Good day, and welcome to the Bandwidth Inc. Second Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. Today all participants will be in a listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] After today's presentation there will be an opportunity to ask your questions. [Operator Instruction] Please note that today's event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Sarah Wallace, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you and welcome to Bandwidth's second quarter 2024 earnings call. Today, we'll discuss the results announced in our press release issued earlier today. The press release and an earnings presentation with historical financial highlights can be found on the Investor Relations page at investors.bandwidth.com. With me on the call today is David Morken, our CEO; and Daryl Raiford, our CFO. They will begin with prepared remarks, and then we will open up the call for Q&A. During the call, we will make statements related to our business that may be considered forward-looking, including statements concerning our financial guidance for the third quarter and full year of 2024. We caution you not to put undue reliance on these forward-looking statements as they may involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to vary materially from any future results or outcomes expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Any forward-looking statements made on this call and in the presentation slides reflect our analysis as of today, and we have no plans or obligation to update them. For a discussion of material risks and other important factors that could affect our actual results, please refer to those contained in our latest 10-K filing as updated by other SEC filings, all of which are available on the Investor Relations section of our website at bandwidth.com and on the SEC's website at sec.gov. During the course of today's call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures is included in our press release issued earlier today as well as in the earnings presentation, which are located on our website at investors.bandwidth.com. With that, let me turn the call over to David.

Thank you, Sarah. Welcome to Bandwidth's second quarter 2024 earnings call. We're pleased to report a very strong first half toward our plan for 2024. In the second quarter, we delivered solid revenue growth across all categories while accelerating profitability and cash flow. We are a disciplined operating team with a steady focus on expanding profitability, creating unique software innovations like Maestro and AIBridge and broadening the reach of our global Bandwidth Communications Cloud to deliver a sustainable competitive advantage. The team is grateful for the trust our customers place in us every day and for our Bandmates who go the extra mile to support them. And I thank God for our opportunity to help connect people around the world. Voice communication is a large growing market and a pillar of our business delivered through our global communications plans and enterprise market offers. Bandwidth powers all the leaders in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for both unified communications and contact center as a service. Now, larger enterprises are increasingly recognizing the potential of cloud contact centers to transform customer experience and leading CCaaS platforms are capitalizing. Microsoft recently announced its new dynamics platform, where we are a foundational partner through Operator Connect and Direct Routing. We've also seen other top CCaaS players announced historic contracts with large numbers of seats. This is a trend that we expect will contribute to future growth in our GCP and enterprise categories. For example, a nationwide provider of medical claims management selected Bandwidth as their exclusive provider for voice, valuing our exceptional customer support and the flexibility of our Maestro product to orchestrate and enhance call routing to their CCaaS platform. When CCaaS platforms add customers, we benefit as the underlying provider. And when the largest global organizations need to simplify and unify their communications…

Thank you, David, and thanks everyone for joining us today. Bandwidth had a strong second quarter. We reported total revenue of $174 million, up 19% from last year and above the midpoint of our guidance range, an adjusted EBITDA of $19 million, up 77% from the prior year and surpassing the high end of our guidance. Free cash flow was $18 million, significantly higher than the first quarter and nearly $20 million over last year's quarter. This robust performance underscores how we are delivering on the commitment we made at our Investor Day 18 months ago to achieve sustainable, profitable growth, operating leverage and cash flow generation, and an optimized capital structure. Rounding out our second quarter results, again, total revenue grew to $174 million and consisted of cloud communications revenue of $128 million, up 8% from last year, and messaging surcharges of $45 million. Our cloud communications revenue benefited from strong growth across all of our products and was led by messaging, which continued to be a strong driver, growing 33% year-over-year. The large bulk of our second quarter messaging revenue is derived from expanding commercial demand from new and existing customers across a variety of verticals and use cases, and also benefited from about $3 million in political campaign demand. A reminder that we go to market serving three customer categories: global communications plans customers, programmable services customers and direct enterprise customers. For global communications plan, our second quarter revenue grew 2% year-over-year, fully in line with our expectations, reflecting stable momentum across our CCaaS and UCaaS power platform customers. Our programmable services category grew 31% year-over-year, driven by continued healthy messaging demand from commercial customers in e-commerce, financial services and healthcare, as well as the previously mentioned $3 million tailwind from political campaign messaging. In our enterprise…

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. And today's first question comes from Arjun Bhatia with William Blair. Please proceed.

