Good afternoon. My name is Sylvie, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Coveo First Quarter 2023 Financial Results Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star then one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, simply press two. Thank you. Mr. Goode, you may begin your conference.
Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today. With me on the call are Louis Têtu, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Coveo, and Jean Lavigueur, Chief Financial Officer. Before we get started, I would like to note that certain statements made during this conference call are forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws, including those regarding our future plans, objectives, growth, and expected performance, including our outlook for the second quarter and fiscal year 2023. These forward-looking statements represent our outlook only as of the date of this call. While we believe any forward-looking statements we make are reasonable, actual results could differ materially because the statements are based on current expectations and are subject to risks and uncertainties.
We do not undertake and expressly disclaim any obligation to update or alter our forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. Further information on these and other factors that could affect the company's financial results is included in filings we make with the Canadian Securities Administrators, including the section titled Risk Factors in the company's most recently filed annual information form, which is available under our profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Additionally, some of the financial measures discussed on this call are either non-IFRS measures or operating metrics used in our industry.
A discussion on why we use non-IFRS financial measures and operating metrics, and where applicable, a reconciliation schedule showing IFRS versus non-IFRS results, are currently available in our press release and our MD&A dated as of today, which may both be found on our investor relations website at ir.coveo.com or our SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com. Please note that unless otherwise stated, all references to any financial figures are in US dollars. Now I'll turn the call over to Louis to begin.
Thank you, Nick, and thank you all for joining us today. Building on the momentum of our record fiscal 2022 results, we had a solid start to fiscal 2023. Even in an uncertain macro environment, we're seeing continued demand for our AI-powered relevance platform as businesses look to maximize efficiency and gain ROI from their investments. As digital transformation remains a priority for businesses worldwide, Coveo helps to enable these enterprises to deliver the relevant experiences that optimize business outcomes at scale. For the first quarter ended June 30, we delivered year-over-year SaaS subscription revenue growth of 47% and total revenue growth of 45%. Gross bookings remained solid, with all lines of business growing double digits on a trailing 12-month basis. Of note, we're continuing to attract and add customers with increasing cost efficiencies.
Our net expansion rate as of June 30, 2022, came in strong at 112% compared to 110% in Q4 of fiscal 2022, demonstrating continued momentum in cross-sells and up-sells and strong customer retention. Lastly, but importantly, we demonstrated the operating leverage inherent in our business and our commitment to accelerating our path to future profitability by posting bottom-line results better than our guidance. I'm also pleased to share that we had a strong start to our fiscal Q2 with two significant e-commerce deals closing just after the first quarter ended, with one of these deals being a large cross-sell of Coveo Search and Recommendations capabilities to a legacy Qubit customer, and the other being a large upsell in EMEA.
Had those deals signed in Q1, we would have had the second largest bookings quarter in the history of the company, and commerce bookings would have been in line with last quarter. However, we've also seen some elongation of sales cycles like many other software companies, especially for some larger transactions. Having said that, demand for our platform remains strong, as evidenced by the record pipeline generation levels we experienced in the quarter. In parallel, we also continue to improve our efficiency in sales and marketing spends. Coveo remains steadfast in our mission to deliver the relevance and personalized digital experiences crucial to compete and thrive in the current environment, which can only be achieved through the application of AI. We believe AI is not only a true disruptor in the digital landscape, but has the potential to change the world even more than the Internet did.
We wanna see Coveo as a leader in this new wave and believe we are at the forefront of this large opportunity. As we enter into a period of more macro uncertainty for many businesses, platforms like Coveo become even more relevant to conversations around strategically applying AI and leveraging tools to deliver optimal business outcomes, including improving profitability. Each of our lines of business represent a compelling ROI for customers as they look to achieve the dynamic goals of their business. In commerce, this means delivering a relevant and personalized shopping experience that boosts customer conversations and spend while optimizing margins and lifetime value. Fostering customer loyalty, however, requires ongoing support that is prompt and addresses the customer's needs. Coveo's service business enables our customers to achieve not only this, but does so while reducing costs and the need for manual intervention.
Lastly, for websites and workplaces, improvements in search and recommendations give users personalized and relevant content that optimizes their experience, leading to more engagement and proficiency. In the quarter, we expanded our relationships with a number of key customers in terms of contract value and use cases, and completed expand transactions with customers such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Enbridge. We also completed a seven-figure expand transaction with a leading multinational enterprise software company. We added new customers in the quarter such as Desjardins Group and Nordstrom, as well as a leading multinational healthcare services company with whom we believe there is a significant opportunity to expand our relationship over time. I would now like to take a moment to highlight a few examples of customers using Coveo's platform to optimize their business outcomes with personalized, relevant digital experiences.
One of Canada's largest alcoholic beverage retailers leverages our e-commerce solutions for over 100,000 products in their catalog. These solutions include query suggestions with automatic relevance tuning. To access the most relevant content for customers, content recommendations to complement product search, dynamic navigation to assist with filtering, and machine learning models to deliver highly personalized experiences for users at scale. Since going live with Coveo during the first quarter, they have experienced a 20% uplift in click-through rates and a significant increase in average cart size. Coveo partnered with one of the best-known telecom companies in Europe. Their communications and cloud infrastructure solutions for telecommunications enterprises are sold worldwide, and they're using Coveo's AI and machine learning capabilities to increase findability and content personalization on both their corporate website and technical help center.
