Cognyte Software Ltd (CGNT) 2024 Q4 法說會逐字稿

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by.

Welcome to the Cognyte fourth quarter fiscal year 2024 earnings conference call.

(Operator Instructions) Please note that today's conference may be recorded.

I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker host, Dean Ridlon, Head of Investor Relations.

Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator.

Hello, everyone.

I'm Dean Ridlon, Cognyte Head of Investor Relations.

Thank you for joining us today.

I'm here with Elad Sharon ,Cognyte CEO; and David Abadi, Cognyte CFO.

Before getting started, I would like to mention that accompanying our call today is a presentation.

If you'd like to view these slides in real-time during the call, please visit the investor section of our website at cognyte.com, click on the Investors tab, click on the webcast link and select today's conference call.

I would also like to draw your attention to the fact that certain matters discussed on this call may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and other provisions of the federal securities laws.

These forward-looking statements are based on management's current expectations and are not guarantees of future performance.

Actual results could differ materially from those expressed in or implied by these forward-looking statements.

The forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this call and except as required by law, Cognyte assumes no obligation to update or revise them

Investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, for a more detailed discussion of how these and other risks, uncertainties could cause Cognyte actual results differ materially from those indicated in these forward-looking statements, please see our annual report on Form 20-F for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2023 and January 31, 2024, which we expect to file today and other filings we make with the SEC.

The financial measures discussed today include non-GAAP measures.

We believe investors focus on non-GAAP financial measures in comparing results between periods and among our peer companies that publish similar non-GAAP measures.

Please see today's presentation slides, our earnings release and the investor section of our website at cognyte.com for a reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures to GAAP measures, non-GAAP financial information should not be considered in isolation from as a substitute for or superior to GAAP financial information, but is included because management believes it provides meaningful information about the financial performance of our business and is useful to investors for informational and comparative purposes.

The non-GAAP financial measures that the company uses have limitations and may differ from those used by other companies.

Now I'd like to turn the call over to Elad.

Thank you Dean.

Welcome, everyone, to our fourth quarter conference call.

The fourth quarter was a strong finish to a productive year for Cognyte, market demand stabilized and continuing to improve is bad actor utilize new ways to conduct the business and the need for advanced technology and actionable intelligence continues to grow.

We executed well in fiscal '24, delivering topline growth of approximately 11%.

And we enter the new year with an improving momentum that is supported by strong short and long-term RPOs, which gave us confidence in our outlook.

Importantly, we have reached an [inflection] point where we are growing gross profit more rapidly than our revenue, and we expect fiscal '25 to be a year of operating leverage.

To be clear, we'll be investing in R&D and our North America expansion efforts to accelerate future growth.

But the pace of our operating expense growth is expected to be slower than our revenue ramp, leading to improve profitability.

For fiscal '24, we generated non-GAAP revenue of $313.5 million and increased our SIS adjusted non-GAAP gross profit by more than $39 million on $30 million in increased revenue.

Our improving gross profit expense management and growing operating leverage enabled our third consecutive quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA at $4.3 million.

In fact, we delivered $9 million in positive adjusted EBITDA for the full year, along with $35 million of positive cash from operations and $25 million of free cash flow.

Cognyte is again generating operating income, and we expect not just to maintain our profitability but meaningfully expand it into next year.

We believe we now have a stable platform to execute and expect the coming year to be one of further operational improvements, as we aim to build on this strong foundation to deliver sustainable and profitable growth.

During Q4, we continued to win deals with both new and existing customers, we recognize the strength of our innovative technology and Cognyte's ability to deliver value.

Looking to the full year, we signed contracts with 29 new customers, which is up 70% year-over-year.

These new customers present a meaningful opportunity to drive growth in most cases, new customer starts small.

And we believe that our land-and-expand strategy will drive incremental revenue growth, profitability, and cash flow for over time.

As we look across our addressable markets, North America presents a meaningful near-term opportunity for expansion.

