On The Horizon
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On The Horizon
Kaltura (KLTR) Talking Heads: Kaltura Puts a Face on Enterprise AI
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Ron Yekutiel, Co-Founder, Chairman, President, and CEO of Kaltura, Inc. (NASDAQ: KLTR), joins the latest WTR Small-Cap Spotlight for an in-depth look at the company’s next chapter. In conversation with host Tim Gerdeman and WTR analyst James Kisner, Yekutiel explains how Kaltura is moving from a long-standing leadership position in enterprise video to an AI-powered, agentic digital experience platform. He outlines how the company is combining its core technology with photorealistic conversational avatars from the eSelf acquisition and intent-based journey orchestration from PathFactory to transform customer, employee, learner, and audience experiences.
During the episode, Yekutiel demonstrates his own digital twin, an avatar that presents Kaltura’s investor deck, answers questions, and switches to Japanese on command. The discussion also covers the two agentic solutions planned for release in the second half of 2026, the strategic importance of Kaltura’s real-time experience layer, and how the leadership team is balancing investment in growth with adjusted EBITDA profitability and positive cash flow.
Welcome to the WTR SmallCamp Spotlight Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Gerdman, Vice Chairman, Co-Founder, and Chief Marketing Officer of Water Tower Research. Today, we're joined by Raman Yukatil, co-founder, chairman, president, and CEO of Kalterma Inc. NASDAQ Ticker Symbol, K M L T R. KalTurma is an enterprise software company that has long-powered video enriched media experiences at scale across enterprise, education, technology, media, and telecom. The company is now executing a multi-year evolution from a video platform into an AI-powered agentic digital experience platform. Calter aims to deliver personalized interactive experiences across the journeys of customers, employees, learners, and audiences. Also, joining is my WTR equity research colleague, James Kisner. Ron and James, thanks for joining me this morning.
SPEAKER_03Thank you, Tim.
SPEAKER_01Ron, for listeners new to the Kaltura story on our platform, please provide us with a high-level overview of what the company does and what types of customers are you serving currently.
SPEAKER_03Sure. Happy to do that. And hello, everyone. So we're a 20-year-old leading enterprise video platform, and we've evolved in the age of AI to power video-based agentic enterprise digital experiences for both internal employee and external customer experiences. So up until a couple years ago, our enterprise video platform included video products like a video content management system, enterprise video portal, video extensions for popular LMSs and CMSs, virtual event platform, an over-the-top television platform. It's all video stuff. And the main use cases have been communication collaboration, teaching and enablement, sales and marketing, entertainment. So using complex video products for different things. Over the last couple of years, we've added a wide array of genuine AI tools for video creation management and experiences. And just to name a few, these are for AI-based video clippings. So you can offer hyper-personalized video experiences, avatar-narrated videos that are created from text or videos or URLs, and they could offer a much more engaging and easy and cost-effective way to create content. We have agentic conversational avatars that are increasing engagement interaction. We have agentic publishing and workflows that are reducing complexities of everything AI-based on top of video. We serve 1,200 enterprise customers. They span across all major industries. That includes a lot of Fortune 100 and 500 companies. We got 35 of the top 50 tech companies, close to 50% of the US R1 schools. We have the five biggest US banks, six of the top 10 pharmas. So we power about 20 million unique monthly users, hundreds of millions of video assets, and we're a global company, about 600 people.
SPEAKER_01Thank you for that overview. My initial reaction is there must be a huge total addressable market, which I'll let James get into as he starts to ask you some questions. Thank you. James?
