D2L Inc
TSX:DTOL
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Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the D2L Inc. Fiscal 2024 Fourth Quarter Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Listeners are reminded that portions of today's discussion will include statements that contain forward-looking information. Any such statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from a conclusion, forecast or projection in forward-looking information.
Further, certain material, factors or assumptions were applied in drawing a conclusion or making a forecast or project as reflected in the forward-looking information. For identification and discussion of such risks, uncertainties, factors and assumptions as well as further information concerning forward-looking statements, please refer to the risks identified in the company's annual and interim Management Discussion and Analysis for most recently filed annual information form in each case as filed under the company's profile on SEDAR+ at www.sedarplus.com.
In addition, during this call, referrals will be made to various non-IFRS financial measures, including constant currency revenue, adjusted EBITDA, adjusted gross profit, adjusted gross margin and free cash flow. These non-IFRS financial measures do not have any standardized meanings prescribed by IFRS and may not be comparable to similar measures presented by other public companies.
Please refer to the company's MD&A for the year ended January 31, 2024, for more information about these and certain other non-IFRS financial measures, including where applicable, a reconciliation of history, non-IFRS financial measures due to most recently comparable IFRS financial measures from our financial statements. This morning call is being recorded on April 4, 2024, at 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time.
I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. John Baker, Chief Executive Officer of D2L. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you, operator, and thank you, everyone, for joining us on our Q4 and year-end earnings call. We released financial results after the market closed yesterday, which you'll find on the Investor Relations section of our website at d2l.com.
Please note the results we're discussing today are in U.S. dollars. I'm joined this morning by Stephen Laster, our President; and Josh Huff, our CFO.
I'm pleased to report it was a strong fourth quarter to close out a year in which we made significant progress on our plan to balance continued top line growth with meaningfully improved operating leverage. Our results were at the high end or above our guidance for the year.
Total revenue for Q4 was up 11% to $47.6 million, including 12% growth in our subscription and support revenue. Annual recurring revenue was up 12% year-over-year or $20 million growing to $188.1 million. Our gross margins increased by 330 basis points to 67%, driven by significantly higher subscription margins. And adjusted EBITDA increased to $3.5 million in Q4 from $0.4 million in Q4 of last year.
Simply put, the team is executing well on the major transition in the financial profile of the business. We accomplished this while strengthening our fundamentals. We are winning great customers across all markets, as you'll hear from Stephen. And we've added 2 million more users since the start of last year, bringing us to 18 million users on the Brightspace learning platform.
In our largest and most competitive market, we jumped to #2 in total enrollments and market share in North America higher education, up from #4 at this time last year. And our win rate is getting stronger as it rose to over 50% in this important market last year.
We're enhancing our core products while broadening our portfolio of products, partners and services, including making investments in artificial intelligence. And lastly, our gross revenue retention rate was 94% last year. This is a new metric we're reporting and the results last year are a testament to our relentless focus on being an active and very strategic partner for clients all around the world.
I want to thank our team for their effort and commitment to achieving balanced growth plan while staying focused on our vision and mission. Our team is working hard to make investments in our products and services to strengthen our leadership in the market. And I also want to recognize the efforts of D2L'ers that are working so hard to deliver our most exceptional customer experience, it's what keeps our clients happy and engaged.
And as we look ahead, I'm confident in our road map and our strategy, and it's well positioned to align with our customers' needs. On a recent trip to New York, where we hosted 47 different universities and colleges and other institutions, including SUNY, CUNY, NYU and the New York City Department of Education, I participated in a highly engaging conversation around the future of work in learning, and these conversations revealed 2 main insights.
First, it's very clear that the work that we're doing around artificial intelligence addresses what customers are looking for, both in the short and longer term. Our clients are viewing us as a critical partner as they embrace AI, and we are working hard to cease that opportunity.
And second, these meetings reinforce the power of the community we're building, which is uniquely strengthened by our ability to bring together constituents from across education and corporate markets to address multiple use cases and modalities of learning. These capabilities make us the right partner to tackle important challenges, whether in student's engagement, enrollment, continuing education or upskilling.
