Near Intelligence, Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Near Intelligence fourth quarter and full year 2022 earnings call. At this time, all participants are on 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 1-1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Gwen Lauber, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning and welcome to NEAR Intelligence's fourth quarter and full year 2022 earnings call. This is Gwen Lauber, Vice President of Investor Relations for NEAR. With me on today's call are Neil Mathews, NEAR's Chief Executive Officer and Rahul Agarwal, Chief Financial Officer. Our earnings press release was issued earlier this morning and is posted on our website. The primary purpose for today's call is to provide you with information regarding our fourth quarter and full year 2022 performance and offer an outlook for the first quarter and full year ending December 31st, 2023. The comments made on this call may include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are based on management's current views and expectations as of today and should not be relied upon as representing our views as of any subsequent date. We disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statements or outlook. For more information about the risks and uncertainties involving these forward-looking statements and factors that could cause actual results to vary materially from those projected or implied by forward-looking statements, please see our Risk Factors in our Registration Statement on Form S-4 and accompanying prospectuses as well as our other reports filed with the SEC. I encourage you to visit our investor relations website at investors.near.com to access our full year 2022 press release, periodic SEC reports, and the webcast replay of today's call. Finally, unless otherwise stated, all financial comparisons on this call will be made to our fiscal year 2021 results on a historical non-proforma basis. And with that, let me turn the call over to Anil. Anil?

Thank you, Gwen. Thank you, everyone, for joining us on our first earnings call as a publicly traded company. First, I'll start with our financial highlights. Fourth quarter revenue was 15.3 million. Revenue for the fiscal year 2022 was $59.7 million. Net revenue retention for the year was 120%, which is in line with our steady state NIR expectation. Now, as many of you know, we completed our business combination on March 23rd and began trading on NASDAQ on March 24th under the ticker NIR. Clearly, this has been an exciting few days for us, I'd like to thank our customers, partners, advisors for the support over the last few years, and the belief in what we have built at Near and the opportunity ahead of us. Finally, I'd like to send a special thank you to our employees around the globe as they have worked tirelessly to get us to this point. For me, the journey started in 2012 when our co-founder, Shobhi Shukla, and I began building NEAR from our Singapore office. It's incredible to me to think how far we have come in terms of our solution, our customer base, our employees, and our geographic reach in that amount of time. Today, I can't even begin to express how proud I am on all fronts. NEAR is a multinational organization with offices and customers around the globe. While NIR's proprietary solutions are suitable for customers of all sizes and industries, they're focused primarily on large customers in retail, real estate, restaurants, and tourism. We estimate the industry TAM to be around 23 billion, which is largely under-penetrated. NIR uses patented algorithms to stitch and enrich data that help enterprise customers derive intelligence on their customers from their databases. Over the last few years, Nier has experienced rapid growth. Looking ahead, we believe we can continue to achieve revenue growth of around 30 to 35% and capitalize on our margin expansion opportunities. With the acquisitions of a company in France and a company in the US, Nier became a truly global company as we integrated these companies into Nier and prepared to enter the public markets we recognized that 2022 was our opportunity to reorganize the company with a go-to-market strategy that would allow us to scale more quickly. We realigned and bolstered our sales organization with sales reps with enterprise software experience who understand what it takes to win enterprise deals. These sales reps hit the ground running. In a few short months, they have closed multiple deals, and have added meaningfully to a pipeline, which in the fourth quarter was significantly larger than it was in the same quarter last year. A new go-to-market strategy is already starting to have profound impact on results and opportunity ahead. In North America, in 2022, our average deal size increased 25% over 2021. And globally, our average deal size is four times what it was last year. In terms of a pipeline, by targeting larger companies, we have seen our annual revenue potential at our target accounts more than double in size year over year. This change in our sales focus recently led to a six-figure deal with a major North American beverage bottling company. While not the norm, we are able to close this deal in less than 60 days. The new customer will use NEAR to get a better understanding of their customer's business by utilizing the data insights that we will provide to better predict the performance of their store locations. Recently, Nier's largest client in France renewed their commitment to us by signing an eight-figure deal, up approximately 100% over previous year. This multi-brand European retail chain uses Nier to drive football traffic in stores and measure the effectiveness around those. Near Solutions allows them to get a better understanding of the right catchment area at a store level and deliver appropriate messaging to their prospects and customers. We provide them with complete end-to-end solution that targets performance measurement. In addition to our direct sales effort, we work with channel partners. As an example, in collaboration with the channel partner, we just won a four-year contract with the state of Hawaii Tourism. This contract is in continuation of a three-year relationship with one of the world's most desired destinations. Hawaii leverages NEAR to understand its tourist visitation patterns and to know which are the top points of interest so they have a better understanding of its tourism impact throughout the islands. Now I'd like to talk a little bit about our product. NEAR analyzes data from approximately an estimated 1.6 billion unique user IDs across 70 million places in more than 44 countries. We use proprietary data sources from both the digital and the physical worlds and stitch this real-world data together, creating a truly unique value proposition. Our ability to harness this vast amount of data has allowed us to develop a deep understanding of consumer behavior on a sustainable, persistent basis. Data is what feeds our winning flywheel. As more customers use our platform, the better the data becomes and the better the algorithms become. It's based on a massive feedback loop. Much of this proprietary data is exclusive to us. This unique data is then stitched and enriched with our first party and third party data sources. This process allows us to provide better business outcomes and provide full stack offerings to our customers, which then further allows us to acquire new customers. The flywheel means that the more customers we get, the better our algorithms become. And that's our winning flywheel. And that is why we believe we are able to do things unlike anyone else. Our core value proposition is in taking our rich data sets and then building models. This is where the real value is derived. We aim to reduce the cost of exploration of our customers to infer insights like dwell time at a location and the number of footfalls that fell in a place. Because data is never complete, the whole estimation lifecycle on these properties is one of the core offerings in our product. In a moment, I'll turn the call over to our CFO, Rahul Agrawal, but before I do, I want to address one more point. For most of our prospects, we're not trying to replace an existing system. In many cases, this is the first time the customer is considering using technology to get richer understanding of customer behavior. Many companies that do not realize that with our operational intelligence product, for example, they were able to replace archaic Methods like physically counting people with clickers with a solution that allows them to access real-time data at scale with high accuracy. Near is a trusted, independent provider of aggregated, anonymized data on people and places, offering unique market intelligence and operation intelligence solutions to an underpenetrated market. We believe our relationship with our customers are strong and our products are sticky. coupled with our land and expand go-to-market strategy, I believe NEAR has a great opportunity ahead of us. Now, I'll turn over the call to my colleague, Rahul Agrawal.