Cellebrite DI - Earnings Call - Q3 2025

Transcript

Speaker 0

Welcome to the Celebrite Third Quarter twenty twenty five Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen only mode and the floor will be open for your questions following the presentation. You would like to ask a question at that time, please press star one on your telephone keypad. If at any point your question has been answered, you may remove yourself from the queue by pressing 2. So others can hear your questions clearly, we ask that you pick up your handset for best sound quality.

Lastly, if you should require operator assistance, please press 0. I would now like to turn the call over to your first speaker today, Mr. Andrew Kramer. Mr. Kramer, the floor is yours.

Speaker 1

Thank you so much, operator. Welcome, everybody, to Celebrite's third quarter twenty twenty five financial results call. I'm joined today by Tom Hogan, Celebrite's CEO David Barter, Celebrite's CFO and Marcus Jewell, our CRO. This call is being recorded, and a replay of the recording will be made available on our website shortly after the call, along with a copy of our prepared remarks. Please note, a copy of today's press release and financial statements, including GAAP to non GAAP reconciliations, is available on the Investor Relations website at investors.celebrite.com.

In addition to the press release, we posted a separate investor presentation that provides an overview of our business and our recent financial performance. I'd like to also remind everybody that the slides in your webcast viewer is a placeholder only. There are no actual slides to accompany our prepared remarks. We also publish supplemental historical financial information for each 2025 and for the past two years on our Investor Relations website. Additionally, unless stated otherwise, our discussions of the third quarter twenty twenty five financial metrics as well as the financial metrics provided in our outlook will be done on a non GAAP basis only, and all historical comparisons are with the 2024.

In addition, I'd like to remind you that today's discussion will contain forward looking statements, including, but not limited to, the company's business operations and financial performance. All forward looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause matters expressed or implied by those forward looking statements not to occur. They could also cause the actual results to differ materially from historical results and or from forecast. Some of these forward looking statements are discussed under the heading Risk Factors and elsewhere in the company's annual report on Form 20 F filed with the SEC on 03/18/2025. The company does not undertake to update any forward looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances.

And with that being said, I'll now turn the call over to Tom. Thanks, Andy, and thanks to all of you for joining us this afternoon. I'll be a bit briefer this quarter than I was last quarter, but I want to start by thanking the many of you that reached out with kindness and support after our last quarter's call. I'm pleased to share that not only do I remain cancer free, I presume my mountaineering passion and climbed a significant peak last month. The doctors tell me that I should plan to die of a heart attack in my late 80s, which I guess is a good thing, but gives me lots of runway to help propel this important company.

So let's go. First, I'm proud of the job the team at Celebrite delivered in the third quarter. Our results were both solid and balanced. ARR grew 19% for the twelve month period. Subscription revenue grew 21%, led by strong performance in our U.

S. State And Local segment and our Latin America region. Adjusted EBITDA exceeded expectations, growing 20% year on year with margin expansion of 60 basis points. We continue to tune our business to optimize top line growth, while driving increased scale and operating efficiency to deliver meaningful levels of profitability and a very healthy free cash flow. Good companies grow, good companies expand margins, great companies do both, which is exactly what we did.

We were also pleased with our third quarter performance in The U. S. Federal segment. As we foreshadowed in our last call, we do not expect a full return to normalized growth until calendar twenty twenty six, but we did deliver year to year growth in the quarter, which included the expansion of several marquee clients and confirmation of our view that growth in this sector will resume as budgets are fully distributed. I think it's fair to say the flywheel in U.

S. Federal has begun to move. I want to highlight some important metrics and milestones that contributed to the quarter and position Celebrite for continued growth and leadership. First, we finished Q3 with approximately 47% of our installed digital forensics license base converted to our insights offering. As a refresh for everyone, we set a target at 2025 of 50% conversions from a 2024 baseline of 20%.

Our year to date progress clearly positions us to meet or exceed that target. And importantly, it's a strong proxy for the value of the industry's most complete suite of digital forensics. Second, we continue to see more customers turn to Celebrite's cloud and SaaS offerings to efficiently and securely manage their digital forensics and investigative workflows. ARR for our SaaS and cloud based solutions grew three times faster than total ARR. Guardian is rapidly emerging as the industry standard for the storage and collaboration of sensitive evidential artifacts.

The number of Celebrite customers using Guardian more than doubled year over year, while ARR grew triple digits at 100% plus for the fifth consecutive quarter. And this is all before we launch Guardian Investigate in the first quarter of next year. Third, our strategic focus on the global defense and intelligence sector is starting to pay dividends. In the third quarter, we continued to expand our business in the D and I sector as multiple global intelligence and military agencies increased their Celebrite investment to support high priority use cases across anti terrorism, border control, and overall military responsiveness and readiness. In particular, I'd highlight our D and I expansion in Europe over the past several quarters as an early proof point validating our intensified go to market focus.

