BlackLine, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Matt Humphries, SVP of Investor Relations.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today. With me on the call are Owen Ryan, Chief Executive Officer of Blackline, as well as Patrick Villanova, Chief Financial Officer. For the Q&A portion of today's call, we'll also have Jeremy Ung, Blackline's Chief Technology Officer, join us. Before we get started, I'd like to note that certain statements made during this conference call that are not historical facts including those regarding our future plans, objectives, and expected performance, in particular our guidance for Q3 and full year 2026, our forward-looking statements within the meeting of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements represent our outlook only as of the date of this call. While we believe any forward-looking statements made during the call are reasonable, actual results could differ materially as these statements are based on our current expectations as of today and are subject to risks and uncertainties. including those stated in our periodic reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, in particular our Form 10-K and Form 10-Q. We do not undertake and expressly disclaim any obligation to update or alter our forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as required by applicable law. All comparisons we make on the call today relate to the corresponding period of last year, unless otherwise noted. Unless otherwise stated, our financial measures disclosed on this call will be non-GAAP. A discussion of these non-GAAP financial measures and information regarding reconciliations of our historical GAAP versus non-GAAP results is available in our earnings release and presentation, which may be found on our investor relations website at investors.blackline.com or in our form 8K filed with the SEC today. Now, I'll turn the call over to Blackline's Chief Executive Officer, Owen Ryan. Owen?

