Aaron Levie
Analyst · William Blair. Your line is now open
Thanks, Cynthia and thank you all for joining the call today. We are off to a strong start in fiscal ‘23, delivering first quarter revenue growth of 18% above our guidance and representing a fifth consecutive quarter of accelerating revenue growth. Our continuous focus on profitability resulted in non-GAAP operating margin of 21%, up 360 basis points from 17% a year ago. Because of this strong momentum, and even with the impact of FX, which Dylan will describe in more detail shortly, we are raising the midpoint of our revenue range and raising our operating margin guidance and EPS guidance for the full fiscal year. In Q1, we continued to execute on our product road map as we address a $74 billion market opportunity. We announced Box Canvas, our native virtual whiteboarding and visual collaboration solution, while also launching significant product enhancements with Box sign, Workflow with Box Relay and security and compliance with Box Shield. We deepened integrations across several of our key technology partners and we expanded our customer relationships while continuing to add new customer logos. The success of our platform strategy is shown in our strong customer metrics as customers are leveraging our Content Cloud platform to transform their businesses and power new ways of working. In the first quarter, our net retention rate was 111%, up from 103% in the prior year, driven by strong customer expansion rate. And for our large deals over $100,000, we had 60 new deals, and we had a 73% attach rate of suites, up from a 49% attach rate in Q1 of fiscal ‘22. We continue to see healthy attach rates in the U.S. and EMEA with improvements of our attach rates in Japan. Our strong Q1 fiscal results and customer metrics underscore that our growth strategy is working and that we are aligned to the key trends that are driving the future of work. Companies today are dealing with a more and more distributed and hybrid workplace as they implement the digital transformation of their business processes and face increasing security challenges across the organization. Our Content Cloud addresses these trends by building out capabilities to power the full life cycle of content in a single platform. As we continue to double down on these product capabilities and investments, we will add more value to our customers and expand Box’s TAM. In Q1, we announced a major new element of our Content Cloud with Box Canvas, allowing us to enter an additional fast-growing market with our platform. With the prevalence of remote and hybrid work now a permanent part of nearly every business, the ability to seamlessly collaborate on any type of content is critical. Over the past couple of years, we have seen a huge increase in companies looking to collaborate on visual content from product design, storyboards and project plans to flow charts, diagrams and more. Box Canvas is an intuitive visual collaboration and whiteboarding experience that powers free form collaboration while leveraging all of the strength of the security, governance and compliance built directly into Box. With Box Canvas officially launching later this year, it will be included across all of our product plans, adding even more value and enabling our customers to benefit from Box in new use cases across their organizations. With products like Box Canvas, Box Sign and Box Notes delivered as included capabilities in Box’s core subscriptions and bundles, customers benefit from getting new value from Box instantly. Especially as companies look to consolidate IT spend from various point solutions, Box remains in a strong position to help retire disparate e-signature technologies, collaboration tools, enterprise content management systems and much more. It’s a win-win that drives ROI for our customers as well as providing additional upside as customers move up to higher tier plans for more features. Since our launch of Box Sign this fall, we have announced major new enhanced capabilities, integrations and developer tools to power even more advanced signature-based processes, helping customers move more of their transactions to the Content Cloud. We are pleased with the momentum we are seeing in customer adoption and use of Box Sign. First quarter customers include a global legal services provider that moved to Box with a 6-figure deal in order to provide its network of lawyers who work on the most sensitive matters with secure internal and external content collaboration along with Box Sign for secure and affordable e-signature options for boilerplate agreements. A U.S. based real estate investment trust purchased Box in Q1 and deployed Box Sign across its organization to support the signing and collaboration around commercial leases. And finally, a global biopharma company, who has been a Box customer since 2018, moved to Enterprise Plus in Q1 with plans to use Box Sign, which will be critical as the company continues to scale, and they release new drugs to market. Box’s security capabilities also remain a critical driver of why customers choose our Content Cloud. Data security, compliance and privacy remain more important than ever. In Q1, we launched new capabilities for Box Shield, our advanced security solution for protecting content in the cloud, including the ability to apply malware deep scans to Microsoft Office files and adding automatic watermarking to classified documents. Throughout this year, we will continue to extend our leading security, compliance and data governance capabilities. Finally, the ability to integrate deeply across the SaaS landscape is an integral part of our product strategy. We recently announced a deepened integration with Zoom, with the launch of the Box app for Zoom chat channels to make it even easier for users to work seamlessly together across the two platforms. In Q1, we also announced the all-new Box App Center, a destination for users, admins and developers to easily discover and access the more than 1,500 applications that integrate with Box, titling the power of Box’s deep partnerships with Microsoft, Google, Slack, Zoom, WebEx, ServiceNow, IBM and many other major technologies. As we look forward in FY ‘23, we believe it will be Box’s biggest innovation year ever. We will continue to focus on our three core differentiators of frictionless security and compliance, seamless collaboration and workflow and an open platform that’s integrated into every application. And we will continue to build products that reinforce each other, powering the full lifecycle of content and empowering our customers to save money by retiring other tools. Above all, we will ensure that our customers derive more and more value from Box as they move more of their data onto our platform. This is a virtuous flywheel that drives our business model and we are only in the early innings of what’s possible. Turning to go-to-market, as we discussed during our Analyst Day in late March, our strength in business momentum is a result of a number of initiatives that we have undertaken to scale our land and expand go-to-market motion. These have included optimized pricing and packaging with our latest multi-product offering, Enterprise Plus. In Q1, Enterprise Plus accounted for more than 80% of our multi-product suite deals, a remarkable achievement since the launch of EPlus in July of last year and a much quicker ramp than we saw when we launched our first suites. Our Q1 customer expansions and new wins with Enterprise Plus include an agency of the United Nations that purchased Enterprise Plus and KeySafe as they look to use Box with other cloud apps, including Salesforce to build a modern digital platform for the approval of new vaccines and medicines from across the globe. Their process now is currently carried out via e-mail, paper, USB sticks and DVDs, a leading biotech company that invents life-transforming medicines for people with serious diseases move to Box in a 6-figure Enterprise Plus deal. This new customer will be using Box for regulated content and high-value use cases. The fact that Box supports GxP compliance and that our offering provides a better experience to both internal and external parties as they work together on clinical trials was critical for the selection of Box with the decision makers at this company. And finally, a major automotive company purchased Box with a 7-figure Enterprise Plus deal, enabling them to eliminate on-premises file servers and solve key security issues. By replacing file servers with Box, they will centralize content management and simplify secure collaboration internally and externally with partners. Our strategy aims to bring the full power of the Content Cloud to our customers. And we know that when a customer adopts our multi-product offerings, we see a greater total account value, higher net retention, higher gross margin and a more efficient sales process. We are also continuing to double down on all of our efforts around deployment, adoption and truly helping our customers transform with Box. As such, in Q1, we launched our new Box Consulting portfolio, a completely redesigned program that makes it easier to position, sell and deliver these critical customer success services to empower any organization to achieve their Content Cloud goals. In summary, our strong first quarter results and the continued momentum we are seeing in our business is the direct result of the execution and focus of the team at Box. Despite macro trends and currency impacts, we have continued to execute on our Content Cloud platform to ensure that we will continue to drive further annual revenue acceleration. At the same time, we remain steadfastly committed to expanding our operator margins by focusing on the highest ROI initiatives across the business, scaling in lower-cost locations, improving gross margin and more. The future of work is here, and the Content Cloud platform has never been better positioned to capitalize on these trends of hybrid, distributed and digital-first work. With that, I will hand it over to Dylan.