Good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining us. My name is Shaul Leal. I'm TD Cowen's research analyst covering the cybersecurity universe. We are joined this morning and delighted to host Elad Sharon, CEO of Cognyte. We also have David Abadi, the CFO, sitting here in the front. Elad, thank you so much for joining us this morning.
Thank you for hosting us.
Maybe for the benefit of the audience slightly less familiar with Cognyte, can you briefly outline for us the company's mission and the market it addresses?
Yes. Cognyte is a global leader in investigative analytics. Our customers are primarily government security agencies, such as law enforcement, national security, national intelligence, and military intelligence. With our technology, they can fuse and analyze growing data volumes and diversity at scale and convert it into hidden insights. What we call, we help them to actually make the unknown known or eliminate the unknown. They have to be able to identify, investigate, and prevent any forms of terror and crime. That's exactly what we're helping them to do. We're in this market for three decades now. We have hundreds of customers in nearly 100 countries. We support many different use cases, such as drug trafficking, border controls, terror activities, et cetera. The market is actually a market of security. We all witnessed that the world, unfortunately, is not getting safer this day.
The need continues to grow over time.
With that in mind, as we think about, on the one hand, the world is not becoming safer, some would even say better place, how should we be thinking about the supporting drivers of Cognyte and its industry?
Yes. Our customers are facing many different challenges. If I have to focus, there are primarily three challenges that customers must address. The first one is related to data. Data is growing in volumes and diversity. In order for our customers to be able to generate very accurate and smart intelligence in real time and be able to prevent bad things from happening, they need to be able to quickly fuse and analyze data at scale. When data is growing and it's growing fast, they need more capacity and more technology in order to be able to convert it into insights. By the way, we help them also uncover hidden insights, including from encrypted metadata. It's very strong tools that we provide them with. The second element we have to remember is related to adversaries. Adversaries are also becoming more and more sophisticated.
They also use technology. In order to evade detection, they're hiding much better. They, of course, don't use regular communication channels. They find themselves in very specific ways. It's very difficult for security agencies to put their hands on them. The last one is related to technology. Technology is running really fast. AI is one element, but it's not the only one. Customers have either to advance themselves and refresh technology and be one step ahead. If not, the bad guys will be the ones to have the advantage. They are also using technology. For example, they use AI in order to create fake identities. This is one very simple example. We help customers to address all these three demand drivers and, of course, maintain advantage among the mission, the critical mission they have to deal with.
You've recently reported a solid set of results, revenue, EPS, beating those. Talk to us about that performance. Maybe talk to us also what you have been seeing from a geographical perspective.
Yes. We finished fiscal 25 strong, with revenue growing double digit and with a significant increase in profitability. Revenue came in at $355 million, representing 12% of our growth. Profitability grew faster. Non-GAAP gross profit grew at 15%. Adjusted EBITDA was $29 million, more than three times what we delivered in the previous year. Generally speaking, a very healthy business. In terms of geographies, we are global. We address many different use cases across many security agencies in nearly 100 countries. The revenue split is more or less 55% coming from EMEA, about 30% is coming from APAC, and about 15% is coming from Americas.
When we think about the initial guidance that you have projected, do you see the drivers, you see kind of results and drivers supporting that as fiscal 26 unfolds?
Yes, we do. Actually, we gave guidance for fiscal 26, in which we expect to continue and grow double digit and improve profitability and increase it even faster than top-line growth. We all witnessed the unrest around the world. We all witnessed that the world is not getting safer. We all witnessed that security agencies have more missions and more challenges to address. We believe that our technology is very helpful and valuable. Actually, customers are with us for more than two, three decades, some of them. This is, I believe, a vote of confidence in the way we serve this market. I think we're highly appreciated by our customers.
If you look at fiscal 2026 guidance, we guided 12% top-line growth, more or less, which is $392 million for the year, for this year, with Non-GAAP gross profit growing faster and adjusted EBITDA to be $43 million, which is a Year-over-Year growth of about 45%. The demand drivers out there, I believe we do have a very strong technology to address customers' needs. We also have the appreciation of our customers, which was reflected, by the way, in the Intelligence Summit we had last year back in November. We participate in industry conferences, but also we have our own. Last year in November 24, we had hundreds of customers joining us from nearly 70 countries. You can see that the demand and the need and the traction with our customers is very good. The market drivers are healthy. The need is there.
