Life360 - Earnings Call - H2 2024
February 27, 2025
Transcript
Speaker 3
The meeting.
Operator (participant)
All participants will be in a listen-only mode until the question-and-answer session. When we come to the Q&A, please raise your hand by pressing the raise hand icon at the bottom center of your screen, and your line will be unmuted in turn. Participants who have joined by telephone will be in a listen-only mode throughout. As a reminder, we will make forward-looking statements regarding future events and potential financial performance during this call, which are subject to material risks and uncertainties that can cause actual results to differ materially from such statements. A summary of these risks may be found in the risk factors section in our Form 10-K filing with the SEC dated February 27, 2025.
These forward-looking statements are based on assumptions that we believe to be reasonable as of today's date, February 27, 2025, and we have no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events except when required by law. Additionally, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures on today's call. These non-GAAP measures are not intended to be considered in isolation from a substitute for, or superior to our GAAP results, and should be read in conjunction with the company's consolidated financial statements prepared in accordance with GAAP. A description of these non-GAAP financial measures, as well as a reconciliation to the nearest GAAP financial measures, are included at the end of the company's earnings media release issued earlier today, which has been posted on the investor relations page of the company's website.
We have posted an updated investor presentation to the investor relations page, which includes additional complimentary graphics and data. Please note that it has been provided as an additional reference and that we will not be using the presentation as an exhibit during today's call. We will begin with a business update by Co-founder and CEO Chris Hulls, and then CFO Russell Burke will provide detail on the Q4 and 2024 financials. Chris will then provide some 2025 outlook comments, which will be followed by a Q&A session. We request that participants limit themselves to one question so that we can get through as many participants as possible. I would like to now turn the call over to Chris.
Chris Hulls (Co-Founder and CEO)
Good afternoon to everyone joining us from the U.S., and good morning to those tuning in from Australia. Thank you for being here for our fourth quarter call results. Let's begin with our most recent results. Life360 made remarkable strides in Q4 2024, capping off the year with our best-ever holiday period and achieving record-breaking annual results in both monthly active users and paying circles, all while advancing our overall strategy to be a super app for families. Though we did experience an expected seasonal slowdown in user growth coming out of a very strong Q3, our solid Q4 results underscore our focus on key growth priorities across the board. Our member base expanded again this year, growing by 2.8 million new MAUs to reach a total of 79.6 million, a 30% year-over-year increase.
We also saw solid growth in our paid offerings as our paying circles grew 25% year-over-year to 2.3 million, with a quarterly net increase of 69,000 paying circles. International expansion was a key driver, with international MAUs up 46% year-over-year and paying circles increasing by 33%, even amid price adjustments for legacy subscribers outside of our core triple-tier markets. Average revenue per paying circle in international markets grew by 42% year-over-year, thanks to updates in our legacy premium pricing strategy, which have allowed us to accelerate experimentation with our new dual-tier approach. 2024 was a transformative year for Life360. Highlights included the successful launch of our advertising business, the introduction of a cutting-edge lineup of power devices, an award-winning brand campaign, a key strategic partnership and investment in Hubble, and the milestone completion of our U.S. IPO to become publicly traded on the NASDAQ.
We also achieved record net additions to our MAUs and subscribers on an annual basis. As we enter 2025, we are laser-focused on achieving our longer-term strategic goals, reaching 150 million MAU, surpassing $1 billion in annual revenue, and exceeding a 35% Adjusted EBITDA margin. To achieve these goals, our priorities are to grow our user base, scale our paid offerings, create new revenue streams, and enhance profitability. In 2025, we remain committed to providing our members with enduring value, helping them stay connected to the people, pets, and things they love. The vast majority of our users come through word of mouth or referrals, and we remain under-penetrated in the U.S. and lightly penetrated in international markets. Even in our most mature U.S. regions, we continue to experience strong growth, highlighting the significant potential for further expansion.
Our freemium model remains central to our strategy, offering free members the opportunity to experience Life360 and ultimately recognize the unmatched peace of mind provided by freemium features. This year, we will continue to elevate the Life360 experience by improving location accuracy and speed. While introducing new premium features tailored to specific needs, such as those of pet owners, these enhancements will drive increased user engagement and satisfaction, creating opportunities for organic virality and referrals. To amplify this, we will strategically invest in marketing to build stronger brand affinity and accelerate conversions from free to paid memberships. Internationally, we are significantly under-penetrated and see vast opportunities for growth. In 2025, we will execute optimized full-funnel marketing campaigns in triple-tier markets to boost brand awareness and drive MAU growth.
Additionally, we plan to expand the availability of emergency dispatch services, triggered by the SOS and car crash detection, to more countries, unlocking new regions for triple-tier and increasing the value of our offerings on a global scale. In Q3 2024, we launched our redesigned Tile device lineup, the first fully designed in-house by Life360. This lineup differentiates us with innovative features like SOS capabilities, a function unmatched by other devices across Google and Apple networks. During Q4 2024, Tile received widespread acclaim as a top holiday gift and an essential luggage tracker during busy travel periods, which drove noticeable year-over-year growth in direct-to-consumer sales. Tile is becoming a valuable gateway to our Life360 subscription business. The percentage of U.S. premium subscribers actively linking Tile to their accounts continued to rise in Q4 2024.
In 2025, we'll complete the integration of Tile into the Life360 app, making it the exclusive activation platform for all new Tile devices, an exciting step towards streamlining the user experience and further strengthening our ecosystem. Looking ahead, with the Tile integration nearing completion, we are shifting our focus to expanding our GPS hardware lineup designed to make life easier and safer for families. We plan to finalize the development of a pet tracking device and go to market by late 2025, followed by an advanced elder care product. These high-growth verticals will drive subscription models during the next wave of subscription growth. By delivering purpose-driven hardware that spans multiple life stages, we aim to help families stay connected to what matters most. In Q4 2024, we advance our advertising platform, setting the stage for significant growth in 2025.
