Docebo Inc. (DCBO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Today, we're going to be speaking with Sukaran Mehta, Docebo's CFO and a recent father, congratulations. And before we jump in, let me appropriately introduce Docebo. So Docebo provides cloud-based learning management systems that will redefine the way enterprises leverage technology to create and manage content, deliver training and understand the business impact of their learning experiences. Equipped with their multiproduct learning suite, customers around the world are equipped to tackle any learning challenge and create a true learning culture within their organization. So with that as intro and backdrop, maybe we can jump into the Q&A.

So as those that have been following Docebo, you recently announced a very strong quarterly performance in the June quarter. And maybe as we get into the discussion here, if you could just discuss some of the highlights from the quarter for the audience and the folks listening around.

Thanks, John. Good morning, everyone. Yes, I'll kind of give you a summary of the quarter and some of the interesting things that came out of the quarter. So we beat across the board in revenue and EBITDA, subscription growth of 28%, gross margin 81%. We're a profitable business, that's important. We are -- adjusted EBITDA at this point at 7% and free cash flow 16% this quarter. As well as one of the important things about us -- or differentiating factors about us is our share-based comp is the lowest out there, 3% of our total revenue, which is free cash flow per share is important to us as a company and operating principle. The other thing we also did talk about is we raised our guidance compared to consensus, and that was something we have been talking about. But generally, in the quarter, what you would have seen is that we've -- the wins we've had across the board as being a learning management software business, we are supporting our customers in not only multiple use cases, but also verticals, and I'll speak about use cases, which is whether it's supporting your customer education, your partner education, whether it's your employee training, compliance, sales enablement, we can penetrate more than 6 to 8 departments in a company, give or take. And at the same time, we are as horizontal as it gets. If you look at the wins this quarter that we announced, it's all the way from that large big tech customer, which has fallen from our earlier win 3 years ago or so with AWS being one of our largest customers. And then this quarter, you would have seen is all the way from Rolls-Royce in the industrial space to Unity Health, hospital networks in north of the border in Canada, 2 HEI hotels, which runs 100 hotels in the U.S. on Marriott's and Westins, et cetera. And so what you're seeing -- and specifically, the other big [ call out ] we had was a number of wins in the federal and SLED space with the state of Georgia and a large pension provider in Canada. And so what I'm trying to get a story here is that this is a business which not only applies to multiple departments within an organization, it also is as horizontal as it gets from a vertical perspective and so even in this difficult macro, we are pleased with the performance with a 28% growth year-over-year, and we're starting to see some signs of enterprise spend focused on driving real tangible ROI and learning is not an aspect of just tick the box. Just an example here is AWS uses us for almost 6 million users a year to train all their customers and they not only charge for that. It drives their top line because it drives adoption of their business and their platform. So if you can demonstrate ROI to your customers you can certainly do well in this market.

And you mentioned the multiple verticals that you address with the product, strengthen tech, strengthen the government side any verticals that are seeing any sense of softness?

What we would say is, I would say that the soft -- not on the vertical, but specifically where we've also moved away over time is, on the smaller end of the market, the SMB side, is where this quarter and the last quarter, we've seen that, especially in our world, I'll speak to learning, is you got to have a learning strategy in place, you've got to have a customer education strategy in place, so it requires an effort and it requires investment in thought. And what you find is that the smaller end of the market, the SMB is where budgets are tight, first-time adopters, they're trying to figure out what -- where the priorities are. But what we have seen is -- and that's where Docebo, since we've been public in 2019, we've been very clear that we are not market player. Our average deal size is mid -- companies that are 2000 to 5000 employees, but where 50% of our business in a given quarter is large Fortune 500, S&P 500 companies. And so where -- what you're seeing is that's where the investments are being made because they are clearly driving ROI for those businesses and are tied to revenue-generating operations. I mean, we can speak about some of this, but even simple things that you guys must be talking about onshoring has become an important element because there's a lot of training needed, whether it's buy-chain networks, whether it's -- we've talked about Rolls-Royce, there's a real reason why they're doing it because it helps them from an operational perspective. We had a large deal with a large shipping company globally that has had some significant changes to their business, which requires a lot of training to their merchants across the globe, and that is also giving us an opportunity to help those businesses.

