zSpace, Inc.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for participating in today's conference call to discuss ZSpace's financial results for the fourth quarter and full year ended December 31st, 2024. Joining us today are ZSpace CEO Paul Kellenberger, CFO Eric de Oliveira, and Greg Robles from Investor Relations. Following their remarks, we'll open the call for analyst questions. Before we go further, I would like to turn the call over to Mr. Robles, as he reads the company's safe harbor statement. Greg, please go ahead.

Thanks, operator. Good morning, and thanks for joining our conference call to discuss our fourth quarter and full year 2024 financial results. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that certain statements made on this call may be considered forward-looking statements. These statements are based on our current expectations and beliefs and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. These risks and uncertainties are described in our most recent annual report on Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Additionally, we may discuss certain key business metrics which are non-GAAP financial measures. A description of these non-GAAP measures and any comparison to the most directly comparable GAAP measures can be found in our earnings release on the investor relations section of our website. Now, I would like to turn the call over to the CEO of ZSpace, Paul Kellenberger. Paul?

Thank you, Greg, and good morning, everyone. Happy Friday, by the way. Thank you for joining us for ZSpace's first public earnings call. First, I would like to start with introduction. I am Paul Kellenberger, CEO of ZSpace, and with me here today is Eric de Oliveira, our CFO. We are both excited to be with you here today to discuss zSpace, our performance, and our plan to drive growth. As many of you probably know, I have been with zSpace since inception, and we have something that is very unique and special. For those of you who have seen and experienced zSpace firsthand, you understand what I mean. And we always tell the people that see videos on our website, and the videos that are in our public domain that they do not do zSpace justice. As you know, we completed our IPO in December of 2024, raising over $10 million in gross proceeds and began trading on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol ZSPC. This milestone marks a significant step for our company, enabling us to accelerate our growth strategy. The proceeds will support our product commitments and software development, both through acquisitions and partnerships, as well as with third-party developers, as well as continuing to invest in our sales, marketing, working capital requirements, and other general corporate purposes. For those of you who are new to our story, ZSpace is a leading provider of augmented reality and virtual reality education technology solutions. Our vision for the company is to transform learning that empowers people to reach their full potential. Education happens to be the first market we decided to focus on. Today, we primarily serve K-12 schools and the career and technical education market, or the CTE market as it's known in the U.S. Outside the U.S., the CTE market is referred to more broadly as workforce development. zSpace offers a unique hands-on learning by doing approach that has been shown and proven to enhance student engagement and improve test scores. We also partner outside the U.S. with reseller partners to expand our reach into over 50 countries worldwide. Before we discuss our 2024 highlights, I'd like to provide an overview of zSpace's market presence and growth potential that positions us for long-term success. Together, the K-12 education and CTE markets exceed $69 billion globally. The global ed tech market is valued at over $142 billion in 2023 and is projected to grow at 13.6% CAGR through 2030. Now, the AR VR education segment is expected to reach 14.2 billion by 2028, growing at a 30% CAGR, and both of these factors reinforce our confidence in zSpace's long-term growth potential. Specifically to the U.S. market, our platform today is currently implemented in more than 3,500 of the approximately 13,000 public school districts, including were installed in over 80% of the largest 100 school districts. As another opportunity, we see strong cross-sell between our two markets, enabling further expansion. And to date, 73% of our existing K-12 customers have adopted our CTE solutions, demonstrating the success of the cross-sell. Our flagship product, Inspire, along with our recently introduced Imagine product, offer key advantages. They feature proprietary hardware and software designed to create an immersive and interactive learning experience without the need for headsets or glasses, which can be impractical in an education and learning setting. We believe zSpace is redefining the classroom experience enabling students to explore concepts that would otherwise be too dangerous, expensive, or impossible to replicate in a traditional learning environment. From STEM education to hands-on technical career training, we provide a scalable and repeatable learning solution that equips students with the skills needed to succeed in the workforce. Looking at the business side, 2024 has been a pivotal year for ZSpace. as we continue to drive growth and expand our reach in the education sector. A few highlights of note. Our largest customer win to date was with St. Louis Public Schools, where we secured a roughly $5 million deal to provide a complete K-12 STEM solution. This win is a great example of how we're making a real impact on education at scale. We also made significant strides in expanding our content offerings, particularly