Leonard Livschitz
Analyst · Cowen
Thank you, Lilly. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'm excited to share the progress we have made since we spoke with you 3 months ago. Today, I will provide highlights of our third quarter results, share what we're witnessing across our business on the demand front and talk about the trends that's shaping up our fourth quarter.
In the third quarter, our revenue of $26.3 million grew 18% sequentially and was one of the highest quarter-over-quarter growth in the company's history. More importantly, underlying the trends that shaped out the third quarter, both from the customer demand and the delivery front were very encouraging. And we're setting the stage to a favorable fourth quarter and 2021 year. Although there were many positive trends, I would like to highlight a few.
First, in the third quarter, we witnessed strong pickup in customer activities across the board as digital transformation initiatives took central stage. These trends will continue in the fourth quarter and we anticipate revenue run rate to approach the level we had at the end of 2019, with strong contributions from our top clients.
Two, within our retail segment, we witnessed strong pickup from specialized e-commerce friendly retailers. Furthermore, we see somewhat of an overhaul as new categories of retail customers emerge. Again, as we enter 2021, we will not rely on traditional retail as we succeed in diversifying our revenue composition across TMT, CPG, fintech, manufacturing and other industries.
Three, some of our larger customers are increasingly seeking to engage with our offshore locations. While the motivations are customer-specific, continued demand for the cost efficiency, combined with greater acceptance of remote work, have influenced many customers toward increasing the use of Grid Dynamics offshore locations.
And number four, companies are increasing focus on improving efficiencies across their sales life cycle and operations by leveraging data-driven solutions. Our customers demand Grid Dynamics expertise in data science, big data engineering and artificial intelligence.
And now coming back in the third quarter. We witnessed growing demand for our expertise as customers steadily increased their investments in digital transformation. This was not specific to any one market but rather widespread across industry verticals. In issue. In each of the 3 months of the third quarter, our revenue grew sequentially, with September being the fourth consecutive month of the growth. Most importantly, in October, we saw the same upward trend, leaving us to be confident in Q4 outlook and momentum to a recovery to a pre-COVID level and beyond.
On profitability front, there was a strong pickup in our margins from the second quarter. This was driven by 2 key factors. The first was tighter increased utilization rate across the company, and the second was from a greater mix of offshoring. While we expect these trends to continue providing tailwinds to our business in the fourth quarter, reinstatement of compensation as well as strategic sales force hires may offset some of the gains. Anil will provide more color around the margin movements in the fourth quarter.
Our non-retail business was 77% of revenue and grew 10% on a sequential basis. Also importantly, this part of the business has grown double digits sequentially in each of the third quarters of 2020. The continuous trends, even during the pandemic crisis, clearly validates the importance of digital transformation.
Now coming to our retail segment. We witnessed a strong sequential growth from the second quarter as our retail customers opened their stores and resumed operations. That said, the growth was not consistent across retail customers, with majority of retailers still working with smaller IT budgets for the remainder of 2020. While we anticipate a pickup in revenue in Q4, we do not expect achieving pre-COVID levels of revenue business in retail.
During the quarter, we had also delivered some notable projects. Number one, we assisted and enhanced the revenue of a leading search technology company by integrating its search engine at several large enterprises in the United States as a part of their partnership to improve online customer experience, both product search and placement. Number two, at a global CPG company, we optimized their in-house cloud data platform. This resulted in 75% improvement in latency of data processing and significant reduction in costs associated with infrastructure and maintenance. Number three, at a leading digital advertisement company, we built a marketing platform using our expertise with data science and data engineering. One of the tangible outcome of our efforts was the customer increasing their ad conversion by 44%.
One more example. At a U.S. retailer, we built a customized loyalty platform, replacing an existing platform that was expensive and inefficient. Our implementation, focused on enhancing customer experience, leading to improvements in customer satisfaction.
In the current pandemic environment, consumers are increasingly demanding a robust digital online experience to shop for goods and services, and this is just one example of how COVID-19 has become a catalyst to digital transformation. Even during this time of uncertainty and uneven customer demand, we continue to execute very well in adding new customers, especially in our higher growth vertical. During this quarter, Grid Dynamics added 5 new logos through at least 4 considerable significant players. One is in the medical device technology space, another one is in the home improvement sector, and the last but not the least one is the global financial technology payment platform system. We believe these logos have the potential of becoming large customers over time.
Additionally, we continue to make good progress on customer diversification. During the quarter, 2 of our top 5 clients were in the technology space and 1 each in CPG, retail and in fintech. Our top clients during the quarter were Apple and Google.
With that, let me turn the call over to Anil, who will discuss third quarter results in more details. Anil?