Eido Gal
Analyst · Truist Securities. Your line is now open
Thanks, Chett, and hello, everyone. 2024 was an important year for Riskified in terms of executing on our business objectives and positioning our company for long-term success. I am proud that we grew our GMV by 15% for the full year and achieved revenue growth of 10%, finishing the year with $327.5 million in revenue and exceeding the high end of our guidance. We also delivered meaningful adjusted EBITDA margin improvement in our first full year of positive adjusted EBITDA as a public company. We finished the year on a strong note with our year-over-year revenue growth accelerating slightly in Q4 ’24 four compared to Q3 ‘24. This sequential improvement contributed to our highest-ever quarterly revenue and adjusted EBITDA. Despite the strong end to the year, our '24 revenue growth in annual dollar retention or ADR and net dollar retention or NDR rates were not in line with our historical benchmarks and our long-term objectives. That being said, I believe that the operational successes of ‘24 position us well for improved performance in these areas in ‘25 and beyond. Allow me to provide some further context. Our go-to-market team had another strong year in executing on our strategy of landing many of the world's largest online merchants, proving our ROI and then expanding our relationships with these merchants to capture additional volume. We closed more new business sequentially throughout each quarter during the year and we derived approximately $45 million in revenue from new merchants added in ‘24 and the annualization of new merchants onboarded to our platform in ‘23. Overall, we continue to win new logos within our larger verticals in fashion and ticketing and live events, while also penetrating newer verticals like money transfer and payments and food. We also saw strong new logo success in the United States and APAC, continued upsell strength contributed to a great year in travel and fashion with the Americas having the most success in these verticals. In ‘24, we welcomed several key merchants onto our core chargeback guarantee product. Notable names include Meta, Todatix, Fast Retailing, Armani, Real Money Transfer, Herbalife, Viva Aerobus, Hy Vee Grocery, Therabody and Mecha brands all joined the Riskified network and contributed to our ongoing efforts to diversify our revenue base across various verticals and regions. We also executed on our goal of expanding our multi-product platform to further diversify our revenue base across products and are excited to have added merchants including Norwegian Cruise Lines, Moncler, Hotel Planner, Oliver's and Sheehan to products outside of our core chargeback guarantee product. We believe that these wins have contributed to market share gains. A key focus for ‘25 is to expand our top-of-funnel efforts to drive more pipeline. Simply put, we believe that increasing the opportunities that we have in the funnel gives us more opportunities to demonstrate the power of our platform, outperform our competition and win new business at high rates, just like we did in ‘24, when our win rate in competitive processes was approximately 70%. Having mapped the revenue opportunities ahead, we believe that there are a number of ways for us to expand our funnel. First, we believe the value that our expanded multi-product platform unlocks is differentiated from our competition and is opening doors beyond chargeback guarantee. Second, we have deeper penetration in select sub-verticals like fashion and ticketing and live events, but relatively low penetration rates and significant white space within many of our newer and emerging verticals. Our experience has shown that once we are able to onboard a significant number of merchants in a vertical and then generate strong performance for those merchants, we reach an inflection point where future wins become easier, faster and more streamlined. By following this proven playbook in our newer and emerging categories, we believe that we can ultimately own these categories as well. Third, landing key tenfold accounts outside of the Americas and EMEA helps us unlock more opportunities for continued geographic expansion. And fourth, we continue to scale our network and data advantage and enhance our brand presence globally, which helps us promote the increasing capabilities of the platform and the financial strength of Riskified. As we have frequently discussed, we have established deep-rooted relationships with many of the top ecommerce brands around the world. In ‘24, our annual dollar retention rate was down from historical levels of 98% and above. This was in part driven by the one-off merchant churn event in the home category that we discussed during our last earnings call along with a broader uptick in competitive pressure. To combat this dynamic, we have operationalized a thoughtful and thorough merchant retention strategy, which is designed to help us return our ADR back towards its historical levels. A key pillar of this strategy has been to aim to shift many of our merchants to multiyear contracts in order to increase our committed revenue base. We have already had success in executing on this plan and have over 70% of our ‘25 book of business committed. Based on revenue, we increased our weighted average contract term signed for our larger accounts by 30% locking in renewals for nearly two years on average. Outside of the previously mentioned insurance event, we successfully renewed 100% of our top 20 contracts up for renewal in ‘24 with half of those contracts signed for multiyear deals with the average ending year of '27. In addition, we are also executing on the other core components of our retention strategy. We are focused on getting our differentiated multiproduct platform into the hands of more of our existing