Good morning. I'm Dean Ridlon, Vice President, Investor Relations, and I'd like to welcome everyone to Cognyte's investor event. Before we begin, I'd like to note that we will be making forward-looking statements during today's presentation. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations. Our complete Safe Harbor statement is displayed on this slide, and the full presentation will be available in the investor section of our website, www.cognyte.com. This event is designed for you, the investment community. We have met with many of you and listened closely to your requests to learn more about how our technology and solutions set us apart in the marketplace. The agenda and content today are structured to provide that information.
During the next hour or so, you will hear from key members of the Cognyte leadership team, including our Chief Executive Officer, Chief Financial Officer, and Chief Product Officer, who will remain available at the end of the prepared presentation to answer any questions you might have. There will be two ways for you to ask questions during the question and answer session. For those of you dialed in, if you want to ask a question during the Q&A session, you will need to press star one, one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one, one again. If you're not dialed in, you can still ask a question through the chat box on the screen where you are viewing the presentations.
Before Elad starts the formal presentation, we would like to share a short video that introduces Cognyte and our unique proposition.
The difference between success and failure is defined by the gap between known and unknown. For those tasked with maintaining security, the size of this gap determines whether a threat is realized or averted, critical infrastructure functions or fails, lives are saved or lost. We engineered our solutions to process and analyze data at an unprecedented scale and efficiency to help rapidly make sense of chaotic data signals with an accuracy and success rate beyond human capabilities. Our technology reveals and prioritizes insights that enable smarter, faster decisions. Simply put, we help our customers eliminate the unknown to ensure the best possible outcomes for law enforcement, national security, and national and military intelligence agencies. In a world of uncertainty, the challenges these security agencies face are unprecedented. A rapidly growing volume and diversity of data, an increasingly sophisticated adversary operating in a constantly evolving technology landscape.
Cognyte's solutions reveal insights that others cannot, harnessing the power of AI to fuse, analyze, and visualize data so our customers can generate actionable intelligence and experience superhuman decision-making power. That is the power of Cognyte's software-led technology.
Hi, I'm Elad Sharon, CEO of Cognyte. Welcome to everyone joining us for this event. I'm here in the studio today with David Abadi, our Chief Financial Officer, and Gil Cohen, our Chief Product Officer. In the next hour or so, we'll be joined by key members of the Cognyte management team for portions of the presentation. Our goal today is to share with you what we believe sets Cognyte apart, what drives us forward each and every day, the select technologies we are excited about, and the growth we focused. Most importantly, we'll demonstrate why we believe Cognyte is uniquely positioned to deliver on the emerging needs of the global market we serve. I would like to start by introducing Cognyte. It's been some time since we had the opportunity like this to share in more detail not just what we do, but how and why we do it.
Cognyte is a software-led technology company focused on solutions for data processing and analytics. Every one of our team members in every department the world over is driven by a purpose to help customers eliminate the unknown. We do that by expanding their knowledge, enabling them to generate actionable intelligence from the data to make smarter, faster decisions that enable a safer world. We work with customers in law enforcement, national security, and national and military intelligence agencies tasked with maintaining security in the face of unprecedented challenges, providing them advanced, innovative technology so they can think ahead, staying one step in front of their adversaries with contextual insights that enable them to investigate, anticipate, predict, and mitigate risks with superhuman precision throughout their mission-critical operations.
Our customers are primarily challenged on three fronts at the same time. T he rapidly growing volume and diversity of data that must be analyzed, increasingly sophisticated adversaries using creative methods to evade detection, and staying one step in front of a technology landscape that never stops evolving. I hear these three challenges from our customers in every agency and every country because organized crime and terrorism have evolved as fast as technology, and their malicious intent respects no borders. Today, an individual with criminal intention and a smartphone can run a sophisticated operation from the palm of their hand. To bring this reality to life, we would like to share content from our recent Intelligence Summit. This was a gathering of 300 senior leaders from law enforcement, intelligence, and national security agencies from almost 70 countries.
At the event, we explored the evolving threat landscape and how operational needs are changing in real time. The following clip is a summary of informed insights shared by our keynote speaker, retired Admiral Mike Rogers, the former director of NSA and commander of the U.S. Cyber Command. Admiral Rogers captures the urgency, complexity, and opportunity that define this moment. His insights reflect exactly why Cognyte's solutions are so relevant today.
Every one of us, it doesn't matter if you find yourself in a large intelligence organization, a law enforcement organization, if you're part of government, if you work in military intelligence, if you're in a security agency, if you're in the commercial world. Every one of us is trying to generate deep knowledge and understanding about what's going on in the world around us so that we can generate information that leads to an actionable outcome. I wish I could tell you that I thought our job as law enforcement, as intelligence, as security, and military professionals was going to get easier. I don't think that's the case. I think it's likely to stay very difficult. Let's not lose sight of the advantages that we have. One, almost every one of these adversaries we're dealing with, they got to get access to money, and they got to move money.
That's a fingerprint for us, guys. Secondly, they've got to communicate. They have to be able to talk to each other in some form. That's a good possibility for us. Even as we've talked about how organizations are spreading globally, again, guys, that means the broader they spread, the more disparate they become, they are more and more dependent on the ability to communicate with each other. They have to physically access resources, whether it's weapons, explosives, munitions. Lastly, increasingly, they have to move. Every time they move, they interact with the broader world around them. Every time they interact with the broader world around them, that's opportunity for us.
I always try to talk to the team about, remember, we have to excel today in meeting the challenges right now, but at the same time, we have got to set ourselves up for success in the future. I'm very proud of the National Security Agency. I was honored to be its director. We may be the largest intelligence organization in the free world, but we cannot do this by ourselves. We need partners in other nations, in other governments, across law enforcement, across other intelligence organizations. Interestingly, in the world of technology, we need partnerships in the private sector. How do we partner with companies, which is what brings us here today? How do we partner with companies that are developing these technologies that potentially can give us knowledge and insight that we do not have right now?