Greater than 20% revenue growth, you're in [ rare ] areas of public company in the software space. You talked about some of the big wins that you've had recently. You've talked about moving upmarket where gross retention improves. As you think about the balance of the 20% plus revenue growth you've been seeing historically, where does the balance come between net revenue retention and new customer adds? And is one sort of tilting more position strength versus the other today?

Yes, it's a good question. We -- so we are -- the company from a growth perspective, I would say almost 70% of what we do is net new business, give or take, at this point, still. Our net retention is still strong. We reported last year 109%, 110% in net retention. The other interesting part is as you move up market, and you support multiple departments in an organization. So let's take an example, Bridgestone, great customer. We support them for 4 departments, Customer Education, Partner Education, HR and Compliance. 4 different members -- 4 different VPs use 1 software but don't talk to each other. That is a very sticky platform. And what I'm trying to articulate here is from a gross retention perspective, we are one of the strongest gross retention players in the learning management space because we penetrate multiple departments, and we support a stack that is not reliant on just an HR buyer. And the more we do that and we ran some numbers I can share, almost 50% of our customers use us for 2 or more use cases. In those scenarios, we see a net retention -- sorry, 3 or more use cases, as you said, 50% of our customers use us for -- in those scenarios, we see net retention in excess of 120% and gross retention is as good as ServiceNow and Salesforce.

So sort of top decile and top quartile metrics when you benchmark versus peers. Helpful. So as part of the net adds and bringing in new customers, you did mention an unnamed big 5 U.S.-based global technology leaders, so we can sort of narrow that down on one hand. And then just piecing together some of the clues you also announced an AI partnership with Google around the same time. So can we put 2 and 2 together and shall we assume Google is that top 5 tech company that was addressed as a new customer that you brought in?

It's sometimes hard to get publicity right, when you sign a customer immediately in the quarter. And I think that is a fair connection that you've made there. It's -- we're proud to be partners with Google. In general from a generative AI perspective, we're going to be running a hackathon with Google on AI with our team in Milan. And just perspective on the business we've won is that this is almost around -- we're supporting one of the larger divisions for global sales mastery, around 2.5 million users, a lot of them external, not just employees of this large [indiscernible]. So this is -- what we think about is this is an opportunity to, again, similar to AWS, we went in, we won the initial business and it grows as they grow into multiple departments. But the reason we grow bigger is because we're serving an audience outside of their internal employees. This is supporting their wider ecosystem on enterprise sales and sales mastery and we expect that business to grow as we grow, as they build this use case with us. So I think the connection is pretty obvious. And what we will say is -- and this is also demonstrating one other thing is if you think about the Learning Management space, we, of course, won some large names like AWS in 2019, 2020 -- 2020, sorry, it takes not only a lot of work and effort to get there, but to be an enterprise grade company and to serve at scale multiple departments is a very different -- we're in a very different category and we've matured over the past 5 years to do that. It's not easy to win a business of a big tech player who can -- who generally think about this as a build-themselves first. And if we are able to convince them that Docebo is the solution they don't need to build themselves, that is a validation of our tech stack and I'm not even emphasizing the areas such as pen testing, scalability of the platform -- when AWS -- Andy Jassy announced AWS Skills Builder, we had 6 million people live on the platform in 15 minutes. You better be ready to serve that [indiscernible] and if you fail, you will have consequences. So that's kind of the level of effort that's going on in the last 5 years to be where we are, and that helps us win enterprise large businesses.

So you've got 2 of the 5 big tech, great validation of product, 3 more to go. We'll check it again next year. Okay. So from an AI perspective, you all have been early adopters, Claudio has been very vocal and active in the AI space for many, many years. You've continued to build out your capabilities with some recent M&A transactions as you go in June and the announcement of the generative AI partnership with Google Cloud that you just mentioned. How are you going to leverage those capabilities and products into the product to further your competitive differentiation?

