Q4 2024 Olo Inc Earnings Call
Speaker Change: Greetings and welcome to the OLO 4th Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode.
Speaker Change: A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded.
Speaker Change: It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Gary Fuges, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Speaker Change: Thank you. Good afternoon and welcome to OLO's fourth quarter and full year 2024 financial results conference call. Joining me today are Noah Glass, OLO's founder and CEO, and Peter Benevides, OLO's CFO. During this call, we'll make forward-looking statements, including but not limited to statements regarding our expectations of our business, our industry, our operations, and future financial results.
Speaker Change: These statements reflect our beliefs and assumptions only as of today and are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. For a discussion of these material risks and uncertainties, please refer to our Form 10-K which was filed today and our other SEC filings.
Speaker Change: Also, during this call, we'll present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are available in our earnings release, which is available on the Investor Relations page of our website. And finally, in terms of our prepared remarks and responses to your questions, we may offer incremental metrics.
Speaker Change: Please be advised, this additional detail may be one-time in nature, and we may or may not provide an update in the future on these metrics.
Speaker Change: And with that, I'll turn the call over to Noah. Thank you, Gary. Hi, everyone. Thank you for spending time with us today.
Team Olo posted a fantastic 2024.
Speaker Change: For more than 750 brands, we powered $29 billion in gross merchandise volume.
Speaker Change: If Ola was a restaurant brand, this level of sales would make us the second largest brand in North America, ahead of Starbucks and trailing only McDonald's.
Speaker Change: We also more than doubled our gross payment volume to $2.8 billion.
Speaker Change: up from more than $1 billion in 2023 and $250 million in 2022.
Speaker Change: And we increased borderless accounts from 2 million this time last year to nearly 15 million today.
Speaker Change: Olo's continued reliability at scale recently supported a record Super Bowl Sunday and a Valentine's Day that was the largest sales day in Olo's history.
Speaker Change: We innovated across all three product suites to support continued growth.
Speaker Change: launching new features in Catering Plus and Engage, and introducing OloPay card-present functionality to further scale our payments business and aggregate on-premise transaction data that helps power the Olo guest data flywheel strategy.
Speaker Change: And we publish strong financial results throughout the year, including Q4 performance that exceeded our revenue and non-GAAP operating income guidance ranges.
Speaker Change: As our full year 2025 guidance reflects, we are confident we can continue to serve our brands while accelerating gross profit growth and driving operating leverage.
Speaker Change: I'll review the fourth quarter customer and product highlights, our new FreedomPay partnership, and our 2025 priorities. And then Peter will discuss our Q4 financial performance and our guidance for Q1 and full year 2025. We'll then take your questions.
Peter Benevides: We ended the quarter with approximately 86,000 active locations, adding approximately 1,000 net new locations over the fourth quarter and 6,000 in full year 2024.
Peter Benevides: We also continue to retain and expand with customers, with net revenue retention at year-end of 115%, a gross revenue retention rate in excess of 98%, and year-over-year ARPU growth of 12%.
Peter Benevides: It was another solid quarter of enterprise and emerging enterprise customer implementations, including more brands that evolved to Olo Flywheel customers by deploying modules across all three of Olo's product suites.
Order, Pay, and Engage.
Peter Benevides: Enterprise new deployments included Jason's Deli, who launched on the full-order suite, Catering Plus, and Olope Cardnot Presents.
Peter Benevides: Leading iced tea franchise, HTO, added Olope. And we're excited to announce that the top 25 brand, Jack in the Box, expanded their Olo relationship to include Rails.
Peter Benevides: In emerging enterprise, Walk-Ons deployed our full order suite, Olo Pay Card Not Present and Catering Plus, and Crisp and Green launched as a full flywheel brand with nine Olo product modules.
Peter Benevides: Brands like Burgerville and Costa Vida expanded with Olope and we're proud to announce that Blake's Lada Burger, for all you Breaking Bad fans, and Mendocino Farms added Engage to become full flywheel brands.
Peter Benevides: We believe the Olo guest data flywheel strategy is resonating within our base, and we expect to add more flywheel brands this year.
Peter Benevides: Finally, CateringPlus enjoyed another successful quarter of expansion deployments with enterprise brands like BJ's Restaurants and Brew House, Black Bear Diner, and Raising Keen's, and with more than a dozen emerging enterprise brands.
Peter Benevides: Catering Plus was off to a great start in 2024 and I'll share more about our plans for this important channel when I discuss our 2025 priorities.
Peter Benevides: In product innovation, we released 13 product enhancements in our winter release, including AI-powered menu item recommendations.
Peter Benevides: SparkFly and Spengo loyalty partner integrations and deeper reporting and analytics in Engage. And enhanced CateringPlus account management features to give brands the insights and tools they need to succeed in this increasingly important channel.
Peter Benevides: In partnerships, Grubhub, a long-standing member of our rails network, expanded their Olo relationship to include Dispatch.
Peter Benevides: And earlier this month, we announced an exciting new partnership with FreedomPay, a leading payment gateway terminal provider, where OloPay card present functionality will be integrated with FreedomPay's gateway terminals and supported by our existing Stripe relationship.
