Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Kaltura First Quarter 2022 earnings call. All material contained in the webcast is sole property and copyright of Kaltura, with all rights reserved. For opening remarks and introductions, I will now turn the call over to Erica Mannion, Sapphire Investor Relations, please go ahead.
Thank you, and good morning. With me today from Kaltura are Ron Yekutiel, Co-Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer, and Yaron Garmazi, Chief Financial Officer. Ron will begin with a summary of the results for the first quarter ended March 31st 2022, and the trends and areas of focus that are expected to impact 2022. Yaron will then review in greater detail the financial results for the first quarter, followed by the company's outlook for the second quarter and full year of 2022. We will then open the call for questions. Please note that this call will include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws, including, but not limited to, statements regarding Kaltura's expected future financial results and management's expectations and plans for the business.
These statements are neither promises nor guarantees, and involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed here. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ from forward-looking statements can be found in the Risk Factors section of Kaltura's annual report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31st, 2021, and other periodic SEC filings, including the quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarterly period ended March 31st, 2022, to be filed with the SEC. Any forward-looking statements made in this conference call, including responses to your questions, are based on current expectations as of today, and Kaltura assumes no obligation to update or revise them, whether as a result of new developments or otherwise, except as required by law. Please note, we will be discussing a non-GAAP financial measure, adjusted EBITDA, during this call.
For a reconciliation of this non-GAAP financial measure to the most directly comparable GAAP metric, please refer to our earnings release, which is available on our website at www.investors.kaltura.com. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Ron.
Thank you, Erica, and thanks to everyone for joining us on the call this morning. We reported today that our total revenue for the first quarter of 2022 was $41.7 million, up 11% year-over-year, and our adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was -$8.4 million. Both results exceeded the high end of our guidance range. As we stated in our last earnings call, the growth headwinds that we encountered in the second half of 2021 continued into the first quarter of 2022. We estimated them well and continue to believe now that we will increase our revenue growth rates in the second half of this year.
I would like to briefly recap what we stated in our last earnings call were the three main driving forces behind the headwinds, as well as the three main growth engines that we believe would re-accelerate our growth towards the second half of this year. The six factors remain very relevant. We said in our last earnings call that the headwinds were driven first by lower than planned E&T booking, caused by lengthening sales cycles and a slower than planned sales force ramp. Second, by a reduced need for our professional services, caused by our continued shift towards lower touch and self-serve offerings. Third, by one of our major customers reducing part of their business and revenue with us.
We further said that we expect our growth to be refueled, first by the evolution of our virtual event offering from catering exclusively to large flagship events that typically require significant event services to an event platform that caters to events of all sizes, and that is managed by the customers independently with minimal event services required, if any. Second, the launch of additional low-touch and self-serve products and go-to-market vehicles for both E&T and M&T. Third, by the continued ramp of our sales force. I'd like to give you an update on these six factors, starting with our E&T-related product services and sales cycles. In the first quarter, we continued to sell our virtual events offering for flagship events.
We're still benefiting from the significant professional services revenues that are attached to these deals, but our eyes are now set on our upcoming cross-enterprise event platform deals that power centrally all events of all sizes across the organization. Though there will be less, if any, professional service revenues from these deals, there are many more such deals to be had, and they command higher subscription revenues and greater stickiness. To that end, we have a growing sales pipeline of existing customers and new prospects that are evaluating our new platform, including Fortune 100 and 500 companies. They come from a diverse array of industries, including tech, financial services, healthcare, professional services, and education.
They're looking to use our platform for tens, hundreds, sometimes even thousands of events every year, catering both to customer and partner events, to internal events, and in many cases, also to their signature flagship events. Throughout the first quarter, we launched new innovative features advancing our event platform, and we continue to believe that this new product will contribute to the acceleration of our revenue growth in the second half of this year. We also continued selling in the first quarter our core content management products to customers, including Fortune 100 and 500 companies that use it externally for marketing and community engagement, and internally for knowledge sharing, learning, and development. To that end, we're continuing to see increased demand for a unified platform that could address both internal and external use cases for both content management and events.
