Hello, and welcome to Needham's 19th Annual Technology and Media Conference. I'm Ryan Koontz. I cover the CommT ech sectors here at Needham. That includes cloud communications, broadband networking companies, and those sort of sectors. Really happy to be joined today by Kaltura, a leader in live and on-demand video SaaS solutions. Welcome, Ron Yekutiel, Chairperson, President, and CEO, and John Doherty, CFO. Welcome, gentlemen.
Morning.
Good morning.
Great to have you. Great to have you. You know, John, it's great to have you on board, first quarter through the gauntlet. Can you maybe, you know, summarize what your time's been like since you arrived, and you know, what the opportunity brought you here to Kaltura?
Yeah, I mean, the time so far has been great. It's been about 3 months now. This isn't my first rodeo, so while it was good to get my first kinda quarter of earnings with Kaltura behind me, you know, we've done it before. In terms of, you know, background on the opportunity, in my last role I was CEO of a company called Magic Leap, 30+ years with Verizon. So, you know, have acquired a bit of, you know, skills and learnings during that time. I had had a number of different inbounds from search firms, you know, prior to joining Kaltura. And I'm at the point in my career where, you know, I was fortunate enough to have options. However, I'm very selective, and I don't put myself into just any process.
You know, what I was really looking for is an opportunity that excited me. It would allow me to utilize all the skills that I have developed over the course of my career. Call it the tools in my toolkit, if you will, and, you know, certainly wanted to use those to, you know, apply them where I could add value. Kaltura really intrigued me, given it is the leader, as you mentioned, in the market it plays in. It has really strong and passionate leadership, as I'm sure folks know, given that they've met Ron before. But certainly saw it as being somewhat undervalued, and to a certain extent, undersized. I felt the fit with Ron and the team was really compelling. And, you know, I'm a really strategic, kind of profitable growth, both organic and inorganic, and execution-oriented CFO.
You know, I felt that's, that's what Kaltura really needed. It's what a lot of companies need today. And yeah, I'm excited about this journey. I'm excited about what Kaltura can do to build and grow, share our value going forward, and, you know, I'm really excited to be Ron's partner on this journey.
That's great. Really, really great to have you and welcome. Ron, can you summarize, you know, some of the main drivers for the business you've seen of late? You know, what sort of things are impacting the business, both headwinds and tailwinds, as you kinda net out the recent revenue trajectory you're in currently?
Happy to do that, Ryan. And again, thank you for having us, and I will just echo John's comments. It's an honor and privilege, and we're very excited to have him join the team, and it's been a great quarter to work together, and prior to that, many months of chatting and aligning. And we're excited about, as mentioned, both the organic opportunities as well as additional strategic moves, and we'll talk more about it, but we definitely see ourselves as a potential consolidator in this market. So, John's experience here is extremely valuable for us. To your question about where we are from a business driver, so a few kind of things to note for the last couple of quarters.
So booking, quarter four last year was the strongest quarter of the year, and it continued to pick up sequentially over last year, which was good. Quarter one is generally seasonally low. It was as such, where a few deals have slipped into quarter two, but we are expecting quarter two to grow sequentially and also year over year. So I think we're headed in the right direction. Typical deals, most of the deals have been more upsells than new logos, and it's aligned with what we've seen in recent couple of years. Mostly enterprise and mostly North America, again, aligned. Within enterprise, we're seeing more tech, financial services consulting, but we did start seeing kind of more green shoots and more pipeline acceleration around EMEA and M&T.
Media and telecom at one end as the non-ENT side of our business, and EMEA as a region, which is great, and hoping to see some deals there come through later in the year that's gonna pick up bookings even more. Continue to see our average recurring revenue per customer, or total revenue per customer, grow. We've seen that over the years, and it's continued year-over-year growth. Our deals are bigger. That's in part fueled by the increased and greater demand for our event platform and the consolidation that we've spoken a lot between internal and external use cases together. We've also liked seeing that we could increase prices upon renewal in this last quarter, and we spoke a lot about downward pressure on price.
