Braze, Inc. (BRZE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome to our next session. Glad to have the team from Braze. Great week for you so far.

Can you talk a little bit, you reported very strong numbers. Share price move kind of reflected that as well and even more. Kind of maybe to bring everyone on the same page, like talk a little bit about what you saw in this quarter and the highlights for you?

Yes. I think this quarter, really a combination of two things. One is the work that we've been doing in the last 6 or 8 quarters really focused on product health, customer health, a lot of the changes that we've made around pricing and packaging and other things to make using Braze and growing with Braze easier, just removing those friction points for customers to be able to get up and running and be able to experiment with new use cases, scale them production, et cetera. And you're seeing that come together, and we'll talk about that a little bit more around Black Friday, Cyber Monday as well. And then, of course, all the excitement around the frontier work being done on the AI road map. We launched -- the -- we launched a bunch of new products, the Operator Agent Console, Decisioning Studio at Forge, which was right at the end of September. And AI is in every single customer conversation. We're seeing people bringing it to life, driving real impact on their businesses with the Decisioning Studio, obviously, also driving revenue for us as well as customers are deploying that in order to drive greater levels of performance in some of their most important parts of their customer journey. And so a lot of different things coming together, some that's dynamic and changing every day around the AI road map and then some that's just great business, making sure that we're staying focused on the fundamentals around product health and customer health, and we're seeing that come together.

And Isabelle, like in terms of numbers, like maybe just kind of round up there as well?

Yes. I mean we're seeing, as Bill mentioned, kind of the culmination of some of the efforts that we've been putting into place over the last kind of number of quarters. So when we think about efforts around completeness and consumption and our ability to have better telemetry on areas where there might be some risk associated with customers who aren't quite utilizing the full breadth of their entitlements. We now have the flexible credit model that allows us to kind of get people to sort of really be able to flexibly expand across channels and make some differentiated decisions and engage in more sophisticated cross-channel strategies. And what that means is we've really been able to stem some of the downsell activity that we've been seeing. And so you're seeing more opportunities for upsell, a little bit less downsell. We're kind of through the belly of the beast on the ZIRP cohort. And so we're starting to see less customer churn activity. You're seeing some improvements in the net customer adds, which is great to see. And then generally speaking, for the overall customer health, you can see this in things like our day sales outstanding and our free cash flow, real strength in kind of payment collections that we're getting there. And that's an indication of kind of the overall health of our customer base, which is exciting to see as well.

Yes. Yes. I mean -- and maybe one last question on that was like talk a little bit about the trends, like I think organic growth accelerated a little bit. What did you see on NRR?

Yes. So on NRR, we've been talking about the organic in-quarter NRR, which I think is an important metric for people to be grounded in as we think about the really -- the underlying health of the business. And I understand that the reported number is a trailing 12-month number. And so it's a little bit hard for people to get some telemetry on sort of what does this mean for kind of the future and because it is such a lagging indicator. So we really started to talk about the in-quarter number. And so to see between Q1, Q2, Q3, ongoing stabilization and slight pickup in that number. And again, I think that speaks to more limited levels of overall customer churn, more limited levels of downsell activity as, again, customers are able to much more flexibly and completely utilize their entitlements. It's been a great trajectory for us. And so we've been talking about stabilization in that metric. It's translating to the organic revenue growth and we talked about organic revenue growth was going to sort of inflect a little bit before the DBNR. That has sort of happened. But so we're really excited about kind of that overall direction of travel of the business.

Yes. Okay. And then, yes, Bill, you mentioned already like the one question I keep asking all the guys that are in your field that are playing in your field is like how about Cyber Week. Like two parts of that question. One is like how does it play out for you? But then also, what are the trends you're seeing there? Because the world seems -- world is changing and merchants are seeing that as well. So maybe kind of talk to the two?

