Jack Abuhoff
Analyst · Van Clemens
Good afternoon. Thank you for joining our call. Starting this quarter, we have shifted our earnings releases and investor conference calls to after market close. We trust that this will prove to be more convenient for investors. Just eight-weeks ago and our Q4 call, we have shared some important new wins expansions and partnerships. Since that time, in just the last eight-weeks, we have had even more wins and more expansions. I’m excited to share a few of those with you today. As I believe they clearly illustrate our market positioning and our land of expense strategy delivering results. We are pleased to announce a strong first quarter with revenue up 33% year-over-year, exhibiting an acceleration revenue growth over the 20% we experienced in fiscal 2021. In the current quarter Q2, one of our largest customers is a reallocating data annotation supporting two of its more mature models to less mature AI models that it wants to ramp up. The impact of this transition is that a portion of revenues from this program shifted into the first quarter in anticipation of this transition and we expect a portion of revenues from this program to shift into the third and fourth quarters as three allocations ramp up. Therefore Q2 may have a lower growth rate likely in the range of 18% to 24%. But it is not expected to change the revenue expectation from this customer for the year, or our overall revenue expectations for 2022. Consequently, we reiterate our 2022 target of 30% year-over-year revenue growth and our long-term 2025 target of approximately 200 million in revenues, and approximately 30% adjusted EBITDA, based on the continued momentum we see in our business. In the quarter we added 121 new logos across our segments. This is a 96% increase over the 62 new customers that we added on average per quarter in 2020 and 30% increase over the 93 new customers we added on average per quarter in 2021. The momentum in just the last eight-weeks since we last spoke, in terms of landing new customers and expanding business with existing customers has been quite exciting. One of the more notable new logos we signed in the last eight-weeks was with the leading multinational consulting firm to provide an ongoing seed of annotation AI data. We expect this wind to result in approximately 800,000 or more of recurring revenue per year. From a strategic perspective, we believe this validated for us the opportunity to partner with large consulting firms. It also validated the opportunity to create native AI offerings by combining capabilities. So for this customer, we are combining the output of our agility infrastructure, in which we intake and tag billions of news items each year with our financial services domain subject matter experts and our new data annotation platform. The result is an integrated solution for automatically identifying certain trends in business news that are important to this consulting firm and its customers. We are winning new customers continually. Just yesterday, as I prepared these remarks, we signed a brand new customer with whom we anticipate approximately 250,000 per year of recurring revenue to start. We view these new logo wins like planting seeds. We nurse and tender them carefully provide outstanding quality data and product along with a culture of service. And we get to watch as they grow. In the first quarter, we saw lots of our seeds germinate looking business expansions with dozens of our existing customers. I will briefly describe several expansions that occurred in just the last eight-weeks. A Fortune 500 Life Insurance Company increased its go forward annual projected spend from about 1.3 million per year to approximately 2.4 million per year. We significantly expanded our scope at one of the world’s largest social media companies, a company that we announced in our last earnings call had become a new subscription customer for our media intelligence platforms and solutions. At the time of signing, we estimate the revenue value of their subscriptions to be about 200,000 per year. Based on expansions over the last eight-weeks alone, we now estimate the value to bring approximately 500,000 per year. The social media company has been ranked as one of the fastest growing brands in the world over the last two years. It chose our product to monitor how their brand is being depicted globally in news and social media. A key area of focus for us strategically is on AI in the enterprise. In the last eight-weeks we have seen a number of our enterprise seedlings germinate and flower. A large billion dollar e-commerce website has agreed to sign with 30% additional scope over the 300,000 initial commitment they made in the SOW we signed within last year. We can tell similar stories and business expansion over the past eight-weeks with respect to a leading credit agency, a large ad tech vendor, a startup mortgage processor and a large research organization. And again, I emphasize all in the last eight-weeks. We have talked before about the great strides we are making in expanding our surfaces and solutions across a number of Silicon Valley big tech companies. We have pilots underway for potentially large programs at these companies. We estimate that they collectively spend billions of dollars on products and services that we believe we are well positioned to provide. Here is what we believe is working in our favor. First, we provide the highest quality data engineering, which results in AI models that perform better, faster. Encouraged by the result, customers often agree to start new programs to create new AI models to help their businesses in other ways. For each existing AI model, our work is not done. Maintaining AI models require continuous training, different data drift, which is the tendency for real world data to change over time. From a business perspective, we believe the cycle of success results in recurring engagements that build over time. I can think of at least two customers that told us recently that they extensively evaluated the vendor landscape before deciding to go with us, and that their technology groups had tried unsuccessfully to duplicate our capabilities in house. And these were both multibillion dollar financial services companies. We are feeding the strong momentum by continuing the investment in sales and marketing that we started last year. In 2021, we increased our sales and marketing spend by 7.4 million or 116%, year-over-year, and in 2022, we anticipate full-year increasing sales and marketing spend by approximately 10.4 million or 75% year-over-year. This year as investments are designed to accelerate our growth in 2023 And beyond. As we mentioned, on our last earnings call, we target the long-term value of new customers from these investments to be 3x to 5x our customer acquisition costs. Two weeks ago, we had our President’s Club trips for high performers in our sales team. The enthusiasm and energy were palpable, and I heard about a number of new exciting pipeline opportunities. It becomes clear to me all the time how well positioned VR to help businesses through their AI journeys, which is doubly exciting because AI is still very much in its earliest innings. On the product front, we also made great progress in just the last eight-weeks. We launched our AI enabled document intelligence platform in late March is planned. This new customer facing platform uses our proprietary Golden Gate AI technology to automatically extract meaning from complex documents. It can be utilized across domains from healthcare