Hi, everyone. Welcome to Braze's Inaugural Investor Day at Forge NYC. It's great to see all of you here in New York, and thank you all for all of you who are joining us via webcast. I'm Chris Ferris, I'm the Head of Investor Relations here at Braze. We're really excited to speak with you today.
Hopefully, you were able to tune into Bill's keynote address yesterday and to Jon and Kevin's product keynote yesterday as well, where they highlighted some of the new product innovations and vision for the future of customer engagement. Today, we'll start off with a brief presentation from Bill, followed by a product presentation from our co-founder, CTO, Jon Hyman, and our SVP of product, Kevin Wang.
We'll transition to a customer fireside between our president and CCO, Myles Kleeger, and Jimmy Dinh of CIBC Capital Markets, followed by a financial presentation from our CFO, Isabelle Winkles. We'll conclude with a moderated Q&A, taking questions from in-person and webcast participants. Now for the fun part that I know you guys all love.
Before we get started, let me remind you that during this session, we will make statements related to our business that are forward-looking under the federal securities laws. These include, but are not limited to, statements regarding our financial outlook, long-term financial targets, and our business and product development plans. These statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations and reflect our views only as of today.
For a discussion of material risks and uncertainties that could affect our actual results, please refer to the risk factors identified in our SEC filings, including our Form 10-Q for the quarter ended July 31, 2022, which are available on the investor section of our website. I'd also like to remind you that today's session includes certain non-GAAP financial measures.
Please refer to the reconciliations of our non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable financial measures calculated in accordance with US GAAP, included in the appendix to the accompanying presentation. The non-GAAP financial measures should not be considered as a substitute for or superior to the measures of financial performance prepared in accordance with US GAAP. With that, let me please welcome Braze Co-Founder and CEO, Bill Magnuson, to the stage.
Thank you very much. All right. Welcome, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today, and welcome to those of you who are joining us online as well. Thank you for your interest in Braze. We're excited to host our first investor event of this kind at this annual customer conference, Forge New York. This is the first time we've been here together in person for this annual customer event since 2019.
It's great to have everyone back. Thank you for bringing the energy here in person, and thank you to everyone that's tuning in online to learn more about Braze. This event brings together marketing professionals and industry leaders from Braze customers, partners and more to share insights and best practices about building for and engaging with customers in the modern ecosystem.
It offers those in the Braze community the opportunity to hear from thought leaders, from Braze customers and partners like AWS, Instacart, the NBA, Peacock, Snowflake, CIBC Capital Markets, and more. We're learning from, you know, the best and brightest, those who are reaching to new heights with customer engagement with Braze and really continuing to push the envelope and drive maturity and increase ROI in their business.
Yesterday, I opened the conference by sharing our perspective on finding opportunity through periods of change and challenge with our Start Anywhere, Go Everywhere framework, encouraging our prospects and customers to kickstart new initiatives while continually working to improve and expand on them over time.
By setting bold goals, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, leveraging new sources of data, and attacking problems from novel angles, our customer community is finding opportunities for new growth and advancement, even in an environment filled with uncertainty.
As we bring together marketing and data experts from across more than a dozen verticals, we widen each other's perspective and feel one another's optimism. This all underpins a concept that we believe sets Braze apart from many of our competitors, the aforementioned framework of Start Anywhere, Go Everywhere.
For our future customers, Start Anywhere is a commitment to meet them where they are on their journey to achieving world-class customer engagement and to get them up and running quickly. The Braze customer base is already widely diversified.
We have amazing examples of customers of all phases, sizes, and at every stage of maturity, who have adopted Braze and transformed their business through modern customer engagement. We're committed to bringing that promise to more brands in more corners of the world as we continue to expand our TAM in the years to come.
For our existing customers, whether they've been with us for years or they're just recently off the starting blocks with Braze, it's a lifelong commitment to supporting the growth of their companies, the success of their teams, and the advancement of their individual careers through our robust investment in our product, community, and customer education.
To make this concrete, consider a customer that starts with Braze with only one or two channels and a small selection of tried and true campaigns. As they pass milestones on their journey to coordinated cross-channel customer engagement, their standard for excellent engagement rises, their work becomes more interdisciplinary, and they gain a new sense of strength through agility as they quickly bring their creative ideas to life and experiment with them over time.
This upward trajectory and sophistication enhances return on investment for our customers, and it creates additional value for Braze along the way. We know from our existing customer base that when a brand starts with a narrow slice of customer engagement, that our vertically integrated data flow and highly powerful Canvas environment makes it quick and easy for them to fast follow into other channels, while evolving to more sophisticated uses of data and deeper integrations into the products or services that their brands deliver. We also see this with multinational customers.
A brand may start working with Braze for its business in one country and then expand in their local region before finally going global. Later in the session, you'll hear from a customer who's grown and evolved with Braze as Myles sits down for a fireside chat with Jimmy Dinh, Managing Director and Head of the Digital Challenger Bank at CIBC Capital Markets.
As I did during our last earnings call, I want to reiterate how confident I am in the long-term trajectory of Braze. When we started this company over 11 years ago, my co-founders and I shared a dual conviction about the change that mobile was catalyzing. First, that fast-growing businesses would be born and built to be mobile first. Second, that the wide-scale adoption of mobile by consumers would transform the enterprise and the way that they did business.
In the decades since, our opportunity has continued to grow significantly as the field of customer engagement and the Braze platform have evolved in complementary support of each other. Today, we remain steadfast in our vision for this market and are committed to delivering industry-leading customer engagement solutions for customers and high growth at scale for our shareholders.
Over the long term, we believe an enduring focus on customer ROI and product differentiation is the most effective way to continue leading the customer engagement market. We're also adapting to changes in buyer behavior by increasing the emphasis on our rapid time to value and the outsized ROI of investing in first-party data. Supporting this message is our ongoing differentiated product offering, including our impressive ability to deliver omni-channel messaging at scale through real-time stream processing and our ever-expanding data management, reporting, and analytics capabilities.
We believe that our platform and vision is increasingly defining the customer engagement space overall, and that we can become the de facto file format for the space, that our continued and robust investment in R&D and our customer community will drive us forward as a generational brand. We also continue to invest in our partner ecosystem, many of whom you can see as sponsors here at Forge.
Our growing relationships, particularly with the marketing agency holding companies and leading global systems integrators or GSIs, will continue to help us land and expand within enterprises and to better serve our existing customers with complementary strategy, integration, and managed services. This speaks volumes about the power of our product and our ability to feed the services ecosystem and the increasing influence we are achieving with large enterprises around the world.
Most importantly, we've continued investing in the evolution of our product to deliver on the promise of world-class customer engagement. Yesterday, we announced new product enhancements around real-time data activation and messaging, including our new Braze Cloud Data Ingestion and expanding messaging capabilities with native support for WhatsApp and Feature Flags.
Both innovations reflect expanded partnerships with Snowflake and Meta, and aim to help brands future-proof customer engagement strategies against a backdrop of shifting consumer expectations, preferences, and behaviors. To build long-lasting and profitable relationships with consumers, organizations must have a deep understanding of their preferences and behaviors.
This task has become increasingly difficult as the amount of data produced and continues to grow exponentially over time. Unfortunately, much of this data goes underutilized by organizations due to under-resourced IT teams that struggle to build and maintain complex data pipelines across a variety of data sources and formats.
Braze can help solve this by providing what we believe to be the world's most flexible customer engagement platform for real-time data activation. With our new Cloud Data Ingestion, brands will be able to take action on real-time signals stored in data warehouses, all without leaving the Braze platform. Brands will be able to quickly and flexibly collect, process, and unlock value from their data to drive growth and increase retention.
This turnkey integration can be set up in minutes, and perhaps more importantly, remains turnkey over time as Braze's partnership with Snowflake takes on the role of monitoring and maintaining the relevant pipelines. Starting with Snowflake at launch, we plan to expand to a number of other prominent data warehouse partners in Q4 and beyond, bringing more flexibility to our customers and enhanced partnership currency to Braze.
In early 2023, Braze will also be launching native channel support for WhatsApp, a messaging platform with more than two billion users in 180 countries. Through the integration with Braze, marketers will be able to create, orchestrate, and send WhatsApp campaigns directly from the Braze dashboard to strengthen customer relationships with content-rich conversational messaging integrated directly into Canvas.
In a few minutes, I'll hand it over to my co-founder and Braze CTO, Jon Hyman, and our Senior Vice President of Products, Kevin Wang, to demonstrate some of these innovative advancements and our product differentiation in more detail. You'll also hear from our Chief Financial Officer, Isabelle Winkles, who will discuss our track record of impressive growth, our proven ability to land and expand within enterprises of all sizes around the world, and how we plan to achieve our long-term margin targets.
We'll wrap up with an extended Q&A session with the management team, and I want to close these opening remarks by thanking everyone again for taking the time to be here and for your interest in Braze. We're so excited to share more about how our latest product innovations are impacting the customer experience and hope they help you to see how Braze continues to lead and differentiate itself in the customer engagement market. Thank you for coming today. With that, please welcome Jon and Kevin to the stage.
Thank you, Bill. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I'm Jon Hyman, Co-Founder and CTO of Braze, and I'm joined by Kevin Wang, SVP of Product. Today, we wanted to share with you some of the most incredible and differentiated customer engagement solutions that we've developed and how they're helping our customers better understand and engage their users.
We believe that Braze offers the most powerful and flexible customer engagement platform in the market and drives high ROI for our customers. With our continued product innovation, we have the potential to strengthen our competitive moat and drive long-term revenue growth. Before we dive into some of the exciting innovations that Kevin and I announced yesterday, let me just take a moment to set the table for you and give you a sense of Braze's size and scale.
As of the end of the second quarter this year, this fiscal year, Braze served nearly 1,600 customers in over 60 countries globally, encompassing over 4.1 billion monthly active users across those customers. Our platform continues to scale, and last fiscal year, we processed over nine trillion consumer-generated data points and sent approximately 1.5 trillion messages across our channels that include push notifications, webhooks, email, SMS, and MMS, Content Cards, in-app, and in-browser messages.
We have over 24 product and engineering teams that are innovating across our entire product offering. Over the last 12 months, our team has introduced over 100 new features and improvements to the platform, some of which are highlighted here and which we'll talk about in more detail. Survey in-app messages expand the breadth of our platform across channels and allow businesses like HBO Max to better understand the interests of their subscribers.
They launched surveys in Latin America to ask subscribers their favorite Harry Potter house or their favorite DC comic book character, and then use that information to personalize their experience better. We also launched Google and Facebook Audience Sync in Canvas to help our customers save money on digital advertising, and we're going to show you a great example of how this works later.
Message archiving, another feature that we launched recently, is helping our financial clients to preserve a copy of every email, push notification, and SMS message that they send to consumers, allowing them to comply with laws and regulations and integrate Braze into all of their customer support processes.
