Veritone Inc Q1 2026 Earnings Call - VDR Pipeline Surges to $68M as Profitability Bridge Tightens

Conference Operator, Moderator: Welcome to the Veritone, Inc. First Quarter 2026 Financial Results Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. After today’s presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Cate Goldsmith, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Cate Goldsmith, Investor Relations, Veritone, Inc.: Thank you and good morning. Before the market opened today, Veritone issued a press release announcing results for the first quarter 2026 ended March 31st, 2026. The press release and other supplemental information are available on the investor relations section of Veritone’s website. Joining us for today’s call are Veritone’s President and Chief Executive Officer, Ryan Steelberg, and Chief Financial Officer, Mike Zemetra, who will provide prepared remarks and then open the call for a live question and answer session. Please note that certain information discussed on the call today, including certain answers to your questions, will include forward-looking statements. This includes, without limitation, statements about our business strategy and future financial and operating performance. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that may cause the actual results to differ materially from those stated.

Certain of these risks and assumptions are discussed in Veritone’s SEC filings, including its annual report on Form 10-K. These forward-looking statements are based on assumptions as of today, May 12th, 2026, and Veritone undertakes no obligation to revise or update them. During this call, the actual forecasted financial measures we will be discussing include non-GAAP measures. Reconciliations of these measures to the corresponding GAAP measures are included in the press release we issued today. Finally, I would like to remind everyone that the call today is being recorded and will be made available for replay by a link on the investor relations section of Veritone’s website at www.veritone.com. I would like to turn the call over to our President and Chief Executive Officer, Ryan Steelberg.

Ryan Steelberg, President and Chief Executive Officer, Veritone, Inc.: Thank you, Cate, and thank you everyone for joining us today. As we look at the AI landscape today, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: the AI and data economies are now converging at scale. Over the last several weeks alone, the world’s largest technology companies have continued to significantly increase their AI infrastructure investment plans, reinforcing the accelerating demand for AI compute, orchestration, and high-quality training data. At the same time, enterprises, governments, and content owners are increasingly recognizing the strategic value of the proprietary data assets, particularly unstructured data, including audio and video. This is exactly where Veritone is positioned. Through aiWARE, Veritone Data Refinery, and our market-leading applications, we sit at the intersection of both sides of the AI data economy.

We help organizations transform unstructured data into AI-ready, semantic, and monetizable assets, while simultaneously supporting the growing demand from large hyperscalers and model developers for differentiated training data. Further validating these efforts and momentum, we are thrilled to announce that in Q1, both Google and NVIDIA have also now signed with Veritone for VDR data services. Our near-term pipeline for VDR has now expanded to nearly $70 million, helping to reinforce our full year 2026 guide of $130 million-$145 million. In addition to VDR, we continue to strengthen our market position through strategic partnerships and customer expansion across our core growth areas.

We announced a multi-year strategic agreement with Oracle to scale aiWARE, VDR, and our award-winning applications on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, further strengthening our infrastructure scalability and enterprise AI capabilities across both commercial and public sector markets. We also recently announced a new collaboration with The Washington Post to help unlock and monetize its news archive through our licensing and AI data solutions platform. In our Hire division, now rebranded as Broadbean by Veritone, we continue to expand our enterprise and government footprint, including the recently announced deployment with the U.K. Department for Work and Pensions to support workforce recruitment modernization initiatives. In the public sector, we continue to see growing demand for our AI-powered investigative and evidence management solutions across federal, state, local, and international markets.

Before I discuss the business highlights in more detail, I want to provide an update on our focus and path to profitability. On our last call, we stated that we expected to achieve operating profitability as early as Q4 2026, driven primarily by the scaling of VDR and the continued growth in public sector. Today, we are taking another important step forward by proactively lowering our breakeven floor by approximately 30%. We are simply not waiting for revenue growth to catch up to our cost structure. We are actively improving the operating efficiency of the business and capitalizing on the operating leverage uniquely enabled by the aiWARE platform that we have spent years building. What this demonstrates is a very clear bridge to profitability that is not dependent on aggressive growth assumptions.

Even under moderate revenue scenarios, Veritone is positioned to achieve operating profitability as early as Q4 2026. As VDR continues to scale and public sector momentum accelerates, the operating leverage and earnings power of the aiWARE platform is becoming increasingly evident. With that broader backdrop in mind, let me now turn to the progress we are seeing across our core business segments. Beginning with commercial enterprise, where we continue to see growing demand for our AI software, data solutions, and content monetization capabilities. Our commercial enterprise division maintained its robust 2025 momentum throughout Q1. During this period, we achieved a significant milestone by finalizing a landmark collaboration with The Washington Post to make their news archives universally accessible. We further advanced the AI supply chain by introducing the Veritone Data Marketplace, providing scalable access to high-quality AI-ready training datasets.

