VERI - NASDAQ

Welcome to the Veritone Inc. Preliminary Unaudited Fourth Quarter 2025 Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this event is being recorded. [Audio gap] I would now like to turn the conference over to Cate Goldsmith, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good afternoon. After the market closed today, Veritone issued a press release announcing its preliminary unaudited financial results for the fourth quarter and full year ended December 31, 2025. The press release is 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

Good afternoon. I'm excited to provide an update on our preliminary Q4 financial results, discuss the strategic deal announced today with Oracle and provide more strategic insight into some of our newer and exciting business opportunities, including our material progress with certain hyperscalers. Because we are discussing preliminary results, we will not hold a question-and-answer session following our prepared remarks today. Our preliminary Q4 results, which we [ first ] today have a fairly wide revenue range of between $18.1 million to $30 million. The range is almost entirely driven by a single transaction, which we completed and signed in Q4 2025. The transaction was a complex multiparty nonmonetary transaction, which included an on-prem sale of our aiWARE [indiscernible] and application software at a price of $12.9 million. In exchange, we received certain intangible rights and direct and preferred access to a significant number of customers who control a variety of digital data sets for future use in VDR and AI model training at a fixed revenue share of 50% which is a significant improvement over our current margin on VDR today. While the contracted price of the software was $12.9 million, from a pure GAAP accounting perspective, it is very challenging to arrive at the appropriate fair value of the sale as the realization of the data rights is prospective, considering the relatively new, albeit fast-growing market of data sales and VDR. As a result, the stand-alone selling price of the software could be discounted substantially from a revenue perspective. It is important to note that the $12.9 million price was included in our previous range of Q4 revenue guide, but it could end up in the lower end of this range, it is very binary. That said, we are actively working with internal and external resources to ensure the value is fairly reflected in our Q4 2025 results, which we expect will be completed by the time we file our 10-K. Irrespective of the final GAAP accounting conclusion, I would like to explain why this deal is so strategic for Veritone, and why we are confident that we will ultimately turn this $12.9 million face value active deal into something far greater. Veritone currently holds exclusive and nonexclusive rights and relationships to monetize some of the most valuable and iconic sports, entertainment, public safety and news data sets from content and IP owners, such as the NCAA, CBS News and other franchise customers. However, the demand for VDR-specific content has increased substantially, and the content demands have varied widely. We do not have universal access to unlimited amount of data suppliers under contract with Veritone today. Case in point, in fiscal 2025, we were forced to turn down more than $10 million worth of bona fide data orders because we could not source the volume or specific type of content or data in the time frames our hyperscaler and motor developer partners required. Hence, why this strategic deal is part of the solution going forward in addition to our normal business development efforts. As a result of this deal, we now have preferred access to potential VDR customers, who control more than 50 million hours of monetizable data sets today. To put this into perspective, the entire marquee catalog of the NCAA video library is less than 1% of this size. And just to cite one example of these new customers from this transaction, which we recently signed an agreement with is a major fast food franchisee to provide Veritone with access to their catalog of multi-camera video surveillance footage, data that is in high demand by hyperscalers for frontier and world model development. Our forecasts have conservatively estimated the overall library of data sets from this transaction for potential VDR customers could generate over $100 million in VDR revenue over the next 3 years. In addition, we have a fixed margin on this data that is significantly better than our historical VDR margin. While the corresponding revenue may ultimately recognize over time from an accounting perspective, we now have access to a significant amount of valuable data sets that can be monetized through our VDR platform with no upfront cash expenditure to obtain them. We expect to begin monetizing this data set as early as Q2 2026. I know I have spent a lot of time discussing this transaction, but we want our investors to have a detailed understanding of the situation as well as the significant opportunity. Next, and I am so excited about this, I would like to introduce and discuss the groundbreaking agreement we just announced with Oracle, a deal that has been in the works for almost a year. The Oracle deal is a multiyear strategic partnership to accelerate the deployment of Veritone's aiWARE platform, application and data services via the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI. With built-in and substantial financial cash incentives that allow Veritone to scale its cloud infrastructure at a more efficient cost for compute and storage. Under the terms of the agreement, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure will become the cornerstone of Veritone's next generation of AI solutions for commercial, public sector and high-growth Veritone data refinery markets. As the demand for scalable and secure AI infrastructure reaches unprecedented levels, Veritone will leverage OCI's high-performance AI super clusters to power its aiWARE platform and data solutions. This partnership ensures that Veritone's customer base can harness the transformative potential of AI with superior price performance, security and data sovereignty provided by Oracle's distributed cloud. Signing and collaborating with Oracle