All right. Hello. Hello, everyone. Good morning. Welcome to the Tech Conference. This is our first fireside chat of the day. I'm Melissa Knox with Morgan Stanley. I run the global software banking business here. Appreciate everyone's time for coming out. It's great to see you. And I'm really excited to be here with Intapp this morning. First time to the Morgan Stanley tech stage. Longtime listener, first-time caller here. We're here with John Hall, CEO, and David Morton , CFO. Intapp has had an incredible run over the last year. Stocks up 75% on a complete tear. So we're going to hear about the magic behind the company, what they've done to execute, kind of future growth opportunities, but a fantastic story. Maybe just to get started, I know last week you had your big Amplify customer conference in New York. Really successful event. Maybe share some news.
What's the big reveal coming out of your customer conference?
Thanks, Melissa. Thanks for having us. We were very excited to have that event. It was one year after our first inaugural Investor Day, but this event was focused on clients. And we had an incredible turnout of some of the largest professional services and financial services firms in the world. And a lot of the focus was on Growth AI. How can we as a company help apply all this modern AI technology to specific workflows and use cases for the professional and financial services firms to help them grow their business?
What did the customers come away with when they were talking about the testimonials? What were they most excited about?
We had launches across our platform, so the overall Intapp platform helps firms in these markets grow their business in a variety of ways. We do it with business development for the investors and the advisory firms. We have a whole compliance component to our business, so one of the companies that really inspired us as we were building the business was Veeva, and so that combination of vertical specific and also a strong compliance component is completely analogous to what we're doing for these large professional and financial services firms. And the launches were very consistent with that, so we had a Walls for AI launch that was focused on helping firms who are deploying Copilots and agents do a much better job protecting information for a variety of clients and investors' engagements and deals.
We had a DealCloud Activator launch, which is about helping the professionals and the firms with a whole Nudge theory-based system to drive better business development behaviors. We had a bunch of strong AI technology components like Prompt Studio and Smart Tagging. We had an Origination launch to help firms with the activity of finding new business, whether that's raising more funds if you're a private capital business or finding new clients if you're a professional services or advisory business. So a whole suite of launches on the platform associated with growth.
Let's dig in. Just take a step back and tell us a little bit about the platform. You mentioned DealCloud. You mentioned compliance. But talk about the Intapp Intelligent Cloud. What are the different products? What are you actually providing?
So the business is a vertical industry cloud business with a strong AI component. We're an unusual company for Silicon Valley because we bootstrapped the business all the way to IPO. It took us about 20 years, but we came public in 2021. But that history gives us a very deep relationship with these large partnership-based professional and financial services firms. And most of the platform, the intelligent cloud that we deliver, was built because we were building a commercial version of the specialized software that these firms historically had built in-house. So the model was really to work with the CIOs of these firms over the years, understand what they were building in-house. I always took it as a sign. Why in the world are law firms, for example, building software?
And it's because as good as the horizontal systems are, the classic CRM, ERP systems, they really were built for traditional manufacturing or retail model. These firms do not sell widgets through a pipeline off of a price list with a standard price book. They negotiate their deals with each and every client or investor. If you think about the model, we could talk a little bit more about this. But the model of information that they manage is totally different from a traditional product-based business. And so we built a platform that was designed for that operating model and then a whole range of workflows inside the firm based on that, from business development, which is what our DealCloud system helps firms do.
Our compliance offering helps firms with all of the conflicts avoidance and any money laundering and ethical walls, information barriers type solutions for all of their engagements. Our collaboration solution helps the partners work together inside their practice area or strategy team or work together with clients. And then our time system for the portion of our market that records time and bills by the hour. We have an AI-based system that helps keep track of all the time of the professionals in the business. And then over the past few years, we've launched Intapp Assist, which is our AI, Generative AI era brand for all of those solutions that bring AI with them.
So a lot of us, I think this is really relevant to a lot of us in the room, on the banking side, on the investor side, we are your target customers. And what you said really rings true. We are on a 30-year-old homegrown system. It is really complicated to use. And our sales motion is very different. This is relationship-based, episodic. We have 10-year sales cycles. So how do you help these organizations? Maybe talk about your data model, intelligence graph, how you're able to take this really kind of unique, complicated industry and provide tools and models to help them with the selling motion.
