Let's get started.
Yeah.
Okay.
What time? 15.
Perfect. Yeah, perfect. Morning, everyone. Thanks for being here. I'm Jason Ader from William Blair. I'm very pleased to introduce TJ Jiang, CEO of AvePoint, and Jim Caci, CFO. Before we begin, I'm required to inform you that a complete list of research disclosures and conflicts of interest is available on our website at williamblair.com. That out of the way, thanks to both of you for being here, and they're gonna go through some slides, and then we'll have some time for Q&A.
All right. Thank you, Jason. Good morning, everyone. Yeah, I'll just share with everyone the AvePoint story. This is actually our standard investor presentation. You can updated version you can download on our IR website. So I won't go through page by page, but I think I'll focus on the actual core business, what's happening in the market today, and then Jim will come and talk about the financial performance of the company. If we talk about AvePoint, what we do today, we're considered one of the most advanced SaaS data management and a data governance player in the Microsoft Cloud ecosystem. We are multi-cloud, but we have been doing 20 years, very focused on Microsoft tech stack, and that's where more than 90% of our revenue are focused on.
So, given everything that's happening in today's landscape around data management, data estate, and how important that is, towards how enterprise manage their data and then drive AI adoption and deployment, we're now very topical for what's happening in the market. Just core business highlights, and of course, Jim will go into more detail. So, so far, this is our after Q1 2024 results. We're at $274 million recurring, 44% SaaS growth, and 23% ARR growth compared to the year before, and 86% of our revenue is fully recurring. The other 14% is services. When we went public in 2021, we were 20% services, so we already stated that we're working the services down to 10% or less, and we're making very quick and meaningful progress towards that.
Yeah, we're quite global. What's really interesting for us is, at our size, 45% of our revenue is North America, and the other 55% of revenue are evenly split between Western Europe and Asia. Asia very much focused on Tier One B2B software markets. That's Japan, that's Australia, New Zealand, that's Singapore, South Korea. What's also interesting is, from a SaaS distribution perspective, North America is pretty much 50% of our recurring, and then EMEA is 30%, and APAC is 20%. So majority of the services that we do today come from APAC. That's just the nature of the business environment there, specifically in Japan and in Singapore, but we'll continue to work that down, as majority of the business is high growth recurring SaaS.
We're also non-GAAP profitable, cash generating since last year, and our stated goal for our the last year's Investor Day is that by 2025, which is very much around the corner here, will be Rule of 40. So GAAP profitable and Rule of 40 in terms of ARR growth, plus EBIT margin, as well, positive EBIT margins. So what's really driving our continued solid execution, we have 5 quarters of successful execution of beat and raises. It's really focusing on fundamental problem that we've been solving for the last 20 years, one of data management and data governance.
So it's really in before COVID, I would say our focus and the right customer journey is to help customers first get to cloud via our modernization data offering of data analytics and data migration, data integration, both on-prem, hybrid to cloud, and even cloud to cloud. And then once you're in cloud, of course, we focus on data resilience, so backup recovery, ransomware attack detection, restore to a good known state before, and also archiving to make sure that you don't actually endlessly expand the amount of data storage you have in cloud. So especially for regulated industry, there's policies towards that as well. And then that's our Resilience Suite.
Of course, we have our Control Suite, which is basically access rights management, who has access to what, and also, in terms of recertifying data to chase ownership. That's very important because you need to make sure that you don't have over-privileged access, both internally, externally. Now, in the AI world, what does that mean? That means these problems that we solve for customers are more important than ever. So, Microsoft Copilot has been out for now 11 months. The adoption rate is rather anemic. The number one identified issue and challenge at the highest level within Microsoft is also data management, data quality issues that enterprise has. Because AI is not magic. AI is only as good as the data that you feed it.
So enterprise data estate is very, very messy. So we recently actually did a AI and data kind of survey for across our 800 biggest customers around the world. 60% of them have over 500 petabyte data. So when you have that size of a data estate across all different assets, classes, multi-cloud, hybrid, it's very hard to prioritize, and you don't even know where to start when you want to actually deploy proper AI to meaningfully improve your business. So this is where we actually really step up and help businesses to discover what some of the issues they have around privileged access, and also, very importantly, to analyze the data to make sure that you get rid of out-of-date, redundant, trivial content.
