Hey, everyone. Good afternoon. Thanks for joining us. I'm Tejas Savant. I cover the Life Sciences here at Morgan Stanley. Before we begin, for important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website at morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, do reach out to your sales rep. It's my pleasure to host SOPHiA GENETICS today, and speaking on behalf of the company, we have Ross Muken, COO and CFO. Welcome, Ross, and thank you for joining us.
Thank you for having us.
Maybe Ross, just to kick things off, you know, you've been with SOPHiA since 2021. Could you just talk to how you've seen the company evolve and grow over the last two or three years? What have you been most proud of, and where do you see room for improvement?
Sure. So, when I joined SOPHiA, I was obviously quite compelled by the mission of trying to bring decentralized, personalized medicine to communities all around the world, right? And, and obviously, we take for granted a bit here in the U.S. that access to testing, particularly in oncology and rare disease, here is much more prevalent. In many parts of the world, it's either too high cost or.
Mm-hmm.
Too sophisticated, right? And so the ability to then take best-in-class technologies to, different countries, and we're in over 70 now, I felt was quite interesting. But obviously, when I joined, one of the big questions I would say was: Could we win in the U.S. market?
Mm-hmm.
Right? And I would say the other was: Could we penetrate the biopharma market, right? And, and we've always, you know, talked about this kind of continuous, you know, wave, where if we were able to obviously take our presence in the clinical market and leverage that then in the biopharma market, the two should feed each other. I would say on the U.S. side, I'm incredibly pleased with the momentum.
Mm-hmm.
That business was up 40% in the first quarter. We're tracking well for the year in bookings in that market. It's one of the key reasons why our year-to-date sort of leading indicators are doing certainly better than our revenue overall is. And I would say the most interesting part for me on the U.S. side is not just, I would say, the typical laboratories that we would address, like the, you know, academic medical centers.
Mm-hmm.
Or comprehensive cancer centers, but also the, you know, private labs.
Mm-hmm.
And up to the biggest in the country. And so we're seeing in our pipeline and in some of our recent momentum, an entire smattering of companies you cover look to us for their data analytics backbone.
Mm-hmm.
Right? And so for me, I'm quite proud and I'm super optimistic of where we're going in the U.S. business, overall, and expect that to continue at similar rates or even potentially accelerate from here. I would say on the biopharma side, you know, the story's a bit more mixed. We had a great year in 2023. We're having a much tougher year here in 2024. I think there were some lessons learned around the types of contracts that we were going after, and as well, I would say diversity of the pipeline.
Mm-hmm.
Where we probably were too concentrated.
Mm.
In sizable deals that, you know, were obviously binary in nature. And so, we've split our data and diagnostic efforts on the biopharma side. We have a new leader, who actually joined this week, in biopharma diagnostics from a company you know well, Illumina, where he was leading before, and so we're really excited about that addition. We have a gentleman internally we promoted to lead the data effort, and he's super focused there as well. And so I think we've got now the right strategy, and we're going after the right business, and we're seeing it already sort of show up in a much more diversified pipeline. And so I think we're better suited for, some of the changes that.
Mm.
Have happened in that market and for where we are in terms of the different stages of the two businesses, where I would say diagnostics, the strategy and go-to-market's a lot more established.
Mm.
The data side is certainly an area where it's newer for us and newer for the market in total. And in where we play, I think there's still some incubation and learnings to be had, and so that business needs, let's say, a bit more go-to-market attention.
Mm.
As well, which it now gets.
Got it. Perfect. Talk to us about the competitive landscape for DDM, Ross. You know, where do you differentiate versus the other platforms out there? Why is the market, in your opinion, primed now for a SaaS solution? And as you think about some of the drivers or the bottlenecks for decentralized analytics like DDM, where does that fit into sort of AI, I mean, this inexorable push towards decentralization and AI in healthcare, but then you've also got a more capital-constrained environment, just the interplay of those two?
So I think, you know, first and foremost, from our perspective, if we're able to deliver the highest quality result, right? And that just means sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, et cetera, across very large sets of precision medicine data at the lowest cost, right, at scale, for me, that's where we're going to win, and I think for our solution and market, there's no one that does.
Mm.