Yes. I mean, so first, the headlines, 100 billion messages sent over the 7-day Cyber Week period, just a tremendous number. Did that with 100% uptime and high performance all the way through. So really good operationally, I think, in overall message volume. In terms of trend lines also, it was the first year that Cyber Monday had higher volumes than Black Friday, which is interesting to see. We obviously are seeing retailer strategies starting to expand across a longer holiday season in order to try to break through the noise. And breaking through the noise is also a personalization strategy question as well. And so we are seeing increased usage of our more advanced features that help with relevance optimization and a lot of optimization around send time, channel selection, content personalization, et cetera. I think the other interesting thing, though, is that it's not a retail-only event. And this is probably the primary driver of that Cyber Monday versus Black Friday comment as well because we're seeing huge growth in other verticals in terms of increases in messaging around these. And Braze is a very diversified customer base. We do retail and consumer goods is our largest vertical, but it's only about 1/5 of the business. And across those other 80%, it's also a globally diverse business. And so there's other interesting times that we'll look ahead to, like, for instance, the first week of January is effectively the Cyber Week for a lot of the health and wellness, personal finance, education apps, things where people are setting the user solutions and engagement in those moments is really important as well as retention. We also had a really interesting thing happen on Black Friday. It's 8:00 a.m. Friday morning. The production support teams are all at the ready. Everybody is watching all the monitors, and we have a tripling of traffic on one of our clusters that shows up all of a sudden, and it turns out it's because the K-Pop Grammys are going on in Hong Kong the evening, and they're doing a giant like one of our big customers in that category is doing a voting like promotion right in the middle of the K-Pop Grammys. And so we've got U.S. retailers all spinning up for Black Friday, and then here's the K-Pop Grammy showing up with this huge traffic influx as well. And of course, we handle all that. As I mentioned, operationally, high performance all the way through that period. But I think just a great testament to how diversified the Braze customer base is as well.

Yes, yes. And then so with Cyber Week, like how would you describe the overall market and I did ask that to kind of all the management teams because the year was kind of -- sorry, I want to say a tough year, but like that's kind of morning, but like a lot of volatility with the tariffs, et cetera, a lot of uncertainty. Like what are you seeing at the moment in the market?

Yes. I mean I think one of the things that we see is the durability of the life cycle CRM and kind of mid and further down the funnel use cases that are in Braze, right? Like there's a lot of volatility at the top of the funnel as you go through a lot of these things that you just cited. But when you're engaged with a customer, the -- a, like the marginal cost of engaging with them is lower once you have -- once someone is a Braze customer and you can e-mail them or send push or you can personalize messaging on your website once they visit it or SMS and WhatsApp, which tends to be further down the funnel because it does have more of a marginal cost, but it's still less of a marginal cost than a lot of other performance marketing tactics. And so that -- I think just seeing the durability of engagement once you're further down the funnel, even as all this chaos happens is one important takeaway. One of the other things, we highlighted the increase in SMS and WhatsApp growth, which was one of the fastest-growing channels. The next fastest-growing channel that we mentioned was content cards, which is actually an in-product message channel. And what's consistent about both of those as well is that they are further down the funnel. And they are also channels that are net new for a lot of marketers to be able to add to their arsenal. And one of the big things that we've been focused on for a long time, but also with a lot of the work around the flexible credits model and the consumption and completeness that Isabelle mentioned is making it easier for customers to expand their strategies across these channels. And the way that, that usually looks is that they run smaller scale experiments. They show themselves that they can achieve uplift through that and then they deploy them more widely. And so I think that we've gotten a lot of questions about whether or not our SMS and WhatsApp growth could be due to like changes in SEO Land or other things going on. Within the Braze customer base, like it's important to remember that those channels are still new. And so what you're actually seeing is just that this year, year-over-year, there are more of our customers that over the course of the last 12 months have experimented with these use cases on SMS and WhatsApp. They found early success with them, and then they've been growing and scaling those. And so those tend to be more middle and further down the funnel places where you've already been engaging with the customer, you're a little bit closer to a sale, you really want to close the deal. And those are, therefore, also places where the marginal cost of those premium channels is more worth it to a marketer because they can see the conversions happening right there.