represents a pivotal milestone in Veritone's mission to help enterprises find their truth in their data, and Oracle's financial commitments in this partnership validate our leadership in managing unstructured data and our commitment to providing some of the most robust AI solutions in the market. By migrating critical workloads to OCI, we are unlocking new levels of scalability for Veritone data refinery and providing our public sector and commercial customers with the performance and security they require to stay ahead in an AI-driven world. Please check out the joint press release on our investor site to learn more. On to our core operating business. Over the past two years, we have been on a disciplined journey to realign Veritone around a singular clear vision, reestablishing aiWARE as the essential orchestration and intelligence layer for enterprise and public sector AI and unstructured data. Today, I am proud to announce that, that transformation of Veritone is complete. We have reshaped this organization into a focused platform-driven company, and we are now executing from a position of operational, financial and technical strength. In 2024, we started to reposition the company. In 2025, we validated that model, and today, we are no longer managing through a transition. We have exited non-core assets, we've simplified our operating structure and aligned our resources behind scalable, platform-driven revenue streams. We are now deploying capital, expanding our platform and driving the kind of operating leverage that defines the market leader. The most significant evidence of our progress is the Veritone data refinery or VDR and more importantly, those hyperscale leading customers that we are now serving. What began as a unique platform capability organically built has evolved into a scaled token production engine that is now powering the world's major hyperscalers and foundational model developers. Our strategy was to convert proprietary unstructured data sets into reoccurring revenue, and that strategy has been validated at the highest levels. We are now actively engaged with under contract to and generating revenue with all major players, including NVIDIA, Amazon, Google and Meta, among others. Now that we have increased our access and supply of rich data and have established contracts with all major hyperscalers, we see a clear opportunity to deepen and expand our engagement across each and every one of these partners. With hyperscalers expected to spend approximately $700 billion in combined CapEx in 2026 according to S&P, Veritone stands to capture an increasing share of that investment as a leading provider of clean, model-ready training data. On the supply side, we are effectively enabling enterprises to treat their unstructured audio video images and text as a renewable monetizable asset class to meet this AI demand. As previously discussed, it is imperative that we remain very focused and cost-efficient on data acquisition. On the VDR supply side, in addition to data sets now available to us as a result of the strategic transaction I detailed above, we continue to sign and expand our portfolio of available data sets through other channels as well as to improve our capabilities to refine, process and prepare those data sets for licensing, distribution and sales. Historically, the sales and representation process has been heavily dependent on business development and manual efforts, which, despite being effective, has limited our ability to significantly accelerate the acquisition and distribution of our data set offerings and portfolio. That changes I'm excited to follow on the announcement we did a couple of weeks ago about the launch of the Veritone data marketplace built on aiWARE. Veritone has officially taken the next step in evolution of the AI supply chain. Leaning into the data economy, we recently announced the launch of the Veritone data marketplace, a platform designed to improve and streamline the data ecosystem without compromising on control, transparency or quality. This marketplace is the essential partner to our Veritone data refinery. While VDR acts the tokenization engine that makes unstructured data AI-ready, VDM, the Veritone data marketplace serves as the trusted and accredited distribution hub, ensuring those assets are monetizable, transactional and governed. We are particularly excited about the value this brings to both sides of the data licensing market. Rights holders with valuable archives and data sets now has a clear path to monetization with complete asset control. Simultaneously, AI developers gain access to a deep catalog of proprietary data spanning industries from entertainment to human behavior to robotics. These data sets can even be evaluated for metadata density and model fit before acquisition, ensuring they are optimized for foundational architectures. Previously available only to a limited group of customers the Veritone data marketplace is now available for content owners and AI developers to accelerate responsible AI development. We are proud to lead the charge in sourcing high-quality data ethically and delivering it through a governed, transparent marketplace that meets the needs of the hyperscaler community. Our public sector division is starting to execute on all cylinders delivering a strong 68% year-over-year growth. This success is built on three clear strategic pillars: First, high-impact applications. Our Veritone iDERMS suite is revolutionizing productivity, enabling mission-critical workflows that simply aren't possible without Veritone. This has dramatically expanded our addressable market across SLED, higher education, Fed SIV and international agencies. Second, unmatched deployment flexibility. aiWARE and iDERMS are designed for the most sensitive environments. We meet the strictest security and sovereignty requirements, whether deployed in government cloud or completely network isolated airgap environments. And now with Oracle, we will take that to an even higher level of performance and security, both domestically and globally. And third, a true open architecture. Unlike many of our competitors, aiWARE is a completely open platform, our ability to ingest data at scale and connect with any application or data set without