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Earnings Call: Q1 2021

May 12, 2021

Operator

Good afternoon, and welcome to Kubient First Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. Joining us for today's call are Kubient's Founder, Chairman, Chief Strategy Officer, and Interim Chief Executive Officer, Paul Roberts, and Chief Financial Officer, Josh Weiss. Following their remarks, we will open the call for your questions. Before we get started, I need to alert you of our safe harbor statement under the Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. During this call, we will be making forward-looking statements, including statements related to future events or to our future financial performance, and involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties and other factors that may cause our actual results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements to be materially different from any future results, level of activity, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements.

Listeners should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements since they involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, which are, in some cases, beyond our control and which could and likely will materially affect actual results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements. Any forward-looking statement reflects our current views with respect to future events and is subject to these other risks and uncertainties and assumptions relating to our operations, results of operations, growth, strategy, and liquidity. These statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected or implied during the call. Furthermore, listeners are referred to the documents filed by Kubient, Inc. with the SEC, including our annual report on Form 10-K filed with the SEC on March 30th, 2021, with the understanding that our actual future results may be materially different from what we expect, which include these and certain other important risk factors.

We qualify all of our forward-looking statements by these cautionary statements. Note that the forward-looking statements on this call are based on information available as of today's date. Except as required by law, we assume no obligation to publicly update or revise these forward-looking statements for any reason or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future. Please refer to Kubient's SEC filings, specifically its Form 10-K and 10-Q and financial results press release for a more detailed description of risk factors that may affect the company's results.

During the call today, management will discuss adjusted EBITDA, a non-GAAP financial measure. In the company's press release and filings with the SEC, both of which are posted on the company's website, you will find additional disclosures regarding this non-GAAP measure, including a reconciliation of this measure with its comparable GAAP measure. Non-GAAP financial measures are not intended to be considered in isolation from, a substitute for, or superior to GAAP results. The company encourage you to consider all measures when analyzing its performance. Now, I'd like to turn the call over to Paul Roberts. Sir, please go ahead.

Paul Roberts
Founder, Chairman, Chief Strategy Officer, and Interim CEO, Kubient

Thank you, Operator, and good afternoon, everyone. After the market closed, we issued a press release with our results for the first quarter ended March 31st, 2021, a copy of which is in the investor relations section of our website. I'll kick things off by noting that we are pleased with the continued growth we're experiencing across our business. Even though it's only been a month and a half since our last call, we have made considerable operational and commercial progress that will prime Kubient for further development and growth as we enter into our next chapter. The most important ingredient to ensure we optimally scale the business is by hiring the right people. Year -to -date, we've onboarded four key seasoned individuals across different segments within our business. Most recently, we appointed Kim Kahn as the VP of People Operations.

Kim has extensive senior-level HR experience across a multitude of companies, including DoubleVerify, which is another organization. At her time with DoubleVerify, she recruited for all positions and levels which totaled in over 300 employees during her tenure, created and constantly updated the employee handbook, acted as the point person for all employee relations needs, managed all HR services and renewals with vendors, set a compelling company culture to help attract and retain talent, and handled compensation logistics for employees. Her ability to kickstart the HR function within early growth stage organizations and develop them into comprehensive segment is something she will be able to translate directly over to Kubient. As we continue to expand our business and grow the personnel that help run it is imperative that we're nurturing our already strong organizational culture for our employees.

Kim will be playing a pivotal role in establishing new employee onboarding and training procedures, internal health and safety protocols, recruitment and retention efforts, employee relations, benefits administration, and most importantly, developing the already incredible culture that Kubient has today. In essence, she and her team will ensure that all the different divisions within our company remain intact and coherently operate under the Kubient umbrella. We felt now is that time to start cultivating this function within our business as we are constantly looking to hire and grow. We look forward to what Kim has in store as she spearheads this new team. Next, about a month ago, we announced that we hired Leon Zemel as Kubient's Chief Product Officer. Leon comes to Kubient with a very prominent background as he has almost two decades of experience within the programmatic ecosystem and has several noteworthy accomplishments.