And with that, I'm now going to turn over the call to Stephen to provide more color on our go-to-market and investments in innovation. Stephen, over to you.
Thanks, John, and good morning. Apologies to everyone for my voice this morning, but I'm happy to be here. Our fiscal '24 results demonstrate that we are building a stronger and more profitable business while making meaningful headway on key growth strategies. During this past year, we continued to grow our customer base and build scale across our markets as we have born more organizations, reshaped the future of education and work.
Brightspace is now serving more than 1,300 customers and 18 million users in over 40 countries. In our largest market, higher education, we had another good year. In North America, more than half of new learning platform adoptions were Brightspace. And as John highlighted, we moved to #2 in market share by enrollment, a great milestone for the team.
In the fourth quarter, these new clients included Villanova University, a Premier University in Pennsylvania, which selected D2L Brightspace versus roughly 10,000 students, replacing a legacy competitor. They selected our platform to, in their words, allow for further innovative teaching and learning in the decades ahead and to expand their capabilities in the graduate space.
We also welcomed Aurora University, a private teaching centered institution in Illinois that is transitioning from an open source platform. They said the Brightspace LMS offers new opportunities for transformative teaching and learning for courses across disciplines and all modalities.
We enter fiscal 2025 with momentum in higher ed, which is translating to healthy pipeline activity. International expansion, an important growth driver. And in fiscal '24, we continue to expand D2L's footprint in key markets, with institutions that are increasingly demanding much more from the learning platform.
Recently, we onboarded Madeira University, a private higher ed institution based in Froebel, Mexico. And we replaced a legacy competitor at the Independent Institute of Education, a large private institution in South Africa. We're building a good growing community of institutions in South Africa, and we see good opportunity to increase our presence in this market.
These are just a few examples of the sales activity that drove an 18% increase in our revenue outside North America last year. Looking ahead, the international opportunity to remain sizable for D2L, with legacy platforms holding 70% to 80% market share in many regions.
In our corporate market, we continue to build the D2L brand and customer base. In the fourth quarter, we had an important win with the Canadian Red Cross, part of the largest humanitarian network in the world. They will use our learning platform to reach nearly 1 million learners with training that could be life-saving. This is another example of our success with the organizations that care deeply about the best learning experiences.
In this instance, our ability to support multiple use cases in our course merchant technology were key factors in their decision to replace a competitor with Brightspace. Concurrent with Q4 earnings, we announced the spinning out of D2L Wave into a new independent stand-alone company called SkillsWave. Wave is in early stage of skilling technology, created our businesses prepare for the future of work by tackling the skills and talent gap.
It represents a very small percentage of our total revenue in fiscal '24 and is separate from our Corporate Learning core business. D2L serves more than 500 corporate customers today with a vast majority of the corporate revenue coming from Brightspace subscriptions and related services. We continue to have high conviction in corporate learning, and this remains a key growth area of our business.
The spinout transaction makes strategic sense for both entities and reflects the reality that Wave is at an earlier stage of development than our core business and has a different business model and investment requirements. Wave has gained traction in an area with long-term potential and we believe it will be better positioned to advance this business plan as a separate entity. And with a 30% ownership position, D2L will continue to have venture interest in the future of SkillsWave.
For D2L, this transaction enables us to focus entirely on the continued expansion and growth of the core learning platform and services business. It ties our objective to generate increasing levels of profitability as you see in our outlook.
The transaction is expected to close midyear and the SkillsWave team will be working closely with our Wave clients, our education partners and internal teams to facilitate a smooth transition. Another key growth strategy is expanding our platform. There's a highly productive year for our team, as we delivered on a long road map of enhancements to existing offerings while broadening our portfolio of products, partners and services.
I'll highlight some key developments. Our continued investment in user experience is having a real impact on our commercial success. Our platform's ease of use was favorably reviewed in the assessment document published by the University of Southern California, and we are getting similar feedback from other new customers and prospects.
In terms of new products, we continue to deliver on AI-focused functionality to support students and help faculty build higher quality learning experiences in less time, resulting in better student outcomes. We recently released our generative AI beta program to help educators and content creators easily and quickly generate practice questions and quiz questions using existing course content.
