Okay. I think we're gonna get going with our next fireside chat. It's my pleasure to host the team from Xometry. We've got Randy Altschuler, CEO, Shawn Milne, Vice President of Investor Relations. Randy, Shawn, thanks for being part of the conference. Great to see you guys in person.
Thanks so much for having us. Yeah.
Okay. Well, I've been looking forward to this one. You know, we've talked a lot about this company over the last couple of months as we've put out more research on it. Randy, maybe you could start, though. For those who don't know the company as well, I think it's interesting what you sort of built, the market opportunity you're going after. Maybe just set the table for us on the current state of the company, and then we'll go thematically into a lot of those big elements.
Absolutely. Let me just take a step back. There's the global manufacturing market, which is $35 trillion dollar market. There's a sub-segment of that, about $2.4 trillion, which is involved with customers buying parts from hundreds of thousands of small manufacturers across the world. This is a very inefficient market where customers are rarely getting the best price, the best lead time, and the optimal solution. Likewise, the suppliers, which are these small manufacturers, which have historically depended on their local customers, are rarely getting the work that optimizes their profitability and maximizes the utilization of their capacity. I'm the co-founder of Xometry, together with Laurence Zuriff.
We started the company in 2013, and we said, "Let us use technology here to create a marketplace to optimize the pricing and the experience and profitability for both the buyers and the suppliers." That's the genesis behind Xometry. We use artificial intelligence to create instant pricing for the buyers and suppliers and to optimize the match. We've created an e-commerce-like experience for a marketplace that's filled with bespoke, very unique items. This is what it is, that artificial intelligence which will unlock this opportunity for both sides.
It's so fragmented, right? In the U.S. alone, there's 665,000 shops. You know, Eric, 70% of them have only 20 employees, so massive fragment on the manufacturer.
Okay. Maybe we'll go side by side in the marketplace you've built, the platform you've built. Let's start with the buyers. Talk a little about who the core buyer is, how who a buyer is on Xometry has changed as the platform continues to evolve, and elements of how you sort of continue to grow the buyer base of the platform.
Absolutely. When we opened our doors for business in 2014, initially our buyers were folks who would find us online. Our marketing and sales funnel starts with digital marketing. And they would find us online, and they would largely do prototyping in small orders, and it would be a wide range of customers. As time has progressed, and we've gotten better known in the market, as we've added additional manufacturing technologies to our marketplace, we not only have individual engineers who are buying from us, but now we have purchasing people buy from us, and now we've got chief operating officers. You're moving from doing single one-off orders to doing entire assemblies to doing, you know, entire products, and that's happening through the Xometry marketplace.
One question obviously that's been dominating here is sort of the broader macro. Maybe just ask when the macroeconomic environment gets volatile, what does that mean for buyers? It also seems to always be measured against you're still in the very early innings of the growth you're seeing in the platform.
Sure.
Does that volatility have an impact on the buyer side?
You know, Xometry has experienced very durable growth since our founding. Just put that in perspective, a few years ago, we were $80 million revenue. The year after that, we were $140 million. Last year, we were $218 million. This year, we've guided $395 million-$400 million. You've seen. That's been during different environments where you've had no problems whatsoever, and you had COVID, where entire shutdowns, then you had supply chain issues. We have that durable growth for a number of reasons. First of all, there is a secular shift to this digital. You've seen that happen in other industries, but that long tail of the internet, that hadn't happened yet in this segment of manufacturing. With AI, we've unlocked that ability.
There's a secular shift, and we are the leading, by far the largest two-sided marketplace tackling this out there. You've got the secular shift. The second thing is that more and more we're doing the core products of what our customers have to have made. Irrespective of if there's some sort of contraction in the economy, these are not frivolous items for them. It's not just R&D. It's what they need to generate their own revenue. Finally, just you had mentioned this, Eric, it's a $2.4 trillion market, so I'm super excited about our growth. We've got huge growth, you know, best in class growth, but we're still very tiny in the market. Long way to go.
Okay.