This innovation is key to driving our competitive advantage against both the legacy marketing clouds and point solution startups. We view the current environment as the perfect time for us to really lean into that R&D spend and separate from all of our competition. What we want to do briefly today is to walk you through a few of the new solutions that we are launching. First, we are going to start with data. We believe that Braze offers the most powerful and flexible data model on the market.
The Braze platform lets our customers activate any data to deliver real-time customer experiences, and we have some really exciting updates that make it faster and easier for customers to deliver personalized experiences and drive that high ROI. Next, we're going to walk through how we're increasing the depth and sophistication of our experimentation and intelligent optimization tools. Finally, we'll talk about enriching the messaging channels that our customers use to talk to their consumers.
Building great product experiences requires data, and already our customers have so much data that they wanna use for their personalized messaging. One of the first challenges that new consumers have, sorry, that new customers have when they sign up with Braze, is that they want to sync their existing data set and then use it to increase their ROI and their engagement strategies.
What this means is some customers will need to create a pipeline from back-end systems to our API or need to quickly get their engineers to integrate Braze into their mobile apps and websites so they can begin collecting data that they can use for personalization.
Now, doing all of that takes a bunch of effort, and so we wanna help customers decrease the time that it takes to be able to use data within Braze, and we wanna help them use the data that they already have more to their advantage. That's why we spent the past year making a lot of updates to our data platform and model that we call Braze Data.
Braze Data encompasses all of our initiatives to make it fast and easy for customers to leverage their data and deliver valuable experiences for their users. Our architecture updates provide Braze customers with a variety of ways to get data into Braze and then to stream it out to other parts of their tech stacks. When we're thinking about data ingestion, we have pre-built pipelines to easily stream events into Braze in real time. Up here is an example of our Shopify integration.
This is an easy-to-use setup wizard that helps customers to seamlessly connect a Shopify store to Braze, where we're going to automatically receive valuable purchase and shopping cart information without any engineering effort at all. Even better, customers can easily add in-browser messages to a Shopify store by checking a box. All of that integration setup has only taken about 20 seconds.
Customers can then use Braze to send in-browser messages in their store, and that'll close the loop of turning all of that data into direct action. This ability to leverage data is possible for any type of Braze customer in any vertical. Earlier this year, we launched Catalogs, which allows customers to store relational data in Braze.
This feature is going to allow customers to create easy-to-use product recommendations or to better personalize their messages with context about their brand's products and services. Yesterday, we announced a programmatic API for catalogs, helping customers to fully automate all of the real-time personalization use cases that they can dream of, such as price drops or flash sales.
Braze leverages an architecture that's built on Snowflake, Kafka, MongoDB, and Redis to give our customers what we believe is the most flexible customer engagement platform for data activation. In short, our platform is designed to handle any amount of data in real time, regardless of how that data is structured or nested. Braze Data reaffirms our commitment to seamlessly connecting Braze to our customers' entire tech stack.
As most of you know, we offer Currents, which is our continuously streaming export of customer engagement data. The majority of Braze customers use Currents to export data from Braze into their data warehouse, connect Braze to analytic tools, to CDPs, and more. Over the past few years, a big trend that we're seeing across our customer base is that the data warehouse is an increasingly standard foundational aspect of their data strategy. That's why yesterday we announced Cloud Data Ingestion.
Cloud Data Ingestion is an innovation that allows customers to directly connect their data warehouse to Braze so they can import and activate their customer data. Here's an example of preference data that syncs to Braze from a data warehouse for a user. Early access customers who've been doing this have reported that their engineering teams have saved dozens of hours a week with Cloud Data Ingestion.
We're also seeing customers unlock new use cases by syncing audiences to Braze that are created from queries that they're making in their data warehouse. This means that they're able to create segments of users to message without having to store the underlying data with us. Imagine that a quick-service restaurant wants to message all of the users who purchased french fries in the last year, but they haven't sent that data to Braze.
A financial company that wants to send messages to users who have low account balances, but they want sensitive account details to remain on-prem. With Cloud Data Ingestion, they can now engage those users in only a few clicks without sending us that underlying data.
Currents then computes this bi-directional sync from data warehouses and lets our customers insert events and purchases back into their warehouse, so they always have an updated view of the user. We have an exciting roadmap ahead for Cloud Data Ingestion, and yesterday we announced the first set of features and first integration partner, Snowflake. We have other launch partners, Redshift and BigQuery, coming soon.
Now, this functionality I actually demonstrated yesterday, and it took about 60 seconds for me to connect the Snowflake data warehouse to Braze and then create a segment of users that were targeted based on that information from there. We think that this is going to give us a huge advantage over startup competitors who do not have this functionality or legacy clouds who will struggle to create as seamless an experience as we have.
I encourage you to watch the demo that I performed yesterday, when that video comes live on our website in the next few days. We believe that with Cloud Data Ingestion, we'll be able to win more deals and faster because customers can connect their data warehouse to Braze in just a couple of minutes, and then they can send in a message to that audience.
Cloud Data Ingestion will also save customers time when they want to add new data sets or new pieces of data to Braze for personalization and targeting. That means the more that our customers can accomplish with Braze and the faster they can do that, the more that we can help drive their ROI and continue to retain them.
Let's now shift gears to orchestration, and we're going to discuss how Braze is making it easier to create intelligent engagement campaigns. We've continued investing in the depth of sophistication of our product to deliver on the promise of world-class customer engagement and build our competitive advantage. That includes updating our flagship low-code orchestration environment, Canvas.
This summer, we launched a major leap forward in the power, usability, and performance of Braze's orchestration capabilities with the release of Canvas Flow. Canvas Flow is the latest generation of our visual programming environment and has been met with positive feedback and rapid adoption by our customer base. Let's take a few minutes to run through some new enhancements that we launched.
Many of our customers use Canvas to run A/B tests of entire journeys and paths, measuring conversion rates to determine which strategy is going to work best and increase ROI. Personalized Variant, a new feature that we launched, uses machine learning to determine for each individual customer which variation we think they will most engage on based on data from customers who have similar usage profiles.
Personalized Variant may send John version A of an email while sending me version B. Customers who beta tested Personalized Variant saw an average of a 7% increase in campaign conversions without any additional effort besides just enabling the feature. Next up is AI copywriting. Many customers run tests of different messaging copy to see what converts best.
If a customer is doing subject line testing, it can be time-consuming to come up with five different subject lines to experiment with. AI copywriting makes this much easier, saving our customers time as they're running their experiments. You can see this here. Whether a marketer is composing a snappy in-app message or an email, Braze has embedded GPT-3 language models into our message composers to help marketers experiment, find messages that resonate, and move faster.
This quality-of-life improvement is like Google Docs' grammar suggestions. It makes the product faster to use and adds to the overall comprehensiveness of the platform for our customers. For the last announcement in our intelligence suite, we've expanded the Predictive Suite to allow customers to make predictions on users who are likely to churn or make a purchase based upon behavior over the last 60 days.
Our approach is different from other solutions in the industry. We allow our customers to define the behaviors of what churn means to them. Like, for example, if a user hasn't bought something in the last month. Essentially, our Predictive Suite is a system that generates more models that are customized to each brand's individual usage fingerprint. This creates a more generalizable solution that works across different industries and business models.
Braze customers have created millions of Canvases. They make Canvases with their coworkers. They build Canvases iteratively, meaning they're saving and tweaking and editing again later.
One of the challenges that customers can run into is they may accidentally make errors and overwrite their Canvases, or they want to attribute changes in performance metrics with changes that they've made specifically in a Canvas. We're solving those problems by launching Canvas Flow Versioning.
With versioning, customers can view what a Canvas looked like in the past, who made what edits, and if you've since deleted a step, what the analytics were like when it was running. What I have here is a Canvas that you can see has four steps, and we can see a version bar on the left that lets us move ahead to see an update that one of our coworkers made to add a branch off of those messages. Great.
We believe Canvas versioning is going to greatly improve collaboration and enhance the stickiness by getting more people into the product. We have a lot of features planned in the months ahead to make collaboration simpler for our customers. Let's now flip over to a demo, and we're going to see Canvas Flow in action with everything that we've just talked about.
In this example, a retail company is going to be looking to retarget customers that have made purchases over the past 10 years to get them to try to buy again. They're looking to send personalized messages based on the predicted likelihood that those customers will make another purchase. Let's build a new Canvas Flow. We're going to define upfront that we're looking to measure a conversion on the amount of returning customers that make a purchase.
This helps understand how personalized and individualized journeys can increase ROI and lead to greater conversions. For our audience, we'll target all users who have made a purchase in the last 10 years. Now, in the Canvas, we've set up two different variants to test, and in each, we've set up an audience path step using Braze's predictive purchase models to nudge consumers into the next best action based on if they have a low, medium, or high likelihood to purchase.
Those with a high likelihood to purchase are going to get a different message than those with medium or low likelihood. After sending a message, we're going to want to take a follow-up action based on whether or not the user makes a purchase within the next 24 hours.
Using Action Paths, which were released last year at Forge, we can take a follow-up action in real time as soon as customers make that purchase. In the case that they did make a purchase, we can leverage Audience Syncs to suppress targeted Facebook ads. This allows us to save on ad spend by suppressing ads we've set up for Black Friday because any customer at this point in the Canvas has already converted.
For everyone else, we're going to send a push notification that's announcing a sale. Since we're not sure what to write, we're going to use the Braze AI Copywriting Assistant to help get inspired. Now, as we go back and look at the version history, we're going to be able to see that the first version of this Canvas was created with only one variant and without the Facebook Audience Sync.
We've built a lot more sophistication into this Canvas since then. Before it goes live, we'll turn to Personalized Variant to determine for each individual user which variant is most effective in getting them to convert. Finally, we'll collapse down the view to one screen so that the entire flow can be seen in one easy-to-use view. In just two minutes of using Canvas Flow, we were able to easily build a sophisticated, personalized marketing strategy using machine learning that can even reduce customers' ad spend.
In fact, we've seen several of our customers reduce customer acquisition costs by up to around 50%. We're thrilled about these improvements to Canvas. We have a fantastic roadmap ahead that's going to make our customers' teams much more productive, provide more expressiveness, improve collaboration and administration, and add more intelligence and experimentation capabilities.
We look forward to sharing more with you and the rest of the world in the coming months. Next, I want to share a couple of the enhancements that we've made to Braze messaging channels and how Braze can help our customers reach their end users wherever they are. In my friend group, we've mostly switched off SMS to WhatsApp Messenger. Lots of people have, and OTT messaging apps have continued to grow.
A central tenet of Braze's product vision is that we want to help our customers reach their consumers on channels that they care about. That's why we've built the ability to send personalized messages on so many different channels, email, SMS, and MMS, push notifications, in-app and browser messages, on Roku, and more. Customers have different preferences, and marketers need the tools to reach them wherever they are with best-in-class messaging experiences.
That's why yesterday we announced, as Bill shared moments ago, that we're building native support for WhatsApp Messenger directly in Braze. With WhatsApp, our customers will be able to further personalize their channel strategies and open up new markets where SMS is less prevalent or SMS is cost-prohibitive.