We think it's kind of on the tail end of that pressure because FTEs have stopped squeezing down, and, you know, I think those that had wanted to have made some reductions have made the reductions. What we were really excited last quarter was it was the third sequential quarter of retention improvement. And we've seen a better annualized retention rate than the last three years, kind of if you take the yearly run rate on the last quarter, so it's continuing in the right direction. And in line with earlier trends, we've also seen that the majority of the churn, or the opposite of gross retention, was on partial reductions, so kind of downsells. 75% or so of the reduction was downsells, only 25 is complete churn, and that's both in ENT and M&T.
And also that a very small part, call it less than 10% of the churn, was associated with a product or service gap, meaning that the rest of it is people didn't have enough money, people wanted to stop doing certain things. So that's really exciting. Couple of other points I'd note is top of funnel, and we spoke about that in recent calls. The year started seasonally again, slower, and it's always seasonally slower, but we've seen a year-over-year increase in QBMs, qualified by marketing leads. And in the second part of last year, we've seen that pull up across QBMs, SDR meetings, RFPs. So we think that the top of the funnel is showing some good expectations into the future. And what we believe in the company is that we are expecting companies to start investing more.
In the second half of this year and beyond, fueled by several mega trends. One is, of course, digital transformation that's continuing, online experiences, the hybrid workplace that obviously post-COVID started, but there was some downward economic pressures, and now that we're back into maybe a bit better macro, then people need that. Gen Z, Millennials, they're living off video. There's a lot of stats that keep on coming about how that's important for them. But also it's saving costs and carbon emissions, so it makes a lot of economic sense. And lastly, we can talk more about that, is Gen AI, which is gonna cause for more videos created, more videos consumed. So we believe that there'll be more of a pickup.
Yeah, exciting trends. Are there particular market verticals that you're seeing some strength or weakness there? You know, you guys sell. You've got a great platform play that's extensible across so many different applications. Are you seeing particular use cases and verticals that are where you're seeing the best traction right now?
Let me hit on that, and we'll speak later about consolidation. You said we're doing. Kaltura has the ability to cater to multiple markets with multiple solutions with a single platform. We like to address kind of this LEGO kit. We don't just provide the pieces of the LEGO kit, we do for some, but we put these kind of cars and planes on a LEGO, which enables to rip off the wing or change the trunk, but also to apply across this LEGOLAND with a lot of different products, which is really, really good for us.
We're also well, you know, diversified, and we're seeing these successes sometimes come in different places, which enables us, this diversity, to really cushion any changes, which we'll talk maybe later. We're the only company in our industry, again, compared to other comps, that have not decreased decline year-over-year by way of revenue. Again, not amazing years, but we're doing better than the rest. To your question, as stated, enterprise at large, and I mentioned a few financial services, and banks, and insurance companies, as well as healthcare, have been the more interesting part of growth.
Yeah.
But we're seeing a revamp around M&T that could be interesting. We're keeping an eye on interesting deals. As it is, we have organic growth there that's helping us go up. Education continues to be a big part of our business. We're definitely focused on that. You know, we don't see that necessarily as the biggest driver by way of TAM, but it is something that's very important, dear to our heart. And we believe that as we continue into more investment cycles, we could make some important leapfrogging decisions that will enable a lot more products, a lot more solutions, a lot more value for the education customer. So the diversity is really interesting. And to your question about use cases-
Mm-hmm
-historically, we started internally within organizations for employee-
Right
-experiences around learning and around communication, collaboration. We've then expanded into CMO-type use cases for customer experiences and sales. The beauty that we're seeing now is a convergence of both. Many customers, RFPs are asking for the combination, because the lines are becoming blurred, but also there's economy of scale and savings to be had, and more efficiency, less silos if you buy both from one vendor, and that's-
Yeah
-extremely unique for Kaltura.