Yes, yes. And do you -- you talked about the top of the funnel having a lot of changes. The question I get, and I just had like e-Commerce on stage as well is that it's kind of -- it actually feeds all the way down that you kind of actually do go and do start doing transactions out of like perplexity, et cetera. When you talk with your big customers, like how do they think about the whole evolution of the value chain and like the future view, like will you get more important because like what's your role in the future as part of that?

Yes. Well, so one of the things that I think is important to keep in mind is that marketers are -- so we're having a lot of these conversations with our customers who are building things like ChatGPT native apps or they're experimenting with instant checkout and such. And one of the consistent perspectives is that they're thinking about these things like marketers always do, which is that they have a diverse range of traffic sources and those traffic sources have different amounts of data and certainty that flow with them, and they also have different costs in terms of the cost of discovery of acquiring those customers. And it also continues to be the case that the best purview on those customers and the highest value way to like reengage with them is if while once they discover you, if they get connected to your first-party or direct-to-consumer ecosystem somehow. And that's true across all these different verticals. And so I think that there's a broader question around how much of our buyer behavior shifts to aggregators as like new aggregator technology comes in. And then there's always the second order effect of once an aggregator starts to command the user attention, what -- how extractive does that aggregator act? And I think one of the -- an instructive example of probably some of the effects that will happen here is like if you look at Amazon, the early Amazon marketplace entrants, you would compete on like organic considerations, like how well reviewed are your products and how do they show up and how do they match like what people are looking for, et cetera. Now they built a giant ad business on top of it, right? And so it is very much pay to play. And that is an example where because that aggregator, the people started in that search box, right, has now started to extract more value out of that, it has increased the incentive for brands to set up their own first party. And so there's a lot of brands that maybe 5 years ago would have been happy just living downstream of the Amazon search box. Now that's not as profitable of a venture anymore. And so Shopify has certainly been a beneficiary of that as more brands have set up their own first-party universe. And I think we are going to see very similar dynamics play out with agentic commerce, which is that having a customer come through an agentic route is a -- that's some GMV like in the retailer example. But that customer is not as valuable if they never actually have a connection with your brand. And so -- and they're even less valuable if all of a sudden an advertising business gets built on top of that agentic commerce. And now not only are you not connecting with them, but you're also paying for the privilege of not being connected to them. And that's the exact same world that a lot of food retailers found themselves in as the delivery app started to come into play, too. And so you see strategy shifts from the likes of McDonald's and Burger King and such with respect to the delivery platforms, and it's because being a commodity supplier downstream of effectively an aggregator or an agentic food delivery experience was not the business that they wanted to be in. And so they've invested heavily and the same thing with hotels and airlines around the OTAs. And so I think as Braze looks at it, there's -- the customers that arrived on these first-party properties, it's actually increasingly important in this chat where if your search box starts with chat, you actually currently have even less visibility than you do if the search box starts in Google, like once they end up on your page. And that's one of the things we're hearing from marketers is that they just don't have visibility about what's happening across that interface. That increases the relative importance of making sure that you're collecting first-party data and getting that ability to reconnect with that customer. And that benefits us. So there's going to continue to be a bunch of change there. But I think that as I spoke about on the earnings call, as the app ecosystem and OpenAI also gets built out, they are -- as -- if that ends up more open and less extractive, that's great. It becomes a new app store or becomes like somewhere between probably the Apple App Store and the open web in terms of how open it is and what they allow there. And that's great for us. It's a new platform to collect first-party data and engage with customers. If they end up much more closed and more extractive, that just increases the incentive for brands to build those first-party connections with their customers, and they do that with Braze.

Yes, yes, exactly. Yes. Okay. Yes. That makes a lot of sense. I mean it's going to be fascinating yes, how that continues to play out?

Absolutely.

Shifting gear a little bit, Isabelle. Sorry, that's kind of more like a number question, sorry. If you think about it, like last quarter, but it might be related actually, last quarter, you think customer growth was really good, especially on the high end. The question I'm getting a lot is like, is that kind of AI-driven or like maybe speak to that.

