Good morning, everyone. My name's George Iwanyc. I am one of the technology analysts here at Oppenheimer. Today, I have the privilege, and, you know, very pleased to be hosting Kaltura. We have Ron Yekutiel and John Doherty, Kaltura's CEO and CFO with us. I'd like to get things started off with Ron, and maybe share a bit of a overview and just table setting for the people on the call with respect to Kaltura.
Thank you, George, and thank you, everybody, for joining. So Kaltura's mission is to power video experiences that drive engagement and business result. We have a video cloud that includes on-demand, live, and real-time video SaaS products for organizations. Products include a video portal for virtual events and webinars, virtual classroom, video extensions for learning platforms and CMSs, and TV streaming apps. All of our products run on an underlying open and flexible platform for both video and TV content management, and that platform includes APIs, embeddable experience components, and a marketplace for integrations to third parties. And because we have a unified horizontal platform, that facilitates customization, integration. We also offer it as PaaS for those that wanna build other solutions, and it enables us to innovate very quickly and rapidly and launch new products.
I'll just wrap and say that the reason folks buy us. I know we're gonna talk about the type of customers, the USPs are, one, the depth and flexibility getting into the mission-critical APIs. Two, the breadth, given the platform of powering multiple use cases across multiple video formats, on-demand, live, real-time, multiple, industries. The third would be the enterprise ability that we offer, by way of reliability, scalability, security. And the fourth would be the engagement, and interactivity, and analytics that are coming with our platform, but we'll talk about all these, I'm sure.
All right. Well, with that, I'll jump into some questions. But anyway, everyone that's out there, if you have any questions, please feel free to chat, put that in through the chat, or you can email me at george.iwanyc@opco.com. So Ron, maybe starting with how a typical customer would deploy Kaltura and, you know, maybe segment that versus your media and telecom customers versus your enterprise customers.
So first of all, to understand our customers, so we're clear about who they are, our products are being used by 25% of the Fortune 100 and 500 companies across verticals, and that includes about 70% of top 10 financial institutions, top 10 consulting and accounting firms, 1/2 of the top 10 healthcare and pharma companies, 40% of the U.S. R1 higher ed institutions, 30% of the top 50 global companies, top 10 global telcos, et cetera. So very, very successful across multiple verticals. And insofar as how we go to market, and how they use us, so 30% of our revenue or so is powering Cloud TV services for telecom and media. We'll give you an example.
Vodafone, which is a very large operator around the world, uses us to power TV, and that's both live and on-demand, subscription, ads. We do all these across all devices, set-top boxes, smart TVs, mobile phones, and we're enabling them to maximize reach, engagement, monetization. And basically, it's driven by the fact that there's, you know, less and less legacy IPTV and more and more interest to power that across OTT environments. In education, it's about 20%+ of our revenue. We're powering remote, and synchronous, and asynchronous video-based education, mainly for higher ed institutions, but also others. And video is also used not just for learning, but for admissions, marketing, alumni relations, and it's driven to the move to distance learning, but also the fact that you have all these Gen Z savvy students.
And then the remaining, about 50% of our business is cross-enterprise in verticals like tech, financial services, professional services and consulting. Healthcare and pharma are quite strong, but we power everybody. And we are used both internally for employee experiences to further communication, collaboration, learning, development, and also externally for customer success, customer communication, partner experiences, training, certification, everything that's kind of CX-related. Obviously, there it's driven by digital transformation, but also, obviously, the hybrid workflow, force, the Gen Z employees out there that are hungry for video. And we'll talk, I'm sure, about AI, so a bunch of initiatives in AI are already catapulting us forward by way of video created, video consumed, and the value we generate.
Lastly, maybe I'll say that as people deploy us in the enterprise, they're very conscientious about our ability to provide one solution for all and to consolidate on Kaltura for multiple use cases and products, and that's really, really, helping.
Now, Ron, maybe expanding on the idea of one solution for all customers' video needs, can you give us a sense of where the majority of customers are using Kaltura today, and how they are expanding with the product set? You know, especially given that you have a broad case of, you know, video enablement technologies, meetings, and event platform capabilities. You know, give us a sense of how you're expanding.
