Certara, Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Certara First Quarter 2021 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 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, David Deichler, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you all for participating in today's conference call. On the call from Sir Tara, we have William Ferry, Chief Executive Officer, and Andrew Shemek, Chief Financial Officer. Earlier today, CERTAR released financial results for the quarter ended March 31st, 2021. A copy of the press release is available on the company's website. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that management will make statements during this call that include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws, which are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Any statements contained in this call that relate to expectations or predictions of future events, results, or performance are forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements due to a variety of factors. For a list and description of risks and uncertainties associated with Sertara's business, please refer to the risk factors section of our Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on March 15th, 2021. We urge you to consider these factors and you should be aware that these statements should be considered estimates only and are not a guarantee of future performance. Also in their remarks or responses to questions, management may mention some non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of adjusted EBITDA, adjusted net income, adjusted EPS, and certain other non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are available in the recent earnings press release available on the company's website. The conference call contains time-sensitive information and is accurate only as of the live broadcast today, May 6, 2021. Sitara disclaims any intention or obligation, except as required by law, to update or revise any financial projections or forward-looking statements, whether because of new information, future events, or otherwise. And with that, I will turn the call over to William.

Thank you, David. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining Sartar's first quarter earnings call. Andrew and I will start with prepared remarks, and then we will take questions. I am very pleased with how the Sartar business performed overall in the first quarter of 2021, our first full quarter as a public company. While we are turning the corner on this pandemic in some regions, COVID-19 continues to impact many lives around the world. I am deeply proud of how our Sitara team has remained focused on our customers, developing innovative ways to further the adoption of our end-to-end platform to accelerate medicines to patients. In this quarter, we continue to strengthen our position as a global leader in biosimulation by delivering strong financial results and executing against our well-defined strategic plan. Revenue in the first quarter grew 16% compared with the first quarter of 2020, achieving another record quarter of revenue. Adjusted EBITDA grew 20% in the first quarter of 2021 compared with the first quarter of 2020. We saw very robust customer demand during the quarter across both software and services, demonstrated by year-over-year total company bookings growth of 34%. In the first quarter of 2021, we expanded our global footprint with revenue growth of 31% in Europe and 69% in Asia Pacific, fueled by our continued momentum in China in both software and tech-enabled services. Our team, based in our new Shanghai office, is excited to participate in the Drug Information Association's conference later this month. In Japan, the Pharmaceutical and Medical Devices Agency renewed more than 50 licenses of our Phoenix platform and SimCip simulator. The majority of our new employees in the first quarter are based in Europe and Asia to support our strong worldwide expansion. The needs of our customers continue to drive our passion for innovation in biosimulation. We were excited to announce version 20 of our SimCip simulator in the quarter. This latest version expands the use cases of biosimulation with new and enhanced models for maternal health, such as assessing drug performance during pregnancy and lactation. It also automates the assessment of virtual bioequivalence to obtain bio-waivers. This is a key advancement in the modernization of drug development. Scientists at the FDA recently published a manuscript illustrating the FDA's approval of a complex generic using the SYNCIF simulator to achieve virtual bioequivalence instead of a comparative clinical study in patients. Furthermore, we surpassed 80 novel drugs approved by the FDA that had drug labels informed by the SYNCIF simulator. For these new therapies, our simulator was used to address critical decisions regarding dosing, safety, and guidance for use for special populations. Another major update to the SimCiv platform is the newly expanded biologics module, the SimCiv Biologics Simulator, which is now available to be licensed as standalone software. With upgraded capabilities in protein development, we can further help our customers address dosing and safety questions using virtual patients in an important area of research where our customers are accelerating investment. This information and conclusions generated by the SimSys Biologics Simulator optimize dosing regimens and predict biologic behavior in special populations such as children, the elderly, or patients with comorbidities. The SimCiv simulator is having a growing impact in biologics, following a path similar to small molecules where the use of mechanistic biosimulation is now well established. We believe the go-to-market strategy of licensing the SimCiv biologic simulator outside of the consortium potentially opens up new customers and markets for biosimulation in software and tech-enabled services. Earlier this week, we announced another new software called Secondary Intelligence, which is the only software of its kind that predicts off-target safety issues earlier and faster. Safety issues contribute to 25% of drug program failures, and some of these safety issues arise from secondary pharmacology, which is the activity of a drug that is not related to its desired therapeutic target. With this software, Safety pharmacologists and toxicologists can automate, streamline, and standardize secondary pharmacology analysis and increase confidence in go-no-go decisions in which compounds are decided to move forward, adjust, or discontinue. The introduction of this software plants the seeds of innovation for future longer-term growth, allowing us to tap into new markets. Turning over to services, our technology-enabled services business continues to experience elevated growth due to the expansion of our work with existing customers and the acquisition of new biotechnology customers. Our services offering, powered by our proprietary technologies, is highly differentiated and profitable. The majority of CERTAR's services business incorporates the use of biosimulation software throughout the drug discovery and development continuum. We are incredibly proud of our team of scientists who are well known in the industry as thought leaders and at the forefront of the science and technology of biosimulation. Our solid total company performance supports our view that 2021 remains very well on track relative to our plan. The impressive total company growth in bookings is driven by demand across all customer types, and is reflective of higher levels of activity at our customers as we begin to make our way out of the pandemic. The first quarter is typically when many of our customers are making major budget decisions on their strategic programs, and we're proud that we're often their first choice as their biosimulation partner. Our remarkable achievements this quarter were the result of hard work by our dedicated and talented Sartara colleagues. We continue to add to our expert team worldwide, increasing our employee base by more than 5% in the quarter. Approximately 75% of our new hires this quarter were scientists and subject matter experts, and many of the remaining hires were business developers. Our turnover remains very low. As I mentioned earlier, while we are starting to recover from the pandemic in some parts of the world, Others are continuing a fierce battle with this disease. Our colleagues in India are especially in our thoughts, and we continue to provide support to our global team through these challenging times. In summary, Sotara is widely recognized as one of the largest and leading biosimulation companies in the world, with relationships across more than 1,650 customers at the end of 2020. We are enthusiastic about the continued success of our customers, a good number of whom had drugs approved at the FDA during the first quarter. These customers use Sertara's end-to-end platform in their development programs, covering a wide range of therapeutic areas such as autoimmune diseases, infectious diseases, and oncology. Today, Sertara is involved with thousands of programs annually throughout all stages of discovery and development, across a very diverse and expanding customer base. We are dedicated to innovating and delivering high-quality, science-backed results for our customers, and our opportunities are expanding every day. I will now turn the call over to our CFO, Andrew, to discuss our financial results for the first quarter.