He was most recently the SVP of Programmatic and Platform Product at DoubleVerify, a well-known DSP, and has held several senior level positions at MediaMath and [x+1], who are both also well-known in the ad tech space. Notably, Leon had prior success leading the development of one of the first DSPs in data management platforms in the industry at [x+1], where he was a key executive responsible for scaling its technical operations. As the Chief Product Officer at Kubient, Leon will be primarily focused on our product goal initiatives. Even though he's only been with us for roughly a month, we have already noticed the impact he is making. In particular, he's helped us focus more on our efforts and mind share towards the products that have the greatest opportunity for scale and potential for profitability.

His ability to identify the low-hanging fruit opportunities is providing immense value as it saves us time and resources. We believe that his abilities and experience present us with the best potential to capture the most amount of market share as possible. Additionally, we appointed Larry Mlawski as VP of Client Services. Larry joins us from Prohaska Consulting, one of the most well-respected programmatic consulting firms in the industry, where he was involved in multiple strategy and monetization projects, including M&A due diligence and transactions. He brings a very rich and diverse background from companies like Trusted Media Brands and LinkedIn, where he was responsible for maximizing revenue growth, refining internal processes, developing enterprise-level corporate initiatives, and engaging in M&A activity. At Kubient, he'll be spearheading client success and operations, which means he'll be in charge of making sure we are maximizing all possible synergies with our partners.

As we further augment the number of customer and partners, we want to be sure we're capitalizing on all opportunities and not leaving any missed ones on the table. We are confident that Larry and his team will do just that. Finally, we onboarded former sales director of Forensiq, Alex Bryers, as Vice President of KAI Partnerships. Alex brings to the table an impressive resume as he's garnered much success in business development for a multitude of programmatic companies. Most notably, he helped grow Forensiq, an MRC-accredited fraud identity company, where he significantly grew their partnership count prior to the acquisition of that business by Impact Radius. He has a phenomenal rapport within the industry, and we're optimistic he'll be able to strengthen our KAI business development effort.

As you can see, in being deliberate with our onboarding process, we have prudently appointed individuals that have proven they have helped evolve the previous companies they were at. We are extremely confident in each of their respective abilities to scale growth, and we look forward to the impact they'll be making at Kubient. Looking ahead, we plan to further increase our overall head count, but more so specifically within the sales, technology and customer success divisions, and intend to have 40 - 50 employees by the end of the calendar year. Before I provide further updates on the progress and milestone achievements made this past quarter, I'd like to hand the call over to our CFO, Josh Weiss, to walk you through the financial results for the first quarter of 2021. Josh?

Josh Weiss
CFO, Kubient

Thanks, Paul. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining our call. To our financial results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2021. Net revenue for the first quarter decreased to approximately $708,000 from $1.4 million in Q1 of last year. The year-over-year decrease in net revenues is primarily due to the one-time recognition of $1.3 million in revenue during the three months ended March 31, 2020, in connection with the beta test of KAI. As a result of this successful KAI beta tests, we have been increasing the number of KAI audits being scheduled by prospective customers and expect to see this number increase going forward. Turning to our expenses. Technology expenses for the first quarter increased to approximately $520,000 from $479,000 in the same period last year.

The year-over-year increase was primarily due to an increase in amortization of software expense and an increase in cloud hosting costs. General and administrative expenses for the first quarter increased to approximately $1.3 million, compared to $517,000 in the same period last year. The year-over-year increase in general and administrative expenses was primarily due to increases in salary expense due to an increase in headcount, professional fees, insurance expense, all partially offset by a reduction in rent and office expense. GAAP net loss was approximately $1.8 million or $0.14 loss per share, compared to a net loss of $58,000 or $0.02 loss per share in the same year-ago period.

The year-over-year increase in net loss was primarily due to reduced net revenues and an increase in operating expenses. Adjusted EBITDA, a non-GAAP measure, decreased to $1.5 million compared to adjusted EBITDA of $548,000 in the same period last year. As of March 31, 2021, we had cash balance of $32.5 million. That concludes my financial summary. For more detailed analysis, please reference our Form 10-Q, which we plan to file this week. I will now turn the call back over to Paul, who will discuss some of our major operational updates and provide a general outlook of our business. Paul?

