Q1 2024 Braze Inc Earnings Call
Speaker 1: identified in today's press release and our SEC filings, both available on the investor relations section of our website.
Speaker 1: 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 to aid investors in further understanding the company's fiscal first quarter 2024 performance, in addition to the impact these items have on the financial results. Please refer to the reconciliation of our non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable financial measures in the world.
Speaker 2: call over to Bill. Thank you, Chris, and good afternoon, everyone. We're very pleased with our first quarter performance, which again demonstrated the power of the Braze customer engagement platform, even against a challenging macroeconomic background.
Speaker 2: We got off to a great start to the year, generating $101.8 million in revenue, up 31% versus the prior year, while driving operating efficiency in the business. non-GAAP gross margins increased 100 basis points year over year, and we demonstrated strong leverage, with non-GAAP operating margins improving by over 700 basis points compared to the first quarter last year.
Speaker 2: We also generated record-free cash flow of $21.7 million, driven in part by solid fourth-quarter bookings. As we progress through Fiscal 2024, we plan to continue driving strong top-line growth while maintaining cost discipline, and believe we are well on our way to achieving the near end long-term profitability goals outlined on our fourth quarter call in March.
Speaker 2: Brands continue to recognize the high ROI that can be achieved through personalized, cross-channel customer engagement enabled by the Braze platform. In the first quarter, we increased our total customer count by 96 sequentially to a total of 1,866.
Speaker 2: continuing to win against both legacy marketing clouds and point solutions with our best-in-class customer engagement platform.
Speaker 2: Recent new business wins and upsells included Procore Technologies, Sonos, Sweetgreen, and Swimpley, among many others. We continue to realize strong growth across multiple customer classes, geographies, and verticals, with both retail e-commerce and median entertainment showing particularly strong year-over-year growth during the period. Braze again benefited from vendor consolidation this quarter.
Speaker 2: and we believe this trend will continue as enterprises with ambition and sophistication consolidate their technology ecosystem with modern omnichannel customer engagement solutions like Braze. We further believe that both the legacy replacement cycle and this vendor consolidation trend will accelerate as customers look to capitalize on new AI-driven advancements in customer engagement.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 2: As I mentioned on our fourth quarter earnings call, existing at the leading edge of technology is in our DNA and at the core of our innovation roadmap. Braze is a company that perceived the opportunity presented by the coming wide-scale adoption of mobile more than a decade ago, and since then, we have worked relentlessly to seize that opportunity through the use of sophisticated technology.
Speaker 2: For years, Braces had dedicated teams of data engineers and data scientists focused on using machine learning to build AI into our product, with the goal of making marketers more effective at engaging their end users by optimizing customer journeys, generating more relevant content, and enhancing targeting strategies. Even more importantly, we believe that the ability to use machine learning and generative AI are as fundamental to being a software engineer as using databases and operating systems.
Speaker 2: generative AI more recently.
Speaker 2: Braze debuted a GPT integration for email subject line generation over a year ago, and we were early to integrate generative AI for images into the message composition experience, launching a dashboard integration with Dolly last December . More recently, we launched a message content checking tool built on top of GPT-4, helping marketers to avoid copywriting mistakes and
Speaker 2: the accidental sending of test messages, or sending culturally insensitive content. We are also testing a wide array of new capabilities, including generating SQL for advanced segmentation and reporting use cases, automatically suggesting improvements to message copy during composition, and even an adversarial A-B testing simulator.
Speaker 2: that we believe may be able to generate and predict winning message variants for populations before a campaign is even launched.
Speaker 2: Customers have been successfully using both our AI copywriting assistant and automatic image generation for months to generate message content and inspire new engagement strategies. Lowering the burden of content creation while also serving as an in-dashboard muse encourages customers to bring new use cases and to braise more quickly.
Speaker 2: while also expanding their usage of the powerful experimentation features native to Canvas, our proprietary no-code visual development environment.
Speaker 2: We believe this enhanced agility and reduced burden to test new ideas further combines with our other machine learning driven experiment optimization capabilities, further compounding the ROI we deliver to our customers.
Speaker 2: We know from our customer base that even small or one-person teams can still accomplish a lot with Braze. And as a company that has never charged for seats, we expect to see generative AI-driven productivity enhancements for individual marketers translate into even more Braze usage over time.
Speaker 2: We believe this will further cement our stickiness and promote expansion into new user populations, driving higher message volumes and the adoption of more channels.
Speaker 2: Internally, we talk a lot about smoothing the on-ramp into Braze as a key part of ensuring that the differentiation presented by Braze's sophisticated capabilities remains broadly accessible to our ever-growing market, even to those who are early in their journey of adopting the modern practice of customer engagement.
Speaker 2: Over the last five years, we've seen an acceleration of two trends that highlight the importance of tackling this challenge, which also translates into a deeper moat for Brace's technology and our customer community.