SPEAKER_04Thanks, Tom. So welcome again, Ron. So for years, Kaltura was known as the Enterprise Video Platform, and now you were describing a shift to an AI-powered, agentic digital experience platform. So maybe just tell us more about what's driving that evolution and how you would describe what Caltura is becoming.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, thank you for the good question, James. That's really key. I mean, we built a couple hundred million dollar business of being top right quadrant and Forrester and Gartner and video, but we believe that is just a leaping position for this next Gen AI revolution. Now, Gen AI and the world of video brings together content creation and engagement into a single platform. Used to have been that you had companies that created content and you had companies that created engagement. Now you could create a flywheel in which AI-based content is created on the fly in real time, delivered to provide hyper-contextualized and hyper-personalized experiences. And through conversational agents that are video-based avatars, you could become the heart of customer and employee experience with one system that does it all. So our platform, as we've emerged, is a flywheel where content, engagement data, user intent, everything comes together in real time to provide very rich experiences that are personalized, automated, and that are maximizing outcomes. Now, consider when you think about today's digital experience, most of them are still textual, right? You go to a website, there's a lot of text. They're mostly static. You don't have something dynamic, you click around, you try to get an answer. They're not personalized, the same for all. And our goal as we see the future is to upgrade these textual, static, non-personalized experiences into rich, video first, engaging, and dynamically forming journeys so that each and every individual that comes to a website or goes through either employee training, onboarding, learning, communication, or customer-based onboarding training, selling, marketing, they could have their own n equals one experience that is very, very rich, very contextualized, and very personalized. And this is what we're here to do. So, in a nutshell, as you think about the shift of the company, we started with using a video as an end. Here's your video product, go ahead and use it, and are now harnessing the power video as a means for an end to offer a complete end-to-end employee and customer engagement platform. And we think this is really revolutionary to increase materially the use cases in the Temp.
SPEAKER_04It's a very forward-looking vision. Um you brought together three pieces the the core culture platform, eSelf for conversational avatars, and now Path Factory for content intelligence and journey orchestration. So can you just tell us more about how they fit together and what can the platform do today that it couldn't do, say a year ago?
SPEAKER_03No, happy to do that. So again, we've been here for 20 years and have powered some of the biggest companies on earth around video. Um, and late last year we acquired eSelf, which is a Gen AI lab that was an expert in multi-model conversational agents. And specifically, they've created avatar technology for conversational avatars. We kind of say that they've added to us a face, a mouth, ears, and eyes. So now you have a conversational agent that speaks 30 plus languages, has a face that uh is photorealistic, reacts in real time, but also has eyes, by the way, in which we can share the screen, it comprehends the screen, it comprehends a camera. So that agent has full conversation capability with you, and it's agentic. It's not just a tool that is listening and that's it. It has the understanding of the context to be able to provide you what you want. Then, earlier this year, a few months after, we acquired Path Factory. Path Factory are an intent-based content and user management platform. They are an expert in understanding why you've come to a certain website, what content have you been consuming, what content should you be consuming, and based on your intent to create to you a user journey of a sequence of certain content pieces. By the way, not necessarily video, could be text, could be video, and then it actually looks at the accreditation of how much content was used, what is the better content, and they deliver that into the CRM so that we can see where and who is more probable to buy what. So that tool that's been out there and used by some of the biggest companies as well, uh, by NVIDIA, by Cisco, by MetLife, has improved funnel conversion on the top of the funnel to offer account-based marketing where individuals are going through the specific journey they should be going through. How does that fit our strategy? Now that we have a video tool that has real-time content creation and delivered and engaged in conversational agents, we wanted to make sure that they have the best brain. I mentioned earlier face, mouth, ears, and eyes. Well, Path Factory are the deeper brain. What we are able to do with Path Factory is to make sure that as we have this conversation with our agents, then we understand what the users, whether they be employees that are being onboarded or trained, or customers that are being sold to, marketed