There are millions of quiz questions generated each week in Brightspace, leveraging the fact that we have a common platform, we're identifying other ways to induce AI across the platform, including the ability to generate practice questions in Creator+.
In addition to our internal capabilities, we have a rich ecosystem of partners who are delivering AI-enabled products throughout our ecosystem. During the year, we continue to build best-in-class team. Recently, Lee Poteck was promoted to the role of Chief Revenue Officer to lead D2L's global go-to-market strategy.
With over a decade at the company, most recently as Senior Vice President, Sales and Customer Success, Lee brings a wealth of experience from within the organization. We also welcomed Amy Clark as Chief People Officer to lead our award-winning People and Culture Department. Amy's recent experiences include leadership positions at 2 larger public companies, Colliers and Manulife, and we look forward to her work in continuing to build a company culture in which talent thrives.
In closing, we're appreciative of the work of all D2L'ers in delivering a strong 2024, which sets us up well for further success in '25 and beyond.
I will now turn the call over to Josh for an expanded discussion on the financials.
Thanks, Stephen, and good morning. Our full financials were posted last night, so I will focus on the highlights for the fourth quarter and full year.
As John mentioned, these results demonstrate our progress in transitioning the business towards a balance of solid top line growth with significantly improved profitability and cash flow.
Total revenue for Q4 was $47.6 million, an 11% increase over the same period last year, and full year revenue grew 8% to $182.4 million, ahead of our guidance range. Growth was led by subscription and support revenue, which was up 12% in Q4 to $42.2 million. The full year subscription results were also ahead of our most recent guided range reaching $162.2 million, up 11%.
Annual recurring revenue at year-end increased by 12% from $168 million to $188.1 million. We added $20 million in new ARR during fiscal 2024 while holding OpEx essentially flat over the prior year.
Professional services and Other revenue increased 10% in Q4 to $5.4 million. However, for the full year, Services revenue decreased 10% based on a large engagement that wrapped up at the end of the prior year, as we have highlighted on recent earnings calls.
Our gross profit and gross margin were highlights in fiscal 2024. Q4 gross profit increased by 17% to $32 million. Gross margin for Q4 came in at 67.6%, up from 64.3%, and we saw a 300 basis point margin improvement for the full year to 67%. We are especially encouraged by the growth in our subscription gross profit. This was up 19% in Q4 and 17% for the full year. And subscription and support gross margin rose to 73% in Q4, up 430 basis points year-over-year.
These increases reflect our team's great progress with cost optimization in our cloud technology and service delivery. The combination of revenue growth, stronger gross profit margins and operating leverage drove a substantial year-over-year improvement in adjusted EBITDA. We reported adjusted EBITDA of $3.5 million in Q4, up from $0.4 million last year. And full year adjusted EBITDA was $7.9 million at the top end of our guidance range and an increase of almost $11 million from the prior year.
In our business model, cash flow typically outpaces adjusted EBITDA. We reported cash flow from operating activities of $15.7 million for the year, an increase of $11.9 million from the prior year. This added to the company's strong financial position.
At year-end, we had no debt and $117 million in cash, providing us the financial flexibility to make disciplined growth investments, both organic and inorganic as we move forward.
Turning to our outlook. With the Q4 results, we presented fiscal 2025 guidance. Specifically, we are targeting subscription and support revenue in the range of $177 million to $180 million, implying growth of 10% at the midpoint over fiscal 2024. Total revenue in the range of $197 million to $201 million, implying growth of 9% at the midpoint over fiscal 2024 and adjusted EBITDA in the range of $21 million to $23 million implying adjusted EBITDA margin of 11% at the midpoint over fiscal 2024.
We also indicated that we expect revenue and adjusted EBITDA to increase as the year progresses, enabling us to exit the year with low- to mid-teen EBITDA margins. These targets include the expected impact of the D2L Wave spin-out transaction based upon a targeted midyear close date, which will be a contributor to this increased profitability in the second half of the year.
