All right. Now we'll be introducing Gavin and Katie from Kneat .
Thanks a lot. Do you want to do your intro slots?
Yeah, sure.
I'll take that. Thank you. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for coming in. We don't have a lot of time, so I'm just going to take five minutes and introduce you to me, who we are. Before I do, anything that I say that's sort of predicting what they have in the future could be totally wrong. It's not my fault.
While we're on compliance statements, my name is Gavin. I'm an analyst at Cormark Securities and Kneat 's investment banking client, and I do own shares in the stock, just for the record.
Okay. All right. So why Kneat? Quickly, Kneat is a software company. We've been around, I guess, since 2007. We got our first client in 2015. We are the market leader in validation.
Validation software, and I'll go into what exactly that means. Very, very high customer retention, which means very, very high revenue retention. This is all organic. We've never made an acquisition. As we grow and expand, the margins are coming along with it. This is a scale business. The executive team is founder-led. Three guys, Western Ireland, started the company, and they're still with it. They put everything on the line. There is a whole lot of buy-in, not just from the management team, but from the entire company. It's a very quality-focused culture at Kneat . I think it has something to do with the business. The business is in the quality space. Everybody who works there is really very assiduous about everything they do. It's really nice to see. What is validation?
Validation essentially is testing all of your equipment, but not just testing it, documenting that you've tested it, capturing that, and then managing all of your proof, not just for the FDA and Health Canada and the European Medicines Agency, but also for your boss, because we're in the life sciences space, and this is quality. Think about it as sort of good manufacturing practices. When you have a life sciences company, they've come up with some new GLP-1, whatever, that's fine. If it's a new antiviral, it's fine in a petri dish. You can prove it at small scale. What about when you take it to manufacture? That's where Kneat got its start, validating these larger systems for batch processing or manufacturing.
You have to prove that every single one of those systems that touches that therapy is doing exactly what it is meant to do, that it is working up to specification. You have to capture that proof, and you have to keep it on file for, I think it's seven years beyond the end of life of a product. Think about the amount of content that is needed to be documented, saved, and retrievable going forward. It's quite a lot. We've done it. Customers do it. What you're doing is you're taking that data, which they put on paper, or they've hybridized, they've scanned in the paper, and we've made it all completely digital. The value delivery is on every level. That is why the first time we presented at this conference was a couple of years ago, thanks to Mark in Chicago.
We were less than half the size from an ARR standpoint. Two years later, we're around almost $65 million ARR and counting. That really very complicated and difficult process is laid out in a slide here. I just discovered this within the last few weeks, and I think it does a very good job of showing you everything that Kneat simplifies by making these processes digital. We digitize it, we give it to the company, they take it, and they put it, and they can find it at the click of a mouse. It doesn't matter who looks for it. There are a lot of other advantages too, which we'll go into in this conversation. The results are, one, that the VP of Quality can sleep at night. They know that the product that they're putting out on the marketplace is doing what it is meant to do.
Not the product, but the process that went into it is doing what it was meant to do. Beyond that, if there's anybody who comes in and audits, they're fully compliant at all times, almost real-time compliant, because this is getting filed as this data is getting created. Just look at the costs. We've got case studies, a library full of case studies on our website where processes, you've streamlined three separate processes into one process. You have ROI on man-hours, you have ROI on quality cycles, massive savings, and above all, faster time to market. This can make a huge difference when you go from, there's a case study on there where they've taken it from six months down to less than two months getting a product into market. Pretty fantastic.
This last one, I'm going to keep it up here because we're going to probably talk to it when we go into our fireside chat. I think if you step back and look at Kneat from a 30,000-ft level, this is sort of the image you want to have in your mind because this management team at Kneat , Eddie, our CEO, Dave, our CFO, they're always looking ahead. What are we building for? Kneat is a platform. Why does it do so well? Why were we 98 out of 100 on G2's most recent pharma and biotech software survey when the next company was 78 out of 100? Kneat gives you a platform. You're allowed to take whatever your process is for quality, and you configure Kneat to how you do it. This is huge.
