Kaltura (NASDAQ:KLTR) Q2 2021 Earnings Call

0:00 Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Kaltura second quarter 2021 earnings call. This call is being simultaneously webcast on the company's website in the investor section under events. For opening remarks and introductions, I'll now turn the call over to Erica Mannion at Sapphire Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

0:21 Thank you and good morning. With me today from Kaltura are Ron Yekutiel, co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer. and Yaron Gamazi, Chief Financial Officer. Ron will begin with a brief review of the business results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2021, and an overview of Kaltura. Yaron will then review the financial results for the second quarter, followed by the company's outlook for the third quarter and full year of 2021. We will then open the call for questions. Please note this call will include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. including but not limited to statements regarding Kaltura's future financial results and management's expectations and plans for the business.

1:08 These statements are neither promises nor guarantees and involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed here. Additional information that could cause actual results to differ from forward-looking statements can be found in the risk factors section of Kaltura's prospectus filed with the SEC on July 22, 2021 pursuant to Rule 424B and other periodic SEC filings, including the quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the period ended June 30, 2021 to be filed with the SEC. Any forward-looking statements made in this conference call, including responses to your questions, are based on current expectations as of today.

1:54 and Kaltura assumes no obligation to update or revise them, whether as a result of new developments or otherwise, except as required by law. All material contained in the webcast is the sole property and copyright of Kaltura, with all rights reserved. Please note, this presentation describes the non-GAAP measure adjusted EBITDA, which is not prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP. For a reconciliation of this non-GAAP financial measure to the most directly comparable GAAP metric, Please refer to our earnings release. Now, I'd like to turn the call over to Ron, co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer.

2:32 Thank you, Erica, and thanks to everyone for joining us on the call this morning. We're excited to report our first quarter as a public company. I want to start off this special call with a few quick acknowledgments and thanks. First, to our amazing team, employees, partners, and longtime shareholders, or as we call ourselves, culturians, for always dreaming big, for your unwavering dedication, passion, and resilience, and for your steadfast commitment to our founding values of openness, flexibility, and collaboration. Second, to our loyal customers, for your partnership, trust, and support. We look forward to continuing to videify the world with you, as they say in the Olympics, faster, higher, and stronger together. And lastly, and most importantly, to our new shareholders, Thank you for your vote of confidence. We're excited to have you join our extended family.

3:26 Our journey to power any video experience for any organization has only just begun. We are all energized and thrilled to enter this new chapter and strongly believe that the best is very much ahead of us. I'll start this morning with just a few opening financial highlights from the second quarter. Then because it is our first earning call, I want to take some time to provide an overview of our business. and Market Opportunity, as many of you may be used to the Cultura story. After which, I'll provide more details on the passing quarter and the road ahead. We reported a very strong second quarter fueled by robust bookings, selfless productivity and net dollar retention rate. Our revenue for the quarter was 41.6 million, up 45% year over year.

4:13 Subscription revenue for the quarter reached 36.5 million, an increase of 46% from the prior year. and represented 88% of total revenue. Our annual recurring revenue run rates grew to 145.4 million, up 46% year-over-year, and our net dollar retention rate continued to increase to 121%, up from 105% one year ago. We're very excited about the results of the passing quarter, but before I share more details about it and the road ahead, for the benefit of those for you to filter out, I want to quickly provide a summary of our business and why we believe the best is yet to come. If you participated in major virtual events in the past year, it was possibly conducted using KOTORA. If you're studying in a university or have graduated from one in the last decade, you may have used KOTORA when you created or consumed videos in class or remotely.

5:09 If you work at any large organization, you also possibly watched internal videos in town halls and have engaged your customers with videos using KOTORA. If you are a TV subscriber of a major PTV provider like Vodafone, you may have also watched your favorite series using KOTURA. Video is everywhere, and increasingly, so is KOTURA. We started KOTURA in 2006 when online video was just in its infancy and embarked on a mission to build a single, open, and flexible platform that would power any video experience for any organization. Over the years, we've built a robust video experience cloud that includes live, real-time, and on-demand video products, solutions, and developer tools for organizations that drive today communication, collaboration, learning, and entertainment for many millions of people at home, work, and school.

6:05 More specifically, we are recognized as the leading vendor in the enterprise video content management market, offering a broad set of products and capabilities for on-demand and live, both for web and TV solutions. And in 2020, we expanded into the real-time conferencing space, focusing primarily on experiences that require both real-time conferencing as well as advanced live and on-demand content management capabilities. Our video experience cloud today is comprised of the following three components. First, a set of media services that include hundreds of video APIs, for on-demand, live and real-time video, developer tools, and video and TV content management systems. We license these media services to tech companies that want to add video workflows to their own products. We also built all of our own products and solutions at Kaltura on top of these same media services and APIs, which make all of our offerings very flexible, interoperable, and easy to customize and integrate with, avoiding traditional silos and redundancies.

7:11 This modularity also fuels a rapid pace of innovation. Second, on-demand, live, and real-time video products that cater to all industries, powering both the internal video needs of organizations with our employees, as well as their external needs with our customers, partners, and prospects. Our products include a video portal, a system for panels, a system for sending video messages, and ever since we've added real-time conferencing last year, also offerings for webinars and virtual events. Third, industry-specific video solutions currently catering to two markets, education and media and telecom. We offer video solutions that power in-class and remote teaching and learning for education institutions.