to, or onboarded, or students at the university, or people consuming TV, what do they actually need? What do they actually want? What should we actually furnish them by way of video, by way of text or otherwise? So now we have the full story. What that enables us, you had asked, what can we do now that we haven't done a year ago, right? So I'll give you a slew of examples because I said earlier we're moving from video as an end to video as a mean. So marketing and sales, from just providing video on a website or just an event platform, here's your video. Now we're enabling to become the full ABM agent, account-based marketing. So you could be an addition, augmentation, or even a replacement to your account-based marketing agents, talking to your prospects. We could be the digital SDRs, the salespeople. We're adding avatars before, during, and after events so that people could see what they're getting into. They could have recaps of what they've missed, they could have personalized follow-ups at events. So you basically become a marketeer or a salesperson. The same goes for training and onboarding. It used to be that we just offered you a video portal and you get trained, then you go to the video and you click on it. Now we can become the full on agent that provides to you personalized learning, personalized training, adaptive learning, full agent. And the same goes for recruiting and customer care, teaching and learning in schools, TV concierge, and maybe if it makes any sense, could I show you a very, very quick demo? Then I wouldn't go through all of the different products, but the one thing I do want to show you, and I'm gonna put the audio here and share the sound, um, and open up my browser here. Give me two seconds. Can you see my screen? So this is our website, and now we are launching our investor deck with a conversational agent, myself, my digital twin, that talks and speaks through the presentation. And this is just an example of how you can take Path Factory, connect it to Kultura, but increasingly at the back end with sorry, uh eSelf connected to Kultura and the background with Path Factory have an understanding of what that agent needs. So you could go, anybody could go to our website, go to Kultura Investorrelations.com, click on investor presentation with a gentic avatar. I'm gonna go through this right now, and if you could put on mute for a second, I'll speak to my digital twin here just for a couple of minutes, and you can see how it could take you through the investor deck.
SPEAKER_02Hi, I'm Ron's Avatar, a digital version of Ron Yacutiel, Kaltura CEO, trained specifically on our Q1 2026 earnings results. I'll walk you through the deck and answer questions on these results. Shall we get started?
SPEAKER_03Yes, Ron, please, thank you.
SPEAKER_02Great. Let's dive in. We are on slide four, which provides a high-level snapshot of the. Navigating to slide six. This slide illustrates our platform's evolution, showcasing our three-tier products. Conversational rich media agents are part of our new agentic AI native tier. They leverage our e-self acquisition to provide photorealistic real-time avatars that can interact with users via voice or text. These agents are designed to automate customer support. Navigating to slide seven. We closed the e-self acquisition in December 2025 to bolster our conversational AI capabilities. The deal includes seven years. Navigating to slide 18. Our growth is driven by eight key pillars, including our platform expansion, new AI native buyer personas, and the cross-sell of Path Factory to our combined customer base. We are transitioning from a video platform to an agentic digital experience company, which expands our total addressable market from $8 billion to between 25 billion dollars.
SPEAKER_03Can you show me the competitive edge of the company, please?
SPEAKER_02Navigating to slide 10. Our competitive edge is built on four pillars our agentic digital experience platform, our deep API architecture, our horizontal application.
SPEAKER_03How about the competition? Who is competing with Kultura?
SPEAKER_02We operate in a competitive landscape, but our position is the only for that, Ron. Navigating to slide 15. This slide highlights.
SPEAKER_03Just to show you how that works, you could go and create an avatar video by uploading a video and summarizing it with an avatar video or a slide deck, like I've done here, or just text or any other form. So, for example, if I want to upload a piece of video that I already have, like here, and generate from it a new video summary and say create a short video explaining it, and I want a one-minute video, I could click on create, choose an avatar, and ask it to actually create the script. You can put a URL or anything you want, it'll go up and create to you a new piece of content with an avatar. And then if you want to generate it, it'll generate a video that is recorded on demand with an avatar summarizing it. But then that same avatar could come to life when you click on it, and then you could become conversational. So consider every piece of content you have on Earth could become engaging and could then come to life to become a Welcome to this recap of the mentoring program overview session.
SPEAKER_00This session was led by Jane Adams.