We have to be able to collect, analyze, manipulate, store, and access over time massive levels of data at a level that we've never dealt with before. Are we ready for that? My argument was, guys, that we need to start creating these relationships. We have got to access their insight. We have got to access their technology. The pressure is on us to generate insights faster, to generate actionable outcomes quicker. In the end, what's our job? It's to generate actionable information that can then lead to an outcome that's favorable to us.
As you just heard from the Admiral, security agencies seek to generate deep knowledge and understanding about what's going on in the world around us, where the future is increasingly driven by data, in an environment where the pressure is on to generate insights faster and to reach actionable outcomes quicker. He also highlighted that the opportunity for discovering insights lies in how bad actors access and transfer money, communicate increasingly globally, physically access resources like weapons, explosives, munitions, and move, because increasingly, the adversary doesn't stay in one place. Cognyte innovation allows our customers to overcome these challenges. With three decades of experience, we never stop advancing our highly modular technology platform. Our engineers are guided by the Cognyte mission to help customers reveal insights that others cannot by enriching and understanding data.
In just a few moments, you will hear from Gil, our Head of Product, and Ronny, our CTO, who will explain in more detail how we see data differently. We enable customers to reveal insights that help answer their most critical questions in ways others cannot. Our engineers develop solutions that bridge the gap between the known and the unknown. We harness the power of AI to fuse, analyze, and visualize disparate data sets, structured and unstructured, at an unparalleled scale and with unprecedented efficiency. We do this via two critical pathways. Firstly, intelligent data analysis, which enables faster, more accurate results with high success rates. Secondly, predictive data analysis, which allows threats to be identified, prioritized, and neutralized before they unfold. We are relentlessly advancing enhanced decision-making ability to create the possibility of the best outcomes. Gil and the team will showcase what makes our solutions platform unique.
However, our value proposition is more than engineering and software code. I would like to highlight just five of the many things that I believe set Cognyte apart in the market and make me proud to be leading this team. We attract technology disruptors, the best purpose-driven, brilliant minds who want to make the world safer. We apply technology foresight by taking a farsighted approach to stay ahead of criminals and terrorists through ongoing research. This helps us understand the evolving threat landscape and anticipate how technology can be used for harm or good. The community trust that we foster. We have built a unique community for collaboration and sharing amongst our intelligence agency customers. They come together across borders to share insights and work as partners. The power of global learning. With customer partners in nearly 100 countries, we gather meaningful feedback from the field.
That input helps guide our product roadmap, innovation pipeline, and long-term strategy. Our deep domain expertise. Many of our team members are veterans of the very agencies we serve today. Now they work closely with our engineers to push the boundaries of Mission-Critical Technology. Gil, why don't you walk our audience through the solutions outcomes that these differentiators enable for our customer partners?
Thank you, Elad. In our quest to help customers eliminate the unknown, we have tailored our solution platform to yield a set of investigative insights that we like to call Winsights, the answers to the critical WH questions that help investigators and their leadership succeed in their mission, starting with the facts: who did what, where, and with whom, followed by the intent, why, and critically important, predicting when something might happen to help an agency develop an effective action plan.
Armed with these Winsights, our advanced analytics technologies allow our customers to see their data differently, revealing hidden relations that we believe our competitors cannot, visualizing commonalities, behaviors, and patterns that became the knowledge needed to make highly informed, accurate, and fast decisions. Decisions must be made by both intelligence investigation units as well as by special operations and tactical teams who need immediate intelligence on the ground. Our solution addresses the needs of different units within agencies, making sure the right intelligence reaches the right team at the right time. Our customers operate in a highly dynamic environment, and it's impossible to know the next technology of choice for bad actors. For example, who could have predicted the adoption rate of AI-powered chatbots to shield identities or the use of drones as couriers for cross-border smuggling?
As you heard from the Admiral, security agencies must operate at speed to react and counter the latest technology being exploited by their adversaries. They need agility, the ability to pivot rapidly from an incumbent technology and develop new capabilities to neutralize emerging threats. To gain this agility, many security agencies are concluding that they must partner with commercial organizations to access the experience and expertise they lack. This creates demand for new future-ready solutions. Enter Cognyte, because this is precisely what we offer. To satisfy our customers' needs for agility, our solutions are engineered with three core design principles: be flexible to quickly adapt to missions they will need to undertake tomorrow, be scalable because their data sets are vast and growing, be modular so they can easily add new mission capabilities.
Given the sensitive nature of our customers' operations, we do all of this while providing them with solutions that are self-operated without Cognyte being involved. To fulfill these design principles, Cognyte has built a solution stack composed of three architectural layers: signal processing to turn chaotic signals into data to help to uncover the who and the where. The data our customers have access to is modulated, encoded, scrambled, and for the most part, encrypted. We give security agencies the ability to ingest, interpret, and process a wide range of signals, databases, and feeds, including open-source data at petabyte scale, into an organized form. We believe that Cognyte technology does this more comprehensively than anyone at any scale. Insight mining to transform data into insights to reveal the what and with whom. We enable customers to enrich and understand their raw data in ways that we believe others cannot.
We leverage industry-leading GenAI capabilities on-prem or in the cloud by tuning and expanding multiple AI modules to create a unique set of data analytics tailored for investigation and intelligence analysis. We do this at scale, speed, and quality levels that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. Investigative analytics to turn insights into knowledge to unlock the why and the when, indicators of intent that are critical to deciding who to follow, surveil, or arrest. Knowledge in general and intelligence or investigative knowledge in particular rarely emerges from looking just at one source of data. The magic is in finding the hidden relations. With around 300 patents, Cognyte has an unparalleled technology platform to help uncover investigative and intelligence insights. For example, who was where and when using cellular data, obtained imagery, browsing activity, and more.
Who talked or chatted with whom and when, even under encryption, behind VPNs, as well as the dark web. Corroborating with customers' additional data types like CCTV, LPR, bank records, and open source such as social media and public records, this understanding of relationship is the basic tenet of many investigations. Cognyte's investigative analytics layer fuses the information and harnessing our domain knowledge and purpose-built agentic AI. The customer can combine individual puzzle pieces into a full intelligence picture. Aided by Cognyte's proprietary AI copilot, we simplify the analyst work to help them more easily interpret insights with human-like prompts and suggested questions that abstract the technical complexity. The fundamental design of these three layers allows our customers to combine technologies to tailor the capabilities they need for their mission-critical operations.