... So through 2020, we were predominantly used internally for communication, collaboration, knowledge sharing, learning, and development within organizations, and we were mainly using VOD and live broadcast technologies, but didn't have real-time, two-way communication. This has changed in 2020 when we expanded to add real time, and launched our events, and webinars, and virtual classroom capabilities. And we have, with that, had moved also to power more external use cases for CMOs, as I mentioned earlier, for both prospects as well as customers, for training, and of partners, and for the entire sales cycle. Because of that, traditionally, the larger part of our revenue had been internally, but the newer part is growing and is growing externally. Now, some of the customers had started internally, and they've added externally.
They went from a portal for all their internal needs, integrated into learning, to a webcast, and events, and webinars. Some have joined us after 2020 directly into events during COVID or after, and are using us for events, and then gradually moving internally, and are saying, "You know what? This is working great for events, but we wanna move deeper internally into training." The reason is a lot of the content itself is not siloed into this or the other. It is created internally and used externally, and you wanna use the same metadata structure and go across. Also, the lines between partners, and customers, and employees are quite blurry at times.
Lastly, there's a huge value in harmonizing across one data pool, whether it is external or internal, especially when we're gonna talk about AI, to boost that information, to prompt the system with a user-based, kind of, journey. And to do that, you really wanna have one unified platform. So we've seen historically stats around average ARR grow year-over-year, always as we get bigger and bigger customers, higher ARPU deals, larger amount of customers that are large. Also, I have a stat that 1/2 of our customers use 3+ products, and that's grown very clearly over the years. Lastly, I'd say that in the vertical areas, we've also expanded. In media and telecom, we started with a back-end system, and then moved to a front-end experience as well, so the actual user interface around TV is also powered by Kaltura.
In education, as I mentioned, we did learning, but through the events, we've also moved to other buyers in areas around marketing, admissions, alumni relations, et cetera. More and more horizontal across all areas that we're in.
Yeah, maybe pulling that together with your recent quarter, you know, it was a very solid quarter, and it showed stabilization in a number of areas. One of the things you highlighted is a lot of large customer traction. I think there was 20+ customers that were over six-digit from a deal perspective. Kind of dig into that, you know, positive trend that you're seeing there.
Yeah, so Q2 was, in general, a rebound in booking. I mean, we can talk later about the macro, kind of how it's gone up and down. But generally speaking, by the way, our company had always grown, unlike all the other vendors, in the space that have dipped over the last couple of years. We're all still guiding, and, the street consensus is for growth this year. But booking has come down last year, and retention levels have come down for post-COVID and macroeconomic reasons, and they've since improved. Retention over the second half of this, of last year coming into this year, have come back to our traditional great numbers, and booking has started rebounding and going back up.
Q1 was slow, which is usually for Q1, a bit more so than usual, and we said Q2 was gonna be a sequential pickup, and indeed it was. It was a rebound more than 2x out of Q1, and also we put bookings that are higher than that of all of last year as well. And within that, to your point, we had 23 new six-digit deals in the quarter, of which, by the way, seven or so from new logos, versus last quarter, which was 11, of which one was new logos. So it's a very definite nice jump. And just to give you a feel, they come from all the different walks and environments. So we had a large, new European government institute that's using Kaltura as their standard organization-wide video platform for internal communication.
We have a large, new leading pharmaceutical customer for both internal and external use cases in one shot. We have a large, new healthcare software provider customer, so they provide the actual software for healthcare companies, and it's used for hosting and embedding training videos into their own applications. So that's yet another third example, internal and external within products. We have one of the largest banks of the world that's been a customer of ours, that's expanded the use of events. And on the flip side, one of the biggest and best well-known tech companies in the world, that expanded their use of EP from external use to also internal town hall use. In education, we have one of the largest Midwest U.S. R1 universities continue to expand across campuses. In M&T, we had telecom companies expand the number of users, subscribers.
