Ron Yekutiel
Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Please proceed with your question
Thank you, Erica, and welcome, everyone, to our third quarter earnings call. We reported today total revenue for the third quarter of 2024 of $44.3 million, up 2% year-over-year and record subscription revenue of $42.1 million, up 3% year-over-year. In the third quarter, we also posted a record ARR for the second consecutive quarter, as well as a record RPO. As for our bottomline, in the third quarter, we posted adjusted EBITDA of $2.4 million, representing our fifth consecutive quarter of adjusted EBITDA profitability, and the highest result since the second quarter of 2020, fueled in part by a record gross margin. In the third quarter, we also generated a record cash flow from operations of $10.7 million, a significant improvement from $1.7 million in the third quarter of 2023. In light of these results, we’re once again increasing our full year revenue and adjusted EBITDA guidance, and are expecting to post positive cash flow from operations in the fourth quarter, as well as for the full year in 2024. Moving on to the business update. In the third quarter, we posted both year-over-year and sequential growth in new subscription bookings for the second consecutive quarter. These new bookings were at the highest level since the fourth quarter of 2022 and came from two seven-digit deals and 22 six-digit deals across a diverse array of industries, use cases and geographies. New customers included a Fortune 500 automotive manufacturer that is now using our video portal and content management system for internal, live and on-demand communication and collaboration, a leading training and certification provider that is now using our virtual events and webinars for internal learning and development, a leading visual discovery engine that is now using our virtual events and webinars for marketing, sales and customer success, and a North American TV company that is now using our streaming platform for entertainment and monetization. A majority of our new bookings came, again, from providing additional solutions empowering new use cases for our existing customers, including, for example, providing marketing, sales and customer success solutions to an S&P 500 health insurance company, to a leading provider of an employee experience platform, to a Fortune 100 bank and to a top-ranked music college, from providing communication and collaboration solutions to a Fortune 100 tech company, and to a leading healthcare software company, from providing teaching, training and certification solutions to universities in the U.S. and Europe, and from providing entertainment and monetization solutions to telcos. Upsells to our customers continue to be fueled by an increased interest to consolidate around Kaltura across multiple internal and external use cases, which is also evidenced through our increased average subscription revenue per customer, which was also at an all-time high in the third quarter. In addition to growing new bookings, gross retention in the third quarter of 2024 continued to improve year-over-year, and net dollar retention, which, as we stated in the past, is a lagging indicator, started reacting to the recent improvements, bouncing back to 101% after posting 98% in the last three quarters. The combination of increased gross new subscription bookings and continued improved gross retention rates has yielded, for the first time since the second quarter of 2021, two consecutive quarters with a year-over-year increase in net new subscription bookings, which is fueling the pickup in our year-over-year subscription revenue growth. On the product front, in the third quarter, we continued boosting events and webinars with automated email scheduling and enhanced our chat and collaboration widgets and integration with a third-party marketing platform, further enabling our customers to run their marketing automation via their preferred market partner or directly in Kaltura. On the video content management and portal side, we completed our integration with Microsoft Teams, and together with our other Zoom and WebEx integrations, now offer a comprehensive archiving solution that enables organizations using multiple conferencing tools to seamlessly and flexibly access, manage and share video content across these leading platforms with a unified workflow. We launched an updated VPAT for our video player as part of our continued commitment to accessibility, enhanced content layout in our conferencing room, in our Cloud TV platform, enhanced subscription management capabilities and furthered security and protection around operator workflows. On the AI front, we are continuing to move towards a future where video content will be created and modified seamlessly for the benefit of each individual viewer. Over the prior quarters, we conducted successful pilots for content repurposing, where Gen AI was used to analyze video captions and viewership engagement data of existing videos to create new clips, highlight reels and other immersive experiences in real time that are hyper-personalized and hyper-contextualized. This functionality is designed to address individual end user wants and needs at the right time and context, and to achieve heightened engagement and interactivity and boost business results at a fraction of the current time and costs. In the third quarter, we started productizing this functionality by adding it into our video content management system in a new component called Kaltura Content Lab. We also showcased a beta version of our Gen AI offerings for Media and Telecom at the IBC 2024 conference in Amsterdam. Among the features presented to excited customers and prospects were AI-generated metadata enrichment, subtitles, dubbing, chaptering, highlights and content recommendations for live streaming, VOD assets and user-generated content. Over the next few quarters, we plan to further enhance Kaltura Content Lab and integrate it into our product portfolio, including streamlining with our other Gen AI developments, such as our transcription engine, quiz generator, sentiment analyzer, notification engine and Gen AI assistance for events. Our product leadership was recently recognized with the receipt of two additional industry awards, the Best Overall Event Management Solution Award in the 7th Annual International MarTech Breakthrough Award Program, and the Best Video Management Platform Award in the 2024 Digiday Technology Awards. We are pleased to have posted a record quarter across many topline and bottomline parameters. We continue to see both sequential and year-over-year growth in new subscription bookings and a growth retention rate that materially improves over last year, both resulting in an uptick in year-over-year subscription revenue growth. In addition, we saw continued expansion of our growth and net margins, as well as cash flow, leading us to forecast for the year a positive annual adjusted EBITDA and cash flow from operations for the first time since 2020. And we plan to continue expanding our growth margins, adjusted EBITDA margins and cash flow from operations in 2025 and beyond. In recent years, we and our entire industry have experienced strong downward pressure on bookings, retention and revenue growth that was induced by post-COVID and economic downturn headwinds. To that end, while we are not content with our slower revenue growth, we do appreciate the fact that, unlike many other companies in our industry, our quarterly subscription revenue always continues to grow year-over-year. And with the exception of only the third quarter of 2022, our year-over-year total revenue has also grown every quarter, despite the purposeful decline in our revenue from professional services in order to accelerate our deployment time and increase growth margins. In summary, we believe the tide is gradually turning on the industry and Kaltura, and the improved booking and retention trend we began to see in recent quarters will continue and strengthen in 2025 and beyond, fueled by renewed industry and macroeconomic tailwinds, as well as product enhancements like Gen AI that are expected to bring about further digital transformation and proliferation of video experiences. We are excited about the opportunities ahead, especially since we believe Kaltura’s flexible and extendable platform uniquely caters to the widest array of enterprise video experiences, while also providing the tightest integrations with our mission-critical workflows. We expect that as the market gradually recovers, customers will further accelerate the consolidation of their video needs around Kaltura to boost all of their employee and customer experiences across communication and collaboration, training, teaching and learning, marketing, sales and customer success, and entertainment and monetization. Kaltura’s single platform is designed to help our customers avoid unnecessary content and data silos, broken workflows, complexities and costs that can result from using many disparate point solutions and increase their productivity and AI-infused insights, engagement and business results. With that, I’ll turn it over to John, our CFO, to discuss our financial results in more detail. John?