Endava plc (DAVA): History, Ownership, Mission, How It Works & Makes Money

Does the market volatility surrounding Endava plc (DAVA) obscure its real value as an AI-native digital transformation leader? Despite a cautious near-term outlook, the company's full-year 2025 revenue reached £772.3 million, with adjusted profit before tax at £82.1 million, validating its strategy to have over half its 11,479 employees using AI in projects. You need to defintely understand how this London-headquartered firm, founded in 2000, is translating its recent multi-year strategic deals, including one for up to $100 million with a leading payments company, into sustainable long-term value. Let's unpack the engine behind that £772.3 million number.

Endava plc (DAVA) History

Endava plc's journey is a classic example of a dual-origin tech firm scaling through strategic geographic expansion and service-line acquisition. It didn't start in one place; it was the result of a merger between a UK-based consulting firm and an Eastern European delivery center, a model that proved highly effective for the next two decades.

Given Company's Founding Timeline

Year established

2000

Original location

The company was formed from the merger of two predecessor entities: Concise, established in London, United Kingdom, and Compudava, established in Chișinău, Moldova.

Founding team members

The company was founded by Norman Fraser and Eugen Cozonac. John Edward Cotterell, the current Chief Executive Officer, is also listed as a founder.

Initial capital/funding

The initial capital and funding for the combined entity remain undisclosed, but the company has since raised funding, including a Private Equity (PE) round in January 2022 from investors like M|C Partners.

Given Company's Evolution Milestones

The firm's growth from 2000 to 2025 was marked by a clear strategy: expand delivery capability into nearshore locations while acquiring specialized expertise in design and digital strategy. This is how they built a global footprint.

Given Company's Transformative Moments

You can trace Endava's trajectory through three pivotal shifts: the initial structural merger, the capital event of the IPO, and the recent pivot to AI-native services. These moments defintely changed the company's scale and focus.

• The Dual-Shore Foundation: The 2000 merger of a UK consulting firm and a Moldovan software house was their original masterstroke. This 'close-to-client' in the West and 'nearshore delivery' in the East model allowed them to offer high-quality services at a competitive price point, which fueled early growth.
• The NYSE Public Listing: The July 2018 IPO was the key capital event, transitioning the company from a private entity to a globally recognized public technology services provider. This move provided the liquidity and brand recognition necessary to compete for large, multi-national clients and fund further acquisitions.
• The AI-Native Mandate: By the end of Fiscal Year 2025, the company officially passed the point where over half of its employees were using Artificial Intelligence (AI) in client projects. This shift to an AI-native approach is the most recent transformative decision, positioning the company for the next wave of digital transformation.
• Strategic Partnerships and Deals in 2025: Despite a volatile market, the company secured a multi-year strategic relationship with a leading payments company, valued at up to $100 million, demonstrating the strength of their client relationships and their capability as an AI-native transformation partner in a crucial sector. Here's the quick math: securing a deal of that size, even with a cautious outlook, helps stabilize revenue projections. For a deeper dive into the numbers, check out Breaking Down Endava plc (DAVA) Financial Health: Key Insights for Investors.

Endava plc (DAVA) Ownership Structure

Endava plc is a publicly traded company, meaning its ownership is distributed among a wide range of institutional investors, individual shareholders, and its own leadership. This structure is heavily weighted toward institutional funds, but a significant founder stake remains, which is important for understanding long-term strategy.

Endava plc's Current Status

Endava plc is a public company whose American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) trade on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker symbol DAVA. As of November 2025, the company's market capitalization stood at approximately $379.28 million. The company's financial health and strategic direction are continuously scrutinized by the market, especially following the approval of its statutory accounts for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2025, which are prepared under UK-adopted International Accounting Standards. You can dive deeper into the company's performance by reading Breaking Down Endava plc (DAVA) Financial Health: Key Insights for Investors.

