EvolutionIQ Inc. (CCC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the CCC Intelligent Solutions announces acquisition of EvolutionIQ Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Bill Warmington, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, and thank you all for joining us today on short notice to discuss CCC's acquisition of EvolutionIQ, which we announced in the press release issued this morning. In addition, we have posted to our Investor Relations website a presentation with supplemental information on the proposed transaction. Joining me on the call are Githesh Ramamurthy, CCC's Chairman and CEO; and Brian Herb, CCC's CFO. The forward-looking statements we make today about the company's plans are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause the actual results and the implementation of the company's plans to vary materially. These risks are discussed in the earnings releases available on our Investor Relations website and under the heading Risk Factors in our 2023 Annual Report on Form 10-K filed with the SEC. Further, these comments and the Q&A that follows are copyrighted today by CCC Intelligent Solutions Holdings, Inc. Any recording, retransmission or reproduction or other use of the same for profit or otherwise without prior consent of CCC is prohibited and a violation of the United States copyright and other laws. Additionally, while we will provide a transcript of portions of this call, and we've approved the publishing of a transcript of this call by a third party, we take no responsibility for inaccuracies that may appear in the transcripts. Please note that the discussion on today's call includes certain non-GAAP financial measures as defined by the SEC. The company believes these non-GAAP financial measures provide useful information to management and investors regarding certain financial and business trends related to the company's financial condition and the results of operations. Thank you. And now I'll turn the call over to Githesh.

