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spk15: Good morning everyone and welcome to Kaltura fourth quarter and full year 2023 earnings call. All material contained in the webcast is the sole property and copyright of Kaltura with all rights reserved. For opening remarks and introductions, I will now turn the call over to Erica Mannion at Sapphire Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
spk16: Thank you and good morning. With me today from Kaltura are Ron Yucatil, co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer, Yaron Gamazi, chief financial officer, and John Doherty, Kaltura's incoming CFO. Ron will begin with a summary of the results for the fourth quarter ended December 31, 2023, and the company's plans and expected trends for 2024. Yaron will then review details of the financial results for the fourth quarter and full year of 2023, followed by the company's outlook for the first quarter and full year of 2024. We will then open the call for questions. Please note that this call will include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws, including but not limited to statements regarding Kaltura's expected future financial results and management's expectations and plans for the business. These statements are neither promises nor guarantees and involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed here. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ from forward-looking statements can be found in the risk factors section of Kaltura's quarterly report on Form 10Q for the quarterly period ended September 30, 2023, and other FTP filings, including the ANA report on Form 10K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2023, to be filed with the SEC. Any forward-looking statements made in this conference call, including responses to your questions, are based on current expectations as of today, and Kaltura assumes no obligation to update or revise them, whether as a result of new developments or otherwise, except as required by law. Please note, we will be discussing a non-GAAP financial measure, adjusted even DAW, during this call. For a reconciliation of this non-GAAP financial measure to the most directly comparable GAAP metric, please refer to our earnings release, which is available on the company's website at .kaltura.com. Now, I will turn the call over to Ron.
spk03: Thank you, Erika, and thank you everyone for joining us on the call this morning. Today, we reported total revenue for the fourth quarter of 2023 of $44.5 million, up 1% year over year, and subscription revenue of $40.8 million, up 3% year over year. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $0.8 million. We posted record-high total revenues in the fourth quarter, which also marked the fifth consecutive quarter of -over-year growth. The quarter wrapped up a year where, as we had previously forecasted, we saw increased subscription revenue and growth rate, and despite declining professional services revenues, as expected, total revenue growth rates also increased. As for our bottom line, the fourth quarter was also a second consecutive quarter of adjusted EBITDA profitability and a positive cash flow from operations, both for the first time since 2020. It was also our highest adjusted EBITDA results since the fourth quarter of 2020. This concluded a year with marked bottom line improvements year over year, where we posted $2.5 million of adjusted EBITDA losses compared to $28.3 million in the past year, and reduced our cash flow use for operations by $38.5 million
spk07: from $46.8 million to $8.3 million. As we draw 2023 to a close,
spk03: we are pleased to have achieved and surpassed our revenue and adjusted EBITDA guidance for the year, delivering on our goal of accelerating revenue growth, while also returning to adjusted EBITDA profitability in the past two quarters, and as forecasted, dramatically improving our cash flows. To that end, we are reaffirming our expectation of posting both a positive adjusted
spk07: EBITDA and positive cash flow from operations this year. Moving on to the business update. While booking
spk03: and retention results in the fourth quarter continue to be lower than in 2022, we closed more deals, achieved higher new bookings, and posted a higher gross retention rate than in each of the first three quarters of 2023. In addition, the top of our sales funnel continued to show a sequential increase in the number of qualified leads in the passing quarter. We believe that our differentiated horizontal platform and continuous product portfolio expansion enables our customers to increasingly consolidate many video use cases internally and externally around Cotera, and by doing so, to reduce their costs and complexities and avoid disjointed workflows and content silos. This consolidation brought forth in 2023 larger deals and continued to increase our average customer size, as evident by record high ENT new logo ARPU and the record high average ARR per customer in 2023,
spk07: which we believe will help our future growth. In the fourth quarter, we saw our new event platform garner traction.
spk03: We extended our reach within a pair of global enterprise software giants to support them with our events and webinar offerings, both for internal communication and training, as well as external marketing and parking enablements. Additionally, a prominent technology company already leveraging our event platform has substantially brought in the range of events supported by our platform, and the leading US automotive company upgraded from Cotera's webcasting to Cotera events. At events and webinars, a Fortune 100 financial institution, one of Cotera's largest and earliest customers, has purchased additional accessibility features to further extend the reach and inclusion of their internal video communication. One of the world's largest restaurant chains expanded its usage and increased its access to Cotera's product suite capabilities. In a very well-known global leader in the -to-consumer streaming space, the new customer selected Cotera to power its internal -on-demand portal for employees and partners. In the education sphere, we continued our global expansion by securing a large European university and a prestigious European business school as new customers, after conducting successful -of-concept with our product. We also continued to increase the number of end users of our media and telecom platform, with our top EMEA customers migrating hundreds of thousands of new households into our cloud TV service. On the product front, during the fourth quarter, we continued boosting our event platform with worlds and permissions, enriched registration reporting, an advanced landing page editor, and additional features that encourage interactivity of both virtual and in-person audiences. Our video portal now enables users to seamlessly stitch videos together, and we also improved its user experience and branding options. We added to our video player additional -to-action capabilities, an enhanced podcast experience, and customizable pre- and post-broadcast links. But our real-time conferencing rooms continue to evolve with the launch of our proprietary new whiteboard, which complements existing third-party integration. We have also introduced simulcast features to improve broadcast quality and network efficiency. On the infrastructure front, we continue to support new regional fast clouds and have made strategic investments in enhancing our capabilities around -own-key options, reinforcing our commitment to security and data sovereignty. As for AI, as previously discussed, we believe that we are in the cusp of a transformative era where video-first, AI-infused experiences will drive great engagement and improve business results. In the passing quarter, we expanded our AI assistant to provide real-time insights and suggested actions to organizers and presenters during webinars and other events, by identifying changes and during engagement in real-time and initiating actions such as launching relevant quizzes and polls and evoking audience reactions. The AI Accelerator program, which we launched last quarter, continued to grow with more technology partners joining and more customers exploring with us the possibilities of AI-powered video experiences and how they can support their interests and needs and boost their business results. Throughout 2024, we expect to gradually cater to many of their needs and for AI to become an increasingly important part of our offer. As we look ahead to 2024 and beyond, we anticipate a more favorable market environment that is expected to ease budgetary constraints for enterprises, particularly in North America. We believe that enterprises will gradually reinvest in digital technologies, including in video-based experiences for employees, customers and prospects. We believe that this will be fueled by an increasingly hybrid workplace with lesser travel in order to reduce costs and carbon emissions, by a growth in the millennial and gen Z workforce, which is both savvy and reliant on video, and by the much greater expected ROI generated by AI-infused video experience. We believe Kotora provides the most robust, engaging and impactful advanced video-based solutions powering use cases such as marketing and customer engagement, employee and partner communication and training, student learning and engagement, and online entertainment. Beyond this, we believe we are unique in offering a single platform that addresses all these use cases and others to follow. As mentioned, we see the single-platform approach not only boosting functionality, reliability and scalability, but also being much more cost-effective. While we believe our advantages helped us outperform many of our competitors in the passing challenging year, we believe they will become even more impactful when improved macroeconomic conditions are expected to cause customers to start making longer-term investments to elevate their system's quality, performance and efficiency. As mentioned, we've already seen this trend affect our entire sales funnel, from growing leading demand indicators such as the number of new qualified leads, to fueling higher win rates, to continuing to increase our new logo, R2, and average ARR for customers. In 2024, we will continue to focus on and cater to the growing demand for our event platform from existing and new customers for both internal and external use cases. We plan to continue our expansion down-market and increase the size of our commercial sales team that sells low-touch solutions to SMEs and to departments within large enterprises. At that end, while in 2023 we reduced for the first time the size of our sales team to match the lower enterprise budgets and longer sales cycles and to address our profitability goals,
spk07: this year we plan to gradually regrow our sales force. In summary,
spk03: we wrapped up a tough year with strong macroeconomic induced headwinds that weighed down our new bookings and gross retention and generated a revenue growth rate that, albeit better than last year's guidance and that of the previous year, is far below our historical level. We entered 2024 with a robust product offering, a clear strategic direction and a validated goal to market thesis. With market conditions improving, enterprise spending recovering, and new opportunities arising from AI, we believe we are well positioned to capture the increasing demand for video experience. While we believe we have the right products and market positioning to support faster growth, given the still unclear macro conditions and considering last year's outcome, we're thoughtful with our revenue guidance for 2024. Regardless of our top line growth, are we affirming our expectations of posting both a positive adjusted EBITDA and positive cash flow from operations this year? Now, before handing it over to your colleague, the RCFO to discuss our financial results in more detail, I would like to address his planned transition, which we announced a few weeks ago. First, I'd like to extend to everyone our deepest gratitude for his great contributions to the company throughout the past seven years. Yaron's commitment to Kultura's growth and his professional excellence have been invaluable. We wish him success in his next endeavour. As we have shared, Yaron shall remain CFO until March 1st and will continue to support the company throughout the second quarter to ensure a smooth transition. We have a saying at Kultura, once a Kulturian, always a Kulturian. While Yaron is moving on, he'll be staying close and will forever remain a partner and partner of the company and me. With that, I am pleased to warmly welcome and briefly introduce to you our soon to be CFO, Mr. John Doherty. John joined us earlier this month and shall formally take the reins of CFO on March 1st.