What we do better, right? And frankly, you know, in terms of the competitive landscape, it's quite varied, but it's ourselves who have a complete solution, and then a number of other types of vendors that come at it, either from an instrumentation standpoint or a consumable standpoint or even from a laboratory standpoint, but it's a very different model that they deploy. Our kind of cloud-centric solution allows us to get economies of scale.
Mm-hmm.
That's just not possible in most of the traditional on-premise or, on-server, type, models that exist out there. So for me, I think we have a superior offering, and it shows up in sort of our win rate if I look, competitively in market. Often, where we don't win, it's because someone continues to use their own homegrown solution, right?
Mm-hmm.
And so it's really around the maturation of the market, and essentially where laboratories get to enough volume.
Mm-hmm.
And hospitals make decisions around integrating their clinical and genomic and other data modalities where our platform really, I would say, shines, and the big change that's happening now, right, that you see across a number of companies in your coverage universe, is one, the breadth of the panels and the breadth of the information collected per patient is growing, so if you think about going from single gene, you know, sort of solutions to 20-gene panels to 100-gene panels.
Mm-hmm.
To CGP, to exome, to whole genome.
Mm-hmm.
Right? That explosion of sort of genetic information per patient, augurs well for our market positioning and solution, irrespective as if you are a centralized or a decentralized player. Many of the centralized players now are coming to us because their solution algorithmically lacked the ability to handle that much data and storage, at the cost, they are seeing relative to what the reimbursement is in the market. And so I think those kind of pressures of growing panel size, growing complexity of data per patient, looking for multimodal signatures, right, for a lot of the newer therapies coming to market, the next gen PARPs or the, you know, the drugs that will replace the PD-L1s or the neoantigens, et cetera.
Mm-hmm.
There's a lot more complexity, whether you're talking about DNA and RNA, or DNA, RNA and imaging, or DNA, RNA, imaging and pathology, and then add on phenotypic data. This kind of explosion per patient is also, I would say, arguing for.
Hmm.
A platform that's able to compute and digest that data at scale at a cost that makes sense.
Got it. You know, lots of new emerging sequencing players in the market. How easy is it to adapt DDM to all the new hardware that's coming to market? And can you just give us an update on just compatibility with the different platforms out there?
Sure. So, you know, the sequencing environment's probably changing for the first time in maybe over a decade.
Mm-hmm.
You know, obviously, the share in and of itself, if you think about it in just sheer numbers of install base, obviously, Illumina and Thermo remain quite dominant. But I think if you look on an incremental basis, particularly in the mid-throughput market, you're seeing quite a bit of new entrants. You know, at the high end of the market, obviously, you have Ultima, and you have Element in the mid-throughput market. MGI has kind of come in in certain geographies.
Mm-hmm.
More in APAC and LATAM.
Mm-hmm.
Across the board, and obviously, PacBio, others, Oxford Nanopore. So, you know, our solution can be compatible with any workflow that exists, which again, is a major advantage versus any of the other sort of traditional products in market. I think for us, it's really around finding, in some cases, what is the right fit and solution for.
Hmm.
What someone is ultimately trying to deploy or what they're trying to accomplish from a precision medicine standpoint. But I would say in general, we're gonna continue to see a more diverse set within our base. And I think, frankly, for the market, even for the market incumbent leader, is probably a good thing.
Got it. How should we be thinking about, you know, the software portion becoming a more prominent portion of the overall cost for customers? Does, you know, Illumina's decision to move away from, you know, price per GB to more workflow-based pricing models, does that sort of impact you in any way? And, you know, if they are giving away essentially, you know, onboard analytics for free, how do customers view that versus a solution like DDM?
Sure. So I would say, you know, one, if they would like to participate across the entire workflow, I don't think free is a model that works, right, when you need to drive gross profit margins and cash flow. But in general, you know, from our standpoint, as we look at the market, you know, we think we have a really unique workflow solution, and we can as well partner with essentially any chemistry, any instrumentation, any automation vendor, right? So no matter.
Hmm.
What the solution is, we can work with the variety of sort of the different players. I think it makes sense from Illumina's standpoint as well to move in this direction, because the real challenge will be, as the complexity of those panels grow, having, you know, customers, right, outside of the very sophisticated laboratories, design this on their own is, I would say, quite a challenge. And so trying to give end-to-end solutions, I think, makes sense.
Mm-hmm.
