Veritone, Inc.

Good day and welcome to the Veritone second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. All participants will be in 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 Kate Goldsmith, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you and good afternoon. After the market closed today, Veritone issued a press release announcing results for the second quarter ended June 30th, 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 Zemetra, 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, August 13, 2026, and Baritone undertakes no obligation to revise or update them. During this call, the actual and 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. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. During the second quarter, Baritone executed decisively on the strategy and commitments we outlined in May. Our goal was to create measurable and material outcomes generating material revenue and repeat orders through Beartone Data Refinery, or VDR, expanding customer adoption and restructuring our organization to be more efficient while materially lowering our cost structure. I'm proud to report that we delivered on these fronts, improving our second half visibility and firmly positioning the business for profitable growth. I would summarize our performance like this. As we sit here in Q3 of 2026, while executing these very material organizational changes and cost-cutting initiatives, we were still able to grow revenues year over year and materially from last quarter. Furthermore, compared to this time last year, we have greatly deleveraged the business, substantially increased our pipeline and total addressable market, and lowered our operating cost structure. Regarding our remaining convertible debt, We have been and remain in active discussions with our debt holders about potential restructuring, and we plan to provide more detail in the upcoming weeks and months. In addition to these corporate and fiscal improvements, our talented product and engineering teams also delivered on the production build and launch of multiple new AI products in the second quarter, including Veritone Assess and Document Redaction, with more exciting new product releases slated for the third quarter. Back to our recent actions. Subsequent to the quarter end, we made substantial progress on the restructuring and cost actions announced earlier this year. These changes, albeit difficult, were necessary. As of today, we have implemented actions that represent approximately $11.3 million in annualized savings, including headcount reductions and lower non-payroll expenses towards a projected total of $15 to $20 million by the end of fiscal year 2026. We expect to continue to identify additional opportunities to improve operating efficiency into next year with a continued effort to realize up to 30% in relative total savings through the first part of 2027. Importantly, we have been deliberate in where we reduced spending while preserving targeted investments behind our highest growth opportunities, including VDR and public sector. Our actions have focused on eliminating duplicative corporate cost and many more. We believe these actions better align our cost structure with our current revenue base while maintaining the resources and capabilities needed to execute against our key growth priorities. As we mentioned last quarter, we are not waiting for revenue growth to catch up to our cost structure. We are actively improving the operating efficiency of the business with the goal of achieving break-even profitability in fiscal year 2027. Today, we are moving rapidly from vision to commercial execution, connecting data owners with AI developers and placing Veritone at the center of the rapidly expanding AI data economy. We are successfully converting VDR opportunities into large commercial deployments, having closed some of our largest individual deals in the second quarter. This traction came from repeat customers and we are currently sourcing and prepping data for several strategic clients, most of which operate under active master services agreements. We remain very bullish on VDR and our market positioning in the training data market. Hyperscalers remain central to this expansion as both foundational clients and high velocity partners, positioning VDR as a core growth engine for Veritone. We have built the VDR infrastructure and signed the major players. Now is the time to execute and fulfill. To put the scale opportunity in context, based on the firms already under contract, a single incremental order from one of our signed hyperscalers or foundational model developers can represent millions of dollars of margin in a single quarter. As we discussed last quarter, and to continue to support this scale, our migration to Oracle is progressing right on schedule. Initial storage payloads are expected to begin moving in the months with complete workloads to follow. This transaction is seamlessly enabled by AIWare's containerized platform-agnostic architecture, which preserves customer flexibility and avoids vendor lock-in. Once relevant payloads are migrated, we expect compute savings of approximately 20% or more. In addition to our infrastructure build-out with Oracle, we are also escalating our co-selling and marketplace opportunities with Oracle. I recently had the opportunity to speak at their national OCI sales team at their annual kickoff and have been invited to speak at the Oracle AI World 2026 conference in October. Partners like Oracle, Workday, Kerasoft, GTAC, and others remain a critical part of our future growth strategies, both domestically and internationally. In addition to these major global partners, we maintain strategic partnerships with numerous public sector agencies and leaders in the sports, media and entertainment industries. Through these strategic partnerships, co-selling activity is well underway, currently representing over 450 sourced or jointly pursued opportunities and over $9 million in active pipeline. Partners are critical. Our commercial enterprise division delivered another quarter of strong execution. demonstrating scalability and deepening