7:57 This includes a video extension for all popular learning management systems, a lecture capture solution to record or stream live lectures, and starting from 2020, also a virtual classroom solution for remote and hybrid teaching and learning. We also offer media and telecommunications companies a platform to launch and manage their cloud-based, over-the-top TV service, including live, on-demand and catch-up TV, both subscription-based and ad-based. As of June 30, 2021, we have over 1,000 customers across four markets. Three of them, enterprise education and technology, are reported together as a unified segment, and the fourth, Media and Telecom, is reported as a second separate segment.

8:42 Among these customers are 25 of the U.S. Fortune 100, more than 50% of the top U.S. research educational institutions, including seven of the eight Ivy League schools, and we power more than 15 major cloud TV initiatives for large media and telecom companies around the world. We sell our solutions primarily through direct sales teams and account teams, that are also organized based on these four customer markets. Today, we have invested primarily in increasing the scope and depth of our offering. At the same time, we've accelerated our year-over-year revenue growth from 12% in 2018 to 18% in 2019 and 24% in 2020. And from 17% in the first quarter of 2020 to 46% in the first quarter of 2021 and now 45% for the second quarter of 2021.

9:34 Up from 21% in the second quarter of 2020. We accomplished this acceleration without materially increasing our sales and marketing spend over 2019 and 2020. In the fourth quarter of 2020, we began investing significantly in sales and marketing expenses to drive revenue growth, and we expect this trend to continue for the foreseeable future. Our revenue acceleration to date was achieved primarily through growing our sales efficiency and net dollar retention rate metrics. We estimate that during 2018, 2019, 2020, and the first quarter of 2021, the lifetime value of our customers exceeded 5, 7, 11, and again 11 times the cost of acquiring them. Our net dollar retention rate grew from 105% in 2019,207 in 2020,216% in the first quarter of 2021, and now in the second quarter of 2021, it continues growing to 121%.

10:33 The rise of both metrics is attributed to increased demand into a growing average ARR per customer, which is fueled by increased consumption levels and a growing number of offerings purchased by each customer. To that end, to date, half of our customers have purchased three or more of our offerings and use them for a range of use cases across organizations. As we look into the future, all of us at Kaltura are more excited than ever We're finally accelerating our investment in sales and marketing at the heels of established leadership across several large markets, attractive unit economics, and proven operational efficiency. We only recently started commercializing our new and exciting products and solutions from 2020, including webinars, virtual events, and virtual classrooms, and we plan to continue to create innovative products and solutions for our customers.

11:26 We're also planning to go downmarket and cater to smaller customers, including SMEs with new self-serve and low-touch products for companies and developers, and to do so with the support of new channel distribution partners. We have many growth drivers, and our opportunity is large and timely. This brings me back to the second quarter of 2021. I would like to give you some more color on what we've done in the past quarter from a go-to-market and technology development perspective, what development we plan to do next, and how we currently see our growth engine. First, from a go-to-market perspective, this was another great quarter. We once again saw strong traction, robust bookings and retention, and an increase of our average ARR per customer. On the enterprise front, Totara continues to position itself as the go-to platform for high-stakes virtual events.

12:19 We sold our new virtual event product to large organizations, including Fortune 500 companies, and delivered major events around the world during the quarter. some including over 100,000 registrants. We also had initial virtual event customers renew their contracts and extend them for additional events. While on the topic, I'm delighted to announce today the upcoming launch of a new KOTURA-led industry event in the field of virtual and hybrid events. It is called Virtually Live by KOTURA and it will take place virtually this November 9th. Virtually Live will focus on the transformation of live Virtual, Unified, and Hybrid Events, and now they've changed forever, transforming the marketing funnel.

13:04 We're expecting marketeers, business leaders, and market leaders to join up to reimagine how events would look like in the years to come. We will deliver the events on Cultura's virtual event platform, which has hosted some of the tech industry's biggest events this year. Beyond virtual events, video messaging continues to gain popularity in the enterprise markets. with the major financial institutions transitioning to video-based communication with its customers using our video messaging product. We're also seeing more global companies switch over to our virtual classroom solution from other virtual learning platforms, including one of the major consulting firms. And most of our customers continue to purchase multiple offerings, so all of our enterprise products remain very much in demand.

13:52 Education institutions are continuing to grow their dependence on video for learning, both real-time and on-demand, and we're continuing to strengthen our position as the central media repository for educational institutions. Our tech customers that are embedding our media services in their own platforms have continued to grow their usage materially, and this remained the highest contributor to our net dollar retention rate. In media and telecom, we continue to broaden the footprint of our Cloud TV platforms, This quarter, our longtime customer Vodafone lost their Kultura-powered Vodafone TV service in Germany, their largest TV market. Also, in Q2, we closed an important deal to power cloud TV for a large telecom company in France.