Thank you, Matt. Good afternoon, everyone. I want to start this quarter with a short overview of the financial results before Patrick does a deeper dive. I also want to walk through the deal timing dynamics that shape this quarter and then give you a sense of the period we have just lived through, because I believe the first half of 2026 is likely the most consequential period in this company's 25-year history. This was a good quarter on the measures that matter for discipline and durability. Revenue grew 9.2%, Non-GAAP operating margin came in at 23.3%, and we generated 37 million of free cash flow. Now, on deal timing, it has become harder to predict this year. AI has put every finance organization in the position of reevaluating what they spend on and why, and that evaluation takes longer. Here is an example. We were recently selected for our first-ever Sovereign Cloud opportunity with a large European company whose security and data requirements are among the most stringent in the world. We won the competitive evaluation and cleared the legal, security, and technical reviews, and we are now working through the final details to close on this five-year, eight-figure deal. Even with both sides aligned and committed to a June 30th close, a deal of this size and complexity simply takes longer to get across the line than either party would like, which is exactly the dynamic I am describing. This elongated timeline shows up mostly in our mega enterprise pursuits. Customers are evaluating more than just software now. They are also going much deeper into Blackline's AI governance model, our product roadmap, and how we sit inside their control environment before they sign. That pulls even more security, risk, compliance, and IT professionals into the room alongside finance, and everything is simply taking longer. More of these conversations have become formal build versus buy assessments, and buying is beginning to come out far ahead. That clarity does not shorten the evaluation itself, so the timeline stretches even when the outcome is clear. In total, approximately 8 million of opportunities we expected to close in the second quarter slipped for similar reasons. This business has not been lost, we have already closed half of it, and we are making solid progress on the rest. There is a second dynamic we are seeing, which is expected. Our platform pricing offers unlimited users. As more of our base moves to platform, we're seeing less lift from user ads. We are making that trade on purpose. Usage and value over seat count. And it means near-term growth will understate actual demand until platform and AI adoption reach scale. We are winning long-term strategic relationships. RPO grew 17% to over 1.1 billion Clear validation that underlying demand is strong. Nearly 90% of net new business this quarter landed directly on platform pricing. New deal sizes are up 24%. Multi-year commitments were 56% of this quarter's renewal book, up from 45% a year ago. This is a customer base making bigger, longer commitments. Platform adoption is broadening across the base, too. Eligible ARR on platform crossed 17%. Up from 13% last quarter and current RPO, the piece we will recognize over the next 12 months grew 11%. That is the near-term picture. Now to the period we have just lived through. AI is going to be a multi-year transformation in the office of the CFO. I will walk through it in four parts. The context, our platform strategy, the validation showing up with customers, and what we are seeing across the market. On context, the pace of AI, our own product development, and the time we have spent in market has been more intense than anything that ever came before it. Over the past two quarters, we have had hundreds of meetings with CFOs, CAOs, and CTOs, met with capital markets regulators, accounting standards setters, and the leadership of the seven largest global audit firms. We also met with the CEOs of adjacent office of the CFO companies, large European enterprises focused on data sovereignty, BPO firms reinventing themselves, and the frontier labs building the models everyone is working to deploy responsibly. Those conversations reinforced our confidence in Blackline's direction and the pace at which we are building. On platform strategy, across these conversations, the same theme kept surfacing. When AI scales, governance must scale with it. Studio 360 is our platform layer for the office of the CFO, and we have embarked on its next evolution to meet that need. We call what it enables agentic financial operations, a model where humans and AI work inside the close, equally visible, and equally governed. Here is why this matters. Gartner expects the average Fortune 500 company to be running more than 150,000 AI agents by 2028, up from fewer than 15 last year, and fewer than one in five companies believe they have the governance to manage that scale. That is the gap Studio 360 closes in accounting and finance. In June, we unveiled Finance Control Console, the control and governance plan for the office of the CFO. Every agent, regardless of who built it, runs from a single registry, must be Blackline certified before acting in a live process and operates inside a policy layer no customer can override. Every action and every human decision writes through an immutable audit trail, so any close can be reconstructed exactly as it happened, working alongside the deterministic, rule-bound workflows underneath. That combination is what management teams, auditors, audit committees, and regulators are asking for. The deterministic Engine Bs and all already runs multiple autonomous close workflows simultaneously. and because the governance layer is built independent of any single model, our customers' investment in it only grows more valuable as foundation or open source models change and improve. That is what extends our lead over anyone building this from scratch and why Blackline is the long-term partner for this transformation. We hear this directly. We are in the room with the big four audit firms, the standard setters for internal auditors and the regulators who matter most and their message is consistent. AI cannot be a black box. Every step has to be evidenced. Our models are tested for bias and failure modes and signed off before reaching production, with humans reviewing, approving, overriding, or halting the process at every stage. AI proposes, people decide, and is covered by the same internal controls over financial reporting framework as everything else in the close. That is the kind of trust the CFO requires from the partner behind the financial statements they personally attest to. and that trust takes years to earn. That trust does not happen by assertion alone. I want to be clear about where that friction still sits. It is an adoption, not the product. Customers are careful about trusting AI inside closed critical accounting processes. Security and risk teams are getting involved earlier in the sales cycle, partly because many regulators still have not finalized guidance for AI. We are not waiting for this to resolve on its own. We expect AIUC-1 certification in September, an independent third-party standard built for AI agent security and reliability. I am proud to say we helped shape this standard as a member of the consortium. That gives customers real upfront validation about BlackLine's trustworthiness. We'll go much deeper on all of this at our Beyond the Black conference in November. On the validation, here's what our customers are telling us and doing. The Studio 360 platform is what our AI runs on, and adoption across our base is now measurable. Roughly 3,500 of our eligible customers above 90% of that base are AI-enabled today, and roughly 3,000, about 77%, are actively using AI in their financial operations. Feature usage reached nearly 13 million actions in the quarter, up over 220% sequentially. Customers are