Peter Benevides: We believe this is great news for three reasons. First, FreedomPay is already integrated with over 1,000 POS and payment systems.
Peter Benevides: This accelerates Olo's time-to-market, enabling us to sell and deploy OloPay CardPresent into the majority of our location base more quickly than by integrating with one POS partner at a time.
Peter Benevides: Second, we can now provide our brands with choice. Use OlaPay through a direct POS integration or through FreedomPay terminals connected to their POS.
Peter Benevides: Third, the FreedomPay Data API will give us access to transaction data that's similar to what we can capture through an OlaPay direct POS integration today.
Peter Benevides: Regardless of how a brand chooses to work with Olapay, we can match their full-stack payment data and our wealth of digital ordering data through Engage's GDP to build a 360-degree view of their guests.
and help brands personalize guest experiences and drive profitable traffic.
Peter Benevides: We think our FreedomPay partnership is a game-changer for OloPay. We expect OloPay to be generally available with FreedomPay by mid-year and we've already enabled the sales team to take this new offering to market in Q1.
Speaker Change: Before I turn the call over to Peter, I want to share our top priorities for 2025.
Speaker Change: Hailing Catering Plus, ramping Olapay card presence, and increasing our base of full Flywheel customers.
Speaker Change: With CateringPlus, we believe we can replicate our success in mealtime digital ordering in the increasingly popular catering channel.
In 2024, Catering Plus began, expanding into our existing base.
Speaker Change: In 2025, we're focused on building on this expansion motion while also winning new brands through Catering Plus's modularity, including top 25 brands seeking to add digital catering order management to their in-house tech stacks.
Speaker Change: And after landing a new brand with CateringPlus, we can then expand these relationships into Olo Dispatch, Engage, Pay, and Rails to support the growth of a brand's catering channel.
Speaker Change: For Olopay, 2025 is about ramping card-present transaction processing, which we estimate is a $130 billion plus GPV opportunity that unlocks the full $160 billion plus GPV opportunity within our existing base.
Speaker Change: This can help drive the Olo guest data flywheel strategy, providing brands with access to data from the 80 percent plus of transactions that occur on-premise.
Speaker Change: while also accelerating our gross profit growth as greater GPV scale helps drive better payment processing economics for Olo.
Speaker Change: Brands currently piloting CardPresent report faster processing times and better reporting and reconciliation functionality, which helps improve the guest experience and improve operational efficiency.
Speaker Change: And with FreedomPay, we believe we're in a strong position to begin ramping card-present business within our base.
Speaker Change: And in 2025, we plan to increase the number of brands using products from all three of our suites.
Speaker Change: The power of the Olo Guest Data Flywheel is resonating with innovative brands like California Fish Grill, who's aggregating order and pay transaction data into Engage's GDP and using the Engage marketing module to identify and understand its guests.
Maximize marketing ROI through personalized communications and drive sales.
Speaker Change: In six months, California's fish grill generated a 41% increase in known guests.
Speaker Change: a 21% increase in guests they can directly market to, and $7 million of digital order revenue attributable to these personalized marketing campaigns.
Speaker Change: As we further demonstrate the value of combining order, pay, and engage with early adopters, we expect more brands to rely on the Olo guest data flywheel to convert their guest transaction data into actionable insights.
personalized communications and experiences, and profitable traffic.
Speaker Change: 2024 was another successful year for Olo, and we believe we can achieve even more in 2025.
Speaker Change: We wouldn't be here without the talented and dedicated members of our team who are committed to our mission, hospitality at scale.
Peter Benevides: I'll now turn the call over to Peter, who will review our fourth quarter and full year 2024 financial highlights and our 2025 guidelines.
Peter.
Peter Benevides: Thanks, Noah. Today, I'll review our fourth quarter and full year 2024 results, as well as provide guidance for the first quarter and the full year 2025.
Peter Benevides: In the fourth quarter, total revenue was $76.1 million, an increase of 21% year-over-year.
Peter Benevides: platform revenue in the fourth quarter with $75.2 million, an increase of 21% year-over-year. Pay had another strong quarter, and platform revenue excluding pay also outperformed our expectations.
Speaker Change: Active locations were approximately 86,000, up approximately 1,000 locations sequentially due primarily to the deployment activity Noah mentioned.
Speaker Change: We added approximately 6,000 net new locations over the year, exceeding the full year target for net new locations we provided in our initial 2024 guidance.
Speaker Change: Our proof of the fourth quarter was approximately $878, up 12% year-over-year, due primarily to increased order volumes and modules per location, in particular Olopay.
Net revenue retention was 115% in line with historical trend.
Speaker Change: Gross revenue retention remains above 98% as we continue to retain brands through our platforms' scalability, reliability, security, and the breadth of our solutions.
Speaker Change: For the remainder of the Q4 financial metrics disclosed, unless otherwise noted, I will be referencing non-GAAP financial measures.
Speaker Change: Gross profit for the fourth quarter was $45.2 million, up 11% year-over-year. Gross margin for the fourth quarter was 59.5%, in line with the expectations we set on our prior call.
