Braze - Q2 2024

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Welcome to the Braze Fiscal Second Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. My name is Christine, and I'll be your operator for today's call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. I'll now turn the call over to Christopher Ferris, Head of Braze Investor Relations.

Christopher Ferris (Head of Investor Relations)

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today to review Braze's results for the fiscal second quarter, 2024. I'm joined by our Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Bill Magnuson; and our Chief Financial Officer, Isabelle Winkels. We announced our results in a press release issued after the market closed today. Please refer to the Investor Relations section of our website at investors.braze.com for more information and a supplemental presentation related to today's earnings announcement. During this call, we will make statements related to our business that are forward-looking under federal securities laws and the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.

These statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding our financial outlook for the third quarter ended October 31, 2023, and for our fiscal year ended January 31, 2024, our planned product and feature development and the benefits to us and our customers therefrom, including our AI features, the potential impact and duration of current macroeconomic trends, our anticipated customer behaviors, including vendor consolidation trends and their impact on Braze, and our long-term financial targets and goals, including the anticipated period in which we may generate positive non-GAAP operating income and positive free cash flow. These statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations and reflect our views only as of today. We assume no obligation to update any such forward-looking statements.

For a discussion of the material risks and uncertainties that could affect our actual results, please refer to the risks identified in today's press release and our SEC filings, both available on the Investor Relations section of our website. I'd also like to remind you that today's call will include certain non-GAAP financial measures used by management to evaluate our ongoing operations and aid investors in further understanding the company's fiscal second quarter, 2024 performance, in addition to the impact these items have on the financial results. Please refer to the reconciliations of our non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable financial measures calculated in accordance with U.S. GAAP, included in our earnings release under the Investor Relations section of our website.

The non-GAAP financial measures provided should not be considered as a substitute for or superior to the measures of financial performance prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Bill.

Bill Magnuson (Co-Founder and CEO)

Thank you, Chris, and good afternoon, everyone. We delivered a strong second quarter, generating $115.1 million in revenue, up 34% versus the prior year, while continuing to drive operating efficiency in the business. Non-GAAP gross margin increased 70 basis points year-over-year, and we again demonstrated strong leverage, with non-GAAP operating margin improving by over 1,300 basis points compared to the second quarter of last year. We were encouraged by the new business we won in the quarter, sales strength in the commercial and enterprise businesses, the progress of our product initiatives and AI development efforts, and the adoption of our newest channel, WhatsApp. While the macro environment still presents challenges, we are effectively navigating them and remain confident in our ability to drive top-line growth while maintaining cost discipline and delivering on the financial targets that we have set.

Brands continue to recognize the high ROI that can be achieved through personalized cross-channel customer engagement delivered by the Braze platform. Customer growth was solid, with our total customer count reaching 1,958, an increase of 92 during the quarter. New business wins and upsells included Miro, the National Basketball Association, Rappi, and Stori, among many others. The diversification of new customer wins was also impressive, with the top five new business deals all originating from entirely different types of businesses: a quick service restaurant chain, an e-commerce platform, a provider of coupons and discounts, a digital collaboration platform, and a company that connects homeowners to tradespeople.

As those of you who have followed us closely are aware, Braze's business is highly diversified, with no single vertical contributing more than a quarter of our ARR and many others where we have not only a significant presence, but also opportunity for growth. The versatility and adaptability of the Braze platform enables its adoption by any business that prioritizes investments in first-party data and customer relationships, regardless of size, vertical, or geography. As the field of customer engagement matures, we continue to win against point solutions that have limited channel offerings, are not real-time, or simply don't scale. We are similarly making progress against legacy marketing clouds as marketers find their fragmented solutions increasingly unfit for modern customer engagement use cases. This quarter, we displaced legacy marketing clouds at numerous enterprises, including at a top quick-service restaurant chain, a large consumer discounter, and a well-known travel company.

In the case of the restaurant chain, a global systems integrator partner was instrumental in the sales cycle and will be working with the customer to complete onboarding and provide ongoing marketing and data services. As we continue to expand our product surface area and enhance its capabilities by infusing AI throughout our stack, we're helping brands create personalized cross-channel solutions faster than ever before, speeding the rotation of the Imagine, Create, and Evolve loop that lets them compound learnings and increase their ROI over time. Meanwhile, the legacy clouds continue to be held back by antiquated data foundations and complex siloed architectures, limiting their innovation and causing them to fall further behind. We believe our product innovation and R&D focus, coupled with their relative stasis, will accelerate the legacy replacement cycle and compel more enterprises to upgrade to the personalized cross-channel customer engagement enabled by the Braze platform.

We also continue to benefit from the vendor consolidation trend we've called out the last couple of quarters, as brands look to an all-in-one platform to coordinate messaging across the growing array of B2C channels and accelerate their investments into first-party data. In the case of an accessories retailer, we replaced four separate vendors, providing a great example of how Braze wins on technical integration capabilities, aligning with the customer's vision of working with a comprehensive, best-in-class customer engagement platform. We believe this trend will continue as customers look to capitalize on new AI-driven advancements in customer engagement, an area of innovation which benefits tremendously from the breadth of Braze's data footprint and messaging flexibility, as well as our real-time stream processing architecture.

At Braze, we are constantly evaluating new ways for brands to communicate directly with their customers by delivering more relevant content and engaging experiences in the channels that resonate most. In March of this year, we launched a native WhatsApp integration that enables marketers to create, orchestrate, and send WhatsApp campaigns directly from the Braze platform. With more than 2 billion active users in 2022, broad international penetration, and the ability to engage in content-rich conversations that build retention and loyalty, WhatsApp is a highly valuable addition to our cross-channel portfolio, and I'm happy to report that new and existing customers have responded very favorably to our offering, with dozens of customers using the channel and a fast-growing pipeline. One early WhatsApp success story I'd like to highlight is Rappi, one of the most popular and trusted technology companies in Latin America.

Rappi has expanded its investment in Braze, specifically adding WhatsApp as an additional channel to its innovative customer engagement strategy that already included email, SMS, push, in-app messaging. Rappi was looking for a more effective out-of-product channel to directly reach their audience and successfully leverage WhatsApp to motivate lapsed users to return to the app to make new purchases and to drive active users to make more purchases over time. Leveraging WhatsApp and Braze's Canvas environment, Rappi was able to drive an 80% uplift in purchases versus a control group that received only push notifications and email. Case studies such as these demonstrate how marketers can immediately leverage the flexibility of Canvas and the power of our streaming architecture with new channels like WhatsApp to target, personalize, and orchestrate sophisticated campaigns that drive high engagement and ROI.

Beyond additional channels, we continue to improve and enhance our competitive moat by expanding our product surface area and deepening our existing capabilities, particularly around data management and governance. Yesterday, we announced new data transformation and integration options to enable brands to get data into Braze quickly and easily, with less ongoing maintenance burden and lower lift from technical teams. I won't go through all of these enhancements in detail, but I'll mention a few key innovations that we believe will be particularly impactful for customers. First is data transformations, a feature that gives brands the ability to easily map incoming data from third-party services onto Braze user profiles. Even more exciting, the code that defines these transformations can be automatically generated using a generative AI capability within our Sage AI suite.

Second, we are expanding Cloud Data Ingestion to include an integration with Databricks Lakehouse Platform, while expanding the capabilities of our existing integrations into the Snowflake Data Cloud, Amazon Redshift, and Google BigQuery. This flexible data ingestion capability helps customers reduce total cost of ownership in their data ecosystem by eliminating complexities when accessing their first-party data. Third, we infused generative AI into our Query Builder and SQL Segment Extensions tools to empower teams to easily transform natural language prompts into insightful reports and audience segments. SQL Segment Extensions itself is a recently released addition to our classification layer that enables comprehensive and flexible targeting on top of a customer's entire Braze data set, enabling marketers to execute on more advanced targeting use cases completely within Braze, instead of relying on their in-house data teams or third-party tools.

Leveraging these advancements, brands will be able to easily access and activate their valuable first-party data to power personalized customer engagement strategies that enhance loyalty, retention, and revenue. We also recently launched Braze Instant Insights, a Snowflake native app that provides turnkey visualizations for analysis use cases like attribution, high-value actions, retention, and investigating monetary value across cohorts. In the same way that we built Snowflake data sharing to reduce the effort and time to value for customers building outgoing data pipelines from Braze, Instant Insights reduces the effort to go from data in the warehouse to sophisticated reporting. In June, we announced Sage AI, a set of advanced AI and ML capabilities integrated into the Braze platform. Sage AI is designed to enhance marketer productivity while powering better and more effective customer engagement results. The most recent additions to Sage included three main innovations.

First, an AI recommendation engine that utilizes a custom-trained Transformer model to match items from Braze catalogs with customers most likely to buy them, providing content personalization that outperforms competing techniques in our tests. We believe this feature, which will become a separate SKU, will boost campaign revenue and improve customer loyalty for the brands that use it. Second, our AI content QA tool that leverages OpenAI GPT-4 to check messages for tone, structure, grammar, and appropriate language was promoted into general availability and has now been used by hundreds of brands. We're seeing the advantage of being early movers in generative AI, as we're quickly expanding beyond obvious use cases and integrating capabilities that are finely tuned to marketer workflows. Third, we added Winning Path to Canvas, our visual development environment, which marketers use as a no-code journey orchestration tool.

This feature automatically optimizes how customers flow through paths in a canvas, allowing brands to boost conversions with a single click. Finally, we are refining an A/B test prediction feature designed to use a combination of large language models and other neural network architectures to automatically predict the winner of an A/B test without a pilot send, helping marketers execute on new experiments more efficiently and improving their overall performance. Finally, I wanted to update you on our social impact initiatives. In July, Braze published its second annual ESG report. This report included our FY 2023 greenhouse gas emissions audit, an overview of our diversity, equity, and inclusion activities, and details on our grant-making efforts as part of our Pledge 1% equity donation program. Our social impact mission is to amplify employee impact, to create opportunity for underserved groups within our communities, and to accelerate science-based climate solutions.

We look forward to growing these efforts through continued employee advocacy and participation over time. Thank you to our customers, team members, and shareholders for your continued support of Braze. We are excited about our path ahead and believe the investments in our product, people, and ecosystem, combined with strong secular tailwinds, position Braze to become the industry standard for customer engagement. Now I'll turn the call over to Isabelle.

Isabelle Winkles (CFO)

Thank you, Bill, and thank you everyone for joining us today. As Bill mentioned, we reported a strong second quarter, with revenue up 34% year-over-year to $115.1 million. This was driven by a combination of existing customer contract expansion, renewals, and new business. Our acquisition of North Star closed on June 1 and contributed nearly $2 million of revenue in the quarter. Our subscription revenue remains the primary component of our total top line, contributing 95% of our second quarter revenue. The remaining 5% represents a combination of recurring professional services and one-time configuration and onboarding fees. Total customer count increased 22% year-over-year to 1,958 customers as of July 31, up 359 from the same period last year and up 92 from the prior quarter.

Our total number of large customers, which we define as those spending at least $500,000 annually, grew 24% year-over-year to 173, and as of July 31, contributed 57% to our total ARR. This compares to a 55% contribution as of the same quarter last year. Measured across all customers, dollar-based net retention was 120%, while dollar-based net retention for our large customers was 123%. Expansion was again broadly distributed across industries and geographic regions. Consistent with the prior quarter, revenue outside the U.S. contributed 43% of our total revenue in the second quarter. In the second quarter, our total remaining performance obligation was $524 million, up 28% year-over-year and up 10% sequentially.

Current RPO was $353 million, up 29% year-over-year and up 9% sequentially. The year-over-year increases were driven by contract renewals and upsells and the signing of new customer contracts. Overall, dollar-weighted contract length remains at approximately two years. Non-GAAP gross profit in the quarter was $80.6 million, representing a non-GAAP gross margin of 70%. This compares to a non-GAAP gross profit of $59.7 million and non-GAAP gross margin of 69.3% in the second quarter of last year. The 70 basis points year-over-year margin improvement was driven by ongoing efficiencies related to personnel cost and continued economies of scale in our core technology expenses.

Non-GAAP sales and marketing expense was $51.8 million, or 45% of revenue, compared to $44.3 million, or 51% of revenue in the prior year quarter. While the dollar increase reflects our year-over-year investments in headcount costs to support our ongoing growth and global expansion, the improved efficiency reflects our disciplined investment approach to resource deployment across our go-to-market organization. Non-GAAP R&D expense was $18.9 million, or 16% of revenue, compared to $16.3 million, or 19% of revenue in the prior year quarter. The dollar increase was primarily driven by increased headcount costs to support the expansion of our existing offerings, as well as to develop new products and features to drive growth.

Non-GAAP G&A expense was $17.4 million, or 15% of revenue, compared to $16.5 million, or 19% of revenue in the prior year quarter. The dollar increase was driven by investments to support our overall company growth, including headcount costs and increases in software subscriptions and licenses. Non-GAAP operating loss was $7.6 million, compared to a non-GAAP operating loss of $17.5 million in the prior year quarter. Non-GAAP net loss attributable to Braze shareholders in the quarter was $3.9 million, or a loss of $0.04 per share, compared to a loss of $15.2 million, or a loss of $0.16 per share in the prior year quarter. Now turning to the balance sheet and cash flow statement.

We ended the quarter with $476.2 million in cash, cash equivalents, restricted cash, and marketable securities. Cash used in operations during the quarter was $17.5 million, compared to $16.3 million in the prior year quarter. Taking into consideration the cash impact of capitalized costs, free cash flow was $-18.7 million, compared to negative free cash flow of $24.7 million in the prior year quarter. The improvement in free cash flow is primarily due to lower capital expenditures compared to the prior year quarter, which included CapEx for our London office expansion. Now turning to our forecast. We're encouraged by the strong first half of the fiscal year. Demand for high-quality customer engagement solutions remains solid, and we're optimistic in our ability to execute against our long-term financial targets.

We intend to maintain cost discipline and reiterate that we believe that we are well positioned to achieve a non-GAAP operating margin of better than negative 7% in Q4 of this year. For the third quarter, we expect revenue to be in the range of $116.5 million-$117.5 million, which represents a year-over-year growth rate of approximately 26% at the midpoint. For the third quarter, non-GAAP operating loss is expected to be in the range of $15.5 million-$16.5 million. At the midpoint, this implies an operating margin of negative 13.7%.

The sequential reduction in non-GAAP operating margin relative to Q2 is driven by one-time expenses related to the company's annual customer conference, Forge, as well as other sales and marketing expenses related to sales enablement, which will be concentrated in Q3 and are not projected to materially impact Q4. Third quarter non-GAAP net loss is expected to be $13 million-$14 million, and third quarter non-GAAP net loss per share in the range of $13-$14 cents per share, based on approximately 100.2 million weighted average basic shares outstanding during the period. For the full fiscal year 2024, we expect total revenue to be in the range of $451.5 million-$454.5 million, which represents a year-over-year growth rate of approximately 27% at the midpoint.

Fiscal year 2024 non-GAAP operating loss is expected to be in the range of $47 million-$49 million. Non-GAAP net loss for the same period is expected to be in the range of $37 million-$39 million. Fiscal year 2024 non-GAAP net loss per share is expected to be $37-$39 cents per share, based on a full year weighted average basic share count of approximately 98.8 million shares. We remain committed to driving revenue growth while improving Operating Income and free cash flow margins in the coming quarters. We reiterate that we expect Braze will achieve positive quarterly non-GAAP operating income and positive quarterly free cash flow by the end of the fiscal year ended January 31, 2025. I'll conclude my remarks by reiterating our excitement in Braze's future.

We remain focused on partnering with our customers to deliver best-in-class customer engagement and growing our top line, while maintaining cost discipline to achieve our long-term financial targets. With that, we'll now open the call for questions. Operator, please begin the Q&A.

Operator (participant)

We will now begin the Q&A session. If you would like to ask a question, please use the Raise Hand feature at the bottom of your Zoom window. Our first question comes from Ryan McWilliams with Barclays. Please unmute your audio and ask your question.

Ryan MacWilliams (Software Equity Research Analyst)

Thanks for taking the question. For Bill, glad to see the improvement in monthly active user growth this quarter. I know that's not a perfect metric, but would love your thoughts on where your customers' usage and marketing spend currently stand at this point in the year. Like, are they becoming more willing to make growth investments at this point, or is it more stabilization? I'd love your thoughts here. Thanks.

Bill Magnuson (Co-Founder and CEO)

So I think overall, throughout the year, we've consistently seen pretty consistent conditions for our customers and just broadly around the macro. And we're seeing that same consistency around the globe. You know, everyone's experiencing pretty similar interest rate conditions. A lot of marketers are operating with flat or frozen budgets. And so, you know, while we've been really happy with our execution through the environment, you know, we obviously highlighted the new business growth. We've been really happy with the diversification of, you know, new customers that are coming in. I also do think that, you know, we've got some gas in the tank from the perspective of a lot of the product expansion that's happened, you know, the WhatsApp launch.

We've been happy with the traction there, but in an environment where, you know, marketers, in general, are sitting on frozen budgets, a lot of scrutiny from procurement, a lot of scrutiny from their CFOs. You know, the opportunity for a new product launch like that or expansion to continue to really see its full potential is gonna be more limited. And so, you know, from the beginning of the year, we've seen things continue to be challenging and unpredictable. I'd say that conditions broadly haven't improved, but they also haven't gotten worse. And we've been really happy with the execution that we've seen across the company. We've strengthened a lot of the foundations, both in our product, as well as in our go-to-market strategy and our sales organization.

We've been really focused for setting up the organization for our path to $1 billion in ARR, but it is definitely still challenging out there.

Ryan MacWilliams (Software Equity Research Analyst)

Appreciate the color. And then for Isabelle, good to see the continued improvement in gross margin. What were some of the drivers of the gross margin improvement in the quarter? And do you think you continue to see step-ups in this metric as your customers begin to utilize more Large Language Model capabilities? Thanks.

Isabelle Winkles (CFO)

Yeah, thanks for the question. Yeah, so I think the trajectory that we're on within our gross margin metric is very consistent with our long-term targets that we've stated. So our long-term targets is 67%-72%. We're operating well within that range, and already at 70%, which is great to see. And we're really kind of just ticking up as we continue to experience and realize cost efficiencies and operations of scale across our technology stack, and then some personnel efficiencies that we have. I think some of the ongoing things that we can look to, that I've talked about before in terms of our path to profitability, is ongoing economies of scale across the tech stack, which we will continue to leverage and continue to improve over time.

And then specifically across personnel, we've talked about our leveraging cost-optimized locations, as we continue to grow that head count, finding ways to do so in a more optimized fashion. So I think the combination of those two things will continue to kind of lead us to where we are and beyond, within that range that we've stated, for the long term.

Ryan MacWilliams (Software Equity Research Analyst)

Appreciate the color. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from Jacob Titleman with Goldman Sachs. Jacob, please unmute yourself and ask your question.

Jacob Titleman (Equity Research Associate)

Thanks for taking the question, and congrats on a great quarter. Bill, you mentioned an AI recommendation engine that will be a separate SKU. Can you talk a little bit more about that, what the plans are to monetize it, and maybe are there some other AI SKUs that are coming down the pipe that you'll also charge for separately?

Bill Magnuson (Co-Founder and CEO)

Yeah, so across our AI and machine learning investments, we expect there to continue to be a mix of ways that we will realize returns on it. You know, some parts will be monetized independently. Our Predictive Suite has actually been in the product as a separate SKU for a while. And if you look at the transformer-driven recommendation engine, we anticipate that to both be a separate SKU and also to support additional upsells for another product we have called Product Catalogs, which could be used with or without the recommendation engine. And so those are both great examples of places where we have independent monetization, and then we also have support of other aspects of the product that independently monetize.

In addition to that, you know, I think that a lot of the generative AII, a lot of the generative AI investments that we're making, which are improving marketer productivity and allowing for marketers to just bring their ideas to life more quickly, to be able to inspire them more. In the example of the SQL Segment Extensions, or the data transformers that I spoke about earlier, we think that these are really good places where the, generative AI is actually helping build confidence for marketers to, to take on more technical tasks within the platform. And what all of those lead to is, you know, faster time to value, more usage, the confidence to deploy more use cases.

And, of course, when we see new use cases come into the picture, those usually come with more monthly active users, and they often come with expansion into new channels or expansion into new data products. And so they're all very much self-reinforcing, even without independent monetization. And, you know, of course, across the board, when we make marketers more productive, and when we make the teams that use Braze more agile, it also leads to higher levels of experimentation, which compounds ROI, improves customer satisfaction, and ultimately leads to better differentiation for Braze.

And so, we, we see this kind of flywheel effect happening where, yes, we are absolutely going to independently monetize, but even if we weren't, we still think there's a lot of monetary benefit and, the ability for our community to continue to uplevel themselves more quickly, so that Braze can further separate from our competition. In the sense that we are certainly characterized in the market as being the top of the sophistication pyramid in the space. And so the more that we have marketers who are operating with agile team methodologies and who are comfortable, with more kind of data-driven strategies, as well as using more technical features, all of those things lead to them being able to utilize the parts of Braze that are very differentiated and very hard to mimic or copy.

That leads to, you know, pricing power and other sorts of benefits for us.

Jacob Titleman (Equity Research Associate)

Thank you. That was very helpful. And then I just wanted to follow up on the GSI being instrumental in one of your displacements of the legacy marketing clouds. Can you just talk a little bit about the GSI relationships, the global agency relationships, how those are evolving, and when do you think that could actually be a material driver to revenue growth?

Bill Magnuson (Co-Founder and CEO)

Yeah, so we're continuing to deepen our relationships with solutions providers, including global systems integrators, the big agency holding companies, and also, a vast global network of smaller marketing and growth agencies. And the fundamentals of those relationships continue to be really solid. We're investing to allow that mutually beneficial flywheel, that I've spoken about in prior quarters to continue to spin up. And I'd say we're also advancing at varying speeds, depending on the partner. But we're really excited about the overall trend line, and we're seeing examples of tremendous success, where we're generating really strong services revenue for those partners that are leaned into their Braze practices and our joint go-to-market motions. But, you know, the characterization of how you're a really great Braze partner is very different from the way that you may have, been a great partner to the legacy marketing clouds.

Braze represents easier integration, faster time to value. But on the flip side, it also represents greater opportunities to compound ROI through experimentation, through additional data analysis. And so the types of services that really resonate with the Braze customer base are different from, you know, what the GSIs were maybe used to providing for legacy marketing cloud providers. They're better, and they're exactly where those partners are trying to evolve to because it represents more ongoing revenue, as opposed to being predominantly the upfront integration-oriented revenue. And so it's a, you know, it's definitely an evolution that our partners want to make, especially at the GSI level. It's one that we're supporting them in making, but, you know, as I mentioned, they're certainly progressing at different speeds, depending on how leaned in those organizations are.

You know, we're looking forward to seeing the success that we are in all the places where partners are really leaned in, where they've adapted their model to spread more evenly across that entire ecosystem over time. We're investing internally to make sure that that's gonna happen. We're seeing, you know, really promising early results from the GSIs and from the big holding companies. We're seeing growing momentum quarter-over-quarter. And like I said, we have complete confidence that the foundations of how we get that flywheel spinning in a mutually beneficial way are, you know, completely sound and will continue to be, and we're excited about where that's going.

Jacob Titleman (Equity Research Associate)

Great. Thank you very much.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from Michael Berg with Wells Fargo. Please unmute yourself and ask your question.

Michael Berg (VP)

Hi, congrats on the quarter, and thanks for taking my question. I just have a quick one on the Cloud Data Ingestion progress. You have a number of announcements in and around that space, and with the strength you're seeing in the business, maybe you can help us understand how that's helping either drive expansion, stickiness, adoption, or just, you know, how you're thinking about the benefits of that longer term. It certainly seems it can ease the adoption curve here. Thank you.

Bill Magnuson (Co-Founder and CEO)

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And, you know, broadly, we're focused on ensuring that our customers can get their data into Braze quickly, easily, affordably, and that they can do so without an ongoing maintenance burden. And so when you think about, you know, whether you want to call it the total cost of ownership, or just think about the characterization of how Braze first deploys and then lives within a technology ecosystem, what we're trying to do with things like Cloud Data Ingestion is lower the activation energy to both get data flowing into Braze in the first place, but also to add those incremental use cases over time.

So that ability to onboard a customer more quickly, to have them get comfortable in the Braze environment, get their early use cases out the door, and then immediately be looking at new opportunities to say, "Hey, oh, I didn't anticipate that I might wanna personalize with this particular bit of data," or, "My data science team has just completed, you know, these new machine learning models around propensity scoring that would be really helpful to incorporate into my personalization strategies and Braze." Or, "I have a new corporate KPI that I want to be able to measure that was not a conversion event that was in my initial integration, but it lives in my data warehouse." You know, there's a lot of examples like these that in the past, a marketing team would have had to have gone to an engineering team or a data science team.

You know, gotten into their next sprint cycle, gone through all of the heavyweight machinery that, you know, goes into releases around new software and such, and just leads to delays, additional energy and investment required, and often that's enough for them to get their progress blocked up. So, what we're really trying to do is put marketers in control of their own destiny for a wider swath of the data that lives within their ecosystem. You know, we're committed to giving customers flexible options for our stream processor to ingest either their raw data, the insights that they're generating through additional data science work, and obviously all of the events and other activities that are generated by end user actions.

That means that we're committed to continuing to integrate with our whole partner ecosystem, working with CDPs, with Reverse ETL vendors, with various analytics software, as well as the data warehouses, and lakehouses, and our own customers' bespoke data engineering pipelines. So you should expect to continue to see a broad investment by Braze on the data front, so that the Braze Data Platform continues to allow our customers to, you know, both get up and running more quickly, get more use cases to us.

And we're not trying to monetize things like that independently, because of course, we have the great advantage of new data that flows into Braze, drives more use cases, it leads to incremental monthly active users when people bring in new user populations, and it leads to additional messaging usage as people start to deploy Braze into more and more parts of their user journey. And so, you know, we really look at data as an input. We wanna make sure that customers can, you know, get it into Braze very easily. They can expand that over time, and it's all a really good self-reinforcing loop for us.

Michael Berg (VP)

Thank you. Very helpful. Then a quick follow-up on the product front. Generative AI, you've mentioned you are early to the game. When I think about your natively built platform, it certainly seems like the products are coming out at a pretty high velocity. Is there anything structural in either your architecture or how you're using generative AI, that's helping with your R&D velocity and, do you feel that's a competitive advantage moving forward to help take further share from the legacy players? Thank you.

Bill Magnuson (Co-Founder and CEO)

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, especially when comparing to the legacy players, many of which were assembled through a series of acquisitions and still maintain the siloed architectures that come as a result of that. You know, I think Braze has always been super focused on keeping tight vertical integration through all the different layers of our stack, as well as just keeping complexity under control, making sure that we're constantly upgrading our foundations, that we're keeping tech debt under control. You know, a lot of the things that keep a well-honed engineering machine running at high velocity, even as you continue to scale. And so when we're, you know, when we look at the roadmap velocity, we've been really happy with it for years.

We've continued to add more and more investment to our R&D teams, and, you know, unlike in a lot of companies, as they get to a certain scale, you start to see the unit productivity slow down out of R&D. I actually feel like in many ways, because of the strengthening of the foundations at Braze, we've sped up our unit productivity over the last few years. And you're seeing the results of that as you see not only the rapid injection of AI into more and more of our platform, but you're also seeing channel expansion, platform expansion, the Braze data platform continuing to, you know, deepen its capabilities.