Thank you, Bill. Good morning, and thank you for joining us. We are incredibly excited to discuss the acquisition of EvolutionIQ, the leading platform for AI-powered guidance in disability and injury claims management. We believe this combination is transformational for both our companies and brings together 2 leading AI-powered platforms to revolutionize how claims are resolved across the insurance economy, creating significant value for our customers, shareholders and employees. On today's call, I'll discuss the strategic rationale for acquiring EvolutionIQ, how we believe this transaction accelerates our vision of delivering intelligent experiences across our customers and partners, augments our AI solutions portfolio and significantly increases our addressable market. Brian will then discuss the financial rationale for the transaction and how it enhances our financial profile. Let me start with Slide 4 of the deck we published this morning on our IR website. As you know, our business today broadly serves 2 massive sectors, Insurance and Automotive, and we help manage a highly connected ecosystem of customers and partners in and across both. You've also heard me talk about intelligent experiences, our vision for combining artificial intelligence and event-based architecture and the connectivity of our multisided network to help our customers achieve a step change improvement in operating performance and consumer experience at scale. We are doing this today across our portfolio of AI-enabled solutions, bringing intelligent experiences to life for customers in estimating casualty and repairs. EvolutionIQ extends and accelerates this journey in several important ways. First, it deepens and broadens our existing insurance footprint, where we have been the partner of choice for our customers for many years. Second, the EvolutionIQ technology platform represents the next leap in intelligent experiences overall, leveraging AI not just to help automate a particular task but to actively guide claims professionals on the next best actions to take among hundreds or even thousands of possible tasks based on their unique configurations and rules. EvolutionIQ pioneered the use of Next Best Action claims guidance in disability and workers' compensation and is rapidly expanding these capabilities to other insurance lines of business. What EvolutionIQ is doing, in many ways, it's not just the future of insurance but a preview of the future world of work. People and AI working together to drive better outcomes than humans or AI can produce independently. The results have been transformational, enabling injured and disabled workers to return to the workforce sooner, producing a better quality of life for people and saving billions of dollars in avoidable costs and lost economic productivity. EvolutionIQ's world-class capabilities in AI-driven Next Best Action guidance, Gen AI intelligent summarization and other innovations are also a strong complement to CCC's existing strengths in computer vision, natural language processing and other AI technologies with broad applicability and extensibility across the entire CCC customer base over time, providing many pathways for durable long-term growth well into the future. We believe the combination of EvolutionIQ and CCC is a strong strategic fit for 4 reasons. First, EvolutionIQ is not just great AI technology. Like CCC, it's a great AI business, a high-quality, high-growth SaaS platform, delivering real AI-driven results in claims at scale. The company's pioneering innovations in next best action recommendations have enabled to grow rapidly to the point that in less than 5 years, EvolutionIQ has become an industry standard tool for AI-based claims guidance and is in use by 7 of the top 15 group disability insurers in the United States based on net premium written. They literally created their category. EvolutionIQ's solutions drive an average program ROI of 8 to 10x, and astounding multipoint reduction in loss ratio, all powered by AI. Second, EvolutionIQ expands our addressable market. Within the $35 billion plus market for digitizing the global insurance economy, CCC solutions have historically been targeted at the $10 billion-plus market opportunity represented by the U.S. auto insurance economy. Through this acquisition, we have added exposure to the broader $15 billion-plus market for digitizing U.S. P&C overall, with new advantaged positions in the attractive strategic adjacencies of disability, workers' comp and general liability. There is minimal overlap between our client bases with only 1 top 20 insurer currently doing business with both EvolutionIQ and CCC, which opens up significant cross-selling and new logo opportunities for both CCC and EvolutionIQ. The third reason is that EvolutionIQ is highly complementary to CCC's existing product portfolio and AI technology. CCC already generates about 10% of our revenue from helping insurers manage tens of billions of dollars of injury claims through our auto casualty business. The addition of EvolutionIQ's AI-powered injury claims resolution capabilities will allow us to expand our auto casualty suite positioning us to build on our already strong momentum in casualty, one of our fastest-growing product lines. In addition, we believe that EvolutionIQ's technology is highly compatible with and complementary to CCC's existing AI capabilities and provides a path to bringing Next Best Action solutions to the rest of our 35,000 customers. The fourth reason is that our combination with EvolutionIQ reinforces and accelerates CCC's broader strategy of delivering intelligent experiences across our customers and partners. It is easy to imagine providing Next Best Action guidance, not just in managing disability in injury claims, but in navigating the complexity in auto physical damage claims, parts ordering, repair operations and so much more. We're also excited by the potential to create a new multisided network in disability and injury claims similar to what CCC has built in our existing business. Turning to Slide 6. So who is EvolutionIQ? The company was founded in 2019 with a mission of improving the lives of disabled and injured workers by transforming how claims from those populations are resolved. To do this, EvolutionIQ assembled the industry's best technical team, 100% devoted to claims guidance. Today, the company has about 200 employees with roughly half of them AI experts with prior experience at Google, Meta, Amazon, Palantir and other tech leaders. This team has pioneered 2 fundamental categories of AI-based intelligent solutions. The first is claims guidance solutions which have been purpose-built for disability and workers' compensation insurance lines. These solutions help claims professionals to take the next best actions to optimize claimant interactions and claim resolution, enabling injured and disabled workers to return to the workforce more quickly. The second is medical summarization with our MedHub solution, which decodes medical documents, helps insurers more quickly understand claims and accelerate decisions with AI-driven insights. This latter solution can be applied not just to disability and workers' comp, but also to auto casualty and general liability lines of business. Medical summarization has been a topic of great interest for CCC's existing customers, and we are pleased to be bringing what we consider the best solution in the world, in this area to our portfolio. To understand why EvolutionIQ solutions have been so effective, you have to start by understanding the day-to-day challenges facing individual claim adjusters. The first challenge is that an adjuster is typically managing somewhere between 100 and 200 claims at 1 time with each claim consisting of dozens, sometimes hundreds of pages of documents, plus a wide variety of daily ad hoc interactions and followups. Without a good way to prioritize those claims or the task within them, most adjusters simply work through the claims sequentially with the goal of looking at each claim at least once per month. The second challenge is the growing cognitive load on adjusters, driven by the increasing complexities in the 5 Vs of data: Volume, Velocity, Variety, Veracity and Value. The third challenge is staffing. Turnover is high, new adjusters struggle to ramp and managers find it hard to scale. All of this often results in significant processing inefficiencies and unnecessary administrative complexity. In short, this is a problem too complicated for humans to solve on their own. Using EvolutionIQ significantly improves these dynamics with AI helping to uncover insights and guide claims professionals to the next best actions for the claims in their queues based on their configurations and rules, in turn, improving short-term disability return to work rate by multiple days, short-term to long-term disability conversion by high double-digit percentages and long-term disability return to work rate by several weeks. The impact of these results add up quickly with a rare multipoint impact on an insurer's combined ratio possible from using EvolutionIQ solutions. These results generate very high ROI to customers, on average, 8 to 10x. And those strong real-world claim results support a strong economic model for EvolutionIQ. The business has long-term multimillion dollar annual contract value relationships with several of the largest insurers in the U.S. helping them process millions of claims per year based entirely on the strength of the tangible results delivered by its AI. And like CCC, EvolutionIQ has a durable software-based economic profile with 75% plus gross margins and strong customer retention with approximately 95% gross dollar retention. With fantastic products and a large white space in front of it, the business is also growing rapidly, with a net dollar retention over 150%. I've been very impressed by the many cultural similarities between CCC and EvolutionIQ. Both companies have top-tier talent, creating industry standard solutions, a culture of solving complex problems through innovation, strong relationships with customers and the communities they serve and purpose-built mission-specific solutions focused on delivering tangible ROI to customers while empowering claim professionals to create a better environment for all stakeholders. We are excited to welcome the EvolutionIQ team to the CCC family and are thrilled to be working together, to accelerate the transformation of the insurance economy. I believe that together CCC and EvolutionIQ will help insurers leverage AI more broadly to deliver a profound improvement for themselves, their customers and their claimants. And over time, we'll be able to deploy these capabilities more generally across our customer base to unlock many additional pathways for growth. This acquisition is an important step towards enabling our broader vision of making the claims and repair experience just work for our customers and theirs. I will now turn the call over to Brian to talk about the transaction in more detail.