As we look ahead, we're centered on four core growth vectors. First, we're focused on asserting our leadership and breadth in providing unlock and access solutions across the wide range of OEM phone providers and operating systems. Our unlocked offerings are now attached to more than 45% of the Insights and legacy forensics installed base, reflecting healthy quarterly expansion and sustained demand for this critical capability. Last quarter, we highlighted our clear leadership on Android phones. We extended that leadership this quarter with the addition of industry first capabilities and even broader coverage across the Android universe.

As we finished 2025, we are equally excited about our leadership opportunity in iOS with pending and added enhancements. We believe the choice will be clear for any customer looking for unlock strength across multiple platforms, combined with industry leading capabilities for extraction, decryption and decoding. Second, we are accelerating innovation in AI and digital investigations with the upcoming launch of Guardian Investigate. This new SaaS AI powered solution is designed to transform the entire investigation lifecycle, enabling investigative teams to build stronger case narratives, collaborate seamlessly in a secure, unified workspace and drive AI enabled insights and analytics and workflow across a diverse set of data sources, including smartphones, computers, call detail records, open source intelligence and case files. Guardian Investigate will launch in early twenty twenty six, and we couldn't be more excited.

Guardian Investigate is the logical extension of our twenty year history of leadership and forensics. We are well positioned to empower hundreds of thousands of investigators, detectives, analysts, and prosecutors in their mission of prevention, exoneration, and prosecution. Third, we expect a resurgence of growth in calendar twenty twenty six across The U. S. Federal sector.

After navigating spending headwinds and leadership changes throughout the first half, this segment returned to growth in the third quarter. We remain cautious on the federal fourth quarter given normal government seasonality combined with the shutdown the past six weeks, but we view both as transitory and believe the strategic spending we enjoyed in our third quarter are harbingers of a strong rebound in 2026. Our conviction in this segment is grounded in three areas. First, the release of targeted funding combined with pent up 2025 demand should elevate investments in our Unlock and InSight solutions. Second, achieving FedRAMP authorization to operate with DOJ sponsorship in early twenty twenty six should unlock a large opportunity for us to leverage our Guardian offerings across U.

S. Federal agencies. And third, assuming Keryllium is closed by year end, this asset has tremendous product fit across The U. S. Federal space.

Our final growth vector is the pending close of Keryllium, which we believe will expand both our TAM and our value proposition, particularly across global defense and intelligence agencies and the private sector. Keryllium's ARM based virtualization software is already enabling some of the world's most sophisticated D and I agencies to harden their cyber defenses by more efficiently and effectively identifying vulnerabilities across a broad range of digital devices. What has us super excited is the consistent surfacing of new and powerful use cases across both the private and the public sector. We're addressing CFIUS requirements real time and expect to complete our purchase of Keryllium later this quarter. And as a reminder, our current results and guidance do not contemplate Keryllium results or performance.

As we step back and consider the big picture, the macros remain strong. Crime and geopolitical risk is not going away, unfortunately. The application and sophistication of technology in the pursuit of crime grows weekly, and budgets for labor to protect public safety remain constrained at best. The deployment of advanced technologies like Celebrite remain the best path to make our nations, our communities and our businesses safer. We're focused on sprinting through the tape over the next six weeks, but we couldn't be more enthusiastic about 2026 with the confluence of the release of several new value generating assets between the fourth quarter of this year and the 2026.

We'll reserve 2026 guidance for our February call and plan to remain prudent when it comes to setting expectations. Nevertheless, our confidence in the reacceleration of our top line growth in 2026 builds every week, along with our commitment to continued stewardship with respect to spending, margins and free cash flow. That ongoing discipline not only delivered a third quarter beat on the bottom line, but also triggered a raise on our full year 2025 adjusted EBITDA target. Dave will talk more about this in just a minute. Finally, I want to sincerely thank the roughly twelve fifty strong Celebrite operatives, which are our people, and our customers who place huge trust in us every day.

It's an honor and a privilege to serve all of you. I was excited about the prospects and the mission of this company when I joined as Executive Chairman in 2023. I can tell you with absolute conviction, I am more enthused about our future today than when I joined two point five years ago. I believe the best is yet to come as we continue to innovate internally and tap much further and deeper into the enormous power and potential of AI, complemented by disciplined and targeted acquisitions and strategic partnerships. We're confident the combination of strong execution with a growing and mission critical TAM will drive material value creation for our customers, our employees and our shareholders.

With that, I'll turn it over

Speaker 2

to Dave. Thank you, Tom. I'd like to briefly share highlights from the third quarter. ARR grew 19% to $440,000,000 Sequentially, ARR increased 5%, which is a healthy improvement from our sequential ARR growth rates in Q1 and Q2. The year over year increase reflects increased spending customers.

The Americas represented 55% of total ARR, while EMEA represented 33% and Asia Pacific represented 12%. In terms of growth rates by geography, The Americas grew 21% with our U. S. State and local government and Latin America teams leading the way. Turning to revenue, we generated third quarter revenue of $126,000,000 which increased 18% from the prior year due to primarily subscription revenue growth of 21%.

