Q4 2023 Inuvo Inc Earnings Call
Participants
Richard Howe; Executive Chairman & CEO; Inuvo, Inc.
Wally Ruiz; CFO; Inuvo, Inc.
Brian Kinstlinger; Analyst; Alliance Global Partners
Jack Vander Aarde; Analyst; Maxim Group LLC
Presentation
Operator
Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Inuvo Inc. Fourth Quarter and Year End 2023 conference calls. At this time, all lines are in listen-only mode following the presentation, we'll conduct a question and answer session. If at any time during this call you require assistance, please press star zero for the operator. This call is being recorded on Thursday, February 29, 2024. I would like to turn the conference over to Alexandra.
Please go ahead.
Thank you, operator, and good afternoon. I'd like to thank everyone for joining us today for the Inuvo Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2023 shareholder update call today. Inuvo's Chief Executive Officer, Richard Howe, and Chief Financial Officer, Wally Ruiz will be your presenters on the call. We would also like to remind our shareholders that we plan to file our 10 K with the Securities and Exchange Commission this afternoon. Before we begin, I'm going to review the Company's Safe Harbor statement that statements in this conference call that are not descriptions of historical facts are forward-looking statements relating to future events. And as such, all forward-looking statements are made pursuant to the Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially when used in this call. The words anticipate, could enable, estimate, intend, expect, believe, potential, will, should, project and similar expressions as they relate to a new voting are as such, a forward looking statements. Investors are cautioned that all forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties which may cause actual results to differ from those anticipated by Inuvo at this time. In addition, other risks are more fully described in Inuvo's public filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which can be reviewed at www.SEC.gov.
The Company makes no commitment to disclose any revisions to forward-looking statements or any facts, events or circumstances after the date hereof that bear upon forward-looking statements.
In addition, today's discussion will include references to non-GAAP measures. The Company believes that such information provides an additional additional measurement and consistent historical comparison of its performance. A reconciliation of the non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures is available in today's news release on our website.
With that, I will now turn the call over to CEO, Richard Howe. Please go ahead.
Richard Howe
Thank you, Ali, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today, and we are pleased to report that for the quarter ended December 31, 2023, we delivered a strong 21% year over year quarterly growth with $20.8 million of revenue for the year, while revenue was down 2%. Overall, it was largely a consequence of a weaker than expected first quarter. The real story, however, was how well the Company performed in the second half of the year where revenue was up 32% year over year. And of course, in Q three, the company recorded its highest quarterly revenue ever at $24.6 million. Our run rate at which we have stated many times in the past that if maintained, we would expect to get us to free cash flow positive. It may be interesting to also note that since the COVID low point in the second quarter of 2020, we've had a 7.5% compounded quarterly growth rate through the end of the fourth quarter of 2023. This trajectory and several positive client industry and product announcements and advancements gives us confidence for the 2024 year.
While we will share more details about our 2023 financial results shortly, what I'd like to do is spend my time bringing you up to speed on our industry, our products and our clients.
Let's begin with our industry. We believe the plumbing of the Internet is literally being reimagined before our eyes for this change is accelerating and is being driven both by legislative and technological pressure resulting from the use of an individual's identity and data for ad targeting. The reason this is monumental is because the very foundation of digital advertising spend worldwide that funds most activity on the Internet over $600 billion annually.
