Hello everyone, and welcome to the VTEX Earnings Conference Call for the quarter ended December 31, 2021. I'm Julia Vater Fernández, Investor Relations Director for VTEX. Our senior executives presenting today are Geraldo Thomaz Jr., Founder and Co-CEO, and Ricardo Camatta Sodré, Finance Executive Officer. Additionally, Andre Spolidoro, Chief Financial Officer, will be available during today's Q&A session. I would like to remind you that management may make forward-looking statements related to such matters as continued growth prospects for the company, industry trends, and product and technology initiatives. These statements are based on currently available information and our current assumptions, expectations and projections about future events. While we believe that our assumptions, expectations and projections are reasonable in view of the currently available information, we caution not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements.
Certain risks and uncertainties are described under Risk Factors and Cautionary Statements Regarding Forward-Looking Statements section of VTEX registration statements on Form F-1/A and other VTEX filings with the US. Securities and Exchange Commission, which are available on our investor relations website. Finally, I would like to remind you that during the course of this Conference Call, we may discuss some non-GAAP measures. Our reconciliation of those measures to the nearest comparable GAAP measures can be found in our Q4 2021 earnings press release available on our investor relations website. Now let me turn the call over to Geraldo. Geraldo, the floor is yours.
Thank you, Julia. Welcome everyone, and thanks for joining us today for our 2021 fourth quarter earnings results. 2021 was a very special year for VTEX. We went public. We added more large enterprise customers than ever before. We launched conversational commerce support, social and live commerce. We partnered with outstanding companies such as AWS, Facebook, Stripe, Mercado Libre, and many new system integrators. We continued consistently executing our geographical expansion plans, among many other things. I'm proud to announce that in 2021, we made significant progress across the globe, which increases our confidence today more than ever on the potential of our global expansion. Now let me move to the progress we've made during the last quarter of 2021.
We continued seeing strong momentum in the new contract signatures, resulting in a quarter-over-quarter increase in our backlog of new online stores under implementation, in addition to the strong performance of the stores coming out of implementation and going live. More importantly, we increased the amount of large enterprise customer contracts signed that are now under implementation. This demonstrates the brand power VTEX gained over the years, giving us confidence in the future growth of the company and visibility of future performance. In the Q4 2021, we had more than 40% additional go-lives than last year in the same quarter, with customers now operating with us in LatAm, US. and Europe. We continued seeing a huge opportunity ahead of us. We still see half of our new customers joining VTEX as greenfield e-commerce operations.
E-commerce penetration, it still has a long road ahead, especially in Latin America. Some new customers that went live this quarter that didn't have online presence in the region before were Elefant in Eastern Europe, H&M and Mango in five countries in Latin America. We also added customers that migrated from in-house solutions or other competitive platforms, including Cencosud in three countries in Latin America, Whirlpool in Western Europe, and CAE in the US. Speed to market continues to be a key differentiator and one of our competitive advantages against born on-premises software. This is crucial as it enable our customers to initiate their digital commerce transformation faster, remaining relevant for their customers and improving their time to revenue. For example, this quarter, H&M in Chile went live in less than four months. We are proud of our customers' journey.
In 2021, we were trusted by more than 2,400 customers with more than 3,200 stores across 38 countries. In our history as a company, we have built successful long-term relationships with our customers, expressed by an increased number of stores per customers and as countries where they operate with us. In 2021, when analyzing our top 100 customers, we reached 4.8 stores per customers with operations across 34 countries, up from 2020's 3.7 stores per customers in 26 countries.
In Q4, some of our existing customers that expanded their operations with us by opening new online stores in new countries were AB InBev in the US., Motorola in Guatemala, Pandora in Colombia, ASICS in Mexico, Victoria's Secret in Uruguay, and Tommy Hilfiger in Guatemala and Peru. Our existing customers continued growing at a healthy pace on top of the impressive growth they experienced in 2020. In 2021, our same-store sales were up 12% on FX neutral basis after 2020 same-store sales growth of 90%. Both same-store sales growth were impacted by COVID. 2020 numbers was positively impacted as our customers could only sell their products online during a significant portion of the year.