Yeah, super interesting. So on the education side, I assume you're mostly still focused on higher ed? Is that the-
Mostly higher ed, but also edtech is interesting for us.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
A lot of folks buy our stuff to use that. We're touching hundreds of thousands of students, for example, through third parties that have inserted our capabilities-
Right
. into their products, their technology. It's even white labeled in cases, you wouldn't even know that Kaltura is powering it. But if you were to talk about higher ed versus K-12, then yes, higher ed would be the higher focus for us. And even there, again, we've started with teaching and learning, but we're now-
Yeah
-expanding into marketing, and admissions, and alumni relations, together with the event stack that we have, so we have more buyers across these organizations to buy from us.
Yeah. And in the healthcare side, are those mostly internal use cases for staff, or are they actually using this for, like, doctor outreach to patients? Do you have any idea what the use cases are?
Yeah, it's a combination, and sometimes it's partners. So when you talk about this healthcare, but if you talk about pharma, a lot about pharma and this combined pharma-
Mm
-healthcare are using is to train-
Right
-your doctors or to train the customers.
Right.
So it's kind of a B2B2C. And so we absolutely see it in internal, we're seeing it in external. In some cases, we've even had. We have a major hospital, we were just meeting at our Connect event last week in New York, which was fantastic. We had another one in San Francisco, and they were coming in talking about the millions of things that they wanna do with Kaltura, and they're considering to continue to expand. And when you think about the breadth of the video use, it's not just about digital health and training you about the medicines that you're taking and what you're doing, et cetera, it even goes all the way to entertainment.
Because in these hospitals, you got your internal TV system that they're going on, "Well, could you actually, you know, you know, power our TV internally, which we have this antiquated system, and using the same capability, we could actually power our TV," which is amazing. Which reminds me that when Andy Jassy at the time, made the decision to use Kaltura for re:Invent for Amazon-
Yeah
-and obviously a lot of companies for AWS, and he looked at Kaltura and he said, "Look, I want to have a Netflix-grade experience." And seeing that we do power TV across millions of households, unlike so many of the other enterprises, we said, "Not only can we offer you something that's highly secure and highly engaging, from a stability, scalability, reliability, engagement level, this is TV-grade. This is a Netflix-grade experience for an enterprise experience," which is extremely, extremely exciting. So that combination, that every company is a media company, whether you are Red Bull, which, are you marketing or media?
Okay.
Whether you're National Geographic, are you education, are you media?
Yeah.
Speaks to the convergence that we power and speaks to the diversity of use cases that we could provide with a single system that powers media across. But to do so, many people would have wanted, you need to go all the way back to the inception of the company and build everything bottom up with that understanding and buy-in, as an API-driven set of products, as a LEGO kit, and that is the sustainable advantage that we have, having come up with that vision as far back as more than 15 years ago.
Yeah, it seems obvious that these companies have, you know, all these valuable video assets, and a lot of times can't share them across these different use cases. And, it's one of the things I know that's been a great entry point for you.
It's not only economy of scale, but to your point about not being able, you get hit by these silos, that you cannot use the metadata 'cause the structure is different. Not to mention, that if you have a rigid system, where you use just a video player, and it's not integrated into your workflows, then you're not using video as a mean for an end to enable training, learning, marketing, sales, you're using it as an end.
Right.
Here's a video." That was Gen 1.0 of video, right?
Right.
Gen 2.0 is use video as a data type, insert it into your workflows, teach and learn with video, sell and market with video, deep into your workflows. This is where Kaltura fits in.
Exciting. You talked about your events in New York and San Francisco. Sorry I couldn't make any of those, right in the middle of my earnings season. But, can you give us any clues as to type of customer contacts that would attend those sorts of events that you're hosting?
Yeah. So over the years, we've perfected it and moved it a bit from kind of these big events, in which we had a lot of folks come in, including a lot of prospects across all of our industries, into regional events, which we've conducted too-
Like a roadshow?