This is a strong and unique selling point for Kaltura, so we believe we're very well positioned to capitalize on this market consolidation. Moving on to our low-touch and self-serve products and go-to-market vehicles. Following the initial release of our self-serve virtual classroom, webinar, and media services offerings, we continue to optimize and scale our digital operations and to ramp up our inside sales team to cater to transactional sales, augmenting our main sales team that is focused solely on larger customers and deals. We believe that several upcoming product enhancements will further drive growth coming from these initiatives in the second half of the year, especially from webinars, where our offering is expected to provide unique attributes and value around user experience, branding, live-to-on-demand flows, and integrations.
In M&T, we're continuing to expand downmarket from large telcos to mid-sized media companies, where we enjoy faster sales and deployment cycles by providing an easy-to-deploy, end-to-end streaming platform that includes a front-end user experience and monetization tools. During the first quarter, we partnered with several technology providers to productize such an end-to-end offering and augment it with a marketplace of value-added services that we believe it will also help to fuel our future growth. Regarding the major customer that reduced part of their business with us. As previously mentioned, they have since renewed various existing projects and have partnered with us on new ones in the first quarter. The impact of the reduction hit most strongly in the fourth quarter of 2021 and the first quarter of 2022. Our business with this customer is picking up again, and we believe they will remain a major customer this year.
Regarding our Salesforce ramp, in the first quarter of 2022, we had over 30% more ramped enterprise sales reps and over 15% more account managers as compared to the first quarter of 2021. In summary, after certain headwinds, including those related to post-COVID shifts, brought about close to flat revenues in the fourth quarter of 2021 and a reduction in revenue in the first quarter of 2022, the headwinds are starting to be offset by our growth engines. Our guidance reflects an expected turnaround in the sequential quarterly growth trend line in the upcoming second quarter of 2022, as well as an increase in our year-over-year revenue growth rate in the second half of this year. With that, I'll turn it over to Yaron, our CFO, to discuss our financial results in more detail. Yaron?
Thank you, Ron, and good morning, everyone. As I review the first quarter results today, please note that I will be referring to a non-GAAP metric, adjusted EBITDA. A reconciliation of the GAAP to non-GAAP financials is included in today's earnings release, which is available on our website at www.investors.kaltura.com. Total revenue for the first quarter ended March 31st, 2022 was $41.7 million, up 11% year-over-year. Subscription revenue was $37 million, up 14% year-over-year, while professional services revenue contributed $4.7 million, down 13% year-over-year. The remaining performance obligations were $171.2 million, up 17% year-over-year, of which we expect to recognize 59% as revenue over the next twelve months. Annualized recurring revenue was $147.7 million, up 15% year-over-year.
Revenue growth continued to benefit from our net dollar retention rate, which was 177% in the first quarter compared to 116% in Q1 2021. Note that this quarter net dollar retention metric also incorporates the impact of the large customer that, as mentioned in our last earnings call, reduced some of its business with us in the fourth quarter of 2021. This customer has since renewed various existing projects and has partnered with us on the new ones. With our E&T segment, total revenue for the first quarter was $29.7 million, up 9% year-over-year. Subscription revenue was $27.6 million, up 15% year-over-year, while professional services revenue contributed $2.1 million, down 37% year-over-year.
Within our M&T segment, total revenue for the first quarter was $12 million, up 15% year-over-year. Subscription revenue was $9.4 million, up 12% year-over-year, while professional services revenue contributed $2.6 million, up to 27% year-over-year. GAAP gross profit for the quarter was $26.3 million, representing a gross margin of 63%, up from 59% gross margin in Q1 2021. Within our E&T segment, gross profit for the first quarter was $20.8 million, representing a gross margin of 70%, up from 69% gross margin in Q1 2021. Within our M&T segment, gross profit for the first quarter was $5.5 million, representing a gross margin of 46%, up from 33% gross margin in Q1 2021.