Thanks, Githesh. I'm really excited about this transaction. Not only does it make sense strategically as Githesh laid out in his remarks, but EvolutionIQ is a high-quality, high-growth business with attractive gross margin and free cash flow characteristics and combining with the business is very positive for CCC from a financial perspective. As noted on the transactional summary slide, we're acquiring EvolutionIQ for $730 million. We expect approximately 60% of that value to be paid in cash, which will be funded with cash on hand and an incremental term loan of $225 million. The other approximately 40% of consideration will be paid in newly issued CCC shares. The definitive agreement was signed last night, and we expect the transaction to close in Q1 2025, pending customary closing conditions. In conjunction with the acquisition of EvolutionIQ announced today, this morning, we also announced that our Board of Directors has authorized a $300 million share repurchase program. This is roughly the dollar value of the new shares we expect to issue as part of the EvolutionIQ transaction. While the approximately 40% stock consideration is important to align EvolutionIQ leadership and the team with CCC's long-term success in value creation, we're cognizant of the dilution created by the equity being issued. The share repurchase authorization is intended to act as an offset to that dilution by returning capital to shareholders. The strength of our balance sheet supports our ability to execute this transaction, with net leverage after closing expected to be about 2.3x versus the 1.3x at the end of Q3. Note that when we came public in August of 2021, our net leverage was just under 3x, 2.9x to be exact. And that as a private company, we operated with net leverage at much higher levels. As we've discussed in the past, a key priority for our capital allocation is M&A that can benefit CCC through product line extensions, geographic expansion and TAM expanding adjacencies. This transaction hits all 3, product line extensions through AI-enabled medical summarization and Next Best Action for claim resolution, geographic expansion with an early footprint in international markets and the addition of attractive TAM expanding adjacency and new logo opportunity and disability, workers' comp and general liability. Prior to EvolutionIQ, we were largely focused on the $10 billion-plus portion of the $35 billion plus TAM represented by U.S. auto. As you can see on the first hand slide, the acquisition of EvolutionIQ expands our footprint into the broader $15 billion TAM represented by U.S. P&C and disability market overall. On a combined basis, CCC and EvolutionIQ will have customer relationships with 23 of the top U.S. P&C insurers and 7 of the top 15 group disability insurers by net written premium. This greater reach creates numerous opportunities for future growth. On the second TAM slide, we break out that the $15 billion plus TAM to show that with EvolutionIQ included CCC solutions, we'll be able to address approximately $7 billion of the total market opportunity. I'd like to turn next to EvolutionIQ's expected contribution to CCC's financials moving forward. EvolutionIQ is a high-growth SaaS business with gross dollar retention of approximately 95% and net dollar retention over 150%. We expect revenue contribution from EvolutionIQ of $45 million to $50 million in 2025. As you think about the impact of EvolutionIQ in the couple of years beyond 2025, we expect it to contribute 1 to 2 points of incremental growth above CCC's existing core long-term revenue growth guidance of 7% to 10%. EvolutionIQ's gross margin is over 75%, broadly in line with CCC's gross margin. As a result of investments to support its high revenue growth, we expect EvolutionIQ to have a modest loss to adjusted EBITDA in 2025, including integration costs, but a modest gain on free cash flow. In 2026, we expect to return to our previous cadence of 100 basis points per year of adjusted EBITDA margin expansion as we progress towards our goal in the mid-40s. As part of the acquisition of EvolutionIQ, we will be absorbing about 3 points of stock-based compensation for a total of 15% in 2025. Prior to the acquisition, CCC was trending towards 12% and we believe this temporary step-up is important for alignment and retention of our new team members. We expect share-based comp as a percent of revenue declined from that 15% level beginning in 2026 and we will provide more details when we report Q4 results in late February next year. We are excited about the impact of EvolutionIQ will have on the business. We are buying a proven world-class AI already operating at scale, and we believe this will further accelerate our vision for leveraging artificial intelligence in event-based architecture and the connectivity of our multisided network to deliver intelligent experience to our customers and the industry at large. The acquisition of EvolutionIQ is an important step in making that vision a reality. With that, operator, we are now ready to take questions. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Josh Baer of Morgan Stanley.

