Veritone, Inc.

Welcome to the Veritone, Inc. First Quarter 2026 Financial Results Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Kate Goldsmith, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning. Before the market opened today, Veritone issued a press release announcing results for the first quarter 2026 ended March 31st, 2026. The press release and other supplemental information are available on the investor relations section of Veritone's website. Joining us for today's call are Veritone's President and Chief Executive Officer, Ryan Steelberg, and Chief Financial Officer, Mike Symmetra. who will provide prepared remarks and then open the call for a live question and answer session. Please note that certain information discussed on the call today, including certain answers to your questions, will include forward-looking statements. This includes, without limitation, statements about our business strategy and future financial and operating performance. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions that may cause the actual results to differ materially from those stated. 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 12, 2026, and Veritone undertakes no obligation to revise or update them. During this call, the actual forecasted financial measures we will be discussing include non-GAAP measures. Reconciliations of these measures to the corresponding GAAP measures are included in the press release we issued today. Finally, I would like to remind everyone that the call today is being recorded and will be made available for replay via a link on the investor relations section of Baritone's website at www.baritone.com. Now, I would like to turn the call over to our President and Chief Executive Officer, Ryan Steelberg.

Thank you, Kate, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. As we look at the AI landscape today, one thing is becoming increasingly clear. The AI and data economies are now converging at scale. Over the last several weeks alone, the world's largest technology companies have continued to significantly increase their AI infrastructure investment plans, reinforcing the accelerating demand for AI compute, orchestration, and high-quality training data. At the same time, enterprises, governments, and content owners are increasingly recognizing the strategic value of the proprietary data assets particularly unstructured data, including audio and video. This is exactly where Veritone is positioned. Through AIWare, Veritone Data Refinery, and our market-leading applications, we sit at the intersection of both sides of the AI data economy. We help organizations transform unstructured data into AI-ready, semantic, and monetizable assets, while simultaneously supporting the growing demand from large hyperscalers and model developers for differentiated training data. Further validating these efforts and momentum, we are thrilled to announce that in Q1, both Google and NVIDIA have also now signed with Veritone for VDR data services. Our near-term pipeline for VDR has now expanded to nearly $70 million, helping to reinforce our full year 2026 guide of $130 to $145 million. In addition to VDR, we continue to strengthen our market position through strategic partnerships and customer expansion across our core growth areas. We announced a multi-year strategic agreement with Oracle to scale AIWare, VDR, and our award-winning applications on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, further strengthening our infrastructure scalability and enterprise AI capabilities across both commercial and public sector markets. We also recently announced a new collaboration with the Washington Post to help unlock and monetize its news archive through our licensing and AI data solutions platform. In our higher division, now rebranded as Broadbean by Veritone, we continue to expand our enterprise and government footprint, including the recently announced deployment with the UK Department for Work and Pensions to support workforce recruitment modernization initiatives. And in the public sector, we continue to see growing demand for our AI-powered investigative and evidence management solutions across federal, state, local, and international markets. Before I discuss the business highlights in more detail, I want to provide an update on our focus and path to profitability. On our last call, we stated that we expected to achieve operating profitability as early as Q4 2026, driven primarily by the scaling of VDR and the continued growth in public sector. Today, we are taking another important step forward by proactively lowering our breakeven floor by approximately 30%. We are simply not waiting for revenue growth to catch up to our cost structure. We are actively improving the operating efficiency of the business and capitalizing on the operating leverage uniquely enabled by the AIWare platform that we have spent years building. What this demonstrates is a very clear bridge to profitability that is not dependent on aggressive growth assumptions. Even under moderate revenue scenarios, Baritone is positioned to achieve operating profitability as early as Q4, 2026. As VDR continues to scale and public sector momentum accelerates, the operating leverage and earnings power of the AIWare platform is becoming increasingly evident. With that broader backdrop in mind, let me now turn to the progress we are seeing across our core business segments, beginning with commercial enterprise. where we continue to see growing demand for our AI software, data solutions, and content monetization capabilities. Our commercial enterprise division maintained its robust 2025 momentum throughout Q1. During this period, we achieved a significant milestone by finalizing a landmark collaboration with the Washington Post to make their news archives universally accessible. We