Eric, we had record net adds with buyers second quarter. Given guidance, at that time, I think net adds was-
Yeah. Okay. Turning to the manufacturer side, maybe give us your perspective on how manufacturers, similar to the buyer side, find the platform, how the relationship with the manufacturer has evolved or typically evolves, and how do we think about growing scale on that side of the business?
Sure. You know, manufacturers obviously are critical here to delivering to our customers. Largely word of mouth. You know, we've spent, when you look at our sales and marketing spend, much more of that is devoted on the buyer side than on the supplier side. It's largely word of mouth. I think initially, the same way that the customer was using us for one-off prototype and we weren't yet an approved supplier, et cetera. Similar theme on the supplier side, maybe just I've got to fill some open capacity, I'll try this out. But as we've matured with them and as they've seen the value of us, we're occupying more and more of their capacity. I also wanna explain that our algorithms, you know, we use this machine learning.
It not only creates an instant price for the buyer and the supplier, but the algorithm also optimizes what work we give to a particular supplier based on what we've seen they like to do. I always use the analogy of, like, TikTok videos. The more TikTok videos you watch, the more likely the next TikTok video is gonna be one you're gonna wanna watch or a recommendation engine on Netflix. What's been nice is, as the suppliers lean in more and do more work with us, we're getting better at giving them more what they want. Then to further cement that relationship, we've been adding a basket of supplier services. For example, we have fintech products that help them get paid faster, help them with their working capital. These are small businesses. They're cash constrained.
They're very sensitive to, you know, long payouts from customers. The bigger the customer, the more they're gonna ask you to pay in 60, 90, 120 days. Our ability to pay them some of the money upfront and then get paid for the entire order very quickly is a real value add. There's a bunch of these products that we've launched that are helping them run their businesses more efficiently.
Just a level set. We ended last year with 1,010 active buyers. We were up 40%. The year before we were up 80%. Mostly organic growth there. Growing that supplier base.
That's the framing of sort of the buyer side and the supplier side. You talked earlier about the size of the market opportunity being the biggest player in the space, but I think one of the main questions we always get, 'cause people don't know how to measure it, is who do you compete against? Like, what does the competitive landscape look like? You know, Ben and I kind of always get asked like, are there companies out there that you don't know about or we don't know about? How do you view who you're trying to disrupt and who you're competing against?
Our biggest competitor is the old way of doing business. It's the customer historically trying on their own to source these parts, to assemble this product on their own. It's a time-consuming process. Because there are so many variables that impact what would be the right solution at a given time, the customer is probably never optimizing that purchasing decision. Likewise, that supplier is stuck with taking the work from their local customer. They are incredibly concentrated with their risk. If you're, you know, if you're in Detroit, not only are you gonna be, if you're a supplier, dependent on automotive, you're probably gonna be dependent on one OEM versus another OEM. We're basically going in and saying, "Hey, there's a better solution for you than the old way.
By using our marketplace, now the buyer can get a better deal and the supplier can fill their capacity." It's more just changing the way they're doing things versus a particular name being a competitor.
Okay. Understood. You know, when you go out, I'm sure investors do this as well, when you go out and do your own due diligence on participants in the platform, your pricing algorithm and model and the way in which you dynamically price always comes back as a big competitive advantage for the company. Talk a little bit about what you've built on the pricing side and how, as you build scale in your marketplace, the pricing dynamic actually continues to iterate and improve.
Yeah. I think when you think about particularly like a B2C marketplace or other ones, it's very commoditized product what's getting sold, right? You know, effectively, there is a list price or some sort of SKU price or people have in their mind what it's gonna cost them pretty much. If you go to two different websites to buy a quart of milk, you got a pretty good sense of what you're gonna pay. By the way, you know, the price differential may be 5-10%. 10% would be a big difference, right? In this case, everything we're making in the marketplace is unique. It's special to that customer.