with the launch of our career readiness solution. This includes a unique feature, a personalized AI career coach, which has been met with a lot of excitement from our customers, and it shows how there's a growing demand for solutions that help students bridge the gap between education and the work. We were also very proud to receive the Best of Show Award at ISTE Live 24, which is the largest annual K-12 education conference globally from Tech and Learning for our career readiness solution. This recognition is a testament to the value we're delivering to our customers and reinforces our leadership in the education technology space. In addition, zSpace has built a very robust IP portfolio We have over 80 issued patents, many of which are particularly unique given our display-based augmented reality solution with interaction. Now, before turning the call over to Eric, I'd like to cover briefly four near-term initiatives that we believe will drive further expansion of the business. Number one, we will continue to focus on increasing our penetration within the existing K-12 STEM and CTE markets. capitalizing on the growing demand for immersive learning solutions. Today, we're in over 80% of the top 100 school districts. However, we have an incredible growth opportunity just within this existing customer base. Second, through our network of over 25 resellers reaching more than 50 countries worldwide, we are actively expanding our international presence. Third, We have always been focused on R&D and remain committed to investing in R&D to enhance our overall platform, ensuring we stay ahead of emerging trends and continuing to meet the needs of our customers. Lastly, and as part of our growth strategy, we're focused on acquiring complementary software solutions to accelerate the growth of our software revenue. Notably, we acquired BlocksCAD in Q1 of 2025 which strengthens our immersive learning solutions with their 3D design platform for STEM education. Looking ahead, we remain open to opportunities that accelerate our strategy and drive value for shareholders. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Eric de la Vera, our CFO. Over to you, Eric. Thank you, Paul. Excited to be with you today. Before diving into our results, it's important to communicate how we recognize revenue. Our revenue consists of hardware revenue, software applications revenue, and services revenue. The latter and approximately equal mix of product warranties and pedagogical training to support educators' efforts to integrate zSpace, AR, VR content with their classroom curricula. Hardware revenue is derived from the initial upfront deployment of platforms to classrooms. Hardware revenue is generally recognized upon shipment to the customer. Software content is predominantly device-based licensed software for annual and multi-year terms. Under our agreements, we generally account for the entirety of the license value in period upon shipment with associated hardware or issuance of a license renewal, regardless of term length. only a small portion of our software revenue is recognized rapidly. As a result of this accounting treatment, our revenue may exhibit quarter-to-quarter variability due to factors such as the underlying seasonality of customer budgeting cycles from which we derive our bookings. These patterns have occasionally been exaggerated when the company has lacked working capital to fulfill backlog quickly, which pushed fulfillment and revenue into later periods. Growth rates measured in future periods can be significantly affected by these comparisons. In the long run, we expect the business to match seasonally stronger sales periods in the second and third calendar quarters of the year and seasonally weaker sales periods in the first and fourth quarters of the year. Given these dynamics, and in order to provide a normalized view of our software ecosystem, we present two key operating metrics. annualized contract value, or ACV, and net dollar revenue retention, or NDRR. Both metrics will be provided quarterly and will be measured using trailing 12-month data. ACV of renewable software is calculated as the total value of a software license divided by its term length, summed over all renewable license agreements currently active with customers. We believe that the long-term health of our business is correlated with the growth of this metric. Our measure of the stickiness of our AR VR solutions in the classroom is the NDRR of our software ACV at the customer level. NDRR is calculated for customers present at the start of a 12-month period with at least $50,000 in renewable software ACV and compared to the ACV for that same group of customers at the end of that same 12-month period. Customers with at least $50,000 represent slightly more than half of our total renewable software ACV. I'd now like to discuss full-year 2024 results, as well as our fourth quarter performance. 