One of them launched for the first time, hitting immediately many hundreds of thousands. The other one's already in the many millions and growing. And by the way, M&T customers in this quarter successfully streamed the Euro Cup, and later in quarter three, now Olympics, which have been going amazingly well, and they're very, very delighted. So the breadth is very, very wide, but the theme is, again and again, more and more usage of Kaltura, whether by way of users or by way of use cases and products.
Yeah, so Ron, with that in context, maybe give us a sense of where you see the strongest growth levers. Should investors think about, you know, seat growth and users engaging more with video? Is it more, you know, cross-platform adoption and deeper? Is it, you know, driving more events? You know, like, what are the levers that really are key here?
... I think it's a combination. The first, them hanging onto the platform and having the budgets to do so, back to gross retention coming back. In the last year, it was, to some extent, coming back to physical from virtual. It was also a push down on budgets, and the fact that there's more budgets enabled them to apply a lot more use cases. Like, banks that were forward-looking started looking not just in training and not just in marketing, but how does that power wealth management opportunities to push revenue up? And so the more mission-critical, unique opportunities people see to use video, the better it is.
And yes, it's a function of both, one, more users using it, whether internally or externally or a combination through consolidation, and to the extent to which this is impactful for the day-to-day operation insofar as adopting mission-critical capabilities, all of which are growing. And again, AI is also playing an important role, that we could talk about that. I think that part of what we see around consolidation is coming out of COVID. A lot of folks were very myopic. So they were thinking about lowering budgets and thinking just about that year. Now, it was clear that Kaltura is a premium product.
We heard it again and again, "You're a better product." And then we also heard, "Look, over the midterm, few years, makes a lot of sense to move to you guys, even financially, because we could do more with less with one system, let alone capitalize on harmonizing data to use AI." But it wasn't the right time, because for a given year, you don't wanna increase the risk and increase the cost. You stay with the existing vendor. What we're hearing increasingly is, you know, with stabilization of financial situation after the last rough few years, is that people are starting to look forward, starting to look at the next few years and saying, "We want the better product. We want the better results and the more mission-critical impact of video, but we're also thinking about cheaper options because of consolidation around Kaltura," and that's the opportunity.
So yes, it's the... All the above that you said earlier, more usage of video, creation and adoption, both on-demand, live, and real-time, more users, more use cases, and harmonization of all these different solutions.
Yeah. Are they pretty equal in importance as far as growth, or is there one area that you feel is, like, the key?
I think, first, the tide's gonna take all of the video companies back up a bit as we kind of ease back on that post-COVID situation and the financial downturn situation into a bit more budgets. I think there's gonna be the AI addition, which will benefit even more of, given that we could harmonize and have all the data to prompt the system, and how mission-critical we are, and how we're using video as a means to ends to learning, training, marketing, sales, and not just as a video player. But on top of all that, I think, kind of, the cream on the cream is the consolidation move, and the fact that Kaltura could be that single platform to replace multiple vendors.
I think that's the home run, and we've seen a lot of that, but it's still not happening in droves, just because it takes more time to do so. It's a big move. And as I said, people are a bit more myopic, but we're seeing it happen. It's growing. There's more of it, and I think that's gonna be a big, big differentiator.
All right. So you've mentioned AI a couple of times. Maybe we can dig into what that means for Kaltura, and let's, you know, take it from two perspectives. One, what does it mean for the product portfolio? And two, how are you able to leverage it internally to either drive margin expansion or, you know, improve the overall performance of your operations?
Yeah, both are very relevant, for sure. I mean, as you know, we, we do see improvements internally, and we expect also it to support the gross margins increase, which we could talk more about later, had grown from 61% to kinda mid-60s over the last four years, and we expect will continue. But I do wanna double-click on how we're gonna utilize this and are utilizing this within our products, which is really, really key. So AI introduces the opportunity to make video experiences even more personalized, contextualized, interactive, and because of all these, impactful, right? Now, there's three areas where AI could meet the solutions that we're offering. One, text related, so this is where both the input and the output is text.