Not only is the design itself special, the quantity may be unique, the material it's made in, the post-processing, all sorts of different things. You basically have infinite possibilities of what the customer wants. Timelines, you know, where it's made, all those things. To be able to give them an instant price, to commit to a price and to commit to a lead time, all that online with these infinite possibilities, is the problem that we're solving using our artificial intelligence. We train, we take those CAD files, and that the customer uploads, the questions that they answer, and we're training on thousands of different features. We're getting more and more data. We use a technique called deep learning. It's a kind of machine learning.
The more data we get, the smarter the system becomes about what something should cost. We definitely get that network effect. It's the more data we have, the more accurate we are in pricing. This is truly the right price for the customer, best in class price for the market. We not only create the instant price for the buyer, but we also create the instant prices for the suppliers. The more that we know what that supplier likes, we're also better at figuring out what's the right price to offer them. Again, as they interact more with us in the marketplace, we get more data on a particular supplier, as well as overall, we're better and better at giving them specific pricing too.
Understood. Away from just the broader industry landscape and competitive landscape, probably the second biggest bucket of questions we get from investors is about the Thomas acquisition.
Sure.
Maybe take a step back first. What drove the company to do this acquisition? Give us a little bit of the strategic rationale, the decision process, to complete this acquisition, and then we'll sort of go down some of the thematic elements around it.
Sure. Some background. Thomas was a company started 100 years ago, had these books that they would have before the Internet, where people would find all sorts of industrial parts that they wanted to buy via the Thomas Register. They eventually moved that online. Think about it as sort of a Google for industrial manufacturing. They've got 500,000 North American suppliers listed, 70,000 different categories. You can go to Thomas, and you can get really specific. I want a manufacturer in Western Massachusetts who's, you know, got clean rooms and has got, you know, XYZ. You can get all that there. Wonderful business, very unique in our industry. Sort of the unicorn there. It's something that I'd always known about and frankly, always wanted to buy.
When we looked at Xometry, Thomas has not only 500,000 listed suppliers, they also had and now they have 1.4 million registered users. At the time we purchased them, they had 1.2 million registered users. Huge audience, gained over 100 years of business, hundreds of thousands of suppliers. We contrast that with Xometry. Super proud of what we've done with Xometry. As Shawn said, last year, we had 2,010 suppliers, grew 43%. We just finished in Q2, we had our biggest number of active buyers ever was 33.
491.
Yeah. 49. 33,491 users. Contrast that with.
Yeah
The Thomas audience. This was a great opportunity to bring a whole new audience into the Xometry ecosystem that we didn't have. Think about it like an amazingly low CAC for us for both buyers and suppliers. Also, there's also some really important things. As we grow within our customers, and our biggest customers are big companies, the biggest companies in the world, more and more we wanna go to them and say, "We can be your one-stop shop for all of your unique manufacturing needs. You don't need to go to 20 different suppliers. It's all here." Thomas is so broad, it enables us to broaden what we can offer. We can, instead of the dozen processes that we had, which is best in class at Xometry, now we've got 70,000 categories.
As we create that unified experience for the customer where we can be their one-stop shop, kind of what Amazon has become for us, for many of us in the consumer world, that's very powerful. Allow us to go even deeper into our customers, and these are customers that could be spending our annual revenue all by themselves every year.
Got it. Maybe just to level set, 'cause we didn't actually do this up front. You know, your biggest customers, some people don't realize who those people are, government entities, big technology companies. Maybe just give people a little sense of just some of the ones you highlight in your typical disclosures and slide decks.
The biggest aerospace companies in the world, the biggest online retailers in the world, the biggest medical device companies in the world. I mean, our biggest customers are the biggest companies.
Yep.
If you're a large automotive OEM and you've got, you know, you've got thousands of suppliers, you want to deal with the supplier who's making your steering wheel. You want to deal with the supplier who's making millions of parts. You still have to do hundreds of thousands of service parts. You know, when you bring in your car and you get repaired, those are fulfilled by these small manufacturers. You don't want to have to deal with all these small manufacturers, the risk of them, just the management of them. For these larger companies, the ability to have us, the marketplace, handle that for them, still get the breadth and diversity that they want in their supplier base, but effectively have one throat to choke, kind of like with Amazon and third-party sellers.
