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Intrinsic Value is all-important and is the only logical way to evaluate the relative attractiveness of investments and businesses.
Intrinsic Value is all-important and is the only logical way to evaluate the relative attractiveness of investments and businesses.
Good afternoon and welcome to Kubient's Third Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. Joining us for today's call are Kubient's Founder, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer, Chief Strategy Officer and President, Paul Roberts; and Chief Financial Officer, Josh Weiss. Following their remarks, we will open the call for your questions.
Before we get started, I need to alert you to our Safe Harbor statements under the Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. During this call, we will be making forward-looking statements including statements related to future events or to our future financial performance and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause our actual results, levels of activity performance, or achievements to be materially different from any future results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements.
Listeners should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements since they involve known and unknown risks uncertainties and other factors, which are in some cases beyond our control and which could and likely will materially affect actual results, levels of activity performance, or achievements. Any forward-looking statement reflects our current views with respect to future events and is subject to these other risks uncertainties and assumptions relating to our operations, results of operations, growth strategy and liquidity. These statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected or implied during the call.
Furthermore, listeners are referred to the documents filed by Kubient, Inc. with the SEC, including our annual report on Form 10-K filed with the SEC on June 30, 2022, with the understanding that our actual future results may be materially different from what we expect, which include these and certain other important risk factors. We qualify all of our forward-looking statements by these cautionary statements.
Also note that the forward-looking statements on this call are based on information available to us as of today's date. Except as required by law, we assume no obligation to publicly update or revise these forward-looking statements for any reason or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future. Please refer to Kubient's SEC filings specifically its registration statement on Form S-1 initially filed on December 12, 2020 for a more detailed description of risk factors that may affect the company's results.
During the call today, management will discuss adjusted EBITDA and non-GAAP financial measures. In the company's press release and filings with the SEC, both of which are posted on the company's website, you'll find additional disclosures regarding this non-GAAP measure, including a reconciliation of this measure with its comparable GAAP measure. Non-GAAP financial measures are not intended to be considered in isolation from a substitute for or superior to GAAP results. The company encourages you to consider all measures when analyzing its performance.
Now I would like to turn the call over to Paul Roberts. Sir, please proceed.
Thanks, operator, and thanks to everyone who joined us today. On our last call, we focused heavily on the new implementation of our cost-cutting practice an initiative which can bear fruit early on and something that will show in our financial results both sequentially and year-over-year in the coming quarters.
Today, I'm happy to report on the efforts, advancements and positive developments undertaken in the previous and current quarters centered around our proprietary technology. Clients continued to re-sign with our services utilizing the Audience Cloud and partnerships continued to evolve as new customers arrive via successful sales initiatives.
With the current economic climate, brands and companies are looking further into various means that can ensure their advertising spend is funneled through channels of consistent, reliable and established ROI production. With this shift into tighter measurements of the utilizing paid advertising and marketing comes a more focused spender, more willing to turn towards services like Kubient.
We offer a safe haven for those unwilling to compromise on unproductive and wasteful advertising spend. It's this mentality that brought us to create and develop our chief offering that I'm confident will carry us forward into the changing market trends. To say the least, the shift towards a more conscious ad spender is very timely for Kubient. At this time, momentum is both created and carried by the progress we have made with KAI.
As we announced in mid-October, we publicly launched the KAI Dashboard, a reporting and optimization platform that helps both media publishers and platforms better understand and manage inventory health to ensure the quality of inventory they are sending to demand platforms. The dashboard helps to bridge the gap in visibility and information provided to brands and platforms, centered around problems that arise on the inventory management level, specifically in the connected TV or CTV channel.
Utilizing the power of KAI's artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms, publishers are now able to easily identify what is causing inventory to remain unmonetized be alerted of the problem and able to take immediate action to drive increased revenue. To this date, the dashboard has already helped publishers tremendously by showing full insights into inventory health, driving improvements in inventory quality and increasing the efficiency of ad monetization efforts for greater revenue acquisition.