The technology options are numerous, allowing Cognyte to provide solutions for multiple mission scenarios in the primary categories that we sell to: fighting organized crime, combating terror, ensuring border security, preventing national cyber and other attacks. You will see a specific use case in just a few moments. We believe that the interoperability of technologies within the architectural layers of our platform sets us apart, allowing customers to scale and expand to their evolving needs with great ease, all with Cognyte as their technology partner. Beyond scalability, what sets Cognyte apart is a number of our proprietary technology options, which deliver certain capabilities to our customers and which we believe are unique, allowing our customers to see and understand data others cannot. I'm joined by Dr. Ronny Lempel, our CTO, and Lior Kohavi , our analytics business general manager, to introduce you to selected examples of our technology capabilities.
Ronny joined us last year following successful technical roles at Google and before that, Microsoft. Notably, he earned a Doctorate in Computer Science from Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, after serving as an R&D scientist in the IDF. He is a perfect example of the attributes Elad spoke of combining technical mastery with deep domain expertise. Ronny?
Thank you, Gil. I joined Cognyte with the expectation that I would be working with the most brilliant minds in the industry, developing the very best technology. I have not been disappointed. The technology does all that it promises, and it's this capability that truly sets us apart. Let's start at the top with investigative analytics, turning insights into knowledge, because this is what helps our customers achieve their mission. At its core, our technology helps our customers fuse, analyze, and visualize information to identify commonalities, behaviors, and patterns among digital personas and real-life identities. These expose the few crucial needles in the massive haystack, as it is often the similarity of obscure patterns among individuals that uncovers a latent connection and the deviation from established patterns, the anomaly that betrays malicious intent. These behavioral patterns become the knowledge that supports making highly informed decisions.
While most digital footprints and patterns are inconsequential, we help our customers uncover those that matter the most in their data sets by comparing and contrasting behavioral attributes of suspects and suspicious groups over time and through numerous data lenses. Let me give you an example. Investigators seek to understand who are the members of a radical group that might pose a threat in a given region. They might start by looking at who is making the most noise on social media. Our technology can reveal the identities of bad actors, even if they are using fake profiles or conversing in the dark web. While these suspects may potentially be members of the radical group, online discourse is often insufficient to draw any conclusions. Maybe they'll layer on where these suspects meet every Friday night.
This requires the ability to aggregate individual location indications into personal habits, identify clusters of suspects who are often co-located on Friday nights, and intersect the corresponding locations with known hotbeds of militant tendencies. Still, expressing extremist views on social media and spending Friday nights with like-minded individuals near radical hotbeds may not be incriminating. They might look deeper into the suspects' social circles to identify with whom these suspects communicate and travel. Cognyte has patented technology that reveals communication patterns in end-to-end encrypted apps, in text and in voice, even behind VPNs, even when using burner phones, which is suspicious behavior in and of itself. The aggregation of pairwise conversations constructs the suspect's communication network, which can shed light on organizational structures.
We enable the investigators to further examine their collective financial transactions, either conventional banking or crypto, layering on open-source information to reveal various digital identities that are being used. The technology can reveal groups of suspicious entities who are being similarly funded. All these seemingly separate suspicious online and physical behaviors can be input into risk scoring and similarity models to assess the overall risk that suspects pose and to identify other bad actors who so far escape detection. To recap, our technology can understand signals and de-anonymize online entities to reveal the true identity behind burner phones, crypto wallets, fake profiles, and more. All these insights aggregate into investigative knowledge through AI that is built with domain expertise. Let me give you a few more examples of how we help our customers connect the dots in massive pools of data by decoding digital behavior.
The most prevalent digital device, the smartphone, is operated by users installing and accessing a variety of applications. Each suspect's collection of installed apps and their usage of those apps is highly indicative. Our technology provides customers with the ability to analyze vast quantities of suspects' mobile phone application usage to understand who is using what application, when, and where. We do this by enabling customers to detect patterns and signatures of 800,000 different smartphone applications within encrypted metadata. These apps encompass almost all of the interesting applications exploited by bad actors while evading detection. As a first example, providing our customers with the benefit of a market-leading digital footprint enables them to detect suspicious activities such as a drone that is flown at a consistent time near an airport.
A second example is our unique crypto de-anonymization technology that provides our customers with the ability to reveal who is behind a suspicious transaction. We do this with proprietary algorithms that correlate customers' IP traffic to open source. This may reveal suspects who are receiving unusual crypto payments or who are sending out transactions in a payroll-like manner. A third example, when customers have access to roadside cameras that capture license plates of passing vehicles, is to identify which suspects are likely riding in a suspicious vehicle. This is done by correlating the timestamped photos of the vehicle in various locations with the whereabouts of the suspects.
To help show these capabilities in a real-life context, I am joined by Lior, who will walk you through a demonstration that will contextualize how our unique solutions serve our customers' needs, saving lives and preventing financial damage, and bring about the best possible outcomes. While this is a simulation, everything you are about to witness is based on a real-life scenario and the benefits that a customer would experience. Lior.
Thank you, Ronny. I'd like to walk you through a short illustration of how law enforcement can use Cognyte's technology to uncover and disrupt sophisticated drug trafficking operations. Criminal organizations exploit the anonymity of the darknet, cryptocurrency transactions, and encrypted communication to operate in the shadow. Let's explore how our technologies can help prevent a fentanyl shipment from reaching the streets. It begins with an alert. Cognyte's threat intelligence technology automatically detects discussions on the darknet about an impending fentanyl shipment. In this instance, a crypto wallet is tagged as the financial hub of the operation. Criminals assume they can hide behind the anonymity of cryptocurrency to avoid detection. However, using blockchain analytics, Cognyte's technology is able to de-anonymize the wallet and identify the mobile device linked to it, leading to a critical breakthrough. Identifying the device is only the first step.