14:38 Second, from a technology innovation perspective, we continued with our fast pace of innovation this past quarter across our live, real-time, and on-demand stacks with a focus of driving convergence across On live, we've finished migrating our customers to our newly built modernized live streaming cloud infrastructure that is based on a new, powerful, cultural live streaming engine.

15:03 It provides broadcast quality, live playback, user engagement, and real-time analytics, and addresses growing scale in viewer concurrency.

15:13 It is ideally suited to power large, high-stakes virtual events and cloud TV initiatives. We've also added a set of new capabilities for Simulive experiences that allow our customers to pre-record content and simulate a live broadcast, relieving much of the stress that accompanies live production. Simulive has been in very high demand in past months, especially for virtual events of all types, and remains an important area of investment for us. On VOD, we released a new Kaltura plugin for Zoom customers, allowing hundreds of joint customers to better manage Zoom recordings on Kaltura. We upgraded management capabilities both within Kaltura and in Zoom, and have automated certain flows for our education customers that use our video solutions for learning management systems. On real-time conferencing, we upgraded our virtual classroom and webinar products with more advanced content management capabilities for breakout rooms.

16:11 and also added interactive advanced functionalities for simple real-time polls. I'd also like to highlight several new partners that have joined our tech partner marketplace, which includes more than 125 companies, further extending our core capabilities and adding value to customers. I'd like to welcome B.Live, a live studio platform, iDubu, an automated video personalization platform, and Pigeonhole, and advanced communication tool for virtual and hybrid events. A few words about our plan for technology innovation going forward. On the media services side, we plan to continue and invest heavily in our real-time video infrastructure, which is the most recent addition to our technology stack.

16:56 For the users of our on-demand experiences, we're investing in enhanced editing and personalization tools. We also started our journey towards hosting our platform on multiple clouds, to facilitate strategic partnerships with several cloud players. Lastly, we're building the infrastructure for self-serve purchasing for media services to cater beyond large tech customers, also to tech startups and to the broader developer community. On the cross-industry product side, we plan to continue investing heavily in our virtual events platform and to combine our advanced branding capabilities that are ideally suited for bigger companies with more self-serve, templatized event management capabilities that are better suited for smaller companies and events. We'll also utilize our infrastructure for self-serve purchasing to launch several self-serve products that cater to specific departments and also to SMEs.

17:48 For the education market, as well as for learning and training use cases in the enterprise, we're building a new infrastructure to easily create and edit interactive, personalized videos to facilitate personalized learning and engagement paths. And for media companies, We're putting together a more simplified end-to-end version of our robust offering for telcos designed to allow them to launch advertising or subscription-based direct-to-consumer services in a matter of weeks instead of months, including the same or even more features offered by global streaming services and without the need to procure individual tech stack components. Third and last, how we currently see our growth engines. We're on track with increasing our S&M spend and ramping up new sales and customer success reps. We should start contributing in the second half of this year, and the average productivity of our sales team so far remains as planned.

18:42 As discussed, we're seeing good traction and a growing demand for our new products and solution releases of 2020. We've made good progress in growing our R&D spend, and we're starting to develop a new set of products and solutions, including those that will enable us to go down market and cater to small organizations. In summary, another great quarter behind us across all of our markets and a strong outlook for the rest of the year. With that, I'll turn it over to Yaron, our CFO, to discuss our financial results in more detail.

19:13 Yaron. Thank you, Ron, and good morning, everyone. As I review the second quarter results today, please know that I will be referring to a non-GAAP metrics. A reconciliation of gap to non-gap financials, including today's earnings release, which is available on our website. Given that this is our first call as a public company, I want to start sharing some perspectives about our business model, our financial profile. Then I will walk through highlights from our second quarter. And finally, I will close with the guidance for the third quarter and the full year before we open up the call for questions. As Ron mentioned, we organize our business in two reportable segments, Enterprise Education and Technology, or EEP, and Media and Telecom, or NMP. This segment shares a common underlying platform consistent of our API-based architecture, as well as the unified product development, operation, and administrative resources.

20:12 Our E&P segment includes revenue from all our products, industry solutions for education customers, and media services, except for media services to telecom customers, as well as associated professional services for both offerings. Subscription revenue are primarily generated at the per full-time equivalent basis for on-demand and live products and solutions, per off-basis for real-time and conferences products and solutions, and participants basis for the virtual event product. Contracts are generally 12 to 24 months in length and the average implementation time range from three to six months. Our segment include revenue from the TV solution and media services for media and telecom customers as well as associated professional services for those offerings. Revenue are generated on an on-prem and subscribe basis for telecom customers On a per video play basis for immediate customers, contract generally two to five years in length and average implementation time is range from nine to 12 months. Generally speaking, our MLP solution requires greater upfront resources for implementation resulting in a longer period of initial booking to go live and higher proportion of professional services revenue as a percentage of overall revenue.

21:38 A higher proportion of revenue comprises private cloud and on-premise deployment, which impacts our growth margin. In the long term, we expect the growth margin for the M&P segment to improve due to a lower mix of professional service revenue, improve efficiency of both production and professional services costs, and increase in the portion of revenue for media customers, which generally entails simpler deployment compared to telecom customers. From a go-to-go market standpoint, a large majority of revenue comes from existing customers with whom we are in active dialogue and tend to have a visibility into their expected usage of our offering. We focus our sales and marketing efforts on large organizations and sell our solutions primarily through direct sales teams and accounts teams.