I think the challenge just becomes, again, for any vendor, if you have an instrumentation platform and you sell your own chemistry, you're obviously biased with what you want the outcome to be, and it may not fit in all scenarios. And I would say your algorithms, because they typically only work on your solution, will never be as powerful as someone who has sort of a diverse set of inputs, right? So there's just an inherent advantage for anyone who serves the entire market.
Mm-hmm.
Versus a fraction of the market. So for me, I don't frankly worry.
Hmm.
That much around some of the changes, and if anything, to me, it's a signal that the economic share of software or data analytics as a percentage of the total precision medicine market, is going to grow from the maybe sub 5% it is today as a mix, to much more than that.
Hmm.
You know, if you look at most software industries, they would comprise at least 30% of the.
Right.
Of the mix, and in many cases, more. I mean, I think even Illumina shared around whole genome, they thought the data analytics component would be almost 45% of the cost of goods sold.
Right.
I mean, that, for me, is a big statement, right?
Right.
That's a huge shift in terms of the instrument amortization or the automation or the chemistry and flow cells being a majority of spend, to actually saying the real value comes in what you can find.
Right. Right.
And it's not just the pure compute, right? Because if we're gonna just compete on commodity, compute and store.
Mm-hmm.
Then inherently, I don't think that's a super sexy long-term market. For us, it's the insights, right?
Right.
What can you learn by connecting all of these players, doing massive compute? I n a cloud all around the world at scale, that to me is much more interesting, and that's the direction for us that we are going in.
Got it. So you're approaching almost two million genomic profiles analyzed on DDM to date. Can you help us think about, you know, the rights that you and your customers have to this data? How you provide your customers comfort that the data stored in the cloud is secure and compliant, and also, on the other hand, address any concerns around enabling their competitors?
Sure. So I would say from that standpoint, obviously, we, you know, abide by the principles of GDPR, right? So we are never an owner of the data.
Mm-hmm.
Right? We can process the data, but we don't control it. I would say inherently, in that, most institutes, given we now have north of seven hundred that we work with, and we've proven to be a good steward and be a, I would say, disciplined handler of de-identified data.
Mm-hmm.
I would say this question doesn't come up frankly.
Hmm.
That much any longer. I think we're probably one of the only, I would say, sort of vendors in market from a data analytics perspective globally.
Mm-hmm.
That generally, I would say, is viewed as a partner to the hospital around this, because we truly haven't monetized raw data, and we won't, at least for the foreseeable future. And so in that, I think when you both, you know, safeguard the data, but then more importantly, you allow for the exchange of data in a productive way so that any partner or any customer can benefit from using the platform, right? That principle of the more you contribute and the more you add, and even with a high level of safety, the more you get back. It's a very, I would say, core principle in tech, and it's what we've lived by, and it's why usage on the platform has grown.
Hmm.
Right, considerably, and will continue to grow in the future. And so from that standpoint, I feel like we're quite well-positioned for what is to come and, you know. Even, you know, I give you anecdotally, last week I was in Germany, and I would say for Europe, Germany is probably the most sensitive to kind of cloud based solutions. And even there, I mean, the top institute in Germany is now adopting our platform. And, you know, I would say they're. You know, we'll prove it out, but if we're able to do that at a top institution, you will see others as well kind of come along. And so I don't think this is a huge debate any longer in terms.
Hmm.
Of whether the cloud versus.
Hmm.
On-premise or other solutions is any more safe. And again, if you've designed your data lake and access, et cetera, well, safeguarding data is a core of what we do. You know, I would say that's not something people should have to be ultimately that concerned about, because we spend a ton of time, obviously, thinking architecturally and with our partners like Microsoft, et cetera, how to make sure we're at world-class standards for what we do.
Got it. What applications in DDM are you currently seeing the most traction in, particularly with new logos that you're bringing onto the platform? Walk us through, you know, that, and then also, just based on what you hear from your customers, what sorts of new multimodal capabilities are you looking to prioritize based on the feedback?
So I would say from a pure application standpoint, some of the ones we've been most public around continue to be of high interest. So liquid biopsy.
Mm-hmm.
The MSK-ACCESS solution.
Mm-hmm.
I would say today probably leads the way from a land new logo perspective in terms of the conversations. We have a big event next week in New York. We'll have almost a hundred people there. I think you might even be attending.
Hmm.