spk07: John
spk03: brings more than three decades of financial and operational experience. Most recently, he served as CFO and COO at Magic Leap. Prior to that, he served as CFO of publicly traded Interaction until after his 8 billion dollar trust acquisition. Prior to that, John held a variety of senior financial and operational roles at Verizon, including head of corporate development and Verizon Ventures, head of investor relations and CFO of multiple large divisions. I am excited to welcome John to our team.
spk04: His
spk03: experience in both financial and corporate development functions at large publicly traded enterprises will greatly contribute to our efforts, including our plans to explore strategic opportunities that advance our commercial goals. Welcome aboard, John.
spk23: Thank you, Ron. And hello to everyone on the call today. I am very excited to join Ron and the talented Kaltura team. I firmly believe that Kaltura has the potential for significant growth in an exciting domain and that it is well positioned to lead the market. I am looking forward to the exciting journey ahead and to getting to know many of you personally soon.
spk07: Thank you, John. And now over to you, Ron. Thank you, Ron. And good morning, everyone.
spk26: I would like to start off by welcoming John and thanking Ron and the team for the amazing past seven years. My period at Kaltura left me with great learning, close friendship and very fond memories. I am very excited about the road ahead of the company and I am confident that it has the right leadership, right product and the right strategy in place to return to a meaningful possible growth and to lead the market. As Ron mentioned, I shall be supporting John and the company on a full-time basis throughout the second quarter to ensure a smooth transition. As Ron also said, once a Kalturian, always a Kalturian. Now back to our financial results. As I review the fourth quarter and the full fiscal year result today, please note that I will be referring to a non-GAAP metric adjusted EBITDA. A reconciliation of GAAP to a non-GAAP financial is included in today's earnings release, which is available on our website at .kaltura.com. Total revenue for the fourth quarter ended December 31, 2023, was 44.5 million, up 1% -over-year. Subscription revenue was 40.8 million, up 3% -over-year, while professional services revenue contributed 3.7 million, down 18% -over-year. The remaining performance obligations were 185.3 million, up 8% -over-year, of which we expect to recognize 59% as revenue over the next 12 months. Annualized recurring revenue was 164.7 million, up 3% -over-year. Our net dollar retention rate was 99% in the fourth quarter, up from 96% in Q4 2022. Within our E&T segment, total revenue for the fourth quarter was 31.6 million, up 5% -over-year. Subscription revenue was 30.4 million, up 5% -over-year, while professional services revenue contributed 1.1 million, up 13% -over-year. Within our M&T segment, total revenue for the fourth quarter was 12.9 million, down 8% -over-year. Subscription revenue was 10.4 million, down 2% -over-year, while professional services revenue contributed 2.5 million, down 27% -over-year. Gap gross profit in the quarter was 28.6 million, representing a gross margin of 64%, up from 63% in Q4 2022. Within our E&T segment, gross profit for the fourth quarter was 23 million, representing a gross margin of 73%, up from 70% gross margin in Q4 2022. Within our M&T segment, gross profit for the fourth quarter was 5.6 million, representing a gross margin of 44%, down from 46% gross margin in Q4 2022. Gap net loss in the quarter was 12.1 million, or 0.09 per diluted share. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was 0.8 million, improving from a negative 4.2 million in Q4 2022. And now for the full year fiscal year's results. Total revenue for the year ended December 31, 2023, was 175.2 million, up 4% -over-year. Subscription revenue was 162.8 million, up 7% -over-year, while professional services revenue contributed 12.4 million, down 24% -over-year. Within our E&T segment, total revenue for 2023 was 125.2 million, up 4% -over-year. Subscription revenue was 120.6 million, up 6% -over-year, while professional services revenue contributed 4.6 million, down 31% -over-year.
spk21: Within our
spk26: M&T segment, total revenue for 2023 was 50 million, up 3% -over-year. Subscription revenue was 42.2 million, up 8% -over-year, while professional services revenue contributed 7.9 million, down 19% -over-year. Our E&T dollar retention rate was 100% in 2023 and was 100% in 2022. Gap gross profit in 2023 was 112.2 million, representing a gross margin of 64%, up from 63% gross margin in 2022. Subscription revenue gross margin was 73%, down from 74% in 2022.
spk21: Within
spk26: our E&T segment, gross profit in 2023 was 91.6 million, representing a gross margin of 73%, up from 70% gross margin in 2022. Subscription revenue gross margin was 79%, up from 78% in 2022. Within our M&T segment, gross profit in 2023 was 20.6 million, representing a gross margin of 41%, down from 48% gross margin in 2022. Subscription revenue gross margin was 55%, down from 63% in 2022. Gap net loss in 2023 was 46.4 million, or 0.34 per day, relative share. Adjusted EBITDA in 2023 was negative 2.5 million, improving from a negative of 28.3 million in 2022. Turning to the balance sheet and cash flow. We ended the quarter with 75.2 million in cash and marketable securities. Net cash provided by operating activity was 1.6 million in the quarter, compared to 5.8 million net cash used in operating activities in Q4 2022. For the full year of 2023, net cash used in operating activity was 8.3 million, compared to 46.8 million net cash used in operating activities in 2022. In the fourth quarter, we also entered into a new agreement with our lenders, extending the maturity and amending the certain financial terms, as discussed in our Form 8K file on December 27, 2023. I would now like to turn to our outlook for the first quarter of 2024 and for the fiscal year ending December 31, 2024. In the first quarter, we expect subscription revenue to range from a 1% decrease to a 1% increase to between 39.9 million and 40.6 million, and total revenue to range from a 1% decrease to a 1% increase to between 42.7 million and 43.5 million. We expect an adjusted EBITDA to be between a negative 0.5 million and a positive 0.3 million. For the full year, we expect subscription revenue to range from a 1% decrease to a 1% increase to between 161.2 million and 164.2 million, and total revenue to range from a 1% decrease to a 1% increase to between 173.7 million and 176.7 million. We expect the adjusted EBITDA to be between 0 and 1 million. In summary, due to a tough macro condition and industry headwind, we close the much slower growth year than usual, albeit better than last year's guidance and that of the previous year. While we believe that we have the right product and market positioning to accelerate growth and that market conditions shall gradually improve, considering the market uncertainty and last year's outcome, we are hopeful with our guidance for 2024. We are satisfied to have achieved our bottom-line accrual and cash flow goal for the passing year, and are reaffirming our expectation of posting both positive adjusted EBITDA and the positive cash flow for operations this year. With that, we will open the call for questions. Operator?