22:30 We currently have a direct sales team grouped by offering type of large customers and we leverage our research relationship globally to help market and sell our products to customers worldwide, especially in areas which we have a limited presence. Moving to our quarterly financial results, total revenue for the second quarter ended June 30th, 2021 was 41.6 million, up 45% year-over-year. Subscription revenue was 36.5, up 46% year-over-year. while professional services revenue contributed 5.1 million, up 36% year-over-year. Remaining performance obligations were 156.3 million, up 34% year-over-year, of which we expect to recognize 65% of the revenue over the next 12 months. Annual retirement revenue was 145.4 million, up 46% year-over-year.

23:32 Revenue benefited from continued strong booking, level, and acceleration of medulla retention rate, which was 121% in the second quarter, compared to 105% in Q2 2020. Within our EAP segment, total revenue was 30.2 million, up 61% year-over-year. Subscription revenue was 27.2 million, up 53% year-over-year. while professional services revenue contributed 3 million, up 195% year-over-year. Within M&T segment, the total revenue was 11.4 million, 14% year-over-year. Subscription revenue was 9.3 million, up 28% year-over-year, while professional service revenue contributed 2.1 million, down 24% year-over-year.

24:26 Gross profits in the quarter was 26 million, representing a gross margin of 62%, which equal to the gross margin of Q2 2020. R&D expenses was 11.8 million, 28% of revenue, compared to 23% in Q2 2020. The increase was driven by additional ad count and payroll expenses, and we continue to invest in technology and innovation. Sales and marketing expenses were 10.5 million, 25% of revenue, compared to 23% in Q2 2020. This increase was driven by additional sales and marketing investment, including ad count and personal related expenses. We intend to continue to invest in sales and marketing as we extend our sales force and marketing efforts to leverage our position in the market and to capture significant opportunity in front of us. G&E expenses were 9.4 million, or 23% of revenue compared to 13% in Q2 2020, G&A reflects an increase in headcount and payroll expenses.

25:35 The up net loss in the quarter was 2.7 million or 0.37 per diluted share. Adjusted EBITDA was negative 1 million, decreasing from 3.3 million in Q2 2020. This results in a line with our plan to increase our spend in order to further fuel growth as discussed earlier. Turning to the balance sheet and cash flow, we ended the quarter with 29.8 million in cash and short-term investment. Net cash provided by operating activity was 0.9 million in the quarter. I would now like to turn to the outlook for the third quarter and the full year of 2021. For the third quarter, we expect revenue of 141.5 million.

26:21 and many more. In summary, our strong new business pipeline accelerated the net dollar retention rate and after a long time also a significant increase of our sales and marketing resources will enable us to continue and support a robust return on revenue growth rate. With that, we'll open the call for questions. Operator? Thank you. At this time, we'll be conducting a question and answer session.

27:08 If you'd like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 if you'd like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. In the interest of time, we ask that you each keep to one question and one follow-up. Our first question comes from the line of Daniel Bardus with Bank of America. Please proceed with your question.

27:40 Great. Hey, guys. Congrats again on the IPO and thanks for taking the question here. First, I wanted to ask about the EET strength. It sounded like you're certainly seeing broad demand, but can you help us understand what's driving that strong growth a little bit more by maybe ranking which products are driving it most in 2Q there?

28:05 Sure, Dan. Thank you for joining, and thank you, everybody else, for your time here again. Broadly, it's been a record new booking quarter for us. Previous record was Q1 2021. Strong contribution came across all markets. We had a similar contribution to bookings, by the way, between new logos and upsells. For E&T bookings specifically, a significant part of our deals in the first half of the year and the second quarter were for new products, virtual events, webinars, virtual classrooms, along with town halls, the majority of our new business. supported live and RTC experiences. So to remind you, this is something we started last year. And we're also, you know, the town hall had been there for a while, but all the new ones have added. And now the fact that this is half of our business for EET is quite significant. Our upsells were balanced between acquisition of more products in line with our multi-product per customer approach.

28:57 We had also an increase in the number of licenses during consumption usage. I'd say it was generally 50-50. On a geo basis, Again, ENT deals were mainly North America and M&T deals were mainly in EMEA. There's also an increase in the percent of booking from channels, which we expect to see more throughout the year. One small interesting note is that we started seeing a reduction, as expected, of the percent of professional services bookings from Total Bookings. That's both, by the way, in ENT and in M&T. That's because of what we expected to see as increased productization and The trend is also starting to affect revenue, in fact, as well. Our pool remains strong like it was before. Pipeline remains strong. We're absolutely en route to having a great strong year. Maybe, Errol, you want to add a bit how this affects revenue and EET and maybe also MMT? Go ahead.