Speaker 2: First, is the rising imperative of collecting first-party data and making it available in real-time to engagement systems. And second, is the increased ROI of tightly coordinating customer engagement with the product journey, often including the delivery of messaging directly inside the product experience.
Speaker 2: Both of these trends mean that a customer engagement professional who expands their traditional marketing skill set to include a deeper understanding of data analysis, product design, and basic coding will find themselves generating higher ROI for their brand and advancing more quickly in their career. Braze's customer education and community investments are designed to help more marketers make this transition.
Speaker 2: and we believe that the integration of generative AI into our platform and the pairing of AI with our Canvas environment more broadly will compound these efforts by further smoothing the on-ramp into Braze for our new customers, while encouraging the use of our advanced targeting, personalization, and experimentation capabilities for those that are already familiar with Braze.
Speaker 2: All of this is a continuation of a central principle of our product strategy, which is that immense value can be created when you place the power of programmability and data directly into the hands of those who are closest to the customer journey and brand promise.
Speaker 2: It's why we built Canvas, and it's why we continue to imbue it with not only additional power and flexibility, but also with enhanced usability and collaboration tools.
Speaker 2: And of course, generative AI isn't the whole story. Preceding these features has been a robust collection of automated decision-making techniques using both machine learning and advanced statistical methods, including our predictive suite, intelligence suite, and a personalized variant capability integrated into Canvas.
Speaker 2: Some of these features are already monetized directly through premium add-ons, while others are provided as part of our standard offering, a blended approach that we anticipate continuing as we release more AI features over time.
Speaker 2: All of these capabilities are integrated deeply into Brase's data flow and execution stack, and represent early examples of what we believe will be an area of enduring differentiation for Brase.
Underlying them is our differentiated architecture, which distinguishes braise from our competitors in three key ways.
First, is our comprehensive data flow and messaging capabilities.
Last fiscal year, Brace processed over 13 trillion data points and sent over 2 trillion messages, all with our real-time stream processor.
Customer data flows into braze across our customers' data ecosystems inclusive of direct integrations into their products and their data warehouses.
We are also integrated into a wide array of consumer touchpoints and end-user product interfaces, which enables us to take action across many channels. The inputs to AI, and the direct outputs from its decisions, are both more flexible and comprehensive with Braze, and the added value this represents is a key component of our ongoing success with vendor consolidation.
Next is real-time execution. Our ability to ingest and act on newly generated data in real-time means that AI and Braze is able to make better decisions faster.
Braze already employs multiple machine learning and statistical methods to enable automated decision making in real time within Canvas, and we're experimenting with custom transformers for automated product recommendation that will be able to inject the outputs of generative AI into message content on a per user basis.
Third, is our focus on experimentation and programmability. Building on Canvas' flexibility and strengthening experimentation, we'll continue injecting both AI, ML, and statistical techniques for automated decision making into an increasing number of decision points throughout the user journey, enabling new AI techniques to be tested against existing manual strategies.
and against subsequent enhancement to our AI-driven methods. It's an incredibly exciting time to be leading a team as innovative as Braze in a market with as much potential as customer engagement.
And even as we approach our 12-year anniversary this summer, it still feels like we're just getting started.
Before I turn it over to Isabelle, I'd like to note that on June 1st, we closed the acquisition of Northstar, our exclusive reseller of Brace Technology in Australia and New Zealand. We are thrilled to have brought their team fully in-house and look forward to expanding in the Australia and New Zealand markets in the coming months and years. We look forward to updating you on our progress in that dynamic market. Despite macro challenges, we look forward to bringing you the best market in Australia and New Zealand.
We are confident in our ability to execute on our growth plan, while remaining disciplined and on a path to profitability. Further, we believe the investments in our products, including generative AI, in addition to the strong secular customer engagement wins at our backs, positions braves to become the industry standard for customer engagement in the coming years. And now, I'll turn the call over to Isabel.
Thank you, Bill, and thank you everyone for joining us today. As Bill mentioned, we reported a strong first quarter with revenue up 31% year-over-year to $101.8 million. This was driven by a combination of existing customer contract expansion, renewals, and new business. Our subscription revenue remains the primary component of our total top line.
66 customers as of April 30th, up 363 from the same period last year, and up 96 from the prior quarter. Our total number of large customers, which we define as those spending at least $500,000 annually, grew 27% year-over-year to 164.
and as of April 30th contributed 57% to our total ARR compared to a 54% contribution as of the same quarter last year.
Compared to last quarter, this reflects a 5% increase from 156 large customers that contributed 57% of our total ARR as of January 31st.
Measured across all customers, dollar-based net retention was 122%, while dollar-based net retention for large customers was 124%. Rejection was broadly distributed across industries and geographic regions.