merchants, generating continuous SLA outperformance for our existing merchants, partnering with key merchants to develop bespoke features and expanding our executive sponsorship and merchant community programs to all aid in driving customer satisfaction and retention. We are also expecting improved net dollar retention in ‘25. We believe that the prospect of stabilization in some of our more recently challenged verticals such as fashion, ongoing execution of our aforementioned merchant retention initiatives and continued penetration of the upsell white space from new logo wins should help us work towards returning our NDR to recent levels of over 100% in ‘25. Shifting focus to our product platform and is playing a critical role in supporting growth and retention by enabling us to address a wider range of emerging use cases beyond chargeback guarantee. The expanded platform is gaining traction with new product revenue up approximately 90% year-over-year in ‘24 and new products bookings representing approximately 10% of the total bookings won in ‘24. I'm encouraged by this trajectory and we are currently anticipating aggregate revenue in the high single-digit to low double-digit millions from PolicyProtect, AccountSecure and Dispute Resolve in ‘25 based on our ‘24 revenue exit rate and pipeline expectations for 2025. Overall, while we are seeing traction across all products, I am most excited about the market opportunity for our PolicyProtect product. The return and claim landscape is evolving quickly causing significant challenges for merchants with the market comprising over $100 billion in losses for retailers. That's why we are further investing in the accuracy, scalability and efficiency of integration in order to get this product in the hands of many more of our merchants. To that end, we recently partnered with Appriss Retail, a top provider of return and claim authorization solutions. This innovative collaboration aims to address the growing challenges of omnichannel fraud and policy of use by integrating comprehensive data on consumer shopping patterns throughout the entire customer journey, both in physical stores and online. This comprehensive offering seamlessly integrates online and offline channel data providing a unique unified view of customer interactions, which we believe further strengthens our PolicyProtect offering. We believe that our ability to provide policy abuse decision across all key ecommerce interactions is unmatched. I wanted to take the time to provide a few real-life examples of how the merchants are utilizing the product, which I think demonstrates the power of PolicyProtect. For one merchant in the fashion space, PolicyProtect has given them insights on who to provide an instant refund to upon return initiation instead of after warehouse inspection. Another merchant is utilizing PolicyProtect's identity engine to customize every return experience, applying friction via handling fees or warnings to repeat of users and auto-approving returns to good customers, reducing manual review work. And another merchant is seeing the benefit of our identity clustering technology, which detects similar consumer behavior patterns across our merchant network. They are also leveraging our recently released Decision Studio tool, which is part of Policy Protect. As a reminder, this tool gives merchants powerful self-service capabilities for the creation, simulation and management of customer-facing policy decisions. By using Riskified's Decision Studio, this merchant has reduced their previous policy review process from 200 static rules to just 20 dynamic rules. This has allowed the merchant to prevent bad actors from buying extra amounts of limited run items for the purpose of reselling them on the secondary market. These complex and unique use cases are just some examples of how our PolicyProtect product is designed to improve customer experiences, reduce manual review work and help to embed Riskified into our merchants’ daily workflows. At our core, we are an innovative growth company with some of the best R&D and product talent in the industry. We are focused on investing in a merchant-centric product roadmap for ‘25 and beyond to help us generate additional opportunities for revenue growth while guaranteeing continued strong performance for our merchants. To aid in this, we have developed numerous AI capabilities which collectively are expected to improve the performance and accuracy of our platforms over time. To name a few, we have further enhanced our autonomous training capabilities, which enables us to provide completely customized model and future performance on an individual merchant basis, which generally leads to better performance results in a faster time to production. Our performance segmentation system automatically analyzes our entire order population and sorts similar transactions into different segments based on features such as payment type, IP or margin profile. From here, we assign certain customized risk thresholds for each segment in order to eliminate chargebacks without impacting approval rates. The entire process is intended to optimize approval and chargeback rates to enable high performance for our merchants. We believe that this automation will allow us to continue to scale the business with high leverage. And we also deepened our modular machine learning infrastructure to easily add additional capabilities into the Riskified’s decision layer. Some of these features such as early detection models, our address obfuscation engine and SKU risk network all plug back into the model to further deepen the AI learning across the entire platform. Our expanded product platform delivers the most comprehensive data capture per transaction we've ever had, starting from the moment the consumer accesses a merchant's