A Note to Our Current and Future Customers
As the year comes to a close, I wanted to write to you directly. Not as a product update or an announcement, but as a reflection on the year we just lived through together.
2025 was not an easy year for manufacturing. Inflation, tariffs, interest rates, and uncertainty shaped how decisions were made across the industry. We felt it alongside our customers. Projects took longer to approve, priorities shifted, and leaders were asked to balance safety, quality, and productivity with fewer resources and more pressure.
However, we saw something encouraging. Investments and momentum returned in Q4. Conversations became more decisive, and initiatives that had been paused started moving quickly. That gives us real optimism heading into 2026. At its core, DeepHow is a deflationary technology that drives efficiency, reduces waste, and enables people to perform at their best and be successful.
Despite the headwinds, this year marked the highest absolute dollar growth in DeepHow’s history. That growth happened because customers trusted us. Because many of you saw DeepHow as a category innovator. And because of a team at my company that shows up every day, deeply committed to growing the business and delighting customers. That trust is also reflected in our customer retention, which remains amongst the best in the industry.
Adoption across the platform told an equally important story. We welcomed many new customers into the DeepHow community this year. More than 27,647 hours of content were viewed, 32,266 new users were added, and engagement grew by over 50 percent year on year. Those numbers matter to us because they represent real usage in real operational environments.
On the innovation front, I could not be prouder of what the team delivered. More than half of the platform's features were built in the last 12 months. That level of innovation only comes from staying close to real problems on the shopfloor.
Innovation today inevitably brings up AI, and it is important for me to be explicit about how we think about it.
A word on AI, because it would feel incomplete not to address it. Much of our innovation, adoption, and growth is made possible by generative AI. At our core, we are an operational knowledge management company, and this is an AI-powered world. Many of the things we are building simply would not have been possible a few years ago. I have personally lived through AI hype cycles before. We built my previous company during the predictive AI wave, and I see familiar patterns emerging again. Early on, the technology is expected to solve global hunger. It usually ends up being useful. In the noise of solving global hunger, that usefulness often hides in plain sight. That brings us to agentic AI. While there are powerful and very real use cases, we are cautious about the idea that software agents will solve every shop floor problem on their own. Most shop-floor challenges are rooted in investments, people, processes, and context, not technology. Our responsibility is to bring the most mature, practical, and impactful AI to our customers, earning trust through results, not promises, with less emphasis on marketing and more focus on measurable operational ROI.
This philosophy shaped many of the product decisions we made this year.
We launched an entirely new line of business around verification, powered by Smart Compare and Live Verification. It brings together computer vision and vision language models to verify work as it happens. This work was made possible through a close partnership and co-innovation with the team at NVIDIA, and some truly brilliant NVIDIA engineers who worked alongside our team. This is a meaningful step forward for DeepHow, positioning us as the only platform that brings together training and verification for operational knowledge. The work earned us a special mention during Jensen Huang’s keynote at NVIDIA GTC, a proud moment for our team and a validation of the direction we are taking. Most importantly, the traction we are seeing reinforces our belief that learning and validation complement each other make operators successful in what they do.
We also expanded how knowledge can be delivered. Beyond Smart Video for training, Smart Instructions for compliance are receiving an additional AI boost, enabling interactive parsing of documents and templates to create structured digital instructions automatically.
We are also launching Smart Guide, which is reaching general availability in Jan 2026, bringing in-the-flow guidance directly to the moment of work. A marriage of videos, photos, and text, all presented visually to enable the operator.
Alongside this, we invested heavily in making the platform far more conducive to compliance-driven environments. We introduced robust versioning, approval workflows, enterprise-grade reporting, and a dedicated cloud for compliance-centric businesses. These capabilities are foundational for industries where governance, traceability, and auditability are non-negotiable.
Through all of this, we stayed true to our roots.
DeepHow pioneered video SOPs, and video remains our core differentiator. We continue to invest deeply in making our video capabilities among the best in the world, if not the best, for manufacturing and industrial use cases. This year’s new video editor, with features like auto-zoom, speed control, picture-in-picture, audio dubbing, and more, reflects that commitment.
Looking ahead, there are areas where we know we can and will do more. We will continue to enhance our compliance capabilities, bringing more depth and rigor to how work is governed and executed. We will invest significantly in skills management, with new features focused on frontline onboarding, upskilling, and engagement. And we will keep a keen eye on adjacencies around knowledge management that make the overall platform experience more complete and more valuable for our customers.
The most significant investment we will make in 2026 will not be in technology, but in impact. We have learned that creating tangible outcomes for our customers goes beyond the product itself, and it is a shared responsibility. To that end, we are forming a Solutions Group, led by a Chief Solutions Officer and comprising industry veterans, delivery leaders, change champions, and product experts. This group will work in close partnership with our customers to drive transformation and to help answer the most important question that follows any technology deployment: so what? So what changed, so what improved, and so what value was created on the shopfloor? Our goal is to ensure that what is built is adopted, sustained, and delivers measurable results.
Most importantly, we will continue to stay close to the work.
To our customers, thank you for letting us into your operations and for trusting us with knowledge that truly matters. To those considering DeepHow, thank you for your curiosity and thoughtful questions. The most complex problems we solve are not technical ones. They are about change, habits, and trust.
As we head into 2026, my commitment remains simple.
Listen carefully.
Build responsibly.
Earn our place every single day.
Wishing you and your teams a restful close to the year and a strong start to the next.
With gratitude,
Sivakumar Lakshmanan
CEO, DeepHow
“Let us together DeepHow your operational knowledge”
For a pdf version of the letter. Click here.
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