As previously shared, we are allocating resources to increase our presence in North America.

These investments have already started to drive results with several important wins over the past fiscal year.

Our strategy to start with state and local has been successful as our new customers are pleased with the value our solutions deliver and providing references to potential new customers throughout the region.

Regarding further our customers, we are working with an established partner to penetrate this market, and we believe that we have the right sales approach and superior technology to allow us to win.

Initial progress in North America has reinforced our confidence that our strategy is sound and we have increased our sales efforts further to leverage this momentum.

We believe we'll be able to win more new customers and simultaneously increase wallet share with our existing customers over time.

We continue to innovate and deliver solutions that we believe demonstrate our technological leadership and generate unique value for our customers.

We have a lengthy track record of delivering powerful investigative analytics solutions to hundreds of customers around the globe.

Our customers view us as domain experts and you have decades-long relationships with many customers.

Our advanced technology, including innovative analytics and AI, allows faster and more effective investigations by using data at scale, creating digital twins, and detecting patterns relationships, another [eden] insight that would be nearly impossible to find other ways.

This helps regulatory risk and maximize the productivity of investigators and decision makers, enabling faster decision making and creating incremental value for our customers in the important mission.

Our investigative analytics solutions are sought to national security, law enforcement, national intelligence, and other organizations to enable them to perform more effective investigations.

We believe customer references and field trials are very effective ways for us to win deals with both new and existing customers.

The first win I would like to highlight is more than $20 million with an existing national security customer for its mission to combat terrorism.

We recently released a new version of our solution with advanced and differentiated capabilities.

These capabilities solve challenges brought on by emerging technologies that create new need for our customers.

The customer recognizes the value we deliver and continue to select our solutions to support the evolving needs.

We believe you want because of the demonstrated superior performance of our advanced technology.

The second, win is for approximately $10 million from an existing national intelligence customer to address border security threats.

This is an additional win from this customer that is highly satisfied with our solutions they are using for other use cases.

For this use case, we were able to demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution through field trials.

The third win is with a new national intelligence customer to help them safeguard the forces, the deal is approximately $3 million.

Previously, we sold solutions to another agency in the country, and this agency served as a reference for us affirming both the performance and the value our solutions generate.

This strong reference played a significant role in our ability to sign this new deal.

The customer is already deployed a new solution, and it is generating value for them.

I would now like to discuss what's driving demand.

Customers view Cognyte as a strategic trusted partner, providing innovative solutions that help them to improve the speed, accuracy, and success rate of the investigations and make timely decisions.

In general, customers ranged from organizations that are focused on relatively small geographies like [local from] state agencies, all the way up to security and intelligence agencies that are responsible for combating threats on a national level.

Our customers are dealing with a wide variety of challenges, the level of sophistication of bad actors continues to increase as they leverage technology to other activities better, it has become increasingly difficult to connect entities to their digital footprint.

In addition, the volume of the diversity of data our customers are working with has grown dramatically.

Our customers face a challenging situation, more digital data in more places much of it is unstructured max investigating bad actors, more difficult.

Cognyte addresses this challenge using advanced analytics and AI enabled solutions to analyze multiple data streams to create a holistic picture of bad actors digital footprint.

These new emerging and [involved] challenges coupled with increased geopolitical unrest, requires our customers to continue investing in the technology to keep them ahead of these threats.

We continue to leverage R&D to bring innovations to our customers so that we can maintain our differentiation.

Cognyte utilizes advanced AI capabilities to rapidly analyze the various desperate and growing data assets to enable our customers to make quick decisions and execute important patients.

We believe the strength of our technology, together with our domain expertise and investigative analytics will continue to enhance the value we provide to our customers, increase our differentiation and drive demand.

The technologies, bad actors are utilizing continue to evolve rapidly.

For example, advancements in GenAI and cryptocurrency has added significant complexity for our customers.