While 2021 numbers were impacted by the reopening of physical channels, which enable omni-channel strategy, in many cases supported by VTEX, that partly offloaded some of the online sales of the prior year. With that said, it is important to note that in 2019, our same-store sales has exceeded 25% in an FX neutral base. Before moving to our product development and enhancement, I want to do a quick comment over a relevant special day we had this quarter, Black Friday. VTEX enabled 1.4 million consumers order globally, which represents a 25% year-over-year increase in the number of orders compared to November 2020, demonstrating the long-term trend of consumers shopping online more frequently and the increasing penetration of digital commerce.
The two things we were most proud of this holiday season were the reliability of our network, which allowed us to reach 100% availability during the Black Friday week, and the increase in volumes in countries such as Mexico and Italy, each joining the top five countries with the most GMV dollar increases of all VTEX countries, demonstrating how our efforts to grow those regions are tangible in volume and top-line acceleration. Now moving to our product. I'm excited to update you with many inroads we made this quarter. I would like to introduce a new principle that will guide our development, commerce on autopilot and copilot, which basically means that we will develop products and features to help our platform to execute our customers' strategy autonomously and to recommend the best actions for them to grow with no or limited human interaction.
Building is always an evolving process. We are encouraged to disrupt together with our customers the mainstream concepts of retail and e-commerce. We are always seeking to provide a future-proof solution that is way ahead of today's needs. Now going into our four product development pillars. In zero-friction onboarding and collaboration, we continued making progress with our new front-end framework called FastStore, which is already adopted by five large enterprise customers such as Carrefour in Brazil, and we have more in the pipeline, such as Decathlon, Avon and Grupo Éxito. We have already successfully mentored SIs that are now implementing this new module for VTEX IO that was built from scratch with storefront performance in mind without compromising flexibility or development productivity. We continued adding sellers to our seller onboarding solution that are actively using our new seller portal.
We have companies such as Doto, MontenBaik, Elefant, GM Heritage and Samsung that already adopted the solution. As we are building the infrastructure to enable brands to be relevant in such a convenience-driven environment, we are always seeking to enhance the consumer's journey and offer omni-channel solutions that integrates all sales and fulfillment channels. Shoppers can now navigate in our customer's website and check for the local availability of each product, rely on faster delivery SLA if the product is available in a nearby physical store or franchisee. We already have Carrefour and Empório da Cerveja and CNA, among others, benefiting from this new capability. We also continued making strides related to our in-store endless aisle approach . Our physical store sales associates can use filters such as price range, department and brands, among other configurable filters when searching for products from in-store VTEX intelligent search.
This results in a more dynamic and precise process, speeding up sales, allowing them to quickly find the desired products. Regarding becoming the single- control panel for every order, we made three major launches: live shopping, conversational commerce and social commerce. In such a highly connected world, customers are becoming increasingly impatient and demanding when it comes to the shipping and support experience. The e-commerce revolution in retail might have been just the beginning of a complete change in the way we shop, which is crucial to be prepared for this next phase. VTEX Live Shopping app is now available to our customers. Our native live stream app helps brands and retailers using VTEX Commerce Platform to create one-to-many and one-to-one immersive live shopping experiences that increase that engagement and conversion rate, unlocking new growth opportunities by simplifying how to start, plan, manage, and track performance of live shopping events.
With live shopping, our customers have the possibility to broadcast live and sell at the same time, either from store, warehouse or the place of their preference. Product details are explained to a deeper level, and the shopping experience is amplified, helping consumers in their decision-making process. Early adopters of VTEX Live Shopping indicated an increase of about 5 times the average online session time, and most importantly, an increase of more than 30% in purchase conversion during live events. We are consistently increasing the support of our customers who want to introduce sales capability to their conversational touch points. Several customers at VTEX already combine the worlds of commerce and conversational platforms. We are onboarding customers from different segments such as grocery, drugstores, to enable them to sell through WhatsApp and other conversational interfaces.