Thank you and appreciate you're taking the question here. Daryl, maybe can you start with I noticed the net retention rate increased quite nicely from Q1. I was hoping you'd just be able to flush out some of the drivers there where you're seeing the most expansion from customers. And is this kind of gross expansion increase? Or are you seeing more kind of favorable volumes that are limiting some of the downtick in consumption as well? Thank you.

It is broad based. Thank you, Arjun. It's nice to speak with you. It is broad based. We're happy with our net retention rate. You're right, it did grow sequentially and year-over-year. That's driven by our commercial messaging customers, that cohort from last year, as well as our enterprise customers. We're onboarding new enterprise customers each quarter, but we have established a nice base and that cohort has been expanding as we cross sell.

Okay, got it. And then maybe one for David here. But when you think about embedding AI in the contact center, and I think you mentioned in your prepared remarks that voice is a durable channel, but why would AI not change the channel mix dynamics in the contact center? It seems like that is one of the early areas where we'll see AI adoption. But I'm curious, what gives you the confidence that the voice is the preferred channel there even under this new technology paradigm?

You know, it's interesting, OpenAI only this week announced that they are – for some certain subscribers, enabling voice as an interface to query and get responses from ChatGPT. And I think what that represents is our conviction as well that voice is a primary human interface that we're illustrating on this call as we speak. So voice and response, whether it's a live agent that you're interacting with that's knowledgeable about your issue and resolving it, or an AI endpoint that has authoritative information at its virtual fingertips to relate to you. In both cases, our Maestro platform, the integrations that we offer, the underlying global cloud platform, all resonate deeply to provide voice as what we believe will very quickly become a primary channel and access interface for AI, in both in the contact center origin and in many other use cases.

All right, perfect. Thank you. I appreciate it.

And our next question comes from Ryan MacWilliams with Barclays. Please proceed.

Hey guys, it’s Eamon Coughlin on for Ryan MacWilliams. Thanks for taking the question. Great to see the beat on EBITDA guide and rev coming in line. Was the decision to reiterate both of these metrics, particularly EBITDA, a sign of conservatism, or was there a shift in expectations in how the second half would perform compared to 1Q?

Eamon, do you mind – so your question was related to would you repeat that? You broke up on us.

So was the decision to reiterate both EBITDA and rev a sign of conservatism or is there a shift in expectations and how the back half would perform compared to 1Q?

We’re really pleased with the performance. The first quarter performance we grew approximately 10% in terms or 12% in terms of cloud communications revenue. We grew another 8% in the second quarter. First half has been very, very strong. It has only really strengthened our conviction around the full year. Raise got outlook from last May of 715 as a midpoint of revenue and 74 as a midpoint of EBITDA. There is some potential inherent conservatism in that, and I think de risking the second half is appropriate.

Perfect. And then just curious how usage volumes trended throughout the quarter? And have volumes shown similar trends so far early in the third quarter?

In terms of – well, leading into the – leading into the first part of this third quarter, we’re very pleased with the volumes. We’re very pleased with our commercial volumes. Our Global Communications Plans, commercial messaging and enterprise customers continue to show – exhibit usage patterns that we would expect that drive our confidence in our full year outlook.

Perfect. Thanks guys.

The next question comes from Will Power with Baird. Please proceed.

Okay, great, thanks. Yes, it’s great to hear some of the early traction with Maestro and Bridge AI. I guess I’d love to maybe if we can maybe dig even deeper there as to some of the customer conversations you’re having there kind of product rollouts with the combination, kind of where are we in that evolution? I assume it’s pretty early. And what does that Maestro and Bridge AI kind of pipeline look like? I’m just trying to better understand the medium, long-term opportunity there.