GenAI has provided bad actors with the ability to create fake identities and generate harmful content on open source channels.

Customers using our solutions can investigate and have really high confidence.

The potential identity of the bad actor and better understand the intent and risk of its action.

Similarly, the use of cryptocurrency has made it easier for bad actors to transact anonymously.

Crypto requires, no physical space and it can be swiftly transferred across borders without currency controls, regulations, or other barriers, making it an ideal assets for illegal transactions.

Our decision intelligence platform enables authorities to construct a picture of suspects, organizations, companies, and financial accounting involved.

Ultimately, this picture allows authorities to limit the ability of organized criminal groups to fund the operations.

These examples illustrate the continually evolving landscape our customers need to address.

We expect these trends to continue to generate demand for our solutions and drive long-term growth.

Turning to our outlook for FY25, The [Cognyte] Solutions is solid and we entered the year with a very strong short-term RPO.

We expect to drive operating leverage this fiscal year.

And at the same time, we are investing in advancing our capabilities and our go-to-market infrastructure with the aim of creating sustainable and profitable long-term growth.

We are expecting revenue for fiscal '25 to be $340 million plus or minus 2%.

We are presenting approximately 8.5% year-over-year growth at the midpoint.

We also expect gross profit to grow faster than revenue, as a result of continued expansion of gross margin, we expect gross profit to grow by more than 10% year-over-year.

Given the leverage in our financial model, we expect adjusted EBITDA for the year to be about $19 million more than double what we've generated in fiscal '24, reflecting the ongoing efforts to drive margin expansion.

David will provide more detailed guidance during his remarks.

To summarize, we believe the market is healthy, our customers continue to face significant growing volume challenges across many use cases and look to us for solutions that help them accelerate investigations make decisions faster and mitigate a wide variety of threats.

Cognyte is well established as domain experts and a trusted partner.

Our customers frequently tell us that our solutions significantly improve their results, enabling them to effectively perform the missions and make the world safer, our establish long-term customer relationships continue to be a significant asset for us.

We are pleased with our execution financial results for the fourth quarter and full year, and we believe Cognyte is well positioned for sustainable growth and continuing improvement in profitability.

Before I turn the call over to David, I want to take a moment to thank our Board of Director members Karmit Shilo and Zvika Naggan for their significant contributions to Cognyte leadership and a strong commitment to our mission all the years.

And I would like to welcome Sarit Sagiv and Ron Shvili, two accomplished executives to our Board.

Sarit, is a seasoned executive with the financial and software industry experience in publicly traded companies.

Ron brings extensive industry knowledge, including relevant experience from the Israeli Defense Forces where he was Head of Research Division, specializing in the field of advanced communications cyber and AI and head of an elite technology on it.

I'm confident that Ron and Sarit, will each provide important additional strength to our Board.

Now let me turn the call over to David to provide more details about our results and fiscal '25 outlook.

David?

Thank you, Elad, and hello, everyone.

We delivered fourth quarter financial results that exceeded our expectation reflecting stabilized market demand, solid execution, with a combination of highly differentiated solutions, healthy demand and the large and [loyal] customer base.

We were able to overachieve our expectation each quarter in fiscal '24, and we entered fiscal '25 with positive momentum.

We ended the year with a strong balance sheet and the solid foundation for profitable growth.

Our cash balance increased significantly during the year, primarily due to the $34.6 million of cash flow from operations and $25.5 million of free cash flow, we generated during FY24.

At the end of the year, our cash balance was $83.3 million, and we had no outstanding debt.

During Q4 we extended our credit facility, and we now have $65 million available to borrow until the end of January 2026.

Revenue for the full year was $313.5 million, an increase of approximately 11% year-over-year.

The vast majority of the revenue growth was driven by $28 million increase in software revenue.

Our software revenue was 89% of total revenue, close to our long-term target of 90%.

Recurring revenue for the full year was $168 million, representing 54% of total revenue.