Our goal is to deliver contextually relevant ads that enhance the member experience while offering advertisers unmatched precision powered by our proprietary first-party location data. Key Q4 milestones include activating global programmatic capabilities, expanding audience segmentation tools, and advancing ad measurement and attribution. The Life360 ad platform now offers brands unparalleled access to our engaged audience of families. Through custom partnerships, such as our collaboration with Uber, we can create tailored campaigns including feature sponsorships, push notifications, and co-marketing campaigns. For those seeking scale, self-managed solutions provide programmatic access to in-app native inventory and curated private marketplace deals, leveraging thousands of targetable audience segments. These capabilities empower advertisers to connect with the right audiences through major DSPs and media platforms. This quarter, we quadrupled our engagement pipeline of prospective partners eager to leverage our unique first-party location data.
These partners see value in integrating high-visibility signals, such as shopping behaviors at retail locations, with promotions that drive on-site purchases and loyalty participation. While realizing our full advertising vision will take time, early results reinforce our confidence that advertising could eventually rival subscriptions as a major revenue stream. And we are thrilled to announce the purchase of Fantech's advertising unit, an AI platform that empowers smarter advertising through cutting-edge machine learning and privacy-first technology. We are excited to welcome their talented small team to Life360 and look forward to leveraging their expertise to accelerate our advertising capabilities, driving the execution of our 2025 roadmap. Our data business also grew in Q4, supported by our exclusive partnership with Placer.ai, which positions us for accelerated growth in 2025 and beyond. Additionally, our strategic investment in Hubble secures exclusive access to a promising future enterprise revenue stream.
Once Hubble's satellite network scales, it will enhance the location capabilities of our hardware devices. Together, these partnerships highlight our ability to expand both our data business and technology offerings as we drive growth and innovation at Life360. With that, I'll hand it over to Russell to review the financials and discuss our strategic priority of increasing profitability.
Russell Burke (CFO)
Thanks, Chris, and thanks everyone for joining the call today. As a reminder, the Q4 financials I will be referencing are unaudited and denominated in U.S. dollars. We are very excited to be presenting record-breaking Q4 and full-year results today. Q4 revenue increased 33% year-on-year to $115.5 million, a sharp acceleration from the prior quarter, driven by positive momentum in subscription and other revenue. Overall, subscription revenue increased 32% year-on-year and accelerated from the prior quarter. Core Life360 subscription, which excludes hardware subscriptions, increased 36% year-on-year, driven by the 25% increase in global paying circles and 6% higher ARPPC. Total paying circles growth was supported by improved conversion and retention in the U.S. Hardware revenue for the quarter increased 13% year-on-year to $23.8 million. Standalone units shipped increased 8% year-on-year, and the average selling price increased by 9%, resulting in improved margins in the quarter.
While the new Tile devices have been well received, the key U.S. Cyber Monday retail period results were mixed. Consumer direct and online sales were strong during the holiday period, while performance in physical retail stores was softer and consistent with performance observed for consumer electronics in online and brick-and-mortar retailers in the fourth quarter. Other revenue in Q4 increased 113% to $13.0 million due to the combination of increases in data and partnership revenue, which includes advertising revenue. December annualized monthly revenue reached $367.6 million and increased 34% year-on-year, accelerating from the 30% growth in September, reflecting the strong performance of subscription and other recurring revenue. Q4 gross profit of $85.5 million increased 42% year-on-year, with gross margins higher at 74% compared with 69% in the prior year due to the increase in the mix of higher margin other revenue.
As total revenue grew 33% and gross profit increased 42% year-on-year, Q4 operating expenses increased only 22%, excluding commissions, demonstrating continued operating leverage. R&D costs increased 14% year-on-year, primarily driven by higher personnel-related costs, technology, and outside services spend. Sales and marketing costs increased 31% year-on-year, primarily due to higher commissions, which increased in line with the 32% increase in subscription revenue. Paid acquisition costs were flat year-on-year due to an intentional shift of allocation of spend to other marketing activity in creative and production, supporting our brand campaigns and holiday sales of the Tile hardware product line. General and administrative expenses in Q4 increased 29% year-on-year, primarily driven by company growth. We continue to make considerable progress in expanding profitability. First, we recorded positive net income in Q4 of $8.5 million versus a $3.1 million net loss for the prior year.
Next, adjusted EBITDA was positive for the ninth consecutive quarter, increasing to $21.2 million in Q4 2024 from $8.9 million in the prior year. And positive EBITDA of $8.4 million improved from negative $2.0 million in the prior year as a result of continued strong subscription revenue growth and improved operating leverage. The difference between adjusted EBITDA and EBITDA in the quarter consisted of stock-based compensation expense and final U.S. IPO transaction costs. We expect to see this expansion of bottom-line margins continue in 2025, as you'll see from the guidance that Chris will discuss shortly. Looking briefly at the full-year results for 2024, total revenue increased 22% year-on-year to $371.5 million. Gross profit increased 25% year-on-year to $279 million, and gross margins were 75%, two percentage points higher than 2023.
Total operating expenses grew 14% year-on-year, while decreasing 6 percentage points as a percentage of revenue, driving outperformance against our guidance ranges. Net loss for the year was $4.6 million, a significant improvement of $23.6 million from the $28.2 million loss in 2023. Adjusted EBITDA increased $24.9 million year-on-year to reach $45.5 million and exceeded our outlook range. Adjusted EBITDA as a percentage of sales increased from 7% in 2023 to 12% in 2024. Finally, EBITDA loss improved $17.1 million year-over-year from negative $20.8 million in 2023 to a negative $3.8 million in 2024 and also exceeded our outlook range. One note for everyone, in 2025, we will transition to sharing only adjusted EBITDA in our outlook and results and in our strategic goals in order to create consistency and alignment across our dual-listing environments.
The EBITDA metric that we've been providing can be manually calculated by excluding stock-based compensation from adjusted EBITDA using figures we will disclose in our reconciliations to net income. Looking ahead, we are confident in our ability to grow positive adjusted EBITDA throughout 2025 as we continue balancing robust revenue growth with expanding profitability. Turning now to the balance sheet and cash flow, Life360 ended 2024 with cash, cash equivalents, and restricted cash of $160.5 million, a slight increase from Q3. Operating cash flow was positive for the seventh consecutive quarter. Q4 net cash provided by operating activities of $12.3 million was lower than adjusted EBITDA of $21.2 million, primarily due to an increase in working capital balances driven by increased activity. Net cash used in investing activities of $6.8 million related to the $5 million investment in Hubble and payments for internally developed software.
