Bridgeline Digital, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Bridgeline Digital, Inc., second quarter 2021 earnings 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 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to the speaker today, Mark Downey, CFO. Please go ahead.

Thank you and good afternoon, everyone. My name is Mark Downey and I am the Chief Financial Officer for BridgeLine Digital. I am pleased to welcome you to our fiscal 2021 second quarter conference call. On the call this afternoon is Eric Kahn, BridgeLine Digital President and CEO, who will begin with a discussion of our business highlights. I'll then update you on our financial results for the quarter and we'll conclude by taking questions. On May 12th, BridgeLine announced that it had entered into an agreement to acquire HawkSearch, the intelligent product search and recommendation engine. HawkSearch AI-powered technology helps online retailers engage customers and convert more sales with personalized site search and intelligent recommendations that connect customers with hyper-relevant products and boost online revenue. Additionally, Ridgeline closed on May 14th a registered direct offering priced at the market of 1,060,000 shares of its common stock at a price of $0.2028 per share for gross proceeds of approximately $2.4 million and a securities purchase agreement with certain institutional investors in connection with a private placement of 2,700 shares of its Series D convertible preferred stock at a price of $1,000 per share. The company expects to receive gross proceeds from this private placement of approximately $2.7 million. Joseph Gutter and Co. LLC acted as lead placement agent and Tatton Scrawlers, Inc. as co-placement agent. If you would like a copy of these press releases, you can access it on our website, Bridgeline.com. Before we begin, I would like to remind listeners that during this conference call, comments that we make regarding Bridgeline that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Act of 1934 and are subject to risks and uncertainties that can cause such statements to differ materially from actual future events or results. These statements are made persuading to the safe harbor provisions of the private securities litigation reform act of 1995. The internal projections and beliefs upon which we base our expectations today may change over time and we expressly disclaim and assume no obligation to inform you if they do. Results that we report today should not be considered as an indication of future performance. Changes in economic, business, competitive, technological, regulatory, and other factors, such as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and related public health measures, could cause Bridgeline's actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by the projections or forward-looking statements made today. For more detailed information about these factors and other risks that may impact our business, please review the reports and documents filed from time to time by Bridgeline Digital with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Also, please note that on the call this afternoon, we will discuss some non-GAAP financial measures when discussing the company's financial performance. We provide a reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to our GAAP financials and our earnings release. You can obtain a copy of our earnings release by visiting our website.

I would now like to turn the call over to Ari Kahn, our president and CEO. Thank you, Mark, and good afternoon, everyone. It certainly is an exciting time for Bridgeline, our shareholders, and our customers. After evaluating dozens of strategic opportunities, we've been fortunate to find two acquisitions that fit perfectly into our e-commerce 360 strategy. In eCommerce 360, we focus on helping our customers grow their online revenue with turnkey apps that drive traffic, boost conversion, and raise average order value. eCommerce 360 leads us to develop and acquire complementary apps that help drive online revenue from these three dimensions. Our intelligent dashboard, powered by WooRank, is being trained to understand which of our apps can make the biggest impact on your eCommerce 360 revenue drivers. and provide recommendations as to which of our products can make the greatest impact to your website. E-commerce 360 apps are out of the box, enabling them to be sold with a touchless sales process for a fast sales cycle with low sales and marketing expenses. Our recommendation dashboard will further reduce sales costs by cross-selling the best apps at the right time to help our customers. because our apps are out of the box, we can increase our gross margins as a more significant percentage of our revenue is subscription and license versus professional services. E-commerce 360 guides our M&A focus towards apps that can drive traffic, boost conversion, or raise average order value. It also transforms and others. In March, we acquired WooRank SRL and this month we acquired HawkSearch. The combination of Bridgeline with WooRank and HawkSearch positions Bridgeline for strong growth in 2021. with a unique product suite that will help our customers increase their online revenue with stronger traffic, conversion, and average order value. WooRank is off to a strong start, delivering 10 new customers per day, 1,500 qualified sales leads per month, strong gross margins, and exciting capabilities that all of our customers need to drive more traffic to their websites. WooRank will become a foundation for us to offer SEO packages to our customers, generate new customers who can benefit from our other products, and it gives us a recommendation dashboard that can drive cross sales throughout our customer base. WooRank also reinforces our commitment to the franchise market with SEO enhancements for each franchisee to drive traffic to their local pages and into their store. Last month, we launched WooRank Assistant. WooRank Assistant allows marketers to evaluate and improve their website traffic without ever leaving their platform and brings a gamification aspect to WooRank that increases engagement with the product. We also added new features that address Google's upcoming Core Web Vitals update, where we check for three critical metrics that Google will be measuring and impacting search rankings with cumulative layout shift, first input display, and largest contentful paint. WooRank also launched Data Bravo this year. Data Bravo helps marketers identify new sales opportunities and understand their prospects' digital footprint by harnessing the power of WooRank's web data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Data Bravo is bringing new revenues to Bridgeline that were not even part of our original projections. Last week, we announced the acquisition of Hawk Search. Hawk Search springs Bridgeline forward in both the e-commerce and enterprise site search markets. SiteSearch is our strongest segment in the marketing technology market, winning a customer per week with our Cellebros product line. TalkSearch brings new capabilities to Bridgeline that will drive even more online revenue for our customers with enhanced merchandising capabilities, product recommendations, personalization, and data-rich search analytics. I have to say it also brings a really awesome team. I met with everybody last week and the energy at HawkSearch is infectious. It's great. We intend to accelerate the HawkSearch roadmap with Bridgeline's e-commerce 360 technologies, including natural language processing, instant search, and our new Wurank SEO recommendation dashboard. These combined technologies and the larger engineering teams will help HawkSearch customers grow online revenue even faster from their HawkSearch software. HawkSearch brings hundreds of new customers and thousands of new sites to the Bridgeline family. Strong revenues and gross margins, an excellent sales pipeline and great, great, great partnerships with world-class digital agencies as well as leading e-commerce and CMS vendors. It's really a great time for Bridgeline right now. At this time, I'd like to turn our call over to our Chief Financial Officer, Mark Downey. Take it away.