Paul Roberts
Founder, Chairman, Chief Strategy Officer, and Interim CEO, Kubient

Thanks, Josh. I'd like to touch upon the encouraging progress we're seeing within our sales division. As a result of much hard work, our SVP of Partnerships, Ryan Adams, and his team have been successful thus far in getting more and more prospective customers to test and plug into our Audience Cloud. A recent example I wanted to share was our engagement with USA Today, who has officially plugged into the Audience Cloud as a demand-side partner or DSP and will be buying our traffic. While it's easy to think of USA Today as a content publisher and seller, the publishing business today is more robust than just placing ads on pages. Publishers and their sales team need access to inventory outside of their owned and operated web properties to maximize their ability to deliver audiences at scale.

USA Today has partnered with Kubient as a buyer or an audience extension partner who can sell them clean, fraud-free inventory with direct publishers we work with. This ultimately gives them a competitive edge to capture more market share from their sales efforts. One piece of feedback we received from the USA Today team was that they chose to go through with Kubient in their digital advertising campaign because of KAI. After numerous successful tests, their team saw the incremental value our real-time fraud preventing solution provided and were on board with executing a deal. Another recent example of compelling partnership is with Enthusiast Gaming, which has both publisher supply and Kubient product upside for our business. They are a Canadian digital media company specializing in video game journalism and own properties such as Xbox Enthusiast and PlayStation Enthusiast.

Gaming is a high growth category with interest from many brands and agencies who have large budgets to target them. Rockstar Games, EA Sports, Spotify, and Vans to name a few. We are pleased to share that Kubient is directly integrating with their 20+ media properties to help them monetize their display and video inventory. Reaching the gamer audience is a challenge for marketers due to much of the inventory available being fraught with fraud. Kubient makes it easy and safe for brands to connect to this community of tech and product consumers. The third example of a recent partnership that I'd like to share is with Endscreen Ads, an impressive connected TV and OTT or over-the-top advertising platform that we're proud to integrate into our tech stack.

Connected TV is in high demand by advertisers, and the supply available to the market is both high in cost, with CPMs often in the mid $20 range, and fraud impact. KAI has detected more than 40% of CTV inventory that we've audited to be fraudulent, and we're excited to bring clean inventory to advertisers. We are certainly encouraged by the partnerships with USA Today, Enthusiast Gaming, and Endscreen Ads, we are still in need of additional advertisers or buyers within our marketplace. As we mentioned on the last call, we still have a robust slate of publishers on the supply side within the chicken and the egg scenario, and we intend to balance the equation out by adding more advertisers. The variable in the equation, though, is time. I wanted to stress that successfully onboarding an advertiser does not happen overnight but takes time.

Nevertheless, our goal is to continue adding more and more partners that create more liquidity in our marketplace. With the ongoing early success from Ryan and team and the influx of prospective customers testing out our Audience Cloud, we are confident in our efforts to scale. Speaking of our robust fleet of publishers, I'm proud to share that we've officially extended our partnership with our long-standing partner, the Associated Press or the AP, for another year. The AP continues to have a scaling media presence, and we believe we are the right partner to continue helping them grow their ad tech segment. One example of this, and a fun fact I wanted to share, was the AP tells us they will have the second most reporters on location for the 2021 Summer Olympics in Tokyo.

Their international footprint is broad, and their content distribution and need to monetize their digital assets makes them a terrific growth-focused partner of ours. Both the AP and Kubient have mutually benefited from the partnership since the onset of our engagement, and we look forward to another 12 months of collaboration and synergies. With that said, I'm pleased to share that our direct publisher partnership count that lists Kubient as an approved buyer has increased 5% to 3,568 as of May 11th, 2021, from roughly 3,400 in the previous quarter. Similar to the growth opportunities we're experiencing on the customer and partnership side, we're seeing that same pattern translate over to our real-time fraud prevention solution, KAI.