R&D expenses for the first quarter were $14.9 million, or 36% of revenue, compared to 29% in Q1 2021. The increase was driven by additional headcount and payroll expenses as we continue to invest in technology and innovation. Sales and marketing expenses for the first quarter were $14.6 million, or 35% of revenue, compared to 27% in Q1 2021. This increase was driven by additional sales and marketing investment, including headcount and personnel-related expenses. G&A expenses for the first quarter were $11.4 million or 27% of our revenue, compared to 21% in Q1 2021. The increase was driven by additional public company headcount and third-party related expenses. GAAP net loss in the quarter was $16.9 million or $0.13 per diluted share.
Adjusted EBITDA was -$8.4 million, decreasing from -$1.3 million in Q1 2021. This result is in line with our plan to increase our spend in order to further fuel our growth, as discussed earlier. Turning to the balance sheet and cash flow. We ended the quarter with $118.5 million in cash and short-term investment. Net cash used in operating activity was $19.6 million in the quarter and $6.6 million in Q1 2021. I would now like to turn to our outlook for the second quarter of 2022 and for the fiscal year ending December 31st, 2022.
In the second quarter, we expect the subscription revenue to grow by 1%-3% between $36.8 million-$37.6 million, and the total revenue to grow by 0%-2% to between $41.6 million-$42.4 million. We expect the negative adjusted EBITDA to be between $8.5 million-$11.5 million. For the full year, we continue to expect subscription revenue to grow by 10%-13% between $159.5 million-$163.8 million, and total revenue to grow by 5%-8% to between $173.3 million-$178.2 million. We continue to expect the full year negative adjusted EBITDA to be between $27 million-$32 million.
In summary, as Ron mentioned, our outlook reflects the expected turnaround in the sequential quarterly growth rates for the upcoming second quarter, and we continue to believe that our new products and larger sales force will enable us to increase our year-over-year revenue growth in the second half of 2022. With that, we will open the call for questions. Operator?
Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up the handset before pressing the star keys. Our first question is from Gabriela Borges with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed.
Hi, good morning, good afternoon. Thank you for taking my question. Maybe for yourself, Ron, I'd love to hear a little bit more about what you're hearing from customers. We're about three months, five months in now to a year that feels more similar to a pre-COVID year. What are you hearing in terms of willingness to invest in communications technologies, virtual events technologies as we progress through the year? How do those conversations compare to three months ago?
Thank you, Gabriela, and thank you everybody else for joining. We are seeing continued interest in the core products of the company. If you're asking if this is like the COVID days, it's not exactly like the COVID days. The cycles there were extremely short, half or a third of the typical cycles, and a lot of folks had also acquired just usage, additional usage of the system. Here we're seeing more interest in additional products as opposed to increasing their usage. The number one product on the enterprise side is, as you know, our Events Platform. There's a lot of interest there. That pipeline has been growing. I think the bigger issue was our availability of this product, which started at the beginning of the year and has built since.
We've seen an increase in the pipeline in that period compared to the beginning of the period, where we were fresh and new in that product. I think generally, what we're seeing is that people are looking less to solve their problem for tomorrow morning and more to address the sustainable issue of using video to improve productivity, efficiency, sales, marketing, training, learning. They're taking a more thoughtful approach on how to apply this across their entire organization, which works well towards our enterprise platform that caters to any and all events, not just the large events.
That's helpful color. The follow-up is for Yaron. Maybe comment a little bit on how your unit economics are evolving on LTV to CAC as you roll out the more light touch self-service go to market alongside the classic go to market. How does the LTV to CAC compare on the self-serve machine relative to the classic machine?
Obviously, we are not sharing the specific numbers around LTV to CAC, which we shared before the IPO. Few comments that I can say. First of all, definitely, we are not in the numbers that we had during COVID, which picked up significantly, also because of the fact that shorter and sunk in terms of investment in marketing, in sales and marketing and so much faster booking pace with customers. I can tell you that the gross churn numbers didn't change. The booking in terms of closing deal is slower, so it puts some pressure on the LTV to CAC. Obviously, we did mention that we have continued to increase our investment in sales and marketing, which also put some pressure on LTV to CAC.
To make a long story short, we are not in the numbers that we had during COVID, and we believe that in the short term and also in the midterm, it's probably going to go to the same number, around the same numbers that we had before COVID.