Yeah, it's more of a roadshow, but it's also a VIP kind of set of events, in which we're bringing in some of the top, customers and prospects, and some large enterprises, organizations well-known, that we all cherish and appreciate as huge brands, for them to learn from each other in this in a more intimate setting, which is, a bit of a different type. By the way, we still have the massive online events, like Virtually Live, which we offer every November, that brings in more thousands of people.
Yeah.
And so we have a bit of both, in line with the future of events, which we believe is hybrid by definition.
Right.
If you're having a physical event, let it be something that enables a lot more collaboration on a smaller level, and if you're having a virtual event, then you could have something that's large, and 100% back on Kaltura.
Yeah.
But if you've missed the event, you can absolutely, consume the content in our VOD site, which is based on our EP event platform. And if you go there, into any Kaltura Connect search, you'll find it, you click on it, and you could watch, some of the sessions. And, London is still ahead of us next week-
Right
-and we're excited towards that. And yeah, what, what excites me in these events, again, is that video is a means. That you sit there, and on one hand, everybody's using video internally, externally, it sounds as if they're using it for the same reason. And yet, you speak to a B2C, B2B tech company, you speak to a major bank, you speak to an insurance company, you speak to a healthcare provider, you speak to a hospital, you speak. And each one is coming with a mission-critical way in which they power services using Kaltura, tightly integrated to generate value for their organization.
And even more so, as you look into the future, we'll talk about AI, and to think about the revolution that's ahead, they're excited about how that could move the needle for them as a business, not just as a tool, but as a new way to engage employees and customers alike. And that's really exciting, and you see people's eyes kind of glowing with the understanding that they could really move the needle for their company, which is, which is great.
Yeah. Exciting stuff. On the kind of macro view, are you hearing much of a shift, or it just feels like the general software industry, enterprise market, in general, is pretty similar, kind of a rollover into Q4, still some elongated sales cycles? You know, I think folks seem to be open for change and digital transformation, but, you know, I'm not hearing a whole lot of, like, pedal to the metal out there on spending and starting to turn up.
No, we haven't seen a material regrowth, and obviously, it's somewhat connected to the macro outlook, and the interest rates, and where the global markets are. I think a lot of banks would suggest that 2025 maybe is a better year in which we see acceleration. But the one thing I would note, given the top of the funnel that's been rebuilding, if you look at our industry, and I mentioned COVID, followed by the financial downturn, it had caused many customers to be myopic in their decision-making process.
Right.
They would say, "Listen, I have an existing set of vendors. If I were to switch, it would require a certain amount of attention and investment on the short term, that maybe I don't have the tools for it right now," 2022, 2023.
Right.
I think 2024, even if the shit hasn't shifted into, "I got buckets of money to throw"-
Yeah
. people understand that they can't, cannot sit on their hands for 3, 4, 5 years in a row. And that if the right decision for the mid- to long-term-
Yeah
. is to move to a vendor that provides more value on one hand, and a more economic solution on the other, because you have economy of scale, and you could converge into one system that's cheaper and better.
Yeah.
Even though on the short term there is a bit of a hassle around it, you do wanna make that smarter decision for the mid to long term. That's something we're hearing increasingly, that people timed out on their pause and are saying, "You know what? We've been waiting for a while, we're ready to make a move." That's exciting, because as much, and we mentioned, Kaltura has done better financially than the other players. Not to say that we've done well, because the whole industry has been crunched, and we're not seeing growth. It's been very low growth. We've been doing better. We believe that as things start going back up again-
Yeah
-not only are we gonna do better 'cause things are gonna go up, but on a relative basis, we're gonna do even better. And the reason is that if you're the premium product, the one that make more sense, and that switch of are we sticking to our guns or moving to the better product-
Yeah
-there's gonna be more opportunity, we believe, and we hear that from folks that are saying, "We wanna make the switch." So that's why we're optimistic for the days ahead, in both the economy as well as Kaltura's positioning.
