Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you all for joining us today. My name is Julia Vater Fernández, Investor Relations Director for VTEX. It is a great pleasure to welcome you to our first ever Investor Day. Today marks a special occasion as we celebrate VTEX second IPO anniversary. We are thrilled to have you here as we share our vision for the future and updates on our initiatives. As management may make forward-looking statements about company growth, industry trends, and technology initiatives, I would like to remind you that these statements are based on current information and assumption. Exercise caution and refer to our Form 20-F and other SEC filings for risk and uncertainties. We'll also discuss Non-GAAP measures, which can be reconciled in our earnings press release on our investor relations website.
Before we dive into our presentation, I would like to share our agenda for the day and present our management. Geraldo Thomaz, our founder and Co-CEO, will kick off the event by introducing VTEX and presenting our vision for the future. Following Geraldo's presentation, we'll have Fernanda Weiden, our Chief Technology Officer, and Renata Lorenz, our VP of Product. They will delve into our R&D efforts, and as well, they'll provide updates on our latest product launches. After Fernanda and Renata's presentation, we'll have a 15 minutes Q&A session focused on the VTEX intro, R&D, and product presentations. If you have any questions, please type them in the Q&A tab at the bottom right side of the screen. I'll be reading and posting the question to our presenting team. After finalizing these four segments, we'll have a quick five-minute break.
After the break, we'll continue with Mariano Gomide de Faria, our Founder and Co-CEO, and Santiago Naranjo, our Chief Revenue Officer. They'll discuss our market positioning and go-to-market strategy. Mariano will afterwards delve into our expansion plans in the U.S. and Europe, while Santiago will present our status expansion efforts in Latin America, including Brazil. Following this segment of presentations, we'll have another 15 minutes Q&A session focused on our go-to-market and sales presentation. Remember, please, to submit your questions in the Q&A tab at the bottom right side of the screen. We'll have time for another quick break. When we return, we'll have the last segment, where we'll welcome Andre Spolidoro, our Chief Strategy Officer, and Ricardo Camatta Sodré, our CFO.
Andre will discuss VTEX capital efficiency, history, and future trajectory. Ricardo will comment on the latest financial updates, followed by the last 15 minutes Q&A session focused on capital efficiency and financial presentations. Wrapping up the call, Geraldo will share some final words. Are you ready? Let's get started with our first segment on VTEX strategy, R&D, and product. We welcome Geraldo to the stage. Geraldo, are you there?
Yes, I am. Yes, I am, Julia. Thank you all for joining us today. It's a real pleasure to be here with you presenting VTEX. I'm going to do a quick recap of our story and then share with you a little bit of our vision. In this brief summary, I will recap several key points already presented during our IPO and the last two years. I gave a lot of thought, and we all gave a lot of thought on the strategy we communicated to investors, and we're happy to say we continue to meticulously execute it. Following this, I will go deeper into our vision for the future of our company, providing additional insight. VTEX provides a software-as-a-service digital commerce platform to large blue-chip enterprises. Our customers are primarily brand manufacturers who want to go direct to consumers and retailers exploring new digital sales channel.
We have been a leader in accelerating commerce transformation in Latin America, and we are expanding globally. At VTEX, we believe in a world where brands can be closer to their consumers, where VTEX can be the backbone for connected commerce. When we founded VTEX, we didn't create it based on what our customers wanted. We created based on what we believed they needed, sorry. What they needed was to start their digital transformation quickly, without excessive overhead and the ability to evolve, learning what works and what doesn't work in an agile manner. They also needed flexibility and customization to work in a scalable and efficient way for their enterprise complexities. My co-founder, Mariano, and I, had this vision over a decade ago, inspired by our experience building Walmart.com.br e-commerce website in Brazil.
We realized that instead of focusing on servers, development processes, and other technical aspects, the project should have focused on increasing assortment and delivering faster to consumers. Since then, we have built the technology infrastructure to solve this problem. Our goal is to empower brands to stay relevant for the convenience-driven consumer in an efficient way. Today's consumer expect fast product delivery and the ability to find everything they need in one place, and seamless interactions across digital and physical channels. This sets a high bar for brands and retailers to stay relevant. Our team of experts at VTEX, with over 20 years of experience in digital commerce, are ready to stand side by side with our customers to provide expert guidance on their transformative journey. Let me give you an example to make it more tangible.
In the past, companies were divided in silos, e-commerce and brick-and-mortar operations. We believe this is no longer an option. Brands need to think holistically about their operations to be closer to the consumers, we can help them in connecting all the dots. We have many trusted customers, including Adidas, Whirlpool, Electrolux, Samsung, Unilever, and Avon, among others. For us, being able to partner with such high quality and prestigious brands represents the ultimate validation of our technology. Our focus is on enterprises, as a result, more than 85% of our revenue comes from online stores with at least $25,000 in ARR. These online stores pay us an average of $138,000 per year, a substantial average ticket that reflects our enterprise focus. Let's look at some numbers.
In the last 12 months, in the first quarter of 2023, we processed $13.3 billion in GMV and generated $165.2 million in revenue, with a subscription gross margin of 73.4%. We currently have more than 2,600 customers with 3,400 stores across 38 countries. These figures demonstrates our solid financial performance and global presence. Going back to our timeline. Despite our impressive growth, we have achieved all this with relatively little capital. We have had private investment rounds, they were mostly secondary to clean up our cap table. The primary investment component into VTEX has been approximately $75 million, about $10 million were paid back in dividends while we were private. Only a net of $65 million were really raised.
At the end of 2020, we had $75 million in cash in our balance sheet. In 2021, we raised approximately $300 million in our IPO. As of March 2023, we still had over $230 million in our balance sheet, even after executing an almost $20 million share buyback. All that leaves us in a very strong financial position, especially as we continue our journey towards profitability and cash generation. Let's talk about the market landscape. VTEX operates in the massive and rapidly growing e-commerce market, with Latin America being the fastest growing region, currently at only 12% penetration. VTEX is the leader in e-commerce in Latin America, with 90% of our revenue coming from the region in 2022.
We're the leaders, we have figured out how to navigate the complexity of the Latin market, giving us a competitive advantage. On top of that, we're expanding globally. The United States and Europe already represents 10% of our revenue. The global market is a massive opportunity, with more than $6 trillion in double-digit growth projection. With our $13.3 billion in GMV, we're just scratching the surface of our potential. Mariano later will deep dive on this today. Stay tuned for that. In today's ever-changing market landscape, it's crucial to differentiate ourselves from the competition. Traditional legacy platforms, once dominant players, are now considered outdated providers that enterprise and retailers are actively seeking to migrate away from. On the other hand, emerging headless players offer flexibility, but come with the complexity and high operating costs.
Our differentiation lies in the efficient balance between customization and speed to market. We understand that enterprise and retailers require a platform that offers both flexibility and ease of use. With, for example, as seamless integrations of sales and fulfillment channels through omnichannel capabilities. Unlike traditional software providers that lack flexibility, a headless solution that can be complex and expensive, VTEX stand out by offering a composable and complete platform that combines the best of both worlds. Our composable technology allow our customers to adapt our solution to their needs while benefiting from our core homogeneous multitenant platform. Our API first and multi-tenant architecture, new developments and integrations automatically become available to our customers. We also have our development platform, VTEX IO, that ensures security, privacy, and scalability for business to grow.
Developers worldwide choose us as their preferred platform for commerce, relying on our tool and environment to deploy, experiment, and evolve their digital commerce applications. VTEX's strong ecosystem of integrated solutions generates network effect, which is a powerful moat and hard to explain, and hard to replicate. Now, how are we thinking about VTEX? At VTEX, our vision is clear: to become the backbone of connected commerce, the platform that powers unified commerce experiences for businesses around the globe. Unified commerce means breaking down the barriers between online and offline channels, seamlessly integrating them into a unified customer experience.
Today, I want to share with you our strategy, focus, and the key pillars that will drive our success in this ever-evolving landscape. Firstly, we're proud to be at the forefront of the omnichannel revolution. Our Sales App and Pick and Pack solutions have positioned us one step ahead of our competitors.
We are redefining the boundaries between digital and physical commerce, empowering personal shoppers and increasing conversion and efficiency even in their physical stores. By expanding into the assisted sales and fulfillment add-on, we enhance our competitiveness in the omnichannel market and open up new avenues for growth. Composability is another key differentiator that sets us apart. Through modularization, we connect with other technology to expand our platform efficiently. We firmly believe that modular architectures enable long-term innovation. FastStore and VTEX IO are clear examples, providing our customers with peace of mind, simplicity, and scalability. Our platform's zero-friction onboarding and collaboration capabilities allow customers and partners to seamlessly join the VTEX ecosystem. Our extraordinary speed to market empowers them to find, buy, and sell products and services, creating a thriving connected ecosystem.
Another standout feature is the single control panel for every order, enabling our customers to manage 100% of their orders from all sales channels through our VTEX platform. This enable our customers to have more control and insight over their operation, which translates into better operational results. On top of that, our platform also acts as an autonomous copilot, using AI-driven solution to optimize various aspects of e-commerce, providing recommendations and empowering our customers to navigate the complexities of digital commerce with ease and confidence. At VTEX, customer satisfaction shapes our journey towards building a remarkable future. Reliability is our commitment. VTEX's focus is to provide secure, scalable, and dependable services for the interconnected commerce ecosystem. VTEX's growth strategy revolves around the five main avenues that you see on the screen.
In this intro, I just quickly touched on why we successfully add new customers to our platform, how we will help our customers grow their GMV above market growth, and some of our innovative products. We also covered a glimpse of our global expansion and the powerful ecosystem we have around VTEX. This is just an introduction. Throughout this event, we will go deeper into each of these growth avenues, highlighting the significant opportunity they present to our company expansion and success. We're shaping the future of commerce, scaling commerce transformation, shaping remarkable customer experiences, and solidifying our position as the leader in digital commerce industry. Our journey is unstoppable, and we invite all of you to join us on this extraordinary adventure. Thank you so much, and see you back in the Q&A session. Now, I'll leave the floor to Nanda.
Thank you, Geraldo. Hello, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here with you today to share our research and development updates. We have framed our research and development updates and priorities across three areas of value generation for VTEX. The first area is peace of mind. This means building trust with our customers by enhancing reliability and performance of our commerce platform. We aim to provide stability, enhance platform security, and also address core retail omni-functional needs. In this line, it's worth mentioning something that might sound obvious: uptime really matters. At first glance, having a headless installation with 20 integration or 30 integration, each provider, each one of them providing three nines of time seems impressive. However, let's dive into those numbers.
When you multiply the 99.9% uptime by 20 providers-30 providers, the combined platform uptime can drop significantly to 97%-98%, suddenly the picture doesn't look as rosy. On an operational side, this translates to almost one day of downtime per month for the customer, which is highly inconvenient, especially during crucial events such as Black Friday. It's no wonder that many customers, including Carrefour, have migrated to VTEX. They recognize the importance of uninterrupted service and reliability, especially during sales peak periods. Moving on to the second area, we want to unlock the United States and Europe regions by meeting localization requirements regarding privacy and administration. Additionally, we aim to tap into the vast potential of the B2B market in the United States. Expanding our presence and capability into these regions will contribute significantly to our growth.
