Ashim Gupta
Analyst · Barclays. Your line is now live
Thank you, Daniel and thank you everyone for joining us today. Before I get started, please note that all growth rates are year-over-year unless otherwise indicated. I am pleased with our second quarter results, which yet again delivered meaningful growth at scale driven by our market-leading automation platform that drives fast time-to-value and tangible benefits. In fact, in an upcoming IDC whitepaper sponsored by UiPath, IDC estimates that the economic benefits driven by UiPath will grow from $7 billion worldwide in 2021 to $55 billion in 2025. Of the three benefit vectors: increased revenue, decreased expenses and increased quality, the expected benefit from revenue gains will be larger than expense cuts and job growth from increased revenue to outpace job losses from expense reduction. We ended the second quarter with ARR of $726.5 million, up 60%. Net new ARR was $73.9 million, growing 33% driven by an increased adoption of our core product portfolio, Automation Cloud, as well as new product offerings. We have run the business and evaluate our performance based on ARR. This quarter’s strong results were driven once again by a world class land-and-expand go-to-market model. New logos included the State of New Mexico, the New York Power Authority and the University of Washington Medicine. In the second quarter, Prospect Medical started their automation journey with broad platform adoption, including test suite and insights. Accuity, a LexisNexis Risk Solutions company, selected UiPath Automation Cloud and plans to utilize Automation Hub as well as Task Mining among other products to standup a citizen developer program. On the expand side, our second quarter dollar-based net retention rate of 144% continues to be best-in-class as customers expand platform adoption, add users and deploy more software robots. And even with these strong expansion metrics, the opportunity for our installed base to grow remains significant as we estimate that we have only captured 3% to 5% of their potential automation spend. Another way to look at this expansion dynamic is ARR lifetime value, or ARR LTV and the purchasing frequency of our largest customers. For those of you who are not on the webcast, we have added two slides to our earnings deck for reference. First, our customers by annual cohort, these cohorts demonstrate continual year-over-year expansion, with many of them making repeat purchases within the first 12 months. This kind of growth comes from our ability to quickly create value and drive meaningful ROI for our customers. Second, our top 25 customers, where we see the momentum driven by automation at scale, this lens on our customer base shows not only the applicability of automation across a diverse set of business verticals, but also the repetitive nature of buying, which happens quarter after quarter. For example, a top 25 customer in the healthcare industry made their initial purchase to automate a handful of use cases in IT. Over time, they found additional automation opportunities across IT and shared services, ultimately setting up a Center of Excellence to service numerous federated automation teams around the globe. And while they have tied automation to an enterprise objective of saving more than $1 billion, they have also expanded their adoption by leveraging automation across subsidiaries, acquisitions and to drive top line revenue, having adopted capabilities across our platform. And finally, ARR LTV multiples, among our top customers, ARR expansion has been strong, a theme that carries through to our top 25 customer cohort, which has grown to approximately 233x their initial investment. If we expand the ARR LTV analysis to include our top 50 customers, they have an LTV of 90x. And what I see as the most illustrative of the potential of our customer base is the LTV for our top 100 customers of 62x. All of the customers in this top 100 cohort are included in the 118 customers that account for $1 million plus in ARR. To ensure that as many of our customers as possible see these kinds of results, we work side by side with our partners, which now number more than 4,700 to enable and accelerate adoption. Partners also expand our global reach and bring us into strategic digital transformation programs. A great example of this is Shopify, a recently acquired UiPath customer. Working with one of our big four partners, Shopify selected our automation platform to enable them to deliver an even better experience to their users. As always, we also look at ways to innovate. And in the second quarter, we signed a strategic partnership with Deloitte to invest in their Smart Factory at Wichita State. This joint ecosystem play is focused on creating the factory of the future and integrating industry-leading capabilities like UiPath to redefine how factories operate. This will be a groundbreaking showcase of the benefits of software and physical robot collaboration. We are committed to investing in our partners and helping them scale their UiPath business. Now, turning to our second quarter, I will be discussing results on a non-GAAP basis unless otherwise noted. Second quarter revenue increased 40% to $195.5 million compared to $139.4 million in the prior year period. Looking at our pipeline, which is strong across geographies, we see the opportunity to move customers to deal structures with annual ramping, which we expect will lower our overall discounts. This structure creates better ROI for our customers, long-term engagement opportunities for our partners and will yield better overall margins for UiPath. It is also positive for ARR growth, which is our most important metric, but it can create short-term revenue variability due to the timing of license delivery and GAAP revenue recognition. The durability of our long-term growth can be seen in remaining performance obligations, or RPO, which were $519.9 million in the second quarter, an increase of 80% year-over-year. Gross profit margin in the quarter was 86% compared to 90% in the prior year period. Software gross margin of 94% was offset by services gross margin of negative 65%. While we continue to run the services business to be approximately cash flow neutral, we expect the timing of revenue recognition as well as investment in customer adoption through partner enablement to create fluctuations in service gross margin over time. Operating expenses for the second quarter totaled $161 million. We continue to invest in headcount across our sales force and customer success teams as well as engineering. GAAP operating loss of $97.8 million included $92.6 million of stock-based compensation expense related to our equity program. Non-GAAP operating income was $6.7 million compared to a loss of $7.6 million in the prior year period. Adjusted free cash flow in the quarter was negative $3.5 million compared to a positive $28.1 million in the prior year period as we continue to invest in the business. We ended the quarter with $1.9 billion in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities and no debt. Turning to our financial outlook, guidance reflects our confidence in our market leadership, differentiated technology and focused execution. For the third quarter fiscal 2022, we expect ARR to be in the range of $796 million to $798 million. As I have emphasized repeatedly, ARR is the key metric for measuring UiPath, and it lays a strong foundation for the company as we scale. We expect revenues to be in the range of $207 million to $209 million. As a reminder, given the variability introduced by ASC 606, we do not focus the business on short-term revenue growth, which can be lumpy quarter-to-quarter and dislocated from ARR and the long-term growth and health of the business. And we expect non-GAAP operating loss to be in the range of negative $30 million to negative $15 million as we continue to invest in the business while still driving efficient operations. For fiscal 2022, we expect ARR to be in the range of $876 million to $881 million, an increase from prior guidance of $850 million to $855 million provided on our fiscal first quarter 2022 earnings call. Before I conclude, I’d like to provide a few incremental modeling points. First, we expect sales and marketing spend to increase in the back half of the year. This includes expenses related to our third quarter user conference, FORWARD, as we start to return to some of our pre-COVID marketing activities. Second, our guidance includes an assumption that there will be a return to office when possible. We continue to monitor the impact of the Delta variant on our teams worldwide and are actively supporting employees and their families where needed. And finally, we expect basic share count for the third quarter to be approximately 531 million shares outstanding. In summary, the team delivered a strong second quarter, reflecting our market leadership and focus on execution. Looking ahead, we have a very strong pipeline, and we expect to continue our momentum in the second half of the year. In the near-term, we are excited to host our user conference FORWARD IV. We invite you to come and speak with our executive team, customers and partners, which include global tech sponsors, AWS and Microsoft, as well as Diamond sponsors, Accenture, CGI, Cognizant, Deloitte and PwC. This significant partner presence underscores their strong support for UiPath and the industry’s largest dedicated automation event. We hope to see you there. We will now take questions. And I will turn over the call to the operator. Operator, please poll for questions.