29:50 Yeah. Thank you, Ron, and Danny, thank you for joining me for the question. Yeah, obviously, as Ron mentioned, we see the growth coming across the board from all segments. By the way, it's not just EINP that's growing very nicely. We are not showing booking number, but I can tell you that also in the M&P, we saw a very significant booking momentum going into this quarter. Actually, the booking that we had for this quarter was basically equal to the same booking that we had last year for this quarter. So down the year, you will probably see a very nice catch-up in terms of the revenue coming also from this segment. The other trend, which is very important, as Ron mentioned, is professional services as a percentage of revenue is going down. So the acceleration that we see in revenue, both in media and telecom, and in enterprise education and tech OEM, is accelerating very nicely, especially in recurring revenue.

30:50 Maybe one couple last points. Is the fastest-growing revenue growing with tech OEM, followed by enterprise, then EDU, then media and telecom? and then lastly and you know you're almost referring to media and telecom was the only market that was growing under 30% but as mentioned now it's kind of rebounding because of significant booking and post-COVID for media and telecom and so we expect that to pull off strongly into the future. Does that answer your question Dan?

31:19 Yeah certainly yeah thanks for all that color guys and then This is a follow-up maybe for either of you. I wanted to ask about net retention rate a little bit because that's improving nicely here too. Just curious at a high level with all your new products, where do you think the net retention rate could go from here? And maybe more specifically, Yaron, what do you have baked in your second half guidance for net retention rate? Thanks.

31:46 Yeah, let me kick it off and then pass it over to Yaron. I'll say a general statement about retention rate. In the second quarter, we had about a quarter of our yearly renewals, and we had even better growth retention rates. We're not reporting on them, but just to understand that even Q1 and last year, Q2 last year, they continue to be best in class for the enterprise industry. So unit churn is also very low, similar to our dollar churn, and gross churn of our U2020 cohorts of customers was not different than the other cohorts before. So a lot of what's fueling us forward is Upsells, but also bearing in mind that the gross retention is looking really, really good. Liron, you want to talk about a net dollar retention rate?

32:28 Yeah, a few more comments on the net dollar retention rate. So, first of all, it was growing very nicely this quarter, as you mentioned, to 121% from 116% last quarter. And just to remind us, the two years before, it was 105% and 107%. The growth and the acceleration we see across the board. We are not breaking up and we will not be providing guidance into the net dollar retention rate for the future. But I can tell you that we see that growth in usage and user is coming mostly for media and telecom and tech OEM. Upsell from enterprise and education with the introduction of the new product is coming across the board. And you expect to see accelerating going forward. We will not be sharing specific guidance for the numbers going forward for the net dollar retention rate, but I can tell you that the momentum that we see is very strong and we feel comfortable in this number going into the next two quarters of the year.

33:31 Yeah, one last comment I'd say is that we've reported on continued increase in the average revenue per customer. It grew by another 27% year-over-year, and that's fueled both by new and exciting and big products that we're adding and people are Thanks, Dan, for the questions. All right. Thanks, guys. Very

33:57 helpful. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Michael Turin with Wells Fargo Security. Please proceed with your question.

34:09 Hey there. Thanks. Good morning. The Q2 metrics continue to accelerate the outlook you're providing. does suggest a bit of a slowdown in terms of growth rate, especially heading into Q4. Is there any commentary you can provide around just the overall approach to guidance, how much conservatism, if any, is built into that second half outlook? I know Ron mentioned some of the investments you're making should start to ramp at the back half as well. I'm just wondering if those could present upside potential or just anything else you can provide in terms of the outlook and color around that. Thank you.

34:42 Thank you, Mike. I'll let Yaron start off, and maybe I'll add a few points after.

34:46 Go ahead, Yaron. Yeah, obviously, you saw the guidance and the numbers that we have provided for the quarter. You are right that the second part of the year, there is a deceleration in the growth rate. By the way, it's much slower trend than what we expected to see, so numbers are better than what we expected in terms of the deceleration. The growth that we provided for this year is roughly 36% for the overall company. So the full year, we obviously started the two quarters with around 45%. So you can see that there is some kind of deceleration the second part of the year as we expected it to be. But few points that are very important. First of all, if you look on the blended between recurring and non-recurring revenue that we had in Q4 last year, which impact the growth rate, the basis for the growth rate of this year, You will see that a major part of the increase in Q4 last year was related to non-recurring revenue.

35:46 Actually, 18% of the revenue was non-recurring. If you look on the trend going into the first half of the year, right now, the non-recurring revenue, the professional services revenue is just 13%. We believe that this trend will continue into the rest of the year. So basically, if you do the math in terms of What's going to be the growth rate of the recurring revenue part of direct business? You will see that it's definitely not decelerating as the overall company, and it's going to get very close to the overall growth rate of the company. So if we take out of the equation the non-recurring revenue, definitely the deceleration is much, much slower, smaller, and it's way better than what we expected.

36:37 and the main reason that it's way better is the booking and the churn rate that we face during Q1 and Q2. So to make a long story short, it's very important that you look on the trends of the return revenue and it's definitely getting to the overall, very close to the overall growth rate of the company, which right now, as I mentioned, is in the 36%. And the most important part, as Ron mentioned before, We are increasing the investment in sales and marketing and the fruits of the new products that we are starting to see. As Ron mentioned, it's very important, but Ron, you can probably highlight more.