For example, besides FastStore and the Extensions Hub that Renata will cover in a moment, we have introduced the Marketplace Offers Quality Filters, which streamline cataloging process and enhance transparency for submitted orders. The visual editor for merchandising rules in VTEX's Intelligent Search empowers our users to customize their search results, while the integration, for instance, with Google Pay as a payment method, ensures faster and more secure checkouts. These product launches help VTEX's expansion into the United States and Europe, meeting localization requirements and also producing an enhanced user experience. The third value generation area is expanding into assisted sales and fulfillment add-ons. We want to empower personal shoppers, increase monetization from the physical stores, and enhance our competitiveness in this omnichannel retail market.
By broadening our reach across different channels, we can increase our platform stickiness, unlock higher lifetime values, new opportunities, and obviously new revenue streams. Renata will go into a lot of detail in this specific initiative. Before I hand over to Renata to cover the product side, I want to share how we have been driving our business towards greater efficiency. Our focus on improving cloud efficiency throughout 2022 has yield significant and long-lasting results. Several key drivers contributed to it. For example, the continued migration to systems from Windows Server to Linux, the diversification of CPU usage to include ARM64 and AMD, alongside with Intel, and also the rationalization of our investments in observability, as an example. In addition, we reduced waste of idle resource, improved the caching and auto-scaling, and implemented InnerSource and instant right sizing across multiple services in the platform.
These measures allowed us to optimize our costs while maintaining high performance. We are now graduating from our efficiency program, which means efficiency will be embedded in every single thing we do moving forward. We are committed to providing better tooling for our teams to assess their cloud investments and, of course, keep them, the costs under control. Just to share some additional context, by optimizing our tech stack, we are now less dependent on a specific software provider, especially on our observability stack, and we can more easily switch providers if we need, while still providing world-class tooling to our engineering teams. This allow us to continue improving the efficiency of our platform, and additionally, making our platform more flexible, allowing us to upscale and downscale more quickly when we need it, which also help efficiency going forward.
Now, to finalize, I would like to share the impact of these initiatives in our PNL so far. In the last six quarters, we have consistently improved our year-over-year subscription gross margin. In 2022, our subscription gross margin improved by more than 350 basis points each quarter, and in Q1 2023, we have already delivered an improvement of more than 400 basis points. We expect to continue delivering consistent improvements year-over-year going forward. The future is bright for VTEX, and we are committed to pursuing those opportunities with determination. Together, we will build a more efficient, resilient, and customer-focused commerce platform. With that, we have covered all the research and development updates. Thank you for your attention. I will see you in the Q&A in a moment.
Now I will pass on to Renata.
Thank you, Nanda. Hi, everyone. What a pleasure to be here today to cover our product update session. At the heart of our company lies our product, which is a greater source of value. It is through our product that we express our vision in a connected commerce, where every player is connected to unleash their full potential. As Geraldo mentioned, our execution focus on two main fronts, unification and modularization. Today, I want to introduce our new releases and the success stories that reaffirm the power of our vision. Our customers are already experiences the advantage over the composable architecture. Brands like Briggs & Stratton in the United States, Nike in South America, Mazda in England, Auchan in Europe, make part of the list, together with the Foschini Group in Africa and Leem in the Middle East.
Those are examples of customers experiencing the power of VTEX. To understand what products and solutions our customers need, our team of ecommerce specialists assessed the market environment and found four brutal facts that affect modern-day operations. Our products solve those issues. Let's dive into each one of them. The first brutal fact is that significant amount of time is spent by engineering teams on maintaining the spaghetti code or the legacy code. As a platform, we have the responsibility to guarantee the scalability and efficiency of our customers. For that, we've created the VTEX IO, the development platform that enables technical teams to extend and connect the VTEX platform in a simple, more scalable way. Customers can use VTEX IO to develop custom storefronts, integrations, and expand the VTEX Admin with new functionalities. We have recently expanded VTEX IO capabilities into the new VTEX IO FastStore.
FastStore is VTEX new front-end technology that provides all the tools business and technical users need to develop, manage, and evolve at the coupled storefront. The product was developed with speed in mind. It delivers a fast loading time for buyers, and it's also simple and fast for developers and marketers to use. Recently, we've introduced the Extensions Hub, the new version of VTEX App Store, where retailers can expand their offering by adding solutions from partners developed with VTEX IO. Retailers can find and configure partner solutions, all without leaving the VTEX Admin. With this, integrations are now in the hands of the retailer in a scalable and secure way, representing another step in VTEX vision of building a live, connected ecosystem. One of the best examples of VTEX IO is Motorola.
With the challenge of maintaining multiple country-specific front-end applications, with VTEX IO, they were able to streamline their architecture and reduce costs significantly. They developed a single front-end app that catered all their markets, allowing their teams to focus on creating a unified customer experience across the different regions. VTEX IO has been a game changer for Motorola, simplifying its development process and saving valuable resources. The next brutal fact that we want to go over is that 83% of B2B buyers prefer to shop through digital channels, according to Gartner. We present our B2B features and marketplace to create direct channels and avoid conflict with partners. To level set the ground in the manufacturing world, we have B2B and D2C as key models. B2B involves manufacturers serving other companies, while D2C enables direct sales to end consumers.
However, those models come with challenges: channel conflict and limited reach. That's where VTEX steps in with our game-changing approach, B2B2B and B2B2C. We empower manufacturers to establish direct channels and integrate partners' inventories. This unlocks expanded fulfillment networks, expanding their reach and scaling operations efficiently. What sets VTEX apart is our native marketplace architecture. This robust combination of B2B capabilities and marketplace empowers manufacturers to operate in both B2B and B2C domains. By embracing our solutions, manufacturers overcome channel conflicts, extend their market reach, and drive operational efficiency. Our value proposition is very clear: by partnering with VTEX, manufacturers enhance their bottom line and strengthen customer relationships. One of the best examples of adoption of B2B capabilities is Stanley Black & Decker. With VTEX, Black & Decker sales representatives can provide a simple experience to their customers, simplifying order management and reducing manual effort.
They have been operating their B2B business with VTEX since 2019, currently running our platform in South Korea, India, Brazil, and expanding it to the U.S. and the U.K. A good example of the B2B2C is Mazda. It has created a Vehicle Stock Locator to allow customers across the U.K. to find, compare, and reserve inventory at dealer locations. With VTEX, they were able to integrate inventory from dealerships, enabling customers to purchase online both parts and cars from the nearest authorized dealer. This optimization has increased efficiency and provide a more friendly experience for Mazda customers. With VTEX marketplace and order management solutions, together, they played a crucial role in Mazda's success. Let's go to the third brutal fact. Is that the one that since the pandemic, inventory levels have increased by 22% without sales tracking this increase?
We will showcase the new solutions that help customers to optimize their inventory and streamline their fulfillment operations. Our order management system enables integration of physical store inventory into the digital journey. Not too long ago, we lived in a world where inventory was kept in separate silos. E-commerce inventory was separate from the physical store inventory and vice versa. With the pandemic, this separation was no longer viable. Those who hadn't integrated had to catch up, while those who had were able to thrive. One of our customers, Track&Field, after quickly adapting our solution during the pandemic, achieved a remarkable milestone. 81% of online orders being fulfilled by the physical store. We've also recently launched Pick and Pack, a solution for optimizing omnichannel operations that transform physical stores into distribution centers, enabling quick and efficient picking, packing, and last mile delivery of orders.
Natively integrated with our OMS, it has a leading time to market compared to other solutions, and enables merchants to track and measure the performance of their entire fulfillment network with real-time data. We've also simplified the integration with Brazil leading carrier, Correios, through the VTEX Shipping Network, providing updated tracking information and competitive pricing. These innovative products reduce manual labor, enhance scalability, and easily integrate with our existing systems. They generate better economics for our customers as it reduces shipping costs, while at the same time increase conversion rates and user satisfaction. Let's go to the fourth brutal fact, that is increasing customer acquisition costs. We've introduced the VTEX Sales App, the omnichannel product that bridges the gap between sales and brick-and-mortar stores. This powerful tool empowers sales associates to unlock the full potential of the retailer, physical stores, and e-commerce operations.
By granting access to inventory across all channels, including physical stores, distribution centers, partner sellers, and suppliers, as well as customer purchase data and behavioral insights, this app enhances customer support, boosts sales, and increase basket size. A standout feature of the Sales App is its endless aisle capability that enables access to inventory from any channel, preventing missed sales opportunities. Whether it's ecommerce inventory, physical stores, or even partner sellers in the supplier marketplace model, this single product integrates the entire retailer operations, regardless of the channel. While we see the Sales App demo, let me tell you the case of Decathlon, a global leader in sporting goods retail that showcases the transformative impact of the VTEX Sales App.
By adopting a sales in our omnichannel approach, their physical stores now influence over a third of the digital sales with the positive experience of their customers. If a product is out of stock in one location, it will now be located and shipped from another store, ensuring customer satisfaction every time. Now, from the combination of Live Shopping and conversational commerce, we present VTEX Personal Shopper, which enables company to offer exclusive one-to-one customer service through live stream videos. When the customer requests assistance, the dedicated salesperson connect via video through the VTEX Admin, and from there, the Sales App can select and send products to the customer, who can add them to cart, what increases sales and average ticket size for the online orders. The following customer testimonial showcases VTEX sales empowerment tools and the impact on increasing conversion rates and customer engagement.
Electrolux, one of our customers, wanted to empower their sales team and enhance the overall customer experience. With VTEX, they implemented personalized shopper capability and the VTEX Sales App that enabled their team to deliver exceptional service and drive conversion. Electrolux has witnessed a significant increase in sales effectiveness and customer loyalty, and for this, let's watch the testimony of Gabriel from Electrolux.
At Electrolux, we have basically all channels. We are talking about D2C, which is the biggest one. We have a marketplace, we have physical stores also connected today with online. We also have B2B and B2E, which is the site for employees. Today, the B2B, the way it is the first step of a transformation that we are undergoing, allowing technical assistance, for example, that we had to call with a slow process, to be able to buy accessories, consumables, parts in a much smoother way and with a much more integrated logistics within the order process. Today, within the same tool, I have orders from the marketplace, I have orders from B2B, I have orders from the employee sale. You have a unique view of the operation, which makes management much easier at the end of the day.
Great testimonia! Now let's move to AI. At VTEX, we believe that connected commerce serves as a gateway to harness the potential of artificial intelligence. Our copilot solution helps customers make smarter business decisions with AI assistance. We've now introduced the Planner feature, an innovative product that enables quick and data-driven decision-making with the VTEX ecosystem. That's not all. AI is transforming our platform in various ways. AI helps supports the optimization of product offering by dynamically adjusting pricing based on conversion rates. This makes pricing strategies agile and responsive. Our logistics is also leveraging AI, optimizing deliveries, and improving customer satisfaction. Frictionless checkouts across multiple channels are now a reality with AI. Our new message-to-order feature converts messages, shopping lists, and PDF quotations into orders. Additionally, our payment gateway automatically selects the best conversion-driven payment option.
In summary, we have identified major brands and retailers' pain points, and we just presented four new solutions to solve those problems. As a platform, we understand that it's our role to ensure scalability and operational efficiency for our customers. Technical debt is a reality for most retailers. Our unwavering dedication remains to support our customers throughout their journey by creating products and solutions that enhance simplicity and scalability, while at the same time maintaining favorable unit economics to ensure business sustainability. Thank you for your attention.
