Similarweb - Q1 2024

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Similarweb Quarter One Fiscal 2024 Earnings Call. All lines have been placed on the listen-only mode, and the floor will be open for questions and comments following the presentation. If you should require assistance throughout the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad to reach a live operator. At this time, it is my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Rami Myerson. Sir, the floor is yours.

Rami Myerson (VP of Investor Relations)

Thank you, operator. Welcome everyone, to our first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. During this call, we will make forward-looking statements related to our business. These statements may include the expected performance of our business and our future financial results, our strategy, the potential impacts of rising interest rates, rising global inflation, and current macroeconomic and geopolitical conditions, including the current war in Israel, challenges in our business and in the markets in which we operate, our anticipated long-term growth and overall future prospects. These statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected or implied during the call. Further reported results should not be considered as an indication of future performance.

Please review the forward-looking statements discussion in our shareholder letter, along with our Form 20-F, filed with the SEC on February 28, 2024, and in particular, sections entitled "Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Statements and Risk Factors therein," for a discussion of the factors that could cause our actual results to differ from the forward-looking statements. Also, note that any forward-looking statements made on this call are based on information available as of today's date, May 8, 2024. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements we make today, except as required by law. As a reminder, certain financial measures we use in presentations of results and on our call today are expressed on a non-GAAP basis. In particular, we reference non-GAAP operating profit or loss, which represents GAAP operating profit or loss.

Net share-based compensation, adjustments and payments related to business combination, amortization of intangible assets, and certain other non-recurring items. We use this and other non-GAAP financial measures internally to facilitate analysis of our financial and business trends and for internal planning and focusing purposes. We believe these non-GAAP financial measures, when taken collectively, may be helpful to investors because they provide consistency and comparability with past financial performance by excluding certain items that may not be indicative of our business, results of operations or outlook. However, non-GAAP financial measures have limitations as an analytical tool and are presented for supplemental information purposes only. They should not be considered in isolation from or as a substitute for financial information prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation between these GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures is included in our earnings press release, which can be found on our investor relations website at ir.similarweb.com.

Today, we will begin with brief prepared remarks from our CEO, Or Offer, and CFO, Jason Schwartz. Then we will open up the call to questions from sell-side analysts in attendance. Please note that we published a detailed discussion of our first quarter 2024 results in a letter to shareholders for investors' reference, as well as an updated investor presentation with a strategic overview of the business, both of which are available on our investor relations website. With that, I will turn the call over to Or Offer, CEO of Similarweb. Or, please go ahead.

Or Offer (CEO)

Thank you, Rami, and welcome to the team and your first conference call with us. And good morning, and welcome everyone joining the call today. We kick off 2024 with continued momentum in both top line and bottom line performance, and delivered very strong first quarter 2024 results. We grew our revenue by 12% over Q1 last year to $59 million, and we generated nearly $10 million of free cash flow, an amazing achievement we are proud of. Our global customer base grew 16% year-over-year to over 4,800 customers, and the demand for our solution at the top of the funnel remains strong. Our customer and prospect appreciate and value the importance of our digital market data for their business.

As a result, our pipeline remain robust, and we are adding new customer and expanding our penetration into our market. We continue to invest, to expand and enrich our Similarweb digital market data. In March, we acquired Admetricks, a digital ad intelligence leader. I would like to take this opportunity to welcome the Admetricks team to the Similarweb. Ad intelligence is an important tool for corporates and marketing agencies. Online display advertising is estimated to attract more than $174 billion in spending in 2024, according to Statista. For certain global brands, it already comprises of 60% of their global advertising budget. We plan to leverage our digital ad data, along with the Admetricks team's expertise, to enhance our digital ad intelligence offering and launch what we believe will be the best and most comprehensive digital advertising intelligence data in the market.

This will supercharge our competitive intelligence offering. We plan to integrate and monetize this Ad Intelligence data through all of our solutions as well. For our Shopper Intelligence solution, we will add visibility into retail media, online spend. For our Stock Intelligence offering, we will add for public company ad spend and ad revenue. And for our Sales Intelligence, we will improve our ability to help ad sales teams with better data to find and qualify digital advertisers and publishers. And this is why I'm very excited about this opportunity. Last year, we introduced and successfully launched SimilarAsk, our AI-driven digital intelligent assistant. Today, I am excited to tell you about SAM. SAM is our AI-powered Sales Assistant Module. SAM is designed to enhance sales efficiency and effectiveness by automatically delivering precise data-driven insights about prospects directly into our customers' sales workflow.