Speaker Change: Gross profit and gross margin performance reflect the impact of this quarter's revenue outperformance, as well as the increasing mix of OLOPAY revenue.
Speaker Change: In Q4, we continue to be disciplined, managing our operating expenses while investing for future growth.
Speaker Change: As shown in today's earnings press release, all three operating expense line items improved year-over-year on a percentage-of-revenue basis.
Speaker Change: Operating expense dollars were down sequentially due to a full quarter impact of the cost reductions we announced in late September.
Speaker Change: Operating income for the fourth quarter was $11.5 million, up from $6.8 million a year ago.
Speaker Change: Operating margin was 15.1% in Q4, an increase of approximately 430 basis points year-over-year. This strong performance reflects both continued expense discipline and the revenue outperformance.
Speaker Change: Net income in the fourth quarter was $11.3 million, or $0.06 per share, based on approximately 176 million fully diluted shares.
Speaker Change: For the full year of 2024, revenue of $284.9 million increased 25%, and ARPU of approximately $3,400 rose 25%.
OLAPAY revenue was slightly above $70 million in the year.
Speaker Change: Brands utilized 3.7 average modules per location as of December 31, 2024, versus 3.5 average modules per location as of year-end 2023.
Speaker Change: Full Year 2024 Non-Gap Operating Income, or NGOI, was $32.9 million, up approximately 80% year-over-year.
Speaker Change: NGOI margin in 2024 was 11.6%, up approximately 360 basis points from 8% in 2023.
Speaker Change: Turning our attention to the balance sheet and cash flow statement.
Speaker Change: Our cash, cash equivalents, and short and long-term investments totaled approximately $403 million as of December 31st, 2024.
Speaker Change: Net cash provided by operating activities was $9.3 million in the quarter, compared to $5.8 million in the year-ago quarter.
Speaker Change: Free cash flow was $6.8 million compared to $2.7 million a year ago.
Speaker Change: Q4 cash flow metrics primarily reflect operating income performance and working capital timing.
Speaker Change: For the full year 2024, we generated approximately $40 million in cash from operating activities and $27 million in free cash flow.
Speaker Change: I'll wrap up by providing our guidance for the first quarter and full year 2025.
Speaker Change: For the first quarter of 2025, we expect revenue in the range of $77.2 million and $77.7 million, and non-GAAP operating income in the range of $8.7 million and $9 million.
Speaker Change: For the full year 2025, we expect revenue in the range of $333 million and $336 million, and non-GAAP operating income in the range of $45.5 million and $47 million.
Speaker Change: A few things to keep in mind as you consider our outlook for the year.
Speaker Change: We continue to expect trends in the restaurant industry to be similar to what we saw in 2024.
Speaker Change: consistent growth in digital ordering, a continued need to improve efficiency to offset rising costs, and macro uncertainty.
Speaker Change: Our guidance once again assumes a two-thirds, one-third split between incremental revenue from existing projects currently in deployment and new business signed and deployed intra-year.
Speaker Change: We expect to add approximately 5,000 net new locations in 2025, in line with recent trends.
Speaker Change: Note that the addition of 6,000 net new locations in 2024 was above our initial guidance of approximately 5,000 due to primarily outperformance from brands that signed and deployed intra-year.
Speaker Change: We expect full-year 2025 Olopay revenue of approximately $110 million, with card-not-present transactions continuing to account for the vast majority of total Olopay revenue.
Speaker Change: We expect card present revenue to begin to ramp in the second half of the year and contribute gross revenue in 2025 in the high single-digit million dollar range.
Speaker Change: Full year 2025 guidance assumes gross margins will compress by approximately 250 basis points versus full year 2024 gross margin as we continue to scale OLOPE revenue.
Based on our revenue growth and gross margin expectations,
Speaker Change: We expect the gross profit growth for full year 2025 to be greater than full year 2024 gross profit growth, with growth acceleration expected to be more prevalent in the back half of the year due to the tougher comps in the first half of 2024.
Speaker Change: For operating expenses, we will continue to manage our cost structure to drive operating leverage while continuing to invest to support our customers and our key growth initiatives.
Speaker Change: As we've previously shared, we expect operating margins and dollars to improve over time as we continue to scale into our payments opportunity, as the incremental profit-dollar-per-payment transaction process continues to improve.
Speaker Change: This is the power of our payments-led, cross-sell model, which we're beginning to see play out.
Speaker Change: Full-year 2025 guidance assumes total OPEX dollars will grow in the mid-single-digit percent range versus full-year 2024, with higher spend in Q1 due to approximately $2 million in investment in our March Beyond 4 annual customer conference.
Speaker Change: We also expect annual compensation increases to hit in Q2, as was the case in 2024.
Speaker Change: Finally, we want to remind investors of our commitment to delivering both growth and profitability. As our strategy has played out and we've scaled Olopay revenue, gross profit growth has become a more relevant growth indicator for our overall business.
Speaker Change: Given this, we are focused on managing the business for Rule of 40 performance based on gross profit.
Speaker Change: Gross profit year-over-year growth plus non-GAAP operating income as a percentage of gross profit dollars.