Yeah. This is really at the core of the technology differentiation, something that we built up over those years as a bootstrap business, really appreciating how different your operating model is and some of these firms that are related to yours. The simple way to think about it, I was describing earlier the idea of selling off of a price list, which is not what you all do. The business that you're in, think about a private markets M&A deal. You've got a sponsor selling an asset, and there's a lawyer associated or a set of legal advisors. There's usually someone from your organization or another bank helping to sell that asset. And then you have a whole universe of bidders, each of whom has their own set of potentially buy-side bankers and counsel and due diligence advisors of a whole different set of expertises.
And if you try to model that, it looks completely different from a price list and a product coming out of an inventory. And then the next day, that same cast of characters that you were tracking on this deal is working together on a completely different deal in a different configuration. And people who might have been in other parts of the auction scenario are now working together the next day and the next day and the next day. And then you multiply that up by the scale of organizations like yours.
You want to know all of that information so that for pitches and for expertise and knowledge, you really understand what's happening internally, historically, with each of the clients and prospects and targets in the market, with each of the deals that were done or the ones that were passed on or the ones that were lost. That information model requires a graph architecture that's much more sophisticated than the traditional CRM ERP model. It's kind of subtle, but this is the industry graph data architecture that underlies our platform. It's why when people from the advisory businesses or the investing businesses come in and experience our platform for the first time, they say, "Oh, you all understand. This is what it's supposed to feel like. This was built for me." So that's the vertical industry cloud differentiation all the way down at the technology architecture level.
And it's not something that the classic ERP CRM systems are going to re-architect themselves to be able to model. So we think we're in a great spot for this industry, which brings in $3 trillion a year across all the types of firms that we sell to. It's three times the size of Veeva's end market. It's actually a very overlooked, underserved industry that deserves its own cloud. So that's our strategy.
You're best served to go address these markets and this technology. It is specialized. Just a horizontal solution has not been able to really crack it. What you've built is very challenging. These organizations are not thought of as early adopters of cloud-based technologies. Really hard to sell into and kind of late to the party oftentimes. Yet your growth has been fantastic. So what is it about these organizations that make them particularly well-suited for them? Why now? What are you seeing from them that's causing this change in how they're buying?
No, that's absolutely right. This whole group was slow to the cloud. A lot of focus on building in-house, a lot of historical reasons. They had their own data centers for everything. We think that's actually the opportunity now. Even pre-COVID, there was a real emphasis from a lot of the firms to have their own systems running in their own data centers. But a lot of people had to suddenly work from home, and they didn't have the experience that they wanted to have with that kind of model. And we saw a big switch. There are also some regulatory reasons why firms were not able to put their information in the cloud that have evolved. And today, those issues have been handled. And then there's the generational thing. There's a whole group of people who are used to working on the phone and the tablet all day long.
And they come into work, and they have this very antique experience. And it's not a great way to draw the best talent and retain the best talent. So I actually think we're in a great spot because we've had the patience through the bootstrap years to really get to know this industry and build a platform for them. And now they're all saying, "We've got to get to the cloud." There's a security angle too. The firms have come to the, I think, correct conclusion that the investment level that they can put into security on individual data centers and on-prem just isn't going to cut it in the modern world. And they need to be leveraging systems like our partnership is with Microsoft and Azure, but they need to be leveraging the security capabilities of the hyperscalers to really serve their security needs globally.
So I think there are several pressures that are causing people to rethink. And we're selling into that. It's just helping us to win people over.
Outside of the move to the cloud, which is happening, it's happening in financial services. What about just kind of the macro environment and the expectation, Trump bump, whatever you want to call it, that deal activity will increase in our industries? Does that have an impact on buying?
So we get this question. I think the answer is maybe. I think the fundamental driver for our business is actually classic digital transformation. We are selling into this industry that is behind in the classic digital transformation curve, the cloud curve.
And now Generative AI has caught a lot of people's attention because there's a general theory that because these professionals are so information-driven in what they do, looking at the markets and trying to make sense of all the flood of information outside, looking at the firm's history, particularly for the large firms, and trying to understand the history of the firm's experience to bring to bear on any particular deal, the type of work that we do from a work product standpoint, there's some fundamental reasons why people are arguing that a vertical Generative AI generation cloud system should really bring incredible, not just efficiency, but competitiveness to the professionals working in these firms. So we think that's the fundamental driver. And then it's just not a question that if the markets pick up, people are looking for growth systems.