As we all know, our emails are bombarded with cold outreach emails from salespeople that we all mark as spam, making it very hard for sales teams to engage with our prospects. With SAM, salespeople can use AI text generation to suggest sales speech that are much more likely to resonate with the potential customer. SAM utilize our market insight data and prepare relevant database insight emails that explain to the prospect why they need to engage with the sales team. And we are already receiving fantastic feedback from early adopters of SAM, who have reported a significant increase in outreach response rates. For one of our customers, SAM increased response rates by 20x compared to their previous response rate. The SAM beta is now open, and we are looking forward to seeing its adapting by our customers and its impact over time.

I'm very proud of the continued profitability and free cash flow momentum. We delivered our third consecutive quarter of non-GAAP operating profit and a very strong free cash flow in the quarter. This is a great achievement for us and a solid result of the smart work and discipline of the whole Similarweb team. I'm also really happy to welcome Susan Dunn, our new Chief Revenue Officer. Having spent 32 years at NielsenIQ, including as its revenue officer, Susan knows the market research world inside and out. She has a deep expertise in delivering the business value and operating impact of the market intelligence to many of the largest consumer brands in the world. Welcome, Susan. I'm confident that you are the ideal sales leader to drive our next phase of growth and expansion. Finally, I want to thank our team for another quarter of outstanding results and great execution.

Remember, we are just getting started. Thank you, everyone, for your continued support. With that, Jason, I will turn the call over to you.

Jason Schwartz (CFO)

Thank you, Or, and let me join you in welcoming Rami and Susan to the team as well. Thank you to everyone joining us on the call today to discuss our first quarter results. I will briefly address our financial performance, and then we will open up the call to questions. Our performance in the first quarter reflects good top line and bottom line momentum. Revenue was $59 million for the quarter at the high end of our guidance range. Our $100,000 ARR customer segment now represents 58% of our total ARR, an all-time high, and NRR was 107%, consistent with Q4 2023. An area of strength for us was in our largest customers, where we closed four seven-digit contracts during the quarter, following the 10 seven-digit contracts we closed in the fourth quarter, an excellent result that supports our positive momentum.

At the end of the first quarter, 42% of our ARR is contracted under multi-year commitments, demonstrating the strength and longevity of our customer relationships. Our remaining performance obligations also reached a new record of $214 million, up from $195 million at the end of Q4, providing a positive indicator of our performance durability going forward. While our results on the top line were towards the top end of expectations, we exceeded expectations on our bottom line. Our non-GAAP gross margin was 81% in the first quarter, compared to 80% last year. Our first quarter GAAP operating loss was $2.7 million, while our non-GAAP operating profit was $2.8 million.

This resulted in a non-GAAP operating margin of 5% and represented an improvement of 19 percentage points versus the prior year, and the third consecutive quarter of non-GAAP operating profit. Our sustained focus on operating efficiency continues to deliver excellent results, and we generated $9.7 million in positive free cash flow in the first quarter, a 16% free cash flow margin, and the second consecutive quarter of positive free cash flow. As a result, we ended the first quarter with nearly $55 million in cash and cash equivalents and no outstanding debt. Turning now to Q2 2024, we expect total revenue in the range of $60 million-$60.5 million.

For the full year 2024, we continue to expect total revenue in the range of $242 million-$246 million, representing approximately 12% growth year-over-year at the midpoint of the range. Non-GAAP operating profit for the second quarter is expected to be in the range of $1.5 million-$2 million. For the full year, we expect our operating profit to be between $7 million and $9 million, up from our previous expectations of $6 million-$8 million. As we discussed at the beginning of the year, we are focused on delivering profitable growth and making further progress towards the Rule of 40 over time.

We anticipate being profitable on a Non-GAAP basis and generating positive free cash flow in all of the remaining quarters of 2024. With that, Or and I are ready to answer your questions.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. The floor is now open for questions. If you do have a question, you may press star one on your telephone keypad at this time. If your question has been answered, you can remove yourself from the queue by pressing one. Again, ladies and gentlemen, it's star one. Please hold while we pull for questions. Our first question comes from Arjun Bhatia from William Blair. Go ahead, Arjun.