Or someone from your team, and you know, we're super excited. We had a similar event in EMEA not long ago, and it was also similarly well attended, and so we're getting a ton of interest and traction on liquid biopsy in general. I would say more recently, with the you know, launch of our solution, powered by Microsoft and NVIDIA.
Yeah.
Whole genome is garnering quite a lot of attention, and there's a lot of interest, obviously, initially in pediatric and rare disease, but increasingly in somatic as well, frankly. And so, we're quite excited. And if you think about where MRD and other solutions are going, I think that could be quite an interesting case for us, as well. HRD remains, I would say, quite high level. There's some high level of interest. There's some new therapies coming to market in the PARP category and in a few other pieces that also use our extended HRD solution. So, that remains kind of a biomarker of.
Mm-hmm.
Of interest, but frankly, we're seeing pretty good balance across the entire portfolio, exome, hereditary. I would say broadly, in general, I'm quite pleased, but some of the more, I would say, larger solutions today from a pure land perspective, tend to be the ones that will get us into a new institution for the first time.
Got it. Switching gears a little bit, you know, you got the EU IVDR certification in place. Walk us through how you can help U.S. customers, you know, adapt to the new FDA LDT regulations. What are some of the lessons you learned over in Europe that will inform that process?
Sure. So obviously, this is not true of just Europe and the U.S., but frankly, all around the world, the kind of regulatory standards are growing, right? And I would say the demands for both proper QMS systems and kind of abiding and validating tests, and we have something we now call MaxCare, right, which is sort of an onboarding.
Mm-hmm.
Program that takes someone through a validation to make sure performance of the newly launched, you know, application in the laboratory is up to standard and is concurrent with other existing known technologies, et cetera. And so from that standpoint, this is something we feel like we have an advantage, and we know well, and it's a platform built under design controls with full QMS. So the ability to adapt to sort of the direction U.S. FDA or the U.S. is going around many of the, you know, LDTs.
Mm-hmm.
We feel quite good, and we do think that there's going to be quite a lot of need for laboratories, at least the mid-sized and sort of small to mid-sized ones, but even frankly, the most sophisticated, and I would say as well, having a platform where you can run, you know, a common, I would say, set of library prep and, you know, all solutions algorithmically in one platform, is going to be much easier than managing many different library preps and many different software platforms.
Mm-hmm.
Across multiple chemistries and probes, et cetera. So I think the solution we offer fits well for the need of where, you know, the future of sort of testing is going, at least decentralized and centralized here in the U.S.
Got it. Quickly on CarePath, Ross, how many physicians on DDM are using the CarePath module today? What's feedback been like so far? I think you're also expanding CarePath beyond lung, so with the recent signing of the first breast cancer pilot? Just outline the next steps for us and when we could start to see some of that data.
Sure. So, you know, stay tuned for ESMO.
Mm-hmm.
I think there'll be some really nice posters and a talk we're giving there that'll be super interesting around some of our multimodal work, as well as some of the. I would say, other things we had not previously disclosed, but projects we had done based on some of that data set with pharma and others, so I'm pretty excited around some of the findings we've had and how we've proven out sort of the technology stack and kind of our capabilities. You know, and you asked before around multimodal. I think what I'm finding, and I, a gain, last week I met with a whole room of oncologists, medical oncologists, and there was interest across gastric, and GBM, and lung, and breast, et cetera.
So, I think there's quite a number of areas, depending on where you are in the world.
Mm-hmm.
Where there's clinicians working to sort of unlock and solve complex problems that even purely from a biomarker perspective, aren't so easy to get at. And I heard, you know, Tempus this morning talking about the different modalities, right? And we see the same theme, both at the pharma side, but also within clinical institutions.
Mm.
I think many clinical institutions are trying to unlock, you know, all of the data modalities. Think about the millions and millions of dollars they spend on PET, CT, MR, pathology microscopes, sequencers.
Yep.
EMR, et cetera. All of this data today lives in silo. It needs to be unlocked, it needs to be tokenized, it needs to be cleaned.
Mm.
And curated, and used for the purposes of improving therapy selection and treatment, and really understanding from a real-world perspective, truly how certain aspects are going. I think this is gonna be prevalent in essentially all, at least from our perspective, all oncology areas.
