Forge Global Holdings, Inc.

Good afternoon. My name is Angela, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I'd like to welcome everyone to the Forge second quarter 2024 financial results conference call. On today's Forge Global's call will be Kelly Rodriguez, CEO, Mark Lee, TFO, Lindsay Riedel, Executive Vice President of Corporate Marketing and Communication, and Dominic Paschal, SDP of Finance and Investor Relations. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. And now, I will now turn the call over to Lindsay Riedel. Ms. Riedel, you may begin your conference.

Thank you, Operator, and thank you all for joining us today for FORGE's second quarter 2024 earnings call. Joining me today are FORGE CEO Kelly Rodriguez, and Forge CFO Mark Lee. They will share prepared remarks regarding the quarter's results and then take your questions at the end. Just after market closed today, we issued a press release announcing Forge's second quarter 2024 financial results. A discussion of our results today complements the press release, which is available on the investor relations page on our website. This conference call is being webcast live and will be available as a replay for 30 days, beginning about one hour after the conclusion of this call. There's also an investor presentation on our IR page. During this conference call, we may make forward-looking statements based on current expectations, forecasts, and projections as of today's date. Any forward-looking statements that we make are subject to various risks and uncertainties, and there are important factors that could cause actual outcomes to defer materially from those included in the statements. We discuss these factors in our SEC filings, including our quarterly report on Forum 10Q, which can soon be found on the IR page of our website and the SEC filings website. As a reminder, we are not required to update our forward-looking statements. In our presentation today, unless otherwise noted, we will be discussing adjusted financial measures, which are non-GAAP measures that we believe are meaningful when evaluating the company's performance. For detailed disclosures on these measures and the gap reconciliations, you should refer to the financial data contained within our press release, which is also posted to the IR page of our website. Additionally, we have posted our second quarter supplemental information on the same page. Today's discussion will focus on second quarter 2024 results. As always, we encourage you to evaluate both annual and quarterly results for a full picture of FORJA's performance. which can be affected by unexpected events that are outside of our control. With that, I'll turn it over to Kelly.

Thanks all for joining today. We're excited to share our Q2 results with you amidst a continued market recovery and consistent and progressive growth at Forge. We're pleased to announce that in Q2, we recorded our fifth consecutive quarter of revenue growth. Revenue grew 15% over last quarter, and rose 32% compared to the year-ago quarter. This performance was attributable to continued upward momentum in our trading business as buyers return to the private market and as valuations continue to trend upward. Perhaps the most telling measure of the market's recovery, marketplace revenue, is up 103% compared to the year-ago quarter. Forge and the private market have come a long way For the past two years, we've continued to invest heavily in our next generation technology platform to enhance our operational efficiency and the efficiency of this market. In that time, even as the market flirted with a near standstill, we introduced new products and new innovations, including Forge Pro and our first two private market indices to position ourselves for the market's reawakening. We're seeing that as IPO volumes start to rise and as VC fundraising picks up steam. While we're excited about our progress, as well as our improvements in the top line revenue over the past five quarters, we are never satisfied. Because of the investments made over the last couple of years, we're in a position now to advance planned cost savings and deliver them to our bottom line. To that end, we announced today a decisive action to further reduce our expenses and accelerate our timeline to profitability. Our action today results in a reduction in headcount costs by roughly 11%. This action, combined with other expense reductions, will significantly improve our margins and produce savings of an estimated $11.3 million on an annualized basis. I want to be clear. Any decision that affects our employees and their families is never easy. I have incredible appreciation for the valuable contributions all our Forge team members have made to this organization. We have intensely talented people here, and losing any of our team members is difficult. However, this prudent and necessary step will strengthen our financial posture, and it is consistent with the next generation platform strategy we laid out two years ago to deliver margin and efficiency improvements. The action today should not be viewed in isolation. We will continue to reap the benefits of incremental gains in productivity and efficiency as we roll out more and more of our next generation platform. the market's continued momentum and revenue re-acceleration puts Forge in a strong position and accelerates our timeline to profitability. Given the path, given the continued growth in the recovery of our markets business and the cost actions we announced today, our models indicate Forge should achieve break-even adjusted EBITDA in 2026. Mark will come back to this shortly. We believe that Forge and the private markets are at an inflection point. The considerable investments we've made in our brand and in our technology, the prescient acquisition of our custody business, and the progress we've made in product innovation throughout the market's downturn have prepared us for this moment. With that, I'll turn it over to Mark to dive deeper on the financials.