Yeah
That's really powerful for them. That's why the bigger the company, the more attractive this proposition is.
There isn't one company that represents more than 3% of our revenue.
Right.
Right.
Yeah. We have no customer concentration.
It's very diversified.
Right. Absolutely.
You know, we talk and we have a slide in our deck where we talk about the world's largest e-commerce company, you know, came to us, I think it was about four years ago, with a $50 order, and they're doing north of $4 million today. As Randy said, we're still scratching the surface of what we can do with them.
Look, that's the beauty of technology. Our platform's very extensible. We're in so many different industries, and we can offer so many of those different flavors, you know, whether it's certifications, or different things that you'd never be able to do as a single manufacturer.
Understood. Just a few more on Thomasnet and some of where you wanna take the platform. I think another area just to get you to comment on, obviously you're taking the Xometry Everywhere product, putting it into Thomasnet, and then you're also, you know, obviously converting buyers who are existing on Thomasnet into the Xometry marketplace. Just help us understand a little bit how the integration and execution of the merger and being able to mine, you know, what you acquired and how it plays out in the numbers over the next couple of years. How should we think about that?
Sure. You know, just I've done acquisitions before. You know, it was very important when we bought Thomas to create one company, an integrated company. Just culturally and making sure that we create one business. I think on Thomasnet specifically, we want to capture. These 1.4 million registered users were reaching out to the suppliers, but all that activity was happening off platform. They would find them on Thomasnet, but everything else would happen off platform, which was obviously not optimal for the buyer because they're still chasing down these small manufacturers trying to reach them. It wasn't even optimal for the supplier because now they're trying to manage things, and it's one-off, et cetera. Of course, there was a revenue opportunity.
There was no monetization of those, of all those RFQs and RFIs. Tremendous number of them. We said, "Hey, let's bring that on platform, make it really simple for the buyer to conduct that RFI, to check out, to transact. And likewise, let's make it very easy for the supplier to interact." At the end of June, we launched what we call the industrial buying engine, IBE, and this is an experience where the buyer can now execute all that on platform. The supplier can interact with them, respond, there's checkout, all the things you'd expect in an e-commerce-like experience. We also embedded in that our instant quoting. Think about it as a buy now option. The customers come in and they say, "Hey, I want these specific parts." If we can instant quote it, we'll detect that.
We can't instant quote. We're not as broad as Thomas. If we can instant quote it, they're gonna instant quote, "Here, you can buy right now." Customer says, "I don't wanna buy right now," then they've got the option to conduct this RFI or RFQ right there on platform and check out there as well. Trying to make it really simple to let the supplier, the customer do it their way. If the customer wants this, they have it. If they want that, they've got it too.
Maybe just to ask a follow-up there. As you integrate the companies and you execute against this game plan in the next couple of years, what friction points are you running into? Are there any elements of, you know, where you have to execute against educating folks in the broader industry or just bringing people up to speed? You know, it was interesting, Randy, earlier, you talked about, we just have to convince people that the old way of doing things isn't the right way.
Yeah
We're doing a new way. Are you running into any of that with this? In which case, once you get someone converted and thinking about what they can take advantage of, you see the benefits, but it takes a little bit of time.
Look, you know, awareness is our biggest issue. It was one of the attractive things, frankly, going public, you know, that helps bring up our awareness. You know, we've talked about we're spending more money on awareness, but I like to say we're legends in our own mind. We need to make sure people know our story. That's why, you know, if everybody knew us, we'd be growing 1,000% a year. I mean, we're growing, you know, 55% Q2 organically, so it's huge growth. It really is getting the word out. I don't think you see resistance once people understand it, but it's just educating them. We are seeing a nice uplift in our organic traffic.
Like, the word is getting out, and certainly it's more and more happening organically, but it will be something we'll always wanna continue to do to reach our full potential.
Last piece on this acquisition, and I think I've asked you guys this just as a framing question a couple times on earnings calls. How should we think about what having these properties together could do for the cost structure of the company longer term? The ability to acquire customers, acquire suppliers, possibly at lower cost inputs. Maybe it's a more profitable company than it is today, just purely by driving synergies against this acquisition. How should folks be thinking about that?