2024 revenues were $38 million, down 13% year-on-year, as capital constraints prior to our IPO limited our ability to fulfill orders from backlog. we concluded the year with $9.2 million of unfulfilled orders stranded in backlog. As of September 31st, 2024, the annualized contract value of renewable software revenue was $11.3 million, up 6% compared with 12 months ago. The net dollar revenue retention as of December 31st, 2024, for customers with at least $50,000 of ACV as of December 31st, 2023, was 92%. A reminder that each of these metrics require that we have fulfilled the underlying software license use, and in the course of our accounting in each period, revenue was recognized at the time of fulfillment. We're very pleased that our efforts to focus on the importance of our software content in driving student outcomes has generated continued growth in the ACV metric and high retention rates, despite the headwinds we incurred this year as we pursued capital. Bookings for the year were $41.5 million, up 1% year on year. Excluding China, where we have made a deliberate decision to de-emphasize, US and rest of world bookings were $39.9 million, up 7% year on year. This reflects growth of 4% in the core US market and 37 percent growth in international geographies other than China. Gross margins for the year were 40.9 percent compared with 38.5 percent in the prior year, an improvement of 240 basis points. Approximately three-quarters of this margin expansion is attributable to a mixed shift of five percentage points of revenue out of hardware and into software and services. We credit the responsiveness of our direct quota-carrying sales team to a new incentive plan prioritizing software content and strong customer renewals for driving this mixed shift in our 2024 bookings and revenue composition, which was particularly evident in the second half of the year. The remainder of our gross margin improvement was rate-based and linked to the abolition of certain incentives for term length that were deemed to have insufficient correlation with sales success as well as some modest software content acquisitions in verticals where we previously sold third-party content and incurred a revenue share. Operating expenses for the year were $33.2 million compared to $25.5 million, an increase of $7.7 million, or 30%. After normalizing for stock-based compensation expense in the first quarter of the year, operating expenses were flat year-on-year. Now moving to the fourth quarter. Revenues in the fourth quarter were $8.5 million, down 29% year-on-year, as capital constraints prior to our IPO limited our ability to fulfill orders from backlog. And the timing of receipt of IPO proceeds in the first week of December left insufficient time to pull product through our supply chain and fulfill the backlog. As previously noted, we concluded the year with $9.2 million of unfulfilled orders. Bookings for the fourth quarter, which along with the first quarter is our seasonally slow period, were $5.3 million, down 3% year on year. Excluding China, U.S. and rest of world bookings were $5.3 million, up 5% year on year. This reflects growth of 21% in the core U.S. market and a decline of 92% growth in international geographies other than China. The fourth quarter decline in international geographies outside of China reflects similar patterns of seasonality and should be right in the context of 37% year-on-year growth international ex-China for the entire year. Gross margins for the quarter were 40.7 percent compared with 34.7 percent in the comparable quarter of the prior year, an improvement of 597 basis points. Although revenue composition improved modestly in the quarter compared with prior year, almost all of the improvement is attributable to the write-down of excess and obsolete inventory in the prior year quarter, creating a favorable comparison. Some benefit was noted from margin improvements related to software content from the factors previously discussed. Although we began shipping Inspire 2 units in the fourth quarter, we do not expect the margin benefits to appear in our P&L until early 2025 when our fulfillment volume is exclusively made from stocks of the newest model. Operating expenses for the quarter were $6.2 million compared with $6.1 million in the comparable quarter of the prior year, an increase of $0.1 million, or 2%. Guidance for Q1 2025. The first quarter of 2025 has brought significant uncertainty in our markets, but with countervailing themes. Although some education customers have demonstrated a mixture of hesitancy in their decision-making which is being driven by uncertainty of funding sources for zSpace's K-12 and ARVR classroom solutions. Others have accelerated their purchases to lock in pricing and availability for Q2 and the coming school year. The net impact on our business remains somewhat unclear at this time, but may materialize as a lengthening of K-12 sales cycles. At the same time, CTE solutions are finding favor, driven by large funding announcements at the state level, such as California's $470 million allocation for workforce development, and similar announcements in states such as Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, New York, and others. Given this landscape, along with the fact that our first quarter is nearly closed, we would like to provide insight into Q1 revenues. we see realized revenues for the quarter slightly above $5 million. The uncertainty for the current quarter reflects timing of deal closing in our end markets, given broader turbulence in the education market. Although uncertainty is likely to persist for the remainder of the year, we remain comfortable in our ability to capture and renew business across the K-12 and CTE content segments, even though performance may not be linear and of delivering growth on the full year. Regarding our capital allocation and management of operating expenses in particular, we continue to control spending strictly. As noted, last year we managed OpEx flat on a year-on-year basis after normalizing for a one-time true-op of employee equity. This year, we anticipate keeping operating expense growth constrained to less than half the rate of revenue growth on the full year. This excludes the impact of restricted stock unit grants to employees. 2025 restricted stock unit grants, measured by the count of RSUs issued this year, 2025, as a percent of shares issued in outstanding, are expected to be below a burn rate of 7%. Now I will turn the time back to the operator for Q&A.

