Q1 2024 Kaltura Inc Earnings Call

Participants

Erica Mannion; Investor Relations; Sapphire Investor Relations, LLC

Ron Yekutiel; Chairman of the Board, President, Chief Executive Officer, Co-Founder; Kaltura Inc

John Doherty; Chief Financial Officer; Kaltura Inc

Matt Niknam; Analyst; Deutsche Bank

Ryan Koontz; Senior Analyst; Needham & Company LLC

George Iwanyc; Analyst; Oppenheimer & Co

Presentation

Operator

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Telx tours First Quarter 2024 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants on only If you require any assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. All material contained in this webcast is the sole property and copyright of Kotura with all rights reserved for opening remarks and introductions, I will now turn the call over to Erica Mannion at Sapphire Investor Relations. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Erica Mannion

Thank you, operator, and good morning. I'm joined by Ron Utell, Cal tours, Co-Founder, Chairman President and Chief Executive Officer, and John Doherty, Chief Financial Officer. Ron will begin with a summary of results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2024, and provide a business update. John will then review the financial results for the first quarter of 2024 in greater detail, followed by the company's outlook for the second quarter and full year of 2024. We will then open the call for questions.
Please note that this call will include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws, including but not limited to statements regarding Cal tours, expected future financial results and management's expectations and plans for the business. These statements are neither promises nor guarantees and involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed here.
Important factors that could cause actual results to differ from forward-looking statements can be found in the Risk Factors section of Caltex's annual report on Form 10K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2023, and other SEC filings, including the quarterly report on Form 10Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2024, to be filed with the SEC.
Any forward-looking statements made during this conference call, including responses to your questions, are based on current expectations as of today, and Caltex assumes no obligation to update or revise them whether as a result of new developments or otherwise, except as required by law. Please note, we will be discussing a non-GAAP financial measure adjusted EBITDA during this call.
For a reconciliation of this non-GAAP financial measure to the most directly comparable GAAP metric, please refer to our earnings release, which is available on our website at www.investors.cantor.com. Now I'm pleased to hand the call over Sharon.

Ron Yekutiel

Thank you, Erica, and welcome, everyone, to our first quarter earnings call, the first quarter of 2024 marked our sixth consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth. We reported record total revenue of $44.8 million, up 3% year over year and record subscription revenue of $41.2 million, up 2% year over year. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was positive $0.6 million.
As for our bottom line, the first quarter was our third consecutive quarter of adjusted EBITDA profitability. We consumed cash from operations during the first quarter as expected, due to our typical seasonality, which came in at $1.1 million, an improvement from $7.4 million in quarter one 2023.
Moving on to the business update, gross retention in the first quarter of 2024 continued to improve for the third quarter in a row and was the highest level in five quarters. This represents an annualized rate that is better than that of the last three fiscal years. We continue to forecast a better retention level this year compared to last. We believe this is driven by the passage of multiple COVID video usage reductions and of the budgetary constraints of the subsequent global economic downturn.
As for new bookings, the first quarter was, as usual, a slower quarter and this year even more. So as we had a few large deals slip into the second quarter, in the first quarter, we closed 1, seven digit deal with a large Fortune 100 insurance company and 12, six digit deals. Consistent with one of our key focus areas. We continue to see growth in the number and size of the opportunities for our event platform for both internal and external use.
We also continue to see existing customers expand their adoption of filter out from their original, mostly internal use cases for employee communication and learning and development to also external use cases for marketing and customer engagement. In addition, while the market remains competitive, we have been increasingly successful in raising our prices upon contract renewal from a geographic perspective, while our bookings from outside of the US continued to be negatively impacted from the macro environment, we are seeing initial signs of recovery with multiple new large E & T & M and T deals in the sales pipeline that are coming from India and A-Pac.
On the product front, in the first quarter, we continued boosting our event platform with enhanced content management capabilities, fleet management features and on-site registration for hybrid events. We enhanced our video portal search results, filters and user experience and added to our video player ad block detection and hotspots for assuming 11 series. The real-time conferencing rooms within our event platform and virtual classrooms now also enable interlude and have more granular roles and permissions, improved dual screen layout and globally shared storage.
On the M&A front, we continue to beef up scalability and security and analytics for both end users and quality of service, as well as to simplify the experience of content curation. Our strong and growing product portfolio yielded several recognitions and awards in the past quarter. These included G2E 2024 best off their awards in the categories of best design software as a virtual event platform and best education software as well as the best virtual event platform in North America award of the 2024 innovation and business market awards.
On the AI front, we were continuing to infuse AI features and capabilities into our products. We completed a successful pilot with a leading tech company to repurpose video content and create that Betsson snackable moment from videos. The feedback has been superb and the RY. measured was very significant with saving of 1,000 to 1,500, 3 to 5 hours in turnaround time per clip, ramping up investment in content repurposing with the goal of further integrating it into our content management, webinars and events portfolios are expanding our AI add-on for webinars and events with capabilities to automatically generate notifications and sentiment analysis for chat and are developing our own AI-powered automatic speech recognition solution with the goal of providing improved results and extended features.
In summary, we wrapped up another record revenue quarter that showed continued improvement in our gross retention rate. While the year started as usual, with slower new bookings. Our current pipeline indicates an expected improvement in the coming quarters. We believe we will encounter more tailwinds as companies start reaccelerating investments in digital transformation and online experiences.
We expect that this will be fueled by the increasingly hybrid workplace growth in Gen Z and millennial video savvy employees, but need to save cost by consolidating multiple enterprise video use cases around a single video platform and the advent of JNI, which will bring about more creation and consumption of video and increased our why despite our revenue guidance, our performance in the first quarter. Considering the lower bookings start and the still uncertain macro outlook, we need to be thoughtful and are therefore maintaining revenue guidance for 2024.
For Lastly, regardless of our top line growth. We are reaffirming our expectation of posting both a positive adjusted EBITDA and positive cash flow from operations this year.
With that, I'll turn it over to John, our CFO, to discuss our financial results in more detail. John?