Speaker Change: We believe this metric is a fair way to assess annual performance of the business.
Speaker Change: And on this basis, we moved from a rule of 25 in 2023 to a rule of 31 in 2024 and ended 2024 with a rule of 36 in Q4.
Speaker Change: Our full year 2025 guidance implies we'll see further improvement in this metric in full year 2025 versus 2024.
Speaker Change: and we anticipate the business will meet or exceed gross profit rule of 40 in Q4 2025.
Speaker Change: To wrap up, Olo posted another strong year of financial performance in 2024, and we believe we can perform at an even higher level in 2025.
Speaker Change: We're executing on our strategy, and we expect to drive a solid mix of growth and operating leverage going forward. With that, I'd now like to turn it over to the operator to begin the Q&A session. Operator?
Speaker Change: Thank you. We will now be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. The confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue.
Speaker Change: You may press star 2 to remove yourself from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to take off your headset before pressing the star key.
Speaker Change: Your first question comes from Terry Tillman with Truist Securities. Please go ahead.
Speaker Change: Great. Good evening, team. Conor Passarella on for Terry. Appreciate you taking my questions. The first one, I just wanted to dig a little bit more into the Freedom Pay Partnership.
Speaker Change: I guess the first part is just once, you know, that partnership comes fully online, I guess, what's the timeline in terms of customers being able to turn it on? And then secondly, just anything directional that you were expecting there in terms of FreedomPay specifically impacting the card present guide that you gave for 25?
Speaker Change: Hey, Connor, thanks for the question. This is Noah. So I think we mentioned, maybe it was varied in the prepared remarks, that general availability for bullet pay card present through FreedomPay would be mid-year, and that we have our go-to-market team already out there having conversations
Speaker Change: with customers. So we started talking about Olopay card presence. If you recall, we announced it at our customer conference BEYOND4 in March of last year, and then last quarter we talked about our direct-to-POS partnerships.
Speaker Change: with a number of the point-of-sale partners that we work with from an order injection standpoint, NCR, Q, and TRE. What this represents with FreedomPay is our ability to really broadly sell OloPay card present to our customers.
Speaker Change: and we're very excited about that and what it opens up in terms of the addressable payments volume for Olopay.
Just reflecting on the journey that we've been on.
Speaker Change: I mentioned it on the prepared remarks, but we went from 250 million of processing volume in 22 up to 1 billion in processing volume in 23, and we finished last year in 24 at 2.8 billion.
Speaker Change: and Processing Volume for OLOPEC, all of that being, or the vast majority of it being, CARD, not present.
Speaker Change: So incredible growth there, over 10x growth over a two-year period.
Speaker Change: If you think about that with the backdrop of $29 billion of GMV, we're approaching 10%, so we still have a big way to go there. If you think about it against the backdrop of what we've just unlocked in adding the additional $130 billion of card present volume,
Speaker Change: that our restaurant customers are doing. That's $160 billion plus of addressable gross payment volume, something around 15% of total restaurant industry sales in the U.S. restaurant industry. And from that perspective, 2.8 against that $160 billion.
Speaker Change: is under 2%. So we're very, very early in this journey, excited about the progress that we're seeing, and thrilled to have expanded so dramatically with this move with FreedomPay to open it up broadly to our customers.
Speaker Change: given all the POS integrations and payment integrations that FreedomPay has completed as an ideal partner for really taking OlaPay card presence to scale.
Speaker Change: Great, that's helpful, Noah. And then maybe just as a follow-up, just on multiproduct adoption as a focus point for this year, adding flywheel customers.
Speaker Change: You've been, you know, typically pretty successful with doing those in the emerging enterprise side of the business. I'm just kind of curious on
Speaker Change: you know, what kind of strategies or how you're thinking about increasing module adoption with enterprise customers this year. Thank you.
Speaker Change: Yeah, I think it's happening organically across the board and you see module adoption growing and an adoption of new product suites to get to that full flywheel of having modules within each suite in enterprise, in emerging enterprise.
Speaker Change: And even some of the top 25 brands that we work with, you see groups like Jack in the Box, who just announced the expansion into Ola Rails.
Speaker Change: If you'll recall, that started off as a single module customer just using dispatch, then adding order, now adding rails. So a great example of expanding into the full order suite.
Speaker Change: And then across the board, you see an enterprise brands that are becoming.
flywheel customers within enterprise.
We're very excited by, you know, seeing brands adopting.
Speaker Change: engage, oftentimes that is the sequence, order first, then pay, then engage.
Speaker Change: and then really being able to benefit from order and pay as great sources of guest data and engage to take that data, collate it back to a guest, and then be able to really personalize communications out to that guest, personalize experiences.
Speaker Change: for that guest, and in so doing, drive profitable traffic. And that's really what we mean by the flywheel, that if Engage is doing its job correctly, doing its job well, as you hear with examples like what we shared.
Speaker Change: with California Fish Grill, that it's driving more orders, more payments, and that flywheel spins faster and faster. We love having customers that can serve as case studies, reference stories.
Speaker Change: evangelists for that Olo guest data flywheel strategy. There are a lot of brands in emerging enterprise and enterprise becoming full flywheel customers.
