Howard Lerman
Analyst · Piper Jaffray. Please go ahead
Thank you, James, and thank you to everyone for joining us today. We had a great quarter, achieving record revenues and delivering positive quarterly operating cash flow for the first time since we became a public company. A few other highlights. Revenue grew 38% over the first quarter last year, which was well above the high-end of our guidance for the quarter. Gross margins increased 100 basis points from the first quarter of last year to 75% and our license count continues to grow at about 50% on a year-over-year basis. These results demonstrate how leading brands from around the world are increasingly selecting Yext. With the investments we’ve made in adding to our sales capacity, particularly at the enterprise level, we’ve seen a lot of momentum over the past year. We won more than 60 new enterprise logos, including leading brands like Wendy’s Telefonica Germany, Nordstrom’s and 21st Century Oncology, and also one of the largest automakers in the world. We also signed renewals with many large existing customers like Rite Aid, like Volvo, University Health System, one of the largest insurance providers in the United States, as well as one of the largest specialty retailers in the United States and many, many more. This list shows how we’ve had great success across so many different types of vertical markets from auto to healthcare to foodservices, financial services, travel, hospitality, retail and more. Digital Knowledge Management is relevant to nearly every single segment of the economy and it is becoming table stakes for any business of any size. Every company that is using a website today to present information about itself will need a DKM solution to take control over how that information is presented in the places where consumers are looking. Customers of Yext understand that the rise of AI-powered services means information about them has got to be discoverable by the consumer as a structured answer at that exact minute of intent. In fact, according to Kleiner Perkins’ recent Internet trends report, over the past three years, Google has seen 900% increase in queries using the term near me on mobile phones. Now this is incredibly meaningful for Yext, because near me searches return answers via the map and Yext powers that data for our customers. And that’s our mission to give businesses control over their digital knowledge and provide consumers with perfect information everywhere. We see a future, where the Yext Knowledge inside of every consumer publisher will be as important as an Intel chip inside of a computer. Our vision is that, Yext will provide authoritative answers for the majority of all digital interactions. To advance that vision, we’ve built direct data integrations with over 150 digital services around the world. Now these integrations give our customers the ability to control what is presented about their business across a huge range of services like Google and Apple and Facebook, Bing, Instagram, Baidu, WeChat, Tencent and because we want perfect information everywhere. You should expect that we will work to continue to expand this network. We were very excited to announce a new integration with TripAdvisor that gives our customers the ability to directly edit their restaurant listings from the Yext Knowledge Engine. TripAdvisor is the global leader in travel information. Hundreds of millions of consumers are using it to discover places to go when they’re on the road. So it is mission-critical for our business to have accurate information available at the fingertips of these consumers at their exact minute of intent. This deep integration gives our customers more control over the vital details about their business, attributes like hours of operation and contact information, locations, menus and so much more. This is a unique first-of-its-kind integration that no one else has with TripAdvisor. And it’s a two-way integration. Not only can we provide content about customers to TripAdvisor, but our platform receives information that consumers post to TripAdvisor service. For example, there are more than 630 million reviews on TripAdvisor. And now our customers are able to monitor their TripAdvisor reviews using the same dashboard, they already have to manage their DKM across every other member of our network. This integration greatly strengthened the quality of our offering in both foodservices and travel, which had already been two of our largest and most successful vertical. Another vertical that has been very success for us is financial services. Now this is a broad category with a lot of sub-verticals and insurance is one of the larger of this. We already worked with a couple of the larger insurance carriers, who are looking to provide all their affiliated agents with the ability to manage all the facts about their individual practices. And average large query will have between anywhere from 10,000 to 15,000 agents, each of whom will need a discrete license to our platform. And then there are midsized and smaller carriers where we’ve got very little presence. So we’ve got improving solution in this category, we estimate that our current penetration still leaves us with plenty of room for growth. And this means that insurance represents a very substantial opportunity for us with considerable room for further growth. But beyond the size of the market, insurance is attracted to us, because the way consumers are finding insurance has changed pretty dramatically. In fact, over the last two years, the use of smartphones as a tool for discovering information about insurance brand has increased 84% for the large home, auto and life insurance companies. And the vast majority of insurance customers are now willing to get a quote online. So people who are looking for potential agents are using search and maps. And intelligent services like voice assistants of chat box to search for deep knowledge like, okay, Google, I’m looking for an insurance agent in New York City who speaks Spanish and focuses on auto. Now in response to these trends, the entire industry is undergoing a digital transformation, and Yext for Insurance, gives agents control of their digital presence to ensure accurate and timely information is available when potential customers are looking for them. Our knowledge manager creates a frictionless experience for both captive and non-captive agents, because it is easy to maintain their content. And because insurance is such a regulated industry, we built in workflow processes with multiple reporting tools and integration with third-party partners like Proofpoint. Continuing the cadence we set over the past 18 months, during the first quarter, we issued our latest seasonal software release. With – as with previous releases, the spring 2018 release was packed with new features that give our customers additional insight into how consumers are engaging with their brands. It also includes new functions to make it even easier for customers to upload and manage content in the Yext Knowledge Engine with features like Knowledge Assistant. This is our conversational AI interface that lets customers manage their content by simply texting with Yext. Knowledge Assistant is intelligent and proactively reaches out for things like holiday hours. For example, in anticipation of Memorial Day this week, Knowledge Assistant sends a reminder to all our users to update their holiday hours. Their response rate was stunning. 46% successfully responded with updates and most of those did so within one hour after we sent the outreach. This is a significantly higher response rate than we’ve seen with other holidays early this year, it dwarfs the response rate we typically see from other methods like e-mail, where you would see a low single-digit response rate. In the spring 2018 release, we added 15 new skills to Knowledge Assistant, including things like show me my hours or how many profile views do I have? How many reviews do I have, or what’s my average reading? Knowledge Assistant is now smarter than ever and because it stimulates usage and encourages customers to upload additional content into our platform, which increases the long-term stickiness of our relationship with them, we make it available to all customers at no additional charge. The spring release also included some exciting new features, including templated reviews, smarter competitive intelligence and bulk editing. We recently held our EXPLORE Conference in Europe. This brought together both existing customers and potential new prospects from some of the largest and most well-known businesses operating in the United Kingdom and France and Germany and more than a dozen other countries. The theme this year was the intelligent future, and we had nearly 500 registrants. Attendees heard about how AI, voice search and digital assistants are fundamentally changing the way we interact with the world around us. We put together an agenda of world-class speakers to help the attendees understand how technology is transforming consumer behavior and brand discoverability. Now this included a keynote from Ed Parsons, the Geospatial Technologist team discussed the necessity of having structured data through present maps. We also heard from Jaguar Land Rover’s Global Head of Digital Marketing, who discussed what they’re doing and how they’re using Yext to support their mission of becoming an everywhere brand. Now this and other events like it give our account teams an opportunity to deepen their relationship with current customers and build pipeline with future deals. And while EXPLORE was primarily focused on Europe, we continue to see that Digital Knowledge Management is a massive global opportunity and, in fact, we recently signed our first-ever enterprise deal in Japan. So I’d like to turn things over now to Jim Steele to talk about the progress we’re making there. Jim?