So I think that that might help us on the margin. I will say we're proud of the fact that the business bootstrapped all the way through the 2008-2 009 recession. We never raised money in that environment. So I'm a big believer in the actual stability of this end market. The banking industry is a little more sensitive to the cycle. But if you look at everybody that we sell to, the lawyers always get paid in good times and bad. The accountants always get paid. The private capital firms that we sell to actually pay us out of their management fee. So it's not dependent on deal transaction volume. So there's a real stability that has allowed us to grow the business the way that we have. And then if on the margin we get some activity bump, that will be great.
You mentioned AI and some of your innovations there. I mean, you were really AI before AI was cool. This is how the business was built. Talk specifically about the application of AI with Assist, what you're doing with Copilot, how that helps end users, and how you're able to monetize.
We've had a strong Silicon Valley R&D group from the beginning. The business is actually half people from Silicon Valley technology companies and half people from the firms themselves. That helps us maintain the balance of innovation and real intimacy with the industry. In the R&D group, we have been doing AI-based solutions for these markets. They were machine learning-based solutions for over a decade. Our time product that we talked about briefly was the first AI system in the market that watched what people were doing all day. If they were at their kids' soccer game on Saturday and they forgot to note that they had done some work for a client because they called them, the AI would suggest, "Hey, don't forget to bill this." We became known for innovation in that regard. The conflict system as well.
We cut 70% of the manual clearance effort and time out of opening new business for a lot of these firms through the use of machine learning-based AI. So we're known for that. And when the generative AI story started coming over the past 18-24 months, we made a decision consistent with our history, which is we're not going to be the people that are investing to build the deep models. We're going to be the people who apply all the great technology that's coming out to the specific use cases and work of the system. So we have a big partnership with Microsoft that gives us access to Copilot, engineers, and OpenAI. But we also have other Generative AI technologies that we use, open-source technologies that we use because we're not sure how it's all going to go.
One of the things that's a big part of our story now is this walls for AI compliance angle because what we've seen is as great as the systems are, the experience has really been kind of a blinking DOS prompt cursor, and people aren't exactly sure how to make best use of this in their work environment, and our strategy has been, ironically, to narrow the use cases where we're proposing to apply this technology to specific parts of the business, whether that's getting suggestions for companies that have popped up somewhere in the world that look a lot like your strategy in a private equity firm. Have you thought about talking to this potential company? This person has changed jobs somewhere in the world. Have you thought about reaching out to one of your clients?
This person has just brought in new business to one of your colleagues halfway around the world. Have you thought about talking to that partner and proposing to sell your advisory service, cross-sell it into that client? So Intapp Assist is very much designed to be behind the scenes, but making positive suggestions to the professionals about how they can better grow their work. So that's the applied AI idea. And what we're finding is the adoption and the uptake is very strong because we're not giving them a blinking cursor. We're actually making specific suggestions related to their business that come from our long history of relationships with these firms.
Are these SKUs? Do you buy this as a SKU, or is it incorporated into the platform, making it more sticky, more valuable?
We have both. We have components of the system that are growing because of the Generative AI technology. We have a system called Intapp Data that we launched about 12 months ago that's helping the firms keep track of all of their clients, that comes with it. And then we have specific SKUs with Intapp Assist. We launched DealCloud Activator, which I mentioned earlier, which is a separate SKU, as well as Origination, which is part of the Intapp Assist price.
You talked a little bit about your partnership with Microsoft, which has been important for you, and it's two-way. Maybe talk about that a little bit more. What do you get from Microsoft? How is their go-to-market joint product? How has that been helpful to you? And then does that help against Salesforce? Or how do you come in market against Salesforce?
So the Microsoft partnership is we're several years into it now. The partnership has several components. There's a technical component where we're standardizing our offerings on Azure that gets all the benefits for global deployments for some of the larger firms we're starting to win now. We have a close relationship with the Copilot engineers and some of the folks working in some of the other areas to help integrate our system into Microsoft's technologies. There's a whole technology track. There's a co-marketing track where Microsoft has invited us and our clients to Redmond, to their big center there, or at some of the Microsoft centers around the world, where we will co-sponsor events and talk about joint go-to-market. And then there's a strong co-selling component. So one of the things that we're very excited about is we are now fully integrated into Microsoft's Azure Marketplace.