Approximately 89% of total revenue was associated with our subscription based software solutions. Our gross profit increased to $106,500,000 which represents a gross margin of 84.5%. This reflects ongoing investment in our cloud infrastructure as we continue to roll out Guardian and invest in the federal ATO process. Third quarter adjusted EBITDA of $37,700,000 increased 20% over the prior year and the margin expanded to 29.9%. Our third quarter operating leverage reflects thoughtful capital allocation across our organization, including disciplined hiring activity in the quarter.

We ended the third quarter with twelve thirty six employees. We reported third quarter net income of $36,900,000 or zero one four dollars on a fully diluted basis. Overall, our weighted average diluted shares outstanding increased by a little more than 1% from the second quarter levels. We continue to thoughtfully manage our equity incentive programs in ways that we believe will be minimally dilutive on a go forward basis. Turning to the balance sheet.

We ended September with $595,000,000 of cash, cash equivalents and investments. Free cash flow for the third quarter was $30,000,000 For the trailing twelve months, free cash flow was $140,000,000 or 31% on a margin basis compared with $102,000,000 or 27% margin in the prior twelve month period. Let's shift gears and take a look at our expectations for Q4 and the full year, which to be clear, do not include any contribution associated with Keryllium acquisition, which is not yet closed. We anticipate our fourth quarter ARR will grow sequentially in the mid single digits. We've left our full year outlook unchanged with a range of $460,000,000 to $475,000,000 This reflects the traditional seasonality of our business in the second half of any year, given the volume of expiring agreements, the overall strength of our pipeline and the uncertain timing of the near term spending by U.

S. Federal agencies. We expect fourth quarter revenue in the range of 123,000,000 to $128,000,000 We expect our Q4 adjusted EBITDA in the range of $35,000,000 to $38,000,000 or approximately 28,000,000 to 30,000,000 on a margin basis. Looking to our full year results, we've increased the midpoint of our revenue outlook and now anticipate 2025 revenue in the range of $470,000,000 to $475,000,000 which represents growth of 17% to 18%. We have increased our full year 2025 adjusted EBITDA range and now expect January to $127,000,000 or approximately 26% to 27% on a margin basis.

And finally, I'd like to reiterate our view that 2025 will be an excellent year for free cash flow. Given the strong cash flow from operations year to date and relatively minimal capital intensity, we expect the company's free cash flow margin will be approximately 30%. Before we move to Q and A, I wanted to share some perspective on our 2026 planning. As Tom noted, we have multiple growth vectors. We're also mindful of the challenges we experienced this year in regard to the timing and magnitude of spending in The U.

S. Federal customer segment. Thus, the initial 2026 outlook we will share in February will be prudent with a foundation grounded in the historic seasonality of our business, our RPO, our contractual backlog up for renewal, the expansion opportunity on those renewals and the near term opportunities to expand with existing customers on multiyear contracts. We will also apply the same methodology that delivered a high level of forecast accuracy last quarter. It's important to note we have multiple ways to grow free cash flow by approximately 20% with 2% dilution.

This will allow us to be very thoughtful in terms of how we set our initial outlook. We are optimistic that we will be able to increase our outlook over the subsequent quarters as our team executes and captures the market opportunity in front of us. Let's take a quick look at the primary growth drivers across our platform that can serve as a foundation for an initial baseline target for healthy ARR growth. First, winning new logos and increasing price or mix on existing operators is expected to generate several percentage points of growth. Second, we see solid expansion ahead for insights as we move into the home stretch for upgrades, drive broader adoption by extending our reach into new user groups, and upsell advanced unlock solutions and automation offerings.

We believe these dynamics should support growth of at least high single digits on a percentage basis in 2026. Our third growth driver involves Guardian and Pathfinder, the cornerstones of our digital investigation and analytics offerings. We anticipate healthy Guardian demand within our existing core markets, expansion into The U. S. Federal sector, Australia and other select international markets, and sales of Guardian into the enterprise.

In addition, we see further new business expansion combined with stronger renewal rate for Pathfinder. Success on these fronts is expected to contribute mid single digit percentage points of ARR growth. In addition, we are excited about the growth prospects for selling Keryllium solutions into our customer base across defense, intelligence and enterprise verticals. Beyond the initial ARR gained from Keryllium once the transaction closes, we anticipate an incremental contribution of at least a couple percentage points to our ARR growth rate. And finally, we remain optimistic about the steps we're taking to drive improved retention rates by minimizing churn as we evolve our pricing and packaging centered on AI and cloud capabilities and attractive multi year terms.

