Description of Business and Summary of Significant Accounting Estimates and Policies | 1. Description of Business and Summary of Significant Accounting Estimates and Policies Description of Business The Company was founded on a simple idea: engineer the highest quality data so organizations across broad industry segments could make smarter decisions. Today, the Company believes it is delivering the highest quality data for some of the world’s most innovative technology companies to use to train the AI models of the future. AI holds the promise that computers can perceive and understand the world, enabling products and services that would have been previously unimaginable and impossible with traditional coding. AI learns from data, and the highest-performing AI will have learned from the highest-quality data. The Company believes that it can contribute meaningfully by harnessing its capabilities, honed over 30 years, in collecting and annotating data at scale with consistency and high accuracy. The Company is also helping companies deploy and integrate AI into their operations and products and providing innovative AI-enabled industry platforms, helping ensure that its customers’ businesses are prepared for a world in which machines augment human activity in ways previously unimaginable. The Company developed its capabilities and honed its approaches progressively over the last 30 years creating high-quality data for many of the world’s most demanding information companies. Approximately eight years ago, the Company formed Innodata Labs, a research and development center, to research, develop and apply machine learning and emerging AI to its large-scale, human-intensive data operations. In 2019, the Company began packaging the capabilities that emerged from its R&D efforts in order to align with several fast-growing new markets and help companies use AI/ML to drive performance benefits and business insights. The Company’s historical core competency in high-quality data, combined with these R&D efforts in applied AI, created the foundation for the evolution of the Company’s offerings, which include AI Data Preparation, AI Model Deployment and Integration, and AI-Enabled Industry Platforms. AI Data Preparation For several of the world’s large technology companies, the Company supports their efforts at building generative AI foundation models. For these companies, the Company provides or is poised to provide a range of scaled data solutions and services. The Company’s scaled data solutions include providing instruction data sets for fine-tuning LLMs to understand prompts, to accept instruction, to converse, to apparently reason, and to perform the myriad of incredible feats that many of us have now experienced. The Company also provides reinforcement learning and reward modeling, services which are critical to provide the guardrails against toxic, bias and harmful responses, and model evaluation services. For social media companies, robotics companies, financial services companies, and many others, the Company collects or creates training data, annotates training data, and trains AI algorithms for working with images, text, video, audio, code and sensor data. The Company utilizes a variety of leading third-party tools, proprietary tools and customer tools. For text annotation, the Company uses its proprietary data annotation platform that incorporates AI to reduce cost while improving consistency and quality of output. The Company’s proprietary data annotation platform features auto-tagging capabilities that apply to both classical and generative AI tasks. The platform encapsulates many of the innovations the Company has conceived of in the course of its 30-year history of creating high-quality data. In addition, because collecting real-world data is often impracticable (due to data privacy regulations or rarity of cohorts and outliers), the Company creates high-quality synthetic data that maintains all of the statistical properties of real-world data, using a combination of domain specialists and machine technologies that leverage large language models (LLMs). AI Model Deployment and Integration The Company helps businesses leverage the latest AI technologies to achieve their goals. The Company develops custom AI models (where it selects the appropriate algorithms, tunes hyperparameters, trains and validates the models, and updates the models as required). The Company also helps businesses fine-tune their own custom versions of the Company’s proprietary models and third-party foundation models to address domain-specific and customer-specific use cases. For the Company’s customers that provide products and solutions that require intensive text data processing and analytics, in addition to deploying and integrating AI models, the Company often provides a range of data engineering support services including data transformation, data curation, data hygiene, data consolidation, data extraction, data compliance, and master data management. The Company’s customers span a diverse range of industries and a wide range of AI use cases, benefiting from the short time-to-value and high economic returns of the Company’s AI solutions and platforms. AI-Enabled Industry Platforms The Company’s AI-enabled industry platforms address specific, niche market requirements the Company believes it can innovate with AI/ML technologies. The Company deploys these industry platforms as software-as-a-service (SaaS) and as managed services. These platforms benefit from the Company’s technology infrastructure, its industry-specific knowledge, its strong customer relationships and experience merging technology with the business processes of its customers. To date, the Company has built an industry platform for medical records data extraction and transformation (which the Company brands as “Synodex ® The Company’s Synodex industry platform transforms medical