embedding these capabilities into how they close the books every day inside the same controls and audit trails they have trusted us with for years and validating the results through parallel testing. This usage is already showing up in revenue. Verity Prepare alone has been a key lever in more than 20 million of platform ACV to date, and a growing number of customers now pay for it directly as a standalone product. That is driving further platform upsell with over 80% of that interest tied to our maturing Verity suite as the primary reason. And because full access to Verity requires platform pricing, this is exactly why Platform ARR is tracking toward our 25% full-year target with Mega Enterprise already above 21%. Platform adoption drives agent adoption, and together we expect these to contribute at least two points of incremental revenue growth next year on top of the acceleration already visible in our contracted backlog. On the breadth of what is driving growth, we started by embedding a generative AI capabilities across the platform, and we have since built a full suite of agentic capabilities natively into that foundation. This suite is a set of complex multi-agent systems working across the customer's full set of accounts. As they run, they are servicing new use cases, hundreds already, with more emerging every month. Each one is a further opportunity to monetize our AI. That surface spans both record to report and invoice to cash. New business is where this becomes concrete. Two of our agentic offerings, Verity Accruals and Verity Prepare, show the clearest evidence. This quarter we closed multiple Verity Accruals deals, including with a multi-billion dollar U.S. hospital system, a global consumer technology company, and a leading cybersecurity company, alongside a steady stream of mid-market wins. This is one product adopted across every tier of our customer base. Verity Accruals is expanding quickly. We are adding new agents for payroll and prepaid accruals this year, extending into two of the most manual, judgment-heavy parts of the close. Early customers are already closing up to three days faster and spending 80% less time on accruals work. Verity Prepare coordinates a team of specialized agents that ingest documentation, identify reconciling items, and assemble a complete, audit-ready package for human sign-off, delivering up to 94% reductions in preparation time. Customer count grew nearly fourfold quarter over quarter. Revenue is not yet material, but growing nicely. The pattern we expect is emerging as customers start narrow and then expand use cases as their confidence builds. Three examples show why this is resonating. One of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world tested whether they could build its record-to-report workflows on a general-purpose LLM. They learned quickly that a model generating suggestions cannot coordinate a full workflow the way our multi-agent architecture does, but the transparency auditors require a built-in from the start, so the company chose to go deeper with Blackline instead. Another top-tier pharmaceutical company already live on our intercompany platform, is deepening its use of Verity because it is built on a real accounting logic and compliance. And a major healthcare company converted to platform pricing this quarter to gain full access to capabilities that are already seen work as an early adopter. Three companies, three different reasons, one conclusion. A customer does not need to build a new governance framework to deploy AI and finance because Blackline already is that framework. Platform pricing is the gate customers pass through to access our agenda capabilities. That is why deepening agent adoption inside an already converted customer is a natural driver of expansion revenue. Proof of value that extends platform adoption across that customer's business. Verity Match makes the same case elsewhere in the close. It is an early adopter testing with general availability expected soon. Our rules-based matching solution already resolves most transactions automatically but the remaining exceptions, a small share of volume, take up a disproportionate amount of time as each one requires manual investigation. Verdi Match targets that tail directly. Running at production volumes with our early adopter customers, it brings total match transactions, automated and AI resolved combined, to 90% while cutting manual investigation time by roughly two-thirds. The same governance model extends into invoice to cash as well. Verity Collect is our multimodal agentic collections offering that is being tested by customers currently. Verity Remit, our agentic remittance agent, is cutting manual effort by more than 95% for our best performing customers. Verity Remit is on track for general availability this quarter and Verity Collect in the fourth quarter. Our largest partners, such as Accenture, Capgemini, Deloitte, E&Y, and KPMG, have had strong years with Blackline, building record practice revenue. They see the opportunity to build an evergreen business on our controls layer instead of trying to build their own. Our relationship with SAP is deepening too, with two milestones expected in the third quarter. We are working to enable platform pricing for SOLEX customers, and we expect Verity Accruals and Verity Prepare to retrieve SAP premium qualifications. Finally on the market, the clearest signals that the largest, most complex enterprises in the world are standardizing on Blackline as their control layer for finance, and this quarter's wins prove it. We won new customers including Vodafone and the leading global market data platform. We also expanded major relationships with Royal Dutch Shell, a mega German healthcare company, and a large private telecommunications company. Subsequent to quarter end, we also closed two of the top six largest U.S. banks both who signed long-term seven-figure deals with Blackline. Net new business has been a bright spot in the first half. Verity adoption has been growing across every segment and platform adoption is scaling fastest with net new business where customers are landing directly on platform pricing from day one. Platform conversion inside our existing base is moving on each customer's own timeline. Customers are timing their move, often with their renewal date. Many customers want additional proof points before moving. More time in market for our new agentic offerings, a referenceable peer they can point to, and support from their audit committees and auditors. We are now putting our own professionals inside customer environments, building a working proof of concept on the customer's data to overcome reticence. That same conviction in the enterprise extends to the middle market, where our agentic offerings are built for faster time to value with less implementation overhead. We are refreshing how we package and price for this segment to match how mid-market companies are evaluating and buying. We also see real opportunity in new markets. Public sector has been a strong area of progress with new deals closed and multiple proofs of concept underway with civilian and defense agencies. In the Middle East, the war has slowed our progress, though we still see it as an attractive market given our infrastructure investments, the depth and breadth of our go-to-market partner network, and continued interest from prospects. To close, I believe this has been the most consequential period in our history. Our urgentic financial operations strategy is rapidly maturing. The proof is showing up in real product, real adoption and real new business. The market has tested us with more scrutiny than ever, scrutiny we are built to meet. We are responding with speed, our position is strong, and we believe the opportunity for Blackline is larger now than what we described last year. With that, let me now turn it over to Patrick Villanova.