In terms of 2026 revenue growth, we believe our revenue growth rate will slightly trail our ARR growth rate. This reflects the continued growth of our cloud based solutions and assumptions for relatively flat nonrecurring hardware and professional services revenue. In terms of revenue seasonality, we have historically generated approximately 55% of our revenue in the second half of the year. From a profitability perspective, we plan to thoughtfully allocate capital to support Celebrite's ongoing expansion in 2026 and beyond. As a reminder, our EBITDA margin is lower in Q1 and steps up over the course of the year.

We also expect our AI investments across go to market, product and the G and A functions will lead to new levels of automation and scale and yielding moderate headcount expansion. This will produce operating leverage to drive incremental improvement in our adjusted EBITDA margin and enabling us to maintain a 30% or greater free cash flow margin. In terms of our guidance philosophy going forward, we plan to set our 2026 outlook using tighter ranges supported by bottoms up forecasting, while continually assessing the full year targets based on the most recent quarter's results and near term visibility. We're excited about our prospects to drive durable and profitable growth and strong free cash flow next year. Finally, since joining Celebrite, I've been very fortunate to spend a good deal of time with current and prospective shareholders.

A frequent topic in recent engagements relates to the overhang associated with the Sun Corporation, our largest shareholder who owns 40% of the company's shares. I've had an opportunity to spend time with some members of Sun's management as well as some of their investors. Overall, I view these relationships as very positive. With that said, we are increasingly optimistic about opportunities that could emerge over the coming quarters and years for Sun to reduce its stake in an organized, structured and thoughtful way that we believe will deliver value for shareholders of both Sun and Celebrite. I'd like to close by reiterating our view that Celebrite remains well positioned to deliver another year of healthy growth, strong profitability and excellent free cash flow with a minimal amount of dilution to shareholders.

Our team is focused on closing out the year on a strong note, while also putting the plans in place that we believe will enable us to expand customer relationships and increase shareholder value in 2026. Operator, that concludes our prepared remarks. We're ready for Q and A.

Speaker 0

The floor is now open for questions. Our Our first question comes from Jeff Van Rhee with Craig Hallum. Line is open. Please go ahead.

Speaker 3

Great. Thanks, guys. Congrats on a good quarter and thank you for the color on the outlook. Two or

Speaker 1

three quick ones here, if I could.

Speaker 3

Just Tom, in terms of the path forward to cloud adoption over time as a percent of ARR, are there any internal goals or any thoughts you can give us on how you see that percentage of ARR that's going to be cloud evolving over the next, say, two, three years?

Speaker 1

Hey, Jeff. It's Dave.

Speaker 2

How are doing? Thanks for the question. We're continuing to work with our customers as they make their transition. We actually have customers that are 100% cloud. We have many that are in the hybrid stage, and then we certainly still have some making the transition.

Right now, we just have a very proactive bent of working with our customers. Many of our products, as you know, are already in the cloud and everything new that we're doing is in the cloud. And so from that standpoint, it's just an ongoing partnership as we support them and keep pressing forward with adoption.

Speaker 3

Yes. And on Karelium, you called it out as one of the three or four key growth drivers. I know you signed that new reseller relationship. Just any color in terms of what you saw, both things you were able to get across the finish line and maybe more so what's building in the pipeline there?

Speaker 4

Yes, sure. Hi, it's Marcus. Yes, look, we've got good initial momentum. We now have a significant pipeline, which we built like an 8 figure pipeline. And that is spread equally across the cohorts that we said, which would be defense intelligence and into the Global 2,000.

To date, we have processed two orders. And Q4, we expect to transact some more.

Speaker 1

Yes. Actually, Jeff, to underscore color, this is Tom. I keep reminding people this business was roughly a $15,000,000 ARR, Carilion's core business. And I don't in the law, of numbers shouldn't be lost on people that the pipe we already see, as Marcus mentioned, is double digit millions of achievable pipe. And so that's before we've even closed the transaction.

Again, we just keep building more enthusiasm. I also referenced, we've uncovered use cases that we didn't necessarily anticipate or plan nine to twelve months ago when we started this conversation with Keryllium. And the and I guess the positive is the contra was there a modest contribution from reseller in the quarter? Yes. But it it's you could argue it's almost immaterial.

So we didn't hit these numbers on the back end of Keryllium back you know, backdoor reseller stuff. So it was largely, you know, a core Celebrite production. But the active and real sort of TAM and pipeline is very encouraging.

Speaker 3

Yes. Got it. Then just lastly, as it relates to the 2026 plan, thanks for the insights on those four primary growth drivers. Sort of just looking at the swag of the range that you gave there, of looks like roughly 20% -ish ARR. But just curious if you'd be willing to provide any balance around that or any expanded insights just in terms of what you think about growth prospects for next year?

Thanks.

Speaker 1

Yes. I know it's tempting to answer that, Jeff, and we'd love to help you out and throw you a number and a bow. We just we really want to reserve that until we close the year and put a bow around the opportunity. But what we are doing, which I think is atypical at this stage, at least historically for us, is we are sort of going public with a level of confidence that you will see an whatever the growth is this year, we do have confidence that, that growth rate will accelerate in 2026. We're just not prepared today to put a number on it.

