Cellebrite at 45th Annual William Blair Conference: Strategic Growth Insights

On Wednesday, 04 June 2025, Cellebrite (NASDAQ:CLBT) presented at the 45th Annual William Blair Growth Stock Conference, offering a strategic overview of its digital intelligence solutions. The company highlighted its robust growth strategy, emphasizing its role in aiding law enforcement with digital crimes. While Cellebrite reported strong financial performance, challenges such as federal budgetary processes were also discussed.

Key Takeaways

• Cellebrite continues to deliver top-line growth and profitability, with positive cash flow.
• The company has seen a 30% compound average revenue growth in the top U.S. police departments over the past five years.
• Approximately 30% of the installed base has adopted the new Insights platform, with expectations to reach 50%.
• AI and machine learning integration are pivotal in enhancing Cellebrite’s digital investigative solutions.
• The company is witnessing over 20% growth in nearly every operating region.

Financial Results

• Cellebrite has consistently achieved top-line growth, profitability, and positive cash flow.
• Serves 7,000 customers globally, including 5,300 law enforcement and defense/intelligence agencies.
• Contributes to 1.5 million investigations annually.
• Maintains a strong balance sheet with $500 million generated from operations.
• Cloud-based solutions account for 20% of the business.

Operational Updates

• Cellebrite entered the digital forensics market 15 years ago and has since taken a leadership role.
• The company serves major law enforcement agencies across the Western World, Asia Pacific, and South America.
• Pathfinder’s penetration is at an early stage, with about 5% of customers able to afford this powerful on-prem solution.
• Insights platform launched in early 2024; 30% of the base converted with plans to reach 50% soon.

Future Outlook

• Significant growth potential in investigative units, currently serving about 5% of the installed base.
• Plans to move Pathfinder to the cloud, making it accessible to the entire installed base.
• Guardian’s adoption as an investigative process manager is growing, with ARR growth exceeding 100% in the last three quarters.
• Existing customer growth expected to support most of the ARR growth in the near future.

Q&A Highlights

• Discussions with the customer advisory board on trustworthy AI application.
• Integration of large language models and GenAI into solutions like Insights, Guardian, and Pathfinder.
• Solutions now include geolocation and persona recognition features.
• Development of technology to uncover and validate manipulated content.

In conclusion, readers interested in a deeper dive into Cellebrite’s strategies and insights are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - 45th Annual William Blair Growth Stock Conference:

Jonathan Ho, Analyst, William Blair and Company: Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our Growth Stock Conference and today’s session with Celebrite. My name is Jonathan Ho, and I’m the analyst with Louis DuPalma, who co covers Celebrite for William Blair and Company. Our speaker today is the CFO, Donna Gerner, who is will provide an overview presentation of the company, and then we’ll go into fireside chat. Before we begin, I’m required to inform you that a complete list of research disclosures or conflicts of interest is available at our website at www.williamblair.com. From a logistics standpoint, we will be remaining in this room following the presentation to hold the breakout Q and A.

With that, I’ll hand it over to Donna for the presentation.

Dana Guerner, CFO, Celebrite: Thank you. Hi, guys. Nice to have you all here. My name is Dana Guerner. I’m the CFO of Celebride for the past eleven years now and four days, And so it’s a pleasure to be here and see such a very large attendance.

So I’m a little bit excited. We are going to go through our investor presentation slides, and let’s start. Right? And I’ll skip the safe harbor with your permission. Where is the volume?

Unidentified speaker: Often without that digital evidence.

Jonathan Ho, Analyst, William Blair and Company: The only way for that victim to truly be heard is by what their phone says.

Unidentified speaker: Text messages, communications, phone calls, so we’re able to really put together and tell a story.

Unidentified speaker: Having the capability to investigate and do a deeper dive into digital evidence is a crucial part. Celebrite offers us that ability to do that.

Andy Walter, Celebrite: Technology partner that we have in Celebrite has has been a great partnership for many years now. The training we have for Celebrite is paramount. It makes or break pieces.