Speaker Change: And I think when restaurant brands see this better way of driving traffic, not just by discounting or doing value menus or other things that erode the bottom line, but driving profitable traffic by leading into guest data and personalization and using the guest data flywheel to do that.
Speaker Change: It's the kind of thing that gets the vast majority of our restaurant brands excited to take that next step along their digital maturity curve.
Speaker Change: I'm proud that we went up from 3.5 modules at the end of last year to 3.7 modules at the end of 24, but of course we have 16 modules. We have a long way to go to get brands all the way to using all of those product suites and all the modules within each of those suites.
Thank you.
Speaker Change: Next question, Matthew Hedberg with RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Speaker Change: Hey, guys. This is Mike Richards on for Matt. Thanks for taking the questions.
Speaker Change: It was great to hear about the FreedomPay partnership and maybe coming back to it. Acknowledging it's still early, have you gotten any early feedback from the Salesforce on what customers are saying? And maybe any early interest that they weren't expecting for pay from these customers?
Speaker Change: And just broadly, was this partnership in your product roadmap for pay? And does it change what your idea of card-present versus card-not-present looks like over time, and ultimately what pay gross margins can look like over time?
Speaker Change: Thanks for the question. I'll start there. Thanks for the questions. I'll try to remember all those and package my answer accordingly. I think when we look at the FreedomPay partnership, it is in part hearing all of the excitement from customers and many of those who weren't
Speaker Change: a user of the point-of-sale platforms that we announced a direct-to-POS.
Speaker Change: Olo Pay card present partnership with. So if you are an Olo customer who's not on NCR, not on Q, not on TRE,
Speaker Change: You probably heard about Olapay CardPresent and said, this sounds exciting, when are you going to get to my point of sale? We certainly have heard a lot of interest from our customer base hearing about the benefits of Olapay CardPresent. We've heard from those who are using Olapay CardPresent in the five pilots that we have launched.
Speaker Change: We're seeing faster processing of transactions. We're seeing better reporting, better reconciliation. This is a win-win for guests and operators. And that's really been the through line of all of our.
Speaker Change: modules over time is that they have to be a win-win for guests and operators at the same time and we're seeing that value proposition play out with the direct-to-POS integrations.
Speaker Change: FreedomPay really just opens up the floodgates and enables us to do this broadly and be the payment processor for the 82% of industry transactions that are happening, not through digital channels, but happening inside the four walls of the restaurant.
Speaker Change: And that's very exciting for our customers because it means that we can offer to them regardless of what point of sale they're on.
the ability to capture all of that transaction data.
pull it into the guest data platform.
Speaker Change: and be able to see a guest's order history and use that to personalize the guest experience. That's the value proposition of that Olo guest data flywheel, and specifically OloPay card present as.
Speaker Change: part of that guest data acquisition strategy to pull that guest data into the engaged GDP and go from there.
In terms of the economics of Olope,
Speaker Change: I think we've talked about how having more scale in any payments business is beneficial for the economics and the profitability of the payments business. So from that perspective I guess it helps us to get to scale faster by having that much larger addressable market now 160 billion plus.
Speaker Change: in Addressable Markets for Olo Pay when you combine card not present and card present together.
Speaker Change: Gotcha. And then just one more. You guys are expecting a similar environment next year for restaurants. Have you seen, given rising prices and need for efficiency, have you seen more customers, as we've been in this environment for a longer time, really leaning into that data analytics strategy and needing the holistic view of a customer from a data perspective?
Speaker Change: Yeah, 100%. That has been the message that we have been shouting from the rooftops is that everybody in this industry is desperate to drive traffic. But this is not a time to revert to the old playbook of discounting and deals and bombing price.
Speaker Change: That is helpful in the short term. It is very harmful over the long term for franchisee profitability, for the guests' perception of what the menu price should be, and ultimately for the health of the brand.
And so what we've been championing is...
Speaker Change: Helping brands to gather more guest data with the guest's permission.
Speaker Change: and to use that data to do things differently, to do things in a more sophisticated manner, which is to personalize the guest experience using all of that data and to use it to drive profitable traffic.
Speaker Change: Proctoral being the operative word in that phrase and the differentiating word from deals and discounts and bundling and other efforts that we see restaurants doing over the years.
Speaker Change: that are ultimately harmful. I think the brands like California Fish Grill and other quarters we've talked about, First Watch, we've talked about Sonny's Barbecue, Five Guys Burgers and Fries.
Speaker Change: California Pizza Kitchen that are leaning into utilizing guest data for personalization and driving profitable traffic. They are going to be most efficient in their marketing spend and they're going to be around for the long term and not just surviving challenging macroeconomic times but thriving.
Thanks again and congrats.
Thank you.
Next question, Clark Jeffries with Piper Stantler. Please go ahead.
Speaker Change: Hello, thank you for taking the question. Noah, Peter, you know, great to see the results and the encouraging top line guide for 2025. I just wanted to ask, you know, firstly, Peter, on
Speaker Change: Olopay, you know, 40-ish million of incremental Olopay revenue, but the commentary that gross profit growth will actually be higher than 2024, just wanted to understand the scale advantage that you're getting for Olopay at this point. Is that
Speaker Change: multiple hundred of basis points of improvement on gross margin, and then I have one follow-up.
