Veritone, Inc.

Welcome to the Veritone First Quarter 2022 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 your telephone keypad. 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 Capital Markets and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good afternoon. After the market closed today, Veritone issued a press release announcing the results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2022. The press release and other supplemental information is available in the Investor section at Veritone's website. Joining us for today's call are both the live and digital twin versions of Veritone's Chairman and CEO, Chad Stilberg, President Ryan Stilberg, and CFO Mike Zmetra, who will provide prepared remarks and then open up the call for a live Q&A session. Shortly after completing today's call, the remarks will be made available in six languages on Veritone's Synthetic Voices. Please note that certain information discussed in 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 income and loss for the second quarter and full year of 2022, respectively. 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 the assumptions as of today, May 3, 2022, 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 Veritone's results between core operations and corporate. Core operations consists of Veritone's consolidated software products and services and managed services and their supporting operations, including direct cost of sales, as well as operating expenses for sales, marketing, product development, and certain general and administrative costs dedicated to these operations. Corporate consists of general administrative functions, such as executive, finance, legal, people operations, fixed overhead expenses, including facilities and information technology expenses, other income or expenses and taxes, and other expenses that support the entire company, including public company driven costs. Veritone has aligned its organization to focus on two distinct customer groups, commercial enterprise and government and regulated industries. Commercial enterprise today consists of customers in the commercial sector, including our media and entertainment customers, advertising customers, content licensing customers, and corporate intelligence customers that are not from the government or regulated industries. Government and regulated industries, also known as GRI, today consists of customers in the government and regulated industries sectors, including our state, local, and federal governments, legal, compliance, and energy customers. Across the commercial enterprise and government and regulated industries, We separate revenue into two categories, software products and services and managed services. Software products and services consists of revenues generated from our AIWare platform and through Panelogic software products solutions, any related support and maintenance services, and any related professional services associated with the deployment and or implementation of such solutions. Managed services consists of revenues generated from our advertising agency and related services and content licensing services. Finally, I would like to remind everyone that not only is this call being produced with Veritone Voice, our proprietary synthetic voice solution, but it's also being recorded and will be made available for replay via a link in the investor section at the company's website at www.veritone.com. Now, I would like to turn the call over to the digital twin of our chairman and CEO, Chad Stilberg. Chad?

Thank you, Brian. Good afternoon. Buon sera. Bonsoir. Zao zhao hao. As Brian noted, I am digital twin Chad. I am excited to speak with you today and to reiterate that AI is alive and growing stronger every day. For the first quarter of 2022, Veritone reported revenue of $34.4 million, representing year-over-year growth of 88% on a gap basis and 45% on a pro forma basis. Our new bookings increased 292% versus Q1 2021. We continue to see strong demand for AIWare, and we remain committed to investing to capture future growth. Artificial intelligence, in good times and bad, will continue to thrive. In good times, AI is the leverage for companies to innovate, differentiate and expand their products and offerings. In tough times, AI provides the tools to better optimize, automate and reduce costs and inefficiencies. The pandemic allowed us to prove the value of AI to Amazon and FedEx, two of the world's most advanced and efficient logistics companies. Through our strong partnership with these companies, we pioneered a new AI standard in recruiting that is being rapidly adopted by a diverse set of businesses. Case in point, during Q1, we experienced greater than 200% revenue growth in our hiring platform within our non-Amazon customer base. Similarly, in the early days of COVID, demand for our performance-based advertising business surged, while overall media spend cratered. Law enforcement agencies all across the U.S. selected our solutions while facing the pressure of increased operational expectations combined with reduced funding. In fact, every day, we see further evidence that our strategy of developing and delivering AI solutions based on common ingestion, temporally based cognition, and standard APIs is fundamentally superior to custom or single-point applications. We remain very confident in our projected growth over the course of 2022 and beyond, and we continue to execute at the highest levels across our platform as is evident with our key customer performance indicators for Q1, which included year-over-year software customer growth of 45%, net retention over 120%, and gross retention greater than 90%. Not only are we growing our new customer base, we are keeping and growing our existing customers as well, proof that our land and expand strategy is working. These are incredible stats for any company, and even more pronounced given current economic conditions. AIWare is helping our corporate and government partners make great progress with environmental, social, and governance, or ESG, concerns. On the environmental side, and in less than two weeks, we will be presenting at the IEEE Innovative Smart Grid Technologies 2022 event. Veritone and our lead utility customer, Tampa Electric Company, will be presenting realized results from the first implementation. Together, we will showcase how we are actively working to reduce carbon emissions and produce more reliable and efficient energy. Tangible results include lower maintenance and operating costs, minimal spinning reserve coverage, smoother energy production, and a 2x improvement in inverter life. This same technology is being utilized by smaller power providers and large manufacturing customers. While many companies claim to have operational commitments to reduce carbon emissions, we are actively enabling meaningful change. We believe Veritone's AI solutions are one of the most effective and efficient means of driving real change in the near term. On the social side, in the business world, our AI is removing bias and increasing diversity in the recruitment and hiring process across all commercial segments of our economy. With state and local law enforcement agencies, AIWare is being utilized throughout the investigative and evidence lifecycle. We know our solutions are fundamentally changing how agencies communicate and serve their communities with reduced bias and increased transparency binding agency management with their constituents. From an overall business standpoint today, industry titans such as Amazon, FedEx, Microsoft, and Disney are not only our customers, they are also our partners, and in many cases, evangelists. As customers, they have literally hundreds of millions of dollars being exchanged across our AIWare-enabled solutions and trust us with some of their most critical business operations from hiring to customer acquisition to core technology. As strategic partners, together, we are developing new applications and capabilities into AIWare that extend and expand the use of AI nearly every day. As evangelists, in many cases these companies are distributing or helping us market AIWare solutions to their customers by delivering heartfelt case studies. Ultimately, we believe all companies will need to utilize AI to be competitive in the near future. We expect increased adoption of AIWare in 2022 and further acceleration in 2023 as the trust and awareness of AI's advantages grow. In March, I referred to the tipping point where our customers use AIWare to develop applications for their customers and in turn drive the geometric progression of our business. the point where AI application development and Veritone diverge, and the point where AIWare creates enormous leverage to grow customers, end users, revenue, and so on, I can confidently say that we are there and it is happening. Our focus on our strategy and our mission remains. We have ample resources, a cash flow positive business, and we are aggressively investing in our people and leaning into the strategic advantages of our technology to further accelerate our growth and outpace our peers. Now, I'll turn the call over to Ryan, our president, to provide further details on our operational progress. Over to you, Ryan.