A significant emerging channel that will complement physical stores, browsers, mobile apps, marketplace and other sales channels. We also launched VTEX tracking notification via WhatsApp in addition to SMS and email notification, increasing reviews response rates of our customers. We also launched social commerce capabilities, enabling sales associates in physical store of our clients to share products with customers via QR codes. This allows physical store customers to access a link to a shopping cart with products so they can complete the purchase even if size or color is not available in the physical store. On our mission of becoming the developer platform of choice for commerce, we continue attracting developers to our low-code platform, gaining momentum in the community and scaling our capabilities. Monthly active developers accessing VTEX development portal increased to more than 20,000 in Q4 from more than 14,000 in Q3.
Additionally, we are excited to announce that this quarter, US. developers accessing our portal have more than doubled quarter-over-quarter. Finally, regarding providing commerce on autopilot and copilot, we launched our new admin dashboard with near real-time data with the most relevant commerce information. Also, with our new VTEX Log Performance panel, customers can have a graphical presentation and description of each carrier's performance with algorithms suggesting which one is more efficient for each particular delivery. Our clients can track carriers' performance calculation results and leverage all the detailed information we have on each carrier for a specific route. Last but not least, I would like to thank our more than 1,700 VTEXers that have made VTEX into the top 10 public software companies to work at according to Glassdoor.
In the last 18 months, we tripled our investments, increasing significantly our headcounts from around 600 in 2019. For us, being able to maintain our core DNA at scale while evolving into becoming a better, stronger, and high-performing company is an honor and a commitment we make every day to all VTEXers. We have been able to build a robust team in every area, G&A, R&D, and S&M. Now it's time to let this team mature, reach efficiencies, and show the world what we're capable of. In 2022, we expect to grow our team at a more measured pace. By reaping the benefits of the investments made in 2021, we will grow at a strong pace in 2022, while at the same time delivering significant operating margin expansion.
Now, before I'll turn the call to Ricardo, I would like to announce that we will be hosting the VTEX Day, the biggest e-commerce event in Latin America and the third globally on April twelfth and the thirteenth in São Paulo. I would like to invite you to come experience VTEX culture and see the power of our ecosystem in this magnificent event. In 2019, the last year we could do this in person, we had more than 20,000 attendees and more than 160 amazing speakers. We are confident we will have another amazing event this year.
Being mindful of social distancing and health safety, the event will be limited in terms of attendees. Book your place quickly and stay tuned. We will be more than happy to have you all with us. Ricardo, I will leave you to cover our financial progress reports for the quarter.
Thank you, Geraldo. Hi, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here updating you on our financial performance for the Q4 2021. This quarter, our revenue increased to $37.1 million, a year-over-year increase of 30% on an FX neutral basis, surpassing the 27% year-over-year FX neutral growth rate we guided last quarter and demonstrating that we are indeed entering into the growth rate normalization trend we were expecting towards 2022.
This allows us to reach a revenue of $125.8 million for the full- year 2021, representing also a 30% growth on a FX neutral basis on top of our record revenue growth of 95% on a FX neutral basis last year. Our robust performance in such a tough cost environment gives us confidence in our future growth projections going forward. In the Q4 , we see some verticals gaining relevance, such as beauty and health, grocery, and apparel and accessories, which grew 22.3%, 36.6%, and 33.8% respectively on a year-over-year and FX neutral basis. Some verticals such as electronics and home appliances on the other hand, were impacted by supply chain challenges and macroeconomic trends and presented more modest performance. That shows that VTEX has a resilient business model.
Our software works well for many different industries, allowing us to perform well even while some verticals are impacted by macro events. Our revenue from existing stores increased to $87.3 million in 2021, representing a net revenue retention of 105.1% on a FX neutral basis. Our 2020 net revenue retention of 171.9% was positively impacted by physical stores temporarily closing. In contrast, our 2021 NRR was impacted by physical stores reopening. On a 2-year compounded average, our 2020/2021 net revenue retention was 134.4%, still above our historical average NRR rates between 110% and 115%.