For example, before, during, and after events, like preparing events, emails, or doing mood analysis based on chat, or sending summary emails because our experience is beyond video, and all that is important. It's kinda ChatGPT capabilities inserted with APIs, and we started doing that. That's great. The second is video to text, where the input is video, but the output is text. So this is like, for example, enhancing video metadata, like transcription, summarization, chaptering, hot spots, where you could derive more value, more insights from the video. The third is video to video or text to video. Regardless, the output is video, and these are things like content repurposing, where you take one video, and you slice it, then deliver contextualized videos for individuals, or synthetic creation of video from scratch.
Now, third one is most exciting because it breaks the divide between video production and video distribution that's been there forever. Companies create videos, companies distribute. Now, we can do it all in one shot and on the fly. So whether it is for education, to have kind of this Khan Academy on steroids, where you learn, and you get your videos on the fly based on the answers, and quizzes, and knowledge, and, and you get on the next video and the next video. And it's not pre-canned videos. They're created for you based on your strength, on how you learn, based on your problems in learning, based on your whatever.
On the marketing side, the same could be said when people are coming to either buy or to get further trained and onboarded on products or to get supported, where instead of waiting to see what video exists, it'll push them towards the exact video that they need. So that's a real, real, real big difference, and the reason it's ideally fitted to Kaltura is because we have the integration into the workflows. Again, we run deep. So for us, we are able to deliver that into the mission-critical environment. We're also with the most data, and as we harmonize, further and consolidate further, we're gonna have all that data. And so as we have all that data, we can prompt the system or the entire user journey, because you don't wanna have, for example, different events, different people going to different events.
You don't know which events they attended or what they liked. Having all that in one place is extremely important. Of course, we have the experience layer, which is really, really important that we offer. Having that sandwich, integration, data, AI, and experience, enables us to really offer a lot. Just to say about what we've launched, keep it kinda very, very clear, we already launched a bunch of AI solutions around event assistance, pre and post. We have the ability to automatically create events in the best way using AI during events to assess and boost audience engagement in the event rooms and in the chat through polls and emails. It senses what's the right thing to do.
After automatic email sending, we already have our own automatic AI quiz generator that looks at the transcript and generates questions, and answers, and quizzes. But we have a noise cancellation using AI for our real-time conferencing rooms. We launched a whisper-based text-to-speech and translation engine that is ours. We used to use third parties for that, now we're using third party. You had asked, for example, about margin. It's not just about value, it reduces our costs, so we're able to do more. But we have a lot of POCs running and a lot of interest around video repurposing. It's gonna be a big focus on the second half of the year. We call it Content Lab, where you're creating clips, highlight reels, video summaries.
For media and telecom, for example, we got the TV AI-based curation assistance to curate metadata enrichments to help it be more productive and efficient for those at the media companies. But also a TV Genie AI chatbot for conversational video recommendation that's way better than past recommendations, and TV-grade dubbing that we're doing through a partnership. So a lot, a lot, a lot that we're doing. Now, you asked... It's not clear. We have insights around how this is reducing cost, like, over $1,000 per clip for customers. At Connect, people shared with us a trillion things that they wanna do, but monetization, and people asked about that. Let's be gradual about this and see how quickly. Will it just fuel platform? Will it be built separately? Is it gonna do this, that, or the other?
But we have no doubt, and we're seeing it already, that it's gonna create more content. We're gonna cause to consume more content. We're gonna enable more value. So coming back to your original question, big disruption on the product side. At the same time, some of these features and beyond, as we use AI internally, supporting our gross margins.
Yeah. So John, maybe bringing you in here, and talking about investment priorities, and how you balance things like AI and sales investment with, you know, being really thoughtful with respect to driving positive operating cash flow and, you know, either maintaining or expanding margins.
Thanks, George. So, you know, first and foremost, we wanna continue and return to, you know, a solid growth trajectory. When you look at investing in those areas, it means, you know, continuing to support sales and marketing group, as well as what we're doing in the R&D front. You know, a lot of what's happening there is supporting our AI efforts. In addition, you know, we also are going to continue to look for driving as much of that revenue, you know, expected revenue growth into profitability. I think we're starting to demonstrate that. We've been investing in a comprehensive program as we're looking at across our overall customer profitability, both in our E&T business as well as our M&T business.