Sure. Yeah, I mean, there's always pushback on change, right? And, you know, it costs time, and manpower, and dollars to change. But if people are looking at conversions, and making better strategic decisions, and getting out of kind of the myopic fight today's fire—thinking long term, that definitely plays—
You can look at it as the curse. It's also a blessing, because by the time we're in, and again, our retention rates are nice, and because we're entrenched into the workflows and we're providing deep integrations, then by the time we're in, we stay there.
Yeah. Great. So I recall in the quarter, you saw some real strength in Europe. Can you expand on that? I was a little bit surprised, actually. I don't, I don't think a lot of folks-
Not real strength, as I mentioned, very cautious here. We said that the pipeline is looking better in Europe as it is in media and telecom, and we're expecting some interesting things to hopefully come. But it's not that the booking. As it were, Q1 wasn't the very high booking-
Right
-quarter, and we've also mentioned that. But we are seeing some better opportunities, that are going through the pipeline in Europe than we've seen before. Is it the lapse of time?
Mm.
Is it a change of behavior in Europe? It's too early to call any of that, but we're seeing that.
Great. And, John, from an op margin perspective, it sounds like you're still planning to arrive ahead of plan for your EBITDA breakeven. Do you think you have the resources in place so you can still grow revenues and achieve those financial goals in terms of cash burn and EBITDA?
Yeah, absolutely, and we reaffirmed, you know, guidance through the full year, which we basically said just that, you know, when we were coming out of 2023. I mean, we certainly expect to be profitable, and we expect to, you know, both from an adjusted EBITDA as well as a cash flow perspective for the full year. And we also feel that we're on the right trajectory to continue to, you know, sustain and enhance that over the next couple of years.
So in terms of sales and marketing and R&D product, you guys feel you've seen some efficiencies there and still capable of, you know, putting together some subscription growth moving forward then? That's great.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, to your point, OpEx is down 8.5% year-over-year, 4.2% Q-over-Q. Company's done a good job of kind of refining that, but I do believe we may tweak around the edges, but certainly we have the right amount of capital. It's allocated appropriately, and like I said, we may tweak it here or there based on what we see happening in the market, but we're. I think we're set up pretty well.
That's great. Let's shift gears and talk about kind of your innovation engine a bit, Ron, and I know you're doing some exciting things in AI. Maybe walk us through a little bit of that, what you're doing on the product front.
Yeah, happily. I mean, this—we are a technology company. This is our pride, you know, to build good stuff and to really make a good impact out there. I mean, the first kind of reminding all of us, what are the USPs? Why do people choose Kaltura? At the end, there's four major differentiators for Kaltura. One is how we run deep by way of API, mission-critical workflows, and I mentioned the LEGO approach. The second is how we run wide, and I mentioned that as well, by way of multiple products, multiple use cases, multiple buyers, which enables to have a systematic solution. The third is the enterprise ability of what we offer.
We've always been that kind of premium provider that provides the right scale, reliability, scalability, you know, all that, security, accessibility, all the things that are so important for larger corporations. And lastly, all these sound kind of more on the enterprisable side, but the end user, the B2B2C or B2B2E, the e-rich engagement, the ROI, the analytics of what we offered, fueled by the data that we provide, is really, really strong. A lot of people, for example, EP, they're saying this is so much better by way of the end-user experience and how gamification and engagement and analytics, and so we have a combination of both. And we are enjoying a very high pace of innovation because of the platform decisions we've made back when we built this LEGO, which enables us to build more and more.
Just to give you a feel, just across our different product sets, and then we'll talk about obviously AI, kind of that icing on a cake, but our event platform, which arranges. A few years ago, you remember, was powering our flagship events and have brought-
Sure
-down market towards medium-sized events. Over the last couple of quarters, we've added advanced event and content management roles and permissions and landing page editors and attachment management and custom pages and different things. Registration is now also for hybrid events, which we didn't have before. We have deeper tools for lead management, and all the time that we're doing this, our video portal has been re-upped. We have more advanced search and filters, seamless stitching of videos that we've done quarter back past, improved branding options within the portal. We've improved our player, its standalone player, and we've shared that around additional call to action capabilities, podcast experiences within our players, Simulive, ad block detection.