Having to be redesigned because of this change, I'd like to put this in perspective, Apple constitutes roughly 50% of all mobile devices in the United States. And because Apple has blocked user tracking those devices for the most part are going untargeted across the open web. Apple has been the single biggest catalyst behind this reshaping of the Internet in favor of ad targeting systems that do not use the consumer's identity and data there is no turning back for IOS devices. And if anything, Apple continues to implement various browser technologies specifically designed to prevent user tracking. The challenge is that there are hundreds of companies supporting this industry whose businesses and technology models are dependent on these identity based methods. Inuvo's technology does not depend on these approaches, and consequently, we can identify suitable audiences target those audiences and predictively measure the effectiveness of those audiences across IOS or any other device. Generally, the incumbents are lobbying hard to keep the existing approach alive through engineering that uses less effective workarounds that were not originally designed to track people. A host of other companies are scrambling to go back to building and using contextually based technologies that are not dependent on using a person's identity, neither approach is likely to produce acceptable results for advertisers. Google, which represents 50% of the overall US Brower browsers market share finally jumped into the mix this year and has begun phasing out user tracking via the third party cookie, which they suggest they will complete by December of this year. Inuvo was built for this moment in time starting nearly seven years ago when we began making investments in this technology, we are the only company I am aware of that has implemented proprietary large language generative, artificial intelligence in a manner that solves the identity targeting problem. And in head-to-head testing, our solution has outperformed other technologies. We've come up against competitively. I cannot emphasize enough how this technology is revolutionary and not derivative of some other companies' technology and our products. It is in a literal sense, the next evolution in Open Web ad targeting in the same way, OpenEye Google and Microsoft. It introduced bare large language based technologies as the next evolution in search, we recently signed up what could be a potentially large client specifically because our product does not rely on identity. And because of the early performance results and insights we delivered that client is now starting to scale media spend with Inuvo. We beat out to other vendors to get that business having gone through a vetting process in 2023 as the advertising industry goes through this transformation, we expect to experience increased demand for our products and services over the next few years as advertisers begin to better understand that this new consumer privacy paradigm is here to stay and they start to experience the performance declines associated with this transformation. Inuvo saw the importance of this large language model AI. branch of data science many years ago when we started developing for a future that has well now arrived a decision that has provided us a significant competitive advantage, a moat of patents and first mover advantage for the advertising use case our AI was designed for. We've received more brand exposure in 2023 than at any time in our history. We've had over 35 media citations since the beginning of 2023.
Let's shift now to products and clients as we have discussed previously, as a company, we have been focused on using our various technologies and assets within a mostly managed service business model. This is true across the entire business where we now count among our clients, some of the world's largest technology, retail and auto companies. We have sold our products and services to agencies, brands and platform clients for whom we have placed over 11 billion ads in 2023.
Going forward, we plan to disclose revenue across two client categories, agencies and brands and platforms. We define platforms as large consolidators of advertising demand in effect, another axis point to media budgets. Platform relationships require less investment in sales and support while providing broad access to advertiser budgets in 2023, the revenue split was 21% agencies and brands and 79% platforms. We had one new platform relationship and 56 new brand and agency relationships in 2023. These new clients cross over many industries. Currently, our largest agency and brand relationships are within auto and retail. We ran over 280 individual campaigns for these agencies and brands and thousands of campaigns for our platform clients in 2023. As we head into 2024, we are now able to deliver scale and support feature-rich self-service version of the intent PAI., having now serve numerous clients through its beta implementation phases. The best way to understand this solution is to think about it as an artificial intelligence as a service product that can be frictionless fully accessed across several of the most popular advertising campaign system for the open web. These are generally referred to as demand-side platform. This is a higher margin product for Inuvo. So as we scale this over the next few years, it can significantly contribute to the bottom line. We are in the process of hiring additional salespeople dedicated to these self service oriented buyers.
As mentioned earlier, we also had a new platform client at the end of 2023. This integration is already delivering revenue at higher margins in this new opportunity. We leveraged existing assets from within both Bonfire and IntentKey in a new and competitively differentiated way client. And question is a large Internet company, the first four months have been encouraging already delivering roughly [$60,000] per month in revenue with only marginal additional costs, along with the AI as a service product I described previously, this forms part of our overall 2024 bottom line improvement strategies, our largest client itself, a platform is scaling because of a strategic initiative initiative that client brought to market in 2023. To meet this demand. We have been expanding digital properties, campaign automation and predictive technologies, along with our advertising fraud detection capabilities. We see strong potential upside in this initiative over the next few years. And accordingly, see, this is an important part of our top line strategy. One of the most significant consequences of no longer being able to attract consumers is the inability to measure directly when those consumers convert. This creates a serious challenge for Chief Marketing Officer. We therefore, will no longer be able to attribute the return on their media investments across the plethora of campaigns and channels they deploy in much the same way Inuvo saw the audience selection and targeting challenge. We also saw this one. This is why in 2023, we incorporated into our IntentKey programmatic AI solution. It's just in time, analytical and reporting capability that predicts across campaigns and channels. The optimal spend levels, giving the CMOs the dashboard they need to continuously tune their marketing investments. This was a critical feature in the larger client win I described earlier. We put out a release this week discussing how this very capability can also be used to predict relative to other advertising tactics, the optimal investment in Netflix advertising inventory, traditional deterministic media measurement technologies will no longer work in that channel.