Next, advanced data processing and analytics are applied to multiple available sources, including public databases, CCTV footage, open-source images, and telecom records. These insights reveal the suspects behind the device, his identity, movement, and connection. Now the GenAI Copilot comes into play. Analysts prompt the system to examine the suspect's digital footprints, communication pattern, travel history, and spending behaviors. Behavioral analytics detect anomalies such as frequent visits to distribution hubs and covert interactions with known traffickers. The next step, network mapping. AI-powered analytics visualize hidden connections, exposing the broader drug trafficking network. Previously undetected links to suppliers, distributions, and financial enablers surface, providing authorities with a complete view of the drug trafficking operation. With actionable intelligence in hand, law enforcement moves swiftly, preventing the fentanyl shipment from reaching its destination and averting countless overdoses.
This is just one example of how Cognyte's advanced technology empowers organizations to tackle complex investigation challenges. In this instance, Cognyte's technologies were used to identify a fentanyl trafficking attempt in the darknet, de-anonymize a related crypto wallet, link the wallet to a suspect device, build a holistic profile of the actual suspect, map his network of operations and activity patterns, and pinpoint the shipment in time. That's just one of many mission scenarios that Cognyte's technologies are used for. Other examples include counterterrorism, public safety, border security, financial investigation, and national cybersecurity, and many more. When intelligence matters, Cognyte delivers. We believe that our core capabilities are a distinct advantage and difficult to replicate in the security market and likely in other potential markets.
I trust that we have demonstrated why we have high confidence that our solutions are primed to address our customers' immediate and emerging needs in a dynamic marketplace. I would like to pass now to Carmen, our Head of Marketing, to share more about the market we operate in, the opportunity it presents, and our strategy to capitalize on them.
Thanks, Lior, and hello, everyone. I'd like to begin with a big picture of the global security landscape, the challenges which are driving growing demand for the Cognyte solutions. We're operating in an era of unprecedented complexity, where crime, conflict, and terror are accelerating, both in scale and in sophistication. Let me start with a number, $2.2 trillion. That's the estimated value of global organized crime today. Another, 56 active conflicts, the highest since World War II. Over 70% of organized crime groups now operate in multiple countries. Boundaries are blurring. What were once local operations have become global enterprises. Terrorists adopt criminal tactics, and crime syndicates use terror to expand influence increasingly. They share financial systems, smuggling routes, and even cyber techniques, making them harder to detect and to dismantle. This convergence is reshaping the way security agencies are responding.
To add to that, the complexity of cryptocurrency. Nearly $100 billion has moved from illicit wallets to convergent services over the past five years. These anonymous and borderless transactions allow bad actors to fund operations, to launder money, and to hide financial trails, often via the dark web. Of course, there is the explosion of data. The world generates 400 exabytes daily from surveillance, financial activity, communications, and open-source data. By 2028, data creation is projected to reach nearly 394 ZB annually. Legacy systems and manual investigations simply cannot keep up. This means that governments and intelligence agencies need solutions that can, one, process vast amounts of data quickly, two, reveal hidden connections before threats emerge, and three, deliver speed, precision, and a complete intelligence picture.
In short, the convergence of crime and terror, the rise of crypto, and the explosion of data present urgent challenges for governments and security agencies, and they underscore the critical need for solutions like Cognyte. At Cognyte, we're uniquely equipped to help address these growing challenges with advanced analytics, a scalable platform, and an expanding footprint in government markets. We're not just responding to change. We're helping shape the future of security and intelligence. This is exactly why decision-makers, those whose very reputations are at stake, are consistently choosing Cognyte. Because our customers are government agencies with complex and mission-critical needs, our go-to-market approach remains high-touch and relationship-driven, thereby enabling long-term growth and deep trust and strong repeat business. To support our growth, we've ramped up investment in sales and marketing, accelerating our go-to-market efforts during the past year, and we'll continue that momentum into the coming year.
We're also deepening customer engagement through our flagship global intelligence summit, complemented by regional events. These gatherings foster a vibrant community of collaboration and shared expertise. Now, looking to the U.S. market, this represents a growth opportunity for us, and we're making deliberate moves to capture it. We've expanded our team in the U.S., bringing in seasoned professionals with deep expertise from federal and state agencies, including the U.S. Marshals, the DEA, and our newest board member, formerly with the U.S. Secret Service. We began our U.S. expansion with state and local law enforcement agencies, and we're extremely pleased with the momentum. We're consistently adding new customers across multiple states, displacing and replacing long-standing incumbent technologies. We're also making inroads into the federal law enforcement market with active engagements across several agencies. We've completed multiple successful proofs of concept, and interest in additional trials continues to grow.
The feedback has been very positive, underscoring both the strength of our offering and its strong alignment with the needs of the federal missions. Now, while we can't name our customers due to the sensitive nature of their operations, the feedback that you can see here, okay, comes directly from security agencies that are using our solutions on a daily basis. These aren't just marketing sound bites. They reflect real-world impact, from saving lives to accelerating emergency response and transforming intelligence gathering. This is what happens when advanced technology meets mission-critical operations. It's a powerful reminder that our work isn't just about technology. It's about empowering those on the front lines to act faster, smarter, and more safely. Now, I'd like to hand it over to David, who's going to walk you through our financial performance.
More importantly, he's going to connect everything you've heard so far: our purpose, our technology, the market trends, and the customer momentum. David will show how it all translates into a clear, sustainable path for profitable growth. David.
Thank you, Carmen. You have now seen the depth of our technology, our strong engagement with customers, and what is driving market demand for our solution. Now, I would like to connect that to our financial performance and targets, as they are a direct reflection of our innovation, our execution, and the traction we are seeing in the market. We've been operating this market for three decades and for four years as a standalone public company. Our customers' trust speaks volumes. We serve hundreds of customers in nearly 100 countries, with over 90% of our revenue coming from existing customers. A real vote of confidence. To date, the majority of our contracts have been based on perpetual licenses, driven by our customers' purchasing behavior. Thus, our near and long-term financial targets reflect this.