vendor walk-in makes us the infrastructure of choice for federal AI monetization and the Department of [indiscernible] AI First strategy. This foundation has led to deep integration within the Air Force OSI and the JPS Trust modernization program. With our pipeline at record levels, our Q4 wins, including a major U.S. University, a top 5 share of department and another major state highway patrol truly validates that we are a trusted AI partner for the public sector. In commercial enterprise, we have successfully operationalized our data to AI flywheel. By connecting proprietary supply or surging AI demand, we built a scalable architecture where volumes drive value. More data attracts more buyers, which directly fuels our margin expansion and relicensing efficiency. The results speak for themselves. In Q4, our licensing team executed 224 orders, growing nearly 10% over the prior year. Our reach is truly global, providing critical media assets to top-tier firms like Google and Goldman Sachs, major studios like NBCUniversal and premier sport entities, including ESPN, the NFL and Tom Brady's Religion of Sports. This momentum directly feeds our high-margin software business. Software deal volume grew 14% year-over-year to 33 deals in Q4. We are seeing a powerful combination of retention and expansion, renewing core partners like Sony Pictures and Summit Media, while simultaneously landing new accounts like Snap and deepening our relationships with prestigious events like the London Marathon and Augusta National Golf Club. I'm incredibly proud of our hire division, now rebranded as Broadbean by Veritone, which delivered yet another strong year. Despite macro hiring headwinds, Broadbean maintained and contributed robust profit margins critical to Veritone's overall growth and success. To appreciate the scale that our Broadbean division manages, in 2025, Broadbean distributed over 7.6 million unique jobs, powering more than 40 million unique job ads. The result, we drove an impressive 132 million engagements in application and clicks directly into our customers' ATS and recruitment systems. Every month, an average of 30,000 unique HR professionals rely on our software to manage their talent acquisition. Other highlights include our Global Media Services unit, achieving a record-breaking year with double-digit year-over-year net revenue growth. In fact, Q4 was our strongest on record, making the first time we crossed the $10 million threshold for media under management. We've carried that energy directly into 2026. I'm thrilled to announce a major SaaS win with the U.K.'s Department of Work and Pensions. This partnership establishes Veritone as a cornerstone of U.K. Government recruitment, as our software will now power job advertising for the Ministry of Justice, DEFRA and the home Office. Furthermore, our first year in the Workday Platinum Partner Program was a Triumph, securing 59 new deals, a 30% increase over the previous year. With an expanding pipeline of Fortune and Forbes Global 500 brands, we are just getting started. As we look ahead, we are preparing to unveil our next-generation job management modules and our groundbreaking angenticAI Broadbean framework. This isn't just an upgrade, we believe it's a productivity revolution, again, for our tens of thousands of monthly Broadbean users. Looking forward to 2026. As we enter the year, our focus is simple, disciplined scale. We are focused on converting our $50-plus million VDR pipeline into recognized reoccurring revenue and expanding our public sector deployments. We will continue to allocate capital towards platform expansion, and we'll continue to evaluate selective strategic opportunities and partnerships that strengthen our data and orchestration moat. Veritone has moved past the transition. We have the platform, the partners and the financial foundation to lead the AI-driven data economy. Thank you. Now I'd like to turn it over to our Chief Financial Officer, Mike

Thank you, Ryan. Given the preliminary nature of our financial results, I will only be discussing our guidance for fiscal 2026 today as well as a few balance sheet updates. Our software products and services revenue pipeline and long-term outlook continue to be at [indiscernible]. Specifically, we continue to see strong demand across commercial VDR and the public sector. In 2026, hyperscalers, including Google, Amazon, Meta, NVIDIA and others have individually forecast to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in fiscal 2026 to power their AI initiatives, including further investments into their large language models. According to Fortune Business Insight, the global AI training data set market size was valued around $3.6 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow from $4.4 billion in 2026 to $23.2 billion by 2034, a CAGR of 23%. From a model training perspective, we believe we are well positioned to exploit this potential revenue opportunity as more mature models are now investing heavily in rich video data, where we believe Veritone has a clear competitive advantage. As of today, our near-term sales pipeline in VDR alone is over 50 million and continues to grow. One of our most important learnings in 2025 was to expand the range of data set availability for our VDR customers and to improve the velocity to deploy these data sets. As Ryan mentioned, we have been able to secure millions of dollars of potential VDR revenue in fiscal 2025 simply due to the fact that we could not readily source the content requested by our VDR customers in a timely fashion. To address this in 2026, we will be focused on the most efficient and cost-effective ways to increase the supply of data, and we will also be investing in the engineering and product around VDR, including Veritone Marketplace, where our aim is to deepen our competitive moat with exclusive access to thousands of more data providers. As Ryan discussed, as a result of our Q4 strategic data set transaction, we now have access to customers who control more than 50 million hours of valuable video data sets, including with some of the largest retail, travel, entertainment and fast food providers in the world. We believe these near-term strategic decisions will enable us to continue to grow our VDR revenue