Thank you, Owen. Our second quarter results reflect a business with strong profitability and cash generation, healthy underlying customer economics with a quarter shaped by the deal timing you just walked through. Going a bit deeper on the financials this quarter. Total revenue was $187.8 million, up 9.2%, with subscription revenue growth of 9% and professional services revenue growth of 11%, reflecting strength in go-live activity and early AI deployment with customers. ARR grew to $719 million, up 6%, or approximately 7%, excluding an approximate 1.FX headwind. Calculated billings grew 6% in the quarter, with trailing 12-month billings growth of 7%. Two factors explain the gap between these metrics and our subscription revenue growth rate. One is timing, tied directly to the deal dynamics Owen just walked through. A number of large strategic deals moved past quarter end, several of which have now closed. The other is tied to our success with platform pricing. As more of our base moves to platform, which is unlimited users, we see less organic lift from user expansion than we've historically experienced. That effect persists until platform and AI adoption scale enough to offset it. Remaining performance obligations, or RPO, which captures the full value of multi-year contracts we are signing, was over $1.1 billion, growing 17% well ahead of both revenue and ARR growth. Current RPO, the portion we expect to recognize over the next 12 months, grew 11%, also ahead of revenue in ARR. Both are being driven directly by the same dynamic Owen described, larger deal sizes and a higher mix of multi-year renewals. Bigger, longer contracts capture their full value in RPO immediately, while ARR reflects only a single year regardless of contract length. So RPO naturally grows faster as deal size and duration increase. Current RPO growth is the best leading indicator we have of where revenue is headed, since it reflects the business already under contract converting over the next 12 months. We expect at least two points of incremental growth from platform conversion and agentic adoption, and that is the mechanics behind our view of exiting this year at double-digit growth with further acceleration in 2027. Platform ARR as a percentage of eligible ARR grew to over 17%, continuing to track toward our full-year target of 25%, with even stronger traction in the mega enterprise segment, where that figure is now over 21%. Our SOLEX channel and broader SAP relationship continue to contribute, and we see further opportunity as platform pricing and premium qualification of our agentic offerings open new avenues into SAP's installed base. SAP was 26% of revenue. Turning to retention and renewal trends. Dollar-based net revenue retention was 102.4%, or approximately 104% normalizing for FX, driven by platform migration and cross-sell of invoice-to-cash, matching, and journals, all set by lower levels of user ads. Our enterprise revenue renewal rate remains strong at 95%. Middle market logo count this quarter reflected the tail end of a lower mid-market cohort we've discussed in prior quarters. It's tracking as we anticipated, and we expect that to ease further from here. Now let me turn to profitability and cash flow. Non-GAAP gross margin was 80.4%, with non-GAAP subscription gross margin of 83%, continuing to expand as we sunset legacy private data centers and drive further efficiencies in cloud spend, structural improvements that keep compounding rather than one-time gains. Non-GAAP operating margin was 23.3%, up from 22.1% in the second quarter of last year, driven by discipline execution and the operating leverage we are building across the business, including efficiency gains from our own use of AI in internal operations. Non-GAAP net income attributable to the Black Line was $42.9 million, with adjusted earnings per share of 61 cents. We delivered operating cash flow of $45 million and free cash flow of $36.5 million. We expect stronger free cash flow margins in the second half, resulting in full-year free cash flow growth of approximately 20%. We ended the quarter with approximately $528 million in cash. Cash Equivalents, and Marketable Securities versus $667 million in debt. We repurchased 1.2 million shares in the quarter for $38 million, ending the quarter with approximately $180 million of capacity remaining under our existing program. And today, we announced that our board approved an additional $100 million increase in our stock buyback program. bringing our total available capacity to approximately $280 million. Outside of M&A, we expect to use approximately 100% of free cash flow for repurchases over the remainder of the year, generally in line with our pace through the first half. Looking to the back half of the year, several of the deals that slipped out of the second quarter have already closed, and the current RPO growth I just described tells you the underlying contract business continues to convert on schedule. Our pipeline continues to mature with larger, more strategic deals moving through it. Platform conversion and strategic products remain two of the biggest drivers of incremental growth. Several product releases also land in this window. Verity Match reaching general availability, new payroll and prepaid accrual agents, and SAP Premium Qualification for Verity Accruals and Verity Prepare along with platform pricing availability for Solex customers. On FX, back in May, we called out a modest revenue headwind of $1 to $2 million for the year. Exchange rates have moved further against us since, and we now expect roughly another $1 million on top of that, concentrated in the back half of the year. Even so, our third quarter and full-year revenue guidance ranges still imply exiting this year at double-digit growth. with this incremental headwind absorbed. Now onto guidance for the third quarter. We expect total GAAP revenue to be in the range of $193 to $195 million, representing 8.3 to 9.4% growth. We expect non-GAAP operating margin to be in the range of 24.5 to 25.5%. and we expect non-GAAP net income attributable to Blackline to be in a range of $45 to $47 million for 62 to 65 cents on a per share basis on approximately 74.5 million diluted weighted average shares. And for the full year 2026, we are maintaining our range for total GAAP revenue of $765 to $769 million, representing 9.2% to 9.8% growth. We expect non-GAAP operating margin to be in the range of 24.1% to 24.6%. And we expect non-GAAP net income attributable to Blackline to be $177 to $182 million, or $2.47 to $2.54 on a per share basis on approximately 74 million diluted weighted average shares. Operator, we're ready for questions.

