Braze, Inc. (BRZE) Earnings Call Transcript

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Braze's Inaugural Investor Day at Forge NYC. It's great to see all of you here in New York, and thank you for all of you who are joining us via webcast. I'm Chris Ferris, I'm the Head of Investor Relations here at Braze. Really excited to speak with you today. Hopefully, you were able to tune into Bill's keynote address yesterday and to Jon and Kevin's product keynote yesterday as well, where they highlighted some of the new product innovations and vision for the future of customer engagement. Today, we'll start off with a brief presentation from Bill, followed by a product presentation from our Co-founder, CTO, Jon Hyman; and our SVP of Product, Kevin Wang. Then we'll transition to a customer fireside between our President and CCO, Myles Kleeger; and Jimmy Dinh of CIBC Capital Markets, followed by a financial presentation from our CFO, Isabelle Winkles. And then we'll conclude with a moderated Q&A, taking questions from in-person and webcast participants. And now for the fun part that I know you guys all love. Before we get started, let me remind you that during this session, we will make statements related to our business that are forward-looking under the federal securities laws. These include, but are not limited to, statements regarding our financial outlook, long-term financial targets and our business and product development plans. These statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations and reflect our views only as of today. For a discussion of material risks and uncertainties that could affect our actual results, please refer to the risk factors identified in our SEC filings, including our Form 10-Q for the quarter ended July 31, 2022, which are available on the Investors section of our website. I'd also like to remind you that today's [ session ] includes certain non-GAAP financial measures. Please refer to the reconciliations of our non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable financial measures, calculated in accordance with U.S. GAAP, included in the appendix to the accompanying presentation. The non-GAAP financial measures should be -- should not be considered as a substitute for or superior to the measures of financial performance prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP. And with that, let me please welcome Braze's [ Co-Founder ] and CEO, Bill Magnuson on to the stage.

All right. Welcome, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today, and welcome to those of you who are joining us online as well. And thank you for your interest in Braze. We're excited to host our first investor event of this kind at this Annual Customer Conference Forge, New York. And this is the first time we've been here together in person for this Annual Customer Event since 2019. So it's great to have everyone back. Thank you for bringing the energy here in person, and thank you to everyone that's tuning in online to learn more about Braze. This event brings together marketing professionals and industry leaders from Braze customers, partners and more to share insights and best practices about building for and engaging with customers in the modern ecosystem. It offers those in the Braze community the opportunity to hear from thought leaders from Braze customers and partners like AWS, Instacart, the NBA, Peacock, Snowflake, CIBC Capital Markets and more. And we're learning from the best and brightest. Those who are reaching to new heights with customer engagement with Braze and really continuing to push the envelope and drive maturity and increase ROI in their business. Yesterday, I opened the conference by sharing our perspective on finding opportunity through periods of change and challenge with our start anywhere, go everywhere framework. Encouraging our prospects and customers to kickstart new initiatives while continually working to improve and expand on them over time. By setting bold goals, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, leveraging new sources of data and attacking problems from novel angles, our customer community is finding opportunities for new growth and advancement, even in environment filled with uncertainty. As we bring together marketing and data experts from across more than a dozen verticals, we widen each other's perspective and feel one another's optimism. This all underpins a concept that we believe sets Braze apart from many of our competitors. The aforementioned framework of start anywhere, go everywhere. For our future customers, start anywhere is a commitment to meet them where they are on their journey to achieving world-class customer engagement and to get them up and running quickly. The Braze customer base is already widely diversified. We have amazing examples of customers of all sizes and at every stage of maturity, who have adopted Braze and transformed their business through modern customer engagement. We're committed to bringing that promise to more brands in more corners of the world as we continue to expand our TAM in the years to come. For our existing customers, whether they've been with us for years or they're just recently off the starting blocks with Braze, it's a lifelong commitment to supporting the growth of their companies, the success of their teams and the advancement of their individual careers through our robust investment in our product, community and customer education. To make this concrete, consider a customer that starts with Braze with only 1 or 2 channels and a small selection of tried-and-true campaigns. As they pass milestones on their journey to coordinated cross-channel customer engagement, their standard for excellent engagement rises, their work becomes more interdisciplinary, and they gain a new sense of strength through agility as they quickly bring their creative ideas to life and experiment with them over time. This upward trajectory and sophistication enhances return on investment for our customers, and it creates additional value for Braze along the way. We know from our existing customer base that when a brand starts with a narrow slice of customer engagement that are vertically integrated data flow and highly powerful Canvas environment makes it quick and easy for them to fast follow into other channels while evolving to more sophisticated uses of data and deeper integrations into the products or services that their brands deliver. We also see this with multinational customers. A brand may start working with Braze for its business in one country and then expand in their local region before finally going global. Later in this session, you'll hear from a customer, who's grown and evolved with Braze as Myles sits down for a fireside chat with Jimmy Dinh, Managing Director and Head of the Digital Challenger Bank at CIBC Capital Markets. As I did during our last earnings call, I want to reiterate how confident I am in the long-term trajectory of Braze. When we started this company over 11 years ago, my co-founders and I shared a dual conviction about the change that mobile was catalyzing. First, that fast-growing businesses will be born and built to be mobile-first. And second, that the wide-scale adoption of mobile by consumers would transform the enterprise and the way that they did business. In the decade since, our opportunity has continued to grow significantly as the field of customer engagement and the Braze platform have evolved in complementary support of each other. Today, we remain steadfast in our vision for this market and are committed to delivering industry-leading customer engagement solutions for customers and high growth at scale for our shareholders. Over the long term, we believe an enduring focus on customer ROI and product differentiation is the most effective way to continue leading the customer engagement market. But we're also adapting to changes in buyer behavior by increasing the emphasis on our rapid time to value and the outsized ROI of investing in first-party data. Supporting this message is our ongoing differentiated product offering, including our impressive ability to deliver omnichannel messaging at scale through real-time stream processing and our ever-expanding data management, reporting and analytics capabilities. We believe that our platform and vision is increasingly defining the customer engagement space overall and that we can become the de facto file format for the space that are continued in robust investment in R&D and our customer community will drive us forward as a generational brand. We also continue to invest in our partner ecosystem, many of whom you can see as sponsors here at Forge. Our growing relationships, particularly with the marketing agency holding companies and leading global systems integrators, or GSIs, will continue to help us land and expand within enterprises and to better serve our existing customers with complementary strategy, integration and managed services. This speaks volume about the power of our product and our ability to feed the services ecosystem and the increasing influence we are achieving with large enterprises around the world. Most importantly, we've continued investing in the evolution of our product to deliver on the promise of world-class customer engagement. Yesterday, we announced new product enhancements around real-time data activation and messaging, including our new Braze Cloud Data Ingestion and expanding messaging capabilities with native support for WhatsApp and feature flags. Both innovations reflect expanded partnerships with Snowflake and Meta and aim to help brands future-proof customer engagement strategies against a backdrop of shifting consumer expectations, preferences and behaviors. To build long-lasting and profitable relationships with consumers, organizations must have a deep understanding of their preferences and behaviors. This task has become increasingly difficult as the amount of data produced and continues to grow exponentially over time. And unfortunately, much of this data goes underutilized by organizations due to underresourced IT teams that struggle to build and maintain complex data pipelines across a variety of data sources and formats. Braze can help solve this by providing what we believe to be the world's most flexible customer engagement platform for real-time data activation. With our new Cloud Data Ingestion, brands will be able to take action on real-time signals stored in data warehouses, all without leaving the Braze platform. Brands will be able to quickly and flexibly collect, process and unlock value from their data to drive growth and increase retention. This turnkey integration can be set up in minutes and perhaps more importantly, remains turnkey over time as Braze partnership with Snowflake takes on the role of monitoring and maintaining the relevant pipelines. Starting with Snowflake at launch, we plan to expand to a number of other prominent data warehouse partners in Q4 and beyond, bringing more flexibility to our customers and enhance partnership currency to Braze. In early 2023, Braze will also be launching native channel support for WhatsApp, a messaging platform with more than 2 billion users in 180 countries. Through the integration with Braze, marketers will be able to create, orchestrate and send WhatsApp campaigns directly from the Braze dashboard to strengthen customer relationships with content-rich conversational messaging, integrated directly into Canvas. In a few minutes, I'll hand it over to my Co-Founder and Braze CTO, Jon Hyman; and our Senior Vice President of Product, Kevin Wang, to demonstrate some of these innovative advancements in our product differentiation in more detail. You'll also hear from our Chief Financial Officer, Isabelle Winkles, who will discuss our track record of impressive growth, our proven ability to land and expand within enterprises of all sizes around the world and how we plan to achieve our long-term margin targets. We'll wrap up with an extended Q&A session with the management team, and I want to close these opening remarks by thanking everyone again for taking the time to be here and for your interest in Braze. We're so excited to share more about how our latest product innovations are impacting the customer experience and hope they help you to see how Braze continues to lead and differentiate itself in the customer engagement market. Thank you for coming today. And with that, please welcome Jon and Kevin to the stage.