Once launched, our customers will be able to reach a global audience of over two billion WhatsApp consumers on one of the most popular messaging apps in the world. We've partnered with Meta to make WhatsApp an integral part of our customers' cross-channel strategy that allows them to send rich multimedia messaging and dynamic content like this conversational engagement tile that you see in this example. There are a lot of interactive high-value use cases for WhatsApp that you can't do easily on other channels. It's much richer than SMS and MMS.
Here, for example, we have a food delivery call to action to order or call the restaurant directly inside the messenger. We have an app that encourages a daily check-in for an important lifecycle event or a way to nudge someone to make an upsell on their vacation. We've heard a lot of customer demand in our customer base for WhatsApp, particularly in Europe. We're excited about the highly personalized and relevant experiences that our customers around the world are going to create with WhatsApp and Braze.
Even if customers are able to send WhatsApp messages themselves or through another competitor, the flexibility and speed of Braze Canvas and Canvas Flow will give them an edge in terms of the personalization and interactivity they're able to generate.
Personalization is more than just messaging. It's about the entire product experience. As we've seen brands orchestrate more and more of their experiences with Braze, we've consistently heard feedback that they want to do more with a flexible user classification and control flows that can be designed with tools like Canvas.
Some customers have even built their own mobile and web personalization products using Braze's segmentation and in-app messages. That's why we're very excited that we're launching a Feature Flags product. With Feature Flags, customers are going to be able to easily launch and test new features without a code release. They'll be able to test features before a broader rollout, and they'll even have kill switches for extra safety in their products.
In this example, this mobile app is using Feature Flags to have control over a gradual release of a yoga module to users who are in the aptly named Braze segment of yoga lovers. With Feature Flags, they're going to be able to easily unify their marketing messaging with their in-product experience. Most importantly, Feature Flags are tightly integrated with Braze Canvas, highlighting how we can combine breadth across channels with depth of orchestration.
The new Feature Flags step that you can see here is going to let customers add or remove users from a Feature Flag audience. That means that they'll have full control over who sees what content, allowing them to run follow-up messages that create a unified one-to-one personal experience. Feature Flags are planned to be available next year.
To sum up, we believe that the product vision that we've described today demonstrates our commitment to delivering a best-in-class customer engagement scale. Through rich data collection, intelligent feature design, and a robust and growing channel set, we are helping our customers start anywhere and go everywhere. We hope that you, our investor stakeholders, recognize the value that Braze is delivering for our customers and ultimately to our shareholders. Thank you so much for your time and attention. I'll now turn it over to Myles.
Thank you all.
Hello, everyone. It's great to see you. Thanks for coming today and spending time with us. Thank you, Jimmy, for making the trip down from Toronto.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah. No, excited to have you share your perspective on being a Braze customer and working with Braze. Just to get us started, maybe just share for everyone, you know, what you do at CIBC and the business that you run.
Yeah, sure. My name is Jimmy Dinh. Good afternoon, everyone .
Thank you.
My name is Jimmy Dinh. I am the Managing Director and head of our digital challenger bank called Simplii Financial in Canada. I work for the corporate investment bank division of CIBC. CIBC is top five bank here in Canada. 11 million customers. But I have accountability for a flanker challenger brand called Simplii Financial. Consumer bank, over two million customers, and we offer basically value-centric digital-only banking service for Canadians worldwide over Canada.
Yeah.
That's me.
Excellent. Just to jump right in. Curious if you could just share with people kinda your broader perspective on customer engagement and kind of how you think it fits into your overall strategy at Simplii.
Yeah, for sure. It's a great question, Myles. The way we think about things really, from a customer engagement strategy really ties back to our corporate objectives at Simplii Financial, right? We think there's a huge market opportunity for us to drive growth in touchless digital banking for consumers. The other piece of it really is around customer experience, right?
We take customer experience and NPS really, really seriously here at the bank. You know, in 2021, 2022, Forrester says we're the number one rated NPS bank here in Canada. If you think about those two opportunities, right? We're gonna start in terms of high growth consumer banking services here in Canada, and secondly, basically an NPS leadership overall.
We tie that back to really centering all our strategy work in customer engagement around our customer. We think about two ways. On the growth side of things, really because we're a digital-only bank, we don't have branches, we don't have financial advisors. Like, really a martech customer engagement ecosystem and platform really is the revenue engine for this bank.
Yeah.
It's important to create that and do that really right. Second, on the NPS experience side, again, because we're a digital bank that caters to very value-conscious, digitally savvy Canadians, we actually wanna make sure that our customers, our clients really know about all the innovations, the products, the services that we actually have at Simplii Financial, right?
Again, when we think about the customer first view of things, we wanna tell our customers about all the cool new things we're doing, all the new services that we're doing. Example I'll give you there is we launched a really industry-leading refer a friend program this past summer across all our products.
Across deposit products, lending credit card products, even our mortgage products is a refer a friend program. We use customer engagement tools and platforms like Braze to communicate that digitally in a very intelligent way and a contextual way for this as well, right?
Fair to say you think about-
Personalized messaging, contextually relevant messaging, high value messaging as fundamentally critical to your success, both from a growth perspective as well as a CSAT and
Yeah.
Overall experience perspective.
Of course.
Is it fair for me to say that you would consider Braze more. It's not just a tool to send messages, it's really part of your infrastructure in terms of how you operate your business.
Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's another great question, and I'll start there by saying, totally. We you know, if you look at that six years ago, and I'll tell the story of, I guess, of Braze and Appboy. Six years ago, we were looking at this. We had a customer pain point, right? Within CIBC.
That was basically we didn't know how to do transactional servicing alerts really well. We actually looked inside the bank and said, "Hey, we don't know how to do this. How do we think about finding a partner that could help us with this?" It was a single use case really that we were looking to solve, a very technology native use case or pain point.
Yeah.
We went onto the market. We found a company called Appboy. Now called Braze.
Never heard of it.
Never heard of it, right? We kind of looked at it and said, "Hey, this company really has great technology. They have a great product. They have a great team, and their culture really fits into what we want to do." I'll talk about a couple of the technologies. Obviously you guys do great endpoint messaging, alerting message channels. We thought the technology was awesome for this use case.
We thought that from a roadmap and a vision perspective, where you want to take the company was super interesting as well, and matched where we thought marketing tech, customer engagement platform and tech ecosystems would head. We bought into that vision and we were aligned there. Thirdly, there were people, the talent, right?
You know, I was on the way to this event this morning. I was talking to my colleague. She's right there. She was talking about the early days of Appboy and Braze, and I think we were doing contract and one of our risk and key infrastructure partners in this contract engagement process in InfoSec had an issue with how we did data integration or shared information between the two firms, Braze and CIBC.
I think your CTO was on a call with us, the co-founder, and he's like, "Yeah, we'll fix this in three days." This is gonna be a contract commercial tomorrow. That to us is really important, right? Like, the way we run our business, we want there to be thought leadership, technology leadership, and really we want people to be super.
Our partners.
Yeah.
to be super entrepreneurial and to get things done in a very efficient, quick way as well.
Mm-hmm.
That was the story there. We started with one thing to do with you guys, and I'd say over the last six years, we evolved up to really being now you guys are a core part of that infrastructure ecosystem that really powers not just messaging, but I think again other parts of how we think about the client experience and client engagement.
Yeah. Just, you know, and to give credit to you, Jimmy, and your colleagues, in 2016 when we were called Appboy,
Yeah.
You know, banks, it was hard to sell to banks, in terms of, you know, the
We was first, right? I think we were the first bank.
You were. I want to give, you know, your team credit for having the vision to look forward, but in your assessment, you know, you just shared some great perspective on sort of how, you know, the why and the how you were able to push it over the edge.
Yeah.
In your perspective, has it, you know, like obviously our your usage of Braze has expanded quite a bit over the years.
Yeah.
Like you said, new use cases, different, business units. We're in the core retail app.
Yeah.
We even have some B2B use cases now, but, is it, would you say, it's that there's more comfort around, you know, working with progressive companies like Braze, even though knowing that CIBC obviously has substantial engagements with big established legacy technology players? Has the fight gotten a little easier through the years?
Yeah. I'd say, look, I think, the proof is in the pudding and execution, right? As we think about this, I'd say before, you know, if you look at kind of the past, it was really a very technology native engineering owned the called the Braze platform. Now, if you look at the organization, we have enterprise-wide adoption and uses of Braze. We have not only technology, basically these, our engineering technology groups that use Braze. We have our marketing actually use. We have actually the business, the line of business folks, the front office people-
Yeah.
....do that work, right? Really interacting with Braze, to really, again, accomplish our business goals.
Yeah.
That has made it a lot easier over time. The maturity of your platform, the maturity of the business overall, across time has been pretty solid, I'd say. I'd say like, you know, as a bank and, you know, there are bankers here in the audience. You know, banks, you know, tend to basically be very risk-averse, conservative as we think about new partners, and we think about risk in very deep ways, vertically and horizontally. I'd say, you know, we took a chance on Braze and Appboy six years ago. I think, you know, we worked well with you folks and it's now basically been, I'd call the de-risking part of it.
Yeah.
We've matured that relationship really, really well.
Yeah. Kind of, you know, Bill touched on sort of the notion of start anywhere and go everywhere.
Yeah.
I think we've demonstrated that at CIBC in terms of, you know, literally navigating through the different lines of business. Talk a little bit about, you know, at Simplii, which is still relatively new in its journey, but how you've started to unlock more Braze channels, more Braze use cases over time.
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. That's, yeah. Look, I think for us, I'll talk about a great example of this, right? Joe and Haley are there in the back. We've gone through the last six months, a complete journey. I've taken on the role, the mandate to run this digital bank about 18 months ago, right in the middle of the pandemic, and we've made a lot of changes.
Our view here is we've gone through the last six months a reimagination and refactoring of our entire customer engagement platform, where now Braze plays a very key role in that ecosystem and that technology stack, right? What we've done is we've taken the Braze platform and we've really started to weave it in and integrate into really key parts of our bank ecosystem. I'd say that's a couple things. One is, we're basically into CDP, Adobe CDP. We're a big part of Adobe. I know you guys are co-opi-
It's okay.
Competition, it's called.
Yeah, that's fine.
Yeah, we are good friends with Adobe. They have a great CDP, and we've had a great time of integrating into CDP with Braze.
Right.
We've also integrated basically Braze with our own brand new OMS. Our brand new order management system that will power all customer engagement, all revenue and digital sales opportunities for Simplii Financial. Last, we've integrated Braze into our downstream platform fulfillment. Right? Our core banking systems. That's gonna manifest itself in November, which we think we're very proud of.
It's gonna be industry first, around a brand new campaign for our credit cards. Credit cards, as you may well know, it's a great growth opportunity for us. We think there's a lot of opportunity to grow our credit card portfolio in Canada. We're gonna go live to market with a brand new pre-approved credit card campaign that is powered by Braze through all our channels.