Thank you. At this time, we will conduct the question and answer session. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star 1 1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 1 again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from the line of Quis Quintero of Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open.

Hey, Owen. Hey, Patrick. Thanks for taking the questions here. I wanted to ask about the friction and adoption that you all called out.

It makes a lot of sense given this is very important software touching financial systems and data.

But from your perspective, what do you think you can do or have been doing to help speed up some of that adoption on your end?

Yeah, I think, Chris, first of all, good to hear you and I think the short thing is if you go back and who we're talking with, right, we're working with the audit firms, we're working with the regulators, we're working with the internal audit standards setters, obviously we're working with our customers, working with implementation partners, and then working with, you know, the customers themselves on what they need to move forward. So, you know, when I said in the prepared remarks the amount of time we're really spending in the market with all those different constituencies, because all of them have their interests align to some degree, but they all have different responsibilities and how they fulfill those responsibilities. So for us, what's been critical is being in the room really showing, and Jeremy's been the one driving that along with Patrick, how our AI works and how it doesn't need to be a black box. We can show all that transparency through what we call a glass box so that you can see the human in the loop, you can see the chain of thought, you can see the Tens of thousands of transactions we keep running to show that we can get to the same answer over and over under different scenarios. And I think that's what's really trying to prove the comfort and confidence that our customers are looking for. And so I think the thing that we're seeing is a building belief in the reliability of what Blackline can provide and control for our customers and the various constituencies that need to sign off on the financial statement. So that's at its core.

Got it. That's helpful, Owen. And then on those deal elongations that you're seeing, can you remind us what a typical deal cycle looks like for you all? And how does the new kind of deal cycle look like today? How much more elongated is it versus your prior ones?

Chris, I mean, we typically in the enterprise space, we talk about nine months to a year. and these are not the most precise numbers, but you could say that the deal cycle is elongated by another 40, 45 days based upon the work we're seeing. That's just an average, but some of them could be longer, some of them could be a little bit quicker. But again, really what's driving it is more than anything else. You have, in essence, a new technology in the marketplace and all the people on the buy side from the customer, there's people asking new kinds of questions around How do we govern our AI? How do we use the different models? How do we protect their data? How do we think about sovereignty as they cross borders? How do we think about if there's political disruption where models can't be used in certain geographies? There's more questions now about the vulnerability because of AI-enabled hacking and how our defenses and security around all that. I mean, the good thing is these are things we're well, well built. to answer and respond to, but it does take more time as customers are asking those questions. And the big deal that we described that we're just still working through the final terms on is a perfect example. I mean, we literally had a war room put together with the customer and ourselves trying to work through everything through June 30. If it's now August 3rd and we still got a few things that we're working our way through and everybody wants to get it done, There's just safety protocols everybody's sort of thinking about. So I don't think this is permanent, by the way. I just think that there's a learning experience that customers are going through. We certainly have learned a lot. We're equipping our teams with responses that they can bring to the market to sort of short-circuit some of these additional questions that are coming through because we now know what the issues are. And quite frankly, even if the customer doesn't know what the issues are, we're trying to bring those more forth front and center so that they know what they should be asking about and thinking about and then why Blackline is very reliable and trustworthy in that process.

Excellent. Appreciate the call, Owen.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Steve Enders of Citi. Your line is now open.

Okay, great. Thanks for taking the questions here and maybe just kind of following, you know, on the prior questions from Chris, but I guess, you know, as we think about the year coming together and the deal delays, I guess, how do you kind of have confidence in the, you know, challenges on the deal side, you know, maybe stabilizing or improving and that we're not at a at a time where the deals keep on slipping. In your conversations, what gives confidence in that maybe being stable now?

Yeah, look, Steve, I wish I could tell you we know exactly it's stable. That's why we said predicting things is just a little bit harder. That said, I think, again, when we look at our pipeline for the third quarter and the fourth quarter, the lessons we learned, where we are in the stages of closing those deals, and then the bottoms-up review that Stuart Van Houten and his team run on every deal across all segments of the business around all geographies and by industries, it gives us a pretty good confidence of what we expect to happen on the back half of the year. So I think we're seeing some good things around our customers' interest in our AI capabilities. You can sort of see some of the additional Confidence, and I know I think while I was reading one of your notes where you've got some proof points that you've seen in the market, but our customers are really responding positively. Our implementation partners have really been invaluable in helping us continue to iterate and improve what we're bringing into the marketplace. And I think that's all showing up really well in what our customers are looking for. And I do think you're starting to see a little bit more confidence in firms like Blackline and what we bring. And I don't want to say that the fever is completely broken where everybody wanted to build something themselves that we saw in the first half of the year, but the fever has come down dramatically more. And I think as we, certainly for us, can articulate our value proposition on a build versus a buy, that shows up pretty well. And so I think we feel pretty good about what we're trying to do in the back half of the year. Patrick, anything you want to add to that?