Thank you, Bill. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I'm Jon Hyman, Co-Founder and CTO of Braze, and I'm joined by Kevin Wang, SVP of Product. Today, we wanted to share with you some of the most incredible and differentiated customer engagement solutions that we've developed and how they're helping our customers better understand and engage their users. We believe that Braze offers the most powerful and flexible customer engagement platform in the market and drives high ROI for our customers. With our continued product innovation, we have the potential to strengthen our competitive moat and drive long-term revenue growth. Before we dive into some of the exciting innovations that Kevin and I announced yesterday, let me just take a moment to set the table for you and give you a sense of Braze size and scale. As of the end of the second quarter this year -- this fiscal year, Braze served nearly 1,600 customers in over 60 countries globally, encompassing over 4.1 billion monthly active users across those customers. Our platform continues to scale. And last fiscal year, we processed over 9 trillion consumer-generated data points and sent approximately 1.5 trillion messages across our channels that include push notifications, web hooks, e-mail, SMS and MMS, Content Cards, in-app and in-browser messages. We have over 2 dozen product and engineering teams that are innovating across our entire product offering. Over the last 12 months, our team has introduced over 100 new features and improvements to the platform, some of which are highlighted here and which we'll talk about in more detail. Survey in that messages expand the breadth of our platform across channels and allow businesses like HBO Max to better understand the interest of their subscribers. They launched surveys in Latin America to ask subscribers their favorite Harry Potter house or the favorite DC comic book character and then use that information to personalize their experience better. We also launched Google and Facebook audience syncs in Canvas to help our customers save money on digital advertising, and we're going to show you a great example of how this works later. Message archiving, another feature that we launched recently, is helping our financial clients to preserve a copy of every e-mail, push notification and SMS message that they send to consumers, allowing them to comply with laws and regulations and integrate Braze into all of their customer support processes. This innovation is key to driving our competitive advantage against both the legacy marketing clouds and point solution startups. And we view the current environment as the perfect time for us to really lean into that R&D spend and separate from all of our competition. So what we want to do briefly today is to walk you through a few of the new solutions that we are launching. First, we are going to start with data. We believe that Braze offers the most powerful and flexible data model on the market. The Braze platform lets our customers activate any data to deliver real-time customer experiences, and we have some really exciting updates that make it faster and easier for customers to deliver personalized experiences and drive that high ROI. Next, we're going to walk through how we're increasing the depth and sophistication of our experimentation and intelligent optimization tools. Finally, we'll talk about enriching the messaging channels that our customers use to talk to their consumers. Building great product experiences requires data. And already, our customers have so much data that they want to use for their personalized messaging. One of the first challenges that new consumers have -- sorry, the new customers have when they sign up with Braze, is that they want to sync their existing data set and then use it to increase their ROI in their engagement strategies. What this means is some customers will need to create a pipeline from back-end systems to our API, where we need to quickly get their engineers to integrate Braze into their mobile apps and websites, so they could begin collecting data that they can use for personalization. Now, doing all of that takes a bunch of effort, and so we want to help customers decrease the time that it takes to be able to use data within Braze. And we want to help them use the data that they already have more to their advantage. That's why we spent the first -- the past year, making a lot of updates to our data platform and model that we call Braze data. Braze data encompasses all of our initiatives to make it fast and easy for customers to leverage their data and deliver valuable experiences for their users. Our architecture updates provide Braze customers with a variety of ways to get data into Braze and then to stream it out to other parts of their tech stacks. When we're thinking about data ingestion, we have prebuilt pipelines to easily stream events into Braze in real time. So up here is an example of our Shopify integration. This is an easy-to-use setup wizard that helps customers to seamlessly connect a Shopify store to Braze, where we're going to automatically receive valuable purchase and shopping cart information without any engineering effort at all. Even better, customers can easily add in-browser messages to a Shopify store by checking a box. So all of that integration setup has only taken about 20 seconds. Customers can then use Braze to send in-browser messages in their store, and that will close the loop of turning all of that data into direct action. This ability to leverage data is possible for any type of Braze customer in any vertical. And earlier this year, we launched catalogs, which allows customers to store relational data in Braze. This feature is going to allow customers to create easy-to-use product recommendations or to better personalize their messages with context about their brand's products and services. Yesterday, we announced a programmatic API for catalogs, helping customers to fully automate all of the real-time personalization use cases that they can dream of, such as price drops or flash sales. Braze leverages an architecture that's built on Snowflake, Kafka, MongoDB and Redis to give our customers what we believe is the most flexible customer engagement platform for data activation. In short, our platform is designed to handle any amount of data in real time, regardless of how that data is structured or nested. Braze data reaffirms our commitment to seamlessly connecting Braze to our customers' entire tech stack. As most of you know, we offer Currents, which is our continuously streaming export of customer engagement data. The majority of Braze customers use Currents to export data from Braze into their data warehouse, connect Braze to analytic tools, to CVPs and more. Over the past few years, a big trend that we're seeing across our customer base is that the data warehouse is an increasingly standard foundational aspect of their data strategy. That's why yesterday, we announced Cloud Data Ingestion. Cloud Data Ingestion is an innovation that allows customers to directly connect their data warehouse to Braze, so they can import and activate their customer data. And here is an example of preference data that syncs Braze from a data warehouse for a user. Early access customers who've been doing this, have reported that their engineering teams have saved dozens of hours a week with data cloud ingestion. We're also seeing customers unlock new use cases by sinking audiences to Braze that are created from queries that they're making in their data warehouse. This means that they're able to create segments of users to message without having to store the underlying data with us. Imagine that a quick-service restaurant wants to message all of the users who purchased French fries in the last year, but they haven't sent that data to Braze, or a financial company that wants to send messages to users who have low account balances, but they want sensitive account details to remain on-prem. With Cloud Data Ingestion, they can now engage those users in only a few clicks without sending us that underlying data. Currents then completes a bidirectional sync from data warehouses and lets our customers insert events and purchases back into their warehouse. So they always have an updated view of the user. We have an exciting roadmap ahead for Cloud Data Ingestion. And yesterday, we announced the first set of features in the first integration partner, Snowflake. And we have other launch partners [ Redshift ] and BigQuery coming soon. Now this functionality I actually demonstrated yesterday, and it took about 60 seconds for me to connect to Snowflake data warehouse to Braze and then create a segment of users that were targeted based on that information from there. We think that this is going to give us a huge advantage over startup competitors who do not have this functionality, or legacy clouds who will struggle to create as seamless an experience as we have. And I encourage you to watch the demo that I performed yesterday when that video comes live on our website in the next few days. We believe that with Cloud Data Ingestion, we'll be able to win more deals and faster because customers can connect their data warehouse to Braze in just a couple of minutes, and then they can send a message to that audience. Cloud Data Ingestion will also save customers time when they want to add new data sets or new pieces of data to Braze for personalization and targeting. That means the more that our customers can accomplish with Braze and the faster they can do that, the more that we can help drive their ROI and continue to retain them. So let's now shift gears to orchestration. And we're going to discuss how Braze is making it easier to create intelligent engagement campaigns. So we've continued investing into the depth of sophistication of our product to deliver on the promise of world-class customer engagement and build our competitive advantage. That includes updating our flagship low-code orchestration environment, Canvas. This summer, we launched a major leap forward in the power and usability and performance of Braze orchestration capabilities with the release of Canvas Flow. Canvas Flow is the latest generation of our visual programming environment and has been met with positive feedback and rapid adoption by our customer base. Let's take a few minutes to run through some new enhancements that we launched. Many of our customers use Canvas to run A/B tests of entire journeys and paths, measuring conversion rates to determine which strategy is going to work best and increase ROI. Personalized variant, a new feature that we launched, uses machine learning to determine, for each individual customer, which variation we think they will most engage on, based on data from customers who have similar use profiles. So personalized variant may send Jon version A of an e-mail while sending me version B. And customers who beta tested personalized variant, saw an average of a 7% increase in campaign conversions without any additional effort besides just enabling the feature. Next up is AI copywriting. Many customers run tests of different messaging copy to see what converts best. But if a customer is doing subject line testing, it can be time-consuming to come up with 5 different subject lines to experiment with. AI copywriting makes this much easier, saving our customers' time as they're running their experiments. So whether a marketer is composing a snappy in-app message or an e-mail, Braze has embedded GPT3 language models into our message composers to help marketers experiment, find messages that resonate and move faster. This quality-of-life improvement is like Google Docs' Grammar Suggestions. It makes the product faster to use and adds to the overall comprehensiveness of the platform for our customers. And for the last announcement in our intelligence suite, we've expanded the predictive suite to allow customers to make predictions on users who are likely to churn or make a purchase based upon behavior over the last 60 days. Our approach is different from other solutions in the industry. We allow our customers to define the behaviors of what churn means to them. Like, for example, if a user hasn't bought something in the last month. Essentially, our predictive suite is a system that generates more models that are customized to each brand's individual usage fingerprint. This creates a more generalizable solution that works across different industries and business models.