Well, I have one more point about the self-serve question because obviously it's one of the important moves that we're making. I wanna distinguish between the lower touch to the self-serve. We've already started at the beginning of the year with our EP product, the event platform product, to cater to more low touch environments where it's self-operated by the customers as opposed to using our professional services. It is still sold with outside sales people and not with a credit card on the website. We have started launching the first versions of our complete self-serve during the beginning of the year, but we've always said that the impact of self-serve will be more in the second half of the year, and that remains the theory. We have more releases to come in the next few months.
I mentioned just a bit earlier that the webinar product, the webcasting product, is expected to continue to get extremely stronger throughout the next few months. We expect to start seeing a lot more change and impact in LTV to CAC in the months ahead, and we'll share as soon as we have complete information about that.
Thanks for the color.
Thank you, Gabrielle.
Our next question is from Matt Niknam with Deutsche Bank. Please proceed.
Hey, guys. Thank you for taking the questions. Just two, if I could. First on the subscription revenue guide. So I think it's fairly clear you've messaged sort of flattish 2Q subscription revenue. I'm just wondering how confident are you in the implied revenue ramp in 3Q and 4Q? And is that. I hear you talk about some of the newer product offerings. I'm just wondering, is some of that ramp up tied to hiring that's already occurred, or are there other factors driving this? And then maybe secondarily, tied to that, I think in the past you've talked about a little bit of a slower ramp in terms of sales force hiring. Any updates you can share there in terms of where you're at today? Thanks.
Yeah. Yes, thank you for the question. Regarding the guidance for the subscription revenue, first of all, we did try to do a very thoughtful process right now in terms of guiding for the rest of the year, especially around the macro environment, the macro environment around us, post-COVID situation, et cetera. The situation is that, first of all, as you can see, there is a nice improvement in the sequential growth of both the overall revenue and the subscription revenue. This is one important point. In terms of the subscription revenue going forward, one other important point is that obviously we mentioned before that we are going to have some less professional services revenue and more subscription revenue.
In the short term, we saw a trend that some of the virtual event deals, the big virtual event deals are still being signed, and therefore we get more professional services than we expected. It's still the professional services is declining compared to last year, but it's more than what we expected. Regarding the overall development of the subscription revenue, I believe that the numbers that we put in place, which are basically the same numbers that we gave before for the full year, are showing a nice sequential growth for the subscription revenue in Q2 going to Q3 and Q4.
By the way, mostly in Q3, Q4, if you do the math, you will see that the numbers that we get for Q2, if you take the balance, you see a very nice sequential growth, both in recurring revenue, in subscription revenue and in the overall revenue. At this point, we believe that these are the realistic numbers for the year, but hopefully we will work very hard to beat the numbers.
Matt, thanks for the question, and I'll answer the second one in a second. Just on the subscription side, A, we have larger, stronger pipelines. It's not that we're waiting for additional sales force to come in. We're seeing the continued move of the deals in the pipeline and expect the impact to continue to be able to affect our second half of the year. To remind you, our thesis was that the second half of the year is the expected growth, and so a lot of it is bottom-up based on the actual pipeline of deals.
The second is that we do have some things that were already closed and are expected to contribute in the second half of the year, so that's backlog, especially on the media and telecom side of the business, where some of the deals, and we said that for a while, are gonna impact only in the second half of the year. Some of the growth that we're seeing there is not based on future booking, it's already based on past booking. But just to add to what Yaron had stated about professional services, while we were cautious and said that professional services will go down, and they have come down year-over-year. They're coming down a bit less than what we have forecasted. There's still flagship events that are taking place.
The blend between recurring and non-recurring is still somewhat shifting, and we expect more and more of the recurring to come with the EP, with the event platform. On the second half of your question on the ramp in Salesforce, as I mentioned, we have a 30% year-over-year growth in sales rep, and a 15% plus year-over-year growth in CSMs. We feel that at this point, this is a decent contribution to what we need for the year. A lot of what's gonna happen over the next few quarters is gonna be more impactful for the follow-on year than the first year. I don't think that coming into the second quarter, there will be a significant change as to the number of people that are gonna come in so far as the impact on the year.