One proof point that demonstrates this is through the increase in KAI audits we are conducting or the number of customers that are testing out KAI within their own platform. We have learned that this method tends to result in the greatest ROI, as we have seen from Tron TV and a number of other customers that are currently using KAI purchase our solution after a number of conducted trials. As of right now, we currently have 14 KAI audits being scheduled by prospective customers, and we feel confident that this number will only continue to increase looking ahead. On par with signing up customers or partners, there's an extensive lead time for the KAI sales cycle to be completed.

We understand we are still early on in our efforts to commercialize KAI, but with adding folks like Alexis and Larry onto our team to help ramp up business development initiatives and the continued increase in the number of KAI audits, I'm confident we'll be able to convert more leads into actual executed deals. Moving on, I'll provide a brief update with respect to our self-serve DSP or Demand-Side Platform. As I previously mentioned on our call, we had two partners that were testing out a beta version of the self-serve DSP. I'm proud to share that both partners continue to be clients, helping us beta test the technology and offering tremendous insight into our platform and how we can improve it. On brand with our broader initiative of commercializing our products and solutions, we're optimistic about scaling this for direct advertisers to use.

As previously mentioned, our business, along with the broader digital advertising industry, were adversely affected by the ramifications of COVID-19, which, as a result, affected digital out-of-home advertising. We're hopeful the effects from the headwind are out of our way and that this segment will eventually rebound back up. Looking ahead, we intend to provide further updates as deemed appropriate. Before I conclude, I'll provide a quick update on our M&A activity. We continue to be in very active preliminary conversations with potential acquisition targets, guided by the council of Lake Street Capital Markets. Although I have no material updates to share at this time, I wanted to mention that we very much still view M&A as a very accretive and high value-added opportunity for growth and look forward to providing incremental updates with you all via the appropriate Regulation FD channels.

In conclusion, we've certainly hit the ground running, so to say, as we entered into our first year as a public company. With the recent headcount additions made, the encouraging early-stage traction we're receiving from customers across our slate of solutions, and our growing portfolio of partners, I can firmly say that we are in a great position for growth and success. That concludes my prepared remarks. Thank you all for your time this afternoon. We look forward to updating you on our progress going forward. We're now ready to open the call for your questions. Operator, please provide the appropriate instructions.

Operator

Thank you. At this time, we will be conducting our question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is on the question queue. You may press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using a speaker phone, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing star keys. One moment please as we pull for questions. Our first question comes from the line of Jack Vander Aarde with Maxim Group. Please proceed with your question.

Jack Vander Aarde
VP and Analyst, Maxim Group

Great. Hi Paul. Hi Josh.

Paul Roberts
Founder, Chairman, Chief Strategy Officer, and Interim CEO, Kubient

Hey, Jack.

Jack Vander Aarde
VP and Analyst, Maxim Group

Thanks for taking my questions. Great results. Maybe I'll start with a question for Paul, maybe a couple questions on the same topic. Just regarding KAI, you mentioned in your prepared remarks there and also in the press release that you have these 14 prospective customers undergoing audits or trials or maybe being scheduled, some of them. Did they actively generate revenue in this first quarter, or are these non-revenue arrangements currently?

Paul Roberts
Founder, Chairman, Chief Strategy Officer, and Interim CEO, Kubient

The trial is a non-revenue arrangement. What we've found, Jack, is especially during COVID-19, a lot of larger organizations weren't ready to make wholesale changes to their vendors. We offered them the ability to allow KAI to scan all of their traffic and let them know, here's how much fraud we would have prevented if you were a partner of ours. We've found a lot of very good conversations come out of that, because what we're doing is we're showing them, here's how much money you would have saved if you were using KAI. The team right now is working on multiple audits at one time, and we're going to be scaling up our team so we could handle a lot more of these going forward.

Jack Vander Aarde
VP and Analyst, Maxim Group

Got it. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. That's actually positive in my mind because that revenue result that you guys produced was well ahead of my expectations, and it didn't even include these 14 trials. Good to know. Okay. Maybe for context, I know you had two of those large trials going on last year in Q1. How many, and you had 14 you just mentioned currently, how many prospective KAI trials were there maybe at the end of the fourth quarter? Is there any way to provide an apples-to-apples context, or did these all just kind of start during the last couple of months?