However, we recognize and support the market will likely transition to be a subscription-based model over time. We are strategically expanding into new markets and steadily onboarding new customers. Last year alone, we acquired 64 new customers globally. Our footprint is global, with over half of our revenues coming from EMEA, a third from APAC, and the balance from the Americas. Beyond our success is a world-class team of over 1,600 employees worldwide. Innovation is the heart of our strategy. With hundreds of patents, we continue to drive the development of industry-leading solutions that reinforce our leadership in investigative analytics. The momentum we've built is the result of focused execution across our go-to-market, product, and customer success strategies, all aligned with the evolving needs of government security and intelligence agencies. Our focus remains on driving revenue growth faster than operating expenses so that we can continue to increase profitability.
Looking at revenue, we have three different streams. Software revenue is primarily made up of perpetual licenses and appliances, along with some term-based subscription licenses. Software services revenue comes mainly from support contracts and, to a lesser extent, cloud-based SaaS subscriptions. Combined, these two streams make up total software revenue, a metric which better represents sales performance as it captures the full software revenue contribution from a customer. The balance of our revenue is professional services and other, which include deployment services, custom development work, hardware reselling, and training. We deliver professional services to help customers to adopt our solutions more effectively and pave the way for follow-on business. We expect the annual share of professional services revenue to be in the low teens. With a strong foundation in government deployments, our growth has come from deepening relationships with existing customers and steadily adding new ones.
This momentum, paired with strong execution, continues to translate into positive financial results. Let's see fiscal year ending 2025 key financial indicators that demonstrate how this strategy is playing out and why we are confident in our ability to continue delivering profitable growth. In FY 2025, revenue grew 12% year over year, reaching $351 million. Non-GAAP gross margin was 71%, up 180 basis points year over year. While revenue grew 12%, gross profit grew 15%, underscoring both the value of our solution and the efficiency of our cost structure. This gross profit growth, outpacing revenue, reflects not just strong demand, but the increasing operational leverage in our model. Adjusted EBITDA was $29 million, more than three times higher than last year. Non-GAAP operating income also improved significantly, reaching $16 million, an increase of $20 million versus last year.
In addition, billings in FY 2025 were higher than revenue, making our financial health and operational performance even stronger and is a testimony to customer satisfaction. Now to RPO. RPO, or remaining performance obligations, represents contracted revenue that is expected to be recognized as revenue in future periods. A few factors primarily impact RPO in a given period: sales cycle, deployment cycles, length of contracts, renewal timing, and seasonality. Our total RPO at the end of the year stood at $546 million, which has since been boosted by a significant support contract renewal announced in late March, with an annual value of over $20 million for three years. In addition, short-term RPO rose to $335 million, reflecting the strong momentum in our business and providing strong visibility into future revenue. Our deferred revenue of $130 million reflects solid forward revenue and continued customer commitment.
Our strong balance sheet remains a key competitive advantage, giving us the financial flexibility to invest, adapt, and scale with confidence. We ended the year with $113 million in cash, up $30 million from last year, and with no debt. This growth in cash was primarily driven by strong cash-to-form operations of about $47 million, reflecting the underlying profitability and the resilience of our business model. In a market where peers are still reliant on external funding, our ability to consistently generate cash puts us in a strong position to invest in future growth. With this strong foundation, we take a balanced approach to capital allocation, continue to invest in innovation and growth initiatives, and ensure we are in a position to do M&A should compelling opportunities become available. We are focused on generating value for our shareholders.
To that end, we are executing a stock repurchase program of up to $20 million authorized through June 2026. As of January 31, we have repurchased $5.3 million worth of shares. Last week, we outlined our outlook for fiscal 2026. Here is a short reminder. We expect revenue to be approximately $392 million, plus or minus 2%, representing about 12% year-over-year growth at the midpoint of the revenue range. We expect non-GAAP gross margin to be at 71.5%, representing another year in which gross profit will grow faster than revenue. Given the leverage in our financial model, we expect adjusted EBITDA for the year to be about $43 million at the midpoint of the revenue range, approximately 45% growth year-over-year. Now, the moment you have all been waiting for. Our three-year target is to become a half-billion-dollar revenue company by fiscal year 2028.
I want to share the key drivers of the top-line growth with you. First, we drive growth by addressing three core needs within our existing customer base. One, data growth and capacity expansion, supporting customers as their data volume scale. Two, functionality upgrades, ensuring mission-critical capabilities remain current and effective. Three, customer requirements to address new use cases, which expands our solution's adoption to support the emerging operational needs. In fact, many of our largest customers begin with relatively modest spending, and they've significantly increased their investment in our solutions over time. On average, customers who have been with us for more than five years invest at more than twice the rate of those with shorter tenures. Second, new customer acquisition. We are winning new logos in our target markets because of our strong reputation and references, as well as successful proof of concept and demos.
We continue to add new customers over time. We expect repeatable success with this lend-and-expense strategy. Third, the US remains a strategic growth opportunity. These are the drivers that will turn us into a half-billion-dollar company by 2028. Our targets build on our steady momentum and the successful execution of our growth strategy. We assume a consistent market environment and continued purchasing behavior favoring perpetual licenses. We target revenue of about $500 million at a CAGR of about 13%. Non-GAAP gross margin of about 73%. Adjusted EBITDA margin is expected to increase to above 20%. Non-GAAP operating margin is projected to reach the high teens. Let me share with you how we create leverage in our model. The differentiated value of our solutions enables us to maintain strong pricing and helps us to further expand our margins. We are also benefiting from economics of scale.
As the business grows, it allows us to spread fixed costs over a growing customer base. We continue to optimize our cost structure through, among other things, leveraging our global workforce, increasing the use of automation and AI to accelerate deployments, and standardizing our delivery processes to make implementations faster, easier, and more cost-efficient. As a result, gross profit is expected to continue to grow faster than revenue. Turning to expenses, we expect to continue to make meaningful gains in profitability over the next three years as OpEx is expected to increase at a much slower pace than revenue. We will maintain our strategy of investing in R&D ahead of benchmark levels as this approach enables us to maintain our leadership position in technology and innovation. R&D investment will continue to grow, but at a slower pace than revenue, resulting in a declining R&D-to-revenue ratio over time.