John Doherty

Thanks, Ron, and hello to everyone on the call today. With three months behind me, I want to open up with a few of my thoughts on Catcher. Overall, Qatar has been operating in a very challenging environment. Over the past two years, there have been industry headwinds from budgetary constraints, competitive pressure and elongated sales cycles due to the economic environment, which impacted the Company more in Europe than the US.
During this period, Qatar has made the necessary and difficult adjustments, including improving its operating efficiency, focusing on further monetizing the existing customer base and reallocating resources towards higher ROI opportunities and markets. Based on these actions and with the continued steady execution, the company is well positioned to benefit from emerging tailwinds of spend consolidation to a single vendor digital transformation and the hybrid workplace that is continuing to drive demand for video-based offerings.
With that, let me move on to our results. Results exceeded expectations for revenue and adjusted EBITDA for the quarter. Total revenue for the quarter ended March 31, 2024 was $44.8 million, up 3% year over year. Subscription revenue was $41.2 million, up 2% year over year. Total revenue and subscription revenue were also up 1% sequentially. Professional services revenue contributed $3.6 million, up 25% year over year. The remaining performance obligations were $165.2 million, down 1% year over year, of which we expect to recognize 57% of revenue over the next 12 months, with the anticipated increase in bookings as we move to the second half of the year, we expect RPO to trend upward as well.
Annualized recurring revenue was $162.7 million, up 2% year over year, we slightly modified our net dollar retention calculation and the results that I will reference reflect that adjustment for all periods, which were to the tune of up to plus or minus 1%. Our net dollar retention rate for the quarter was 98%, incidentally, both before and after the modification. This reflects no change from where we were in the fourth quarter, but down from 103% in Q1 2023.
This result was expected due to lower net bookings last year, NDR as a lagging indicator for gross retention and upsell bookings. We expect it to further decrease in the second quarter and the rebound in the second half of 2024. Given the sequential improvement in gross retention that we have demonstrated over the last three quarters and our upcoming forecasted sequential pickup in bookings following the traditional slower beginning of the year within our E. and T. segment. Total revenue for the first quarter was $32.4 million, up 4% year over year. Subscription revenue was $30.7 million, up 3% year over year, while professional services revenue contributed [$1.8 million], up 23% year over year.
Within our M. and T. segment, total revenue for the first quarter was $12.3 million, representing 3% year-over-year growth. Subscription revenue was $10.5 million, which was flat year over year, while professional services revenue contributed $1.8 million, up 28% year over year.
Gaap gross profit in Q1 2024 was $28.6 million compared to $27.3 million in Q1 2023, resulting in a gross margin of 64% for the quarter, up from 63% in Q1 2023.
Within our E. and T. segment gross profit for the quarter was $23.6 million, representing a gross margin of 73%, which is consistent with where we were in Q1 2023 Subscription gross margin was 79%, up from 78% in Q1 2023. Within our MC segment, gross profit for the quarter was $5.1 million representing a gross margin of 41%, up from 38% in Q1 2023. Subscription gross margin was 53%, down from 56% in Q1 2023.
Total operating expenses in the quarter were $35.9 million compared to $39.2 million in the first quarter of 2023, an improvement of 9% year over year and indicative of our goal of improving our operating efficiency. Gaap net loss in the quarter was $11.1 million, or $0.08 per diluted share.
Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $0.6 million, increasing by $3.3 million from negative $2.7 million in Q1 2023 Turning to the balance sheet and cash flow, we ended the quarter with $73.8 million in cash and marketable securities. We consumed $1.1 million in cash from operations during the quarter, as expected, due to our typical seasonality, this reflects a significant improvement compared with $7.4 million in Q1 2023.
I would like now to turn to our outlook for the second quarter of 2024 and for the fiscal year ending December 31, 2024 in 2023, we experienced a year-over-year decline in gross retention and new bookings, which impacted our revenue. And while gross retention sequentially improved in recent quarters, new booking was still low in the first quarter for reasons mentioned in the last two quarters as we have guided towards sequential total revenue declines, but ultimately our revenue growth, we believe that the downward pressure that had accumulated in prior quarters will catch up to us this quarter.
And therefore, we are forecasting a modest low single digit sequential revenue decline in both subscription and total revenue in the second quarter as a result, we expect subscription revenue in the second quarter to be between $39.6 million and $40.3 million and total revenue to be between $42.7 million and $43.5 million. We expect adjusted EBITDA in the second quarter to be between negative $0.6 million and positive $0.4 million. As we look towards the second half of the year, we expect to return to sequential revenue growth, driven by our improved gross retention rate and our forecasted growth in new bookings for the full year, we are reaffirming our guidance. We continue to expect total revenue to be between $173.7 million and $176.7 million and subscription revenue to be between $161.2 million and $164.2 million. We also continue to expect adjusted EBITDA for the year to be positive with the high end of $1 million, which compares to negative $2.5 million in 2023. We also continue to forecast a positive cash flow from operations for the full year.
Now I'd like to share some closing thoughts as we look out over the balance of 2024 and into 2025, we are aiming to achieve both revenue growth and sustained and improving profitability over the long term. We believe we are on the right path to achieve this objective and to drive consistent returns to our shareholders.
We are encouraged by the increased adoption of our products, the continued improvement in our gross retention rates, the large deals in our pipeline that we expect will yield growing bookings and by what we believe will be growing industry tailwinds in the second half of the year and in 2025.
With that we'll open it up for questions. Operator?

Question and Answer Session

Operator

Thank you. The floor is now open for questions. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. At this time, information tone will indicate your line is in the question queue, you may press star two, if you would like to remove your question from the queue since using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up the handset before pressing the star keys. Again, that's star one to register a question at this time. Our first question is coming from Matt McClintock of Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Matt Niknam

Hey, guys, thank you for taking the question and just two, if I could. First, on the demand backdrop, I think gum, Ronnie spoke to maybe a little bit softer bookings sounded like that may have been more seasonal in the first quarter. But just generally Wondering if you can speak to what you're seeing and hearing from customers as they entered the new year in terms of budgets and the willingness to spend on video and how that's evolved relative to 2023. And then secondarily on the deal slippage. Maybe just a follow-on to that. If you can talk to what drove some of those larger deals slipping from 1Q to 2Q, are we seeing lengthening sales cycles again and have these ended up ultimately closing off by where we sit today.
Thank you.