Revenue outside the U.S. contributed 43% of our total revenue in the first quarter, in line with the prior quarter.
In the first quarter, our total remaining performance obligation was $478 million, up 22% year-over-year and up 5% sequentially.
Current RPO was $325 million, up 28% year over year, and up 4% 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-gap gross profit in the quarter was $70 million, representing a non-gap gross margin of 68.8%. This compares to a non-gap gross profit of $52.5 million and non-gap gross margin of 67.8% in the first quarter of last year.
The 100 basis point year-over-year margin improvement was driven by ongoing efficiencies related to personnel costs and continued economies of scale in our core technology expenses. non-GAAP sales and marketing expense was $49.3 million or 48% of revenue compared to $40.2 million or 52% 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 $19.6 million, or 19% of revenue, compared to $15.5 million in 2018.
$1.1 million or 17% of revenue compared to $15 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 subscription and licenses.
non-GAAP operating loss was $16 million compared to a non-GAAP operating loss of $18 million in the prior year quarter. non-GAAP net loss attributable to braised shareholders in the quarter was $12.6 million, or a loss of 13 cents per share compared to a loss of $17.7 million.
or a loss of 19 cents per share in the prior year quarter. Now turning to the balance sheet and cash flow statement. We ended the quarter with $507.4 million in cash, cash equivalents, restricted cash, and marketable securities.
Cash provided by operations during the quarter was $22.5 million compared to $17.9 million in the prior year quarter, driven by improved operating efficiencies, including improved spend management. While we reiterate that we expect our cash flow to fluctuate from quarter to quarter given the timing of customer and vendor payments, we note that this was the first period in which we delivered two consecutive quarters of positive operating cash flow.
of AI and ML capabilities to internal productivity and efficiency.
Beyond product use cases, Braze is rapidly experimenting with AI and ML capabilities throughout the organization via projects designed to shorten ramp times, improve productivity, and streamline processes.
Projects are in flight using both custom large language models and GPT-4 via OpenAI's APIs to serve as co-pilots to our sales, solution consulting, and post-sales teams, including an exciting project focused on customer support, which we believe will increase productivity and decrease enablement needs by improving discovery and automating research across our comprehensive public face-
capabilities to complement decision making and drive operational efficiencies.
And now turning to our forecast. We are off to a strong start in fiscal 2024, and interest in high-quality customer engagement solutions remains strong. However, the broader macroeconomic environment remains challenging, and as such, our guidance continues to assume the current macro environment persists.
through fiscal 2024. We intend to maintain cost discipline and reiterate comments made during our Q4 earnings call that we believe we are well positioned to achieve a non-GAAP operating margin of better than negative seven percent in Q4 of this year.
For the second quarter, we expect revenue to be in the range of $108 to $109 million, which represents a year-over-year growth rate of approximately 26% at the midpoint.
This includes a $1 million contribution from our acquisition of North Star, which closed on June 1st.
For the second quarter, non-GAAP operating loss is expected to be in the range of $15 million to $16 million. Second quarter non-GAAP net loss is expected to be $13 to $14 million. And second quarter non-GAAP net loss per share in the range of $0.13 to $0.14 per share based on approximately 97.4 million weighted average.
As a reminder, we expect our North Star acquisition to add less than 2% to fiscal year 24 revenue, and our updated full year guidance includes a $4 million contribution from North Star.
Fiscal year 2024 non-GAAP operating loss is expected to be in the range of $54 million to $58 million. GAAP net loss for the same period is expected to be in the range of $50 to $54 million.
Fiscal year 2024 non-GAAP net loss per share is expected to be $0.51 to $0.55 per share, based on a full-year weighted average basic share count of approximately 97.8 million shares. Our commitment to growing the top line while improving operating income and free cash flow margins remains unchanged. We reiterate that we expect Braze will achieve positive quarterly...
And with that, we'll now open the call for questions. Operator, please begin the Q&A.
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. If you would like to ask a question, please use the raise hand feature at the bottom of your Zoom window.
I will wait one moment while the queue assembles. Our first question comes from Ryan McWilliams from Barclays. Please unmute your audio and ask your question.
Thanks for taking the question. Bill, how do you think gender of AI, real time, student processing, more important in marketing campaigns, and any early signs on how gender of AI could impact a member of Interact and Flutter Platform? Thanks.