spk15: Thank you. We will now be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate that your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment please while we poll for questions. Our first question comes from Matt Nickham with Deutsche Bank. Please proceed with your question.
spk17: Hey guys, thanks so much for taking the question. Maybe two if I could. One, Ron, if you could talk about some of the confidence you have in terms of improving market conditions that you referenced and when you could maybe see this driving more positive inflections in subscription revenue. And then secondly, just in terms of competitive backdrop, if you could just talk about what you're seeing there and then any change in terms of competitive dynamics over the last couple of months. Thanks.
spk03: Thank you Matt and hello to everyone on the call today. Let's start with the first one, confidence for market conditions. Let's wrap what we have this quarter by way of demand and trends and leading indicators. It was, as mentioned, the highest booking quarter of last year, albeit relatively sluggish but also the best retention that we had in the year past and it's also coming back to levels that we had prior years which are much better. From a net booking perspective, it was a better quarter than the ones before. Again, it's been a tough year and it's another quarter of improvement. We're going to wait a bit and see where things go but it is headed in the right direction. Also important to note that as we wrapped up the year and our booking had come down from the year before by about 25%, as mentioned earlier, we also had about 25% less sales people than the year before which is the first time we've actually done that. Productivity hasn't fallen down, it has kept and now that we've become profitable, we can invest and we can put more, we believe we can cater to the demand with more people. It's not just about the demand, it's our ability to cater to the demand. Other points to your question about demand, we look at the leading indicators we had throughout the year. We look at the QBMs, the Qualified by Marketing Leads. They continue to grow and they grew sequentially throughout the whole year. They have come down from the year before, the beginning of the year, but ever since have gradually climbed up and also the RFP submissions have also grown materially both sequentially and year over year. So that's a good sign and lastly on that point, we are selling bigger deals and to bigger customers because of all the additional products and our strategy to consolidate around cultural for internal and external. We've seen this year record ARPUs and continued increase in average amount of ARPUs per customer all the time that win rates have remained high. So if you look at all these things together, I think for us they spell that we believe things are going in the right direction. We're talking to folks, I think in North America more so than in Europe, there's conversation about more comfort around taking a decision. It was always the case that people said that in the mid to long term, because that makes more sense, not just because it's a premium technology, but the consolidation that we offer enables them to have less silos, less broken workflows and lesser total cost of ownership. It was just doing it in the tough year that it was, was harder because people were looking very near sighted to additional cost just to get things shaken and moved. But as people look into the following years, I think people are getting geared and ready to make the better decision for the mid to long term, which is Côte d'Irère. So again, we're careful, we're not celebrating, it's been a tough year. We've talked about slower growth rates than we've seen in the past, but we've also delivered on what we said we would. And let's look how next year pans out and hopefully it continues to climb up. So your second question around competitive change, we have not seen a material difference at the last quarter. So we continue to lead for reasons that we've always led, the four main differentiators for Côte d'Irère. One, the depth of our APIs and the integration that we could offer, enabling a lot more mission criticality. And two, the breadth of what we offer that enables us to offer VOD live and real time, internal and external. And as I said earlier, to enable consolidation. A third is the enterprise ability that we offer, meaning by way of scale, reliability, security, compliance. And the last is the degree of engagement and analytics that comes from our products. And we continue to see these strong, we have not seen lower win rates or stronger competition coming from elsewhere. It's up to you to look at the end year results of the other companies. I think most of the public companies out there have shown lower growth rates, if not negative this year. And we think that the reason that we have done relatively better is because of these advantages. Does that address your question, Scott?
spk17: It does, yeah. Just one quick follow up. In terms of sales cycles, are you seeing those maybe shorten or maybe stabilize? I'm just curious in terms of how that's been impacted as well of late.
spk03: Good question. Not yet, but the good news is that the ones that have come in into the pipe are gradually going to need to come out. So they do come out. We are closing the deals. As mentioned, at the beginning of the year, the pressures, the headwinds that we've seen that have caused this year to be, or past year, 2023 to be so off, are a significant lengthening of the sales cycle as well as price pressures. And we're still seeing that. I'm too early to say that it's suddenly getting better, but as mentioned, since wind rates are held and the top of the funnel is continuing to grow, then what comes in must come out. And we are closing these deals. So we believe there will be more opportunity to close these deals in 2024.
spk05: That's great. Thank you so much. Thank you,
spk15: Matt. Our next question comes from George Erwannick with Oppenheimer & Koch. Please proceed with your question.
spk19: Thank you for taking my question. And just to start off, Ron, best of luck on what's ahead and congratulations to you, John. So maybe, Ron, starting off with kind of your comments on the sales productivity, can you maybe give us some perspective on what you're expecting from a hiring perspective this year and when those additions might happen during the year?
spk03: Sure. Happy to do that. So first on sales productivity, as mentioned, it had kept compared to last year and I can also say it's broadly aligned with the pre-COVID productivity. But we had reduced quite materially our sales force after growing it always year over year. We had a 25% drop in order to be profitable, but also aligning us to the lesser productivities than during COVID. We're not ready, given our profitability metric and the ability of additional salespeople to contribute in a decent way. It's not as great as it has always been, but we're ready to do that. And even if it is the existing productivity of the last couple of years, it's still good. And so far as numbers, order of magnitude of maybe another 10 at this point, we're doing it gradually, we're doing it throughout the year. There's going to be more focus on inside sales, commercial sales, rather than outside sales, but we're going to increase both because we want to continue going down markets. The discussion could continue separately and that's important for us, but that's the order of magnitude. Does that address your question?
spk19: Yes. And you're on maybe on the net expansion number. That was up year over year, but it did decline a little bit on a quarterly basis. Can you give us some perspective on what you're seeing there from an expansion perspective and what your expectations are for 2024?
spk26: Yes. So first of all, you're right. There was a decline of 1%. It was 99% this quarter, but as you can see for the year, it was 100%. We said in the previous calls that we believe that for the short term, it's going to be around the 100%. Based on the fact that we saw, as Ron mentioned, the improvement in both booking and retention rates, we believe that we will be able to see a bit better numbers than the 100%, but at least for the short term, I believe that this is the new normal. Obviously, if and when we will see a re-acceleration of both booking and retention rates, we do believe that we will see an increase to the rates that we saw before COVID, which was in the low 100.
spk20: Thank
spk15: you. Our next question comes from Gabriel Borges with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed with your question.
spk13: Hi, good morning. Thank you. I wanted to follow up, Ron, on your comments on the macro. I appreciate the detail. I wanted to understand what you think is driving that. How much of this is just COVID normalization? We're a couple of years out and customers are ready to reinvest again. Any qualitative comments from your customer conversations that you can share with us?
spk03: Thank you, Gabriella. I think we had the two -to-back issues. COVID was the first one when people said, we've just bought a lot, give us a bit of time to figure out what we're doing in a more strategic way. We heard a lot of that in the end of 2021, the beginning of 2022, when people said, listen, there were a bunch of different systems that we had bought, there's a bunch of new use cases that we're powering, we want to make order in the whole thing, give us a few quarters or less, and we'll come back to you with thoughts. They said that they love the fact that we can consolidate and offer a solution across, and the fact that we can offer even more mission-critical services that are more tightly integrated that could be customized and tailored to their needs. Everybody said, look, we understand video is a new normal and we're going to do more in video. Just as this was getting ready to impact us, we had the financial downturn. I think ever since, over the last year and a half, couple years, it's more the financial downturn than the post-COVID impact. People said, look, we already know that we want to have more, it's just now is not the right time. We had the price pressures and people saying with incumbent vendors, even if it's not the most ideal system, we're saying that sometimes some of the products, definitely the internal ones are FTE-based licenses. If there's also reduction of FTEs because companies are letting go people as opposed to hiring, then that in itself is also pushing against usage. I think that was the biggest issue so far. What we're hearing from folks now is they're saying, look, we waited enough, we need to be smarter about what we do. Our goals are not just 2024 goals, they're also 2025 and beyond, and we're spending too much money on things that need to be done. I want to be cautious about this and our guidance is in that as well. It's not yet time to celebrate. This industry has gone down and it's gradually hopefully going to start going up again. But at this point, we're seeing our competitive advantage being accepted in the market and there's interest in moving forward with Cotera. Let's see how quickly that goes.
