Tom Siebel
Analyst · Piper Sandler. Please proceed
Thank you, Paul and good afternoon everyone. Thank you for joining us. I am pleased to – I am here with Juho Parkkinen, our Chief Financial Officer. And I am pleased to share with you our results for the fourth quarter and for the entire fiscal year of 2022. Bottom line, it was a great quarter. We finished the quarter with $72.3 million in revenue, up 38% year-over-year, exceeding our guidance and exceeding, I believe, all analysts’ expectations. And I haven’t really looked at lately at the matrix of high-growth software companies, but I expect that would be in the top decile of growth rates. Subscription revenue was $56.3 million, up 31% year-over-year. Our non-GAAP gross profit was $58.5 million, a 43% improvement over the previous year. We ended Q4 of fiscal year ‘22 with GAAP RPO of $477.4 million, a 62% increase year-over-year. Non-GAAP RPO is $516 million, a 50% increase year-over-year. We continue to sustain healthy non-GAAP gross margins of 81%. Our free cash flow for the quarter was a negative $14.8 million, a 46% improvement year-over-year. We finished the quarter with $992 million in cash and cash equivalents. So, we have roughly $1 billion at the bank – in the bank. And at this rate, it will take quite a few quarters to deplete our cash reserves. Looking at the results for the year, they were quite good, exceeding our guidance and exceeding analyst expectations, finishing the year at $252.7 million in revenue, a 30% growth rate over the previous year. Subscription revenue was $206.9 million, a 31% increase year-over-year and our non-GAAP gross margin increased a little over 5 points to $81.7 million. Now, I want to talk a little bit about the addressable market opportunity, which is really quite staggering. Enterprise AI software is predicted to be almost a $600 billion market by 2025. We spent the better part of the decade building what we call, actually more than a decade now, building what we call the C3.ai Suite. That is a software platform that provides all of the services necessary and sufficient to design, develop, provision, operate even in the most complex enterprise applications. And on top of that, we have to develop and deliver to the market now 42 enterprise AI applications that meet the needs of manufacturing, utilities, oil and gas, chemicals, aerospace, state and local government and other industries. Now, enterprise AI is a very complex market and it has a lot of players who do a lot of things and it is confusing to investors, it is confusing to customers, and it is confusing to the market at large. Because we have all of these kinds of bright shiny objects out there that are provided by hyperscalers and are available as open – some are available as open source solutions. And they do things like provide machine learning libraries or virtualization or data persistence or machine learning pipelines or whatever it maybe. And many of these are great products. Many of these are great companies. But again, this is really very confusing to investors, to customers and in the market acquired. And C3.ai is frequently lumped into this category. So, I want to take a minute and talk about how we fit into enterprise AI, because it’s quite different from all this and it’s quite different from the way that these companies fit into the market. These organizations generally make piecemeal components that do interesting things like platform independent data persistence, AutoML or whatever. Now the way that we think about enterprise AI applications is the way the market has thought about enterprise application software for the last few decades, where we first began developing enterprise application software in the early ‘80s at companies like Oracle and SAP and later PeopleSoft and Siebel Systems and others, we basically built these applications on top of relational database systems. And on top of relational databases, we built a set of development tools, we are building in reports and forms and whatnot. And we use those to build families of applications that solve business problems like CRM and ERP and manufacturing automation, supply chain management what has. A few decades later, this has grown to be roughly a $500 billion software market and everybody understands it. And these applications are used to solve very real world business problems. They enable companies, for example, to report their inventory balances and their supply chain. A supply chain say for at Boeing for a Boeing 777 might be a million components in a supply chain that stretches from South Carolina to Shenzhen and consists of resistors and transformers and flat actuators and propulsion devices and flight management systems. And they want to be able to report every 30 days or 90 days or 365 days exactly what was the inventory of each item. And by the time you add the Boeing 777 to the 787 for the 767 to 757 and the Boeing 737 or the Boeing 707, there is pretty big parts inventory that you need to be able to report accurately. Or you might be able to – you might want to report on what your customer churn was 60 days ago or 90 days ago. Okay, if you are a bank, you might have to report on how much fraud took place, how much anti-money laundering took place 90 days ago or 180 days ago. And if you don’t do this correctly, as CEO, you get to rewrite your resume, you get to pay billions of dollars in fine and you might go to jail. So it’s really quite important to get this right. You might want to report on what your customer churn rates were, for example, at rise. And so, this enterprise