Gross margin for the year was 69.2%, up about 650 basis points year-over-year.

And full year gross profit grew twice as fast as revenue and was $217 million, an increase of 22% year-over-year.

The main driver for our gross profit improvement are the value our customers see in our innovative technology, our competitive differentiation and improved cost structure.

As Elad mentioned, we continued to win significant deals from both existing and new customers, reflecting the demand for and the value of our cutting edge investigative analytics solutions.

During fiscal '24, we won 29 new customers, an increase of 12 new customers compared to last year.

Let me now share with you how we perform against each of our major KPI.

Our short-term RPO continues to be strong.

The result of healthy demand for our solution and this we have won.

We ended the year with a short-term RPO of $302.5 million total RPO at the end of Q4 was $591.9 million.

As a reminder, RPO or remaining performance obligations represent contracted revenue that is expected to be recognized as revenue in future periods.

Q4 revenue grew by 17.6% year-over-year and was $83.7 million.

Our software revenue in Q4 grew by 14.9% year-over-year and was $73.8 million.

We were also able to improve our gross margin significantly.

Q4 gross margin was 69%, an improvement of more than 420 basis points year-over-year.

Our gross profit continued to grow meaningfully faster than revenue.

In Q4 gross profit was up 25% year-over-year.

We have been focused on executing our goals to improve our financial model further and drive margin expansion.

The combination of revenue growth, better margins and effective cost structure drove improved profitability.

During Q4, we delivered $4.3 million of adjusted EBITDA, bringing full year adjusted EBITDA to $9 million.

We have delivered positive adjusted EBITDA for each of the last three quarters, and we expect to continue delivering positive adjusted EBITDA going forward.

All the metrics I've discussed so far our SIS adjusted non-GAAP basis.

For fiscal '25, we expect full year revenue of approximately $340 million plus or minus 2%.

This represents approximately 8.5% year-over-year growth at the midpoint of the revenue range.

We believe that our strong short-term RPO of $302.5 million and the positive demand environment support this outlook.

We also believe that the seasonality of our revenue will be similar to previous years, we expect Q1 revenue to be slightly below the Q4 level we are reporting today and to increase sequentially each quarter throughout the year.

We believe that our outlook of top-line growth and continuing improvement in our gross margin.

We do have more than 10% year-over-year gross profit growth.

We expect the non-GAAP gross margin to improve year-over-year and to be about 70.5%, an improvement of 130 basis points year-over-year.

Gross margin may fluctuate between quarters based on our revenue mix.

For the full year, we expect our non-GAAP operating expenses to grow meaningfully slower than revenue and be approximately $233 million, an increase of about 5%.

Our quarterly OpEx may fluctuate slightly throughout the year.

Because of the leverage we have in our model, we expect adjusted EBITDA to be about $19 million more than doubled compared to last year.

We expect our cash taxes to be about $10 million and non-controlling minority interest to be about $5 million.

As a result, we expect annual EPS loss to come in at $0.13, the midpoint of the revenue range.

For share count, we assume about [$72 million] weighted average fully diluted shares in FY25.

Turning to cash flow in a typical year cash from operation is similar to adjusted EBITDA.

This year, we plan to generate about $34 million of cash from operation, significantly higher than expected adjusted EBITDA.

We have recently extended our lease agreement in our headquarter facility in Israel for an additional 10 years, we decided to renovate and change it to a more open work environment and reduce the amount of space we occupy.

The renovation is expected to drive an incremental CapEx investment of about $6 million and will result in future OpEx savings.

We also expect additional proceeds of about $5 million from the divestiture of SIS related to price adjustments.

For the full year, we expect a total CapEx net of SIS expected proceeds of approximately $12 million.

To summarize, we executed well during FY24 and produce strong results.

The market has stabilized and new and existing customers recognize our advanced solutions and the value they generate for them.

We continue to add capabilities and increase the value of our solution delivered to our customers, by leveraging the latest technologies, including AI.