Unidentified speaker: Without Celebrite’s tools don’t know what we would really do. Black Box project was a way for us to use innovation and technology to prevent and predict suicidal trends between veterans. The amazing thing about Black Box and the tools from Celebrite is we’re getting firsthand data.

Unidentified speaker: I didn’t have the hours or the people to do what Pathfinder did. We wouldn’t have known things.

Unidentified speaker: Being able to get this digital evidence out using our various tools, our Celebrite software, different hardwares, we’re able to get really good evidence.

Dana Guerner, CFO, Celebrite: So this is us in a nutshell. Celebrite entered the digital forensics market fifteen years ago as a m two player and took leadership on this market through technological breakthroughs. We grew bootstrap. We never raised cash to grow our business. We are consistently providing both top line growth and profitability and positive cash flow.

We are serving 7,000 customers worldwide. Of them, 5,300 are law enforcement agencies and defense and intelligence government agencies, and we make sure that one and a half million investigation can get to a closure in a very efficient manner on a month on an annual basis. So we, as a company, are very, very proud to what we are contributing to our world’s safety. When we speak a little bit about what’s happening in our world, you know, crime is not getting anywhere. It’s actually becoming more complex, more sophisticated, and much more digital.

And that means that also law enforcement needs to change the way they are investigating crime. They are now relying in nine out of 10 cases on digital evidence that is being collected, whether it’s the mobile phone, which is our actual digital DNA. It states not only what we’ve done or where we’ve done it, but also what our thoughts are through looking at our search history. And what we are trying to do is to help those customers close their public safety gap because data volume is growing dramatically. If you think about how much data you have on your phone now compared to three years ago, five years ago, think about how complex the data is.

It’s not any more data saved on the phone. It is application. It is wallet for cryptocurrency. It is search history and so much others. How can you deal with that manually?

So first and foremost, this is a gap that needs to be closed only through technology. And then, unfortunately to all of us, most law enforcement agencies are still working as they’ve already been before. They are actually taking digital evidence and putting it in a physical form, on thumb drives or on disk keys or on other physical storage. This is a very inefficient process, especially when law enforcement needs to collaborate between examiners in digital forensics labs, investigators in the fields, and district attorneys. And by that, they are losing their ability to maintain chain of custody.

And so what we are trying to do with our technology is take all these gaps, analyze them, and make sure that our digital investigative platform helps them close and narrow these gaps on a daily basis. Time to data, time to evidence. We all know and we grew up on the fact that closing a case or getting your hands on an evidence in the first forty eight hours is critical. This is not a story. This is actual fact.

And when you look at what we are actually providing through our investigative platform, and you see at the bottom line of these slides our three bespoke offerings, our Insights, Guardian and Pathfinder, all of them are actually helping customers to get their hands on data faster, and when they get their hands off the data, get the insights of the data. So think about have around each and every person has around 50,000 chats on their phones, thousands of photos, hundreds and thousands of videos, and so forth. How can you go through one phone in a very efficient way and get insights? That is very, very difficult. And then when you do get insights and the examiner in the lab do understand what’s on the phone, how does he collaborate with the detectives?

How does he collaborate with the secret attorneys? How can he help them get to the evidence as fast as possible? How can they manage their investigator in a manner that is not manual? Most of them are working still with a writing pen and a pen. How can we educate them to work on platforms that use AI capabilities and flesh out what are those pictures on this phone?

Who is speaking with whom? Where did they meet? And when you take larger crimes and you have 20 phones or 100 phones, how can you create the case narrative and overlap all the information collected and understand what happened? All of that is done through our offering, and I’ll double click on every one of them and explain in a second on how we are serving our customer with that. So insights.

Insight is our most used solution with our customers. There is no one customer in Celebrite that doesn’t hold at least Insight’s solution. And what does Insight’s suite of solutions do? It allows access to phone. So if your phone is locked or the suspect’s phone is locked and you need to access it, you will do it with Insight Analog’s capability.