We have our real-time conferencing rooms, our RTC engines, other than continue to improve roles and permissions, dual screen layouts, proprietary whiteboard, on top of the third-party integrations that we've had, simulcast, globally shared storyboards, cloud TV at the same time. We've furthered all, all the front-end experiences. To remind you, two years ago, a year and a half ago, we didn't have a front-end experience. It was just the back-end tools. Now, we have a full solution for a set-top box, mobile, smart TVs, and it's out there commercially running in many, many households and growing. We've also simplified the experience for content creation. We have additional data sovereignty and security solutions. So all these things are really the heart of what we do. And then come AI, that you've mentioned, which is really, really, really exciting.
And so I wanna say a few kind of opening words about the whole idea of AI in video. I see the biggest opportunity as the fact that AI could connect together video production with video distribution, right? Used to have been a day where people would either produce video or distribute video, right? You had the cinema folks, AMC or whatever, as distributors, but you had others that are Paramount, that are created the cinema. And then, you know, they wouldn't be the same one. And the same in TV. You had the Time Warner Cable, you had the Comcast, the MVPDs that would deliver it, but you had somebody else that would create it, ABC or you know, any one of these content owners. And obviously, this has been increasingly overlapping.
So Netflix is now producing content, and Disney is now distributing content, and everybody's doing both-
Yeah
- 'cause you wanna touch the end user, but by the time you've caught the end user, you also wanna create the content, so you want to have the whole thing. But if you move that to the world of education and enterprise, et cetera, to do this right and to own the whole of it, you need to have a tool that could create this dynamically in a hyper-personalized and hyper-contextualized way. Because what's interesting is not to create, recreate, if you take education, what Pearson did or McGraw Hill did. You don't wanna have a book that's relevant for everybody.
Mm-hmm.
You wanna have a tutor that would enable every individual student to learn at the right time, in the right place, based on what they've known and succeeded in their exams, the right context, and the right material, and teach them as they go. Or if you take that into corporate learning, when you have lifelong learning, and you have reskilling of employees, and they need to keep on learning, you need to understand what they need to learn and teach them. Now, what's the best way to teach and learn nowadays? Video.
Yeah.
People wanna have snackable, short content to teach them what they need to learn. So the opportunity around AI is to enable the real-time creation of content attached to the distribution tools to deliver to individuals at school, at home, at work, the right content at the right time, in the right context, to create this virtuous circle that would enable immediately to keep on feeding the right content. Not the same for everybody, but personalized content for every individual, and this is not the way people teach today. You don't have a tutor that's sitting there creating videos, maybe repurposing from existing, like a Khan Academy, we have different clips, or creating it from scratch, just kind of a general gen AI creating the text, and then creating the video, and then having a short video for you that teaches you something, and the same for marketing.
So that's the big opportunity. Now, where does Kaltura fit into this?
Yeah, that's-
We provide the sandwich.
Oh, wow.
We provide the sandwich that starts from the workflow integration, because just having the AI tool, like a Sora or like a Gemini or like. That's great, but where is that connected into the teaching and learning workflows? Where is that connected into the marketing workflows? Where is that connected into the webinars? Where is that connected into your events? It's not. So you need to first be in the workflow integration.
Yeah.
Then, you need to have the data of the company in a federated way, because you wanna prompt the AI with the data of the people, because what you wanna get out of it is the individual journey of a customer, if it's for marketing.
Mm.
What you wanna get out of it is the individual learning journey of an individual student or an individual employee.
Sure.
To do that, you need to prompt to the AI the data, and you need to control of it. Again, in come a horizontal platform for all things marketing or all things learning with video. And then you have the experience layer on top of AI, which is the actual engagement. If you have that sandwich, which is workflow integration, data, AI, and experience, now you could completely change the way people teach, learn, educate-
Yeah
-market, sell-
With AI
-with AI.