Additionally, the commercial team secured an extension with U.S. Soccer, utilizing our AI-driven products to enhance the monetization of both their archival and current footage. Staying on the topic of sports, there is no better place for our product applications and agentic workflows. Q1 leading into early Q2 remains a landmark period for our sports vertical. We have successfully live ingested, tagged, and annotated thousands of hours of live sports data for many of the largest sports rights holders in the world, including NCAA March Madness and the prestigious Masters Tournament. By making the data readily available and accessible, organizations are able to drive greater experience for their fans and sponsors alike while maintaining control of their valuable IP, the content produced in these prestigious events.

As the value of live sports continues to rise, the foundational understanding required to process content in near real-time is a necessity. Our technology allows both rights holders like USTA, Big Ten, and NCAA to not just deploy our applications and workflows across their organization, but also instantly turn a live broadcast into a searchable, monetizable, and extensible library. Veritone is ensuring that live sports remains the most valuable inventory in the media ecosystem. In the commercial enterprise, we closed 224 software and license agreements in Q1, including renewals and expansions across sports, media, entertainment, and brand licensing. The strategic importance of these wins is not just the number of agreements, it is the expanding archive base, rights-cleared content relationships, and monetization engine they create for VDR, VDM, and aiWARE.

We are consistently expanding and refreshing our client portfolio, partnering with prestigious organizations such as CNN, the Smithsonian, GEICO, and the President Barack Obama Foundation. Our influence across the market continues to strengthen through collaborations with other leading brands, including Titleist, Tubi, Game Show Network, and Bauer Media. As we look ahead, we plan to leverage our market-leading AI technologies, extensive expertise, and blue-chip client roster to capture the next wave of potential customers to provide material growth for our commercial group. We are undergoing a strategic reimagining of our vertical applications. Historically, our products and services were architected to address the complexity of the world’s largest media, entertainment, sports, and news organizations. We are now leveraging the same tech stack to create optimized versions of our platform and applications that are accessible to organizations of all types and sizes.

This is a significant democratization enabled by our technology. Over the next few quarters, we are introducing solutions and pricing tiers designed specifically for these expanded verticals and segments. By offering the same best-in-class AI applications and agentic workflows in a more accessible package, we are greatly expanding our addressable market while maintaining our core high margins. A primary driver in this effort is Veritone’s cloud-native digital asset management platform or Digital Media Hub. We are positioning Digital Media Hub as the central audio, video, and image repository, where mid-market SMBs, city councils, marketing departments, schools, and even individual creators can now leverage the same AI sophistication and dynamic workflows previously reserved only for the largest firms, such as CBS News and the NCAA. We look forward to continuing to update you on our progress here in future calls.

Turning to our Hire division, Broadbean delivered solid Q1 performance despite continued hiring market headwinds. The business met its Q1 revenue plan, remained cash flow positive, added 42 SaaS clients globally, and expanded in government and enterprise markets. The U.K. Department for Work and Pensions win is a strong proof point, with Broadbean supporting recruitment workflows across a large international public sector environment. Our global media services unit continued its double-digit year-over-year growth trajectory in both clients and revenue and expanded its business in North America. In Q1, we signed marquee new clients, including the Department for Work and Pensions and three other government agencies in the U.K., Ministry of Justice, Defra, and the Home Office. In addition, Alcoa in the U.S. and Orano in France. In total, we added 42 new SaaS clients globally.

On the partnerships ATS front, we hit significant milestones with all 3 global human capital platform leaders, Workday, Oracle, and SAP. Our Workday partnership focus keeps delivering. We signed 24 new common clients in Q1, in line with our goal to sign 100+ new clients this year and accelerate our new logo wins from this client ecosystem to over 50% year-over-year. Our onboarding team is receiving Workday training and certifications in Q2 to improve our ability to onboard and activate new clients at scale. More importantly, we released the alpha version of our new Workday job management integration, which will enter beta in Q2 with an expected general re-release in Q3. We also completed the preparation of our SAP partnership agreement, which was signed in early Q2.

At the same time, our Veritone group collaboration with Oracle is strengthening. We released Oracle integration updates that improve clients, interface, and campaign tracking. Other highlights include the successful beta and expected Q2 release of our job acceleration feature on the programmatic advertising platform, which creates a unique self-service feature that allows clients to fund individual job campaigns and track candidates to specific high-priority roles. We look ahead, we are unveiling our next-generation job management modules to more clients and continuing our groundbreaking agentic AI Broadbean framework with a Q4 alpha re-alpha release target date. This isn’t just an upgrade, it’s a productivity revolution for our 30,000 plus monthly Broadbean users. Moving on to public sector. I am proud to report that we are off to a strong start in 2026, characterized by material growth and activation across the entire government landscape.