Yes. This is an important topic, and I will say that there's a lot of hype and all the buzz and all that. But we, firstly, I want to state that Docebo has been in the business and AI has been part of our ecosystem for the last -- since we started, but we have products in the market. For example, Docebo Shape, it's a content automation product. It has had the record attach rates for the last 2 to 3 quarters. And we've been doing that, and that product was launched 2 years ago. And it took time traction like every product does but now has a record attach rate. So we're not going to -- I'm not talking about the future promises. We're talking about what we've already done today and how we're going to enhance our AI strategy from here on in. Firstly, the acquisitions and the partnership with Google, and I'll come to some of the things that we're working on from an AI perspective. Edugo is specifically very targeted. We always think about ourselves from a build versus buy product road map mindset. And we found incredible talent. It's more of an aqui-hire and some technology of really smart engineers. Our Head of AI, Giuseppe, led that company. He is now our Head of AI. And we've worked a very -- let's call it targeted accelerated product road map that is part of the acquisition. So the way we do our acquisitions is tied to our product road map and our earn-out is specifically tied to delivering those product road map. And so what you should expect with that and our partnership with Google on AI, including using some of other technology, we think that Google is probably, from our perspective, the leader when you think about large language models and how we can apply that at scale to our businesses. And one other area, which I'll start with in terms of where we're focused on. People are talking all about AI, but here's the practical reality, even with banks such as Citi and others, security, data privacy is the forefront from an AI point of view. So the first starting point for our product road map is what we call the AI Control Panel. Our customers have direct -- will have and have already direct capability to switch on and off what features of AI they want to use or not for their usage. An example here an AWS, who is a customer of mine, does not want that algorithm to support a Walmart, which is also a customer of mine. So you want to give those customers capability that there -- even in synthetic data format, because there's a lot of synthetic data that's being used in AI that they -- their algorithms are unique and being applicable to their use case and their platform. That is going to be very important as we move forward. Even GDPR will make it complicated. So that's number one in terms of how we will start. Our mindset is to make sure we're thinking it from the perspective of the customer. Now we'll talk about -- I'll give you some ideas of where Claudio will speak a lot more at Docebo Inspire in a couple of weeks from now. Docebo Shape is #1 on our priority list in terms of what we do there. It's the content automation module. Effectively, what it does is -- just a simple example is, if I'm an organization, I want to share -- build and share content. I'll give you my example of my team. I have a 400-page revenue recognition document, which is crazy. I want to give that to my team, loaded up on Docebo Shape within seconds, it creates content for true AI with all the pictures and the bells and whistles [indiscernible] within seconds you've done 90% of the work, and now you can give that training to your team with -- it's not a presentation, but it's what we call a micro-learning pill. And that effectively creates social learning at scale and it's shareable. What you have done by this example is cut significant costs of the company on creating content. And as we can do that more at scale for these companies, they don't have to have one center of excellence who only produces content, they can socially enable their customer -- their end users to use content. So when you think about Docebo Shape, you should expect significant enhancements to that platform from where we are today to the future. I will leave some of the excitement for what we announce at Inspire, but content automation is one area. The other area we will talk about is learning -- sorry, is extreme hyper-personalized experience for the end user. So John at Citi may have a very different experience than Peter Fox at Citi, because you -- even though you're on the same learning path because how you're learning is unique to how you are as a person. And so you're learning path will be adjusted and the content that we created, even the quizzes that you get are going to be unique to your learning path, and that's all AI driven. The other area that you should expect, which is going to be on steroids, as we call it, is the world of semantic surge. So we're in LMS. We are in a fortunate position that we have the intellectual property of our customers sitting in their platform. And when you think about searching within that ecosystem, it's an intranet that I call it all worth to, the way you want to access that content, how we can access that search and semantic search will be part of that enhancement, that we will certainly do. And finally, I mean, there's more areas, but I talked about quizzes and content on the fly. But finally, one of the areas you should think about is that the world of AI is not limited to text. We think that -- you can expect that video learning is -- or other forms are going to be interesting. I'm just keeping it relatively quiet in the sense that we have some product builds that are happening. But an example would be, there's nothing stopping John or me to -- if I'm -- let's just take an example, if I am a seller and an account executive at a company, I can relatively practice with a video technology with an avatar an how to sell and that use case effectively means is that I'm actually be able to learn and coach my employee on how to sell. So this platform can give you -- what are the -- how should you start? How should you get started in the sales call? How should you finish the sales call? What are the words you should have used in the middle of the sales call and a whole report card just by practicing with an avatar, perhaps.