When we acquired Thomas in December of last year, we pulled forward our profitability.
Yep.
We said, "Hey, in 2023, we're gonna be adjusted EBITDA positive for the year." You can see already the drawdown, the increase in our profitability from Q1 to Q2. We've indicated that will continue in Q3 and Q4. We are absolutely. There's the ability here to create real leverage, and you're seeing that and you're gonna continue to see that, moving forward with it. I think on the revenue side, it will be a gift that will keep giving. You know, we've indicated we've had great growth this year. None of that has been because of Thomas in terms of our marketplace core thing, but you're gonna begin to see us get that traction, convert those buyers, those users, Thomas users, into Xometry active buyers.
As that awareness gets out and we penetrate, it's not like you're gonna have a couple big giant quarters, and then we're done. It's gonna be that you're gonna see that gift deliver this year, next year, and the years that follow.
Thomas will be effectively a very low-cost customer acquisition-
Yeah
platform for sure.
Supplier acquisition platform as well.
Yeah. Right.
We just launched at the end of June. We also launched two new technologies in our quoting engine, tube bending and laser tube cutting. That was done on the backbone of the Thomas suppliers that were in Thomas. We knew how popular those categories were. These are awesome intel and networks that we can adapt. Now we know which customers were looking for that, and put them into the quoting engine.
You talked a lot about innovation so far, and I wanna maybe just zoom back out on this topic. There's sort of product innovation that takes place in the marketplace, and then you've also talked a little bit about layering more services innovation into platforms. We're seeing a lot of two-sided, multi-sided platforms talk about these services layers more. First, let's start with the product side. You've talked about a couple of the products that have been implemented and built and deployed. Talk a little bit about product cadence. What are you most focused on in terms of driving innovation on the product side of the equation when you look out over the next couple of years?
Yeah. Certainly, you know, continuing with IBE and creating that one-stop shop for the customer, making it easy for them, whether it's a engineer or it's a procurement person, just making it really simple to fulfill all their needs and give them everything they need for us to become their rails for purchasing. Likewise, on the supplier side, you know, we haven't really talked about Workcenter.
Yep.
We deployed at the end of June something called Workcenter. We had bought last year a manufacturing execution system called FactoryFour. It was a small company based in Southern California. We took that product, and at the end of June, we deployed that to all the manufacturers in the Xometry/Thomas ecosystem. This is a software system that enables them to manage their capacity. It's also got different components. We're adding managed quality and other things. Most of our small manufacturers don't have anything today. They're using clipboards and Excel spreadsheets, so it's a real value add. We're layering into that our financial products and other products right within that.
Our goal is not just to have those manufacturers use Workcenter for work they're getting from Xometry or from Thomas, but our goal is for them to use it for all of their work. Hey, you're a small manufacturer. In the past, you couldn't afford to buy this software. You didn't have the time to do it. Here it is. This will optimize your utilization, help you with quality, help you with delivery. Use it for everything you're doing.
Yeah, we just wanna be their operating system.
Yeah.
Just a single pane of glass. They come in in the morning on their phone, they see all their jobs. We can help them finance that. We can help them with their working capital. We can help them with their supplies and really build that basket of services right in that single pane of glass.
Just if you're able to share anything, I mean, as folks do, for lack of a better term, move up the stack and become services customers of yours, what does that do for net revenue growth, net revenue retention, you know, loyalty? How should we think about the amplification of return as they become more embedded in your platform?
I mean, it absolutely, you know, it creates more stickiness. I mean, attrition is inversely correlated to attachment rates, right? I mean, said a more positive way, the more that they use more of our products, the more likely they are to stick with us.
Yeah.
You know, we're very focused on creating that product set that they will adopt because the more activity when you take a step back about our gross margins in particular for Marketplace, our gross margins for Marketplace depend on more data. We've had huge gross margin accretion, more data, but also with more active suppliers.
Yep.