further advanced the AI supply chain by introducing the Veritone Data Marketplace providing scalable access to high-quality AI-ready training data sets. Additionally, the commercial team secured an extension with U.S. Soccer, utilizing our AI-driven products to enhance the monetization of both their archival and current footage. Staying on the topic of sports, there is no better place for our product applications and agentic workflows. Q1 leading into early Q2 remains a landmark period for our sports vertical. We have successfully live-ingested, tagged, and annotated thousands of hours of live sports data for many of the largest sports right holders in the world, including NCAA March Madness and the prestigious Masters Golf Tournament. By making the data readily available and accessible, organizations are able to drive greater experience for their fans and sponsors alike while maintaining control of their valuable IP, the content produced in these prestigious events. As the value of live sports continues to rise, the foundational understanding required to process content in near real time is a necessity. Our technology allows both rights holders like USTA, Big Ten, and NCAA to not just deploy our applications and workflows across their organization, but also instantly turn a live broadcast into a searchable, monetizable, and extensible library. Veritone is ensuring that live sports remains the most valuable inventory in the media ecosystem. In the commercial enterprise, we closed 224 software and license agreements in Q1, including renewals and expansions across sports, media, entertainment, and brand licensing. The strategic importance of these wins is not just the number of agreements. It is the expanding archive base, rights-cleared content relationships, and monetization engine they create for VDR, VDM, and AIWare. We are consistently expanding and refreshing our client portfolio, partnering with prestigious organizations such as CNN, the Smithsonian, Geico, and the President Barack Obama Foundation. Our influence across the market continues to strengthen through collaborations with other leading brands, including Titleist, Tubi, Game Show Network, and Bauer Media. As we look ahead, we plan to leverage our market-leading AI technologies, extensive expertise, and blue-chip client roster to capture the next wave of potential customers to provide material growth for our commercial group. We are undergoing a strategic reimagining of our vertical applications. Historically, our products and services were architected to address the complexity of the world's largest media, entertainment, sports, and news organizations. We are now leveraging the same tech stack to create optimized versions of our platform and applications that are accessible to organizations of all types and sizes. This is a significant democratization enabled by our technology. Over the next few quarters, we are introducing solutions and pricing tiers designed specifically for these expanded verticals and segments. By offering the same best-in-class AI applications and agentic workflows in a more accessible package, we are greatly expanding our addressable market while maintaining our core high margins. A primary driver in this effort is Veritone's cloud-native digital asset management platform or Digital Media Hub. We are positioning Digital Media Hub as the central audio, video, and image repository where mid-market SMBs, city councils, marketing departments, schools, and even individual creators can now leverage the same AI sophistication and dynamic workflows previously reserved only for the largest firms, such as CBS News and the NCAA. We look forward to continuing to update you on our progress here in future calls. Turning to our higher division, Broadbean, delivered solid Q1 performance despite continued hiring market headwinds. The business met its Q1 revenue plan, remained cash flow positive, added 42 SAS clients globally, and expanded in government and enterprise markets. The UK Department for Work and Pensions win is a strong proof point, with Broadbean supporting recruitment workflows across a large international public sector environment. Our global media services unit continued its double-digit year-over-year growth trajectory in both clients and revenue and expanded its business in North America. In Q1, we signed marquee new clients, including the Department for Work and Pensions and three other government agencies in the UK, Ministry of Justice, DERFRA, and the Home Office. In addition, Alcoa in the US and Orano in France. In total, we added 42 new SaaS clients globally. On the partnerships ATS front, we hit significant milestones with all three global human capital platform leaders, Workday, Oracle, and SAP. Our Workday partnership focus keeps delivering. We signed 24 new common clients in Q1, in line with our goal to sign 100 plus new clients this year and accelerate our new logo wins from this client ecosystem to over 50% year over year. Our onboarding team is receiving Workday training and certifications in Q2, to improve our ability to onboard and activate new clients at scale. More importantly, we released the alpha version of our new Workday job management integration, which will enter beta in Q2 with an expected general release in Q3. We also completed the preparation of our SAP partnership agreement, which was signed in early Q2. At the same time, our Veritone Group collaboration with Oracle is strengthening, and we released Oracle integration updates that improve clients, interface, and campaign tracking. Other highlights include the successful beta and expected Q2 release of our job acceleration feature on the programmatic advertising platform, which creates a unique self-service feature that allows clients to fund individual job campaigns and track candidates to specific high