We feel that we have what we need in order to attain the numbers that we have communicated.
That's great. Thank you both.
Thank you, Matt.
Our next question is from George Iwanyc with Oppenheimer & Co. Please proceed.
Thank you for taking my question. Ron, just following up on your sales comments recently. Can you give us some perspective on, you know, the 30% hiring over the last year and, you know, how you've seen sales productivity ramp as those, you know, salespeople start to get out and talk to customers?
Sure. First of all, from a media & telecom is generally a clunky business, so it's hard to say from one quarter or another because these are relatively larger deals that are coming in and out. They're less so immediately impactful. Just as I mentioned in the second half of this year, we're gonna be benefiting from deals that came from deep into last year and before. So I'm gonna put that aside. No significant change there. From a sales rep productivity and the EE&T side of the business, it's still, as we said, somewhat lower like it was in Q4 insofar as elongated sales cycles, but the pipeline is picking up, and especially for our Events Platform products, there's a lot in. Some of them are paid POCs.
Some of them have already told us that they've chosen Kaltura, so it is moving forward. To the best of our forecast going forward, the remaining of the year is gonna become increasingly stronger. As for the new people that come in, historically, it's taken six months for an outside salesperson to be fully ramped. Given the somewhat elongated sales cycles now, it's probably a bit longer. My comments are not so much on people that have joined over the last couple of months. It's more to the people that were here earlier and have been already contributing, i.e., six months plus in the company.
Following up on your pipeline comment, so it sounds like the customer generation is healthy. But you know, are you seeing any change in the type of conversations you're having from a given the macro pressure or from a regional perspective? Let's say, you know, has anything changed in Europe?
Not significantly. We're. Again, it's hard to decipher how much of it would have changed because of the macroeconomic conditions and how much of it is the post-COVID and how much of it is the issue of the shifting demand from the event, general event for flagship to the event platform. I could say that the degree of interest that we find is very significant. It's been building up. We have, just to give you examples, advanced stages with multiple large tech companies, financial institutions, professional services. We have a tech company that has been a top 20 Kaltura customer for more than 10 years. They awarded us their event business for tier two and tier three events.
For many, many events, we're working with one of the largest professional services networks in the world to standardize their global events, and they have indicated that they wanna go ahead and conclude with us. We have one of our top customers, which is a Fortune 100 financial institution that is an existing customer, again. It's planning to expand their usage into the event platform. A top U.S. healthcare provider, which has been with us for years, that's converting into using our events, a Fortune 100 global financial institution. The list is long, and it seems to be rolling forward. We're not hearing from them that they're pulling off because there's some sort of a economic slowdown or a macro condition issue.
I think that the mission criticality that we're discussing here is significant among enough organizations, especially as we continue to work remotely. That organizations are gonna require this. A certain good piece of our business is recession-proof. If you look at people going into universities in recessions or watching more TV. I think generally I think we're gonna be in a reasonable spot. I will say that we're monitoring everything. Our ears and eyes are open, and we'll adjust our plans accordingly. As stated, we're a bit more slow and cautious as it pertains to additional spend on the sales and marketing side. We're definitely listening, but from the pipeline generation, it seems to be advancing nicely forward.
Thank you.
Our next question is from James Corey with Bank of America. Please proceed.
Yes, how you doing? Thanks for taking my questions. This is James. I am on for Mike Funk at Bof A. So I know you talked a little bit about, you know, your demand across verticals and things like that, but can you know, talk a little bit about if you've seen any specific areas of weaknesses or strengths within those demand across your verticals?
Yeah. Happy to provide a bit of angle here. First of all, the new booking contribution has been from all segments. The only one actually in the first quarter that did not contribute was our tech OEM segment, which is where we enable third-party companies to build products using Kaltura. That's been a bit lesser. Otherwise, they're all contributing and growing. Again, from a product perspective, a lot of the interest and deals are around meeting-related activities. From a geo perspective, it's quite similar. The majority of the E&T new bookings are still in North America, followed by Europe and then APAC. From an M&T perspective, it's still outside of the U.S., like EMEA. Channel-wise, we're still generating quite similar deals from a booking perspective.