Net cash used in financing activities of $5.2 million related primarily to taxes paid for the net settlement of RSUs and final IPO transaction costs. Thanks for your attention, and I'll hand back to Chris to discuss further details on our earnings guidance.
Chris Hulls (Co-Founder and CEO)
As we enter 2025, the opportunities before us remain vast and full of potential as we drive to become the number one brand that makes everyday family life better. Our team is focused on creating value for our members and increasing our impact in their lives. Much of our focus for 2025 will be on fully integrating our hardware experiences and extending the peace of mind we offer to the pets and our families. We'll continue to drive growth into international markets, both doubling down in existing markets and expanding into new markets, particularly in Europe. Meanwhile, we continue to gain momentum and increase our investment in advertising, aided by the purchase of Fantech's ads business unit.
The small team joining us from Fantech brings a wealth of AI expertise that will help us accelerate our vision for targeting, measuring, and delivering unique and high-performing ad formats at scale, all leveraging Life360's unique first-party data. As we nurture multiple new product lines, including pets and ads, we expect an increase in seasonality, and we plan to make significant upfront investments that will strengthen our growth in subsequent years. This effect is particularly pronounced in pet tracking, where hardware sales will function as an acquisition vehicle for our subscription product. As Tile becomes a more core part of the Life360 experience, we are continuing to lean into hardware as a key part of our subscription ecosystem and will trade off hardware revenue for increased adoption.
With that, let's turn to our 2025 outlook, which includes the following: consolidated revenue of $450 million-$480 million, subscription revenue of $350 million-$360 million, hardware revenue of $45 million-$55 million, other revenue, which includes partnerships and advertising, of $55 million-$65 million, and positive adjusted EBITDA of $65 million-$75 million, inclusive of an initial $8 million investment in the 2025 launch of our pet tracking initiative. We anticipate adjusted EBITDA will be weighted towards the back half of 2025 as we shift forward some sales and marketing expenses to earlier in the year in order to leverage the efficiency we achieved in 2024 and to support global growth initiatives. That concludes our prepared remarks, and I'll now turn the call over to RJ, who will manage the question-and-answer portion of our call today.
Raymond Jones (Head of Investor Relations)
Thanks, Chris. As a reminder to everyone to participate in the Q&A, please raise your hand by pressing the raise hand icon at the bottom of your screen within the Zoom app. You will need to unmute yourself to ask your question. So for our first analyst, we're looking at Apoorv from UBS. Are you there?
Apoorv Sehgal (Equity Research Analyst)
I'm here, RJ. Can you hear me?
Raymond Jones (Head of Investor Relations)
Absolutely.
Apoorv Sehgal (Equity Research Analyst)
Good evening, guys. Thanks for taking the time, so my, I guess, one question. Just on the 2025 EBITDA guidance at the midpoint, it implies about a 15% EBITDA margin. Now, even if we add back the $8 million of pet device investment, you're looking at about a 17% EBITDA margin at the midpoint. And I guess if I just compare that to the fourth quarter of 2024, you've done about an 18% very strong margin there. Now, I appreciate there's probably some seasonality benefit in your fourth quarter margins, but just maybe step me through why calendar year 2025 margins wouldn't expand slightly from that Q4 run rate of 18-odd%. Is it a function of marketing investment, new people hires, or perhaps you're just being a bit conservative? Just keen to hear your thoughts there.
Chris Hulls (Co-Founder and CEO)
Rob, do you want to take that one?
Russell Burke (CFO)
Sure. No problem. It's a combination of factors. We are definitely investing more in marketing in 2025, and that's partly related to the sort of expansion of international, partly related to pet tracking, and partly related to just the efficiencies that we've seen in 2024 and a real sort of bring forward in our payback period so we can confidently invest more. And that will be sort of in the first half of the period. So between that and looking at investment in pet tracking really ahead of substantial sales in 2026 is probably the main reason for that. But we don't expect that this will change our overall path that we've talked about in terms of our EBITDA goals.
Apoorv Sehgal (Equity Research Analyst)
Okay. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.
Raymond Jones (Head of Investor Relations)
Great. With our next question, we'd like to open it up to Wei Sim from Jefferies. Wei, you there?
Wei Sim (Senior Analyst)
Yeah, I'm here. Thanks, Chris, Russell, and RJ. Yeah, Wei from Jefferies, congratulations on a great result and a strong outlook. So my one question is, you may know we did a proprietary survey of over 1,000 U.S. consumers in January, which generated many interesting insights into Life360. One of them, which was really on the material upside from pet tracking into the service addressable market expansion and the upside opportunities for monetization. So this is an area which I'm very excited about. I'd like to get a bit more color as to outside of the investment, when we think this might be launching and the kind of monetization which we could expect into calendar year 2026. Thanks.
Chris Hulls (Co-Founder and CEO)
Sure. Let me recap just the big vision, and then we can talk about launch and rollout. So as we have long shared, our entire strategy is predicated on building a huge free user base, bringing in your family, people you care about, building that trust. And once we have that, then we can layer on different services, pet tracking being an obvious one. And we're so excited about it because essentially half of our customers have a dog. And if you think about dogs, you don't love them quite as much as your kids, but sometimes pretty darn close. And if you look at the life cycle of a dog, they're around 12 years. And even after your kids leave home, you're often getting a new one. So we're so excited that by having this additional feature, we can get people into the premium tiers.
It's going to be best in the market. There are going to be a bunch of things that leverage Life360 that others can't do, like a pet finding network, and unlike people on the market now, our cost for existing customers will be zero, so we will be able to have what I think will be the best device in the market at the lowest cost, and it will directly drive subscription revenue, and going back to some of the numbers, we are leaning into hardware more and more. It's not to sell devices. It's to drive subscriptions and drive membership. If you look at timing, we have a bit of a longer staggered rollout because there are some software features, but the main launch will start very much towards the end of the year. Our stretch is the holiday season, but you will definitely see pet features this year.