in fiscal 2026 and beyond at or above the current 23% projected CAGR for spending on large language models through fiscal 2034. In the public sector, the TAM for digital evidence management solutions today exceeds $10 billion and is growing at double-digit rates. In fiscal 2026, we are targeting our public sector to grow between 60% to 70% year-over-year. This growth is forecasted to come from expanded offerings under existing federal contracts including those with the DLA and OSI and from new international deals across Western Europe. Collectively, our backlog and sales pipeline across our core AI platform is in excess of $200 million today. And as Veritone remains uniquely positioned to capture even more opportunity in the data as a currency market, we expect that pipeline and our potential to monetize our trove of tokenized audio and video content to increase further. On the OpEx side, we are forecasting relatively flat sales, marketing and G&A expenses in fiscal 2026 as compared to 2025 with forecasted spending across these areas as a percentage of total revenue expected to show improvements year-over-year. We are projecting research and development expenses to be slightly higher year-over-year on an absolute dollar basis, starting in Q1 and throughout fiscal 2026 as we continue to invest in our VDR and public sector revenue initiatives, including the Veritone marketplace and planned new software product features and enhancements in 2026. Note that consistent with 2025, we expect revenue to grow sequentially quarter-over-quarter in 2026 with Q1 2026 revenue approximating Q1 2025. This is partly driven by the public sector, where we see a higher revenue ramp starting late in the first half of 2026 from our existing larger federal deals, coupled with the timing of certain international contracts we expect to announce in the coming year. In addition and based upon the discussion and timing of certain VDR deals, including the signing of several large hyperscalers in late Q1 2026, we expect to see a more pronounced revenue ramp in VDR starting in Q2 and throughout the second half of 2026. The key risk to our revenue projections are the consumption-based nature of [ VDR ] coupled with the timing of government-based contracts and decision-making. In addition, the visibility into our VDR pipeline is typically 2 to 3 months in advance of delivery and decision-making on the nature and volume of content may change depending on the customers' need anticipated impact on its trading models. Given these factors, coupled with the complexity of government decision-making, especially during [ war ] time, we will only be providing financial guidance for the fiscal year 2026, which we plan to update on our next earnings call. More specifically, in fiscal 2026, we are expecting revenue to be at $130 million to $145 million, which at the midpoint represents a 47% increase year-over-year from the low end of our 2025 to eliminate financial range. We are expecting the public sector revenue to grow between 60% to 70% year-over-year and the remaining growth that comes from our commercial enterprise sector, predominantly from VDR. Our Veritone higher products and services are included in this growth, and we expect H1 to be flat to slightly down year-over-year given the current macroeconomic [ hire ] environment. Our managed services is expected to be up year-over-year by 10% to 15%, [indiscernible] due to the recent improvements we are seeing on the representation side of our business. We expect gross margins to fluctuate between 60% to 65%, driven by the forecasted mix of revenue in the period and non-GAAP net loss to be between $13.5 million to $22.5 million, which at the midpoint represents a 54% improvement year-over-year at the low end of our preliminary 2025 financial range. The change is reflective of the timing shifts in revenue, the previously discussed planned increase in research and development coupled with the compression in gross margins due to the mix of VDR in 2026. We believe we are still on the path to profitability, which is the earliest would be in Q4 2026 and is highly dependent on the planned compound growth of VDR in the public sector throughout fiscal 2026. Finally, I want to highlight several material improvements we have made to our balance sheet. In Q4, we retired 100% of our senior secured term debt and repurchased approximately 50% of our then outstanding convertible notes. This has resulted in a 90% reduction in our annual debt carry costs from roughly $14 million to just $800,000. We closed fiscal year 2025 with unencumbered cash and cash equivalents of $27.7 million, free of any restricted covenants. $45 million and 1.75% convertible debt and 92.6 million shares outstanding. We expect to provide a full financial release for Q4 and the full year 2025 once we finalize our fiscal 2025 results, which we expect to furnish when we file our 2025 annual report on Form 10-K. That concludes my prepared remarks. Ryan?

Thank you, everyone, for your time today. Veritone has come a long way in just a very few short quarters. Over the past two years, we have focused the business around aiWARE, our core platform, which powers really our entire corporate and product offering strategy. We are very excited about the scale that we are beginning to experience. For example, VDR has evolved in a true production engine, and we are engaged with all of the major hyperscalers, which is a tremendous accomplishment. The strategic data set transaction and our partnership with Oracle are additional proof points of our success, and they're expanding our access to high-value data and giving us the infrastructure to scale more efficiently going forward. As we move into 2026, we are focused on disciplined scale by converting our pipeline into revenue, expanding our data supply and continuing to build on the operating leverage we have created. We have the platform, the partners and the foundation in place. Now it's about execution and scaling into what we believe is a very large opportunity. Demand remains strong. Our pipeline continues to grow, and our engagement with hyperscalers is as strong as it has ever been. I appreciate everyone's time today, and we look forward to speaking with you next quarter. Thank you.