverage AI to assist in the creation, review and approval of customers messaging, but not replace human evaluation and review.

We believe we are positioned to be one of the communications platforms of choice as a cost-effective alternative to both small regional providers and global customers. As of December 31, 2025, our workforce is fully remote, which we believe is a benefit to have the flexibility to hire and retain customer service or production personnel anywhere and at a reasonable cost.

Customers

Our customers include a wide variety of public and private companies. For the year ended December 31, 2025, we worked with 12,802 customers, compared to 12,349 for the year ended December 31, 2024. We did not have any customers during the year ended December 31, 2025 that accounted for more than 10% of our revenue or more than 10% of our year end accounts receivable balance as of December 31, 2025.

Human Capital and Culture

As of December 31, 2025, we had 91 employees and independent contractors. None of our workforce is represented by a union. Our employees work remotely in designated regions worldwide.

We recognize and value our people as our most important asset in achieving our strategic goals and growing an industry leading communications company. We are continually working on a human resources strategy that helps drive the right culture, leadership, talent management, performance, reward and recognition, personal development, and ways of working to ensure we achieve our strategic goals while our people benefit from an exceptional experience. Our efforts in creating a working environment that draws out the best in our employees and allows them to fulfil their potential and support our goals focus on the following:

Facilities

Our headquarters are located in Raleigh, North Carolina. In October 2019, we began a lease for 9,766 square feet of office space, which expires December 31, 2027.

On December 18, 2025, the Company entered into a Commercial Sublease Agreement (the “Sublease”), to lease 100% of the corporate headquarters for the remaining term of the lease, commencing on March 1, 2026, through December 31, 2027. As a result, as of December 31, 2025, our entire workforce is now remote.

Insurance

We maintain a general business liability, cyber-security and an errors and omissions policies specific to our industry and operations. We believe that our insurance policies provide adequate coverages for all reasonable risks associated with operating our business. Additionally, we maintain a Directors and Officers insurance policy, which is standard for our industry and size. We also maintain key person life insurance on our C level executives.

Regulations

The securities and financial services industries generally are subject to regulation in the United States and elsewhere. Regulatory policies in the United States and the rest of the world are tasked with safeguarding the integrity of the securities and financial markets and with protecting the interests of both issuers and shareholders.

In the United States, corporate issuers are subject to regulation under both federal and state laws, which often require public disclosure and regulatory filings. At the federal level, the SEC regulates the securities industry, along with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or FINRA, formally known as NASD, and NYSE market regulations, various stock exchanges, and other self-regulatory organizations (“SRO”).