That's what you'll get in February. But growth is going up. And that's against, by the way, it also gets overlooked, the law of big numbers, the denominator in the baseline has gone up this year. So we're going to accelerate our growth against a bigger baseline. But that's all we really are ready to share at this point.

Speaker 0

Our next question comes from Brian Essex with JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Speaker 5

Hi, good afternoon. Thank you for taking the question and congrats for me as well on the solid results. Maybe to follow-up to Jeff's question to start and then I have a follow-up. On Keryllium, Tom, I think you noted that you're addressing CFIUS issues in real time. How significant are those issues?

And are there any contingency plans for, a case where you might hit a roadblock there in terms of maybe tucking that into the Sellerite Federal business? Just wondering what that process looks like and what the risk is to close at this point?

Speaker 1

Yes. Nothing is 100%, so I can't write a check that I can't cash on that front. But I would tell you, if you put a gun to my head, I'd say it's 98% odds that we'll get this done. And I think that will similar odds that we'll get it done this quarter. We're in the final stages.

I will say there was more inspection than we anticipated, combined with all the chaos in government and the shutdown didn't help some of the case managers and people involved and just coordinating input across DOJ and DOD and all the people that care was a little bit tougher given what's been happening the last six weeks. Other positive, if you're a full person, is if this stuff wasn't powerful and if it wasn't relevant to these agencies, they wouldn't care so much about making sure the IP was protected. So the bad news is they ran us through the ringer a little bit more than we expected, but it's because this stuff really does matter to agencies that you care about that keep us safe. But we're I hate using sports metaphors, but we're on the one yard line, and we have high confidence that we'll push it over the line here in the next four to six weeks.

Speaker 5

Got it. That's super helpful. And then maybe just a follow-up on Celebrite Federal. Any sense of what the contribution was there in the quarter and progress there with regard to like building that out to better penetrate the federal vertical? I understand that shutdown is a headwind, but would love a little bit of color around where the efforts are focused there and how they're positioned as you kind

Speaker 6

of like head into fiscal 'twenty six?

Speaker 1

Yes. The good news is just to I know it's a lot of babble when we go through these scripts. But the first half was tough. We sort of held the line. It certainly didn't deliver the growth that we had historically, which is what which was the headwind for our full year.

The good news is we got back in growth mode in Q3 and even better. It wasn't just growth. We nailed a couple of very strategic clients. And I'll let Marcus add some color because I think it's fair to use those wins as sort of a proxy for product fit and momentum and trust in The U. S.

Federal space. But Marcus, why don't

Speaker 4

you add some color? Yes, sure. So it was actually a very strong quarter for Federal. The team executed particularly well. I'll draw attention to a couple of deals, and you guys know these are all in the public domain.

You don't have to search too hard to find the names, but I won't do them an injustice and talk about them specifically, but I'll talk about a large agency, which does our protection services, placed in excess of an $11,000,000 order with us, which was a big expansion on previous years, including some new products. And we're very confident that, that was also a share taking opportunity for us. And then another agency following up, is very well known in the market and protects a lot of us, we have our largest expansion year with them that we've ever had. So between 3035% expansion on the base and then investigating new products. And interestingly, taking us for the first time into the cloud.

So we talked about this cloud journey. We're now seeing federal customers, be a lot more aggressive in the in the movement to the cloud, which bodes exceptionally well for our ATO process with FedRAMP, where we'll be, taking advantage with the the only cloud enabled solution high in the market in the forensic segment. So good execution and we feel a lot more to come.

Speaker 1

Other Ryan, the other thing I would add before somebody asks is we've talked I think we talked in the last call about a very large client that we expected to renew in the '6, and we expected that renewal rate to go up significantly. The numbers and performance in U. S. Fed in the third quarter did not include any of that. So that is still in the hopper and still something that we expect to win and close in the 2026, which is material.

Speaker 0

Our next question comes from Tomer Zilberman with Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Speaker 7

Hey, guys. Wanted to ask about federal and your thoughts around the performance this quarter. Mostly wanting to ask, how do you differentiate the growth this quarter from potential budget flush as it was the fiscal year end versus maybe the more secular underlying recovery that you're talking about? And then I have a follow-up.

Speaker 4

Yeah. I mean, budget flush is a thing, but I mean, remember, we're on the mission side. So the products that we have, have to be used. So we're not selling licenses for word processors. So we don't really unfortunately see budget flush because we're mission critical and we're program driven.

So I would like to think it's down to solid execution and a good product market fit has driven all of our gains in that sector. We didn't really see because of the shutdowns or slowdowns, the normal what we call U verse, which I'm sure you're familiar with the unidentified funding requests. They were not a part of it. They were just solid execution into three or four of our key clients.

Speaker 7

Got it. Got it. As a follow-up for Dave, I appreciate your commentary around your discussions with Suncor. It's been an ongoing conversation the last few years. Just wanted to ask, as you speak with the other side, have you gauged any sense of urgency in terms of where that goes?

