Therese Tucker
Analyst · JPMorgan
Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you so much for joining us today. Mark and I enjoyed meeting many of you during our IPO roadshow last month, and we greatly appreciate all of the interest we received from investors. Now for those of you that we met with, I'd like to remind you that you should be asking your portfolio companies if they closed their books with BlackLine. Accurate financial reporting doesn't just happen magically.
We're very pleased to be reporting our first quarter as a public company, which was marked by record revenue and a number of additional financial and operating achievements. There are several highlights I'd like to share from the quarter, but first since many of you are just getting to know BlackLine, we thought it would be helpful to provide you with some perspective on the factors behind our strong track record of growth, the substantial market opportunity in front of us and our strategies to continue driving the business forward.
BlackLine is still in the early innings of developing what we believe is a very large greenfield market opportunity. We continue to see success, because the financial accounting processes for both public and private companies are still batch oriented, manually intensive and they need to be radically improved.
Our cloud-based platform addresses the 3 major issues surrounding these processes: inefficiency, cost and risk. Macro tailwinds like regulatory scrutiny, rising business complexity and the need for accurate real-time data are driving adoption.
2 weeks ago, we had our annual user conference and the theme of that conference was Blueprint for Continuous Accounting. As a concept, continuous accounting embeds typical month-end tasks into daily workflow, automating wherever possible and effectively eliminating the big bubble of work that occurs in the month-, quarter- and year-end closes. This approach minimizes manual labor, maximizes visibility and moves organizations towards accessing real-time information that allows them to run their businesses better.
However, our customers are looking for more than just concepts. They want a blueprint for how to radically improve operations, and our focus is giving them a clear path to accomplish these goals. It's exciting, because we think that we have an opportunity to shift how the entire industry of accounting and finance works. This is both at a macro organizational level as well as at the individual level. When a person is freed up from repetitive work, they have the bandwidth to become a value-added partner to the business, which true insights and analyses that are forward-looking. Our customer base is wildly enthusiastic about these changes.
We believe that virtually every company of scale in any industry and geography is a prospect. Our internal estimates, which have been validated by independent research firm, Frost & Sullivan, point to a TAM of approximately $17 billion. We're targeting enterprise businesses with over $500 million in revenue and mid-market businesses that have between $50 million and $500 million in revenue. There are more than 165,000 corporate organizations worldwide who fit that profile. Within these target companies, there are over 13 million finance and accounting professionals who can benefit from the BlackLine platform. For perspective, we currently have approximately 1,600 customers and 156,000 users. So this market is incredibly underpenetrated.
We have multiple growth drivers to help us develop and continue to lead this market. We are executing against 5 key strategies. The first is international expansion. We have already proven our ability to enter new markets and succeed, and we're continuing to aggressively expand our global reach. Today, we serve customers in over 120 countries. Our plans call for international expansion, primarily in major markets within Europe and Asia.
The second area is land and expand. This strategy is enabling us to consistently drive strong growth within our existing customer base by adding more users, selling new products and cross-selling interrelated entities. The power of this model is evidenced by a strong net revenue retention rate, which is consistently been in the range of 118% to 120% for several quarters now.
Our third area of focus is the continued expansion of our sales force. We have been rapidly expanding our mid-market sales team. Our scalable cloud platform makes our solutions quick to implement and widely appealing to companies of all sizes.
Next, we are continuing to extend our reach to our robust network of partners, including our consulting, BPO, ERP and channel partnerships. These partners often provide complementary services that are not a part of BlackLine's core offerings, and this results in a winning combination for both our partners and clients.
The fifth strategy is continuous product innovation. Our customers trust us and they are quite vocal about the opportunities for new solutions in adjacent areas. Oftentimes, they use our configurable platform to create their own solutions to problems. Because accounting and finance organizations have been typically conservative and slow to adopt new technologies, the opportunities for automation and optimization are broad. The BlackLine Intercompany Hub and Insights products are perfect examples of solutions that were created and driven by customer needs.
Now, let's talk about our strong third quarter performance. Mark will go through the numbers, but first, I'd like to highlight some of our accomplishments. Total revenue increased 49% to $32 million, reflecting strong momentum across all aspects of the business. We added 122 new customers across mid-market and enterprise segments and across all geographies. In fact, we signed our largest initial deal in company history this quarter. Major wins include First Data Corp., GoPro and British Polythene Industries. In the third quarter, our user base increased to more than 156,000 users. That's up 31% from a year ago and also reflects strong sequential growth throughout 2016.
Next, we expanded our European operations with the opening of an office in Frankfurt. The market opportunity in Europe along with the adoption by many large European companies already made this a logical next step. As we drive growth and build scale, we expect to selectively add new talent to the organization. Most recently, we created the position of Chief Customer Officer and brought in Karen Flathers, who has exceptional experience in both enterprise and SaaS software. Karen is responsible for solution consulting, customer success, implementations, training and support. In fact, she owns the entire customer experience from beginning into perpetuity. After just 6 weeks on board, it's obvious that she holds the same passionate commitment to customer happiness that has driven our success to date.
Finally, we completed the acquisition of Runbook, a highly respected provider of financial close automation software to the SAP market. Runbook brings a great deal to the equation: complementary products, formidable talent and capabilities and a portfolio of marquee customers. We invited the U.S.-based Runbook customers to our user conference, and across the board, we saw excitement about the combined BlackLine-Runbook integration path that we laid out. This is a strategic investment for us and a key part of our plan to have closer integration with a number of different ERP systems.
Looking ahead, we are excited about the growth we're seeing and the opportunity in front of us. We have a fantastic team across the entire organization. We work hard and we love what we do.
We appreciate your interest in BlackLine and look forward to reporting to you on our progress as a public company. Now I'll turn the call over to Mark to review our third quarter financial results and discuss our outlook for the remainder of the year.