SPEAKER_03So I'm gonna stop here. These were just a couple of examples of things you could do with the JetTick Avatars. Now imagine I've just shown you this just to give you a feel because it's an investor-related experience around how an investor could actually have a whole IR experience with a conversational avatar that is not only has a face but understands everything, takes you through content, creates content on the fly, adds videos on the fly. Imagine the same thing into marketing, into sales, into recruiting, into customer care, into field force automation, a lot of different things. Again, bringing together richness with conversation, with smarts, into a full agentic experience.
SPEAKER_01Ron, I rarely, rarely jump in once the stock analyst takes over from Watertower, but I have to in this instance because I'd be remiss if I did. And I got to say, that's really, really impressive technology.
SPEAKER_03I'd love to hear that. And by the way, this is through Zoom. So I encourage each and every one of you to go look at it by yourself because there's some uh delay that happens natively because of the Zoom conversation here. There's no latency. Go to our website, Investor Relations, click on the deck and have a conversation with Digital Ron. It's not me. Whatever you want to take this. By the way, try to be aggressive. Like, should I buy a bunch of Kotura stock? We have the right guardrails. My digital twin is going to tell you it cannot recommend for you to do this, that, or the other. But we'll try to put you in touch with Erica here from IR, and we'll take your email so that you can discuss with her. So, anyway, let's get on the questions about the future.
SPEAKER_04The future is definitely here. It's pretty, pretty, pretty amazing, almost like science fiction here. Um, let's see where this is going. But maybe step back here. I mean, there's there's so many applications that you could do with this. I mean, and you frame that opportunity around kind of like four key journeys, journeys uh customers, employees, learners, and audiences, and you know, which of those is really kind of showing the strongest early traction, you know, why you think that is, and kind of what do you think is likely next?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, we're excited about all of them to be clear what each one is. So the customer journey is anything that around sales, marketing, and customer or onboarding and training, anywhere where the end user is a customer. Employee is recruiting and onboarding and training and communication, communication, collaboration, everything where the employee is the end user. Learner is a subset specifically for students. Again, albeit that you have learning for customers and learning for employees, you also have learners at school. So learners is to grab that because sometimes schools would be remiss very hard for them to say there are customers, there are students. So we make that clear because it's a good piece of our business. Likewise, for media and telecom, audiences are the customers of our media and telecom, but they wouldn't call them customers, they'll call them subscribers, viewers, so we call it audience. So our focus is on all four of them. We have excitement around all four of them. I would say that the two bigger TAMs are customers and employees. I would say that historically Kultura had been coming from the employee side, mainly communication, collaboration, learning, development enablement. And we didn't move towards marketing in 2020 after COVID with events externally. We did reInvent at the height of COVID, et cetera. But historically we're internal. So a lot of the existing logos and existing relationships from us are coming from there. And a lot of excitement around sales enablement, because while it's internal, the users are salespeople, you're training not the customers but the employees. It touches revenue. So anywhere that's internal, but also bringing you from an ROI perspective more revenue is exciting. Um, it's also stickier than Martech when you go internally, you put it in, you stay there, and you're done. We'll say Path Factory is coming from the CX side, and all their business has been around marketeers. And our latest couple of years or three, four years have been around marketing. So we definitely have some existing logos that are expanding there. But a lot of the new logos are coming from that side because it's touching dollar value. Give me marketeers that could do this cheaper, better, faster, follow up with our existing marketeers and across languages, show me how you follow up on our events and get a much higher ROI. So these are the two, and we've built two main solutions we could talk more about soon. One of them, and these are going to be throughout the second half of the year, a lot of focus. One solution is our uh agentic revenue experience, which is around sales and marketing and SDRs. And the other one is our agentic learning and enablement experience solution. That is around training, and training could go anywhere. Internal, external students. These are the two big solutions we're building. We're adding a lot of IP to it, and we're expecting both of these solutions to be really, really strong solutions.
