Good afternoon. Welcome to the 26th Annual Needham Growth Conference. My name is Jim Ricchiuti from the Equity Research Department at Needham. Thanks for joining us. We are going to have our next presentation with the management of Digimarc. Digimarc is a global leader in product digitization. They've been a pioneer in digital watermarks, a history that goes way back. They can supply the technology to many of the world's largest central banks. The company has been leveraging its technology across a wide range of markets that include product recycling, sortation of consumer plastics packaging, connected packaging, inventory management, retail checkout applications. So a whole variety of new applications that the company is developing.
We're pleased to have with us today, Digimarc CEO, Riley McCormack, and CFO, Charles Beck.
Thanks, Jim. I don't think I need to say anything. I think you covered everything. So before I begin, this is our safe harbor statement. I don't think we've broken any new ground in our safe harbor statement, probably the same as the thousands that you've read, but they are important, so please do read. We're really excited to be here. A lot has changed since Digimarc was last at a Needham conference, and perhaps the biggest change is we are no longer selling just simply digital watermarks. We are selling SaaS solutions that help companies progress in their digital transformation. So to be very clear, digital watermarks are still a key part of the products we have built and the products we will build going forward. They differentiate us from other software companies, our unique selling proposition.
They are the reasons why we will win, what we believe we will win in what is going to be a massive market, but they're no longer the totality of what we're selling. They're just a very key component. And by building these products, it's allowed us to benefit from a lot of macro trends. This may not seem like that big of a difference, but Digimarc, a couple of years ago, would walk into a prospect and say, "Do you know what you can do with our technology?" Today, with our products, we can walk in and say, "Do you know what we can do with our technology?" These macro trends are, are one of the big drivers or a few for our high ARR growth. I'll let Charles...
I won't steal, Charles, your thunder, even though, Jim, you stole all my thunder of what I was gonna say. But I'll let Charles talk about our ARR growth. And the differentiation that the digital watermarks give our products is why we enjoy such high gross margins. And again, I'll let Charles touch on those gross margins and where they're going. But a lot hasn't changed. So core to our business, for 25 years, we've been working with a consortium of the world's central banks to protect the world's currency. I'll talk about that more later in this presentation. And the other really wonderful thing about this business that has remained is the deepest and widest moats that I've seen in technology. These wide moats are evident in these gross margins.
You know, I often refer to Digimarc as a generational investment opportunity, driven in one part by these deep and wide moats, and also the massive, massive TAM, which again, I'll address toward the end of this presentation. Core to all the products that we build are interactive and intelligent digital twins. We create these digital twins for both physical products as well as digital assets, and it probably makes sense to cover both of those areas in turn, both the physical products and the digital assets. On the physical product side, every company is on a digital transformation journey. Companies like SAP and Oracle have helped companies digitize their enterprise resources. Companies like Salesforce have helped companies digitize their customer assets.
But if you're a product company, if your job is to manufacture, market, and sell products, what sits between the enterprise resources that create those products and the customers that buy the customers that buy those products, are the products themselves. And for a lot of these companies, it's the biggest single asset they have are their products, and they're, they have not yet been digitized. So how do we help companies digitize these products? We create these interactive and intelligent digital twins. So these intelligent and interactive digital twins can be loaded with information about the product. The digital twins can then securely convey information to digital devices that come across these products in the real world, the physical products.
They can also provide instructions to those devices on what to do now that they've encountered this physical item, and they can also report, that interaction back to the digital twin, making it more intelligent. So that's what we mean by digital twins, on the physical product side. The same holds true in the digital asset world. Now, it may seem a little paradoxical. You might be asking yourself: Why does a digital asset need a digital twin? Isn't there information that is, attached to a digital asset, like a digital image or a digital audio clip?
The answer is yes, that at a lot of times at creation of a digital asset, there is metadata associated with it, but unless the internet is completely rearchitected, there's a real problem because the internet was not built to propagate that information, so that information is often severed. In fact, more than just often, almost all the time, severed from the digital asset. So it's the same idea in the digital world that we do in the physical world. We create a digital twin for a digital asset. You can upload information to that digital twin about that digital asset.