Just right around the end of that year timeframe, the device will be on the market. In coming quarters, we're going to share a little bit more about what exactly it'll do and how it will differentiate from everything else in the market today.
Wei Sim (Senior Analyst)
Great. That's perfect. Thank you so much for that, Chris.
Chris Hulls (Co-Founder and CEO)
You're welcome.
Raymond Jones (Head of Investor Relations)
So for next, we'd like to open up the call to either David or Mark from Evercore.
Hey, guys. Can you hear me?
Yes. Loud and clear.
Hey, this is David on for Mark. I wanted to ask a little bit about your tariff exposure on the hardware side. Can you maybe talk a little bit about how much of your COGS are from China and any exposure to other countries at risk of tariffs? And then on the pet seasonality, can you just talk a little bit more about pet tracking seasonality? Is that greater seasonality during the summer months? Thank you.
Chris Hulls (Co-Founder and CEO)
Why don't I take the first half of that, and then Russell can answer tariffs. So seasonality, we're not entirely sure yet. It is a new product lineup. I have a hunch there will be some level of this being a gifting-type product, particularly within families. So I would imagine that does mean we're a little more holiday-oriented, probably not nearly pronounced as the Bluetooth devices because they're more stocking stuff or presents. But we'll have to roll it out to find out. And then in tariffs, Russell can answer that, but as just a reminder, we're all about driving people to the subscription. So it's going to be less material for us than companies really relying on the hardware to drive the underlying margin because it is all about getting people into those membership tiers. But roughly.
Russell Burke (CFO)
What I'd say, David, just sort of very specifically is that we have built in an assumed increase in tariffs into the plan. We, like most other hardware manufacturers, are looking at the logistics at the moment. We do have a limited amount of exposure to China, but it's relatively easily moved. So we're continuing to look at that. We feel that the cost that we've got built into the plan at this point should be okay.
Great. Thank you.
Raymond Jones (Head of Investor Relations)
Next, we'd like to open up the call to James Bales from Morgan Stanley, if you're on. James, can you unmute? You there? James, it looks like we're going to have to. Oh, there you are. You've unmuted.
James Bales (Analyst)
Okay. Can you hear me okay?
Raymond Jones (Head of Investor Relations)
Yes.
James Bales (Analyst)
Okay. Perfect. So I'd just like to ask a follow-up on the pet tracking side. So you've had the experience with Tile and Jiobit, not optimizing for sales, but for customer acquisition. Can you sort of help us understand how the difference that that's made with engagement for people who've taken that offer up in terms of conversion to paid, retention, or other ways that it's creating value? And then secondly, I had a question on the other revenue outlook. There was an incremental $3.7 million in other in the fourth quarter. How much of that is ads? And is the uplift in guidance versus that fourth quarter run rate, how much of that is due to advertising versus some of the other data-led products that you're scaling into 2025?
Chris Hulls (Co-Founder and CEO)
I'll take the first half of the question, and Russell can take the second. On the first half, how has Tile and Jiobit impacted things, in particular around engagement and conversion retention? First, one clarifying thing. Jiobit, after we did that acquisition, we had the market downturn, and we did make the extremely frustrating move to largely put that on ice until the market came back. In many respects, the pet tracking device we're launching now is the true launch of Jiobit, what we wanted to do significantly earlier. There was a more frustrating period of time where we had just done those acquisitions, and then early 2022 happened. When we look at Tile, though, it's very hard as of now to say X behavior is related to Tile, Y is related to other improvements because we've been out of the testing phase for a while.
But I will remind everyone that when we did the testing phase, when we did the generic promo paired with the generic promo that said, "Upgrade and get a free Tile," we had something like a 30% uplift and significantly improved retention over time. But now Tile is part and parcel with everything else. It's very hard to have a holdout group when everything else has been changing. But clearly, we've been hitting record net adds, and Tile is a big part of that. So I'm very confident that if it weren't for Tile, we would not be nearly as far along as we are on the core subscription business. So it has felt very vindicating. And even from a qualitative standpoint, if you look at where we are now versus even three years ago or two years ago in terms of attitudes to location devices, they are becoming ubiquitous.
Raymond Jones (Head of Investor Relations)
So the fact that we are the only company other than Apple and Samsung, the only cross-platform company that has this offer, has the hardware, makes it really, really, really hard for others to compete with us. So I'm feeling extremely good about it. In terms of looking at behavior, one thing that is, again, hard to quantify the impact on this, but we are getting a pretty significant number of our premium subs linking tiles. We don't disclose the number because, A, we've been told it needs to be audited and that's happened soon. All tiles are going to get activated through Life360, so there would not be an apples-to-apples benchmark very soon anyway. But we just see it in the reviews. We see how people use it.
We just see the reaction from customers, just the magic of seeing your family with their keys and people put them on dogs. It's a lightweight version that validates us that the GPS tracker would do well, and you can just tell that it does really round out Life360 and makes us look so much more of a platform than an app, and a lot of what we're trying to do as we become this super app for families is helping our customers understand that, yes, we're not just this app, we are something more akin to a platform, and we are a very natural conduit for other goods and services, so that's part of what's driving that optimism is that we can see it, and we do have those early results that showed that the bundling is extremely powerful.
As you can see, we've been performing extremely well, even better than internal expectations in net sub ads.
Russell Burke (CFO)
James, in terms of the second part of your question, the incremental revenue in sort of other revenue in Q4 was really largely advertising-driven. I'd have to say that we were sort of very happy with the way that progressed in the quarter. It was very much along the lines of what we expected. Then looking at the 2025 guidance, it's essentially a similar story. While we do expect good growth in sort of data revenue, the majority of the growth in other revenue will be driven by advertising as we see that really sort of ramp up over the course of the year. Generally, it's very much following the sort of roadmap that we expected. That includes the sort of addition of data science and AI capabilities through the Fantech's acquisition that we made today.
Perfect. Approach that, Colin.
Raymond Jones (Head of Investor Relations)
All right. Great. Next, I'd like to open it up to Andrew Boone with JMP if you're available. Andrew, can you unmute?