Thank you to all our first segment presenters for the valuable insights and updates. Let's wrap up the session with a 15 minutes Q&A session. If you have any questions for Geraldo, Fernanda, Renata, please type them in the Q&A tab at the bottom right side of the screen. The first question is from Marcelo Santos, from JPMorgan. Good morning. Thanks for the presentation. How much more space is there to gain Non-GAAP gross subscription margins?
Thank you. I'll answer the question. I'll take the question. Marcelo, thank you very much for the question. There's several initiatives we're doing to improve the gross margin of the company. One of them, but not limited, is like optimizing our infrastructure, our tech infrastructure, as Fernanda said. Naturally, there's optimizations in the way we provide support, centralize some areas, decentralize some others. But I'll focus on about the tech infrastructure. Tech infrastructure, as you've seen, we're evolving a lot since a year ago, but I don't believe it is in the end. I feel that you cannot expect the pace to be as strong as it were during the last year until today.
I guess you will see more improvements, and Andrea will talk a little bit about that and how this is affecting our long-term vision of the company. Thank you.
Perfect. Thank you very much, Geraldo. Our next question is from Eduardo Rubi. There were six launches at VTEX DAY. How has the customer reception been? Which ones have had more adherence so far?
I can take this.
Okay, go ahead, Renata, please.
Thank you. You can complement me at the end if you want. Yeah, we have been launching in-- so we launched many big launches on VTEX DAY, and we see Pick and Pack and Sales App, you know, being very well accepted with customers as they, you know, they add up on the channel, on our, you know, value chain, and they offer a better customer experience for, you know, for the overall order experience. Those have been great, you know, they have been great, you know, acceptance with the market. I also like, you know, the FastStore as we, you know, unlock this product. We have been seeing great, you know, conversion rates and user experiences on those stores.
Amazing. Thank you so much. Now we have another question. This is from Nicholas Dowo. He says: Hi, thanks for the investor day. You're welcome. Could you explain a bit more about the AI revenue opportunity as presented? Is it chargeable or included in the current fee? Thanks.
I can get that, and Fernanda, Renata can help me. I won't limit myself to AI. I'll talk also about the power of data that our platform produces, that gives valuable information to our customers. This data can be used in another AI training models that our customers can do in the future that are proprietary as well. The idea is that we will have a lot of built-in, included in the price, AI capabilities. Just as it is today, we have a API-first approach. You can extract data from most of our services, all data from our services, you can extract through our API.
If you are an enterprise customer and you want to extract the term of the data, you want to extract comprehensive logs, you want to extract comprehensive payment logs, you want to extract security information so that you do your own assessment on security risks, eventually this can be charged because this is a premium service. Same apply to AI. I gave a real tangible example for data. I cannot, for now, give real tangible examples for AI because, you know, we still need to find out what are the true differentiation that we will bring to the market with AI. When it's true differentiation, it's not like any other ecommerce platform, the tendency is that we will charge an extra fee for that.
The idea is that VTEX is level set with other platforms in all this technology, and where we differentiate, we charge a premium price for that.
Perfect. Thank you very much. Our next question is from Tiago. Tiago Kapulskis, who says, "Hi, two quick questions on my side here. You showed Nike as a client of VTEX, in one of the slides. Are you doing business with the company in Brazil/LATAM or worldwide? Could you explore a bit more use cases with them, given that they are a premium company? The second question is on observability improvement initiative. Are you taking or thinking about cloud observability using vendors like Datadog, to rationalize usage?
About Nike, maybe this question should be asked to Stanley and Mariano. hey are in the forefront of how we are evolving with each customer. Nike is an important customer for us in LATAM. They started in four countries already. You know, like, I won't limit myself to example of Nike, but this is a natural path of our customer that VTEX, they start with a single country or a single brand in one. As they feel that they are more agile, they expand to other brands and other countries. This is not a fast product, but a fast process, but it is a consistent process that happened throughout the years, and that's why we have such good net revenue retention at KPIs.
That's the case specific of Nike. You know, like, they're starting the journey. They're customers of us since how long time ago, Stanley?
one year.
Just 1.5 years . We have customers like Whirlpool, that are customers of our since 2012 or 2013, I don't recall right now, and they are much bigger in other countries and other brands. They have five brands with us and more than, I don't know how many, how many countries, more than 10 countries, I'm sure. That's a good journey for customers like Nike, and we have several others, from Samsung and several customers like Nike. For the second question, Tiago, I will lend the floor to Nanda. Nanda, could you help me on that?
Perfect. Yes, of course. Observability. Yes, we use it to use a single platform for to host most of our capability on the observability side. We are talking about cloud observability. We are not using Datadog. We use OpenSearch, and we use some OpenSearch tools. We are also using Honeycomb as our as our provider for that. It's not only about cloud and platform observability, but also about observability of our own platform, because this allow us to map optimization opportunities in our own code base that will then be seen in our results as Geraldo mentioned earlier, a continued improved subscription gross margin.
If I can add, we're truly a technology company, right? Nanda, you know, our volumes are sizable. Like, we have services right now that are serving almost 70 million requests per minute at this moment, as we are speaking. There's several technologies that we need to customize from some open source technology to the way that we need them to work, and we need to be very careful, when we decide if we're gonna buy or build a infrastructure software for, to help us, because the volumes are already sizable, right?
Yeah. It's never an easy answer, if we build and if we buy.
Exactly.
Perfect. Thank you very much. Our next question is from Rodrigo Cassiolatto. He's asking: VTEX have developed products in OMS and other fronts, which are usually charged separately by other software e-commerce platform providers. Do you see potential for eventually having relevant monetization from such products?
I can talk about that, Rodrigo. It's the same, you know, like, remember our vision and our goal to be the backbone for connected commerce, to blend the barriers between physical and e-commerce, physical commerce and e-commerce, like everything should be digital commerce. For this, it's very important that all of the orders of our customers convert to our system. Us having the OMS embedded in our offering is so powerful to getting to this goal, that the question about should we overcharge OMS or not is a minor question now. It's not a big question to be done. But the answer for the long term is yes.
As we, as all this product and product definition and product articulation evolve, you are seeing, and customers are seeing that we are decomposing our product, the commerce platform, the OMS, the front-end cloud. We are separating some parts so that the customers can understand our product offering better. Yes, we can price it for that, do a pricing that is very tailored for the customer, depending on what are their needs. To not- we're not doing now, we love the way we charge our customers on their success. This is, this brought the company until here. We are a company, a group of people that are aligned with the interest of growing the revenue of our customers. We do whatever it took to get there.
We needed to build an OMS, an OMS that talks to physical stores, an OMS that talks to franchises of the brand that we serve. We did everything we could as a software company, as the technology team, to increase the revenue of our customers, because we upsell if they increase revenue. We're very happy with the business model that we currently have. It doesn't mean that this will last forever.
Perfect. Thank you very much. The next question, and most likely last question, is from Clarke Jefferies. It says, "Where does omnichannel and on-premise functionality rank as an R&D priority? Online channel, or omnichannel now being 35% of our GMV, do you expect omnichannel to continue to grow? How important will Sales App be in your omnichannel on-premise investment?
I can get that as well. Thank you, Clarke. My understanding of on-premise, that Clarke said, is like orders coming from physical stores. That's, that's my assumption here. I do believe, Clarke, that we gave a very important step, that we made a very important step, getting orders from the online world and driving these orders to the physical store so that the physical store delivered the order. This is the cause of the GMV that you're seeing here, and this is growing. There's several avenues, several customers that need to do that, several new stores, we need to implement this, and franchisees of the brands of our customers, several customers that have franchisees, we're just scratching the surface on that direction. When you...
Now there's another direction that we are planning to explore. you know, like, e-commerce is in Latin America, 12% penetration, right? Roughly every brand has 90% of their sales through physical stores and 10% of their sales, more or less, through e-commerce. Suppose that I'm a fashion brand, and I want to optimize my inventory. I don't need to have... I cannot, because of a crisis or something like that, I don't want to have all the colors of a shirt. I don't want to have all, even all the sizes of a shirt. Then I will implement Sales App to my salespeople so that we enable them to not lose the sale if there's lack of inventory in the local physical store.
Now we're exploring another direction. The physical store will do the sale, the e-commerce network will do the delivery. This is a completely new avenue, and although it is, you know, like, you can claim that a few percentage of customers will buy that way because, you know, going to a physical store is a very impulsive movement. But if you, if you estimate that 5%-10% of the customers will buy that way, it's almost, it almost double the volume of the e-commerce volume, right? Because e-commerce volume is 10%. If you, if you... I don't know, if 9% of the volume comes from customers that are buying products that are not available at the physical stores, eventually the volume can double.
I mean, my bottom line here is that omnichannel integration, connecting, digitalizing the physical store is a very big opportunity for fulfillment and for selling, and we're just scratching the surface for that.
Just to add, Geraldo, the Sales App is the materialization of this order that starts in the physical store and goes into our online world. It is a top priority for us to make sure that we work directly with customers that are starting to implement as early adopters and making sure that the experience is good and is helping us to drive this new channel or new revenue stream opportunity.
Perfect. Thank you, Nanda. Yes.
Our Q&A time is over. Thank you very much, everyone, for participating, big claps for our presenters. Now, let's take a quick 10-minute break to recharge, grab a cup of coffee, or stretch your legs. Let's be back shortly.
Welcome back, everyone. Now, let's go straight to our second segment on market positioning, go-to-market strategy, international expansion, and Latam, including Brazil growth. Let's now welcome Mariano to the stage. Mariano, the floor is yours.
Thank you. Thank you, Julia. We are doing this Investor Day live from New York Stock Exchange. As you can see in this background, we put the Sugar Loaf here because that was where the company was founded. Actually, we are inside New York Stock Exchange with clients celebrating the two years of the IPO of VTEX. Two years ago was the IPO, and we brought our clients here to celebrate with us, as probably you can follow could follow from the CNBC opening bell ceremony. Today is a special day. It's emblematic day. It's something that you look backwards and I'm really proud. I'm really proud how we are consistent delivery our path, and we are consistently building the foundations for our future.
Let's talk about VTEX marketing positioning. By declaration, we chose to express VTEX brand through the cases of our clients, so nothing better than start by listening our customers and allow them to talk in our behalf. Please, let's see the video.
We choose VTEX because we are looking for partnership. We are not a technology company. We don't aim to be a technology company. We want to do retail. We know our customers, and we want to have partners which can cover this gap that we have right now. We found VTEX with the SaaS solution to be, let's say, the best option in this direction.
Brazil is critical. Speaking from an e-commerce perspective, it's our top-selling, most productive country. Our partnership with VTEX is critical. We're tied at the hip. Our success is their success. Beyond technology, which you can buy anywhere, it's about the partnership.
We've had some great ideas about how to keep surprising our customers. We have usually been able to develop them on VTEX.
The change in the evolution was basically dramatic in such a, you know, a short period of time.
One thing that we saw in VTEX was a very strong roadmap.
... not only for the short term, but also for the long term.
VTEX is a key partner for us. VTEX is enabling e-commerce for Carrefour in Brazil, in all Latin. We've been working for quite some years already. We are still continuing to work. We have strong ambition in the coming years.