Or do you foresee this being a long term kind of trend?

Speaker 2

I don't see urgency. Think going back to my prepared remarks, I see them being very organized, structured, thoughtful. Obviously, Sun Corporation owned 100%. It's come down over 55%. And so I think it is you'll find them, I guess, measured and thoughtful and rational.

And I think that's what we're hoping to communicate to everybody. Yeah. Mean, obviously, that's stuff

Speaker 1

that we don't have full control or, you could argue, even limited control over. But the devil's in the details of your question when you say long term, is your expectation, the question around a sell down over five years or over five months? I think to Dave's point, you know, they've been pecking away for years. Our guess is they'll continue to peck away. And and I don't since I don't have control or insight to specifics, but I I would expect to see.

My guess is you'll see some more sell down over the more the near future than, say, a five year horizon.

Speaker 0

Our next question comes from Louis De Palma with William Blair. Please go ahead.

Speaker 7

Tom, David, Marcus and Andrew, congrats on the EBITDA guidance raise.

Speaker 1

Thank you.

Speaker 7

Should investors view the positioning of Guardian Investigate relative to Pathfinder? And are you still working on a SaaS version of Pathfinder?

Speaker 1

Great question. It's really a good question because it's really important to our value prop and our strategy as we go forward. Pathfinder will persist. Think of Pathfinder as a either on prem or VPC based analytic engine that is optimized for, you know, processing correlations and analytics and insights when you have multiple phones and the data sources we control. Now fast forward to Guardian Investigate, which is an evolution from a lot of capability around the examiner and forensics into the world of the detective and the investigator to provide very not only robust case management capability, but also the ingestion and the ability to drive work streams and collaboration across a broad range of different data sources, some of which we control and we create, and some of which are created by other vendors in ecosystem, and then complement that Guardian Investigate with a cloud based that's contrasted with Pathfinder as a VPC product, a cloud based, very intensely AI enabled analytic engine that can now prosecute and interrogate all the data that we surface that sits in Guardian Investigate and the data that we're able to pull in and combine with to drive what we think would be the most insightful analytic engine in the world of investigations.

Speaker 4

Yeah. And I can I'll follow on from Tom there and add that the simple way to think about it is Pathfinder is from extractions of multiple phones into hundreds, whereas when you look and investigate that as a multiple data source. So you actually need the horsepower and the number of our customers answering the question on cloud or on prem, the nature of what they do with multiple phone extractions in the hundreds or dozens or even thousands, they need that on prem power and they want to be off the cloud to do it. So there is going to be two variants. One is going to be cloud based and one is going to be on prem.

And the two actually need to work with each other and that they are not duplicative and replace or replace each other at all.

Speaker 7

That that makes sense. So there likely will be customers that subscribe to both Pathfinder and Guardian Investigate. Right?

Speaker 4

A 100%. I mean, Investigate is actually one of the industry's first forays into multi data source. For instance, being able to ingest CDR records with and then reference those to the cell phone is very powerful. And so that will be a functionality that would be pervasive within Investigate and would be additive to the deep work that we do in the cell phone extraction on Path Finder. They're completely competitive.

Speaker 0

Our next question comes from Bhavan Shah with Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Speaker 8

Great. Congrats from me as well and thanks for taking my questions.

Speaker 1

I guess, first, just maybe a little

Speaker 8

bit on the defense and intelligence kind of vertical. Can you just talk about the pipeline there? And how maybe how the go to market strategy and the sales cycles for this vertical compared to your core kind of buyers buying centers?

Speaker 4

Yes. So great question. Obviously, defense and intelligence has been strong for a number of years in The U. S. The U.

S. In previous regimes was kind of policing the world in a number of areas. What we've now seen is some threats coming in from all over the world, particularly in Eastern Europe, as you know. We're seeing the NATO spend increase to the 2% commitment, and that is driving warfare is now not only across all of my regions. We have a new single leader that we'll be appointing for DNI to actually drive that strategy forward.

And we're very happy with where we are and where we're being brought into it. Our accreditations in that space are second to none. The fact that we have ATO and heading to FedRAMP High puts us at a completely different level to the competition. We have a number of people that are ex. I won't say what they're ex, but let's say they did things in the military which kept us safe and they are very well connected and we are exceptionally grateful to the customers giving us a shot there and we're very excited about the potential that we have on a global basis.

Speaker 8

That's very helpful there. And maybe just as a follow-up for David. You talked about the EBITDA strength. And in your prepared remarks, you kind of noted disciplined hiring. How much of that maybe lower than expected hiring is a function of volatility in the federal business versus kind of efficiencies you might be getting from Gen AI or other areas?

And then as you talk about targeting accelerating ARR growth next year, how does hiring play a role there?

Speaker 1

That's a great question.