Endava plc's Ownership Breakdown

The company's shareholding structure is typical for a mid-cap technology services provider, with a majority held by institutional money managers. What is less typical is the substantial stake held by the founder, which provides a strong alignment between management and shareholder interests.

Here's the quick math on the ownership split, using the most recent data from the 2025 fiscal year filings:

The largest single external shareholder is Kayne Anderson Rudnick Investment Management LLC, which holds a significant stake of 12.21%, representing roughly 6.86 million shares. This level of concentration means institutional decisions can defintely impact the stock price.

Endava plc's Leadership

The company is steered by a seasoned executive team, many of whom have long tenures, providing stability despite the recent market volatility. The leadership underwent a strategic reorganization in July 2025, centralizing some operational responsibilities under the CEO to focus on AI-driven growth.

• John Cotterell, Chief Executive Officer (CEO): A founder who has led the company since 2000, his tenure is over 25 years. He assumed additional operational responsibilities for sales and go-to-market strategy in 2025.
• Mark Thurston, Chief Financial Officer (CFO): The primary executive responsible for the company's financial reporting and strategy.
• Alastair Lukies CBE, Chief Engagement Officer: Joined in July 2025 to focus on deepening stakeholder engagement and chairs the Global Advisory Board, which is key to the company's AI-led growth initiatives.
• Rob Machin, Chief People and Locations Officer: Returned to a senior leadership role in July 2025 to focus on building the engineering culture and leveraging AI for client value.
• Matt Cloke, Chief Technology Officer (CTO): Oversees the company's technology roadmap and innovation strategy.

The average tenure for the management team is about 4.5 years, showing a relatively stable leadership core guiding the firm through its digital transformation and AI strategy.

Endava plc (DAVA) Mission and Values

Endava plc's core mission centers on driving client success in the digital realm through innovative technology, while its values are fundamentally people-centric, focusing on enabling its employees to be the best they can be. This dual focus on client outcomes and internal culture is the engine behind its growth, which saw its full-year FY2025 revenue reach £772.3 million, a 4.3% increase year-over-year.

If you're looking at the fundamentals, the company's cultural DNA-its mission and values-explains why they maintain such strong client relationships; over the last five fiscal years, on average, 90.7% of their revenue came from customers who purchased services in the prior fiscal year.

Given Company's Core Purpose

The company's purpose goes beyond just providing IT services. It's about cultivating an environment where both their people and their clients can thrive sustainably. This is a critical distinction in the consulting world, where short-term project wins can often overshadow long-term partnership value.

The stated core purpose is simple: 'We exist to create an environment and a culture that breeds success by caring for our customers as individuals and enabling our people to be the best that they can be.'

• People-First: The focus is on employee growth and well-being, which directly translates to better service delivery.
• Customer as Individual: They emphasize a tailored, human-first approach, not just generic solutions.

Official mission statement

Endava's mission is to be the trusted partner that helps clients navigate and win in the complex digital landscape. This isn't just about coding; it's about delivering tangible business results through technology. It's defintely a high-stakes game.

• Deliver innovative solutions that drive business growth and success for our clients.
• Help clients succeed in the digital world by delivering exceptional services.

Vision statement

The vision statement maps the core purpose to the three key stakeholders: clients, people, and shareholders. It's a clear commitment to balanced, sustainable expansion, which is what you want to see as an investor or a strategic partner.

• Create an environment and a culture that generates sustainable growth for our clients, our people and our shareholders.

For a deeper dive into how these principles translate into financial strength, check out Breaking Down Endava plc (DAVA) Financial Health: Key Insights for Investors.

The core values are the behavioral guardrails for the company's 11,636 employees, as of September 30, 2025, ensuring consistency across their global operations.

• Smart: Employing skilled individuals to craft intelligent solutions.
• Thoughtful: Caring deeply about people-employees, customers, and communities.
• Open: Maintaining transparency and confidence in their abilities and approach.
• Adaptable: Embracing change and remaining flexible in complex environments.
• Trusted: Building relationships on integrity and reliability.