The great thing about the things that we're doing in terms of the ecosystem is that the innovation, the IP that we've built will unlock really what's called a one-click approval. If you think about how credit card campaigns are run in Canada and U.S. today, you get an email, you get a push notification about an offer. You've been pre-approved for this great new credit card.
You click on that in that message, that push, that email, you get sent to literally the bank's application page for a credit card, and you run yourself through ten more pages of applications, know your customer onboarding, account opens. What we've done with Braze and the creation of our overall cloud stack ecosystem is made what's called one-click approval. Literally at the point of sale, at the point of this offer, where you see the offer in our banking app, you click yes, that's it. You'll get your credit card, your new credit card with its $20,000 credit limit.
I don't have to complete an application.
No, nothing. Basically get the credit card literally in the mail in 3-5 days. That's something that we're very, very proud of. It's going live in November. Again, that's really because we've expanded Braze. We basically looked at this and said that it's not just about learning. We're gonna open all channels. We're doing Content Cards, we're doing in-app, we're doing SMS, we're doing email, and obviously again, like we'd love to. We love the product roadmap that we introduced this week.
Yeah.
the past couple days.
That's super exciting. On that point, I'm curious if you could share any perspective on value and ROI and you kind of even touched on it a little bit at the top where you've got growth goals of course, but then you have NPS goals, but then there's also how your team works, right?
Yeah.
Level of effort, the amount of experiments you can run, the sophistication of the programs you can run, the ability to bring a first to market campaign like this one click credit card to market, you know.
Yeah.
-quickly.
Totally.
How do you think about value, with a platform like Braze? How do you measure it?
Yeah.
What kind of results, frankly, have you seen that you're able to share?
Yeah. I think again, it's a great question again. When we think about partnerships with partners such as Braze, because I run a P&L. Again, I come from an investment bank, we think about everything in a P&L, right? Top line growth is really important. How do you think about overall value? How do you think about optimization?
When we evaluate partners such as Braze, the key things we think about in terms of value really is one, efficiency and two, is productivity, right? I'll talk first about efficiency. For us, you know, if you look again back into like the early days before this, you know, and a campaign, a revenue-generating ad or sales campaign in our channels, our digital channels, whether that's online or in our app, it required engineering resources. We literally had basically software developers, two AI people, DevOps release people, creating the actual engineering, the actual ad and the campaign. As we all know, engineers are pretty expensive.
Not very creative.
QA people are very expensive. Yeah. Again, we love to like repackage the resources to do other major things for the bank. When you talk about Braze, you know, the fact that you have a no-code, zero-code platform called Canvas for journey mapping, for creation, we leverage that, right? That, what that means is, you know, I can go out and hire front office people who are of different creative backgrounds, arts backgrounds, commerce backgrounds.
Data science.
Yes. They sit in the front office. They're business people. They run a business. They're not marketers. They're not ops people. They're not engineers. But they literally can do and create, you know, impactful things for us in growth and in client experience. We have it today.
That's really important. Then productivity, as we said, like, you know, we think we can do faster and more in this model, in this operating model. You know, I'll share a metric with you, right? You know, in the past, when we had to do a campaign, you know, it took like, you know, 12 weeks.
I think right now with our ecosystem that we've built with Braze at the center of it, you know, we're talking about, you know, one or two weeks, right? Massive efficiency there. That's efficiency. Productivity I think again comes out around with that. The other thing I can call is email. When I took over the business, we were reviewing kind of our partnerships and the outsourced partnerships on email.
We actually used an agency for email. I looked at the P&L line of, you know, all our costs. We were spending seven figures on an email agency. Do creative, production, controls, and deliver the emails, right? We use lots of emails as you know. We talked about this. We have a fabulous with emails, right? Core part of our engagement strategy.
We've looked at this as like, "Hey, like, why are we spending this much on email? At the same time, this is what connected you back into our channels, right? This is like, you know, little island over here. We have a strategy there, and that's why we chose basically to think about kind of email campaigns in a very vertically integrated manner through your customer engagement platform.
Yeah.
We've taken that in. We're now gonna basically not use and outsource our email. It's another channel that we have that we use today to basically deliver contextual intelligent communications to our clients overall.
Which of course connects back to customer experience too, right?
Yeah.
'Cause you're sending messages to the right people that actually wanna receive them, that they're more likely to convert on, and you're able to be more efficient.
Of course.
run your marketing budgets and your messaging budgets.
Yeah. Totally.
Yeah. Last question for you because we're short on time. Along, you know, we're tangentially related to this value question. Do you see potential for, you know, just kind of looking at some of the stuff Jon and Kevin were sharing, do you see potential for Braze to help you, become even more efficient, let's say, and eliminate certain types of technology from your stack over time or find other ways to, you know, to make your team more productive and more efficient as we add-
Yeah.
Feature-rich capability?
Yeah. I think, yeah, for sure. Like, as we look through your roadmap and where you're taking the platform and the solutions or tools, you know, because we're a digital bank, you know, today we have our clients who really basically directly engaging with us in two key channels. One is obviously our app, our website, but we also have kind of a contact center and a call center that is again, quite expensive, quite. There's a lot of overhead to run a contact center. You know, it's filled with legacy technology and legacy ways to do things.
What we've heard this week and what we've seen from your product and the CTO really is there's some opportunities there to basically how do we think about kind of again using your tools to really basically one is not have our customers engage in certain channels at all.
Yeah.
Like a contact center, but also be selective in moving into the right channels at the right time, right? Definitely think there's some really core nuggets we're gonna think about as we leave the conference.
Yeah.
Yeah, like when we think about omni-channel, we have to also think that we have other channels that when we think again, how do we best use those channels? How do we optimize them? How do we basically leverage our investments in customer engagement? Because when we think about customer engagement, yes, we focus on mobile first between digitally active customers, but we have, we also have that, you know, as a bank, we also have other engagement channels like a contact center.
Yeah. Of course. Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Jimmy Dinh. I really appreciate your perspective.
Myles, pleasure.
All right.
Thank you.
Good afternoon, everybody, and thanks for being here, both in person and for those of you that are viewing the presentation online. I'm Isabelle Winkels, Chief Financial Officer here at Braze. Today, I'm gonna recap our track record of delivering strong growth at scale, including the ongoing success of our land and expand strategy.
I'm gonna describe in a little bit more detail some of the drivers to our improved operating leverage as we execute on our path towards profitability. Following this presentation, Bill, Miles, John, and Kevin will join me on stage to address your questions. Turning to this first slide. Over the past few years, our successful go-to-market strategy has led to exceptional revenue growth at scale.
As the chart on the left shows, over the last two years, we've delivered compound annual growth rate of 55% in our quarterly revenue run rate, which we define as quarterly revenue multiplied by four. As a result, in Q2 of FY 2023, we realized a quarterly revenue run rate of $344 million. From a customer perspective, we've also experienced tremendous growth over the same period.
We've expanded our customer count by a compound annual growth rate of 42% to nearly 1,600 customers over the past two years. As a reminder, we define a customer at the ultimate parent level of an organization. We've also seen growth specifically in our large customers, which we define as those spending at least $500,000 with us annually.
As of the end of the second quarter, we have 139 large customers, up from 82 large customers in the prior year period. These 139 large customers contributed 55% of our annual recurring revenue in Q2 of this year, compared to 50% from the 82 customers in the prior year period.
This growth in both the overall revenue and our customer count reflects strengths across industries, throughout our segmentation of customer sizes, and across geographic regions. In fact, from a geographic perspective, in the last three quarters, we've increased the proportion of our revenue earned outside of the U.S. by approximately 200 basis points to 42% in Q2 of FY 2023.
I know many of you saw a version of this slide in our. But I wanted to take an opportunity to provide an update here today. This cohort analysis illustrates how customers have expanded their spend with Braze over the years. Particularly exciting is this ongoing expansion of some of our earliest cohorts who are benefiting from our expanded product sets and enhanced overall post-sales customer experience.
As of last quarter, our total customer dollar-based net retention was 126%, compared to 125% in the prior year quarter. Our dollar-based net retention for large customers was 130%, down from 135% in the second quarter of last year, but continuing to show healthy expansion.
This ongoing strength reflects our ability to start anywhere with a customer, meeting them where they are on their digital customer engagement journey, then empowering them to go everywhere as they expand across a number of different dimensions.
Expansion is realized as we increase the volume of entitlements sold as users or messaging volumes increase due to business growth or diversification into new use cases with the addition of entirely new channels through further penetration within a parent company's portfolio into new brands or geographic region.
And with the addition of incremental products and services. Now, I'd like to take a few minutes to discuss our long-term approach to managing our cost structure, realizing operating leverage, and ultimately achieving our long-term financial targets that we outlined nearly a year ago during our IPO roadshow.
Over the course of our history, we have demonstrated an ability to achieve improved operating leverage while delivering strong revenue growth, as you can see from this table. When I arrived here in early 2020, which kicked off our fiscal year 2021, I embarked on a project to improve non-GAAP gross margins, and we've been successful, moving them from 63.3% in fiscal year 2020 to approximately 68% in fiscal 2022.
We've consistently improved our gross margins by realizing efficiencies in our core technology spend, which comprises two-thirds to three-fourths of our core spend, and by optimizing personnel resources, which obviously accounts for the balance of core. Notably, in core tech, we have optimized vendor spend as well as storage and computing costs without compromising our platform's performance or customer experience.
Moving to sales and marketing, our non-GAAP sales and marketing expense as a percent of revenue improved from fiscal year 20 to fiscal year 22 due to improved efficiencies in our go-to-market motion as we increased the overall productivity of our reps, improved renewal rates across the organization, most notably in our SMB customer classification, and honed our upsell motion to achieve the net retention statistics we enjoy today.
Our non-GAAP R&D and G&A expenses as a % of revenue have both increased moderately over this period. In R&D, this reflects the ongoing investments in headcount to maintain and extend our competitive position, and in G&A, growing investments to enable the company to scale and expand globally.
Taken together, we've shown operating leverage improvements across each of the last three fiscal years, improving our non-GAAP operating margin from -21.9% in fiscal year 2020 to -13% in fiscal year 2022. Finally, I'll note that from inception in 2011 to the company's IPO in 2021, Braze burned only $95 million of cash while achieving annual recurring revenue of 2.5x that or approximately $250 million at the time of our IPO.
An impressive ratio, nearly unheard of in software, and the result of ongoing disciplined capital deployment. Looking at the first half of fiscal year 2023, we've executed on the plan we articulated during our IPO roadshow and in subsequent earnings calls. Fiscal 2023 was and remains an investment year.
We've leaned into our significant market opportunity by investing in headcount across all areas of the organization to support our vision for long-term growth. Across our non-GAAP operating expense lines, the higher expenses as a percent of revenue is as we would have expected and specifically reflective of those investments. Now, I want to articulate in a bit more detail the key drivers of our projected operating leverage improvements over time. Beginning with our non-GAAP gross margin.