We are seeing a powerful convergence of demand in both federal and SLED markets, culminating in a 69% year-over-year quarterly growth rate. Our Veritone applications and iDEMS suite are doing more than just improving workflows. They are revolutionizing the very nature of productivity and efficiency for our public safety customers and end users. We are enabling mission-critical outcomes and materially driving up case closure rates that simply were not practical or even possible before Veritone. Our integration with Thorn Detect is a strong example of how we continue to enhance iDEMS with trusted AI capabilities that support investigator safety and help agencies accelerate the identification and handling of harmful material. This ability to continuously evolve our applications as AI matures has dramatically expanded our total addressable market across SLED, higher education, FedCiv, and international agencies.

Security and data sovereignty remain critical focus areas for Veritone. aiWARE and iDEMS are engineered for the world’s most sensitive environments. Whether deployed in top-tier government clouds or entirely network-isolated air-gapped environments, we meet the strictest sovereignty requirements. This ensures that any agency, regardless of its security posture, can utilize our tools to support its most vital missions. Our recently announced partnership with Oracle allows us to scale this to an even higher level of performance and global security, providing us with a distinct competitive moat. Unlike the closed ecosystems of many of our competitors, aiWARE is built completely as an open platform. Our unique ability to ingest data at massive scale while integrating seamlessly with virtually any application or data set without vendor lock-in continues to differentiate Veritone in the market.

This positions Veritone as a foundational AI infrastructure partner and the infrastructure of choice for federal AI modernization and the Department of War’s AI-first strategy. This open architecture is also a key advantage for our SLED customers and strengthens our ability to collaborate with partners delivering complementary technologies and capabilities. These foundational elements are translating into significant high-value wins. This quarter, we achieved deep integration within the Air Force OSI to support their investigator, FOIA, and counter-espionage requirements. We expect the Air Force’s use of aiWARE and our applications to greatly expand and accelerate in 2026 and beyond. Additionally, another Department of War agency, the Defense Logistics Agency, went live with its own private instance of aiWARE and iDEMS, providing the basis for growth within the JPS TRUST Modernization Program.

Despite some government operational delays, I’m excited that we are back on track and moving aggressively forward with several of our marquee land and expand federal accounts. Our public sector pipeline currently sits at record levels. We are seeing significant traction with the DOE’s Project Genesis, the Department of Homeland Security, and multiple foreign state and federal agencies. Our Q1 wins, which include a major U.S. university, top five sheriff’s department, and several major U.S. city police agencies and state highway patrols, validate one simple truth: Veritone is a trusted AI partner for the public sector. Finally, we are aggressively expanding our technical and partner reach. Our recently announced partnership with the Cold Case Foundation is a strategic force multiplier and demonstrates the same thing, using AI to unify decades of disparate investigative data and help agencies surface connections that would otherwise remain buried.

This collaboration will not only accelerate our product capabilities, but will expose Veritone’s technologies to entities across the U.S. and the globe as they partner with the foundation to solve their most difficult cases. The conclusion is clear. We possess a unique AI-native solution that solves the most critical challenges facing public sector organizations today. We are confident that the aiWARE technology stack is the essential foundation that will allow us to continue layering in agentic AI and automation capabilities well into the future. We are energized by this progress and the immense growth ahead. Overall, we are very pleased with the progress we continue to make in our business.

The momentum we are seeing across commercial enterprise, public sector, and Broadbean continues to reinforce the strength and scalability of the aiWARE platform and our position at the center of the rapidly expanded AI and data economies. Importantly, the combination of accelerating growth across VDR and public sector, together with the operating leverage initiatives we announced today, further strengthens our path to profitability and long-term value creation. As organizations increasingly invest in AI infrastructure and seek to operationalize and monetize proprietary data, Veritone is uniquely positioned to capitalize on these long-term secular trends. We remain focused on disciplined execution, scaling our platform and data ecosystem, expanding strategic partnerships, and converting our growing pipeline into durable revenue and profitability. With that, I’ll now turn the call over to Mike Zemetra to review our financial results and outlook in more detail. Mike?

Mike Zemetra, Chief Financial Officer, Veritone, Inc.: Thank you, Ryan. As we previously discussed on our last call, Q1 2026 results are going to be somewhat in line with the prior year, in large part due to the timing of contractually onboarding several large hyperscalers in mid to late Q1 2026 and of our public sector deals, specifically to more pronounced expansions across the federal government and internationally. As I will explain later in my prepared remarks, we do expect VDR to generate its strongest quarter to date as early as Q2 2026, with several potential contract values individually ranging from several to tens of millions of dollars. As a result, we remain confident in our annual revenue guide of $130 million-$145 million. Before I detail our Q1 performance, I would first like to discuss several important strategic initiatives.