Yeah, I guess to put some data behind that too, Steve, and it's good to hear from you, even looking back in March at some of the deals that slipped in and the time it took to close them subsequent to March, and then looking again at June 30 at a different list of slipped deals, and we've already closed half of them. So we're all collectively, to Owen's point, getting smarter about this. We're getting more diligent. We're short-circuiting some of the to use his words, some of the questions that are coming. So we're seeing, while we're still seeing some deal slippage, we're getting better at closing them after the quarter and that window is shortening, that timeframe is shortening.

Okay, that's very clear there. And then maybe just in terms of, you know, top of funnel and opportunities coming through, how is that maybe progressing? And as we think about the AI opportunity and people assessing, you know, going through those assessments, does that have any impact in terms of the opportunities that you might be seeing coming through at this time? Yeah.

So I don't have the July data, but through the end of June, our pipeline has never been more robust. It's skewing more towards mega enterprise and enterprise than it is mid-market. That's more of a global phenomena than just, say, a North American phenomena from what I've seen. And so you're starting to see things moving through, continuing to see things moving through the pipeline. So I think we feel really good and confident about the top of the funnel. I think for us, again, now is the issue in the back half of the year is to continue to find ways to accelerate those closes, those close dates. And I think, you know, the team is doing all the things that they should be doing. Obviously, it takes a few people to work through this on the customer side as well. But I think, you know, from a pipeline perspective, the positioning we have, particularly, you know, in the enterprise and the mega enterprise space, you know, we like where we're at. and so again, it gives us quiet confidence as we head into the back half of the year.

Okay, perfect. Good to hear. Thanks for taking the questions. Thanks, Steve. Thanks, Steve.

Our next question comes from Rob Oliver of Baird. Your line is now open. Hi, Rob.

Great. Hey, guys. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions. I had two. Patrick, I'll start with you. On the overall RPO number, definitely a really nice leading indicator there on deal activity. I know you said that agents are going to deliver, I think you said, a couple of points in the growth going forward. As you're looking at those longer-term contracts coming in here, particularly with new customers or you're having a lot of success with the new model, How are you accounting for the agentic elements? How are customers accounting for those consumption-based elements around some of your products? And how do you get comfort around that contribution? And then I have a follow-up for Owen.

Rob, thank you. I appreciate the question. So, Rob, you're absolutely right. The RPO story right now with 17% year-over-year growth is a great story. It's not just a Indicative in terms of that we're landing larger deals, that our average deal size is up 24% year over year. But we're landing longer-term deals as well. Customers want to be part of the finance transformation. And then existing customers that have been with us for years, they're renewing for longer periods of time. They're inspired, they're interested, they're intrigued by the product offerings that we have out there. I can say this, that in that 17%, there's not a material amount. in terms of future agentic revenue. But all of our customers that are signing new right now, we are discussing that with them. As we said in the prepared remarks, we saw a 4X increase in the number of customers on Verity, and we have now proof points in terms of the monetization of our agentic revenue. That only represents a tailwind for us, and that RPO number will only grow with that tailwind into the future. Great, that's helpful.

Okay, thanks. And then, Owen, this could be for you or for Patrick, a bit of a follow-up, but just, you know, so clearly new customers are embracing the new model here. You guys have done a really good job, I think, of showcasing the value to new customers. There still appears to be some tension around existing customers. I think part of that is clearly because of the SAP Solex, which could be a potential unlock here for existing customers, but I know you said you're not forcing customers onto the new model, so a lot of cajoling happening. Can you maybe talk a little bit about, as you're meeting with customers, you've got some very loyal long-term customers, what some of the pushback points are right now? Are those renewals or negotiations being brought to RFPs? Are there any additional tensions that are coming in around that process with some of your strong multi-year customer relationships as they consider the new model? Thanks.

Yeah, I think, thanks Rob, Patrick, and I'll tag team this a little bit. So, no, we don't have our customers going out for RFP, so that's not really the issue. You're right that there is some things around Solex that make this a little bit unique, but we try to sort of talk about the eligible pool for going to platform versus the part that's not. I think there's a couple things that certainly come out. One is are customers, if they're pretty well adopted, there's always this push of, well, how much more am I going to get out of this? Show us more, you know, proof point on your roadmap. Show us other examples. And so it's sometimes just taking a little bit longer to win over their hearts and minds, if you will, from what we've seen. And then sometimes it's just, you know, where these customers are on their own journey and all their other competing priorities. And so even though they might want to increased their commitment to Blackline because of some of the other things they're doing in their technology shop. They're not going to take advantage of that yet, so they're just sitting there saying, we don't need this right now. While I don't love that answer, I respect and understand that that's some of the things that they think through. Patrick, you're also dealing with this every day with Stuart and the team as well. Anything to add?