On top of our existing stores growth, we continue attracting new stores, adding $19.4 million in revenue to our base, which represented 23% of our 2020 VTEX platform revenue, demonstrating the strong momentum we are having in new facilities. The number of customers with revenue above $250,000 per year reached 76 from 58 in 2020, representing a year-over-year increase of 31%. Our geographical expansion continues to broaden, with revenues outside of Brazil already representing 47% of our total revenues. In a two-year figure, Latin America excluding Brazil grew 84%, while the rest of the world grew at almost triple digits at 96%. When analyzing our FX neutral year-over-year growth in 2021, Brazil grew 24%. Latin America, excluding Brazil, our region most impacted by physical stores reopening given our customer base there, increased by 28%.
Rest of the world grew 98%, positively impacted by the Workarea acquisition, but also driven by solid organic growth. Now, moving down our P&L. Non-GAAP subscription gross profit was $24.1 million in the Q4 2021, compared to $17.9 million in the Q4 2020, representing a year-over-year increase of 35% in US dollars and 38.2% on a FX neutral basis. Non-GAAP subscription gross margin was 69.9% in the Q4 2021 compared to 64.6% in the same quarter of 2020. Non-GAAP subscription gross margin year-over-year 530 basis points improvement reflects operational hosting cost efficiencies.
We believe we will continue improving subscription gross margin in 2022 and onwards, even if specific quarters could potentially show some volatility while we introduce new product features and migrate non-core software providers, potentially incurring additional short-term costs in order to enjoy long-term higher efficiency. We decided to significantly increase our investments 18 months ago to capture the strong e-commerce acceleration market opportunity. As a result, our non-GAAP loss from operations was $10.9 million during the Q4 2021 compared to non-GAAP income from operations of $0.1 million in the Q4 2020, primarily due to incremental personnel-related investments.
The non-GAAP loss from operations margin this quarter already improved versus Q3 as a result of Q4 seasonality as well as operational leverage after a more moderate quarter-over-quarter expense increase. Also, along this line, we are encouraged to announce that we continue having attractive unit economics during Q4, despite the higher investment we conducted in new geographies. Our LTV to CAC is still above six times cash on cash. During 2021, we planted the seeds across new geographies and product features. Now it's time to see which ones will be most equipped to VTEX, and focus our efforts on those to leverage our future growth. As of the three months ended December 31, 2021, VTEX had a negative $21.3 million free cash flow, primarily driven by our non-GAAP loss from operations and one-off working capital impacts.
Here, it's important to note that until the end of 2020, VTEX grew without relevant capital injections, self-funded by its powerful business model. Although in the last three years we had relevant private investment rounds, most of those rounds were secondary. Out of them, we only received $66.3 million of primary funding. We consider it important to note that by the end of 2020, we had $75.5 million in cash and marketable securities in the balance sheet. We ended the year with almost $300 million in cash, so we are more than well- positioned to deliver strong results with no additional foreseeable funding needs for our organic growth plans.
Before moving to our 2022 outlook, I would like to remind the audience that from a business perspective, we think about our P&L as a combination of two P&Ls: our existing stores P&L and our new stores P&L. You'll find this referenced in slide 28 of our Q4 quarter earnings presentation. VTEX existing stores revenue, excluding our SMB platform, represented approximately 80% of total revenues. This P&L has an attractive operating margin and grows at our net revenue retention rates. We don't have any significant sales and marketing expenses to serve our existing stores. We only have support costs, which we already included in our subscription cost. This existing stores P&L grows with our net revenue retention, which is mainly driven by the same-store sales growth of our existing stores, our variable revenue as a percentage of our total revenue, and our annual revenue churn.