As a result, we expect FY25 to be a year of continued growth, significant profitability improvement and strong cash flow from operations.

We believe we are well positioned for sustainable growth and have leverage in our model so we can generate additional improvement in profitability and cash flow in future years.

With that, I would like to turn the call over to the operator to open the line for questions.

Operator?

(Operator Instructions) Mike Cikos, Needham.

Great thank you, guys.

Thanks for taking the questions here.

I think the first question I wanted to ask you about was with respect to this past quarter -- over the year, actually, I know the company said that you landed 29 new customers, which is up 70% year-over-year, which is a great statistic.

Just trying to see are these new customers when they land or are they actually landing larger or has the initial land, remains relatively unchanged.

If I look at customers coming to Cognyte this year versus the customers who landed with Cognyte last year?

Yeah hi, Mike.

So yeah, it's a good number of new customers for the year, maybe I'll give you some more color it's variety of customer types it's coming from different areas, law enforcement, national security, and national intelligence, also geographic wise, it's spread globally.

So it's a good indication that demand across the world is a healthy.

Usually new customer starts small, and this is the case also now we had one large deal last year with a new customer of more than $20 million.

But the other deals, most of them are small and they actually grow over time.

And this is actually the land-and-expand strategy that we are following acquiring new customers, starting small with a they're a few use cases and relatively limited capacity.

And when they see the value they go with us, which expansions upgrades, more functionality and the wallet share is usually growing over the years and this is the case also here.

That's great to hear.

And if I could just build on that comment around the land-and-expand.

I know that you guys have the in your slide deck those three customers that you're citing two are existing customers who decided to renew or increased their spend with Cognyte.

I just think it might be helpful.

But let's say for that national security customer who signed over a $20 million deal.

Is there any way you could provide some additional color as far as what the deal size was before that we're seeing for the $10 million national intelligence deal you guys signed like for these customers expanding at a rate of, is it 3% a year or is it 5% a year?

Just trying to get a sense of mean how quickly they're expanding their usage of Cognyte over time when they come to renew with you?

Yes.

So maybe I'll give you some more color about each one of them.

And then I'll answer the quantification side because quantification side, it's quite difficult because it varies a lot between one customer to the other with one day to the other, but the first customer, actually faced new technology that came in their territory and created a more data that they need to address, which they didn't have the capabilities before.

And given that we have the solution and this customer is with us for many years, actually more than two decades, where they came to us and they actually upgrade their capabilities with the new solution.

And this happened, a lot of it is with this customer.

The second one is related to use case.

It's a border control solution for existing customers that we had before.

Actually, we sold already to this customer for a border control also.

But actually, they have a lot of border and different concerns and different challenges in different areas of the border, and they actually expand that with capability that they didn't have before for a different broader challenge.

And the last one is actually a result of reference of existing customer that worked with us was very happy and actually was a very strong reference for us to another organization in the same country.

About the quantification, it's very difficult to quantify because it might be that customers that very large lower like the other one that I mentioned earlier, $20 million plus new customer -- that can fit into the capacity and functionality for a few years and not upgrading or it could be small deals that can come and grow quickly.

So it really varies between one day to the other, which from one customer to the other.

And so statistics is not something that you would be helpful here.

And also, I believe that given that we have hundreds of customers in many countries and that we are able to actually engage with customers frequently and understand their current and future needs it help us a lot to be prepared and with the technology they need in order to upgrade and address the new challenges, which happened in one of the examples I gave earlier.

So land-and-expand is very important to us.

Great.

Thank you for that.

And then just one final question, if I could, but I'm just trying to get a better understanding.

I know that you guys gave some great color around cRPO exiting fiscal '24 on.

If I look at the fiscal '25 revenue guidance that we have, this outlook, it looks like there's a decent amount of incremental revenue you guys are looking to add in this coming year, in comparison to the cRPO growth.