Congrats on the acquisition. I was hoping you could talk a little bit about the history of your relationship with EvolutionIQ. Just wondering any color around the deal, how it came together, when it came together?

Yes. This is -- it's really been a great relationship. We've got to know the company over the last couple of years. As you can imagine, it's a very young company, about 5 years old. They've grown rapidly, phenomenal people. And what we were most impressed by is that they were able to start with a clean sheet of paper and really look at some very large complex problems with a very, very fresh perspective. And in a very short period of time, what we were also impressed by is the customers, very large customers who they've been able to -- being able to implement. And so we got to know the company over the last period of time. We've spent a lot of time with them. We've gone deep in terms of the technology, the capabilities of the company, the relationships they have with their customers and very importantly, what they are able to deliver for the customers. But single -- but this thing that stands out the most is really the people. The caliber, quality of the team, and it's been a great relationship as we've got to know the folks. Does that help, Josh?

Yes, it does. Could you help us out a little bit? Obviously -- well, I'm not familiar with sort of the history of this company. Just wondering like what this company look like pre Gen AI? And did that represent an inflection point for some of their AI capabilities?

Yes. So remember, the company is 5 years old. And clearly, they started working on many of the problems in the disability space. And as you started to work with the very core problem, think about an adjuster who's handling 200 claims at any moment in time, with anywhere from 100 to up to 1,000 pages per claim, all of this loosely structured data coming in and just around as they were looking at these problems, looking at it from a software standpoint, from a solution standpoint, the ability to start to build out core algorithms that start to morph into the ability to really extract very unique medical information, there is general purpose summarization that we've all seen with ChatGPT and all the other technologies. But what they focused on using a lot of those horizontal technologies, is really having extraordinarily deep semantic content around the medical terminology, the way different conditions interrelate to each other, and that has been a game changer. So if you look at the heart of it, that ability to guide frontline people with the extraction of this information. Second, perhaps as important and maybe even more important, this thing called Next Best Action tells you which claims should I look at? And what should I be doing next? That, we think, is fundamentally the future of work. And so that ability to embed AI in vertical software, and to create next best actions are really delivering just phenomenal results for some very large customers. And I would add very sophisticated customers.

Last one just for Brian. You talked about -- or you mentioned the 7% to 10% organic growth target. So I guess, first, are you reiterating that range for the core? And then are you saying that, that implies an 8% to 12% new range starting in 2026?

Yes, Josh. So first, we are reiterating the confidence in our long-term range for core CCC. So 7% to 10% as we've talked about. We've given a couple of data points within it. So in '25, we're saying that EvolutionIQ will contribute about $45 million to $50 million of revenue. So that's how to think about '25 incremental to our guide. Then we say, for the next couple of years after '25, expect to contribute another 1 to 2 points of incremental growth beyond our existing long-term range of 7% to 10%. So that's how to think about it a couple of years after '25.

Our next question comes from the line of Michael Funk with Bank of America.

A couple if I could. So Githesh, you mentioned that EvolutionIQ's AI can help to improve and enhance existing CCC's solutions. Can you expand on that for me? And then how long do you think to train EvolutionIQ's AI to expand into some of your existing claims management and auto solutions?