So that you actually, when you use that data to train, to refine your large language models or your domain-specific knowledge, you're only using high quality, relevant, up-to-date, information. And also, this actually problem exists both at the input and output of the data models, right? AI models. Because, now 10% of all data is generated by AI already, and that issue is gonna become even more of a problem going forward. So that means the output of the data model also have to be managed and refined and analyzed. Because, as you know, fundamentally, large language models have this inherent problem of 10% of data is actually considered wrong. It's called hallucination.
So if you feed that data back into the input to then model the t, because as the world, we evolve, we change, and enterprises have to continuously train their AI models to reflect the evolving business landscape. Then they're actually feeding it new data, both from what they organically generate and collect from the environment, as well as generated from other data models. So then both input, output of the data quality need to be managed and governed, and that's really the space we've been doing and we've been in in the last 20 years. So historically, our customer base is very much regulated industry focused, so 60% of our revenue is from regulated industry.
But what's really interesting is, since we've gone SaaS, and, we see that small businesses also, come to us in a big way. So I'll talk about the, the go-to-market here, where small businesses are basically 500 or smaller, employee companies. And we realized that, their data quality, and management, is important to them as well. Initially, we thought that the small businesses are just working with regulated industry, that's why they need our solution. But it's evident that even if they're not in the regulated industry, it's just as important. So what that led to is a phenomenal growth. Less than three years ago, we had 0 revenue in small businesses, and today, small businesses, as the latest quarter, is 23% of our recurring.
Of course, our recurring is already growing at 20%+ year-over-year. So the SMB segment is growing essentially triple digits. Unlike others in the market, we don't see softness in the SMB space. The reason for that is we actually, our go-to-market motion is that we don't directly work with small businesses. We work with intermediary layer, which is called MSPs, Managed Service Providers. These are basically IT back office for small businesses. They're outsourced service organizations, and they will handle hundreds of clients, and they become our customers. And we actually have a wrapper around our SaaS solution for them. We collectively call it the Elements Platform, which is part of our Confidence Platform, that services MSP.
So they have single pane of glass to be able to do data management, data backup, entitlement management, operation management for hundreds of tenants in one go. We also made it easy for them that we can do monthly license and pool license, so the threshold of using our solution is very low. And because of that, and because we also distribute our SaaS, and they buy it directly from digital marketplaces, from Ingram Micro, Tech Data, also Crayon, the big, big guys, as well as Microsoft Azure Marketplace today, it basically is a zero human touch from our side. So what that led to is also what Jim will talk about later. It's a good improvement of sales efficiency, and then which led to a direct improvement of bottom operating margins.
So we'll continue to work on that to have more and more of indirect sales versus direct sales. We started off as a direct sales organization. Today, we are, essentially 60% of our business is touched by indirect, both as a channel-led or channel-procured model. That will continue to improve, and that allow us to reach a much bigger, audience set. Just for reference, the Microsoft- for Microsoft, that segment, small business segment, is actually over 40% of their revenue. So we still have a lot of room to grow, and this is why we continue to see strength, in actually all three segments: enterprise, midsize, as well as, small businesses.
And again, very few enterprise software company were able to address all three segments with such a wide geographic coverage, and we have that through our 20-year history, and we believe that we built a very solid foundation for growth going forward. And this slide actually is a very good visualization of what exactly is our confidence platform. And in the day, it's actually a data orchestration engine. We touch 350 PB of data every single day. We cover all disparate data repositories because we've been around for 20 years, so we really understand all the enterprise content management systems under the sun. The kind of data we address is unstructured data, which is 80% of all data, right? We're not talking about database, machine-generated data.
We're talking about files, emails, chats, and these are unstructured data. And what we do is, we actually allow businesses to then manage security, manage access rights, manage backup, and do data analytics. That means classification, tagging. So then they can then incorporate that into ongoing data lifecycle management, policies. And ultimately, it drives towards allow business to do more automation around data management, data estate management, give them insight and delegation, and also allow self-service. And then the three major areas I mentioned earlier of data monetization, modernization, which is data analytics, migration, integration. Resiliency, which is backup, archiving, recovery, ransomware detection. And then, of course, control, which is access control, and also lifecycle management. So those are the major functional areas. Collectively, they're actually over close to 30 SKUs in the same SaaS platform.
