Otonomo Technologies Ltd.

Q1 2022 Earnings Conference Call

5/17/2022

spk01: Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Autonomous First Quarter 2022 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there'll 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 call over to Mary Segal, CEO of MSIR. Please go ahead.
spk00: Thank you, Operator, and thank you all for joining us today. Welcome to Autonomous First Quarter 2022 Financial Results Conference Call. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that our discussions today will include forward-looking statements that are subject to risk and uncertainties relating to future events and the future financial performance of Autonomo. Actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements made today speak only to our expectations as of today and we undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise them. For a discussion of some of the important risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from any forward-looking statements, please see the risk factors section of Autonomous 20F form filed with the SEC on March 31st, 2022. If you have not received a copy of the earnings press release, please download one from the investor relations section of the company's website. Today's call will be accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation. You're welcome to view the presentation on Autonomous Investor Relations website. Following the call, a replay of the webcast will be available on the Autonomous Investor Relations website. Please also note that we will present non-GAAP operating loss on today's call, which is a historical non-GAAP financial measure. Because this financial measure is used in Autonomo's internal analysis of financial and operating performance, Autonomo believes that it provides increased transparency to investors of management's view of our economic performance. Autonomo also believes the presentation of this measure allows investors to more effectively evaluate and compare the performance of Autonomo to that of its peers, although autonomous presentation of this non-GAAP measure may not be comparable to other similarly titled measures of other companies. A reconciliation of this measure to its most directly comparable GAAP financial measure is included in our earnings release. Today we are joined by Ben Volkow, CEO, director, and co-founder of Autonomo, and Bonnie Moave, CFO, and Ron Simon, Executive VP, Strategy and Corporate Development. Ben will start with the current state of the market and an update of the business. He will be followed by Bonnie, who will share an overview of the company's financial results. We will then open the call for a live question and answer session. During the Q&A session, Ben will be joined by Bonnie Moav and Doron Simon. With that, I'd like to pass the call over to Ben Volkow. Ben, please go ahead.
spk05: Thank you, Miri. Hi, everyone, and thank you for joining Autonomous First Quarter 2022 Financial Results Conference Call. Today, we will provide insights into how we see the market evolving from connected cars to mobility services, and now that is shaping our strategy. We will provide the high-level summary of the first quarter and a review of recent business development, including the acquisition of the flow. Our Q1 results reflected strong growth year-over-year of our leading indicators, continued momentum in demand for key mobility service use cases, as well as met new customer levels joining the autonomous ecosystem. I will elaborate on these points later in today's call. At Autonomo, we believe mobility should be more fair, accessible, sustainable, and safe. We believe that harnessing the power of mobility data will be the catalyst to forever change how people move. In the same time, we see new emerging complex cross-segment use cases arising, changing the mobility ecosystem in our lives. We believe that those multi-level mobility-related tectonic changes require a platform that can capture, translate, and unify raw mobility data so our ecosystem can create rich new experiences and services. That's Autonomo. We are building the platform to power the mobility economy. At the heart of Autonomo's platform is connected vehicle data. We take over 150 data points, historical and real-time, and shape them into active, curated data sets that our partners can use to build or enrich mobility services and applications. but we see a wall shaping up where it's connected vehicles data and micro mobility data and mobile phone data and infrastructure data such as charging points, traffic signs, road conditions, et cetera. More than this, we see an ecosystem shaping up where it's data and insight with the ability to use technology to map and highlight patterns, visualize complex interdependencies, and create the needed insights to propel a business forward. What we are describing is an evolution from connected cars to a larger, broader market that encompasses all forms of mobility and mobility-related infrastructure. That view is what is driving our platform development and acquisition strategy. Let me explain. Autonomous smart mobility data platform can take streaming data from tens to hundreds of millions of mobility devices, index it, process it, and create valuable insights around environmental, vehicle, mobility, and infrastructure data. We use our unique IP to normalize, standardize, and anonymize both static and streaming data. We use machine learning to create evaluated, curated data sets to meet and empower a wide range of use cases, from smart city planning to traffic management, fleet management, and connected insurance. We employ additional data science to create insights for clients to support their business critical decisions. All of this is applications and services ready. We are one API and one contract. We believe that Autonomo is highly appreciated in the market. Here are a few examples. One. In the breadth of curated data we provide covering the mobility spectrum, not just connected cars. Two, integration of AI workbench and visualization tools into our platform to enable mobility intelligence analytics. Three, the enabling technologies we develop to accelerate market transformation in specific sectors. Today, Dozens of our ecosystem customers and partners are using Autonomo's smart mobility data platform across a wide range of segments, like insurance, fleet management, urban planning, traffic management, electric vehicle infrastructure, planning and monitoring, and