37:18 Sure, happy to do that, and thanks again for the question. So, look, the expected flow of Q3, Q4 was there all the way from the beginning. It's a model that's mainly because we're comparing post-COVID versus post-COVID. Obviously, in the first half of the year, we got all the bumps from COVID. and as we advance, that's affecting us. But it's not just because of COVID. As you know, for years, we've maintained our sales and marketing spend the same way. The improvement was done mainly because of the food deficiency. Remember, the up to data packs went from 5 to 7 to 11. We made that 11. If it's not continuing to grow, then efficiencies are as is. And what you're waiting is for more salespeople to come around. So, this is what's starting to happen. We started increasing our number of salespeople at the end of last year, the beginning of this year. They're mainly coming up and ramping up at the second half of this year.

38:04 It's not just the time that it takes for them to ramp up. It's then the customers and then the gradual recognition of subscription revenue. It's all that's going to mainly contribute to 2022 into next year. So that's quite significant. And if you look at the longer term, other than the next couple of quarters and other than the ramp up in salespeople, that's the most important one. We expect the increase in activities with channels and strategic partners, which are going to support the growth. We're seeing the great traction of our new products, and we just started scratching the surface with this. virtual events, webinars, virtual classrooms. As I mentioned earlier, they're a big part of what we're selling right now. It's just the beginning. And we're developing a new set of products and solutions going down market to self-serve and low-touch, and that's going to enable us to go faster as well. So a lot of things are really going well.

38:49 Yeah, and one main point regarding the guidance that we provided. Obviously, we provided the guidance that we need for the rest of the quarter, but we will work very hard to try to beat those numbers.

39:04 That's great detail. Very helpful. Thank you.

39:07 Well, thank you, Mike. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Matt Nicknam with Deutsche Bank. Please proceed with your question.

39:18 Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the question. Congrats as well on the IPO. I had a question about demand. And I think, Ron, you may have alluded to this a little bit, but maybe if you can expound. We've heard some peers starting to talk about moderation or sort of right-sizing of demand in recent weeks. maybe as they start to lapse from the peak initial benefits from COVID last year. I'm just wondering if you can comment on whether you've seen anything similar across any of your core verticals. And then maybe as a follow-up there, with the proliferation of the Delta variant, I'm wondering if that's had any meaningful effect or change on customer demand in more recent weeks. Thanks.

40:00 Thanks for the question, Matt. So we have not seen a slowdown in demand. One thing to remember for us as a company, we're a very horizontal company addressing a lot of different markets between enterprise, education, media and telecom, tech OEM, embedded, all these different things. And also that we've not been one of these companies that have pumped up during COVID because of consumption and usage and have then come flying down. If you remember last year, we spoke a lot about the fact that we have FTE-based pricing versus usage and the fact that the growth was not picked up by consumption. If any, our gross margins were pushed down because of that. So, if any, what we're seeing is maybe slightly less consumption levels, which are starting to improve our gross margins. We can talk more about that. But we're not seeing in our pipeline a softening of the demand.

40:48 Because we have also all these new products that are very exciting that we started adding late last year, we're seeing a lot of demand for these products, which we didn't cater to before in the last few years. And so maybe it's hiding some undercurrent of what generally people want. But where we are in the market right now, we're seeing a lot of growth. As for Delta, we don't see a lot of that impact. And I think the reason is that we're good either way. I mean, definitely we're supportive of Delta. remote work and of remote teaching and learning. But the underlying trends for which we power our customers have been there for the longest time and they're continuing. I'm going to give you a couple of examples. And teaching and learning, it's not just about people staying at home and learning. It's about the continued trend of what's called the flipped classroom, where people might be coming back to school in order to do their homework together with their teachers and trainers, but they're going to stay home in order to listen to the lectures.

41:44 We definitely see a lot of these trends continuing. We're seeing strong renewals as well. That's very encouraging. In the last few weeks, there were a lot of renewals for virtual events for both virtual and hybrid. Even those that I've been considering to have physical events are wanting to have back-to-back virtual events. The reason for that is they see that as a lifelong tool for engaging their customers and communities. It's replacing the historical way of doing marketing. It's not just Instead of the physical, it's an addition. So the short answer is, at this point, we're not seeing any softening. Does that address your question, Matt?

42:20 It does. And if I could just throw in one last follow-up. You know, you talked about the potential for maybe some moderating consumption, which actually is a tailwind to your gross margins. And then also in the commentary, you spoke a little bit about how professional services may be moving lower as a percent of total revenue. So collectively, those seem like dual purposes. I'm just wondering, I guess, bigger picture, how does that, if at all, affect the roadmap or visibility towards a return to profitability over the next couple of years?

42:54 Yeah, maybe this is a good chance for Yaron to talk a bit about gross margin. I'll tell out a few things, but let's talk about gross margin. Go ahead, Yaron.

43:01 Yeah, obviously, you saw that gross margin for the quarter was 62%, which is a significant It's even better than what we had in Q1 this year. If you look on some of the challenges that we saw in the beginning of the year or even the end of last year due to the fact that we had to move to our public cloud, all of it is behind us. So in many cases, we came back all the way to the gross margin that we had before COVID. We saw it both in enterprise education and talk OEMs. and also in media and telecom. Actually, in media and telecom, we see a very nice improvement in gross margin, even in most significant phase going forward.