You can buy all of Intapp software through the Azure Marketplace. And as part of that, the Microsoft sales team now gets 100% quota credit if Intapp sells its software. So they are directly aligned with us. Microsoft has gone through phases, but they've disassembled their vertical sales model. And they're really looking to folks like us to help them succeed in some of these end markets. And so their folks are incentivized to bring our team in for any of the opportunities that they're spotting to help grow the business. There's also a component with the marketplace. Microsoft has these agreements they call minimum Azure commitments, MACC agreements. And so they're selling to their clients a commitment that the client will spend X million, X hundred million for some of them a year. And they can now burn that down to buy Intapp software.
So it takes away the budget question because they've already committed to spending X million with Microsoft a year. And they can use that dollar for dollar to buy Intapp's products. So the partnership with Microsoft does a lot in the marketplace. We had the head of Microsoft Copilot speaking at our event last year when we announced Intapp Walls for Copilot. And we have had huge response from the clients about that relationship.
Great. David, I want to bring you into the conversation. Maybe just talk a little bit. Let's just level set on what you sell. What's the model? What do you land with? Is it the platform? Is it a product? Kind of how you sell and how you land and expand.
Yeah. So our model is equal across both the professional services as well as the financial services firms that we sell to. And depending on what that specific application or request, we can go either way. Typically, Time, our most oriented is around professional services, specifically law firms. But all the other, whether it's conflicts, DealCloud, others, that can go across. And so once you land, then it's got a very powerful expansion motion.
All right. And then you've gone through a very successful cloud transition from on-prem to cloud. Talk about that from the customer's perspective, just kind of the drivers and then the progress that you've made toward the cloud in terms of metrics.
Yeah, so we're cloud origination here on out. We do have some legacy that is still on-prem. We've continued to bifurcate the code set, meaning if you want attributes, AI, other things, you need to be cloud native, so that isn't necessarily delivered on-prem, and so even last week, we announced time for AI or AI for time, which will then help further differentiate and accelerate some of that pivot to the cloud. When you think about what's going through the client's journey, you're getting a lot more robust applicability, and so therefore, things have been relatively smooth, but we are also acknowledging that we're dealing with a very sophisticated, conservative end client base, and so there'll be some time there over the next 2-3 years.
So, 75% of ARR from the cloud, the fastest growing part of the business. And you're seeing more adoption from customers landing with cloud today.
Yes. Well, to be clear, we do not sell on-prem to anyone. Even firms who have on-prem software today, if they buy anything from us, they're buying it in the cloud. So we're helping the last, it's about $100 million, we've said, of the business is still remaining on-prem. By the way, it's annual licenses. We made that switch in 2008. So there's no perpetual business at all. There's about $100 million of annual on-prem license left that is continuing to migrate every year. We have a general manager in charge of that migration. And this is a metric that we have reported each quarter since the IPO because we knew this was an important part of the story. I think we're actually getting to a point now where it's much less of the story because we've made so much progress.
It's been sort of a cloud-only company for many years now. So we're going to help those firms continue to migrate. It'll be in a great spot.
Good. So you've made some changes to the Salesforce recently. Maybe talk about what those changes are and what you expect the impact to be.
So as we built the company, we were originally with the mid-market firms, as you would expect for a small company that was bootstrapped. And over time, as we developed the platform and more references and more capabilities in the team, we started moving up market to larger and larger firms. We talked at Investor Day a year ago about the shape of the market. It's a little less consolidated than Veeva's market, three times as large, but there are more firms. About 70% of our SAM is in the top 2,000 accounts. So as we've grown, we have done a few things to position ourselves to better serve that bulk of the market. One was the partnership. So we have the Microsoft partnership.
We also have an exciting partnership with KPMG that has happened since the IPO and has just sort of been developing in some of the large financial services institutions to help us deploy our software for some of the large rollouts. We've done some technology work to get the scalability and the security, a lot of the interoperability features that firms of the enterprise class wanted, so things like Snowflake integration, for example, we needed to do coming out of the IPO, and then most recently, to your question, we adopted an evolution in our sales organization, which we had not really touched since the IPO, but we separated out an enterprise Salesforce. We had tried a small version of that in our 2024 fiscal year.