Thank you, sir. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1-1. If your question has been answered and you'd like to remove yourself from the queue, please press star 1-1 again. One moment while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from Nihal Chokshi with Northland Capital Markets. Your line is open.

All right. Hey, thank you. Thank you for the question. I've got a few here. Help us understand why bookings is impacted by a timing of the IPO, because it would appear that demand should be largely uncoupled from supply. I think it would be really helpful to get that explanation out there.

Anil Hall, thank you for being with us today. I appreciate the question. A key driver of bookings was the anticipated release of two new products that we unveiled earlier. The second generation of our flagship Inspire 2 product, which was unveiled in Q4 of 2024, and our Imagine solution, the smaller 14-inch form factor designed for the larger elementary school market. Both of those products required capital to deploy and have available in quantity to launch bookings. While we had previously anticipated releasing those products much earlier in 2024, delay in capital pushed us to unveil those at a later point in the school year, impacting their availability for sales launches and customer demos.

And when did you actually have the inventory on hand to start doing the sales demos then?

So inventory for Inspire 2 became available late in Q4. Inventory for Imagine is now available in Q1 of this year. We recorded bookings for the new Imagine product in Q4 in advance of that launch and are continuing to accelerate that now in Q1.

Okay, great. And then given the... $5 million revenue guidance for the March quarter. With now having the supply in hand, obviously there's a lot of external factors that are impacting demand now. But it does seem like your bookings for the March quarter is indeed being impacted negatively. looking at the segmentation that you provided for the December quarter specifically, it looks like you had weak European bookings. Is that the continued trend that you expect into March quarter, or is there some other mixed shift going on that's driving what is likely some weak bookings activity that you're seeing?

Nehal, let me break that follow-up into two parts. one around geographic mix and the other around the uncertainty here. Internationally, we've seen significant strength in the last two years with growth rates in the mid-30s. That's after excluding China, where we've made a deliberate decision to de-emphasize growth. And we anticipate continued strength on that trend line for international ex-China. In our U.S. markets, we continue to see very strong interest in the solution. And our business is probably best characterized by a comment I heard recently where we don't see a demand problem for our zSpace solutions in the US, particularly in the K through 12 educational space. But the turbulence that we're seeing in the market challenges our end users to identify which pot of money will be used to fund the solutions. Now, because there's so much interest in CTE solutions, we feel pretty confident in capturing that demand because our content library is fairly broad, but we see this as potentially accelerating, or sorry, not accelerating, extending the duration of sales cycles as individual schools and school districts make a decision to move ahead with zSpace, but now need to reapportion or re-identify which funding source will be used to cover their zSpace purchases. Is that helpful?

Yeah, absolutely. Very, very helpful. All right, I'll see the floor. I'll get back into the queue here. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Rohit Kulkarni with Roth Capital Partners. Your line is open.

Hey, thank you. Thank you, guys. And a few questions here. In terms of just the overall kind of breakdown of the two new products that you've launched, perhaps talk about the biggest kind of learnings from the sales force in terms of what has been the reception in the last 90 days from the two new products, and where do you feel more optimistic about that reception in terms of which pockets or which use cases or any cohorts of the broader market as such?

Let me take that one, Rohit. Good morning. It's Paul. You know, I think right now and By the way, the word that we certainly hear used a lot is uncertainty, given what's going on in the market in general. I would say over the course of the last couple of months in this first quarter in particular, clearly the CTE workforce development focus continues very strongly, and we continue to see very strong demand there. in this uncertain market and all the things that are going on. I think the other thing that we're very bullish on right now is our relatively recently launched Imagine Elementary solution. And I think we've seen already that it's had real positive impact and positive reception. So I think amidst all of the uncertainty going on in the market in general, I mean, those are a couple things that I would point to. And again, we see the demand there, so we feel good about that.

Okay. And then just in terms of the outlook and what you're seeing with regards to the uncertainty, is there the lengthening of sales cycles in the school, K-12 schools, Can you compare this to any prior periods that you have seen? You've operated this company for quite some time, but as a private one, with regards to how such conversations tend to evolve to give more comfort around customers. how perhaps as we get into your peak kind of seasonally strong seasons of buying in Q2 and Q3, you hope those cycles come to a head. So just was wondering where would you compare this current period of uncertainty to?