Yes. So Bill mentioned that AI is sort of embedded in every conversation that we're having with customers. So I think it's just -- it's generally part of the narrative. But it's not like it's necessarily like, oh, well, all these new customers are coming from kind of the AI kind of native tiny companies that are all kind of budding out there. So it's not really that. And actually, when we think about the larger -- the greater than $500,000 customers, we're seeing a lot of healthy graduations from kind of sub 500 up into north of 500. And that's really great to see. And again, the customers' ability to kind of more fully utilize their entitlements is really kind of a driver of the ability to sort of see upsells on the horizon. And then -- and when you think about that net number of sort of customers that will trade down from north of 500 to below, that obviously works against us. Well, if you are utilizing the vast majority of your entitlements, then you are not going to have to trade down at a contract renewal period. So that's also really exciting to see.

Yes. And I think what is absolutely true is that like no one in this category is gaining new customers like without frontier investments in AI and an extremely strong AI product road map, and that is like increasingly like the pivot point in purchasing decisions that people are making, especially for those that are making this decision once every 5 or 10 years, right, which characterizes broadly the legacy replacement cycle opportunity that's out there. And so I think we're also really -- like we're optimistic about both within the customer community and customer section, but also the broader partner ecosystem. that Braze's position right now, you look at the Salesforce Marketing and Commerce Cloud growing 1% year-over-year versus Braze growing 25.5% year-over-year. And just like brass tacks on that, like which one of those is going to have a more robust AI investment that if I'm going to partner with them, if I'm either going to build an agency practice in the partner ecosystem or I'm a customer looking to make a transition in my infrastructure and for the first time in 5 or 10 years, like where am I going to place my chips, right? And so I think we feel really good about our position around that.

And then -- I mean, there's 2 ways to think about that using more of what's available to them. That's kind of macro because like they feel they want to do more or it's more like product -- more product from you guys that you want to kind of work with to improve things?

Yes. I would say there are two things at play there. One of them is that people's budgets are stable at a minimum right now. And for some of them, they're growing. And in other places as well, I think some of the SMS growth that we saw certainly is driven by the fact that there's a clear ROI function there, right? The example that I provided in the -- in my prepared remarks and earnings about the medical supply repurchase use case, like that's further down the funnel. There you are spending both to have AI personalized the content and to deliver the lural message. And you know exactly how worth it that is, right, because you've got that ROI function there. And so that is driving certainly incremental usage of some of these higher marginal cost channels in particular. But in general, I think that the marginal cost of engaging your first-party ecosystem has always been more performative and had higher visibility than the broader performance marketing space. But retention and engagement usually is higher up and hierarchy than acquisition is for a lot of people, right? And so I think it's important and one of our roles in our customer community and in broader education and the marketing technology space certainly that strategies need to go further down the funnel. You need to stay there as a companion of the customer all the way through their customer journey. And you need to have an -- like in order to do that, you also need to be able to orchestrate a strategy that goes across all these different relevant channels. And so I think we're really focused on that. AI is absolutely an important part of that because the complexity inherent in trying to actually keep track of where customers are across these multifaceted customer journeys that they are and making sure you're engaging in the right moments with the right strategies. And increasingly, I think deliverability is getting very hard in these inbox, too, right? Push notification, inboxes are getting automatically sorted by AI now on both Android and iOS. You've got more noise than ever coming into your e-mail and some Instantbox. And so those are places where it is -- personalization isn't just like a nice to have that gives you some uplift anymore. It is like table stakes if you even want your messages to get in front of people's eyes. And so I think that increased complexity in that deliverability environment has always been a big benefit for us because as the more advanced solution, there's always the question of like, well, do I need to invest in the more advanced solution? Like what about this other thing that I've been doing before? Like isn't that just good enough? And it's like the harder it is for messages to even just get any sort of placement in an inbox and have a customer actually look at it, the more the answer to that question is like, no, what you were doing before is not only not good enough, it's actually not accomplishing anything for you, right? And that we're a big beneficiary from that.

And changes to our pricing and packaging are actually enabling.

I was asking about the premium...