As a reminder, we raised our long-term target from 65%-70% to 67%-72%. Over the next several years, we expect to continue realizing economies of scale in our tech infrastructure and personnel efficiency in our customer support functions. On the personnel side, we are pursuing a cost-optimized location strategy, which we expect to have in place before the end of fiscal year 2024.
In addition, we're in the early stages of deepening our relationships with system integrators and agency networks in order to optimize our post-sales and support functions, enabling these organizations to take on some of the post-sales effort delivered by Braze today. While we are confident in the non-GAAP gross margin range we have provided.
We will also continue to reinvest into our platform in order to maintain our competitive positioning, making the platform more featureful, and maintaining its speed and reliability at scale. Sales and marketing is where we expect to realize the greatest improvement in operating leverage over time. While these efforts are still in their early stages, nearly all of them are already underway. They can broadly be categorized into efforts that will either drive higher levels of top line or will optimize associated expenses.
In the top line category, first, we're working to increase the productivity of our direct sales team. As you know, we've continued to invest heavily in our headcount throughout this year, despite the macroeconomic uncertainty that surrounds us. This uncertainty requires greater focus on training and enablement to unlock the sales team's full potential. Starting in Q2 of this year, we've been investing in more targeted development programming.
This programming starts during onboarding and is adapted for AEs at the later stages of their ramp through to more mature and fully ramped AEs. Importantly, these initiatives focus on in-person learning, including sales process certifications embedded into new rep onboarding, in-person competitive enablement and certification in each of our global offices, Braze demo certifications and enablement, and industry-specific playbooks and territory and account planning resources, among others.
Further anticipated enhancements to our top-line efficiency will derive from a number of partnerships and relationships that we're building and expanding across our ecosystem. While we're primarily a direct sales force, we have a long history of engaging a growing number of resellers throughout the world. With our heaviest contribution from the APAC region, we've continued to expand into Latin America and plan continued growth in the number and revenue contribution from resellers.
We're also in the early stages of establishing and implementing co-seller and OEM relationships. We have the opportunity to establish product-led growth paths to provide for near frictionless upsells where customers simply seek to expand existing entitlements. Bridging across both top-line efficiency and post-sales cost structure optimization is the exciting traction that we're seeing emerging among the GSIs.
Their clear enthusiasm to establish Braze practices is projected to drive not only further sales efficiencies for both new business and expansion opportunities, but also post-sales cost optimizations as they take on some elements of the post-sales and success support offerings done by Braze today. Further areas of cost structure efficiencies as we continue to scale will come from our cost-optimized location strategy, which I mentioned previously.
As well as expanding our existing use of automation for elements of our customer success services. This automation is already in place, supporting much of the SMB success organization, and will be expanded where appropriate to drive improved post-sales efficiency. Taken together, we believe we can achieve our previously disclosed long-term target for non-GAAP sales and marketing expense as a percent of revenue of 23%-25%.
In research and development, we've continued to hire talented engineers to fuel innovation, and we believe that with our fully funded business and ability to offer public company equity compensation, we are well positioned to continue to do so. Over time, we do expect to drive efficiencies in our engineering infrastructure and headcount as we scale revenue and execute on our cost-optimized location strategy.
As with our core technology stack, we'll continue making the key investments necessary to enhance current products and add new products and features to maintain and advance our competitive market position and drive revenue growth. Our long-term non-GAAP R&D cost as a percent of revenue target will continue to remain at 13%-15% of revenue.
Finally, over the past two years, we've ramped our General and A dministrative staff and expenses considerably for public company readiness and to build out key functions to support our global growth. The public company expenses, such as D&O insurance and audit fees, will scale as we grow. Internally, we also expect to leverage process and workflow automation, and we expect parts of G&A to be some of the most significant beneficiaries of our cost-optimized location strategy.
Our target long-term non-GAAP G&A expense as a percent of revenue remains at 8%-10%. While my last comment applies across the organization, it continues to be in our DNA to approach discretionary spend with discipline, prioritizing spend that generates community and furthers our company values. In fact, it was my pleasure not to provide any of our in-person attendees today with any Braze swag.
We hope that instead, you will take with you the memory of today's experience and the interactions you were able to have with our incredible executive team. Before I wrap, I'd like to leave you with a few key takeaways. Start anywhere, go everywhere. We meet our customers where they are on their journey and empower them to realize world-class customer engagement.
We continue to expand our competitive moat with new product innovations. We have a strong track record of growth at scale with a proven land and expand model. Our priority, given the substantial market opportunity and our technology advantage, is to drive sustained growth at scale. We have ambitious but achievable long-term margin targets. We believe our disciplined approach to high ROI investments will drive substantial leverage in our business.
Thank you for your attention. Now we'll take a brief moment to set up for the Q&A of today's event. Thank you.
Thanks, Isabelle, for the comic relief. That's why you see a phone in the business.
Yeah. There we go.
That's probably my favorite thing.
We'll take Gabriela first from Goldman Sachs.
Great. Thank you. Appreciate all the details. I have a question on how to think about the product roadmap evolution. If we think about the marketing stack, classic competitors doing relational database use cases, Braze doing real-time use cases, now Currents connecting the dots between the relational database and the Braze real-time use cases.
We understand, or we've spoken in detail about why your classic competitors can't do what Braze does. Could you answer the reverse question, which is how much functionality can Braze replicate from the existing relational database legacy guys, and how much do you want to actually be able to do that?
Yeah. At a high level, you know, I think when you talk about functionality, there's the jobs to do when you're actually interacting with the customers. I think, you know, anything that you can do slowly, you can absolutely do with a system that's fast, right? Anything you can do with a system that's siloed, you can obviously do with a system that has broken down those silos.
From the perspective of the jobs to do, and actually engaging with the customers, you know, we think that the solution is not only comprehensive across those pre-existing use cases, but actually in general, even when we see our customers migrate over, in a carbon copy fashion, where they just say, "Hey, this is what I was running in this other platform, let me set it up in Braze." There's a lot that they get for free along the way because of the vertical integration of our data flow, and just a lot that's inherent, especially now in our reporting infrastructure and in our experimentation infrastructure.
You know, Kevin even just mentioned that, when you do the intelligent variant flip-on, you know, if you were doing AB testing in another system before, all you have to do is add intelligent variant to it from Braze, and that AI/ML that we're gonna apply to it will in place improve performance.
Now, there are other aspects of the data integration ecosystem, that we believe are archaic and are better to be left behind. When we look at the kind of data integration options as a simple example, you know, you're not hearing us up here talking about improving our FTP landing zones for ETLs that are moving, you know, flat files around and things like that.
Obviously there are parts of data infrastructure and data ecosystems that exist, you know, in certain companies today that utilize or rely on those. We've actually always tried to make sure that when a customer moves to Braze, that they are integrating and implementing with us in a way that they are going to be able to realize the differentiation that we have, if not immediately, certainly over time.
You know, there are a lot of organizational dynamics that can get in the way of that progress, where if you kind of allow a company to just move over a prior way of working with data, and don't kind of think about things in a new way, that can lead to them limiting their ability to make rapid progress over time.
There's a balance to strike there, right? When we say start anywhere, go everywhere, part of saying start anywhere is also just meeting you where you are from a sophistication standpoint. One of the things that we've always done to try to sidestep that particular tension from a data perspective is we rely on our vertical integration.
You know, Jon brought up the example of being able to load in, you know, 10 years of legacy data, and being able to understand purchase targeting that certainly is looking out over something that would be stored in a legacy data warehouse. There are so many lifecycle use cases and activation ones that can start acting on data immediately as it's flowing into the system.
That's why, you know, I think when you look at Braze and the SDK footprint that we have, the hard work that we've done to make sure that we've earned the right to integrate into our customers' products, that not only gives us the right delivery point for those jobs to do that I started with in the beginning, but it also provides the data flow that doesn't involve any maintenance, and it doesn't involve a need for them to upgrade those old systems. We can provide an in-place replacement that's very easy to deploy.
I think that's why, you know, if you go back to my opening remarks, I think it's tremendous that in Braze's customer base, we have examples of everything from pre-launch startups with just a handful of people all the way up to the world's largest enterprises, and we've shown an ability to actually adapt to the data realities within those organizations at all different stages of maturity. A big part of that has always been that vertical integration story. But now, you know, when we look at things like cloud data ingestion, we're able to really complete that loop for more and more customers.
A follow-up from where Myles was going with CIBC, which is how do you think about customer engagement use cases in the call center and that kind of gray area between marketing and maybe service?
Yeah. I mean, Jimmy actually touched on it. I think it's very relevant for a challenger bank type model. We're not interested in powering directly kind of human interactions with customers. We're helping a lot of companies turn interactions that today happen between humans and humans into digital interactions when it makes sense.
If you can divert more of you know, someone is having trouble with a password reset or they have a question about a product or something like that, instead of calling the call center and being able to satisfy that through two-way messaging, whether it's through an in-product message within Braze or WhatsApp or something like that, it's actually potentially a better customer experience.
I know I personally don't enjoy speaking to call center reps and spending 20 minutes getting to the right person through the IVR, but it can also be much more cost-effective for the customer. It is a gray area. There is a bit of crossover because we think about customer centricity and customer experience first and foremost, more so than this is a customer service use case, this is a marketing use case. If we can help our customers use a single technology solution to basically enable the right type of engagement for that customer based on the need, customers better off, clients better off, and Braze is adding more value.
Yeah. I think that, just to highlight a lot of the roadmap advancement that we've had even on our conversational messaging, you look at the new developments across SMS and MMS, even just over the last 15 months, the amount of automated conversations that the Braze platform can have actually been, you know, moving forward quarterly as we've added more and more refinement to things like keyword targeting, soft matching, incorporating AI/ML into that ability to have the upfront conversation with the customer, potentially deflecting from the need to engage an actual human on the customer support desk, if you will.
We're gonna continue to do that, and one of the amazing aspects of Canvas and the visual programming language is that it also allows you to build real-time conversational flows because it's all event-driven, and it's all running in real time. Unlike the workflow tools that exist in the entirety of the competitive set in the marketing technology space, which behind the scenes are a bunch of small batches running over and over again, Braze's is truly a real-time event-driven system. What that means is that it can actually have an interactive conversation with someone as long as the conditional logic is there to be able to kind of play that role of the other side of the conversation.
We have this great investment, kind of launchpad, whereas we continue to add the ability to handle more diversity in human responses on these conversational channels like SMS, MMS, WhatsApp, et cetera, we will start to be able to fulfill more and more of the automated customer support use cases.
But I wouldn't expect to see us investing in the, you know, in the near or medium term in something, you know, in the kind of traditional, you know, how do I manage a big bank of humans and a ticket queue within that and all those types of things. You know, Braze has really been built to allow a small number of people to achieve massive scale and leverage through full automation.
I think that the scaling function that, you know, a lot of the customer support ecosystem tries to work through is really managing human-to-human problems. You know, we wanna empower small groups to have massive reach, not deal with this.
Go to DJ next, Canaccord.