Our new stores revenue, also excluding our SMB platform, represented approximately 20% of total revenues. This P&L has a negative operating margin, but brings new stores to our base with attractive unit economics. Targeting new stores is a key focus of our sales and marketing team, so this P&L includes almost all those expenses. Now, comparing our P&L breakdown for 2020 and 2021, there are a couple comments I'd like to make. We are exiting the year at a subscription gross margin of 70%, so even higher than the overall gross margin for 2020. On the other hand, in the new stores P&L, the 35% gross margin in 2021 is simply a result of a higher mix of new stores in the overall base and the additional services these new stores require to go live.
When analyzing the expenses, it is important to note that we estimate that in 2021, 25% of our expenses were related to our global expansion outside of Latin America. More precisely, 35% of our S&M, 15% of our R&D, and 10% of our G&A expenses. Therefore, the increase in sales and marketing in new stores P&L is mostly explained by our global expansion. The increase in R&D is explained by our global expansion and our investments in new products and capabilities that may drive additional future growth. The increase in G&A is mostly explained by our investments to become a public company, which is already reducing as a percentage of revenue over the last four quarters. Now, moving to our outlook. We expect to continue seeing strong new stores growth as our encouraging backlog undergoes implementation.
In Q1, our existing stores will face tougher comps than the ones in Q4, as many countries in LATAM were experiencing a second wave of COVID during the Q1 2021. Nevertheless, we expect our revenue growth to continue at a strong pace. With that said, we are targeting revenue in the $33.0-$33.5 million range for the Q1 2022, implying a 30% year-over-year FX neutral growth rate in the middle of the range. For the full- year 2022, we expect FX neutral revenue growth of 29%-31%, implying a range of $158-$162 million as of Q4 end of period FX rates.
Wrapping up today's call, we want to reinforce that VTEX, as a leading digital commerce platform in Latin America, the fastest growing region for e-commerce in the world and yet overwhelmingly under-penetrated, is better positioned than ever to continue delivering strong results. On top of that, we are also only scratching the surface of our global opportunity. We have an exciting road ahead of us, and we are encouraged to conquer this journey with our employees, customers, partners, and investors by our side.
Thanks everyone for joining this Conference Call. We look forward to keeping you updated on our progress next quarter. With that, let's open it up for questions now.
Thank you. If you would like to ask a question today, please press star followed by the number 1 on your telephone keypad. I'll just allow a moment for any questions to be registered. Our first question today comes from Clarke Jeffries from Piper Sandler. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.
Hello. Thank you for taking the question. You know, first question is, how we should view your hiring plans for 2022. Obviously, a large investment here. Headcount has grown from roughly 855 quarters ago to now more than 1,700. You know, how are the hiring visions shaping up for 2022? And maybe, I think specifically how we should think about the margin profile based off of those rest of the world investments. Then I'll have one follow-up.
I can get this. Thank you for the question. So, you know, we for the last... I would say, since the beginning of the pandemic, in 2020, we accelerated the hiring a lot in all sorts of areas in the company. At R&D, sales and marketing, G&A. And this was a very important moment. We are attracting very good people and we've grown the team a lot. After the IPO, we continue hiring a lot more people, and these are the brand the employer brand that the IPO brought to us was very important for us to find key people that we were missing in the organization and at before the IPO, and we hired them.
I would say that now, after maybe I think, Andre correct me if I'm wrong, but I guess as I said, we triple our workforce since 2019. For this year, it's not that we're not hiring anybody, but we expect that our revenue will grow more than the expenses of the company, and you will start to see positive margins next year. That's our path right now. You know, like we expanded the team a lot, have a very powerful team. Now it's at the right time to nurture this team, to find the only the key element that is missing from the team and use this investment in our favor for increase the revenue in the next years.
Great. That's very helpful.
On your second question about.
Oh, go ahead.