Paul Roberts
Founder, Chairman, Chief Strategy Officer, and Interim CEO, Kubient

A lot of it came in the door in Q4. As of right now, we don't have the data to say, "Hey, here's how we're trending either quarter-over-quarter or even month-over-month." We realize, we look at our pipeline every single day from the team internally who are out there talking about KAI, and that pipeline continues to grow every day. I think fraud and a lot of the conversations that we're having are very relevant, especially as we come into the next quarter, where you start to see an uptick in the overall programmatic spending.

Jack Vander Aarde
VP and Analyst, Maxim Group

Got you. That makes a lot of sense. Just kind of lastly with KAI, in these particular trials, do you have any idea of a target conversion rate that you have in your mind for these 14 trials or just in general? What you think the hit ratio will be? Maybe some things are just more due to technical reasons that they don't play out.

Paul Roberts
Founder, Chairman, Chief Strategy Officer, and Interim CEO, Kubient

Sure.

Jack Vander Aarde
VP and Analyst, Maxim Group

Maybe it's just how many?

Paul Roberts
Founder, Chairman, Chief Strategy Officer, and Interim CEO, Kubient

So we-

Jack Vander Aarde
VP and Analyst, Maxim Group

I'm sure that the customers want it.

Paul Roberts
Founder, Chairman, Chief Strategy Officer, and Interim CEO, Kubient

Yep. It's a great question. What we look at, number one, is we pre-qualify a partner if they could even use KAI. Some partners say, "Hey, this sounds like a great thing, but we don't have the technology to plug in." What we're looking at is when we work with a partner that we know that can use the product and they go through the audit, we're showing them sometimes tens of thousands of dollars every single day that they would've been losing if they had not had KAI scanning all of their media.

We're able to show them with real data that they can double check and back up and say, "Here's all of the fraud that we would've prevented for you." I think that, I don't want to be too optimistic, but I think we're going to see a good success rate of people who go through an audit who will continue on to be paying customers because we're the only one who could do certain things for them, and we're showing them before they ever pay us $1.

Jack Vander Aarde
VP and Analyst, Maxim Group

Got it. Of these customers, I said that was my last question on KAI, but I got another one. Of your customer trials, of these 14 set, is there any data points you can share maybe of what they were currently using as their fraud prevention tool or maybe post-fraud identification tool?

Paul Roberts
Founder, Chairman, Chief Strategy Officer, and Interim CEO, Kubient

Yep.

Jack Vander Aarde
VP and Analyst, Maxim Group

Kind of what you're hearing from them anecdotally and how it compares?

Paul Roberts
Founder, Chairman, Chief Strategy Officer, and Interim CEO, Kubient

Yes. We ask a lot of those questions in the pre-qualifying of going through the audit. The beauty of our product is due to the fact that we use machine learning in real time, and we're preventing the fraud. If a brand or a partner is actually using a third-party vendor who does the post-analysis, we benefit from another party basically saying how impactful KAI is, because if we're stopping the fraud before it goes through, that third party that they're already paying is going to start to report lower fraud numbers. It's a very exciting opportunity for us that somebody that a brand is already paying is going to justify how impactful KAI is.

Jack Vander Aarde
VP and Analyst, Maxim Group

Yeah, that is very interesting. Okay, great. Shift gears just back to the first quarter revenue results. Like I mentioned before, it was ahead of my expectations. Can you maybe talk a bit more about the underlying drivers of the revenue? I know Josh spelled out pretty clearly why it was down year-over-year because those two trials from last year.

Paul Roberts
Founder, Chairman, Chief Strategy Officer, and Interim CEO, Kubient

Sure.

Jack Vander Aarde
VP and Analyst, Maxim Group

As far as what actually drove this, maybe existing traffic from existing partners increasing, new partners plugging in, anything you can share?