Arjun Bhatia (Partner and Software Research Analyst)

Perfect. Thank you. Hi, Jason. Hey, Or. Congrats on the strong results here. I wanted to ask on the go-to-market changes and the, you know, the pricing packaging adjustments that you've made. Could you just share with us how customers are receiving those, both at the low end and maybe how you plan to adjust, or where you are in the process of adjusting go-to-market with, on the enterprise side? And I know you hired a new CRO, Susan. I'm curious what initiatives, you know, she might implement, as she gets up to speed here.

Or Offer (CEO)

Hi, Arjun. Thank you for the question. From what I heard, that there was two parts for the question. First one about change we rolled into the go-to-market. So I think, there was two big changes we did in the beginning of the year. One is to centralize and give more focus around customer success effort to our lower part of our customers, for our SMB customers. So give them more focus on value. And the second part is aligning on our strategic account, basically building more focus product by sector in order to give better support and value to our strategic account. So those two changes rolled up in the beginning of the year, and we've seen great success with them in the few months we've rolled them.

And regarding the second question about Susan joining, so super excited. She just joined last week, so she in her, literally her second week. We very excited. She come with a lot of experience selling, you know, data, insights, market research from NielsenIQ. And I think she can help our... She will help us scale a lot our strat motion that is new to us. We're getting better, as you heard from the earnings. We start closing more and more seven-figure deals, and we're seeing huge success and potential at the start, as our data is very unique. We consider really the top digital and data provider in the world, and I think there's a lot of potential, especially with the strat, and we're sure that Susan can help us a lot there. I hope it answers your question.

Arjun Bhatia (Partner and Software Research Analyst)

Yep, very, very helpful. Thanks, Or. The other one I wanted to ask on, Sales Intelligence, or maybe if we zoom out even, where you're seeing incremental demand among your product suites. It sounds like you are making some investments in Sales Intelligence from a product perspective, which is why I brought that up. But, yeah, if we could zoom out and just kind of think product by product, and then on sales specifically, I'm curious how you plan to monetize SAM. Is that something that's just going to be embedded or something that you could potentially, you know, have an add-on pricing for?

Or Offer (CEO)

Yeah, of course. So I think, you're right, it's looking good on a few products that we sell. One, our innovation product is doing really nicely. We now have Shopper Intelligence, our Stock Intelligence. It's new products we introduced lately that's doing well. We have a lot of custom product. People come and want some unique data, more on the strategic side, and that is doing very well. And on the Sales Intelligence, yeah, there's a lot of great innovation, mostly on AI, and it was the first product we implemented AI strategy in order to enrich the workflow for the user. And if you think about it, we are like a market research company, and the sales organization use us to find the most ideal prospect they should approach.

They use our platform to find interesting insights, to share with those prospects, to tell them, "Listen, I see this and this data in Similarweb. You should speak with me. I have a solution to help you solve this pain that I see." Now, with AI, all this workflow can be automatically, so it's very nice. You can tell the AI, "Listen, I'm selling a marketing automation software. Please find me all the companies online that their email traffic is not doing well compared to their competition, and write me email to send them, to show them that they are not in a good place, and they should speak with me." The AI can automate all this process, write the email, and really help them open the door.

This is a very unique approach to sales, because as I said, in the earnings call, we all feel this pain that we bothered with a lot of emails of people try to prospect you that are just cold email, that everybody markets spam. When you get these kinds of insights that tailor to you, that show you that you have a pain, somebody can really help you. This approach for the seller is very powerful, and really we're seeing a great increase of response rate to the customer that work with SAM. So we're really excited about it.

Arjun Bhatia (Partner and Software Research Analyst)

Perfect. Very helpful. Thank you, Or. Thank you, guys. Take care.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from Ryan McWilliams from Barclays. Go ahead, Ryan.

Pete Newton (Equity Research Analyst)

Hi, thanks for taking the question. This is Pete Newton on for Ryan McWilliams. Or, now that we're kind of further into the year, how have you seen macro impact your business at this point? And, and how do enterprise spending budgets look for the rest of FY 2024?