What's worth mentioning is also, nearly a third of our business is public sector, so we're very, very strong in security. In fact, we have, we're one of the vendors with most number of SKUs in FedRAMP-certified data centers in Arlington, Virginia. As you know, the FedRAMP certification from Intune is actually a three-year process. So it takes time to build this level of sophistication in SaaS data management. It's not just about putting your software in the cloud and call it SaaS. It's actually completely rework the way you develop, deploy software, and also ongoing data security and operation management. So I just came from, as I mentioned, the CEO summit at Microsoft two weeks ago. Spent two days with Bill Gates, Satya Nadella, and Jensen Huang, their top, you know, 200+ customers and partners.
You know, CEO of Accenture was there, McDonald's was there, ServiceNow was there. Top of mind is obviously data management for AI deployment, and second is security. So, and of course, security is, you know, you have the tier one security threats as the state sponsor, standing army, PhD attackers, as you know, attacking data estates. Also, their number one attacking sector is focused on IT service providers, like folks like us, like Microsoft, because we have customers like the State Department, like the White House.
So that kind of capability that we develop over the years to be able to go head-to-head against the state actor from a cloud security and cloud operation perspective is what really led to continued confidence of our enterprise customers around the world to trust us as a enterprise-grade data management, data governance provider. With that, I'll bring Jim.
Great. Thanks, TJ. Just the green? Yeah, I can. Hello, everybody. I will try and keep this to a few minutes, and then we'll have time, Jason, for a bunch of questions, and then people can, can follow up and ask additional stuff. Really, when we think about our financial profile, it kind of breaks down into these really five buckets, right? We've got a strong track record of growth. We're focused on long-term profitability. TJ mentioned that earlier. Really started last year, where we, we wanted to focus on growth, but also profitability and balance those two, and I think we've done that well for now the past five quarters. We've got a diverse global customer base.
About 55% of the business is outside of North America, 45% in North America, and then our two other regions are EMEA and APAC, and we divide the balance between those two. Strong recurring revenue business, and then we've got a land and expand motion that TJ was alluding to with the platform. So we have customers join, and then they buy additional products across the platform suites. Q1 highlights was a very strong quarter for us. We had a very strong performance in 2023, followed up with a strong performance in Q1 of 2024. We had ARR growth of 23%. We had net new ARR of $10 million, which is really 29% up from last year. SaaS revenue growth, as TJ alluded to, accelerated to 44% year-over-year. Total revenue growth is 25% year-over-year.
Our dollar-based net retention rate grew to 110%, and we've seen a nice, steady increase really through 2023, and it continued in the first quarter of 2024. Our non-GAAP operating margin was 8.9%, again, focused on that profitable growth. You can see here this nice, steady increase in our ARR, and you can see the growth rates down at the bottom, where we continue to achieve that 23% in Q3, sorry, Q1 of 2024, and we had the same kind of growth rate throughout 2023. I know this is a pretty confusing slide, a lot of numbers here, but maybe two things to point out.
You'll see some percentages across the top, and you can see that back in 2019, SaaS represented about 24% of total revenue, of the revenue mix. And you can see when we get to Q1 of the trailing 12 months, now SaaS represents 62%. So again, that, that focus and shift to really SaaS being the dominant player in our revenue streams. And then at the bottom, the percentage is growing across the bottom. You can see in 2019, 71% of the business was recurring, and now that percentage is up to 84% and the balance there, the difference is just our services business, which are non-recurring. But again, heavy focus on SaaS, and obviously recurring revenue. TJ alluded to profitability improvement and our focus there. This slide kind of demonstrates that.
You see some improvement on the far left in our gross margin, 73%, uptick to 74% in Q1, which is healthy and what we're expecting. We would expect a continuation along that progression. If you move over to sales and marketing, we expect to see significant leverage. TJ referred to the channel focus in terms of our go-to-market strategy. That's one of the components that's driving efficiency out of sales and marketing. You can see back in 2021, when we went public, about 44% of our revenue was attributable to sales and marketing. That's dropped to 37% now in Q1, and we would expect to see that trend continue. R&D, we've kinda guided to about 10%-15%. We're right in that 12% range, which again, we think is healthy.