Hi, guys. It's Matt on for Andrew. Thanks for taking my questions. My first one is just on the U.S. MAU growth. It's been very consistent in 2024. How should we just think about the persistence of growth in 2025? And then can you just give us an update on international triple-tier launches in 2025? What's the timing there? And any color just on the dual-tier and what you're seeing there as well? Thank you so much.
Chris Hulls (Co-Founder and CEO)
So if you take the U.S. numbers first, it's very hard to know when we slow down. I always tell people I'm a very optimistic, aggressive founder. And also, I think I've built a reputation, I hope, with you all of being very reasonable, not drinking your own Kool-Aid. So to start with a crazy founder vision, why can't we have 90% penetration in the U.S.? Everyone has a family. It doesn't always have to be having teenage kids. I have an aging parent right now who I really need the elder care product for. Lots of people use Life360 when they have boyfriends and girlfriends. I've been a little bit stunned how even college women in particular are making circles for their friends to stay safe on dates. So our TAM is arguably everybody. Is it likely that we get to 90% penetration? Probably not.
But if you told me 10 years ago we'd have states with over 25% penetration, I would have had to pinch myself about possibly dreaming as well. So what we instead try to say is, let's just look at the numbers. And because so much of our growth is organic, which is obviously an extremely high-class problem, we really have to go based on trends. And if you look at trends, we can take our most penetrated states, and they're still growing just as quickly, if not faster, than our least penetrated states. If our least penetrated states were to catch up to our most penetrated states and we didn't have continued growth in the most penetrated ones, which we don't have, we would be doubling MAU already. And those trends are continuing.
The things I am looking for to say that we have hit a saturation point because we will at some point. I don't know when, and that would be a change in strategy, and it will be a fine one because we've really been growing the base versus trying to harvest the base. But we have our big back-to-school bump. At some point, that probably fades, and that probably says something about penetration. We usually have a big spike after Christmas. That's more of a one-off, but it does show when people get new phones, is Life360 one of those things they immediately turn to and install? And then I would just look at what's happening in general on trends on a region-by-region level and try to see where we're starting to tap out.
But the great news for us is that we haven't seen that really in any region yet, and we are now seeing international regions follow a similar curve. And there's possible reason to believe that in areas like Europe, we might even do better than the US because cross-platform is such a bigger differentiator there. And counterintuitively, historically, we've done better in iOS-heavy regions, and I think that's because Apple helped make location sharing not creepy, which it once was.
While it might take a little bit longer to get going in Europe, given the majority of people are on Android phones and Google's really pulled away from most of the initiatives in this space, maybe we do get everyone because there has not been a region where people have said, "Wow, this just doesn't work for Germans or Swedes or whoever." It seems like we are hitting this very, very universal value prop that resonates with everyone, so I think we have a long, long way to go, and we'll be very open about what these trends look like. To your question of dual-tier and triple-tier and when we're doing different rollouts in different regions, we're taking a more iterative approach this year. When things are vision-oriented or product-oriented, that's when I work very closely with the team, and it's less about the immediate data.
It's more about where we believe the world's going to go. But when we're looking at something that really is more around optimizing scarce resources, the team does a very good job of deciding what that right next lever to pull is. So under internal management meetings, we, of course, challenge, and we push on different assumptions. But we are taking a more quarter-by-quarter approach around, do we launch a new triple-tier region, which is obviously a lot more work? Do we optimize more in dual-tier? What we've seen with dual-tier to your question, and just for everyone's benefit, dual-tier is just a very lightweight version. It doesn't have things like the tow truck dispatch, which just takes a lot more integration work and just infrastructure.
It's just letting us move more quickly to start monetizing under-monetized countries, and then we can get paid acquisition going, which is a very new muscle for us outside of the U.S. So we're working on the plans for the back half of the year now. Over the next few months, it's a very dual-tier optimization-focused set of quarters. But we'll know more probably in Q1 earnings. Definitely Q2 earnings, we'll be able to share a little bit more specifics in terms of what the next few steps of the roadmap look like because we'll have had some data from some of these dual-tier regions.
Russell Burke (CFO)
And just to add to that, Chris, I think the successful launch of dual-tier last year has sort of given us a lot of information where we can take this sort of more nuanced, more sophisticated approach that Chris referred to. And that means that ultimately there'll probably be a greater level of customization on a territory-by-territory basis, but in a way that gives us higher scalability. So as we move forward, the lines between triple-tier and dual-tier might be a little grayer. But we've seen great success in international. We expect a lot of expansion in international in 2025, and that's what will drive this.
Very helpful. Thank you so much.
Raymond Jones (Head of Investor Relations)
All right. We'd like to open it up to Laf at MST. If you can unmute.
Lafitani Sotiriou (Research Analyst)
Hey, guys. I appreciate the opportunity to ask a question. May I sort of follow up on the advertising revenue and partnership specifically? So late last year, we heard about Uber and Airbnb. Can you just talk to what kind of conversations you're having now with other partners? And can you give us detail around categories that are live conversations? And just following up in the international market, we noticed there's now ads in Australia. Is it broadly now available ads on in all the international markets? And are you already having any conversations in the international markets about partnerships, or is it just in the US at the moment?
Chris Hulls (Co-Founder and CEO)
I'll start with the last part of the question. Yes, we're turned on in Australia. We're not in all regions yet. We want to make sure there's enough volume, and we're starting that process. But again, this is where the international team has limited resources, and we ask them to prioritize the highest ROI activities. We have many discussions ongoing. We're starting to go to lots of conferences, talking to advertisers. We hired Brian McDivitt, who came from Google. He had over a decade of doing a similar role there. So our pipeline is long. I could name-drop lots and lots of companies. I don't know the specifics outside of the U.S., but over time, we'll, of course, give a much deeper look at that.
When you look at the pipeline and why we're excited about it, and I think why we are getting this demand, aside from having Brian come over with a very deep Rolodex, the Uber partnership has been an extremely powerful one to be able to just show someone what a contextual ad really looks like. Because we can talk about, "Hey, we're going to meet people where they are. We're not just going to do the banner." Now we can actually show something that's really outperformed, and we're looking for other similar ad units. When I think of specific categories, retail is an obvious one. Some of that will be tied in with things like off-site advertising, where we use our first-party location data to do targeting attribution.