We have all the incentives in the world to make these people happy, grow deeper within them, become that operating system that pays off not only because we can monetize that, but also because it will, on this Marketplace side, create more active participants.
Wonderful.
Yeah, just to kinda level set on the supplier services basket, that's a high 70% gross margin business. Eric, as you know, as we can open up our financial products to all these suppliers, that's a 90%+ gross margin business. Longer term, really strong growth opportunities, we open that up.
Yeah. Understood. We haven't yet talked about international. You know, can you talk about the footprint you've built globally? When you think about all the things you wanna accomplish, how should we think about international versus domestic from a market opportunity standpoint?
Sure. Well, overall, we think, like, it's similar in other marketplaces that international could eventually be about 40% of our overall revenue. We launched in Europe at the end of 2019. It's now roughly 10% of our revenue. It grew last quarter 136%.
Yeah.
136%, so it's growing very rapidly. You can go to Xometry.eu. You can see us. We're in many different languages, including we just launched Norwegian. So, you know, it's a huge market there. The value proposition that we have in the United States, and we've built a local network within Europe, and in Europe, we're in the E.U. plus the U.K. You know, we're not impacted by this tragic war that's going on right now, the invasion of Ukraine.
Sure. Yeah.
You know, that's been growing really rapidly, but it has got a lot of the similar dynamics here in the U.S. We've seen that story still, you know, resonates a lot. We actually took that, the learnings, you know, the way we launched in Europe so successfully, and we used that to launch in Asia-Pac.
Yep.
Our first place in Asia-Pac has been in China. In the beginning of this year, we launched in China. We're headquartered in Shanghai. In April, our platform went live there. You can go to Xometry.asia. That's going really well. We're getting daily orders and we're building a local Chinese network, so it's China for China. It's important for so many reasons. You know, one reason is that more and more we have global customers, and those global customers are gonna buy locally. They want the ability for me to go to a Fortune 10 company and say, "Hey, I can service you in Europe. I can service you in Asia. I can, of course, service you here in North America, and I can service you in your local languages." Every market's a little bit different.
The underlying technology is the same, but materials may be different in China. Processes, even the payment systems in Europe are slightly different. My ability to do that for these companies is really powerful. Nobody else can do that. It's really helpful. Of course, we've got the cross-border opportunities as well.
Yeah. Strong.
I'll just say too, just, in Europe, you know, if we were to index for you, Eric, basically starting point at the same time as the U.S., we're just seeing Europe scaling faster in their growth, not only in the revenue side, but their gross margins too. You know, the fact that we have the technology platform and the data to learn from gets these new markets to scale at a nice pace.
Yeah. Understood. Obviously, you know, the market has shifted somewhat in its attention from growth to profitability.
Right.
You know, myself and my peers have asked you a lot about that over the last couple earnings.
Of course.
You did pull forward your profitability, you know, with more recently. Talk about your medium-term goals around profitability, and also how should investors think about longer term profitability goals, but especially measured against all the choices you have for growth, because it is a balancing act, I think, for a company like you.
Yeah. Well, look, I think we're fortunate because our revenue is growing so quickly, and our gross profit margins are growing actually even quicker. That's generating. You know, just put this in perspective, and I'm just talking about it organically. We grew overall in Q2 about 80%-
Eighty-nine.
89%. If you just look organically, we grew 55%. In Marketplace, so that was the historical Xometry business, our gross margin not only grew 55%, our gross margin grew from last year's Q2 of 23.5% to 29.2%. This is a long-winded way of saying we've got lots of gross profit dollars to leverage there, so we can still invest in our business 'cause we wanna still invest in the technology. We particularly invest in sales and marketing. Those are two important categories for it. We can still do that and really gain operating leverage. That's why you saw from Q2-Q1 to Q2, we'll jump forward on operating leverage. We've indicated you're gonna see good progress in Q3 and Q4.
Next year we should expect for the full year for us to be adjusted EBITDA for the entire year. I think you'll see it. It will be demonstrated decrease each quarter as we go into profitability.