Braze customers have created millions of Canvases. They make Canvases with their coworkers. They don't Canvases iteratively, meaning they're saving and tweaking and editing again later. One of the challenges that customers can run into is they may accidentally make errors and overwrite their Canvases or they want to attribute changes in performance metrics with changes that they've made specifically in a Canvas. We're solving those problems by launching Canvas Flow versioning. With versioning, customers can view what a Canvas looked like in the past, who made what edits. And if you [ since deleted ] the stat, what the analytics were like when it was running. What I have here is a Canvas that is -- I can go back one slide, is a Canvas that, you can see, has 4 steps. And we can see a version bar on the left that lets us move ahead to see an update that one of our coworkers made to add a branch off of those messages. Great. We believe Canvas versioning is going to greatly improve collaboration and enhance the stickiness by getting more people into the product. And we have a lot of features planned in the months ahead to make collaboration simpler for our customers. So let's now flip over to a demo, and we're going to see Canvas Flow in action with everything that we've just talked about. In this example, a retail company is going to be looking to retarget customers that have made purchases over the past 10 years to get them to try to buy again. They're looking to send personalized messages, based on the predicted likelihood that those customers will make another purchase. And let's build a new Canvas Flow. We're going to define upfront that we're looking to measure a conversion on the amount of returning customers that make a purchase. This helps understand how personalized and individualized journeys can increase ROI and lead to greater conversions. For our audience, we'll target all users who have made a purchase in the last 10 years. Now in the Canvas, we've set up 2 different variants to test. And in each, we've set up an audience past step using Braze's Predictive Purchase models to nudge consumers into the next best action, based on if they have a low, medium or high likelihood to purchase. Those with a high likelihood to purchase are going to get a different message than those with medium or low likelihood. After sending a message, we're going to want to take a follow-up action, based on whether or not the user makes a purchase within the next 24 hours. Using Action Paths, which were released last year at Forge, we can take a follow-up action in real time as soon as customers make that purchase. In the case that they did make a purchase, we can leverage audience syncs to suppress targeted Facebook ads. This allows us to save on ad spend by suppressing ads we've set up for Black Friday because any customer at this point in the Canvas has already converted. For everyone else, we're going to send a push notification that's announcing a sale. Since we're not sure what to write, we're going to use the Braze AI copywrite assistant to help get inspired. Now as we go back and look at the version history, we're going to be able to see that the first version of this Canvas was created with only one variant and without the Facebook audience syncs. So we've built a lot more sophistication into this Canvas since then. And before it goes live, we'll turn to personalized variant to determine for each individual user which variant is most effective in getting them to convert. Finally, we'll collapse down the view to one screen, so that the entire flow can be seen in one easy-to-use view. So in just 2 minutes of using Canvas Flow, we were able to easily build a sophisticated personalized marketing strategy using machine learning that can even reduce customers' ad spend. And in fact, we've seen several of our customers reduce customer acquisition costs by up to around 50%. We're thrilled about these improvements to Canvas. We have a fantastic roadmap ahead that's going to make our customers' teams much more productive, provide more expressiveness, improve collaboration and administration and add more intelligence and experimentation capabilities. And we look forward to sharing more with you and the rest of the world in the coming months. Next, I want to share a couple of the enhancements that we've made to Braze messaging channels and how Braze can help our customers reach their end users wherever they are. In my friend group, we've mostly switched off SMS to WhatsApp messenger. Lots of people have. And OTT messaging apps have continued to grow. A central tenet of Braze's product vision is that we want to help our customers reach their consumers on channels that they care about. That's why we've built the ability to send personalized messages on so many different channels, e-mail, SMS and MMS, push notifications, in-app, in-browser messages, on Roku and more. Customers have different preferences, and marketers need the tools to reach them wherever they are with best-in-class messaging experiences. That's why yesterday, we announced, as Bill shared moments ago, that we're building native support for WhatsApp messenger directly in Braze. With WhatsApp, our customers will be able to further personalize their channel strategies and open up new markets where SMS is less prevalent or SMS is cost prohibitive. Once launched, our customers will then be able to reach a global audience of over 2 billion WhatsApp consumers in one of the most popular messaging apps in the world. We've partnered with Meta to make WhatsApp an integral part of our customers' cross-channel strategy that allows them to send rich multimedia messaging and dynamic content like this conversational engagement [ trial ] that you see in this example. There are a lot of interactive high-value use cases for WhatsApp that you can't do easily on other channels. It's much richer than SMS and MMS. Here, for example, we have a food delivery call to action to order or call the restaurant directly inside the messenger. We have an app that encourages a daily check-in for an important life cycle event or a way to nudge someone to make an upsell on their vacation. We've heard a lot of customer demand for -- our customer base for WhatsApp, particularly in Europe. We're excited about the highly personalized and relevant experiences that our customers around the world are going to create with WhatsApp and Braze. Even if customers are able to send WhatsApp messages themselves or through another competitor, the flexibility and speed of Braze Canvas and Canvas Flow will give them an edge in terms of the personalization and interactivity that we're able to generate.