Those customers are just a sample of our customer base. In firsthand, the announcement of some of our new logos additions we have conquered across the world. Those are enterprise brands that have chosen VTEX for our ability of delivery through our product and our commerce knowledge. We are happy to announce that Groupe Casino, one of the largest grocery groups in the world, has decided to migrate their headquarters' digital commerce operation in France to VTEX. Let me repeat that. A global company with more than 10,000 stores across the globe, has chosen a non-European platform to run their digital commerce business in the country they started in the first place, France. Secondly, I'm happy to announce that here in the U.S., we went live with Beautycounter, a global leader in beauty and personal care, part of Carlyle Group portfolio.
Not only they were looking to digitalize its physical sales operation, but expand the direct consumer strategy to the U.S. and Canada. Last but not least, as a proof of our platform capabilities, we have added our customer base, Hearst Corporation, which really needs no introduction, right? If you have been ever in a convenience store, you've probably been face to face with Hearst magazines, such as ELLE, Cosmopolitan, Bazaar, Men's Health. They chose us because of the composable commerce capabilities. This is interesting. I always been questions in the streets that say, "Why companies choose VTEX? Why to migrate from SAP Salesforce to VTEX?" This is an interesting thing, why companies choose VTEX. Let me try to explain why and how we've been positioning our platform for the market.
COVID has rewritten the rules of commerce, we have entering a new era, no longer focused on growth at any cost. Now it's about profitability, sustainable growth. As a recent study by Policy Sapiens found, 37% of the retailers are not meeting their profitability targets in ecommerce. Something's wrong. Many customers needs help identifying the best opportunity to invest their capital to generate profits. VTEX has great responses to that demand. The diagram that you are seeing now represents a real commerce architecture of a customer before migrating to VTEX. It's a nightmare. The system have many dependencies, middlewares, over-customization, making it fragile and hard to scale. Even more, almost impossible to maintain. More than anything, it's pretty expensive to maintain. The sum can reach incredible 8% of the online GMV just to maintain the stack of your digital commerce operation. That's not sustainable.
Maintaining the legacy commerce, it is not sustainable in that sense, from a business, IT, and financial state point. Something will happen. The question we often ask our prospects is: How much of your online GMV is allocated to tech? Amortizations plus maintenance. Normally, this is in a different lines in the P&L. Put them together, they're gonna surprise you. Labor, hosting, this is not different like, cost centers. This is the maintenance of your tech stack for commerce. Modern CIOs and CEOs are pursuing sustainable commerce architecture, moving away from legacy systems. VTEX composable commerce approach aims to reduce the total cost of ownership of the entire commerce stack to a healthier 2%-3% range of the GMV, enabling customers to allocate more capital to marketing, retention, and actually innovation.
As customers migrate off their legacy platforms, with VTEX, they can discover the best of the two worlds: a fast go-to-market with an end-to-end solution that combines freedom to compose their unique modules with hundreds live connected solutions provided by our ecosystem, and the end-to-end solution that allows them to go to market pretty fast. Speed to market, plus freedom of customization. That's why companies are choosing VTEX. With VTEX platform, you can choose what module to compose with third-party solutions, and you can choose to write off any module of your architecture as you want. This is what we see as a new trending wave, the pragmatic composable commerce. Freedom, it is the ability to test, the ability to compose, and just the ability to compose when you need, not because you are mandated to compose.
Real freedom can only be accessed when you have a composable but complete platform. That's why we pitch VTEX as composable and complete platform. This is the core of our value prop. Our customers can enter in the new testing economy and leaving behind the old building economy. This is the disruption VTEX is delivering to the world of commerce. At the end, we believe innovation is ability to test, the ability to test fast, the ability to write off components. Freedom to innovate is not represented by unlimited ability to build. It is indeed by the unlimited ability to test. Let's do a little tech diving into our composable and complete platform. As seen in the pink boxes, we provide a set of commerce services for digital commerce, experience management, order management, and marketplace management.
These complete set of functionalities helps customers migrate their existing operations quickly. Our customers can also extend or swap the native capabilities by custom build, once under the same infrastructure. Look at the light pink boxes now in your left. We also provide add-ons, channels, and experience applications out of the box. You can create new channels with VTEX, not with CapEx, but with a very fast market. Finally, look at the gray boxes. With VTEX live connected ecosystem, our clients can configure third-party applications without having to build any code, any middleware. Better than myself, I would like to bring the voice of a customer to show how they are using our technology. Let's see Olivier Gibert, Global Chief Technology Officer of Carrefour, at VTEX Day.
My name is Olivier Gibert. I joined Carrefour almost nine years ago. Currently, Carrefour, we are operating in more than 43 countries, directly or through franchisee. Our total GMV for e-commerce was a bit more than EUR 4.2 billion. Brazil is currently becoming the number one country for us. We have a strong growth there. We are still continuing to push for having such growth for the upcoming years. We want to transform Carrefour, a retailer with traditional e-commerce capabilities, into a digital retail company, which places tech and data at the heart of its processes and its value creation model. To summarize, business expectation and the will to better serve our customer has been the key driver to move to composable. I don't think composable architecture is a target. It's probably more a way to achieve a target.
We wanted to provide a first-class shopping experience to our customer, which wasn't the case before. When we wanted evolution, it took too many times, et cetera. We wanted also to ensure that our platform were highly available and scalable enough, okay, to be sure that we can provide a customer a shopping experience for everyone. Finally, we wanted to have speed to market. It wasn't affordable for us to wait, I don't know, six months before delivering a new feature, which was expected by many of our customers. That's why we switched to that, because we were seeing that having monolith, it was way very complex to be well-serving our customers.
Now 11:18 A.M., live broadcasting from New York Stock Exchange. We're gonna switch gears. I'm gonna invite Santiago Naranjo, Chief Revenue Officer of VTEX, to explain how we are taking this positioning to the market. Please, Santi.
Thank you, Mariano. Messaging and positioning are nothing without a focus and discipline execution. I want to give you an overview of VTEX go-to-market strategy, starting with demand generation. We believe our platform and e-commerce knowledge are our greatest advantages, and the best way to prove it is through the success cases of our customers. This is our demand generation growth loop. When we enter a new country, we use our knowledge as an e-commerce specialist company to conquer our first reputational case. When our new customers go live, the next step is to expand our footprint in that given industry by promoting those cases. The more we do it, the more we can expand to new industries and diversify our customer base.
The combination of diverse success cases and the e-commerce knowledge turns VTEX in a reference within the country, organically attracting new customers and enable us to be more efficient. In addition to our marketing investment, our partners play a vital role in our go-to-market strategy. We have established global partnership program with the leading system integrators and independent software vendors who serve a valuable source of opportunities. Let's hear from Ravi Bagal, General Manager at AWS, about their experience.
Our customers want us to unify the experience. When leadership in a retail organization recognizes, in order to serve the customer this way, the technology has to follow the customer. The customer shouldn't have to follow the technology. Both VTEX and AWS have always believed in the practical requirements of retailers and how do we make sure we keep the business running as we move in this direction?
Our partnership with AWS is very important. We were honored as one of AWS ISV Partners of the Year. We have also expanded our global partnership program to drive demand generation. VTEX and AWS sales team are doing go-to-market together in North America and Europe to generate and accelerate opportunities. As the opportunities generated move through the pipe, they enter our sales cycle. We are doubling down on solution engineers and solution architect roles. From the beginning, we are mapping the prospects, the goals, and the existing systems. Once the opportunity is qualified, the team focus is to maximize value as fast as possible and establish an architecture and implementation timeline. Here is an example of an architecture diagram shared with Auchan, one of our customers. We have been executing a new sales cycle since the end of the last year. It is part of our growth playbook.
This playbook use a set of business indicators to identify which stage of maturity a country is at, and from that, define the next action and investment to reach its next stage of development. The playbook is divided into four stages. First, discovery, when we are testing a market by getting a first reference customer. Second, validation, when we build reputational cases that can give us a positive demand generation loop and start recruiting talent. Third, acceleration, when we create momentum by increasing sales and brand awareness through the success of our customers and across multiple industries. Finally, scale, when we drive towards market leadership and operational efficiency. Now, let's dig into how we execute our go-to-market strategy by region.
Thanks, Santi. US and Europe are significant market opportunities for VTEX, right? let's talk about two opportunities we believe VTEX can capture in these markets. The first, it is around B2B. I'm talking about manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors, looking to migrate or to implement a B2B digital commerce operation, a new and modern front end for their legacy ERPs. A modern front end for SAP, a modern front end for Oracle. Here is a quote from Orlando Ross, Global VP Customer Experience at Stanley Black & Decker, that has been with VTEX since 2019 and now operates its B2B business with our platform in South Korea, India, Brazil-
To Stanley Black & Decker, one of their main goals was to enable sales representatives to be more effective in this digital era.
As you evolve and you start offering, for example, digital options, where customers can put orders at on their terms, it starts, like, changing the dynamic between not only your sales rep, your customers, and you as a company, but the dynamic even in how customers and sales rep start engaging. Our sales rep are now able to be much more of a consultant, be much more of a business partner to our customers than what they had been able to do in the past, because 70% of their time during the visit would be consumed by taking an order. That is a great change for them. What we like to think is that this digital transformation is giving our sales rep the superpower of omnipresence.
That's live event, guys. You saw that the video came five seconds before. Just complementing, Stanley Black & Decker is expanding their operation with VTEX to the US and UK. According to the eMARKETER, B2B economy and B2B e-commerce is reaching $2.47 trillion in 2023. Many drivers are influencing the accelerated growth of B2B commerce globally. First driver, it is the need for a faster time to market. B2B companies have tried to transform their legacy process for years. B2B customers demand a new front end, modern digital experience. VTEX is well positioned to capture the greenfield B2B opportunities of customers looking for it. Second, B2B is becoming marketplaces. This model enables manufacturers to integrate inventory from distributors and third-party sellers.
VTEX has a unique position to capture this trend, as we are one of the unique providers in the market to offer B2B commerce and marketplace under the same platform. The last driver is the need of a digital commerce solution for the sales rep, the missing link in between the online and the offline world. In the B2B world, even the most tech-savvy buyers will look for human support before placing an order. The buyer needs is the same experience, the best of the online and the best of the sales consultant. The world needs to bring it together, VTEX is ready to capture this trend through our highly flexible front-end technology and the native Live Shopping and personal shopper capabilities that connects B2B buyers with sales reps to assist the online digital journey. It's pretty amazing.
In the past, we have seen significant increase in B2B logos in the U.S. and Europe for VTEX. Companies like bisco, Briggs & Stratton, CNE, CNA, CAE, sorry, Colgate-Palmolive, Macromex, Mazda, Motorola, Cartamundi, Kayser-Roth Corporation, have chosen VTEX to run their B2B operation. Now, Santi will explore the second opportunity, the migration from legacy system.
Yes, our second go-to-market place focus on legacy migration. A recent Forrester study shows that 44% of sovereign decision maker within retail plan to replace their commerce platform. An example of how we are executing this strategy, we have a testimonial from Magali Vaissière, E-commerce Director at Groupe Casino. The leading French multinational retail company operates more than 10,000 stores worldwide, and now it is VTEX entry point for the grocery industry in Europe. Let's see why they have decided to migrate from legacy to VTEX.