R&D is the lifeblood of our company, and we continue to invest heavily there. Our G&A, we think we can get efficiencies out of G&A. You saw it last year, it dropped to 15%. Q1 was 16%, but we expect over the balance of the year, that number would continue to drop, and we'd see some efficiency coming out of G&A as well. And then obviously, that all translates to operating margin improvements, and we saw a nice improvement in Q1, and we would expect to see that moving forward. I'm gonna flip through a couple of these slides pretty quickly so we can get to Q&A, Jason. But we're really progressing toward this rule of 40.
You can see in 2022, we're at 27, 2023, we're at 31, and we're expecting to see improvements on that here in 2024. Gross retention rates, we've been consistent really over the past several years at 87%. We do have goals, and I'll get to those in a minute, in terms of our medium to longer-term targets of 90%+. We think we've got a bunch of things in place that are gonna help us get there. Obviously, the past year or so has been a little tough in terms of most of our licensing is seat-based. We've seen a lot of reductions in force, customers experiencing reductions in their workforce. And so for us to maintain that gross retention rate, we're actually very pleased with that, and would expect now to see that start to tick up.
And then net retention, as I alluded to before, we're up to 110%. You've seen a steady increase over the past several years. And again, our longer-term targets there are 110%-115%. This is probably my favorite slide, so, I'll, I'll talk about this for a minute, but would love for you guys to take a look at this in a little more detail 'cause I do think one of the, one of the differences of our company is we do have a very balanced approach. So we refer to that here as balanced ARR contribution, and it really covers a lot of different segments. So I'll start on the right-hand side.
If you think of our geography, as I mentioned earlier, we've got 45% of our ARR coming from North America, 35% from EMEA, and APAC, 20%. So a really good balance across the globe. We're not concentrated really in any one area. That's been a great strength of AvePoint, really from day one, and it continues to be today. And then when we think of our incremental ARR, where it's coming from, I'm sorry, we'll start with direct versus channel. So here we've got this nice balance of really channel contribution of about 51% and direct at 49%. So again, nice balance between the two. And then that incremental ARR, what's coming from new customers versus what's coming from the existing customer base. You see a nice mix here of about 50/50, and we would expect that to continue.
Ultimately, we're gonna see more of that incremental ARR coming from our existing base. Product suites, again, good diversification here across the three suites, and then customer segments. You see enterprise at 52%, mid-market at 29%, SMB at 18%. SMB is probably the latest, as TJ alluded to, market that we've gotten into, but it's yet our fastest-growing segment, so we would expect to see that continue. And then on the left-hand side is industry, and you can see here that we're not heavily concentrated in any one industry, which again, gives us nice balance. And again, no one customer here represents more than 2% of our ARR. So when we think about risk profiles, we think we've got very good diversification. Customer attach rates, we've seen nice improvements.
On the far left, you see our product attach rates, and they've increased nicely from 2020. At 42% of our customers having two or more products, that's increased to 50%. And then on the far right, suite attach rates, you see similar trends in terms of the increasing from customers taking two or more suites over the past several years. So nice, nice progression and nice growth amongst our customer base. Again, it plays nicely into our platform play in terms of providing additional products and suites to our customers and them taking advantage of it. When we think about guidance, you know, like I mentioned before, we had a strong Q1. Feeling that momentum off of Q1 and what we see in our pipeline, we've raised the guidance for the year, and we've got guidance set for Q2.
As you can see here, revenue, nice growth on the top end, 16, almost 17% year-over-year growth and operating margin of a little over 6%. Then for the year, we've got almost 22% ARR growth, almost 18% revenue growth, and 10% non-GAAP operating margins. As TJ alluded to, our 2025 target is to be Rule of 40 company and also GAAP profitable. We've already been non-GAAP profitable. Our biggest difference, GAAP and non-GAAP, is just stock-based comp, but we're well on our way to achieving both of those goals. Then the last slide is really just some of our long-term targets here. Gross margin of 75%+. Sales and marketing as a percentage of revenue dropping to about 30%, so continued steady efficiency gains there.