And then you will use use insights to extract 100% of the data off the phone, not just what your operating systems allow you to see, but also the deleted data, the hidden data, the tokens to your cloud applications, the geolocation, everything that there is on the phone that can support an investigation, and then take this binaric data that’s been collected and translate it into readable data, decode it, and put it on a platform, AI based platform, that examiner in the lab can double click on the information and identify what is on that phone. It will tell him, which applications are there any photos which related to drugs, guns, human trafficking, all of that through very intense machine learning capabilities that we have developed over time. It would help them deal with multiple language on the phones. Not every criminal speaks English if we want to think about it, or Germany and German, and so Germany and Germany and so forth. So we need to help them go through that, and then they need to collaborate.

They need to share this data with the detectives and district attorney. So currently, 95% of law enforcement are putting it on a portable drive. The detective needs to drive to the lab, collect the data, drive back to their offices, and take two, three hours to upload it to an old computer and review it through a freemium solution that we provide them that allows them to review this data in a reasonable manner, but that’s not good enough. So we introduced Guardian, which is a SaaS native solution, which bridges the different infrastructure that each of the participants in investigations are working on, allows the detectives to see all the marks and remarks that an examiner in the lab are actually putting on the data, collaborate back and forth, ask questions. And not only that, they can actually review the data on a SaaS platform that integrated into it almost the same level of, I would say, models of data analytics that the examiners in the lab can do, but in a way which is less technical because detectives are not the most sophisticated technological people.

Right? So it will show them geolocations. It will show them what type of discussions have been discussed in the different chats and emails and so forth that are on the phone. It will provide chat summarization. It will provide any other information that will make it easier for them to understand what was this owner of the phone doing, whether it’s the victim or the suspect or even a witness, and help them to get to the golden evidence faster.

Now, this guardian is a great solution that is currently helping review one source at a time. But as I said before, what happens if you have multiple sources? This is where our Pathfinder is stepping in and is actually supporting multi phone investigation by providing case narrative and answering the WH question: who, with whom, when, and in many cases also the why, which is not less important when you want to prosecute a case. So when you want to be in a situation where you start an investigation and get to a prosecution, when you are using the Cerebrite digital investigative platform, you have the highest probability to be able to actually close a case in a timely manner, and we take very pride on our ability to support law enforcement in doing so. Now, as I said before, we have 7,000 customers globally.

We are serving the largest law enforcement agencies in the Western World, in the largest countries in Asia Pacific and in South America, in which we decided that we want to do business with. Is not doing business with everyone. Ceramide is selective with which agencies and in which country we are going to do business with. We have our own ethical guidelines, and we adhere to that in a very, I would say, almost religious manner. But those customers and us are only the basis for our future growth.

Because while all of them have the ability to investigate the phone through our digital investigative solutions, our insights, they need more and more of those solutions. They need our automation processing that we are introducing to be able to deal with the increased backlog that is knocking on the doors on a daily basis. And our penetration within investigative units is only at its early stages, around maybe 5% of our customers can actually afford currently our Pathfinder because it’s a very powerful on prem solution. And as part of our journey to the cloud, we expect that we’ll be able to offer these capabilities to our entire installed base in the future. So our growth and our existing customers are actually the ones that support most of the company ARR growth, and this is how we expect it to be in the near future because we don’t have a lot of new customers to add.

What we do have is a lot of new budget departments that currently are not being served by Celebrite. Our profit is very good. We have delivered a very strong Q1. We continue to deliver those committed rule of acts that we have shared with the market last April last March, actually, March 2024 in our first Investor Day, which means that the ARR growth plus our EBITDA will be anything between 45 to 50, and we continue to generate cash flow from operations in a very constant manner. We are currently sitting with around $500,000,000 generated by operation in our balance sheet, which will support the company’s growth both organically and inorganically in the near future.