We did a quick analysis of the solution available on the market, and VTEX was identified by Gartner, as you know, and Forrester, as one of the most innovative solution in the quadrant. Casino is always very ambitious on this kind of transformation. There is the scalability, the time to response to get a product ready. There was the innovation side of the technology and the availability of the team. What also make a difference is all the plugins that you have available that allow us to accelerate on the social commerce and customer relation and customer service, and all that stuff, like Live Shopping, et cetera. That's why allow us to really focus the investment on what will make the difference, and we absolutely need it. The solution was already used by Éxito.
We also get very good feedback from them on about the technology, about the team, about what the platform is able to do so. That's why for us it was a, no question, in fact, on, are we going to make more business With VTEX?
Imagine it is a dream come true. Our first customer in France, one of the biggest groceries in the world. You cannot imagine how was the process to convince a French company to migrate to a non-European platform. We have exercised every muscle of our technology and e-commerce knowledge, not through slides or PowerPoint, but showing our APIs, building up POCs, reducing the fear of change through our attention to details. Actions speak louder than words. This is how we will disrupt the market. Many drivers are helping us to accelerate our expansion in North America and Europe. The first one is data privacy and compliance. You know, this topic is more relevant than ever, mainly in Europe. Complex architectures are harder to audit, and the more services you integrate, the more liabilities you potentially have.
As companies centralize their operation and data on VTEX, our tools, like VTEX IO development platform, guarantees transparency. The second trend is around operational efficiency. A Forrester study says that in 2023, at least a quarter of digital businesses will double down on technologies that consolidate shipments and fulfillment. Because of our native order management system and marketplace capability, we can simplify the implementation of new models like marketplace, dropshipping, and cross-border. Last but not least, we are seeing an increased adoption on composability. A Gartner study shows that by 2024, 20% of global CEOs will report an increased appetite to risk and resilience. To do that, mature enterprise are starting to look at new architectural strategy. With our pragmatic approach, we believe this trend will be an important source of growth for our future.
Let's switch gears from international expansion to our Latam and Brazilian growth. Even though Latam was the fastest growing region e-commerce in 2022, with the changes of pace in the market, you might be asking yourself, how we plan to maintain the same levels of growth we have seen in the past years? Well, here we have 2 place to deliver sustainable growth. The first one is the next country to conquer, Mexico. According to Statista, Mexico has the largest percentage of total B2C commerce in Latin America, surpassing Brazil as the number 1 country. In 2021, Mexico was the country that saw the highest growth in retail e-commerce revenue in the whole region. Mexico is the natural next big opportunity to be conquered, we are seeing increased momentum there.
Customers like Elektra, one of the biggest Mexican retailing and financing corporation, use VTEX for its omnichannel B2C operation, connected their 1,340 point of sales through Mexico and Central America. After migrating to our platform, they saw a 378% of increase in online stores. Other client, Chedraui, a grocery retailer that operates in Mexico and United States, that improved its operational efficiency in 421 brick-and-mortar stores across Mexico. The most recently, H-E-B, a supermarket chain that operates in Texas and northeast of Mexico, implemented its VTEX site on VTEX IO with the goal overthinking their commerce digital experience. There was a 65% of increase in weekly sales after H-E-B went live with VTEX. Speaking of H-E-B, we have a testimonial from the customers explaining why they have decided to migrate to VTEX.
We are the number one supermarket in this region. We want to be the same in the digital world. The results that we have since the first week that we launched with VTEX, we saw an immediate response in sales. The loyal customers, they were happy, they were buying. All the new customers, we weren't really happy with that first look that they have when they logged to the old website. It was amazing what we saw. We saw almost no cannibalization between the app and the website. Given that VTEX was recently launched, it's been proved to be a very good tool in order to have a lot of new customers in a short period of time, and in converting those customers into shipments and sales.
Those are the things that we are looking in the near future, in probably in the next 18 months, to increase another 50%-60% the sales. I think that's achievable with the tools that you have.
Well, it is an amazing case. In a market crowded with open source providers like Adobe, we have to fight against the headquarters. Our omnichannel promotion and time to market were the key factors for them to choose us. Even if VTEX was not the first in their list, through our product capabilities, we were able to unlock this deal and to show that we could migrate under six months. Our second play is around portfolio expansion. In 2022, 90% of retailer transaction in Latin America were conducted offline. This represents a significant opportunity of new GMV for us. This portfolio expansion is really primarily focused on upselling and cross-selling within our customer base, for that, we see three big opportunities. First one, enabling our customer fulfillment efficiencies.
As our customer base is majorly represented by retailers with large network of stores, the first opportunity is to enable our customers to transform their brick-and-mortar into distribution centers. That is why we have developed Pick and Pack. Now, the brands use VTEX to integrate their inventory, and will also have the tools for their in-store team to fulfill and deliver these orders. The second opportunity is new sales channels. As an API-first platform, we are well-positioned to become the e-commerce engine for any front end, not only, not only for online, but also mobile apps, messaging platform, and live stream. The third one is the expansion of business models. Our current customer base has many retailers, manufacturers, and consumer goods only running B2C strategies with us. We are actively expanding our product adoption within the customer base with customers like Electrolux and Motorola, now using B2B also inside VTEX.
Let me invite Mariano for our final chapter.
Hey, thank you, Santi. Now I'd like to invite Hisham Faour, The Carlyle Group Principal of Transformation and Portfolio Operations, to join me. We are all here in New York Exchange, Santi, Geraldo, all the clients. As it is a online first event, we are prioritizing us to be in front of the camera to you. Hisham is going to join us now. Hisham, please. Let's check if we can listen to you, Hisham.
Mariano, nice to see you. Nice to be here. Happy to be here.
Great. First question, Hisham, is, tell me, you manage, like, many companies. What was the impression on the field to work with VTEX in one of your portfolio company? You are very hands-on leader. You were in many, many meetings with our team, so better than anyone, how could you translate to the team here, what's your impression, of VTEX in the field?
My impression, Mariano, has been very positive. VTEX project team has. They've come across as partners in the project, which is critical. They're very hardworking, very committed. They come across as commerce specialists, not just a service provider. They're committed to the success of the program, and they really look holistically at the end-to-end process to make sure that what we're designing is gonna make sense for our portfolio company.
Perfect. Hisham, if you want to summarize for the ones asking about like, what's the trends on digital and how the e-commerce platforms would fulfill and transform the companies that you do have. The message that VTEX is passing in this Investor Day resonates with the future that you foresee for the portfolio. Give us more a sense of future-proof vision in digital commerce.
We support many of our portfolio companies with their e-commerce implementations. I think the implementation that we have going on with one of our portfolio companies is critical to their business and to their transformation from a digital perspective. We're in the midst right now of actually implementing the VTEX solution. We're very excited for the launch. I would say what I really admire is the thoroughness of the VTEX solution. I also admire their rapid time to market. VTEX was really able to kind of present a proof of concept just within 15 days, with a lot of the out-of-the-box capabilities within production. I would also say they come to the table with a relatively deep partner ecosystem that they're able to introduce ourselves and our portfolio companies to.
Hisham, have you heard about VTEX before, or it was the first time you heard about us?
First time.
First time.
First time. Actually, Mariano, I appreciate it, kind of meeting you in New York. Actually, I do also appreciate your involvement as a CEO, which I think is rare in the project, and shows kind of that you're vested as well in the success of the program and the broader transformation that our portfolio companies are going through.
No, thanks, Hisham. This is a little bit of our culture. We consider ourselves commerce specialists. We are not software developers or solution architects or solution engineer or account executives or marketing. We are all commerce specialists. That's all we do and only what we do. We are really proud. It is an intense project with you guys, but we are, like, really proud by collaborating with the portfolio company and bringing them to inaugurate a new kind of unknowns. Thank you for joining us today. It's really difficult, right? In a Friday at 11:42 A.M., New York, you know, like, the New York is the old Friday, right?
Friday, to invite people like you here, it's a honor for me, for Geraldo, and for all VTEXers, that you can share your time and come with us for the opening bell and everything. From the bottom of my heart: thank you very much.
Thank you. Thank you, Mariano, and thank you to the entire VTEX team for having me here. It's been a pleasure.
Okay, guys. Now, just as you heard from Hisham, our platform enables customers to modernize their stack, to reduce their maintenance cost, and we believe the value prop will continue to propel our growth. It's pretty simple. It's just be there for your clients, put the energy, form your commerce team of specialists. We don't call our solution engineering a solution engineering, we call them commerce solution engineering. At the end of the day, in summary, there are two main growth investments we are making. We are propelling our growth in the US and Europe by targeting legacy B2B migrations and B2C migrations, and we are doubling down our existing customer base as a new source of revenue through add-ons of our products.
Those investments have significant market potential and will enable accelerate in a sustainable, in a sustainable way, our growth for years to come. We are heads down in the operation. Thank you very much. I hold now for Julia for our Q&A session.
Thank you to all our second segment presenter. There are a lot of things going on, right? We are now back to another 15 minutes Q&A session. Please type your questions in the Q&A tab at the bottom right side of the screen. The first question is from Marty. Marty is asking: Can you talk about the go-to-market for B2B channels specifically? Is there a dedicated team for this, and is there a difference in sales cycles? What is the goal for B2B as a % of revenue in the future?
I can look at this, Santi. B2B, it is a different platform or it's the same platform? We have an opinion. We have a hard opinion. B2B, B2C, and marketplace should run in the same platform. The B2B clients, they want the same thing as the B2C: a better search, a personalization, a modern experience. The B2C will air some functionalities from the B2B: quotations, consultant, concierge commerce, personal shopper. At the end of the day, B2B and B2C are the same. That's why we don't have a team specifically for B2B. Because there is not such a thing of a specific B2B. The question of goals, we obviously we do have, but we don't disclaim. Yes, what we can say that we are cautiously optimistic with the B2B momentum, mainly in the United States.
We announced many B2Bs today that we close in the United States, and they are running live, and that's a big momentum. The market needs a new front end for the SAP. VTEX is well positioned to capture this market. Nobody wants that blue, old screen anymore, right? Maybe it's a time for a pink kind of approach. Thank you for the question.
Perfect. Thank you so much, Mariano. I like the quote of, "Now it's the pink time." Now we go-
Actually, it is, right? Did you see the New York Exchange, kind of opening bell and the Nasdaq opening bell with Barbie?
Uh-
That's a peak day!
Of course. Okay, let's go with Clarke Jefferies. Clarke is asking, "Are the largest competitors in Mexico and Central America different than Brazil? Do you expect win rates to be similar to other Latin countries?
Sorry, Julia, I had a interference here. Could you repeat, please?
Yes, of course. It's basically if the largest competitors in Mexico and Central America are any different than in Brazil, and if we expect the same or different win rates than in other Latin American countries.
Yes, I can go with this one. Thank you so much for your question. Yes, we have the same competitors in Mexico than any part of the world, Europe and United States. We are seeing our conversion rate, it is the same that we have Latin and Brazil, very high. This is why we are so excited about Mexico. We have the biggest players of the global, there we have seen biggest retailers taking decision to come with VTEX, as we shared, Chedraui, Elektra and H-E-B.
Amazing. Thank you so much. The next question come from Marcelo Santos. Marcelo is asking: "How does the opportunity in B2B compares with B2C? How do you see the long-term split in VTEX business, and how is it today?