Sure, Michael. I could give you kind of 3 overviews, right? So first and foremost, when you look at core CCC, we've spent a decade building very sophisticated AI that is processing literally tens of billions of dollars of claims, but we started with visual AI that takes literally hundreds of millions of photos of auto accidents, extracts, meaning, information, the cost of the claim and so much more. And that has been a very complex and sophisticated journey. And as you know, that's in production in a lot of different places. And what EvolutionIQ does for our core business especially when you think about our casualty capabilities, we had casualties roughly, call it, 10% of our revenue today. And one of the things that we found very interesting as we have made further progress in casualty is a lot of very vertical specific summarization that we needed to do for casualty. They already do. They do that today. They -- so medical claims and medical claims. There's 120,000 ICD codes, and their solution does that today. So the ability to plug in that medical summarization capability into the CCC casualty suite for our auto insurance customers, who we service today is relatively quick. And that is not a heavy lift for us. So what this does for us is augments visual AI with medical summarization capability. And then last but not least, we've talked about delivering intelligent experiences across the entire ecosystem. So this notion of Next Best Action that is really the way we think everything will be done where some an AI is guiding people to what are the things they should look at next, providing suggestions and really helping the cognitive load. So a lot of those are applicable -- the medical summarization is applicable very, very quickly. The Next Best Action kind of capability coupled with what we've talked about in the past with our intelligent experiences and the IX Cloud, that is -- that will continue to evolve. So back at 100,000 feet level, super capabilities, it adds a very, very nice adjacency for us in disability and workers' comp, which are a huge market, $40 billion market in disability alone, and then workers' comp and the company is doing -- is the premier company in the space and is a thought leader. And some of the core technologies also boost our capabilities in casualty in the short term, immediate term and over the long term, this notion of Next Best Action applies across the portfolio.

So the way to think about it then in addition to the $45 million or $50 million is potentially some revenue synergy to drive faster adoption of your technologies in casualty and then also applicable across your other solutions with Next Best Action, and that might be a longer-term benefit, but potentially some revenue synergy here as well?

You captured it precisely.

Okay. Great. And was it a competitive bidding process? Or was this a longer-standing relationship as you implied earlier, and you came together and realized it was the best outcome for both?

This was a proprietary relationship and the company has an amazing group of founders, and we felt their vision, our vision aligned very deeply, and that's how this came about.

Okay. And Brian, can you just clarify for one second on the press release that said EBITDA dilutive, if I read it correctly. I think in your prepared comments, you said that EvolutionIQ is EBITDA negative. So I want to make sure I understood that just given the difference between the two.

Yes. So the way to think about it, Mike, is in '25, you will have a modest EBITDA loss and that's driven from integration costs but also just investing in the business as it continues to scale. That said, it's got a positive cash flow contribution in '25. When you look at the business, it's got gross profit similar to ours and the unit economics are very attractive. So as the business continues to scale, it will start to deliver positive EBITDA growth. And when we get into '26, we expect to return to our previous cadence of 100 basis points per year margin expansion as we progress towards our goal of mid-40s EBITDA margin.

Can you provide any more detail or help as we try to model this out on the integration cost, what EBITDA margin might look like ex integration for EvolutionIQ just to help us with our own modeling?

Yes. I mean we'll do that in a more complete way as we get into Q4 and report into February. I would just go off at this stage, Mike, the modest EBITDA loss, that does include the integration. So as you think about '25 use that as a -- where to start, and then we'll give a more complete update as we report Q4 in February and talk about the impact in more detail.

Again, the modest EBITDA loss we're talking about is only for the EvolutionIQ piece.

Absolutely. Well understood. While I have you guys quickly, any update on the adoption of your own emerging solutions? I think last quarter, you said a little slower adoption is customers continue to evaluate certainly long-term outlook intact. But any update on that?

Yes. I would give you just a short version of this is that we are seeing really 2 dimensions. One, more customers adopting or piloting the solutions, including a couple of top 5 carriers who are now also starting to pilot some of our newer solutions. So we are starting to see a continued increase in the number of pilots. We're also seeing some conversions starting to take place, especially in subro and the like, and we'll give you more details on the call, but what we believe as a secular opportunity over the next 5 years, we remain very, very comfortable and confident around it. And as you can see, the fact that we feel confident about our core solutions and our core products also made us feel good about the acquisition of EvolutionIQ.

Our next question comes from the line of Gabriela Borges with Goldman Sachs.

