Yossi Carmil
Analyst · William Blair. Your line is now open
Thank you, Sabrina, and thank you all for joining us today. So I'm pleased to report that in 2022 we've made significant progress advancing our mission to help our customers modernize investigations by digitizing their workflows. Our results and achievements in the fourth quarter and throughout the past year reflect four important things. The first, the market for investigative digital intelligence solutions remains healthy. Second, our leadership position is strong. We have a long broad runway for profitable growth in a market that remains highly underpenetrated. Third, we executed well on our development road map and go-to-market initiatives. And fourth, thanks to our progress in 2022. We are well positioned to deliver strong results in 2023. And before I cover each of these area in more details, I'd like to quickly review our Q4 results and select KPIs that are critical to the health and success of our business. First, our ARR grew 33% year-on-year to reach US$249 million. Our quarterly net retention rate was 130%. We closed 29 large deals, greater than US$0.5 million in the quarter. We reported Q4 revenue growth of 9% to $74 million, largely attributed to subscription revenue growth of 24%. We delivered Q4 adjusted EBITDA of $16.1 million, and we also further strengthened our financial foundation, ending the year with cash and investments totaling US$206 million and no outstanding debt. A little bit about the healthy market environment. So we continue to operate in a healthy market with significant growth opportunities in front of us, thanks in large part to Cellebrite's industry-leading technology. Against this backdrop, we continue to implement our growth strategy of expanding business with existing customers through upgrades, upselling and cross-selling, and by winning new logos in both public and private sectors. Cellebrite solutions are increasingly attractive today with strong demand and positive feedback from customers and prospects. Just as important, customer budgets for our type of Digital Intelligence solutions are expected to remain robust in 2023, as they are generally insulated from the broader macroeconomic pressures that are currently impacting a wide range of other technology sectors. In the Americas, which, by the way, represents 52% of our fiscal year 2022 revenue, law enforcement budgets have historically grown over time and we anticipate that this trend will continue in 2023. In the U.S., incremental U.S. federal funding for law enforcement agencies of all sites will support increased staffing and additional resources to help them stay current with the latest evidence-based practices. And we expect overall investigative digital intelligence spending by law enforcement and intelligence agencies in other geographies will remain solid in 2023. Now Cellebrite has built a reputation as a trusted digital intelligence market leader, which is best reflected by our success in increasing our wallet share within existing customers. Over the years, we have leveraged our traditional stronghold in Collect & Review solutions to increase our footprint within digital forensics units by helping them make digital evidence more accessible, intelligent and actionable. Now we believe that our newest Collect & Review Premium Enterprise and Premium as a Service solutions are true game changers for customers, and our physical analyzer continues to be the leading review tool in the investigative fields. With ongoing investments in Collect & Review and the addition of new investigative analytics offering like Pathfinder, we are supporting the neutral expansion of our customers' operations and continue unlocking new buying centers to address a growing range of use cases. Now our success in upselling and cross-selling into our installed base is best reflected in Q4 in our net retention rate of 130%. This was the 16th consecutive quarter we reported NRR greater than 120%, and we are very proud of our best-in-class retention rates, which demonstrate the power and the value of our go-to-market strategy. Furthermore, we closed 29 large deals in Q4, bringing our 2022 total to 101 large deals and this is 22% higher than in 2021. We expect that winning more business with existing customers will continue to fuel Cellebrite's growth well into the future. A little bit about the product development and go-to-market execution. During 2022, we took important steps to further advance our portfolio of solutions, while also investing in the cloud infrastructure necessary to scale our SaaS offering like our Guardian solution. We enhanced our offering by adding new features, capabilities and functionality that help our customers extract, filter, analyze and manage data and evidence efficiently and securely. With Collect & Review, the newest version of our Premium as a Service offering was rolled out earlier in the year and we were pleased to see success in the U.S. state and local government agencies. It is development effort like this that have helped our – us to address major pain points for customers and underpin our efforts to fortify our longstanding strengths in Collect & Review, and extend our reach into adjacent investigative analytics and case management solution. Now this past year also marked meaningful investment to expand our global sales force. With an emphasis on strategic account management to improve our effectiveness in the U.S. and in Europe, and we made solid progress. Our sales