We don't plan with seeing the split. We plan to win as most deals as we can in B2C and as most deals as we can in B2B. And that's a fact that the functionality of VTEX by having a OMS inside the platform allow us from to be a native competitor, really strong competitor in both sides. Because at the end of the day, new channels needs to be added without a big CapEx. That the old sense that was in the table that say, "Oh, now I need to plan a budget for the next two years for my B2B project," that's gone. That's gone.
A B2B, B2C, B2B2B, B2B2C, new channels, new front end, conversational commerce, Live Shopping, Personal Shopper, concierge commerce, the business area needs to be able to do this in like weeks, not with CapEx, not with projects. That's the disruption that VTEX is bringing to the market. No, we don't, we don't plan to have, like, a vision on how we see this growing. Actually, we are seeing a good momentum in B2B that we didn't have before, and we're gonna, with a very tech approach, as Rishan said here, we are putting a POCs live, and we are answering RFPs with our POCs. People that don't know VTEX brand, as Rishan, as majority of the United States, we are pretty new in the field of United States.
Although we are the number 1 unified commerce by Gartner, by brand, we are not well known. That's why we need our customers to speak in our behalf. That's the most sustainable and powerful kind of a brand foundation that we do have, the success of our customers. Yes, B2B will be a driver for the US for sure.
Perfect. Thank you very much. The next question is from Fred Mendes. Fred Mendes is asking. Well, first he's saying hi, so hi. "When the operations with Casino in France will go live, do you believe this contract will help you win other contracts in Europe?
Thank you so much. We are expecting to have Casino live on September. This is our roadmap. Yes, for sure, we will unlock a lot of grocery verticals in Europe and EMEA. We are seeing these capabilities being deployed, so we are going to show to the European market how we can combine online and offline operation. Yes, modern CIOs are every day more able to take the risks and change from legacy and consolidate the journey for the customer. Yes, we are expecting to unlock this vertical in Europe.
Let's reinforce, Julia, that we are collecting new wins, compelling new wins like Hearst Corporation, It's a momentum to be created, but we cannot think that this momentum will explode. We are a consistent growth company. The growth of U.S. and Europe will take the moment to mature the brand, the delivery, the size, the ecosystem. We are really proud, but also we need to be kind of cautiously optimistic, because retail all over the world has been a bumpy world. The interest rate's too high. There's a lot of macro uncertainties.
What we can do is heads down in our operation and make the best product for our customers to drive and be, like, cautiously optimistic for what is about to come.
Okay, perfect. Thank you very much. The next question comes from Froilan Mendez, and he's asking: Among the incremental revenue sources coming from cross-selling and upselling, example, live shopping assistant, which is the one that you see the largest potential? Is there a goal for cross-selling penetration for any of these solutions? Can this be offered for non-VTEX clients?
Good question. Let me go deep on this. Yes, as you know, we have a large client base around the world, and this solution can bring not only GMV for VTEX, but also to simplify the operation of our customers. For example, of Live Shopping solution, yes, we offer to VTEX clients, but also to clients that are not using VTEX. We have an amazing bullet example about Real Madrid and Adidas, that they launched the new jersey of Real Madrid by Live Shopping. We are seeing potential in all the solutions, Sales App, Pick and Pack and Live Shopping. They are different angles they approach the e-commerce operation. Of course, with Pick and Pack, you enable to expand the order management capability of VTEX. We can go from the order to the picking and packing process.
In the Sales App is to combine the operation of the brick-and-mortar stores with the online. We have a potential, as we say, more than 90% of the operation are not yet running through VTEX.
Amazing. Thank you so much. Our next question is from Franco Landa. He's first saying congratulations on the Casino growth win. When you look back at how long it took to get them to sign with you, how did it compare to when you signed your first customer in Mexico, for example, or some other countries you've been expanding to?
I can take this. Just answering Mendes, and hi, Mendes. Just answering, adding more color to Santi's answer. The B2B, it's also a upsell for our B2C customer base. You can consider B2B as we are already inside the client, and we are these modern front end for the legacy SAPs of... They're kind of ERPs or SAPs, Oracles, whatever. It is a natural kind of expansion for our upselling. On... Sorry, Julia, could you remind me the point I was with Mendes' question?
Yes. The main point is basically to look back.
Oh, yeah, I got it. I got it.
Okay.
The timeline of the clients. What is our go-to market? We have, we divided the regions in four scales. First is discovery, validation, four stages, discovery, validation, acceleration, and scale. We have a KPI and unit of economics to be very disciplined, executing each region in their own stage. Normally, the unlock of a country comes after we have a lighthouse account. Yes, you are right. Takes long time, years, to have a lighthouse account, and once you have the lighthouse account, other companies say, "Oh, they might be a really good solution for our region." We do focus in five categories, and this is how we validate a country.
We go category by category, collecting logos and exposing our clients that are live and talking in our behalf. That's what we did here by bringing several clients to the New York Stock Exchange and allowing them to talk on our behalf, collecting their testimonials. That's how we create brand. Once we do have one, two, three, four, five clients in these five categories, yes, it is expected for a consistent growth, a little bit more accelerated than it was before. Are we already there with U.S. and Europe? No. Very precise here. We are not. We need to go further and to conquer more anchors, more brands in the U.S. and Europe, for us to be a clear leader in those regions.
We are not there yet, yes, it is an ambition of our company to be a global leader for digital commerce platform.
Okay, thank you very much. The next question is gonna be Rodrigo Casiolato. He's asking: in the past, when VTEX entered a new country and landed at lighthouse customers like Éxito in Colombia or Cencosud in Chile, there was a fast acceleration within those countries. Do you believe the growth curve in France, US, and Mexico should be similar, given the new client announcements?
It's a wishful thinking, right? Of course, we need to believe. That's why we work like heads down to conquer and deploy an amazing project. VTEX is unique because our team of commerce specialists creates projects that are bringing us our reputation, that are creating us our reputation. You have several clients, and we disclaim them, I think, in our investor material, how our clients, our logos, are expanding from one country to more countries inside the same company. Yes, of course, we expect. Yes, of course, we believe can unlock new kind of bright future, but we are really, really cautions on how to be optimistic about it.
We don't have yet the momentum that we can say, "Oh, let's migrate these countries to another stage of our playbook." Not yet. We are collecting logos, yes. As you know, the cases live are our main tool to communicate our brand. Yes, you can expect consistent growth from VTEX for the years to come, as we state in our message here.
Great. Thank you very much. Time is up again. We are gonna have now another 10 minutes break. We'll be right back with the next chapter on capital efficiency, history, and future. Let's stretch your legs, grab a coffee. We'll be just back. Welcome, welcome! We are now reaching to the end of our investor day. By the way, I was really enjoying the music. Let's go right into our last segment on capital efficiency and financial updates. Let's welcome Andre to the stage, please. Andre, the floor is all yours.
Thank you, Julia. Hello, everyone. It's a pleasure being here with you today to discuss the history and future of VTEX. Focus on our higher growth and capital efficiency journey. I'll talk about the future of capital efficiency. To talk about the future, let's go back to the past to understand how we have been running VTEX, a company that since the beginning, we have continuously strived for excellence in capital efficiency. VTEX was founded in 2000 by Geraldo and Mariano, with only $100,000 in investment. The main focus at that time, and during the following eight years, was to build a CRM for the Brazilian textile industry. As a side business, so that they could pay the bills and wages, they created some e-commerce websites in Brazil.
In 2008, we encountered a turning point when we were entrusted with the task of building and delivering Walmart's Brazilian website with a challenging 10-month timeframe. This project provided invaluable experience in developing a new enterprise-level ecommerce platform, prompting us to pivot our strategy towards becoming a cloud ecommerce platform provider. In 2012, we got the first round of investment. Around $10 million was invested from Naspers. The funding was used to develop the multi-tenant cloud infrastructure and to start our expansion to Latin America, where we got the first couple of clients in Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia and Mexico between 2013 and 2015. In 2015, Riverwood Capital acquired the Naspers without any primary investment. We had burned the $10 million investment in four years.
In 2016, we ran out of cash. We took a loan for working capital so that we would be able to pay our hosting bills and other expenses. It was needed to become efficient because we didn't have an alternative that wouldn't dilute us at that time. That is, was in the middle of the recession happening in Brazil. We reached 250 employees in 2014 and 2015, but by 2016, we had adjusted the company to 107 employees. We made the necessary adjustments. We worked hard on working capital to be able to pass through the first half of the year, and in the second half, we changed the game. We ended 2016 with more than 20% in Non-GAAP EBIT margin, and we grew revenue by more than 50%.
From 2017 to 2019, we started accelerating investment again, focused on expansion and product. Even with the increase in investment, we were able to generate cash enough to pay dividends and to make some acquisitions. In the period from 2017 to 2022, a five-year period, we increased the VTEX revenue by more than four times, from $39 million- $157.6 million. In 2019, we made the second round of investment, $40 million, primarily led by SoftBank. In 2020, we made a decision to increase the investment and expansion to the United States and Europe. In September 2020, we secured another round of investments, $25 million in primary, led by Tiger Global.
By the end of that year, our cash position was $75 million, the same value of all three rounds we made since 2012. We were able to achieve $100 million in ARR with only $10 million invested in 2012, and we paid back in dividends almost the same value. In 2021, we became a public company in the United States, entering a new phase of expansion and investment. In this new phase, we decided to invest more because the world had changed after the COVID period. We invest in all forms, G&A, R&D, sales, and market expenses. However, our journey has been challenged since then. The online demand generated by COVID pandemic and the macroeconomic environment was not as strong as we were expecting.
One more time, just like in 2015, our late alert signals indicated that we need to adjust the company. In June 2022, we made a layoff of a little bit more than 10% of the employees, and we implemented our efficient phase plan. We saw this challenge scenario as an opportunity. We came from Brazil. We grew up in a place with inflationary recession. We know how to adapt ourselves in this scenario. We did that, and we've been doing that, focused on profitability. We adjust the company to be efficient in this scenario, but in a way that we retain our growth opportunity. We are a growth company. We have a huge address for the market and opportunity, and we will go after that, but efficiently, as we've done in the past.
Looking forward, we find ourselves guided by a vision deeply rooted in our past achievements. Our aim is to resume being a Rule of 40 company, where revenue growth and EBIT Non-GAAP margin combine to exceed 40%. Today, I would like to explain how we intend to accomplish this. Let's start by examining the two facets of our business: the company serving our existing customer base and the one focused on acquiring new customers, as shared in our annual presentations. Analyze the PNL of our existing customer base, we can observe a healthy operation that generates cash, positive cash flow. Looking ahead, we anticipate further scalability in this aspect, accompanied by the dilution of G&A and R&D expenses. Our investment in G&A during the IPO have proven fruitful, with G&A expenses growing at a much slower pace than our revenue. We expect this trend to continue.
Similarly, R&D expenses, though likely to increase, will do at a lower rate than the revenue growth. Notably, our revenue growth in this P&L is reflected in the net revenue retention metric, historically between 105%-115%. As a result, we anticipate that this P&L segment is aligned with the Rule of 40 sooner than the overall company. Now, turning our attention to the other P&L, we anticipate leveraging the same efficiency in G&A and R&D. Our focus remains on maintaining the effectiveness of our sales operation as measured by the LTV to CAC ratio. While we aim to maintain a high LTV over CAC in regions where we are more established, like Brazil, Latin America, we acknowledge that the need to lower ratios in our initial phase of expansion, such as United States and Europe.
