Cognyte Software Ltd. (NASDAQ:CGNT) Q3 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

These capabilities provide significant value to our customers. With increasingly sophisticated capabilities of bad actors, together with the challenge of constantly evolving technology and data overload, the ability to make smarter and timely data-driven decisions that become even more critical and complicated. Traditional analytical tools tend to simply summarize trends or provide insights that are sometimes insufficient and limit the ability to take actions. With more powerful analytics solutions are deployed. These tools are often only available to a limited group of data scientists or technical experts. Our solutions address those challenges by rapidly uncovering and delivering critical insights and making those insights accessible to technical and non-technical experts, including analysts, investigators and decision makers.

It also empowers personnel to ask questions, challenge ideas and make use of data-driven insights rather than relying on historical trends or gut instincts in making key decisions. We continue to leverage the latest AI developments for commercially available models and our own AI research lab to further enhance our solutions’ ability to deliver impactful results to our customers. We believe our ability to continue and embed the latest innovations together with our domain expertise in investigative analytics will further enhance the value we provide to our customers and our differentiation. Turning to our outlook for this fiscal year. Given our performance during Q3 and current visibility, we are raising our revenue guidance for the year to $311 million, plus or minus 1%, representing approximately 10% year-over-year growth at midpoint on an SCS adjusted non-GAAP basis.

With revenue expected to grow by about 10%, we now expect gross profit to grow faster at more than 20% year-over-year on an SCS adjusted non-GAAP basis. We now expect adjusted EBITDA for the year to be about $8 million. Looking beyond this year, we believe that the combination of positive industry trends, our innovative technology and our large global customer base position us well for growth and improving profitability. To summarize, our customers continue to face significant and growing challenges across many use cases and look to us for solutions that help them accelerate investigations, make decisions faster through decision intelligence and mitigate a variety of threats. Our customers’ U.S. domain experts and a trusted partner and frequently tell us that our solutions significantly improved the results enabling them to effectively perform their missions and make the world safer.

Our established long-term relationship with customers continue to be a significant asset for us. We are pleased with our third quarter results and our return to profitability and our raising guidance for the current year. Looking beyond this year, we expect continuing revenue growth and further improvement in profitability. Now let me turn the call over to David to provide more details about our Q3 results and outlook. David?

David Abadi: Thank you, Elad, and hello, everyone. Our discussion today will include non-GAAP financial measures. The conciliation between our GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures is available, as Dean mentioned, in our earnings release and in the Investors section of our website. Our website also include a financial dashboard with a tab that detail our historical results, excluding the divested Situation Intelligence solutions. We are very pleased with the continuing improvement in our performance over the last few quarters. In Q3, revenue, gross margin, operating income and adjusted EBITDA came in ahead of our expectations. We continue to win significant deals from both existing and new customers, reflecting the demand for our cutting-edge investigative analytics solutions.

Q3 revenue grew both sequentially and year-over-year, coming in at $79.4 million, up $2.3 million from Q2 and $17.9 million from Q3 last year. Gross profit grew faster than revenue and was up 4.5% sequentially and 48.4% year-over-year. Q3 gross margin was 70.2%, up 910 basis points from Q3 last year, primarily due to the increase in software revenue. We are pleased with our software gross margin of 78.9%. Our gross margin reflects our competitive differentiation and ability to continuously create value for our customers. Our Q3 non-GAAP operating expense were $54.5 million similar to the level in previous quarter. Our Q3 non-GAAP operating income was $1.2 million and adjusted EBITDA was $4.6 million. In the first nine months of the year, our overall revenue grew by $18 million, representing 8.5% year-over-year growth, and our software revenue grew by $19 million representing 10.1% year-over-year growth.