Right. The credits model, if you think about what that's doing is it's materially lowering the activation energy for a customer to even think about the cross-channel engagement strategy, the experimentation, the expansion into net new channels that they maybe haven't tried before. It used to be one that if you were going to even do SMS, you had to start thinking about which countries, how much volume, how much across each individual country. And if you kind of underutilized in one place, it was really hard to kind of switch that over somewhere else. Here, when you buy the credit, you don't have to think about that in the same level of detail. So it reduces friction in the original sales cycle. And then once you have the credit, you're automatically enabled, right? We have to enable all the customers across all of these channels. So once if they want to try something new, they don't have to engage in a new procurement cycle. They don't have to work with another order form and work to understand what a SKU looks like. It's just embedded and ready to go. And that experimentation is great from a customer experience perspective, and it enables them to actually get to the place where they have the cross channel. And once we have a customer using more and more channels, the number of competitors that we have just kind of falls away. And so that adds to the stickiness of the customer.

Yes, yes. I mean how do you -- from a CFO perspective, pricing packaging, how do you think about premium SKUs then?

Yes. Yes. So look, we look at this across kind of two different dimensions. One is the way it sort of works is think of like an FX table that lives in the background where it's like one credit equals such and such kind of action. And we work to make sure that the -- there is some relevant important margin that we do need to get a minimum margin that we do need to get relative to the pricing that we're being charged by the vendor. On the vendor management side, one, we have -- we're expanding the number of vendors that we buy these premium channels from and sort of work to make sure that we are optimizing where we're putting the customer on, so which vendor are they kind of flowing through. And the vendor -- customers tend to be agnostic as to sort of where that is. And so we will work to optimize that and then working the vendors against each other to make sure that we're kind of getting the best pricing. So we're continuing to do that, but ensuring that we can be in sales cycles, win business without being pricing ourselves out. So it's a line to walk, but we're very aware, obviously, we don't want to be upside down on this.

Yes. Okay. Perfect. I wanted to shift gear OfferFit. What do you see here in terms of adoption trends?

Yes. I think that excitement continues to be high amongst the customer base. We have seen some great customer wins, too, across verticals and in regions around the world. It's going to continue to be rate limited as we continue to build up the services side of the business, right? Like just as a simple example, we've got opportunities like across APAC, but OfferFit didn't have or deployed people in those time zones before. And so we're still in the early days of like bootstrapping a scaled GTM engine around that. But I think customers are seeing great value, and we continue to be very optimistic about it.

Yes. Okay. Perfect. Okay. And then the -- if you think about it, like how broadly kind of -- how broad can that cross-sell be for OfferFit? Like and what's the cross-sell motion that you want to do? I like is that at a renewal point? Or how do you think about adoption there?

Yes. So I think broadly, the -- I would take a step back and say like where do we want to sell people AI to optimize relevance. And the answer to that is everywhere. Everyone should be using AI to optimize relevance. And we will have premium offerings across the whole spectrum. The Decisioning Studio Pro SKU that we sell today, which is around -- it's a multi-hundred thousand dollar per year proposition. That is going to only apply in use cases with high-value actions and with high scale customer bases. But when you have those ingredients, it is absolutely the right answer to get the maximum performance that you possibly can out of those parts of the customer journey. And then there's a whole bunch of other places where relevance optimization that's driven by AI is going to get plugged into the Canvas environment and plugged into other parts of the Braze AI ecosystem, and we're excited about having a full spectrum offering across that.

Yes. Okay. Perfect. And then changing slightly gear again, like Isabelle, one for you. The one question I got from investors is like so organic growth improved a little bit. And there's like the market is there, but the question is, how much of that is go-to-market? And what are you doing there to kind of work on that?

Yes. So we've been talking about improving overall sales efficiency over the productivity over the last couple of quarters. I think that started in kind of Q4 of last year, continued into kind of Q1, Q2. So we're seeing that kind of that momentum continue. And the other part of it, which accumulates over time, obviously, is our ability to quell the downsell motion. And so that is immediately beneficial to top line because it's a classic $1 saved is $1 earned. And that really mixes in sort of immediately. And so we -- it's a combination of those two things that are driving that against some previous years where we were a little more challenged in both of those areas, both on the salesperson productivity side, and we have been talking about carrying a little bit more capacity than where we were punching and also continuing to deal with levels of downsell that were kind of elevated. And so I think those two things are mixing in together.