Taking both P&L segments into account, we envision a return to our Rule of 40 rules. Just as we were in the past, our targets for the next three to five years is clear to exceed the 40% threshold. It is important to note that while pursuing this objective, we remain committed to seasonal growth opportunities. Based on our trajectory and progress we have made, we have established margin expectations that align with our long-term goals. To illustrate our aspirations, let's look how we envision our P&L a few years from now. Regarding subscription gross margin, we aim to achieve approximately 80%. This demonstrates our commitment to optimize our subscription offerings and providing exceptional customer value while maintaining a healthy margin. Looking at the overall gross margin, including services, we envision a range around 75%+.
This considers the ongoing enhancements in efficiency, expense management, and value creation across our platform. On sales and market expenses, our target range is approximately 20%-25% of the revenue. By efficiently allocating resource and leveraging our strong market positioning, we aim to strike a balance between driving customers' acquisition and managing expenses effectively. For R&D expenses, we anticipate a range around 20%-25% as well. This reflects our ongoing commitment to innovation and continuous improvement of our platform, ensuring we meet the evolving needs of our customers and remain at the forefront of the industry. Regarding G&A expenses, we aim for a margin of approximately 10%. This showcases our dedication to streamline administrative functions and maintaining operational efficiency while providing the necessary support for our expanding operations.
Finally, in terms of operating margin, we envision a range of 20% or higher. This reflects our dedication to providing profitable growth while maintaining strong financial foundations. By striving to achieve these margin expectations, we are confident to find the sweet spot for top-line growth, optimization, and sustainability of our business operation. We have made significant progress in improving our gross margin and streamlining our expenses, positioning us on the right track to realize these aspirations. In conclusion, our future is shaped by a strategic roadmap that leads us back to the Rule of 40. By optimizing our existing customer base, maintaining efficient operations, and embracing smart investment decision, we are confident in our ability to achieve our targets. We have started this journey, leverage the lessons of our past, and we are excited by the opportunities that lie ahead and offer us.
Together, we will pave the way for a prosperous future at VTEX. I'll leave the stage to Ricardo to cover our financial updates.
Thank you, Andre. Thanks to all investors that are here with us. It's a pleasure to tell you more about VTEX. In my presentation, I will share with you some financial updates. I will start with a quick recap of our revenue model and revenue mix. I will share updates on each of our five growth drivers. Okay, let's start by recapping our revenue model. As shown here in this slide, roughly one third of our revenue comes from a fixed fee, and two-thirds come from a take rate we have on our customers' GMV. This variable fee is a shared success model we have with our customers, meaning that as our customers' GMV grows, our revenue grows.
This pricing approach has been key in driving our growth, providing protection against inflation, and positioning us to capitalize on the increasing adoption of e-commerce in an under-penetrated market. Going a little bit deeper into our pricing structure, our pricing tiers are basically a risk allocation decision by our customers. At one end of the spectrum, we offer a pricing tier with a low fixed fee of less than $10,000 per year and a higher take rate of 2.5%. On the other end of the spectrum, we offer pricing tier with a higher fixed fee of over $400,000 per year, and a lower take rate of 0.5%. As our customers grow and increase their confidence in their digital commerce operation, they can up tier.
When that happens, our price table is designed to reduce the total cost of ownership on a percentage of GMV basis, while at the same time, it increases the absolute dollar amount they pay to VTEX. This ensures a net revenue retention above 100%, which is ingrained in our business model. Our fixed fee portion is typically charged in hard currency, except for Brazil, where we charge in Brazilian reais. We adjust the fixed fee portion annually by inflation. Moving on to our revenue mix. Our revenue mix is well diversified across segments. Also, we have no over-reliance on any single customer. In fact, our biggest customers represents only 3% of our total revenue, demonstrating the healthy customer base dilution. Most of our revenue comes from customers that have been with us for more than three years.
That's because our churn has been pretty stable over these past years, in the mid-single-digit percentage of revenue per year range, which demonstrates the thickness of the relationship we have with our customers. Okay, after this quick recap, let's talk about our growth levers. As mentioned by Geraldo at the beginning of the VTEX Investor Day, VTEX has five key growth avenues. These avenues will help us drive revenue growth and strengthen our market position. We are gonna go deeper in each one of these, but before that, let me make some quick comments. First, we grow by adding new customers. In a under-penetrated market of only 12% e-commerce penetration in LatAm, we've attracted unit economics of over 6x LTV to CAC and sticky customer relationships. This is a very attractive growth lever for VTEX.
Second, given that two-thirds of our revenue comes from a take rate we have on our customers' GMV, we grow by helping our customers increase their GMV. Third, we also grow by innovating and expanding our platform. For example, with the product launches Renata mentioned earlier today. Fourth, we are also expanding globally. As mentioned by Mariano and Santiago, in 2022, 35% of our revenue came from Latam ex-Brazil, and 10% from the rest of the world. Just three years ago, only 24% was coming from Latam ex-Brazil and 5% from the rest of the world. Fifth and final, we have a strong ecosystem plugged into VTEX that generates a significant spinning wheel effect for us.
We are not focused on meaningfully monetizing this ecosystem right now, as we don't want to introduce friction into this spinning wheel, but this could be a meaningful growth lever in the medium to long term. Okay. With that, let's dive deeper into each one of these growth levers. On the first growth avenue, expanding to new customers. New logo additions reflect our investments in sales and marketing, sales efficiency, successful customer cases, and brand reputation. For example, here you can see some logos that we added since our IPO. Expanding on this growth lever, we have been successful at gaining traction winning larger enterprise customers that generate more than $250,000 per year in revenue. We have grown from having only 18 of these customers in our base in 2017 to having 58 of these customers by 2020, and 94 of these customers by 2022.
It is interesting to see that our larger customers perform better than the average. They have a lower annual churn in the low single-digit range, and have higher same-store sales performance, as presented on the chart on the right. For instance, in 2022, VTEX same-store sales was 17%, while this segment grew same-store sales more than 20%. Let me use the hook of faster same-store sales and GMV growth to move on to our next growth lever, our existing customers' growth. Let me make this more tangible by presenting some case studies of how some of our top customers are expanding their operations and growing with us. Starting with Motorola. Motorola, a renowned global technology company, is an interesting case of one brand expanding with us globally.
They started their journey with us in 2017 in Brazil. If you fast-forward five years, in 2022, they operated 19 countries with us in Latin America, North America, Europe, and Asia. During this period, Motorola GMV increased by more than 10x , roughly 3/4 of that driven by their operations growing organically in each country, and the remainder by expanding with us to new countries. This strong organic growth and the rapid global expansion demonstrate Motorola's confidence in VTEX capability to support their growth objectives and to deliver seamless customer experiences. Let's move on to Grupo SOMA, a B3-listed multi-brand fashion retailer. This is an interesting case of one customer expanding their portfolio of brands with us over time. Grupo SOMA started their journey with VTEX in 2017, launching their online operations for Foxton brand.
If you fast-forward five years, in 2022, they were operating 11 brands with us, including Hering, that was acquired and migrated from a legacy digital commerce platform to VTEX. From 2018- 2022, Grupo SOMA increased their GMV with VTEX by more than 5x . Roughly 3/4 driven by organic growth of each brand post its VTEX launch. It's also interesting to note that Grupo SOMA connected over 900 physical stores into the VTEX platform, enabling them to do true omnichannel operations. Let's move on to Cencosud, one of Latin's largest retailers. Cencosud is an interesting combination of country expansion as well as brand expansion with us. Cencosud started their journey with us in 2015 in Colombia and Peru with their own brand.
Fast-forward to 2022, Cencosud was operating in five countries with us, including Brazil, most recently, and 11 brands. From 2018 to 2022, Cencosud increased their GMV by almost 10x , most of it coming from organic growth of each operation, but a significant portion coming from adding new countries and new brands as well. We started with some case studies to make it more tangible, but zooming out to our top 100 customers, we see a broader picture. Expanding within our existing customer base is a valuable opportunity for us that is not restricted to the case I just mentioned. As you can see on this slide, our top 100 customers increased their geographies and number of stores per customers, resulting in our annual recurring revenue with these customers tripling in five years.
By entrenching our relationship with these customers, we can drive further growth and capitalize on our ambition to become the backbone of digital commerce. As presented in the case studies, our existing customers are growing their GMV significantly over time and outperforming the market. Omnichannel is one of the key drivers of this GMV growth and market over performance. Collaborative commerce, as a percentage of our total GMV, is steadily increasing, and omnichannel plays a key role in this trend. Most of our new product launches are connected with this strategic approach, allowing us to provide seamless customer experiences across various channels. When looking at our base at the time of the IPO, the GMV coming from collaborative commerce was more than 10% of our overall GMV.
If you fast-forward to the first quarter of 2023, it represented already more than 35%, a significant increase in penetration in only two years. During this period, our GMV from physical store integrations has almost tripled, resulting in top-line acceleration for our customers. Okay, now let's move on to our third growth vector, innovating and expanding our platform. Our new product launches, covered by Renata earlier today, aim to expand our addressable market, increase our customers' GMV, and start monetizing our ecosystem. Further expanding on each product, if we start with the VTEX Sales App and VTEX Personal Shopper, they aim to expand our reach into physical store sales by providing a seamless mobile app experience for customers and personalized shopping assistance. With that, we may capture additional GMV and increase our customers' same-store sales.
These, in turn, could lead to a higher GMV and more revenue for VTEX, as we have, you know, a revenue share success model. Pick and Pack and the Shipping Network. They aim to expand our addressable market by supporting our customers with asset-light fulfillment software. Pick and Pack should mostly help us with our GMV growth, while Shipping Network could help us with a slight take rate increase over time. Lastly, the Extensions Hub. They play a crucial role in expanding our connected ecosystem and potentially incrementally increasing our take rates. The VTEX platform serves as a distribution channel for third-party developers to our more than 2,600 customers, and the Extensions Hub may help us monetize this channel. Now, on our fourth growth lever, expanding to new markets. As mentioned by Mariano, we have a disciplined go-to-market strategy.
At the beginning, we typically experience a lower win rate, and most of our commercial leads are brought by the VTEX sales team, which of course, operates with a lower LTV over CAC. As we advance, we start building success cases and brand awareness, and our efficiency improves. As we evolve from discovery to scale phase, we become a commerce ecosystem, and as an ecosystem, we start to get nearly half of our leads from the ecosystem, which helps on our top-of-the-funnel commercial efforts. Additionally, we improve our win rates, which helps on our bottom-of-the-funnel sales efficiency. By optimizing our efficiency metrics and leveraging the ecosystem's potential, we can achieve sustainable growth and expand our market presence in strategic and scalable manner. However, generating more leads from the ecosystem is not something that can be achieved overnight.
We need to consider the various stages involved in driving top-line acceleration from our investments. From starting a relationship with a customer and participating in RFP, to the customer being implemented and fully ramped up, it take nearly two years. Building success cases and reference customers takes time because of this long feedback loop of nearly two years. To demonstrate how this evolves over time, we would like to present our expansion journey in LatAm as a reference point for our international expansion efforts. As you can see in this slide, building a solid position in LatAm took us several years. It is important to note that our international expansion began roughly six years after we expanded into LatAm, ex-Brazil. Therefore, we are currently at a different stage in this new endeavor.