Got it. I want to switch to biopharma. Just to set the stage, Ross, can you just break down your biopharma revenue between insights versus clinical trial matching versus market access solutions? Where do you see the most traction today? And to your earlier point around customer concentration, what does that look like within biopharma for you?
Yeah. So obviously, we haven't disclosed all of those numbers, but I guess the sense I can give you is, you know, this year and last year look a little bit different. I would say this year, majority of the revenue would be either what I would consider sponsored testing or CTA.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Type work. We do have some insight and data work.
Mm-hmm.
This year, and a little bit on the trial matching side, but I would say the predominance is probably more diagnostic-oriented.
Got it.
Last year, we had a mix more of data and diagnostic.
Got it.
I think that mix will continue to move in that data direction.
Mm-hmm.
And you'll probably see that happen even in the fourth quarter of this year and into next year, just given where some of the recent activities we have on our side. We now work with a handful of customers, I would say, more regularly. I'd like to see that expand out to 10, 20.
Mm-hmm.
And so we're quite, I would say, active on diversifying that pipeline and making sure we've got quite a lot of the top twenty in kind of emerging biotech at the table. But for us, you know, it's still quite early innings for the business and we're still sort of, I would say, in some senses, making sure we've got, you know, the right sort of go-to-market flows, and that we can-- we're not sort of doing n of one business, right?
Right.
Because the problem in the data business today, with the sophistication of where pharma is, you know, you either need, you know, again, a huge database, like Eric talked about this morning with Flatiron and Tempus.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Or you need sort of more deep data-focused solutions, and then be able to answer questions.
Right.
Using algorithms. That still, you don't want it to be an n of one.
Right.
In terms of every project.
Right.
So that's why building out our factory and having tools that can quickly allow us to scale up and do some of that custom work across multiple pharmas was really critical.
Got it. Ross, on that point, I mean, sometimes we get this question around: how exactly does SOPHiA DDM differ from Tempus in terms of working with pharma companies? And I think there's portions of the portfolio where you actually overlap, right? And you compete with each other, but there's also differences. And so just maybe, help shed some light on that.
You're saying in pharma specifically or in general?
Specifically in pharma.
Okay, 'cause I was gonna say, on the clinical side.
Yeah.
Tempus can be a customer.
Exactly.
So.
Exactly.
And a partner. So I would say from that standpoint, obviously, we don't view them, and I would doubt they would view us truly competitive.
Right.
My understanding, and again, you probably know their business better than I do, but where they typically sell into from a data perspective, tends to be at a different point of the R&D process than where our data capture.
Mm-hmm.
And collection is. We tend to be later.
Mm-hmm.
So market access.
Mm-hmm.
And commercial.
Okay.
And so, or phase III and beyond, and they tend to be phase III and sort of pre, s o it's a bit complementary. We're also obviously global, right?
Right.
We're bringing.
Right.
Data from around the world. They obviously have primarily a U.S.-centric, although large, database here. And so I would say we're doing less of licensed access models to kind of specific data cohorts.
Mm-hmm.
Versus you have a question. All right, you're seeing in your Trial OS that's not separating at the rate you had expected. Why?
Right.
Right?
Right.
You know, the simple data science work you did internally didn't sort of answer the question: Can we use our multimodal factory and multimodal models to now answer that why? T hen they will come to us.
Right.
Right? Or, you know, we're trying to understand, outside of this biomarker of interest, what else may influence therapy response in this category? They will come to us. Or why is it that when, this certain biomarker is seen in the panel.
Mm-hmm.
Doctors or clinicians prescribe X drug versus Y drug, right?
Right.
And then what happens.
Right.
In terms of the treatment outcomes, right? So I would say it's a bit of different types of questions and problems that we are helping solve. And so to me, I would say we don't probably see them too often in many areas, although we're obviously in a lot of the same accounts, just because those, I would say, are the pharmas that are more forward-thinking from a data analytics and AI perspective.
Mm-hmm.
But certainly, I would imagine over time, there's probably gonna be some complementarity as, you know, people would look at their U.S.-centric data sets with our, I would say, more global data sets.
Mm-hmm.
Kind of in unison.
Mm-hmm. Got it. So turning to the headwinds, I mean, on, on the biopharma side, is it all just, you know, IRA and patent cliff concerns bubbling up in terms of how companies spend their money? And then you talked about sort of an elongation of the sales process, particularly for the larger contracts. Can you share some detail on how long typically the sales process takes for you with these large clients versus what it's taking today?