It's still single digit at the high end. We expect that to gradually change as we become more and more low touch and self-serve. Like I said, from a demand for our services, the percentage of service out of our deals has a bit jumped back up compared to Q4. Per my note about additional flagship deals, we do expect a quarter-over-quarter reduction in this. By the way, on the revenue basis, it's somewhat ahead of what's gonna happen on the booking side. But generally speaking, it's still remaining strong, and there's an interest for that. That's a bit more color, but all segments are contributing.
Got you. Thank you for that. I do appreciate it.
Our next question is from Patrick Walravens with JMP Securities. Please proceed.
Oh, great. Thank you. You know, Ron, congrats on doing better than people thought. Look, Yaron, if I get this wrong, tell me, but you guys have $120 million in cash. You have $38 million in debt. You have $82 million net. You burned $22 million in Q1. Why not de-risk this and cut the burn? Like, why continue on this plan? You know, your stock is trading at a level where it's, you know, people don't believe it anyway. Why not de-risk it? I'm sure you talked about it a lot, but just share your thinking with us.
Yeah. First of all, thank you for the question. It's a great question, and we are putting a lot of thoughts behind it, and we actually already taking the action based around the area that you are discussing right now. First of all, the fact that Q1 we burned so much cash, a lot of it is related to seasonality that we have in our cash collection. We have a very strong Q2 and Q3 for the universities and some of our major customers that pay us annually in advance when it's coming. We also had this short-term slowdown with a specific customer, which we mentioned last quarter, which is already behind us, and they are increasing the volume of business with us. To your overall comment, yes, we are taking already the action.
We are definitely not going to be above the numbers that we presented and were even mentioned before by some of you guys. We are already considering some significant actions the rest of the year in order to take it to a better place in terms of our cash flow and our adjusted EBITDA. At this point, for the short term, we didn't want to slow down. To the midterm and to the long term, we are not changing our plan, and we are going to get the company to a break-even situation much, much before we get to the lowest part of our cash balance. It's already in the move.
Okay, great.
Yeah.
Okay, good. That's good to hear. I guess the follow-up to that, and I understand you hope to beat this, but what does this, you know, -27, -32 EBITDA imply for actual free cash flow? Like, how much in this plan do you expect to burn this year?
Yeah. We are not providing specific numbers there. It's going to be a little bit more than the adjusted EBITDA because of some of the deferral expenses like the ASC 606 impact, et cetera. But it's not going to be significantly more than this for the year. By the way, the most important part is that we are building our midterm and long term to a situation that we don't need to raise additional cash. Definitely the plans that we had to balance the company at the end of this year, which in the last call we mentioned that we are going to do it next year, it's still the plan, and we are going to accelerate the plan in order to get it to a better place.
The second part of the year, I can tell you it's not going to be any more two-digit in terms of the negative cash flow. It's going to balance itself to one-digit, and the overall number that we discussed before is not going to be way above the adjusted EBITDA number. We are going to work out to beat the numbers that we provided for the adjusted EBITDA. If you've seen in the first quarter, we did do better than the nine to 12 that we mentioned. Actually, it was 8.4.
Okay. Thank you.
Our next question is from DJ Hynes with Canaccord. Please proceed.
Hey, thanks for taking the questions, guys. Ron, I'm just trying to put into perspective the sequential decline in ARR. My understanding was that the large customer attrition happened in Q4. I guess two questions there, like, one, have you had additional meaningful revenue turnover or loss in Q1? Second, how much of an ARR headwind was the large customer loss that you talked about?
Sure. Thank you, DJ. One thing first, I wanna remind everybody because ARR is reported differently for different companies. The way our ARR KPI works is that it is pretty much similar to our subscription revenue for the quarter times four. The only fix there is for term licenses that are addressed differently with ASC 606. That's the only difference. It's not a run rate, it's not a CRR, it's not a function of new bookings that happen in the quarter, it's just the recurring revenue. That's the one thing I wanna be clear. It's always been like that. Within that, when we had this incident in Q4, we knew that it was impacting Q1. There's nothing new here. We said that it's gonna hit Q4.