We do think there are opportunities to improve the existing profitability profile we have of our customers, as well as to be a bit more selective in terms of how we, you know, go after, you know, new logos.
John, are you there? Looks like we've lost him. Ron, are you still connected?
Yeah, can you hear me?
All right. Why don't I pivot back to you, since John seems to have frozen. Kind of just going back to that, sales part that John-
Yeah
... mentioned, about investing there, can you talk about, you know, the type of changes that you may make to the leadership, kind of, roles that you're putting in place?
Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, we keep on, every year we make changes. We continue to optimize organization as it grows, and morphs, and continues to grow. We announced in this past quarter a couple of executive changes that are great. In the case of go-to-market, to your question, Liad Eshkar assumed the role of CRO and replaced Navi. Navi had moved to run products. Navi was earlier come in into the company to be the GM of E&T, and when things slowed down on growth, he moved to be CRO. He was an engineer in his life and ran companies, including for analytics and well, running engineering teams, and had the opportunity to learn of our products the last 3.5 years, of our customers, of our market, and is amazing at that.
Then now he's bringing all these capabilities into the product world and had vacated his seat on the sales side to Liad to be CRO. Liad had been running our prior to business development our fastest-growing and most strategic sales group with all our strategic accounts. Prior to that, he was also coming from sales supporting sales enablement and channel enablement, and ran all professional services, so extremely well-rounded with over 10 years in Kaltura. So both of them very experienced, very talented, you know, working in the right geographies as well, et cetera. And what he's focused on, and we're continuing to push for, is to him to focus on the larger opportunities.
So we've moved some of the smaller accounts and the commercial sales to a different team that could run these, kind of with a net as opposed to a fishing rod. And in the big ones, we're doing more verticalization, focused more on a per vertical value prop and mission-critical capabilities. By the way, we moved back SDRs, the sales development reps, from marketing team to the sales team to be within these hubs. They'll become increasingly verticalized, and as I mentioned earlier, we're gonna focus both on marketing use case as well as the traditional use cases, as well as the vertical focus on the different verticals that we are. So we're excited about this change.
Sure, maybe unpacking that on a couple levels. One, with the larger customers. You know, you mentioned that you had a number of new logos that landed large. Maybe, give us some perspective on that opportunity there. And I think a number of those came from Europe, so, highlight, you know, the international opportunity at the same time.
Yeah, happy to do that. So yes, I mean, I mentioned earlier that the ARPU had continued to go up. It was the highest it's been for a while for new logos, and average MRR continues to go up, and people buy bigger solutions 'cause we have more to offer, whether it's on the first shot or beyond. And to your point, yes, there was the most amount of new logos this time, and most amount of new MRR for new logos, not for total new bookings, but just from new logos, came from Europe, which is wonderful because we said...
I mean, Europe was the first to be hit by the geopolitical situations there, as well as economical, and we said, "Look, it's gonna take a while, but it's gonna bounce back up." You know, it's hard to say what's gonna happen on a multi-quarter basis, albeit that we have good pipeline, but it was wonderful, as much as the U.S. continued to perform, to see, Europe, come back and do well across... And I mentioned earlier, various accounts, it's across industries and across verticals, so we're excited about that.
Yeah. With a new logo, what does the typical relationship look like? So if you... is this an annual contract or is it multi-year? And when you go back and have a conversation with them, what are the typical levers that you talk about?
So the typical contract is anywhere between one year-three years for enterprise, for E&T, and it's between, I'd say, usually three years-five years for M&T. So these are longer contracts for media and otherwise. We have commitment numbers there, so volume commits, but which drives our subscription, which is 94% of our revenue, right? So the bulk of our revenue is obviously subscription. And, you know, when people come in, they have a certain amount of products that they commit to, a certain amount of duration they commit to, and then over time, you know, we evaluate whether new products are required.
This is where we've seen that others, some that have started internal move external, some external move internal, some move to other subsidiaries or groups or, or campuses or whatever it might be, and they start growing, and sometimes it's just important big features that are being added in. I mean, one stat that's interesting is we were able, this quarter, to have commanded a lot more price increases from existing customers than we did before. We said that in the first quarter, it happened again in the second quarter, it continues to happen more so than the first, right?
