Veritone, Inc.

Good day and welcome to the Veritone fourth quarter 2020 financial results conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on a touchstone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Brian Alger, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, and welcome to Veritone's fourth quarter and full year 2020 conference call. I'm Brian Alger, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development and Investor Relations. After the market closed today, Veritone issued a press release announcing results for the fourth quarter and full year into December 31st, 2020. This press release is available in the investor section of our website. Joining me for today's call are Veritone's Chairman and CEO, Chad Stilberg, President, Brian Stilberg, and CFO, Mike Dimetra. Following their remarks, we'll open up the call for questions. Please note that certain information discussed on the call today will include forward-looking statements about future events and Veritone's business strategy and future financial and operating performance, including its expected net revenues, non-debt net loss for the first quarter, and full year of 2021. Please note that for the first time, we will be providing guidance for the full year in addition to the current quarter. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that may cause the actual results to differ materially from those stated or implied by those statements. Certain of these risks and assumptions are discussed in Veritone's SEC filings, including its annual report on Form 10-K, which will be filed in the next few days. These forward-looking statements are based on the assumptions as of today, March 4th, 2021, and Veritone undertakes no obligation to revise or update them. During this call, the actual and forecasted financial measures we will be discussing other than revenue will be presented on a non-GAAP basis, unless otherwise noted. Reconciliations of these measures to the corresponding GAAP measures are included in the press release we issued today. These non-GAAP measures include a breakout of our results between core operations and corporate. Core operations consist of our AI-aware operating platform of software, SaaS, and related services, our content licensing and advertising services, and our supporting operations, including the direct costs of sales, as well as the operating expenses for our sales, marketing, and product development, and to a lesser extent, certain general and administrative costs. Corporate consists principally of general and administrative functions such as executive, finance, legal, people, and IT, and other areas that support the entire company, including any public company-driven initiatives and supporting functions. Finally, I would like to remind everyone that this call is being recorded and will be made available for replay via a link on the investor section of our company's website at www.veritone.com. Now, I'd like to turn the call over to our Chairman and CEO, Chad Stilbert. Chad?

Thank you, Brian. And thanks everyone for joining us on today's call. 2020 was a pivotal year for the planet with COVID and social unrest shaking the very foundations of society. And yet in the midst of this turmoil, Veritone demonstrated great agility and speed of thought and execution to not only survive, but thrive. Delivering for our customers while keeping true to our core mission of building a safer, more vibrant, transparent, and empowered society through artificial intelligence. I'm proud to report that our efforts are paying off. Fourth quarter 2020 revenues grew 35% year over year. And today, we are guiding to 2021 full-year revenue growth in excess of 40% at the high end of our range, driven by our SaaS business growing 60 to 65%. In 2020, AIWare came into its own as a full-fledged distributed intelligent operating system with massive performance, reliability, and deployment improvements. As a result, demand for our cognitive solutions from our customers and partners across multiple markets this past year is accelerating. We are very grateful to have so many loyal and successful customers exploring the boundaries of artificial intelligence with us and applying it to their real-world problems. Their results have been profound and have led to repeat and expanding relationships. Our media customers are using AIWare to learn what makes their audiences tick and, in turn, help them deliver more engaging programming and advertising solutions. Our law enforcement partners are solving peer-to-peer unsolvable crimes and processing crime scene data and other legal evidence at superhuman scale and speed to help find the needle in the haystack and sometimes even the smoking gun. AIWare assists investigators in their pursuit of justice, but also speeding the disclosure of audio and video footage to the public, increasing transparency and trust. Soon, AIWare will be helping the U.S. government and our allies to analyze huge volumes of aerial images faster and more accurately than humans to identify threats to our national security. Most recently, we focused the power of AIWare on addressing the enormous reliability and safety challenges facing electric utilities as they struggle to manage extreme weather, natural disasters and unpredictable green energy sources with aging grid technology that largely still relies on human in the loop decision making. The widespread power outages in California and Texas in the past year have underscored yet again the need for a more robust electrical grid. Our AIWare energy solutions address the critical needs for a better forecasting, synchronization and optimization to make power grids more resilient and efficient. Early customer data from our forecasting engine, combined with our optimization technology, leads us to believe that our technology will enable our current and future utility partners to realize significant reductions in their spinning reserves, protect critical grid infrastructure, and reduce costs, while at the same time improving the quality and reliability of service to their customers. We believe AIWare is uniquely positioned to solve these distributed challenges in the AI energy management market, which is projected to exceed $7.8 billion by 2024. I'd like to pause for a moment and let the magnitude of these opportunities settle in. I realize that for some, it's hard to believe that a nascent company like Veritone could be leading the world in this AI revolution. But then again, we aren't alone. We stand with giant partners like Microsoft and Nvidia that are symbiotically collaborating with us as we leverage the performance and flexibility of our third-generation operating system and proprietary Hamiltonian models to usher in a new era of artificial intelligence powered by AIWare. Our passionate pursuit of this AI-powered future and strong belief in the meaningful role Veritone will play in shaping this trajectory are being driven by many factors, a few of which I will highlight to help align our perspective and expectations with yours. First, organizations globally are expected to spend more than $100 billion on AI solutions annually by 2025. And we think that's a conservative estimate. We believe that TAM will be even larger as AI adoption diversifies and accelerates, especially for those companies serving both the commercial and government sectors. We are seeing a behavioral change in the marketplace. Organizations are no longer simply experimenting with AI, but rather are depending on it to deliver improved operational performance. Second, Veritone offers hundreds of fully orchestrated world-class cognitive models and cutting-edge machine learning technologies, including our patented, cooperative, distributed, inferencing, prediction, and optimization models. More companies and government agencies are learning about it across more verticals and geographies. Our customers depend on us to deliver the growth, cost savings, and efficiencies that come with the adoption of our AI platform and cognitive engines. Third, Veritone is a run anywhere and everywhere solution. Today, AIWare operates in both AWS and Azure, including our AIWare government FedRAMP certified version. We are also deployed and processing data on the edge and our customers' on-premise data centers. We expect our support of NVIDIA CUDA and EGX to further expand our deployment and use cases into the IoT realm. The symbiotic relationship between Veritone's AIWare operating system and NVIDIA's advanced processors follows a proven path for success and is reminiscent of the Wintel relationship that dominated the computational computer revolution. Finally, AIWare is an open standard-driven OS. a model whose success has been proven time and time again. Just think of Windows over Mac, Linux over Solaris, or even Android over iOS. The largest and most vibrant ecosystems have always been built on open standards. We see AIWare unlocking several successive levels of value for customers, measured in orders of magnitude on a logarithmic scale. I look forward to discussing this more in our inaugural Technology Expo in May. Veritone is quickly maturing as a company and forced in the AI revolution, with our management team and go-to-market efforts finding their rhythm. This stability gives me comfort and, more importantly, a strong platform to continue to innovate and make calculated bets on exciting new opportunities. With that, I would like to now hand the call over to Ryan, our president and co-founder, to discuss our operational achievements in greater detail. Over to you, Ryan.