Paul Roberts
Founder, Chairman, Chief Strategy Officer, and Interim CEO, Kubient

Sure. We obviously benefit from a robust roster of partners. We have seen an increase, luckily, from our partnership with the AP, which we just re-upped for another 12 months. Where we're looking at now, Jack, is understanding out of all the partnerships we have, which are the ones that are going to give us the biggest impact in the short term while we continue to build up those longer-term partnerships. That's one of the key things that Larry Mlawski is going to be doing, and he's done already at companies like LinkedIn and other types of publishers, where we can identify, okay, if we have these 45 buyers and all of these publishers, how can we go ahead and make the most revenue with what we have?

Jack Vander Aarde
VP and Analyst, Maxim Group

Got it. No, that makes a lot of sense. With all these new executive hires, or at least leadership positions, you guys are stretched pretty thin before and you still are. It's pretty amazing that you're continuing to drive revenue at this stage even though everyone just kind of walked in the door recently.

Paul Roberts
Founder, Chairman, Chief Strategy Officer, and Interim CEO, Kubient

Sure.

Jack Vander Aarde
VP and Analyst, Maxim Group

What does this mean for your revenue ramp throughout the balance of 2021?

Paul Roberts
Founder, Chairman, Chief Strategy Officer, and Interim CEO, Kubient

I think what we're seeing is a lot of the, excuse me, a lot of the new executives who have come in, these are very seasoned executives. Where we might have struggled to get on the phone with maybe a very large DSP or a very large agency, some of the conversations I had with these executives was, who do you know at these companies? We're trying to get into these 10 or 15 companies. It's a very, very small industry and a very small community in programmatic and ad tech. We're very excited with the additions that we've recently put on the team that we're going to be able to open up a lot more doors and hopefully convert relationships to revenue a lot faster.

Jack Vander Aarde
VP and Analyst, Maxim Group

That's great. Maybe just to that point as well is, you mentioned your total number of publisher partners increased to, was it 3,568? You said that was up 5% sequentially. Is that 5% kind of growth in publisher partners a sustainable level? Do you expect that to accelerate, maintain? Is there any sense to that? What kind of target number are you looking for in terms of publisher partnerships by the end of this year? Maybe just directionally.

Paul Roberts
Founder, Chairman, Chief Strategy Officer, and Interim CEO, Kubient

Sure. One thing to understand, and I think I've talked about this on a prior earnings call, is operating a marketplace is very much like an airplane. You have the supply on one wing, you have the demand on the other. If we get too much supply without the demand, we start to go in circles. We spent a lot of time going into Q3 and part of Q4 last year building up our supply, building up direct publisher relationships. Now that we have these publisher relationships, we kind of shift focus to the demand side, and we start to bring in additional buyers or advertisers for all of those publishers.

A lot of it, what you're going to see is growing in lockstep where the more demand we get, the more publishers we're going to be able to go out and onboard into the Audience Cloud. As we onboard more publishers, we're going to grow the demand side, the advertising sales team, to go out and find more great advertisers to help buy those advertising spots.

Jack Vander Aarde
VP and Analyst, Maxim Group

I think you mentioned too, as far as it goes with prospecting for new advertiser customers, and you mentioned a couple of new big major wins recently with Enthusiast Gaming and a few others that you mentioned. I think you said KAI is really also contributing to this. Is an attractive selling point as well. Are you able to provide color around how many discussions you have going on right now with other prospects on the demand advertising side that wouldn't be reflected in the press release?

Paul Roberts
Founder, Chairman, Chief Strategy Officer, and Interim CEO, Kubient

I try to steer away from exact numbers of who's in the pipeline and things like that because I just want to answer a part of your question that you asked earlier, is KAI the driver? I'll come back to the actual outlook of who we have in the pipeline. When you start to talk to somebody about KAI and you explain we can remove fraud before it's bought and sold, it's a very powerful starting point of a relationship. Then they start to ask us, "Well, can I plug in directly? Can I plug into the Audience Cloud as a buyer?" Yes. "Can I plug into the Audience Cloud as a seller because I want to clean up my traffic? I know I'm getting hurt by selling fraudulent traffic, which I'm a victim of.