spk13: That makes sense. Remind us, how long does it take typically for a deal to go from top of the funnel to close? How long does it take typically for a salesperson to ramp up to full productivity? Any color on the training and enablement that you're providing to help with some of the larger deals and some of the ourselves? Thank you.
spk03: On the third one, training enablement, is that for the customers or enablement for our new salespeople?
spk01: The latter.
spk03: Let me start with the last. We're definitely very structured and we're onboarding folks into the company and we're a video first company so we have everything video-fied. We have an internal group that's also expert in training our customers and they're the ones that are also helping us so we do that well. To your first question connected to that or the second one on the ramp time, in our models, we put six months ramp for outside salespeople and three months ramp for CSMs and we put that into our expectations around booking. I can tell you that most salespeople, if they come in and they get some leads, they could start selling before but that's for us to be careful in our modeling around when booking is going to hit. And so far as the sales timeline, it varies between the different markets. Meeting telecom, which is why most of our focus was not there it was more on the E&T, is longer sales cycles. If you're coming into a new logo, it could be sometimes a year and a half, two years and then a week, length of discussion and then even more so the deployment time are relatively long and the time that it takes all the way to profitability is longer. Back to my point that we've during down times have always enjoyed the organic growth of users within the existing customers, which is quite significant. This quarter we added hundreds of thousands but we're putting our foot off the gas a bit and trying to hunt new customers that will take longer to bring and longer to make revenue and longer to make profit. And so in terms of the sales, it usually had been somewhere around 6 to 12 months cycle albeit that as we've come to offer more low touch products and we've moved from internal, which is more content management to external, which is more event that they have shortened. But over the course of the last year, given trends that have happened in industry it has started to elongate and we're seeing things go beyond the year which is in line if you talk to major, large software companies out there. Enough statistical answer to tell you if it's exact 12 months or 18 months, but it's not a few months time on average, we definitely have from time to time deals that come in and I'm talking about new logos not upsell that are way faster. Education is a tweener it takes sometimes, depending on the situation there's also cycles around when they actually deploy the software for the new learning year but I'd say it's closer to enterprise than it is to the ones that are in the market.
spk11: Thank you for the detail.
spk15: Thank you. Our next question comes from Ryan Kunt with Nita Minko. Please proceed with your question.
spk25: Thanks for the question and welcome to John coming on board. On your guidance there for subscription for the year flat, how would you unpack that in terms of turn and downsell negative impacts on your returning customers versus new logos or new customers as part of that guide?
spk26: Thanks. First of all, when you are saying about declining guidance for Q1 actually what you see is as Ron mentioned we had some pressure all year which were lower than last 2022 obviously but at the same time we do see an increase in Q4 both on retention rates and in booking rates at this point if you look on our forecast obviously we see an improvement because we are comparing to Q4 which was much higher than what was expected before so the basis was higher so in effect it's a decline but from our forecast even compared to the numbers that you saw before it's not really a decline guidance for this year and we do believe that hopefully we will see continued increase in both retention rate and booking rate you will see a situation that the second part of the year it will start to improve and obviously at this point we are trying to be very thoughtful with our guidance
spk27: but what was the specific other question?
spk03: I can address that if you would like so let's start with the fact that we have not taken any assumptions that are not happening already over the past few months so we are not assuming any strengthening, we are not assuming any change we are assuming that things will remain albeit that we do expect and hope that things are going to get better meaning that if we are looking at retention rates that we are currently seeing we are expecting them to continue forward we are also expecting from a ratio of downsell versus full term in the last quarter only 12% of the turn of the loss that we have had of any dollar was associated with initial service or product most of it was budget issues, price issues and the majority was still done through not full departure of customers but through downsell and so we are assuming an NDR that would continue the trends and the activities for both upsell and you that are more or less aligned and so everything is at this point guided to Flattish which obviously we have kept the necessary cushion for us but we also want to be very thoughtful given the past of the year that we have seen is there any more specific question that you have on this or you want me to address Mark?
spk25: No, that was good but I will follow up here if I could on the inside sales focus, is that more on renewals or lead qualification for your inside sales hires?
spk03: So most of our customers have been managed by outside sales let's look at the average MR we have 1000ish customers and we have 125ish million in revenue so the typical customer here is paying us around $170,000 but if you also look at the median this is by and large large enterprise sales what has happened as of recent is the last couple of years as we have added the products that are enabling us to go down market is that we are targeting both small and medium enterprises as well as departmental sales and by doing so we are going to be doing that through more blow touch inside sales and therefore because it is a new conference for us it is not so much renewal, it is more
spk28: new
spk03: and we divide that based on the size of the opportunity between the different sales teams now one other thing that we did do this year in order to double click on the size of the opportunities because our big customers are quite big coming back to my earlier statement about ARPU we have a lot that have climbed 5X and more in growth into multi-million dollar opportunities and we believe we could copy paste that again and again so what we have actually done this year for the renewal side is we have moved to a point somewhere around a third of our customers that are larger and have moved them into a team that is more automated that is working on lower touch renewals in very structured approaches and if that works out we are gradually going to do more and more and we are going to leave the outside sales team to address the 80% of the revenue which usually is 20% of the customers and get that 5X growth and bring more and more multi-million we are thinking we are very thoughtful about how to optimize efficiency in the sales force and how to maximize the output but happy to talk more about that later if you would like
spk02: that is a great run thanks so much for your time thank you Ryan
spk22: as a reminder if you would like to ask a question please press star then one our next question comes from Austin Cole of CitizensGMP please proceed with your question
spk18: thanks for taking the question Ron I was wondering if you could talk about what some of your conversations have been like recently with regards to AI and what those features are adding to your platform and what the response has been like from customers
spk03: thanks thank you Austin over the last quarter we just mentioned that we expanded our AI assistance for webinars and events and we said that we are going to continue to add features that will be during the event in order to offer real-time recommendations and how to increase engagement we have added that and we are seeing very good acceptance for that we are also working on a bunch of other features that we will announce when they come out we in addition to our in-house work have worked on our accelerator program and have increased the number of customers and vendors there we have a couple dozen each and we are working with folks that are helping add value because the virtual culture of how flexible and open it is is that it could be a bus to connect to a lot of innovation from the ecosystem in addition the customers that are in discussions with us across a variety of industries are expressing a lot of interest around AI in all its fashions it is not yet and I said that at the beginning of the process turning into immediate significant revenue I think the entire industry understands that as we continue to develop it will be more and more important what part of it will be big into the existing costs and prices and what part of it will be additive and I think that over the year we will gradually provide more and more info about how this is impacting growth and revenue the one thing I will say is that for me it is clear and over time hopefully we will provide more statistics around it that AI will cause for a lot more videos to be created and a lot more videos to be consumed in a more contextualized way so that is user based, value based the value of the system is going to increase in a material way and we are seeing folks echo that a lot of customers as I mentioned quite significant across multiple industries are echoing that so we are seeing continued trends but as mentioned earlier it is not one of these things that you would expect the next quarter are going to come and say here is the amount of revenue this is how much it is moving the needle for the company it is a multi-year move and we are advancing there
spk07: that
spk06: works for you Austin
spk07: I appreciate that you guys still hear me yep just Austin do you have any questions
spk06: at this time
spk14: yep thank you we will move on to our next question which is coming from the line of Michael Turin with Wells Fargo please proceed with your question