With multilingual content spread across various repositories, their main objective is to increase content consumption and customer satisfaction while streamlining support costs. Noticing how valuable the experience was to their end users, they expanded their use case internally to help their support agents solve cases more efficiently. Earlier this year, Coveo partnered with one of the largest publicly traded food-based companies in the world with over 250,000 employees. As our largest ever workplace implementation, we're currently powering their custom-built workplace sites across several of their larger European and South American territories ahead of a gradual rollout in October 2022. Coveo is helping employees search through vast amounts of internal content to find relevant information. The results of our collective work have been warmly received by end users with further optimizations planned.
Lastly, Coveo brought artificial intelligence to the public-facing websites of one of the oldest continuously operating companies in Northern Europe. Although still very early in deployment, we have implemented close to 50 machine learning models, which are already bringing end users the most relevant products and information, driving higher cart sizes, click-through rates, and recommending the most relevant items. I'd now like to give you an update on some exciting new features and launches made within the quarter as we continue to prioritize research and development as one of our strategic investment focuses. We released new recommendations decisioning capabilities to allow deployment of explicit, finer grain strategies for specific audiences and streamlined deployment of global multi-region configurations to help generate more engagement from merchandisers and increase revenue driven through the Coveo Merchandising Hub.
We also simplified the ingestion of complex catalogs found in SAP's Commerce by introducing native SAP Commerce sources to make the deployment of Coveo alongside SAP significantly easier, as well as to enable processing of all catalog data by our machine learning algorithms. Additionally, we introduced new decisioning capabilities that allow merchandisers to tailor recommendations at the user type or audience level, enabling them to test entirely different strategies per audience or apply granular rules to specific audiences on top of the personalization based on user behavior performed by Coveo recommendations models. Finally, we added a new no-code builder experience for hosted search pages to enable any user to easily create and share next-gen Coveo Atomic Search page experiences.
In closing, I am pleased with the progress we are sharing today that demonstrates not only the demand for our platform, but also the compelling opportunity in AI, which Coveo sits at the forefront of. To deliver relevant, profitable digital experiences at scale, you need AI, and Coveo has created an industry-leading platform that enables businesses to do just that. While getting full value out of their strategic investments. I look to the future with conviction that this large and underserved market will continue to be of utmost importance to all businesses looking to compete and succeed. I will now hand the call over to Jean to discuss our financial results in more detail. Jean?
Thank you, Louis, and good evening, everyone. As Louis noted, we kicked off our fiscal year in a strong demand environment despite the more uncertain macro environment. We had another solid bookings quarter, with all lines of business growing double digits on a trailing twelve-month basis. Our bookings in the quarter included a seven-figure expand transaction with a large enterprise software company with whom we continue to grow our business. As Louis mentioned, we did see some elongation of sales cycles related to economic uncertainty like many other software companies. This was especially notable with larger deals, where the size of the deal often incurs another layer of approvals in the current economic environment. We also continue to deliver strong organic SaaS subscription revenue growth with a year-over-year growth rate in constant currency of greater than 30%.
Note that the strengthening of the US dollar had an approximately 1% negative impact on our year-over-year organic SaaS subscription revenue growth rate this quarter. Turning to our results. SaaS subscription revenue for the first quarter of fiscal year 2023 was $24 million, up 47% year- over- year. Note that the strengthening of the US dollar had an approximately 2% negative impact on our year-over-year SaaS subscription revenue growth rate this quarter. Total revenue came in at $26.5 million, growing 45% on a year-over-year basis. Self-managed licenses and maintenance revenue was $0.3 million, and professional services came in at $2.1 million. Please note that all figures include the contribution from our acquisition of Qubit, which was completed on October fourteenth, 2021.
Current SaaS subscription RPO for the quarter came in at $84.4 million, growing 49% year-over-year. Our net expansion rate as of June 30, 2022 was 112%, an increase of 2% compared to March 31, 2022, and within our target range of 105-115% as retaining and expanding within our existing customer relationships remains a key priority. Turning to our operating results, our first quarter gross profit percentage came in at 75%, compared to 76% for the same period last year. Adjusted gross profit percentage, which normalizes for the effects of share-based payment and related expenses and acquisition-related compensation, was 76% for the first quarter, a decrease of 1% compared to a year ago.
Our product gross profit percentage was 80% in the quarter, in line with the prior year, and our adjusted product gross profit percentage was 81% for the quarter, a 1% increase compared to the year ago period. Our professional services gross profit percentage was 7% for the quarter, compared to 20% for the same period last year. While our adjusted professional services gross profit percentage was 15%, a 7% decrease compared to the prior year period and primarily driven by lower professional services gross margin of Qubit, which we continue to improve. Operating loss for the quarter was $13.3 million, and adjusted operating loss for the quarter was $7.4 million. Note that our adjusted operating loss for this quarter was favorably impacted by the weakening of the Canadian dollar compared to the U.S. dollar.
