Docebo Sees Growth Accelerate as Enterprise, AI and Skills Bets Gain Traction

Growth is accelerating: Docebo’s core ARR increased 13.9% in the second quarter, driven by larger enterprise contracts, stronger pipeline activity, steady mid-market demand and improving international performance. Reported ARR growth is expected to converge with core growth as the company laps prior Dayforce and AWS churn. Skills and AI are expanding the platform: The 365Talents acquisition is helping Docebo win larger deals and increase contract values, while new AI products, Enterprise Knowledge and AgentHub, are scheduled to launch in October. Docebo is prioritizing targeted investment and shareholder returns: The company plans to build a dedicated healthcare business, pursue roughly 2 percentage points of annual EBITDA-margin expansion and launch a $70 million issuer bid, while focusing on integrating recent acquisitions rather than pursuing additional deals. Docebo said its underlying growth accelerated for a second consecutive quarter as the company gains traction with larger enterprise customers, expands its artificial intelligence product portfolio and begins integrating its recent skills-intelligence acquisition. Speaking at Canaccord’s 46th Annual Growth Conference in Boston, Chief Executive Officer Alessio Artuffo said the learning-platform provider has spent the past several years increasing its enterprise focus. That work has begun to show results through accelerating pipeline activity, larger customer contracts and new product releases, he said. “We’re signing bigger customers at bigger tickets,” Artuffo said, adding that the company is progressing toward becoming a more strategic enterprise-focused platform after beginning its public-company history with greater exposure to mid-market and small-business customers. Chief Financial Officer Brandon Farber said reported annual recurring revenue grew 9.5% in the second quarter. The company’s core ARR, which excludes foreign exchange effects, acquired ARR and the wind-down of its Dayforce business, rose 13.9%. Farber said Docebo expects reported ARR growth to begin converging with core ARR growth during the second half as the company laps prior churn from Dayforce and Amazon Web Services. Dayforce represented about $19.5 million in ARR roughly a year earlier and about $16.5 million at the time of the conference, according to Farber. He said the company faced approximately $5 million of Dayforce churn in the third quarter of the prior year, followed by approximately $4 million of AWS churn in the fourth quarter, in addition to Dayforce churn. Management cited enterprise momentum, steady mid-market performance and improving international business as drivers of the acceleration. Farber also said Docebo is seeing enterprise sales cycles compress, though he noted that several factors can affect deal timing. He identified go-to-market execution as the largest controllable contributor, alongside improved product positioning and the addition of skills capabilities. Earlier this year, Docebo acquired French skills-intelligence platform 365Talents and AI-native enterprise-search company Zive. Artuffo said the company began seeing results from the 365Talents integration in the second quarter, with some large customers adopting the combined skills-and-learning offering. Farber said the skills component has helped raise contract value and has opened opportunities that Docebo may not have won previously as a standalone learning-management-system vendor. In two recently discussed deals involving a large telecommunica...