Githesh, just hoping you could expand a little bit more on your comments on how EvolutionIQ helps you in casualty. I know CCC has been strong on the [ property ] side for basically since the founding of the company. So I'd love to hear a little bit about what your strategy to expand into casualty looks like now versus what it might have looked like without EvolutionIQ?

Sure, Gabriela. So first and foremost, as we have pointed out before, the casualty business, while it's 10% of CCC, it is also the -- it has an overall growth rate faster than the company -- than the total company. And as we mentioned before, we have 1/5 of the number of casualty customers as we do for auto physical damage, so it's a large growth opportunity for us. And over the last, I would say, 24 months or so, what we have seen an increased adoption by carriers coming into our casualty solutions, that 2 forms, first party and third party. So we have seen that adoption continue because we've invested pretty heavily in building out additional capabilities in the tech stack for casualty. And so that was evolving very, very nicely. What we found as we were continuing to grow that business, this ability to really process the -- because 1 -- in roughly, call it, 1 in 5 auto accident results in casualty. So when we build products like Impact Dynamics that we've discussed with you before, Impact Dynamics takes the physics of the accident, the photographs of the accident and then translates that into injury and some of those claims as well as traditional software we've had. One of the things that we've been working and have been developing was really the medical summarization capability. The complex interaction between different medical treatments and medical conditions and understanding large complex medical documents, which can often run into hundreds and thousands of pages, that ability comes prebuilt with the work, the EvolutionIQ team has built. And so that was a piece that has been of increasing interest to our customers, and we feel on that particular piece, what EvolutionIQ does that mean in terms of medical summarization is absolutely the best in the world and it's very well trained for that piece. And we think that will be a home run for our customers and continue to drive the more casualty business we have.

Yes. Yes. That makes sense. Maybe the follow-up is on the competitive environment in medical summarization. You have Slide 8. It sounds like it's mostly manual is an alternative. If customers are not using EvolutionIQ for medical summarization, what are they doing? And how do you think about the gap and functionality between their medical summarization versus what their competitor is doing?

I would say, for the most part, what we have seen in our core business is that medical summarization capability is done by people. So that is really the technology and the experience today is it's people-driven. And so the vast majority of the customers we talk to, this has been especially in the auto physical -- auto insurance side of the business, a lot of that is in very early stages. We'd also look at a lot of other summarization capability in general. And again, as we did our homework, we worked with the team, this turns out to be the absolute best in terms of the medical summarization capability. They developed it for a different market, but we think by integrating this into our casualty business will help us a lot.

Our next question comes from the line of Samad Samana with Jefferies.

Maybe first, just obviously, the net retention is really impressive evolution. Can you maybe help us unpack that between claims volume growth, complexity growth going back into the basis. Help us understand how that 150% is composed?

Yes. Happy to. Samad, it's Brian. Yes, so it's a great metric. We're super impressed with it. I think the other thing is, as Githesh said, it's a relatively new company. They've been around for 5 years, and they have these great client relationships with some of the largest carriers in disability. So they're at 7 of the top 15. The growth has really come in a couple of different ways. I mean, one is, as they've rolled it out and taken smaller sets of their claims and rolled it out to the entire claim population, you get growth off that. They've also rolled out additional modules. So they'll sell one module into a client, prove that module out shows a strong ROI and then they're able to cross-sell additional modules into that client. So that selling motion has been very strong and really driving the strong NDR of over 150%. So yes, we're excited about that and expect more to come.

Great. And then maybe, Githesh, as I think about one of the exciting things about CCC is in the auto space is how you've been able to expand into other areas of that ecosystem, and maybe for those of us that are less familiar, just as you think about where EvolutionIQ takes you into, do you see a similarly complex ecosystem that where you're serving the insurers, but then you can move into other areas? And is that part of the strategy behind this acquisition?

Samad, you hit the nail on the head. That is exactly one of the other things we're excited about, right? Because when you look at our history, we moved from providing tools for auto insurance companies and then we moved to the repair facility market, which is a very close adjacency, and that's now roughly half of our revenues of almost half of our revenue. And then we expanded from repair -- collision repairs to parts providers and dealers and now we have almost all OEMs as customers as well. And so that experience of learning adjacencies and building out an ecosystem that's for the benefit of all the different providers, there's a lot of lessons learned in that. And this was a rare example of finding a company that is a game changer in how disability claims are done. So that by itself, stand-alone is a large growth opportunity, there's a very close adjacency from there into workers' compensation. It also has the benefits of reinforcing our core business. But like you pointed out, the disability market, workers' comp, there is a large and complex ecosystem in that environment, and we are equally excited about building that out, and that is clearly a great opportunity for us.