Thanks, Will. This is David. The medium- and long-term opportunity for Maestro and AIBridge is fantastic. And we illustrated during this quarter some of the customer wins and I’ll just highlight those. Thanks for the great question. First one is a nationwide provider of medical claims management. This customer provides solutions for industries like workers comp, auto health, disability management, and they manage claims and do virtual care. And these are complex interactions with customers. And we are providing Microsoft Teams Voice as a Solution with inbound-outbound voice from Bandwidth. And Maestro helps them with this voice interface, the SMS inbound-outbound solution and the ability to integrate third-party solutions that – some are pre-integrated, some that they bring to the table. That’s one example. And I think what’s really important to understand about this kind of a Maestro win is it represents a contract value that is orders of magnitude larger than our $198,000 average ARPU. This is an enterprise customer using an enterprise product in Maestro at an enterprise contract value that is orders of magnitude larger than our ARPU. The second one is a provider of patient transportation, meal delivery, remote patient monitoring, and personal in-home care. They also are a Maestro win. They also use our toll-free Call Assure product, and the flexibility that we give them with Maestro as an orchestration layer allows them to really build a future proof set of services internally for engaging with customers. And these are complex customer interactions. And the Maestro product is so unique in the marketplace compared to the incumbents or anyone else. We’re really excited. And again, this example – this is a three-year contract at many multiples of our average ARPU that we’ve experienced historically. So those are just two examples. Both happen to be in healthcare, both nationwide, domestic. During the period we also added a global luxury brand using our platform outside the United States as another example. But in each of these cases, well, these are really smart operating teams planning for the future in a very fluid environment where there are third-party solutions in AI that are emerging. And they want to make sure they’re ready with an orchestration layer. When those best-of-breed or novel new solutions emerge. And so they’re planning for the future, they’re signing with us, and leaving incumbents and doing so at a contract value for us that is really healthy.

Okay, that’s helpful. Thank you. And then maybe just a quick second question, whether David or Daryl, just on the messaging growth, which continues to look – continues to look very good, I guess up 33%. I guess the question is, is that apples-to-apples, with the 50% in Q1 and any kind of color on deceleration, is there seasonality in there? Just trying to understand kind of the delta, I guess, and the change, even though we’re still a healthy number here.

Yes, thank you. It is a healthy number and we’re pleased with that commercial growth. There is some seasonality, there is some usage patterns and usage timing, that goes with that. But there’s nothing – it’s very healthy and there is nothing to report really on that.

Okay, thank you all.

Thanks, Will.

The next question is from Patrick Walravens with JMP Securities. Please proceed.

Oh great. Thank you. And congratulations to you guys. The sustained performance at Bandwidth is really great. Okay, so maybe, first of all, David, very big picture, you have this comparison between you guys and AWS in your deck, which can you just comment on that? So what are the similarities? And where does that comparison maybe break down?

Yes, all analogies are helpful. There are also limited [indiscernible], you’re absolutely right. In this case, cloud migration revolution is something that was pioneered by AWS, where you got rid of servers that you were racking and stacking on your prem and you were able on a global regional basis, to abstract processing, storage, compute, security and many other things to AWS in a wonderful way. And you were liberated from hardware concerns on site, from incumbent legacy interconnections that were challenging and difficult. And it really provided the base layer for much of the amazing experiences available today digitally. In the enterprise, we, as an analogy to that, have really pioneered for UCaaS, for CCaaS, for conferencing and now for AI, across all those different use cases, that same cloud-based approach to technology for the future. You don’t have to have on your prem, any hardware, you don’t have to maintain software. You’re able to leave AT&T, Verizon, Lumen, and other incumbents behind and really take your voice in messaging services to the cloud with Bandwidth and do so globally. And that’s really important with a single universal platform and access to our universal API, you don’t have to have multiple integrations. Now, certainly the analogy can break down. We aren’t yet at the scale of AWS. That’s one way in which it does not work. But certainly, as an example, structurally and architecturally, it’s very aligned.