In 2023, we were the first company ever to provide online access to a large language modeled generative, artificial intelligence. It it's instantly capable of creating audiences based on a contextual description of those audiences. We made this available at our noovie.com forward slash portal. I cannot stress this enough every piece of audience information presented at this portal is generated by AI. This has never been done before. The commercial version of this product allows our clients to generate action and measure audiences based on the collection of contextual information and imagery. It is representative of their products, services or brands with a virtually on limited audience curation flexibility. This is the first of its kind capability within advertising possible only because of a numerous proprietary patented AI.
Now as it relates to the continuing investment in our AI, we are not resting on our laurels. Rather. We are continuing to expand our IT training in ways that will make it increasingly harder for competitors to catch up. Our latest research involves generating audiences specific to events about to occur and or are currently occurring across the country, you'd have to be living under a rock to not have heard about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey. If you're a brand that Kelsey endorses, you have both risk and reward associated with this kind of global attention to imagine if you had an AI technology that already knows you're associated with these two celebrities and could immediately and anonymously generate and target an audience of those people most loyal. So this ongoing story that would be just in time, event-driven marketing in a manner that has never been possible at this time, I would like to now turn the call over to Wally for a more detailed assessment of our financial performance within the quarter and year.
Wally Ruiz
Thank you. Rich.
Good afternoon, everyone. I'll recap the financial results of our fourth quarter and full year for 2023. As Rich mentioned, Inuvo reported revenue of $20.8 million for the fourth quarter of this year of 2023, and that's compared to $17.3 million for the same period last year or the prior year 21% increase. As Rich pointed out in his remarks. Going forward, we'll be disclosing revenue in two categories, platform customers and agency and brand customers. We believe this better reflects our go-to market activity. We had 56 new agency brand customers and one new platform customer. In 2023. The higher revenue was due to scaling of our largest platform customer. Yes, we reported $73.9 million of revenue for the full year of 2023, a slight decrease as compared to $75.6 million in 2022. The decrease is due to the slower than expected start in 2023 in the first half of the year, 79% of the full year of 2023 revenue was from platform customers and 21% from agency of brand customers for the year that ended in December 31, 2022, 52% of the revenue was from platforms and 48% from agencies and brands. The change in mix was a result of focusing on and scaling a program brought to market in 2023 by our largest customer and to a lesser extent, the loss of an agency client late in 2022.
Cost of revenue was $2.6 million for the fourth quarter of 2023 compared to $5.5 million for the same period last year. Cost of revenue was $10.5 million for the full year ended December 31, 2023 compared to $30.2 million for last year. The decrease in the cost of revenue for the three months and the full year ended December 31, 2023 as compared to the prior periods last year was due to the change in revenue mix. Cost of revenue was primarily composed of payments to advertising exchanges that provide access to digital inventory where we serve advertisements.
Gross profit improved in the fourth quarter of 2023, where it was $18.2 million compared to $11.7 million for the same period last year. The gross profit margin for the fourth quarter of 2023 increased to 87.3% compared to 68% last year.
Gross profit for the full year ended December 31, 2023 increased to $63.4 million compared to $45.4 million last year. Gross profit margin for the full year that ended December 31, 2023 was 85.8% compared to 60% last year. Again, as I mentioned, the higher gross margin in the current year as compared to the prior year is due primarily to the change in revenue mix. We have a greater percentage of the revenue this year was from platforms, which typically has a higher gross margin.
Operating expenses for the 4th year of 2023 totaled $20.6 million compared to $15.7 million for the same period last year.