And I just wanted to get a better understanding what's driving the confidence in driving that incremental dollars at Cognyte above and beyond the cRPO balance that we have today?

Actually, the coverage of the RPO, the short-term RPO for the year was similar to last year.

So it's not far from what it was before in terms of the coverage.

And this gives us high confidence that we can deliver on the outlook and also we have the confidence given that we have the mix of the deals in the RPO that we are going to see improved of profitability.

So the confidence level outlook is high.

If I could just push back on that for second.

But if we go back a year ago, you guys kind of had a cRPO balance of $281 million and then guided the full year to $300 million in revenue.

So you're talking about $20 million increase.

And I look at where we are today, we have $303 million or so in cRPO and then the guide of $340 million.

So the incremental dollars above and beyond the cRPO balance has gone up from $20 million to almost $40 million.

If I look at the guidance that we have today, and I'm just trying to get a better understanding of again that the doubling of the incremental dollars above the cRPO bounce.

Does that make sense?

But I just want to make sure I'm clear on that.

Yeah.

So if you look at the previous -- our current RPO of the $280 million versus the initial guidance of the $300 million that we would like in that period in a different environment from our perspective, during this year, we saw significant demand, and we saw that RPO is growing quarter over quarter, which first increase our confidence and second, allow us to increase the guidance of the year.

When you look at next year.

We are starting the year with $302.5 million of RPO, short-term RPO and guiding $340 million, which is from a coverage perspective it's the same percentage that you will see very similar percentage versus the $280 million and the [$313 million] that we actually guided.

The main difference that we have if you compare this year versus last year, is that over the last few quarter, we work closely with our customers and we know that our short-term RPO is very strong and allow us to predict in a good way where we're going to lead.

And actually, we are very pleased with the last from the last few quarters that were able also to overachieve quarter over quarter.

Is that address to your question?

No, it does.

I really do appreciate the incremental color from both you and Elad.

So thank you very much, and I'll turn it over to other analysts on the line.

Thank you.

Thanks, Mike.

(Operator Instructions) Shaul Eyal, TD Securities.

Hi, good afternoon, guys.

Congrats on the ongoing consistent outperformance.

My question is around AI, GenAI which has been the topic this year, in recent quarters Elad in your prepared remarks, you did mention latest AI developments as a driver for the market and the company.

Can you maybe double-click on this point, maybe provide us with some insights?

And how should we be thinking about GenAI impacting Cognyte near and long-term?

Thank you.

Sure hey Shaul.

So AI is becoming more important for customers over time.

And actually, it's a race, maybe it's important that we understand that the interest between our customers were trying to make the world safer and the bad guys are trying to hide better.

So if you look on the bad guys, they're using GenAI and the advanced technology to hide their identities.

I gave an example earlier in the call about GenAI and using fake entities and cryptocurrency that actually they used in order to anonymize and where they are.

And actually, this makes our customers' challenges much more complicated and difficult to address, as if you want to put your hands on the bad guys and investigate them, you need first to know who they are.

And this is one challenge that is growing over time.

On the other hand, our customers, they have more data coming in structured and unstructured from different sources and in order for them to be able to actually unhide uncover hidden insights they need more capabilities in the analytics in AI areas in order for them to be able in high probability to identify who is actually the identity behind something that happens.

So it's a race between those two and it's important to remind everyone that AI has been part of our solutions for quite a long time.

We view it as an integral part of our present and future product.

And it's important to note that actually, when we implement AI into our solution, we implemented into the process and the workflow of our customers.

So it's part of the overall investigation process.

It's not a standalone solution, but it's part of the workflow, our customers using, which is highly important and also some of our customers or most of our customers are government customers and they have unique environment, so we feed AI into the environment.

So we give them actually a holistic benefit of using our AI technology.

So we leverage AI to continually generate incremental value for customers.

And for this purpose, we have a dedicated AI research team that we established long ago and that's all the focus on to give more value out of the existing data sets that customers have in order to be able to unhide insights in a much quicker and accurate manner and view it as one of the demand drivers for the short and for the long term, it's something that is evolving over time.

