Thank you, everybody, for joining us here today. Our next presenting company is zSpace. They deliver innovative augmented reality and AI-powered immersive learning experiences that improve educational outcomes and prepare students for future careers. Here to tell you more about the business is Paul Kallenberger, CEO, and Eric DeOliveira, CFO of zSpace. Please take it away.
Thanks, Greg. I'm Paul Kallenberger, CEO of zSpace. Our CFO happens to be right over here. For those of you who are interested afterwards, we're going to talk about zSpace, but unlike Perfect Moment, we're actually going to let you experience zSpace if you want to. It is super unique. We're going to show you a really short video to give you a sense for zSpace, and then we're going to talk about the company. We're going to start with this. It's about a minute. We'll give you a sense of zSpace, but it's not nearly as good as experiencing it firsthand.
zSpace is really good.
It's amazing.
It's just awesome.
Wow.
Amazing.
It's a really cool experience.
Awesome.
It's fun.
This is a game changer.
zSpace is a headset-free augmented and virtual reality solution that includes our hardware, software, standards-aligned lessons and activities, plus the professional learning and support to ensure a successful implementation, empowering students to do things that would otherwise be too dangerous, impossible, counterproductive, or expensive to do. Schools across the world are using zSpace and realizing its impact.
It is so fun, and it's so engaging.
You can try new things that you wouldn't have tried before that.
They get a more in-depth understanding of the concept.
It creates a level of understanding easily and effectively.
zSpace has actually had a truly huge impact on student learning, student growth, student achievement.
They also learn a little bit about communication skills, teamwork, and problem-solving, and those career-type skills that we want.
From a workforce development training, zSpace has been amazing.
zSpace can impact students' skills for future careers because we believe that students should take ownership of their learning. Quick snapshot on the company, but before I do that, just really quick, raise your hand. How many of you are investors on the investment side? Perfect. By the way, we're based here in Silicon Valley, down the highway, San Jose, which is why both Eric and I happen to be here. You see the numbers up here. You saw from the video, we've actually been in the market and the education market for pretty much a decade. In the U.S., we're in what we call both the K-12 business, which is selling to the education school districts, as well as the career and technical education market.
Career and technical education market is both what I call old school trades, welding, automotive, HVAC, as well as a bunch of newer applications, AI programming, advanced manufacturing, robotics, super cool, super innovative. You see all the numbers. In the U.S., which is our primary market, representing about 85% of our revenue, roughly $40 million, we're in 3,500 of the 13,000 public school districts. A lot of room for expansion. We went public late last year. The way we go to market, by the way, I'm going to go through this extremely quickly, and we'll take questions along the way or at the tail end. We sell it as a solution. It's a combination of hardware, software, which is the recurring piece, as well as some professional development that goes along with it.
On average, school districts pay for a classroom set, and again, Eric happens to have one system set up over here. If there's 20 kids in a classroom, 20 of the laptops, along with the core bundles of software, which I'm going to talk about in a moment, for roughly $100,000. We're a premium product. However, schools are buying because nobody has anything like it. Very, very innovative. If you haven't had a chance to check it out, you should do it. All kinds of awards. On the hardware piece of it, Acer actually builds the hardware for us to our specifications, and we've got a couple different versions. This version here is branded Inspire. The one up on the slide here on the right is branded Imagine, is built by another PC OEM. The hardware is the enabler. It is all about the content.
We started into this in 2014, 2015, 2016, built out the content, the entire use cases. Initially, we were focused on sciences and middle school, and now we've got a full suite pretty much from K- 12, as well as a whole host of applications in the career and technical education market. By the way, on the funding side of it, the career and technical education side is one of the areas that has bipartisan support. Whether it's advanced manufacturing in states like Tennessee and Kentucky, or health in the bigger states, anywhere, there is a tremendous amount of funding that has gone along with this. In those areas that are traditionally known as trades, but also in those new areas, advanced manufacturing, advanced pneumatics, AI programming, which is another really big one.