Operating expenses for the full year ended December 31, 2023 totaled $73.8 million compared to $58 million in 2023. We invested in our go-to-market team and marketing programs designed to increase our market exposure.
Marketing costs were $15.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2023 compared to $10.1 million in the same quarter last year. Marketing costs increased primarily primarily as a result of traffic acquisition or media costs associated with campaigns. Marketing costs were $52 million in the full year 2023 compared to $36.9 million last year. Compensation expense for the fourth quarter of 2023 was $3.6 million compared to $2.9 million in the same quarter of the prior year. Compensation expense was higher in 2023 due primarily to higher salary commissions and incentive expenses for the full year of 2023. Compensation expense was $13.8 million compared to $12.5 million in 2022. Our total employment of full and part-time was 93 at December 31, 2023 compared to 86 at the same time in 2022. In 2023, we added to our go to go to market sales and support team and to their commission and incentive programs.
General and administrative expense for the fourth quarter of 2023 was $1.8 million compared to $2.7 million in the prior year, a decrease of 32%. General administrative costs were lower in 2023 compared to the same quarter in 2022 primarily due to a decrease in the reserve for doubtful accounts and professional fees.
General and mix and administrative expense was $8 million for the full year 2023 compared to $8.6 million in the prior year, a decrease of 6.7%. On a full year basis, net financing income was approximately $8,000 in the fourth quarter of 2023 compared to an expense of approximately $10,000 in the same quarter last year. Net financing expense was approximately $30,000 for the full year 2023 compared to $21,000 last year.
Turning to other income and expense, we reported an income of approximately $15,000 for the full year of 2023 compared to an expense of approximately $436,000 for last year and 2022. Last year's expense was associated with net realized and unrealized losses on trading securities. The net loss improved in the fourth quarter of 2023, where it was $2.4 million or $0.02 per basic and diluted share as compared to a net loss of $4 million or $0.03 per per basic and diluted share for the same quarter last year. Net loss for the full year also improved to $10.4 million or $0.08 per basic share for the year ended December 31st, 2023, compared to a $13.1 million net loss or $0.11 per share in the prior year. Adjusted EBITDA of loss improved in the fourth quarter of 2023 was $1.2 million and that compared to a loss of $1.8 million in the fourth quarter of last year. The adjusted EBITDA loss for the full year ended December 31, 2023, was $5.3 million compared to a loss of $5 million last year. The Company had a positive free cash flow from May through September of 2023. And for the full year, the cash flow used had improved by $3 million over the prior year 2022. On December 31st, 2023, we had cash and cash equivalents of $4.4 million and a net working capital of $211,000. In addition, we maintain a $5 million working capital line of credit, which had no outstanding balance. We have a simple capital structure with [138 million] common and common shares outstanding, [7 million] employee restricted restricted stock units outstanding and [108,000] out of the money warrants outstanding.
With that, I'll turn the call back over to Rich for closing remarks.
Richard Howe
Thanks, Wally. We had a strong year over year fourth quarter growth of 21% and a second half year over year growth of 32%, which provides confidence. But as we head into 2024, we have the momentum required to continue growing, as we have mentioned in previous quarters, and numerous financial metrics begin to change at a threshold of roughly $100 million in annual revenue at this level, gross margins are capable of absorbing much of our fixed costs and therefore generate positive cash flow.
An example of this occurred in the third quarter of 2023, where we reported revenue of $24.6 million, and we did have positive free cash flow in that quarter.
We believe we have a plan to reach this threshold in 2024 and can be cash flow positive.
I will now turn the call over to the operator for questions. Operator?
Question and Answer Session
Operator
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. Should you have a question, please press star followed by the number one on your touchtone phone. Should you wish to decline from the polling process, please press star followed by the number two. If you are using a speakerphone, please lift your handset before pressing any keys. One moment, please. First question.
Your first question comes from Brian Kinstlinger from Alliance Global Partners.
Please go ahead.
Brian Kinstlinger
Great, thanks, Creating exciting news about measuring Netflix ads, maybe highlight the testing that's been done with beta customers, the results and how it's helped advertisers make budget decisions and then second, related to that, how do you plan to educate advertisers and agencies?