Speaker Change: Yeah, thanks, Clark. So, you're right in terms of the incremental revenue contribution embedded in the guide of about $40 million a year, getting to that $110 million of total revenue for 2025.
Speaker Change: In terms of the margin improvement specific to pay, so we continue to see improvement within card not present, because similar with card present with greater scale comes better economics. So we've seen some improvement in card not present.
but the incremental blended gross margin improvement.
specific to pay is really going to be fueled by
Speaker Change: card present coming online. And again, that's that's for two reasons. Number one is
Speaker Change: Typically, what you see in a card-present transaction is it lends itself to better margins because the card makes on-premise.
usage of things like debit.
Speaker Change: tend to have a better margin profile. And then secondly, again, with greater scale comes better economics. So we can, you know, drive better card present margins and overall pay margins. So taken as a whole, if you look at pay margins in 2025, you're seeing an improvement
as compared to 2024.
Perfect, makes sense.
Speaker Change: just, you know, in the, at a high level, you know, it certainly high teams growth at the consolidated level and revenue is encouraging. But how are you thinking about brand?
count and location growth at that 5,000 level.
Speaker Change: Would you like to see it go higher in terms of making either initiatives or changes to?
just move the number up or...
Speaker Change: has the quality of the pipeline, meaning that we shouldn't overly index.
Speaker Change: to that number because of the kind of volume of merchants or size of merchants that you're onboarding.
Speaker Change: at this point is giving you comfort and you're not looking to maximize that metric from quarter to quarter.
Speaker Change: Thank you. Yeah. I mean, I think the 5,000 in general, I mean, this is more guidance philosophy than anything. You know, when we entered 2024.
Speaker Change: We planned on adding 5,000 locations to the platform. That number then stepped up in the second half of 2024, as we mentioned on the call, as more intra-year signings and deployments were happening than anticipated. So that was great to see. We pulled more locations into
Speaker Change: year. When we look at 2025, we want to take a similar prudent approach as we, you know,
Speaker Change: set out on setting the guide with 5,000 locations as that target.
Speaker Change: And then similarly to 2024, if you recall, we sit out to
Speaker Change: at about two-thirds of incremental revenue from things that we walked into the year.
going through the deployment process with about one-third
being driven by entry year signings and deployment.
Speaker Change: brand mix shifting over time. It's really just again philosophically setting realistic expectations as we as we start the year and then hope to outperform as we go throughout the year.
Perfect, thank you very much.
Next question, Eric Martinuzzi with Lake Street. Please go ahead.
Eric Martinuzzi: Yeah, congrats on the strong finish to the year and the robust outlook for 2025.
I wanted to dive in and kind of...
Thank you.
see if maybe Jack-in-the-Box is representative of an overall enterprise.
behavior, you know, when they went
to, when they added...
Eric Martinuzzi: Rails. Was there an initiative inside Jack in the Box to redeploy? I'm assuming they were on kind of an internal platform.
Eric Martinuzzi: Was there, did they redeploy their internal IP assets? Did they have layoffs? What was the, you know, what were they on and what was the impetus for embracing the product?
Eric Martinuzzi: Eric, this is Noah. Thanks for the question. I think specific to jack-in-the-box or maybe more generalized to what we see in the the top 25 segments,
Eric Martinuzzi: Typically we are landing with those brands with a single module and then expanding the relationship from there and Jack is a great example of that. Although typically we're landing with rails and then expanding the relationship beyond rails, in their case we landed with dispatch and expanded into order and rail subsequent to that.
Eric Martinuzzi: And then recently, what we've seen is the opportunities emerging for catering plus in a lot of brands up and down the different segments, but inclusive of.
Eric Martinuzzi: 25 brands that are interested in working with Olo on that catering channel as it grows and becomes more resonant in the industry even for QSR kinds of brands
Eric Martinuzzi: and then thinking about that as sort of a testing ground for a larger relationship.
Eric Martinuzzi: I would say that what happened during really the COVID era with a lot of these kinds of brands, and certainly the top 25 QSR drive-thru brands, a little bit synonymous,
Eric Martinuzzi: is that they dipped a toe in the pool doing marketplace relationships but without a lot of integration. In other words, they might have had all of their operators get tablets.
Eric Martinuzzi: an order that originated from a guest ordering from a marketplace website or app would then just get deposited onto a tablet. And what we've seen is that that doesn't scale very well, doesn't scale from the operator simplicity standpoint. They have many different tablets.
Eric Martinuzzi: We lovingly call that scenario tablet hell. And it also doesn't scale very well for the franchisor to be able to keep track of the royalties that they're owed. So you see a lot of brands...
Eric Martinuzzi: Once they achieve some level of success where they realize, okay, third-party marketplace orders, that's going to be a real thing. It's going to drive a real meaningful.