The midpoint of this fiscal 2025 guidance represents a 700 basis point improvement to our adjusted EBITDA margin relative to fiscal 2024 and builds on the 600 basis point improvement to adjusted EBITDA margin that we delivered comparing fiscal 2024 to fiscal 2023.
As we think about managing the business over the medium term, our broad objective is to balance top line growth and margin expansion as we continue to make progress on the path to Rule of 40.
Over the medium term, as we look beyond fiscal 2025, we are targeting low double-digit to mid-teens growth in annual revenue, and we expect adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA margin to increase annually based on further operating leverage and continued improvements in gross margin.
We are pleased with our progress, balancing growth and profitability the past year and look forward to further progress in fiscal 2025 and beyond.
With that, we'd be happy to take your questions. Operator?
[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Doug Taylor from Canaccord Genuity.
Congratulations on the progress on delivering operating leverage this year and the outlook for more.
First question likely for Josh. ARR growth at 12% is pretty steady. You're guiding to growth in subscription and support revenue a little shy of that at the midpoint. So perhaps I'll ask if you can maybe paint a picture of what other factors we should be taking into account here? Is this just the D2L Wave revenue dropping off at midpoint this year because there's a -- or is there a degree of conservatism built in there?
Yes. Good question. Thanks, Doug. As you mentioned, we're certainly pleased with the progress we've made growing the business, noting that 12% ARR growth in FY '24. As we look forward to '25, we considered the timing of flow-through to rev rec as well as just being aware of general market activity levels, we still see that elongated sales cycle persisting and ultimately providing a set of numbers here that we stand behind with conviction.
And I guess just as we pan out, again, we're really pleased with the progress we have made in establishing that durable growth as we look forward. And during a period which we significantly expanded profitability, more specifically, we added net $20 million to ARR in F '24 while expanding our profitability margins considerably, F '23 to F '24, and then as we look forward to '25. So overall, we're certainly pleased with our balancing of that top line growth with our profitability progress as well.
Okay. And while I got you there, Josh, if I'm not mistaken, the guidance speaks to another potentially a slight contraction or at least flat year-over-year performance for the Services side of the business. Any commentary you'd like to add on that dynamic?
Yes. With the Services, maybe just a reminder that it tends to be about 50% implementation and 50% consulting and advisory and a big chunk of that being in the vein of creative content services and new content creation. And so that latter part tends to have a little bit less predictability. And so again, providing a Services outlook that we stand behind with conviction.
Okay. Okay. And then maybe a question for John or Stephen, if your voice can handle it here. The D2L Wave spin-out was -- it's a logical move. However, it was 1 point of differentiation that you'd highlighted in your efforts to date to penetrate the enterprise market. So maybe it's just a good time for you to maybe get you to speak to your investment in the enterprise segment, what initiatives you are focused on to help capture share within that market?
Yes, sure. We remain laser-focused on the corporate market and the enterprise learning and associations and training organizations. We've invested through M&A and things like course merchant that help accelerate our growth in that market. And a good portion of our road map is also tailored to that market as well. So for the reasons we've shared, we think creating 2 great companies make sense, and we're excited by the spinout. We're equally excited about D2L's ability to service our 500 and growing enterprise customers and remain very focused on that.
Our next question comes from Christian Sgro from Eight Capital.
I'll follow-on with a question on the corporate market and your strategy there as well. To the extent quantitatively or just qualitatively, could you compare the pace of growth you'd expect from the corporate market going forward as compared to your core academic markets?
Yes, I'll take that, Christian. Good to speak with you again this morning. What we're trying to focus on as a business is really expanding all of these markets. Higher education is doing really well. We see corporate outpacing still, just given the size of the market and our early entry into that space.
Stephen pointed that we've got 500 great clients there. We expect that to continue to scale much faster than the rest of our business as we continue to lean into that new market. We have a highly competitive product in that space. As Stephen pointed out, of course, merchant acquisition really did play a big role in winning a number of deals in the last quarter.
We hope to continue to see that kind of trend as we look out into the future and lean into the differentiation that we have in the space in terms of building out better learning experiences for these companies. I can't think of a time when I talked to more CEOs where learning is top of mind, is one of the key challenges they're tackling as they have a hybrid workforce or they're trying to engage with their employees, it's become more important than ever to support these with a real world-class learning platform, and that's what we've got.