Richard Howe
And yes, front. So the budget decisions is a big issue and in fact, it's a real weakness it has been a weakness within advertising for a long time. Not that there hasn't been technologies that are available to be purchased, but not all CMOs actually use them and perhaps maybe even know that they exist since the thing about it is it when the when the cookie breaks and when you can't track people anymore around the Internet, all of the existing technologies that have historically been used to optimize media across channels and campaigns. It will no longer function because there's no longer a one-to-one connection and their technology was developed around that one to one connection. So this component and that of our technology that we completed in 2023 and have now implemented across a number of customers is proving and to have been a really good initiative for us. In fact, the large client win I talked about earlier was won as much for this predictive BUDGET optimization capability as it was for the cookie-less audience targeting capability?
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, what was the second question?
Brian Kinstlinger
Yes.
So it sounds like you have a handful of customers to answer the numbers question. I'm not mistaken that we'd or beta are now customers.
The other question I would have is I mean, again, you're a small company limited limited capital to deploy. How do you educate the market? How do they become aware of this market? And I'm not sure you can get anywhere else.
Richard Howe
Yes. So well, there's the people we have on the street, obviously, talking to prospects all the time.
And that's one avenue.
But you're correct on that compared maybe to other better funded companies, we've got some fraction of the total sales force that they have and we did start investing in 2023 in marketing.
And by that by investing, I don't mean it's a lot of money.
I actually believe most of the increase in media exposure that we've gotten in 2023 or at least some large component of it is just simply the result of the reality at the end is near and as a result, you know, media is starting to jump on the story more than they have in the past. We're going to continue to do that, Brian. In fact, I was just featured on a podcast recently about this.
I see this accelerating for us.
So I mean, these are the best two avenues we've got perform for our clients to make sure that we're canvassing as much of that marketplace as we can and get the word out to increase the brand exposure for Inuvo.
Brian Kinstlinger
Great, two more questions.
First, the ad market had its challenges, but I think it showed some signs also of improving, but we've got also an election year at a high level, maybe discussed with the opportunity you have with your 10 K and your AI., how should we think about reasonable growth rate targets in 2024? And I assume the first quarter is seasonally weak as usual?
Richard Howe
Yes. So we suggested on obviously in the script that I just wrote that we do have a plan that we believe we can execute on that could get us to the [100 million] mark. And it doesn't mean we will Brian, as you well know here. But I can tell you we take our planning pretty seriously.
And when we say we think we can get there.
It means that with the customers we've got with the traction we've got with how things look just from today, we think we've got we've got a good shot at getting there this year on immunoassay. That's the best I can give you.
That's what that's what I believe.
Brian Kinstlinger
No.
Understood.
And this will be a tougher one than now. You've got this product that solves a major problem. And I'm not to say your second half numbers aren't super. It's not to say achieving $100 million wouldn't be great either. But I guess I'd ask why isn't adoption much faster? Why aren't agencies pushing these products so much more aggressively? Or why aren't advertisers giving you increased wallet share once they see the performance, I guess in another way, when do we see a hockey stick growth at Hana a moment of what's going on.
Richard Howe
So there's two primary reasons for that for the for the question you're asking and the third one's about hockey stick growth. I'll take that as the third one is change if people don't like to change right again, it's the one thing, humans avoid at all costs. And so you have to overcome that year the aspect of change and then the reluctance to change, as I've said in the past, about change it's really helped along in a big way when there are catalyst that are forcing people to have to change. And in our case, that's a legislative catalyst, GDPR in Europe, the California Consumer Privacy Act started it, but now 13 other states have data and consumer privacy legislation.
Another 17 states, I think, have legislation in progress if the change is going to occur, whether the people who are reluctant to change one or two or not.
Now they may wait, which is what's happening. I think a lot of people are waiting for Google to jump in this mix and finally start eliminating the cookie. And they did that in January and they say they're going to phase it out this year. So this change is now what's happening now and it's going to accelerate and all the people who have been waiting, you know, because they thought, oh, it's not going to happen or I know I'm going to use somebody else to do this. I'm going to find out that it's not going to work. And that relates to the second issue with this that I answer on which is the incumbent. As I said in my script, there are literally hundreds of companies, right?