Percentage of sales
Eric Martinuzzi: and dollars of sales and dollars of royalties by extension is that they wanna have some organization and they wanna use a product like Rails to have those orders integrated directly into the point of sale so there doesn't have to be a manual entry of an order into the point of sale for it to get collected.
Eric Martinuzzi: And I think you see a lot of examples of brands that are trying to just bring some order to what was sort of the Wild West as they stepped in, in a hasty way, into the digital world with these marketplace relationships.
Eric Martinuzzi: the platform and into the point-to-sale and into the kitchen display system in a way that gives both the operator and the franchisor control. I think that that's a great example with Jack in the Box.
Eric Martinuzzi: And with that, again, back to their own internal IT organization, are they redeploying those folks once they're up and running on a new OLL module, or are they, you know, getting more efficient?
Speaker Change: I can't speak to Jack in the Box specifically, but what you typically see is that either a brand will redeploy their technology resources to something that is more differentiating for the brand, that is what they sort of think about as their technical version of secret sauce.
What we see is that they're not having to then...
Speaker Change: recreate the wheel. And I think that goes back to, we talked about a little bit in the prepared remarks, just the
Speaker Change: the demonstrated scalability of a platform like Olo that is enterprise SaaS and doing this now for 750 brands across 86,000 locations.
Speaker Change: its reliability, its performance on days like Valentine's Day and Super Bowl, its security, and increasingly it's things like privacy. I mean, we are doing all of that, all of that complexity as a service.
Speaker Change: and at a fraction of the cost of what brands who have built in-house are spending to maintain in-house platforms. And that's why you've heard me say time and time again on these calls.
The natural tendency, the natural trend is really homegrown technology.
shifting over to
Speaker Change: and then it's not a build or buy decision as a binary, it is both. It is buy into the Ola platform and use your tech resources to build on top in a way that really differentiates your brand and appeals to your guests and your operators.
Thanks for taking my question.
Stephen Sheldon: Thank you. Next question, Stephen Sheldon with William Blair. Please go ahead.
Stephen Sheldon: Hey, thanks for taking my questions and really appreciate all the commentary on 2025.
Stephen Sheldon: That answered a lot of my questions, but I wanted to dig in on the gross profit growth acceleration. It sounds like you're expecting acceleration in 2025, which is really great to hear. It sounds like it's more second half acceleration, so I just wanted to ask, given what you can see.
Stephen Sheldon: Was 4Q, was this quarter kind of the bottom there or could it dip a little more in the first half relative to I think 11% growth before accelerating in the back half of the year? I guess when are you kind of baking in that inflection point into the guidance?
Speaker Change: Yeah, so the re-acceleration, Stephen, really happens in the back half of the year as we move through a tougher compare in the first half of 2020-2025.
Stephen Sheldon: Q2 is more of the trough, if you will, from a year-on-year growth perspective and then a re-acceleration beyond that.
Stephen Sheldon: Okay, got it. That's helpful. And then just on Catering Plus, you had a lot of announcements, a lot of wins there. Recently, it seems like you're seeing a lot of traction. So is that becoming more material to revenue? And can you just remind us if that continues to scale, what the margin and gross margin implications are?
Stephen Sheldon: Yeah, so where Catering Plus shows up today is primarily in ARPU. It's part of what helps to drive both modules per location adoption and overall ARPU.
Stephen Sheldon: Obviously, if we have success with brands that are not using the platform today and do subscribe to Catering Plus as their initial product module, that will help to also drive location count. But again, today, primarily an ARPU driver.
Stephen Sheldon: And part of what is giving us confidence in the ability to
Stephen Sheldon: reaccelerate gross profit growth on a full year basis, but also in the second half of 2025 is because many of the catering
Stephen Sheldon: plus wins that we've had throughout 2024 starting to come online.
in 2025.
Stephen Sheldon: And from a margin perspective, I would think of Catering Plus like software margins, right? So it's high margin, which helps to, again, help drive overall gross profit dollars.
Stephen Sheldon: and gross profit growth. And it doesn't stop there. And we've said this in the past, you know, catering plots
Stephen Sheldon: Many of the product modules that we've developed for the core ordering platform are also useful in a catering experience. So whether you want first-party delivery enablement, Dispatch can help. If you want third-party marketplace...
Stephen Sheldon: We think catering is a great opportunity. We're just getting started again today showing up in ARPU. Over time, we'll expand from there and use that to help drive more and more gross profit growth.
Got it, thank you.
Gabriela Borges: Our last question comes from Gabriela Borges with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Speaker Change: Hi team, this is Max Kemperl on for Gabriella. Thanks so much for taking our questions. Noah, you've had some leadership changes in the second half of last year with your new CTO joining and your COO departing. How do you feel about the current state of the management team? Where are you seeing strengths versus areas that need a little bit more attention?
Noah Glass: Thanks for the question. I think the proof is in the pudding. We feel great about Jason Ordway, who joined us as CTO, and you can see that he and the team really lived up to our reliability and performance at scale with the record-setting Super Bowl and then the highest
Speaker Change: sales volume day of all time on the platform, Valentine's Day, Valentine's Day on a Friday that we just had.
we're thrilled about.
Jason's leadership and the team around him.