We are in, even though we're in 85 of the top 100 school districts in the U.S., we've been really focused on the public schools. We still have a lot of room to expand. We're in all the top 10, and we have a really sticky product with a really solid, strong retention that goes along with it. This year has been a little bit unique in that we went public late last year on NASDAQ, small-cap company, and with the administration and all of the, I'll call it, disruption and changes that have happened, hasn't really impacted our market from a funding perspective in a big way. Has impacted the higher education university markets in a bigger way. However, it certainly has created a lot of, I'll call it, noise in the system, and we're just seeing things starting to come back to normalcy.
Specifically, there were some funding freezes that the administration put in. They've eliminated all those at the end of July. I get asked a lot of times, why don't you look to go into other markets? Right now, these two segments of the education market for us, just in the U.S., present a really good, strong opportunity for growth. We do business outside the U.S. Traditionally, it's been exclusively through resellers, which is another opportunity for us, and I'll talk about that in a couple of minutes. Everybody's talking AI. If you live out here, I'm not sure how many of you are based out here in the Bay Area. Everything is AI. AI has picked up San Francisco again in the city. We announced a year ago a product that was AI-based. We started working with OpenAI two years ago.
It was called Career Coach, and it was intended to help mostly middle school, high school students in thinking about where they would go in their career. It was backed by AI, and in the last couple of months, we made a couple of other announcements. This slide here is a lot of information, and I'm going to go to the result of what it is that we're doing. It's really the holy grail of education, which is the researchers call it the two sigma problem. It's moving C students to A students. With our solution, and if you do have a chance to see it, if you haven't seen it, we actually have a lot of data that we're capturing on you as an individual user.
By the way, whether you're a K-6 student, whether you're a high school student, whether you're working in a community college, or whether you're an adult worker in a workforce development program, we are capturing a lot of data, and we actually understand and have a good view to where you are in that learning process. On the fly, we are real-time creating virtual experiences. zSpace is really augmented reality, display-based with interaction, if you boil it down. You heard the kids in the video talk about it. Our initial push with zSpace was all about engagement, getting students interested in learning, engaged in learning. The results have been that the grade scores have improved with the students.
With the connection on the AI side of it, right now, we are already starting to get the early returns that create this personalized learning for each of the students that not only makes them interested in the learning of whatever it is that they're looking at, but also in terms of increasing their grade scores. This is something that over the course of the next year, we're going to continue to invest in a really big way. A lot of people know VR, and VR has become headsets or goggles, as you will put them on your head. The group of players in the bottom left, including Meta, including HoloLens, including Apple's Vision Pro in here, they've looked at a bunch of different markets. In fact, many of them started on the gaming side.
I contend that having the right applications, the right content is what ultimately drives the volume. In the education market, they pretty much have all failed for a couple of simple reasons. Teachers don't want kids going off in some world. They don't know what they're doing. Learning is collaborative, no different than we're sitting in a room here. I happen to be up front, but we're talking. Learning is collaborative. The features of zSpace here are very, very unique. I've talked to a lot of people over the years. I've been with the company since inception. Nobody has anything like this. By the way, it was on one of the slides. We have a whole bunch of patents that we filed.
We were originally a government project that concluded in the 2014 timeframe and then looked and moved forward into the public market on our own with all the technology. We went public, as I said, in December. These were our three major growth initiatives. Earlier this year, we acquired a couple of smaller software companies that have been integral to us owning and controlling more of the software, which is the real control point. Something we're investing more and more in, and that AI solution, which is in the first embodiment in a product called Career Explorer, is really the beginnings of that. We've invested in the U.S. and continue to invest in the U.S. Somebody asked me the question this morning, you know, Florida, Texas, California, and New York. You're hitting about almost 70% of the students in the U.S.