Given Company slogan/tagline

While the company uses several phrases to describe its value proposition, the most succinct and powerful statement reflecting their work is a clear differentiator in the market.

• Technology is our how. And people are our why.

Endava plc (DAVA) How It Works

Endava plc is a technology-driven business transformation group that partners with clients to build next-generation digital platforms and products. It operates by combining deep industry expertise with an AI-native approach to consult, engineer, and deliver tailor-made software solutions that drive core business modernization and lasting impact.

Given Company's Product/Service Portfolio

The company's offerings span the entire product lifecycle, from initial concept to production and ongoing optimization. This full-spectrum capability allows them to tackle complex challenges across diverse industries, with a significant revenue focus on financial services and technology verticals.

Given Company's Operational Framework

Endava's operational framework is built on a distributed, agile delivery model that prioritizes deep collaboration and continuous value creation, which is crucial in a volatile market where clients recalibrate spending quickly. This model is supported by a global workforce of 11,636 employees as of September 30, 2025, operating across Europe, the Americas, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East. Honestly, this global reach helps them manage cost and talent defintely.

• Value Creation Pipeline: The process moves sequentially from ideation and business analysis to IT strategy, architecture, and then production, ensuring solutions are tailor-made at every stage of the client's digital journey.
• Industry Vertical Focus: Revenue generation is highly concentrated in specific sectors, with Payments and BCM contributing the largest share of FY2025 revenue at 19% and 20%, respectively, demonstrating a specialized approach rather than a generalist one.
• Innovation Ecosystem: The recent launch of Dava.Rise is a new program designed to connect high-potential scale-ups with enterprise clients, bridging the innovation gap and providing a credible route for enterprises to adopt new technologies quickly. Mission Statement, Vision, & Core Values of Endava plc (DAVA).
• Financial Performance Anchor: For the full fiscal year 2025, the company reported total revenue of £772.3 million and an adjusted profit before tax of £82.1 million, reflecting their ability to maintain profitability even as clients delay large contracts.

Given Company's Strategic Advantages

The company's long-term success isn't just about writing code; it's about being a strategic partner in digital transformation. Their advantages stem from a combination of proprietary technology, deep-seated industry knowledge, and a proactive shift toward AI-centric solutions.

• AI-Native Differentiation: Over half of Endava's workforce is already using AI in projects, a clear marker of their commitment to becoming an AI-native business, which drives productivity gains and new service models.
• Strategic Partnerships: They have established alliances with key technology leaders, including OpenAI, Google, AWS, and Microsoft, which directly contribute to deal flow and enhance their technical capabilities in areas like cloud and advanced engineering.
• Proprietary Accelerators: The utilization of internal, proprietary solutions like Dava.X and Galaxy for core modernization allows for faster, more efficient project execution, giving them a distinct competitive edge over firms reliant on purely manual processes.
• Client Depth: The top 10 clients account for a significant 36% of total revenue, which shows deep, strategic relationships, but also presents a concentration risk that any analyst must monitor closely.

Endava plc (DAVA) How It Makes Money

Endava plc primarily makes money by selling its expertise as a technology-driven business transformation group, delivering customized software development, cloud adoption, and data solutions to large enterprises. This is a services-based model where revenue is generated by billing clients for the time and materials of its specialized engineering and consulting teams, increasingly focused on an AI-native approach.

Endava plc's Revenue Breakdown

The company's revenue streams are heavily concentrated in the financial and technology sectors, but a strategic push into Healthcare has dramatically shifted the mix. For the fiscal year ended June 30, 2025, the total revenue reached £772.3 million, reflecting a 4.3% year-over-year increase.

Business Economics

Endava plc operates on a time-and-materials or fixed-price contract model, but it's actively introducing innovative pricing models like transaction-based pricing for certain clients. This shifts revenue risk and reward, tying their fees to the client's actual business volume, which can be a smart hedge against project delays. The core economic engine is the utilization rate of its 11,479 employees, where higher utilization of highly-skilled, lower-cost nearshore talent translates directly into better gross margins.