Yeah. So, you know, this one is kind of a nuanced challenge, and I would say for us, it's also and again, it's always hard to understand the why of why anything changes on a budgetary perspective. But I would say you know it when you see it because the process that before you were used to just completely evolves, and even for the internal stakeholder, right? Because normally you have someone that's sponsoring the work, right? And they're like a therapeutic head, or they're on the precision medicine team, or they're on a commercial team or market access, wherever you are within the pharma continuum. And then there's budget owners, right? So the kind of technical buyer and the budget owner aren't always the same.
Mm-hmm.
And then you have procurement that sort of does the contracting and so forth. And so for us, coming to pharma later, I would say, than some others, because, you know, our business primarily focused on clinical, we don't have MSAs with all pharma companies.
Right.
Right? And so it is not like we have guaranteed contracted volumes by which, you know, if you're a sponsor, you can write a PO and it matches against something that's existing and contracted.
Mm-hmm.
That's already approved and in budget, and essentially, will move through a relatively quick process. Now, it still used to be, if you had a very senior sponsor at pharma and they wanted to move forward with you as a technology provider, you would be able to contract relatively quickly, and let's say, from verbal to contract, and then revenue is maybe three months. Okay, we had some instances where from verbal to contract, it was six to nine months now, and then from contract to revenue, it was even longer, right?
Wow!
So that this was a definite change in behavior, right, for us, and certainly not what we were necessarily expecting. I don't think this will continue to go on. Now, some of it as well, I would say, was because we were putting forth quite large deals, right?
Right.
So if you had unbudgeted spend, right, with a vendor that wasn't yet approved in that account, let's say, you would have a challenge essentially getting that across the goal line, or just it would elongate sort of time from verbal to revenue. And so we've sort of now seen that, hence we've taken down deal sizes below levels.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Where you need that level of approval. And now we're actually starting to see things happen in a much more expedited rate in the third quarter, and we expect that it'll continue on going forward. So.
Got it.
Again, lesson learned on our side. But certainly, I would say some of the behavioral changes we saw in the early part of this year for us.
Mm.
Obviously, unfortunately, caught us a bit off guard, and we pivoted and quickly adapted, and so I'm quite happy with where we are. But certainly, it led to some of that weakness we talked about in the second quarter that we expect to be quite temporary.
So two-parter, and then we'll switch to EMEA. The switch to focusing on smaller contracts, Ross, is that just a near-term thing, or do you envision that being the long-term sort of go-to-market strategy?
Yeah. I think in general, I'm laughing because one of my pharma heads sent me something that was quite a large contract before I came into this meeting that we're looking at, right? And again, it may not be something we win, but it was, you know, in the double-digit millions, right?
Mm.
And so, certainly we still have stuff in the pipeline that's kind of sizable, just because in the nature of pharma, there are some things that are just.
Mm-hmm.
Quite chunky. It's how that business goes. But me, putting on my CFO, not my COO hat, I would rather see $100,000, $500,000 deals, right? Because just from a probability weighting perspective.
Right.
And from a de-risking perspective and diversity of pipeline perspective, it's just an easier to manage business, right? So I would say we're trying to chunk out some of the deliverables, particularly with customers where we haven't necessarily worked with them in the past, so that we can kind of have the proof points and then unlock the rest of the budget over time. And frankly, again, I just think deal diversity is quite good, or pipeline diversity.
Mm.
Is quite good, even in the nascent and new business. So I don't think we've, like, necessarily de-emphasized it, but we're not elephant hunting.
Got it.
Right? And we're not going after these multiyear, multi double-digit or triple-digit million type contracts that we had in the pipeline before. We've got some things that are sizable, but, you know, we've got also another thirty or forty deals that are bite-sized and can go from kind of.
Mm.
Concept to signature relatively, relatively quickly.
Has that taken a change in incentive structures, Ross, in terms of making sure the sales force responds?
Yeah. So, so obviously we continue to morph that, because to your point, if you don't have that right, then necessarily you don't get the sort of behavioral change. But frankly, salespeople are also quite smart. So if you're not hitting your targets and you're not achieving your quota, you will ultimately seek for what can accelerate sort of your ability to be successful, right? So I think some of this also came out of our conversations there with, with our sales folks.
Mm-hmm.