Thank you for that appreciate it.

(Operator Instructions) Peter Levine, Evercore.

Great.

Thanks, guys.

For taking my questions.

Maybe just one follow-up to that AI question.

Given the privacy of your customers, the governments you work with, are there any restrictions in terms of maybe the data -- the data [pools] that you can pull from.

Just curious how you guys navigate that given the secrecy of some of your customers?

So I want to remind you that we do not provide managed services to our customers and data customers have used their own data.

It's not data that we deliver to them.

So given that your government customers and the regulated customers in their countries.

It's their responsibility to put their hands on the data that they are allowed to and do the investigation process themselves without our interference.

So we are not exposed to customers data.

(technical difficulty)

Yes, please.

And then maybe if you think about the guidance, let me help us what's baked in there, obviously, 17 net new customers in fiscal '25.

What are the assumptions for -- fiscal '25? -- I'm sorry, 17 for fiscal '24.

And then we think about fiscal '25, what are your assumptions, meaning is it more of an upsell motion you still need to?

Are you assuming that you're going to be heading, call it net new customer growth north of 17 versus what you saw -- for '24.

So just give us an idea of kind of the assumptions behind the guidance and what that entails?

Yes.

So I understand you clearly you ask about this in the directions of the guidance.

So if you look at the guidance, the guidance is built primarily on the existing RPO, so we are not relying much on new customers for the for the guidance.

But if you look at existing and new customers, we do have investments in order to accelerate growth over time, including acquiring new customers.

One example is the US market that we are focusing on actually most of the customers that will occur.

There will be new customers I mentioned earlier in the call that we focus on state and local first and started recently with the federal.

So we do expect new customers to lend for us and also as I mentioned earlier, about the land-and-expand strategy, and we expect those customers to stay with us for quite a long time and continue and buy from us again and again.

Actually I can tell you that I was in the US in January this year, meeting customers and I can tell you that we already have follow-on order from customer after the meeting.

And I actually one customer that already put a second deal with us.

So it's important for us to continue and win new customers, and we're focused on that.

It's primarily in the US.

And if you think about the expansion into the US, is that direct that through partners help us understand the investments that you're making today to expand further into US?

Thank you.

Sure.

So for this, we started with the state and local.

We started direct and actually we have a sales team, a local sales team with everything you need including them on POC capabilities and marketing efforts and participate in relevant conferences and the investment, given that it's a penetration mode, the investment in sales efforts in the US is disproportional to the current business level.

As a federal, we are using established the partner who has the relevant clearance and market access and know-how and relationships with relevant federal customers.

So state and local is primarily direct and federal is primarily by an established partner that we have.

Great thank you for the color.

Sure thanks, Peter.

(Operator Instructions) Mike Cikos, Needham.

Hey not a follow-up question here, more of a comment, just to make sure everyone was clear at least based on what I heard and management that you guys a lot.

And David, just sanity check the numbers I have on my side because I know Peter had referenced 17 incremental new customers.

Just for perspective, the numbers I have on overall digesting this in real time, you added 29 new customers in fiscal '24, which is up from 12 in fiscal '23.

And so there's a 70% year-on-year increase from 12 to 29 from fiscal '23 to fiscal '24.

Is that correct?

It is from 17 to 29.

So 12 --

12

more, which is up 70%.

Got it thank you for clarifying.

I appreciate that.

Sure, no problem.

Thank you.

There are no further questions at this time.

I turn the call back Dean Ridlon for any closing remarks.

Thank you, Michelle, and thank you, everyone, for joining us on today's call.

We will be attending several conferences in May and hope to speak with some of you then should you have any questions in the meantime, please feel free to reach out to me, and we look forward to speaking with you again next quarter.

Thank you.

Thank you for your participation.

And this does conclude the program.

You may now disconnect, everyone have a great day.