We said it's gonna hit Q1, and that the hit later will be smaller. It's obviously a reduction in recurring revenue, so it doesn't disappear, but it doesn't continue to go down further materially, and hopefully it starts to build up given the additional sale. The reduction that was there in Q1 was already considered in our forecast. As you've seen, we've beat these forecasts, so nothing was surprising here. Per your question about gross retention, as Yaron has earlier stated, our gross retention remains strong. It's actually better than last quarter, of course, from a perspective of not losing this large customer. On an ongoing basis, it's better than the run rate of last year. We do not have any additional losses of customers that are material above our ongoing rate.
As mentioned in the past, it is a strong good rate of gross retention, so we're not seeing additional pressure. I'll just say that. On the ARR is just a reflection of the loss. You had asked about the size of the loss. Again, it's a large customer, and we've lost part of their business. It was a kind of a multi-million-dollar impact on the year at the high level, but not, but still the great majority of that customer is continuing forward, and they're coming back to be a very significant customer.
Perfect. Yeah, appreciate all that color.
Actually, they are also.
Go ahead, Yaron.
They are also signing new business. Yeah, they are not just renewing business, they are signing some significant new business with us, the same customer.
Got it. Then the second question, just what are you seeing in terms of retention of sales reps? You know, I think we were up 40% in ramped reps in Q4, 30% this quarter. Then the follow-up to that would be, like, last quarter, you talked about still we're on this path to 40% growth in sales capacity this year. I understand you have what you need to hit this year's targets, and in your answer to pats last question, it seems like maybe you're reevaluating plans to kind of lower cash burn. Are we still on this aggressive, like, path to 40% ramp in sales capacity this year?
That's a great question, DJ. These things are indeed connected, and we are with enough sales force to be able to address what we plan for this year. We believe, given the amounts that we have and the productivities that are expected to come back up to where we want them should be enough to generate some nice growth into next year. Yes, we are keeping our eyes on the overall macro situation and our cash position and are delaying the rapid growth in the sales count. If your question is, do we still think we're gonna grow yet again by 40% this year? Not necessarily. It might be lower. It should not impact this year. Next year, we should still be very good to go. It really depends.
We will give you an update as this year advances and as we look into both our cash position, productivity, deals that are closing, trends of the recurring revenue. As mentioned, we are thoughtful given the situation in the markets and our particular situation as well.
Understood. Thank you, guys.
Thank you.
Our next question is from Michael Turrin with Wells Fargo. Please proceed.
Hey, guys. This is Austin Williams on for Michael Turrin. Thanks for taking the question. I just wanted to touch on net dollar retention rate. It looks like that ticked down pretty meaningfully to 107% in the quarter. I know there's the one customer that was called out, but could you give us any color on anything else that drove that expansion activity? Any thoughts on where that could go over the next year in the longer term?
Yeah, thank you, Michael.
Got it. Speaking for. Go ahead.
Yeah, let me react to this. First of all, you're right. Some of the impact came from this specific customer, which had some meaningful impact on Q4 and then Q1. It did put some pressure on the net dollar retention rate. One thing that is very important, Ron already mentioned it, the gross churn is definitely at this point not under pressure if we are taking out of the equation this specific customer. We don't see any trend that really put significant pressure or any pressure at all, even there was some improvement in gross churn this quarter, the overall gross churn. This will not put pressure on the short term.
As you know, the fact that we are comparing now in the net dollar retention calculation a post-COVID situation to post-COVID, definitely, we see the pressure on the overall net dollar retention rate. We believe that it will get back to something that is more closer to the rates that we had before COVID, which were still strong, so the customers are still growing very nicely. Even if you take out of the equation the impact of this customer, probably the number would be by a few points up above the number that we have right now.
If you consider what can happen in the next quarter and going into the rest of the year, it's probably going to continue to go down to around the levels that we had before COVID, and you have the numbers. We don't believe that if we take out of the equation, this specific customer is going to be much below this number because the net impact of the gross churn didn't change. Actually, it's very strong. By the way, we may see also some new some deals that are signing with our new with our current customers around the, the EP and the event platform, so it also can improve the number going forward.