Ron Yekutiel

Yes, Matt, thank you, and thanks, everybody, for joining today. All. Let's start with the demand and a bit of kind of background around where we start.
Yes, Q1 is always a drop to Q4. The numbers are generally not very high for Q1 compared to the year. So differences even if we come a bit softer to not necessarily say much about the rest of the year, it's just the nature of our business being a larger enterprise company. We are seeing Q2 already in a better spot than expecting to continue to pick up throughout the rest of the year.
To your point about the slippage of these deals where they seem strong coming into Q2. I can for close exactly what happened and what have closed since, but we feel pretty good about this being a better quarter than Q1 from a booking perspective, most of the new bookings were upsells from North America. I mentioned the amount of deals that we had closed. We did mention that there is a strengthening of the pipeline across MENA back, which is interesting for us.
And there's also some high-flying deals that are being looked at that like make a very big difference to our numbers. But you know, it's early to talk about these things and they could take a while. And but we are excited about these things. The type of demand we're seeing out there continues to be similar in the sense of consolidating around cultural for internal and external use cases. We are seeing more EP. cells, even platform sales, both opportunities and usage by the way, we just came out of the first Kotura customer events for the year, Kotura Connect in New York.
We will be discussing it in the subsequent call, given the timing of it, but we also have our San Francisco coming tomorrow in London coming later this month. And we had great turnout and very, very excited people about the type of stuff they could do with us and more thoughts about what they can do in the future. These are big brands. And so there's no softening in the business from that perspective. On the contrary, we are able to command higher prices in times that we had also talked about, which is great.
And upon contract renewal, just inserting that automatically and regardless of additional services that we offer. We are seeing some growth in the top of the sales funnel with year-over-year growth in QVM.s. That's good. So we are expecting companies to start accelerating their demand in the second half of the year. We are strong on the belief that digital transformation, online experiences, hybrid workplace, that Agensys savvy video folks are going to need and want to do this. It does come up in conversations we have, including in the last couple of days, has mentioned with customers.
Gemini is pushing us forward, which is really exciting. And I feel that we do close are across all industries that's excited and across multiple use cases. So all in all, we're feeling good and we've talked more about retention is also a good sign, but we're feeling good. But that said, the year did start slow as it generally does. It was a bit slower and we got to be thoughtful and cautious, and it's too early to celebrate. We left numbers as are for the year. So let's see where things move.

Matt Niknam

If I could just follow up also, just one question for John. I know it's still relatively early, but just being in the seat a couple of months now you've talked about longer term sustained revenue growth as well as on a profitability. What's the path I guess, to more sustained profitability and cash flow generation? Is it improving gross margins? Is it more work to be done on the OpEx base. I just want to maybe get a little higher level sense of what the path is as you think about later 2024 to 25.
Thanks.

John Doherty

Yes, sure. I mean, I mean, basically it's all the above. I mean, I mentioned some of it in my prepared comments in terms of the the hard work that the company did over the last couple of years to improve in the overall operating expense foundation. I certainly think there's additional work that can be done there. But the largest driver I anticipate would be coming from from top line given what we're seeing and kind of what I said about what we see for the second half of this year and into 2025.

Matt Niknam

Great. Thank you, both and Kim, and thank you.

Operator

The next question is coming from Ryan Koontz of Needham & Co. Please go ahead.

Ryan Koontz

Great. Thanks. Ron, how do you think about pricing for a I know there's some features there that are definitely on really kind of shiny objects to attract customers to the platform.
And are there other features that come with a higher COGS perspective element that you've got to accommodate higher price points for you. How do you generally think at this point about AI. as a feature set in pricing?