How do I clean that up?" Interesting, a lot of the conversations and a lot of the prospects that come in as a quote KAI partnership, they then potentially turn into a demand-side partner or a supply-side partner. Where originally they reached out and said, "How do I stop all of this ad fraud?" As we begin to talk and explain why an efficient market is so important and why you don't need all the middlemen, they then say, "Well, I would love to connect as a buyer or a seller of my inventory." It's almost been a Trojan horse to start a lot of great conversations. Looking at our CRM and our pipeline, right now we have upwards of about 82 conversations with the advertising side. These are going to be either agencies, brands, or buyers of the media.

Jack Vander Aarde
VP and Analyst, Maxim Group

Got it. Fantastic. I appreciate the color there. I understand you can't provide everything, show all your cards. That's all good to hear. Then maybe a question just kind of regarding other metrics you've provided in the past. I don't need the specifics maybe, it would be interesting just in terms of how many Wi-Fi unique devices you've fingerprinted. Then also, you've mentioned publisher inventory growth. Any of these key metrics you can provide more color on or an update on?

Paul Roberts
Founder, Chairman, Chief Strategy Officer, and Interim CEO, Kubient

Sure. Yeah, one of the biggest things that we're looking at, as we've talked about in the past, is how many impressions or how many revenue opportunities come through our platform every single day. That number has increased by 28% from last quarter. We've actually seen a significant increase from the publisher side because one thing that happens is once you actually start to clean the traffic and show results, publishers start to open up more and more of their inventory. Typically you'll work with a large publisher and they'll say, "Okay, we'll let you bid on 25% of our inventory." You can basically show them all of the fraud you've removed, the revenue increase, the optimization, then they give you a full 100%.

A lot of that was driven by existing partners and it was really a combination of existing partners, new partnerships, and really an overall increase in web activity due to COVID-19, which has affected almost all online or dot com businesses.

Jack Vander Aarde
VP and Analyst, Maxim Group

Got it. You did mention, I wasn't expecting you to, but you did mention something about the digital out-of-home opportunity. Can you just provide some more color around that? I know that's another piece to the story longer term, but whatever you could share on that front right now would be helpful.

Paul Roberts
Founder, Chairman, Chief Strategy Officer, and Interim CEO, Kubient

Sure. When we obviously started the idea of Kubient, we wanted to have omni-channel reach. That means being able to reach an audience of one at scale wherever they are, whether they're on their laptop, digital out-of-home screen. If they're walking down 7th Avenue in Manhattan, can we serve a relevant ad to them? We forged a lot of supply-side partnerships in the digital out-of-home space. These are all of the screen owners. This at the time was a heavy lift for us because a lot of the digital out-of-home screen owners don't have a standard format of how they buy and sell their ads. Our team built up a lot of good relationships there. We continue to have those relationships.

As I mentioned on the call earlier, we're starting to see some of the ad dollars start to trickle back into digital out-of-home. I'm always aware of the New York City tourism numbers and how many people are coming back in on mass transit. Those numbers are very important to us because we've already built up those digital out-of-home relationships. As the ad dollars start to come in, we would expect to be a benefactor of that.

Jack Vander Aarde
VP and Analyst, Maxim Group

Great, Paul. That's really helpful. That's it for me. I may have some more questions, but I'll hop back in the queue. Again, solid results. Congrats.

Paul Roberts
Founder, Chairman, Chief Strategy Officer, and Interim CEO, Kubient

Thank you very much, Jack.

Operator

Once again, as a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Once again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. One moment please as we pull for questions. At this time, this concludes the company's question and answer session. If your question was not taken, you may contact Kubient's investor relations team at kubient@gatewayir.com. I would now like to turn the call back over to Mr. Roberts for his closing remarks.

Paul Roberts
Founder, Chairman, Chief Strategy Officer, and Interim CEO, Kubient

Thanks, Operator. Thank you everyone for joining us today on our Q1 2021 earnings call. I would especially like to thank our employees, our partners, our investors, and customers for their support. We appreciate your continued interest in Kubient and look forward to updating you on our next call. Operator?

Operator

Thank you for joining us today for Kubient's first quarter 2021 earnings conference call.