Yeah, Rob, I would add, in terms of our existing customer base and the uptake of the platform, That headwind was more of a 2025 story, and we saw that dissipate by the end of 2025. Right now, as the story has gone from unlimited users to product-led, the level of intrigue and interest is increasing notably. That's why we feel so confident that we're going to get to 25% of eligible ARR by the end of this year, and we're exactly where we want to be as of June 30th. The model is holding together. The forecast is holding together. It's proving out to be true. And we continue to see that acceleration in the existing base as Jeremy and his team release more and more products, solutions, and agents within the platform that our customers are interested in, our existing customers. Very helpful.

Thank you both. Thanks. Thank you. Our next question comes from Patrick Walravens of Citizens. Your line is now open.

Oh, great. Thank you. Owen, can you talk a little bit more about what exactly you guys mean by a sovereign cloud? I mean, it was a company, not a country, right?

And just what are the requirements there and how many of these kinds of opportunities are out there?

Yeah, I'm going to let Jeremy take the lead on this one. Go ahead, Jeremy, please.

So sovereign cloud really refers to the need to have data sovereignty. So customers we're increasingly seeing wanting their data to be fully within the borders of the country. And so sovereign cloud deployments allow us to deploy our solution into that environment, ensure that no data leaves, ensuring that AI solutions and other software are fully hosted in that environment. You can think of it like FedRAMP and other federal markets, but for other countries and other regions of the world. Okay, and are there a lot of these? I would say the appetite has increased due to geopolitical events, and so you're seeing increasing desires to have control over data. It has been a trend over several years. That has been increasing over several years. The other is around AI models. AI model selection, which is why we are model agnostic, has also been a topic for discussion where people want to be able to understand where their data is used. ensure it doesn't leave their country to meet compliance requirements in other areas. So you'll see this in a lot of regulated industries.

All right. And then if I could follow up, and hopefully this is related, but in the prepared remarks, there was a comment about meeting with lots of CEOs, and there was a comment there about, and the frontier labs building the models. Yes.

What's the nature of those meetings and conversations?

Well, it's basically, if you think about it, You know, when you're thinking about the conversations around build versus buy, obviously, Frontier Labs, they provide the tokens, the opportunity to build things, and what we bring, obviously, is all the institutional knowledge of how this works. And so, I think we're seeing the opportunity to help drive more speed to value for customers The ability to reduce risk as customers are trying to do this, helping them figure out the best way to get the best return and the most cost-effective way, because I think the Frontier Labs think about what they do is they provide that sort of raw material that can be used in creating of agents, and what we do is help create the right way to build those agents in a very controlled and governed way and do that with customers directly as well as with our large system integrator partners and we expect as well to be doing with our VPO partners. But that's just part of it. Jeremy and I have been doing these conversations together. Jeremy, anything you want to add?

Yeah, I think a large part of where AI adoption It's really in finance and accounting, there are critical workloads that need to have controls, governance, and auditability. You need to be able to reproduce those outputs on requests for auditors. They need to be immutable. And I think if you look at what these frontier models provide, they provide part of that equation, but they don't provide the auditability. They don't provide the governance. They don't provide those controls. And that's where we come in. And so those partnerships are critical to unlock more AI adoption in the Office of the CFO in Finance and Accounting.

Okay, that's helpful. Thank you.

Thanks, Pat.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Alex Sklar of Raymond James. Your line is now open.

Thanks for taking the question. This is John for Alex. I know it's been touched on quite a bit, but maybe, Owen, on the sales cycles, What do you think can change heading into the second half to maybe close some of those deals? I know you just called out broader complexity leading to the elongation, but any more commonality, maybe geographical differences or customer size dynamics that you're seeing differences in elongation with sales cycles? I have a quick follow-up.

Well, the elongation is definitely concentrated higher up in the market. So the bigger the company, the more people in the room, the more questions, the more checks and hurdles that we're working our way through. and I, you know, as I think about whether it's North America, Europe, Japan, the rest of Asia, PAC, I'm not sure that we're seeing anything really different materially. Certainly between Japan or months between Japan, Europe and North America, I think those standards are continuing to be very, very high as to what we have to meet. And so I think a lot of this, Alex, is us continuing to work and educate and the buyers about how, again, it works within Blackline. And then I was just getting smarter to accelerate our ability to respond to those questions, both holistically, whether it's by industry or geography, to your point, or comparable size. I mean, there's just a whole bunch of things that we're learning each and every time. And as we learn things in the field, we bring it back to the center and then try to get it back out to our team so they can be that much more effective and efficient as they're working with with prospective customers and existing customers.

Okay, thanks. That was a helpful call there. And I wanted to ask on the mid-market headwinds you've been facing, are we getting close to a point where those dynamics begin to reverse? And can you remind us what's sort of embedded in the outlook, and do you still expect to be through this dynamic as we exit 2026?