Ron Yekutiel

Yes. Thanks for that. Good question. As you know, we're very excited about AI. We think that that represents a material shift and change in the world at large, obviously, but also in the world of video theme. The video is the most engaging data type out there and our organization is going to want to have a lot more immersive experiences. And if they're a high infused immersive experiences that can drive results.
The beauty and Kotura is that we are tightly integrated into workflows that we have all the content Federated across the enterprise, given the breadth of use cases and being the system of record. And then we're also the engagement layer. So if you consider kind of a sandwich at the bottom of which are the integration into the workflows, then the data then the AI.
and on top of that, the system of engagement than you could create solutions with the for to this kind of a cycle that enables to provide the right contextualized, hyper relevant content for interaction with individuals like kind of Econocom me on steroids for all these schools that we're in plus corporate training that would enable people to learn and we can go up to the content realm and not just the system platform on providing the right information for people to learn and reskill and that could increase RPU by an order of magnitude when we're not just the kind of the pipes, but we're helping the water come on. The same goes to marketing and the stuff that we're doing now with big brands, in other words, supporting Salesforce and Adobe and so many others right now, and they are looking into inserting whether they're AIREI. So we're excited about that.
To your question about pricing, I think we as well as much as in the same as all the other folks in the industry are we're taking it slower because we're running POCs. We're starting to insert things. These are large enterprises. They do require a certain degree of caution as you introduce AI into their world. We did state that our prepared remarks that there was a very successful POC that demonstrated a very clear ROI and that could translate into pricing. We had not been very careful to date, not to mention how that's going to drive revenue, but we believe it will.
It would be probably a combination of in certain places increasing prices for things that will be offered by AI, but even more so by orders of magnitude, it will be driving the amount of content that's created and the amount of content that's consumed. And by doing so in a roundabout way, will drive our to and would drive stickiness. And we drive all these great things on the Cape and the KPIs of the company. And we're seeing the beginning of a lot of exciting things. So I don't want to set the stage to say here's how much revenue is going to come up over the next six months in line with what I've been saying over recent quarters, we absolutely think it's a very important element of the future of this company.
It's great sense. And I wanted to just comment because you did you did ask about COGS. This is actually an opportunity for reducing COGS in various areas. Let me give you one example. We announced and made mention in prepared remarks that we are creating our own a.s.r. And so the transcription engine that we've used from a third party is not going to be based on whisper open-source library. That is a I driven not only increasing and improving quality, but also reducing COGS. And so if use smartly the opportunity here to actually generate something that's improving our margins, we are not in the business of creating from scratch New Orleans. We're not crunching endless amount of data, like I mentioned earlier in the sandwich metaphor for riding on existing integrations into workflows with existing data and are prompting the Netherlands. I will say that the opportunity that we have and we're talking about major banks and financial institutions and insurance companies and just about every industry is that they have vertical solutions based on their improved LOMs for their specific vertical case, but that does not require crunching of an endless amount of data that is extremely expensive. So I don't foresee a worsening in our margins. I potentially foresee an improvement interest and

Ryan Koontz

super helpful. Thank you, Paul.
Paul, if I could any comments around kind of industry structure out there in terms of, you know, a larger players, smaller players, you know how you see this evolving right now. It just seemed to be kind of a stall in terms of growth and potential consolidation stability? Any comments? Any updated commentary?

Ron Yekutiel

Yes, that's a good question of no major change. I mean, we are seeing the beginning of the reports for the quarter and glad to see that we're coming. And again, with the caution forward are above not below any forward looking kind of year over year growth directions of other companies which is not surprising. But again, it's the beginning of the year and there can be many surprises as we advance and insofar as consolidation, yes, we are keeping an eye on opportunities out there to create further value for shareholders.
We do believe that this industry had been under quite pressure, significant pressure over the last couple of years. We do believe things are going to turn around was coming out of COVID on one hand and coming into the financial crisis at the other. And when there's blood in the street, there is the opportunity. I think we've proven that we can be the consolidator of this industry by way of the depth of integration into workflows as well as the breadth of products and use cases and industries.
And so that introduces opportunities to partner with other technologies that we've done successfully to integrate them into our A. eyes quite easily as well as to potentially consolidate a market and cater to a larger set of customers which could introduce economies of scale and more operational leverage. So no nothing specific to state, obviously on this call, but the fact that we also have John together with us and he's done great things of that nature in the past is indicative, as we've said to us, looking on seizing the opportunity around this market to actually become a stronger leading player. And because of the amazing technology positioning and customer set that we have, I'm going to let John comment on this. If he has anything different.

John Doherty

I think Ron Ron covered it all. I mean I would expect over the course of time there it could be strategic activity in this space just given kind of what's happening in the space. And you mentioned it upfront and new are our goal is to make sure we continue to build a tremendous business here business that shows off revenue growth and positions and puts the company in a great position for revenue growth as well as increasing profitability.
And we do that.
We feel other things take care of themselves.

Ryan Koontz

Super. Thanks for the comments.

Operator

Thank you. The next question is coming from George Iwanyc, Oppenheimer & Co. Please go ahead.

George Iwanyc

Thank you for taking my question. Ron, given the comments you made for EMEA and A-Pac and kind of expand on the regional trends you're seeing at this point?