Or Offer (CEO)

Yeah. So macro, macro environment is kind of the same, like we don't see it getting better like it used to be in 2021 or beginning of 2022. It's kind of, I, I feel, going back to 2020 and, when it was before, and we all just need to do. We work harder and do better job and execution to scale. So I think this is what we see. And there was a second question, or was only one?

Pete Newton (Equity Research Analyst)

That was just one for now, and then just how you, how you think about budgets the rest of the year on the enterprise side, based off what you've seen so far early this year.

Or Offer (CEO)

I think, I think it's looking good. I think it's looking in a good place.

Pete Newton (Equity Research Analyst)

Okay, great. And then just a quick follow-up. Anything to call out in 1Q in terms of vertical performance?

Or Offer (CEO)

Yeah, I think on the vertical performance, we have two teams that are doing a great job. E-commerce doing very well, we have a vertical selling to investors also, that still perform really nicely. And we have the OEM team, that sell to companies that want to integrate our data into their own solution and software. That is also doing really well.

Pete Newton (Equity Research Analyst)

Very helpful. Thanks, guys.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Our next question comes from Brett Knoblauch from Cantor Fitzgerald. Go ahead.

Thomas Shinske (Equity Research Associate)

Hi, guys, this is Thomas Shinske on for Brett. Congrats on the great quarter. Just on the acquisition of Admetricks, just, I guess, how we should be thinking about that. How much of the customer growth in the quarter can be attributed to customers coming over from that platform? And then how should we think about this contributing to the financials, both on revenue and, you know, margins as we progress throughout 2024 and beyond?

Jason Schwartz (CFO)

Yeah. Hi, it's Jason. Tom, thanks so much for the question. Admetricks was really not a material contribution to the quarter. It's a great business, and what we think Admetricks is really gonna provide is to when we take their knowledge together with our data, we're gonna be building out an outstanding Ad Intelligence product and Ad Intelligence data that can be monetized across not only our research intelligence solution, but also our Investor Intelligence, Investor Intelligence, Stock Intelligence, Shopper Intelligence. Everybody really needs those data points to tell them what's going on in whether you're an investor looking for that alternative data, or whether you're a CPG company and trying to understand the trends of retail ads. So all of that is stuff that we think is gonna be the driver of that, ROI on this acquisition. Really excited about it.

Thomas Shinske (Equity Research Associate)

Awesome. Sounds great. Thanks, Jason. And then just, if I may, on retention, I guess good stabilization in the quarter. You know, we're seeing broader, broader software churn, so it's great to see this. I guess what, what's driving the stabilization? Is it the, is the new pricing and packaging model with Similarweb? You know, demand for AI? I guess you guys, you guys mentioned the, the SAM a lot in the call and the press release, so I'm just curious to hear on that. Thanks.

Or Offer (CEO)

The retention is, you know, it's historical data information. You think that the people that churn in Q1, they made it. So we're talking about customers that decided to churn in November, December last year. So, they don't, they don't -- didn't enjoy from all those nice benefits we launched now. I think if you're talking about the stabilization of the retention rate, because a lot of we were pulling last year that we now start collecting the fruits, we still did a lot of great changes, as I said, around our customer success organization and in Q1, that we very eager to see how it's gonna impact the retention going forward.

As I said, we put a lot of RCA around our SMB sector, and we moved most of the people there to be value people, focused on product engagement and education. So we still hope that all these initiatives will help to increase retention over time.

Thomas Shinske (Equity Research Associate)

Awesome. Thank you, guys, and congrats again.

Jason Schwartz (CFO)

Thanks.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from Tyler Radke from Citi. Go ahead, Tyler.

Tyler Radke (Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

... Hi, thanks for taking the question. Jason, maybe for you, just wanted to see if you could put a little bit more color on the assumptions in the outlook. Obviously, you know, decent beat here in Q1. You guiding Q2 slightly ahead, but not raising the full year. Is that just conservatism? I know there's some go-to-market changes. Macro is a little bit shaky, but any changes that you'd like to highlight as you're thinking about the second half, relative to 90 days ago?

Jason Schwartz (CFO)

Hey, thanks, Tyler. You know us, we like to give guidance that we know to meet. We're really proud that we're, you know, hitting the numbers on the high end of the guidance that we've done. I think that we see that trend continuing. And on the profitability, where we are seeing that efficiency coming through, we took the opportunity to raise the guidance on the profitability from $6-$8 million to $7-$9 million for the year. So, we are looking at that, where we see them make sense.