Here's the quick math on client concentration: the top 10 clients accounted for a significant 36% of the total revenue in FY2025. That's a double-edged sword: deep, sticky relationships with major players, but also a concentration risk if one of those clients pulls back spending. The company is defintely pushing its AI-native strategy, which means embedding Artificial Intelligence (AI) into more than half of its projects to drive client productivity, but this also creates a short-term headwind on traditional billable hours.

• Pricing Strategy: Moving beyond traditional time-and-materials to value-based and transaction-based models.
• Cost Structure: Dominated by employee compensation, a reality for any IT services firm.
• Growth Driver: The massive +103.8% growth in Healthcare revenue in FY2025 shows where the market is responding to their offerings.
• Risk Factor: Client-specific risk is high, with a few large clients driving over a third of the business.

Endava plc's Financial Performance

While the company achieved a record order book exiting FY2025, the overall financial picture shows some pressure from the volatile market backdrop and client spending recalibrations. The reported full-year revenue for FY2025 was £772.3 million, a solid increase, but the adjusted profit before tax (PBT) margin compressed slightly to 10.6% (£82.1 million) from 11.2% in the prior year.

You need to look at the cash flow to see the real health. Net cash from operating activities for FY2025 was £52.8 million, which is a strong indicator of the underlying business generating cash. However, adjusted free cash flow saw a slight dip to £48.7 million from £58.4 million in the prior year, partly due to shifts in working capital. This is why I always stress looking past the headline revenue number. For a deeper dive into the balance sheet and liquidity, you should read Breaking Down Endava plc (DAVA) Financial Health: Key Insights for Investors.

• FY2025 Adjusted PBT: £82.1 million, representing a 10.6% margin.
• FY2025 Adjusted Diluted EPS: £1.13, a marginal increase from the prior year.
• Operating Cash Flow: Generated £52.8 million in net cash from operations in FY2025.
• Liquidity: Held cash and cash equivalents of £59.3 million as of June 30, 2025.

Endava plc (DAVA) Market Position & Future Outlook

Endava plc is currently navigating a challenging macroeconomic environment, positioning itself as a premium, AI-native digital transformation partner despite near-term revenue headwinds. While the company reported a FY2025 revenue of £772.3 million, its revised FY2026 guidance projects a revenue range of £735 million to £752 million, reflecting client caution on discretionary spending. This pivot is critical: the company is shifting from traditional IT services toward higher-value, AI-centric projects and core system modernization to capture long-term growth.

Competitive Landscape

In the specialized digital transformation segment, Endava competes with larger, more geographically diversified peers. To be clear, Endava is a smaller, more focused player, and this table illustrates their relative size based on their combined projected FY2025 revenues in this niche. Here's the quick math on their relative positioning:

Opportunities & Challenges

The company's future trajectory hinges on its ability to convert its strategic focus on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and enterprise core modernization into tangible revenue growth, overcoming the current demand softness.

Industry Position

Endava operates as a premium, mid-tier digital transformation pure-play firm, distinct from the large-scale legacy outsourcers. You can see more on the breakdown in Exploring Endava plc (DAVA) Investor Profile: Who's Buying and Why?

• The company's valuation, evidenced by a Price-to-Sales (P/S) ratio of roughly 1.3x (as of March 2025), suggests the market is pricing it at a significant discount compared to peers like Globant (P/S of 2.33x) and EPAM Systems (P/S of 2.16x).
• This discount reflects the recent growth challenges, but also the potential for a sharp rebound when the spending cycle turns.
• Endava's core competence lies in modernizing the core technology systems (core modernization) of financial services, payments, and media clients, which is a higher-barrier-to-entry service than basic IT outsourcing.
• The firm is defintely poised for an acceleration in organic constant currency growth, but it needs an improved demand environment to convert its record-high order book into realized revenue.

Finance: Track the conversion rate of the AI-native pipeline and report on the new $100 million payments client deal's contribution by the next quarter.