But personalization is more than just messaging. It's about the entire product experience. As we've seen brands orchestrate more and more of their experiences with Braze, we've consistently heard feedback that they want to do more with a flexible user classification and control flows that can be designed with tools like Canvas. Some customers have even built their own mobile and web personalization products using Braze's Segmentation and our in-app messages. So that's why we're very excited that we're launching a feature flags product. With feature flags, Customers are going to be able to easily launch and test new features without a code release. They'll be able to test features before a broader rollout, and they'll even have kill switches for extra safety in their products. In this example, this mobile app is using feature flags to have control over a gradual release of a yoga module to users who are in the aptly-named Braze Segment of yoga lovers. And with feature flags, they're going to be able to easily unify their marketing messaging with their in-product experience. Most importantly, feature flags are tightly integrated with Braze Canvas, highlighting how we can combine breadth across channels with depth of orchestration. The new feature flag step that you can see here is going to let customers add or remove users from a feature flag audience. That means that they'll have full control over who sees what content, allowing them to run follow-up messages that create a unified one-to-one personal experience. And feature flags are planned to be available next year. To sum up, we believe that the product vision that we've described today demonstrates our commitment to delivering a best-in-class customer engagement and scale. To reach data collection, intelligent feature design and a robust and growing channel set, we are helping our customers start anywhere and go everywhere. We hope that you, our investor stakeholders, recognize the value that Braze is delivering for our customers and ultimately to our shareholders. Thank you so much for your time and attention. I'll now turn it over to Myles.

Hello, everyone. It's great to see you. Thanks for coming today and spending time with us. And thank you, Jimmy, for making the trip down from Toronto. Yes. Now excited to have you share your perspective on being a Braze customer and working with Braze. So just to get us started, maybe just share for everyone what you do with CIBC and the business that you run.

Yes, sure. So my name is Jimmy Dinh. Great show, by the way. My name is Jimmy Dinh. I'm the Managing Director and Head of our Digital Challenger Bank called Simplii Financial in Canada. I worked for the Corporate Investment Bank division of CIBC. CIBC's top 5 bank here in Canada, 11 million customers. But I have [indiscernible] a [ flanker ] challenger brand called Simplii Financial. Consumer Bank over to in customers, and we offer basically value-centric digital-only banking service for [indiscernible] worldwide. Over to you. That's me.

So just to jump right in. Curious if you could just share with people kind of your broader perspective on customer engagement and kind of how you think it fits into your overall strategy at Simplii.

Yes, for sure. Great question, Myles. So the way we think about things really from a customer engagement strategy, it really ties back to our corporate objectives at Simplii Financial, right? So we think there's a huge market opportunity for us to drive growth in touch with digital banking for consumers. And one -- and the other piece of it really is around customer experience, right? So we take customer experience and NPS really seriously here at the bank. So in 2021, 2022, according to Ipsos, we're the #1 ranked NPS bank here in Canada. So you think about those 2 opportunities, right? So leadership in terms of high-growth consumer banking services here in Canada. And secondly, basically, an NPS leadership overall. We tie that back to really censoring all our strategy work and customer [ reach ] around our customer. And we think about two ways. On the growth side of things, really because we're a digital-only bank, we don't have branches. We don't have financial advisers, like really a MarTech customer engagement ecosystem and platform really is the revenue engine for this bank. So chiefly important to create that and do that really right. And second, on the NPS experience side, again, because we're a digital bank that caters to a very value-conscious digitally savvy Canadians, we actually want to make sure that our customers, our clients really know about all the innovations, the products, the services that we actually have at Simplii Financial, right? So again, when we think about the customer first view of things, we want to tell our customers about all the cool new things we're doing. All the new services that we're doing. So the example I'll give you there is, we launched a really, really industry-leading referral friend program this past summer across all our products. So across deposit products, lending credit card products, even our mortgage products is a refer-a-friend program. And we use customer engagement tools and platforms like Braze to communicate that digitally in a very intelligent way and a contextual way for this as well.

Yes. So fair to say you think about personalized messaging, contextually relevant messaging, high-value messaging as fundamentally critical to your success, both from a growth perspective as well as CSAT and overall experience perspective. And then you also -- is it fair for me to say that you would consider Braze more -- it's not just a tool to send messages. It's really part of your infrastructure in terms of how you operate your business.