Yeah, absolutely. And I spoke about this last quarter, and it's one of the areas that I'm most excited about because of the way that it lowers the creative and content production burden and allows for more and more people to take advantage of the differentiated capabilities that we bring to bear through Canvas and are just generally pushing people in the direction toward more modern customer engagement. So we've been really excited to see the...
content checking tool, including a marketer sharing with us that it gave them the confidence to move faster because it provides a robust copywriting capability without having an individual that would actually provide that on their team. With respect to pre-existing AI ML features, these are widely used across our customer base, including throughout Canvas. And I'd wager that many of our customers using them don't know that there's machine learning going on under the hood for some of them. And I think that's a great...
going to cause. I can dig into those as people ask additional questions, but I think when you look at it with respect to competition, when you look at the point I've made about Brace having a broad spectrum of both inputs and a flexible set of outputs, I think if you think about what it takes to really fully leverage the automated decision-making capabilities, you
You need to have a full data picture that needs to be inclusive of the user's historical behavior, their attributes, the evolving context around them as they either move through their own lives or the product journey that they're having with your brand. And you need to have the ability to quickly take action when the insights that are generated from that data point you in a new direction. You know you want to nudge them toward taking a new high value action you want to
point solution competitor that's simply not there in all the moments that matter and has a disjoint look at the data picture. Or you look at the legacy marketing clouds who suffer from disjoint channel by channel architectures, which inhibit cross-channel use cases even today. And we know that their batch oriented data or architectures limit their ability to deliver real-time experiences.
And that new reality is creating an even higher opportunity cost for companies who are remaining either on the legacy marketing clouds or continuing to use Silent Point solutions. We believe that in order to take full advantage of what AI has to offer, you need to be comprehensively integrated into the user journey and executing in real-time at scale. And that's just where Braze has been the whole time. And so we're really excited to see the market moving.
philosophy over time. And for Isabel, you know, solid RTO performance in the quarter. Were there any deals that were pushed out of 4Q into 1Q? And for new bookings, have you seen any signs of stabilization or improvement since the end of the quarter? Thank you.
Yeah, thanks for the question. So look, I think the overall evolution of the macro has not really changed. And what we are seeing in terms of elevated deal scrutiny and those elongated deal cycles, it is persisting. And so we started talking about this last quarter. We continue to see that evolve. And so there are deals from Q.
And so that scenario is taken into consideration. And then, sorry, your second question.
Just to say in the corner, have you seen any stabilization or improvement on new booking? Yeah. So we are continuing to approach this with sort of a risk-adjusted view, but we are seeing some of the benefits of the investments that we've made to continue to improve and enhance overall productivity of our sales force.
Appreciate the call. Thank you.
And our next question comes from Gabriella Borges, Goldman Sachs.
Good afternoon, thank you. Phil, I wanted to ask on the longer term implications of generative AI and what customers are telling you, the way it's going to impact that budget. In other words, what are you hearing in terms of customers spending intentions on marketing technology and software versus marketing people versus other areas of the budget.
And is it actually leading to customers potentially thinking about taking up the budgets from marketing software over the medium term? Yeah, so I think about the marketers that are actually hands on keyboard in Braze as a complementary investment that a brand needs to make into achieving customer engagement goals. And in some cases, when you look at the total cost of ownership of obviously software like Braze, you know, one of the
six week or a three month cycle where they refresh content rather than getting down to the more agile teams that we see today. We know that as teams adopt a more agile methodology with more experimentation, they're trying out more content, more strategies, they're bringing more moments in the user journey into this agile and experimental framework instead of just having it be some sort of transactional message or something that is hard coded, which is so often the case with a lot of product delivery.
agent practitioners in the economy is still very low compared to the potential that more and more brands have. I think that we're going to continue to see software like Braze make them even more productive, which improves the ROI function for bringing those teams together and for up-leveling them. I think that there's also some just really exciting things happening from a skill set perspective. We just spoke about...
more people becoming comfortable with basic scripting and other low-code approaches to automation. And you see that in some of the features that we have that we're working on right now, where SQL or HTML templates or looking at data transformer logic or the liquid logic that enables personalization, these are all slightly technical concepts that definitely are not accessible by all marketers.
And what ChatTPT and other sorts of code-generating co-pilots are going to do is it's going to, first, it's going to help generate them, but second, it's going to really teach people that they can be more comfortable working with these more advanced ideas. It also, I think, increases ROI in other systems to be able to use first-party data and real-time data, both of which should encourage ancillary investments that kind of pave the way for braver actor.
the ROI of the investment by enhancing productivity, we should see both the software spend and the size and the skill set of the community around customer engagement continue to grow.
Yeah, that makes sense and it ties nicely into a little bit of a longer term roadmap question. You mentioned the dynamic around consolidation of point products. You talked a little bit about competition. How are you thinking about brains expanding longer term?
outside of marketing into perhaps adjacencies and other front office applications? Yeah, so you know when I look at this and look at the places where Braze's underlying foundation is supportive of us continuing to take on more enterprise workloads and expand into new personas over time, it kind of models or parallels the same structure.
runtime and execution engine, and then you have experimentation and programmability through Canvas. And you saw just recently we had a big productivity release, which was really focused on bringing more and more people into the Canvas environment, enabling it to be used for more use cases.