We're talking about a $600 billion worldwide industry.
There are hundreds of companies they have built the entire tech stack that they have on this old way of doing it and consider that, of course, they own the majority of the market share compared to our we know if we do [$100 million] this year, they obviously they don't have a lot more of it.
They're not in a hurry to tell their clients, right that they don't have a solution for this problem.
And so that causes the clients to think like.
Okay.
Well, we've got it covered.
And all that does is it just pushes them to have to be late adopters because that's the performance starts to decline because their incumbents didn't have a solution to this problem, not an adequate solution. This problem will we'll start hopefully getting more demand for what we have. And so that probably answers the third thing, a hockey stick for us, by the way I should point out. I said it in my my notes, but we have been growing at a 7.5% quarterly compounded growth rate since Q2 2020. That's not terrible on a better way better than terrible Okay. So yes, I get your point on the hockey stick.
And I think the next three years, you know, one, two, three years are going to be a really, really exciting years for us important and exciting years for us because the game's over.
Brian Kinstlinger
Great, Brian. But actually, last question I have I heard it right. You had 56 new agencies. I think for the year you added? and --
Richard Howe
agencies and brands
Brian Kinstlinger
Agencies and brands, right? And you had 80 campaigns, I think for those customers and I'm not mistaken, I'm not sure if I heard that right?
Richard Howe
we did no. We didn't disclose that and we won't disclose how many campaigns we ran for the 56.
I guess maybe you might try to disclose how many campaigns we had for the for the entire year, I think was [218] wasn't to a bar.
Brian Kinstlinger
Okay. So back to the 86 new agencies and brands. I would think that they've started the change. They started to see it. So it's customers. You add in year one that would drive substantial wallet share growth in year two and year three. Is that the right way to think about it?
Richard Howe
Yes, it is exactly how to think about it. I've said this before, so I'll say it again, we rarely lose a client any client, unless it's almost always are when we do lose. It's a brand in an agency because the agency we're working with lost the clients. That's typically how we lose a, call it a client on our strategies, land and expand. So yes or no. And when we sign up 56, even if they're small now that there's a good chance unless an agency loses the client themselves, that those will continue to expand right now and going forward for us.
Brian Kinstlinger
Great. Thanks for all your responses.
Yeah, Thank Brian.
Operator
Thank you.
Your next question comes from Jack Vander Aarde from Maxim Group. Please go ahead.
Jack Vander Aarde
Okay, great. Thank you, Rich and Wally on and great to see the strong growth momentum in the back half of the year.
So Rich, maybe maybe just for clarity because I think it's material in important to point out if this is correct. But considering the large agency customer or the end customer that left in the fourth quarter of 2022, I think it was about $80 million of annual revenue, if you does, is it correct to if you adjust for that client back, that revenue out through 2023 full year revenue seems like it was up almost nearly 30%, which I think is important to point out if that is kind of the right way to think about it, netting that out with that, right, what it is?
Richard Howe
Yes, I think that's exactly the way to look at it, Jack. And in fact, I think it's another reason why we we have we feel good about that second half and why we emphasize that because we effectively, which is what you're saying, we see we backfilled that you cannot live in, and that's not an insignificant amount of revenue, right?
But we were we were able to to to plug that agency lost client.
Um, that was one of those examples by the way, but I just add to Brian's right of a loss. And so yes, I think you're thinking about it the right way.
Jack Vander Aarde
Okay.
Great.
And then maybe just just further to that point, it was kind of my my feeling are centered in, I believe your guys' Essentis well in previous quarters following that event that that was an isolated one-time occurrence. And just to be clear, I mean, how is your relationship with that actually agency, but are you still growing and actively working with them?
Richard Howe
lesser
Jack Vander Aarde
Lesser, Okay.