Whatever you've done on paper, you just do it on a tablet now. It's all digital. That is a huge competitive differentiator for Kneat . There's not another company in this space that enables a life sciences company to do their validation regardless of what that process is, whether it's for computer systems validation, whether it's for commissioning qualification validation, any process. They can take it, they can do it their way. They can configure it on the Kneat platform, and then they're off and running. That is, in a really rapid-fire delivery, the essence of what we are. Think about the data. I was at this conference in Vegas in April, and somebody said, "How are you any different from just like an SQL, just a relational database?" The big difference there is that comprehensive audit trail and data that has been fully authenticated, high integrity data.
This is data that is completely immutable, right? It's completely attributable. You cannot make one change to any piece of that data without it being noted somewhere in the system itself. I would say that's a pretty big differentiator too. This is why Kneat is used in highly regulated areas. You're not going to use Kneat to print T-shirts, right? Anyway, that's me. I hope you have a better understanding of the value that the Kneat platform brings to life sciences. I'm just going to leave this up there and we'll go from there.
Thanks for that intro, Katie. One of the things that maybe I'd add, if I may, just to the intro remarks here, is that Kneat had a lot of commercial success. You've got eight of the top 10 biopharmas globally as clients, the majority of the top 20, growing in areas like CPG and med devices and other. What's different from my perspective about Kneat is the lifecycle of a client, which is different from other software companies that I've seen. Maybe you can run us through how customers kind of evolve over time and maybe use an example.
Sure. Think about you're setting up a new site. You're a big pharma company and you're looking for a way to keep all of this on your system. Okay, we'll try it. We'll try this Kneat. $100,000. Not a huge leap to get over that. We can get it. We can get in there. Kneat's in there. The users see Kneat. They use Kneat. They love Kneat. They're like, "Wow, this is amazing. Why don't we use this for our site in Switzerland or our site in, I don't know, Birmingham, England?" Call that $100,000. One more site, double that, $200,000. First one, it'll take about six months to get up and running. This is a very stringent audit that Kneat, the software we ourselves go through. If you're a big life sciences company, you want to make sure that this is exactly what you're looking for.
You go to Limerick, Ireland, you audit it, and then you get in there. Once you're in, it really is an expand strategy. Most of our growth every quarter comes from customers that we already have in our customer roles. 12 months maybe, they go to another site. Beyond that, 12- 24 months, you're on new sites and also new processes. You're not just using Kneat for your new lines on commissioning qualification validation. You're also using it maybe for computer systems validation. Think about CQV, about 30%-40%. This computer systems validation or computer systems assurance more recently is maybe another 35%-40%. There are a lot of processes in between. Method validation, process validation, cleaning validation. Kneat can be used for all of that. One platform for all of that.
When you look at the entire lifecycle, I would say three to six years before Kneat's validation capabilities are fully penetrated within a large life sciences customer. Merck is a great example. They have 12,000+ users of Kneat across 27 sites all over the world. I think it's seven validation processes that they're using Kneat for. They're fully validated. I mean, they're fully penetrated. You look at the other ones that are remaining, maybe a few about halfway-ish, we think. Everybody else, still plenty of room to grow just in validation.
One of the big focuses of the company in the past years has been attacking risk-based workflows and agile workflows. Historically, you grew up doing waterfall approach. We do kind of one step at a time. Where are you in terms of getting risk-based or agile workflows into the system, and what does that mean from an ability to penetrate your customers?
We've made a lot of progress on that. I joined Kneat almost three years ago. The most rewarding thing is seeing what we plan to do, and then they just do it, and then we're there, and then we sell it, which has been amazing. If you look at the more recent customer announcements, we only will announce, like, press release customer if we think we could get to $1 million with this on validation. That's the only way we'll... We have more than what we press release. If you look at these press releases we've done, you'll see a lot of them are computer systems validation. That is not where Kneat started. Kneat started in commissioning qualification validation, and that's very sort of, think of paper-based. These people are doing it on paper. They're documenting everything on paper. It's quality teams doing it.