And I think that when you extrapolate that forward, you see this future vision for Braze that really provides this real-time compute engine that lives in the flow of data being generated by customers through first-party data as well as just other sorts of enterprise workflows and provides the business user the ability to not just kind of define these workloads in Braze but actually optimize and experiment with them over time.
expand and break down the silos that exist within marketing teams. I think we have a proven ability already to bring a disparate set of personas into the braze environment, really kind of create a home for them and produce value and encourage collaboration amongst them as they bring more and more workloads into you know into ultimately canvas. And so as we continue to capture more of those I think we see you know more scale there's more of a center of gravity coming in because the data flow is all in that one place.
defined by the Canvas engine, and that just creates tremendous potential and optionality for us in the future.
Sounds good, thanks for the detail. Absolutely.
And our next question comes from Taylor McInnis, UBS. Yeah, hi. Thanks so much for taking my question. I want to touch on the 2Q revenue guidance strength. So if we normalize 1Q and 2Q quarter over quarter growth for the two less days in the first quarter, as well as North Star.
it looks like at the high end of the 2Q organic guide, the sequential growth that is only a point below what we saw in 1Q. So the guide seems to apply some potential reversal of the decelerating sequential growth that we've seen. So can you just touch on what you saw on the corridor as well as what you're seeing in the demand environment today that's driving or giving you comfort in the outlook? particular
That will then reverse in Q2 when we get the full 92 days in the quarter versus 89. So a part of that is seasonal. But there is definitely some, we're not necessarily seeing business, material business acceleration. We are of course continuing to apply the same philosophical risk adjustment.
going forward, but you're seeing the seasonal difference between Q2 and Q1 there. Awesome, thanks so much for answering my question. Our next question will be from Michael Berg, Wells Fargo. Hi, congrats to the quarter and thanks for taking my question.
I want to piggyback off of Gabriela's question on consolidation and competition. Maybe you can help us understand better what's driving that currently in the near term. I think you guys are announcing that you're going to have.
ID resolution, features are coming out soon and I think about that plus your data cloud ingestion capability. It seems like that can replace CDP just as an example so maybe you can help walk us through that dynamic. Thank you.
Yeah, I mean I think all these things work together. So first you continue to see expansion of our channel options, which I've also referred to as kind of the outputs from the decision making. And so as we've added WhatsApp in recent quarters, we've continued to expand our audience network integrations as we've continued to increase the flexibility of in-app messages to include more robust surveys and other sorts of capture forms. And just kind of continue to march ahead, the integration.
you know, is lessened. And so we definitely are going to continue to stay partnered, you know, with CDPs, with our CTL vendors, and with the data warehouses because those are all augmentation on top of the direct integrations into the products that our customers have. But our entire data picture is more than just making sure the inputs are coming in. You know, we're also doing more from a data transformation and a data governance perspective, and we're making it so that more of the operational...
have the ongoing operational burden of babysitting them forever. We think that that actually improves the working relationship between marketers and between those data and engineering teams over time. It creates more organizational desire to actually move more and more use cases into Braze because it's a place that's delivering not just the ROI through the capability but it's doing so in a way that's streamlined and operationally efficient. And then of course you know as you continue to move more use cases into a place like you
through our flexible webhooks and the other logic that exists within it. And so, when you kind of think about the extensibility there, you continue to pull in more use cases over time. And so, just across the board, you know, we're really thinking about how do we smooth the on-ramp of getting data into Brase, how do we make sure that over time, organizations have across the entire board, you know, have a lot of data to be able to get data into Brase.
in, you let them experiment and drive more value out of moving more and more workloads into Canvas and give the massive flexibility to be able to deliver, you know, outputs whether those are messages or product delivery or what have you through, you know, the flexibility of all of our different channels. And those combine together to just continue to push vendor consolidation. Helpful. Thank you very much. Our next question comes from Derek Wood with TD.
what you saw across enterprise versus commercial cohorts.
Yeah, so I think as people are generally aware in SaaS, Q4 tends to be a pretty enterprise-heavy quarter just because of the way the budget cycles work with a lot of these enterprises. That definitely drives some Q4-specific behavior. As we got into Q1, I think that, as Isabelle mentioned, we're continuing to broadly see a lot of the same pressures in the macro. So a little bit more commercial business coming in.
the work that we've done to improve execution, you know, our work against, you know, competitor tactics and things like that has all been really bearing fruit. And we've just continued to see, you know, braise people across braise all over the world, rising to the occasion of this difficult macro and making sure that, you know, we're executing during this time where it's such a great opportunity for us to be separating away from the competition. You know, I know it's hard to always see that when the...
things start to improve. I'm not going to speculate on exactly when that's going to happen. You know, we're still seeing a pretty similar environment as we have for the last couple quarters, but we're excited about it. You know, we're controlling everything we can, and I think we're doing a great job of it.