Yeah.
This is what we're doing. So we're focused on three areas of AI. We're focused first, and that's an easier one in a way, non-video AI. How do you insert just regular gen AI capabilities into our experiences, many of which are not just video? So, for example, last year in quarter three, we launched our AI assistant, which is-
Mm
-at the time, streamlined the preparation of webinars and events. And so it recommended to them, what do you wanna actually create? What's the event about? Who are the presenters? And then a quarter after, we turned it into the real-time AI assistant during the event that enables you as a presenter to get your intelligent insights, so that you can automatically have calls for action and have your engagement information, so that you could insert that into something that would wake people up, depending on what it is that's running.
Yeah.
It creates the quiz for you on the fly. It creates a poll for you on the fly. It invokes audience reaction on the fly, because it detects where you're at and gives you an actionable recommendation right now.
Mm.
This is something we've launched. Now we're working on expanding the AI tool, not just for video, but for a chat engine. It will listen to the chat and see what's happening across, in text, all across, and recommend to you what's the sentiment analysis, what do you need to talk about? But these are non-video, and yet we're still introducing all of them into our products.
Okay.
In comes the video metadata, item number two. Video metadata is not the full video, it is the metadata coming out of the video, like transcript. So in the third quarter of last year, we added AI-powered chatbot to our media and telecom cloud TV for recommendation. We call it Kaltura TV Genie. So you're taking all that, but you're doing better recommendation than ever before to prompt people based on the genre, based on the. in a better way using AI.
Mm.
We're also now working on our full AI-powered ASR, automatic speech recognition, so transcription. We've used third parties. We're now gonna use all Kaltura Whisper-based, so open source, gen AI-type technology in order to create that internally, which is going to unlock a lot of different things that we could do together. And then the last category is the video itself. So we started with non-video, video metadata-
Actual con-
and video
-actual content. Actual video video.
Actual video. Actual video. So there's two things there, right? There's the repurposing, so you have an actual video, and you clip it, trim it, and send the snippets. And there is the complete synthetic creation of video from text, which we're working on. And so we've conducted a great POC with a leading tech company, which we worked on the whole repurposing thing. It saved them anywhere between $1,000-$1,500 per clip using repurposing-
Wow
-which is anywhere between 3-5 hours in turnaround time per clip saved. And so we believe this is not just savings, it could increase ROI, and again, driving how much video is created, driving how much video is consumed. And we're ramping up our investments in this whole topic to continue to push it forward. So we're, we're extremely excited. Again, we think that-. This is gonna change how many videos are created, this is gonna change how many videos are consumed, but much more so, this is gonna change the ROI. And beyond all of that, this is changing completely the positioning of companies like Kaltura, because we will no longer just be the pipes.
We can help pass the water, and we can help create the right content at the right time using these tools for the right people, for the right context, and you could replace textbooks. You could become the engine for learning and marketing.
Yeah, super exciting stuff, Ron. Wow, you got some passion for this.
Oh, you better believe it.
And we just have a couple minutes here. Can we talk a little bit about consolidation and kinda how you guys see, you know, this.? There's a lot of players out there. Kaltura's got a great platform position. And how do you see this unfolding here in terms of the video player, kind of, you know, players coming together to figure out who's got, you know, the best shot here to really put growth together?
I'll say a couple things and pass it over to John. So I mentioned we run deep and run wide, and that enables us to do a lot of stuff. We've integrated, in the past, successfully, third-party technologies into our midst because we run deep, so we can insert these at the API level.
Yeah.