As that digital asset crosses through the internet, the digital twin can securely exchange information with the internet software that the digital asset is interacting with, provide instructions from what that internet software should do with that digital asset, and then also record that interaction. And where Digimarc is unique, one of the reasons we're unique, there's a few reasons we're unique, is we are able to do this, create these interactive and intelligent Digital Twins, both for physical products and for digital assets. So the fact that we can live in both the physical world and the digital world differentiates us. Now, hopefully, at this point, you have two questions, which is, first, is this sounds like a incredible market, Riley, you said earlier on that, you believe we're gonna own this market, that Digimarc's gonna own this market.
So why do you believe that? And the second one is: Why are you able to exist? Why are you unique in being able to provide these digital twins in both the physical world and the, and for digital assets? And the answer to both of those questions are digital twins need a bridge. So the idea of a digital twin, the intelligence about a physical product or a digital asset, there needs to be a connection between the digital twin and the, the asset itself. Again, either a digital asset or a physical product. There needs to be some way for that digital twin to instruct a digital device to what to do when they encounter that. There needs to be some way to record that interaction.
And again, it probably makes sense to talk about bridges, both talking about the physical world as well as the digital world. So on the physical world, there's multiple bridges. A lot of these you all are probably familiar with. We support them all, NFC chips, RFID, QR codes, barcodes. Where we're unique is we are the only company that can provide a digital watermark as a bridge, and we'll talk about digital watermarking next. That's on the physical world. In the digital world, actually, the competitive set here shrinks. You can't put an NFC chip on a digital image. You can't put an RFID chip on a digital audio clip. You could put a QR code, I guess, on a digital image. It wouldn't do anything. Computers aren't scanning QR codes.
Computer software is actually looking at the code itself within the digital asset. So while these bridges work in the physical world, in the digital world, it's pretty much a digital watermark. So what makes digital watermarks so special? Why are they a differentiated bridge? There are five features about digital watermarks that separate them from other bridges, and if you need one, some, or all five of these attributes, digital watermarks are either the best bridge for your digital twin, or in a lot of cases, the only bridge for your digital twin. So the first feature is they're covert, which means that you can't see them. Humans cannot see them, they can't hear them, whereas for a machine, they're black and white like a QR code.
That being covert has some advantages when it comes to anti-counterfeiting, and we'll talk about that a little bit later. It also has advantages because it is covert, a digital watermark can ubiquitously cover the asset. So in the case of the physical products, because you and I can't see digital watermarks, you could completely cover a package with digital watermarks without taking away from the aesthetics of that package. Again, same on the digital side. Because they're covert, you can ubiquitously cover a digital image with a digital watermark. Because you can't hear them, they're covert, you could completely cover an audio clip with a digital watermark. That ubiquity, plus the way the software itself is constructed, makes digital watermarks redundant, which means that, again, in the physical world, a package could take a lot of damage.
It could be crumpled, it could be soiled, it could be torn. The digital watermark can still read. Even without damage, a lot of times in the physical world, there's occlusion, where maybe a single code can't be presented because it's hidden behind another package. So the fact that with a digital watermark, with a complete package is the signal itself, that signal would still go through. And on the digital asset side, the redundancy matters because most of the damage that happens isn't really damage, but editing. But you could damage or you could edit a digital image tremendously, and the signal still comes through, or you could edit an audio clip, and again, our signal would still remain. So the fourth feature, which is important to understand about digital watermarks, they're secure.
For a lot of use cases, the secure transmission of data is extremely important, and bridges such as QR codes or barcodes, which are open source, don't provide the level of security needed. And then the fifth feature is they're adaptable, which by that we mean that if you put a watermark on a physical product, there's a lot of use cases you can benefit from, from that single watermark, and same on the digital asset side. So again, these are the five features of, features of digital watermark that separate them from other types of bridges, and if you need one, some, or all five of these, we're either the best or, in a lot of cases, the only digital bridge available. And there's more in the appendix of this slide on digital watermarking for those who are newer to the science.
Okay, so what we have done is we have taken our digital twins, we have taken our digital watermarks, and combined them in the Digimarc Illuminate platform to create a hyperscaler for product digitization. So you all are probably familiar with hyperscalers for compute or for processing, like Azure, AWS, GCP. They are a hyperscaler for compute and processing or memory. We are a hyperscaler for product digitization. We license Digimarc Illuminate to value-added resellers who want to build their own products or services on top of Illuminate or directly to customers that want to license our platform. We've also used the capabilities of Illuminate to build our own products. So these are the five products we have today. We'll...
