On Tuesday, 21 October 2025, Veritone Inc. (NASDAQ:VERI) presented at the LD Micro Main Event XIX Investor Conference, offering insights into its strategic initiatives and financial outlook. The company emphasized its AI-driven solutions for unstructured data, showcasing strong growth prospects despite ongoing challenges. Veritone highlighted a projected 30% revenue increase for the current quarter and a focus on improving liquidity and reducing debt.
Key Takeaways
* Veritone reported $24 million in revenue last quarter, with core software revenue growing over 45% year-over-year.
* The company raised over $100 million in equity to enhance liquidity and pay down debt.
* Veritone's aiWARE platform supports over 850 AI models, serving both commercial and public sectors.
* The Veritone Data Refinery (VDR) is a key growth initiative, with a pipeline exceeding $40 million.
* The company targets operating cash flow breakeven by the back half of next year.
Financial Results
* Revenue for the last quarter was $24 million, with a projected 30% growth for the current quarter.
* 2023 revenue is expected to be between $108 million and $115 million, up from $92 million in 2022.
* Core software growth exceeded 45% year-over-year.
* Gross margins are over 60%, with potential to exceed 65% from last quarter.
* Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) for core software is over $62 million, with customer retention in the high 90th percentile.
Operational Updates
* Veritone's aiWARE platform offers over 26 levels of cognition and more than 850 AI models.
* The Veritone Data Refinery (VDR) targets hyperscalers, with a market expected to grow to $17 billion by 2032.
* The company has over 3,000 customers globally, including ESPN and the NCAA.
* Veritone supports the Air Force with investigative capabilities, aiming to expand across the Department of Defense.
* In the public sector, Veritone deploys identification systems for public safety.
Future Outlook
* Veritone is focused on growth with cost management and aims to reach operating cash flow breakeven by late next year.
* The company plans to use recent equity raises to improve liquidity and reduce debt.
* Strategic focus remains on core business and potential future acquisitions, targeting the AI market for unstructured data.
Q&A Highlights
* Recent capital raises will enhance liquidity and support debt repayment.
* The Air Force contract involves centralizing the Department of Defense's software stack.
* Veritone competes with companies like Axon in specific public sector use cases.
* Seasonality affects content licensing due to events like the Masters and March Madness.
* Veritone utilizes over 800 machine learning models, optimizing best-in-class solutions.
For a deeper understanding of Veritone's strategic direction and financial performance, refer to the full transcript.
Full transcript - LD Micro Main Event XIX Investor Conference:
Unidentified speaker: It's this massive thing. Right? So Alabama sent two football players over to do players over to do TikTok rush with the sorority we're working with. They're two best players. They sent over there.
So the colleges are leaning in because they've got a gap to fill. Right? They've got $30,000,000 deficit they got a hit now that they've never had before. So they're leaning in. So I work I'm meeting with the AD of Alabama in two weeks to go through this.
We're also going to announce keep out for the October. Concerts work really well with music. We're not Live Nation, so we don't need to make a 20% margin, we can break even. So imagine, say, Morgan Wallen at Bryan Denny Stadium in April would be pretty cool, wouldn't it? And then by the way, if you want Ticket Stack as we go forward and grow this out, if I don't care if you have a black card, a platinum card, a sapphire card, get in the back of the line.
How much Yea Alabama product? How much Yea Ohio State? How much Yea Oregon product did you buy? You buy more, you go front of the line and discount on the ticket. So imagine being able to sit on the floor and watch Morgan Wallin for $100 but because you bought $300 in Yea Alabama gear and we break even on that, free marketing.
Just an idea, it might not be him, maybe it is, But that's what we're doing. So we have our loyalty program, if you think about Sephora and Ulta, our loyalty is music. But the only way you get access to tickets and better prices, you support us. The sororities, we've already talked to them. We said, here's what you got to spend as a sorority on our product, if you spend that much, first in line.
Sorority girls, Alabama has 18 or 19 sororities, 800 girls each, right? So imagine 60 universities across the country, Greek system, student athletes, families, alumni and all these influencers coming on top of it. Pretty powerful. So and it's a good margin stack. I know you got to go.