spk10: hey guys this is David from Michael Turin I just wanted to see if you could double click on some of the demand trends I know we heard some comments around geography but I wanted to double click on what you are seeing by geography anything specific in terms of vertical strength thank you
spk03: sure, on the geo side we are seeing stronger North America and a bit weaker Europe it has been consistent throughout the year and it is connected immediately to macro geopolitical situation etc on the vertical side it is not so much just a demand issue we have been as mentioned over the last couple of years focused more on the enterprise more so than EDU or media and telecom just by way of how quickly that could convert the size of the TAM and how quickly we could bring about our new technologies to market to bear or continue to pull across all of these I mentioned earlier we closed even to that extent we have increased in Europe which are the two that I mentioned that are a bit less in the focus so we are attacking it all I can tell you media and telecom we increased a lot of users in Europe we are now engaged in conversation with a bunch of customers that are generally outside of the US but if I were to say given the macro situation most of the focus and most of the upside is North America enterprise
spk10: I appreciate that and then just one more from May what are the biggest areas of focus as it relates to driving profitability of the business? thank you
spk03: yeah so first of all I am very content of the improvements that we have done over the last year as you know first of all the last quarter was the second quarter in a row of adjusted EBITDA profitability and cash flow profitability cash flow ops which is great and the year has been a massive leap forward compared to the years before not a big surprise that we are going to do this and we have done this in the past we have demonstrated it yet again what I like is that we have done that at the same time that we have hit our revenue goals and we are still growing faster than the industry and so the reason was that we did not drop the ball in completing the big important moves that we have made in order to expand our TAM, our ARPU and our competitive positioning over the last few years so while we cut I wouldn't say fat but we made sure that at the right time we didn't cut muscle and were able to move forward and continue to grow let me turn it to your Ron to give you a bit more thoughts about profitability and areas of focus and maybe I will add a couple of words after
spk26: so two important points first of all regarding the gross margin we are working very hard in order to continue to improve it in the short term you should probably not see a significant improve but we will try to get a few more points here and there in terms of the gross margin we are going to start investing back in sales and marketing based on the change that we see in the market under the assumption that it will continue to change but as mentioned we are committed by the end of the day to post both positive adjusted EBITDA and positive cash reform operations for this year
spk10: very much appreciated the detail thank you
spk14: thank you, we have reached the end of our questions and answers session so I would like to pass the floor back over to Ron for closing remarks
spk03: thank you everyone for your great questions and for participating today as mentioned we are feeling ok about the year that has passed we achieved what we said that we would and at the same time we are strengthening our capability to lead the market forward it has been a tough year, we believe there is a good macro direction that is going to improve next year we are thoughtful with our guidance and beyond anything and everything we are very happy to be able to work with John and to be able to work with the company he is still with us in the months ahead helping us and to welcome John, quite excited about him joining the team a lot of great things for us to do together this year thank you everybody and have a beautiful day
spk14: ladies and gentlemen this concludes today's teleconference we thank you for your participation and you may disconnect your lines at this time
spk24: thank you for watching thank you for watching thank
spk00: you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank
spk15: you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you
spk16: for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you
spk03: for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you for watching thank you
spk23: for watching
spk07: thank you, Ron, and good morning, everyone.
spk26: I would like to start off by welcoming John and thanking Ron and the team for the amazing past seven years. My period at Kaltura left me with great learning, close friendship, and very fond memories. My period at Kaltura left me with great learning, close friendship, and very fond memories. I'm very excited about the road ahead of the company, and I'm confident that it has the right leadership, right product, and the right strategy in place to return to a meaningful, profitable growth and to lead the market. I'm very excited about the road ahead of the company, and I'm confident that it has the right leadership, right product, and the right strategy in place to return to a meaningful, profitable growth and to lead the market. As Ron mentioned, I shall be supporting John and the company on a full-time basis throughout the second quarter to ensure a smooth transition. As Ron also said, once a Kalturian, always a Kalturian. Now back to our financial results. As I reviewed the fourth quarter and the full-year fiscal year result today, please note that I will be referring to a non-GAAP metric adjusted EBITDA. As I reviewed the fourth quarter and the full-year fiscal year result today, please note that I will be referring to a non-GAAP metric adjusted EBITDA. As I reviewed the fourth quarter and the full-year fiscal year result today, please note that I will be referring to a non-GAAP metric adjusted EBITDA. As I reviewed the fourth quarter and the full-year fiscal year result today, please note that I will be referring to a non-GAAP metric adjusted EBITDA. The total revenue for the fourth quarter ended December 31, 2023, was $44.5 million, up 1% -over-year. The total revenue for the fourth quarter ended December 31, 2023, was $44.5 million, up 1% -over-year. The total revenue for the fourth quarter ended December 31, 2023, was $44.5 million, up 1% -over-year. The total revenue for the fourth quarter ended December 31, 2023, was $44.5 million, up 1% -over-year. The total revenue for the fourth quarter ended December 31, 2023, was $44.5 million, up 1% -over-year. The remaining performance obligations were $185.3 million, up 8% -over-year, of which we expect to recognize 59% as revenue over the next 12 months. The remaining performance obligations were $185.3 million, up 8% -over-year, of which we expect to recognize 59% as revenue over the next 12 months. The remaining performance obligations were $185.3 million, up 8% -over-year, of which we expect to recognize 59% as revenue over the next 12 months. The remaining performance obligations were $185.3 million, up 8% -over-year, of which we expect to recognize 59% as revenue over the next 12 months. The remaining performance obligations were $185.3 million, up 8% -over-year, of which we expect to recognize 59% as revenue over the next 12 months. The remaining performance obligations were $185.3 million, up 8% -over-year, of which we expect to recognize 59% as revenue over the next 12 months. The remaining performance obligations were $185.3 million, up 8% -over-year, of which we expect to recognize 59% as revenue over the next 12 months. The remaining performance obligations were $185.3 million, up 8% -over-year, of which we expect to recognize 59% as revenue over the next 12 months. The remaining performance obligations were $185.3 million, up 8% -over-year, of which we expect to recognize 59% as revenue over the next 12 months. The remaining performance obligations were $185.3 million, up 8% -over-year, of which we expect to recognize 59% as revenue over the next 12 months. The remaining performance obligations were $185.3 million, up 8% -over-year, of which we expect to recognize 59% as revenue over the next 12 months. The remaining performance obligations were $185.3 million, up 8% -over-year, of which we expect to recognize 59% as revenue over the next 12 months. The remaining performance obligations were $185.3 million, up 8% -over-year, of which we expect to recognize 59% as revenue over the next 12 months. The remaining performance obligations were $185.3 million, up 8% -over-year, of which we expect to recognize 59% as revenue over the next 12 months. The remaining performance obligations were $185.3 million, up 8% -over-year, of which we expect to recognize 59% as revenue over the next 12 months. The gross margin of Q4 2022 was $7.3 million, up 8% -over-year, of which we expect to recognize 59% as revenue over the next 12 months. The remaining performance obligations were $7.3 million, up 8% -over-year, of which we expect to recognize 59% as revenue over the next 12 months. The remaining performance obligations were $7.3 million, up 8% -over-year, of which we expect to recognize 59% as revenue over the next 12 months. The remaining performance obligations were $7.3 million, up 8% -over-year, of which we expect to recognize 59% as revenue over the next 12 months. The remaining performance obligations were $7.3 million, up 8% -over-year, of which we expect to recognize 59% as revenue over the next 12 months. The total revenue for the year ended December 31, 2023, was $175.2 million, up 4% -over-year. The total revenue for the year ended December 31, 2023, was $175.2 million, up 4% -over-year. The total revenue for the year ended December 31, 2023, was $175.2 million, up 4% -over-year. The total revenue for the year ended December 31, 2023, was $175.2 million, up 4% -over-year. The total revenue for the year ended December 31, 2023, was $175.2 million, up 4% -over-year. The total revenue for the year ended December 31, 2023, was $175.2 million, up 4% -over-year. The total revenue for the year ended December 31, 2023, was $175.2 million, up 4% -over-year. The total revenue for the year ended December 31, 2023, was $175.2 million, up 4% -over-year. The total revenue for the year ended December 31, 2023, was $175.2 million, up 4% -over-year. The total revenue for the year ended December 31, 2023, was $175.2 million, up 4% -over-year.