more. For every one of them, Autonomo provides rich data sets and intelligent insights. to enable them to unlock the value of mobility data. We recognize that this is a fast-moving and growing market. That's why we embarked on a rapid acquisition strategy to both build differentiation and also to address the large growth sectors. The Neura acquisition last October gave us the ability to integrate data science tools directly into our platform. No third party partnerships or relying on a third party is needed. Customers in smart city planning, traffic management, infrastructure planning, or micro mobility fleet, to name just a few examples, value our ability to provide data processing, engineering, and data science all in one unified platform. We will continue to enhance the insights mobility intelligence tools to address key ecosystem requirements and fast-moving segments in the mobility sector. During Q1, we announced the next element of our growth strategy. with the acquisition of the Flow, a SaaS provider of connected insurance technology for major carriers globally. We successfully closed the acquisition early in Q2. The Flow is making mobility safer and smarter for everyone with a proven set of products and services used by some of the largest insurance companies in the world. We expect the flow will materially contribute to autonomous success in multiple vectors. First, exiting 2021, the flow grew their client base by more than 50% and has a very strong pipeline coming into 2022. With long cycle time to revenue in the insurance sector, We expect to see strong growth in the flow's revenue through the second half of this year. Further, as the flow of business is recurring revenues by nature, we feel this will be a strong contributor to autonomous success and recurring revenue. Second, on a more strategic basis, we believe that the fusion of connected card data via autonomous and mobile device data via the flow is a game changer in the insurance industry. To date, market feedbacks from partners, clients, and industry analysts has been extremely positive about the combination of the two companies. Clearly, there is an opportunity for both OEMs and insurance companies alike to accelerate the utilization of their data, create new products, improve customer experiences, and accelerate business transformation. On top of that, our belief is that the Flow technology can be deployed and used in new emerging services outside the insurance landscape. Like, for example, fleet management and others. We are already engaged with ecosystem partners outside the insurance sector that confirm the breadth of opportunity with our combined technology. Autonomo is uniquely positioned to walk across both aggregate and VIN-based data use cases in the market and focus on two of the largest revenue segments in mobility, streets and insurance. using our differentiating data and IP. We believe that we have the capital to successfully operate and fund the business as market adoption accelerates over the next few years. We expect to aggressively grow our revenue in 2022, including ARR, and further separate ourselves in the market with the IP and value we deliver So how is our position and strategy translating into traction for the business? Based on Q1 results, we are seeing positive momentum across key attributes. We added 10 new customers in Q1. Quarterly recurring revenues grew 40% compared to the previous quarter. Recurring revenue backlog more than doubled compared to the previous quarter. Booking of recurring revenues nearly doubled compared to the previous quarter. Backlog increased 61% compared to the previous quarter and 207% year-over-year. We signed one of the top five global OEMs bringing the total number of OEM contracts to 23. Those combined contracts represent over 50 million addressable connected vehicles. Average sales cycle time decreased 30% compared to the previous quarter and decreased over 20% year over year. And of course, we acquired the flow a leader in connected insurance technology. Finally, we continue to see demand for our core market of connected car use cases. For example, Waycare, a subsidiary of Recall Systems, uses autonomous connected vehicle data to help government agencies with crash prediction, congestion detection, as well as incident management and identification. WayCare collects data from transportation agencies' existing infrastructure, which is then synthesized with additional data from mobile apps, connected vehicles, weather analysis, and events management systems. For all of these use cases, Waker needs large amounts of connected vehicle data to increase the efficiency of their application. This is where Autonomo and its smart mobility data platform bring value. Or Total Traffic and Weather Network, the leader provider of traffic, transit, and weather transformation in the United States. TTWN reaches more than 200 million monthly radio and TV listeners across more than 200 markets. They provide traffic alerts as well as average speed information for road segments around the U.S. TTWN is using autonomous data to do ground truth average speed studies for road segments around the U.S. Prior to meeting with Autonomo, TTWN was paying drivers to help calculate average speed on road segments. Autonomo provides average speed data for specific time frames at the customer request, making it faster and easier for TTWN to perform their studies, as well as add new road segments in the future at the fraction of the time and cost. Finally, a recent competitive win against a competitor with Xuba, a European analytics company. Xuba was using physical roadway sensors to collect data around speeding and accident-prone road segments. Now Xuba is partnering with Autonomo to use connected car data to revolutionize the way European road authorities are able to improve the safety and efficiency of road operations. To summarize, we are increasing our deal volume, decreasing sales cycle time, winning new customers in our focused use cases, building a strong recurring revenue base for our company, and growing our core business organically. We believe that all of these factors show positive momentum. Looking ahead, I'm confident that the momentum in bookings, recurring revenues, and new customers will continue. Furthermore, we expect significant revenue contributions from the flow will be reflected in autonomous financial results from April 14th. For more details on our Q1 financials, I'll hand it over to Bonnie Moab, Autonomous CFO.