Our next question comes from the line of Kirk Materne with Evercore ISI.

Githesh, sorry if you have brought this up at the beginning, I was a few minutes late. But how do you envision just sort of the go-to-market with EvolutionIQ and your casualty business? I assume you are going to leave EvolutionIQ largely independent to start. I guess how do you think about sort of the synergies, the branding? Like how do you want that to unfold over the next couple of years?

Look, a couple of things. First and foremost, you have to recognize the founders and the management team and the entire company, they've done a phenomenal job in a very short period of time building a great reputation, and their ability to help customers solve large problems, implement it, execute it, so -- and to be able to sell, they have all of those capabilities. What CCC brings in the short term is scale in terms of cybersecurity, data center and for many large customers, the ability to have a CCC behind an EvolutionIQ we think will help with the process of large carriers feeling even more comfortable. So the management team itself does need a lot of help. They will continue to focus on disability and workers' comp and we will leverage some of their capabilities in other areas for us.

Makes sense. And then, Brian, 2 quick ones for you. On the revenue guide for Evolution next year, I assume that's largely just their business, not any assumptions of synergies or anything like that at this point in time? Or can you just give us some idea of how you kind of got to that number?

Yes, that's right. I mean we're guiding to largely their business and what they're going to deliver based on the forecast and kind of their CAR as they exit the year. And then, as Githesh said, there's certainly a revenue synergy opportunity that we're really excited about. But it's not meaningful in the '25 position.

Okay. That's helpful. And then to your comment about alignment, obviously, of the stock, which makes tons of sense. I guess we'll see this when we get all the details, but are there earnouts and sort of performance hurdles that come along with that grant?

Yes, you'll get the detail when we release the agreement. But no, it's largely just a stock transaction. There is a lockup for the key leaders just to make sure that there is a retention tool and that they're incented for the long-term success and value creation. And that's why the share component was important part of the consideration, but there is not an earn-out component of the deal.

Okay. Great. Congrats on the acquisition.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of Gary Prestopino with Barrington.

Githesh and Brian, congratulations on this transaction. A couple of quick questions. First of all, I would assume that this is priced on a subscription basis. It's not based on a per claims basis.

Yes. Gary, it's Brian. Yes, exactly. It's a SaaS revenue model. It looks very much like ours, where they come up with an ROI to determine kind of the price or the P within the equation. They look at the claim count within the client to get the queue to come up with the flat fee structure, but then it gets priced on a subscription, very similar to how we sell our products to the carriers.

So as I read up on what the information you gave on what you discussed in the call, it seems like that this product helps speed the process tremendously by directing the claims individual to look at the most immediate needs, claims in the system to get that person back to work. But does it do anything with fraud or anything like that? Can it prevent or push back on fraud?

Yes. The word, Gary, I would use is guide and not the word direct. So that guidance is really, really important because at the end of the day, the adjuster is dealing with a lot of complexity. So it does all the guidance, and there are the core technology capability in terms of medical summarization, especially as we -- we have not made any public announcements about any of our fraud solutions. And as you can imagine, we are working on those capabilities. But this is they'll continue to focus literally on leveraging it for disability. And they're really helping people getting -- disability is different from auto in the sense that disability helps people get back to work sooner so they can get back to their lives. That is really how a claim professional helps a disability -- someone who's on disability. So that fundamental ability to help somebody.

Okay. That's helpful. And then you may -- I think you kind of addressed this in the last question somewhat, but I just wanted to ask it anyway. I mean, in doing the due diligence on this company, its product and all, did you come up against that insurance companies were hesitant to take the product just because EvolutionIQ on a stand-alone basis was such a small company and there was concern about whether they were going to be in the market 5 to 10 years from now? And given that they're part of your system now that just goes away?

We certainly think that helps. But to really point out. This company on their own, they've got 7 of the top 15, and they were able to do that from a standing start. So they have a great reputation and credibility in the marketplace. But as you go broader to scale this out, they already have large contracts, we certainly think that it helps, and there's a number of things that we can help in terms of the back office or hosting, cybersecurity, infrastructure and other things as well. But it's a very strong team. And the grand scheme, it probably helps a little bit on the margins, but the company has been very successful.