We've got good coverage, good penetration in all those areas. We also work with some resellers in the U.S., although our business and the roughly $40 million round number of revenue is predominantly 85% in the U.S. We do a little bit of business internationally. We haven't really invested. We've got a couple partners, and it's a really big growth area that we plan to invest in in the future. I'm not going to go through the financial slides in any depth. What I wanted to do was really open it up to questions. If people want to know more in depth on the financial or anything to do with the recurring revenue, happy to take the questions.
As I said, for those of you who are interested and haven't seen zSpace firsthand, would love to show this to you because the video is interesting, but it's always better to experience it firsthand. Any questions?
I can kick it off, Paul. I mean, I know the answer because you've told me this before, but can you kind of just speak to the differences between the funding landscape and our...
You mean in the business? Yeah. Yeah. In the K-12 side of the business, by the way, quick show of hands, how many of you live out in Silicon Valley here? Anybody? Okay, good. In the K-12 side of the business, by the way, the numbers are huge that the school districts get. Historically, that funding, and part of the Trump administration has been to change the way funding flows. Historically, the funding flowed through specific federal programs, things like Title I, Title IV, that were targeted at specific programs, and things like special education, things like after-school programs, things like English learning languages. Those have all gone away as a part of the Trump education PACs. What they've done is really moved it to what they call block grants.
That means moving the same amount of money directly to the states, but not tying it to a specific federal program. That's actually good for us. I will say the disruption and the confusion that I will say for four to five months this year that has happened along with that is pretty, I'll say, significant. Another item, and I'm going to go back to the very top here. By the way, this happens to be, and we are in a blue state here, but the governor of Oklahoma and Linda McMahon, the head of the DOE here, Secretary of Education, this is a couple of weeks ago in Oklahoma at a charter school. Another item that has been changed as a part of the education policy is more money flowing to charter schools and ultimately to choice.
This is an academy in Oklahoma that happens to be a zSpace customer. From a zSpace perspective and K-12 funding, and from our perspective, the prospects continue to be huge. There has been some disruption this year, including, by the way, we have a hardware component and specific tariffs that go along with it, but we've managed our way through it, and we think we're through, and things have settled down. I go back to on the K-12 side of it, by pushing more of the funding from the federal side directly to the states, it's helping the business, and it will help us even more in the longer term. In the CTE side of the business, there's one major funding source. It's called Perkins funding. It's a $1.5 billion annuity. Every year, $1.5 billion gets set aside for career and technical education applications.
That's this big list we have here. That funding continues to flow. By the way, it targets CTE innovative programs. For us, that's perfect. The funding piece of it, although it's been a little bit disrupted this year because of changes in the administration, we feel really good about where things are headed here. I think things have settled down, and we're at a good spot. Was there another piece to that, Greg, or was that the...
I think just the demand is like what you're seeing with your customers and how they're selling.
Yeah, I mean, I would say right now to the demand side, and again, in the buildup of the company and the history of the company, the reason I asked if anybody's out here in Silicon Valley, I was, because I've lived out here 26 years, my previous company was in the education market as well. It was acquired by Pearson a number of years ago. You know, building your go-to-market, and one of the folks we met with this morning was quizzing us on the go-to-market in the education market. I'm going to say it is harder and more difficult because it takes you longer than necessarily going into a B2B market or into the enterprise market. It takes about three years. We did all of that in the 2014, 2015, 2016 timeframe to be able to scale the company.
I think that has, in the big scheme of things, really helped us. We sell it as a solution, as I mentioned earlier. We have something that's very, very unique. The only competition we have is for funding. Ultimately, school districts, and we tend to sell at the very top, whether it's a school district or a community college, they find the funding that goes along with it.
The only thing I'd like to add to that is the disruptions that you see show up most prominently in hardware revenues, which make up the larger share of revenues, but the smaller share of economics, and the growth of the sustainable software ecosystem that we're building is best measured by the annualized contract value of our active licenses at any one time. That number has grown from $6 million two and a half years ago to just over $11.5 million in the last quarter due to report it. When Greg asks about demand, one of the things that I point to is the renewal rates. The retention of that software ecosystem is measured by our net dollar revenue retention measure. That measure has been north of 100% in 10 out of the last 12 quarters.