First is our recent strategic deal with Oracle announced in Q1 2026. We believe this partnership is a game changer and will initially provide over 20% savings on compute with non-dilutive cash-based incentives from Oracle over time to facilitate the future scale and growth in our AI platform, including VDR and expansion and acceleration of the Veritone Data Marketplace in our public sector. In addition, we will be able to leverage Oracle’s high-performance AI to power our aiWARE platform. This collaboration also allows Veritone’s customer base to use AI with the superior price performance, security, and data sovereignty provided by Oracle’s distributed cloud. We plan to share more details on the progress on this initiative with Oracle as it progresses throughout fiscal 2026.

We’ve made great strides at securing more digital data with the introduction of Veritone Data Marketplace and further expanded the supply of digital content with adding many petabytes of readily accessible data from everything from cruise lines to fast food and major furniture outlets through key partnerships entered into at the close of fiscal 2025. Why is this important? Every hyperscaler has specific requirements depending on what exactly they are trying to train their AI models on. From multi-camera angles of point-in-time situations to specific movements and actions in sports and real life, to 4K nature videos, all with hundreds to many thousands of hours of bespoke, indexed, and curated digital content for a single instance of AI training. Our VDR platform, powered by aiWARE, is uniquely positioned to solve this need at the scale and meet timelines these hyperscalers require.

In fiscal 2026, our goal is to be able to fulfill all of the hyperscalers’ needs in video and audio digital content. We believe that with partnerships we have forged through today and the build-out of the Veritone marketplace, our competitive moat just got larger, and our ability to secure the necessary content and time frames of the hyperscalers improved substantially as compared to 2025. Lastly, we are in the process of reevaluating our cost structure and believe we have the ability to unlock substantial savings of up to 30% in existing operating expense as early as the end of Q2 2026, in part to improve our operating margin, but more importantly, to subsidize areas where we need to continue to invest for growth.

This initiative reinforces our target of operating profitability as early as Q4 2026. We plan to share the details of our plan in the coming months. During my prepared remarks, I will discuss our Q1 year-over-year performance and KPIs, balance sheet, and liquidity position, and provide updates on our financial progress in Q2 2026 and fiscal 2026 guidance. I’d like to discuss our Q1 2026 performance in more detail. Q1 revenue was $20.3 million, down $2.2 million from Q1 2025, driven by managed services, which was down $1.5 million or 19.2% from prior year.

Overall, our software products and services was relatively flat year-over-year, including Broadbean by Veritone, which was down slightly year-over-year despite a very challenging macro environment across hiring in Q1 2026. Note that Q1 results were tempered by the fact that deals with several large hyperscalers, including Google and NVIDIA, were delayed and not signed until mid Q1 2026. A result, several larger VDR deals from newer hyperscalers were pushed into the remainder of 2026 as opposed to Q1 2026. I’m also happy to report that we currently have a near-term VDR sales pipeline and bookings of over $68 million, up over 150% from our guidance in mid 2025 and over 500% from our guidance a year ago.

In addition, we have over $20 million of active sales pipeline, which could all close in Q2 2026 and includes several deals in the many to $10 million range. As I will discuss in more detail, Q2 2026 could be one of our best quarters on record, assuming these larger deals close, and at a minimum, Q2 2026 revenue could be in the range of $25 million to over $30 million or in excess of 25% growth year-over-year at the high end.

Turning to the public sector, which grew 69% year-over-year, driven by the continuing rollout of larger deals executed in the first half of 2025, including the Department of Defense and certain larger public safety agencies. We did experience some delays in our larger federal deals, including the planned rollout of OSI. Expect these deals to resume their planned rollouts in Q2 2026. Given these delays, which were partly driven by resource and prioritization across the DoD, we expect the public sector to continue to grow throughout fiscal 2026. This growth should be more pronounced beginning in fiscal 2027 with the expected rollout of iDEMS across the DoD, including OSI.

Turning to Q1 managed services, which decreased $1.5 million year-over-year, principally due to a decline in representation services, coupled with a year-over-year decline in content licensing due in large part to the timing of certain licensing revenue pushed to Q2 2026, and slight declines year-over-year from the NCAA’s March Madness. We expect this negative trend to reverse as early as Q2 2026, as we are already seeing improvements in our representation and licensing services in Q2. Turning to key performance metrics across our software products and services in Q1 2026. ARR of $64.2 million, up 9% from Q1 2025 of $58.7 million. The improvement in ARR was largely driven by increased consumption-based revenue from one-time software revenue or VDR, and stable recurring SaaS-based revenue.