Yes. So I think that's another great question, and I'll start there by saying, totally, we -- if you look at back 6 years ago -- I'll tell a story of, I guess, Braze [ to Appway ]. 6 years ago, we were looking at this. We had a customer pain point, right, within CIBC, and that was basically we didn't know how to do transaction and servicing alerts really well. [ Yes ], you looked inside the bank and said, "Hey, we don't know how to do this. How do we think about finding a partner that could help us with this?" So it's a single use case really that we're looking to solve, a very technology-native use case or pain point. We went into the market. We found a company called Appway. Never heard of it, right? And we kind of looked at and said, "Hey, this company really has great technology, have a great product. They have a great team, and their culture really fits into what we want to do." So I'll talk about the technology. So obviously, you guys do great endpoint messaging, alerting message channels. So we thought the technology is awesome for this use case. We thought that from a roadmap and a vision perspective, where you want to take the company, it's super interesting as well and matched where we thought marketing tech, customer agent platform and tech would head. So we bought into that vision and we were aligned there and [ further into ] people, the talent, right? So I was on the way to this event this morning, I was talking to my colleague, she's right there. She was talking about the early days of Appway and Braze. And I think we were like we're doing contract. And one of our risks in key infrastructure partners in this contract [ and dealing ] process and InfoSec had an issue with how we did data integration or showed the information between the 2 firms, Braze and CIBC. I think your CTO was on the call with us, the co-founder. And he's like, "Yes, we'll fix it in 3 days." This going to be contract commercial [indiscernible]. So that, to us, is really important, right? Like the way we run our business, we want there to be thought leadership, technology leadership. And really, we want people to be super to -- our partners to be super entrepreneurial and to get things done in a very, very efficient quick way as well. So that was the story there. So we started with one thing to do with you guys. And I'd say, over the last 6 years, we've evolved up to really being now -- you guys are a core part of that infrastructure ecosystem that really powers not just messaging, but I think, again, other parts of how we think about the client experience of [ client ] engagement.

Yes. Just -- and to give credit to you, Jimmy, and your colleagues, in 2016, when we were called Appway, banks, it was hard to sell to banks. In terms of the...

We were the first, right?

You were. And I don't want to give -- your team credit for having the vision to look forward. But in your assessment, you just shared some great perspective on sort of how -- why and how you were able to push it over the edge. But in your perspective, has it -- obviously, your usage of Braze has expanded quite a bit over the years. Like you said, new use cases different business units. We're in the core retail app. We even have some B2B use cases now. But is it -- would you say it's -- there's more comfort around working with progressive companies like Braze, even though knowing that CIBC obviously has substantial engagements with big established legacy technology players. Has the fight gotten a little easier through the years?

Yes. I'd say, look, I think the proof is putting in execution, right? So as we think about this, I'd say, before, if you look at kind of the past, it was really a very technology-native, engineering-owned call the Braze platform. Now if you look at the organization, we have enterprise-wide adoption and use of Braze. So we have not only technology basically use our engineering technology groups at these Braze. We have our marketing SBUs. We have actually the business, the line of business folks, the front office people do that work, right? Really interacting with Braze. So really, again, accomplish our business goals. So that has made it a lot easier over time. The maturity of your platform, maturity of the business, overall, across time has been pretty solid, I'd say. And I'd say, like as a bank, and there are bankers here in the audience, banks tend to basically be very risk averse, conservative as we think about new partners. And we think about risk in very deep ways, vertically and horizontally. I'd say, we took a chance on Braze and Appway 6 years ago. I think we worked well with you folks, and it's now basically been, I'd call them the derisking part of it, we mature that relationship really real well.

And kind of Bill touched on sort of the notion of start anywhere and go everywhere. And I think we've demonstrated that at CIBC in terms of literally navigating through the different lines of business. But talk a little bit about at Simplii, which is still relatively new in its journey, but how you've started to unlock more Braze channels, more Braze use cases over time.

Yes, for sure. That's -- yes. So look, -- so I think for us -- I'll talk about a great example of this, right? So Joe and Haley are there in the back. We've gone through this last 6 months a complete journey. So I've taken on the role of the mandate to run the Digital Bank about [ 18 points score ] right in the middle of the pandemic, and we've made a lot of changes. So our view here is we've gone through the last 6 months a reimagination and refactoring of our entire customer engagement platform, where now Braze plays a very key role in that ecosystem, in that technology set, right? What we've done is we've taken the Braze platform, and we really start to weave it in and integrate it into really key parts of our bank's ecosystem. I'd say, that's a couple of things. One is we've integrated into CDP, Adobe CDP. So we're a big partner of Adobe. And I guess, you guys are coopetition?

That's fine.

But yes, we are good friends with Adobe. They have a great CDP, and we've had a great time of integrating into CDP with Braze, right? We've also been [ integrating ] basically Braze with our own brand-new OMS, our brand-new offered management system that will power all customer engagement, all revenue and digital sales opportunities for Simplii Financial. And lastly, we integrated Braze into our downstream [ plot ] fulfillment, right? So our core banking systems. Investment manifests itself in November, which we think we're very proud of. It's an industry first, around a brand-new campaign for our credit cards. Credit cards, as you may as well know, it's a great growth opportunity for us. We think there's a lot of opportunity to grow our credit card portfolio in Canada. And we're going to go live to market with a brand-new preapproved credit card campaign that is powered by Braze through all your channels. But the great thing about the things that we're doing in terms of the this ecosystem is that the innovation and the IP that we've built will unlock really what's called a one-click approval. If you think about how credit cards are run -- campaigns are run in Canada and the U.S. today, you can e-mail, you can get push notification about an offer. You've been preapproved for this great new credit card. You click on that in-app message, that push, that e-mail. You got to send to in the bank's application page for a credit card, and you run yourself through 10 more pages of applications, know your customer, customer onboarding, account opens. What we've done with Braze and the decrease of our overall, call it, stack ecosystem is maybe what's called one-click approval. So literally at the point of sale, at the point of this offer, where you see the offer in our banking app, you click yes. That's it. It's like you'll get your credit card, your new credit card with a 20,000 credit limit.

I don't have to complete an application?

No, nothing. And you get the credit card literally in the mail in 3 to 5 days. So that's something that we're very, very proud of. It's going live in November. And again, that's really because we've expanded Braze. We basically look at it and said, it's not just about learning. We're going to open all channels. So we're doing Content Cards, we're doing an app. We're doing SMS. We're doing e-mail. And obviously, again, like we love the part where you introduced this week or the last couple of days.

That's super exciting. So on that point, I'm curious if you could share any perspective on value and ROI. And you kind of even touched on it a little bit at the top where you've got growth goals, of course, but then you have NPS goals, but then there's also -- there's how your team works, right? So level of effort, the amount of experiments you can run, the sophistication of the programs you can run, the ability to bring a first-in-market campaign like this one-click credit card to market quickly. How do you think about value with a platform like Braze? How do you measure it? And what kind of results, frankly, have you seen that you're able to share?

Yes. I think, again, so it's a great question again. When we think about partnerships with partners such as Braze, because I run a P&L, I got -- I come from an investment bank. And we think about everything in the P&L, right? So top line growth is really important. How do you think about overall value? How do you optimization. When we evaluate partners such as Braze, the key things we think about in terms of value really is, one, efficiency and, two is, productivity, right? And I'll talk first about efficiency. For us, if you look at kind of back into like the early days before this, a campaign, a revenue-generating ad or a sales campaign in our channels, our digital channels, whether that's online or in our app, it required engineering resources. You really had basically software developers, QA people, DevOps release people creating the actual engineering, the actual ad and the campaign. And as we all know, engineers are pretty expensive. And again, we love to repackage the resources to do other major things for the bank. So when you talk about Braze, the fact that you have a no-code, zero-code platform called Canvas for journey mapping for creation, we leverage that, right? So that -- what that means is I can open hire front office people, who are of different creative backgrounds, arts background, commerce backgrounds.

Data science.

