CS Disco, Inc. Q2 FY2025 earnings call

Eric Friedrichsen noted that the company saw acceleration in its software business. They focused on targeting customers with larger Ediscovery wallets and larger matters, with strong growth in multi-terabyte matters. Operationally, they tightened processes across all areas, such as enhancing the talent pool in sales and marketing, investing in the customer success team, and changing the lead generation team to a territory-based account orchestration model. Product-wise, progress was made with Cecilia, Auto Review (launched in EU and UK with strong interest), and Searchable AV Transcriptions. Legal department slimmed contracts by over 50% to reduce sales process bottlenecks, and HR automated processes to minimize distractions.

In Q2 2025, software revenue was $32.7 million, representing a 12% year-over-year increase. Total revenue for the quarter was $38.1 million, up 6% year-over-year. Services revenues, including DISCO managed review and professional services, amounted to $5.4 million. Adjusted EBITDA in Q2 was negative $2.7 million, with an adjusted EBITDA margin of negative 7%, which was a $2 million improvement compared to Q2 2024. The company concluded the quarter with $114.5 million in cash and short-term investments and had no debt.

For Q3 2025, total revenue guidance is in the range of $37.5 million to $39.5 million, and software revenue guidance is $32.75 million to $33.75 million. Adjusted EBITDA is expected to be between negative $5 million and negative $3 million. For fiscal year 2025, total revenue guidance is $148 million to $158 million, software revenue guidance is $128 million to $134 million, and adjusted EBITDA is expected to be between negative $17 million and negative $13 million. The fiscal year 2025 guidance for total revenue, software revenue, and adjusted EBITDA represents an increase at the midpoint from previous guidance.

Q: Congrats on the quarter. So I know there's been this push for the With You in Every Case and sort of raising this awareness around the holistic offerings to the platform and service capabilities. Are you thinking of services and kind of working with clients as like a tip of the spear for new customer acquisition or more expansion within existing customers?

A: Yes. Thanks, DJ. Let me tell you how I think about services or more specifically With You in Every Case because with you at every case is really about being able to support our customers with whatever they need for their largest and most complex cases. And when we really dug in and met with our customers over the last several quarters to try to determine in situations where they're not putting their largest cases into DISCO, why aren't they doing that? And the most common reason that we heard was that they needed to leverage services or they needed the access to services and that typically could be project management, forensics, ingestion type services. And so we recognized that we needed to do a much better job educating the market that we have those types of services capabilities. And we've seen great results in increasing our software revenue, specifically related to doing better education around that exact topic. Last quarter, I shared an example of a customer that I met with in the U.K. in February, where once we educated them about their services, they tripled their software revenue with us in the first 3 months after that. Since then, they've doubled again. And so that's just an example, and there's many examples across the board where by educating customers that we have these types of services available, they're more inclined to leverage us. So we're not trying to promote our services. We're not trying to drive up our services revenue. That's not in the least at the point. The point is we're with them. And whether they leverage our services, whether they leverage a partner's services, or whether they leverage their internal services. Some of the bigger law firms have centralized litigation support teams or centralized Ediscovery teams that can serve them really well, and we can support those teams. But again, it's not about driving up the software revenue. It's about helping our customer and driving up our software revenues.

Q: Okay. Got you. And then maybe a quick follow-up for Michael. So we have your target for -- I know we're still probably about 6 quarters, give or take away from the quarterly EBITDA targets you gave us. But it still sounds like you guys are working to implement a couple of changes operationally. So do you think achieving these targets is going to hinge more on an inflection in revenue growth? Or do you think the operational prudence is what's going to get us there?

A: So CJ, that's a good question. The guide -- the feedback we've provided previously, and we're standing by that feedback is our goal is to be adjusted EBITDA positive or breakeven in Q4 of 2026. And we -- that continues to be the goal, and it obviously -- there's revenue growth assumptions in that. From an expense structure, we're planning on keeping our expenses relatively the same. There might be a modest uptick in certain departments. But most of what we're doing on the expense side is primarily reallocation in areas of the business that will drive -- that we continue to believe will drive growth and that we've been doing over the last couple of quarters.

Q: This is Ian Black on for Scott Berg. Congratulations on the great quarter. As you guys move upmarket into larger matters, how does that increase your revenue visibility and durability?

A: Yes, that's a great question, Ian. I think one important thing to point out, obviously, we're a usage-based business. And as we've spoken -- as we have spoken about in the past, matters begin and then revenue begins. Matters end and revenue ends. That's the vast majority of the revenue that comes in for DISCO. One of the things, not only are larger matters larger revenue, but they tend to last a lot longer as well, which gives us the opportunity to have a little bit better, I guess, predictability from a revenue standpoint over time as well. The other thing is those larger matters oftentimes are coming from our larger customers. And larger customers tend to have larger wallets. They tend to have more matters. And the more traction that we get with those customers, the more opportunity we have to expand even further within those customers, and it becomes a much more efficient cost of sale through that expansion. So -- as I mentioned in the past, we've got -- well, now we're up to -- we actually just grew 6%, but we're up to 323 customers that spend over $100,000 a year with us, up 6% year-over-year. And in many of those customers, we might only have 10% or 15% of their wallet share, and we're hyper focused on growing our wallet share within those customers. So larger matters equals more wallet share, larger matters equals longer revenue streams.