We adopted a broader group because that had been successful in our 2025 fiscal year to really get the depth of coverage and density of coverage in those top 2,000 accounts. That was the change that we went through. We created a new accounts pursuits team and an existing accounts cross-sell growth team for the industries that we sell to. The charter is to continue to win the market share. A lot of the growth that you're seeing is progress in those enterprise accounts. We were very excited this last quarter in December and the call that we had last month to be able to name a bunch of the large enterprise accounts that came in there at the end of the year. We're seeing some initial results from this enterprise alignment.
The company has just been on a tear over the last year. One of the most successful companies in vertical software. A lot of that's attributed to this combination of growth and margin. You have a high kind of rule of, if I look at growth plus margin, accelerating growth in the cloud. Maybe talk about how you think about balancing growth and profitability, what you prioritize, and kind of the levers that you can pull on the profitability side.
Yeah. We'll always continue to over-index on growth. That said, we'll do it in a very balanced way, and a lot of that balance has been coming through a lot of our revenue mix, more applicable to SaaS versus some of our services operating line. We've also been getting a lot more productivity, not only out of our sales and marketing motions, and then in G&A, just absolute cost reductions. We continue to invest heavily within our product and engineering as we want to continue to develop that moat, as John explained earlier, but that's what's really been driving the margin equation. And so when you think about it, at our inaugural Investor Day, we gave a near-term, I'll call it guidance of 300- 500 bps a year, and we've overachieved that the last two years, and so we'll continue on that trend.
What's your view on the rise in stock price? What are you hearing from investors? Is this all your execution? Is it the market backdrop? Kind of what's the cause?
I can give my take, and you can take it. In all honesty, we came public in June of 2021. It was one of the busiest times ever. It was all remote. We never met anybody in person. I think there wasn't a lot of visibility to us. We've been a pretty quiet company as a private company focused on this particular end market. We started meeting people for the first time two years later. We had some strong investors who spent time with us right away. We've made a lot of effort to get out and meet everybody and to have folks start to appreciate the story. We also had some important tests, I think. People wanted to hear when we came public, are you going to make the progress in the cloud? Are you going to be able to show leverage in the model?
There were important things that people wanted to see us prove, and I think over that 2-3 year period, we were able to actually show, yes, this is going to work. I think also it contrasted with some of the other folks that had come public in the same time, so it just needed a little bit of time to get out and meet everybody, and we've been very excited about the shareholder support.
Yeah, likewise. And I think we've done a lot in just increasing the messaging in and around. We're just not a best-of-breed, single-point solution. We've continued to highlight our growth levers across the board. We've broken out SaaS and support in that, as well as continue to show profitability as we look at our long-term durability within this ecosystem. That and also going through our own shareholder rotation post-IPO, I think has really eliminated a lot of the bear side cases against Intapp, so.
Any questions from the audience?
Can you give an example of how AI can be used to improve litigation via law firms, for example? It's a very document-intensive area.
Yeah. So the question was, how can AI help with litigation in a law firm? So the firms that we sell to tend to be multi-strategy for the asset managers or multi-practice in the case of the law firms. So litigation would be a piece of the business. There is a long history in that example, specifically of an e-discovery industry that helps firms get through a lot of the discovery processes. So we don't actually do e-discovery. There are some other companies in the marketplace that do. I admire those companies. Our approach to that particular problem, I think there's a sales challenge there because you have to sell each and every litigation engagement. And then the engagement ends, and you have to sell the next one. So the cost of sale in that particular practice area on the litigation delivery itself is pretty tricky.
We've chosen, because of our history with these firms and watching how they work, to focus on the growth side. So we're helping the firms find the litigations using AI, look at the opportunities out there, and not just litigations, but IP matters, M&A matters, labor and employment matters, cross-selling. So this is what we mean by applied AI on the one hand and growth AI on the other, is we're choosing the aspects of the firm that I think are actually the most valuable to the firm, which is how they grow their business across the wide range of services that they provide.
Yes.
Just going back to the Salesforce, you now have a focus on larger accounts. Can you just talk about the mindset with forecasting? Obviously, your deal sizes will get bigger. The deals will get more complicated. There's more of a larger ASP at the time of land versus expand. So just kind of walk through how you think about that pipeline, close rates, KPIs, etc.