spk21: The total revenue
spk26: for the year ended December 31, 23,000, up 4% -over-year. The total revenue for the year ended December 31, 2023, was $175.2 million, up 4% -over-year. The total revenue for the year ended December 31, 23,000, up 4% -over-year. The total revenue for the year ended December 31, 23,000, up 4% -over-year. The total revenue for the year ended December 31, 23,000, up 4% -over-year. The total revenue for the year ended December 31, 23,000, up 4% -over-year. The total revenue for the year ended December 31, 23,000, up 4% -over-year. The total revenue for the year ended December 31, 23,000, up 4% -over-year. The total revenue for the year ended December 31, 23,000, up 4% -over-year. The total revenue for the year ended December 31, 23,000, up 4% -over-year. The total revenue for the year ended December 31, 23,000, up 4% -over-year. The total revenue for the year ended December 31, 23,000, up 4% year
spk21: -over-year. The
spk26: total revenue for the year ended December 31, 23,000, up 4% -over-year. The total revenue for the year ended December 31, 23,000, up 4% -over-year. The total revenue for the year ended December 31, 23,000, up 4% -over-year. The total revenue for the year ended December 31, 23,000, up 4% -over-year. The total revenue for the year ended December 31, 23,000, up 4% -over-year. The gross margin was 79%, up from 78% in 2022. Within our M&T segment, gross profit in 2023 was 20.6 million, representing a gross margin of 41%, down from 48% gross margin in 2022. Subscription revenue gross margin was 55%, down from 63% in 2022. Gap net loss in 2023 was 46.4 million, or 0.34 per value teacher. Adjusted EBITDA in 2023 was negative 2.5 million, improving from a negative of 28.3 million in 2022. Turning to the balance sheet and cash flow. We ended the quarter with 75.2 million in cash and marketable securities. Net cash provided by operating activity was 1.6 million in the quarter, compared to 5.8 million net cash used in operating activities in Q4 2022. For the full year 2023, net cash used in operating activity was 8.3 million, compared to 46.8 million net cash used in operating activities in 2022. In the fourth quarter, we also entered into a new agreement with our lenders, extending the maturity and amending the certain financial terms, as discussed in our Form 8K file on December 27, 2023. I would now like to turn to our outlook for the first quarter of 2024 and for the fiscal year ending December 31, 2024. In the first quarter, we expect the friction revenue to range from a 1% decrease to a 1% increase to between 39.9 million and 40.6 million, and total revenue to range from a 1% decrease to a 1% increase to between 42.7 million and 43.5 million. We expect an adjusted EBITDA to be between a negative 0.5 million and a positive 0.3 million. For the full year, we expect the friction revenue to range from a 1% decrease to a 1% increase to between 161.2 million and 164.2 million, and total revenue to range from a 1% decrease to a 1% increase to between 173.7 million and 176.7 million. We expect the adjusted EBITDA to be between 0 and 1 million. In summary, due to a tough macro condition and industry headwind, we close the much slower growth year than usual, albeit better than last year's guidance and that of the previous year. While we believe that we have the right product and market positioning to accelerate growth and that market conditions shall gradually improve, considering the market uncertainty and last year's outcome, we are hopeful with our guidance for 2024. We are satisfied to have achieved our bottom-line accrual and cash flow goal for the passing year, and are reaffirming our expectation of posting both positive adjusted EBITDA and the positive cash flow for operations this year. With that, we will open the call for questions. Operator?
spk15: Thank you. We will now be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate that your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment please while we poll for questions. Our first question comes from Matt with Deutsche Bank. Please proceed with your question.
spk17: Hey guys, thanks so much for taking the question. Maybe two if I could. One, Ron, if you could talk about some of the confidence you have in terms of improving market conditions that you referenced and when you could maybe see this driving more positive inflections in subscription revenue. And then secondly, just in terms of competitive backdrop, if you could just talk about what you're seeing there and then any change in terms of competitive dynamics over the last couple of months. Thanks.
spk03: Thank you Matt and hello to everyone on the call today. Let's start with the first one, confidence for market conditions. Let's wrap what we have this quarter by way of demand and trends and leading indicators. It was, as mentioned, the highest booking quarter of last year, albeit relatively sluggish, but also the best retention that we had in the year past. And it's also coming back to the levels that we had prior years, which are much better. So from a net booking perspective, it was a better quarter than the ones before. Again, it's been a tough year and it's another quarter of improvement. We're going to wait a bit and see where things go. But it is headed in the right direction. Also important to note that as we wrapped up the year and our booking had come down from the year before by about 25%, as mentioned earlier, we also had about 25% less salespeople than the year before, which is the first time they've actually done that. And so productivity hasn't fallen down. It has kept. And now that we've become profitable, we could invest and we could put more. We believe we could cater to the demand with more people. So it's not just about the demand. It's our ability to cater to the demand. But other points to your question about demand, we look at the leading indicators we had throughout the year. We look at the QBMs that qualified by marketing leads. They continue to grow and they grew sequentially throughout the whole year. They had come down from the year before, at the beginning of the year, but ever since have gradually climbed up. And also the RFP submissions have also grown purely both sequentially and year over year. And so that's a good sign. And, you know, lastly, on that point, you know, we are selling bigger deals and to bigger customers because of all the additional products in our strategy to consolidate around cultural for internal and external. We've seen this year record ARPUs and continued increase in average ARPU per customer all the time that win rates have remained high. So if you look at all these things together, I think for us, they spell that we believe things are going in the right direction. We're talking to folks, I think in North America more so than in Europe. There's conversation about more comfort around taking a decision. It was always the case that people said that in the mid to long term, cultural makes more sense, not just because it's a premium technology, but the consolidation that we offer enables them to have less silos, less broken workflows and lesser total cost of ownership. It was just doing it in the tough year that it was was harder because people were looking very near sighted to additional costs just to get things shaken and moved. But if people look into the following years, I think people are getting geared and ready to make the better decision for the mid to long term, which is cultural. So again, we're careful. We're not, you know, celebrating. It's been a tough year. We've talked about slower growth rates than we've seen in the past, but we've also delivered on what we said we would. And let's let's look how next year pans out and hopefully it continues to climb up to your second question around competitive change. We have not seen a material difference at the last quarter. So we continue to lead for reasons that we've always led the four main differentiators for cultural one, the depth of our APIs and the integration that we could offer enabling a lot more mission criticality.
spk05: And
spk03: to the breadth of what we offer that enables us to offer VOD live in real time, internal and external. And as I said earlier, to enable consolidation. The third is the enterprise ability that we offer, meaning by way of scale, reliability, security, compliance. And the last is the degree of engagement and analytics that comes from our products. And we continue to see these strong. We have not seen lower win rates or stronger competition coming from elsewhere. It's up to you to look at the end year results of the other companies. I think most of the public companies out there have shown lower growth rates. It's not negative this year. And we think that the reason that we have done relatively better is because of these advantages that address your question.
spk17: It does. Yeah. Just one quick follow up in terms of sales cycles. Are you seeing those maybe shortened or maybe stabilized? Just curious in terms of how that's been impacted as well as late.
spk03: Good question. Not yet. But the good news is that the ones that have come in into the pipe are gradually going to need to come out. So they do come out. We are closing the deals. As mentioned at the beginning of the year, the pressures, the headwinds that we've seen that are caused this year to be or past year, 2023 to be so off, are a significant lengthening of the sales cycle as well as price pressures. And we're still seeing that. I'm too early to say that it's suddenly getting better. But as mentioned, since win rates are held and the top of the funnel is continuing to grow, then what comes in must come out. And we are closing these deals. So we believe there will be more opportunity to close these deals in 2023, 2024. Apologies.