43:47 And this is even before the big change, as you mentioned, that the portion of non-return revenue is decreasing definitely at the first part of the year, and we believe that this trend will continue into the future. So if you take the overall profile of the gross margin, We do see a scenario that it's definitely balanced itself to the level that we were before COVID. For the short term, we are not providing any guidance on growth margin, but we do not expect it to go much lower below the level that it is right now. And for the midterm, definitely it's going to improve. And for some of the reasons that you mentioned, especially the fact that we are reducing the portion of the non-recurring revenue going forward, and we are continuing to optimize our system.

44:39 So to make a long story short, definitely we see a very balanced situation of the gross margin. It's not going below the 60% as we had some pressure before. And down the road, we will see a scenario that will improve. It's definitely a trend that will help us to improve the overall gross margin and take us back to profitability. We are not changing the view of the need and the long-term profitability to come back to a run rate of profitability in the next couple of years. It's still the plan. Obviously, we will monitor it very carefully as we are adjusting our expense base and we are investing so much to fuel our growth, but definitely the overall plan didn't change to take the company to profitability.

45:31 Thank you, Ron. I'll just say that Our current 62% consolidated gross margin is not too far from our pre-pandemic consolidated in 2019, which was 63%. And we did have a quarter of a quarter improvement in our subscription gross margin because of everything that was said, the move through AWS and the consumption levels that are somewhat coming down. But we're still lower than the pre-pandemic subscription GM, not a median telecom, which improved across everything, both the ratio of and the subscription GM is much better. But in ENT, it's still because of the heavier weight of all the accumulated pandemic storage and some of the consumption, we think it's still going to improve. And with that improvement in ratio of professional services versus recurring revenue, it's going to continue to help us.

46:20 And that's both in ENT. If you look at virtual events, the first ones required a lot more professional services than the ones that we're doing now, and definitely the ones we're going to do in the future. So in the longer term, Everything is going to scale towards the same directions that we spoke about in recent weeks and months, and we're optimistic on the growth of the gross margin. Thanks again for the question. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of DJ Hines with Canaccord Annuity. Please proceed with your question.

46:49 Hey, guys. Congrats on the IPO, and nice start here. Ron, I was hoping you could talk a little bit about the ad-deck market and where they are in terms of buying cycles. I would have thought that A lot of higher ed and even K-12 buyers would evade their video bets last year during the pandemic. So wondering if there's any risk that sets us up for softness in the vertical over the next couple of buying cycles. Can you just talk about that dynamic and what you're seeing in that market?

47:16 Happy to do that. So as you know, we power half of the R1 schools in the U.S., including seven of the eight Ivy League schools. And we've been for years the leading video content management system that runs and manages everything video in all these different schools. Throughout the years, we've started to go downmarket. Part of what we're doing now is moving deeper into K-12 schools and more government deals that are taking full countries and full regions. And I'd say more generally, we have moved, as you know, from VOD live to RTC and would be in addition of our virtual classroom product are in a wonderful place to consolidate the full stack between on-demand live and real time. and that's something we hadn't had to date. This started at the end of last year. It's starting now to get into what we do in 2021. We're seeing the initial acquisitions of these products that integrated all together.

48:03 Now, to be clear, we are integrated into Zoom and into Teams and into all the RTC providers and we've actually launched this quarter of better integration with some of these so that enables us to provide even more value for those that are using Zoom or Teams for the virtual classroom elements. But the alternative that we offer now that enables everything to connect to the gradebook and to the LMS and to have a continuous solution from on-demand, live and real-time is really, really attractive. So I think that some schools have put a patch, but as you look into the future, they're not looking at just adding remote people, but truly disrupting how education is done in this post-COVID world. And they're not just interested in piecemeal solutions, but a full end-to-end remote solution for on-demand, live and real-time. and Kaltura is in a wonderful place to do that.

48:49 So whether it is increasing wallet share through real time with existing universities or going down market to K-12 and going global, we still have a lot of juice to go with education.

49:00 Got it. Yep, that makes sense.

49:01 And then maybe as a follow-up, I want to ask a little bit about the strategy with your meeting solutions, right? I think investors hear that category and they immediately think, oh my God, Zoom, Teams, Meet, like how is Kaltura differentiated in this space, right? Is it really about kind of wrapping the rest of the portfolio around it. Maybe you could just talk a little bit about that. Thank you.

49:20 Sure. So first of all, we're not really selling at this point aggressively for the collaboration and communication use case for RTC or Ergo going after Zoomer teams. The RTC is in addition to our learning and development internally for training with a virtual classroom for schools. It's also externally with webinars and definitely as a piece of our solutions for marketing integrated into and the virtual events platform and other events that we offer. So, the power of Kaltura is a consolidation integration between VOD live and RTC, not standalone RTC. So, will you see us in the near future selling to consumer or SMB or regular large even enterprise the pure play meeting solution? Less so. In the future, could that happen? It might. One of the things that we're seeing is that people definitely on the larger enterprise are consolidating for one vendor that addresses all their video needs to avoid silos and to be able to have less redundancies.