Net loss came in at $12.5 million, compared to net income of $73.2 million in the first quarter of fiscal year 2022. As we mentioned last quarter, we are focusing closely on our organizational efficiency and accelerating our path to profitability. While we continue to make disciplined strategic investments into the areas of greatest opportunity within our business, we are constantly monitoring our strong unit economics to achieve operating leverage while driving growth. Looking at our balance sheet, we ended the quarter with $217.7 million in cash and cash equivalents. Cash flow generated from operations was $1.4 million in the quarter compared to $6.5 million used in the same period last year.
The positive variance was mainly caused by the collection in the quarter of refundable government tax credits from fiscal year 2021. Finishing with guidance. For the second quarter of fiscal year 2023, we expect SaaS subscription revenue to be between $24.4 million and $24.9 million, representing growth of 41-44% year-over-year. Total revenue in the range of $26.6 million-27.1 million, representing growth of 36-39% year-over-year. Adjusted operating loss in the range of $6.5-7.5 million, and between 104 and 104.5 million weighted average shares outstanding. Note that our adjusted operating loss for the second quarter is favorably impacted by seasonally lower expenses due to accrued vacations taken in the quarter.
For fiscal year 2023, we expect SaaS subscription revenue to be between $101.5 million and $103 million, representing growth of 30-32% year-over-year. Total revenue in the range of $110 million-111.5 million, representing growth of 27-29% year-over-year. Adjusted operating loss in the range of negative $31.5 million-33.5 million. Between 104 million and 105 million weighted average shares outstanding. This guidance does take into account some of the macroeconomic uncertainty we are seeing. It also assumes FX rates roughly in line with where they are today for growth and adjusted operating loss.
In conclusion, our first quarter results captured the momentum we continue to build upon, underpinned by the considerable opportunity in AI that is still in its early stages. Since becoming a public company, we have shown our commitment to executing and capturing demand while maintaining focus on profitability, a commitment that we look to extend upon for years to come. Before we move to Q&A, I would like to invite members of the financial analyst and institutional investor community to our first Capital Markets Day, being held in person and virtually at the TMX Market Centre in Toronto on November 17, 2022. Registration information is available within our earnings press release issued today or by emailing our investor relations department at investors@coveo.com.
We hope you can join us during this important half-day event, where you will meet other members of our team and learn more about our differentiated AI-powered platform. With that, operator, you may now open the line for questions.
Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your touchtone phone. You will then hear a three-tone prompt acknowledging your request. If you would like to withdraw from the question queue, please press star followed by two. If you're using a speakerphone, we do ask that you please lift the handset before pressing any keys. Please go ahead and press star one now if you have a question. Your first question will be from Thanos Moschopoulos at BMO. Please go ahead.
Hi, good afternoon. Maybe just starting off on the macro question. You mentioned longer sales cycles. I mean, clearly you were able to bump up guidance despite that and despite the mild FX headwinds. That's great. On the sales cycles, you know, any themes that you would call out? You mentioned large deals. Any differences you're seeing as far as geographies, as far as you know, verticals or the various use cases that you sell into in terms of the elongation you're seeing?
Yeah. I think we've seen. As you know, we work on fairly large transactions and perhaps that's our thesis. As you know, we tend to be a little conservative there, as always. Our thesis is that given the economic backdrop, companies will be a little more meticulous, I would say, on spending. What we've seen in the case of two large transactions is that, you know, we were able to to hold large prices, but it came with an additional level of approval. You know, we prefer to maintain the discipline of protecting the company revenue and the solution value. It's only two data points here. You know, that is probably not enough for us to extrapolate.
Our thesis certainly, Thanos, again, is that there will be a little more scrutiny and prudence in terms of how they spend. Yet on the flip side, our solutions, as you know, we're able to demonstrate very high ROI both on the revenue gain and the cost savings. We don't anticipate much slowdown at this time from a bookings perspective.
In terms of, let's say, the kind of deals that are kind of in the six-figure range, the low six-figure range, those types of deals are still kind of going through without, you know, any slowdown?
Pardon me. Can you speak closer to the phone or maybe on my side?
Oh, yeah, sorry. I said it from-
I apologize. Yeah.
Yeah. If we talk about smaller deals, sort of deals kind of more in the, you know, $100,000-200,000 range, which I think a lot of that's your bread and butter, those smaller deals, are they kinda going through without delay at this point?
Yes, that's correct. It's really on the bigger transactions. You know, sometimes, the dynamics also of the enterprise software industry is such that, procurement departments believe that they can get a better deal on the last day of the quarter. Given our business model, obviously, we're able to maintain that discipline and certainly our pricing, sometimes at the expense of waiting a day or whatever because, you know, we wouldn't do unnatural things. You know, it's pretty much from that perspective, the way enterprise software has behaved in the past. Perhaps, you know, we do foresee slightly elongated approval processes, without overall affecting much the bookings at this time.
Okay, thanks. Maybe just a quick one for Jean. As far as the Qubit integration, remind us, are there more synergies to be captured? Or at this point, from an OpEx and margin perspective, are we mostly there as far as integration?
Thank you, Thanos. Yeah, certainly what we're seeing right now, we are very excited as we've reported, you know, that large cross-sell that you know we were able to sell, you know, Search and Recommendations into one of the
Qubit customers that, you know, had implemented, you know, merchandising features of Qubit. Certainly very excited with the, you know, customers kinda. As you know, the thesis was certainly where we would see the merchandising market combining with search and recommendations and that certainly is evidence that it is moving forward to that. From that perspective, I think where we're still working on is, you know, you did see, you know, a decrease in, you know, professional services margin, you know, year-over-year, and that is due to Qubit. We are still working on, you know, improving, you know, this motion to ensure that, you know, we do get, you know, margins that are closer to that, you know, 10-20% on professional services.