Yes. They sit in the front office. They're business people. They run a business. They're not marketers, not ops people. They're not engineers, but they literally can do and create impactful things for us in growth and client experience. And we have that today. So that's really, really, really important. And then productivity, as we said, like we think we can do faster and more in this model, in this [ operating ] model. So I'll share the metrics anyway. So in the past, we had to do a campaign, it took like 12 weeks. I think we're now with our ecosystem that we've built, with Braze at the center of it, we're talking about 1 or 2 weeks, right? So massive efficiency there. So that's efficiency. Then productivity, I think, again, comes out around with that. [indiscernible] is e-mail. So when I took over the business, we were reviewing kind of our partnerships and outsourced partnerships on e-mail. So we actually use an agency for e-mail. And I look at the P&L line of all our costs. We were spending 7 figures on an e-mail agency...

to do creative and...

To do creative production controls and deliver the e-mails, right? We do lots of e-mails as you know, [indiscernible] with e-mails, right? Core part of our engagement strategy. So we looked at this and said, "Hey, like why are we spending this much on e-mail? At the same time, there's no connectivity back into our channels, right? This is like a little island over here. We have a strategy there." And that's what we [ chose ] basically to think about kind of e-mail campaigns in a very vertically integrated manner through your customer agent platform. So we are taking that in, we're now going to basically not use and outsource our e-mail, where basically it's just another channel that we have that we use today to basically deliver contextual, intelligent communications to our clients overall.

And which, of course, connects back to customer experience, too, right, because you're sending messages to the right people that actually want to receive them that they're more likely to convert on, and you're able to be more efficient in how you run your marketing budgets and your messaging budgets. So last question for you because we're short on time. Along -- tangentially related to this value question. Do you see potential for -- just kind of looking at some of the stuff Jon and Kevin were sharing, do you see potential for Braze to help you become even more efficient, let's say, and eliminate certain types of technology from your stack over time or find other ways to make your team more productive and more efficient as we add [indiscernible] capability?

Yes. I think, yes, for sure, like as we look through your roadmap and where you're taking the platform and the solutions and our tools, because we're a digital bank, today, we have our clients really basically interacting engagement with us in 2 key channels. One is obviously our app, our website, but we're also kind of have a contact center and a call center that is again, quite expensive, quite -- there's lot of overhead turn in a contact center. It's filled with legacy technology and legacy way to do things. So what we've heard this week, we've seen from your product and CTL really is, there's some opportunities there to basically how do we think about kind of, again, using your tools to really basically one is not having our customers [indiscernible] certain channels at all like a contact center, but all the [indiscernible] moving into the right channels at the right time, right? So I definitely think there's some really core [ nuggets ] that we're going to think about as we leave the conference, overall. But yes, like when we think about omnichannel, we have to also think that we have other channels that we think again, how do we best use those channels, how do we optimize and how do we basically leverage our investments in customer engagement. Because when we think about customer engagement, yes, we focus on mobile-first digitally active customers, but we also have that -- as a bank, we also have other engagement channels like the contact center.

Yes, of course. Excellent. Thank you so much, Jimmy. Really appreciate your perspective.