spk03: Thank you, Ben. Hi, everyone. Revenues for the first quarter were $1.03 million compared to $215,000 in the first quarter of 2021. Growth was driven by our new mobility intelligence activities, new customers, and new OEM agreements. We have one use case of mobility intelligence related to COVID-19. This use case contributed to our year-over-year growth in revenues and went down in our quarter-over-quarter revenues. We do not rely on this use case in our business moving forward due to the unpredictable nature of this revenue. Before I move further into the numbers, I want to remind you that our non-GAAP items consist of stock-based compensation expenses and amortization of acquired intangible assets. Our GAAP financial results, along with reconciliation between GAAP and non-GAAP results, can be found in our earnings release. I will now turn to the detailed financial results for the quarter. Our GAAP operating loss was 15.1 million compared to 4.3 million in the first quarter of 2021. The increasing gap operating loss was mainly driven from acquisition and the significant increase in our headcount year over year and expenses associated with the cost of becoming a public listed company. In the first quarter, our non-GAAP operating loss was $12.5 billion compared to $3.8 million in the first quarter of 2021, a 231% increase, which were driven by the same reason mentioned before. Our cloud infrastructure mainly consists of costs related to the third-party cloud services, which increased by 216%, from 367,000 in Q1 2021 to 1.2 million in Q1 2022 due to our increase in the amount of data the company ingests, process, and stores, and the amount of data used by our data consumer, which grew year over year by more than 147%. Our cost of revenues mainly consists of purchasing of data costs which represents the cost we pay to our data providers, including the OEMs, for their data used in our products, and remains in the same level year over year. Our research and development expenses, together with our sales and marketing expenses, continue to increase by 129% and 284%, respectively, year over year, mainly due to the accelerated workforce growth of more than 50 employees in both departments year-over-year, including the acquisition of MIURA. General and administrative expenses for the first quarter of 2022 were $5 million compared to $0.2 million in the same period a year ago, representing an increase of over 536%. As mentioned earlier, this is mostly attributed to the expenses associated with our registration to the SEC and the cost of becoming a public company, in addition to the headcount and the acquisition. Turning to the balance sheet, we ended the quarter with $196.8 million in cash, cash-exhibit and restricted cash. a decrease of 11.3 million from year end 2021. This was primarily driven by operating cash activities in our ongoing business. I would like to reiterate the 2022 guidance we provided on March 31st. For the fall year 2022, revenues is expected to be in a range of 13, million to 13.5 million with most of the revenues back end weighted. Revenues from the flow will be reflected in autonomous financial results starting from April 14. Thank you very much. I will hand it back to Ben.
spk05: In closing, Autonomo is uniquely positioned with a solid portfolio of technology assets and IP, a committed and strong team, and with a first mover advantage. We remain positive about our outlook for the year ahead and even behind it. The large-scale adoption of mobility data is in its infancy. and Autonomo is perfectly positioned for this promising future. With focus, execution and clear strategy, my colleagues and I on the management team are committed to leading this market and creating value for our customers, partners, investors and employees. Before we move into the Q&A session, I'd like to update that we will be hosting a virtual solutions showcase for investors on June 22, and we will share more details about the event over the coming weeks. Operator, we are now ready for the Q&A session.
spk01: Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. To withdraw your question, press the pound hash key once again Start on one if you would like to ask a question. Your first question today comes from the line of Josh Nichols from B. Reilly. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
spk07: Yeah, thank you, and good to see the progress being made in terms of the recurring revenue and customer base growth. I was going to ask, like, since the flow acquisition closed early in the second quarter, Could you provide a little bit more detail on how that integration is going? Is there much to be done there, or is it going to be run as a separate entity initially, and what's the expectations on that front?
spk05: Doron, are you with us? Do you want to try to take it?
spk04: Yes, I would be glad to take that. And, Josh, the operating mode for the flow is primarily, Running is a separate entity. We are working on joint use cases where some data is shared and we would be bringing up a common platform in the long term. But initially, you should think about it as a separate entity with some joint functions.