And, you know, where we thought we were going to be able to put wins on the board.
Got it. Fair enough. Switching to EMEA, you know, given that you called the churn and the pricing pressure headwinds you saw in France, Italy, and Spain as transient, has utilization started to tick up over there? And then similar sort of question as on the biopharma side, given that you've decided to focus on more aggressive growth markets, if you will, does that leave you under indexed to an eventual EMEA recovery?
So I would say we're certainly not removing necessarily any resources from kind of some of our core markets. And certainly, I would say, you know, the most honestly the most challenging piece of the dynamic that's going on in EMEA this year for us, for me, even from our standpoint, is as we saw in those three core markets, some change in kind of utilization, and we saw some pricing pressure. From a bookings perspective.
Mm-hmm.
Which is again, more forward indicating, we actually saw things start to improve pretty materially. So it's the opposite of ultimately what you would expect. First, you would expect pipeline and bookings to roll over and then revenue to slow.
Right. Right.
We're actually seeing revenue slowing and then bookings and pipeline actually accelerating. It is a bit of an atypical picture, but it's why we're so comfortable that the pause we saw in demand is temporal.
Mm-hmm.
I would also say, yes, we're seeing quite a bit of signs in a number of those areas, and, you know, we've made some changes as well, personnel-wise, in a few of those countries, to where I feel quite good about where we are today. And I think as we think about EMEA growth for next year, and again, without providing any exact color, I feel as if we'll get back to more normalized growth rates starting in the fourth quarter and then into next year. So I do think and there's some other reimbursement-related challenges.
Mm-hmm.
That drove some of that usage change. But I think overall, I'm generally sort of pleased with at least the forward-looking indicators we're seeing in those geographies. And the point we were making is, you know, there's still areas like the U.K., where we've had some big wins recently in some of the NHS, you know, accounts.
Mm-hmm.
As well as, you know, I mentioned, we've got a huge win coming for us in Germany, huge for us, just because it's a marquee name in a country where we're trying to gain some momentum and share. We've seen a lot of interest in the Middle East.
Mm-hmm.
And we've got some really nice wins, coming out of that territory. And so my point is, we aren't solely reliant on those three countries to drive a majority of the business in EMEA, as if we were before. Now, there's real diversity across those subregions and markets. Even Africa is contributing now.
Mm-hmm.
And so again, that diversity also makes me feel better.
Right.
That I'm not overly, I would say, indexed to any one specific thing there.
Got it. Final question, and we'll get it out of here. On the guide, you know, you took down numbers in the quarter, but you also sort of like said that the business. I mean, on the guide, on a go-forward basis, it focuses more on what's contracted and already executed on, rather than verbal awards. Is that, I guess, does that leave open the possibility of more upside in the back half of the year, should those verbal awards start to come through? Where are you on that? And more importantly, as you think about framing your 2025 outlook, will that be the same yardstick you use?
Yeah. So I would say, first and foremost, we don't want a repeat of what we had in the second quarter, right? So, you know, we've, I think, since we came public, been quite consistent. Even before we were public as a private company, we were quite proud of our ability to overachieve on our forecast.
Mm-hmm.
That's not something we wanna revisit. So I would say we're, you know, spending a lot of time on the FP&A side and in general with our customer base, and as we think about expectation setting, making sure we deliver on what we've committed to, right? So I'd say, first and foremost, that's been the focus. You know, we'll have the debate around twenty-five, you know, when we get to the board in sort of later this year. I think the challenge for us is gonna be sort of. You know, we had this really strong bookings year, and we've.
Mm-hmm.
Contributed. You know, we've communicated around it, and so there's still some expectation level on the kind of growth. And we're quite still confident in getting back to our long-term growth rates.
Mm-hmm.
And so we'll probably have to balance. But as you can expect, coming off of a year where we had to lower our forecast as we did, I would say, you know, we're certainly gonna strike a more conservative tone, you know, in general, just to ensure that, you know, we have a very high probability of being able to deliver on our street forecast. But for me, again, just looking at the mix of it, I'm super confident in sort of where our growth is going to come back to, and those are levels that, again, I think are consistent with what we've seen in the past.
Got it. Fortunately, that's all we have the time for, but thank you so much.
Thank you.
For doing this, Ross.
Great.
I appreciate it.
Appreciate it. Thank you for having us.