Overall, ARR from consumption-based customers increased 50% year-over-year. Recurring subscription-based SaaS customers were flat year-over-year. As of Q1 2026, 73% of our ARR was from subscription versus consumption-based customers as compared to 81% in Q1 2025. New bookings of $16 million, up slightly year-over-year. Gross revenue retention continued to be above the 90th percentile. Total software products and services customers of 2,897 was down 8% year-over-year, predominantly from our commercial enterprise sector, which includes lower consumption-based customers across Broadbean by Veritone, principally due to a macro-driven churn from smaller customers as we focus on larger ARR opportunities. As the hiring market continues to struggle, we expect this trend of smaller ARR customers to continue throughout fiscal 2026.

Q1 GAAP gross profit was $12.7 million as compared to $13.7 million in Q1 2025. The decline was primarily driven by the decline in revenue, principally across our managed services. Q1 GAAP gross margin of 62.7% as compared to 61.1% in Q1 2025, an improvement of 166 basis points. Excluding non-cash depreciation and amortization expense, Q1 2026 non-GAAP gross margin was 67.7% as compared to 65.1% in Q1 2025, an improvement of 260 basis points. Note that we continue to forecast 2026 non-GAAP gross margins to be closer to 60%-65% throughout the year, which will vary depending on the timing and mix of VDR revenue in a given period.

Q1 operating loss of $19.4 million improved by $2.2 million or 10% year-over-year, primarily driven by lower operating expenses across G&A due in part to headcount efficiencies coupled with lower professional and banking fees year-over-year. Net loss was $19.5 million, a slight improvement from $19.9 million in Q1 2025.

Driving this year-over-year improvement was the $2.2 million improvement in operating loss and a $2.4 million improvement in net interest expense year-over-year as a result of the paydown and retirement of 100% of the company’s senior secured debt in November 2025, offset by a one-time gain of $3.7 million in Q1 2025 from a change in the fair value of the company’s estimated earn out from the Veritone One sale in Q1 2024. Excluding this one-time gain, net loss would have improved $4.1 million or 21% year-over-year. Overall, non-GAAP net loss was relatively flat at $11.9 million as compared to $11.1 million in Q1 2025.

The year-over-year variance was mostly driven by lower capitalized software in Q1 2026 as compared to Q1 2025. Turning to our balance sheet. As of March 31, 2026, we held cash and restricted cash of $15.4 million as compared to $27.7 million at December 31, 2025. The $12.3 million net change in cash reflects net cash outflows from operations of $11.5 million, principally driven by our non-GAAP net loss of $11.9 million. Net cash outflows from investing and financing activities of $1 million, driven by net cash outflows of $0.5 million in capital expenditures and $0.7 million in net share settlements of equity awards.

Excluding the $19.9 million capital raise in Q1 2025, we improved our net cash outflows by over 40% or $8.5 million year-over-year. Turning to liquidity today. As of March 31, 2026, we held $15.4 million of cash and restricted cash as compared to $16.4 million as of March 31, 2025.

Moreover, all of today’s cash is unencumbered and free of any restricted debt covenants, unlike in the prior year when we had a $15 million minimum cash requirement under our legacy senior secured debt. In addition, we have approximately $45 million of total debt outstanding at March 31, 2026, accruing interest at an annual rate of 1.75%, as compared to over $130 million at March 31, 2025, a year-over-year improvement of more than $85 million in debt principal and more than $13 million reduction in annualized debt carry costs. This improved balance sheet allows us to focus on reaching our growth potential to meet the market opportunities ahead of us.

That said, we will continue to be opportunistic with continued focus to further improve our current liquidity position and balance sheet, as well as the previously discussed plan to reduce our consolidated operating expenses up to 30% over the next several months. At March 31st, 2026, we had 93 million shares issued and outstanding and 2.5 million warrants outstanding to certain legacy term debt holders. Turning to full year 2026 guidance. As a reminder, we will only be providing financial guidance for the full fiscal year 2026, given the complexity of forecasting the timing of VDR deals, which tend to be larger in dollar value and entirely consumption-based, coupled with the complexity of government decision-making, especially during wartime.

That said, and as I explained earlier, we are seeing a large backlog of more than $20 million in active VDR deals that could close in Q2 2026, and we have given a soft range in Q2 2026 revenue to be between $25 million to in excess of $30 million, which at the high point would be a year-over-year improvement of over 25%. As a backdrop to our annual guide, our software products and services revenue pipeline and long-term outlook continue to be at all-time highs. More specifically, we continue to see strong demand across commercial VDR in the public sector.

In 2026, hyperscalers, including Google, Amazon, Meta, NVIDIA, which are all current customers, have individually forecasted to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in fiscal 2026 to progress their AI initiatives, including further investment into their large language models. According to Fortune Business Insights, the global AI training data set market size was valued around $3.6 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow from $4.4 billion in 2026 to $23.2 billion by 2034, a CAGR of 23%. From a model training perspective, we believe we are well-positioned to exploit this potential revenue opportunity at the forefront of this future spending with our VDR solution as the more mature models are now investing heavily in rich video data where we believe Veritone has a clear competitive advantage.