spk05: That's great. Thank you so much. Thank you, Matt.
spk15: Our next question comes from George Erwannek with Oppenheimer & Co. Please proceed with your question.
spk19: Thank you for taking my question and just to start off, Ron. Best of luck on what's ahead and congratulations to you, John. So maybe Ron, starting off with kind of your comments on the sales productivity, can you maybe give us some perspective on what you're expecting from a hiring perspective this year and when those additions might happen during the year?
spk03: Sure. Happy to do that. The first on sales productivity as mentioned, it had kept compared to last year. And I can also say it's broadly aligned with the pre-COVID productivity. But we had reduced quite materially. Our sales force, after growing, it's always year over year. We had a 25% drop in order to be profitable, but also aligning us to the lesser productivities than during COVID. We're not ready, given our profitability metric and the ability of additional salespeople to contribute in a decent way. It's not as great as it has always been. We're ready to do that. And even if it is the existing productivity of the last couple of years, it's still good. And so far as numbers, order of magnitude of maybe another 10 at this point, we're doing it gradually. We're doing it throughout the year. There's going to be more focus on inside sales, commercial sales, rather than outside sales, but we're going to increase both. Because we want to continue going down markets, the discussion could continue separately. And that's important for us. But that's the order of magnitude. Does that address your question?
spk19: Yes. And you're on maybe on the net expansion number. That was up year over year, but did decline a little bit on a quarterly basis. Can you give us some perspective on what you're seeing there from an expansion perspective and what your expectations are for 2024?
spk26: Yes. So first of all, you're right. There was a decline of 1%. It was 99% this quarter. But as you can see for the year, it was 100%. We said in the previous calls that we believe that for the short term, it's going to be around the 100%. Based on the fact that we saw, as Ron mentioned, the improvement in both booking and retention rates, we believe that we will be able to see are coming to a bit better numbers than the 100%. But at least for the short term, and I believe that this is the new normal. Obviously, if and when we will see a reacceleration of both booking and retention rates, we do believe that we will see an increase to the rates that we saw before COVID, which was in the low 100.
spk20: Thank
spk15: you. Our next question comes from Gabriel Borges with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed with your question.
spk13: Hi, good morning. Thank you. I wanted to follow up, Ron, on your comments on the macro. I appreciate the detail. I wanted to understand what you think is driving that. How much of this is just COVID normalization? We're a couple years out and customers are ready to reinvest again. Any qualitative comments from your customer conversations that you can share with us?
spk03: Thank you, Gabriella. I think we had the two -to-back issues. COVID was the first one when people said, we've just bought a lot. Give us a bit of time to figure out what we're doing in a more strategic way. We heard a lot of that in the end of 2021, the beginning of 2022, when people said, listen, there were a bunch of different systems that we had bought. There's a bunch of new use cases that we're powering. We want to make order in the whole thing. Give us a few quarters or less, and we'll come back to you with thoughts. And they said that they love the fact that we can consolidate and offer solution across and the fact that we could offer even more mission critical services that are more tightly integrated that could be customized and tailored to their needs. And everybody said, look, we understand video is a new normal and something had happened here. We intend to do more in video. Just as this was getting ready to impact us, we had the financial downturn. People said, look, we already know that we want to have more. It's just now is not the right time. And so we had the price pressures and people staying with incumbent vendors, even if it's not the most ideal system, saying that they're going to make a switch later on. But that's the main, main rationale. Also bear in mind that sometimes some of the products, definitely the internal ones are FTE-based licenses. And so if there's also reduction of FTEs because companies are letting go people as opposed to hiring, then that in itself is also pushing against usage. And so I think that was the biggest issue so far. And what we're hearing from folks now is they're saying, look, we waited enough. We need to be smarter about what we do. Our goals are not just 2024 goals. They're also 2025 and beyond. And we're spending too much money and it's too complex. Plus, there's more things that need to be done. I want to be cautious about this and our guidance is in that as well. It's not yet time to celebrate. This industry had gone down and it's gradually hopefully going to start going up again. But at this point, we're seeing our competitive advantage being accepted in the market and there is interest in moving forward with Cotero. Let's see how quickly that goes.
spk13: That makes sense. And on the sales productivity metrics, remind us, how long does it take typically for a deal to go from top of the funnel to close? How long does it take typically for a sales person to ramp up to full productivity? And any color on the training and enablement that you're providing to help with some of the larger deals and some of the ourselves? Thank you.
spk03: On the third one, training enablement, is that for the customers or enablement for our new salespeople?
spk01: The latter.
spk03: The salespeople. Okay, good. Let me start with the last. We're definitely very structured and we're onboarding folks into the company. And we're a video first company so we have everything video-fied. We have an internal group that's also expert in training our customers. And they're the ones that are also helping us. So we do that well. To your first question connected to that, or the second one on the ramp time, in our models we put six months ramp for outside salespeople and three months ramp for CSMs. And we factor that into our expectations around booking. I can tell you that most salespeople, if they come in and they get some leads, they could start selling before. But that's for us to be careful in our modeling around when booking is going to hit. And so far as the sales timeline, it varies between the different markets. Right? Meeting telecom, which is why most of our focus was not there. It was more on the E&T, is longer sales cycles. If you're coming into a new logo, it could be sometimes a year and a half, two years. It's lengthy discussion. And then even more so, the deployment times are relatively long and the time that it takes all the way to profitability is longer. And we're back to my point that we've, during down times, have always enjoyed the organic growth of users within the existing customers, which is quite significant. This quarter we added hundreds of thousands. But we're putting our foot off the gas a bit and trying to hunt new customers that will take longer to bring and longer to make revenue and longer to make profit. On the enterprise side of the business, it usually had been somewhere around 6 to 12 months cycle. Albeit that as we've come to offer more low touch products and we've moved from internal, which is more content management, to external, which is more events, then they have shortened. But over the course of the last year, given trends that have happened in the industry, it has started to elongate. And we're seeing things go beyond the year, which is in line if you talk to major, large software companies out there. But we don't have enough statistical answer to tell you if it's exact 12 months or 18 months, but it's not a few months time. On average, we definitely have from time to time deals that come in, and I'm talking about new logos, not upsell, that are way faster. Education is a tweener. It takes sometimes, depending on the situation, there's also cycles around when they actually deploy the software for the new learning year. But I'd say it's closer to enterprise than the other ones. Does that address your questions?
spk11: Yes, thank you for the detail.
spk05: Thank
spk15: you. Our next question comes from Ryan Coont with Nita Minko. Please proceed with your question.
spk25: Thanks for the question, and welcome to John coming on board. On your guidance there for subscription for the year flat, how would you unpack that in terms of turn and downsell, kind of negative impacts on your returning customers versus new logos or new customers as part of that guide? Thanks.
spk26: Yeah, first of all, when you are saying about the declining guidance for Q1, actually what you see is that, as Ron mentioned, we had some pressure all year from booking and retention level, which were lower than last than 2022, obviously. But at the same time, we do see an increase in Q4, both on retention rates and in booking rate. At this point, if you look on our forecast, obviously we've seen improvement because we are comparing to Q4, which was much higher than what was expected before. So the basis was higher. So in effect, it's a decline. But from our focus and even compared to the numbers that you saw before, it's not really a decline guidance for this year. And we do believe that hopefully we will see continued increase in both retention rate and booking rate. You will see a situation that the second part of the year, it will start to improve. And obviously at this point, we are trying to be very thoughtful with our guidance.
spk27: But what was the specific other question?