website, opens an account through the card checkout experience, potential refund and return process and finally the eventual dispute of a chargeback, the multiple customer touch points that we collect and tag throughout the entire customer journey all feedback into the platform. This integrated cross-platform data sharing creates a synergy that enhances our performance across each product and further strengthens our identity mapping capabilities. Adding to our capabilities, I am excited to announce Adaptive Checkout, a new advanced configuration of our Chargeback Guarantee, Fraud and Risk engine. We have enhanced our AI decisioning engine to intelligently adapt the checkout process to the risk level of each transaction ensuring more legitimate transactions are approved while reducing fraud. This configuration works by blocking fraudulent attempts before bank authorization even occurs preventing fraud from entering the payment stream. And now we are employing selective smart friction to certain transactions such as automatically asking for a CVV if there are concerns on an account takeover or sending a one-time password prompt to good, but risky-looking orders in order to help legitimate customers proceed through checkout. These enhancements combined with sharing enriched data with card issuers to boost off rates to help us optimize the end-to-end conversion flow, creating a dynamic and safe checkout process. More details on Adaptive Checkout will be shared in our launch press release scheduled to be issued later today. By focusing on continuously advancing the capabilities of our product platform and through strong execution by our go-to-market organization, we believe that we are well positioned to capture more market share in a large and growing e-commerce end market. The largest part of the e-commerce landscape being traditional CNP transactions continues to grow off of a large baseline, which further expands our addressable market. And as alternative payment methods such as Apple Pay, Google Pay and various buy now pay later types grow off a small base, we are also finding ways to be relevant to this subsegment of volume. In order to capture more of this market opportunity, we are doubling down on our platform development and expansion efforts. Throughout our company's evolution, we have always aimed to invest in the development of our technology and products in a responsible way, while remaining focused on managing our expenses to drive towards profitability. In ‘24, we decreased our non-GAAP operating expenses by 4% for the year on top of the 6% decline that we achieved in ‘23. Given our strong new business generation in ‘24, our robust new pipeline new business pipeline for ‘25 and increased demand for our multi-product platform, we believe that now is the right time to focus our investments into further developing our product platform. In ‘25, we plan on increasing development of research capacity by almost 20%. We plan on doing this while keeping total expenses flat versus 24%. To accomplish this, we recently initiated a plan to restructure Riskified's workforce by relocating certain positions to lower-cost regions and reducing headcount in areas that we viewed as less critical to our product development and growth strategy. In addition, we are identifying further opportunities to incorporate AI tools into our business to help automate certain employee tasks and reduce manual work processes. This will in turn allow our employees to focus on higher-return work and increase their output. We believe that with increased employee capacity and efficiency that we can limit future hiring to the most critical roles needed. As a result of these initiatives, we expect to be able to increase development capacity, advance platform innovation to outperform the competition and improve product accuracy and customer service to deepen our merchant relationships. These actions should help us position us to maintain market leadership, accelerate our revenue and achieve our long-term financial goals. As this project ramps up in the second half of ‘25, we believe that we will see a meaningful step down in expenses in the second half of the year with the overall exit rate being lower heading into '26 versus '25. Agi will touch on the overall positive impact to our expense outlook shortly. As we previously discussed, we are aiming to achieve adjusted EBITDA margins between 15% to 20% by the end of ‘26. We are still eight quarters away from this timeframe and we believe in our ability to manage the business to continue driving improvement in order to achieve these goals. By optimizing the operational levers available to us over the last two years, we've achieved approximately 2,000 basis points in total adjusted EBITDA margin expansion and we remain confident that we can hit our target by '26. While tightly managing our bottom line, we have also executed on our capital allocation priorities. During ‘24, we repurchased over $140 million of our stock and generated nearly $40 million in positive free cash flow. This is a testament to our commitment to driving shareholder value and our powerful business model. As discussed on previous calls, our meaningful free cash flow generation and our strong cash reserves with no debt empower us to utilize our capital strategically. Our M&A strategy remains unchanged. We believe that we are the leader in the space and are continuously looking for opportunities for potential consolidation to drive scale and synergies. In conclusion, I feel great about our leading identity engine and our differentiated positioning in the market. I believe that we are redefining the e-commerce fraud and risk intelligence landscape through our leading tech and our robust pipeline for ‘25 supports the market demand for our product platform. Now over to Agi.