As of today, our near-term sales pipeline in VDR alone is over $68 million and continues to grow. One of the largest learnings from fiscal 2025 was to improve upon the speed and expand the range of data set availability of content demand from our VDR customers and to improve our ability to deploy those data sets quickly. As previously discussed, we were unable to secure millions of dollars of potential VDR revenue in fiscal 2025 simply due to the fact that we cannot readily source the content requested from our VDR customers in a timely fashion.

To address this in 2026, we are focused on the most efficient and cost-effective ways to increase the supply of data, and we will also be investing in the engineering and product around VDR, including Veritone Data Marketplace, where our aim is to deepen our competitive moat with exclusive access to thousands of more data providers. As previously discussed, we now have access to partners who control more than 50 million hours of valuable video data sets. In Q1 2025, we entered into a highly strategic deal with a third party that locked down universal access to millions of hours of new video and audio data sources, including with some of the largest retail, travel, entertainment, and fast food providers in the world.

We believe these near-term strategic decisions will enable us to continue to grow our VDR revenue in fiscal 2026 and beyond at or above the current 23% projected CAGR for spending on large language models through fiscal 2034. In the public sector, the market for digital evidence management solutions today exceeds north of $10 billion and is growing at double-digit rates. In fiscal 2026, we are targeting our large public sector growth to be between 60%-70% year-over-year. This growth is forecasted to come from expanded offerings from existing federal contracts, including those with the DLA and OSI, and from new international deals across Western Europe.

That said, once we begin formally rolling out more instances of iDEMS across the broader DoD, including OSI and the DLA, we expect the growth rate to be much higher starting in the first half of 2027. Collectively, our backlog and sales pipeline across our core aiWARE platform remains in excess of $200 million today. As Veritone remains uniquely positioned to capture even more opportunity in the data as a currency market, we expect that pipeline and our potential to monetize our trove of tokenized audio and video content to increase further. On the OpEx side, we are forecasting relatively flat sales and marketing and G&A expenses year-over-year, with forecasted spending across these areas as a % of revenue expected to show improvements year-over-year.

However, these should be down year-over-year beginning in the second half of 2026 following our cost reductions initiative discussed earlier. We are also projecting research and development expenses to be slightly higher year-over-year throughout fiscal 2026 as we continue to invest in and build out our VDR and public sector initiatives, including the Veritone Data Marketplace and plan new software product features and enhancements in 2026 and beyond. Including our revenue guide for 2026, we remain on track towards our projected operating profitability as early as Q4 2026. Note that consistent with 2025, we expect revenue to grow sequentially quarter-over-quarter in 2026, with Q1 to be lower in revenue from Q2 through Q4 2026, with progressive growth each quarter.

This is partly driven by the public sector, where we see a higher revenue ramp starting late in the first half of 2026 from our existing larger federal deals, coupled with the timing of certain international contracts we expect to announce in the coming year. In addition, and based upon discussion and timing of certain VDR deals and the delayed signing of several large hyperscalers to late Q1, 2026, we expect to start seeing a more pronounced revenue ramp in VDR starting in Q2 and throughout the second half of 2026. The key risks to our revenue projections are the consumption-based nature of VDR, coupled with the timing of government-based contracts and decision-making.

The visibility into our VDR pipeline is typically 2 to 3 months in advance of delivery, and decision-making on the nature and volume of content may change depending on the customer’s need and anticipated impact on the training models. In fiscal 2026, we are maintaining our previous guidance of revenue to be at $130 million-$145 million, which at the midpoint represents a 49% increase year-over-year. We are expecting the public sector revenue to continue to grow over 60% year-over-year and the remaining growth to come from our commercial enterprise sector, predominantly from VDR. Our Broadbean by Veritone products and services are included in this growth, and we expect Broadbean by Veritone to be slightly down year-over-year, given the current macroeconomic hiring environment.

Our managed services is expected to be up year-over-year by 10%-15%, principally due to the recent improvements we are seeing on the representation side of our business. We expect gross margins to fluctuate between 60%-65%, driven by the forecasted mix of revenue in the period, and non-GAAP net loss to be between thirteen and a half to twenty-two and a half million, which at the midpoint represents a 56% improvement year-over-year as compared to fiscal 2025. The change is reflective of the timing shifts in revenue, the previously discussed plan increase in research and development, coupled with the compressions in gross margins due to the mix of VDR in 2026.

As previously discussed, we believe we are still on track towards operating profitability, which at the earliest would be Q4 2026. Before closing the call, I’d like to remind everyone listening that Veritone will be in New York City this week attending Needham’s 21st Annual Technology, Media, & Consumer Conference. That concludes my prepared remarks. Operator, we would like to now open up the call for questions.

Conference Operator, Moderator: We will now begin the question-and-answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. The first question comes from Joshua Riley with Needham. Please go ahead.