I believe we are well positioned with our strong technology. We have very good visibility into fiscal 26.
As we think about your expansion and probably growing focus on the U.S., and you touched before on the geographic spread, what are the strategies that you're putting in place and implementing in order to broaden your current U.S. exposure? What's the thinking along these lines?
Sure. I'll start and say that historically, we were not present in the U.S. by decision. Whatever the reason is, we focused mostly on the rest of the world. The U.S. was not a focus market for us. I said before that 15% is coming from Americas, but only a few percent, 3%, something like this, is coming from the U.S. We had a decision. We made a decision to expand presence in the U.S. We've started focusing on law enforcement agencies instead at the local level, primarily operational units. Later, we've decided that we want also to expand into the federal units. We started. It's the penetration mode. The way we drive this penetration is by hiring local sales teams, by participating in industry conferences in the U.S. We are expanding our network presence.
Last week, we announced a small acquisition for market reach. We acquired GroupSense. And we have already in the state and local level customers that joined us. We acquired new customers. Some of them became very strong references for us. Some of them already put follow-on orders, which is, I believe, a vote of confidence in the value we deliver to them. The progress is very good. In federal, we started a little bit later. The sales cycle with federal and the penetration process is more complicated and will take a long time. It's not a big surprise. We knew that. Having said that, we also see there a very good engagement and traction. We had POCs with them, proof of concepts with them, very successful ones. The feedback is very strong. I believe that the US market presents a significant growth opportunity for us over time.
It will take some time. Penetration is a process. You have to create brand recognition, brand awareness, have more critical mass of more customers with you. We are in the right direction. We'll continue this initiative in the next few years.
Maybe in that respect, looking at it from a customer perspective, how is the company, how is Cognyte addressing customer retention? What strategies are in place to attract also new logos into your platform?
Yeah. If you look at our growth initiatives, there are three. One of them is to expand with the existing customer base. Unlike a usual commodity product that you buy for yourself, and until it's broken, you don't have to replace it. In our business, it's a very dynamic environment. We mentioned it before. Data is growing. There is more new technology that is coming in. Customers have to expand, to upgrade, to refresh, to increase capacity, to add more capabilities. There are expansions, upgrades, and also selling to other departments within the same customer base that we have today. This is one pillar. It's a very strong one. Customers stay with us for many years. The reason is, by the way, our solutions, most of them are sticky.
The reason customers stay with us is it's not because the solutions are sticky, but because we continuously innovate and deliver to them very high value. They are very happy with us. Actually, the customer success or the customer survey results are extremely high. This is one pillar. The second pillar is new customers, acquiring new customers. I mentioned it, how we do it in the U.S. We do it exactly the same in the rest of the world, participating in industry conferences, having customers' references, opening doors for us. We have global Salesforce that is available for customers. We have partners' network. We have our own regional and global summits in order for customers to be able to come to the same place, first talk to each other.
Actually, one of the customers told me something very strong, that we became the intelligence community, the intelligence community orchestrator for law enforcement agencies to talk to each other. It was a very nice compliment for me. We are able to acquire new customers. Last year, we acquired over 60 new customers. Those customers, potentially in the future, will buy more and more of our solutions and our technology and expand and upgrade. This is how we attract new customers, how we acquire them, and how we maintain them. We invest a lot in innovation and R&D and make sure that our customers stay one step ahead of the adversaries or the bad guys and solve and identify and prevent threats before they unfold.
Understood. Let's talk for a second on the competitive landscape. Maybe a two-part question. On the one hand, who is your head-to-head competition that you're seeing out there the most? That's on the one hand. On the other hand, it would appear as if given there's very high barriers kind of to enter kind of this arena, given the advanced technologies. Are you seeing new startups emerging in this field, in this category, or not?
Yes. If you look at our competitive landscape, actually, because we are global and because we address many different use cases to different security agencies, our landscape is fragmented. We are competing against large global companies like BAE , like others. We do have local competitors that we compete on certain territories. There are some local competitors that are focused only on one or two use cases. It is very fragmented. If you take the U.S. as an example, we are focusing on operational units. The local vendors that compete against us are L3Harris and Jacobs, just as an example. In Germany, you will see someone else. In Europe, you will see Rohde & Schwarz. It is different between one territory to the other and between one use case to the other.