Then R&D staying in that 10%-15% range, and we're at 12% now. And then G&A continuing to drop to about 10%, which would yield operating margins of 20%-25%. So we're well on our way to achieving all of these kinda longer term targets, and we feel really good about about getting there. So with that, I'll, maybe Jason, turn it back over to you.
Thanks, Jim. Thanks, TJ, for the overview. I wanted to, like pretty much every company at this event, I'm gonna ask, the first question is gonna be: What are you seeing in the macro environment? We've definitely seen software be under some pressure with some high-profile misses. Is the selling environment, is the buying environment changing at all? Is it about the same as it's been? I know you guys are highly diversified, as you just went through on that slide, but what is your just kinda gut feel on, on the environment right now?
Sure.
Okay. Yeah, I mean, you know, for us, you know, like I said, we had a strong first quarter. We haven't really seen changes in our pipeline in terms of w hat we think about is how long are deals taking to get through the pipeline, and through our sales cycles. We haven't seen that change. It's been pretty tight over the past, say, five, six quarters. Definitely taking longer to get things through the cycle, but we haven't seen that change from the past couple quarters. So we haven't seen that elongate, but we haven't seen it accelerate either. And so for us, I look at our pipeline, and I feel good about it, but I don't feel like it's accelerated, and I don't feel like it's taken a step back.
Okay.
So internally, among our teams, we're kind of feeling like it's steady as she goes in terms of where we've been. Lots of excitement around AI and talk, but still early stages, and the pipeline for us looks good. We're confident with it, which gave us the, you know, the comfort to raise guidance, but I wouldn't say it's changed, you know, anything significantly.
Okay. All right. Great. And then just probably the number one question I get from investors on AvePoint is: Where does, like, Microsoft's capabilities end and AvePoint's begin, and why can't Microsoft just do a lot of this stuff themselves? Like, what, what, why do you guys need to exist?
Microsoft, as large as they are, they still need an ecosystem, and indeed, they have a multi-trillion dollar ecosystem to complement everything they do. At the end of the day, the Microsoft Cloud platform has 500 million users on it, so it's offering the same quality of services to 500 million users from hundreds of thousands of businesses as big as Accenture, as small as a two-man accounting firm. So somewhere in between, there is actually a very wide gap of needs, and this is where consistently since the beginning of their history, Microsoft rely on the partner ecosystem to kind of fill the last mile problems. So that's what we do.
We have been known as 20+ years as a vendor that actually enterprise rely on to actually fill out those specific needs around data management, data governance, data sovereignty, and that's the space we're in, and we operate very well. Obviously, we work alongside, and we also stay ahead of the curve. We rather cannibalize our own products than wait for the market or the platform to cannibalize. So I would say that anytime Microsoft does a large platform play, that actually creates additional opportunities of capabilities that a customer additional need. And fundamentally also is that Microsoft is very focused on Microsoft, right? So but the thing is, most customers, actually vast majority of customers, are multi-cloud and multi-vendor in term of these hyperscalers. It's even in a large enterprise, the government has a mandate.
From a business continuity and resiliency perspective, they cannot rely on one. So there also lies the opportunity where we provide consistent data management capabilities across multi-cloud. We also provide consistent data management capabilities across different licensing types. So, for example, Microsoft will offer Purview and other advanced functionality for E5 license type, but those are not available for E1 or F1 license types, for folks who don't even have a computer. And how do you then remediate and have that holistic and cohesive management capabilities across that? So this is where a customer continuously come to AvePoint, a platform provider, to give them that consistency and also to get better ROI, return on investment, on their overall cloud investment. I already have these different license types.
I don't want to buy all the Cadillac version, nor do I want all my data assets sit with one cloud provider. Then how do I have a handle on my entire data estate? And that's where we come in. So that's how Microsoft ecosystem. Microsoft rely on their ecosystem to complete that last mile problem.
Okay, I think we're out of time. Thanks, everybody, for coming. We're gonna have a breakout session up in room B, so I hope some of you can join us. Thank you guys for being here.
Thank you.
Thanks, Jason.