That's the main one I would call out, Thanos.
Okay, great. I'll pass the line. Thanks, guys.
Thank you, Thanos.
Thank you, Thanos.
Next question will be from Paul Treiber at RBC. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much. Good afternoon. Just a question on the guidance, the full year guidance for SaaS. The low end decreased slightly. Could you just walk through some of the reasons there, you know, how much is foreign exchange versus macro assumptions?
No, Paul, thank you for the question, Paul. No, the guidance increased, did not decrease. It was for the fiscal year, Paul, right? We were guiding at $101-103, and now we're guiding at $101.5-103. We are seeing an increase in our guidance.
Okay. Thank you. My mistake there. Just on, you know, with this, you know, these larger deals taking a bit longer, you know, about a year ago, you had some self-service offerings up on the website. Is that a higher priority in this environment, or do you see more uptake? You know, I know that's targeting developers, but could that drive more sort of organic uptake of your offerings without going through these more approvals?
Yeah. We continue to invest in the self-service offerings and the developer motion, but let's keep in mind that our market at Coveo is the large enterprises. This, to us, the self-service is really, Paul, to us a channel to help companies assess our technology, put our technology in the hands of developers, as well as the developers of our large systems integrator partners. You know, once they do that, they're able to test it and validate the functionality and the power of our AI models and our platform, and then we engage in sales cycles.
We don't do today per se much self-service sales because the nature of our market is such that those are large, you know, complex, oftentimes global multi-country situations that require, you know, quite a bit of expertise in addition to obviously to leverage our platform. Help me understand if I'm answering your question.
Yes, you are. Just, you know, in terms of the adoption among developers, has the adoption, the breadth of the uptake been in line with your expectations when you launched the program?
Absolutely. We're continuing to invest there. What we're doing, this is part of a broad theme at Coveo, which is to really reduce to the maximum the friction to engage, you know, with customers, help them, understand and quickly touch the value of our platform, you know, in most cases before they buy. The answer is absolutely yes. You know, the developer community is really engaging, you know, quite a bit with that. The platform has become, you know, full Open APIs, as you know, and headless infrastructure and really a composable platform, and that's what the market is looking at.
Okay. Great to hear. I'll pass the line.
Thank you.
Great. Thank you, Paul.
Next question will be from DJ Hynes at Canaccord. Please go ahead.
Hi, DJ.
Yeah, this is Luke on for DJ. Thanks for taking the question, guys. It sounds like you haven't seen much sign of this at all, but we're curious how, if at all, generally slower e-commerce volumes and activity might affect your customers' decision-making and prioritization of AI-driven personalization implementation decisions.
Obviously, we've seen the broader news as it relates to, you know, the perception obviously and, you know, in certain areas, certainly probably the reality that e-commerce might be slowing down. There's a couple of ways to look at this. First of all, you're absolutely correct in your preamble, DJ. We haven't seen any of that. We deal with large enterprises both in the B2B and B2C, business to consumer and business to business space. Business to business, you know, these large enterprises are typically, obviously, you know, large global companies. They're typically very well capitalized. The one thing that doesn't slow down in an economic downturn is digital transformation.
Given that our solutions, you know, essentially we can triangulate to the value, you know, we can actually measure that we can increase revenue, and increasingly, you know, we're focusing a lot of our machine learning models on looking at things like profitability and so on. You know, they won't slow down, you know, these kinds of investments. Obviously, you know, there may be, you know, in the case of a more abrupt recession, which everyone seems to be talking about, there may be certain subsets of the commerce market that, you know, will slow down, mainly on the consumer side. And we have the ability to pull the levers to adjust and focus our attention on the segments that don't. You know, that's really the key.
Now, the other part to this topic is really the fact that our customers don't see digital commerce as a separate silo. They see it as part of a multi-channel strategy, which drives commerce on all channels, you know? You know, as a simple example of what I'm describing, you know, for some of our customers, as much as 40%+ of their in-store transactions start online. They really value, you know. There was this whole debate about Shopify about the fact that people were going back into stores and were going less online. You know, the types of companies we deal with, you know, don't quite see that.
In fact, they look at the commerce and digital as well as in-store and across all channels as one and the same. For that reason, we don't anticipate much slowdown, you know, for these types of solutions that really can optimize, you know, Coveo really can optimize existing commerce infrastructures, you know, in a way as to, you know, increase not only conversion, but really revenue and ultimately margins. This is what companies care about in commerce, in particular.
That's really helpful. Thanks for all the color there. That actually-
Yeah. Thank you, DJ.
Yeah. My other question would be, in a tougher economic environment, are you changing at all your go-to-market strategy to prioritize certain use cases or, you know, otherwise emphasize messaging that resonates, maybe a little better in a tighter spend environment? Thanks.