Speaker Change: I think, you know, the open role is our Chief Revenue Officer role, and I have been thrilled to get closer with our sales leadership the next layer down.
Speaker Change: Katie Koufer in particular, Katie Lang, and working with that team directly on some of the the big deals that we are going after and some of the additional module ads to existing customers to take them further on their digital journey. It's been
Speaker Change: Really fun for me to get closer to that part of the business as we're going through the process.
interviewing candidates to come into this role.
Speaker Change: And I would say, you know, we are thinking about this as a very important hire, but don't feel this burning sense of urgency given the success that we're having and the energy that we're feeling in terms of how resonant our message is with our customers around.
Speaker Change: guest data, the guest data flywheel strategy, and driving profitable traffic.
Speaker Change: I also want to just note something, Max, a little bit related to your question, but part of that confidence and that energy
is sort of what we're feeling about this moment.
Speaker Change: in sort of the competitive side of things. And I would point to, I typically get the question in these calls about.
Speaker Change: Olo versus Point of Sale, and do we see competition from Point of Sale? And I've said in the past, and I'll repeat, that we think about Olo as the guest-facing tech stack for our restaurant customers, and we compare that to the Point of Sale really as the staff-facing tech stack.
Speaker Change: and you can think about what is the platform, who logs into it to distinguish what's guest facing, what's staff facing.
Speaker Change: There has been this sort of battle for the control point, that's what vertical software thinkers would say about the battle between guest-facing tech stack and staff-facing tech stack, OLO versus point-of-sale. And I think historically it's been that POS is...
Speaker Change: of a mile wide, sees every transaction, but really an inch deep is blind to who the guest is.
Speaker Change: Although traditionally has been an inch wide, only seeing 18% of overall transactions, just those digital transactions, but a mile deep having all the context around the guest.
Speaker Change: That has now changed with this announcement around Olope card present. This is really a meaningful milestone.
Speaker Change: where Olo has now become a mile deep and a mile wide that we can see every transaction when a restaurant customer is using OloPay CardPresent.
We can tie those back to a guest.
Speaker Change: And then we operate in another dimension, which is a longitudinal view of that guest.
Speaker Change: It also means that we've eliminated the switching costs of switching to a different point of sale because you can do that now with no disruption to the guest experience, whether that's digital or the in-store experience in how the guest pays.
Speaker Change: Bolo has really now become that control point in this ever-shifting competition between guest-facing tech stack and staff-facing tech stack. And part of that is what's driving the energy in our go-to-market team and I think some of the success that we're experiencing.
Speaker Change: That's very helpful. Thanks, Noah. And maybe just to close us out, I noticed that in your Venture release, you included AI-powered menu recommendations. What potential opportunities do you see in incorporating AI technologies across your product suites? Is this something that customers are actively requesting? And if so, what themes are emerging from these potential conversations? Thank you.
Speaker Change: Thanks. Thank you. I think we've used AI for several years now across every suite within our platform. In order, thinking about some of the less sexy things, like how do you keep the kitchen as productive as possible, as profitable as possible, probably the thing we've talked about the most is our order-ready AI solution, which does just that, reading from the kitchen system to understand exactly how long an order will take
Speaker Change: about how busy the kitchen is at that moment and making sure that we're keeping the kitchen running like a race car in the red, but not running over its capacity and doing so as profitably as possible. We're using AI extensively throughout OLOPE.
Speaker Change: to why you see some of the great results we've been able to post in terms of authorization rates, lower fraud rates, etc. And of course, Engage is full of examples of how we're using AI to do messaging out to guests so that we're
Speaker Change: ambitiously getting toward a segment of one in how we can communicate with each guest in a personalized manner.
Speaker Change: And you're seeing now how we're using AI in what we announced in this past quarter, this winter release and mentioned on the prepared remarks.
Speaker Change: in how we recommend dishes to a guest based on what we understand about them. Again, using that longitudinal view of that guest.
Speaker Change: knowing what they like because they've explicitly said that or they've reordered it, comparing that to a lookalike audience of guests and recommending things they've never tried before but have a very high likelihood of enjoying.
Speaker Change: And, of course, now with this network that we've created with Borderless scaling to 15 million guests.
Speaker Change: That is another really powerful asset for Olo to continue on that personalization journey and use what the Olo platform can see about a guest.
Speaker Change: to help our restaurant brands really get smart in terms of how to personalize their experience.
Speaker Change: Even if it's that guest's first time visiting that restaurant, we're really excited to continue on this personalization journey and really be the leader in personalization. And of course, AI and machine learning plays a massive role in all of that. And we're proud of the team that we've stood up to take that on.
Great. Thank you.
Speaker Change: I would like to turn the floor over to Noah Glass for closing remarks.
Noah Glass: Okay, thank you for joining us today. Our strong performance in 2024 sets the table for Olo to continue to win with brands.
Noah Glass: and drive financial results for our shareholders. We're still very early in realizing Ola's potential for helping brands capture transaction data across the entirety of their business and surface actionable guest insights that drive profitable traffic. Have a great evening.
Speaker Change: Thank you. This does conclude today's teleconference. We thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.