software is the end market and you know of pretty well as ERP and CRM and supply chain management and what have you. I was there when we started it. And today, it’s roughly $0.5 trillion business. Now, these applications are inherently descriptive in nature. They provide a company a perfect 2020 hindsight into what happened 3 months ago, 6 months ago, a year ago. Now at C3.ai, we spent a decade in almost $1 billion building a software technology stack that consists of a platform as a service, an application development platform and low-code development tools and now including 42 turnkey enterprise applications. And these with C3.ai, we make these existing enterprise applications predictive in nature. Okay. So, now instead of using a database or relationary database for data storage we are using the cloud. Okay, we are using existing ERP systems and CRM systems, like SAP and Salesforce and Oracle and what have you. And we built an AI application layer that makes these applications predictive in nature so they can tell us what’s going to happen in the future so that we can change the future. So rather than simply telling us how many parts we had in each inventory been historically, a predictive AI application will tell us exactly how many parts we need in each bin, in each of the next 180 days to meet the demand function, okay? Rather than tell us how many customers left us 90 days ago or 180 days ago, these applications will now tell us which customers by name are going to leave us in the next 180 days, so we can take action to retain them. Rather than tell us, for example, a number of fraudulent events that we had some time ago, it will identify fraudulent events in real time so we can progress the fraud from happening. The beauty of enterprise AI is when we apply AI to the market of enterprise applications they become predictive in nature that we can predict the future and change the future. Now, this promises to be order of a $600 billion market, not too many years down the road. I believe that if we look 2, 3, 4, 5 years out, this is a complete replacement market for everything that happened in enterprise application software in the last three decades. I do not believe that in 2 years or 3 years or 4 years, companies are going to be satisfied knowing what their customer churn was 90 days ago. They are going to demand to know which customers are going to leave if we don’t take action. Rather than know what our non-deployment rate was for tractors, aircraft, automobiles, they are going to want to have predictive maintenance applications that tell them which machines are going to fail in advance so they can fix the devices before they fail and have lower failure rates. That’s the big deal. That’s what enterprise AI is all about. Now, when we look at the companies that many people in the market, investors and customers, okay, consider to be competitors of AI, okay, really, none of these are competitors. They are all in fact parts. Now, like C3.ai provides out of the box, okay, all of the services necessary to design, develop, provision and operate an AI application. Many of our customers, in fact, all of our customers will have some experience working with AI tools and they want to use many of these third-party products like Databricks for data virtualization or Snowflake for platform independent data persistence or Amazon SageMaker for citizen data scientists or what our Python to develop machine learning tools and C3.ai provides orchestration layer that enables customers to easily meet these solutions together into a cohesive solution. And all of these applications, both open source and proprietary are entirely compatible with the C3.ai platform. So we need to think of all of these things, Alteryx, TensorFlow, AWS, Google Cloud, Databricks, these look more to us like partners than the selection competitors. Let’s take a look at – this will be an example of the Shell AI platform. We are on top of Azure, they put C3.ai and because they have investments of value in things like Kubernetes for containerization and Databricks for virtualization and TensorFlow for machine learning libraries, Matlab, TIBCO, Alteryx, what have you, we enable them to very easily incorporate these into the C3.ai platform market. This is Shell AI, but virtually 100% of our customers, 100% are using some combination of these other products with the C3.ai platform. So, it’s really quite different than I think what it is perceived to be. Bottom line, all of these independent products appear to us – that appear to some to be competitors are, in fact, partners. They are partners at Shell, at Koch Industries, at the United States Air Force, at virtually every C3.ai customer. I want to address the issue of customer capture. Our customer count has been growing quite substantially in recent years. And in the last year alone, it grew from 151 customers to 223 customers. But – and if you look at our diversification by industry, it’s really becoming increasingly diverse like oil and gas, which is a pretty good market to be in today with oil in excess of a rough order of $100 a barrel, pretty good business. At the same time, we have seen a lot of diversification outside of oil and gas. And this is a diversification of the industry, including oil and gas. This is bookings without oil and gas. And you can see that while our – year-over-year, our bookings in oil and gas grew 95%. Outside of oil and gas, it grew by 116%. So, let’s talk about customer penetration. We are very certainly focused on landing new customers. That being said, when you think