This efficiency is driven by economies of scale and cost structure optimization. SG&A leverage will also improve as we scale the business more efficiently while maintaining strong go-to-market execution and customer engagement. In summary, our leading technology meets prevailing customer needs, and our go-to-market strategy can capitalize on the opportunity. With that, let me turn things back to Elad for closing remarks.
Thank you, everyone. Before we open up for questions, I would like to summarize what you heard today and why I think you should be excited about Cognyte's future. Let's start with the healthy demand for our products. Globally, our customers seek to enable the best possible outcomes: reduce crime, avert terror, save lives.
As the Admiral stated, security agencies understand that they need to partner with external experts to access solutions that help them address the three challenges they face: rapidly growing volumes of data, increasingly sophisticated adversaries, and staying ahead of an evolving technology landscape. Cognyte offers these customers an extremely strong value proposition. Our solutions are flexible, scalable, and modular, with capabilities that address the emerging needs of our customers. The testimonials that Carmen presented speak volumes. Cognyte technology is a game changer in our customers' operation, leading to more successful outcomes. With this momentum, we are targeting to become a $500 million company by fiscal 2028. Now, let me open the line for questions.
Thank you. As a reminder to ask a question, please press star one, one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced.
Hello, everyone. Welcome. We are now open for questions.
Ask a question, please press star one, one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. Our first question from the phone line will come from Mike Cikos with Needham. Your line is now open.
Hey, guys. Thanks for doing this today. I appreciate the presentation and the overview, as well as the three-year targets. Just wanted to get a better understanding. Great to see the targets in calendar 2028, $500 million in revenue. I think it implies 13% growth over the next two years, if I'm doing my math right, assuming you do the 12% this coming year. Can you help us think about that implied? I know it's a slight acceleration at the margin, but what gives you that confidence in being able to drive that kind of growth?
Thank you, Mike. Maybe I'll start with the demand drivers, and then I'll turn it over to David to discuss the target itself. What we see in the market today, and as you saw previously in this day, is that demand drivers are intensified. The world is not getting safer. The data volumes are growing. The data diversity is growing. We do see the adversaries are becoming more sophisticated, better hiding. We also see that technology is running really fast, and customers have to maintain their leadership and be faster than the adversaries. This actually creates a very healthy demand environment for us. In addition to that, we do see that more customers are willing to integrate more AI into their existing solutions. Our technology is really providing them with the ability to solve the most critical and pressure problems that they are facing. With this market environment, together with our strength of the technology, we believe that we are well positioned for growth. Now I'll turn it to David to discuss the model.
Thank you, Elad. The model is targeting $500 million by fiscal year 2028. The major elements behind this top line is actually the demand driver that Elad was referring to. Giving the demand driver that we see, giving what we have as experience from the past. I will elaborate now about the fiscal year 2026 view and then why it's reflecting the long term. We are entering the current year with the demand driver intensified. We have a strong recurring revenue. We ended the year with $187 million of recurring revenue, much higher than last year, more than 10% growth year over year.
We have the short-term deferred revenue grew by 15% by the end of the year. We have the current CRPO, which we ended with $335 million for the current year. If you look from a coverage perspective versus previous years, it's the same level of the similar level of coverage of 85%. On top of that, we were boosted by a three-year deal of annual $20 million support contracts. Actually, if I'm looking how I'm entering today for 2026, we have much stronger visibility. When I'm going back to the target for the FY 2028, giving what we know on the market, what we see from the customer, the demand, the technology, that gives us the confidence that we will be able to achieve the half a billion dollar by FY 2028.
If you look at the profile of the targets and why we believe that we can generate more profitability, actually, we assume that we will get 73% of gross margin, taking consideration that we are already aiming to achieve 71.5% by the end of the fiscal year 2026. This level of gross margin can drive from two main elements. One of them is the scale, the top-line growth, and the other one is better cost structure related to our professional services. The combination of the two will drive better profitability. We deploy faster. We have AI capabilities that are related to deployment that allow us. If you look at the overall OpEx structure, we get the leverage from multiple elements, fixed costs that can spread over more revenue.
We have efficiencies that are related to our ability to use AI models to improve development cycles and other activities with the organization and our global workforce optimization. Everything together can give us today $500 million and to be above 20% on adjusted EBITDA.
Got it. Maybe just a quick follow-up on that. Again, coming back to the revenue, are we coming up against a larger renewal cycle? Do you have that level of visibility in your existing customer base today? Maybe if you're thinking about 13% growth in fiscal 2027 and 2028, just assuming it's even each year, how much of that 13% is coming from new logos that you guys are landing today?
It's a combination. It's not one element. The growth can come from multi-elements. One of them is the ability to sell more within our customer base.
If you will see our history within our customer base, we were able to sell more to our customer. It's more data capacity, meaning that there is much more data. We actually spoke during the session about what happened to data and how it grows. This is one driver for the growth. The other one is that more functionality. In order to be up to date in the world of security, you must upgrade on a regular basis your solution to drive more and more functionality. The third one is more use cases that the customer needs. This is a combination. We can grow within the same customer into different units. This drives one element of the growth. The second element of the growth is new logos.
We ended the last year with more than 60 new logos, which gives us the ability to continue to sell within these new logos. The third one is new territories. We are entering into the U.S. We believe that that gives us another opportunity to put everything together, our know-how, our technology, what we see from our customer, what we hear from our customer. The combination of everything will bring this growth. We believe that the kicker will be 13%. It's because what we're getting as feedback from the customer and what we know that we can offer them, that will drive this growth.
Great. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Mike.
Thank you.
I show no further questions on the phone line. I would now like to turn the call over to Dean Ridlon for questions from the website.
Hello all. We do have a question from Eric Sterling at Senvest, and his question is, how, if at all, do you have to evolve your go-to-market to better capture the market opportunity?
Thank you, Eric. First of all, to begin with, our philosophy is that we should deliver significant value to our customers over time, which means that we have to solve the problems today, but also to be prepared to solve the problems in the future. This is the foundation for the growth. In terms of go-to-market strategy, the way we do it is the following. First of all, we hire the sales team, either ex-domain experts, veterans from the agencies, or sales guys that came from a certain territory and know to open the doors for us. Another area is references. Existing customers are very good references for us.