Powerful. And as we know, sales, there's tangible ROI.

It applies to accounts receivable. It applies to customer support. It applies to a various number of areas where you're directly interacting with the customers and so on and so forth.

So let's shift to some of your OEM relationships. So those have obviously been an important part of your expansion into enterprise and into new countries and efficient mechanism to do so. It's been a little while now since you announced any sort of new partnership. In this past quarter you announced 2, so a little bit of shift in acceleration. Can you discuss how they strengthen your position in market, how they enable you to scale more quickly?

And I will speak to one OEM. So when we think about the word of OEM and partnerships, we'll speak to OEM and SI separately. But historically, just some background for folks. So Docebo, as I talked about, is a learning management solution, we sell into multiple departments. And if you ask about our competitive landscape, the one area we do compete with someone like a Workday or a Cornerstone is where they're an employee experience platform. So effectively, HR is buying a solution and LMS has been a solution as part of the whole HRS suite. How do I participate in that game because HR is one of my buyer personas, I have multiple buyer personas, but when HR is the sole buyer persona, we will partner with our friends at Ceridian or MHR or DarwinBox. And how that works is just some Ceridian being our largest and oldest partner. In 2018, when David Ossip called us and we were able to work together, they decided that they wanted the best-in-breed LMS solution, which was Docebo. And effectively, Dayforce Learning is Docebo. And what we do in that regards is as part of Dayforce's offering to those buyers, we are able to now penetrate a market where I would have had to compete as just an LMS and a big HRS suite where I'm not even able to compete. And that business, we've said this has -- is give or take, north of 10% of our total revenue and has grown close to 40% to 50% even in the past year. And so -- what I'm -- from there on, if you think about Ceridian, Ceridian, of course, has a strong player in North America, but MHR, I'm sure not a lot of people have heard about them, but they are the largest payroll provider in the U.K. that dominate the market by 40%. And we are their sole LMS provider there. DarwinBox, we just signed, has 2 strategic aspects to it; one, they are India focused. It's a large, large market. And also a market where you cannot go without a partner who has local knowledge, and they pretty much serve almost half of the Bombay Stock Exchange companies on the enterprise large into the market. And so we think that this is the right way not only to partner in regions where we do not have the expertise, but they also have the scale to be able to partner with us and sell into that market. So when we think about certain regions where it is difficult to establish your own sales factors or it's just much better to -- it's much quicker and scalable, we will partner in the OEM world with the DarwinBoxes of the world, specifically in Asia Pac and Europe. And then finally, I want to speak to one other area, which is important that I forgot to mention. The wins that we've had in the large tech customer or some of the government customers. One of the biggest strategies for us has been system integrators in larger size. The big 4 firms/Accenture is the one other, I would call them, the 5 combined. If you think about the large tech customer, this was led by an SI that we partner with. And they effectively are an important source attribution for us in terms of winning business, both in the large enterprise segment, the Fortune 500 as well as government.

Are they recommending Docebo? Are they making sure you get a look at an RFP? What role do they provide in helping you land some of those new customers?

So what is happening in the world of SIs is that they are looking at platforms, specifically Docebo, because -- let's go back in history, the legacy players, maybe the one that we always talk about Cornerstone and others, they have platforms, but they're not platforms that are federated. You want to have a federated platform, which means that you can be -- you can create -- use an LMS, create multiple departments, multiple content and serve it. Maybe an example I'll give you is that, there's some work we're doing right now with school boards. This is happening in 5 to 6 states in the U.S. right now where security of schools and educating the school teachers as well as the police and enforcement -- law enforcement agencies, there's a huge requirement in California and Florida and some other states where you need to have that training happen. And what I'm saying here is that the SI in the front end designs, creates the content, runs the managed service, and we are the learning management solution that powers that. And so what you're doing here is doing a federated concept where you're building a solution, which effectively can scale to multiple states, and all I will say is that we certainly think of our large SI who specifically works in the federal and SLED space as more of a unique sole relationship. And so yes, leading technologies are where they're focused on, where they can scale their businesses as a consulting practice too.

So that's a good segue into the government sector where you've been seeing strength recently and has been a growth vector the past couple of quarters. And now that you've gotten the FedRAMP certification, do you see that as an accelerant into the government sector and continued growth within that vertical?