And I know that we are almost out of time, I would just like to summarize that although we do have now studied with challenges with the federal government budgetary process, our market is very healthy. We are seeing growth in almost every region that we are working, which is exceeding the 20%, whether it’s Latin America, state and local, U. S. Government, federal here in The US, regardless of the hiccups that we have now with the federal budget, Asia Pacific, and EMEA, which is a little bit soft currently, but we will catch up for sure. The platform that we are providing is a top notch platform, great technology handling exactly what our customer needs, powered by AI capabilities because you cannot deal with so much data otherwise.

And we are on a very solid cloud journey with 20% of our business at this stage being generated by cloud based solution. I would say, just for clarity, that we don’t expect it to get to 100 because some of our customers will always work in an air gap environment due to their mode of operation, but this is a great journey that we started few years ago and growing very nicely, and we are fired by our patient to continue delivering innovation to this market. I want to thank you all, and we’ll go to Q and A.

Jonathan Ho, Analyst, William Blair and Company: Yeah. So Great. Yeah. Just to maybe start out with the fireside chat. Donna, thank you for that presentation and great overview of the company.

Can you also speak a little bit to the longer term strategic opportunity that you see for Celebrite Ahead?

Dana Guerner, CFO, Celebrite: Yeah, I think if we look at where we are now, we see few lines of growth within our customer base. One, and I’ll start with the investigative units. If you go to any law enforcement agency and ask them, do you have a budget line of digital investigating software? Most of them will look at you like, what are you talking about? Right?

But they cannot stay in a you know, in the way that they are doing their business now. There is no way to investigate digital crime in a manual manner. And so what we see as a great potential, and currently we are setting our digital investigative solutions to maybe 5% of the installed base. We see great opportunity to grow there. When we look at the TAM of the evidence management and investigative analytics, this is the biggest TAM of our entire business.

We believe that our customers will continue subscribing to our Pathfinder at this current on prem stage, but moving to the cloud will actually allow us to offer this solution for the entire installed base. So this is one thing. The second thing that really encourages us is the level of adoption of our Guardian as a investigative process manager and the ability to bridge between the digital forensics unit and investigative unit. We are seeing it’s a very new solution, but it’s growing more than 100% in the last three quarters, our ARR growth, and so great potential to continue growing at the same pace. And, of course, unfortunately, digital forensics unit, although we are serving them from day one, their needs are growing.

Their needs to automation is growing. Number of examiners in the lab is not growing, in many cases growing, maybe one to 2% year over year, and of course, there is a challenge that now defense and intelligence are facing with border control, illegal immigration. All of that would allow us to introduce more field use cases to those customers. So the future is bright in our eyes.

Andy Walter, Celebrite: If you look, you know, within let’s just take the top 20 police departments in The U. S. You look at those budgets, they don’t grow significantly year to year. Headcount is stagnant. And in a constrained environment like that, for the past five years, our revenue has grown at a compound average rate of 30%.

And even with that type of very strong consistent growth, we are a rounding error to zero inside of those budgets. So there’s considerable headroom for continued growth and expansion. You know, as Donna highlighted in her slides, you know, the drivers of data complexity, data volume, operational efficiency, ethics, accountability, all of those open up incremental opportunity for us with our customers.

Jonathan Ho, Analyst, William Blair and Company: Excellent. Excellent. And maybe Celebrate has historically been the dominant player in the extraction part of the business. Over the past year, you’ve also started to bundle this capability as part of insights. You talk a little bit about why this is such a powerful offering for customers when you combine these elements?

Dana Guerner, CFO, Celebrite: So you want to speak about your Happy Meal?

Andy Walter, Celebrite: I’ll give you the announcement. Yeah. Sure. So previously when you think about some of our legacy technology, we had a core set of capability, you know, the legacy product brands where UFID and Physical Analyzer for basically collecting and reviewing the digital data and digital evidence from mobile phones. But that was paired with a half dozen or more bespoke offerings, whether it was for advanced access and extracting all the data off of the most modern smartphones, cloud extraction, the ability to do computer forensics, more and more.