However, as you can see in this slide, we are witnessing similar trends and reaching comparable performance levels in a comparable time frame. We remain committed to maintaining discipline in our approach and investing resources strategically in alignment with the metrics previously disclosed by Santiago. Currently, we are already starting to see results. Today, we had the pleasure of announcing Hearst and hearing from Beautycounter and Casino, who share why they selected our platform. As Brazil and Latam continue to grow, we expect them to be able to support our investments in our international expansion, and as our international expansion evolves, we will start showing better overall efficiency metrics. Finally, on our growth avenues, the fifth one, the ecosystem development. Our ecosystem has over 3,000 integrated solutions, offering an extensive range of customization options to our customers.
This robust ecosystem ensures that our customers have seamless access to multiple providers, including payment gateways, fraud prevention services, shipping solutions, among others. As this ecosystem continues to expand, our customers reap the benefits of increased flexibility and choice. Here you can see some of the partnerships that we have signed since our IPO, showcasing the dynamic and ever-evolving nature of our co-collaborative efforts. We believe that as the ecosystem grows, customers gain access to a broader range of tailored solutions. Partners enjoy increased exposure and revenue opportunities, and VTEX is strengthening its position as a leading digital commerce platform, a win-win-win scenario for everyone. To finalize, let's revisit our target model presented by Andre.
By executing these five growth levers and demonstrating the operational leverage of our business model, we see the path to be a Rule of 40 company. As mentioned by Fernanda, we have been delivering substantial subscription gross margin improvement, and we see the opportunity to continue improving. As mentioned by Andre, although expenses will increase in nominal amounts, they will reduce as a percentage of revenue, given our operational leverage and efficiency focus. We have already clearly demonstrated these two initiatives in the second half of 2022. In the end, this approach will enable us to reach a Non-GAAP operating income margin of 20% or more, while we're still growing fast and staying above the Rule of 40.
We are a team of commerce specialists. We are confident that with a clear vision for the future and the initiatives that we have in place, we are well positioned to deliver sustainable growth while also delivering profitability. With that, let me pass it back over to Julia. Thank you, everyone.
Thank you, Ricardo, and to all our last segment presenters. I cannot believe we are about to end this event. Let's go to the last 15 minutes Q&A. Please type your question on the Q&A tab at the bottom right side of the screen. The first question comes from Christian Faria. First, he says: Congratulations on the event to the whole team. Thank you, Christian. I have just one question. What is the contribution of the customers announced today to achieve the company's 2023 growth guidance?
Thank you, Christian, for the congratulations, and thank you for being here with us during all this period. I mean, it has been a pleasure for us to deliver this event for you all, and hopefully it's helpful. On your question, these new customers that are announced today, they are just being implemented, and it's, as I mentioned in my presentation, the sales cycle, implementation cycle, ramp-up time, you know, it's all something that we have to consider. They don't have a meaningful contribution for the short term, 2023. I mean, they help us a little bit, but their contribution will come later, more in 2024.
Also, as a reference customer, they could help us, you know, to have a more expansion into the United States and Europe as well. It's not really about the 2023 growth guidance, it's more about the long term and the potential that they bring to us.
Amazing. Thank you so much. Next question is from Lucas Chavez. How should we see the EBITDA margin evolution in the midterm, especially considering the existing stores margin? If you could please give us an update on that figure too, please. Should we look at existing stores margin close to 22%?
I can take this one, Julia. Thank you. Thank you, Lucas, for the question. Just to recap, all the metrics that I showed was EBITDA margin and Non-GAAP, not EBITDA. However, in the VTEX, EBITDA and EBITDA is really close because we don't capitalize R&D, okay? Consider the what I showed about the future of VTEX. I'm talking about between three to five years, and that's the intention. The company with this metric, with this EBITDA Non-GAAP margin, is from three to five years. We don't have a plan like next year or the year, the evolution of that.
Talking about now the existing store margin, and now I'm talking about the existing store margin in the future, okay? In that future, you can, you have to consider it, as we usually show in our annual presentation, that the sales and marketing expenses to keep the current base of customers is really low compared to the sales and marketing expenses to attract the new customers. It's expected, if we are aimed to have higher than 20% in EBITDA margin in the future, we're gonna have a much higher margin in the same base of customers, because in this company in the future. I hope I answered your question, Lucas.
Perfect. Thank you, Andre. Marcelo Santos, what is the rough timeframe to reach the more or less 20% operating margin level?
Marcelo, thanks for the question. There is no specific timeframe. This is, as we mentioned, they are a target model, but I would say that we would expect, you know, reaching this in a few years, you know, maybe a handful of years, but we are working very hard. As we mentioned in the presentation, you can already see significant improvement in the second half of 2022 and also in the first quarter of 2023. That's the general guideline I would mention here.
Amazing. Thank you so much. Next question is from Clarke Jeffries: Very helpful to see the mix of direct versus ecosystem attribution for new leads. In terms of winning new brands today, do scaled markets still make up the majority of the overall logo growth? How material are discovery markets to the logo growth?
Hi, Clarke. Great to hear from you. Great question. The markets that we are at scale right now, basically, you know, Brazil, Colombia, they do have a relevant representation of our overall revenue. They do bring, you know, considerable amounts of new customers to us, so they continue to grow. For example, if we go back to 2022, the overall company grew at like mid-20s% year over year, and Brazil grew just below that, still in the 20s%. Brazil continues to grow in a nice space and continue to bring, you know, the majority of the new logos, right? If we look at the new markets, they are growing much faster, right? Like, the...
In 2022, the rest of the world, which is basically US and Europe, grew almost 50% year-over-year, and they are adding logos, right? We are mentioning today, in the announcement of Beautycounter, Casino, Hearst, you know, all of these contribute to the rest of the world to continue growing going forward, right? They are coming from a smaller base, right? When you think about number of customers, like in amount of customers, we still have more additions coming from scaled markets for us, like Brazil and Colombia, than from these new markets.
Perfect. Thank you so much. Let's go to Tiago Kapulski's question. "Hi, guys." Hi, Tiago. "A follow-up from the previous questions. The existing versus new stores model is great because it makes an easier to compare to other global software companies. Today, 85% of revenues are existing and 15% new, according to your disclosure, if I understood it right. In the longer term, what would be the mix of existing versus new? In other words, what would be the mix you consider when finding the +20% EBITDA margin in your algorithm?
Good question, Tiago. Thank you for your question. look at in the future, everything depends on the demands that we are seeing, the phase that we are. For example, you can, in five years from now, in a really good time in United States and invest more and say in the sales, is a really good LTV over CAC ratio. We're gonna invest much more because we are seeing the growth opportunity happening in the United States and Europe. If this happening, you're gonna see for sure, an EBITDA much lower, because we are investing a lot in sales and marketing expenses to attract the new customers in that new in the PNL of attracting new customers. Considering that, probably we're gonna have an EBITDA even lower than 20%.
The growth is gonna be much, much higher. We are aiming in the Rule of 40. I think that's the message here, is that we will not aim the 20% EBITDA, but we're gonna aim to have a company in the future over the Rule of 40. We will not go for margin instead of go for growth. Okay? We don't have an opinion right now, how would be the new customers PNL and the current customers PNL in 5 years from now. What we have here and our focus here is that in 3-5 years, we're for sure gonna be a Rule of 40 company. That's the mindset. Okay, Tiago?
... Perfect. Thank you so much, Andre. Next question is from Rodrigo Cassiolatto Fonseca: Could you comment about difference in profitability of operations LatAm versus US and Europe, not only related to maturity scale, but also if there is any reason to believe there should be long-term structural differences?
Hi, Rodrigo. Great question. I can take this one, Andre. Feel free to chime in. Starting from the end, we don't see any material or structural differences in this market that would make us to see, you know, a different level of margin of profitability. Obviously, when you look at the U.S. market, we have much larger customers, and that's very helpful for you to get scale, so that helps. As you see from our customer base, we also have some of the largest retailers in Brazil and in Latin America, so we have that type of scale as well. If we look at the average ticket size from different countries, they do vary a little bit, but not that much. We can support customers locally.
Like, our gross margin, when we think about the gross margin, it doesn't change that much from country to country. Of course, there's some variation, but it's not, you know, meaningfully different. You know, on a steady state type of stage, we don't see the different countries with significantly different margin profiles. We do see the maturity of each country as having a significant impact in the margin. The more in the early stage a country is, like, in the discovery phase, I'd say, you don't have a lot of existing customers in that country, but you are going after adding new customers, and the sales efficiency is lower in the beginning. And the sales efficiency increases over time, right?
You have a much lower margin in the discovery phase, as you evolve through, you know, discovery, validation, acceleration, and when you reach the scale phase, then the margin is completely different. Much better margins, right? Much higher. That's how it works. Right now, I mean, we are, you know, seeing the level of the maturity that we have in Brazil and some countries in LatAm, as, you know, a source of funds for us to invest in this international expansion. As the international expansion gets more mature, the overall efficiency of the company will increase.
Amazing. Super clear. Thank you so much, Ricardo. The final question is from Clarke Jeffries. He asks: What kind of growth rates do your oldest Brazilian cohorts still grow at, given approximately 54% of revenue is from three-plus-year-old cohorts? Fair to say, even well-established cohorts grow at similar rates through overall net retention rates?
Yeah, Clarke, great question. We still see old cohorts, like in Brazil, so the more, you know, long relationships that we have growing at a decent pace. I mean, of course, there is variations, depend customer by customer, but if you do a group by cohort, we still see old customers growing at a nice pace. We do disclose cohorts on an annual basis, so you can see that, how that's evolving. We disclose it on revenue basis, and we don't disclose it on GMV, but I showed today in a few slides how, you know, the GMV of some of our customers evolve over time, and you can see that there are some very interesting cases there.
On a GMV basis, obviously, the cohorts, the old cohorts grow even faster than on the revenue basis because, you know, as we know, the revenue model is roughly one-third fixity and two-thirds take rate. Only roughly two-thirds of the GMV growth flows into the revenue growth of these cohorts. You know, by taking a look at the cohorts that we give disclosure on an annual basis, based on revenue, you can type of try to extrapolate how that could look like on a GMV basis. Yes, they continue to grow at a good pace.
Amazing. I have a bitter and sour feeling as I enjoy so much this event that it reached to its end. I hope you enjoyed today's Investor Day session and found it informative and engaging. Before closing out, I would like to ask Geraldo to step up once again to share some final words.
Yes, Judith. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all. I'm very happy. You know, like, we brought some customers in the New York Stock Exchange, and we opened the bell, and this is a big day for the financial market. At Nasdaq, there was the bell for Barbie debut. VTEX in New York Stock Exchange and Barbie on the other stock exchange. Good coincidence. But, you know, like, in conclusion, VTEX is at the forefront of accelerating commerce transformation. We are empowering brands, as you can see, today, to connect with their consumers, providing customization and speed to market through our composable commerce technology. We're driving network effects with our strong ecosystem.
With our financial, solid financial performance, global expansion, and relentless focus on innovation, we're very well positioned to capture the massive opportunity in the e-commerce market. Thank you very much for joining us today. Join us in this journey. See you next time.
Thank you. Thank you again for joining us today, to our management team, who always inspire us for all the time and commitment. We appreciate your continued support and belief in our mission. Have a wonderful day ahead. You may now disconnect. Bye.