Howard Lerman
Analyst · RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead
Thank you, James, and thank you everyone for joining us today. We had an amazing quarter and a really strong half to the first half of the year, highlighted by record revenues and continued growth in the mid 30% range. Just a few highlights. Revenue grew 35% over the second quarter last year, well above the high-end of our guidance for the quarter. Gross profit increased 36% and we substantially improved our quarterly non-GAAP net loss, and because of the continued strength and winning new business, deferred revenue increased more than 50% versus last year. Our growth in deferred comes in part from the nearly 80 new enterprise logos we won this quarter. This includes some of the best-known brands in the United States, Europe and Japan. Brands like AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, MetroPCS, Vodafone, Chanel, Alexander McQueen, Balenciaga, Yamato Transport, which is the largest shipping company in Japan. And while we continue to sign new logos, we are always looking to grow our relationships with existing accounts. During the quarter, we also signed renewals or expansions with Jaguar Land Rover, Home Depot, Domino's Pizza, Enterprise, NAPA Auto Parts, Massage Envy and many, many more. DKM is increasingly appealing to all types of businesses and across all geographies: telecom, auto, financial services, travel and hospitality, healthcare, food services, retail, the United States of America, Germany, The United Kingdom, Japan information around the world is moving from dumb documents where you have to do the thinking to smart databases that think for you. For example, let's say you wanted to know LeBron James' scoring average last year. You go to NBA.com, you look for the stats section. You click on league leaders. You see a table. You scan the rows for LeBron's name. Then you look at the column headers to find points per game. You find the cell. You see the answers 27.5. Your brain have to do the thinking, the interpretation of the data, the calculation. Now maybe that wasn’t too hard. But what if you want to know how many points Mason Plumlee scored last year? Now because he wasn't a league leader, he is many pages deep into the table. With the document you have to hunt and find information yourself and not all information is in the document. What if you wanted to know how many points did LeBron score versus the Lakers last year or what's the Miami Heat all time record on Saturdays? Today the world is moving to smart databases. AI powered services that do the thinking for you. There's an app called STAT News. You can ask any question you want about NBA stat and it uses NLP to understand your question, break it into a query, and it just tells you the answer directly. Their brain does the thinking, not yours. Now while this app just tracks sports data, we see a database that thinks for you as the future of the world's knowledge about businesses as well. Today every business in the world has a giant document available for the public to read, that’s their Web site. We see a world where every business is going to have a smart databases that does the thinking for you, that is their brain. And Yext is built to be every company's brain in the AI powered future. We provide the system of record. The centralized nervous system that lets any company store all the [facts][ph], relationship they want the world, the outside world to know. And this information has got to be accessible across any device that consumers want to use, whether it's a web browser, a mobile phone, a voice based assistant. In a recent blog post, the VP of Marketing for the Americas at Google pointed out that near me searches are starting to go way beyond just the query about location. She reported that searches on a mobile device using the term near me along with some combination of language indicating intent to buy have grown more than 500% in just two years. Now to put that in context, our IPO was just about 18 months ago. So from the point of our IPO until today more people than ever are using their mobile phones to discover information about businesses with the express intent of buying products and services. Getting accurate and timely information to these consumers is table stakes for any business. Over the same two year period, Google also has seen greater than 200% increase in mobile searches using the combined terms near me with open now. This highlights how urgent it is for a business to make their hours both easily discoverable and accurate as possible. The business says it's open when it really is - if a business says it isn’t open when it really is, that’s lost commerce. And finally Google also reported a 900% increase in mobile searches over two years for queries like near me today or near me tonight. Now this could be something like what events are happening near me this evening. No longer is mobile search just about location, it has expanded to include additional dimensions like time and circumstances relating to place and time. Now we recently issued our summer product release. It was packed with new features and tools. Perhaps, most meaningfully the general availability of our events product. Yext for events allows a business to essentially create, approve and manage information about the things that are happening. Just as Knowledge Manager functions as the source of truth for information about a business’ products and people, our events product functions as the brain to store and manage all event related data. It powers their own intelligent event calendars and other information across the event discovery system, because our platform put that information in places like Facebook, Eventbrite and Eventful. We're selling Yext events as a discrete license on a per event per year basis and we develop packages with different levels of features in each tier and much the same way that our other licenses work. We believe events meaningfully add to our market opportunity, because it opens up a completely new type of entity for us. Yext began selling licenses related to where a business is and when it’s open. We call that the location entity. We then broadened the platform to include the people entity. This captured all the relevant information about professionals like doctors and wealth advisors, attorneys, realtors and so on. Events are a whole new license category that we can now market alongside these existing license types. And although it's difficult to measure the incremental value of event, we know that there are a ton of use cases. For example, our financial services customers talk a lot about having personal finance workshops, loan seminars, branch promotions. In healthcare, there are health fairs, vaccination days, charitable events. In retail, there's product demonstrations, launch parties, celebrity appearances. We are in the very early days of rolling out our events and we're not expecting to see an impact right away. The summer release also included 11 new skills for knowledge assistant, our conversational AI user interface that lets customers manage information about their business using Facebook or SMS text messages. The new skills include the ability to see reviews that are waiting for response and the ability to respond to them. You can also see the number of phone calls or driving direction requests from consumers. And now there is a nudge feature that asks a business to confirm or update data so that consumers are always getting the most up-to-date information possible. And that's our mission, to give businesses control over their digital knowledge and provide consumers with perfect information everywhere. We have data integrations with more than 150 digital services around the world. Services like Google, Apple, Facebook, Bing, Instagram, Baidu, WeChat, Tencent and TripAdvisor. And now we've added Amazon Alexa. We recently launched our integration with Amazon and its market-leading family of voice-enabled echo devices. Now the tens of millions of consumers who use Alexa can receive accurate and timely and authoritative information sourced from the business itself and this was huge for us. It took a long time to get it. Amazon is understandably very protective about its knowledge architecture. And they won’t work with just anyone. Their recognition of Yext as their trusted data partner is an incredible validation. It says that they along with over 150 other services we work with, understand the value of our knowledge base and now with Amazon Alexa, we address all of the largest digital services that use voice search. And having this coverage changes the conversations we have when we introduced ourselves to new customers. Alexa, can I please turn the call over to Jim Steele, our President.