And so what insights does is it takes those core capabilities, think about that as the equivalent of a burger and fries. All of our customers want burgers and fries. But many want all of those other bespoke capabilities, but selling them individually created a level of spend that was simply too great for all but the largest of customers. And so what insights does on a much more modern tech stack with a better UI, UX, is it allows for the integration of features, functionality, and capability from those bespoke products to be paired with the legacy UFID and physical analyzer, so that you get the equivalent of a Happy Meal at a much higher price point, significantly more value. We are seeing customers recognize and they’ll pay for value.

So we’ve launched insights in at the start of 2024. We are approximately 30% of the installed base has been converted. We expect that to go to 50% and to move the substantial majority of the customer base over the next couple of years. There will be, you know, sort of multi year agreements and stragglers that come in, you know, as a longer tail to that three year migration or upgrade cycle, but we’re very optimistic that there is, you know, what insights does also is it’s a cloud enabled capability, and that creates much tighter integration with the Guardian and Pathfinder capability. So it’s, you know, for us, not only is it a growth vehicle in and of itself, but we believe that it will result in much more upsell of advanced digital forensic capability like unlocking a locked device, as well as cross sell, upsell motion with Guardian and Pathfinder.

Jonathan Ho, Analyst, William Blair and Company: That makes a ton of sense. I mean, as you embark on this journey, can you talk about how Celebrite can be more than just a digital forensics provider, but also a platform longer term as well?

Dana Guerner, CFO, Celebrite: So I think the journey to the cloud is one of the things which is very important for us to introduce to our customer base. Most of our customer base, I would say, are conservative in nature. They used to work on an on prem environment. Until three, four years ago, they used to work with a perpetual license. So we have taken this customer base from a perpetual license, I would say, legacy way of doing business to a subscription, and now we want to help them move towards the clouds and better use of AI to efficient their processes.

So what we are trying to do the introduction of Insight is also cloud enabled with the rest of the offering is actually making sure that we can modernize the way that our current customers are working. Again, it’s public sector. It doesn’t happen overnight. You need to be patient. You need to introduce the capabilities one by one and educate them, but we believe that the potential is really enormous, and the level of stickiness that offering Great Guardian that actually manages the entire process end to end of the evidence management will allow us to be the number one or continue being the number one vendor in this market also for the future.

Unidentified speaker: Great. And you guys are tremendously innovative with Guardian Pathfinder and insights. And, you know, investors here in the audience and on that webcast, they wanna know what’s next after all these existing products. And AI is a big theme, obviously, you know, in my capacity as a sell side analyst, you know, we’re always concerned about how we’re going to compete with AI. And so in that context, when are we going to see an AI detective that plugs into your your software and that you have access to a treasure trove of data?

You have access to all of the text messages for a cell phone, the location data, bank transaction records, all of the call location history. You have access to Snapchat messages, Telegram, all of that treasure trove of data, and it seems the natural evolution of your software would be to have a a language learning model plug in that could be the AI detective in Zoho. Could this be on on the road map as we’ve seen other software providers that plug into ChatGPT or Anthropic or or Lama or these others? And so is this is this a possibility for for Celebrate on the roadmap?

Dana Guerner, CFO, Celebrite: You need to be a fly on our customer advisory board when we have those meetings with them because one of the things that we are really discussing with them is how can we apply AI in a way that our customer would trust the outcome. Right? So AI is not new for us. Large language models are being integrated in our solution, both on the insight and the Guardian and the Pathfinder. Same goes now with GenAI that we’ve introduced into Guardian.

Geolocation, persona recognition, and so forth, all of them are actually part of our solution now. The major thing that we hear from our customer advisory board is that, guys, we don’t want an AI detective. We want you to build something that then a detective can follow-up to the source of the evidence because we are not sure that we can trust AI, at least not now. We know there is bias. We know there are mistakes.