Perfect. And I'll ask a second question here. On the elongated sales cycles, which were quickly called out a moment ago, peers are referencing the same, no longer sales cycles to date, it's been a phenomenon for quarters, years now.
My question would be if you could provide color maybe around what that means, what stalls the process and then the signs you'd look for, maybe in North America at least, to show that buying activities back or to pre-pandemic levels, if you color it as slower or less robust as it was, maybe 2, 3 years ago?
Yes. Christian, again, great question. I want to underscore what Josh said. While we're still facing that headwind of elongated sales cycles and the big macro conditions that everybody in the market, frankly, is facing, we're still seeing it slowly rebounding.
So there's really no change from the last time we provided an update in terms of our overall market outlook. We still see the market coming back. We still see the RFP volume still creeping back up. People are still taking a while to make these decisions.
There's no real difference there from the last time we talked, other than a slow continued progress back to where we were pre-pandemic. We just can't bank on things coming back faster this year. We haven't seen insights to that, but we are still seeing a continuing trend in a good direction.
Our next question comes from Daniel Chan from TD Cowen.
Another question on the market share. You've been taking market share from legacy players like Blackboard. But when I look at one of your main competitors in the higher -- North American higher ed space, they're calling for 5% organic growth next year. So your 10% suggests you're going to be taking market share from them as well. Have you been seeing a lot more of that where you guys are winning deals against them or maybe even displacing them?
Great question, Daniel. We are. We're actually very pleased with the progress of the North American higher education team and also global higher education team have been doing over the course of the last 2 years. We've gone from 10% to 20% win rates a few years ago to 40-plus percent win rate 2 years ago to now over 50% last year, and we see a good trend as we look out into the future.
We are now not only taking away business from legacy players like Moodle and Blackboard and others. But we are head-to-head against our main competitor. We are winning more and we are taking away some of their business today.
That's helpful. And then just digging into the Blackboard and Moodle displacement. Steve mentioned that they've got 70% to 80% presence in international markets. Do you think you can apply the same successful North American strategy to those international markets to win market share there? Or do you need to make product and sales strategy changes to address those?
No, absolutely. I think in North America, legacy players representing around 40% of the market share today. Internationally, it's around 80%. And I think we can move even faster in some of these markets globally. As I mentioned on previous calls, in some markets, we're actually now taking over #1 in market share in spots like Singapore, the Netherlands.
And in emerging markets, as we mentioned, groups like IIE in South Africa are a great example of how we can enter new markets, build quick presence and really make sure that these clients love the product, love the experience and use that to expand rapidly.
So I think international will still outpace North America in terms of organic growth, no issue there. And then it's about making sure that we're doing it efficiently. Josh really zeroes in on making sure that we not only enter a market, but we go deep in that market as quickly as we can and focus our energies versus just trying to do sort of a peanut butter approach around the world. And so far, that strategy has been playing out really nicely in the last couple of years.
That's helpful. Maybe a final question just on the D2L Wave spinout. It sounds like EBITDA margin will expand post spinout. How should we think about the EBITDA margin pre and post transaction in your full year target?
Yes, for sure. Thanks, Dan. As mentioned in our opening remarks and disclosures last night, there is a midyear close date expectations. So you see in Q3 and Q4, you'll see some of the impact of the spin-off transaction. The other thing I'll highlight is we talked about the second half profitability scaling upwards. And to note, that also included just the operating scale of the company.
And so as we increase our revenue as the year progresses in this relative sort of OpEx flat or managed environment, effectively that additional growth drops through to the bottom line. And so that is also a contributor towards that second half profitability, moving towards the mid-teen levels that we disclosed.
Our next question comes from Paul Treiber from RBC Capital Markets.
Just a question on the long-term structural growth rate of the market. And just looking at your medium-term growth outlook calls for faster growth than your '25 guidance and it looks like '25 seeing some headwinds maybe from elongated sales cycle. But the question is just around the longer term. What gives you confidence in the long-term growth rates and the fundamental opportunity here?