Yeah. We have very good telemetry within our own ecosystem. Clearly, we're not going to go out and forecast or even guide to hitting some of the largest lands, right? It's going to continue to be very prudent, very conservative, not only with that, but also with the beauty of a SaaS model itself, and so just know that the management team is very conservative on that aspect, but then longer term, we also know, here's all the deals in play over the visibility that we have with over the contacts that we're having. Now that we have named accounts and how we're serving them with direct sales going into those, we know where each of those are progressing within the respective pipeline.
So, just given the nature of your customer base, the nature of the data that you guys are sort of managing and touching, can you speak a little bit about the length of the deal cycles, what the implementation process actually entails, and then also which products do you typically land with, and what is the sort of expand? What drives the expand, the cross-sell over time?
So for the portion of our business that is below the top 2,000 accounts, we call that the mid-market. They're still relatively large firms, but we call that the mid-market. That's three months sales cycle, could be six months. In some cases where people have had a compliance issue that they need to solve, we can do a deal in two weeks or 30 days. So that happens. In the larger accounts, the enterprise accounts, it's more like six to nine months sales cycle. We get into the annual budget cycle and are working with a CIO, COO, sometimes as long as a year, sometimes longer for the really large enterprise accounts. The deployments are about the same. The smaller firms, 30- 90 days. The larger accounts, 6 - 9 months. So it's an enterprise model, a direct model. But the cloud helps us.
Once we've got people on the cloud system, we can deploy effectively there. So that's one of the good things about the transition there.
What do you land with?
Oh, what do we land with? Thank you. It's changed over time as the company has grown. But today, DealCloud, the business development system. Firms are very driven towards growth, as you would expect, and then compliance. We will get calls from firms that have an issue. And there's a very quick, often, sales cycle around compliance because we're one of the few people who really have a deep understanding of the style of regulatory issues that these firms are facing.
Are you landing within specific groups within these organizations and then broader groups? [inaudible]
Yeah. So we can both sell the firm or sell a piece of the firm. There's absolutely a land and expand model. A good example at Carlyle, we started with the private equity investors. And then the real estate investors next to them said, "Oh, we like that. Can we have it too?" And then the private credit group, and then the fund of funds group. And then eventually, Carlyle said, "Let's just do one Carlyle agreement." And we expanded to the whole firm. So that's a very common model for us.
That's kind of related. But who do you generally sell to that compliance officer? Was this necessary? I'm going to look into the CRM, but better ones. Am I still too far?
So the professionals, by whatever title they may have, managing director or partner, are a big part of our story. They're using DealCloud. They're using Time. They use our business acceptance intake conflict systems to open new business. So there's a lot of word of mouth among that community. And there's actually an interesting cross-profession tendency in these M&A deals. Bankers and lawyers and investors will see each other using our systems and talk about it. And so a lot of our original growth came from word of mouth across these firms. That's why we're in these markets. So certainly the folks who are doing the deals, but also the business services leaders. So the compliance team, the finance team, particularly around our time system, business development, and obviously IT is always involved in what we do.
One more. Go ahead.
Can you just discuss how you price the product? Is there some consumption element to it, or is the expansion all more products or more divisions within each customer? And then one other question on the cloud transition. Is there any uplift as customers transition from on-prem subscription to cloud, or do they transition dollar for dollar?
It's a subscription model. You can license for a group within the firm or the firm or by the user. We have not adopted a consumption component. That cuts both ways, and we felt like our long history, this subscription model gives us a lot of stability, and we've got a strong NRR that we've talked about.
Then, as far as the uplift,
we're seeing about 20%, and that's either through contract compliance, upsell, and cross-sell, so.
All right. What can we expect to see from Intapp over the next five years? Where are you going to be?
We look at Veeva as the pioneer with this business model, and they proved how significant a company you can build for an industry that's actually smaller, so we think there's a big company to be built here if we stay focused and execute because the firm's alternative is to build themselves or to try to verticalize a horizontal system that has the wrong data architecture that assumes that they're selling off of a price list when they're not, so we've had a lot of positive feedback that the firm has been underserved and is excited to have somebody who's really focused on them, so I think there's a big business to be built.
We look forward to seeing it. Thank you, John, David.
Thank you.