Got it. And Isabelle, one for you. Very strong free cash flow in the quarter. I know, as you commented, there tends to be volatility quarter to quarter, but any goalposts we should think about keeping in mind for free cash flow for the year versus how you're guiding operating income.
Yeah, so I mean I'm going to come back to the point that I've made over the last couple quarters that free cash flow is going to continue to be volatile quarter in and quarter out. So we advise folks to look at it on more of a four quarter trailing. I'll reiterate the longer term guide of by the end of next year being both operating income positive by the fourth quarter of next year in the quarter as well as free cash flow positive in that fourth quarter of next year.
Piper Sadler. Good afternoon. I wanted to go back to kind of a macro demand environment. Totally understand that the environment is still challenging, sales cycle remains challenging, but you did flag retail and media entertainment as one area of strength you saw in the quarter.
I was hoping you could double click into the drivers of that improvement. Is there something specific to those verticals that's resonating around first party data? Is it omnichannel? Just walk us through maybe a challenge macro in those environments, but Braze's ability to do a little bit better. Thanks.
Yeah, I think it's both of those things. I think also, you know, Braze has shown a tremendous ability over the years to get, you know, great reference and landmark accounts in categories and be able to leverage the increased, you know, know how that we have around the business and those customer examples to be able to continue to expand within those categories. We've also with with retail and e-comm in particular, we've also done a lot on the product side in order to do things like improve our Shopify integration and continue to build out, you know, even.
In any given year, we've seen our ability to build on prior momentum within different categories. There's other places where we spread our bets out and make sure that we're always cracking into new categories for the future so that we can continue to have robust, diversified growth even as things like the macro or other sorts of competition effects might hit a particular vertical or another. We've always been very diversified, and I think it's given a good durability and predictability to our results, and we're continuing to...
like focused on avoidance of loss, which is that everyone is kind of talking about needing to invest in first party data as their third party data sets either become, you know, invalid, incomplete, illegal to use, etc. And, you know, they're frantically trying to build up a first party data set so they can keep running the same performance marketing strategies as before. The next stage of that, which is the stage that you know, most braise customers are at is really realizing that first party data has a job.
move in a positive direction. We're really excited to see then, the next stage of that is when customers start to look at their first party relationships as an important brand asset and one that gives them the ability to have more flexibility within their business model. Because on top of that customer relationship, you can start to expand the breadth of products and services that you're delivering to them. You can extend the lifetime of
And we see that whole spectrum across both our prospect and customer base, but it's an evolution that's all moving in one direction and it all points toward more future success for us.
Sounds good. It's great to see this all in execution. Thank you. Thank you. And our next question comes from Brian Peterson with Raymond James.
Hi, thanks for taking the question. Just one for me. So I wanted to double quick on the vendor consolidation point. I know it's come up in other questions, but Bill, you mentioned that as a benefit this quarter. Would you characterize that as something that's really reflecting this year, or is that more of a continuation of the norm? How do we think about the balance?
of cross-sell versus up-sell in that NRR metric this year. Thanks, guys. Yeah, so I think we are seeing a bit of an inflection. Obviously, as I mentioned before with the macro, where it is, it's hard to really compare to historical data because there are some other conflating factors that are out there, but if you think through what's going on with enterprise software buying right now, there's a lot more scrutiny on the budgets and the stack, and there's been, you know, there's been...
as a competitive set in terms of being really comprehensive from a cross-channel perspective and really being able to execute on all these use cases. I've spoken in the past about the importance of Braze's vertical stack design where because we put such a strong abstraction layer over the channels, the feature set that you have within Braze for any given channel has a lot of consistency across it.
quickly competitive with even single channel focused software as we add new channels. Similarly, not just from a feature set perspective, but actually from a familiarity perspective, because we've been designed to have all of these integrated together, which, you know, as I mentioned before, is very different from how the legacy marketing clouds were assembled, which was mostly through inorganic expansion where all the channels kind of work a little bit differently. The feature sets are...
can add it to my inbox, I can start to run surveys, that there's just a lot that we've done to smooth the on-ramp and that expansion ramp, both for new customers to come in and feel confident that they can pull together four or five prior vendors and run all those use cases through Braze, as well as maybe someone that only started with one or two channels in Braze, and then systematically going through the rest of their ecosystem.
to kind of bloat out a number of different point solutions when they maybe didn't have as much scrutiny on the purchasing. And then similarly, another important thing that's happening is just more collaboration across these teams. And so I mentioned that earlier about thinking about marketing and product and data teams. And so there are certain product use cases that you may have bought either a different vendor for, like our launch of feature flags that we had last fall, or maybe you...
that you've got things like our audience syncing, which started out with, you know, Facebook and Google audience manager integrations a couple years ago, and we launched that. We've since expanded into a whole bunch of other ad networks, looking at places like TikTok and Pinterest and LinkedIn and what have you. And that actually is now creating a reason for more teams to collaborate with each other within the braze environment.