I got to go. Yeah. Thank you. I wanna
Mike Symetra, CFO, Veritone: So I'm Mike Symetra. I'm the CFO of Veritone. I've been with Veritone since October 2020. Veritone at a macro level, we are in the AI space, so nice little buzzwords. We've been around since 2014.
The company was founded by two serial entrepreneur brothers. On their last voyage of selling a company, they sold to Google. They came up with the concept of Veritone and what it is today. Today, we're about a little over 400 employees. We've got offices around the world.
We are in The U. S. We're in predominantly all of Europe with offices in The UK, Germany and France, Australia. And then we have some satellite offices in India and in Israel. We've got about 3,000 customers today, and we went public in 2017.
So what does Veritone do? At a simplistic level, we take unstructured data. So it's everything that you consume from your cell phone, video, audio, e mails, and we make it intelligent. So if you look at the rate of unstructured data today, it's everything that we do from cell phones to Zoom calls, etcetera. We are heavily in two verticals.
One is the commercial sector, and I'll go into these in more detail. And then we have a very growing public sector, which is really state and local law enforcement as well as federal government with the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice. In terms of unstructured data, this is just to give you a snapshot of the gravity of how much we process. Last year, we processed over fifty eight million hours of media. If you think about in the context, that's the everyday processing the Walt Disney Company's film library.
That's the power of our platform. It's over 10 petabytes. That's from here to the moon several times. And then I'll explain in more detail, we do utilize unique AI models, whether they're machine learning or large language models. We have over eight fifty in our platform.
And as a snapshot is again, unstructured data is video, audio, text, images, e mail, things that you can't structure today. And we've got a platform we call aiWARE. AiWARE, at its simplistic form, has over 26 levels of cognition built into it. So what's cognition? That's everything a human does.
That's object detection, so identifying it, identifying a human. We have both biometric and non biometric ways of identifying people. We have translation, we can take in real time any language, whether it's coming from speech to text, translate it speech to text. So it's very powerful. The beauty of this platform, and I'll explain it a little bit, it's a little bit like Microsoft Office.
So we've got the platform on top and then we've built applications like Excel, Microsoft Word, etcetera underneath, which were in market today. I'll go into those in more detail. As I mentioned before, this API sits on top of all cloud providers, AWS, Microsoft Azure, it can API any feed in terms of data, so it's very malleable. It can both sit on the cloud and on-site. So some of our because of for intelligence reasons, we have to have we have to be deployed in private environments like GovCloud or for the Department of Defense in their own tenant.
It can go both in tenant and can sit on the cloud. As I mentioned before, a little bit like Microsoft. This is just a little bit. We've got over 3,000 customers. There's a lot to put on this list, but we're on the commercial side, it's everyone from the NCAA to ESPN.
I'll explain in terms of what we do for them in more detail. And on the public sector, it's everyone from the Department of Defense. We just announced a huge contract with the Air Force in June to state and local law enforcement, which is everyone from LAPD all the way down to local state and sheriff departments. In terms of the commercial sector, as I mentioned before, we're both in commercial and in public sector. The commercial sector has our mainstay and the public sector is growing.
But I'll give you a use case here in terms of applications. We help ESPN program SportsCenter. So if you watch the end of every SportsCenter, you're going see our logo appear. Well, how do we do that? We're literally ingesting across all their properties in real time feeds.
So whether it's the herd or whether it's sports center, what they're talking about, and that just allows them to program. We also deal with our advertisers, so their advertisers understand how to monetize. And we also help them in terms of archiving. They have access, we're able to index their entire thirty year plus library. So if they want to pull up every Tiger Woods putt where he's fist pumping and the Nike logo in the background, they can literally do it on their keyboards.
They used to have about two fifty interns in Connecticut that did this for them. They no longer have that. So we're an efficiency product for them as well. We also do content management. So the NCAA, everyone's familiar with the NCAA, of course.
We are with the exclusive rights over all their digital content. So whether it's the March Madness or it's the college football playoffs, anything in terms of monetization comes through our platform because our platform is so massive in terms of what it can digest. We literally host the likes of CBS News, Bloomberg, the NCAA, etcetera, which allows third parties to come in, find the content and then monetize it. A good example of that is the movie Air with Michael Jordan. They had NCAA footage in it.