50:12 And Kaltura is the number one player that does that. But we're also, like I said, integrated into all the other players. And we're the video content management platform that brings together even Zoom and Teams. And a lot of these places where they have one or both, they'd like to have it all managed in one place and definitely also integrated outside of the scope of, for example, Microsoft products. And so the short answer is not direct competition, definitely not SMB and consumer with Zoom and Teams. Absolutely, as it pertains to integrated workflows for learning, marketing, and events, and larger enterprise, and integrated and consolidating all the different use cases to one platform. Does that address your question, DJ? Yes, thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Steve Enders with KeyBank Capital Markets. Please proceed with your question.

51:00 Okay, great. Thanks for taking the question here. I think you mentioned in the script that the channel was improving as a mix and helping drive some bookings there. Just wondering what you would attribute the strength of channel partners as part of that, and how are the cloud providers ramping as a partner for you at this point?

51:24 Yeah, happy to answer that question, Steve. Thanks again for your time. So channels for years have been kind of the mid-single-digit, high-single-digit part of our new bookings, I'd say, and are now starting to ramp up to be a more significant contributor to that. Part of the issue was how self-serve or low-touch our products are, right? When you deploy things through channels, you'd like it to be, A, addressing a very large array of customers, and, B, relatively easy-to-sell, integrate, and deploy. And that's not what we historically have been. As you look into the addition of RTC as a capability, we're now coming to solutions that are catering to smaller companies. And, you know, we're going to go to SMEs, whether it's K-12 for schools, whether it's SMEs in the enterprise, whether it's smaller media companies and media and telecom, whether it's more of the broader startup community and tech developers for the tech OEM side. And as we open up the volumes, then channels become a lot more relevant. And we're seeing that start to happen.

52:23 Some of these channels are value-added resellers and integrators that have specific affinity to specific industries. The ones that really drive our attention are the global big ones as well that are catering to infrastructure as a service. Video is the biggest consumer and accelerator of IaaS consumption, so there's a lot of synergy between IaaS PaaS and SaaS and video. And partners like AWS that are now co-selling and reselling us through their marketplace are benefiting through tremendous amount of consumption. of their resources, and they have a one plus one equals three. So we're in the process of training salespeople. AWS is a great partner. We're also in the process of looking into a multi-cloud strategy to address more partnerships. And so I think there's a lot more good stuff to come.

53:09 Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ryan Kuntz with Needham & Company. Please proceed with your question.

53:16 I think the question, I'm going to follow up on your channel model there. and the types of partners you're targeting. It sounds like a lot of infrastructure as a service partners. As they look at their solutions, what other types of products in their portfolio would they be bundling with Kaptura? Thanks.

53:33 Thank you. It depends on the type of partner. I mean, if it's a standard IaaS provider, then it's enough that we're basically consuming storage delivery and compute, which we do in growth. So, now the question is really are they a value-add provider with SaaS solutions? and that could work in two different directions. They could either have a full OEM deal using our platform as a service to videify their products. As you've known, we have announced such a relationship with many players, including Oracle, where they add our video capability into theirs. And if it so happens that it runs on their cloud environment, that's even better. But there's others that could sell along CycleDRAW or be co-sellers. And that's especially folks that have sales teams that are addressing the customer experiences or the internal learning and Development, HCM Type Sales, and so varied. We're looking for all types of partners, but the ones that are most interesting for us have both alignment around the infrastructure as a service, the platform as a service, and the software as a service as embedded and or as a co-sell, re-sell.

54:35 And I hope we're going to have some more good announcements in the months and quarters to come. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Itam Kidron with Oppenheimer. Please proceed with your question.

54:49 Thanks and congrats again, guys, on the IPO. Ron, maybe I want to talk about the upsell opportunity. You mentioned before that half of your customers are buying three or more of the offerings. Maybe perhaps you can kind of call out for us what are the three most popular offerings right now and how would you think that would change perhaps in a couple of years? Historically, I'd say that the biggest sellers for us were the core platform that includes our media content management capabilities together with our video portal, together with a learning platform or integration into the LMSs. I'm putting aside TV for a second because for TV, we've moved gradually from OVP for small media companies to full-on cloud TV.

55:35 But in the ENT, it was content management, video portal, learning platform with LMSs. Now, from a momentum perspective, the most popular solutions on the enterprise side are webcasting together with virtual events. And we're seeing the beginning of virtual classroom. But what's very interesting is that they come together. So seldom do people go and say, I'd like to have webcasting without the video portal, or I'd like to have a virtual classroom without the LMS integration, or that I'd like to have a virtual event that, by the way, banks on VOD live in RTC without having the rest. So It's an addition, it's not an instead, but they drive a lot of acceleration to what we've had before. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our question and answer session.

56:21 I'll turn the floor back to Mr. Yekutiel for any final comments.

56:26 Yeah, I just want to thank you again, everybody, for your time and attention. I know it's a busy period and you've made a lot of time to stay with us. We'll be happy to provide you further information if and when you are in touch with us and wish you a great day and remaining of the week and talk to you soon. Take care.