Our next question comes from the line of Shlomo Rosenbaum with Stifel.

I want to jump back on something that was touched on before. Just in terms of retention, with over half the firm is AI experts, I want to know to ask you how far will the stock ownership go? Do you believe that there's going to be some kind of component of having to pay the people more to stay on board after you acquired the company, how much of the management team are viewed as key men? Just trying to understand how -- to make sure that you retain very key assets, which seems a lot of them are people assets here in terms of making this product work and continue to innovate on it?

We're not going to go into the gory details of that. I mean -- but I will tell you at the macro level, right, especially as a technology company, people are the core asset over and out. And so we will do all the right things as we work with the management team in terms of ongoing equity. So we're doing all of those for sure. But the heart of it is having cultures that are aligned around innovation and people solving large complex problems, having more tools and capabilities to pursue the mission that they're on, we think that is extraordinarily important. And obviously, we have to make sure all the other stuff is working well. But that is really what we like about the team and their focus -- the mission-critical focus. And we've been in the technology business for a long time, and we understand that aspect. But we're not planning to go into too much detail on what we're doing.

Yes. Shlomo, the only thing I'd add -- it's Brian here. It's just the reference I made of our share-based comp moving up 3 points next year. And so like, clearly, that's a meaningful step. I mean, we were trending at CCC towards 12% of revenue. And then with this transaction, it's going to move closer to 15%. And so there's a meaningful set of stock that we're putting out really around retention incentives. So we feel good about putting that in place to align long-term value. And as Githesh said, the culture side is a really important element as well.

Okay. And then just Githesh, you said that a lot of what your -- this company competes with is just people on their own in terms of medical summarization. I know from a high level, Mitchell1 also does a lot in workman's comp and the like. Does this -- do they compete more with Mitchell1 in what they do?

I don't know the exact answer to that. But I would say, by and large, they really created this category. We have not really seen anything in the equivalent. There are lots of different software technology providers and everything else. And what we found in fairly sophisticated diligence that we did was what they've built is unique and stands on its own. That's actually the benefit you get out of being a 5-year-old company that has gone from 0 to deliver $45 million to $50 million of revenue next year with some large complex customers who've been able to kick the tires on a lot of different horizontal and vertical tech companies.

Our next question comes from the line of Alexei Gogolev with JPMorgan.

Githesh, I wanted to check if you've had an opportunity to look at the partnership that EvolutionIQ has with Guidewire. And if you would be able to comment what that means for CCC, Obviously, we know that you also now have a partnership with Guidewire. How will this partnership evolve following this transaction?

Net of it is Guidewire is a great company. We have a great relationship with them. In fact, I think we had some of our folks at their conference recently, EvolutionIQ has a good connection. But what we think of this is really the breadth of the ecosystem that we have, and there are several other partnerships as well that need to be developed. So I'm not sure, Alexei, that changes materially one way or the other. We have great relationships all around.

Perfect. And the other question I had was about the comment you made that EvolutionIQ services 7 out of top 15 players. Does it serve Progressive? And does that mean that you are now going to service Progressive?

Alexei, we don't comment on individual customers. And remember, when we said 7 out of the top 15, we're talking about disability carriers, not auto insurance. We're not talking about our traditional auto insurance carriers. We're talking about disability.

Congrats with the acquisition.

And I'm currently showing no further questions at this time. I'd like to hand the call back over to the CEO, Githesh Ramamurthy for closing remarks.

Well, thank you all for joining us today to discuss our exciting combination with EvolutionIQ. And again, to point out, the combination of CCC and EvolutionIQ, we think, would have profound improvement in disability and injury claims handling and how all that is resolved and with proven AI capability, we also believe this is an important step towards enabling our broader vision of making the claims and repair experience just work for our customers and theirs. And we believe the transaction positions us to create significant value in the future for our customers, shareholders and CCC team members by increasing substantially the addressable market, augmenting our AI solutions, accelerating our vision of intelligent experiences and obviously, enhances our financial profile, and I want to extend a very warm welcome to the EvolutionIQ team to the CCC family, and I wish everybody on the call, we wish you all a safe and joyous holiday season and Happy New Year to you.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.