Veritone, Inc.

Good day, and welcome to the Veritone, Inc. First Quarter 2021 Financial Results Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing star then zero on your telephone keypad. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Brian Alger, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon and welcome to Veritone's first quarter 2021 conference call. I am 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 first quarter ended March 31st, 2021. This press release is available in the investor section on our website. Joining me for today's call are Veritone's chairman and CEO, Chad Stilberg, President Brian Stilberg, and CFO Mike Zimetro. 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 and non-GAAP net loss for the second quarter and full year of 2021. 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. These forward-looking statements are based on assumptions as of today, May 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 noted otherwise. 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 AIWare operating platform of software, SaaS, and related services, our content licensing and advertising services, and their supporting operations, including direct cost of sales as well as 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 the company's website at www.veritone.com. Now, I'd like to turn the call over to our Chairman and CEO, Chad Stilberg. Chad?

Thank you, Brian. And thanks everyone for joining us on today's call. We are off to a tremendous start in 2021. Veritone is in the strongest position in our history, with over $125 million in cash, no debt, and a rapidly growing pipeline of business. Our momentum from last year is accelerating from a revenue, market share, and technology perspective. Our total year-over-year revenue growth accelerated to 54% in Q1, compared with 35% in Q4. Our Q1 performance exceeded both the top and bottom line guidance we provided just two months ago, and our outlook continues to improve. Underpinning this growth and everything we do at Veritone is AIWare, the world's leading operating system for artificial intelligence. AIWare's unique architecture enables unparalleled scalability and deployment flexibility, delivering over 500 machine learning models, dozens of applications, and a developer suite that accelerates enterprise AI adoption. The market is rapidly shifting their focus to AIWare as more and more organizations come to realize the need for an operating system for their machine learning applications and solutions. In March, I highlighted the key factors that are driving Veritone's leadership role in the AI-powered future to recap and provide further insights. First, we are targeting a large and accelerating market expected to be in excess of $100 billion in just a few years. AIWare is limitless, capable of serving any industry. We are now selling direct and through channel partners AIWare into a number of new markets, the initial pilot customer feedback has been positive second aiware already orchestrates hundreds of cognitive models and hosts dozens of applications across a growing set of industries demonstrating not only the breadth but depth of our expertise in ai this includes of course our patented prediction and optimization models that we expect to accelerate the green energy revolution third Veritone provides run AI anywhere solutions with a vibrant ecosystem of technology and channel partners, system integrators, and developers. Whether your organization runs on Azure, AWS, or your own servers, AIWare is there and ready to handle your cognitive computing needs. And finally, AIWare is based on a standards-driven architecture that is accelerating development and deployment of AI solutions across multiple industries and use cases. This standards-based approach creates an open framework for partners to deploy and extend AIWare with their own models and applications. Veritone continues to thrive because our customers continue to find value in our AI solutions. The strength we demonstrated last year continues to build as we stay true to our core mission of building a safer, more vibrant, transparent, and empowered society through artificial intelligence. Our SAM is expanding rapidly, not only with media and entertainment companies, federal, state, and local government agencies, and energy industry leaders, but in a wide range of other global markets as well. Our pipeline and visibility into ongoing growth opportunities continues to build, and as a result, we are increasing our full-year guidance, which we now expect to grow by 40% year-over-year at the midpoint, driven by the accelerating growth in our staff services which we expect to achieve at least 65% year-over-year growth in 2021. While the M&E and government verticals are the primary drivers of our recent acceleration, Veritone's energy offerings are poised to deliver crucial and transformative enhancements to an increasingly complex energy infrastructure. Unlike SCADA and distributed energy resource management systems, Veritone Energy, with its patented AI models and applications, is the only solution capable of providing latency-free prediction, control, and optimization across a geographically distributed power grid. Industry experts and participants know that as more and more clean energy comes onto the grid at the utility level and at the independent and residential levels, the requirements for autonomous monitoring, prediction, and control is only going to grow. Our technical progress and sales pipeline gives us tremendous confidence that the energy vertical will rapidly grow to match the strength we are seeing in our other more mature verticals. For those of you on the call who are new to the energy market, let me break it down. In layman's terms, we make the grid plug-and-play compatible with new energy generation and storage solutions. So rather than energy providers having to manually reprogram their energy networks In a suboptimal way to handle unpredictable energy flow as a result of green energy technology, AIWare now learns and manages the supply, distribution, storage, and delivery of energy autonomously and in real time. Bottom line. This means the world can accelerate its march toward the green energy future and trust that an AI-powered grid will intelligently adjust to ensure the delivery of clean, quality, reliable, and cost-effective energy to customers. Next week at our Investor Day and Technology Expo, we will be providing a much more detailed look into our business and some of the new technology innovations that we believe will drive additional growth and business opportunities for our partners and customers. 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.