The effectiveness and worthwhile nature of this offering is already showing customers a lift of 20-plus percent in revenue due to the dashboard. What's continued to fuel our development of the dashboard has been the encouraging feedback we have received from several organizations within the industry at conferences. The work we've developed and performed with the new dashboard is reflective of our thesis which is to remain nimble and productive, as we have listened intently to the needs of both publishers and advertisers, while delivering an immediate accretive product.
It's with this exercise that we've had our horizons expanded even further to the capabilities KAI possesses beyond fraud detection and prevention. Instead, we see it becoming the comprehensive intelligence layer that sits between the buyer and seller of digital advertising throughout several transactions. In this case, brands that are frequently worried about how their data is being used to better protect their own data.
On that note, we have seen successful and sought-after intelligence-related features centered around the implementation of machine learning on KAI with the ability to infer the personhood of each user that passes through the platform assisting with ridding the Audience Cloud of fraudulent users or bots.
Some preliminary examples of how KAI can be augmented with the data and the information it collects, consists of tools to do real-time targeting, audience targeting attribution insight into why media buying is not successful times for buyers and sellers and more. We want to remind everyone that the ad tech realm still remains a nascent industry with a significant amount of white space opportunities.
To that end, we want to bet on KAI and continue investing in growing its portfolio of capabilities which is why we've made the decision to hire additional engineers that can help manifest what incremental layers we can add to KAI what other tools can be built in conjunction with it and what other features can be placed in it. The impetus for this move has once again been due to feedback we're garnering from partners in the space which has been very validating.
Additionally, with the recent popularity of clean data rooms, which is where brands don't want their data out into the ecosystem anymore, KAI could come into effect by being the AI decisioning that would take the data, interpret it and understand what the outcome would be. KAI has the potential to become the decisioning engine of the future that allows brands to remain in control of their valuable data, while also being able to use machine learning and AI to understand in real time the best possible advertising opportunity for their target audience.
Regarding the patent notice for KAI, on August 19 of this year, Kubient was issued a Notice of Allowance. This document is delivered to a company after a USPTO patent examiner has determined that a patent should be issued. In other words, when a patent examiner has determined that all the legal requirements for patent issuance have been met a Notice of Allowance is sent. That said our patent attorneys are confident we will receive the final issuance for this patent before the end of the year.
I'd like to take a quick second to emphasize the difficulty of receiving a patent within the ad tech industry. Given the relative nascency and complexity of our industry, there are not many patents that get issued. This once more illustrates the compelling nature of KAI and highlights the vast potential of our solution. All in all, the organic growth we see in Kubient will spur from our efforts on the KAI front, something we predict will result in powerful opportunities for our company and investors.
As I iterated at the onset of my prepared remarks, we have been encouraged by several clients that have re-signed their engagement with us this past quarter. One example I wanted to specifically highlight was with our long-term partner MediaMath, where we recently decided to shift a portion of our direct brand advertiser budget from The Trade Desk over to them. This will provide MediaMath with the ability to purchase ads directly on Kubient's SSP, which of course has KAI built into it. We're confident that this move will give us the opportunity to provide strong data-driven case studies revealing the impact of higher efficiency advertising spend on our platforms from both the demand and supply sides of the equation.
With the transactions expected to take place on our marketplace, we're given the autonomy in controlling the ad budgets and where the spend goes. We are envisioning there will be opportunities for direct brands to get 20% to 30% of their media buying power back due to KAI and look forward to sharing the results of these case studies in the near future as this project is now currently live.
We're very pleased with our MediaMath partnership and plan to leverage several synergies with them looking ahead. With most of the COVID-related restrictions lifted, we have also seen an uptick in media spend from one of our largest direct advertising clients who is a live events and entertainment company. The results we were able to provide in 2022 had led this partner to extend their media buying partnership with Kubient through 2023.
As an ongoing topic, I want to note that we continue to field and look for interesting opportunities to inorganically grow Kubient's strength and reach in the M&A realm. We recognize that there is still a ton of companies interested in a public vehicle amidst this turbulent time within the stock market and the economy, where there is virtually no access to cheap capital today.