demand for our AI software and data monetization solutions, with 232 agreements executed over the period. One of the clearest examples is within our content licensing division, which drove double-digit year-over-year growth in both revenue performance and completed agreements. Simultaneously, our sales team continued to close strategic software deals, expanding the operational footprint of our AI enterprise platform By securing and renewing key rights clear partnerships like premier brands like CNN and Sony Pictures Entertainment, Veritone continues to prove its value as an essential software and revenue engine for commercial organizations. Live sports remains the crown jewel of the media ecosystem, and Veritone sits directly at the center of it. Building our Q1 momentum, Q2 marked another milestone in our longstanding relationship with Augusta National, which began in 2008. During the Masters, our technology delivered live ingestion, automated AI tagging, and agentic metadata workflows to transform tournament coverage into instantly searchable, high-value digital assets in near real time. Extending this momentum across the broader sports ecosystem, we have recently announced a multi-year renewal with the Pac-12 Conference as their exclusive global content licensing partner. leveraging our digital media hub to manage and monetize both historical archives and current athletic seasons. By unlocking immediate asset accessibility while preserving strict IP control, Veritone empowers premier rights holders to open new revenue streams and elevate fan engagement as action unfolds. As global demand for high-quality AI training data reaches an inflection point, we are actively monetizing the AI data economy. through our Veritone data refinery as we turn massive unstructured video and audio archives into high margin AI-ready assets. We remain consistently and actively engaged with both hyperscalers and frontier labs as a trusted partner of the necessary data to power the AI economy. This underscores the strength of our data pipeline as AI technology and innovation leaders turn to Veritone to fuel their next generation models. Looking ahead, we continue to aggressively execute on our strategy to dramatically expand our total addressable market. Leveraging our cloud-native digital media hub, we are taking the enterprise-grade AI architecture we have built for media giants and democratizing it through modular packaging and tier pricing to capture high-margin growth across previously underserved market segments, including mid-market SMBs, marketing agencies, and independent creators. We are transforming Veritone from purely an enterprise specialist into a universal software standard for audio and video workflows. Turning to the public sector, Veritone's AI applications and IDEM suites are revolutionizing productivity and efficiency for mission-critical workflows. This quarter, we launched Veritone Document Redaction and Veritone Assess to our product portfolio. Both applications are built on AIWare and fit seamlessly into the IDEM suite of solutions that we currently offer. Document redaction materially increases our TAM as all states have requirements for document redaction. We have already closed several deals and we'll be making document redaction available to our existing customers and generally available to all customers this quarter. Veritone Assess is an agentic AI-powered data analysis solution designed to help public safety agencies rapidly identify inconsistencies, missing information, and critical intelligent gaps hidden within complex unstructured datasets. Assess significantly expands our AI capabilities across investigations, compliance, and case analysis, while increasing the speed and accuracy of decision-making. It uses cases including solving crimes, identifying procurement and financial fraud, developing mission plans, and applying policies and procedures to processes involving unstructured data. As we highlighted during our July Innovation Showcase, we are translating our technology into meaningful real-world impact through our ongoing work with the Cold Case Foundation. Veritone Assess is currently being used on multiple cases, including the JonBenet Ramsey case in Colorado. We believe the public exposure from this work, as well as engagement with the law enforcement agencies where these cases originate, will continue to help accelerate growth across our public safety business. We also secured a multi-year contract with the California Highway Patrol, or CHP, the largest state police agency in the United States for Veritone Redact, to automate the redaction of sensitive information within digital evidence datasets collected by CHP, significantly accelerating public records processing while protecting citizen privacy. This contract validates a highly scalable, repeatable deployment model for use across a variety of state and local agencies. In fact, the CHP is already evaluating our other IDEMS applications, thereby contributing to the growth of our overall public safety pipeline. Our broader public safety sales momentum also remains strong. We secured a five-year agreement with a state agency in Washington and added several new customers that licensed multiple products under multi-year agreements. We also saw a significant increase in partner activity, including new activations and new accounts. We added MCCI and JustFoya as new channel partners for our redaction solutions, added several new reseller partners, and continue to advance our technical integration and co-selling relationship with G-Tech. To accelerate adoption across the local agency market, we have established a strategic partnership with Police One and Lexipol to help agencies identify, pursue, and secure grant funding for advanced investigative technologies, reducing a key barrier to procurement. At the federal level, we are demonstrating our leadership in AI infrastructure and government AI initiatives through our partnership and participation in the Genesis Mission Consortium, supporting efforts to accelerate the federal government's AI resources, datasets, and high-performance computing capabilities by