You know, Rohit, I have to tell you, I don't have a comparison. I think, and part of it, you know, has to do with the timing of the buildup of the company over the last eight or nine years in terms of the business itself. So I don't have a comparison where I could say to you, hey, we've seen this before. Again, I think right now there's no question that the uncertainty is particularly more so on the K-12 side than on the CTE side of it. It's lengthening the sales cycle a little bit. because people are hesitant to move forward. I think on the other side of it, the other thing that we're hearing pretty strongly is people still have funds. And the second quarter here and the third quarter, as you know, in our business tend to be the really strong quarters. People are talking about making sure they spend their money in the second quarter. So I think there's a positive component to that. And without getting into specific deals, that gives us pretty strong confidence that the people are going to move things ahead regardless of how much uncertainty there is in the broader market.

Okay, great. And maybe a quick one for Eric is around the gross margin trend. How should we think about the gross margin that you saw in 4Q and you made comments around some of the potential uplift from the new hardware mix is still yet to come. Maybe just help frame what we saw for 4Q gross margins and how should we think about the gross margins coming forward.

Thanks, Rohit. Yeah, we're particularly pleased with their success of driving increased software and services content. We saw that in three different ways in our 2024 results. the 5% mix shift out of hardware and into software and services compared to full year 2023. You see it in the relative performance of software and services P&L revenue compared to hardware. And the result of that is the 240 basis points of margin expansion this year over last year. And I'd note that that is an acceleration of margin expansion if you go back to 2023 and compare that to 2022 results. That margin expansion has been driven by the software ecosystem in at least a couple of ways. Firstly, as we add new clients and renew older clients, we see increasing layers of software in the ecosystem being renewed And that's where we look at our net dollar revenue retention, and we're very pleased at the extent we're able to hang on to existing business once we acquire it. That trend we see continuing, and that's just a testimony of the extent to which educators, district superintendents, and principals see our ARVR solutions as not a shiny bell and whistle in a classroom, but a very real tool to drive student outcomes. On top of that, the launch of Inspire 2 and the Imagine solutions, while not only providing a path for additional revenue acquisition as we provide a form factor through Imagine that better suits the elementary school segment, which is seven to eight times larger than the high school segment, in K-12, those new laptop platforms come at a favorable BOM cost relative to their predecessor versions, and that should be a source of hardware-driven margin expansion that would essentially contribute a one-time step function improvement. With additional benefits coming from innovations in our tracking and interaction devices, both the stylus and the tracker, we anticipate that that could provide a tailwind of an additional four to seven percentage points of gross margin as that hardware rolls out.

Okay, okay. Thanks, Eric. Yeah, again, I'll go back into the queue, and thanks for all the color. Thank you, Rohit.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Alex Paris with Barrington Research. Your line is open.

Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my question. I got a couple, and I'll start top-down. First of all, with regard to the potential lengthening of the sales cycle within K-12 due to uncertainty, which definitely makes sense, K-12 education is largely funded on a state and local basis, 85% plus. the federal money, you know, which could cause some concern given DOGE and its effect on the Department of Education, is really in Title I and IDEA, Individuals with Disabilities. I'm wondering if you could kind of go over the typical funding sources for your product in K through 12.

Yeah, sure. Good morning, Alex. You know, you are correct in everything you said. And the reality is most of the funding that goes towards C-Space, whether it be in K-12 or CTE, is not connected to the DOE. And the other big one out there is Perkins. And albeit, even though the money and the 85% is state and local, I think what we see is the hesitancy, which is causing some of the uncertainty. So even though the funding is there and available, I think it's just the uncertainty that goes around all the things going on. And I think the nervousness on the part of a lot of senior leaders within our market system and with what they see in the headlines. So to your point, the money is there. The funding is there. It's the than the decision to go ahead and actually spend it.

Gotcha. That makes sense. And then here's another question for you. To what extent did you benefit from ESSER funding before that program was sunsetted last September?

Yeah, that's a really good question. You know, the statistic I think we had for 2023 was that roughly a little over 10%, I think it was under 11%, of our 2023 revenue was ESSER-related. So we didn't have the big run-up like a lot of other education companies that really benefited from ESSER. And consequently, we didn't have a really big fall-off either relative to the ESSER fund piece of it.

So when ESSER ran out, your customers found other buckets of money to pay for the product for your 2024 revenue?

Correct. Correct.

Okay, great. And then lastly on that topic, you said the sales cycle is lengthening a little bit. Can you give us like an order of magnitude? What was a K-12 average sales cycle and what is it looking like today?