Over here on the computer systems validation side, these are IT teams looking at computers and systems. That's the agile approach that Gavin is referring to. Our dev teams, our R&D is working very, very hard on really rounding out that agile approach to data management. IT teams can look at it however they want and have it served up however. It doesn't have to be in a piece of paper. I think that the customer announcements we've done have been a very good indication that we're making good progress. I have heard my management team say, we look over probably about the next 12- 18 months and we feel very good about where we are. We could say we are completely rounded out on any validation workflow, any way you want it, agile, waterfall, it's all good. That's the exciting part.
That's when we move on to the next phase.
Yeah, that's a good segue. We've heard Eddie talk about adjacencies in terms of manufacturing and maintenance and clinical, taking the TAM from $2 billion to $7 billion. Where are you at in the process of kind of expanding beyond that core validation market?
Right now, still in the $2 billion, but when you look at $65 million in ARR, that's still a lot of headroom, a lot of space to grow. What's important to understand, and we get this question a lot, is how much of your R&D spend is on just maintenance and keeping the platform healthy versus new things. That's a complicated answer because as we are building out for computer systems validation and computer systems assurance, a lot of that build is also going to be leveraged as we move outside just validation and into these other adjacencies. When we say adjacencies for that $7 billion TAM, that's still life sciences. That's still the same company buying, right? Maybe not exactly the same teams when we think about where we'll go, but it's still the same kinds of companies. We're not hiring experts in other verticals entirely.
We're feeling pretty excited about it, but we're still finishing out the $2 billion, and then we'll move on to the $7 billion, call it, and we kind of are with little things. Drawing management is a good example. We're moving on bit by bit. These customers of ours are pulling us in there. They really want more from the system, but we have to finish validation first, and then we'll be ready to sell them the other things.
Yeah, just as a fun fact, I mean, Veeva , which is very active in the space and would have, you know, a lot of the big life sciences companies as customers, can have tens of millions of ARR. If you can come to that bigger piece of the stack, there's certainly lots of opportunity. Maybe just on AI, obviously lots of chatter about how that could upend SaaS companies, whether it's a big opportunity or whether it's a threat. Maybe you can talk about how you're working to get AI incorporated into your product and how you think about the defensibility of Kneat if new competitors pop up.
We've all used it. We all know how much more productive it makes us in our everyday life, and that's no different at Kneat . Anywhere that we can make the product better and more efficient is better. If you're staying at that same quality, we will do that. Our R&D teams have been working with it. I would say if you look at this slide and think about that core right there, that data-centric core, again, that is highly, it's really high integrity data, and that's what you're going to want to work with in your AI model, however you're going to leverage it. Companies want to leverage their data. They have these data lakes, and they're applying large language models to the data that they own. It's our job, Kneat , to make sure that data is ready and available to be leveraged in these other ways.
Some examples of how you could do that with this multi-context protocol where you're using not just the data itself, you're finding it, but you're able to put it into other contexts so it can think and produce what you want. I'm a validation engineer. I go in and I say, all right, this is my hundredth template that I'm having to put together for a cleaning validation. However, this one's a little bit different. It's got a different maker. It's got a different size sheath in the tube. I can just ask the model, how do you do that? Kneat 's data is very helpful in serving that up. When you think about how Kneat can be, and that's just one example, any query, do we have any cells that haven't been filled out? Do we have any deviations from where it should be?
Being able to ask the system this saves a lot of time on the part of the quality team, and that's what Kneat has always been very good at, making their jobs a lot easier, which is why they love Kneat so much. We have chat bots ourselves, and we have other ways that you'll be seeing us use it in the future. I think we're pretty excited about it. As far as a threat, that is kind of a head scratcher because validation itself, how do you validate validation with AI, right? You almost have to have a human somewhere in the process because you have to have it be attributable. You need some accountability on it.
That's why at this layer, when we talk about how we're using AI, it's you're using AI to generate ideas, to give you a template, and then you are the one who's so comfortable, you're signing off with it. You're signing off on it.
You've been announcing a lot of big new strategic customers recently, and Eddie's talked about a win rate north of 50%, well north of 50%. You do have a couple of competitors out there. How would you say that you stack up versus your competitors and why are you winning?
