M+E Connections

The past year was a notable one for Veritone as it launched multiple new products, established major new channel partnerships and “invested significantly in product development,” according to Chad Steelberg, its CEO and chairman.

Meanwhile, the company’s bookings are “at record levels, our pipeline of new business is growing at an accelerating rate, and we’ve significantly reduced our cash burn,” Ryan Steelberg, its president, said March 5 on an earnings call for Veritone’s fourth quarter (ended Dec. 31).

During the quarter, Veritone executives had discussed that, with the development of its platform largely complete, the company “shifted our focus to take advantage of our amazing opportunities to accelerate revenue growth, while improving our path to profitability,” the CEO told analysts on the call.

To capitalize on that, Veritone has “realigned our business and functional teams to maximize our speed, efficiency and customer focus, and implemented a number of enhancements” to its artificial intelligence-driven aiWARE platform, he said.

The company’s business realignment is “already accelerating our product development cycle, and helping to drive increased engagement with our customers,” he said, noting Veritone finished 2019 with its best bookings quarter by far, up more than 82% from the prior quarter.

The $12.4 million in total revenue it reported were “at the high end of our guidance range,” as both Veritone’s aiWARE Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and advertising business were “at record levels” and its SaaS “pipeline continues to grow,” he said. Total revenue grew 14% from Q4 a year earlier.

The company’s recent aiWARE upgrades are “yielding significant cost savings,” the CEO told attendees, adding: “Without question, Veritone is on its strongest footing ever. Our SaaS business just had its strongest revenue quarter in history, and we’ve signed new and expanded multi-year agreements” with media and entertainment SaaS customers that “we expect to increase our revenues from that market significantly in 2020 and beyond.”

In addition to that M&E growth, the “activity level and the opportunity pipeline” in Veritone’s government, legal and compliance (GLC) business are “both expanding rapidly, giving us further confidence that our revenues” from that business will “eventually eclipse” M&E, he said.

Meanwhile, Veritone’s advertising business “continues to far outpace” that of its peers, with double-digit revenue growth in Q4 and net commission margins two to three times the industry average, he said, adding: “We’ve never been more bullish about Veritone’s growth prospects than we are today.”

Veritone’s VeriAds network “continued to show tremendous potential as well” in Q4, “highlighted by” Influencer Bridge, its pay-per-performance ad platform for podcast and social media influencers, Ryan Steelberg told analysts.

In Q4, Influencer Bridge, had more than 2,300 unique digital influencers that generated advertising performance, he said. So far in Q1, the company already had over 8,800 unique digital influencers sign up for the Influencer Bridge program, with over 2,100 already delivering advertising performance, he noted.

“We expect to see Influencer Bridge and all of VeriAds drive meaningful acceleration in our advertising revenue growth in 2020,” he added.

Veritone’s Q4 SaaS revenue grew to $2.9 million in the quarter, the highest level in Veritone’s history, he pointed out. That was 18% higher than Q4 the prior year and 22% higher than Q3. Ad revenue grew to $6.5 million from $6 million in Q4 2018.

In October, Veritone announced that the San Francisco Giants had licensed its “AI-powered rapid media discovery and workflows to further fan engagement,” Ryan Steelberg noted on the call. “This has led to increased interest from other teams as well,” he said, adding: “We’re now engaged with over 20 professional sport teams in the U.S., and just last week we closed SaaS licensing deals with two additional prominent teams.”

The company has “executed 81 new SaaS contracts” with GLC customers since the start of Q4 and its “pipeline of new customer opportunities in this market is growing rapidly,” he said, adding: “We have conducted over 219 customer demos and initiated 11 trials in this market during the same period.”