Yeah. No, on your second question, I think I had a question about the margins, and globally. As you probably heard in the prepared remarks, we are estimating that 25% of our expenses comes from our global expansion. We have roughly 9% of our revenue coming from the rest of the world, right? From that, you can have a sense of how much we are investing. We tend to think more about our P&L by breaking between the existing customers and the new customers, as highlighted in the prepared remarks than by geography at this point. Hopefully that's helpful.
Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, that certainly makes sense. You know, I think a follow-up question is encouraging to hear about the number of go lives, the backlog of contracts that are moving to implementation. You know, I wanted to get an update on how you've seen the conversations change, especially as some of these brands start to weigh incremental investments, maybe in the context of physical channels coming back and how they're weighing their e-commerce strategy versus physical channels. Has omni-channel or hybrid kind of elevated to the top of those conversations? And where are you seeing the appetite to invest as we enter 2022?
We are very excited in digitalizing the physical store experience. We're bringing the physical store to the digital world of the retail. We are doing this with several initiatives for that. We are developing an in-store solution that is a software that is for the salesperson at the physical store. There are plenty of customers at VTEX that already deliver from store orders that were made in the e-commerce website. These in-store solution allow infinite aisle purchases. The customers can buy products that are not available at the physical store and not available at the brand as well. The physical store salesperson can also sell third-party products as a marketplace. We are slowly developing a picking solution to enable the physical sales force to make a picking of the orders that were generated somewhere else.
Deliver to the customer that is close to them. This allows very fast and good SLAs for the consumers. With this conversational commerce initiatives that we're supporting conversational commerce interactions, we will make a huge step toward this direction to enable the physical store sales to be much more than a salesperson that serves the person that is at the physical store. This person, this physical sales store will serve the customers everywhere and all the time.
Great. I appreciate the color. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question today comes from Josh Beck from KeyBanc. Please go ahead. The line is yours.
Thank you, Keith, for the call and the question. You know, I wanted to ask about this live shopping feature. It certainly seems like it's improved engagement. It's improved conversion. Obviously, those are really important metrics for your customers. Just curious about, you know, where the uptake could maybe go over time. Is this something that you plan to monetize specifically or is it just part of the platform? We'd love to hear more on that topic.
Yes, we are seeing a big trend of the traffic moving from the browser to the conversational kind of suite. Social commerce with a personal shopper, live shopping, all these suite of social engagement we foresee as a big trend for all our clients. This trend started in Asia. It's ramping up in Latin America, strong as it was in Asia, and will reach Europe and United States. Live shopping is one of the elements of the social commerce. We already have the VTEX Live Shopping in production. It is already in place in more than 50 clients. Yes, we will monetize the channel as we do in other channels.
Where this live commerce will stand in Latin America, EU, Europe or US., we are believing that can reach the same level that is in Asia right now. That social commerce entirely represents 50% or more of the entire GMV in Asia. It is a big bet for VTEX. We are seeing good momentum on those clients and brands from luxury brands, from discount brands are using this as a new channel. And the beauty of the new channel, it is the most organic channel, live commerce. It is a trend, and the trend that kind of helps the margin of our retailers, our clients.
Just to-
Very helpful. Maybe,
Yeah, go ahead.
Yeah. No, just to complement on the monetization side, we do charge a fee for you know, using the live commerce app. However, as you know, we are very aligned with our customers as we have this transaction fee, the take rate on their GMV. If they increase the session time, if they increase their conversion, they will increase their GMV, and that will translate into additional revenue for VTEX as well. It's a very aligned business model with our customers.
Makes total sense. Then maybe another follow-up for you, Ricardo. You know, just curious on, I don't know how specific you need to be, but just with respect to, you know, GMV and net revenue retention, just if you expect this year to be within more typical ranges, if there's other factors that we need to be thinking about as we build out the model for this year.
Yeah. No, thanks, Josh, for the question. On GMV growth and revenue growth, right? I think if you look at the past couple quarters, we saw revenue growth higher than GMV growth. There are two mixed impacts that explain what happened over the past quarters, and I can now link that to the expectation for the future. I think that's more of your question. The first mixed impact is the increase of new stores as a percentage of our total revenue, right? New stores come with a higher- take rate as customers GMV ramp up over time and our fixed fee remains the same. New stores drive an increase in services needed for implementation and go live of the store.