All right, great. And then, Daryl, some financial questions for you if you don’t mind. First of all, can you just walk us through sort of the tranches of what remains in your debt and when they come due, so you have the credit line, you have the 250 convert in 2028, and then the is there some of the 26 left?

Yes. So let’s start at the first one you articulated, Pat. To close the transaction on this last repurchase exercise, on the 26 convertible notes, we drew – we had expanded our revolving credit facility with Bank of America and Wells Fargo to $100 million and drew $50 million. And that was a balance at the immediately upon draw. We were able to, within 45 days, reduce that by 20%. So at the end of the quarter, we had $40 million drawn. And our pace, we expect to remain on that pace going forward here, and to reduce that balance essentially to nothing. The 26 notes have $35 million remaining on them, trading at about 32. I understand, as the last time I looked at it, that $35 million is just going to sit there until March of 2026 will be our intent. It is at 25 basis points. And just given the tender rules, the tender rules and the like on further repurchasings, we will just be retiring that in the ordinary course. We have the final tranche is our February or 1 March – 2028 convertible notes at 50 basis points, which is $250 million, currently trading around $160 million. And that is – we’re aware of it. We do recognize that it’s a little, slightly less than four years from now, and we’ll just be paying attention to that as we stay on our track to produce over 15% free cash flow margin and really optimize and improve out our business.

Yes. All right, well, fabulous. So, so much easier to see how you get through this now than it was before. I am surprised, it’s interesting as Joel trading that was discount seems like a disconnect, but okay. And then lastly, just big picture on the growth rate. I mean, like in my model, I have you going back down to 9% next year and then going back up to near 20 the year after. How do we think about how much you are able to even out this every other year growth rate, which is one thing which, I think, some investors have a hard time wrapping their heads around.

Hey, Pat, this is David. I think your question about our capital strategy and how we’ve paid down debt addressed the viability concerns investors have had. Others have talked about surcharges. We’ve overcome both objections. And as to cyclicality, seasonality, it’s something that, I think, represents growing pains for a business that’s beginning to scale and that over time we’re definitely going to smooth out those waves. They certainly are beneficial to pay down debt and are useful in our capital strategy. But the momentum in commercial messaging and enterprise I think speaks for itself regarding our long-term, steady, durable franchise of both revenue growth combined with profitability.

All right, thank you guys.

Thanks Pat.

And our next question comes from Meta Marshall with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed.

Great, thanks. Maybe on Maestro, just where are customers kind of asking you for kind of the most extensive expansion of integrations right now? Just is there a certain category where you are finding kind of the most uptick in activity there? And then second, just on maybe you guys have a lot of partnerships and kind of sales channels. Just where are you kind of finding the most effective sales channels right now or areas to expand kind of internal sales? Thanks.

Thanks, Meta. This is David. The biggest demand that we’re seeing for Maestro and AIBridge is definitely within the contact center, serving as a primary technology orchestration layer that supports a huge number of emerging solutions that address different aspects of call flow and call resolution, sentiment, fraud detection, identity. There are an enormous number of opportunities that really require the Maestro product to integrate easily, or to take advantage of pre-integrations to do so on a global footprint basis, to connect to one API to be able to do so. Contact center, to answer your question is definitely the area in which we see the most immediate demand. As to the second question regarding the Maestro sales funnel, some of it is clearly coming from existing customers that we already worked with, that have a familiarity with us in what we do and have bought into the early beta release last year, August 31. We continue to grow the new opportunity funnel in finance, in healthcare, in transportation. These are all large verticals that have complex customer engagement models in the contact center where we’re seeing great success, growing enterprise at a 25% growth rate, and we think that that is healthy and in-line with our expectation. We do have an emerging channel strategy that’s really important. And we expect over time that will contribute to our direct approach to the market with our sales team.