Coveo, DJ, has always had a singular focus on value and being able to calculate and triangulate the value that we deploy and that we can unleash with customers, be it, you know, as I just mentioned, either increase in revenue, increase in conversion rates, increases in loyalty that can be measured through A/B testing. The service area, you know, increases in customer self-service satisfaction while reducing manual interventions and costs. Companies, you know, I would argue that companies in a recession, the types of customers we deal with continue to invest. They won't invest in nice to have, they will invest in must-have. I would argue that delivering better digital experiences is a must-have nowadays.
The reason why they continue to move forward with this is because it's actually more costly to keep the status quo than it is for them to deploy Coveo. In a way, we're handing them a bag of dimes for a nickel. We continue to pursue that strategy. So far it's working well.
Thank you.
Yep.
Thank you, DJ.
Next question will be from Taylor McGinnis at UBS. Please go ahead.
Hi, Taylor.
Hi. Thanks so much for taking my question. Just to understand the full year guide and the 2Q guide a little bit more. It looks like you raised the low end of the guide on the subscription guide by the beat, roughly the beat in the quarter, but then kept the high end of the guide the same. When we look at the 2Q guide, it looks like an implied sequential growth that is stronger than what you initially guided to last quarter. When we think about what that guide means, are you assuming, I guess, that the macro environment worsens in the second half of your fiscal year than what you are seeing today?
Maybe you can talk, you know, a little bit about some of the assumptions there as well as the FX impact that's embedded in the full-year guide.
Yep. Thank you for the question, Taylor. Certainly you're absolutely correct. I think the message is, yes, we did raise guidance for both SaaS subscription revenue and total revenue, as you correctly stated. One on the lower end of the range, the other one on the top end of the range. Certainly pleased to be able to do that, right? However, clearly there is conservatism in the way we are, you know, projecting the rest of the year. You know, we did beat both, as you know, by $0.5 million, we beat the SaaS subscription. We beat by $1.5 million the top, you know, the total revenue.
That certainly partly made its way into the guidance. Again, Taylor, certainly being conservative. When you look at FX, it is really a minimal impact. You know, when you look at, you know, almost 80% of our revenues are denominated in US dollars. Not from the revenue perspective. I think the fact that we are highly concentrated in the US certainly, you know, favors this, you know, low variance when it comes down to FX. Certainly from that perspective, I think you'll only read, you know, only some conservatism in how we're guiding. But certainly very confident in our ability to as we've been doing, you know, this is the third time, right, where we're beating and raising.
I think from that perspective, you know, very pleased with the results of this quarter and what's coming for the rest of fiscal year.
Got it. My next question is just on, it looks like, you know, the operating guide or income guide didn't really change, you know, a whole lot. You have a lot of software companies just given some of the uncertainty in the macro that are starting to, you know, pull back on headcount and things like that. Curious, when you think about, you know, what the in-guide like implies for the back half of the year, are you guys starting to, you know, temper some of those OpEx areas, or are you just, you know, continuing business as usual? How should we think about, you know, some of the puts and takes there?
Yeah. No, thank you, Taylor. First of all, if you recall, you know, we had guided, you know, $8 million-9 million, and we delivered $7.4 million this quarter. Certainly again, we beat on the bottom line this quarter. But you know, if you look at the guidance again for next quarter, we certainly guided below, you know, substantially below what we had initially communicated at the time of IPO. Again, I think we are taking steps to accelerate our path to profitability. With regards to full year guidance, again, you know, while we did, you know, slightly improve our guidance with regards to the bottom line, you're correct in stating this. Again, we're being conservative, you know, from that perspective.
Though, if you go to our website, Taylor, you'll see that there are over 50 jobs right now still open. We're still hiring, but we're hiring in areas where we will see, of course, you know, high ROI. Right now you'll see job openings in R&D for machine learning, in sales, marketing, alliances, you know, very specific pockets. We are certainly being, you know, more careful where we are making investments, but we are making investments right now, as we've seen, you know, our unit economics keep being very strong. You know, strong expansion and right now, very disciplined with our sales and marketing investments. That gives us a lot of confidence in providing guidance for the rest of the fiscal year.
Got it. Thank you so much for answering my questions.
Thank you, Taylor.
Next question will be from Koji Ikeda at Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Hi, Koji.
Hi, guys. Hi. It's actually Danika Mera for Koji today. Thanks for-
Hi, Danika.
taking our questions.
Yeah.
Thanks. My first question is, I know at the start of the year you guys hired a new Chief Growth and Strategy Officer, Nicolas. I was just wondering if you could talk about some of the changes that he has implemented, and are there any changes in your strategies going forward, any of them starting to bear fruit? Also, I saw that you launched like a host of new capabilities in commerce and merchandising as well as search. Just wanted to know, were they customer driven through feedback and any color, additional color you can offer there? Thank you.
Yeah. Great. Yeah. We're very excited about that functionality. Let me talk about Nicolas first. Nicolas, as we might recall, was the chief evangelist globally at Google, who essentially all the evangelist team at Google reported to Nicolas, and think about them as kind of the internal McKinsey worldwide of Google. A very strategic mind, obviously, and yes, you know, as a result, but you know, that was the goal too, and we're constantly evolving our strategy to focus on markets that provide the company with greater economics in terms of, you know, how we think constantly about, you know, where is our technology creating the most value, in which segments for which type of customer.