We need to make sure that we can track down whatever you are giving us to the core of the evidence. If you would go now into our Guardian as a detective and review the data and ask questions, What are the relationships between Lou and Andy? And I will give an answer, and the general AI will analyze all the data and provide an answer. You will see a screen opening on the side and showing all the underlying data that this answer has been relying on and being calculated based on, and this is what our customer would like to see. I don’t know where AI is going to be in the future.

I do know that Cerebite is always one of the most advanced vendors are utilizing AI, machine learning and language models and will continue doing so.

Unidentified speaker: So you’re working on it. Right?

Dana Guerner, CFO, Celebrite: You’re always working on something? I will not tell you. It’s future looking

Andy Walter, Celebrite: when we look at AI, you know, and I think that, look, if those of you who can, you know, watch 1970s detective shows, you know, Barney Miller’s not walking in with an AI, you know, on his shoulder, he’s not going to rely on a pen and paper anymore. And so from that standpoint, you you think about the opportunity that we have. AI is going to enable higher levels of productivity and efficiency, and will keep humans in the loop. The detective is critical to advancing the investigation. But, you know, as you think about those different dynamics from a monetization standpoint, today these are product features and enhancements that for us will help us validate and support price increases, will help us sell a solution.

And over time, you know, if you look twelve, twenty four, eighteen months or longer out, we’ll determine whether or not new features and functionality represent an entirely new offering or whether they’ll just be embedded in the existing feature product set that we have today. And I

Dana Guerner, CFO, Celebrite: think the move to both subscription and to SaaS compared to the perpetual licenses we used to sell in the past allows us much better flexibility in packaging and pricing. So, what if before it was auto nothing when you bought a perpetual license with subscription and SaaS? We can layer offering on top of offering in a very natural manner for a customer, and that goes directly to what Andy said before.

Andy Walter, Celebrite: And the other thing that you want to keep an eye on is how AI is helping criminals do bad things, right? They’re taking images and they’re manipulating images of children and individuals in ways that are just terrible. How do you know that that individual, you know, either granted permission or how that image was manipulated? Right? So our technology is not only, you know, AI driven to support investigation, but we also are being, you know, our technology and tools are being used to uncover and validate that, you know, certain content has been manipulated.

Unidentified speaker: Yeah. And along those lines, do you have deep fake analysis capabilities?

Dana Guerner, CFO, Celebrite: We are we have some fake analysis capabilities and we continue developing them.

Unidentified speaker: Great. And related to another topic you were discussing, the the traction of Guardian in that I think you said for the past several quarters, Guardian has been growing greater than 100%, which is a pretty pretty staggering growth rate. And and Jonathan, you cover Axon, which has evidence.com, which similarly is a a digital evidence management system. And can you discuss how these products compare and and evidence.com had, you know, a very long trajectory of fast growth and do you envision something similar?

Dana Guerner, CFO, Celebrite: I’ll start speaking about Guardian and then I’ll compare it to because I prefer to speak about us. So Guardian is an evidence management system that helps collaborate between the different parts of the investigation, as I said before. The storing of the evidence is only a mean to an end and not a target per se. So we are enriching the evidence that is being collected through our physical analyzer and insight solution in the lab, and we allow customers to collaborate and continue investigating it through our Guardian review solutions. If you think about evidence.com, evidence Com mainly store body worn camera data, and I would I don’t think I’d be wrong to say that 99% of this data will never be reviewed, and certainly not as part of a criminal investigation.

It may be part of an ethical misconduct investigation against policemen, but being part of a real criminal case investigation, this is rarely happening. And so while what we are doing is actually dealing with investigation itself, and our data is critical for the investigation, Guardian is processing and helping doing that and using storage as a mean. Evidence.com is mainly storage.

Unidentified speaker: Great. And we’re gonna stop there in terms of the main webcast, and we are going to continue the conversation right now in this room as part of the breakout. So thanks everybody, but you can stay here for the breakout session.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.