Hey. Thanks. David Hynes from Canaccord Genuity. This may be a bridge between Bill and Isabelle, but I'm curious with the new cloud data ingestion capabilities, can you just help us think about how the technology bridges the impact on the financial model? Like, is it a premium SKU that you're offering? Does it drive more messaging? Does it help, you know, grow MAUs? Like, how do we think about the technological enhancements driving the growth?
Yeah. So I think that the best way to think about Cloud Data Ingestion, if you're familiar with, you know, the rest of the way that we do integrations, is that, I'm at least thinking about it as the equivalent of an SDK living in someone's data warehouse.
When we look at it from that perspective, you know, certainly when we add SDKs into new platforms, like as we expanded, we started in the early days in Android and iOS. We've expanded to the web. We add Roku as a set-top box. You know, we've continued to grow from there. We've got client demand to move into places like video game consoles or desktop applications. Those are all future platforms that we may build SDKs in.
Similarly, when you look at Cloud Data Ingestion, that's us living in the data warehouse. That's gonna bring in additional data. It's gonna expose us to additional users that, you know, maybe didn't appear in those other places. If you've got someone that you wanna communicate with who's never visited your app or your website and their information only appears in your data warehouse.
But you want to be able to, you know, message them on SMS or you wanna be able to target them in Google or, you know, Facebook through various ways, that is uniquely enabled by us pulling in that user's information through the data warehouse. You could imagine that adding additional user profiles.
It also opens up more use cases because having additional context around a customer and their journey would allow you to communicate in more avenues and more places. There, there's a lot of different ways that that helps with volume-based expansion. You know, I think the most important thing that it does is it continues to expand the surface area of Braze within an organization.
The more that we engage with the engineering counterparts that, you know, the marketing teams that are using us every day, you know, rely on to do additional integrations and more instrumentation and have more surface area to be able to communicate with customers, the more that we engage with the data engineering, the data science teams within companies, it helps get that flywheel moving faster, so they can expand to more use cases over time.
It increases our stickiness. It increases our ability to kind of upsell and cross-sell into new places because we've got more champions and more advocates within the organization. And then obviously, Cloud Data Ingestion has a really big impact on time to value.
It's. You know, Jon highlighted that as a couple of the specific examples in the product presentation where you can literally be up and running in a matter of minutes, and not only that, but you don't need to get your engineering team to commit to maintaining a data pipeline and setting up alerting and monitoring around it because through our partnership with the data warehouse providers, we're gonna handle all that. It makes it turnkey right out of the gate, and it makes it turnkey continuously ever after. That allows for us to really have our customers move forward with more speed and confidence.
Arjun.
Hey, thanks for having us guys. I wanted to touch on maybe the Feature Flags, and Bill, you were kind of just talking about this right now. What is your footprint in the product and engineering organization today? Does the introduction of something like Feature Flags get you deeper into those? Maybe if you could just touch on your long-term vision of the company and how you evolve into do you want to evolve into servicing that product org a little bit more as you mature here?
I'll broadly say yes, and then I'm gonna hand that to Kevin to talk about Feature Flags in a little bit more detail.
Yeah. What we generally see, of course, is that we have product engineering teams, lots of cross-functional stakeholders, and really like doers in the Braze platform who are all working together to accomplish all of these different customer engagement goals that they have. In regards to Feature Flags, one of the reasons that we're so excited about it is that it allows our customers to use all of the different orchestration and control flow and segmentation and personalization capabilities off of all the data that we have, all within one product, and then dive deeper into that overall product and customer experience.
Because one of the things that we're really seeing happen across our entire customer base is that as these teams that are focused on customer engagement and on growth are getting closer and closer together and really sharing these core business goals to increase ROI.
We see this virtuous cycle where investments in the product side that can lead into strong customer engagement campaigns, they all reinforce one another, and so we wanna help these teams really stitch everything much more closely together. In the case of Feature Flags, what's actually been really cool is that we've seen a number of customers using our existing products, using our in-app messages.
The fact that we have this very flexible, vertically integrated SDK setup in which it's very easy already to get data into an SDK and then deploy it in a website, deploy it in an app, but using all of Braze's control flow. We've already seen customers doing a lot of this sort of web and site personalization and feature flagging, and we just want to make that a step more turnkey to help to kind of advance the state-of-the-art for our customers and really get in deeper with all the different stakeholders who are really touching any part of the customer experience.
I think when you look at the high level strategy, you know, there's two aspects to it that are really important to see as these generational trends. The first is that marketers have been getting more and more tech-savvy over time. It's why we see them lean so excitedly into learning more about how to use Canvas. They build out, you know, more and more sophisticated programs. You know, you heard earlier that it's not just marketers, it's also front office people that are working through that. Interestingly, the CI/CD journey that was referenced earlier started with an engineering use case.
We also have a lot of engineering teams who, once their marketing teams have moved over all of their lifecycle and promotional messaging, that they start to move all their transactional messaging as well because of the AI and ML and other sorts of work that we're doing, where the more data that we have and the more broad purview that we have around the customer's engagement and their patterns.
We can actually optimize everything else. We've got so many great examples in the customer base where we're already getting the engineering, you know, stakeholders buy-in. They're moving their workloads over to Braze. In fact, you know, the...
One of the really key things I think to realize when you look at the competition in the space is that unlike providers that have been focused on channels like email or SMS that exist outside of the product, Braze has always done the extremely hard work of kind of winning the approval and the hearts and the minds of the engineers within the organizations because our code in every case is running right inside their products, right? That meant that we needed to have their trust and their confidence to be able to do that and has meant that we've always engaged with engineering teams.
It's not this, you know, you won't find situations where, you know, like was referenced earlier, where the entire, you know, program has been outsourced to some agency that just runs everything and they're off on an island. You know, when Braze comes into an organization, we're engaging with the user lifecycle, and that means being part of the product.
It means working with those engineering stakeholders. We've always done that at a bare minimum with them as part of the integration journey. What we've been able to do over time is build more and more parts of the product to be able to be utilized by them, and that helps enhance our, you know, our stickiness, and it helps us expand over time. Now, we do still primarily see the budgets and the buyer coming out of the marketing organization.
Of course, when you look at the overall organizational ROI and the value that we bring to the organization, the more that we're delivering to both products and engineering groups and also to data engineering groups, you know, the better, the more relevance we have, the more stickiness we have, the more mind share we have, and that gives us opportunities to expand into more areas like you're seeing with Feature Flags, and you should certainly expect to see additional expansion in those same directions.
Perfect. Thank you.
Also, before we go forward, I'd like to remind folks that are watching online you can submit a question. Use the Ask a Question button on the top right corner, and we will curate those. Ryan MacWilliams from Barclays, please.
Thanks. Two quick ones from me. We get a lot of questions from investors about how MAU translates to revenue growth for Braze. You know, given your success with larger customers, could these customers overly impact the MAU count on a quarterly basis? I guess, what's the best way for investors to think about MAU count for Braze?
Yeah. The monthly active users obviously are a portion of the volume-based revenue that we generate, and they've been an important one over time, and we've clearly enjoyed revenue growth alongside MAU growth over time. There are a lot of dynamics that kind of hide under the surface of a giant number like 4.1 billion. That's one of the reasons why, we've cautioned investors from reading too much into kind of short-term aberrations in it.
I'll highlight a couple examples of this. You know, one is that if you think about the nature of a high monthly active user customer that we would have had three or four years ago, it was more likely to be what we referred to at the time as a mobile titan.
Often something like a freemium game, that would have a long tail of customers that were not as valuable, a small number which were, you know, generating a lion's share of the revenue. In those cases, you know, our ability to maintain pricing power through the long tail of those monthly active users was relatively low because the ability to value sell with the customer was not necessarily there.
You compare that to today, you know, we sell to a customer like a large media streaming application or any sort of video on demand. You know, they will have similarly sized tens of millions of monthly active users in their customer base, but they value every single one of those. We're delivering additional, you know, channels to them. We're running more use cases.
We're helping optimize a much more valuable customer relationship. You have an example of kind of two large monthly active user bases, one of which has generated tremendous value for us over time. It does it at higher margin and is representative of the expanding product footprint Braze. One which is, you know, a little bit more simple and obviously has different unit economics involved in it.
There's been a number of kind of underlying trends, all of which have pointed to additional improvement. You can see that, certainly our revenue growth has outpaced our monthly active user growth for years now. Along the way, our gross margins have improved. We've achieved additional pricing power. We've expanded into new verticals. And at the same time, we've also continued to obviously grow internationally. There's a lot of things that intermix within there. And certainly, you know, monthly active users are a way that we grow and that we upsell our customers. But there's a lot more to the story.
Great. I like the example of pulling converted customers out of additional ad spend. Thought that was interesting from the product demo. As customers look to improve marketing efficiency, are you seeing any changes on the usage side by channel? Like, are customers looking to save costs when deciding between whether to market between email, push or SMS in a platform macro?
Yeah. I would say that, across most of these first-party channels, when you compare them to ad spend, we're talking about different orders of magnitude. When customers are looking to overall optimize their marketing spend, and, you know, obviously there's kind of this broadly accepted understanding that during times of, you know, cost optimizing pressure, that marketing spend tends to get cut.
We don't see any signs of that happening in first-party channels. What we do see is, you know, more and more customers have actually. I think there's two really cool things happening. One of them is that we do see more and more customers using things like our Google and Facebook audience networks. We've got increasing demand for additional ad networks over time that we're certainly going to meet with future product development.
We're also now starting to see brands for the first time breaking down the silos between customer engagement teams and brand marketing and performance marketing teams. That's a really awesome long-term, certainly an awesome long-term trend for us. We think it needed to be catalyzed by the higher pressure that exists in the spend environment right now.
What it's gonna do over time is it's gonna give us, in much the same way that we've had a lot of value, generated out of breaking down the silos between email teams and mobile teams and web teams, and then increasingly the silos are being broken down between the marketers and engineers and data engineers, as we've spoken about at length already.
We're now also finally seeing those walls being broken down between the kind of consumer B2C customer engagement, CRM marketers and the brand marketers and the performance marketers, and those budgets are now being shared back and forth. We've actually had some really great performance marketing use cases that sit alongside the first party owned channels for years now that are available in the platform.
A lot of the customers that use Braze every day had not been allocated performance marketing budgets in the past because those silo walls were up within the organization. One interesting thing that we're now seeing is that we actually have more customers that are running ad spend through Braze than they were before. That doesn't even require necessarily that there's an increased investment in ad spend within those companies.
It's actually that the silos are being broken down and the strategies are now being consolidated. We're definitely seeing upticks in customers being really interested in a lot of our data sophistication and data flows as well. This is another interesting side effect of the increased scrutiny on spend in the environment.
We've had a lot of customers, even in our customer advisory board earlier this morning, who have been talking to us about attribution and uplift models. In those cases, what they're doing is they're, you know, to be able to show the uplift in the attribution with Braze has been, you know, very easy when you look at incremental revenue spend, you look at the robust experimentation tools that we have, the control groups and other sorts of statistical rigor that we can provide to customers.