They actually derive significant value from our solutions and are willing to recommend on us. Another area is investments in marketing. We are actually increasing the investments in sales and marketing. In marketing, we are approaching more customers with more use cases and actually providing the existing customer base an upgrade path and also giving the potential new customers the benefit to better understand what we do. In addition to that, we participate in more conferences. It could be industry conferences. As you also saw earlier in this meeting, we have our own global intelligence summit. In this summit, we also attract customers, actually existing and new ones that we invite. We became so-called an intelligence committee for those customers that are talking to each other, look at our roadmap, look at our existing solutions, and being able to discuss their current and future needs with our customers.
In addition to that, we've decided to penetrate, to expand presence in the U.S. This is another effort we are doing. We started with state and local, sorry, and now we continue with federal. It is a matter of providing the market with very strong technology to address the most pressing needs as a basic. From that on to expand presence with existing and new customers, expanding more territories, developing more use cases, and also providing them the upgrade path, primarily with AI, which actually provides them the capability to uncover more hidden insights out of the same data sets they have today by using stronger tools over time.
Okay. We have another question from Noah Steinberg at Tumont Capital. He's got actually several questions. First question is, how does the size of deals that are in your pipeline today compare to one to two years ago?
Yeah. The size of the deals has not changed. Actually, usually new customers start with smaller deals, which means a few hundreds of K dollars, and go with us over time. Obviously, we have smaller customers with smaller budgets. We have larger customers with larger budgets. There is also a difference between law enforcement and national security, national intelligence. Law enforcement usually have less data, and they have less capacity to deal with when it comes to national security, national intelligence. Those are usually customers that have huge amounts of data they have to process and analyze and convert into insights. The range of deals is usually a few hundreds of K dollars to a few millions of dollars. Sometimes we do see from time to time also $10 million-plus deals and also $20 million-plus, but this is rare.
I would say that the average is a few millions of dollars a deal.
Okay. Noah's next question is, does signing bigger deals get you to $500 million, or is it a similar mix?
I would say that for now, we do not see a change in the mix. What we see in the market is actually the demand drivers I mentioned before that are driving the growth, which is the security pressure. We all see that the world is not getting safer. The bad guys are better hiding. Customers are facing more complex situations that they have to deal with, and they have to move fast. That is actually the growth in terms of market demand, data volumes, adversaries that are becoming more sophisticated, and those create the need for more technology. That is where the growth is coming.
It's not about that we see change in the mix, but we see more demand across the world globally for actually having more and more technology. I wouldn't say that I see any major change in the deal size mix.
Okay. One more question. To get to $500 million, is it dependent on existing products or new products that have not yet come out yet?
Yeah. Actually, our offering today is very strong. We help customers globally to address many different use cases. We approach law enforcement, national security, national intelligence, military intelligence in about 100 countries. We serve hundreds of customers, and many of them, or most of them actually, have repeat business with us over time.
Our offering is evolving, which means that we are not relying on a new product release that we plan for a few years from now in order to generate this growth. What we do is actually continue to innovate and evolve the current solutions that we have, make sure that they can deal with the growing capacity, make sure that they address new technologies that are becoming disruptive technologies for our customers that could be potential risk or potential opportunity for our customers. It is evolving innovation over time in the current offerings that we have. We are not relying on new products.
Okay. We have a question from Paul, and he is wondering how Cognyte, he basically wants to know more about how Cognyte is leveraging artificial intelligence in its solutions.
Sure. I will take that one. Elad talked about the demand. We need to understand that for our customers, AI is an opportunity, but it's also a threat. It's an opportunity in the way that they can do two things. One is enrich the insights or get more insights out of the data they have and optimize their analysts to really work in an optimized way. That's the copilot, for example, or the hidden relations when it comes to getting more insights through AI. It's a threat because also bad actors use AI. It's actually like fighting fire with fire, meaning it creates this race of what the bad actors are doing and what our customers are able to do with AI. Our core pieces of AI are in two places. One, where we have our proprietary AI models around investigative intelligence.
The examples that you saw also before are around things like finding hidden relations, either from communications, images, and so on, de-anonymization, and such, which enrich the value of insights from the data they have. The other piece is, as I said, is around optimizing the analyst cowork, abstracting the analyst work from the actual data structure that he can work seamlessly and fast. This is one piece. We also leverage industry AI models that are out there, assuming they are in the right quality. It's not a like-to-like usage because we need to adapt them into the investigative workspace and tune them according. Just an example, access control or explainability, things that we need to have in any AI model that we use or we use to provide solutions to our customers.
Overall, between what our proprietary or our core IP around AI and what we leverage and change from the industry, both of these together bring a comprehensive solution to our customers.
Terrific. Michelle, I'll hand it back to you for I believe we have another question on the phone lines.
Thank you. Yes. Our next question from the phone line will come from Shaul Eyal, and that is with TD Cowen. Your line is open.
Thank you. Hi. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for hosting this. I apologize. I might have missed that. David or Elad, maybe Elad can also. Can you double-click on your billings, bookings, backlog expectations for fiscal 2026 just to make sure that I think everybody's on the same page in that respect? Maybe some of the drivers or visibility levels you have around it. Thank you so much.
Yeah. Thanks, Shaul. I'll start, and then I'll hand over to David to elaborate if there is anything to add. When we look at fiscal 2026 visibility, as David mentioned earlier, we do see three things that give us very high visibility and confidence level for the year. The first one is the demand drivers, the healthy market. We do see that customers need more technology. Their mission is becoming more complicated, and they need us in order to help them. This is one area that is giving us a tailwind. Another one is the recurring revenue level, which I'll let David discuss shortly. The third one is our technology that actually provides very strong capabilities to our customers. Sorry, one more element is actually the short-term RPO.