Generally speaking, there are the global ones and the local ones or the ones that are focused on specific use case. Our way to maintain leadership is to heavily invest in R&D, innovate, and make sure that the value we generate for our customers is significantly higher versus competition, but also in absolute way address the real challenges and the real security pressure that they have to deal with. We do it successfully for many years. The landscape has not changed recently. We do not have, I would say, one-on-one competitor that I can tell you this is number one competitor that competes with us globally and with all use cases. It's fragmented. We are able to maintain leadership. The one way we're trying to win competitors, by the way, in certain cases, it's becoming a single vendor.
Customers that are with us for many years, including the one we announced last week that we had a large subscription deal with one of the customers for $10 million-plus for three years. This is a single vendor. It's not always a bid. Yeah. They come to us. If it's a competitive bid, we usually encourage the customers to go through a POC because on the paper, everybody's checking the box and everybody's complying with everything. Eventually, when you come to the field, it's not that way. We encourage customers to go for POCs, to test and try the technology in their own hands. Usually, this helps us win.
That's a bold statement. Gen AI, agentic AI, without a doubt, top of the jour over the course of the past 12, 24 months or so. How is Cognyte addressing the strength from a product perspective?
Yes. If you look at AI in general, first of all, it's not new. It's in the market for many years. It became more a, I would say, attractive buzzword in the last two years. It exists for quite a long time. AI presents a risk and an opportunity for our customers, a risk because also the bad guys are using it to evade detection, to anonymize themselves, to spike identities, to hide better. If customers will not be able to address it in a very strong way, actually, there will be a gap. The opportunity is in two ways. The first one is related to being able to uncover more hidden insights out of the same data sets. What we call actually, I mentioned before that we help customers to eliminate the unknown. What is to eliminate the unknown?
Our customers need to understand who intends to do what, when, with whom, what is the funding source, those kind of WH questions accurately and quickly in order for them to be able to respond to this threat. AI, on one hand, can help customers to unlock more insights out of the same data sets, including from encrypted data, which is a very strong capability that we have. I do not know of any others that have this capability. We do have capabilities to de-anonymize and uncover hidden insights out of metadata that is encrypted. This is one element of AI. The second element of AI is the Gen AI, actually being able to improve dramatically the efficiency of using the technology, being able to ask questions in natural language rather than being a super technical guy that queried the solution with many sophisticated fields and databases.
This is another layer of opportunity for our customers. We offer them both the AI for stronger analytics and better uncovering of hidden insights. Also, in order to use, we call it Cognyte Copilot or COGI. This is the layer that allows natural language interface with the users that improves dramatically the efficiency of utilization of the technology. I see it as an opportunity for us. It is important to understand that, first of all, we leverage the AI capabilities that are in the market. Second, we do innovate AI algorithms and machine learning capabilities that are specifically required for customers like ours. The most important part is that we integrate all of it into the investigation process. We look at it holistically with the required governance and security that customers need. We do leverage AI.
I do believe that AI will continue to be developed and actually present more and more opportunities for customers to improve their results.
I know one of the questions that we've been getting, the various companies we cover, how do you price on Gen AI right now or the capabilities? Is it part of the ELA company depending? Is it part of the subscription? Is it per seat, per head?
Yeah. So actually, government agencies historically and also today purchase solutions like ours in perpetual license. So a deal is perpetual license plus support contracts. I believe personally that eventually they'll move to subscription. We did have some good news from last week with the large deal I mentioned before. Today, we offer our solutions in a dual way. Customers that want perpetual, we continue to deliver to them perpetual. We encourage them to move to subscription, encouraging them by the fact that if you're in subscription, your tech refresh and value that you derive from the solution is much higher. There is a benefit for them. They do have the option to move to subscription. Having said that, I believe it will take some time because first, they have CapEx and not OpEx.
Sometimes the benefit to move to subscription is to move to cloud. They are not prepared for that. While eventually, I believe they'll move, I think that it's very hard to predict how fast. In terms of pricing, it's capacity, its users, and its functionality. Data capacity, how many users are using it, and the functionality, how much analytics, how many engines are involved in this data processing, that's the way we price our solutions.
Got it. Cash utilization strategy, what's the philosophy behind it? I know you mentioned the small stock that you've just announced. Yeah. How do you guys think about cash utilization and maybe build versus buy?