And then you've got that longer term process happening with just greater collaboration amongst these different groups.
process happening with just greater collaboration amongst these different groups. Thanks, Bill.
Our next question will come from DJ Hines with Canaccord. Hey guys, Bill, maybe you could talk a little bit about what you're seeing in terms of adoption of cloud data ingestion and then, you know, for the customers that turn that capability on.
What are you seeing in terms of signs that maybe A, they're spending more with braids or B, yielding better results? Any color there would be helpful.
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, when we look at cloud data ingestion, the impact on, you know, kind of revenue and adoption, it breaks down in a few ways. One of them is just more time to value, or, you know, faster time to value, being able to get people up and running more quickly and being able to therefore get more data sets in. And so, you know, one of the impacts that you often see, whether we add a new channel and a new set of use cases, or we add a new data source, is a lot of times those data sources are describing users that previously had not appeared in.
By us drastically reducing the amount of effort required to get those new data sets into braze, we take on more use cases that brings in more monthly active users, it adds more message volumes. And you know, as we've spoken about a lot in the past, we're really trying to make sure that when we value sell, we do so in a way where we're enhancing the value of the monthly active user that we're collecting, you know, the value of a contract primarily in the middle of the
And, you know, we're already seeing, in terms of just like quantitative numbers, we're already in the billions of rows ingested across cloud data ingestion since it launched last fall. We also are looking at things like expanding the cloud data ingestion concepts into product catalogs, which I mentioned before, you know, has been a driver of the ecom business. And that gives you an ability to bring in not just data about users, but also data that's coming from the cloud.
Our next question comes from Arjun Bhatia with William Blair.
Perfect. Thank you. Bill, I want to touch on the
the legacy marketing cloud refresh cycle that we've been talking about. Can you just help us understand why this is happening now? Certainly a positive for someone with a more modern stack, but why is this taking place now? And what have you noticed about the customers that have come from legacy marketing clouds to braise in terms of it?
their sophistication, their usage, their scale, etc. Yeah, so first I point out that we think the legacy replacement cycle is broader than just people moving from the legacy marketing clouds into a more advanced platform like Brace. There's also a lot of legacy point solutions that are out there in the email marketing space, and there's a kind of a broad array of tools that have been deployed over the last 10, 15 years that are not just the usual suspects of...
I think that's pretty fundamentally changed over the last, I would probably call out the last 12, 18 months. Certainly the notoriety of having gone public helped with that. A lot that we've done in our ecosystem strategy with our partners, looking at the GSIs and our partnership with WPP, and just continuing to expand and get the Braze brand and Braze product awareness into more corners. And I think we've also seen some of the shine come off of those legacy models.
the legacy marketing clouds as marketers and product teams are trying to be able to act on data in more real time, be able to bring together more of these channels and more of these cases. I think that one thing that always helps there is when we continue to add net new channels very quickly. If you want to be able to send WhatsApp, if you want to be able to do the audience network integration, if you want to be able to coordinate...
get you to move on from your old strategies. There's also a lot that's just happening in the broader landscape that is continuing to put pressure on it. So if you look at things like Apple Mail privacy that launched or the app tracking transparency, changes that continue to gain steam or the continued deprecation of cookies, these are all things that have made operating...
that's getting more aggressive even in channels like SMS or in notification centers with push notifications. All of these create increased return sophistication for marketers and they make it so that if you're still just running the same basic strategies, they're less and less often even getting in front of your end consumers' eyeballs. And so just staying in place and continuing to use this old software is not just holding steady, it's actually actively deteriorating.
Ryan, you may unmute and ask your question.
have yet that you would like to get.
Yeah, I mean, we've been really excited about the momentum that we've seen across the GSIs and across the big marketing agencies. And specifically, we talked a lot about WTP last quarter. We're continuing to deepen our coordination with those partners and also seeing them continue to build their bench of certified people within their teams that are...
the stack, looking at data warehouse providers, looking at a lot of the data transformation players, continuing to have channel partnerships as well to expand out there. I spoke about the audience network expansions as we've gone into more and more ad network targeting as well as obviously the partnership with Meta as we've expanded into WhatsApp. So, there's a lot that we've been doing across the partnership landscape and we're continuing to invest in those. It also...
which are going to help drive that legacy replacement cycle. And I think that means that our partners in the modern data ecosystem are going to stand to benefit. And so whether those pressures cause them to really look at customer engagement first, or it causes them to look at the rest of their data ecosystem and start to upgrade all of it to be more real time, to be based on streaming, to be cloud based.
Our next question will be from Brian Schwartz with Oppenheimer. Brian , please press star six to unmute.