Yes. So firstly, I'm going to just say that -- correct that. So we have announced that we are investing. And I mean we talked about it in the earnings call, we are now within the next quarter, 2 quarters, on track to be FedRAMP. So it is an important element of us winning business, both in federal and SLED and maybe financial services space because, firstly, federal -- FedRAMP allows you and exempts for the most part to selling into states, which requires StateRAMP. And third, certain financial services institutions would rather be on a FedRAMP-certified ecosystem because it provides higher security and so on and so forth as an environment. I will say that we, historically, just from a business perspective, close to 4% to 5% of our business organically, mostly through inbound has been Fed and SLED. And we have now formed -- this is the only vertical where we formed and we've hired someone in D.C. that leads that practice, and that's part of that ecosystem. And from a sales perspective, and we started seeing really good traction since last year. We won the province of Quebec, a large contract there last year. We won a large contract in a pension provider in Ontario. We won a large contract with State of Georgia this quarter. And so what we are seeing is significant traction. Just some context in numbers, close to [ $260 million ] was spent last year by federal government in the LMS space, that's a large number. And what's interesting there is it's all legacy old tech that is still there. And what we will -- what we are focused on is not only winning state businesses, but now we see a significant opportunity as we move forward in the federal space. There are large opportunities, whether it's the VA, Department of Defense, Homeland Security, that are looking -- if you look at Homeland Security they recently have put out a note that they are going out there with a full on installation and revamping the -- getting rid of their historical platform and building a brand-new platform. So there are some large opportunities that are coming at the federal level. Ultimately, what's happening is that upskilling and helping the federal employees from a productivity perspective is an important element of what the federal government is doing, and we're seeing even larger spend in the next 2- to 3-year cycle on how the budgets are being allocated. And old tech and legacy platforms are being challenged quite a bit, and we see a big opportunity there.

What about on the government side, not within the U.S., but international, Canadian plus in Europe elsewhere?

I would say U.S. will be our biggest focus, if I am frank. There's just a significant amount of opportunity at state and federal level. And sometimes you have to keep that focus because even from a CAC perspective, I want to be mindful of where we spend our time and investments. The other natural market for us is Canada. We won quite a bit in Canada between the provinces of Quebec, Alberta and Ontario. And we will -- with the same system integrator that we work with, both north and south of the border, we have some relationships that are helping us do that. I think in general, Europe is the next market. We would probably just focus on G7, but in the immediate term, you should expect us to mostly be focused in North America for the next 2 to 3 years? We're just seeing a lot more traction. We have a lot more opportunity in our pipeline, and we'd rather stay focused on where we build the infrastructure.

So we've talked a lot about growth drivers. So let's spend a minute on margin. So you've announced 2 tuck-in acquisitions made in the June quarter, continuing to invest in R&D, sales and marketing, and even with that as a backdrop, you've guided to low double-digit EBITDA for Q4 this year. What's the math or the data points that help explain how you get there?

It's always easy because, I said this to my buddy, they are brand, it's like when you are 81% gross margin business being profitable should be possible, I find, in light, but here's how we think about it. We're 81% gross margin business. As you think about our profile below that, we are fortunate from an R&D perspective that we have 18% of revenue in R&D, 38% in sales and marketing and G&A is 18%. The math is simple. We will exit this year 10-plus percent EBITDA free cash flow, without compromising any investments in sales and marketing and R&D. Primarily, that leverage is coming from G&A. And if you look at my friends north of boarder of Kinaxis, I look at them as a Canadian company, for example, that is at a [ $300 ] million ARR mark, their G&A is at 10% or so. You've got another 8% in leverage coming from G&A. I've held my G&A flat for the last 4 to 5 quarters. So that gives you confidence that we have the cost discipline and G&A should be one that's easy to solve for. And we think as we look at -- one of the things that's been interesting, I'm sure other companies are seeing this too, 2020, 2021 was an interesting time because you had competition on all ends from an employee perspective. Sales and Marketing was one area where if you lost a seller, you would -- it would take you 9 months to fully ramp them. Now that attrition rate that we saw in 2020, '21, because of our success, now we're seeing that go away because of where the markets are today and the private markets and all the competitors are slightly going away. And we are seeing -- at this point, we're seeing the lowest attrition rate in our sales and marketing team. As you know, our R&D team is based in Milan, which has always been the lowest attrition in the company. So as you move forward, I do not need to spend, especially in Sales and Marketing, I do not need to spend that incremental spend that would have happened to fully ramp people and as we lose people, where we are pretty much from a quota capacity perspective, in a good position as we look forward to next 18 to 24 months. So you should see some leverage coming in through Sales and Marketing. G&A, I talked about. That kind of tells you that this business. If I exit this year 10%, you should expect that on a long-term basis, this business has a way to go and be a reasonably good rule of 40 business, where almost give or take, half of that is coming from EBITDA free cash flow.