organization grew by 10% as we put the right talent in the right roles to best serve our customers. This infusion of resources helped us to deliver on ARR, NRR, and large deal targets. Now we delivered excellent results in the U.S. state and local enforcement – law enforcement during Q4 and gained greater confidence in our ability to realize the growth potential we see in Europe. Guardian is gaining traction in the market with hundreds of new users now benefiting from the simple, secure and scalable cloud-based solution for investigative and evidence management. And we see continued growth ahead for our SaaS solutions, which appeals to a broader range of customers, who need to modernize their digital operation, but often lack the budgets, IT staff and infrastructure, which is associated with on-prem solutions. Let's talk a little bit about the customer success. So I'd like here to briefly highlight some of our Q4 deals, all of which demonstrates how Cellebrite technology is helping these customers modernize their operation, while expanding our wallet share. So in the Asia Pacific region, we grew our longstanding relationship with a regional law enforcement agency, who is now deploying our premium enterprise solution more broadly into the field to help them accelerate their investigations. As a result, our ARR from this customer will grow by more than 50% to nearly US$1 million and help set the stage for further expansion. In the U.S., a large federal agency selected premium enterprise to augment use of our UFED solution at regional labs and leverage their AWS private cloud infrastructure to move more capability into the field and operate the mode of operation. This deal increases our ARR from this account by almost 60% to nearly US$2 million. Now, I mentioned earlier that our investigative analytics solution, the Pathfinder, is enabling us to unlock new buying centers and support customers as they modernize their digital investigative workflows. So, for example, we closed two large Pathfinder deals in Q4, one of which was a mid six figure deal with one of the largest state and local police agencies in the U.S. And the other, multi-year low eight figure deal that triples our ARR with a national law enforcement agency in Western Europe to over US$4.5 million per year. Now both deals showed Pathfinder's unique value in helping law enforcement professionals accelerate investigations by sifting through mountains of digital data to surface the most relevant evidence, discover connections and collaborate more efficiently. And finally, in the private sector, we closed four notable deals, two with service provider partners and two with Fortune 500 corporate customers. Now all of these customers purchased Endpoint Inspector to improve overall operational efficiency by remotely collecting data from mobile devices and computers, thereby substantially upgrading costly, time-consuming legacy approaches. In closing, our solid execution over the past 12 months has enabled us to enter 2023 trying to further capitalize on the vast market opportunity. Digital transformation has clearly reached all industries, and it is here to stay. Our customers, regardless of whether they are national, regional or local public sector agencies or private sector businesses, are under increased pressure to modernize their investigative workflows in the face of rising volume of increasingly complex data, operational inefficiencies and greater scrutiny around the ethics and accountability of how digital evidence is handled throughout its life cycle. And Cellebrite is playing an important role in enabling our customers to address those challenges. Now I'm confident that from where we stand today, we have the products, the programs and the people needed to execute and deliver on our 2023 financial targets. We have established a scalable model that will support improved fundamental performance, even as we invest for the future. As we mobilize to capture demand in a healthy market and further fortify our market leadership, our priorities this year are clear. First, we plan to deliver ongoing innovation through state-of-the-art SaaS solutions paired with on-prem offerings that will help customers modernize their digital investigation workflow. This will require sustained investment in R&D across our entire portfolio and in the technology infrastructure that supports it. Second, we will focus on extending our leadership in Collect & Review by advancing our UFED and premium solutions that are used extensively by digital forensic labs. And third, we are broadening our reach beyond our stronghold in the labs by accelerating our progress with a high-value investigative analytics and case management solution, which helps investigative units move faster and collaborate securely to resolve complex time-sensitive cases. Now by executing against these high-level priorities, we expect to accelerate our revenue growth rate, deliver improved profitability and generate strong cash flow from operation in 2023. I would like to use the opportunity and thank to my colleagues at Cellebrite for the hard work in 2022 and our continued commitment to make our world safer. I'm excited for what lies ahead. And more ever, we remain committed to helping our customers modernize investigation and close the public safety gap. And in short, I'm confident in our strategic direction and in our ability to capitalize on the attractive opportunities in front of our team. And with that, I will turn the call to Dana.