spk07: Thanks, Agus. And just to follow up, talking about reaffirming the guidance and then, you know, it being second-actuated. Do you think near-term, at least over the next, let's call it 12 months or so, that fleet and insurance are going to be the primary revenue drivers, or are there other areas as well that you think are going to be near-term revenue contributors to the company's go-to-market business model?
spk05: I will take it. So, Josh, you're asking a very good question. Definitely, we believe that those two in the short-term and near-term will be the main... First of all, those are the biggest potential markets out there based on most analysts, like McKinsey. With the acquisition of the flow, we share that it's a company that has done about $7 million last year and has a very strong pipeline. So definitely, we are very excited about what we see in insurance. And we are also, we mentioned it, we are taking some of the technology outside of the insurance, outside of insurance vendors. We see OEMs are interested in that to go towards their own insurance offering. And some other industries or segments in mobility that really find some of the insurance-related capabilities like driver scoring of high interest. So insurance is definitely up in the list. Threads is the same. We did a strong solution and formed also some exciting partnerships in the segment. For example, we shared the partnership with Salesforce. So the pipeline is growing. Those opportunities are all recurring by nature. And they are growing. We always want more and faster and better, but they are growing very nicely quarter over quarter. We see some other segments rising and other use cases, but right now the two segments that we see running in front of the PEC is insurance and fleets, and we're excited because we bring a lot of value there behind just providing data with the technology that we either built in-house or got through the flow. Bonnie, Doron, anything you want to add on top of that?
spk04: I think that was perfect.
spk07: Last question for me, then I'll hop back in the queue. Any comment about there's been a lot of changes, macro changes going on recently, whether it's the ongoing supply chain tensions, the war in Ukraine, rapidly rising interest rates. How's that impacting the company's industry and markets, and how should investors be thinking about that?
spk05: So definitely we are not immune to whatever is happening on the planet. In the end, we also live here. Interest rates, what is happening in the stock markets, what is happening in crane, the lack of vehicles, definitely all of those are not healthy. Having said that, we don't see material impact to our business. We are in a fast-growing market. a market that is a blue ocean, and all those macro events are not helping, but definitely we don't see them impacting or changing our annual focus and growth plans.
spk07: Thanks. That's all for me. Thank you.
spk01: Thank you. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. Your next question comes from the line of Chad Tiverbaugh from Needham and Company. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
spk06: Hey, guys. It's Chad on for Ryan Kuntz. I just wanted to touch on the decrease in average sales cycle time, both sequentially and year over year. Can you sort of talk about the drivers of that and how you see that evolving over the coming year?
spk05: Yes, definitely. This is Ben, and I'll take it. I think that the decrease, first of all, is a blessing and help us to sign and get the revenues many times in the same quarter. I think it's a result of a number of things. First of all, we are becoming better. We are learning to walk better, faster. I think our legal framework is tighter. and our ability to enter customer requests, provide them samples, and move in the process is improving all the time with maturity. I think it's also an indication to growing maturity in the market. Customers know what they want. Customers have depressing business timelines. It's not innovation projects anymore like two or three years ago. It's needed for the business, so the other side also is keen to move forward as fast as possible. So I think it's a combination of those two mainly. I think we'll continue to see a decrease. I cannot promise another 30% quarter on quarter, but definitely we are improving all the time, and we hope to deliver another decrease there. Bonnie, Doron, anything you want to add? I guess that's enough. I hope it answers the question.
spk06: Yeah, got it. That's helpful. And then, you know, just an update on where you guys stand from a hiring standpoint and, you know, what your outlook is for the rest of the year in terms of hiring.
spk03: Hi, this is Bonnie. Happy to take your question. Obviously, you've seen a significant increase when – When we did the DISAG, starting August 2021 until now, we more than doubled our headcount. Now, in Q2, with the additional 100 employees coming from our new acquisition, we will end up with approximately 240 employees, which is very significant for us. In terms of the rest of the year, we are looking to recruit. You know, we have our roadmap. We are looking to recruit to support the roadmap, to support our business plan. But you won't see a massive recruitment like we have in the past nine months since this packing. And our recruitment will be in areas where we think we need to – We want to scale up fast. This goes both to Autonomo and the flow, but I can tell you that you won't see doubling our headcount in the near future.
spk06: Got it. That's all for me. Thank you.
spk01: Thank you, Doug. Thank you. With that, I will now hand the call back to Ben Falco, Autonomo CEO, for closing remarks.
spk05: Thank you all for joining us today, and I hope to see you here next quarter. Thank you.
spk01: Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.
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