Thanks. Alex, just so you cut off briefly there, you're referring to the mid-market? Mid-market, yes. So, Alex, everything is playing out as we expected as it relates to the mid-market, the lower mid-market, just to be clear. We track that cohort of customers very carefully over the last three years. We see that built into the outlook, or it is built into the outlook for the remainder of 2026, and we see that rate of churn amongst the lower mid-market dissipating or slowing down as we exit 2026. So, It is playing out as we forecast it, or as we have been monitoring it, and that is built into the guide for next year and beyond.

Thank you very much. Thanks, John.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Lucky Schreiner of D.A. Davidson. Your line is now open.

Great. Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to ask about acquisition of WiseLayer and how we should think about how their more complex agent capabilities and able to handle those more challenging judgment-based tasks are trending so far with customers given your commentary around AI scrutiny from customers in terms of the deal cycle and how we should think about that moving forward. Thanks.

I think a couple things, and again, it's Jeremy and I all impacting this. So first of all, I don't think we could be any more pleased with the acquisition of Wisely. I think their team has been a phenomenal addition to the organization. You know, I think on the go-to-market side of this, and I'll let Jeremy, you know, ask Jeremy to talk about the product side. You know, it takes a couple cycles to work your way through. Learning what the customers are looking for. I know one of the big improvements we wanted to make was linking the accruals capabilities to our journal solution, which was very important. We learned in the enterprise space as we were moving forward. The pipeline for that part of our business has grown quite nicely in the second quarter as our own teams get more comfortable with its capabilities, but also as the WiseLayer team has a little bit of time to breathe and get out in the market and do some of the things that that we were asking them to do. So net-net, we have a board meeting this week. I think we're going to tell the board we're very pleased with the acquisition so far, not satisfied with what we think we can still do, but overall positive. But Jeremy, you want to talk about the product side?

On the product side, the WiseLayer team has been a great catalyst. Being able to seed those agentic AI capabilities and expand them throughout our portfolio, they have helped us accelerate that, not just in the capabilities themselves, and also how we work and how we write code. In terms of their capabilities, it's also been great to be able to marry up their agentic capabilities in the accrual space with our mature capabilities and controls like journaling. Those two combined give people the confidence that these agentic capabilities can be done safely, provide real ROI, but we also get the benefit of fast time to value from accruals and those agentic implementations in addition to the existing mature BlackLine capabilities that we've now integrated them together with.

Great. I appreciate that. Maybe the last one for me, just on the enterprise renewal rate ticking down slightly to 95%. Was that mainly just from the pushed deals? Were there some FX headwinds in there? And with some of those deals now closing, should we expect that to bounce back next quarter? Thanks.

No, that metric, just to be clear, is not impacted by FX, the 95% renewal rate. There's a little bit of rounding there, 95 versus 96, but we have modeled that out over the next year, and we feel very confident that it will be at the mid to upper 90s for the foreseeable future. So we feel very confident in that metric. We like where it is. And just to be clear, the slip deals would impact DBNRR but would not impact GRR. or the renal rate.

Thanks, Lucky.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from Tomer Silberman of Bank of America. Your line is now open.

Hey, guys. Maybe I wanted to ask a similar question along the lines of the deal slippage. I think you said earlier that

Half of the deals that slip in Q2 now closed in Q3.

But if I look at the guidance for Q3 and the implied guide for 4Q, the results are largely in line with street expectations. So I guess the question is, you know, what's the timing between the closing of the deals and when you actually see them start showing up in the results? And do you think that as you continue to close the other half of the deals that that could provide potential upside to back half expectations this year, or would that be more of an opportunity for 2027?

Thanks for the question. So the story there in terms of the guide for Q3 and the remainder of the year is largely FX. Back in May when we were bridging to our original guide that we laid out at the beginning of the year in February, we calculated or identified about a $1 million to $2 million revenue headwind. Since May, based upon where FX rates were at the end of the quarter, there's about another $1 million FX headwind as a result of the strengthening of the U.S. dollar given several market factors. Our guide that we laid out in February was able to absorb that FX headwind, which is a testament to our underlying performance and what we're doing in the market. But to your question, there is an element there that these slip deals Whether they're a month or two months or so, you do lose a month or two of revenue, but that is a subset or a minor part of the story as compared to FX. And then lastly, as these deals close throughout the remainder of 2026 in Q3, that absolutely is a tailwind for 2027 because then you get the full revenue impact next year.

Thank you.

I am showing no further questions at this time. I would like to now turn it back to Owen Ryan, Chief Executive Officer of Blackline.

Thank you, operator, and thank you, everybody, for listening today. We truly appreciate your interest in Blackline, and we look forward to talking to you soon. Take care.

Thank you.

Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect.