Klaviyo - Earnings Call - Q2 2025

Executive Summary

• Strong top-line beat and margin expansion with raised FY25 guide. Revenue grew 32% YoY to $293.1M, above S&P Global consensus of $278.7M, and non-GAAP diluted EPS was $0.16 vs $0.127 consensus; non-GAAP operating margin rose to 14% from 11.6% in Q1, driven by broad-based demand and international strength. Q2 consensus figures from S&P Global marked with an asterisk in tables below (Values retrieved from S&P Global).*
• Guidance raised: FY25 revenue to $1.195–$1.203B (from $1.171–$1.179B prior) and FY25 non-GAAP operating income to $144–$150M (from $133–$139M); Q3 revenue guided to $297–$301M and non-GAAP OI to $32.5–$35.5M.
• KPIs remained robust: customers 176K (+17% YoY), >$50K ARR customers 3,291 (+38% YoY), NRR 108%; EMEA/APAC revenue grew ~42% YoY and geographic mix continued to diversify (EMEA 24%, APAC 10%).
• Catalyst: Outperformance vs estimates, guidance raise, and public beta of “Klaviyo Service” (Conversational AI agent/Customer Hub/Helpdesk) expanding the platform beyond marketing into AI-powered service, reinforcing the B2C CRM narrative.

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

• What Went Well

  • Beat on revenue and EPS with operating leverage: $293.1M revenue (+32% YoY) and non-GAAP diluted EPS $0.16; non-GAAP operating margin improved to 14% (from 11.6% in Q1) on broad-based customer demand and strong international momentum.
  • International growth and upmarket traction: EMEA/APAC revenue +42% YoY; customers >$50K ARR grew 38% YoY to 3,291, evidencing mid-market/enterprise momentum.
  • Product velocity and AI expansion: Public beta of Klaviyo Service with a Conversational AI Agent and unified Customer Hub/Helpdesk strengthens the “only B2C CRM” positioning. CEO: “Our AI‑native platform … help brands personalize at scale—turning data into action in real time”.

• What Went Wrong

  • GAAP profitability remained negative: GAAP operating loss of $(31.3)M and GAAP net loss of $(24.3)M as stock-based compensation, employer payroll taxes, and prepaid marketing amortization elevated GAAP expenses.
  • Gross margin down YoY given SMS/infrastructure mix: Gross margin 75.7% vs 77.4% a year ago, reflecting higher outbound SMS sending and cloud infrastructure costs as usage scales.
  • Elevated G&A tied to payroll taxes and option activity pressured GAAP Opex; management highlighted higher payroll taxes from increased option exercises as a key driver.

Transcript

Speaker 7

Good afternoon and welcome to Klaviyo's second quarter fiscal 2025 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star one again. We ask that you please limit your questions to one. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Andrew Zilli, Vice President of Investor Relations.

Speaker 6

Good afternoon and thanks for joining Klaviyo's second quarter 2025 earnings call. Our earnings press release, investor presentation, SEC filings, and a replay of today's call can be found on our IR website at investors.klaviyo.com. With me on the call today are Andrew Bialecki, Co-Founder and CEO, and Amanda Whalen, CFO. As a reminder, our commentary today will include non-GAAP measures. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measures can be found in today's earnings press release or earnings release supplemental materials, which can be found on our Investor Relations website. Additionally, some of our comments today contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, which could change. Should any of these risks materialize or should our assumptions prove to be incorrect, actual company results could differ materially from these forward-looking statements.

A description of these risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, and other factors that could affect our financial results are included in our SEC filings, including our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and subsequent quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. Except as required by law, we do not undertake any responsibility to update these forward-looking statements. With that, I'll now turn it over to Andrew.

Speaker 1

Thanks, Zilli, and thank you all for joining us today. Klaviyo delivered another fantastic quarter, demonstrating our continued momentum and critical value to consumer businesses worldwide as the only CRM built for B2C. In the second quarter, we delivered revenue of $293 million, up 32% year-on-year. We now empower over 176,000 customers from individual entrepreneurs to global enterprises to build smarter digital relationships that drive revenue and grow their business. Our performance this quarter once again validated the three defining themes for Klaviyo, which continue to guide our strategy and execution. First, we are a growth company and continue to execute on our strategic priorities to deliver sustainable, efficient, long-term growth. We are expanding internationally, and we're investing and making progress with our move-up market. Second, Klaviyo remains well-differentiated with our vertically integrated data-first approach, driven by fully embedded AI and powered by the Klaviyo Data Platform.

The Klaviyo Data Platform's capacity to process billions of events and profiles is fundamental to our real-time capabilities, which drives faster, more intelligent segmentation and personalization at scale. Third, we're making incredible progress bringing our multi-product B2C CRM vision to life, with early momentum in service and analytics and continued innovation in multi-channel marketing automation. Many companies today are dealing with disconnected systems, often bolt-ons or stitched-together Frankensteins, not designed for fluid consumer interactions. Our platform addresses a critical market gap by providing consumer brands with a single integrated data platform designed for their unique, high-volume, fast-paced needs. We unify the pre-imposed buying experience across marketing and customer service, driven by insights from analytics, delivering inherent speed, simplicity, and flexibility. In fact, IDC noted that Klaviyo clearly addresses a set of needs often overlooked by other vendors and is bridging the gap between commerce and customer service.

Our product and engineering team continues to innovate fast, delivering incredible new features in the second quarter. At Klaviyo London in June, we unveiled major enhancements to our marketing platform to tackle one of marketing's most persistent challenges: fragmented customer experiences. Our focus here is twofold. First, we want to support the channels that matter to our customers and be great at these channels individually. To support real-time conversational journeys through rich interactive messages, we've released native support for RCS, which is the future of text messaging, and WhatsApp. Second, we are focused on making our platform even better at supporting multiple-channel channel affinity marketing. On that note, we announced our Omnichannel Campaign Builder, a new canvas to plan, launch, and measure complex multi-day campaigns across channels.

We now have omnichannel across all major areas of our marketing platform, and with built-in insights and AI-optimized delivery, teams can execute faster, reduce costs, and increase ROI without switching tools or duplicating work. We also announced channel affinity powered by Klaviyo AI. This intelligent new capability leverages predictive attributes to automatically discern each customer's preferred communication channels and optimal engagement times. By understanding these key predictive signals, channel affinity ensures messages are delivered precisely where and when they're most likely to convert. Finally, we launched multi-touch attribution, providing real-time visibility into revenue drivers beyond last click. Now turning to our service products. The paradigm of customer service is shifting at an unprecedented pace, moving far beyond simple exchanges and returns. In the near future, it's our belief that consumers will expect highly personalized experiences in every brand they interact with, facilitated by their own personal AI agent.

We are building the technology that will empower every brand to make this a reality. Just a few weeks ago, we expanded our service offering with the launch of two private betas, one for help desk and another for our conversational agent. Our AI-first help desk brings customer support into the same platform as marketing, giving service and marketing teams a shared real-time view of every customer, order, interaction, and conversation. Our conversational agent leverages a brand's Klaviyo data catalog, content, shopping behavior, and other integrations, offer tailored product recommendations, facilitate product discovery, surface coupons, and assist with orders. This goes beyond customer service and cost reduction effort. Instead, we view this as the consumer's personal assistant, which today happens via chat, but over time, this agent can assist across every touchpoint a consumer has with a brand: messaging channels, mobile push, emails, voice, and more.

This is not just for traditional customer service issues like returning an item. For example, the agent answers questions like which shirt pairs best with the pants I'm looking at, and it can quickly provide product recommendations directly to the consumer, which ultimately drives more revenue. Our goal is to democratize this technology, making it possible for consumer brands of all sizes and across industries to provide this level of personalized experience to all of their consumers. These products build upon our multi-product strategy, which we launched earlier this year with Customer Hub. Importantly, we view Customer Hub as much more than just customer service. It's really a jumping-off point for the future of personalization and bridges the gap between marketing and service to bring them closer together.

We're very pleased with the success we've seen to date, and customers love the ability to unify consumer experiences across marketing and service using the data they have in Klaviyo. When companies successfully create seamless consumer experiences across touchpoints, it helps build more loyal customer relationships, which also drives more lifetime revenue. In fact, in just five months since we launched Customer Hub, we've generated millions in additional incremental attributable revenue for our customers. Finally, the third product category of the B2C CRM, analytics. Our marketing analytics product, which we launched earlier this year, is also gaining strong momentum and already has nearly 2,000 customers. This powerful tool ensures that critical efforts like win-back emails and abandoned cart flows are precisely targeted and timed for maximum effectiveness and ROI.

For example, Hibby, a women's apparel brand, harnessed marketing analytics RFM segmentation and catalog insights to fuel post-delivery automations that are driving significant incremental revenue. The combination of marketing analytics and SMS to complement their email strategy resulted in a 100x ROI for Hibby in the past year. Across all of our products that make up the B2C CRM stack, we're taking an AI-first approach. In addition to the many new AI-powered solutions across marketing, service, and analytics, we are solidifying Klaviyo's leadership as one of the next-gen technology stacks with new features like our MCP server. Brands can now access or integrate Klaviyo data directly into the LLMs they're using. This is more than just a technical achievement. It's an important step in empowering our customers to supercharge workflows and cementing Klaviyo as the indispensable single source of truth for consumer businesses.

Customers are already using our MCP server for things like planning out their campaign calendar, finding changes that can be made to flows or campaigns to drive better performance on a daily and weekly basis, and other use cases. This is just one way we're empowering our customers to leverage their data for better consumer engagement. We're also proud to share that Klaviyo has been recognized as a leader in the 2025 IDC Market Scape for AI-enabled marketing platforms, which evaluates and ranks based on current capabilities and future strategy. As businesses grapple with fragmented tech stacks, the secular shift towards unified data-powered platforms that are AI-first like Klaviyo is clear. Legacy technology is a significant pain point for mid-market and enterprise companies, and we continue to see success with our efforts to displace incumbents. This quarter, we signed Winston Flowers, a premium floral and gift company.

They were facing ongoing issues with their legacy marketing cloud, particularly concerning its usability and agility for their small marketing team. They chose Klaviyo for our ease of use, faster time to market, and strong multi-channel capabilities. We also signed a deal with a premium coffee brand who is finding it difficult to execute even basic marketing functions like abandoned cart flows despite significant investment in their legacy marketing cloud. They chose Klaviyo because they needed a solution that would deliver immediate results and provide a more intuitive and effective platform for their marketing efforts. We're pleased with the success we've seen in the mid-market and enterprise, and you've heard about many of the notable large customers who have joined us over the last couple of years.

We know there's more we can do to support the higher end of the market, and we are continuing to evolve our product and go-to-market efforts as a result. On the go-to-market side, we're adding additional enterprise experience to our team and increasing strategic partner collaboration, enabling us to drive deeper engagement with complex customers. On the product side, we continue to add features and functionality to the platform that are important to large enterprises, including custom objects, mobile in-app messaging, channel affinity, and more. We are also continuing to expand the scalability of our platform to serve the largest consumer brands and the diversity of use cases they have. These features are key to winning and supporting mid-market and enterprise customers going forward, and we'll continue our rapid pace of innovation to make our platform the leading solution for their evolving needs.

We continue to see companies choose Klaviyo to consolidate their marketing tech stack from the fragmented tools they have been dealing with. In the second quarter, we expanded our relationship with Princess Polly, a leading digital fashion brand with a growing physical presence. Princess Polly has been using Klaviyo email, but was one of the largest SMS customers of another vendor. They consolidated SMS with Klaviyo to leverage the power of our omnichannel platform for more effective consumer engagement across channels. We also signed a deal with Loop Earplug, a rapidly growing company that creates stylish, high-quality ear protection. Loop was struggling with a fragmented marketing strategy, relying on multiple vendors that led to a lot of inefficiency. They chose Klaviyo for our comprehensive platform that will enable them to consolidate email and SMS to drive growth and streamline their customer engagement.

International expansion continues to be a significant growth opportunity for Klaviyo. In addition to the WhatsApp launch, we've simplified multilingual email campaigns in Klaviyo and launched our website in German, Spanish, and Italian. These investments are yielding results. In the second quarter, we grew international revenue over 42% year-on-year, adding brands like Nothing, a UK-based fast-growing challenger in the smartphones and audio category. Nothing was grappling with a fragmented CRM strategy with their legacy tool, which made it difficult to drive repeat business and loyalty. They selected Klaviyo to unify their CRM strategy and leverage our powerful automations to boost direct-to-consumer revenue. Our thriving partner ecosystem is a force multiplier, expanding our reach and functionality. We're thrilled to announce two new integrations that further expand Klaviyo's reach into the hospitality and entertainment sectors.

Our partnership with Guesty, a leader in property management, will transform how property owners harness first-party data to boost direct bookings and cultivate lasting guest relationships. Our integration with Vivenu, a global leader in event ticketing, will empower entertainment brands to leverage attendee data for unparalleled personalization and engagement at scale, as exemplified by their work with partners like the Grammy Awards. These integrations underscore our commitment to vertical expansion and delivering transformative solutions across industries. Our vision is to empower every consumer-oriented business to standardize on Klaviyo, from marketing to service to analytics, enabling them to build strong, personalized relationships with each of their consumers. We are proud of the progress we've made and are driven every day by the massive amount of white space that still exists for Klaviyo.

We're excited to welcome our customers, partners, and all consumer businesses to Klaviyo Boston, the preeminent event for consumer businesses focused on growth, taking place in Boston, September 25th and 26th. Following the success of Klaviyo London and Klaviyo Sydney, Klaviyo Boston will serve as another opportunity for sharing our strategic vision and showcasing our latest advancements for our growing ecosystems of customers, champions, and partners. We will also be hosting our first Investor Day live from Klaviyo Boston on September 25th, and virtual registration is open on our Investor Relations website. Before I turn it over to Amanda, I'd like to cover a couple of changes in our leadership team. I want to welcome Archna Rao, our new Chief Information Officer, who joined us in June.

Archna brings 25 years of experience helping high-growth tech companies scale and will play a key role in shaping how we use AI internally to drive smarter, faster decisions and how we scale our systems to help us serve our customers better and deliver more value to the companies that rely on us. We also announced that our President, Steve Rowland, is retiring. He'll be staying on through the end of the first quarter of next year. Since joining in 2023, Steve has been instrumental in implementing our mid-market and enterprise sales motion, expanding our growth internationally, growing our partner ecosystem, and building an incredibly strong go-to-market organization. During Steve's tenure, we have driven remarkable growth with our revenue run rate growing from $660 million to more than $1.1 billion today. I'm incredibly grateful for his contributions and leadership at Klaviyo. I'd like to turn it over to Amanda.

Speaker 3

Thanks, Andrew. Our second quarter results were very strong as we are delivering efficient growth at scale. Revenue grew 32% year-over-year to $293 million. Non-GAAP operating margin was 14%, and free cash flow was $59 million. These results demonstrate another quarter of strong, consistent top and bottom-line performance. Our vertically integrated AI-driven data platform is the only CRM built for consumer businesses, and we are expanding the functionality as we add features across marketing, service, and analytics. Customers are responding well to this vision, which drove strength in the second quarter as we added new customers, expanded with our existing customers, grew internationally, and expanded up markets. We ended Q2 with more than 176,000 customers, up 17% year-over-year, and up 7,000 from Q1. This strength was driven by momentum in entrepreneur customers with support from SMB, mid-market, and enterprise, affirming Klaviyo's value in every market.

We delivered a Q2 NRR of 108% in line with the last two quarters, driven by consistent gross revenue retention, improvement in email expansion, and, while a smaller contributor, returns from our newer product offerings. We are advancing our cross-sell motion, as evidenced by more of our larger customers adopting multiple products and the growing SMS penetration in our SMB and mid-market cohorts. We are also very pleased with the early adoption of our marketing analytics product and the success of our Klaviyo Customer Service beta. Our success in serving larger customers is evident as we ended the quarter with 3,291 customers with over $50,000 in ARR, up 38% year-over-year. This was a record quarter of net adds into this cohort as we drove strength in both new customers to Klaviyo landing in this cohort and existing customers who are growing their businesses with Klaviyo.

As you heard from Andrew, our investments towards expanding internationally on both the go-to-market and product fronts are delivering returns as our outstanding international growth continued in the second quarter. EMEA revenue grew 47% year-over-year, and APAC revenue growth accelerated for the second quarter in a row as our international expansion strategy is driving strong results. This broad-based strength drove the revenue outperformance in Q2 as we execute on our growth priorities. As we mentioned last quarter, we incorporated some additional prudence in our guidance due to the uncertain macro environment. However, we continue to hear from customers that Klaviyo is more critical than ever to driving their growth, and we did not see an impact from the macro during the quarter. Our results against guidance, therefore, were slightly higher than they would have been in a normal environment.

Moving on, second quarter non-GAAP gross margin was 76%, down approximately two points year-over-year, primarily due to increased infrastructure costs and the continued growth of our SMS product. We are beginning to see efficiencies from these infrastructure investments, and our non-GAAP gross margin was flat to Q1 due to infrastructure optimizations offset by our growing SMS mix. Turning to non-GAAP operating expenses, we saw leverage in R&D and G&A. Sales and marketing as a percentage of revenue increased year-over-year as a result of continued investments in sales capacity and timing of marketing program spend. For the second quarter, our non-GAAP operating income was $41 million, representing a non-GAAP operating margin of 14%. This came in better than our guidance, primarily as a result of the revenue upside we saw in the quarter and, to a lesser extent, due to operating expense leverage.

We generated strong free cash flow of $59 million during the quarter due to higher collections and the timing of payments. This result excludes the impact from Andrew's option exercise and the related share sale for tax payments, which took place during the quarter. Before I turn to guidance, let me quickly touch on our revenue seasonality. As a result of the profile enforcement changes we made in February, we expect our revenue to be less volatile quarter to quarter as profiles tend to grow consistently throughout the year compared to the seasonal increases that can happen from sending volumes. As a result, we expect that our fourth quarter revenue will experience less of a quarter-over-quarter spike in growth than it has in prior years.

Additionally, with the strength in Q2, we are reducing the amount of incremental prudence incorporated into our guidance for Q3 and the full year, though not removing it completely as the environment remains dynamic. Turning now to guidance. For Q3, we expect revenue of $297 to $301 million, representing year-over-year growth of 26% to 28%, driven by continued strength across the business. We expect third quarter non-GAAP operating income of $32.5 to $35.5 million, representing a non-GAAP operating margin of 11% to 12%. As a result of our strong first half performance and robust customer demand signals, we are raising our full-year guidance by $24 million at the midpoint, from $1.195 billion to $1.203 billion for year-over-year growth of 27% to 28%. We expect non-GAAP operating income of $144 to $150 million, representing a non-GAAP operating margin of 12%.

This guidance reflects our confidence in the resilience of our business and the value that we provide to our customers who continue to rely on our platform to drive results even in uncertain times. In dynamic environments, our business is more relevant than ever. In closing, our performance in the first half of the year reinforces that we are executing well on our growth strategies. We are delivering on our goal of achieving sustainable, efficient, long-term growth through adding new customers, expanding with existing customers, international expansion, and moving up markets. Our single unified platform for marketing, service, and analytics positions us well to deliver unmatched value to our customers and establishes a solid foundation for continued innovation and growth in the future. I look forward to discussing more about our business at our upcoming Investor Day in September. With that, I'll open up the call for Q&A. Operator?

Speaker 7

At this time, I would like to remind everyone, in order to ask a question, press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. We ask that you limit yourself to one question. We'll pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from Gabriella Borges with Goldman Sachs.

Hi, good afternoon. Congratulations on the quarter. Andrew and Amanda, I wanted to ask you a little bit about your progress in the mid-market in particular. Amanda, I remember it was a handful of quarters ago where you talked about seeing the pipeline be really good and stepping up the level of investment to go after that opportunity. If I look at your unit economics and LTV to CAC standpoint, you're seeing really nice improvement on LTV to CAC. My question for the both of you is, give us a qualitative overlay of what you're seeing in the mid-market in particular, and if there's anything else you can add quantitatively on what you're seeing with sales productivity and how you're thinking about sales investment in the mid-market in particular, that would be great as well. Thank you.

Speaker 1

Yep, I'm back. Thanks, Gabriella. I'm happy to take those. Just qualitatively, why are customers turning to Klaviyo in the enterprise? We see that the Klaviyo data platform plus this consolidation story of taking not just all the channels with marketing, but now marketing and service together is really resonating. As we talked about, I think there's this trend of all of the entire CRM stack is about to go autonomous. Every enterprise is looking at, hey, who is their partner that they're going to work with over the next five, ten years on making the customer experience really an autonomous, auto-optimizing thing. I think that story is really resonating. The fact that we have the data platform at the core and the only one to do that, that's what's setting us apart.

Now, on the unit economics, we've been investing in building out our mid-market enterprise demand gen and sales motion, and we continue to refine those. I think we still have work to do, as we always do, but we're very excited about the trend in the unit economics, like you mentioned.

Speaker 3

Yeah, and just a couple of examples to bring that quantitatively to life. You saw the growth in the $50,000 cohort, 14% year-over-year growth this quarter in average revenue per customer, and we're continuing to see strong growth in the average revenue that we generate from our top ten customers. All of them are really demonstrating that progress. One of the examples that I really appreciated this quarter in the mid-market was Mejuri, who is a prominent jewelry brand. They chose us because of our robust integrations, our ease of use, and the reliability of the platform, especially after last year they had some issues with their prior provider. Heading into Black Friday, Cyber Monday, they wanted to know they had a brand who can scale with them and support their business, and Klaviyo is that partner.

Speaker 7

Our next question comes from Terry Tillman with Truist.

Yeah, good afternoon. Congrats on the results. Hi, Abby, Amanda, and Zilli. My question relates to the service suite of products, and I know that they're not actually generally available, I believe, but you're talking about releasing or putting into access help desk and the conversational agents. I'm just curious, if you take a step back, and I think investors care about this, is how do you size this opportunity to run your service suite versus some of the other products, whether it's mobile, email, or Klaviyo Marketing Analytics? The second part of this is, would it be a similar playbook where maybe it starts with traction more down market, or would this be more potentially actionable across all customer segments? Thank you.

Speaker 1

Yeah, great, Terry. Happy to talk about what we're doing in service. I'll start with this. I think as what we traditionally thought of as customer service gets more automated, more autonomous, our belief is every business is going to offer up to every one of their consumers their own personal AI, their own agent, their own concierge that's there across all modalities. We're starting with web and chat. We think it'll be voice. We think it'll be on your mobile apps. It'll be everywhere. Anytime that you have a question, whether it's something we traditionally think of as customer service or something proactive, you need some advice, we already are seeing in our beta questions where people are writing in and asking about things like, hey, you know I'm shopping and I'm wondering whether this outfit will work for this event that I have to go to.

That's not what we traditionally think of as a customer service request. It almost blends between service and marketing. This conversational piece, I think, is going to be critical. To the question on, hey, how big is this market? I look at the marketing application, the market automation category. This conversational category, I think, is of an equal size. We're early into this. We're doing a great job of building out the product and working with customers to refine it and planning to launch it soon. I think it's going to be a major accelerant. We look at, for a lot of businesses, I don't know why you wouldn't want marketing and then the conversations you have with customers all to be driven off the same data set. I think this is where the market's going, and it's going to get a lot more automated.

Because of that, obviously, when Klaviyo was starting out, we focused more on SMBs and in recent years have started to shift our focus or more of our focus off market as well. I think there's a moment right now where, you know, for service, for conversation, whether you're an SMB or an enterprise, you're looking and saying, who's going to provide that personal agent, that personal concierge to every single one of my customers? We want to be that. We're already working with some larger businesses on using and adopting our conversational agent and our other products, the Customer Hub and student help desk. I think here we're not going to wait nearly as long to bring this into the mid-market enterprise because we're already seeing a lot of interest.

Speaker 7

Your next question comes from Brent Bracelin with Piper Sandler.

Thank you. Good afternoon here. Abby, talking about the moment you're in right now and was hoping maybe you could help quantify the opportunity. You have a good base of 50,000 customer cohort, mostly using marketing today. What does that cohort look like when they layer in service, when they layer in marketing, when they layer in the AI-first help desk, when they layer in this AI-first conversational agent? Any sort of sense of what the revenue capture for kind of cross-sell could look like as you think about the full bundle?

Speaker 1

Yeah, sure. I'll begin with where I answered the last question. We think the opportunity in service and all the products we're building there is large, and it's sort of equivalent size. Even for some businesses, it's potentially larger than marketing. Because it's not just responding to customer service requests, it also has an element of helping customers in generating incremental LTV. The way to look at it is like every business is going to have to buy the entire CRM stack. They're going to want all those products to work together on one data platform, whether that's marketing, all of the various marketing channels, then service and conversation, and then analytics. They expect all of that software to become more automated. We're really obsessed with this idea of what does the autonomous CRM look like?

I think that's going to start with B2C businesses, with consumer, where every experience is already at scale. You need more automation, more personalization, more optimization there. I think if we can deliver better LTV to our customers, if they engage their consumers better, those consumers are spending more, then that gives us the ability to share in that upside. We're not putting numbers on it yet, but I'd say compared to some of the products that we've launched around marketing that fit in that marketing category, service is a real expansion. I think we're going to find that with AI and its ability to do more and generate better results automatically, that's a further revenue per customer expansion as well.

Speaker 7

Your next question comes from DJ Hines with Canaccord.

Speaker 1

Hey, thank you, guys. Congrats on the next quarter. Abby, look, you've always had this interface for brands, for marketing, and now service and analytics use cases. If I understand right, it now sounds like you also have more of a consumer-facing interface, right, with these personalized conversational AI conversations. You kind of talked about your long-term vision and why that's important. Does it create any conflict with e-commerce partners that I suspect may be trying to do something similar on their own? How do those agents work together? Help me understand how all the pieces kind of fit together. For sure. I don't think it creates any real competition. In fact, we're collaborating with a lot of the platforms and partners that we have to help develop this technology and then help put it to work.

Frankly, we're in a rush right now where we feel like every single one of our customers ought to be delivering to their customers their own personal agent. Right now, that doesn't really exist. If you go to the major e-commerce players, then yes, that technology is there. For everybody else, it hasn't really been adopted yet. When I talk to our customers about what's slowing them down, a lot of it is it's technically challenging. We're not sure what to do. We're not sure how to train these models, how to put them to work. In that case, I think we've got a great team working on that. We're working with customers, and I actually think our partners are an accelerant there.

We've actually worked with a lot of our agency partners on how they can build up and stand up practices and services around helping take conversational to all of our consumer businesses. I look at our partners, the other, you know, in the platforms we work with, we all have the same shared mission, which is to help our mutual customers be more successful, own their destiny. I'm excited to work on it with them. Thank you.

Speaker 7

Your next question comes from Jackson Ader with KeyBanc Capital Markets.

Thanks for taking our questions, guys. Amanda, can we talk about the push and pull on gross margin? I guess with the launch of service and agents and kind of the new products that have a little bit more software gross margin, when should that be able to kind of outweigh some of the SMS headwinds? Is there any impact from the smoothing of your revenue through the seasons? Would there be any kind of seasonal impact or a similar smoothing on gross margin? Thank you.

Speaker 3

Yeah, great question. Thanks so much, Jackson. In thinking about gross margin, I would probably think about three key drivers there. One is what's happening with growth in SMS, and we've spoken about that over time. The second is the investments that we've been making in infrastructure and the leverage that we're getting from those. The third is new products. Now, new products, we are really excited about them, but I would not at this point build in meaningful revenue into this year's outlook for it, at least not to the extent that it would meaningfully shift gross margin. Over time, it is exactly what you spoke about, which is we see some positive gross margin impacts coming from those products, particularly Klaviyo Marketing Analytics, which leverages largely the same infrastructure as our existing email plus data product.

Service, which is early days and we're still working through the pricing, but again, have a positive view on the margins there. In terms of the infrastructure investments, which is a big benefit, we talked about in Q1 some of the investments that we had made and that we expected to get leverage for them over time as we continue to grow and scale with our customers. If you look at our gross margin in Q2, it was flat quarter over quarter. What was going on within there, as we talked about in the prepared remarks, was the fact that we were getting leverage from those infrastructure investments, which offset some of the headwinds from SMS. Again, feeling good about where we're looking in terms of gross margin based on those trade-offs across the two.

Regarding the seasonality, I would not anticipate too much of a change because while email revenue does tend to, you know, will be less seasonal with the profile enforcement and the fact that those grow more steadily, SMS is still a subscription that is based on them sending volume. We tend to see a higher portion of SMS in Q4, and that tends to be the biggest driver there.

Speaker 7

Your next question comes from Derek Wood with TD Cowen.

Great, thanks. Congrats on a great quarter. Amanda, you had a nice seasonal rebound in both net new total customers and net new $50,000 plus customers. Just hoping you could double-click on this. Are you seeing more seasonality on the new customer side, or did you see some sequential improvement, or was the change in pricing somehow a factor? What would you chalk up to the sequential numbers being so strong and what that kind of means for seasonality looking into the second half on the customer side?

Speaker 3

Yeah, sure thing. Great question, Derek. On the net new adds overall, similar to what we've spoken about in the past, the primary driver of that was in our entrepreneur segment because they tend to be the highest number of customers. We did see also strength in adds across SMB and mid-market and enterprise. It is further evidence that the value proposition is just resonating across customer sizes.

Specifically in terms of what's driving that growth in entrepreneur, I would point less to seasonality and more to the changes that we've been making driven by both our marketing and our product teams, thinking about how do we get increasingly dialed in on how we attract those entrepreneur customers in a really efficient manner, and then also how we bring them through the product usage curve, graduating them from free customers to highly engaged paying customers who are making great use of the platform. A couple of things that we did in Q2 that helped to drive that: one, we put in an earlier payment step into the process for new customers just to reduce friction in the free-to-pay conversion process, and that helped to improve that conversion rate.

We redesigned our Klaviyo login page, which is one of our highest traffic pages, by testing out various marketing messages and improving product and feature discovery. As a result of that login page change, the new design has been really, really positive. Really proud of the great work that the team has done to drive the strength in those overall new adds. On the $50,000 side, as we've spoken about before, $50,000 adds are a mix for us of new customers who land directly into that cohort and customers who expand into that cohort. What we saw this quarter was a record number of net new adds across both of those. The new lands was near our record highs, and the expansion was a record high number there.

As we have talked about, the fact that customers expand their usage with us is something we're really proud of because it shows that as their businesses grow, we can grow with them. A great example in that $50,000 cohort this quarter of expansion was a household electronics company we work with who started with Klaviyo a few years ago with just email. They've been growing their profile steadily ever since. In Q2, they added Klaviyo Marketing Analytics, and the combination of the organic growth of their business and the addition of the new products moved them up into that $50,000 cohort. We love it when our customers are successful and they expand their business with us.

Speaker 7

Your next question comes from Elizabeth Porter with Morgan Stanley.

Great, thank you so much. As customers are standardizing on Klaviyo and you go with more of this one brain, one Klaviyo data platform, how does the go-to-market motion need to evolve? Is it still the same buyer, or do you need to target kind of more senior decision makers? It'd be great just to get kind of your perspective on how the go-to-market motion evolves just as the product portfolio expands. If there's anything tactical we should watch out for that can better unlock the opportunity and just overall where you are on the journey. Thank you.

Speaker 1

Yeah, that's a great question. Thanks, Elizabeth. I look at the portfolio expansion of product. The expansion of the product portfolio is really opening up more doors, more ways to work with the businesses that we want to partner with, and especially in the enterprise. To give you an example, with marketing, you know, we've traditionally gone through the CMO and the marketing organization. Now with the expanded portfolio B2C CRM, we're finding a lot of those conversations are getting up leveled. More increasingly, we're starting to talk to Chief Digital Officers, CIOs, heads of technology. Why? Because they see the shared data platform, you know, the brain, as you said, and they say, hey, look, we actually use this in a lot of ways.

The fact that we're bringing multiple applications to the table across analytics and now the different service products we're going to offer, it starts to become more of a company-wide conversation. In a lot of those cases, we still say, hey, look, it was great to start in one area, and often that's still marketing. We definitely anticipate over time that we're finding more customers who want to buy the entire Klaviyo stack at once. We see that bit of that trend. I think with what we're doing with conversational and our conversational agent, we actually think that's going to open up a whole new angle for us. That's such a new market. It didn't exist a few years ago. We find, you know, we have such great respect. We've earned the trust of our customers.

When we say, hey, we've got something for you to help you deepen your relationships with customers, you know, that goes way beyond just customer service, a lot of those folks are saying, okay, well, let me introduce you to our team because you know what, we're actually trying to explore this category and understand, you know, who we should be going with, you know, looking forward. Our kind of mental model is like now it's not just through marketing. We might be going, in some cases, maybe a little more tops down. In other cases, we may be going through other parts of the organization that own the customer experience. It's given us now, you know, multiple vectors, multiple ways to start the conversation.

Speaker 7

Your next question comes from Rob Oliver with Baird.

Great, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. It's on the international strength, really strong numbers with the 42% year-over-year. I think, Amanda, you called out accelerating growth in APAC. If you could just remind us, you know, I know you guys have been rolling out languages at a really brisk pace. Where are we in terms of that language rollout? Are there major GOs that still need to be rolled out? Abby, I'd just be curious to hear from you. I'm sure mostly SMBs and entrepreneurs early on, but I'd love to get a sense from you of what kind of flavor of customer that could be and if there's an opportunity for, say, multinational companies that now see an opportunity within the Klaviyo platform to do things multilingual and globally for you to really make a move up market via that path. Thanks very much.

Speaker 3

Sure. Thanks so much, Rob. Great to hear from you. Yeah, we're very pleased with the results that we're seeing in international. Overall, 42% year-over-year growth outside of North America this quarter. In particular, I would like to call out strength in three countries: Norway, Germany, and Spain. Each of those countries, the new ARR that we landed in them in the quarter grew over 90% year-over-year. We have rolled out new languages, and we will continue to roll out some new languages later this year. Look for more announcements coming there. In addition, an important part of what we've been doing in international is improving the product experience for international customers, as well as rounding out the end-to-end customer journey across all of our go-to-market interactions with customers.

Some examples of how that came to life in Q2: the release of WhatsApp, which was really important for our international customers, where WhatsApp is much more prevalent as a mobile texting option, simplifying multilingual email campaigns. Many of our customers in Europe operate across multiple countries and multiple languages, and we made it easier than ever for them to leverage their content across multiple languages. On the go-to-market side, we are rounding out the product offering in languages by supplementing it with things like the launch of new websites. We rolled out German, Spanish, and Italian websites and hosted our big marquee customer events internationally this quarter, both K-London and K-Sydney.

Looking ahead, what you should expect is we're going to continue to invest in that local language selling capability, continue to invest in growing our Dublin office and building out the partner network because as we build on those, it helps drive even better returns and results from the language investments that we've made.

Speaker 1

That's great. I'll add a little bit of color on the question around like, hey, is international unlocking new enterprise opportunities? The answer is absolutely yes. I've talked to a couple of customers in Europe and Asia where we're already working with them, you know, their business in the U.S., and we've started to have opportunities and said, hey, you know, we've actually got a larger business outside of the U.S. Can you help? We mentioned some of the accelerants, some of the investments that we're making in the enterprise. There's a lot of stuff we're doing. Amanda mentioned, you know, WhatsApp support, multiple languages. We're also doing a lot with data residency and data locality, spinning up new data centers outside of the U.S. to help address those needs. I actually think that the enterprise growth we're seeing, it's not just within the U.S.

I think we're going to see that it's also around the world and internationally as well.

Speaker 7

Your next question comes from Brent Huff with Stephens.

Good afternoon. Congrats on the nice results. Thanks for squeezing me in. Early on when we picked you all up, we thought that international was going to be kind of the big cajon of growth opportunity here in the near term, however we define that. It seems like now international kind of is accompanied by the AI conversational interaction, the service beta, and then continuing up market growth. How do you all, you know, should we think about reshuffling how assiduously you're going after each of those, or maybe can you rank them and kind of give us pros and cons and how you're approaching those? Thank you.

Speaker 1

Yeah, sure. If there's one takeaway here, it's that we very much believe that the future of CRM, and it's going to be led by consumer businesses, is going to be AI-driven. It's going to be AI-first. Our belief is every company in the enterprise, in the SMB in the next few years, they're going to adopt a CRM stack that is AI-native from the start. This means not just our data platform and some of the predictive analytics we do on top of that, but finding ways to make marketing more autonomous, self-optimizing, make customer service something where everybody gets their own agent. I think this is the massive opportunity that's right there. It's all market segments. We see it in SMB, we see it in enterprise. It's global. It's not just here in the U.S. It's around the world. That is the number one opportunity that we see.

That's why I'm very excited about the work that we're doing with our service products, the work we continue to do with our marketing platform, expanding channels, building on top of that the autonomy layer. That's definitely number one. After that, I think we'd look at enterprise, a great area of growth. You mentioned that's also global and international. We still have a lot of runway there as well. Maybe I could give you a little bit of the stack rank, but I'm very proud of what our team has done on the product side to really set the table for really being able to deliver this B2C CRM in one that is truly AI-first and can automate away a lot of the work, personalization, that end last mile personalization to consumers.

Speaker 7

Your next question comes from Parker Lane with Staple.

Yeah, hey team, thanks for taking the question here. Abby, you've added a lot of AI enhancements to core products this year, including things like automated campaign follow-up, automation, and conversations in SMS. How would you assess the adoption and utilization by different customer cohorts, the size of those customers, and how is that correlating with message volume growth today?

Speaker 1

Yeah, that's a good question. The AI features that we've rolled out so far, we track for each of them its adoption rate. I think what we're finding is our more advanced users, which tend to maybe skew a little bit more towards the enterprise and SMB, tend to be faster adopters. This is actually something we're working on. We find that a lot of the AI features we're building, imagine things we rolled out like channel affinity. A lot of questions I get from customers are, how should I go about using this? When is it appropriate? We actually think that's something we can automate too. Rather than just giving people tools, actually telling them exactly when to do it, to use it, recommending it so that they can just accept those recommendations and automatically embed it in their marketing. That's what's happening on the adoption side.

What was the second part of the question?

Message volume growth.

Message volume growth. Yeah, I think it's still early for that, but I think what we're finding is the quality of the messages that folks are sending has increased quite a bit. We have a lot of stories from customers that are now, for instance, using the channel affinity feature that we rolled out. It's helping them prioritize email versus SMS versus other channels, and it's leading to better consumer interaction. That's why the key thing for us is it's actually, you know, how much, you know, lifetime value, as we often talk about, attributed revenue back to Klaviyo, how is that growing? That's ultimately the metric that our customers care the most about. That's the metric that we measure as well.

Speaker 7

Your next question comes from Siti Panigrahi with Mizuho.

Hey, this is Phil on for Siti. I just wanted to ask, for all these new products like help desk, conversational agents, the Customer Hub, how would you stack rank them in terms of revenue potential over the medium term? On the MCP server, what's the early feedback been and any initial thoughts on how you would price this? Thank you.

Speaker 1

Yeah, terrific. Out of the three, I think it's early. I'll give you some rough thinking on this. We're very bullish on this idea of every business being able to offer their consumers a personal AI, a personal agent. That's going to be driven, we think, primarily by our conversational agent technology. I expect that there's going to be an enormous amount of value there. We're also very excited about what we're doing with Customer Hub, but the Customer Hub actually has the conversational agent embedded in it. In some sense, you can think of those two working together. We see that as an additional revenue opportunity.

The help desk piece, frankly, we've talked to customers that have said, look, when we think about the customer experience and customer service, we know that, hey, there's still going to be moments where our conversational agent needs to, it's maybe too challenging a question for it as it exists today. That's what our help desk helps solve for. The thing that I'm most excited about, and I think consumers are most excited about, our customers are most excited about, is the idea of extending customer service beyond just questions about where are my products, where are my orders, very tactical things, and into more forward-looking use cases, things that feel more like marketing, that feel more value-add to the end customer. Oh, and then MCP on that, actually, we're not intending to price and package that right now. What's really cool about that is I talk to customers.

They're using that with the LLMs, their personal LLMs. We're finding people, it's just another way for people to ask questions about the data inside of Klaviyo. It's actually been really interesting. We're learning a lot about the patterns of the kind of questions that people want to ask. We're using some of that feedback loop in terms of how we build kind of agentic technology inside of Klaviyo. For instance, we're seeing people use it to, hey, analyze my recent campaigns, tell me which performed best and why. We love making that data accessible to our customers. It's also giving us great examples of things that we can build into our analytics products or into our recommendations. This will all help power the recommendations that will ultimately make things like marketing more autonomous or help improve automatically those conversations that our conversational agent is having with customers.

Speaker 7

Your next question comes from Arjun Patiya with William Blair.

All right, thank you so much. Abby, maybe for you, you started off, I think, in your prepared remarks. You mentioned that, you know, you guys are seeing some pretty good traction in terms of incumbent displacements. Obviously, we can, it seems like we can see that in the net new customers. I imagine some of those are also landing in that $50K plus cohort. I'm curious, as you look out at the market, where are we in the incumbent kind of replacement cycle? Where are the legacy players? How much opportunity is there still on that front? When you look at that opportunity, is that mostly larger enterprises, or do you still see a lot of room to go on the kind of, you know, longer tail of entrepreneurs and SMBs?

Speaker 1

Yeah, that's a great question. I see a lot of room in both areas. I'll kind of say that there's a little bit of a difference in the opportunity. Amongst our entrepreneur and SMB customers, we still think there's always a ton of businesses starting up in the retail and commerce category. We see even bigger opportunities outside of commerce. That's why some of the partnerships and integrations that we shipped this quarter around Guesty, Vivenu, I think those are real, those open up new markets for us. We see a lot of opportunity even outside of pure retail or pure e-commerce. In the enterprise, we've made a lot of progress in the last couple of quarters. The more we look at it, we're just getting into really that enterprise segment. We see a lot of opportunity there.

The things I mentioned, and Amanda's talked about, investments that we're making both on the sales and marketing and project engineering side. That's why things like we talked about custom objects, allowing for more bespoke or more custom enterprise data models, allowing that data to be inside Klaviyo really matters. It's the work that we're doing to better support mobile applications and mobile experiences, and routing out the true, all of your marketing channels in one place. I feel really good about the progress we're making there. As we do that, what we're finding is that customers say, okay, great, you're meeting my requirements. Obviously, you've got the Klaviyo data platform. You have everything you're doing around AI. Obviously, the ease of use, everyday usability that comes with Klaviyo, that is turning into more social proof points that's helping drive our growth in the enterprise segment.

Speaker 3

An example recently of a customer who came to us from one of these legacy providers was a customer of ours who's in the food space. With their legacy technology, what they were finding was that it was really cumbersome. Whenever they wanted to execute on even just very basic marketing tasks, they needed developer support in order for the marketers to put their ideas into action. The other thing that they were dealing with was that they had a totally separate data warehouse, and maintaining the data integrations was a big burden on them. They came over to Klaviyo. They actually replaced four different products and moved into Klaviyo, not only for email, but also for our CDP, the advanced Klaviyo data platform. As a result, two things happened.

One is they saved over 50 developer hours per month because the Klaviyo system is just so much easier and self-enabled to use. More importantly, it empowered their marketers. Now they can move faster and generate more revenue. That's what we hear consistently from customers: they want to reduce their reliance on development teams and increase their ability to move with speed and engage their customers.

Speaker 7

Your final question comes from Scott Berg with Needham & Company.

Hi, this is Rob Merillion for Scott Berg. Thanks for taking my question and congrats on the quarter. Excited to see the addition of support for new channels like RCS and WhatsApp. I know it still might be early days, but can you touch on customer feedback and interest so far? Is it just skewing more a market or is it relatively broad-based? Additionally, apologies if this was touched on earlier, but any insight you can provide on the potential impacts of gross margins with increased adoption of these channels? Thanks.

Speaker 1

Yeah, that's great. I'm happy to cover that. With RCS, we think about SMS 2.0, the future of text messaging, and WhatsApp. WhatsApp is obviously opening up a whole new communication channel that's especially popular outside of the U.S. For both, it's really allowing for a lot more enrichment of the end experience that a brand can deliver to a customer. We're very excited about both. We're seeing adoption amongst SMBs and our larger mid-market enterprise customers. Everybody's interested in that. I'm very, very happy about the work that we've done to support those channels and some of the new media type experiences offered. In terms of the gross margin impacts, it's still early, but I think the gross margin profile is going to end up looking somewhat similar to what we see for SMS.

RCS, I think of as almost like a, will eventually be like a direct replacement for SMS in most places. We think of WhatsApp as, frankly, a messaging channel that's comparable to SMS, but is more of the default in certain markets.

Speaker 7

There are no further questions at this time. This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.