Speaker 2

Now, I think we are the disciplined hiring, I think, from a capital allocation, really, we think about what's going into product. So you heard about Investigate, you've heard about just the other AI initiatives that are going across all products, and those are prioritized, and that's what we're going after. We have a very detailed go to market model with markets that we run. And so I'd say our I think we have our hiring model. I think we have our AI initiatives that are driving efficiency across our business.

And I guess that is the disciplined framework that we use to guide how we're doing. And so I think we have a long term orientation around our business around how to capture and fulfill our long range model, and that kind of works its way back into our hiring decisions.

Speaker 1

Yes. And I would add that our ramp of headcount growth has been on a steady decline for the last three years because of improved efficiencies and much of which is AI enabled, that will continue in 2026. And I would tell you that of the modest growth, roughly half of it is going into our go to market organization so that Marcus can respond to interest levels and opportunities across, you know, both the public and private sector around the world. So but but it's a it's a it's a healthy story.

Speaker 4

Yeah. We're able to express in sales an increasing quota carrier ratios to to the back back office functionality that you see in the in the go to market line. So we're we're always increasing that ratio of of actual people to deal with customers away from back office, and we see that there have to continue for a sustainable amount of time.

Speaker 0

Our next question comes from Shaul Eyal with TD Cowen.

Speaker 7

Congrats on the strong set of results and outperformance. My question is on the competitive landscape. So Celebrite operates in a market being characterized by high barriers of entry. What can you tell us on the current competitive landscape? And are you seeing have you seen any newcomers into new adjacencies in the current market?

Thank you.

Speaker 1

Yes, I'll take that one. First, to get to the end of your question, there's no to your point about barriers to entry, that's a very real observation. And as a result, we would not be able to call out or point to any significant there's always start ups and pop ups in every industry, but there's no material new entrants from a competitive perspective. So we continue to see the same people. We have good competition.

We respect our competitors. They're good companies. But I got to tell you, we sort of like our hand and how we stack up right now. And as some of the things I alluded to sort of hit the shores over the next ninety days, our view is that our competitive positioning is going to increase very quickly. So same competitors, good companies, but like where we sit.

Speaker 4

Yes, I'll add. We feel very comfortable. Again, we have some strong competitors. We respect them a lot. But as I said, I think with Tom, we agree we have a winning hand here.

I would say that what we do have is ability to manage and control the workflows and the data puts us in prime position. There are a number of AI entrants. If anyone went to IACP, you would see them. But for me, they open up not only potentially partnership and M and A opportunities for us, but again, we back our own AI ability to understand. It's a difficult industry to break into from just customer intimacy and also from understanding the sensitivity to data.

It's not it's very hard to trust people that are coming in with a new AI algorithm written in Vibe code that he thinks is going take it apart. That's not what our customer base is going to do. And so we're comfortable with our

Speaker 1

position to expand it. Yeah. And that's a double pile on. But given the sensitivity of what we do, who we help, and what their mission is, they have the brand and the track record and the proven capability of the limited vendors in this space are a big deal. This isn't some back office trivial thing that people are willing to take flyers on.

It's important to them that they deal with people they have dealt with for twenty years that have delivered, that are focused and committed to the space and that they trust.

Speaker 4

It's hard to outsell when it's called the Celebrite report, when they go to court, when they say, I've celebrated a phone. That's very hard to undo. That's become in the mindset of our customers over a number of years.

Speaker 0

Our next question comes from Mike Fekos with Needham. Go ahead.

Speaker 6

Great. Thanks for taking the questions here guys. I'll echo my congratulations on the strong results, the reiterated ARR guidance and the confidence that you guys are imputing as far as that top line reacceleration for next year. Congrats on that. I just wanted to unpack a couple of items here, but great to see that U.

S. Federal returned to this growth dynamic. I don't want to be dismissive. I believe you guys called it out a couple of times in the prepared remarks, but the strength that you saw out of U. S, state and local as well as Latin America.

Can you kind of unpack that a bit more as far as what you saw from those two segments, the durability of that growth from where we stand here and maybe potentially size up what the contribution was if we're trying to staff rank drivers of outperformance? Sorry, I know a lot to unpack, but again, it was a solid quarter for execution, and I just wanted to highlight that.

Speaker 4

Yes. Sure, great question. And my SLG leader will be she'll be very thankful that you're giving us some props because they continue to execute consistently to a certain extent it's a gift that keeps giving. So what are the drivers? The crime type in The US continues to be digitally driven.

So what I mean by that is there are a number of cases and investigations that require the unpacking of phones. Most agencies we sell to still have a backlog of cases and a backlog of phones, and that means that our driver is not limited by that. Now unfortunately, that's crime, but that is what we see. There is no end in sight. We also saw, even through the shutdown, grant budgets were available.

So the government was actually working hard to get the grants out because these grants matter, because they know that a number of people rely on them to meet their objectives in case reduction and solving crime. So that was the driver there. And there's no end in sight. We're very comfortable with our competitive position there. I've got a good team.