SPEAKER_04You actually just touched on this. So, you know, many enterprises are exploring or building their own agents now. And you kind of I understand open that platform so that customers can integrate cultura into their own workflows. And it's kind of a crowded AI market. Like, what makes your piece that kind of rich real-time experience layer like hard to replicate?
SPEAKER_03So we already have the synergistic video products are at the bottom of this. We're starting from a $180 million business. So take events, for example. You can add all these engagement before, during, and after events, or if you have a video portal that are people using it or customer using it. So we're not starting from ground zero. We're already the trusted partner for experiences that are rich. Now it's just turning these rich experiences into hyper-personalized, interactive, conversational, and we can add it to our own products. Now we're gonna launch a lot of these separately, and you don't need to have any of our existing products, but a lot of them are happy to do one plus one equals three and to be able to have that connected to our existing products. That's number one. Second thing is we're sitting in all the content. We're at 100, 200 million plus assets, we're 60 petabytes of content, where we atomize and understand that content. And by understanding the content, we're able to deliver snippets and deliveries of pieces of video and conversation, plus infer from what people are watching in this content because we have the usage data. So if people are consuming content, we know what are the hotspots. We know what's exciting for them. So if we're delivering personalized learning, we could deliver the right piece of the content to the right people in the right context. So content is king, and we already sit in a lot of that content. Workflow integration is king. Part of what's unique in Kultura's platform is we have very deep APIs. So we run very deep and we're integrated into the workflows already. So now when they're saying I want to agentify as in turn into an agent our training, Kultura is already within the training workflow with the video experiences. So we already have the contracts, we have the relationship, we have the trust, we have the customer scale, and very importantly, we know how to address very big and complex projects that are mission critical: security, scale, reliability. When we power television for the likes of Vodafone, this is touching millions and millions of people all around the world at four and a half, nines reliability. When we power video for Bank of America and their security videos, so we are in a spot that has already the serious underlying mass that's required for an enterprise great company to do well with AI. And this isn't a feature, this isn't a nice AI GUI. This goes all the way from creation, management, and experience and the whole end-to-end flywheel of people need the end-to-end. So this is our opportunity to provide full end-to-end. So that's a big advantage. That's compelling.
SPEAKER_04So um try to be remiss not to ask at least one kind of financial question, um, a lot of investors listening. You know, just you you've paired this transition with the real discipline, you you've been steadily profitable on a Jesse basis, um, you know, quarter after quarter. Just how are you balancing continued investment in the new portfolio against that profitability? And maybe to tell us a little bit about when investors might expect the new products to really kind of start to lose erosion line more.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, so we very much believe in a very um responsible management style. I mean, we were profitable and growing very nicely before COVID, and obviously at that point the whole video industry came to a screeching halt, and most companies have declined in revenue. We never declined. But we came to much bigger investments right before the market's tanking, so there was some significant losses uh to the tune of 25 million-ish in adjusted EBITDA. We turn it around within two years to a nice positive number that's growing very nicely. Uh last year we did 18.5 million of adjusted EBITDA, uh, which was great. And this year we gave guidance for the same guidance we started last year when we hit the 18 and a half, and not saying where we're gonna get to, hopefully higher than the guidance we originally gave. We've since increased it. But we said that we're not gonna save our way to grace by just having a bit more profits because we do want to invest in growth. So we were able to invest as much as we believe makes sense while maintaining a threshold of profitability that safeguards the current valuation. Our view is that we're gonna grow by way of accelerating our top line, addressable market, and rekindling growth, but we're gonna protect the core asset value by ensuring that there's positive cash flow, which we have, and good adjusted EBITDA to protect the current valuation. We're gonna continue to think very hard as we launch the first big projects or what's that right point between growth and profitability. But our number one commitment is to rekindle growth.
SPEAKER_04So just to wrap up here, maybe just kind of recap with kind of what your priorities are for the rest of this year, uh, you know, what milestones investors should watch for to kind of know the strategy is working.