Ron Yekutiel

Yes. And again, it's early in the year. We got to be careful but a but a few things that we think the one we have on the majority of our E. and T. business coming from North America. But we have a fair bit significant revenue for M&T coming from rest of world kind of immediately connected to the fact that the very large companies in the US have bought or built their own technologies. We consider the large streamers or the very, very large telcos or media companies in North America, which is very different otherwise. So that's historically been the case on the growth we're seeing around the world is a function of two things, number one, a certain regrowth of the M and T opportunity. And I want to be very clear, these are long cycles and they are also longer to convert into revenue and profitability.
So not to say that, you know, because they deal within a second or that it impacts revenue or profitability within a second, but we are cooking some stuff and looking at various opportunities. And it seems as if some folks that have taken a pause given COVID or given following some financial and geopolitical unrest, et cetera, are considering to improve where they are and what they're doing. And to remind you, we are a premium technology there and these are quite significant large deals and so that's one thing, but it's not just that we are seeing also in E. and T.
And to remind you again, we're large enterprise, not SMB, but some of the folks out there that have been extremely cautious over the course of the last couple of years, given where things are our understanding that they can sit on their hands forever, especially that the decision to move to a culture is not just a decision to improve functionality and to have less complexity and less silos on. But it is also a cost reducer because there's economy of scale associated with having a single platform as opposed to multiple vendors.
And so what might not work well for a given year could very much be smart for a company as it looks forward into the next two, three, four years. And I think companies now are more open to consider the mid to long term than they were a couple of years back. But again, let's let's wait and see. We're just giving a what we see at the pipeline when it converts to more deals. We're going to report data.

George Iwanyc

And given the seasonal start to the year and may be the little bit softer trends that you're seeing, can you maybe update us on your hiring expectations, especially from a sales force perspective? And when you you talked about Salesforce, maybe give us some update on your downmarket focus.

Ron Yekutiel

Sure, Tom. So we did see when we were prepping for the year and giving the year guidance. Last year, we reduced sales force by about 25%, indicative with that booking come down by about the same amount, meaning that the sales efficiency was kind of flat year over year and that this year, unlike before, we expect to not reduce but gradually increase to the tune of 10 people, but that that was going to be more so on the second half of the year and that it's not going to make a huge difference this year, but it will start building up towards the following year by way of revenue.
That's still the case. We haven't changed our thesis. Again, it's just small minor. It changes at the beginning of the year, but we're keeping an eye and we're going to continue to keep an eye on at the end. What we're here to do is to be effective, efficient and foreseeing that there's enough breakthrough capacity to move forward and put more people out there to generate growth and were going to do that if we think we need a weighted off a bit. And so that focus more on bottom line than top line growth. We're going to do that as well. We're agile, and we'll see where things go.
But at this point, there's no change in our philosophy and the same goes to going down market. We have done continue to show some interesting deals as we go down to SME and departmental and where our plans have not changed to continue to go down that track. I had mentioned that for the prior call that we are less looking into going full on self-serve, but more the low touch mid-market again aligned with needing to pick your battles in the years that we have seen.
And we're still very much aligned with that. We want to be thoughtful. We don't want to shoot all directions. There's a lot of upside for the Company, but we've got to choose our battles and we the battles haven't changed. It's been a good start for the year, and we're waiting to see where things continue, and we're continuing forward with the same strategy and the same execution.

George Iwanyc

Thank you.

Operator

Once again, that's star one. If you'd like to register a question at this time.
Next question is coming from Michael Turrin of Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.

Hey, this is Romit Shah filling in for Michael. I wanted to ask on the retention rates, what levers do you guys kind of have to pull to bring these back to where they were about a year ago?