priority roles. As we look ahead, we are unveiling our next generation job management modules to more clients and continuing our groundbreaking agentic AI broadband framework with a Q4 alpha release target date. This isn't just an upgrade, it's a productivity revolution for our 30,000-plus monthly Broadbean users. Moving on to public sector, I am proud to report that we are off to a strong start in 2026, characterized by material growth and activation across the entire government landscape. We are seeing a powerful convergence of demand in both federal and SLED markets, culminating in a 69% year-over-year quarterly growth rate. Our baritone applications and IDEM Suite are doing more than just improving workflows. They are revolutionizing the very nature of productivity and efficiency for our public safety customers and end users. We are enabling mission-critical outcomes and materially driving up case closure rates that simply were not practical or even possible before Veritone. Our integration with Thorne Detect is a strong example of how we continue to enhance IDEMs with trusted AI capabilities that support investigator safety and help agencies accelerate the identification and handling of harmful material. This ability to continuously evolve our applications as AI matures has dramatically expanded our total addressable market across SLED, higher education, FedSiv, and international agencies. Security and data sovereignty remain critical focus areas for Veritone. AI ware and items are engineered for the world's most sensitive environments whether deployed in top-tier government clouds or entirely network-isolated, air-gapped environments, we meet the strictest sovereignty requirements. This ensures that any agency, regardless of its security posture, can utilize our tools to support its most vital missions. Furthermore, our recently announced partnership with Oracle allows us to scale this to an even higher level of performance and global security, providing us with a distinct competitive moat. Unlike the closed ecosystems of many of our competitors, AIWare is built completely as an open platform. Our unique ability to ingest data at massive scale while integrating seamlessly with virtually any application or data set without vendor lock-in continues to differentiate Veritone in the market. This positions Veritone as a foundational AI infrastructure partner and the infrastructure of choice for federal AI modernization and the Department of War's AI-first strategy. This open architecture is also a key advantage for our SLED customers and strengthens our ability to collaborate with partners delivering complementary technologies and capabilities. These foundational elements are translating into significant high-value wins. This quarter, we achieved deep integration within the Air Force OSI to support their investigatory, FOIA, and counterespionage requirements. And we expect the Air Force's use of AIR and our applications to greatly expand and accelerate in 2026 and beyond. Additionally, another Department of War agency, the Defense Logistics Agency, went live with its own private instance of AIWare and IDEMs, providing the basis for growth within the JPS Trust Modernization Program. Despite some government operational delays, I'm excited that we are back on track and moving aggressively forward with several of our marquee land and expand federal accounts. Our public sector pipeline currently sits at record levels. We are seeing significant traction with the DOE's Project Genesis, the Department of Homeland Security, and multiple foreign, state, and federal agencies. Our Q1 wins, which include a major U.S. university, top five sheriff's department, and several major U.S. city police agencies, and state highway patrols, validate one simple truth. Baritone is a trusted AI partner for the public sector. Finally, we are aggressively expanding our technical and partner reach. Our recently announced partnership with the Cold Case Foundation is a strategic force multiplier and demonstrates the same thing, using AI to unify decades of disparate investigative data and help agencies surface connections that would otherwise remain buried. This collaboration will not only accelerate our product capabilities, but will expose Veritone's technologies to entities across the US and the globe as they partner with the foundation to solve their most difficult cases. The conclusion is clear. We possess a unique AI native solution that solves the most critical challenges facing public sector organizations today. We are confident that the AI technology stack is the essential foundation that will allow us to continue layering in agentic AI and automation capabilities well into the future. We are energized by this progress and the immense growth ahead. Overall, we are very pleased with the progress we continue to make in our business. The momentum we are seeing across commercial enterprise, public sector, and broadband continues to reinforce the strength and scalability of the AIWare platform and our position at the center of the rapidly expanded AI and data economies. Importantly, the combination of accelerating growth across VDR and public sector, together with the operating leverage initiatives we announced today, further strengthens our path to profitability and long-term value creation. As organizations increasingly invest in AI infrastructure and seek to operationalize and monetize proprietary data, Veritone is uniquely positioned to capitalize on these long-term secular trends. We remain focused on disciplined execution, scaling our platform and data ecosystem, expanding strategic partnerships, and converting our growing pipeline into durable revenue and profitability. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Mike Symmetra to review our financial results and outlook in more detail.