I would just certainly look at, you know, we talked about the G&A line specifically, like we called out, you know, almost $12 million in incremental public company costs that we started to take on in Q3 last year. We anniversary that, so you'll see a lot of leverage on that line.
Okay.
Zooming out and that I understood on the goals around profitability, how do you think about which capital allocation projects could yield the best ROI for you as a platform? When you think about aligning growth investments against the opportunity set, what are you the most excited about in terms of deploying capital and driving growth?
We can't invest enough in our technology. I mean, there's so many opportunities. It unlocks. It helps with customer attrition or retention. It helps with locking in suppliers. It creates internal efficiency. It's, you know, technology, it's at the core of what we do. Continuing investment. Even our algorithms, our AI, which is, you know, we've got patents around it. We're the leaders and all that. We still can do so much more with that. Constantly investing in our technology is key. I think also, you know, we've indicated we're investing more and more in our enterprise sales efforts. Going to those large companies that are our customers, we've grown like a weed, but we're still really small.
Yeah.
Saying, "Hey, we wanna get more of your spend." Really locking those relationships in. Those have the potential to blow out. You know, we've grown like a weed that could blow us out even more. I think those are two particular areas. I think international continues to be exciting for us, and so we'll continue to look at international expansion. Ultimately, if there are more value-added services we can give our buyers and suppliers, we'll look at those too.
It's sort of a micro question, but you brought up an interesting point just there. When you deploy an enterprise sales force and you go into a client today that is scaled, you know, but still small in the grand scheme of things, who does the connectivity go with? Does it go from a project-by-project basis and you're moving up the stack into the engineering department, the product department, the CTO? Like where?
You're moving to procurement.
You're who? Got it. Okay.
You're moving to, you know, and within a larger company, it could be division manager, you know, division procurement chief.
Got it.
Overall in a company. Smaller companies, it'll be the COO.
Yeah.
At that point, it really becomes a financial decision.
Right.
It's not pure CFO.
Right. Right.
It's more of a, I can execute this part of my business less expensively, more efficiently, and with less risk if I use Xometry. The COO or the chief procurement officer, those are the people that ultimately are gonna make those decisions.
As those relationships scale, that really is the enterprise-like behavior, right?
It is.
Almost analogous to IT spending and things like that, where you.
That's right. We've tried to enable that with technology integration. Now we are integrated. We've got integrations with CAD programs, 3D CAD programs. That's helpful with the engineer, not particularly.
Right.
Now we're integrating also into the ERP systems of our customers, what we call PunchOut. You can buy directly from Ariba or Coupa right into. You don't have to come to the Xometry site and upload your PO. Things like that are also resonating with our these more senior people with hey, this is also reducing friction, making it easy.
Got it. Okay. We only have a few minutes left. I do wanna just ask one more question I've been asking all the.
Yeah.
Senior managers and CEOs here at the conference. When you think about either your company or the broader industry you occupy in, you obviously talk to investors, you know the perceptions out there. What's the one sort of out-of-the-box thought or prediction you have about what investors might not have front of mind, but you feel very confident about looking out over the next couple of years?
This is not specific to Xometry, but just.
Doesn't have to be. It can be. It could be wider.
I think you will see, and this is a good thing, an explosion in innovation and investment in clean technology across the board, whether it's agriculture or it's obviously energy and transportation. We, you know, we at Xometry have the benefit of seeing lots of startups.
Mm-hmm.
You know, our biggest customers are big companies, but if you're a startup and you've got to build something, you don't even have a supply chain.
Right.
The number of just amazing hardware innovation we're seeing in those areas is inspiring. I think you'll see a flood of those, and I hope that the investment community, whether it's the venture capitals or the growth equity, I know other things have been fads for a while. I think we wanna, you know, really help save our world. By the way, it's magnificent for the American. If I'm thinking about America right now, the American economy is a great sector to invest in. I think that's the place to be.
It is a really interesting window you have in terms of watching how people are building product and building scale on your platform.
It's amazing.
Well, Randy, Sean, thanks so much for being part of the conference. I love that you guys traveled here. Thanks so much. Guys, please join me in thanking Xometry for being part of the conference.