records into useable digital data organized in accordance with its proprietary data models or customer data models. The Company’s Agility industry platform provides marketing communications and public relations professionals with the ability to target and distribute content to journalists and social media influencers world-wide and to monitor and analyze global news (print, web, radio and TV) and social media. The Company’s operations are presently classified and reported in three reporting segments: Digital Data Solutions (DDS), Synodex and Agility. Critical Accounting Policies and Estimates Principles of Consolidation Use of Estimates Revenue Recognition For the Digital Data Solutions (DDS) segment, revenue is recognized primarily based on the quantity delivered or resources utilized in the period in which services are performed and performance conditions are satisfied as per the agreement. Revenue from agreements billed on a time-and-materials basis is recognized as services are performed. Revenue from fixed-fee agreements, which is not significant to overall revenues, is recognized based on the proportional performance method of accounting, as services are performed, or milestones are achieved. For the Synodex segment, revenue is recognized primarily based on the quantity delivered in the period in which services are performed and performance conditions are satisfied as per the agreement. A portion of the Synodex segment revenue is derived from licensing the Company’s functional software and providing access to the Company’s hosted software platform. Revenue from such services is recognized monthly when all parties to the agreement have agreed to the agreement; each party’s rights are identifiable; the payment terms are identifiable; the agreement has commercial substance; access to the service is provided to the end user; and collection is probable. The Agility segment derives its revenue primarily from subscription arrangements and provision of enriched media analysis services. It also derives revenue as a reseller of corporate communication solutions. Revenue from subscriptions is recognized monthly when access to the service is provided to the end user; all parties to the agreement have agreed to the agreement; each party’s rights are identifiable; the payment terms are identifiable; the agreement has commercial substance; and collection is probable. Revenue from enriched media analysis services is recognized when the services are performed, and performance conditions are satisfied. Revenue from the reseller agreements is recognized at the gross amount received for the goods in accordance with the Company functioning as a principal due to the Company meeting the following criteria: the Company acts as the primary obligor in the sales transaction; assumes the credit risk; sets the price; can select suppliers; and is involved in the execution of the services, including after sales service. Revenue includes reimbursement of out-of-pocket expenses, with the corresponding out-of-pocket expenses included in direct operating costs. Revenue associated with the services provided in one period and billed in a subsequent period is commonly referred to as unbilled revenues and is included under Accounts receivable. The Company considers U.S. GAAP criteria for determining whether to report gross revenue as a principal versus net revenue as an agent. The Company evaluates whether it is in control of the services before the same are transferred to the customer to assess whether it is principal or agent in the arrangement. Contract acquisition costs, which are included in prepaid expenses and other current assets, are amortized over the term of a subscription agreement or contract that normally has a duration of 12 months or less. The Company reviews these prepaid acquisition costs on a periodic basis to determine the need to adjust the carrying values for early terminated contracts. Included in prepaid expenses and other current assets on the accompanying consolidated balance sheets are contract acquisition costs amounting to $0.8 million for each of the years ended December 31, 2023 and 2022. These acquisition costs relate to our Agility segment and are amortized over the term of the subscription agreement which normally has a duration of 12 months or less. Foreign Currency Translation The functional currency for the Company’s subsidiary in Germany is the Euro. The functional currencies for the Company’s Agility subsidiaries in the United Kingdom and Canada are the Pound Sterling and the Canadian dollar, respectively. The financial statements of these subsidiaries are prepared in their respective currencies. Financial information is translated from the applicable functional currency to the U.S. dollar (the reporting currency) for inclusion in the Company’s consolidated financial statements. Income, expenses, and cash flows are translated at weighted-average exchange rates prevailing during the fiscal period, and assets and liabilities are translated at fiscal period-end exchange rates. Resulting translation adjustments are included as a component of accumulated other comprehensive loss in stockholders’ equity. Foreign exchange transaction gains or losses are included in direct operating costs in the accompanying consolidated statements of operations and comprehensive loss. Derivative Instruments - Cash Equivalents - Short term Investments-other - Concentration of Credit Risk - Accounts Receivable - We record an allowance for credit losses for estimated losses resulting from the failure of our customers to make the required payments and provisions for billing adjustments relating to quality issues on delivered services. The allowance for credit losses is based on a review of specifically identified accounts and an overall aging analysis applied to accounts pooled based on similar risk characteristics. Judgments are made with