Yeah, I would have said, you know, we would have traditionally said 60 to 75 days in the K-12 world, and I think we'd now probably say 75 to 90 days. So, you know, it's not too extreme, but it certainly is a little bit longer. I don't think it's changed radically in the CTE side, and I would probably say it hasn't changed markedly, but you could add a couple of weeks is probably the right way to think about it.

Makes sense. And then I'll move on from the education sector and move on to other DOGE issues, primarily tariffs. You get your hardware primarily from China to PCOEM's relationships today. And then I think your stylus is also produced in China. What are your thoughts there? I know we don't know all the details yet, but how are you viewing tariffs and how would that be dealt with? Would it be a pass-through of cost, which could have an impact on revenue growth? Anyway, just any thoughts or color there, I'd appreciate it.

Let me give you a high level, and Eric can add to specifically. You know, this is an area we have experience in, given we went through the exact same thing in 2018. And at the time, we were shipping our older product, the all-in-one. You know, we really passed that through. And so in the first round of tariffs, we passed that through to our customers. You know, I added another, I'll just say, level of detail that went into the invoicing, but we didn't see it as a major negative impact. But it does, you know, create more, just like we see in the world with tariffs right now, whether it's automotive industry, whatever it is today that's in the news. So we don't see it as a big negative impact. I'll let Eric add his comments to this, including... you know, our own interactions. Now, Paul, I don't have a lot to add there. I guess the two comments that I would offer are firstly that the extent to which tariffs affect deployment of hardware to classrooms, they do not affect our ability, obviously, to renew software. And so when we're looking at growth of our key annualized contract value of renewable software. That's not impacted there. And so we anticipate just the continued strength on that line of the P&L. With respect to the actual pass-through of tariffs, to a large degree because we were already anticipating margin improvements coming from hardware and the majority of tariff expenses will be passed through to customers. And the fact that we saw this behavior in 2018 leads us to believe that the business is well-placed to manage that part of it, even though obviously on the back end it creates some challenge in turn just in our internal systems. Is that helpful, Alex?

Absolutely. Thank you. That's about as much as we can know at this point. So thank you for that color. And then I guess the last thing I would say ask you about is related to the IPO and use of proceeds. Among other things, a portion of the proceeds were used to, within the sales force, increase quota carrying reps and support staff. And then M&A, and you did announce an acquisition in the first quarter here on March 11th, BlocksCAD. So just a little maybe color on what you've done within the Salesforce so far? And then maybe some color on the recent acquisition, particularly because this seems more like a technology or infrastructure acquisition rather than a software acquisition. I might be wrong. Please give me a little additional color then.

Yeah, I mean, speaking specific to Blockscat, it really is something that we had already been selling It's not a major platform play, if you will, but it's something that is very much used within the classroom play. So it's really now just integrating it into our core bundles. So that said, you know, we have other things planned that we think are going to take us in other directions. But the Blockscat acquisition is really the first one for us to really start to move things ahead. And again, our field team was already selling Blockscat as a part of zSpace, but now it's tightly integrated into our own bundle. That's what the acquisition allows us to do.

Great. That on Salesforce, the actions you've taken since the IPA?

Yeah, Alex, this is Eric, so I'll take that. And I'll come back with a commentary on acquisitions and software. On sales and marketing, we had said throughout the IPO process that two of our intentions for use of proceeds was to expand the quota carrying sales force in the U.S. We have done that predominantly through the fourth quarter and earlier in Q1 to add approximately a 50% increase in quota carrying heads in the U.S., The uncertainty notwithstanding that we've talked about, we want to be well poised for driving growth here and more feet on the street, so to speak, has been a key part of that. We've also added to the quota carriers the additional support on the account management side and some modest support to field marketing as well. Now, while we've also previously discussed a similar expansion in international, to build out a direct sales force to supplement our reseller network. We have not yet pursued that, but remain interested in identifying key geographies to build out that kind of a presence. To add another comment to what Paul was sharing around our software acquisitions, other than the kind of acquisitions that could be characterized as acqui-hires, there are two predominant to content acquisition we would pursue through M&A. One is very obviously incremental software titles to unlock access to new verticals and drive revenue capture through that means. The other is to acquire partners or applications in entirety that we may currently be reselling and incurring a rev share on. Those acquisitions are particularly attractive because we see them as the lowest risk with immediate accretiveness to gross margins. And those acquisitions do not figure into any forward-looking guidance that we would provide, but they're attractive because, again, to the extent that those titles are already in our libraries, in our sales catalogs, and in some cases already deployed, we're incurring immediate pickup in gross margin and EBITDA as a result of those kinds of acquisitions.