One thing to remember is that the gross retention number is a bit more important than net dollar retention in the sense that it looks what's happening right now in the quarter. Net dollar retention looks at the cumulative impact from a year back to now. As mentioned, for a certain period, there was a whole COVID up, but then after that, there was also a particular change again with that customer. I will say that while the majority of the recurring revenue had come down already from this change, the net dollar retention is in the lag. So if you take, for example, next quarter, it's going to compare Q2 versus Q2 last year. A big portion of that analysis wouldn't be what's happening now between this quarter to next, but what happened a year ago between Q1 and Q2.
If we indeed grew a lot last year, which we did, it will put the downward pressure on our NDR as we move into next quarter, not because of anything that happened right now, but because of something that happened a year ago. The net-net is, as Yaron had said, we are coming down to more pre-COVID levels. We expect in the midterm that it will probably rise beyond with additional product upsells. From a growth term, which is the most important one, we continue to be strong.
Understood. I just had one follow-up on RPO and the backlog. It looks like RPO was down sequentially mid to high single digits on both RPO and current RPO. Is there anything else besides that large customer that you would point to that's driving the backlog down as well?
No, no. Three points. The major customer, we discussed it, so I will not repeat it. There is a seasonality in terms of booking our deals and renewing some of our previous year deals which take place in Q2 and Q3, so it put some short-term pressure on Q1. Other than that, in some cases, and we discussed it before, there was a slower pace of closing deals in the last couple of quarters, which we hope that it's going to change nicely based on the development of the pipeline. Compared to last quarter, I don't see any major change. It's the same factors that impact previous quarter are still here.
The only thing that I can say that there is some improvement, some nice improvement even in the pipeline, which we hope that it will enable us to put a much stronger numbers in terms of the RPO going forward, especially in the second part of the year.
Thank you.
As a reminder to star one on your telephone keypad if you would like to ask a question. Our next question is from Ryan Koontz with Needham & Company. Please proceed.
Thanks for the question. Most of them might have been answered, but I wanted to ask, are you seeing much customer interest, in moving from your high touch product to your newer low touch products? Can this help with retention, you know, expansion of existing accounts? What are the economics for you in that, if it's possible, apart from lower, professional services reps? Thanks.
Yeah, thanks, Ryan. We are seeing folks that have looked or have physically taken from us the event solution for the flagship events, looking at the holistic solution for their entire company. In fact, even the newer ones that are coming around and are starting off with one or two events are already considering and testing and looking into addressing what's called their tier two and tier three events, not just their tier one events. There's definitely an opportunity to do that. That being said, I think that the bigger opportunity here is not to replace existing low touch, but to come on top and in addition to them. Most of our business historically have been video content management, right?
Up until a year and a half ago, most of what we did was internal learning and development, collaboration, communication, some external use cases. Now most of what we do and support are external use cases for marketing and sales, albeit that some of the events are also internal. The bigger opportunity that's here is to materially increase the upsell opportunity, to increase the average MRR, to increase the average ARPU, and that will drive up net dollar retention because it will fuel up the size of the customers. By and large, if you look at COVID being an opportunity that a lot of the growth was usage-based, universities that needed more storage, delivery, you know, corporates that needed to increase their licenses. Now, given the new product basis that we're discussing, a lot of it could be product upsell, which is more strategic.
It enables us to be stickier. It puts us in a better competitive advantage given that we're a horizontal platform that addresses multiple things. You know, if we're talking about the signs of slowing down of the market, it is a more cost-effective solution. The fact that we're consolidating multiple solutions into one vendor enables us to offer a cheaper, more affordable solution to our customers. For multiple reasons, this should be interesting for the market, and this should enable us to improve our net dollar retention.
No problem. Thank you.
We have reached the end of our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Ron for closing comments.
Yeah, I wanna thank you all for your time, everybody that's been listening in addition to the great questions. I know some of us are still impacted by the virus, so I'm hoping everyone good health. Godspeed. Be well. Thank you.
Thank you. This does conclude today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and thank you for your participation.