Going forward, we'll continue to launch new products, and importantly, our products are accretive, which means the more Digimarc products you take, the better they all perform. There is a natural analog to everything we're doing, everything I just said here, and it's Microsoft. So Microsoft has Azure. That is their hyperscaler, again, for compute or for memory. They license Azure to app developers who want to build their own applications on top of Azure. We license Digimarc Illuminate to people who want to build their own products and services on top of Illuminate. Microsoft, though, also uses Azure to build their own products. So if you don't want to build your own video conferencing software, you can license Azure Teams. If you don't want to build your own email app, you can license Outlook, and those products are accretive.
If you take both Outlook and Teams, if I send you a calendar invite in Outlook, you're also a Teams customer, it'll populate there. Same thing we're doing here with Digimarc Illuminate and our accretive products. So these are the benefits to our customers. This is what customers get from Illuminate. We've talked about all these, so Engage with intelligence, these are our digital twins. See everything, achieve anything. This is reporting back, the digital twins. We build, our products are accretive, and we've been doing this at a massive, massive scale for a very long time. Not every customer is ready for Illuminate. One of our mantras, and you'll hear this today, a couple times in my presentation, you'll hear it internally a lot, at Digimarc.
One of our mantras is, we have to become easy to begin doing business with and excellent at guiding customers along their product digitization journey. And so that applies here as well. So it's okay that customers, not every customer is ready for the full power of product digitization to Illuminate platform. In fact, Gartner and McKinsey just recently started talking about product digitization the same way we do. This is why we've built the products I referenced before. So these are discrete products that can solve discrete problems, that can be an easy way for customers to start their product digitization journey, 'cause maybe marketing has a problem that they wanna solve with our Engage product. Maybe somebody in manufacturing has a problem that they wanna solve with Factory Automation. It's an easy way for them to begin their product digitization journey.
So let me talk about some of these products. So the first is Engage. With Engage, historically, our focus has been on the physical world, where, using QR codes or digital watermarks, but normally QR codes, we allow brands to open an interactive and fully owned communication channel directly with their customers. This is probably the most competitive market, the most competitive product that we have, where there is real competition, but we still differentiate ourselves, from the competition in a few ways. First of all, we have the most advanced contextual redirection engine, which means that the payoff that a consumer would get from scanning a QR code, it's not static. The brand or the...
Our customer can choose from pretty much an unlimited number of inputs, context, in order to decide what their customer should see. So it could be time of day, it could be number of scans, geolocation. The context can decide what their customers see as a payout from scanning a QR code, as opposed to just a static QR code. Our digital watermarks do add value, though, in Engage, besides just being the direct mechanism for consumer engagement. There are use cases of Engage, could be loyalty programs, could be reward programs, where there has to be some authenticity or some sort of verification technology. Digital watermarks can provide that. We could do multi-factor authentication, is the technical term, using Engage.
The very fact that we are a platform, so a lot of our competitors for, in Engage, are simply just provide a consumer engagement product. One of the biggest problems CIOs have is platform propagation. So one of our key selling propositions is, "Hey, if you wanna start your product digitization with consumer engagement, we got you. As you continue on your product digitization journey, we are a single platform. There's a lot more that you can be doing, with us, and your CIO is not gonna get mad at you for buying yet another platform and bringing it into your ecosystem." And then lastly, two of the big drivers for consumer engagement applications, the GS1 Digital Link, as well as a Digital Product Passport. Our Digital Link is a standard. We co-authored that standard.
We actually contributed some IP to that standard, and DPP is a standard in formation, and we're part of those conversations. So we're part of the standards organizations that are actually driving these. So that's everything we do with Engage for physical products. And what I'm excited here to talk about for the first time with Wall Street, and something that we're gonna be making a lot more noise about in the not-too-distant future, we are taking the power of Engage to digital assets. So everything I was talking about was with physical products. This is what we've been doing for a couple of years. We have the ability, and we will be launching soon, doing the same thing with digital assets. So in the digital, in the digital domain, our competitive advantage is even greater.
Firstly, because we will be the only people offering contextual redirection for digital assets. So this could be emails, this could be, you know, social media posts. But secondly, we'll be the only company that can cross both the digital and physical world. So imagine the power for a marketer to building a marketing campaign, where they can take into account the fact that a customer might be at some point engaging with the product itself, or might be engaging with a digital asset, such as a social media post or an email. Also imagine not just the power of the campaign and how the brand gets the customer closer to the end customer, but the power of the analytics that's gonna come from that.