Great. Thank you very much. That answers my questions. Appreciate it.

Thank you. Operator? Yes. Please go ahead, Operator.

As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star 1-1. Our next question is a follow-up from Nahal Chokshi with Northern Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Yep. Thank you, guys. So, Eric, in your prepared remarks, you had said something about, let me see if I can find it here. Okay. Excluding China, bookings were up 5% year-over-year for the December quarter. And then core something was up 21% year-over-year. I'm sorry, I didn't quite get exactly what you said. Could you just repeat that?

Yes, no, absolutely. So that was a discussion of our Q4 or full-year comment that you were asking about now.

In Q4... Both, actually, please.

Okay, so in Q4, that was a discussion of the geographic disaggregation. So bookings for the fourth quarter were $5.3 million, down 3% year-on-year. But if you back out China, where we've made a deliberate decision to steer away from, U.S. and rest of world bookings were up 5% year-on-year. And the split there to get to the 5% was up 21% in the U.S. market and down 92 in international. And international has the same quarter-to-quarter variability that we see in the U.S. market, but it's much smaller. So there's a lot of small numbers there that create some volatility in the growth rates. On the full year, international was up 37%, but the contribution to Q4 was down 92. So you see the plus 21 in U.S., down 92 in international, gives us up 5% year-on-year in bookings excluding China overall. Is that the piece you're after?

Yep, yep. Thank you very much. And then Paul says, You talked about your four near-term initiatives. One of them really piques my interest. I'd like to get a little bit more color on that, and that is the R&D, enhancing the overall platform and stay ahead of emerging trends. I mean, I would agree with your opening statement that if you haven't experienced the Z space, what you see on the videos just does not do it justice. And so, you know, help us understand where's the future innovation going to be focused on because it does seem like you guys are far ahead.

Yeah, I think without getting too specific and too much, excuse me, looking forward, Nihal, it really is in the interaction area that we continue to be super focused. Some of that has to do with some other gross margin improvements we want to go do and some of it has to do with just making it easier even simpler to use zSpace, so to speak. So when I was referring to the R&D piece of it, mostly has to do with that interaction part. And again, to kind of repeat what I said, one of the real unique things about zSpace and the augmented reality display-based solution is the interaction. So that's where the R&D focus is going to continue to remain.

Stay tuned. Yep. A couple more questions real quickly here. Eric, you did note that your net dollar revenue attention rate is with that 92% for the December quarter. That is an eight-quarter low. I do think that you were trying to indicate that there was some impact from revenue being caught in backlog. So if you normalize for that, what would your NDRR have been then?

So that's a good question, and I don't want to speculate on like a pro forma NDRR only because, as I noted also, for our NDRR measurement is a characterization of how much of our renewable software ACV from customers present a year ago remain with us today. And it requires that we have fulfilled and recognized as revenue the underlying software licenses. The revenue recognition there is to some degree tied to backlog, and we've seen some quarter-to-quarter variability in that measure as well. If you look at the overall trend, particularly in growth of the underlying software ACV, it's been very strong as we've been able to renew existing customers. Some of those customers, when they renew, are actually moving up to the latest version of hardware. To the extent that those orders get caught in backlog, it cascades into NDRR ultimately, but not in a way that, you know, impairs or would indict our outlook for continued retention there.

Okay. All right. And then finally, last question. What were the reasons behind the recent debt instrument that you guys took on? And just repeat what the terms are on that debt instrument.

I think you're referring to an 8K disclosure we made around a $2 million debt line that we took on in Q1. And yeah, so the terms for that were comparable to similar terms that we had taken on from that same lender previously disclosed in our earlier filings. And the main reason for that was simply just to take on some dry powder given the market turbulence that we're seeing.

Understood. Thank you.

And with that, I'll turn that back over to the operator.

Thank you. At this time, this concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the call back over to Mr. Kellenberger for closing remarks.

Thank you, Gwen. Thank you to everyone for listening to today's call. We look forward to reporting Q1 results in May, and we hope everybody has a great day. Thanks again.

Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.