As we think about, you know, where the future of customer engagement is going, what we're trying to do is make sure that we're supporting exactly where the leading edge of modern customer engagement teams are driving toward. They're becoming responsible for more and more of the customer journey. They're becoming responsible for not just the delivery of marketing messages, but also aspects of the product experience. And those are all the leading edge of where we think that you can bring in a lot of these ideas around: How are we data-driven about what we're delivering? How do we use agility and experimentation to compound learnings over time?

How do we make sure that, you know, we're delivering personalized and relevant experiences where we can take in the combination of all the context around the customer, all of the strategies, and, and the important priorities for our business? And we combine those with automated decision-making through all the investments in AI and ML, and, you know, those things compound together to create a tremendous amount of value for the brands that use Braze, but they also deliver better product experiences to end user customers. And so, you know, we've always looked at the importance of us controlling that you know that end-to-end data flow. And when you think about Braze's vertical integration, where we live inside the end user products, as users take actions, we know about it immediately.

We're able to respond to it in the moment, in the product, or we're able to use those insights in order to inform subsequent actions. And, you know, marketers are able to actually stay focused on business strategy as opposed to thinking about channels. And so, that's all inherent to our architecture. It's been there from the very beginning, and you're seeing the benefits of that, not just in, you know, our great growth as a company, but also in our R&D velocity.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from DJ Hynes with Canaccord. Please unmute yourself and ask your question.

David Hynes (Managing Director)

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the question. I'll echo others' comments on the quarter. It was nice to see the sequential growth in CRPO. Isabelle, the last time we spoke, I think the message from you was kind of like, signs of stability are forming in the business. Like, to that end, can you talk at all about linearity of bookings in the quarter? Any observations on kinda intra-quarter NRR, and any of that sort of stuff would be interesting to hear.

Isabelle Winkles (CFO)

Yeah, so, I think we're, you know, really pleased with the execution that we had this quarter. And linearity, actually, I think one quarter does not a pattern make, but we were very pleased with our linearity results. And in fact, if you look at sort of some of the over-attainment that we had relative to kinda the consensus number that was out there, linearity played a non-negligible part of that. We are not including that type of expectation going forward for purposes of guidance, so, definitely expect that to, you know, the overperformance that you're seeing here, this is not a pattern that we would expect to repeat. But it was very pleasing to us to see the linearity that we did achieve in this quarter.

We're kinda back to the pattern of in this quarter, back to the pattern of about 50% of our bookings occurring within the first two months of the quarter, which is great, versus some of the back-end weighting that we had been experiencing over the past several quarters.

David Hynes (Managing Director)

And then a quick follow-up for you. As that WhatsApp channel kinda gets into market and continues to scale, any comments you'd make around kind of contribution margin of that channel? Like, does it look more like SMS? Does it look more like higher margin channels? How should we think about things?

Isabelle Winkles (CFO)

Yeah, so we won't, we don't speak specifically to that. I'll just sort of, and I think we've made comments around this, just sort of in terms of, like, where it lives in the sequence. It's gonna be somewhere between email and SMS, so think of it as kind of there in the pecking order. But that's what I'll say. I'm not certainly not concerned, you know, in fact, even as SMS was growing as a proportion of our total top line, which it's done very steadily over the last 3.5-4 years, we've continued to find ways to expand our margin, and you've seen that fairly meaningfully. So I would not look at the incorporation or growth of WhatsApp as, with any concern towards gross margin compression.

David Hynes (Managing Director)

Yep, makes sense. Very helpful. Thank you, guys. Congrats!

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from Derrick Wood with TD Cowen. Please unmute yourself and ask your question.

Derrick Wood (Managing Director)

Oh, great. Thanks. Congrats on a solid quarter. Following on that same topic, just curious, Bill or Isabelle, what you're seeing in terms of cross-sell activity across channels, including email, SMS, in-app, WhatsApp. Just wondering outside of push, where you're seeing the most traction, and whether there's any change in what channels you're landing with for new customers?

Bill Magnuson (Co-Founder and CEO)

Yeah, so I'll call it two things. You know, one is that we've been really excited to see that as we've added new channels and as we've grown the sophistication of those channels, even some that have been, you know, in the product for, you know, 10 years, like email, that we continue to find the ability to start new contracts across, you know, any subset of channels. So we have customers that are starting with just SMS, with just Content Cards, with just email, obviously, you know, just mobile, which is a big part of our heritage. And so, as we continue to build out these new channels, we're looking for them to both provide upsell and cross-sell opportunities, but also a new way to introduce people into the Braze ecosystem.

And our goal with all of these, and this comes under that umbrella of "Start anywhere, go everywhere," that we've been talking about for a while, is that when we get a customer into Braze on any given channel, we introduce them to Canvas. And they also set up a data flow that flows through every layer of our stack. And once they do that, it's incrementally very easy for them to then expand across to other channels. The feature sets that they use for targeting and for personalization, the concepts that exist around reporting are all the same.

In many cases, the data flow, you know, can be augmented, and I spoke earlier about how, things like Cloud Data Ingestion and, and a lot of our partnerships across the broader data ecosystem make it easy for new use cases or new channels to have the data that backs them, supplementarily come in and get set up quickly. And so, we've got the right mechanisms, both to have customers start in a flexible array of places, as well as have them continue to expand across new channels. I'd say that the thing that's most exciting, though, is the sheer number of customers that we see go from four to five to six to seven to eight to nine, you know, channels.

I was visiting a customer in Australia earlier this year who proudly told me that they were in 11 different Braze channels, and they had made it, like, an internal mission to make sure that they continue to adopt all of them. And you know, when we look at the adoption of WhatsApp in the quarter, you know, there were certainly some of the customers that came in there were brand new, but there were other places where a customer was adding it as their fifth, sixth, or seventh channel. And I think that when you look out across the legacy marketing cloud landscape, and if you look out across our, you know, the other startup competitors that we have, you're just not gonna see examples of that.

And it goes back to a lot of the points I was making about architecture earlier, which is that unless you're laser-focused on controlling complexity through the entire lifetime of your existence, and unless your R&D process is continuously focused on upgrading your foundations and maintaining tech debt, and making sure that, you know, you're doing a lot of user experience research, that you're going back and revamping the, you know, UI, UX of all of these different products as you introduce new channels so that the complexity stays under control, you just are not capable of being able to have your customers expand so fluidly and across so many different channels as we see with Braze. You know, I talk a lot here about how if we're talking about channels, we're actually missing the point.

You know, the idea is that if we can get people into orchestration and into sophisticated data-driven strategies that are focused on, you know, what the customer cares about and what the brand cares about, and how you marry those together and have them self-reinforce each other through, you know, sophisticated customer engagement, that the channels are more of an implementation detail. And you're not achieving that unless your customers are able to spread across them. And so, you know, we really carry that as a goal, both with our product development, as well as how we help our customers through integration and onboarding, and through the post-sales process as they add new channels, you know, over their years of being a Braze customer.