Yeah. When we look at capital allocation, we always think about value creation for investors. This is always in our mind. We actually took a balanced approach. First, we want to make sure that we have operational flexibility in order to continue and invest and innovate and grow the business organically. Second, we announced a share buyback back in November of $20 million over 18 months. This is another layer that we believe will create value for investors. The third one is tacking M&As. We do not have plans for transformational M&A at this time. We are focusing on looking at potential M&As that are aligned with our strategy to expand presence in certain territories and actually expand our market reach. We do not think we need more technology. Technology, we have a very strong one.
Of course, if we find something that will pop up and be very attractive, we'll consider it. The focus is tacking M&As that are primarily for market reach. We look at capital allocation periodically. Actually, we have no debt. We have a very healthy and strong balance sheet. Yes, last week, we announced a small tacking for the same reason, to expand presence, in this case, in the US.
Questions from the audience before we proceed? Hugh, please.
Two questions. One, Elad, you mentioned sort of these three drivers. You talked about data, adversaries, and technology as those three drivers. If you had to rank those, my sense is that the adversaries drive the technology or help drive the technology. That is the first question, your thoughts on those three. For David, what is the mix of, you talked about customers preferring on-premises, government customers preferring on-premises. You were saying you think they will move to the cloud. Where is the mix now? Do you see that impetus from your customers to say, hey, we need to start looking at cloud for the government customers?
For the first question, I think all three drivers are combined with each other. And why I'm saying that? If data is growing, you need more technologies, stronger technology in order to be able to analyze huge amounts of data. It's not linear. If you have a piece of data and you have 10,000 pieces of data, you need different technology in order to address this jump. If adversaries are now moving to cryptocurrency rather than using cash or going to fake bank accounts, you need now to de-anonymize Bitcoin transactions, for example. The drivers are combined. It's not just one driver sits for itself. If data is growing, you need technology. If adversaries are moving to a new environment, you need a new technology in order to address it. I mentioned before that we uncover hidden insights out of encrypted metadata.
When encryption became very popular, they moved to encrypted applications in order to communicate. When we are able now to de-anonymize it, it helps our customers with the new technology to be able to do that, in this case, AI. I do not think you can separate between the three. I think all are feeding each other. In terms of perpetual versus subscription, most of our business today is perpetual. Very minor portion, marginal portion, is subscription. The reason I do believe they will move is a few things. First of all, even if you do not want to move to public cloud, moving to cloud technology gives you benefits, for example, no downtime, for example, easy upgrades, et cetera. This is one element. Second element is tech refresh. It will be much faster for customers that are in subscription.
Because if one customer today is buying perpetual license and he wants now new capabilities, he'll have to have another perpetual license purchasing. So it's another new deal that he has to deal with. If it's subscription, he'll get a tech refresh. I also believe, and that's my personal view, that the cloud services will eventually support the governance and security requirements of security agencies. All in all, today, everybody, or not everybody, most of the customers still stick to the current CapEx on-prem perpetual license. We do see some customers start talking about moving. We do see one customer that took the decision and wanted to move to subscription without moving to cloud. I do believe this process will happen eventually. How to predict how fast? I do believe that it will happen.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
Elad, any closing remarks before we finish kind of the session?
Yeah. Maybe a very short summary of what I said. The market is there. The world is not getting safer. Our customers have new challenges every day. They need technology in order to address it. We do have domain expertise and technology expertise and reputation in the field for over three decades. Customers are with us and loyal for many years. We did have very good results in fiscal 25. We gave guidance for fiscal 26 and also target for fiscal 28. There is also a long-term target that is available for you. We expect to be in $500,000,000 revenue by fiscal 28 with adjusted EBITDA to be beyond 20% and gross margin to be in the 73% area. Generally speaking, the market is healthy. We are in a very good position technical-wise.
I encourage the forum, all of you, everyone who hasn't seen yet the IR Day video. We had an IR Day on April 8 this year, a very fresh one. It's only a one-hour video. You don't need to spend half a day for that. It's only one hour, very focused. There you'll see not just the business and the market, which I gave you some briefing here, but also the technology. The CTO is there. The Chief Product Officer is there in this video. You'll be able to get a lot more color about Cognyte market, technology, as well as opportunity into the future.
Thank you so much. That was great.
Thank you.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you, guys.