So we have a lot of new MRR coming from price increases upon renewal, even without increasing the quote, unquote, "value or products," just coming back from being able to command the value and the price that we have, given the value that we provide. And so some of the changes that happened over time are not just upsells, but also us being able to also take more money from folks.
Sure, and, yeah, that's pretty impressive, considering you also talked about being able to consolidate your customers. Can you give us a little bit of color and maybe some examples of where you do consolidate use on the video side?
Yeah, we discussed it a bit earlier. And again, these are some of the biggest companies come to us, and they, either for the same use case and the same product, have multiple vendors, take events. You know, somebody would come in, and they'd be using three different, four different vendors, depending on subgroups. A lot of them are looking into making a consolidated decision at the company level. So instead of having each one of their different marketing groups around the world make decisions, to have the unified marketing team make a procurement decision that would apply horizontally to achieve better global prices.
But like I said earlier, it's not just about the price, it's also about having a single system that would reduce complexities, but also enable to gather all the metadata so that you could follow the users, 'cause they might be moving from one place to another globally or from different groups and different departments. The same buyer could be buying one thing and then buying something else, and they wanna see the behavior and events, for example. So that would still be the case where you're still talking about the same use case. Others, as I said, are looking to do this far beyond and are saying, "We're not just looking to grow within the use case across multiple overlapping products, but across different use cases," and many, and quite oftentimes, different buyers, CMO and CIO, external and internal.
And as I said, sometimes it's the external folks that came in in recent years, and they bought something for their events. Some of the biggest tech companies you know have started with us there, and then they came back and said, "Wait, we're doing our all-hands internally, and recordings, and video portal, and all the internal learning with a different platform. We'd like to consolidate on your platform." And sometimes the other way around. The CIO, who's generally running all their platforms, is not just doing it internally, but working with the CMO, saying, "Listen, can we consolidate externally?" So we're seeing all of the above, and I've...
You know, and we keep on having these examples, and I think the KPI that we continue to look at is, again, the average number of products used by customers, the average ARPU and the average ARR per customer, or that are continuously growing, and we're seeing that up and to the right.
Yeah, so, going back to unpacking that sales motion, you also mentioned that, you know, you have increased opportunities with, you know, midsize and commercial customers. How are you approaching that opportunity, and when do you see that as a more meaningful organic growth driver?
That's a good question. So, one of the directions, we said that when we launched real-time, we could start going down-market and, because real time, when you think about the size of a company, when you need a video portal, you could argue this, that, or the other, but the first time you use video for webinar or for a real discussion, it's, it's when you're very small immediately. And so that enabled us to come down. The other thing is that as we've launched that, we've become more and more focused on PLG, product-led growth, and more and more on products that you use first, and then you can come and talk to us, whether it is low touch or complete self-serve. And we started launching our complete self-serve webinar and made our events more, for example, more low touch.
Just to point a case, the very first event, Amazon re:Invent, and others that were huge, but were a lot of professional services, which have been, you know, we wanted to do less of, because these are lower deployment, slower deployment times, lower gross margins, and we wanted to get into faster, quicker, less hurdles, and more kind of, transactional. So we started providing more and more features that enable the customers to do what we would otherwise do, and that enables our gross margin to go up. So within these migrations, we've enabled to go gradually more and more towards PLG and low touch and no touch. And the big question was, when would that enable us to also come down market to start selling departmental, and also ultimately selling SMB, obviously not direct to consumer, but to SMBs? Now, we started playing with that.
The one thing you'd note is that in recent years, this was a place in the market that it hurt most, right? If you're looking at some of the other vendors, enterprise was the more interesting, stickier. They still have budgets. It's mission critical. SMBs, they could come, they could go, they could stop, they could not. So timing-wise, when we started doing this, was 2020, just before COVID and then through COVID. But then after, we needed to time the perfect timing for focus. So long story short, we're doing this. It's yielding more, but this had not been our number one focus as of recent, while we're gradually doing this.