We are winning because we have your workflow, your way, and it's based on really secure data. That's it. Neither of the other companies that come to the table at the very end of an RFP process, there's really just one. More recently, Veeva has been showing up. They only do computer systems validation, nothing else. People want a platform. They want a platform to do all of it. You don't want to be scrambling, looking up, well, that's in that system, that's in this system. You want it all on one platform. We win because it is a no-code, easy-to-use, completely configurable platform that can do all of your validation data end-to-end. The win rates are very, very strong. The other company that's in, they just don't seem to be doing that great. They were in the space before we were, and we just outgrew them.
We are doing well. I did listen to Veeva's Analyst Day last Thursday. I didn't hear really anything about it at all. I mean, I don't know. They got a lot to focus on. Never get complacent about your competition. Just keep doing what you're doing, and that's what we're doing.
I saw the five minutes left sign, so maybe I'll stop asking questions and see what the audience would like to ask. Would anyone like to jump in? Go for it, Rob.
(Inaudible) Can you talk a bit about your VA customer, a $1 million customer? Can you talk about your go-to-market strategy for those smaller companies?
Yeah, just for people online, the question was around the go-to-market strategy for smaller customers.
Our go-to-market strategy for smaller customers is primarily through partners. If there is inbound from a smaller customer, that is part of the grand plan, to be the name in the space that everybody goes to. You want to standardize on a really high-quality validation platform. When they come, we have plenty of partners who really know their stuff. They're very good, and they are more than ready to help these companies configure what they need and how they need it. That's really what's at the center. On the direct sales strategy, which is what most of our hunters are out capturing really big enterprises, they'll go in, they'll find somebody. I talked about the sales cycle, and we have customer success managers who are kind of working with these customers side by side, and they're helping them identify other areas where Kneat could be leveraged.
That's been very, very high ROI for us because that's where you get the expansion, where they use it in other spaces, and we're able to more easily bring back potential use cases to the product team.
Any other questions out there?
There have been some notable new customers in other verticals over the last couple of years. I remember seeing one, I think, in logistics and a few other industries. Is there at some point there'll be a push to build out some of the other verticals?
Right. The question was, will Kneat start to build out the platform to serve, target other verticals? We have had one of the largest logistics companies come on to Kneat using the platform. We've also had consumer packaged goods products come on. That CPG company and that logistics company, they are Kneat customers because you've got a life sciences company in the center of it. They want everything validated all the way throughout the value chain, from anywhere it needs to be shipped, all the way down to delivery to consumption, almost by the patient. It's still very much in the life sciences context. That's where we will stay targeted for the next several years, just because there is so much opportunity in there.
When we say adjacencies in life sciences, that's beyond validation, still in quality, think deeper into manufacturing, think deeper into engineering, think of areas that these are not well- served today by the solutions that exist. Kneat is a platform. They could be leveraging this data from the Kneat platform once we get to those areas. Yes, we'll focus on adjacencies. If you're thinking aerospace or energy, which I think would be phenomenal to leverage Kneat , that's years, that's years away.
Maybe I'll lob in one more if we have a minute. You've been on a pretty phenomenal growth path. I mean, $13 million of ARR in 2021, up to $60 million exiting 2024. Are there any kind of dots on the wall or targets that you're striving for? Maybe just touch on, you know, break even in margins.
Yes. If you look at Kneat 's land-and-expand strategy and you think about the sales efficiency that was mentioned last night in the presentation on Kneat , it's pretty clear that you're on this path, you know, at 30,000-ft level, where revenues are going to grow. That is where you get the leverage. You know, that's where you get margins. On that path, we see Kneat in 2026 getting to, for the full year, cash flow break-even. When you think about the stickiness of our customers and you think about the fact that we had 151% net revenue retention last year, it's pretty straightforward that Kneat is on a path to profitability, not quite there yet. That profitability comes with growth. This trade-off that people always ask about, this trade-off, we don't really see a trade-off.
We see as we grow and continue to add, you know, accumulate customers and accumulate ARR, then that brings everything else up with it.
Great. Thank you. I think we're at time. Thanks for coming.