So maybe we'll end on the balance sheet and capital allocation. So no debt today, $200 million in cash, steadily improving margins and cash flow generation of the business, what is the capital allocation strategy today going forward as you continue to get more profitable and cash generative?

Yes. Firstly, I think the $200 million is important to note that we will generate, give or take, on an annual basis at this point, let's call it, 10% free cash flow. And as we move forward as EBITDA and free cash flow is relatively similar for me, and follow each other. So we are generating reasonable cash already, but we should expect to generate more cash as we move forward next year, which also gives me the capability to use our free cash flow for tuck-in acquisitions, and we will be strategic in this market to use that cash to our benefit to the extent it's accretive. The other thing that [ Jerome Powell ] helps us with is that the [ $200 million ] that is sitting on the balance sheet, it makes a decent 5-plus percent interest. So that is reasonable for us, at least for now. So with that perspective, I will say that our primary focus on our cash on the balance sheet is continue to look at build versus buy M&A, where our thought process is threefold. Number one, we're not in the business of acquiring legacy platforms and competitors, especially legacy competitors. We look at our product road map by use case where by vertical sometimes, and we think about build versus buy in terms of accelerating the product road map. So Edugo or PeerBoard, just an example. So Edugo was an AI acquisition, which accelerates our AI road map by 3 to 4 quarters. And PeerBoard was a social community forum. Mihail is ex Facebook, he built at the time Facebook Messenger, and we wanted that community forum within our platform and that significantly accelerates our product road map by acquiring PeerBoard. Both of the acquisitions that we did are tied to clear product road maps and earn-outs are almost half of the acquisition prices tied to earn outs on milestones. So we will continue to use our cash and our balance sheet in that regard and think about where specifically in customer education, sales coaching and upskilling are the 3 areas we've talked about, where we will be focused in terms of looking at technologies that can advance our product. We tend to stay away from companies that will slow down our organic engine. So we look at adjacencies because our organic engine is growing reasonably well at 28% subscription growth. So we want to make sure we do not disrupt the organic engine and that primary focus from a use of proceeds perspective and the second area that you would have seen, free cash flow per share is an important metric for our company and on the C-suite and how our board looks at ourselves. And as we've been generating this incremental cash with our free cash flow as well as the interest that we're earning on the $200 million, we have been responsible stewards and we think returning some of that incremental cash through a programmatic share buyback NCIB, we call it in Canada, has been received well with our investors. So really M&A first and being mindful in returning some of that shareholder incremental cash that we generate from the interest, et cetera, is how we think about proceeds right now.

And as you continue to generate more profit and EBITDA in the future, I think business scales today, primarily equity funded business, would you ever consider any other type of capital, whether it's debt or convert in the future?

If there was ever a large -- I mean, listen, this will be always in the context of a large opportunity from an M&A perspective. It would have to be highly accretive from where we sit today. If there was ever an opportunity like that, you never say no. But I think that at least as we sit today, there is -- we've been very mindful of doing acquisitions that do not construct our organic engine. But yes, I mean, it just depends on the size of the acquisition we do. I mean, we do certainly have the -- if you think about the business, we will probably be close to, I won't say, but in reasonably good double-digit free cash flow next year, and we probably bring close to $25 million, $40 million -- give or take, $40 million in next year in free cash flow, we should be able to generate some incremental cash that will help some M&A. But if it's a large opportunity, then you have to look at other sources of capital, whether it's a primary or [ a bet ].

Well, I think we're just about out of time here. So thank you for joining us today, and look forward to checking again next year.

Thanks, John. Appreciate it.