In the quarter we just reported, NDR was 135%, driven in part by a handful of customers from a year prior that significantly expanded their footprint with us. The improvements to gross profit and gross margin that you see are heavily driven by renewals, heavily driven by the strength of the software ecosystem. It's the key factor that has driven, for the first six months of this year, 8 percentage points of gross margin expansion over the company period last year. That's my CFO lens on retention of the demand side. Once this gets into schools, educators really appreciate that they're buying student achievement, not a bell and whistle to brag about at a PTA meeting. That shows up in our revenue retention measures.
Any other questions? Yes, sir.
You said that you recently studied 70% of the students so far. What are kind of the biggest growth drivers as you look for as part of the way to expand within those?
It's a good question. Right now, our revenue splits roughly 50% new sales and 50% land and expand. We have a lot of room for growth. By the way, this is the top 10 school districts in the U.S. Two of them happen to have fairly significant implementations. The other eight are relatively small. Our penetration is probably 1% overall. Again, we've got a lot of room for growth. On the demand side, the other thing that is a little related to Greg's question, in the building of the company, we were very K-12 focused in the 2018-2019 timeframe. COVID actually shifted this more because I'm not sure where you all live, what the availability of skilled tradespeople are, but out here in Silicon Valley, they're really hard to find and gotten really expensive. I'm talking plumbers, electricians, welders, those kind of things.
More of the business, even though it's a little smaller market, has, I would say, in the last couple, two, three years, shifted to career and technical education (CTE). That is, by the way, not just CTE within K-12, because typically the programs would have started in grades nine. They now start as early as grade six and up for career and technical education. For people who've been around for a while, they used to call it industrial arts. Now it's called CTE. They've got all the new programs in robotics, AI programming, all of those things, Unity programming. By the way, virtually all of the applications on zSpace are built on Unity 3D. It's the de facto AR/VR environment. Kids want to get into that. By the way, we have content and applications in those areas as well.
I would say we're doing, last year, a little more CTE, even though it's a little smaller market in terms of the market size, still a huge opportunity and growing. Any other questions? Yes.
What are the top...
Yeah, so in K-12, it really is, again, the acronym is STEM, but it's science. We literally got started with a school district down the Silicon Valley here that was focused on biology and middle schools. That's where we started more than 10 years ago. All of that has expanded. I would say all the sciences, we have great coverage, math, including computer science. I would say in the K-12 realm, and you can see the color codes across the top here, including chemistry, physics, where we really shine are abstract concepts. We all go look at our laptop for those folks who have a laptop display, whatever, that's all 2D, but we live in a 3D world. I would say in the K-12 world, we've got coverage across the board. Science is the most obvious one, and it's a big part of what we sell today.
The other one, which tends to be in the high schools and in community colleges and even in universities, is health. Whether it's nursing schools, next week I'm actually meeting with a new nursing school, or whether it's other applications specifically in health. We have an EKG module. For those of you who don't know what a phlebotomist is, we have a lot of content in that health area. Health is really big. The other area is, I'll call it broadly, transportation. Up here, we've got applications in automotive. By the way, that's EV, hybrid, combustion with all the different manufacturers that go along with it. We also have diesel. There's a whole bunch of components that go into transportation. The other big area is advanced manufacturing.
There are a lot of states right now that are putting more and more with the push of the administration to bring more manufacturing back here. A lot of, I'll just call it training that goes along with bringing in or re-bringing in industry. Health is a big one in the CTE world, transportation, and advanced manufacturing. In the K-12 side of it, it really is the STEM acronym: science, technology, engineering, math, science being probably the biggest piece of it. Unless there's any other questions, I'm going to stop and I'm going to invite, and I think we're a little less than a minute here and we have a couple more minutes. Anybody who wants to have a peek at zSpace, please do. If you don't get a chance, if you find one of these gateway individuals, ask them to tee something up.
Eric and I are here for the afternoon. What I can assure you is you will never have seen anything like this.