Joshua Riley, Analyst, Needham: All right, great. Thanks for taking my questions here. I have a few. Maybe just starting off on the expanded Digital Media Hub opportunity. Can you give us some more color around, you know, what verticals you’ll be targeting there and the timing of the launch for that offering?

Ryan Steelberg, President and Chief Executive Officer, Veritone, Inc.: Thank you, Josh. Yeah, we’re excited about this one. Right now, as we kind of detailed on the call, the Digital Media Hub was, you know, primarily and originally built and designed for, I’ll say, more complex, you know, enterprise-level integrations and onboarding of data for some of the largest media companies. Although obviously we’re very sticky with those customers, and again, we’re in no way gonna be compromising our service attention to them. What we’re gonna be introducing here, just over the next couple of months, and again, to be very clear, over the next couple of months, not a few quarters, is an ability to preserve that same level of market-leading DMH capabilities, but to allow us to almost provide a near self-service onboarding solution for these entities.

Mike Zemetra, Chief Financial Officer, Veritone, Inc.: That is going to allow us to more seamlessly onboard individual teams, even individual creators, but also corporate enterprises. you know, what we are all seeing is almost every company, quote-unquote, "Is a media company now." Meaning they are creating unstructured audio-video. They need a more effective way of storing those files, you know, above and beyond just, I’ll call it more traditional, like say, generic storage facilities, frankly, like a Google Cloud or say like, you know, Google Drive or a Box or something like that. They need the proficiency and expertise that Veritone has been providing our media entertainment customers for years.

Again, we believe that this is gonna greatly expand, the vertical focus that’s gonna span between smaller businesses but also corporate enterprises who are sitting on a tremendous amount of audio and video and other structured data. We do expect to launch this, renewed solution, just in here in the next couple of months.

Joshua Riley, Analyst, Needham: Got it. All right. On the Oracle agreement, can you just remind us the timeline for integrating the OCI, how you’ll be marketing to customers the use of that, and then maybe how are you gonna leverage that as a sales tool and a little bit of a competitive advantage going forward?

Ryan Steelberg, President and Chief Executive Officer, Veritone, Inc.: First is we are very near starting to do some porting of tech. I think we’re well along the path of integration. It’s been a great collaborative working environment, working with their team. To be clear, what’s making all this possible is our ability and our success of transforming aiWARE to a complete platform-agnostic solution. Our ability to make this transition finally and start working with Oracle really starts with us, right? What we’ve done in terms of transitioning Kubernetes and creating a more containerized top to bottom offering of AI applications. You know, that being said, the Oracle team has been fantastic, and we are looking, and we are doing integrations, and we’re looking to actually start moving some major payloads over to them as early as early August.

That being said, we have already started the co-selling opportunity with them. I’ve been invited, and I’ll be speaking, for example, the keynote in June with their national sales kickoff, and we expect to really be working in a very collaborative operating model with them, as they’re going very aggressive across several verticals. Obviously, media to entertainment, sports, and news is a big one, where obviously Oracle is very motivated to continue to drive, but also across the public sector as well. Again, I think we’re on track or even ahead of schedule in terms of technical integration and planning to start moving initial, I’ll say, storage payloads over first and then compute payloads. Number 2 is we’re already working and working together on co-selling executions.

Third, ultimately is, once we are up and running, we do believe that these, incremental cost savings based upon, due to the efficiencies of how we’re gonna be running at a lower cost structure with Oracle Cloud will be passed on to our customers, which again, I think is gonna be, resulting in a more competitive offering than our competition.

Joshua Riley, Analyst, Needham: Got it. That’s helpful. As we think about the guidance of $130 million-$145 million in revenue for the year, maybe you could just lay out some of the key variables you plan to hit that would lead you to hit the high end of the guidance or exceed the number. You know, I’m assuming it would primarily be driven by VDR and commercial enterprise deals, but any additional details on how you’re thinking about the setup for the guidance?

Ryan Steelberg, President and Chief Executive Officer, Veritone, Inc.: I think for sure it’s going to be dominated by VDR, as Mike kind of articulated in more detail. Not just, I’ll say, the overreaching pipeline, but kind of the short-term visibility we have on a multitude of different deals. Obviously, we, you know, we were hopeful, as we’ve communicated a few times, to bring some of the major, the additional hyperscalers, Google and NVIDIA, on board in Q4. You know, those were delayed until February of this year. The bottom line is, you know, we finally got those done, and we’re, you know, servicing orders now. We’re really excited about that opportunity. Again, VDR will lead and be the bellwether to achieve and hopefully surpass even that, you know, the high end as an opportunity.