Relative to the cost of acquiring these customers and the potential for growth. You know, we signed, as we mentioned in the release, you know, one of the largest transactions that the company signed, you know, especially as a first customer, you know, large seven-figure deals, you know, within this quarter. We continue to focus on that, and that's a key change with the strategy. The other one is really around better aligning our solutions and our pricing with what generates the most value and really getting our fair share of that value. I would say those are two of the key driving strategies. Aside from continuously looking at, you know, prioritizing, we know where the target markets are.
The key here is to prioritize, you know, what's more important in terms of verticals and use cases and geographies and managing that mix. As it relates to your second question, Danika, we're very excited with the Merchandising Hub and what we've released. You know, e-commerce, and especially with large organizations is very complex. You know, Coveo has been in machine learning and deep learning for more than a decade. As we've said, you know, earlier on the call, you know, there's some customers where we've tested more than 50 machine learning models and so on. What the Merchandising Hub allows merchandisers to do is to tailor recommendations by user type or types of audiences and then enable them to test.
It's really about evolving the role of merchandisers to people who make, I would say, human decisions around which products to promote to who, to people who test machine learning models on different audiences at scale and can look at the analytics and the results. We're excited with that, and we're also excited with our no-code builder experience. You know, that's highly technical, but it's extremely important for large commerce infrastructures and their capability to go headless and composable essentially, and really take the merchandising into the future, to the next level. Did that answer your question, Danica?
Yeah. Yeah.
Yes.
It definitely did.
Okay. Very good.
Thank you.
Yep.
Thank you. Your next question will be from David Kwan at TD. Please go ahead.
Hi, David.
Hi, guys.
Hi, David.
I had a question, I guess. Just following up on Taylor's question on the adjusted operating loss. You know, we saw that come in nicely below expectations this quarter or I guess, better than expected, but, you know, below what you had been guiding. Then when you look at the guide for this upcoming quarter in Q2, it looks to be a further sequential improvement. When you, I guess, back out the second half, it looks like it implies a widening of the losses in the second half. I was curious to get your thoughts as to what's happening there.
You should not read that. Clearly, I think, David, we are. You know, you should instead read that we need to take some conservative assumptions in building the forecast for the balance of Q3 and Q4. I think what you should expect is, as you've seen in Q1 where we've delivered $7.4 million, guiding to $8-9 million. Then again, a further reduction right now in the guide for Q2 at $6.5-7.5 million. I think right now it is just being conservative for us, but we did improve the guidance for fiscal year, right?
We were guiding between $32 and $34, right? For fiscal year now we're improving on it, guiding to $31.5-33.5. We get it that we did not, of course, reflect the entire savings onto the full fiscal year guidance. Please only look into this as a conservatism on our from our perspective as to, as we look into Q3 and Q4. Certainly right now, Q2 looking as we're very comfortable with the guidance we provided again for adjusted operating loss.
Thanks, Jean. Yeah, it seems like you've done a good job in looking to narrow the losses here and get
Correct.
The break even quicker. I just didn't know to what extent we could extrapolate that in the second half, because if we did, then obviously the guidance that you've put out for the full year is significantly off. I'm just trying to understand the dynamic, whether it was FX related, like you're expecting the dollar to reverse or something else.
Yeah. No. Part of the reason why you're spot on, certainly from that perspective. Certainly, you know, while we did adjust guidance for the FX as of June thirtieth. We're not hedging, as you know. Right now we wanted to be conservative that we didn't know if, you know, the USD to CAD would revert back to where it was. Also right now, it is providing a little bit of a tailwind for us.
It is helping us, as you know, because, you know, about a little bit less than half of our expenses are in Canadian dollars because of the R&D centers, you know, being located in Canada. However, you know, given that we're not hedging, as I mentioned, we wanted to to, you know, to have some room there. If it does revert, then, you know, with the full year guidance, we'll be able to, you know, have some room. Right now, if the FX stays as it is right now, you should expect us to, as we've done the last, you know, two earnings call, to again, beat and raise, you know, each and every quarter again on all.
Hopefully, we'll see that. I appreciate that, Jean.
Thank you.
Maybe two more questions. You talked about Qubit a bit, just I think in particular as it relates to helping bolster some of the margins from the professional services side. Can you maybe talk about when you could expect the, I guess, the overall professional services margins to move up into that 10-20% range? Then just in terms of the integration overall, how that's been going. You know, it's been any surprises either on the positive or negative side?
Yes, certainly. Thank you. Certainly, you know, where Qubit before the acquisition, certainly the priority was mostly on recurring revenue and not so much on professional services. As part of the acquisition now, I think we're trying to work with the customer base of Qubit to gradually, you know, implement a certain type of discipline where, you know, where you're getting margins as well on professional services as we are on recurring revenue that are in that range of 10-20%. We believe it's gonna take another 2-3 quarters from that perspective. Keeping in mind that this, you know, professional services represents less than 10% of our total revenue. Again, it is still only, you know.
It is all about, you know, product gross profit margin, as you can imagine. Certainly from that perspective, to answer your question specifically, I would say two to three quarters on the professional services front. With regards to the integration, as you know, certainly our thesis was, you know, we want to have one platform, right? That one technology platform would combine all the expertise that Qubit were bringing to Coveo with regards to merchandising, right? All the capabilities that Louie described, we wanted that not in two separate platforms, but in one. We did commit to doing this over one year. Certainly now very excited to have that first, you know, large customer that did purchase, you know, you know, that did actually cross-sell.