That does tie in with the Fantech's acquisition because they can help with that, understanding who these customers are, pairing different data sources together, doing that in a way where raw data doesn't leave our system. So everything targeting-wise just gets better that way. There are conversations in cybersecurity. There are conversations in device protection. So it's a pretty wide range of companies that we're talking to. We'll have deals with our more generic banners kind of rolling out in real time. We won't be announcing all of those because that's just more business as usual. But we are working on how to find the next Uber-style custom placements that will drive that real-out performance versus banners, which are more brand-oriented versus performance-oriented and don't leverage our secret sauce quite as much.
Lafitani Sotiriou (Research Analyst)
Great. Thanks [crosstalk]
Raymond Jones (Head of Investor Relations)
Next, we'd like to open it up to Rob at Loop Capital.
Rob Sanderson (Managing Director and Senior Internet Analyst)
Okay. Thank you. I've also got a few questions on the advertising sort of go-to-market. Lots of optionality around here. First, on the first-party opportunities and specifically the acquisition of AdTech with Fantech, which seems to make sense. It sounds like this is mostly to help on targeting. I assume this is intended to just help performance of the ads that you can serve. But maybe can you expand on what the acquisition might enable from a product perspective that was not possible before? And then I've got a couple of follow-ups on some of the third-party opportunities.
Chris Hulls (Co-Founder and CEO)
Sure. So a lot of what Fantech is building out the team with people who are deeply experienced in the AdTech space. It was a relatively small acquisition. So the biggest thing we're getting are people with deep experience in advertising and AI. And yes, you are correct that a lot of it is the targeting and attribution, but there's a lot more there in terms of building out customer profiles. I'll get a little bit technical for the moment, but when you think about targeting attribution, you have deterministic insights where you actually can track a device and see what happened after it was served an ad. And that ad could be even outside of the Life360 ecosystem with people who gave us permission, and our opt-in rates to IDFA sharing are extremely high, way over industry averages.
That deterministic data, that's something that doesn't need the kind of deep machine learning as much. But a lot of what the industry does is synthetic data, which is probabilistic, where you don't exactly know where someone went or what they did, but you take different insights and create these profiles and target these synthetic profiles. We're very unique because we have bigger deterministic data sets than almost anyone outside of the internet giants, who obviously don't let their walled ecosystem, the closed-off ecosystem. But we can also build our own synthetic profiles so we can make inferences about other user attributes based on their location, familial connections, and other things we know. And that is a very specific skill set, which is not one that we've had in the company. So we're really excited about this because we now have a team that's deeply experienced.
Usually, companies have a very specific DNA. Our DNA is consumer products, and we're excited that we've now brought on a team that expands this pretty quickly.
Rob Sanderson (Managing Director and Senior Internet Analyst)
Thank you for that. So yeah, the deterministic measurement. But even beyond that, I mean, you can just at a high level, the data seems very valuable to, and I can imagine a lot of applicability across the ad ecosystem at large. So when you talk about quadrupling the engagement pipeline, is that sort of mostly brands like Uber that you could go to market with, or are we talking about potentially other sort of partnerships? And with that, could that pipeline include what we might consider mega-scale ad platforms or even the next tier of large-scale ad platforms? Because I'm sure there's a lot of ways to leverage this type of data if done in a privacy-safe way, and etc., etc.
Chris Hulls (Co-Founder and CEO)
There have been a.
Rob Sanderson (Managing Director and Senior Internet Analyst)
Maybe you could expand on that a little bit.
Chris Hulls (Co-Founder and CEO)
Yeah. It's been all of the above. I am not involved in most of each of the conversations, but when I've got the briefing, we're talking to the retail media networks, interesting retailers who are interested in having ads on the map that pop up. And if we know you went to a certain store, we can call it out and give you a coupon. That's kind of fun and actually feels great for a customer. So it really is all of the above. And as we progress, I think we'll probably at some point do a breakout. It's a little more ad-focused in particular, where we can give a little bit more color. I'm not trying to be cagey on it, but it is sort of lots and lots of opportunities in front of us. And then we're picking the next one, and you'll see a slow, steady drumbeat of new things here.
Rob Sanderson (Managing Director and Senior Internet Analyst)
Yeah. Obviously, you're very early in the business development journey here. But if we think about first-party versus third-party, what do you think is the larger opportunity? Sort of where are you putting the bigger focus maybe over the next two or three years?
Chris Hulls (Co-Founder and CEO)
When we think of first versus third-party, it's hard to know exactly. It's going to be both. I'd love to be able to get you a little more specific answer to your question in the coming months because, again, we are figuring this out. So I'll talk a little bit about both, and I've heard people use first-party and third-party in different contexts here, but I'll just give a few examples, so when I think about ad placements within our app, all first-party data, but bringing these partners, that's where we're going to see a lot of these really high-performance, really relevant ads that don't feel like ads, and those make me very excited.
When I think about off-site, which is more third-party in the sense that we're going to be working with third-party networks who can do targeting and attribution in other properties, intuitively, that feels like it could be big and where you could just dominate because the big guys completely wall themselves off from other people, and we'll be, I think, the largest company with a first-party location data set of this size doing anything like this. One thing to be clear on, though, is we're not getting out into raw data sales or allowing non-service provider entities to access customer data directly.
So a lot of what we're trying to do with the system is more around user-opted-in IDFA matching to just get us outside of the kind of regulatory issues that were a bit challenging a few years ago and were kind of causing a little bit of ongoing anxiety. We don't think we need to go back that direction to monetize. And some of the developments, such as the ATT pop-up, actually are helping us because it really gives us a good framework in which to operate and know what's going to keep us safe, both from a regulatory and IDFA standpoint as well.
Rob Sanderson (Managing Director and Senior Internet Analyst)
Okay. Thanks, Chris. Excited to see how this comes together for you.
Chris Hulls (Co-Founder and CEO)
Thank you.
Raymond Jones (Head of Investor Relations)
All right. Next, we'd like to open it up for Julian at E&P, please.