The second mixed impact is the increase in revenue coming from customers that have, you know, lower average ticket consumer purchases. We tend to have a slightly higher- take rate for customers of VTEX with lower average ticket. Given the acceleration in the last two quarters of beauty and health, grocery and apparel and accessories categories with lower average tickets, we experienced a positive contribution to our take rate. Now, having said that, for the full- year 2022, we would expect that GMV and revenue growth to be more aligned on a quarter-over-quarter basis. There could be some mixed fluctuations. For example, we currently have a strong backlog undergoing implementation. For the next couple quarters, GMV growth could lag revenue growth. For the full- year, GMV and revenue growth should be more aligned. Hopefully that answers the question.
Super helpful. Thank you, team.
Thank you. Just as a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, press star followed by 1 on your telephone keypad. Our next question today comes from Fred Mendes from Bank of America. Please go ahead, Fred. The line is yours.
Hello. Good afternoon, everyone. I have two questions as well. The first one about the developers. You know, very interesting information disclosing here. The growth is, it's quite relevant, you know, 20K this quarter from 14K last quarter. First question, how do you detect you have a new developer who writes in your platform and gets a code? I mean, how do you get this information? Number two, if you did any kind of marketing campaign or a non-recurring event that led to this very strong growth over the last two quarters pretty much. This would be the first one. Then the second one, also on the same topic.
Most of these developers, this growth, are they coming from your clients who have developers and working on your platform? Or you are seeing a strong number of freelancers pretty much trying to develop a product and monetize on it? Those would be the two questions. Thank you very much.
Hey, no, great. It's Ricardo here. Happy to take this one. On the detecting the developers on our development portal, right? I mean, we have a portal. They have to log in to that portal so we can see how many developers are logging in and if they are deploying codes to our platform, right? That code could be a new app, could be an update to an app. It could be some type of customization that a customer is making on top of the VTEX platform, right? All those interactions, we see it because they have to log into our portal, right? We have the control, and we see if they are in Brazil or if they are in the US., and so on and so forth, in different geographies.
We can very quickly and easily track that type of information. The other interesting information that we track that we have in the earnings presentation, we did not mention in the earnings call, is the number of deploys that they are doing, because it's not just a matter of them logging into the portal. You have to see if they are actually doing something from the portal, right? We also track that, and that has also been increasing over the quarters. We released these over the past couple quarters as well, so you can all see that trend. That's how we track it. Your second question, if you could repeat, please.
I would like to complement. Mariano here. Just to complement. As we are expanding in US. and Europe, and now obviously we need to adapt our product to the local necessities. In the last two years, we've been investing a lot in this network effect, how to integrate VTEX to the local players. Today we have more than 100 ISVs natively integrated, like CyberSource, Affirm, PayPal, Avalara, Segment, ShipStation, Klarna, Listrak, Akeneo, like all the suite that we need to be competitive in US. and Europe is already in place. Obviously this needs a lot of development manpower from our clients, from our partners, and from VTEX itself. This ecosystem is growing as we expand our footprint.
Another demand for developers to increase is our integrations with ERPs. We are integrated with ERPs and OMS such as SAP, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics, Retail Pro, Lightspeed. Also, those needs developers to create the apps to our platform. The third dimension also it is our SIs in the United States, like Publicis Sapient, Wunderman Thompson, Gorilla Group, Valtech, Born Group, Pivotree, and Rely. They have now undergoing projects with VTEX that also needs their IT resources to be VTEX ready on this. Those are the three dimensions that demands more and more developers to be delivering code in VTEX IO. Perfect. It's super clear, Mariano.
I guess going for the second question would be if the new developers that you attract to your platform, if you can track if they are basically developers from your clients, right? Working on their own portal to develop their own products or they are basically freelancers that through the community they see your platform as a way to develop an app or something and monetize from it. Thank you.