Good afternoon, everybody, and thanks for being here, both in person and for those of you that are viewing the presentation online. I'm Isabelle Winkles, Chief Financial Officer here at Braze. Today, I'm going to recap our track record of delivering strong growth at scale, including the ongoing success of our land and expand strategy. And I'm going to describe in a little bit more detail some of the drivers to our improved operating leverage as we execute on our path towards profitability. Following this presentation, Bill, Myles, Jon and Kevin will join me on stage to address your questions. So turning to this first slide. Over the past few years, our successful go-to-market strategy has led to exceptional revenue growth at scale. As the chart on the left shows, over the last 2 years, we've delivered compounded annual growth rate of 55% in our quarterly revenue run rate, which we define as quarterly revenue multiplied by 4. And as a result, in Q2 of FY '23, we realized a quarterly revenue run rate of $344 million. From a customer perspective, we've also experienced tremendous growth over the same period. We've expanded our customer count by a compounded annual growth rate of 42% to nearly 1,600 customers over the past 2 years. As a reminder, we define a customer at the ultimate parent level of an organization. We've also seen growth, specifically in our large customers, which we define as those spending at least $500,000 with us annually. As of the end of the second quarter, we had 139 large customers, up from 82 large customers in the prior-year period. These 139 large customers contributed 55% of our annual recurring revenue in Q2 of this year, compared to 50% from the 82 customers in the prior-year period. This growth in both the overall revenue and our customer count reflects strength across industries throughout our segmentation of customer sizes and across geographic regions. In fact, from a geographic perspective, in the last 3 quarters, we've increased the proportion of our revenue earned outside of the U.S. by approximately 200 basis points to 42% in Q2 of FY '23. And I know many of you saw a version of this slide in our S-1, but I wanted to take an opportunity to provide an update here today. This cohort analysis illustrates how customers have expanded their spend with Braze over the years. Particularly exciting is this ongoing expansion of some of our earliest cohorts, who are benefiting from our expanded product sets and enhanced overall post-sales customer experience. As of the last quarter, our total customer dollar-based net retention was 126% compared to 125% in the prior-year quarter. And our dollar-based net retention for large customers was 130%, down from 135% in the second quarter of last year but continuing to show healthy expansion. This ongoing strength reflects our ability to start anywhere with the customer, meeting them where they are on their digital customer engagement journey, then empowering them to go everywhere as they expand across a number of different dimensions. Expansion is realized as we increase the volume of entitlements sold as users or messaging volumes increase due to business growth or diversification into new use cases, with the addition of entirely new channels, through further penetration within a parent company's portfolio into new brands or geographic regions and with the addition of incremental products and services. Now I'd like to take a few minutes to discuss our long-term approach to managing our cost structure, realizing operating leverage and ultimately achieving our long-term financial targets that we outlined nearly a year ago during our IPO roadshow. Over the course of our history, we have demonstrated an ability to achieve improved operating leverage while delivering strong revenue growth, as you can see from this table. When I arrived here in early 2020, which kicked off our fiscal year 2021, I embarked on a project to improve non-GAAP gross margins, and we've been successful, moving them from 63.3% in fiscal year '20 to approximately 68% in fiscal '22. We have consistently improved our gross margins by realizing efficiencies in our core technology spend, which comprises 2/3 to 3/4 of our core spend and by optimizing personnel resources, which obviously accounts for the balance of core. Notably, in core tech, we have optimized vendor spend as well as storage and computing costs without compromising our platform's performance or customer experience. Moving to sales and marketing. Our non-GAAP sales and marketing expense as a percent of revenue improved from fiscal year '20 to fiscal year '22 due to improved efficiencies in our go-to-market motion as we increase the overall productivity of our reps, improved renewal rates across the organization, most notably in our S&P customer classification, and honed our upsell motion to achieve the net retention statistics we enjoy today. Our non-GAAP R&D and G&A expenses as a percent of revenue have both increased moderately over this period. In R&D, this reflects the ongoing investments in headcount to maintain and extend our competitive position, and in G&A, growing investments to enable the company to scale and expand globally. Taken together, we've shown operating leverage improvements across each of the last 3 fiscal years, improving our non-GAAP operating margin from negative 21.9% in fiscal year '20 to negative 13% in fiscal year '22. And finally, I'll note that from inception in 2011 to the company's IPO in 2021, Braze burned only $95 million of cash while achieving annual recurring revenue of 2.5x that or approximately $250 million at the time of our IPO, an impressive ratio, nearly unheard of in software and the result of ongoing disciplined capital deployment. Looking at the first half of fiscal year 2023, we've executed on the plan we articulated during our IPO roadshow and in subsequent earnings calls. Fiscal '23 was and remains an investment year. We've leaned into our significant market opportunity by investing in headcount across all areas of the organization to support our vision for long-term growth. Across our non-GAAP operating expense lines, the higher expenses as a percent of revenue is as we would have expected and specifically reflective of those investments. Now I want to articulate in a bit more detail the key drivers of our projected operating leverage improvements over time, beginning with our non-GAAP gross margin. As a reminder, we raised our long-term target from 65% to 70% to 67% to 72%. Over the next several years, we expect to continue realizing economies of scale in our tech infrastructure and personnel efficiency in our customer support functions. On the personnel side, we are pursuing a cost-optimized location strategy, which we expect to have in place before the end of fiscal year '24. In addition, we are in the early stages of deepening our relationships with system integrators and agency networks in order to optimize our post sales and support functions, enabling these organizations to take on some of the post sales effort delivered by Braze today. While we are confident in the non-GAAP gross margin range we have provided, we will also continue to reinvest into our platform in order to maintain our competitive positioning, making the platform more featureful and maintaining its speed and reliability at scale. Sales and marketing is where we expect to realize the greatest improvement in operating leverage over time. And while these efforts are still in their early stages, nearly all of them are already underway. They can broadly be categorized into efforts that will either drive higher levels of top line or will optimize associated expenses. In the top line category, first, we're working to increase the productivity of our direct sales team. As you know, we've continued to invest heavily in our head count throughout this year despite the macroeconomic uncertainty that surrounds us. And this uncertainty requires greater focus on training and enablement to unlock the sales team's full potential. Starting in Q2 of this year, we've been investing in more targeted development programming. This programming starts during onboarding and is adopted for AEs at the later stages of their ramp through to more mature and fully ramped AEs. Importantly, these initiatives focus on in-person learning. Including sales process certifications embedded into new rep onboarding, in-person competitive enablement and certification in each of our global offices, Braze demo certifications and enablement and industry-specific playbooks and territory and account planning resources, among others. Further anticipated enhancements to our top line efficiency will derive from a number of partnerships and relationships that we're building and expanding across our ecosystem. While we're primarily a direct sales force, we have a long history of engaging a growing number of resellers throughout the world. With our heaviest contribution from the APAC region, we continue to expand into Latin America and plan continued growth in the number and revenue contribution from resellers. We're also in the early stages of establishing and implementing co-seller and OEM relationships. And we have the opportunity to establish product-led growth paths to provide for near frictionless upsells where customers simply seek to expand existing entitlements. Bridging across both top line efficiency and post sales cost structure optimization is the exciting traction that we're seeing emerging among the GSIs. Their clear enthusiasm to establish Braze practices, is projected to drive not only further sales efficiencies for both new business and expansion opportunities, but also post sales cost optimizations as they take on some elements of the post sales and success support offerings done by Braze today. Further areas of cost structure efficiencies as we continue to scale will come from our cost optimized locations strategy, which I mentioned previously, as well as expanding our existing use of automation for elements of our customer success services. This automation is already in place, supporting much of the SMB success organization and will be expanded where appropriate, to drive improved post sales efficiency. Taken together, we believe we can achieve our previously disclosed long-term target for non-GAAP sales and marketing expense as a percent of revenue of 23% to 25%. In research and development, we've continued to hire talented engineers to fuel innovation, and we believe that with our fully funded business and ability to offer public company equity compensation, we are well positioned to continue to do so. Over time, we do expect to drive efficiencies in our engineering infrastructure and head count as we scale revenue and execute on our cost optimized location strategy. As with our core technology stack, we'll continue making the key investments necessary to enhance current products and add new products and features to maintain and advance our competitive market position and drive revenue growth. Our long-term non-GAAP R&D cost as a percent of revenue target will continue to remain at 13% to 15% of revenue. Finally, over the past 2 years, we've ramped our general and administrative staff and expenses considerably for public company readiness and to build out key functions to support our global growth. The public company expenses, such as D&O insurance and audit fees will scale as we grow. Internally, we also expect to leverage process and workflow automation and we expect parts of G&A to be some of the most significant beneficiaries of our cost-optimized location strategy. Our target long-term non-GAAP G&A expense as a percent of revenue remains at 8% to 10%. And while my last comment applies across the organization, it continues to be in our DNA to approach discretionary spend with discipline, prioritizing spend that generates community and furthers our company values. In fact, it was my pleasure not to provide any of our in-person attendees today with any Braze swag. We hope -- we hope that instead, you will take with you the memory of today's experience and the interactions you were able to have with our incredible executive team. Before I wrap, I'd like to leave you with a few key takeaways. Start Anywhere, Go Everywhere. We meet our customers where they are on their journey and empower them to realize world-class customer engagement. We continue to expand our competitive moat with new product innovations. We have a strong track record of growth at scale with a proven land and expand model. Our priority, given the substantial market opportunity and our technology advantage is to drive sustained growth at scale. And we have ambitious, but achievable, long-term margin targets. We believe our disciplined approach to high ROI investments will drive substantial leverage in our business. Thank you for your attention. And now we'll take a brief moment to set up for the Q&A of today's event. Thank you.

We'll take Gabriela first from Goldman Sachs.

Great. I appreciate all the details. I have a question on how to think about the product road map evolution. So if we think about the marketing stack, classic competitors doing relational database use cases, Braze doing real-time use cases now [ cards ] connecting the dots between relational database and the Braze real-time use cases. We understand or we've spoken in detail about why your classic competitors can't do what Braze does. Could you answer the reverse question, which is how much functionality can Braze replicate from the existing relational database legacy guys? And how much do you want to actually be able to do that?