And then just speaking to the signing 56 new agency brands and in one platform and customer in 2023, given your comments about the strong outlook and pipeline. I'm just hoping you could expand on that a little bit further on so the 56 agency brands, how likely are those to be repeat customers in 2024? And are you have an expanding within those customers with those brands and agencies?
Richard Howe
Very likely.
So that's the second very likely to all be customers in 20 this year, 2024 have agreed for 2024 and dumb and likely to expand.
Jack Vander Aarde
Okay.
Great.
And then just a follow-up, then I cut the headcount you've been you've been hiring new. It sounds like you continue to plan to hire more. Just given your pipeline growth expectations, do you feel like you have sufficient capacity personnel from today? Or will you to service the kind of demand and pipeline growth you're expecting? And how is the demand versus kind of your capacity balance today? Is it too much demand right now, three, which would be a good problem to have. Just any color, any color there would be helpful.
Richard Howe
We well, we whenever you grow as much as we did in the second half, you feel some strain. But I would say where we're not we're not feeling the strain in the sense that we're scared of continued growth.
So maybe that's the best way to say. So there's clearly still utilization potential within the resources we have, although we do run about as efficient as a technology company that's doing the kind of mix that has the kind of technology we have. I can't remember what the number is, but I think we run about $900,000 in revenue per employee a pretty high number relative to comps from. So we're efficient in that regard. If we add resources, we said this before, it will really be all client facing for the most part we may add more engineers and data scientists around the Company here and there, but it won't be a significant number relative to the client facing components that go to market just sales and account managers and and campaign people.
Jack Vander Aarde
Okay, great.
And then just one more for me and I apologize. I kind of I kind of missed if I caught a lot of your comments, just the large customer you're talking on your prepared remarks that I think it boils down to your repeating in a bake-off against two other competitors on your new eventually won, you won the deal on. Just how long was that kind of from initial discussions to signing the bottom line? How long did that process interaction is going to take and then any color on who those two customers potential competitors were flash? Was it a bigger handful of competitors originally just walking through that whole kind of process? And how long it took and eventually why you wanted, I guess?
Richard Howe
Yes, nine months is the answer to the first question on.
Jack Vander Aarde
Okay.
Richard Howe
The second question, I don't like we have a name that these these other companies were in this incredibly competitive environment, Jack. So if I name them, then they're going to and they're going to know who it is. They may not know that they've even lost at this point on. And so I am reluctant to do that. I will tell you that they're much bigger than we are, which means they have a lot more resources and been around a while yet there considerably bigger than just a testament, quite frankly, to our technology to be able to beat out the companies.
Jack Vander Aarde
We did no that's enough Toy Fair. I'm not looking for you to disclose anything that you shouldn't, I guess.
Yes, that's what I was really looking for is what was the kind of caliber or size of these competitors are going was a kind of a David versus Goliath story here and it's kind of proof in the pudding there. Technology is definitely behaving itself and gaining traction.
And then just one more thing, which in terms of platforms now with this new segmentation, is there how do you expect these two segments? If you if you had a crystal ball and you're looking forward, I do expect these to ramp and kind of in terms of the revenues going forward, are they going to be one going to help us the other are they ever going to be kind of at parity? How do you just think about the opportunity near term, long term?
Richard Howe
In the future they should be parity So I think, yes, in an end, state some years down the road, I would expect the agency and brand component to continue in terms of the mix to be a bigger part of the overall mix and albeit it could surprise us because the platforms by default, you know, are bigger and they do tend to scale faster. So it's hard to predict they're both looking really good right now with the bottom line, we see potential in both of them, right? In fact, like I said, we added a new platform relationship in 2023, which as you know, also exciting for us.
Jack Vander Aarde
Absolutely.
Okay. Well, great.
That's all I have for you. I appreciate the time.
Thank you.
Richard Howe
Thank you, Jack.
Operator
And thank you there are no further questions at this time. I'll turn it over to management for closing remarks.
Please go ahead.
Richard Howe
Thank you, Sergio and everyone. Thank you for joining us today on the call, and we appreciate your continued interest in the Company, and we look forward to keeping you apprised of our progress on on the next call.
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call for today. We thank you for participating and ask that you please disconnect your lines. Thank you.