Because from an allocation of capital, the market still hasn't rebounded at the level that this should be our focus, and so we're doing that, I'd say, in that 20%, not the 80% of our focus. There's more departmental, there's more work around commercial. I've just stated we've moved it to a separate team that can 100% focus on that, while the other team 100% focuses on the large one. But I expect that from a growth perspective, the fueling of, of revenue, booking and revenue from that, is gonna grow over 2025 and beyond, and not so much the near future.
All right, maybe bringing John back in here. When you think about the impact of professional services on both guidance and margins, how should we look at that contribution over the next couple of years?
Yeah, well, and obviously, as you know, we just gave recent guidance for the third quarter and the full year, which reflects, you know, PS will be down a bit. Subscription, you know, for next quarter, down a bit, the return for growth, and we do expect it to have, you know, a solid year and overall line of the year, you know, with the total revenue growth of about 1% and certainly driven by what we're seeing in subscription. Over time, and I kinda mentioned this on the call as well as set it up, you know, with the first quarter earnings call, you know, PS can be a little bit, it facilitates. PS isn't necessarily, you know, bad revenue for us.
It certainly comes with lower margin, but it also can be tied to some larger deals over a period of time. You know, before I was cut off, and by the way , no, I was not... You're not on my teleprompter platform, so it's not ours, and apologize for that. You know, but overall, I do expect, you know, PS will still be an ongoing part of our revenue over the next several years. As I was mentioning before, we have a really solid focus on overall customer profitability and bringing all of our customers into a better place, and certainly not having customers that are not profitable, which we're, you know, we're working through and managing through.
So from that perspective, again, I do think your PS will probably be consistent as a percent of revenue, is where it's been, like 6%-7%. But ultimately, I do believe the way in which we're approaching it, the way in which we're managing the business, is that we will be able to continue to, you know, enhance our overall gross margins and drive that through to, you know, the different levels of profitability and where they're managed on, you know, over time.
Maybe expanding a little bit there, you know, you do have a very clear target to get to posting a positive operating cash flow. Once you get there, how do you feel about, you know, balancing investment for growth and driving, you know, more bottom line leverage?
Yeah, I'm a really big believer, particularly now, that we need to be a 100% end company, so revenue growth and improving profitability, positive cash flow, and improving both of those, you know, over time. Certainly, if we have opportunities to accelerate growth, will we 100% find the right way to invest in that? No question. And at the right time, as we do expect the market, and Ron's mentioned, I've mentioned, you know, to pick up, we're seeing some solid signs as we head out of 2024 and into 2025. So certainly we're not gonna be immune to, you know, putting the foot on the accelerator to kinda get, you know, if we can, you know, move revenue growth to a higher place.
But again, you know, that we're gonna be really, really thoughtful about that, and we're not gonna sacrifice where, where we've kinda gotten back to positive free cash flow and, and improving, you know, profitability.
Right.
We can do both.
Very good. How do you feel about the macro environment? And this might be a question for both you, Ron, and John. You know, you, you do show some stabilization across various parts of the business, but it remains a pretty volatile environment. Where are the tailwinds starting to emerge? And, you know, what are the things that you keep your eye on most closely with respect to, you know, either cracks in the environment or just incremental headwinds?
John, you wanna start?
Yeah, you wanna... Yeah, go for it.
... Are you wanting me to go? So, we do believe, and I said that earlier about the last three years, which were a funk for this industry. You know, it's right. We grew pre-COVID by 20% easily, and that's without increasing people. And, like I said, the need isn't coming down, the need for digital transformation, the Gen Z, the amount of videos created, consumed, the value that could be created, the fact that we're moving from videos and end to videos of mean for better learning. I mean, it for forever there was conferencing, but really embedding that, like, in banks to do better wealth management, so the ability to put it into workflows where it's still early, early days.
So I think that the biggest turnaround is gonna be through kind of the macro and the fact that more budgets are gonna come back from marketing. But also, as I said earlier, the people will be able to take their eyes up and look less myopically about the immediate risk and look at what's gonna be best for the couple of years after, and thereafter, by way of not just quality, but also price, by way of the consolidation opportunity that I mentioned earlier. I think that coupled in the public markets, and John could talk about interest rates and, you know, small cap and liquidity and all that stuff, there's a lot of opportunity for Kaltura. But we feel strong about the acceleration of revenue, acceleration of profitability, and John will talk about the rest.