Julian Mulcahy (Managing Director)
Chris, I just asked about your subscription growth forecast. It's pretty strong for this year. Given that the conversion rate in the U.S. seemed to sort of stall in that final quarter, and the rest of the world has been sort of declining because of the price increase, are you banking on sort of a big kick-up in the conversion rate, or is it purely about just MAU growth being pretty strong still?
Chris Hulls (Co-Founder and CEO)
We're not forecasting any sort of step function. If you look at the numbers and just how it stacks and with MAU growth and international, it does add up to the numbers you get. And looking even at the first couple of months of the year, I feel confident about how all that's trending. International, obviously, is a very big lever. And I do believe over time, the majority of the revenue is going to become from these international regions. And we are seeing that in regions of similar kind of demographic and socioeconomic status, we're seeing similar results to the US. So I think we just have a lot of headroom there. And the team does do a bottoms-up model, taking existing trends and run rates, and then we look at what has to happen.
No, you do not need a step function in any of the metrics for us to hit our numbers, but MAU does have to continue to grow healthily.
Russell Burke (CFO)
Just very quickly, Julian, we are seeing really strong continued growth in the U.S. with international sort of coming back to good growth, having digested the price increases that you referenced, so.
Chris Hulls (Co-Founder and CEO)
Probably one, I think, and Russell, keep me honest. I'm getting this wrong. We actually saw the price increases being absorbed better than in the U.S. I think we actually had a backward net adds quarter. We did that price increase in the U.S., and we did not have that overseas, which is a pretty good omen in my mind.
Julian Mulcahy (Managing Director)
Cool. Thanks, guys.
Raymond Jones (Head of Investor Relations)
Next, I'd like to open it up to Maria from Canaccord Genuity.
Maria Ripps (Managing Director, Senior Research Analyst)
Yeah. Thanks so much for taking my question. Actually, following up on the prior question on your core subscription business, how should we think about sort of your approach to price increases in 2025, given that you've been so successful at sort of taking prices up in key markets over the past couple of years? And I guess, how much of sort of like-for-like price increases sort of in more developed markets is factored into your full-year guidance?
Chris Hulls (Co-Founder and CEO)
Russell, can you start with the back half, and then I'll talk the more strategic piece?
Russell Burke (CFO)
Yeah. Absolutely. Maria, what I would say is that we, apart from some optimization in terms of the dual-tier strategy that we talked about before, we haven't necessarily built price increases into our plan. We will be opportunistic, and if we see that that makes sense, we will do that. But we're not necessarily counting on that in 2025.
Chris Hulls (Co-Founder and CEO)
Going to the more strategic piece, a very important thing for us while we continue to see the user base growing as quickly as it is, is not to prematurely move into harvest mode. I am highly confident that we could double revenue extremely quickly, honestly, within weeks or months if we got more aggressive. But I want us to play the long game, and so we really want to have a very big value surplus so people really love the brand and feel like they're getting a very good deal. At some point, again, that will change, but we're not at that point in the strategy. When we look at the U.S. numbers, it has been a couple of years since we've done a price increase, but I don't anticipate we're going to do one in the near future.
It is a pretty big process, or I shouldn't say a big process, but a noisy process because users get a notification via iTunes, and even if you increase prices a cent, you would probably get a significant churn event, so when you aren't doing direct credit card billing, where you can just do it on the back end and be more incremental, it's better to do bigger bites more infrequently, and I am very customer-focused. I want to make sure that it's matched with real big step function improvements in the value we give. When you look internationally, we have had very low pricing, and that does tie into the whole dual-tier, triple-tier trade-off, where if we can do moderate price increases very quickly to get people in dual-tier, that might be a better option than going right to the triple-tier setup, which obviously is the highest ARPPCs.
That being said, we are looking at where we might be underpriced internationally and trying to more match the U.S. and figure out how we can kind of, from almost a purchasing parity standpoint, have similar value and similar pricing. So we probably will have some even triple-tier price increases in international regions this year.
Maria Ripps (Managing Director, Senior Research Analyst)
That's very helpful. Thank you.
Raymond Jones (Head of Investor Relations)
Next, we'd like to open up to Wei-Sheng Huang from RBC.
Wei-Weng Chen (Head of Small Cap Equity Research)
Hi guys. Thanks for taking the question. Can we maybe speak to the acquisition that you guys announced today? What have you bought there? Is it more of a product, or are you buying people and capabilities? Can you maybe give a practical example of what this acquisition kind of unlocks for you guys? And then can you also speak to whether this was a cash or equity-based transaction?
Chris Hulls (Co-Founder and CEO)
So I can take the first half of that. Although we did buy assets, this is primarily getting the team. And this is a team that has worked together for a very long time. The founder of the company is someone we had worked with in the past when he was running another company in the data space. So we know the people well. And this has really been able to get us top-tier talent very, very quickly. And I'd say that's the majority of what makes us excited. That being said, there are some assets. There's some ML AI models that help us segment our customers very quickly. Some of the infrastructure to plug in with third parties and do segmentation is pre-built.
So it's moving our roadmap along a little faster than if we were to do it ourselves, but with a much better talent bench and more starting on third base versus hiring up unknown entities that may or may not be successful. So it really de-risks, in our mind, the infrastructure we need to build.
Russell Burke (CFO)
And Wei, just on the specifics of your question, we've said it's a small acquisition. As Chris said, it's mainly about the sort of people and the models. Very specifically, it's a $4.5 million asset acquisition with a mix between cash and equity.
Wei-Weng Chen (Head of Small Cap Equity Research)
Thanks so much.
All right. The next question will be from Mark from Stifel.
Mark Kelley (Managing Director)
Great. Thanks very much, guys. Chris, can you clarify the comment you made earlier about an increase in seasonality? Is that just focused on the hardware side, or is that a broader statement? That's my first question. And then the second one, appreciate the commentary on pets. I guess, can you give us maybe an update on the product roadmap or just general thoughts about elder care? That would be great. Thank you.
Chris Hulls (Co-Founder and CEO)
Sure. On the seasonality, please. Do you remember the context of which comment that was?
Mark Kelley (Managing Director)
It was part of the wrap-up to the guidance, I believe, in your prepared remarks.