respect to the collectability of accounts receivable within each pool based on historical experience, current payment practices, and current economic trends based on our expectations over the expected life of the receivables, generally ninety days or less. Actual credit losses could differ from those estimates. Property and Equipment - two ten years Capitalized Developed Software - three Long-lived Assets - Goodwill and Other Intangible Assets - ten Goodwill represents the excess of the cost of an acquired entity over the fair value of the acquired net assets. The Company does not amortize goodwill but evaluates it for impairment at the reporting unit level annually during the third quarter of each fiscal year (as of September 30 of that year) or when an event occurs, or circumstances change, that indicates the carrying value may not be recoverable. The Company performed its annual goodwill assessment for the Agility segment as of September 30, 2023 for impairment. The impairment test involves estimating the fair value based on a combination of income (estimates of future discounted cash flows) and the market approach (market multiples for similar companies) using unobservable inputs (Level 3). The Company concluded that there is no impairment of goodwill for the Agility segment. Income Taxes In assessing the realization of deferred tax assets, management considered whether it is more likely than not that all or some portion of the U.S. and Canadian deferred tax assets will not be realizable. As the expectation of future taxable income resulting from the Synodex and Agility segments cannot be predicted with certainty, the Company maintains a valuation allowance against all the United States, Canadian and European (principally Germany and the United Kingdom) net deferred tax assets. The Company accounts for income taxes regarding uncertain tax positions, and recognizes interest and penalties related to uncertain tax positions in income tax expense in the consolidated statements of operations and comprehensive loss. Accounting for Leases The determination of whether an arrangement is, or contains, a lease is based on the substance of the arrangement at the inception date and requires an assessment of whether the fulfillment of the arrangement is dependent on the use of a specific asset or assets, or the arrangement conveys a right to use the asset. A reassessment is made after inception of the lease only if one of the following applies: a. there is a change in contractual terms, other than a renewal or extension of the arrangement; b. a renewal option is exercised, or extension granted, unless the term of the renewal or extension was initially included in the lease term; c. there is a change in the determination of whether fulfillment is dependent on a specified asset; or d. there is a substantial change to the asset. Whenever a reassessment is made, lease accounting shall commence or cease from the date when the change in circumstances gave rise to the reassessment for scenarios (a), (c) or (d) and at the date of renewal or extension period for scenario (b). Leases where the lessor retains substantially all the risks and rewards of ownership are classified as operating leases. As of December 31, 2023, all of the Company’s leases are classified under operating leases. Operating lease payments are recognized as an operating expense on a straight-line basis over the lease term. Accounting for Stock-Based Compensation - The stock-based compensation expense related to the Company’s stock plans were allocated as follows (in thousands): Year Ended December 31, 2023 2022 Direct operating costs $ 294 $ 214 Selling and administrative expenses 3,733 3,069 Total stock-based compensation $ 4,027 $ 3,283 Fair Value of Financial Instruments Fair value measurements and disclosures define fair value as the price that would be received for an asset or paid to transfer a liability (an exit price) in the principal or most advantageous market for the asset or liability in an orderly transaction between market participants on the measurement date. The accounting standard establishes a fair value hierarchy that prioritizes the inputs used to measure fair value into three levels. The three levels are defined as follows: ● Level 1 : Unadjusted quoted price in active market for identical assets and liabilities. ● Level 2: Inputs other than those included in Level 1 that are observable for the asset or liability, either directly or indirectly, such as quoted prices for similar assets or liabilities; quoted prices in markets that are not active; or other inputs that are observable or can be corroborated by observable market data for substantially the full term of the assets or liabilities. ● Level 3: Unobservable inputs reflecting management’s own assumptions about the inputs used in pricing the asset or liability. The Company’s forward contracts are at level 2 in the fair value hierarchy. Income (Loss) per Share Pension - Deferred Revenue The table below provides information about contract liabilities (deferred revenue) and the significant changes in the balance for the years ended December 31, 2023 and 2022, respectively (in thousands): December 31, 2023 2022 Balance at January 1 $ 4,366 $ 4,509 Net deferred revenue in the period 21,619 29,756 Revenue recognized (22,586) (29,618) Currency translations and other adjustments 124 (281) Balance at December 31 $ 3,523 $ 4,366 Recent Accounting Pronouncements - On December 14, 2023, the FASB issued ASU No. 2023-09, “Income Taxes (Topic 740): Improvements to Income Tax Disclosures”. The ASU’s effective date is for fiscal years beginning after December 15, 2024. The adoption of the ASU 2023-09 will enhance quantitative and qualitative disclosures related to rate reconciliation of significant components and income tax paid. The Company does not expect any significant impact from the adoption of this standard. |