As a publicly traded organization with shelf eligibility, in addition to a healthy balance sheet, very strong core technology, exceeding the executive team, we understand the value we could provide to private corporations that would want to leverage us as a public vehicle.
With that I'll hand this call over to Josh, who will provide additional color on the quarter from a financial perspective. Josh?
Thanks, Paul and good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining our call. Now to our financial results for the third quarter ended September 30, 2022. Net revenues for the third quarter of 2022 were approximately $482,000, compared to approximately $677,000 in the same period last year. The decrease was primarily due to a decrease of net revenues associated with one of our customers as compared to the 2021 period, partially offset by revenues generated in the 2022 period related to customer contracts acquired in connection with our acquisition of MediaCrossing in November 2021.
Technology expenses decreased to approximately $525,000 from approximately $777,000 in the same period last year. The decrease was primarily due to a decrease in headcount costs, hosting fees, software technology, subscription expense, amortization and consulting expenses.
General and administrative expenses decreased to approximately $1.1 million, compared to approximately $1.5 million in the same period last year. The decrease was primarily due to a decrease in non-cash stock-based compensation, professional services and consulting expenses.
GAAP net loss attributable to common shareholders improved to approximately $1.7 million or a $0.12 loss per basic and diluted share, compared to a net loss of approximately $2.3 million or $0.16 loss per basic and diluted share in the same period last year.
Adjusted EBITDA loss a non-GAAP measure improved to approximately $1.5 million or $0.11 loss per basic and diluted share for the three months ended September 30, compared to an adjusted EBITDA loss of approximately $1.9 million or $0.13 loss per basic and diluted share in the same period last year. As of September 30, 2022, we continue to have a strong cash balance of approximately $16.9 million.
That concludes my financial summary. For a more detailed analysis, please reference our Form 10-Q, which we plan to file today.
I will now turn the call back over to Paul. Paul?
Thanks, Josh. The landscape right now is froth with opportunities for Kubient, as we've reinforced our balance sheet and have begun capitalizing on the quality of our staff and offerings. The excitement for what lies ahead is alive and well with our management and organization as a whole. We intend to continue operating efficiently as a lean and mean company as a small team looking to solve very big problems.
Now, I'll turn it over to the operator for Q&A.
Thank you, Paul. Ladies and gentlemen, the floor is now open for questions. [Operator Instructions] Your first question is coming from Jack Codera of the Maxim Group. Jack, please proceed.
Hi guys. This is Jack Codera calling in for Jack Vander Aarde. Thanks again for taking my questions. I have a couple. Last quarter there was some cost cutting. It sounds like you guys got yourselves in the right spot. And I think you mentioned there was 21 full-time employees, which got you about 24 to 36-month runway. I was wondering if that's still the case. And then just any color on any strategic changes surrounding that at all? Thank you.
Sure. Great to talk to you Jack. And, obviously, I'll let Josh comment on some of the financial details, but the reality is we all saw a huge shift in advertising number one, due to COVID; and then obviously number two, due to the financial markets moving. So we wanted to be proactive with the cash we had on hand and be very strategic of how we spend that money. So as you noted we did make some very hard tough cuts towards the beginning of this year.
We're starting to see some of the dust settle and brands get back into a more normalized media plan. So we've begun internally looking at where do we start to fill in some of the head count especially on the tech side relating to KAI. And then also on the business development side where we went all the way down to two salespeople. So it's challenging to really scale and get the traction we're looking for with those types of numbers. So hopefully next quarter when we have this call again, we're going to talk about some additional headcount and also some strategic news as well around KAI.
So with that being said Josh, if you just want to go into a little more detail on the cost savings of where we are and any further we might get will be helpful.
Yeah. I mean, I don't really have much to add Paul. But, yes, we did make the cuts that Paul mentioned. And we are finally seeing the benefits of those cuts over the last few months. And as Paul mentioned, we're always looking to hire the right people in the right places. And with the way the landscape has been changing, we're looking forward to some good opportunities there.