And we'll continue to, you know, we'll continue to measure ourselves by that yardstick, to be able to say, "Hey, you know, it should be just as easy for a customer to adopt their eighth channel as it is for them to adopt their, you know, their first two." And as long as we can keep accomplishing that, we think that our ability to invest in net new channels or to deepen the capabilities of existing channels and have our customers, you know, take advantage of those to both drive more revenue to Braze through cross-sell and upsell but also to enhance their own ROI will continue to be a really vibrant growth path for us.

Derrick Wood (Managing Director)

Great, thanks for that. Maybe one for Isabelle, just on the guidance. I mean, going into Q2, you had guided for 7% sequential growth. You ended up with 13, very strong quarter. Going into Q3, you're guiding for 2% growth. It sounds like maybe that upside in Q2 is linearity, and you're not assuming that in Q3, but anything else to call out in terms of potential, or maybe some pull forward, or how to think about some, you know, extra seasonality around the Q3?

Isabelle Winkles (CFO)

Yeah, thanks for the question. I think one other thing to call out, so this—the linearity is certainly at play, and we did have a very strong execution quarter. I think one quarter does not a pattern make, so the combination of the strong execution with the linearity, those two things combined, drove some, you know, higher than anticipated results, which I wouldn't necessarily expect to repeat, and are not embedded in the guide, in the back half of the year. The other item is, you'll remember in my comments, that North Star was, in terms of the guide, we had embedded about $1 million. And we had an extremely successful on-time integration right at the beginning of June, for that.

Had very limited surprises to the downside, and they contributed almost $2 million instead of that $1 million. So when you combine that factor with the strong ACV and the linearity, all of that combined together, that drives kind of the level of outperformance that you saw. We are continuing, you heard Bill talk about the where we are on the macro. We're not anticipating that to improve. And therefore, we're continuing to have a risk-adjusted posture in our earnings, in our guidance.

Derrick Wood (Managing Director)

Very clear. Very clear, thank you.

Isabelle Winkles (CFO)

Oh, the only other thing to mention-

Operator (participant)

Our next question-

Isabelle Winkles (CFO)

Sorry, the only other thing to mention is, on a sequential basis, remember that Q1-Q2 has the number of day count that changes. So Q1 only has 89 days, all the other quarters have 92, and so from a sequential perspective, you end up with the very strong sequential growth between Q1 and Q2. That does not repeat in any other quarter.

Derrick Wood (Managing Director)

Got it. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from Arjun Bhatia with William Blair. Please unmute yourself and ask your question.

Arjun Bhatia (Co-Group Head of Technology, Media, and Communications)

Yep, thanks for taking the question here. Bill, maybe one for you. It seems like ease of use and, you know, kind of, maybe I'll clarify first to say, like, pre-configured data mapping is the big part of the investment that you're making. How much of a sticking factor or gating factor was that with customers for growth? And as you make these investments, is the goal to, you know, expand this out of the customer segment that you didn't have access to, or maybe just increase the intensity with which customers are using Braze and the data that they're including in the platform?

Bill Magnuson (Co-Founder and CEO)

Yeah, so it's definitely both, but they, they really go hand in hand. If you take, for instance, consumables or CPG as an example, you know, many of those brands don't have large mobile app audiences. And so the historical way, which was very SDK centric, that we got the vast majority of the data into Braze, is not gonna be as applicable to a lot of their use cases.

But when you look at, you know, to continue with that example, when you look at their paid ad spend, the combination of pulling, you know, the, the growing first-party data sets that they're creating out of data warehouses through something like Cloud Data Ingestion, or, using a partner, like a CDP or reverse ETL provider into Braze, and then being able to take action with things like our Audience Sync capability, is not what you would think of as a traditional Braze use case of integrating into a mobile app and sending push notifications. But it's actually tremendous ROI when you consider the per user orchestration of data as it's generated in order to direct marketing actions.

And so, you know, it's, it's a combination of both us expanding into new verticals, and into new use cases, as well as the expansion of our own channel and platform breadth. So as Braze has more places to interact with customers and more places to collect data, that enables us to execute on more use cases. Of course, Canvas has been architected the entire time to be incredibly flexible and to enable customers to be able to take action across all of these different places. And so when you combine those things together, what you get is a greater amount of optionality for our customers to move within the surface area of our product.

In order to support their movement through that surface area, you need to be able to, we need to be able to make it easy for them to get new data into, you know, into Braze, and into places where we're gonna be able to make sense of it and take action on it quickly.

Arjun Bhatia (Co-Group Head of Technology, Media, and Communications)

Got it. Super helpful. And, for Isabelle, I know you have a free cash flow breakeven timeline out there. As we just kind of navigate through the next few quarters of, you know, continued macro, what would be some of the factors that maybe get you to push or pull that timeline and make any investments that you're making in the business?

Isabelle Winkles (CFO)

Yeah, thanks for the question. So, are you asking specifically only on free cash flow or the operating income as well? So there, I'm gonna... there's two different sets of answers.

Arjun Bhatia (Co-Group Head of Technology, Media, and Communications)

No, in general.

Isabelle Winkles (CFO)

Okay.

Arjun Bhatia (Co-Group Head of Technology, Media, and Communications)

In general.

Isabelle Winkles (CFO)

Yeah, okay.

Arjun Bhatia (Co-Group Head of Technology, Media, and Communications)

Operating income.

Isabelle Winkles (CFO)

Yep.

Arjun Bhatia (Co-Group Head of Technology, Media, and Communications)

In general.

Isabelle Winkles (CFO)

Got it. Okay, great. Yeah, so I'm gonna reiterate some comments that we've been making, as we've been talking about this path to profitability. Don't expect us to overachieve on this. Because to the extent we generate extra capacity, we are going to look to prudently reinvest that into the business in order to foster overall growth. So I think we're sticking to the timeline that we have articulated, both for the free cash flow and the operating income. You know, we, we were very pleased with our performance this quarter, but actually, we are taking some of the savings that we've realized on a year-to-date basis, and we are enabling certain parts of the business to redeploy some of those savings through the back half of the year, while maintaining a laser focus on our guidance for Q4.

So, you know, short answer is: don't expect us to overachieve, and we have, we're consistent in that commentary.

Arjun Bhatia (Co-Group Head of Technology, Media, and Communications)

Okay, understood. Thank you, appreciate you taking the question.

Operator (participant)

For the purpose of time, and so we can get to everyone's question, please limit to one question. Our next question comes from Nick Altmann, with Scotiabank. Please unmute yourself and ask your question.