Ron Yekutiel

Yes. Thank you for asking young on retention. It was it was a good progress, and I'm going to repeat some of what I said earlier on. This was the third consecutive quarter of improvement. And to remind you that we have the lowest gross churn in Q4, and now we're was even lower than that, meaning better gross retention. It's actually the best that we've seen since the last quarter of 2022. And I also mentioned in the prepared remarks that it represents an annual retention rate that's better than the last three years on a quarterly basis. And then if you multiply that by four, you're getting to better results in the last three years.
So I would say that where we are now actually, if this were theoretically to continue, we're definitely back to where we were even better, not to say that it would be copy paste, and that's what's going to continue. But when we look at the year and that we said in advance, we believe that the year would be a year that is aligned with probably results of the Company prior to last year, which was a up and we remain in that belief that we're in the right direction and also add on retention.
That smaller piece was a full churn, let's say, to the tune of 25% of our churn was full churn, a majority of it was down sales, call it 75% of the churn, and that's the case in both E & T & M and T and we continue to see a very small piece, call it less than 10% of our gross churn associated with either product or service gaps. So the rest are either budget limitations, product services that are no longer needed. These are things that are aligned with what we've recently seen on. I'll just say this touches NDR now we've mentioned how we fared in Q1.
Not a surprise for us given last year's churn is a lagging indicator. And we also as we look forward into the future, we did say kind of cautiously in the prepared remarks that there may be a bit of a decrease into the next quarter. We're not seeing anything significant. So let's wait and see where it goes. If it is it might be a small decrease. And then hopefully, as the continued improvement around gross retention and the bookings that we expect will start climbing, then we expect to gradually start showing better results there. So that said, if you have any other questions on that, John, anything you want to say I'm not going to go to.

Okay. Yes, yes, great. Thanks for the color there. Just one more, if you don't mind on the competitive landscape and who you're running into with deals and comments on pricing trends, things like that.

Ron Yekutiel

Yes, we're not seeing anything, you know, fiercer competition nor new players come in on and on the pricing, I did mention that we are we were able to have increased contractually more so than in the past. And that was by way of strategy, which I had stated prior that we intend to do so as well this year. So we're not seeing additional pressures come in.

Great. Thanks. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. The next question is coming from Pat Walravens of Citizen's, JMP. Please go ahead.

Hey, great. This is Oliver KIRK and demand for Pat. Going back to competition a little bit with the seven six-figure deals that you closed this quarter. Can you talk a bit about the extent to which these deals you were involved in were part of competitive bake-off?

Ron Yekutiel

on most of the more not like I said, most of the bookings this quarter was more so on on upsells rather than new logos, which is indicative that's kind of a light for the industry in recent quarters, given where things are, you know, people are sticking to their existing vendors more so than in the past because it's just too risky to start making moves. This hasn't changed. But in most of these cases, people, they love us debates and they want to stay with us and they're not considering a change and it's also sticky offering and especially to our culture because unlike the other folks that are quite often offering just kind of a low touch self-serve product or without a lot of API is not necessarily mission critical more. So an app that's easy to replace in our case. But often what we're offering is something with a lot of API integrations and harder switch. Again, to remind you, when we spoke about even higher churn rates are low retention rates that was more often than not down sales because people needed to use less stuff, not because they wanted to disconnect or were interested to switch. What we're seeing again, in line with your question is that, you know, things are maintaining with Kotura, there's mainly upsells and people are not considering significantly doing it with somebody else. It's just a question of how much money they have in order to do what they wanted to do now versus wait a bit longer.

Great. That's helpful. And I guess a little bit of a follow up. I know you powered some of the functionalities of the GTC. conference and you have in the past. So has the growth of that ecosystem helped at all in terms of upsells.

Ron Yekutiel

And so India is a great partner and customer obviously a phenomenal company. We're privileged. We do some work with them and in fact, we're doing a bit more work with them and hopeful that that trend will continue if they were to mimic historical contracts and we were able to overcome and expanded quite significantly. And we're hoping that that will continue to be the story with this amazing company as well.

Great. Thank you.

Ron Yekutiel

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. At this time, I would like to turn it back over to Mr. Yoo Bill for closing comments.

Ron Yekutiel

Yes, I want to thank you all for your good questions and a good beginning for a year, like I said, optimistic trends around retention, which we promise and are currently delivering on. And we're excited and we're going to I'm sure in the next call how our Company Conference, the Concur Connect is taking place. For those of you who still want to join San Francisco's happening tomorrow in London. Is going to happen later this month. Now please do come and you can find it on our website by the way, we're going to be sharing the recordings from that events you'd be able to have a look at them. I think they're quite telling us the breadth and depth of what it is that we offer.
Thank you all for you for joining the call and have a wonderful day.

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation. This concludes today's event. You may disconnect your lines or log off the webcast at this time and enjoy the rest of your day.