They had to license that through us in our platform. And then we get to the the government side of the business. We on the government side, we we basically go the the whole spectrum of public safety from identifying bad people. We can do that biometrically, non biometrically. So think about the capital riots.
And you had CCTV footage, you had about 1,000 cell phones, you had cameras inside of the Capitol Building, we can actually take all that data, ingest it in our system, time correlate it, so we can follow the person in the Nike hat with the black shoes where they started and where they ended up. Why is that important? A lot of states have laws that prevent you from using pure identification because it's not perfect, and it could it could criminify somebody who's particularly innocent. But actually having this, not only can it catch the person in the Nike shirt, we can actually identify the dent on the door if a criminal decided to paint their car. That's how powerful the system is.
We call it IDEMS. And recently, we announced a deal with the Air Force, where we are the back end on their investigative capabilities, is which basically the beachhead to go across the entire Department of Defense. There are 17 divisions of it. So we're super excited about where this product is going to go. And then we get to one of our most recent growth initiatives.
In the back half of last year, we launched a product, again, an application across aiWARE called Veritone Data Refinery. We refer to it as VDR. VDR at its simplistic ingest content. But we're not talking about a small amount of content, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of hours of content, digitize it, index it and allows hyperscalers, this is the AWSs, the metas, the open AIs of the world to feed that content and train their large language models. Why is that important?
If you actually look at, go to the next slide, where training data is becoming essential, all these models have scaled through what I call static data, text or that's the World Wide Web or images. And now they're moving on to video. So you want to train a robot to run like an NFL athlete, you need video. You want to train bespoke images just on subtleties of light and shadow, you need video. You don't just need one thousand hours of video, you need hundreds of thousand hours of video to train something on a bespoke level.
There's just not many companies capable of being the aggregator of that content, being able to digitize it and feed it into these systems. When we went out and launched this in the back half of last year, we had sub million dollars of bookings. Today, our bookings and our pipeline is over 40,000,000 So we see this as a big market. Today, it's a little north of $3,000,000,000 We see it going to $17,000,000,000 by 02/1932. And we hope to be a big part of this ecosystem.
In terms of our last quarter, we did about $24,000,000 in revenue. It was basically flat year over year, but that's a little bit misleading. Our core software, when you exclude our higher business, which I'll explain in a second, grew over 45% year over year. This quarter, we're projecting to do growth of 30% on aggregated revenue. Our bottom line is expected at our midpoint to improve over 40%.
We are still in the process of growth and burning capital, but that year over year improvement is really trajecting us to get to an operating cash flow breakeven by the back half of next year. So we're super excited about it. As I mentioned before, we have over 3,000 customers. We're all over the world. In terms of ARR, which is our core software, we've got a little over $62,000,000 of ARR, so sticky revenue.
And our customer retention is world class. I mean we're we look at it on a dollar basis, and it's well in the high ninetieth percentile. It says we have cash and cash equivalents on there. That's a little bit misleading because we just raised over $100,000,000 of equity in the past two months. We can skip that.
And this just shows optically our quarterly revenue. We are now going into the growth phase, and this is going to be even more pronounced when we get to the third quarter, which we're going to be announcing here in early November. I want to save questions. Yes. I saw you did a was it a shelf offering for $75,000,000 recently?
Yes, last week. We did another offering in September as well, a little over $25,000,000 How do you plan on deploying that now? We've got about 125,000,000 of debt. It's a little over $30,000,000 of term debt, and we've got about $91,000,000 in change of convertible debt. And just expect us to use a good portion to improve our liquidity position.
Can you characterize your Air Force contract? Yeah. So Yeah. So, if you go back to Doge and the Trump administration, they're about centralization. Centralization just isn't centralizing the Department of Defense.
It's also centralizing their sophomore stack. They have multiple if whether you're the Yes, we're projected to do between 108,000,000 and $115,000,000 this year. Last year, we did about $92 So I guess, if you're not thoughtful about the market, I'm trying to put mine around how the gross margins are. Yes. So our gross margins are north of 60% today.