Yes. So at a high level, I think when you talk about functionality, there's the jobs to do when you're actually interacting with the customers. And I think anything that you can do slowly, you can absolutely do with a system that's fast, right? And anything you can do with a system that siloed, you can obviously do with a system that has broken down those silos. And so from the perspective of the jobs to do and actually engaging with the customers, we think that the solution is not only comprehensive across those preexisting use cases. But actually, in general, even when we see our customers migrate over in a carbon copy fashion, where they just say, Hey, this is what I was running in the other platform. Let me set it up in Braze. There's a lot that they get for free along the way because of the vertical integration of our data flow and just a lot that's inherent, especially now in our reporting infrastructure and in our experimentation infrastructure. Kevin even just mentioned that when you do the intelligent variant flip on, if you were doing AB testing in another system before, all you have to do is add intelligent variant to it from Braze and that AIML that we're going to apply to it will in place improve performance. Now there are other aspects of the data integration ecosystem that we believe are archaic and are better to be left behind. And so when we look at the kind of data integration options as a simple example, you're not hearing us up here talking about improving our FTP landing zones for ETLs that are moving flat files around and things like that. And obviously, there are parts of data infrastructure and data ecosystems that exist in certain companies today that utilize or rely on those. We've actually always tried to make sure that when a customer moves to Braze that they are integrating and implementing with us in a way that they are going to be able to realize the differentiation that we have, if not immediately, certainly over time. And there are a lot of organizational dynamics that can get in the way of that progress where if you kind of allow a company to just move over a prior way of working with data and don't kind of think about things in a new way that, that can lead to them limiting their ability to make rapid progress over time. There's a balance to strike there, right? When we say Start Anywhere, Go Everywhere, part of saying Start Anywhere is also just meeting you where you are from a sophistication standpoint. But one of the things that we've always done to try to sidestep that particular tension from a data perspective is we rely on our vertical integration. Jon brought up the example of being able to load in 10 years of legacy data and being able to understand purchase targeting that certainly is looking out over something that would be stored in a legacy data warehouse. But there are so many life cycle use cases of activation ones, that can start acting on data immediately as it's flowing into the system. And so that's why I think when you look at Braze and the SDK footprint that we have, the hard work that we've done to make sure that we've earned the right to integrate into our customers' products that not only gives us the right delivery point for those jobs to do that I started with in the beginning, but it also provides the data flow that doesn't involve any maintenance and it doesn't involve a need for them to upgrade those old systems. We can provide an in-place replacement that's very easy to deploy. And I think that's why if you go back to my opening remarks, I think it's tremendous that in Braze's customer base, we have examples of everything from prelaunch start-ups with just a handful of people all the way up to the world's largest enterprises. And we've shown an ability to actually adapt to the data realities within those organizations at all different stages of maturity. A big part of that has always been that vertical integration story. But now when we look at things like cloud data ingestion, we're able to really complete that loop for more and more customers.

And a follow-up from where Myles was going with CIBC, which is how do you think about customer engagement use cases in the call center and that kind of gray area between marketing and maybe service?

So we -- I mean, Jimmy actually touched on it, I think it's very relevant for a challenger bank type model. But the -- we're not interested in powering directly kind of human interactions with customers. We're helping a lot of companies turn interactions that today happen between humans and humans into digital interactions when it makes sense. So if he can divert more of someone is having trouble with a password reset or they have a question about a product or something like that instead of calling the call center, being able to satisfy that through 2-way messaging whether it's through an in-product message within Braze or WhatsApp or something like that. It's actually potentially a better customer experience. I know I personally don't enjoy speaking to call center reps and spending 20 minutes getting to the right person through IVR, but it can also be much more cost-effective for the customer. So it is a gray area. There is a bit of crossover because we think about customer centricity and customer experience, first and foremost, more so than this is a customer service use case. This is a marketing use case. If we can help our customers use a single technology solution to basically enable the right type of engagement for that customer based on the need, customers better off, clients better off and Braze is adding more value.

Yes. And I think that -- just to highlight a lot of the road map advancement that we've had even on our conversational messaging. You look at the new developments across SMS and MMS even just over the last 15 months, the amount of automated conversations that the Braze platform can have, had actually been moving forward quarterly as we added more and more refinement to things like keyword targeting, soft matching, incorporating AIML into that ability to have the upfront conversation with the customer, potentially deflecting from the need to engage an actual human in the -- on the customer support desk, if you will. We're going to continue to do that. And one of the amazing aspects of Canvas and the visual programming language is that it also allows you to build real-time conversational flows. Because it's all event-driven and it's all running in real time. And so unlike the workflow tools that exist in the entirety of competitive side in the marketing technology space, which behind the scenes are a bunch of small batches running over and over again. Braze is truly a real-time event-driven system. And what that means is that it can actually have an interactive conversation with someone as long as the conditional logic is there to be able to kind of play that role of the other side of the conversation. And so we have this great investment kind of launch pad where as we continue to add the ability to handle more diversity in human responses on these conversational channels like SMS, MMS, WhatsApp, et cetera, we will start to be able to fulfill more and more of the automated customer support use cases. But I wouldn't expect to see us investing in the near or medium term in something in the kind of traditional -- how do I manage a big bank of humans and a ticket queue within that and all those types of things. Braze really been built to allow a small number of people to achieve massive scale and leverage through full automation. And I think that the scaling function that a lot of the customer support ecosystem tries to work through is really managing human-to-human problems. We want to empower small groups to have massive reach, not deal with this.

Good. DJ, Next of Canaccord.

David Hynes from Canaccord. Just may be a bridge between Bill and Isabelle. But I'm curious with the new cloud data ingestion capabilities, can you just help us think about how the technology bridges to impact on the financial model? Like is it a premium SKU that you're offering? Does it drive more messaging? Does it help grow MAUs? Like how do we think about the technological enhancements driving the growth?

Yes. So I think that the best way to think about cloud data industry and if you're familiar with the rest of the way that we do integrations is that I'm at least thinking about it as the equivalent of an SDK, living in someone's data warehouse. And so when we look at it from that perspective, certainly, when we add SDKs into new platforms, like as we expanded, we started in the early days in Android and iOS, we've expanded the web. We add Roku is a set-top box. We've continued to grow from there. We've got client demand to move into places like video game consoles or desktop applications. Those are all future platforms that we may build SDKs in. And then similarly, when you look at cloud data ingestion, that's us living in the data warehouse. So that's going to bring in additional data. It's going to expose us to additional users that maybe didn't appear in those other places. If you've got someone that you want to communicate with who's never visited your app or your website and their information only appears in your data warehouse, but you want to be able to message them on SMS or you want to be able to target them in Google or Facebook through various ways that, that is uniquely enabled by us pulling in that users information through the data warehouse. You could imagine that adding additional user profiles. It also opens up more use cases because having additional context around a customer and their journey would allow you to communicate in more avenues and more places. And so there's a lot of different ways that, that helps with volume-based expansion. But the -- I think the most important thing that it does is it continues to expand the surface area of Braze within an organization. The more that we engage with the engineering counterparts that the marketing teams that are using us every day rely on to do additional integrations and more instrumentation and have more surface area to be able to communicate with customers, the more that we engage with the data engineering and data science teams within companies, it helps get that flywheel moving faster. So they can expand to more use cases over time. It increases our stickiness, it increases our ability to kind of upsell and cross-sell into new places because we've got more champions and more advocates within the organization. And then obviously, cloud data ingestion has a really big impact on time to value. It's -- Jon highlighted that as a couple of the specific examples in the product presentation where you can literally be up and running in a matter of minutes and not only that, but you don't need to get your engineering team to commit to maintaining a data pipeline and setting up alerting and monitoring around it because through our partnership with the data warehouse providers, we're going to handle all that. And so it makes it turnkey right out of the gate, and it makes it turnkey continuously ever after. And that allows for us to really have our customers move forward with more speed and confidence.