authID Inc.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for your participation in today's conference call to discuss AuthID fourth quarter and full year 2024 financial results. I would now like to turn the call over to AuthID General Counsel, Graham Arad. Graham, please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. Greetings and good afternoon. This is Graham Arad, General Counsel at AuthID. Welcome to the AuthID fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings conference call. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. With me on today's call are our CEO, Ron DeGuro, our CFO, Ed Solito, and our founder and CTO, Tom Zoki. By now, you should have access to today's press release announcing our fiscal year 2024 results. If you have not received this, the release can be found on our website at www.authid.ai under the Investor Relations section. Throughout this conference call, we will be presenting certain non-GAAP financial information. This information is not calculated in accordance with GAAP and may be calculated differently from other companies similarly titled non-GAAP information. Quantitative reconciliation of our non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA information to the most directly comparable GAAP financial information appears in today's press release. Before we begin our formal remarks, let me remind everyone that part of our discussion today will include forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, and therefore you should not put undue reliance on them. These statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from what we expect. Some of these risks are mentioned in today's press release. Others are discussed in our Form 10-K and other filings which are made available at www.sec.gov. I'd now like to introduce our CEO, Ron DeGuro.

Thank you, Graham, and thank you all for joining us today to discuss our fourth quarter and full year 2024 results. AuthID is a biometric authentication company focused on knowing who's behind the device. While artificial intelligence has made incredible strides across many use cases within the last two years, it has also brought advances in deepfake capabilities, which make it increasingly difficult to verify a person's identity. I want to start off the call by sharing the statement which captures the role AuthID plays in today's world. Artificial intelligence is producing the most realistic, inauthentic content the world has ever seen. The only way to allow companies to ensure authenticity is to give them the capability to trust the physical presence of an individual human being. This is what AuthID delivers. I'm very proud of our 2024 growth, not only across our financial metrics, but also in the foundation we have built to be a dominant player in this rapidly expanding market. When I began my tenure as CEO, AuthID created a product that I believe had the potential to be a winner, but the team was down to bare minimum. The company was in financial strain. My mandate was to rebuild AuthID to deliver strong financial and operational results and rebuild a company that lacked market credibility. So in 18 months ago, we set ambitious goals not to just turn the business around, but to quickly grow by assembling a world-class team, positioning the technology to be market-leading in every category of biometric authentication. I am proud to say that we have quickly made great progress in positioning for aggressive growth, and our business has improved across all key metrics. We built a proven go-to-market plan to execute a high-growth year-over-year strategy where we centered our entire organization around 300 core accounts divided into three categories, fast high-growth companies, large enterprise companies, and channel partners. We calibrated our sales pipeline to the rate of $9 million a quarter, and we closed many fast customers as we could while nurturing large accounts for our 2025 pipeline. To this end, we assembled a team of identity domain experts that large companies can trust and feel confident to do business with. We also had to refine our software to be enterprise ready to service large brand name accounts. We did it all in just 18 months time. And here's what AuthID achieved in 2024. Let's start with booked ARR, which is the total of committed ARR plus estimated usage above committed ARR, 18 months from signing the contract. We set out to achieve a five-year T2D3 growth target, which is triple growth year one, triple growth year two, and double growth in years three, four, and five to get to 100 million in ARR. For the first year, we originally targeted 3 million in booked ARR over 12 months, but we achieved that target within six months. 3 million represented more than 3X in booked ARR from previous years. For 2024, we aim for our second 3X growth year, targeting 9 million. and I'm very happy to report that we achieved that 3x goal of $9 million this year. We also improved our remaining performance obligation, or RPO, by 3.5x from $4 million to over $14 million. To reiterate, we have performed at least 3x in booked ARR and RPO. Despite our size, we have positioned ourselves to partner with very large customers, some of whom are in the late stages of our sales cycle. We expect to close multiple Fortune 500 and multinational customers in 2025. We have increased our pipeline generation activity with an open pipeline of over 3X the 18 million in bookings we are targeting. We are adding over 20 million in bookings pipeline per quarter, which we will continue to ramp up. And we are also working diligently to bring our new customers live on the platform and convert our bookings to revenue. Moving to our fourth quarter highlights. AuthID closed the largest deal in the company's history in Q4, a 10 million contract over three years with our next generation AI partner in