utilizing AIWare and our applications. In addition to supporting our current Department of War agencies, the U.S. Defense Logistics Agency and the U.S. Air Force, We are in the process of expanding our enterprise ATO and application footprint for the Department of Justice by adding Veritone Investigate with Assess to the FedRAMP marketplace. We are also in the final stages of contracting for a border security project that we expect to commence shortly. Internationally, we recently concluded an agreement with the UK Department for Work and Pensions, highlighting our growing global momentum in the public sector. Also, as it relates to the UK, We have been down selected as part of an exclusive group of technology firms and vendors for a large countrywide procurement framework, which we remain optimistic as we finalize the contract to secure the award and the appointment here shortly. We also have been actively engaged on IDEMS opportunities with law enforcement agencies in the UK, Canada, and Ireland. Our international activity continues to grow as we focus on these important markets. With the addition of new products, new partners, and expanding channel presence, we have significantly increased our addressable market and routes to market. Our applications and item suites are doing more than improving workflows. They are enabling mission critical outcomes, improving productivity and efficiency, increasing case closure rates, and helping the public sector customers reduce costs. The strong momentum we are seeing across our public sector business underscores the critical nature of our offerings, and we look forward to the public sector opportunity in the future. Our hire division, now officially rebranded as Broadbean by Veritone, delivered a focused and highly productive second quarter. Even as we navigate a selective and challenging macro hiring environment, Broadbean remains a bedrock of high margin recurring revenue for Veritone. This operational stability is powered by the sheer scale of our global network. BroadBe now manages over 7.6 million jobs annually and generates 132 million candidate engagements, cementing its position as a vital foundational asset within our product portfolio. On the product innovation front, I'm thrilled to report the successful launch of our job acceleration feature on May 11th. While our programmatic advertising campaigns excel at standard budget pacing, shared pool dynamics can sometimes leave urgent or specialized roles underserved. Job acceleration solves this directly by allowing recruiters to place high priority roles into a dedicated high velocity fast lane without altering their main campaign settings. Market adoption and customer feedback during early rollouts have been exceptional. A key client, SOS Group, highlighted the tool as an absolute game changer, specifically praising its ability to enable their team to respond immediately to sudden spikes in talent demand. By combining dedicated budgets with a friction-free pay-for-performance model, job acceleration gives talent acquisition teams instant speed and control, a capability we expect will drive meaningful incremental spend across our broader user base. Our enterprise sales momentum also remained strong in Q2, highlighted by 76 new business wins and key multi-year wins across our global footprint. Our media services revenue delivered exceptional performance, surging by 48% compared to Q1 and reflecting robust demand across our global advertising footprint. Concurrently, our team is executing smoothly on the multi-agency UK public sector rollouts announced last quarter, including the flagship UK Department for Work and Pensions implementation. Finally, as we have stressed above and previously, the importance of our partnership channels are very critical to the business and I wanted to provide an update on our Tier 1 HCM ecosystem where we have reached several critical milestones this quarter. SAP Partner Edge Build Program. On May 5th, we officially signed as a partner in the SAP Partner Edge Build Program. This creates a direct channel to integrate Broadbean solutions directly in SAP's core talent management ecosystem, establishing a clear pathway to expand our footprint within the global 2000s brands that rely on SAP daily. Oracle HCM. We continue to deepen our functional integrations with Oracle HCM, ensuring our global distribution power is seamlessly exposed to their enterprise customer base. We will continue to push into this ever-expanding relationship with Oracle. Workday. Building our momentum as a Workday platinum partner, we closed seven new Workday deals in Q2, bringing our year-to-date Workday total to $1.3 million across 33 joint wins, keeping us firmly on track towards our full-year ecosystem expansion goals. These operational wins, technology launches, and strategic alliances collectively signal a pivotal transition for Broadbean by Veritone. We are no longer just a job distribution tool. We have established ourselves as a deeply embedded, AI-driven strategic partner essential to how the world's largest employers source, engage, and manage talent. Looking forward, I'm exceptionally excited about the rapid strides we are making in Ingentic AI technology and our next generation product roadmap for broadband. By embedding autonomous capabilities into our core job management architecture, and pioneering new enterprise compliance and career sites, we are positioning Broadbean to not only streamline recruitment workflows but to set the global standard for intelligent, compliant talent acquisition in the AI area. In closing, the investments as well as the difficult yet disciplined operational decisions we have made over the past several quarters position Veritone to accelerate growth while materially improving our path to profitability through the second half of 2026 and N22027. Our decisive reorganization and cost cutting will more appropriately align our current revenue base and growth areas, creating a clear path to profitability in 2027. Now I'll turn the call over to Mike, who will review our financials and business performance in more detail. Mike? Great. Thank you, Ryan.