Next question will be from Brian Schwartz with Oppenheimer. Brian , please press star six to unmute. Press star six again.
Good afternoon. This is Camden Levy, sitting in for Brian Schwartz today. Thank you for taking my question. Can you speak about the momentum you've seen with global GSIs in sourcing new business? And if possible, any insights you can provide on the percentage of your net new ARR that is currently derived from these growing relationships?
Thanks. Yeah, so we're not disclosing that quantitatively, but I will say that qualitatively, as I just mentioned, we continue to see that five-wheel spin up. We've got really great account coordination. We've got all the right communication channels are in place. We've got mutual investment on both sides. And we're excited to see how those partnerships continue to bear fruit over time. When you look at the broad evolution of where I think the GSIs are trying to move to, to latch back to Vanilla 3, you know that? Right now, it's very difficult because that whole concept happens in that, you know, you keep pronounced out even though you don't recognize that the manufacturer is actually very host cakewater. And we hope that it will change, in the next couple of months. I'm sorry.
where both sides of that landscape want to evolve to. And so, we've been really excited to be their partner, help bring them into this new world of modern customer engagement, to be able to do more with first party data, to be able to do it faster, to be able to bring more value through experimentation and agility. I think that one of the topics that we spoke a lot about at the beginning of this call was just, what are the things that you can do to help your customers to get to the right place? And so, we've been really excited
strategies that our customers want to be able to run and help them evolve and improve them over time.
Perfect. I appreciate the color. Thanks. Next question comes from Nick Altman with Socia Bank. Awesome. Thanks, guys. Just given the strength in billings and customer count and.
the sequential step up your guiding queue and revenue for 2Q. I know Isabelle, you talked about deals that slipped out of 4Q close in Q1, but I'm curious, was there any pull forward activity of bookings into 1Q? Thanks. Yes. There was some push out of Q1,
If you think about it, if you remember in Q4, we talked about a pretty back-end loaded bookings quarter. And so the way we count customer count is by when we actually start recording revenue, which means the customer start date has to have actually passed. And so if you book a brand new deal on the very last day of the quarter or in the last week of the quarter, it's gonna take a little bit of time for that to become a new customer.
So some of that is timing. And some of that is, and then we've seen some of that happened in Q1 pushing out into Q2. I mentioned that in answering a previous question. With regards to the guide, I'll come back to a little bit of the seasonality. We're not forecasting any improvement in the overall environment. In fact, our guide philosophy is generally unchanged.
But we are, you know, including the fact that sequentially there are three extra days in Q2 versus Q1. Q1 is just seasonally our lowest sequential revenue quarter, and then you'll see that start to reverse going into Q2. Q1 is just seasonally our lowest sequential revenue quarter, and then you'll see that start to reverse going into Q1 versus Q1.
Yeah, so WhatsApp just released in March of this year. And so we're seeing a lot of interest by customers and a lot of good momentum in pipeline. But we're not meaningfully yet adding to revenue from that channel. We saw the same thing with SMS when we launched this about a little over three years ago. So there's a lot of kind of keen interest and we look forward to kind of that.
Do you expect a generative AI to work better and be more impactful on certain messaging channels that are more real-time driven, for instance? I wouldn't call it out across channels, but one of the things I'm most excited about with 360 generative AI, especially as we're talking about some of these smaller teams or one-person teams...
of LLMs as a copilot is their inclusion of a wide array of cultures, human personas, different languages. And so I spoke about generative AI being a muse earlier. And I think it's a lot more than just getting over writer's block. It's also about enabling a marketer who's lived just one life in one place to connect better with a globally diverse audience. And when you combine that with Braze's personalized variant capability and some of the other automated decision making capability that we have in Canvas, that forgives aassicar burden out of yourclosestgt to become more Elektraal with their production across the spectrum. And take a break. We're simultaneously continuing to move into a more fork-making ofoms around a standalone role.
What it does is it provides just substantially more inputs for us to go and optimize. And so that's going to move across channels. And I think that the key part is that more of the user journey that gets into Canvas, the more of the workloads that are defined there, gives us the mapping of all the different moments that we have to be able to intervene. And when we can improve the kind of diversity of different...
techniques and engagement strategies that an individual marketer is using or generating within Braze, we can then unleash our AI on it and really go and optimize the results for them in a way that they just never would have been able to access before. Great, thank you so much and congrats on a solid quarter. Yeah, thank you.
and engagement strategies that an individual marketer is using or generating within Braze, we can then unleash our AI on it and really go and optimize the results for them in a way that they just never would have been able to access before. Great, thank you so much and congrats on a solid quarter. Yeah, thank you. I will now pass the call back to Bill for closing remarks.
All right, well, thank you to everybody for joining the call today. We appreciate your continued support, and we look forward to seeing you either at a conference or on the road soon. Thanks a lot.