Tyler Radke (Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Great. And then as you think about the Similarweb 3.0 with the, you know, lower upfront pricing, just as we're thinking about customer ARPU here, obviously that's putting some short-term pressure on that. When do you think that stabilizes, you know, as just in terms of that ARPU? Is that next quarter, or could this take a while, just given that you are still seeing pretty strong new customer additions?

Jason Schwartz (CFO)

Yeah, I think that the way to think about the, about the model, about the business is that we really have two ends of a, of a barbell. On one hand, we've got these large customers, the over $100,000, that we, we take them from, you know, starting at thousands or tens of thousands, to get hundreds of thousands of, of dollars. And now you're seeing those guys taking up to millions of dollars in transactions, and that's a journey that we're really proud of. In fact, when you look at the, you know, 378 $100,000 customers that we have at the end of the quarter, the overwhelming majority of them started well less than $100,000. Most customers don't start at that level.

What we've seen is that journey is the right way for us to do, and we think that that's the, you know, that has been our success over time, and that's one of the things that we're doubling down. On one end, you're gonna see those large customers, those strategic accounts, getting bigger, and at the same time, we want to keep on having flow of, you know, 100, 200 customers every single quarter that come in, because those customers become the NRR for 2025 and 2026 and beyond. So we're actually very happy with the levels that we're seeing over here, and if it goes up or down by, you know, $500 over time on the blended ARPU, we think that that's okay.

Tyler Radke (Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from Patrick Walravens from Citizens. Go ahead, Patrick.

Aaron Kimson (VP)

Thanks so much. This is Aaron Kimson on for Pat. First question: What sort of tailwinds are you seeing from tech customers using your data to train their large language models? And maybe can you help us quantify that in 1Q relative to 4Q and how you expect it going forward?

Or Offer (CEO)

I think we're still seeing nice momentum of companies that looking to buy data to train their LLM in different angles. So we still saw some nice activity in the quarter. Going forward, I don't know. It's an interesting question. We'll need to wait and see if this will still be hot topic.

Aaron Kimson (VP)

Got it. And then, Or, can you talk about the current state of the Investor Intelligence product? What's on the roadmap there? I think you mentioned in your prepared remarks, adding ad spend and ad revenue, and how meaningful driver of growth do you envision Investor Intelligence being going forward?

Or Offer (CEO)

Yeah, and thanks for this question. So I'm super bullish about this product, this solution of Stock Intelligence. And, you know, it's our product that help you get all the different signals from the digital world, that you can evaluate public company performance before they release their earnings. And this software is part of what we will call the alternative data market, that we assume is probably $10 billion market and growing. And we believe that the more we're gonna increase the coverage. Right now, we support 3,000 stocks in the basic data, that is mostly like traffic and engagement. And we have, I think, around a little bit above 100 stocks that are more advanced, when you can get signals that can show you revenue growth, customer growth, and you get more signals that correlate with what the companies are reporting.

This is very exciting, and can really see a very clear R-squared, that we can predict some companies' performance, and it is very impressive. Now, going forward, we still have a lot of data assets we need to map to different signals and upload to this platform. So I know that in the roadmap, they're gonna introduce our app data. We have very good app data about usage, and think about that you can see how many people install Tesla app on their phone. This is very strong correlation to how many Tesla cars are being sold out now. So these data sets will go into the platform in this quarter, and we have more data set, like technographic, about how many people implement Zendesk chat in their website. This is a very strong signal for Zendesk adding customer in a quarter.

Those are amazing signals. This technographic data set would introduce also or this quarter or next quarter into the Stock Intelligence. So very exciting thing there, and I'm super bullish about this solution.

Aaron Kimson (VP)

Very helpful. Thanks so much.

Operator (participant)

Again, ladies and gentlemen, it's star one to ask a question on the phone. There appear to be no further questions at this time. I'd like to turn this back to management for any closing remarks.

Or Offer (CEO)

Thank you, everyone. I'm super excited on the quarter result, especially the almost $10 million Free Cash Flow, and I'm super proud on that, and we're just getting started. Thank you, everyone.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. This does conclude today's conference. We thank you for your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time.