I think that's a great question, Paul. And by the way, nice to meet you. In our case, we see tremendous opportunity to support better learning experiences globally. Education is largely on digitized, but I know that's not strange, given that we just went through a pandemic, but K-12 is still largely on digitized.
Higher education is basically replatforming to move to cloud, move to mobile, move to a better experience for their learners. As you think about that adoption, once they go digital, then they can actually get into a transformational phase where they can adopt new models of delivering education moving away from traditional models to support things like competency-based education or mastery-based models.
So really exciting things ahead for education. And the long-term trend for higher education enrollment growth is substantial growth globally. Today, the number of students enrolling in higher education is going to be a small fraction of what it will be in the future. as opportunities for education open up for students all around the world. So the big macro picture is certainly growth in education.
And then in corporate, we're really just scratching the surface. Companies largely today have adopted old approaches like management type of approaches to learning, where it's -- everyone does the same thing and watches the same video and spends the same amount of time on every activity and a modern learning approach, again, competency-based, mastery-based models is going to really drive a real transformation and real ROI for these businesses.
And if you talk to literally any CEO about learning, they will highlight how this is a major problem for the organizations indicating that they have not figured out how to fix this problem. But if you look at the cutting edge clients, for example, big companies like Accenture or others that have adopted our platform, they've seen incredible impact in ROI with the technology being rolled out for their onboarding of new people for the leadership development and other types of use cases that we've seen play out.
So I think there will be an opportunity for us to grow tremendously into corporate, which is why you're seeing our growth rate starting to accelerate even as we're balancing this growth and profitability story as we build our company.
Unlike our competition, we believe in this balance of growth and profitability and making sure that we're investing to win in the market for the long term. And that's the key balance point that we're trying to drive.
That was really helpful. You mentioned the digitization of education. Do you see -- or how impactful is generative AI as part of that trend and do you see generative AI as a tool to further improve productivity for your users. And then to what degree have you shifted your product road map to address generative AI? You've got a couple of new features, but can you speak to what hasn't been announced to the jury that you're shifting towards generative AI?
Yes. No, great question again, Paul. We see tremendous opportunity to leverage generative AI with our technology to really support productivity gains for all stakeholders using our platform, whether it's students or instructors, leadership. We see this being a tremendous opportunity for us as we look at it ahead.
Just to give you a little background, D2L has long been an AI leader in our market, so adopting technologies that can predict student grades by week 3 to 87% accuracy to automatically creating adaptive learning pathways based upon how students are demonstrating mastery towards bigger outcomes or close capturing videos in different languages, all automatically to save tremendously on accessibility and compliance costs for these clients.
And then when we look at generative AI, our first use case that we rolled out is the ability to create questions within the system using generative AI. And keep in mind, clients built millions of questions in our system every month. And so if you can imagine building out a generative AI solution that enables them to do that more efficiently and really importantly, creating [indiscernible], leveraging in good pedagogical design, ring-fencing the data so that it's building questions based upon the actual content of the course is, this is actually going to improve the quality of assessment with our clients.
And I think the value goes actually beyond just simply the productivity lift, it will actually improve the educational quality and experience for the students. We have also announced work that we're doing in terms of our beta environment around virtual tutors using generative AI, buildings to build courses and many, many other different use cases.
So you're going to see a big road map for us in terms of new technologies and applications rolling out around artificial intelligence, and we're intent to be the leader in our space on the adoption of these technologies to drive real impact for students, for faculty, for the clients that we're serving all around the world.
Our next question is from Suthan Sukumar from Stifel.
Congrats on a strong finish to the year. First question I had was really more of a follow-up on the spending environment hearing, obviously, that sales cycles remain extended. But from your perspective, what may have changed in terms of buyer requirements and the potential scope of deals versus maybe a year ago?
So that's a great question. And actually, really reinforces why our win rate continues to tick up. Buyers are becoming more sophisticated. They're looking for more support for an expanded set of use cases, which plays incredibly well into the strengths of D2L Brightspace.
When you think about learning within -- let's take an example, universities not only are they supporting traditional undergraduate education, but they also have use cases around faculty development or professional development for their people. They have use cases for workforce development or upskilling or to support noncredit continuing education use cases.