spk03: It was around down sell versus new logo. I could address that if you'd like to. Let's start with the fact that we've not taken any assumptions that are not happening already over the past few months. So we're not assuming any strengthening. We're not assuming any change. We're assuming that things would remain, albeit that we do expect and hope that things are going to get better. Meaning that if we're looking at retention rates that we're currently seeing, we're expecting them to continue forward. We're also expecting from a ratio of down sell versus full turn in the last quarter, only 12% of the turn of the loss that we've had of any dollar was associated with an issue of service or product. Most of it was budget issues, price issues, and the majority was still done through not full departure of customers, but through down sell. And so we're assuming an NDR that would continue the trends of what we've seen. We're assuming productivities for both upsell and new that are more or less aligned. And so everything is at this point guided to Flattish, which obviously we've kept the necessary cushion for us. But we also want to be very, very thoughtful given the past of the year that we've seen. Is there any more specific questions that you have on this that you want me to address, Mark?
spk25: No, that was good, but I will follow up here if I could on the inside sales focus. Is that more on renewals or is this on more lead qualification for your inside sales hires?
spk03: So most of our customers have been managed by outside sales. Let's look at the average MR. We have ,000-ish customers and we have 125-ish million in revenue. So the typical customer here is paying us around $170,000. That's the average. But if you also look at the median, this is by and large, large enterprise sales. What's happened as of recent is, the last couple of years as we've added the products that are enabling us to go down market, is that we're targeting both small and medium enterprises as well as departmental sales. And by doing so, we're going to be doing that through more low-touch inside sales. And therefore, because it's a new coverage for us, it's not so much renewal. It is more new. And we have that coming from the top of the funnel and we divide that based on the size of the opportunity between the different sales teams. Now one other thing that we did do this year in order to kind of double-click on the size of the opportunities, because our big customers are quite big. Coming back to my earlier statement about ARPU, we have a lot that have climbed 5X and more in growth into multi-million dollar opportunity. And we believe we could copy-paste that again and again. So what we've actually done this year for the renewal side is have taken at this point, somewhere around a third of our customers that are larger and have moved them into a team that is more automated, that's working on lower-touch renewals in very structured approaches. And if that works out, we're gradually going to do more and more. And we're going to leave the outside sales team to address the 80% of the revenue, which usually is 20% of the customers, and get that 5X 10X growth and bring more and more in multi-million or very high figure numbers. So we're thinking, we're very thoughtful about how to optimize efficiency in the sales force and how to maximize the output. But happy to talk more about that later if you'd like.
spk02: That's a good one. Thanks so much, Nicolas. That's all I got. Thank you, Ryan.
spk22: As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star then one. Our next question comes from Austin Cole of CitizensGMP. Please proceed with your question.
spk18: Hey, there. Thanks for taking the question. Ron, I was just wondering if maybe you could talk about what some of your conversations have been like recently with regards to AI and kind of what those features are adding to your platform and what the response has been like from customers. Thanks.
spk03: Yeah, thank you, Austin. Over the last quarter, we just mentioned that we expanded our AI assistance for webinars and events. The quarter before, we mentioned how we did that for preparing events. And we said that we're going to continue to add features that will be during the event in order to offer real-time recommendations on how to increase engagement. We've added that. We're seeing very good acceptance for that. We're also working on a bunch of other features that we will announce when they come out. We, in addition to our in-house work, have worked on our accelerator program and have increased the number of customers and vendors there. We have a couple dozen each. And so we have more folks that are helping add value because the virtue of cultura of how flexible and open it is, is that it could be a bus to connect to a lot of innovation from the ecosystem. In addition, the customers that are in discussions with us across a variety of industries are expressing a lot of interest around AI in all its fashions. It is not yet, and I said that at the beginning of the process, turning into immediate significant revenue. I think the entire industry understands that as we continue to add these things, we're going to monitor what part of it will be baked into the existing costs and prices and what part of it will be additive. And I think that over the year we'll gradually provide more and more info about how this is impacting growth and revenue. And one thing I will state is that for me, it's clear and over time, hopefully we'll provide more statistics around it, that AI will cause for a lot more videos to be created and a lot more videos to be consumed in a more contextualized way. So regardless of how one monetizes it, whether it's a usage-based, a user-based, a value-based, the value of the system is going to increase in a material way. And we're seeing folks echo that. A lot of customers, as I mentioned, quite significant across multiple industries are echoing that. So we're seeing continued trends, but as mentioned earlier, it's not one of these things that you'd expect the next quarter are going to come and say, here's the amount of revenue. This is how much it's moving the needle for the company. It's a multi-year move and we're advancing
spk06: there. That works for you Austin?
spk07: I appreciate that. You guys still hear me? Do you have any questions
spk06: at this time?
spk14: Thank you. We'll move on to our next question, which is coming from the line of Michael Turan with Wells Fargo. Please proceed with your question.
spk10: Hey guys, this is David Ungar-Fillingen from Michael Turan. Thanks for taking the question. I just wanted to see if you could double-click on some of the demand trends. I know we heard some comments around geography, but I wanted to double-click on what you're seeing by geography, anything specific in terms of vertical strength. Thank you.
spk03: Sure. On the geo side, we're seeing stronger North America and a bit weaker Europe. It's been consistent throughout the year and it's connected immediately to macro and current geopolitical situation, etc. On the vertical side, it's not so much just a demand issue. We've been, as mentioned over the last couple of years, focused more on the enterprise, more so than EDU or media and telecom, just by way of how quickly that could convert the size of the TAM and how quickly we could bring about our new technologies to market there or continue to pull across all of these. I mentioned earlier, we closed, even to that extent, education opportunities in Europe, which are the two that I mentioned that are a bit less in the focus. So we're attacking it all. I can tell you media and telecom, we increased a lot of users in Europe. We're now engaged in conversation with a bunch of customers that are generally outside of the US. But if I were to say, given the macro situation, most of the focus and most of the upside is North America Enterprise.
spk10: I appreciate that. And then just one more from me. Can you just talk about the biggest areas of focus as it relates to driving profitability of the business? Thank you.
spk03: Yeah. So first of all, I'm very content of the improvements that we've done over the last year. As you know, first of all, the last quarter was the second quarter in a row of adjusted EBITDA profitability and cash flow profitability, and then the cash flow ops, which is great. And the year has been a massive leap forward compared to the years before. Not a big surprise, because we said that we're going to do this and we have done this in the past. We've demonstrated it yet again. What I like is that we've done that at the same time that we have hit our revenue goals and we are still growing faster than the industry. And so the reason was that we did not drop the ball in completing the big important moves that we have made in order to expand our TAM, our ARPU, and our competitive positioning over the last few years. So while we cut, I wouldn't say fat, but we made sure that at the right time we reduced what we could reduce, we didn't cut muscle and we're able to move forward and continue to grow. Let me turn it to your own to give you a bit more thoughts about profitability and areas of focus. Maybe I'll add a couple words after.
spk26: Yes, so two important points. First of all, regarding the gross margin, we are working very hard in order to continue to improve it. In the short term, you should probably not see a significant improve, but we will try to get a few more points here and there in terms of the gross margin. Ron mentioned the fact that we are going to invest, start invest back in sales and marketing based on the change that we see in the market. So under the assumption that it will continue to change. But as mentioned, we are committed by the end of the day to post both both positive adjusted EBITDA and positive cash flow from operations for this year. Very
spk10: much appreciate the detail. Thank you.
spk14: Thank you. We have reached the end of our question and answer session, so I'd like to pass the floor back over to Ron Yacotillo for closing remarks.
spk03: Yep. Thank you everyone for your great questions and for participating today. As mentioned, we're feeling okay about the year that had passed. We achieved what we said that we would. And at the same time that we're strengthening our capability to lead the market forward. It's been a tough year. We believe there's a good macro directions that are going to improve next year. We're thoughtful with our guidance and beyond anything and everything. I want to thank again your own Gourmazi for his great partnership and work with the company. He's still with us in the months ahead helping us and to welcome John. Quite excited about him joining the team. A lot of great things for us to do together this year. Thank you everybody and have a beautiful day.
spk14: Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's teleconference. We thank you for your participation and you may disconnect your lines at this time.
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