So as a very quick example, we all get a ton of emails. Most email marketing software is looking at open rates or how long it took somebody to open an email. We can actually add the next layer of: yeah, but of people who got that email, how many actually scanned a product? How many actually interacted with the physical product within 48 hours? Crossing both the digital and physical world and unifying that is gonna be a key differentiator for Engage. Our next product I wanna talk about is Factory Automation. This is our most recent product. This product is really, this is where the power of the digital watermark I was talking about, the features. There are a couple of ways now that companies are...
trying to improve, to reduce their waste or improve their efficiency in production, fulfillment, or distribution facilities. So first is with humans. Obviously, that's not automation. Secondly, is using machine vision systems, which have the problems of not being deterministic, they're probabilistic. And if you think about a lot of these fulfillment centers or distribution centers, things are moving really, really quickly, and, they often look alike. So probabilistic normally doesn't cut it, which is why it hasn't really caught on. The last is using overt codes, such as Data Matrix Code, QR codes. This link here, Digimarc Factory Automation in action, you can actually see how we perform against, some of the more common codes. And I wouldn't call them quite idyllic situations, but at least not stress conditions.
So back to digital watermarking, where in a lot of cases we're the best or the only. You can see in these situations, we're the best. We outperform the other codes. There's also a lot of situations, however, where these codes wouldn't work. So one of the customers we talked about for factory automation on our last call, they wanted to remove shrink sleeves from their products. By doing that, there was no place to put a visible code, such as a QR Code or Data Matrix. We were the only option. There's other examples like this, like a harsh condition in a fulfillment center or distribution facility, where the presentation of a single code doesn't work or workflow. So Digimarc Factory Automation can help replace existing codes like Data Matrix or QR.
In a lot of cases, it allows automation that hasn't been able to been done before. Digimarc Recycle, our third product I want to talk about. This is probably the best known of our products. Here we help with the increasing the quality and quantity of of plastic recyclate. There is a by-product of our doing that. We're also unlocking novel data for brands and retailers, they never had before. So again, if you go back to our idea of a digital twin, the digital twin of a product that is taking Digimarc Recycle, yes, it can inform that sortation equipment sitting at a waste facility, how to recycle that product. It also captures that interaction.
And so for the first time ever, you think about a traditional product, it is maybe scanned 10, 12 times before it gets to the front of a store, and then it gets bought. There has been no data capturing what happens to that product after it's bought. So the fact that we sit in recycle in these waste facilities at the end of this product's life cycle is incredible data that brands and retailers have never had before. There are 4 ways we're going to market with Digimarc Recycle. The first is opening up a country-by-country basis. There's a link here about France, which is the first country to launch Digimarc Recycle. The second is working with big brands and retailers to open multiple countries at once.
The third is a closed loop motion, where we're working with big users of plastic, i.e., brands or retailers or big producers of plastic, like converters, who actually want to get their own products baack to recycle, as opposed to getting a mixed bale of similar products, but not just theirs. Then the last is DRS, deposit return schemes. We actually announced a $32 million deal a couple quarters ago with Dever, who is building three products on top of Illuminate. One of them is powering a deposit return scheme in a country. Now that we are in that country, so we're making money, it's a profitable sort of market entree. Our signal, our digital watermark, will be on these products. We are helping this country with the recycling. We're helping with the upstream, with the collections of the recycling.
It's an easy conversation to say, "You know what else we can do for you to help you with the recycling? We have another product called Digimarc Recycle." So those are our four go-to-market motions now. If you remember, I said, and I warned you that we're gonna be talking a lot about our mantra of easy to begin doing business with. We are excited to announce relatively soon, again, not quite yet ready to announce it, a fifth go-to-market for Recycle, which would make it even easier for people to begin to do business with us. A couple last points on Recycle before I move on. Historically, most of our focus has been on plastics packaging. That's what we're best known for. We are getting interest in working with other types of substrate besides plastic, still for packaging.
And then there's a lot of other items in the world besides packaging that has to be recycled, that could be recycled better, we can help. And so we're earlier on our journey there. This last link at the bottom of this slide talks about the PPWR, which is a regulation going through the EC. What's really interesting to call out about that regulation, again, is proceeding through the EC. I think there's been a couple of rounds of edits. It's not quite yet finalized. There is language in there requiring digital marking for packaging for better sortation in waste facilities. The EC is very well aware of our work in Europe on Recycle. But important to note that this regulation is currently written for all packaging. So again, our focus has historically been on plastic.