about many of our large global customers like Shell, Koch Industries, United States Air Force, Department of Defense, ENGIE, we are very much focused on penetrating these customers deeply. And if we look at this customer base that we have today, it might be 5% to 10% penetrated. Now with many companies in the AI space or the SaaS software space, investors are really interested how many new logos did the vendor add in the quarter and perhaps $10,000 or $20,000 each. That’s not the business we are in, okay. We are in the business of landing very large customers, okay, investing in those customers and making them very large and very successful over a period of years. Let me give you a couple of examples, okay. Shell is, I think, the fifth largest company in the world, one of the largest hydrocarbon producers in the world. Shell has standardized on C3.ai across all lines of business: upstream, downstream, midstream, integration of renewables. Today, they have over 10,000 pieces of equipment monitored by our platform. They have 23 assets in production. Now, I understand the asset at Shell isn’t a pump or a valve. An asset at Shell is something like Pernis, Pernis being the largest refinery in Europe, but I think processes order of 0.5 billion barrels of oil a day. An asset for Shell would be like Nigeria LN gas, okay. So an asset at Shell might be larger than 50% of the companies in the world. Okay. There on the road today that 65 assets in production this year. At our users’ group in March, Shell sit up on stage and they realized – that they realized in front of all of our customers at our users’ group conference and then they realized a $1 billion of economic benefit from their C3 investments last year and they expect to realize $2 billion of economic benefit from our investors this year. Now I ask you, how many customers are you aware of from SAP, Salesforce, Siebel Systems, Oracle Corporation, whatever it might be, all five companies, how many customers are you aware of who have stood up on stage and said that they are getting $1 billion, $2 billion, $3 billion, $4 billion or $5 billion a year in economic benefit from that solution. I would argue that none of you have ever heard that, because it’s never been said. Let’s take a look at the United States Air Force Rapid Sustainment Office. Again, this is predictive maintenance for aircraft and the Air Force has roughly 5,000 aircraft. Here, we are doing AI-based predictive maintenance for B1 bomber, F-15, F-16, F-18, F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. And look at the speed, this project line shows the speed at which we bring these applications into production. So, what is this all about? This is about integrating all of the data about missions, about weather, about fuel or kilometry from the devices on the aircraft maintenance systems to build predictive models that will predict what device is going to fail, 50 or 100 flight hours before it fails, so that we can avoid the failure. And some of these aircraft cost $100 million a copy and their current availability rate is say 50%. With C3.ai, we can increase the availability by 10%, 20%, 30% and now we deal with the scale of the United States Air Force. This is worth billions of dollars in economic benefit annually. I believe we have 16 aircraft platforms live today and we expect to have 22 platforms live by midyear. So, deeply penetrating these accounts is what C3 is all about. We continue to be focused, okay, on adding new customers. But at C3.ai, it’s more important to look at the lifetime value of our customers than at how many new customers we are sizing. And yes, our customer base is growing with new customers in the quarter, we included PwC, EY, the County of San Mateo. Cargill is a recent customer. Again, what’s really more important okay is the penetration of these customers. Koch Industries, which is more than a $100 billion business, and they became a customer a couple of years ago, made a decision in the quarter to standardize on C3 across all lines of business. This would include Foothills Resources, Georgia-Pacific, Molex, all Koch business units are standardizing on C3. Similarly, at Cargill, we are doing predictive supply chain optimization and supply network risk from one of the largest food producers in the world. And the value of this is quite significant. We are helping feed the world at a time when much of the world is facing famine. So this is what it means to – for bookings at C3. So this is an example of a large integrated energy company in Europe. Their initial contract was for about €300,000 in over 8 years. It has continued to grow to €120 million. This is an example of a large chemical company in the United States, where their initial contract was for $9 million and then it grew to $14 million and then $59 million. This company stood up at Stage Users Group and that they expect to realize $8 billion of economic benefit from C3 this year, $1 billion. This is a major U.S. government agency and how – now we have penetrated that. This is a large industrial manufacturing company, what have you. So while we might start small, we might start with a trial – a free trial, a $50,000 trial, a $500 product, a $0.5 million trial or initial project for a couple of million dollars, our goal is to realize sometimes $1 billion, $2 billion, $3 billion, $4 billion in annual economic benefit for the customer. So as you can see, this is quite a different story from what you’re used to seeing in enterprise application software where people are selling hundreds of things for $40,000 a