And our costs are actually down year over year. So there's not a lot of incremental costs we need. And I mentioned before in the third quarter, at the midpoint, we're going to achieve over 30% revenue. So it's really the growth with extreme cost management. Yes.
Yes. Sorry? What is gross margin on the soft mix? So we don't break it out between soft but on a blended basis, it's north of 60%. I think we were north of 65% last quarter.
Yes. So the beauty is we are experts in copyright and infringement just with the customers. So that's why a lot of the hyperscalers are coming us to make sure they do this clean. Outside research? Yes.
Today, we're covered by Ladenburg, UBS. God, you stumped me on this one. De Boreal and H. C. Wainwright.
And just a little birdie told me that Needham's going to be initiating coverage this week. You bet. Yes. So we have a software business, which is less than 40% year over year? Our core software, but it's over 45%, yes.
So we've got so we take our software and we have a managed service business, which is predominantly that content licensing business, which is very consumption based. It's not it uses our software, but it is a consumption based model. That grew about 6% last quarter. And then we've got a small bit of a representation business that declined mostly from macro. But that's our really what we'll call noncore from software.
Yeah. I think we did about 17 and a half million is software and the residual, so $78,000,000 is on the managed service side. There's not much seasonality in our business. Yeah. If there is seasonality, it's on the content licensing side because we do sponsor live events.
So Augusta National, everyone knows the masters. They're actually utilizing our software on-site to do real time content management. So we've got a room full of 100 people just like this. They're utilizing our software to take real time feeds from a 100 different cameras. And then it's published on xyz.com.
Similarly, we do that for the USTA, so at the US Open for tennis. That creates a little bit of seasonality, but and then in March, we have March Madness. And then in December in the fourth quarter, we have football. So it actually ends up all kind of, yeah, streaming itself up. Yeah.
Yep. Both. So AI where the platform is completely homegrown, built, but we do use over 800 different types of machine learning, right? And the beauty of that is we're not in a race to compete with OpenAI or Gronk or Gemini. We can use best in class and just interchange them.
But we do have third parties in the platform, yes. Sorry? Yes. I mean our velocity is definitely increasing in terms of the number of yes, is that your question? Well, I mean, no, not necessarily.
Like I mentioned, the majority of our revenue is on cloud. Of course, AWS went down this week, so who knows, but we can scale pretty efficiently in that environment. Yes. Wait for Q3. It's going to be bigger.
I mean I mentioned that the TAM here is enormous. I mean AI is enormous. Our SAM is enormous. Unfortunately, our lawyers don't like the way that we put our SAM on a slide, they won't let us put it into a deck. But it's billions and billions of dollars.
So yes. Yes. That's a good question. I mean I think Palantir is a little bit of the opposite of us. They're pretty heavily involved in the public sector, more so they are in the commercial, albeit growing, whereas we're more heavily involved in the commercial sector and not so much in the public sector, but growing.
I don't I wouldn't say I mean we have competed against them head to head. Obviously, their velocity and their size is much larger than ours by a multiple. But we go head to head with Axon, which is the £1,000 gorilla. It just kind of depends on the use case. And we'll mostly see them in the federal space, not necessarily on the commercial side.
Yes. All right. One more, yes. So our founders came from an advertising background, mostly in the radio side. We had a full fledged media advertising agency predominantly on the audio side, but we sold that business last year.
It was non core to us. So there's a little residual amount of that, but it's very small. Yes. Yes? So you foresee being able to get to like end of next year without raising capital?
Sorry? Without raising capital? Yes. I think it will depend on velocity of growth and being opportunistic. I mean our stock is up pretty substantially since the beginning of the year.
So we're always going to be opportunistic. Yes. Yep. If you were to raise capital, would it be a follow on offering or a shelf offering or how would Stay tuned. There's a lot of efficient ways to raise capital.
We did have an ATM that was up previously, but we'll talk more about that in a couple of weeks during our earnings call. We very acquisitive. We were doing an acquisition a quarter. We really stopped that a couple of years ago to focus on the core. I mean we've taken out north of $40,000,000 for us, which is over 40% of our burn today of cost out of the company to really get us to be more lean focused where we are today.
And your focus really on that debt repayment? We publicly said that part of the proceeds would be used to pay down debt, yes.
This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.