Chris Hulls (Co-Founder and CEO)
Got it. The seasonality is Russell, do you remember the exact specifics of that one?
Russell Burke (CFO)
Yeah. Mark, the only point we're making there is that as we move forward, we are becoming a little more seasonal with obviously, we've had the seasonality with hardware. Advertising, as it ramps up, is seasonal both in terms of the ramp-up, but also in terms of obviously, there's more activity in sort of holiday seasons, etc. So that was the gist of the comment. But the other aspect, which I specifically talked about, is that we are increasing marketing spend a little more this year, and that's a little bit first-half weighted in order to really help drive subscription over the course of the year.
Mark Kelley (Managing Director)
Okay. Perfect. Thank you, Russell.
Chris Hulls (Co-Founder and CEO)
On the elder care front, I'll start with a bit of a personal anecdote. I am working on this feature with our former COO, David Rice, who's running international and also doing special projects with me. We, unfortunately, both have moms who are going to be users of what we're building. My mom has dementia, and David's mom is just getting to that age where brain's sharp, but really need a lot of help. We are both experiencing the products in the market today, and we are just this should be the easiest layup in the world because they all suck. They are low quality. Nobody likes them, and they're exorbitantly priced.
And if you look at what we can do, in many regards, it's the same advantage we already have, which is we already have the customers, and we often already have the seniors who are using Life360 standalone but now need a little bit of extra help, and they don't feel threatened by Life360, in particular, just more frail seniors, non-memory care ones, because they're already in the ecosystem. And so if you look at what we can do, we're going to start with software-only features, which are very simple ones, like his mom or dad or whoever. When's the last time they picked up the phone? Are they taking steps? I know for my mom, a lot of the time, she's just in the house, and she does pick up her phone, but I don't know she's been active. And I have done all these weird hacks.
I check her video doorbell. I check different cameras in the house. I have this thing called the Jubilee TV, which is actually quite good, which senses presence in the room. We can do that all from the phone. We can also do that when we have a device. Like mom was last active an hour ago. Can't really get that from Life360 today because all you know is where the phone is. So we can do that purely in software than with the hardware. We have a huge network of people. I live in a small town, and it's very helpful where people actually a couple of times my mom has wandered, and they've helped bring her home, and that's been very nice.
But imagine if you didn't have that personal tie. You could notify the nearby Life360 members around you that, "Hey, this person's wandered, and here's where they are. Can you help them out?" Have a bit of that community feeling. And then from a hardware standpoint, a lot of what exists on the market. It's usually those I fall and I can't get up alarm services. They're really more marketing companies because they were not targeting the millennials and younger Gen Xers who are now the buyers of these products for their aging parents. They were going through late-night TV and doctor's offices, and they were not winning on product quality. So bad battery life, bad industrial design, not very comfortable, none of the technology we have. And so if you look at what we can do, we'll be able to pair a hardware device to the phone.
We'll be able to really have good battery life. It's going to be seamlessly integrated in Life360, so it's not a whole new product. And that same story of we will not have a customer acquisition cost when we market to our customers. And we can pick up signals. People now say their roles in the family. We know exactly who's a grandparent. We know how old they are. We can start surfacing these different features to you. If we see a senior move to a new home, that often might mean they're moving to a senior residential neighborhood. That's a great time for us to start helping our customers out. So that will be 2026. I wish we could do it sooner. It's just scarce resources.
But the really cool thing about our hardware strategy is if you take the pet device and the senior device, it's kind of the same thing, just with a different shell around it. So the technology is very extensible, and even some of the software features are going to be similar. We're going to have the pet finding network, which our competitors can't really have because they don't really have the customer base we do. Lost pet, lost senior, lost kid. It's really all the same feature. So I'm excited to start this drumbeat of launching out into these different services that line up to the core and build out that people-pets-things ecosystem that I think is really just starting to come to life right now.
Mark Kelley (Managing Director)
Thanks a lot, Chris. Appreciate that.
Raymond Jones (Head of Investor Relations)
We've come to the end of our time. This last question is from Chris Savage at Bell Potter, and then we'll close out the call.
Chris Savage (Head of Research)
Thanks, Jay. Very quick. So a bit obscure, but you're suggesting hardware revenue will go backwards this year, and that's obviously despite the relaunch or the new product launch of Tile. So what's driving that? Are you basically going to give more away to drive subscription, either Jiobit or Tile, or what's the story there?
Chris Hulls (Co-Founder and CEO)
Sure. So we're focused on, first, as you mentioned, giving them away and driving subscriptions. That's the reason we did the acquisition. We know hardware revenue isn't particularly exciting. It's not a great business to be in per se, but driving subscriptions is a great business. So that's continuing to be more of the theme. We actually will be deprecating the Tile app. It will all be through Life360. And every time you buy a Tile device, you will be activating your account on Life360, which gives us that upsell. So we would definitely prefer lower pricing, giving more away, all that if it's going to drive subs. We should also be open that retail has been challenging. I think at some point, especially with pets and all that, when we're going to be very differentiated, it will help.
But we need to be open that Apple really does dominate this space right now. And when retailers already have AirTags and there's been kind of a declining brick-and-mortar foot traffic presence in consumer electronics anyway, that's been frustrating, but not really impacting that core. And as we differentiate, and if this Hubble partnership works, and I'm very excited to give updates on that, we will leapfrog AirTags, and maybe we can bully everybody out because if we have the satellite-compatible Tile devices, the only benefit that we see Apple having will go away, and we're cross-platform, and we don't have any of the owner's controls. But that will probably be more of a 2026 thing.
But for now, focused on driving subscriptions, lowering costs, giving them away with some admitted weakness in retail as we still are fighting those headwinds of just the broader trends and Apple still being this behemoth we're chipping away at.
Chris Savage (Head of Research)
Sure. Thank you.
Raymond Jones (Head of Investor Relations)
This concludes our call. Chris, I'll turn it back over to you real quick for parting remarks.
Chris Hulls (Co-Founder and CEO)
I have no parting remarks. Very excited about the year to come and spending some time with some of you in coming weeks. Thank you all.