They were a Qubit customer now, you know, buying, of course, the Coveo Search and Recommendations to complement. Certainly now we will have that lead anchor, you know, customer to certainly work with us to kind of build out that one platform. So we certainly expect many more cross-sells on both sides. Certainly winning new customers, you know, new land, new logos with the combined platform, as you know, towards the end of the year where we will have, you know, that one platform combining merchandising and search and recommendation. Does that answer your question?
Yes. Very helpful. It does.
Thank you.
Thank you, Jean.
Thanks, David.
A last question, just on your cash balance. Obviously
Yes
Nice, good cash flow performance this quarter.
Thank you.
which is pretty important these days. Looking at deploying that cash, obviously, Qubit's just been in the fold for a few quarters now. I'm curious to get your thoughts on the acquisition environment and your appetite and what kind of you're seeing from a valuations standpoint.
Yeah, certainly. Right now, as you know, certainly the public markets have been, you know, certainly we've seen a re-rating, certainly from in terms of valuation multiples. That unfortunately in the private markets we have not seen. Certainly, you know, we still have a large pipeline of companies that we talk to on a weekly basis. Unfortunately right now, I think it's gonna take still probably another 2-3 quarters before valuations of private sector come down to earth, to come down to where the public multiples are. Then it will certainly provide to us the right environment to proceed with, you know, being a little bit more aggressive on the M&A front.
Right now we're certainly very active in the market, talking still to a lot of companies, but being very disciplined in terms of, you know, how we will deploy that excess cash that we have.
Sounds like we shouldn't be expecting anything soon then.
Well, yeah, let me add to that, David. You know, again, you know, as Jean mentioned, there's no question that the private markets lag the public market valuations, and we all, I believe most people on this call understand the dynamics there, with private equity and so on. You know, we think that will correct. As Jean mentioned, we're constantly, you know, talking. I wouldn't conclude that we're not gonna do anything. You can expect the Coveo management team to remain extremely disciplined around acquisitions, both strategically and financially, obviously.
No, helpful. Thanks, guys.
Thank you.
Next question will be from David Weiss at Scotiabank. Please go ahead.
Hi, David.
Hi. Hi. Congrats on the quarter.
Thank you.
You've also mentioned. Yeah, no problem. You always mentioned a number of key wins in this quarter. You previously called out that there was some strength in the tech sector, financial services, and healthcare verticals last quarter.
Hey, David, I don't know if-
Yeah.
David, can I interrupt you? I don't know if you're talking on a speakerphone. I know I can't hear you very well. If you wouldn't mind.
Hi. Is that any better?
Oh, oh, that's 10 x better. Sorry about that. I apologize.
No, no, sorry about that. Yeah, I was on a headset. Okay, let's try this again. This quarter you've mentioned a number of key wins, clearly. You've previously called out on other quarters seeing strength in the tech sector, financial services, and healthcare verticals. I was wondering if you could provide an update on which verticals we're seeing the greatest strengths in Q1.
Yeah. The tech sector remains a very strong sector for us. We're a dominant player across certainly a large number of the well-known tech brands across the world. We've continued to see some good traction pretty much across all sectors. Obviously, the ones that you know are growing alongside with our commerce line of business are you know B2B, which typically comes from manufacturers and distributors, as well as retail, right? B2C commerce, and you know, I would add on top of the ones that you mentioned. It's pretty much across the board and we're happy.
If you think about the focus of Coveo from a vertical standpoint, it's really mainly, although we have some in some instances, some more horizontal solutions, such as, for instance, websites and you know, general intelligence, AI-powered search applications across digital properties such as websites and so on. For the most part, it's across tech, financial services, healthcare, and then manufacturing, distribution, and retail.
Those are, you know, the main verticals for us.
Okay. That's helpful.
Right.
In Q4, you've mentioned about when you looked at bookings there, you said about 60% of those new bookings were from new customers. You know, just was wondering, how does that look in this quarter? Do you see similar trends, and are those expected to continue?
This quarter we did mention that we had that important cross-sell with that, you know, that large seven-figure deal. That certainly skewed-
Right.
You know, that percentage towards the existing customer base. So typically, as you said, you know, it was 60/40, you know, for the June quarter, it was closer to the opposite, right, 40/60 because of that large transaction. Certainly looking forward, given the uncertain macroeconomic environment, you know, maybe on the new logo front, you know, we may see, you know, as we've mentioned, sales cycles elongating a little bit, but certainly we don't expect anything, you know, of importance to change the model which is, you know, typically in that 60/40.
Very happy with our net expansion rate at 112% within the range that we've, you know, guided in the past. Certainly, we believe that with all four lines of business right now, we're able to grow them double digits, with both, you know, new logos, as well as, the existing customer base.
Thanks. That's very helpful. Just one last one here. Again, just to touch on operating margins again. You've mentioned, you know, making ongoing investments in your business as well. I just, you know, wanted to sort of unpack. When we think of gross margins, R&D, sales and marketing, and G&A, sort of the key operating expense lines, which areas should we expect to see more significant leverage or improvement over time? Is it something that's kind of across the board? Thanks.