If the PPWR passes as it is, that would be incredible for our TAMs because it's all packaging, not just plastic. Digimarc Retail Experience is our application of digital watermarks on packaging to improve in-store operations. Included with those watermarks, we also give a GS1 compliant digital link QR code. We have two big customers for Digimarc Retail Experience today. They're both retailers who are using Retail Experience on their own private label. The first is Netto Marken-Discount, which is the largest grocer in Germany, based on number of stores. The second is Walmart U.S., which I think you all know. I don't need to qualify who Walmart is. Interesting on Netto, we put out a press release not too long ago where they're talking about their adoption of Retail Experience to,
improve their in-store operations, but are also really excited for Digimarc Recycle to come to Germany, because now that they've digitized their products with our technology, it's gonna be really easy for them to now adopt Digimarc Recycle. That talks to the accretive nature of the products we were talking about, as well as the adaptable watermarks. And then with Walmart, for those of you who know us well, yes, they are a Retail Experience customer for their private label. They also licensed Illuminate from us not too long ago, so they're building something. Again, Illuminate is a hyperscaler for product digitization. Walmart is building something on top of Illuminate, which we can't talk about, obviously. But Retail Experience, their private label products, which take Retail Experience, will be interoperable with whatever they're building using Illuminate.
All of the rest of the stuff sold in Walmart stores, so the big national brands, unless they take Retail Experience, they would not be compliant with that. So think about it here as sort of, again, the value of having a platform plus products. It's the razor plus razor blade model, where we can license to retailers, in this case, Walmart, Illuminate, to build things on top of. And then for them to work, we can also license the razor blades, in this case, Retail Experience. And while we're starting with Walmart, there are a lot of retailers in the world. Okay, our last product I wanna talk about is Digimarc Validate. This is our anti-counterfeiting technology, or, sorry, anti-counterfeiting product.
One of the wonderful things about anti-counterfeiting, as a use case to go after, besides the TAM, which I will get to eventually, is that the way to get entree into a package or into a customer, you don't need to prove that your layer is better than another layer. You just need to prove that your layer, what you can bring to their stack, adds value. It's very similar to network security, where you're not trying to decide if you want a firewall or antivirus. You see the benefits of both, you want both. It's the totality of the stack that brings value. And so because we are differentiated, most of the packaging anti-counterfeit technology is physical products, such as holograms or security ink. By our very nature, we're different, differentiated because we're digital.
So we actually had a customer that we signed a couple of quarters ago that before they were aware of us were deciding between us and overt security ink to their package. Once they understood we existed and what we could do, we could not only add value standalone, we were differentiated because now their products were digitized. And the other big advantage of Digimarc Validate for anti-counterfeiting versus our normal competition, again, security inks and holograms, is you can't buy Digimarc Validate on Alibaba. And unfortunately, you can buy most security inks and most holograms on Alibaba. So a big point of differentiation, and again, very similar to what we're doing with the currency.
We can't talk too much about that, obviously, but I'm sure you all are familiar that most currencies have multiple physical anti-counterfeit technologies on them. We are the digital layer. And then there's Digimarc Validate Digital. So again, we are now expanding the Validate offering into the digital domain. I'm sure you all are aware of what's going on with Gen AI and governments worldwide talking about the role that digital watermarking has to safeguard Gen AI. As the pioneer and widely recognized leader in digital watermarking, we absolutely agree digital watermarking has a role to play. We think that it could be a little bit more expansive than the way it's being thought about now.
Having built systems of trust and authenticity on top of our technology for close to 30 years, we've done this before. We have some opinions on this. You know, consider me an optimist. I'm often accused of being an optimist. I do think one of the wonderful things... I think Gen AI is an incredible technology. I think it's gonna bring all sorts of incredible change. I think one of the things that Gen AI is gonna bring most to the world is the safer, fairer, and more transparent internet we've deserved. The issues of IP theft in the digital domain, the issues of deepfakes in the digital domain, Gen AI did not create them. They've just democratized them, and now they're forcing action.
