Howard Lerman
Analyst · Oppenheimer. Please go ahead
Thank you, Conrad. Hello and everyone welcome to our second quarter earnings call. We are pleased to report another solid quarter for Yext. I am excited to share our quarterly highlights driving these results. Revenue grew 32% over the second quarter last year and it exceeded the high-end of our guidance. Unearned revenue during the quarter grew 42.4% year-over-year and the number of structured facts which is an indication of engagement and usage grew more than 60% from the year ago quarter. We continue to see some of the best known brands in the United States, Europe and Japan choose Yext. During the quarter, we signed contracts with leading brands like Travelers, Liberty Mutual, UCLA Health, MAC, Big Lots, Versace and Lloyds Pharmacy. We also signed expansions in renewal with big customers like FedEx, AT&T, Baskin Robbins, Metro PCS and BBVA Compass. In fact, last week, we signed a contract with my favorite broccoli cheddar soup maker Campbell's. This is the first time in our company’s history that we’ve closed a contract with a CPG company that’s consumer product goods that doesn’t have any physical store location. Now how were we able to sign a CPG company with no physical store locations? One simple word, search. Search is changing from links to answers and because it is people are being retrained to ask longer questions instead of just typing in simple keywords. They are not only asking longer questions, they are also asking questions in more [places] [ph]. The fact is that today’s customer journey starts with a question and if a brand doesn’t answer a question, someone else will. So what do you need to answer questions? What you need is a knowledge graph and this is a structured data base that contains facts in their relationships in a way that can efficiently be surfaced to answer a question. It turns out Yext powers the knowledge graph for every one of our clients and collectively, these contain more than 200 million structured facts and that gives us a huge head start and be able to deliver a breakthrough new search product which we call Yext Answers. Let’s take a step back. Today’s site search products are not that smart and are not that useful. Most sites when you see that magnifying glass, you type in a query and you get junky results. Try it for example. Go to Procter & Gamble’s website PG.com. Now the very first search results for their popular product if you search for Tide, just type in Tide and it gives you a Vietnamese result. You can’t find what you are looking for. And when the user gets a result like this, they just go back to Google and it means Tide lost control of the customer journey and that the user is likely to see competitor ad. Yext Answers is a breakthrough new site search product that delivers a Google-like experience for every company. It gives you answers not links. The user types in a question on a company’s website and Yext answers the question, kind of like Google does, except it’s all controlled by their brand and built on a brand’s knowledge graph. It’s simple to install and every single business with a website can use it. And we are already seeing strong demand. It’s in early access right now, but already by the end of Q2, we sold eight Answers-led deals and that’s pretty impressive considering we are still in early access. Now like Campbell’s, we signed a large healthcare company to Answers. The number one used case in visiting a health system website is to find a doctor and these are the kinds of questions that Yext answers. Answers is the latest expansion of our platform. With Answers, we’ve got three products that’s in the knowledge graph, Answers, Listings and Pages. We’ve got Answers, we just talked about that delivers a site search experience on Yext customers’ websites where customers can search the knowledge graph and get answers. Pages lets Yext customers create a page for every answer, which is a best practice for ensuring the right information shows up in the search engine. And Listing integrates the data in a knowledge graph directly into 150 voice assistance map apps, third-party services like Google and Amazon, Bing, Facebook and many more. And because the market opportunity is so large, we think that Answers is going to be a natural entry point for many companies. It’s essentially available to any company with a website; it’s no longer limited to physical locations. This will significantly increase our total addressable market. We are launching Answers in general availability at Onward. I am so excited to share more details about Answers on our next earnings call. With our mission of perfect answers everywhere, Yext is leading brands into the future of search. We’ve been doing this for more than a decade. We always have and we always will. And with that, I will turn it over to Jim.