So instead of having this weird bush of different products, you can really have a tree based on the right structure to embed new technologies, which is great. But we could also roll up competition, and the reason is, because we're running wide, we could replace a lot of the use cases with some adjustments. So if you talk about economies of scale, operational efficiencies, leverage, we could roll and save a lot of money. We could also, and I mentioned that earlier, expand into marketing and into learning, and we could also expand into other verticals. We've done that historically with M&T, with the likes of Vodafone, and into
Yeah
-learning, and half of the schools in the U.S., the R1 schools and the Ivy League schools, and so we could get into more verticals. So it's just a lot of potential. Part of what we're doing, and again, with John and others, is to consider what the right order of things is. I will also say that, you know, we believe that the time is ripe because, you know, the markets have been crazy, and things are settling down, and now scale is of obvious importance. Looking at small cap, you need more liquidity-
Yeah
-you need more relevancy, you need more size.
Yeah. Yeah.
I think that if you were to grow to achieve relevancy, then Kaltura could be a great tool for you. Let me pass it over to John.
Yeah, John?
Yeah, Ryan, I think Ron hit on, you know, most of the salient points. Kind of in summary, though, you know, for us at Kaltura, the most important thing that we can do is focusing on enhancing the value of this company. You know, everything we need to do to execute it to perfection so that we, you know, move back towards a strong, you know, top-line growth profile, and then flow as much of that through down through profitability, as we talked about before, and we're committed to enhancing that over time. But yeah, I mean, the market, certainly there is some overcapacity in the market. Companies that are competing, you know, kind of where we are, need scale.
So from that perspective, and based on my, you know, previous experience, yeah, I wouldn't be surprised to see, you know, inorganic activity take place. But again, the most important thing for us is we do it from a position of strength, and that means doing everything we can to put this company in a really, really strong, solid position overall.
That's great. Yeah, really appreciate those thoughts. You know, just about out of time, any last comments, Ron, in finishing up here? Appreciate you joining today.
Yeah. Well, thank you for the opportunity, and always great to be here. Obviously, look, it's been a tough three years for the video industry. It's way down on growth. You know, it was a post-COVID financial downturn, and companies, as I said, are gradually gearing up to make a more strategic decision. We feel that seeing how deep and wide we go, we are the better strategic decision. We're hearing that from leaders across that are starting in one place, moving to the other. You know, looking at big companies, leaders across every sector. We got the five largest banks in the U.S., we got leaders around the tech world like Salesforce and Adobe that have recently-
Yeah
-joined on top of Amazon and so many others, and Oracle, and SAP. Across every industry, we got the biggest companies-
All of them.
-and so we think we're in an interesting point. But I'd say around that is, again, back to small cap, 'cause we're talking to investors here. Obviously, you know, liquidity, most of our pre-IPO investors, almost all of them, those that could hold, have not sold, and so there's less liquidity. And so we believe that the moment things are gonna. Which is a great sign, by the way, because they're huge believers in the company. And so as we sit and wait for things, hopefully to pick up, quicker and, and continue to execute well on our bottom line and rekindle growth, I think the opportunities are gonna be really, really excited. I think that AI, coupled with what we do, is really, really, really exciting.
And I think at the end, my summary point would be, in my view, that it's not really a Kaltura question, it's more an industry question. We've already, I believe, exemplified over the years that we're able to come in and be a better company and do well. We're able to have come in and from nowhere, and take half of the education market, and very respectable organizations. We've come into enterprise, we got almost 30 of the Fortune 100, some of the biggest players. We've moved into events and came into AWS. We moved into media and came into Vodafone. We've always had a hole-in-one type of a move.
Yeah
-because we've built this right, and we have a lot of passion, and I think we're executing well. The question is, will the entire industry come back up or stay at zero? I think regression back to the mean is a powerful force. Video is not in the last inning, it's far from it, and to be used as a mean, not as an end, coupled with AI, there's a lot more growth in it. And for where we are right now, from a valuation, a multiple standpoint, if things will regrow with a leading company and with the bottom line, you know, that we have, and the team that we have, and now with John and the rest of them, I think it's a great opportunity, and I'm the most objective person in the world to say that-
Uh-huh
-so you should listen.
Right on. Well, thank you both for joining, Ron and John, and have a great rest of your day.
Awesome. Thank you.
All right.
Take care.
You're welcome.