So we have a product, Digimarc Validate, which can help create a safer, fairer, and more transparent internet. And again, going back to our easy to begin doing business with, and excellent at guiding customers along the journey, we just put out a press release talking about how we're making these tools widely available to device manufacturers and, content creation platforms. Basically a freemium model, to get the tools out there. I'm looking at the time, Charles. I promise I'll leave you plenty of time. Our easy to begin doing business with also expands to our partners. So for those of you who know Digimarc, we have historically, in the last couple of quarters, focused on our VARs. Again, these are people who license Illuminate to build their own products and services on top of.
We were leaving some really low-hanging fruit on the table by doing that. So we now have a couple of programs with partners where they don't need to actually become a VAR in order to work with us. They could either have a marketing partnership or a lead gen partnership. A couple of benefits to this: This could be a farm team for future VARs. As they get to know our technology, they could ultimately graduate to being VARs. But along the way, these partners have incredible customer relationships, incredible numbers of customers, incredible number of salespeople, incredible domain expertise in their own industries. It'd be crazy to not take advantage of all of that. And so they will bring us into deals that they are currently involved in, and another way to accelerate ARR.
Eventually, again, either they become huge partners the way they are, or they graduate to VARs and license our technology directly... Speaking of TAM and huge opportunities, one of the questions we get asked the most is about our TAM, probably 'cause I talk about that and our deep and wide moats for why I consider this a generational opportunity. The true answer to our TAM is there are trillions of products and packages sold every year, and every one of those trillions of products and packages could be taking multiple Digimarc products. We've just recently started talking about our entry into the digital asset, again, with Engage and now with Validate. And again, trillions of digital assets created every year, and there could be multiple Digimarc products that we can continue to sell into those digital assets. It's massive, and it's ever-growing.
But I realize that doesn't really satisfy the more direct question people are asking, so we tried to break it out here a little bit more. Digimarc Engage, you know, $37 billion. The digital Engage, which we haven't yet officially launched, even bigger. Factory Automation, I'll just quickly touch on a few of these. I won't go through all of them. We announced the customer we talked about in Q3, actually signed them in Q2, but I talked about them in Q3. A single product in two countries, almost $500,000 in ARR. This company sells this product in multiple countries. This company has multiple products, and there's hundreds or thousands of other companies besides this company in the world. So we're just beginning there. Digimarc Recycle, you see our TAM for plastic.
We talked earlier about entering non-plastic packaging and non-packaging. Again, I won't go through all these. Here's what's incredible, is even with the, the use cases, where we're currently monetizing, we're really, really early. Some of these really big opportunities, we haven't even monetized yet. So again, everybody knows about Digimarc Recycle. As of Q4, we hadn't monetized Digimarc Recycle in such a way that we would consider it really beginning the monetization journey. Same with the, Digimarc Engage, right? We haven't even launched that product yet, so we can't have monetized it yet, and same with future products. So we are really early, even in the use cases where we're monetizing. There is still massive opportunity we haven't even started to monetize yet. We would not be a software company if we didn't include a slide full of our customers.
I think we have absolutely incredible customers. You know, some of the world's biggest, some of the world's most respected companies on here. We're thrilled that they trust us to be a supplier. Going back to the TAM and the opportunity, there isn't a single customer on here where in the, the product that we are selling any of them, we're fully penetrated, let alone multiple products. We could add... We could not add a single logo to our customer list and be $200 million ARR, easily. So our opportunity is more penetration in the products we're currently selling, getting toehold in the products we have yet to begin selling, even just in our existing customers alone. And then lastly, I'll touch on this quickly. Everything we've been talking about is our commercial business.
This is the business with the world's central banks, 25 years helping protect the world's currency. So many wonderful things about this business. It's one of the—From an operational perspective, it's one of the most forecastable, margin-protected businesses, incredible end customers in the world's central banks. It also brings us advantages on the commercial side. You know, again, our technology is on most of the world currencies and billions of endpoints. There is not—When we get asked by a commercial prospect: "Are you scalable?" There aren't very many commercial applications that would need to be more scalable than our work with the world's central banks. Are we trustworthy? We do business with the world's central banks, protecting probably the single biggest physical asset, currency. And then lastly, Charles, I promise I'm turning it over to you.
I know you're looking at the clock. All of the work we do with the world's central banks, we get to keep that IP and use it in the commercial business. So this is, besides all these other wonderful legitimizers, this business brings us, it is profitable R&D. So that's it for the commercial and the government business. Charles?
