Note from CEO Eric Vaughan
It has been a year since IgniteTech acquired Khoros, and I want to talk to you directly. There has been a lot of secondhand talk going around, none of it coming from us, and most of it from people who stand to gain from the telling. Enough of that. If you want to know something about Khoros, come to Khoros. Ask us. We will give it to you straight.
Here is where we are.
We did not buy Khoros to dress it up and sell it. That is the private equity playbook, and it is not ours. We are privately held, we keep what we acquire, and we run it for the decades, not the quarter.
Khoros was losing millions. We made it profitable so it would not go dark. That took painful decisions, and I know some of them affected you. I am not going to gloss over that. It is also why Khoros is still here, on solid ground and able to invest in what comes next.
And we have invested. We rebuilt the platform and shipped two AI-native products in under a year. Aurora AI reimagines community for the AI-answer-engine era and closes roughly 30% of community questions that never get a good answer. The brand-new Iris® AI replaces Care and Social Media Management, two products that ran separately for 15 years and never fully integrated. It brings social engagement and brand care into one platform, with publishing, moderating, engaging and analyzing all in one place.
No other company offers enterprise community alongside enterprise social and brand care, and large enterprises are switching to us because of it. Everyone else still makes you choose. We have been the gold standard in customer community since Lithium (Khoros’ predecessor) pioneered the category in 2001, and then built the bridge to social when Lithium and Spredfast became one company, because community and social were never meant to live apart. That foundation has powered more than 4,000 community deployments since 2001 and draws 1.8 billion site visits a year.
This first year post-acquisition was about putting the house in order. This next stretch is about innovation, building on the platform you count on. We are strengthening the online infrastructure and improving uptime, with faster, sharper incident response when something does go wrong. When we fix something now, we fix the cause, not the symptom.
As part of that investment, we are turning on Community Guard for you, free for the next 60 days. It is a new protective layer for an internet that is not just people anymore. Communities like yours get crawled, scraped and hit by bots and automated agents that distort your analytics, consume capacity and put avoidable pressure on the experience. Community Guard catches that traffic before it reaches your community, while keeping the door open for real users and the discovery channels you actually want. The result is a cleaner, steadier community with real protection against bot abuse and traffic spikes. We are turning it on now because it is the right thing to do for our customers.
Here is what all of this means:
- Stronger reliability and faster incident response as we harden the platform.
- Community Guard will be enabled and free for the next 60 days, screening bots and automated traffic before it reaches your community.
- Free migration from Community Classic to Aurora AI through the end of 2026.
We are as visible as ever in this market, on our own terms. We have redeployed our presence to where our customers actually are, the independent events and conversations that are open to everyone. We were a key sponsor of Toronto Community Week 2025 and London Community Week 2025, and this year we are the headline sponsor of London Community Week 2026, which takes place July 7-9 in London, UK. Come find our product/engineering and commercial teams there as we lay out the real future of Khoros.
The full story of the turnaround is at khoros.ai/transformation, and if you want to see Aurora AI, Iris AI or Community Guard in action, let us know and we’ll set it up.
Year one was the save. Year two is what we saved it for.
Eric Vaughan,
Chief Executive Officer
P.S. If anything you have heard about Khoros does not match this post, that is exactly my point. For the real story you can make proper investment decisions on, just ask us.