SPEAKER_03So we acquired a couple companies and post-merger integration is key. They're all working amazingly well together. We've been showcasing in some key conferences and bringing the companies together and leadership forums together, culture is aligned, people are excited, everybody's within the respective teams, retention is great, excitement is there, we're working as a unified company, um, and and really everybody's energy is really, really high. So, number one is make sure that this works and that comes together. Core product integration. We've already started launching the core integration with Path Factory. ESelf is completely integrated, and we've launched a set of all these new avatar tools running on the core cultura platform. That's done. We're now pushing the envelope of what we can do around avatars, but it's all in the cultura infrastructure. And Path Factory that came after, we already have an integration that delivers Cultura videos into Path Factory. The next stage is to take Path Factory into Cultura and turn it into the heart of what it is that we are building, the smarts of the agents that's going to take a bit longer around the two solution sets. So post-merger integration, launching with the first um, you know, nice, big, exciting deals around these new technologies and agents. You know, we've been POCing, we've been working with some big companies or existing customers, new customers. And we said that the second half of the year we'll start launching these, we'll start having some revenue contribution with a bigger contribution expected next year. We're still aligned with that and looking forward towards that second half of the year. And you know, we need to keep an eye on how these come out. It's not that this year is a be-all and end all for coming into the market. It is the transition year. And in this transition year, it's about demonstrating the success of the product, the integration of the product, the new use cases, the mission criticality, the usage, the stability, everything else we're going to do around that. And then copy, rinse, repeat in 2027 and beyond as we've taken this company from one point to a different point. It's not easy to kind of come out from one market and move into the other. We're doing this extremely clearly, decisively, yet carefully. And this is what we're executing on, and we're excited. Like I said, there's two important solutions that we're building. I mentioned the one that is for marketing and sales, and the other one is around training, enablement, whether it is internally and employees, whether it's externally partners and customers or students. We're having these two solutions defined, developed on top of all the products that we've built. And by the end of the year, we expect to have some serious IP around these two solutions. 27 is going to be, again, a lot about rinsing that and repeating that. So we're we're excited for the days ahead.
SPEAKER_04Awesome. Thanks, Ron. This is really exciting stuff. And when you make my uh my avatar, please uh you know touch it up a little bit, make it a little more easy. No worries.
SPEAKER_03By the way, it's really easy. And you can go to the Kultura site and use our own kind of uh freemium model. You can upload a f a video of yourself, upload your audio, and within minutes define our studio what you want to be. We have people come up and say, I love cars, and I turned them into a used car salesman in seconds. And they pulled up cars and it told them how much they should buy it or not. We had other people, so it's exciting, it works, it's amazing. Please go ahead and use it.
SPEAKER_04Awesome. Well, thanks. Thanks a lot, Ron. And uh on our show, and I'll pass it back to Timmy now.
SPEAKER_03I appreciate it. Just in closing remark, I just want to say to the investor community. I mean, again, the video world had been in a tough place for the last few years. Uh, but at the end of the day, you've seen the company stable and growing and and really achieving its profitability. I think that we all understand that if we're able to achieve this shift into this brave new world with AI, given the potential energy that we have with the customer base, the positioning, the strong IP, the great team, the acquisitions that we've made, transition could be quite huge. And I think it all ends with the current valuation, right? The valuation is is low, and I think again, for each their own to choose how well it is protected on the downside. We obviously believe that there's a huge upside here for where we are, and uh it's exciting. Uh I can tell you I've been here leading this company for the last 20 years. The energy level has never been higher.
SPEAKER_01Ron and James, thanks for joining me this morning. Thank you for listening, and don't forget to subscribe, as well as visiting www.watertowerresearch.com to stay up to speed on the company small cap written research reports, podcasts, fireside chats, industry specific symposiums, and conference schedules. We will see you next time for another edition of the WTR Small Cap Spotlight Podcast. Finally, a special thanks to the producer and editor of the podcast, Krista Fitzpatrick.