Public sector, as we mentioned on the call, you know, we are completely unlocked now with a couple of our bellwether accounts that we landed last year, the DLA and Air Force OSI, and we expect those to consolidate. We’re on track. You know, again, they actually had a there was actually some personnel changes over there. We’re past those blockers. As we articulated, we’re up and running and live with DLA. Again, DLA, the logistics agency, manages and staffs all of our bases around the world, and we’re looking to greatly expand our rollout through the balance of 2026 and beyond for DLA and also OSI.

I think those will be 2 bellwether leads that are going to help substantiate and, you know, hopefully, you know, get us to the high end of our guide by the end of the year.

Joshua Riley, Analyst, Needham: Got it. One last question from me is on the public sector business, you know, curious, when you’re selling to these customers, how much is it getting budget allocated a factor relative to just understanding the capabilities of what your platform can do for them? How does that impact the timeline of closing deals with, you know, both U.S. federal customers and state and local in terms of awareness relative to budgets? Thanks, guys.

Ryan Steelberg, President and Chief Executive Officer, Veritone, Inc.: Yeah, great question. Let’s break them apart. For state and local law enforcement, I think the key is being ready. Like everybody, they’ll have different cycles where certain opportunities for, okay, you know, let’s say larger reviews of platforms and systems come up for renewal. The key is to make sure that you have those relationships, you are communicating with the procurement officers, at times even the chiefs or the captains at the respective areas. It’s important for Veritone to continue to build up our brand relationships with these groups, which I think we’re doing a great job at.

Second is, when these opportunities come arise is how can you enter or land an additional contract with large agencies, such as, again, which we’ve kind of teed on larger entities in, you know, California or New York or wherever, whether they’re sheriffs or police agencies. The key is having what makes kind of our offering so unique is we can land with one application. We don’t need to come in and have them buy the entire stack of all the offerings of iDEMS in every single application. For example, they may have budget already available outside and potentially out of cycle for just programmatic Redaction, right? Document and audio-video Redaction. Another agency in their homicide division may have immediate budget for Investigate, right?

Trying to accelerate and speed up, you know, case closures. Again, the key is being ready when they do have budget, and when it comes up for, I’ll say, scheduled cycles, but also being opportunistic that if they do have And, and they vary, but let’s just say hypothetically a budget threshold without having to go to city council is $30,000 or less per year. I’m just giving a hypothetical. We do have offerings. We have offerings because again, everything’s kind of built on AI where we can land right at low entry cost points and then scale up with those entities, and we can actually land in different departments, not just, you know, go, you know, from a landing an entire police agency.

Again, if they have budgets in their records department for redaction or in their homicide division for an Investigate, that’s another way. Makes us very unique in that capacity as well. Again, on the federal side, it’s again, it’s all across the map. Again, it’s, I think it’s, you know, what we’ve shown here is making sure that we are continuing to be disciplined in bidding on every single RFI and RFP comes out that we think is relevant to AI or our applications, which we are doing. It’s also aligning yourselves directly with the mission leaders. As we mentioned on the call, when we’re, you know, working with the Department of Homeland Security and Project Genesis, those are us working with the individuals directly.

It’s important that you start to build those personal relationships in addition to going through the Carahsoft and others for, I’ll say, the more traditional procurement, bidding and RFI and proposal process. I would say it’s a, it’s probably even more involved on the federal front. obviously you’re starting to see the fruits in which we discussed a little bit of finally landing some of the bellwether accounts with the Air Force and DLA and continuing to build those and sort of make sure we’re continuing to have the right products and services and service layer to scale those when they’re ready to scale up.

Joshua Riley, Analyst, Needham: Excellent. Thanks for all the details.

Ryan Steelberg, President and Chief Executive Officer, Veritone, Inc.: Thanks, Josh.

Conference Operator, Moderator: Again, if you have a question, please press star then one. This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Ryan Steelberg for any closing remarks.

Ryan Steelberg, President and Chief Executive Officer, Veritone, Inc.: Thank you for joining today. Veritone is poised for strong disciplined growth through the balance of 2026 and beyond. By securing additional leading hyperscalers under contract and fueling a robust VDR pipeline, bolstered by our strategic Oracle partnership, we have solidified our role as the essential infrastructure for next generation AI training data and enterprise scale deployment. Our momentum and pipeline within the public sector, coupled with the resilient performance of our Broadbean Hire division, reinforced our high level of conviction. We are not just expanding our growth and reach, we are resharpening and we are sharpening our execution. The proactive measures we are taking to streamline operations and optimize our cost structure through internal reorganization, automation, and AI initiatives are already yielding results.

We expect to see these efficiencies and productivity gains accelerate starting in this current second quarter, firmly underpinning our path to operating profitability as early Q4 2026. Veritone is leaner, faster, and uniquely positioned to capture the massive AI opportunity ahead. Thank you for your continued support as we deliver on this mission. Have a good day.

Conference Operator, Moderator: The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.