India. We also expanded our relationship with Einstein to enable a larger initiative to provide basic income payments to individuals and families in need around the world. This represents a satisfied customer who increased their usage of AuthID, a land and expand model we are working to replicate with more customers. We also added several new customers and partners in Q4, including TurboCheck to help verify identity of job candidates, Imperial Technologies to support onboarding for new telecom customers, Affintech for financing major recreational purposes, Verify to power reusable identities for onboarding and authenticating users across their portfolio brands, and Salus to support the automated underwriting of consumer microloans. We continue to build our partner ecosystem and seamlessly work with other platforms in order to leverage mutual market opportunities. These partnerships help us reach their existing customer bases as well as new verticals. In Q4, we announced a partnership with Zendesk to enable their customers to seamlessly access AuthID through their customer support software and to better address call center use cases. We announced our membership in the Accountable Digital Identity Association, or ADIA, which is a critical step as we work to advance the adoption of reusable digital identities and collaborate closely in the growth of ADIA's standardized framework and ecosystem, which is rooted in biometrics. The ADIA was founded by Ramesh Kesi-Napali, who also founded the FIDO Alliance, the most successful standards body solving for passwords. Our mutual goal is to validate every identity in an interoperable format controlled through biometrics. AuthID is working with a major biometric hardware provider to showcase our reusable identity solution by deploying the first identity exchange between the United States and Japan. Our plan is to demonstrate this identity exchange between two different entities across two different countries, all based on the ADIA standard. This has never been done before. This addresses the challenges enterprises face in managing multiple identities for their global employee and contractor workforces. In addition, having a single trusted identity bound to a person's biometrics and reusable across business units in geographical territories reduces the cost and time and unnecessary friction of onboarding individuals multiple times. Enterprises we talk to are excited about the release of the capability for reusable identities. On the technology side, in our 4.0 release, we offer Privacy Key, which represents a quantum leap forward in biometric authentication, providing frictionless security while maintaining the highest standards of data privacy and protection. As we recently highlighted in a press release, the PRISM project conducted an independent analysis of AuthID's approach to privacy and compliance-first biometric authentication, classifying AuthID as a luminary, their highest level of distinction for our leading-edge platform. I'm proud of the team's efforts and accomplishments in 2024. As I mentioned earlier, the rise of artificial intelligence is challenging identity verification solutions to contend with the most sophisticated fraud attacks that leverage deepfakes, public available AI models, and camera injection software. At AuthID, we are meeting this rising AI threat by combining the sophistication of biometric liveness and injection attack detection, while also delivering speed, accuracy, and privacy to allow broad adoption for all organizations. The market has told us that there are three key pillars for adoption of biometric solutions and our foundation for differentiating AuthID in the market, starting with speed. Instead of traditional 7 to 10 seconds for other vendors, AuthID can process new identities in a blazing 700 milliseconds for the best possible user experience. We're even faster at 25 milliseconds for simple selfie biometric authentication. Next is accuracy, which we measure by false match rate, meaning the probability of matching a face to the wrong user account. No other vendor matches our 1 to 1 billion false match rate, which leads the market by at least 4x. More importantly, even with our speed, there is no compromise to accuracy. The third key to adoption is privacy and compliance. Stringent legislation already exists in the form of CCPA, BIPA, CUBI, and GDPR, with new laws being enacted globally all the time. The potential liability for compliance failures around biometric data creates a tremendous amount of hesitation around the use of biometrics. With the introduction of PrivacyKey, we are the first to offer biometric authentication without needing to store any biometrics. by leveraging public key technology, the baseline for all enterprise encryption and crypto. This helps AuthID customers implement biometrics with built-in compliance. We also achieved an industry first with the ability to revoke biometrics to comply with corporate password rotation policies. It's a challenge in biometrics without requiring the person to effectively get a new face. This capability unlocks critical enterprise use cases where revocability is necessary in any company's IT compliance policy. This commitment to privacy and the market-leading ability to deliver it further helps our customers eliminate the biggest hurdle in adoption, the fear of biometric data being stolen. Identity verification technology is critical to corporations and governments. As AI continues to advance, AuthID offers a critical solution for our customers while also eliminating barriers to biometric adoption. Customers choose us because we fulfill the requirements of speed, accuracy, and data privacy. Before I turn to Ed to cover the financials, Dale will show you a three minute demo so you can see for yourselves how we help our customers combat AI generated fraud.