Nick Altmann (Director)

Awesome. Thanks, guys. Just a quick one for me. You know, as we entered the year, there was sort of this notion that COVID perhaps had a little bit of front office pull forward, and then the turbulent macro, you know, front office, MarTech initiatives maybe get put on the, the back burner. Just given the booking strength in Q1 and in Q2 here, is there any way to sort of parse out the strength between the end market holding up a little bit better than maybe you guys had expected, versus you guys just executing much better? Because I know that, Isabelle, you had called out execution was very strong in Q2. So just wondering if you could kind of parse out the, the strength between those two factors. Thanks.

Bill Magnuson (Co-Founder and CEO)

Yeah, I mean, I said this at the top, which is that I think that the broad macro that we're experiencing, and that everyone is experiencing together, has been pretty consistent throughout the year so far. And so, you know, I've also been, you know, speaking for quarters now, on these calls about how, you know, we think that a lot of the narratives out there about the front office, about, you know, concepts like optimizing spend, don't apply to customer engagement in the same way. Because the marginal ROI of customer engagement activities by customers is so much higher than a lot of other marketing spend. You know, we're not a seat-based model. We're tied to the activity of the customers. And, you know, the fact that you also can't go through...

A lot of the optimization strategies that, you know, companies have used for things like data warehouses or other sorts of analysis, where you do things like sampling, just simply don't apply when you need to actually be able to talk to your customers, right? It's an always-on responsibility for brands. And so, you know, I would present that in two ways. You know, one is that we think we're seeing a pretty consistent buyer behavior throughout these periods, but I think also a lot of the front office narratives that have been floating around out there don't apply to customer engagement in the same way. And then, you know, I'll just reiterate that we have been really happy with execution.

You know, it was four quarters ago on this call that we highlighted, you know, some of the struggles that we were seeing from a sales force productivity perspective. In those last four quarters, we've done a tremendous amount of work on this topic, including org structure and leadership changes across both sales and go-to-market strategy. We've, you know, enhanced our training and our in-person onboarding, tighter performance management. We've also had a renewed focus on competitive strategy to make sure that in an environment with less opportunities, that we're winning as many of them as we can. We're encouraged by that progress, and we think we're gonna continue to make progress there. You know, I think sales morale is high, and we're working really well together as a team.

We're actually currently completing what is effectively a mid-year global sales kickoff, complete with training, workshops, and role-playing, all of which have been done in person. It's actually an example of some of these incremental investments that we're making right now, that Isabelle just alluded to on the last answer. You know, within that, we've been prioritizing things that are not as sticky. So that's why you're seeing, you know, headcount is still growing in a very tempered way. But we are really focused on making sure that we are prepared with extremely solid foundations and continuously improving execution. So that when we do come out of this, that Braze is gonna be, you know, right there, ready to stomp on the accelerator and springboard out of it.

Nick Altmann (Director)

Great. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from Matt VanVliet with BTIG. Please unmute yourself and ask your question.

Matt VanVliet (Director of Equity Research)

Great, thanks for taking the question. Congrats on the quarter. I guess, as you look at the somewhat of an acceleration on the 500,000+ net revenue retention rate, curious if you're seeing even more sort of cross-sell and new channel adoption there, or is this just sort of the natural expansion of, you know, large customers landing and expanding and already being at that size? Any additional color you can help that, particularly at the larger sized customers, where you're clearly gaining market share?

Isabelle Winkles (CFO)

Yeah. So, I think it's really just a combination of existing large customers that are continuing to grow, adopting more channels, more use cases. We're further penetrating organizations by getting into new geos and new business units that they have, being able to support incremental new use cases. All of that comes with new volume and new monthly active users. So, I think there's sort of existing customers, and we're also doing well in terms of large net new customers. And so, I think when you look at the contribution in our ARR from these large customers, you know, we are built for a broad range of customer sizes, but we're very well built for the top-tier enterprise.

And so that, I think you're seeing the needs across those enterprises for highest level sophistication, customer engagement platforms. And as we continue to improve the product, increase our breadth of channels, we're just continuing to further penetrate these organizations. In addition, you know, 43% of our revenue earned outside the U.S., that means we already have a solid presence globally. A lot of these organizations, large multinationals, we can continue to support them and increase our exposure with them across the globe. So I think you're just seeing us continue to penetrate a very great market that we think we have the right to win in.

Matt VanVliet (Director of Equity Research)

Great, thank you.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from Taylor McGinnis with UBS. Please unmute yourself and ask your question.

Taylor McGinnis (Equity Research Analyst)

Yeah, hi, thanks so much for taking my question. Isabelle, just one for you. So the sequential CRPO growth was really solid. So aside from just strong execution and linearity, was there any impact from North Star or something, one time in the renewal base to keep in mind? And the reason why I ask, because as we look ahead, if the environment's stabilizing, could we start to see stronger growth quarter-over-quarter, adjusting for seasonality, of course, throughout the year, versus maybe what we saw last year?

Isabelle Winkles (CFO)

Yeah, thanks for the question. So, North Star did have an impact, and actually, we're not gonna quantify it specifically, but if you remove the impact of North Star, Q2 of this year looks a little bit more like Q2 of last year, if you wanna look at sort of sequential percentage growth in RPO, CRPO. So it looks a little bit closer to that. So that's one way to think about the impact of North Star.

Taylor McGinnis (Equity Research Analyst)

Great. Thank you so much!

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from Brent Bracelin with Piper Sandler. Please unmute yourself and ask your question.

Brent Bracelin (Head of Technology Equity Capital Markets)

Thank you. Good afternoon. Great to see the change in the business. Even if, Isabelle, even if I back out North Star, it looks like it's the highest dollar change in subscription revenue and overall revenue ever. You got the acceleration in U.S., accelerating growth internationally, accelerating RPO growth. It just feels like something's changed here. The strength isn't one area, it feels pretty broad-based. So my question here, does it feel, the environment you're in or your ability to execute in this environment, the new normal, is it different now?

Or again, I know one quarter doesn't wanna make a change or a trend, but it does, outside looking in, it feels like there is a change here, and maybe I didn't appreciate it going into the quarter, the changes, and just trying to understand, to make sure if we fully do appreciate what it looks like to be a little healthier environment, your ability to at least execute in this environment has changed. So what do we think about that? Thanks.

Isabelle Winkles (CFO)

I think we're very pleased with our execution results in the context of the macro that we continue to live in. So we've been talking about investments that we've made across our sales organization over the last several quarters, and Bill talked about, you know, some that continue on today. And we're very pleased to see some of the results of that in Q2. That said, the environment continues to be challenged, and so while we are gonna continue to invest in this improved execution across our sales organization, I think it is too soon to declare that we really feel like things are different on a persistent basis.

Brent Bracelin (Head of Technology Equity Capital Markets)

Well, you're certainly surprised us this quarter. Hopefully, we'll have more surprises in the next few quarters. Thanks.

Operator (participant)

Next question comes from Brian Schwartz with Oppenheimer. Please unmute yourself and ask your question.

Brian Schwartz (Managing Director and Senior Analyst)

Hi, thank you very much for taking my question. Following up on that last question, for you, Bill. You know, the commentary is that the macro's unchanged and still challenging out there. So wanted to ask you, what are you looking for to help you decide when to underwrite a higher level of new investments for the business for whenever the macro does turn? Thanks.