Great. Thank you, Riley, and thank you to Needham for the invite today to get a chance to present with everybody here. So we have not obviously issued Q4 results yet. Those will come out end of February. So financial update's really focusing on Q3 results. I do wanna just highlight kind of four key developments in our business, first being annual recurring revenue. Year-over-year, we saw 54% growth in Q3 versus Q3 last year, resulting in ending ARR of $19.6 million. For Q4, we expect to see a notable increase over that year-over-year change, so above 54%.
Why we've kind of focused on ARR is it really represents a leading indicator of our commercial subscription revenue, which we think is the largest opportunity for our growth. It does not include government, and does not include service. Second development is continued expansion in gross margins around subscription revenue. We increased gross margins by 1,000 basis points, from 75% to 85%. In Q4, we expect to be able to expand those subscription gross margins even further. The third is effectively managing our costs. Operating expenses are down 17% on Q3 this year versus last year. So we're doing a great job there, and we'll continue to manage our costs closely.
And then fourth, when you take higher ARR, expanding gross margins, and lower costs, you obviously reduce your cash burn. We saw a significant reduction in our normalized level of free cash flow usage in Q3. We ended the quarter with $33.3 million of cash and investments and no debt. For those that follow us closely, we report revenue by subscription and service, but we also report by commercial and government. And I think it's just important to kinda delineate the two to understand the business models, 'cause they are quite different. Riley spent most of the presentation focusing on the commercial market, high growth, high margin opportunity. It's a traditional SaaS model. We charge an annual subscription fee, generally based off of volumes with tiered pricing.
Very similar to what you'd see with any other SaaS company. And again, we have incredible margin potential here. We're very confident we can get subscription gross margins above 90%, with continued revenue growth and continue to focus on our costs. There's some additional things that we can do to optimize our platform costs, going forward that we're focused on as well. And then there is a little bit of services tied to implementation and support for our commercial products, but we're not trying to build a big services organization around our commercial business. That's where our partners can really come in. The government business, though, is mostly services. So Riley talked a couple slides back, around the work that we do with a consortium of central banks.
We get paid in services, and there is a small subscription component as well. Services is just rate times hours, rates adjusted annually for inflation, generally, each year. And hours can fluctuate slightly year to year, depending on the priorities of the central banks. For being mostly services work, we earn a really nice margin, about 60% plus margin on that business. It also helps generate a significant amount of free cash flow for the overall business as well, as there's not a lot of operating costs associated with the government business.
Riley also touched on this, but I think it's important to reemphasize, 'cause it is a key component of the deal that we have with central banks, and that is the IP that we generate in that area of the business, we can use in the commercial areas. And we've been able to generate a lot of IP over the years that has served us really well in the commercial space. And then something being CFO that I love, I have multi-year visibility on the budget, which is just fantastic. I would also just point out, we put a little slide here or a table there at the bottom, too. We've seen growth really both on the commercial side and the government side of the business. So just a different kind of cut.
This kinda gets lost in MD&A a little bit, but thought it'd be helpful to kind of explain the... 'Cause there are quite a bit of differences between the two. We spend most of our time talking about the commercial side of the business just because that's the hyper-growth area, but the government side of the business really is the foundation of the business and is critically important to our success. All right. In order to wrap this up here, I just wanna leave everyone with kinda six key points. Riley's talked a little bit about, we've got some strong tailwinds given alignment with macro trends that we're seeing in the market. We've got a diverse but connected use cases with massive TAMs and the opportunity to upsell and cross-sell our customers for years to come.
We continue to expand our subscription gross margins, and believe that we can get those to best-in-class levels. Obviously, gross margins, too, are a great indicator of future profitability of the company. We have high-growth commercial business opportunities, augmented by synergistic direct and channel go-to-market strategies. Riley talked about moats, some of the widest, deepest moats I know he's ever seen. And, you know, it's not just our patents. We have an IP portfolio of 860 patents, but we are already, we also have proprietary algorithms, trade secrets, as well as an ecosystem of technologies and partners that we've built around this to support the business. And then lastly, we've done this before. We've got decades of experience working with the central banks. We've built a great business around that.
Financially, it contributes a lot to the business, but also, there's a couple other ancillary benefits, too, that provide a lot of credibility, and that is trustworthiness in the market. We're a trusted partner, given our work with the central banks, and also, we've scaled at a global basis. And so that provides a lot of credibility of our ability to go and scale with these large customers. So that's our prepared remarks. Again, thank you, Needham, for the opportunity to present, and we'll cut it off there. Thank you.