Yeah, I'm not in the habit of saying the Fed should have done this or the Fed should have done that. I'm more in the... I'm more kind of stick to what we see happening. And ultimately, you know, we do expect there'll be a rate cut in September. We think that's absolutely a good thing for us. We do think while, I mean, generally, you could argue that it was a little bit late, and you know, we do believe it's 100% coming, and that's gonna be a positive for us.
And we also think not only from a company in terms of, you know, the products that we put into the market, which, you know, rate cuts obviously usually help to, you know, reaccelerate or certainly, you know, continue, you know, overall economic growth as we know. But we're also a company that, you know, our products allow companies to manage their overall cost profile in a much more effective way than how they might be doing so with Kaltura product. So we also see an opportunity there. In addition, the small cap market has been somewhat forgotten about over the years, and hopefully, with interest rates coming down, some of the...
And again, I want NVIDIA and Microsoft to keep doing well and keep growing and all that good stuff, but a lot of capital has moved, you know, up, you know, into those companies, and I think small cap's been a little bit forgotten, and hopefully it gives us an opportunity to, you know, put ourselves back on the map and firmly claim a really solid position, as a small cap company, you know, and, and as a company that's gonna be growing revenue and enhancing profitability over the next several years.
All right, Ron, maybe bringing it back to you to kinda tie everything up. What do you see as the key near-term things to watch with respect to Kaltura's performance, and how do you think things can evolve over the next three years-five years? You know, maybe even put it in perspective of what kind of tailwind you see for the overall market that you're exposed to. Like, what is the growth opportunity here?
Yeah, in the near term, we're already there. I mean, improving gross retention, continuing to expand profitability, and we're landing this year, as stated, profits on both Adjusted EBITDA and cash flows, which we always said we will do. We also did this 2019 and 2020 before we were public, and during the beginning of being public. And, you know, the number one question I had as we're IPO-ing is, "Why were you profitable?" I said, "Sue me for believing a company needs to be profitable." So we're not moving around by the winds of this or that year. We're trying to run the company very in an organized way, and I think people are seeing that. We've been outperforming the industry in revenue growth, albeit low, but we've never declined, and we have come back to being profitable.
And we have amazing, amazing companies in our roster, if you think about across industries, and they're betting on Kaltura time and again. I think the biggest thing to understand is that regression back to the mean is a powerful force, and this industry, while pushed down, will come back up. As people say, when, you know, when it's blood in the streets, it's a time to invest, and it's been a bloody industry, and we're gonna come back up with all the backwind around digital transformation, Gen Z, the return to hybrid workplace, and, of course, with that, AI, which is huge, and we've already started doing.
Again, as adding to the point of consolidation that we've spoken so much about, the opportunity in consolidation is not just that we will replace so many other vendors, but that with AI and consolidating and harmonizing data, will enable us to provide the full experience of employees and of prospects and of customers, which is extremely, extremely valuable. So I'll leave the last point, which is, there's an opportunity beyond all that organic growth to continue and consolidate our market. We've made very small acquisitions. We stopped and needed to demonstrate we're coming back to being profitable, we're doing better than the others, and that, you know, turnaround is around the corner with more budgets. But it's an opportunity to start, you know, consolidating the industry. We believe we're ideally suited to do it.
We've historically proven our ability to cater to different products, different markets, extremely successfully, and to expand with our API- driven platform into other areas. And we have the right, positioning, we have the right customers, and we have the right team. So we're excited about that. Then the last is a comment that, John had said, you know, public markets, we believe, will turn around, for, for small cap. You know, our punishment, if you may, is that our original investors believe in us. Why is there so small liquidity? Because 99% of the pre-IPO investors have never sold one share in the company, because they keep on thinking this is so, underpriced. So that's the reality. We think things are gonna get pulled up into the right.
All right. Well, Ron and John, thank you very much for the time today.
Thank you so much. Take care.