It will be pretty much across the board, but I certainly will call out, you know, certainly from a sales and marketing perspective, if you look at an adjusted, you know, basis, you know, without stock-based comp, if you look, you know, last year we were around 58% as percentage of revenue, sales and marketing, coming down to 49% this quarter. Certainly happy with the, you know, the efficiency from a sales and marketing perspective. Louis talked, you know, certainly about the impact that Nicolas Darveau-Garneau certainly had on our team, and I think it bodes well for the future.
From an R&D perspective, I don't think that you should expect, you know, the same kind of improvement from an R&D perspective. When we went public, certain tax credits that we have from the Canadian government went away. From that perspective, we you know will probably have a year of adjustment there. Certainly from a G&A perspective, yes, we you know have made a number of investments to get ready as a public company in systems, legal, as you can imagine, financial with the finance team. Expect as well some leverage from a G&A perspective, looking forward. All three are expected to contribute to our accelerated path to profitability, David.
Okay, great. Thanks very much.
Well, thank you.
Last question will be from Richard Tse at National Bank Financial. Please go ahead.
Hey, thanks for.
Hi, Richard.
Hey, how are you? Thanks for getting me in the queue.
Good. Yep.
Just a couple of quick ones here. You know, in terms of the competitive environment, you know, since you've become public, clearly you've got an elevated profile now. Has that kind of improved your positioning here, you think, in terms of, you know, the win rates in the market?
You know, we're very pleased with our win rate. We're not seeing any slowdown there. We're not relying, frankly, on our public presence to improve our competitive profile. This was really a financing event. We win because, you know, because we believe to be the most mature firm in AI. In particular, we've been in AI a decade more than our competitors. We've had the advantage of working with some of the leading brands in the world and very large data sets and maturing those models, and we're able to triangulate those using analytics and so on to the benefit in ways that are unmatched, we believe at least, in the industry.
When we get in front of those types of customers who really care about that, you know, and really care about the minutia of technology that will bring them the most amount of value, you know, this is what makes us competitive. The fact that we're public or private, we have competitors that have a size that is also significant and they're also, you know, good companies. They do things differently. But the fact that. Long answer to say, Richard, that the fact that we're public is obviously a good branding event. I think really it's probably more the.
Well, it's certainly more the fact that our balance sheet is so strong is certainly a very reassuring factor. But at the end of the day, we need to perform, and that means growth and value to customers and efficiency, and that's what we're delivering.
Sorry, and just one last one for me.
Richard, if I may add a quick one, Richard. As Louie alluded to, right? One of our verticals that we focus on is financial services. They provide extensive financial due diligence on our company. If you look at our balance sheet prior to the IPO, you had, you know, all of the equity that we had raised from venture capitalists. As you know, under IFRS, you know, we had to put a fair market value in terms of on that, which was over $1 billion, right? Certainly when you look at the balance sheet prior to the IPO and after the IPO, certainly in the financial services market, the conversations are much easier as our balance sheet has improved tremendously from that perspective.
Certainly a big plus on that side.
Okay, great. Just one last one for me. You know, as I sort of look through the MD&A, you sort of have a section on geographic expansion. Clearly there's a massive opportunity on the international side for you. Can you maybe talk about sort of the timing of that push and just really help us understand how much of the current OpEx structure could support that expansion going forward? Thank you.
Yeah, good question. First of all, for us to, you know, when we expand in a new geography, essentially we need to spawn a new typically, you know. Given the privacy laws, et cetera, typically, If it's a large geography such as Asia Pac, for instance, or Japan or so on, we need to spawn a new what we call a new region with our cloud infrastructure. That's not a very significant expense and something we're ready to do, and we can execute within 60 days. Number two is we need to factor in that we want to deploy a full infrastructure.
It's not just about selling in a territory, but it's really about being able to deliver and support our customers and gain a significant market share and presence in the country. That means, you know, deploying marketing and sales and so on. The reason I say that is this becomes a major program within the company that needs to be factored against, you know, what other markets can deliver a share, what the existing markets we're in can deliver to shareholders. Currently, we do not have much plans, you know, at least in the next 12 months, to enter into other geographies than the one we're currently operating in, which is in Asia Pac, you know, Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, where we're investing right now.
We just appointed a managing director in Europe and, you know, we have more than 100 people in London and so on. We're really expanding well there. Continuing obviously to penetrate the US market, which is largely under-penetrated, in our view, you know, where we play. To us, it's really a matter of factoring, you know, do we invest in new verticals, in new use cases, in new channels, or in new geographies? I would say long answer, Richard, to say that at this stage, we think that what continues, the gift that continues giving to shareholders is the current markets we're in. For that reason, we're staying very focused.
Okay. Appreciate the detail. Thank you.
Yep.
Thank you.
Could change in 12 months. For now, for the next year, don't expect us to do much more than really continue to grow in those regions and particularly in Europe as well. Yep.
Thank you. At this time, we have no further questions, so I would like to turn the call back over to Louis Têtu for closing remarks.
Yes. Very good. Well, I wanna thank you all for your time in joining us today. We believe that the company, as I think, probably transpired, is very uniquely positioned and poised to deliver AI to businesses and really help our customers optimize their outcomes at this critical juncture. I look forward to updating you in the future. Thank you for attending again. With that, operator, you can please end the call.
Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, this does indeed conclude your conference call for today. Once again, thank you for attending. At this time, we do ask that you please disconnect.