Thanks guys. That's amazing color. And if I can switch gears -- I had a couple of questions on KAI. There were some press releases mid-October and you guys mentioned again today 20% of -- on the CTV content like 20% is monetized. It sounds like a really compelling value proposition. I was wondering if you can speak overall what that TAM is in like the Connected TV market and then any color for the strategic road map of that solution.
Sure. So what we were hearing back from a lot of our partners is a lot of budget was moving to CTV or Connected TV, which is just a massively big opportunity for us because of the fact that it's new. And when things are new and there's a lot of money involved, it typically attracts a lot of fraud. So it was a really, really good opportunity for us to insert KAI, start to identify what's real, what isn't real, et cetera. But then what we started to notice also is that a lot of errors were firing within the auction marketplace.
At the end of the day, Connected TV is an application that sits on a device. It's usually a television that hangs on your wall. The fact that it's somewhat of a newer channel, you're going to see a lot of people setting campaigns up improperly installing the apps into the marketplaces improperly. So we see all of this with KAI. We're able to see okay this partner Connected to outdoor TV or Fox TV, they're getting an error message. And we met with somebody recently at a conference here in New York called Programmatic I/O and she told me that she has three full-time employees where all they're doing is trying to troubleshoot the error messages that they're getting.
So we realized that if we can make this available on our dashboard, we can very easily help both the buy and the sell side transact. The publishers make upwards of 20% more using KAI, using our platform. So we don't have numbers right now because a lot of people on the TAM for Connected TV, they're also adding in other channels around video. But we just hear anecdotally that almost every brand is pushing more and more dollars into connected TV and Kubient and our KAI solution be able to give back 20% more revenue to those app owners. This has been pie-in-the-sky type thinking. This is -- here's actionable insights today, very clear and concise on a dashboard that allow you to make more money. And having this as a byproduct because of this amazing KAI, Dashboard has just been -- it's been so well received. It's good news for us.
Yes, that's amazing. And then I had one last one. It's exciting to hear you -- it sounds like you guys are confident to get the patent by the end of the year. I think I heard that right. And I was just wondering generally, what sort of infringement that patent is going to protect. And then also I don't know if I was reading through wrong, but it sounds like maybe that is some sort of leverage on the sales front. Is that beneficial to you guys as well? Thank you.
It is. And when you talk about the infringement piece and we did put in our press release today, there's not many companies out there that have patented technology in digital advertising. The fact that we were able to develop this product, the fact that we're able to get a patent as far as we have and like we mentioned, we're basically at the final stage of approval, we think there's going to be a lot of opportunity to look at others in the industry that are using, our footprint or our fingerprint if you will, and defend that vigorously. So we have a very competent and experienced law firm that handled us with our patent work.
We also have a very strong litigation team. So not to say, we want to become litigious, but we spent a lot of time, a lot of shareholder and investor dollars in the development of KAI. So we will spend and we will work very hard to defend what we've built. And I think it does give us a huge advantage because, a lot of companies have a very black box model of, how they are allegedly preventing ad fraud. So the fact that the US patent office looked, very deeply into what we've built, the technology, the methodology and was able to say "Okay, this is noteworthy enough to be protected with a patent" I think that's going to be front and center, in a lot of our future conversations.
That's amazing color. Thank you so much for answering all our questions. That’s all I had. I’ll hop back in the queue. Thank you.
Thanks, Jack.
Thank you. At this time, this concludes the company's question-and-answer session. If your question was not taken, you may contact Kubient's Investor Relations team at kubient@gatewayir.com. I'd now like to turn the call back over to Mr. Roberts for his closing remarks.
Thank you, operator. And I just want to thank everyone, for joining us today on our Q3 2022 earnings call. I especially, want to take a moment and thank our employees. Obviously, it's been challenging times and we want to really just say thank you again, to everybody our partners, our investors and customers for their support. We appreciate your continued interest in Kubient and look forward to updating you on our next call. Operator?
Thank you for joining us today for Kubient's Third Quarter and 2022 Earnings Conference Call. You may now disconnect.