So there's quite a diverse set of different environments that these institutions are trying to like pull together, and I think you do that with 1 platform, that is an exciting opportunity and a point of difference from several years ago. The other big one is the modalities of learning.
In the past, when we were competing -- we were largely competing against platforms that we're supporting a face-to-face environment and a pure face-to-face environment for many of these institutions. But now we're doing face-to-face online, hybrid, everything in between.
And again, that plays to D2L's strengths. And again, another indicator of why our win rates continue to tick up. So great question. I think learning and putting in place a better running system has never been more important for these institutions, both in higher ed, K-12 and in corporate.
Okay. Great. The next question I had was on partners. Could you provide a quick update on your partner strategy? How are you guys thinking about the role of partners to extend the D2L platform here?
Great question. We have a very vibrant partnership network that we invest very deliberately and are seeing really good results on behalf of our customers with that ecosystem. It allows us to expand and leverage our R&D across a larger ecosystem, that allows us to accelerate this learning transformation that John spoke of.
So we have a dedicated team that's doing some fantastic work. We continue to grow our partner network every quarter and are deeply committed to it and really pleased with the impact that it's having on behalf of our customers.
And I think one of the other key things that I would point out is we have an event that's being held this July in Toronto. It's a great opportunity to engage with a number of our partners. If you're inclined to come, really get to see the impact that we can have together with our clients. It's Fusion, it's Toronto, it's July 8 to 10.
Okay. Great. And I guess maybe the last question for me is just really on capital allocation. Cash balance is quite healthy and you guys are now consistently profitable and cash flow generative. How does M&A fit as part of your total growth strategy? And what would be your priorities there on that front?
Yes, for sure. Good question. As you mentioned, we're certainly pleased being in a position with a strong balance sheet, over $100 million of cash, no debt and generating meaningful cash flow. We do have the NCIB that continues to be in motion we announced in December. But as you mentioned, it's really about looking at how can we grow the business for the long term, and that includes organically, and that also includes looking at inorganic opportunities.
And I think Connected Shopping was a transaction that was closed in fiscal '24 and you heard it sort of spoken to a bit here, looking for those type of opportunities that can really deliver value to our customers and also have an accretive impact on the business from a financial perspective. So certainly, Suthan, as you mentioned, as we move into this phase of having more meaningful cash flow generation, that is something that we're looking at with heightened focus.
Our next question comes from [indiscernible] from BMO Capital Markets.
I just want to follow on Paul's thread about generative AI. Have you seen any increased propensity from customers to pay for this kind of product? Like how do you think about that as you work on the next generation of generative AI products in your platform?
Yes. No, absolutely. Great question, Stephen. So I think there's a good support across the base to pay for generative AI features that are coming out into the platform. Our plan is a bit of a mix. We want to roll out a base level generative AI and other AI technologies like we have in the past as part of our core offering to drive interest to drive adoption.
But no, I think everyone understands the cost implications of these types of technologies rolling out for students and faculty and other stakeholders. And so we do anticipate there will be a generative AI package or enhancing the packages that we have already out in the market like Traders Plus or Performance Plus or the new one that we're launching around Achievements Plus.
These new technologies are going to be greatly enhanced with this type of technology. And then big picture, I sit on an AI task force with the State of New York through the SUNY system. I'm certainly chatting with dozens and dozens of clients in the last few months. And it's very clear that all of them see this as a tremendous opportunity, not just for technology adoption, but -- I also think this is a tremendous opportunity for us to help them with core spare development and other services to help them transform their own offerings.
Because you got to remember, it's not just about adopting the technologies but helping to educate the world on how to embrace these types of technologies. And so for institutions, that means redoing their content, redoing their curriculum, ideally putting that online and then offering it not just to the current students, but also to support like a workforce development, upskilling of industries around the world. And so we see this as a great opportunity for us to help our clients grow their overall enrollment as well and not just simply a technology sale.