piece. So our primary focus is penetrating existing customers. This is an example of the utility in Europe that today is generating billions of dollars of smart an annual benefit from smart grid analytics. Now the growth strategy, I’ve covered this, all familiar with how we are growing the business. We continue to grow geographically in North America, in Europe, in Asia-Pacific. At the same time, we are building vertical market, sales organizations in financial services, manufacturing, what have you. We are aligning with go-to-market partners in each vertical, bigger use in oil and gas, IS in financial services, [indiscernible] in aerospace and defense. And then we have very meaningful horizontal market partnerships with hyperscalers, very significant relationship with Microsoft, significant and growing relationship with Google, HPE, NVIDIA, okay and others. And so this is what – this is how we’re expanding all assets of the cube to establish a leadership position. And we’ve made a big investment in this over the years. I’ve talked about it. I’ve talked to you about this. And so how does this investment pay off with these partners, the hyperscalers, vertical market partners, utility partners, oil and gas partners, it’s paid off pretty well. If we look at our bookings for last year, 64% of our bookings, okay, was generated in partnership with these market partners. So this is becoming really quite significant. We have a substantial and growing partner ecosystem. We have a recognized market leadership. We have a proven track record of success. We have a veteran management team. We have a very high-performance culture. We have excellence in execution. Big picture, C3.ai is $0.25 billion software business growing at roughly a 40% compound annual growth rate. We have roughly $1 billion of cash in the bank. And our strategy is quite simply to establish and maintain a market leadership position globally in enterprise AI. Okay. Let’s talk about guidance, okay? Okay. As I mentioned, the addressable market opportunity is large and expand. Our pipeline continues to expand. Our customer footprint is growing. Our balance sheet is rock solid. Okay? I have never been more optimistic about C3.ai than I am today. We have exceeded revenue guidance for each of the six consecutive quarters that we have been a public company and we are tracking exactly to the long-term plan that we laid out during the IPO roadshow, looking to go [indiscernible] it’s still on the web, okay and we’re tracking exactly to what we said that. Our revenue growth rate was 38% in the year ending April, okay, up 17% – up from 17% in the prior year. Now in the past few years, as you know, okay, we’ve been making substantial investments in branding and advertising. These investments have contributed substantially to our brand equity and market recognition. I’m confident these were prudent and productive investments, we largely created and not only the market category of enterprise AI. That being said, it’s not lost on us that there’s been a fundamental shift in capital market expectations regarding cash flow. Until recently, the market rewarded rapid growth at any cost. This has clearly changed the market currently demanding sustainable growth combined with free cash flow, with free cash flow. We are confident that we can achieve that goal. Our economic model is quite healthy. This is a structurally profitable business with a strong cash balance and a non-GAAP gross margin of 80%. Our investments in branding and advertising over the last few years have been very effective in establishing C3.ai as a market leader in enterprise AI. And those investments will now permit us to dramatically reduce our branding investments as a percent of revenue going forward. We’ll benefit from cost economies of scale, in product marketing and development, and we will realize additional savings from expanding the bulk of our engineering and services capacity in our new Guadalajara, Mexico facility. To drive growth, we will continue to expand our investments in sales, partner capacity and service capacity commensurate with revenue growth. Our target is to generate sustainable positive free cash flow within eight to 12 quarters. Under stable market conditions, I would guide to a 30% or greater growth rate for fiscal year 2023. With the current economic and political uncertainty, however, and pervasive market passivism, we are inclined to set the expectations by low. While we are much more optimistic about the business, we’re not sure the guiding high is at any benefit to our shareholders. Also, candidly, we did see some business that we expected to close in Q4 got moved out of the quarter. And we feel there is still too much lumpiness in our pipeline. Taking all of this into consideration, we believe it is prudent to provide fiscal year ‘23 Q1 revenue guidance of $65 million to $67 million. And fiscal year ‘23 growth targets of 23% to 25%. By the way, there is a typo on the slide that the vendor was not able to pick up. It’s so – it says ‘22 and in fact, this is a ‘23. So I apologize for that error. When market conditions stabilize, we expect to target 35 – 30% to 35% steady-state top line growth, while continuing to grow free cash flow to 20% non-GAAP targets. Now well, free cash flow, it’s just a 20% target. That’s the predict non-GAAP, okay? Now I’m going to turn the call over to our experienced and accomplished Chief Financial Officer, Juho Parkkinen, to provide additional color on our business results and plans, and then we will throw this open to questions. Juho, over to you.