Q: And then one quick follow-up. You guys called out significant growth from Cecilia. What is the revenue uplift of that product?

A: So good question. So we're really, really pleased with our overall software performance in Q2 and also coming in about $900,000 above the guidance range we had provided, really, really strong execution across the board. In terms of Cecilia, we don't break out that actual number, but we're really pleased with the number of databases using Cecilia. And the other thing that we're really pleased about is a lot of our larger multi-terabyte matters, the use for in Cecilia has gone up a fair amount. We talked about that a little bit previously. And that is really part of our overall strategy of driving larger matters and also focusing on our larger customers. So we're just overall really pleased with the adoption of Cecilia.

Q: Yes. And just to add to that, we're also pleased with the revenue that we're getting from Cecilia. So it's great that we have 150% growth in the first half of the year on the number of large cases, but the revenue associated with those is great, too. But equally important, honestly, is the value that the customers are getting from Cecilia that makes them want to keep using it. So many of our customers that use Cecilia will use it again and again. And that makes our core Ediscovery product that much stickier.

Q: Eric, a couple of questions around go-to-market. With respect to the increasing focus on larger customers, I was wondering if you could just discuss the progress you've made just bringing in the right type of sales rep, bringing them in that -- at least the right sales rep that has the capability to sell higher up into the organization.

A: Sure. Yes. I mean, well, I think you know we brought on Lauren Caruso as our Chief Sales Officer. It's been about 6 months ago. I think it was October of last year. She obviously has a lot of enterprise experience. That's been super helpful. We have brought on several more enterprise-grade salespeople who have experience not just with large accounts, but also in the legal technology industry. So that's been extremely helpful. And then a lot of it is about focus. We've actually opened up more reps in that space. We've got less people that are working on small accounts and more people that are working on large accounts. And then it's the plays that we're running. So for example, we've got a strategic account management program where we have a set of accounts that we have multiple resources working on across the country or in some cases, even in the U.K. and Canada, where it's not just one experienced enterprise salesperson, it's multiple because there's a decentralized aspect and a centralized aspect to how we grow our share within these particular accounts. In addition to that, we've got an account-based marketing approach. So that we're putting, again, extra very focused resources on sharing the content, the stories, the value that we're getting or that our customers are getting within those accounts to try to work to expand it. So it's a real cross-functional approach between sales, sales development, marketing and customer success.

Q: And as a follow-up, I was wondering if you could just review some of the changes you've made to your lead gen team.

A: Yes. Well, so the lead gen team, and this -- if we just rewind all the way back to the time before I got here, was really just all about setting up meetings with customers. And those meetings could be and they're incentivized that way. And those meetings could be with small customers, they could be with large customers. We've really changed -- if you think about the way I just described our go-to-market approach and how it's integrated between sales, sales development, marketing and customer success, the sales development rep now really orchestrates all of that. So think of them as almost like kind of like the quarterback in a way, making sure that they're taking the inputs from marketing and qualifying the opportunity and sending it along to the salesperson and the customer success person is working in coordination with them because, again, a lot of our focus is on these existing accounts where we're expanding the wallet share. So it's very much more now of an orchestration type of an approach rather than just a prospecting type of an approach.

Q: Michael, it's been awesome working with you over the years and best of luck with whatever journey you have next coming for you. I have a question on maybe go-to-market and any sort of additional pieces that you may need to bring into the company to kind of execute the long-term growth strategy, either from additional executives or regions or capacity? I'm just trying to figure out, is there more to go? Or is the team here in place to really drive the kind of the next story of growth here for DISCO?

A: Yes. Thanks, Koji. I mean if I think about the story of the transformation journey that we're on, I guess I would really sort of phase it out. And I would say the first phase started when I got here 15 months ago, and it was really about digging in deep, learning the business, meeting with our customers, I met with over 100 customers in that first year, but many, many in the first couple of quarters, digging in deep on our ideal customer profile, understanding exactly where we can add the most value to customers and where we can generate significant revenue improvement from customers, looking at the types of matters that we should focus on. So really digging deep and learning the business. The next phase was all about developing the strategy and developing a very, very clear strategy where we knew exactly who we were going to focus on, how we were going to go after them, how we're going to drive efficiency into the operations of the business. The third phase was really about team development. The biggest phase of building out the senior leadership team, which was sort of a combination of taking the extremely talented people that we have on staff and adding some more been there, done that executives who have helped scale organizations in the past. So that was the next phase and then the next phase was really about alignment, making sure that everybody in the company is 100% aligned on our strategy, and that's what we went through. And then there's a lot of phases, but those all happen quite quickly in succession. And when we launched into 2025 at our company kickoff meeting in January, I told the company that our rally cry for 2025 is it's go time. And it's all about execution. And I acknowledge the fact that we have more transformation to do. And frankly, Koji, we still do. We still do have more transformation to do. But just because we are still doing transformation doesn't mean that we can't execute. It doesn't mean that we can't start getting results and starting to perform. And so look, I think what I would say is there is still more to go, but我 consider that a good thing. In fact, there probably always will be something to go. We're an innovative company, right? There will always be some transformation. But there's still some more to go. We're rolling out new plays. There's, I think, some more that we can do around specific matter types that we're starting to execute on where I think we can perform even better. So there's some more to go there, but we're a good chunk of the way through the transformation such that we can start executing and getting results.