Also looking at things like avoiding churn, improving retention curves. There's a lot of just very obvious value that gets created. When you start to get into performance marketing ecosystem, that's obviously been harder. We actually have more and more customers that are looking at Braze as a first-party data asset that's helping them better analyze the performance of that other large spend bucket.
That's another area where, you know, we are playing a new and expanded role within the kind of mindset of the, you know, especially our enterprise customers that are starting to look really closely at these things. Those are all just exciting trend lines for us 'cause it means that it's more and more surface area for Braze over time.
We do have an online question, and this comes from our friend Patrick Walravens at JMP, and this question I think is for Isabelle and probably for Bill at Opine as well. He asks, "How's business?" He says, "I know that there's two weeks left in the quarter, but what can you tell us about how things are going?
Look, I think when we announced Q2, we were talking about kind of, you know, slower sales cycles and customers asking for more time to pay and slower start, a little bit more time to kind of start their contracts. I mentioned that we expected those dynamics to broadly continue. I think that is fair. That is actually what we're seeing.
The macroeconomic uncertainty is out there. It's somewhat global. We're really seeing the impacts of that from kind of a timing perspective. That said, you know, the interest continues to be extremely high. We're getting, you know, excited customers. Obviously, the stickiness is still there. Our renewal rates continue to hold up. We are excited about that. I will say that the dynamics that we saw in Q2.
As expected, they are continuing. We're not in a position to talk about FY 2024. We'll talk about that in March of next year. You know, we maintain our guidance that we've provided in the context of the rest of this year.
We'll go to Brent Bracelin, Piper Sandler, next.
Thank you. Thank you for hosting this. Two questions, if I could. One tactical and then one strategy question. On the tactical side, you did a great job expanding with large enterprises. We're going into a recession. How do you think you can expand with these large customers next year? Does it change? Is it first-party driven?
Any sort of thoughts on some of the conversations you're having this week on how can you expand large customers in a recessionary environment, where it's gonna come from? And then two, on the strategy side, go everywhere is pretty broad. And so if you take a longer term step back, when you talk about go everywhere, is this hinting at customer support personas? Is this hinting at siphoning off more ad dollars in a unique way with first party? Like, walk us through what you really mean longer term by go everywhere?
Sure. Well, I'll hand the first one to Myles because I've been talking a lot.
Yeah.
I'll handle your second question.
On the expansion thing, I'd say a few things. One, we obviously continue to innovate and roll out new products, things that we can monetize directly and indirectly, and you're gonna continue to see that, whether it's new channels, new integrations in the data stack, new intelligence features. That will continue, and I would say actually it's increasing in pace as our R&D team is really, you know, firing on all cylinders. The other thing I'll say is that we are still relatively under-penetrated in, you know, many of our big clients.
Kind of as I hand it back over to Bill for start anywhere, go everywhere, we have so many different places to land, and we're quite good as we go out and sell to figure out where to land, where's the most pain on the customer, and then we're quite good from a post-sales motion perspective in adding value quickly and then helping our customers become more sophisticated, which oftentimes involves usage of more Braze products and services and capabilities as you unlock new directions.
We're still early. You know, certainly there's more and more customers now as the market matures that are buying big Braze contracts right out of the gate that involve lots of channels or multiple brands or multiple geos or whatever it is. The reality is, we've got a very long way to go within our big customer base, and we have an expanding opportunity with all the new R&D and products that are coming out.
Yeah. From a go everywhere standpoint, you know, I think there's a tremendous amount of opportunity when we look at the compute environment that we've been building. You know, if you break down Braze and kind of look at it as is, you've got a vertically integrated data flow that flows in real time into a stream processor. That stream processor starts to make sense of that data and allows you to take action on it.
You know, it's being programmed by business users, by people in the front office, by marketers, by people that don't need to have a computer science degree to really be armed with the power of programmability and automation. You know, we're helping deliver them additional capability through AI and ML investment.
We think that in the long term, that creates tremendous opportunity for us to expand into more environments where business experts can really bring to bear, you know, their expertise, their creativity, solve their business problems in ways that, you know, the expensive engineering resources are just never gonna get to. We also don't wanna lose sight of the fact and lose focus on the addressable market that lies right in front of us.
Because the customer engagement space, when you look at how diversified Braze is across verticals, across company sizes, across geographies, you look at expansion across platforms and all the new channels that we're adding, there's tremendous capability for us to continue to grow within our existing customers as well as access additional greenfield opportunities and expand into new areas of business, new use cases, and even bringing in use cases into things that seem like old, just kind of standard transactional messaging use cases. We turn them into growth experiments.
You know, I have actually cited an example over the last couple days that I heard at a customer advisory board in the spring where we have customers who are excitedly experimenting with how to deliver you the message that your credit card was declined when they tried to renew a subscription. You know, that was something that as an example would have been simply a transactional message in the past and now has an entire experimentation framework built in Canvas around it.
We just had a customer this morning at our customer advisory board share with us that they just had a patent granted at their company with a product feature that they built entirely out of Braze in-app messages, and there are literally screenshots of Braze in-app messages in their patent application.
We're seeing just tremendous flexibility and power being delivered to our customer base through the products that we're building, and it's driving incredible return on investment for them. You know, we really believe in kind of the generic power that this framework is gonna be able to bring to the company as we look forward to being a generational technology company.
The opportunity that sits in front of us in customer engagement, especially as customer engagement continues to become a more interdisciplinary sport, you know, it grows beyond just the marketer, it grows beyond just the customer engagement marketer and includes the brand marketer now.
You know, as I was just talking about, there's all these places where silos are being broken down and that increases our opportunity to expand in ways that are not unnatural, that are not a whole nother line of business. They're actually just that customer engagement and customer experience is so core to so many businesses that it provides us an opportunity to grow organically and through adjacencies, in a way that we believe will be very efficient while still allowing for us to capture increasing levels of addressable market over time.
Brian Schwartz, Oppenheimer.
Thank you very much for having us. An excellent presentation. Myles, I wanted to follow up on your customer conversation with CIBC. I thought it was very interesting that the customer was using the platform both in the B2C as well as a B2B environment. I wanted to ask about that B2B environment. I mean, how prevalent are those use cases within the customer base today? Maybe can you talk about the B2B opportunity of selling the platform within divisions and within the partner ecosystem? Thank you.
First and foremost, it is not prevalent whatsoever within our customer base today. We've not focused on it. You know, from the early days, one of our key areas of differentiation was being able to process you know, massive volumes of data with high performance and efficiency at scale, which is something that typically helps you differentiate from a consumer perspective.
That was always kind of the original area of focus. I think there's a couple of really interesting trends going on. There's been a consumerization of B2B marketing for a long time now, where a lot of B2B brands are behaving like B2C brands in terms of how they talk to their customers. It's really. You know, the LTV is different.
A lot of unit economics are different, but they're still humans on the other end. You're still trying to build a relationship with them. You still wanna use personalization, context to drive results. All of those things are the same. There's just, you know, a smaller scale of them. We've always felt like there's opportunity for us to grow and expand in that direction. Actually, I did a fireside chat yesterday with Anheuser-Busch, and they've been a customer of ours for a few years. I believe it'll be posted online as we recorded everything in the coming days, so I invite you to watch it.
Our client there has shared how they're using Braze to basically manage relationships between their brands and their distributors and their retail partners in, you know, 20 different countries all around the world, and they're leveraging an e-commerce app to automate the purchase process, reordering, replenishment, in-store signage, all the different things that salespeople used to do directly with the retailers all around the world.
They've automated all of that. They're trying to deliver better CSAT like Jimmy from CIBC was talking about earlier. It also has transformed their frontline operations. Now their salespeople and their account managers can focus on building better relationships with the accounts and selling in more product. There are a few of these examples around the Braze customer ecosystem now.
I expect you'll see more of them over time. I'll also mention that for a lot of our marketplace customers that are sort of operating two or three-sided marketplaces where they have the buy side and the sell side, they're often using Braze to talk to the supply side. So think about food delivery.
They might use Braze to talk to the restaurants. They might also use Braze to talk to the drivers as those are, you know, B2B use cases. They might have originally bought us to power the B2C comms and then realized that they can also see, you know, efficiencies and gains and benefits of using us for those other use cases. More to come there.
Also, Jon and Kevin didn't really talk about it in the product presentation today, but they did yesterday, but we also have some things around like landing pages, some other types of functionality that is kind of table stakes for a lot of traditional, you know, B2B marketing automation tools that you can accomplish with Braze now, but it requires more manual effort that we're gonna be building, you know, more natively and flexibly into the platform. Yeah, there's more to come in this area for sure.
We'll go to Pinjalim Bora from JPMorgan next.
Thank you very much. Great presentation, guys. Thanks for hosting us. Two questions. One on WhatsApp. How should we think about that opportunity? Do you think over time we see a mix shift from SMS to OTT, especially in international areas? What's the gross margin implication around that? Second, Myles, we obviously talked about the sales sales force productivity issues last quarter. Maybe update us on what are you seeing so far. How quickly can we see the rebound to kind of a normal trajectory?
Yeah. I'll take the SMS WhatsApp question up top. You know, we're excited to see WhatsApp really fill gaps in certain markets where either email or SMS is either cost prohibitive, which is not the case with email globally, but certainly is with SMS in certain markets, or where consumer preferences and consumer behaviors tend to bias towards certain channels, often due to just how those channels grew up in certain areas of the world in particular.
From that perspective, you know, I don't think we're expecting to see WhatsApp necessarily cannibalize SMS messages, because in the markets where SMS rates have been prohibitively high, they have actually just caused people to not really use SMS in those places.
We think that it will therefore be additive in that way. We also just looking further into the future, you know, we think that WhatsApp is just the first of many OTTs that we will build over time, as we're committed to comprehensively supporting, you know, any channel that's relevant at consumer scale. From a margin perspective, you know, we remain committed to the long-term gross margin target.
Obviously, our channels have varying levels of margin 'cause they have different cost functions within them. When you look at a channel like Content Cards or in-app messages or surveys, those are obviously fully owned end-to-end. They're all of our software, and so we have a tremendous ability to optimize the margin on those over time.
If you look at something like WhatsApp or SMS, there's obviously a price floor and a cost that, you know, exists because there's a monopoly provider on the other side, and so those are gonna have long-term different margin implications. I think that, you know, one of the major benefits of Braze is our ability to really value sell up at t he monthly active user level.
Which means that, you know, when we look at the revenue contributions from channel mix, it's obviously important that we maintain and defend margin there. But to the extent that that leads to us having more, you know, users, more use cases, more data flowing into the system because people are using those channels.
We've always had an opportunity to actually recoup additional gross margin because there's, you know, there's a lot of ways that we kind of monetize through the flow. It's not just the channel at the end. That's one of the benefits, obviously, of not being a commodity channel supplier and really being able to sell further up the stack and value sell with the monthly active user.