And Nicole and team continue to execute exceptionally well. So thank you to her and Zach for what they do. Is great. I mean, LATAM is an example of, again, high crime units, very well connected at a national level, a solid team which works, very well with partners and sells the end to end solution. So if you looked at the perfect way to execute, then my goal as a CRO is to get everyone to be in the same boat as LATAM with our end to end solutions.

They truly believe in the C2C and deliver the C2C, the case of closure and execute incredibly well. We are also very well collected politically with a number of senior sellers that have been in that region for a number of years, which is actually very hard to compete against. So two great teams and thank you for reflecting that, but we don't see their growth rate slowing.

Speaker 0

Our next question comes from Eric Martinuzzi with Lake Street. Please go ahead.

Speaker 9

My question has to do with the use of cash. You finished the quarter real strong. The cash balance is close to $600,000,000 Now I know you've got a check to write when Keryllium closes, that's $170,000,000 but still, we'll leave you with a substantial balance here. Just curious to know your priorities as far as internally focused, maybe more M and A, what's the use of cash post Keryllium?

Speaker 1

I'll let Dave take a first pass at this and then I might jump in and add color. But Dave, why don't

Speaker 2

you take it? But let me maybe just round out one data point. So Keryllium, you're right, that will be a significant piece of cash when that closes, which we're so incredibly excited about, but that's $150,000,000 not $170,000,000 And so I think when we look at it, again, looking forward to getting them on board. Obviously, we'll continue to invest. And so you're right, over, call it, two quarters of the normal OpEx cash that we would keep, so call it 150,000,000 to $160,000,000 We are maintaining a little bit of surplus cash.

We do look at this as a pretty interesting opportunity, both in terms of companies like Carilion that are rapidly scaling. We also see some other adjacencies. And so I think we're going to continue maintain some flexibility so that we can continue to grow the business.

Speaker 0

Our next question comes from Jonathan Ho with William Blair. Please go ahead.

Speaker 7

Hi. Let me echo my congratulations as well. You know, with your insights conversions ahead of schedule, you know, what does that mean for you from a future ARR and upsell perspective, particularly if these customers fully utilize the suite and maybe start to renew?

Speaker 4

Yes, it's a great question. I mean, it means that we are expanding our cross sell opportunity. The important thing for Insights, Insights was the first position to allow us to get to our case to closure, which then means storing and then analyzing and workflow in the data. So most of our customers wanted to get the initial work done to get onto a much more modernized extraction and review technology, which they now have. So we now see the expansion potential going across into our Guardian platform and our Pathfinder platform.

But it does also open up in the DNI, and this is why DNI is such a key part for us, where insights is fully not fully tapped. And we do see with our triage functionality, working in the field in different use cases, a TAM expansion for insights into the D and I on a global basis. So we've got a nice vector to continue. We're not through the base yet. We still got work to do in 2026 and then we'll be moving in.

And we already have thoughts about our next version of insights clearly, which is going to be moving decoding into a different format to enable our customers to do even more, even quicker and increase their productivity again. So insights is the end. It's part of the journey, and there will be a ton of insights coming along at some point.

Speaker 1

Yeah. The other thing I would add to that, it's not very sexy, but unit growth. I mean, those macros I talked about, almost any agency you go talk to today, they've got huge case backlogs. And crime, unfortunately for all of us, as I said, it isn't going away. And the use of digital was in the 90% range.

It's eventually going to be pushing 100. And so there's unit growth opportunity even where we've migrated people to insights. You have pricing power, you have unit growth, plus all the cross sell, plus the acquisitions, plus, plus, plus. There and that all fuels and contributes to the optimism, I think, you're hearing about our opportunity to maintain our growth and to accelerate it actually into 2026.

Speaker 4

There's also one thing if I could pile in on this. We're breaking the link between the number of operators and the number of licenses. I mean, there was an operator could only extract so many phones. Our automation and workflow tools allow that process to be automated. And so the actual number of licenses per user can increase pretty dramatically and start eating into those backlogs as we get into

Speaker 1

'twenty six. Yeah. And I know we're at the end here, the other thing that creates an opportunity that we don't talk a lot about is the cloud and storage economics around Guardian is we collect more and more petabytes of information, assuming that we thoughtfully price and package that offering, that becomes another ramp of growth, of profitable growth for the company that did not exist a few years ago.

Speaker 0

This concludes the Q and A portion of today's call. I would now like to turn the floor over to Andrew Kramer for additional or closing remarks.

Speaker 1

Thank you very much, Angela, and thank you very much to our analysts and our shareholders, prospective shareholders for their participation today. If you do have questions, feel free to reach out to Investor Relations. There are a number of virtual and in person engagements that we have scheduled over the coming weeks, and we look forward to speaking with you at that time. Thank you very much.

Speaker 0

Thank you. This concludes today's Celebrite third quarter twenty twenty five financial results conference call. Please disconnect your line at this time, and have a wonderful day.