Okay. That's good to hear. I have a question around the subscription revenue growth next. So for the full year, it grew around 11%, but customer growth was only around -- or net customer growth was only around 6%. I'm wondering if you could give us some color on the spread between the 2? Is it just signing larger deals? Are there -- is there more adoption of expansion packages, price increases? Just hoping for a little color on that.
Yes. Yes, for sure. Yes, I think the short of it is that the average size of our adds relative to the average size of the losses, the average size of our adds was bigger. And I think another helpful data point is the gross revenue retention, which we provided this quarter as well for you to just sort of see the magnitude and sort of our ability to retain and grow our customers. So yes, it's largely just an average deal size explanation there, Stephen.
Okay. And as we look into fiscal '25 guidance, does the guidance count on net adds accelerating or do you continue to see fewer adds but much larger deals? And I was wondering if you could give a bit of color on whether you expect more growth to come from corporate versus higher add versus international?
Yes. Our growth outlook is really a combination of new customer adds as well as expanding with existing customers. We see a similar sort of mix and dynamic playing out into the future. And really, healthy opportunities in both regards, both adding new logos as well as expanding with our existing customers. So it's a mix.
Our next question is from Brian Peterson from Raymond James.
This is Jessica on for Brian. I just want to start off with you had some notable wins internationally this quarter. Are there any markets you say that you're really focusing on for 2025 versus what you experienced in 2024?
Yes. Great question. International remains a market that's outpacing North America in terms of growth, but we're not losing our focus on winning in the U.S. and Canada for clarity, where our win rates are now up over 50%. But international is growing at 18% in the last year. As we look at those key markets, we want to go deeper in the markets where we're winning and we want to start to open up new markets where we see tremendous opportunities.
So we're going to just stay laser-focused on the strategy that we've been executing in the last couple of years. And continue to drive that adoption. So whether that's in Singapore or the Netherlands or India or South Africa or in Mexico or Colombia or many of these other different markets that we're in, we're seeing a lot of opportunity right now. We want to just continue to go deeper in each of these markets.
All right. And also, I just want to double-click on the D2L Wave spin-off. Does this transaction affect any of your investments that you're planning for, say, like sales and marketing or R&D in D2L?
So we continue at the same level of investment and same focus in the core D2L business. We think we've got the right balance of investment, profitability and growth, and we remain focused on the plan that we've shared with you and are very excited by our progress and our staying the course.
Got it. I guess one last one for me. How much -- so with the ARR stepped up pretty nicely this quarter, how much visibility do you have on pipeline trends in fiscal year '25? Like, I think you mentioned before that you're still seeing strength across your segments, but really want to call out as the particular market trend.
Well, I think Q4 is a good indicator that we've seen good progress. Our ARR held consistent with prior periods where we're seeing about 12% growth. There's still the big macro of elongated sales cycles. There's still the slow rebound of the RFPs. But generally, activity is coming back.
The pipeline continues to expand and grow. But I think the thing that's most important is the stuff that we can control, which is we've got an incredibly good CRO. We're adding up new talent underneath our CRO to drive pipeline, to drive better operational efficiency within the organization, to make it easier for our sales reps to go out there and build great relationships with the clients.
And we're building up capacity in our marketing team to do similar. And so I feel as we continue to make those investments in our go-to-market motion. And then I was at our revenue kickoff earlier this year, and I can tell you, I've never been more excited -- and I've probably said this a few times in the past, that I've never been more excited about our road map than what was presented at a revenue kickoff.
And I think that product excitement, the efficacy studies that we're seeing done on some of these new technologies that are rolling out all that combined with a stronger go-to-market motion, I think, leads to some pretty exciting opportunities ahead. Now we've got to demonstrate execution on that in the quarters ahead. But obviously, when Josh says he has high confidence, I also have high confidence in the team's ability to go off and execute. And that's key.
We currently have no further questions. I will hand back to John Baker to conclude.
Well, I just want to say thank you very much for the ongoing interest in D2L and for joining us on today's call. It was, as you can tell, a very strong end to the 2024 year for the company. We're building a great team and we're looking forward to updating you with our Q1 results in the future. So thank you. And in the meantime, if there's any questions, please reach out at any time. Have a good day, everybody.
This concludes today's call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.