And I mean, maybe -- do you have any practical examples of what do you do on downsell? Is that kind of seeing closer to the client through the renewal -- before the -- way before the renewal process, et cetera? Like what are you doing there?

Yes. So it starts right at the sale process. So initially -- so first of all, at the sale process, we recognize that customers probably shouldn't be in a position where they're buying for levels of growth. And so we've seen both on the customer demand side and then the way we sort of go to market, we're a little bit more careful about kind of entitlement sizing to make sure that there's going to be good utilization rates. Second, right at the moment of inception for the implementation and onboarding, we talk about completeness and consumption. And so we're literally tracking at the line item level how much progress are we making in the implementation process to make sure everything is enabled and they are ready to go. Then as the contract is underway, we're tracking consumption. And so making sure that like are they able to utilize their entitlements, how is that going? What can we suggest to them? And then looking at as we approach the renewal date, and we're looking further and further out so that we are not quite as reactive, but we can be a little bit more proactive. We're looking at sort of what -- where are things tracking and what are the expectations around kind of customer sentiment and health and et cetera, and what are the risks on the renewal. And so all of that, plus the fact that I think the overall customer base is a little bit healthier today than it was kind of as we were really exiting that ZIRP era. That means that we have fewer places where there's real risk. We can take our existing resources and point them more specifically and more proactively, and it kind of accumulates together with a better overall outcome on a quarterly basis.

I apologize for the question, but was that a system problem in a way, like because like you think about it, well, everyone should watch ever you would?

Yes. No, I think it's just really having better telemetry on the overall kind of level of utilization across kind of the broad swath of sort of the customer entitlement pool. And then just an organizational and a management cadence where you're just looking further and further out. And so just becoming -- moving more to a posture of being proactive. I think also when the volumes of areas of risk were high enough, you just sort of feel like you're -- it's kind of all coming at you, and it's difficult to sort of be proactive and to look further out in the future. As we've gotten through some of that surf era, it's just become a little bit easier.

Yes. Okay. Perfect. Okay. Last couple of minutes, I wanted to talk a little bit about profitability. Margins have been kind of a highlight this year as well. Can you talk a little bit about the drivers there? And where do you see that going from here?

Yes. So we were excited to kind of announce a return to the overall framework that we had identified and articulated back about 15 months ago. And so we've been very judicious about our sort of overall capital deployment strategy this year, even in light of the M&A that we did. So we're a little bit below the expectations on the framework. We should have added maybe closer to 400 basis points given the revenue growth that we're achieving. But next year, looking at adding -- hitting 8% for the full year. And so that really gets us back on the framework, if you think about kind of the cumulative 2-year profile of should have added 400 this year, looking to add another 400 next year. And so looking for that commitment. And funny got a couple of questions as to why talk about that now. And I think this is budget season. This is when we're kind of getting geared up for next year. I've got -- we've got 2,000 employees at the organization. It's really great to be able to kind of set this mile marker, set the expectations, rally the troops and be able to talk to them the way we talk to the broader swath of investors.

Sounds almost more like an internal flag than an external, yes. Yes. Okay. And then last minute, OfferFit was a really good deal for you guys, but you also have been very strong in terms of organic product evolution, et cetera. How do you think about that build versus buy dynamic going forward from here?

Yes. I mean I think that we're going to continue to look for opportunities to make sure that our road map is on the leading edge of technology, and that's going to be both an organic and inorganic exercise. I'm not going to like speculate on the inorganic side, but I think we're committed to staying on the frontier of everything that AI is going to make possible in our space.

Yes, yes. I mean it must be -- I mean, that's the other thing. So the market is evolving so quickly. I guess you can't make that call.

Yes.

Yes. Okay. Perfect. Our time is up. So thank you for joining us. That was really nice. I really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you. And congrats from me as well again.

Yes. Thank you.

Thank you.