Yeah. Majority of the developers are from SIs or ISVs. We see very few freelancers starting new companies through VTEX. What we are seeing, it is a massive adoption of ISVs and SIs, where we have our expansion. Those added developers comes from those new expansion markets.
Perfect. Very clear. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question today comes from Vitor Tomita from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead. The line is yours.
Hello, good evening, all, and thanks for taking our questions. Two questions as well from our side. The first one is thinking so far in 2022, we've seen some wider macro issues that have likely affected the business in different ways. There's the Omicron spike recently, further economic reopening, some macroeconomic volatility, still some supply chain issues. Thinking about the 2022 guidance, what kind of scenario are you assuming for the impact of these type of variables? That would be our first question. Our second question, if we may, would be following up on your discussion of expanding features, R&D on the channel. Could you give us an update on your M&A strategy and on whether you are seeing any potential opportunities to complement your platform via acquisitions to further accelerate that rollout of new features? Thank you.
Hi, Vitor. Thanks for the question. I mean, on the macroeconomic scenario, right, I mean, we don't control the macro, and it's very hard to predict what's going to happen. As you mentioned, there is supply chain issues. There is the Omicron. There'll be, you know, election in a few countries in Latin America this year. All these things we don't control, right? What we do control is how we help our customers to sell more, to perform well, to improve their GMV, to do more omni-channel type of solutions, to integrate their physical stores with e-commerce through our OMS, to launch marketplaces and to help them on their digital transformation journey, right?
From our side here, what we are looking at is, you know, if you look at 2021, a year that we had very tough comps compared to 2020, given the lockdown of 2020, and we managed to grow 30% on a year-over-year basis in 2021. We feel confident about growing again 30% in 2022. We know macro is not gonna be, you know, as landmark or, you know, a normal year, as we are seeing by the events today, for example. But we feel confident in delivering a 30% growth in 2022. That's the middle of the guidance for the year, right? We guided FX neutral growth between 29%-31% for 2022.
We feel confident on that. The second question was on M&A. I can also take this one. We have $300 million on the balance sheet. We feel very comfortable with this level of cash to, you know, deploy and develop our organic growth plans. We could also explore some M&A. Historically, VTEX has done M&A. I think 15 transactions in its history, seven or so transactions in the past three years. These are mostly bolt-on type of acquisitions. They are not transformational acquisitions. We are looking at M&A. We have a M&A team at VTEX. We have a pipeline that we are evaluating. We look at M&A through, you know, three key verticals and one horizontal.
The first vertical is buying a customer base and migrating those customers to VTEX. We've done that last year with the Workarea acquisition in the US. that can help us expand geographically. The second vertical is to buy features, right, that will help our customers to sell more or will, you know, reduce the churn, or will increase the NPS of our customers. We bought, for example, a company called Biggy, which is a search engine that helps our customers to sell more. The third vertical is going into adjacent markets, right? That we are well-placed, and we have a right to win. That's also something that we are exploring. Then the horizontal is acquihire, right? Developers, R&D talent is scarce in this moment.
Looking at companies that we find have a very good team could also be an interesting acquisition target for us. We have a pipeline. We are looking at this opportunity. I think, you know, there is nothing to announce at the moment, but we have the cash on balance sheet, and we have a team, and we have done M&A in the past. I think this is something that could be something to do in the next, you know, in the future. Now, I would expect more around a certain type of acquisitions than, you know, transformational acquisitions.
Very clear. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Now Geraldo would like to say some final remarks. Please go ahead.
I want to take this opportunity to thank you for being here with us. We closed 2021 showing solid steps toward our desirable future, and we are excited for what's to come. We will continue to focus on executing with excellence and making VTEX the platform of choice for enterprise brands and retailers, not only Latin America but worldwide. We invite you to join us in our journey of disrupting commerce. Looking forward to keeping you updated on our progress next quarter. Stay safe. Thank you very much.
This concludes today's call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.