Yeah. Quick on sales productivity. Obviously, it's something we continue to watch and track every single day. Like as Bill said, a lot of the same macro factors that we were talking about on our last earnings have continued on through this quarter. Clearly those are highly correlated with sales productivity, whether it's for new reps coming through their early enablement process and having to learn how to value sell from the very first call as opposed to much further along in the sales cycle to, you know, well tenured enterprise reps who just see some deals pushing out because customers are a little bit leery about making final decisions.
The productivity metrics are not as strong as we you know historically like to see them, but we feel good about the changes that we put in place back in kind of the May, June timeframe. We've been seeing good progress, good traction, a lot of good early leading indicators around kind of what we track from a productivity perspective that leads us to believe that things will definitely be improving over time.
We'll go to Scott Berg from Needham.
I hope it's a hard technical question because Jon hasn't been able to speak yet.
Super-duper difficult. Actually, my first question is on the technical side.
Excellent.
We'll start there, and I've got two. We'll start with the first one, the new data ingestion capabilities from the data warehouse perspective. Is there a real difference between how users think about pulling data from that versus a CDP, for instance? I know it's activating different types of data at the end of the day, but just I guess from a user's perspective, are they doing anything maybe significantly different, just pulling data from different sources?
Yeah, sure. The overall strategy I'll say with Cloud Data Ingestion is twofold. One is that we wanna help customers decrease the time that it takes to get value out of Braze to be able to get started and use their data, while also then allowing them to use more of their data in order to get that into Braze.
With respect to the difference between us and say like needing the CDP in order to do it, we wanna help look at what are use cases that customers run into and challenges they have that make it harder to get started. One of the first ones is that historical import that I mentioned of you just signed with Braze, you've got a ton of data, you need to get that into our system.
We can make that very easy, and now you can do that kind of thing in about five minutes. I would expect to see that customers, you know, may just decide to make a connection with Braze in order to just pull that in and get started like very, very quickly, without needing to do any additional other kinds of data mappings there.
Overall, like what we're looking for is building a suite of functionality that really like helps us use that data layer to improve personalization. You can imagine that what we shared today were things like taking users that exist and syncing them over, taking segments that are composed of users that perform some actions that maybe you didn't store in Braze and syncing that over.
We have other information like catalogs, where that type of data might live in your data warehouse, or other things where we can use your data warehouse in order to improve performance and personalization. I think that for data that's sitting in your data warehouse, we're gonna use more of it. If that exists in your CDP right now, if you've kind of been funneling that in, there's an easy connection into Braze.
I think that the way Bill framed it was really useful is that this Cloud Data Ingestion works kind of like an SDK on top of your data warehouse for you to get the data in. Data ingestion also has CDPs inserting into our stack, and now you have the data warehouse coming directly in. They operate slightly differently.
One, you can control the latency and the performance of your data warehouse versus CDP. You may be aggregating things and then getting that to Braze with some kind of delay, and you can do it directly with the data warehouse. Also you can also be in control of when you're sending the data over to us.
I think that the differences will exist, but will really vary by use case. We're focused primarily on just making sure that however our customers get data into Braze, they're able to do it quickly and able to get more data into us so we can help them achieve higher ROI.
Great. Second question is probably for Myles, as Bill talked about leveraging the sales and marketing organization. I think we're all familiar with a reseller and a co-seller model. Those are pretty standard in the industry. But an OEM model can differ by company for a variety of different reasons. What does, you know, OEM relationships mean to Braze in particular going forward? And how do we see that maybe manifest itself out over time?
Yeah. I think the best way to think about it for us right now is helping us sell into markets that we would not otherwise be selling into directly on our own anytime soon. Think about certain vertical industries as an example. There are some companies out there that have specialized capabilities that cross over from like a hardware and a software and a services perspective, let's say, for the retail industry or the restaurant industry. Maybe they cater to more local restaurant chains that aren't the typical types of companies that Braze would be out selling to.
Maybe a company like that would want to white label Braze's SDKs, embed it into, you know, a POS plus, you know, engagement plus marketing services offering that they would go out and sell to customers where there's no channel conflict, and that becomes a new OEM channel for Braze, as one example. There might be a ton of scenarios like that that we've looked at.
We actually have one relationship which is very new, and we just closed our first customer through it. It's kind of very similar to what I just described, except it's more of an e-commerce play for small companies. The first customer that closed is actually a bourbon manufacturer based in Kentucky, surprisingly. That is a small operation.
They're new to e-commerce, and they're working with a company that's gonna handle, it's almost like the old GSI Commerce model, where they're gonna do fulfillment all the way through to the front-end e-commerce store to, you know, search marketing and all these other things to bring customers through the front door, and Braze is the white labeled engagement solution inside of that.
That costs us zero from a sales and marketing effort perspective. It's you know, we're supporting the partner who then is supporting all of their end customers and we think that could be an interesting motion for us over time.
Yeah. There's also some, you know, not like traditionally OEM, but, we're excited about use cases working with some of the GSIs, like Accenture and Deloitte, to be able to work into potentially highly regulated industries or into places like the public sector, where you could imagine integrations being built out through those practices with something like an electronic medical record, or looking at, you know, selling it to the federal government and other sorts of places that are just, like, highly regulated and onerous.
You know, those are places that we may decide to sell into directly eventually, but when you look at just the wide swath of opportunity that we have in verticals that are less onerous, creating that opportunity to be able to work with partners to get into those places faster is something that we may capitalize on.
Yun Kim from Loop Capital. Give him the microphone, please.
I can talk really loud.
All right. Thanks. When I talk to investors about Braze, I always find myself talking about the relationship between Braze and the CDP vendors, like Salesforce of the world and whatnot. Can you just, you know, give us some history on how that relationship has evolved over the years? You know, recently Salesforce introduced a product called Genie. You know, can you just kind of talk about whether that's a competitive product or, you know, is it something that you can actually potentially work with? Thanks.
Yep. I think whenever you're analyzing the CDP market, I think it's important to kind of look at the different generations of CDPs that have existed, because the characteristics of our relationship with them vary depending on kind of what type of CDP we're talking about. There are CDPs that are, you know, effectively, higher levels of automation on top of ETL.
There are some that operate, as similar to like a kind of Grand Central Terminal for, you know, for data, where it flows from a lot of sources, it runs through a cloud-based, you know, channel and then spans back out. Those are vendors like Segment and mParticle and Tealium. Then you've got the CDPs that are being built out by like Adobe and Salesforce.
When we kind of look at all of those, you know, obviously the middle group are the ones that we've historically been partnered with the most and the longest, and we have the deepest integrations with. They have integrations both on the high end or at the top of our stack, where they might have personas or other sorts of data that's coming in from other sources where we don't have the direct SDK integration.
That's flowing in through our partner APIs. They're also often a target for Currents, where we're generating data from customer engagement. You know, in many cases, we will flow that data directly to a data warehouse or directly to an analytics solution.
We may also send that directly to a CDP so that they can then fan that back out to, you know, whatever their data destination targets are. When you look at the kind of Salesforce and Adobe CDPs, and I think that, when we look at Salesforce Genie.
You know, I think a lot of those is actually them trying to improve and consolidate the interfaces by which, customers of their multi-cloud products work with them, like, in an internal way as well as from an external perspective. Because many of those solutions, you know, looking at Salesforce Marketing Cloud or Adobe Experience Cloud, they were created through a series of subsequent acquisitions.
That means that the individual products that are within them are not tightly integrated, and they also expose very heterogeneous, inter-APIs and other sorts of interfaces. I think that, you know, largely when we look at the Salesforce and Adobe CDPs as well as Genie and, you know, the primary promise I think they're delivering on is really just improving the interface for people to work across the clouds that are insular to those companies.
To the extent that Genie could, you know, help Salesforce Marketing Cloud deliver on the promise that it's already trying to deliver on, you know, that certainly is product advancement that would potentially make Salesforce Marketing Cloud more competitive against us.
In terms of it being a new generation of competition or a new front that you know we're concerned about, we think that there's a lot of work for them to do to clean up the complexity that has really come about due to them constructing the Marketing Cloud through a series of acquisitions. From our perspective.
Those are table stakes because the only way to really deliver in this space is through having tight vertical integration, having that comprehensiveness that can be delivered to customers across all the different channels where they can still think about strategy in a customer-centric way. We believe that without a foundational rebuild, they're not capable of delivering on that no matter how many things they try to layer on top.
Brian Peterson from Raymond James.
Thanks, guys, for all the content. Maybe one for Isabelle. Just thinking about some of the margin leverage drivers that you mentioned. You know, it was very clear from the start that fiscal year 2023 was gonna be an investment year. You know, I'm curious, how do we think about forward years given what we're seeing in the macro? I know you specifically outlined lower cost locations. Are those plans kind of already starting today, or is that maybe something we should see in future years? I don't know how much you can comment, but just wanna get more color on that.
What I can't exactly comment on is exactly how each of these pieces are gonna mix in and which ones will come first. But what I can say is almost everything I talked about is already underway in some way, shape, or form. I can specifically talk about the low cost location.
We've already engaged a vendor that's helping us figure out where we're gonna be, and the goal is to have picked the location by the end of this year. We are actually very well-versed as an organization to set up shop in a new location, setting up an entity, figuring out how to hire. We've done that a number of times over the last couple of years, and we will just engage that motion, and the idea is that the entity will be set up. In next year. We're not setting any expectations that there will be any hiring there in, you know, until the back end of next year. That mixing in towards the back half of next year.
Do you have any more questions in the room? We have no more online questions. Well, if there's no more questions, maybe we can proceed to the wrap. Conclude the Q&A. Bill, you have any final remarks for us?
No, I just wanna thank everybody for joining us here in person, everyone that joined us online. It's obviously an exciting space. You know, we see tremendous potential across the entirety of the customer engagement market. I continue to just, you know, wake up every day excited about the opportunity that's in front of us because of how much it expands.
Every single time we have a conversation with customers, every single time, we roll out new products and features, you know, our customers immediately go to, "All right, what am I gonna do next? How is this gonna expand?" You know, we had a customer advisory board meeting this morning that I would characterize as totally different than the one we had six months ago because our product's advancing so quickly, the customer appetite is just insatiable.
That's a really exciting place to be as a technology company. We're also really excited to be in this position where we have the ability to continue to invest. We're creating separation from our competition. We're taking advantage of the hiring market right now, especially in R&D.
As Kevin and Jon mentioned, we've got, you know, 24 separate product teams that, as you can see from the sheer volume of releases that we're making across all these different dimensions of our product, are creating new opportunities for us to enhance stickiness for customers to get up and running more quickly, for them to expand their use cases with Braze over time.
And for us to both take market share from existing places, but also create entirely new markets along the way. Those are incredible opportunities for us, and we're gonna continue to capitalize on them. We thank you all for your participation in that journey, and, you know, we're looking forward to a really fantastic future.
Thank you, everyone for joining us.
Cheers.
Look forward.