Great, thanks.

The next question is from [indiscernible]. Please proceed.

Thanks for the question and congrats on the great momentum here in first half. You really see an inflection here in growth, and I wonder if you see any changes in the competitive landscape that are helping you achieve some of these higher growth rates? David would be interested to hear your thoughts on the competitive landscape. Thanks.

Thanks, Ryan. I wish we had the kind of lead that Katie Ledecky has at about the 1400 meters mark in her 1500 meters swims. I’d like to – we do look to our left and right swim lanes and are excited about the leadership position that our team has achieved and we’re headed for the podium to continue the Olympic analogy. There are no new entrants diving into the pool. There are very known quantities that we collaborate with in some cases, incumbents that we compete with mightily. And in the vanguard we are proud of being in a space that is really innovative and the lead that we’ve achieved so far, we’re excited about continuing.

Do you feel like to some degree, you have a cost advantage over the legacy players at least?

No doubt. Yes, no, thank you, Ryan. There is no question that owning and operating our platform globally provides us with a vertically integrated advantage for both cost, but also quality and reliability. We are able to deliver visibility to enterprise customers that need to know how their services are performing on a global basis and economically as well as quality, we have an advantage. And there in some cases, our 15 years of infrastructure work that have gone into our global platform, and we are proud of that. It’s a huge differentiator. Large, global enterprise can trust us to not point fingers at other vendors, but instead to predictably identify issues and to resolve them when they emerge, but most of all to avoid issues altogether.

Quick follow-up there. Are you seeing more traction in U.S. these days, or how’s Europe developing?

Both Europe and globally are developing well. We signed in the period one customer that we called out a global, luxury brand and have more Maestro customers that are signing up both globally and domestically in the quarter. So, we’re excited about that success. Certainly U.S. domiciled, large, global companies remain the foundation for our business, but we are serving customers around the world. And that will continue to be our focus. Just a global, single, unified platform for voice and messaging for enterprise.

Thanks a lot. Appreciate it.

Thank you.

And the next question is from James Fish with Piper Sandler. Please proceed.

Hey, guys, I did want to circle back to Will’s question, as I think, it’s important as arguably your biggest growth driver right now. If my math is right here, it appears the messaging API, sort of ex-political and ex-passthrough grew just sub 20%, which is down from roughly 34% and almost 70% in Q4. I guess what seasonal slowdown is causing this? Or was there something sort of geographically, competitively or kind of use case wise that the end cause here? And really just to kind of set expectations for all of us, I guess, what do you guys see as the growth for messaging this year?

We did – hey good morning. This is Daryl. It’s nice to speak with you. Our commercial message, you’re right, our commercial messaging right at 20%, slightly less in terms of growth. And that is right in line with our expectation and where we thought it would be. There are some seasonal factors. There’s no change in customer mix or any shift in the cohort or the like. We are really pleased that our cloud communications revenue grew the $10 million 8% over the prior year that led to an expansion in margin by that point. And also very good EBITDA profitability flow through on that incremental revenue. In fact, I would probably call your attention to the model economics on that because we have been really focused on and speaking about scale, and as revenue grows and how that’s going to produce disproportionate profit. So we’re really happy with that. There is really nothing to report in commercial – in terms of commercial messaging, it is right in line with where we think it should have been and based on our customer conversations, and we’re looking forward to a continuing strong second half.

Got it. Helpful Daryl. Any changes competitively across mediums versus Twilio center legacy carrier providers? And within that conversation, I guess, what are you guys seeing with pricing across both messaging and voice? Thanks, guys.

Thanks, James. There hasn’t been any change in our competitive landscape from those like us who have been very innovative in the space or incumbents that have lagged. I think that the dynamics and competitors set up well. And again, no change.

And at this time, we are showing no further questionnaires in the queue. And this does conclude both our question-and-answer session and today’s conference. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. And you may now disconnect.