Bill Magnuson (Co-Founder and CEO)

Yeah. So first of all, we are actually still carrying some excess sales capacity, and we've spoken about this in the past as well, that we think we have the ability to grow into. We're similarly investing on the demand generation side to make sure that we can have our sales force be as productive as possible. All of that is about remaining in a forward posture so that as things start to improve, we're able to pick them up immediately.

We believe that we have a right to win across this market, and that, you know, as I mentioned at the very top of the call, you know, I think there's been a lot of really exciting product innovation that we haven't seen the full potential of from a revenue generation perspective, simply due to the realities of a lot of frozen or declining budgets that marketers have been living through in this year. And so, you know, part of it is gonna be the conditions, and, you know, confidence improving, looking at brands extending their planning horizons.

You know, I think it's why we've seen a bit more relative strength in the enterprise than we have across, you know, the SMB sector, simply because those businesses are more able to quickly shift back to planning on a multi-year time horizon. And that's exactly where you're gonna invest in a premium product like Braze, in order to set you up for your future. You know, some of the other things to that end that we would look at are gonna be the venture activity, and we're starting to see some green shoots there. But continuing to see just more investment flowing into more promising young businesses so that they can scale up quickly.

Part of it's gonna be the calendar as well, you know, getting into the next budget year so that businesses are ready to be back on an investment footing as they start to look ahead into, you know, into next calendar year or next fiscal year, as we get to the end here. And in the meantime, we're gonna continue to execute as well as we can and stay in control of everything that we can.

Brian Schwartz (Managing Director and Senior Analyst)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from Scott Berg with Needham & Company. Please unmute yourself and ask your question.

Scott Berg (Senior Analyst)

Hi, thanks for taking my question, and congrats on the quarter. Just Scott Berg here. As customers have looked to expand on the platform in the current macro, are you guys able to touch on, you know, where they're expanding now compared to a year or two ago? You know, is it in different channels or capabilities? You know, just still looking to understand where the incremental expansion dollar is going. Thank you.

Bill Magnuson (Co-Founder and CEO)

Yeah, I, I would broadly characterize it as being consistent, with the caveat that it's conceptually consistent, 'cause obviously the, the product continues to expand in net new ways, and we are seeing customers continue to adopt those. So for instance, you know, Currents has had a really high attach rate for a long time. You know, as Snowflake data sharing has gotten, more capability, we're seeing more customers adopt that. But conceptually, those are, are very similar products in the sense that they help customers with their data export pipelines. You know, we also are seeing people add incremental, capability through things like product Catalogs or Audience Sync or the Predictive Suite. You know, these are net new, but they, they kind of follow this trend line of customers continuing to deploy new use cases on Braze.

And so I think that the drivers of it, which are, you know, how do we expand into new use cases? How do we both take over channels that are, you know, currently being run by other vendors? You know, we talk about that for new business in terms of vendor consolidation, but that vendor consolidation trend obviously exists once a person is already a Braze customer, as well as we supplant other vendors that might still have been in their ecosystem when we first got going with them. And then, you know, things like WhatsApp are net new for everyone. And so those are great places where we see a lot of greenfield. We don't need to go in and replace a legacy vendor.

And especially as we get the early proof points, like the case study that I referenced with Rappi early on, you know, we can bring to life the ROI and the business case for more customers to be able to expand into those. And that's, you know, very exciting. But conceptually, that's similar to how we've gone to market with SMS over the last few years, too. And so, you know, I think at a high level, we're able to exercise muscles that we're getting more and more familiar with over time as we go through cross-sell and upsell. And the number of, you know, opportunities that we have to expand within our product surface area continue to multiply as our R&D innovation, you know, continues at the rapid pace that it's at.

I would say that it's all tempered by this, you know, by the flat or, you know, declining budgets that a lot of marketers went through this year. But, I'd like to think that, you know, we're also generating some pent-up demand, that when we start to see those budget levers, you know, at whatever point in the future, that we'll be ready to sell into those.

Scott Berg (Senior Analyst)

Thank you for the color.

Operator (participant)

We have time for one more question. The final question will come from Yun Kim with Loop Capital Markets. Please unmute yourself and ask your question.

Yun Kim (Managing Director)

Thank you. I'll make this a quick one. Hey, Bill. As you roll out more generative AI-based products and solutions, how are you thinking about pricing model around those products? As you can see from a couple of large, high-profile vendors, they're putting premium on premium on their GenAI products. And then maybe Isabelle can talk about the cost side of the equation on these products?

Bill Magnuson (Co-Founder and CEO)

Yeah, so I think that a lot of the GenAI work that we're doing to help with customer productivity, or, you know, with marketer productivity, we're not looking to keep those amazing tools out of the hands of marketers, because we know that they lead to higher usage of Braze, and we're able to monetize them in that way. And I spoke about that earlier. You know, if we're helping a marketer deploy more variants more quickly to help them check their copywriting or generate or inspire themselves to have new content strategies, if we're helping them be able to, you know, use a more technical capability through code generation or other sorts of schema or syntax checking, you know, these are all things that really encourage uses of Braze that we already monetize on our own.

And so, we're not looking necessarily for, those aspects of GenAI that help with the productivity of the marketer to be monetized independently. But there are other aspects that incorporate in, you know, LLMs, or other sorts of transformer models. I mentioned the, personal... or the recommendation engine earlier. The things like the Predictive Suite and other, aspects of automated decision-making that'll get deployed into both our classification layer and our orchestration layer, that we think there's both an appetite to pay more for those or an, or an expectation based off of other investments that have been made, and they just produce a tremendous amount of value in, in terms of improved ROI and, and improved results for marketers.

And so, you know, I think we're gonna continue to take a hybrid approach across those, and we're gonna look for them to all really feed each other in, you know, in, in mutually self-reinforcing ways. But we always have the tremendous advantage of being able to, you know, bill based off of the monthly active user, based off of the message volumes. And to the extent that we incorporate more value into value generation into each monthly active user, that gives us more pricing power within that. And you've actually seen this for several years now, where our revenue growth rate has outpaced our monthly active user growth rate for quite a while.

A big part of that is 'cause we continue to add more productivity for marketers that use Braze, and then they're able to extract more ROI out of the platform, and we're able to capture that very smoothly through monthly active user pricing.

Isabelle Winkles (CFO)

The only thing I would say on the cost side is I do not expect. I talked about this a little bit earlier in the Q&A. Don't expect the impact of AI to sort of be margin dilutive. So we are continuing to remain within our long-term margin targets of 67%-72%, and embedding, you know, the AI functionality in that cost structure. We don't break out the individual components, but don't look for that to be margin dilutive.

Operator (participant)

This concludes the Q&A. I will now pass the call back to Bill for closing remarks.

Bill Magnuson (Co-Founder and CEO)

Yeah, I just wanna thank everybody for joining the call today. We appreciate your continued support and look forward to seeing you at a conference or on the road soon, or for the next earnings call.