The short-term RPO coverage is similar to previous years and very strong and boosted recently with three renewal contracts of $20-plus million a year. If you look at all of those together, the market demand, the CRPO, the short-term backlog, the recurring revenue, all of this together gives us a very strong visibility into fiscal 2026. If we look beyond that, we do see that customers will have to address the evolving challenges even faster because of the demand drivers that I have just mentioned earlier, which is data growing, diversity in volumes, adversaries that are becoming more sophisticated, better hire, they are well-funded, they are well-organized, they do their job, unfortunately, much better. It is very difficult to put our hands on them. We just saw earlier in the demo that they do everything anonymized. They talk to each other in anonymization.
They actually fund themselves through the cryptocurrency, which is anonymized. It is becoming more and more complicated for the customers to address their needs and be successful in their missions. We believe that the only way our customers can address it is by having a strong technology that is able to give them the strong tools to uncover more hidden insights out of the data sets quicker, faster, in a more efficient manner in order for them to be able to do the job and be successful. When we say be successful, it means that actually we help them to save lives and prevent financial damage. Those are critical mission-critical areas that customers must be successful in order to prevent those kinds of risks and threats. I will now turn it over to David to discuss the numbers.
Yeah. Let's take an overview about what took place in the, I would say, in the last two years. You can see that in the last two years, we are quarter over quarter improving our visibility, and we actually share certain KPIs to give you a more holistic view. It's not about one KPI that is playing a role. It's multiple KPIs that give you the idea of where we are going and what we are trying to achieve. If you look at that point, the KPIs that we are sharing, we give you, for example, deferred revenue. You can see the current deferred revenue increased significantly year over year. It's more than 15% an increase, which means that we have for the next 12 months visibility into our revenue. If you look at our billing, last year billing was above revenue.
If you look at Q4, it was $95 million, also above our total revenue. If you look at our CRPO, very strong CRPO, $335 million, about 85% of coverage versus our guidance without taking consideration recent deals that boost the RPO. We had a three-year deal of $20 million. If you look at all KPI and look at the trend, what we see in the market, you can see that we get much better visibility. We have, I would say, very strong visibility within FY2026.
I think that if you look into FY2028, given the number of the new customers, the new logos that we brought abroad, almost twice the number that we had last year, and everything that I just shared, all the combination, the demand that's getting intensified, everything together puts us in a position that we can look into the future and say, "We can achieve these numbers, and why these targets are the right one for us."
We do have another online question, and it's from Peter Levine at Evercore. He's wondering, out of the $500 million, we'll talk about the competitive landscape, and in addition to that, talk about kind of of that $500 million in 2028, how much is going to come from displacing existing users versus new customers?
Yes. Actually, the competitive landscape for us is very fragmented. The reason it's very fragmented is that because first, we are global. We actually operate in nearly 100 countries, and sometimes we do see local smaller vendors. We also address many different use cases for those customers in law enforcement, national security, national and military intelligence. We do see different vendors for different use cases. Actually, there is a very fragmented competitive landscape. We do see actually three areas where we compete. The first one is the global ones. It could be BAE Systems, L3Harris, Swedish Route, Palantir. Those are more global and cover more use cases. We also see some smaller local ones that either focus on certain territory or focus on certain use cases. It could be, for example, Selection, SS8, JSI, those kinds of competitors. We also still see some customers who are using very old homegrown solutions.
Homegrown solutions, those are the solutions that they actually develop on their own, either by external resources or internal resources. It's very difficult, obviously, to maintain those solutions. It's very expensive, usually inefficient. Unless you're a very wealthy organization that has real deep pockets, it's very difficult to develop for one time the same technology that a commercial company like us developed for hundreds of customers, and each one is benefiting from the requirements of the others. Actually, we give a much better, we believe, a much better solution to the global market. Those are the three areas where we try to gain market share. In terms of whether revenue comes more from existing customers or new customers, the behavior usually is that new customers start small and then grow over time.
If I'm talking about this period of time compared to fiscal 2028, those customers that are today small new customers in fiscal 2026, probably some of them will have repeat business over the next three years, and the repeat business will grow. If you look at it, actually, we do see new customers start small and grow over time, but the next time they put a deal, they're already repeat business. You will see that most of the growth comes from repeat business while we continue to acquire new customers. David mentioned last year was a very good year for us in terms of new customers. We doubled the new customers we acquired to over 60 last year.
Okay. We do have another online question from Omri Cohen. He's wondering, his statement is that he thinks our analytics capabilities seem to suit adjacent markets and just wondering what our thoughts are on adjacent markets.
Yes. So actually, we developed our platform in a very flexible manner, and Gil will elaborate on it in a minute. Our focus today is investigative analytics for the security segment, which is security agencies that I just mentioned, and we expand with our existing customer base, with new customers, and in territories like the U.S. This is our main focus.
Having said that, we recognize and realize that converting data into insights or being able to fuse and analyze data in a very smart way using AI and advanced analytics and convert it into insights in order for an organization to take a decision quickly and accurately, our platform can fit into other use cases outside of the security segment, and we'll consider it for the longer term. Maybe I'll let Gil elaborate a little bit on the technology and how it can fit into other agencies.
Sure. I will actually connect this answer to a previously asked question about new products, which is pretty much related, right? Because the way we structure the layers, the three layers you saw, and the modularity between them enables us to build within that same technology stack or by enhancing it in some areas, various solutions to address the customer needs.
They all boil down to decision-making, right? Getting the insights out of data and decision-making. Even within our market, when you say new offering, this is like think about a path between those layers of the components talking to one another and creating that analytical suit to answer a specific question. Now, our customers have an everlasting change that they need to have this modularity within them. This is why it goes back to the answer. Can we go to adjacent markets by creating additional use cases? Yes, we can, and we'll consider it going forward. The technology itself is structured like this because of our existing market, which enables us to go into additional markets if we decide to.
As a reminder to ask a question, please press star one, one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced.
To ask a question, please press star one, one on your telephone. At this time, I am not showing any further questions on the phone line. I would now like to turn the call back to Elad for closing remarks.
Thank you, Michelle, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. We truly appreciate you taking the time to gain more insights into Cognyte's business and the future and the opportunities that are ahead of us. We are really excited about the future. I hope today you saw more things than you used to see before and are excited as we are. Thank you all. If you have any further questions, please feel free to reach out to us. Thank you.
Thank you.