to financial services to media and entertainment, essentially any business that employs people to read or manage complex documents. Initial feedback from our customers has been positive and we are in the late stages with two opportunities which taken together we believe will be worth approximately a million dollars per year in likely recurring revenue. Our annotation platform embodies what is becoming increasingly known as data centric AI. It solves the data curation, annotation and introspection challenges, rather than trying to compete with tensor flow torch or general algorithms. Many experts in AI know clearly say that the neural network architecture is basically a solved problem. And that for many practical applications, it is now more productive to hold the neural network architecture fixed, and instead find ways to improve the data. Taking this exact approach, our platform will include tools to enforce data consistency and learnability tools to analyze blind spots, bias and noise, choose to automate data and collect data more efficiently and choose tools to select the best data to annotate next in order to maximize system accuracy, while minimizing annotation costs. Last eight-weeks, also saw a good progress on a new platform that we are on track to deliver by the end of June that will be sold as an extension to our existing agility platform. Its purpose will be delivering deeper analytical insights into social media. It will be the first of two related platforms to be launched with a second plan for the end of the year. Both platform releases are expected to support our strategic drive toward increased initial average selling price for agility, subscriptions, and offer new entry points for new customers. You may have seen on our website that a few weeks ago, we launched an e-commerce portal where users can purchase on demand datasets to accelerate AI/ML model building and training. At the same time, we partnered with Snowflake, a leading data warehousing company to provide access to some of our synthetic data through its marketplace. These initiatives are designed to increase our brand awareness and lead generation. Perhaps saving the best for last, because it is something I’m particularly excited about. We launched the initial version of our new banking industry platform on March 31, on time and on budget. Our charter customer, one of the world’s largest banks, is committed to $11 million subscription spent with us over five-years, and already has 65 people using the product and giving us valuable feedback. The bank’s leadership is very excited by how we are able to augment their existing teams work through our AI enabled product. We hired a new product manager with extensive experience in financial services to lead the charge and bringing this product to a wider market next year. We have made and this year are continuing to make strategic investments and product development to expand our SaaS platforms and our industry solutions. This year, we plan to take six new platforms to the market. In 2021, we increased our product development spend by 2.4 million or 65% year-over-year, and in 2022, we anticipate increasing product developments spend by approximately 7.2 million or 115% year-over-year. We expect these investments to significantly increase our addressable market and high margin recurring revenue. Because our book of business is cash generative, we can fund the substantial investments from our internal resources. Based upon current assumptions and expectations, we are budgeting to be cash flow positive by the end of 2022, with significant increases in cash flow expected thereafter. With $15 million f cash no debt, we do not presently expect to need external financing to execute our plan. What is particularly exciting is to see our products and services within the marketplace against our competition. And we feel that our three tiered product service architecture is helping us intersect with enterprise customers, regardless of where they are in the AI adoption cycle. If they have data science teams, we can provide the highest quality data annotation and related data engineering services across multiple domains. If they do not, we can provide applied AI services in the form of custom trained models or API access to our models. For companies that want to do their own data annotation, we now have a licensable platform. For others, we have domain experts on hand. For companies that want to manage their own AI models. We now have a document intelligence platform that enables them to do so. And lastly, for companies with discrete workflows that can benefit from AI, we provide end-to-end platforms that embed AI to augment their knowledge workers. We invested in building out agility. And now agility just last month was recognized for fourth consecutive quarter as a momentum leader by Software Review Site G2 this latest time in its spring PR software report. We are continuing to invest in the product to increase its ASP and the value it delivers to customers. As a result of the expansion of the social media company I spoke about a few minutes ago, we now have a new largest agility customer ever. And in Q1, we enjoyed a 127% year-over-year increase in subscription bookings and a year-over-year increase in our average selling price. Let me say a few words on the macro environment. Instead, it is top of mind for a lot of investors. There was talk of recession, stagflation, capital, markets, dislocation, the great resignation, et cetera. We believe we are well positioned to withstand these evolving economic challenges for two main reasons. One, our services lower costs for our customers, which becomes a core focus in tough times. And two, we make our customers more efficient, enabling them to tackle the labor shortages they are experiencing. The increased momentum we see in our business is a testament to the growing sector the demand for our offerings in these challenging times. The growth of our Synodex business is illustrative of this phenomenon. We are putting our Golden Gate AI to work within our Synodex medical data extraction product that changes the way underwriters work. They need many fewer underwriters than they used to. This is a good thing because underwriters are expensive and hard to find. Indeed, large life insurers are becoming increasingly focused on digital transformation of underwriting and embracing AI, and concluding that the Synodex platform is an ideal tool for enabling this transformation. As a result, our Synodex year-over-year growth of 64% in Q1, and we anticipate this accelerating to over 100% in 2022 over 2021. With our new document intelligence product, we enable businesses to use this AI capability not just for medical records, but for virtually any kind of document. We believe we changed the game in terms of both enabling people to avoid having to read large documents, either by producing summaries or generating structured data feeds that are then fed into decision engines. So simply stated, people reading complex documents too expensive. Our platform salsas, people that read complex documents hard to find or hard to retain. Again, our platform can be an answer to this as well. We are quite pleased with our execution, product validation, and the tailwinds from the growth in our markets. We believe more firmly than ever, the blue sky growth opportunities in front of us and remain laser focused on execution and shareholder value creation. I will now turn the call over to Marissa to go over the numbers, and then we will open the line for questions.