Rubicon Technologies, Inc.

Good afternoon, and welcome to Rubicon Technology's second quarter 2023 earnings call. My name is Lisa, and I'll be your operator for today's call. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded, and at this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, it is star one again.

It is now my pleasure to introduce Chris Booner, Executive Vice President of Finance. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Rubicon's second quarter 2023 earnings call.

A few quick reminders before we begin. This call is being webcast and can be accessed on the Investors section of our website, which can be found at investors.rubicon.com. Today, we will present Rubicon's financial results for the second quarter of 2023. which will be followed by a question and answer session. During the call, management will be making forward-looking statements that are subject to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are not guarantees of future performance, and our actual results may differ materially due to known and unknown risks and uncertainties, as discussed in greater detail in our earnings release and our SEC filings. We assume no obligation to update forward-looking statements except as required by law. Additionally, we will refer to non-GAAP financial measures during our call today, including adjusted gross profit and adjusted EBITDA. We provide these non-GAAP results for informational purposes, and they should not be considered in isolation from the most directly comparable GAAP measures. A discussion of why we believe these non-GAAP measures are useful to investors, certain limitations of using these measures, and reconciliation to the most directly comparable GAAP measure can be found in our earnings release and our filings with the SEC. Joining me on the call today are Phil Radone, Rubicon's Chief Executive Officer, and Kevin Schuber, President and Chief Financial Officer. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Phil.

Thank you, Chris, and thank you to everyone for joining us today. To begin today's call, I am very proud to say that since our last call, we have achieved a second consecutive quarter of record adjusted gross profit of approximately $18 million, which represents an impressive 41% increase over the second quarter of 2022. Further, we have completed all the highest priority tasks from our Bridge to Profitability plan and continue to make significant progress against the goals we announced at the end of 2022. Our focus since the fourth quarter of last year has been to improve our liquidity position and accelerate our progress to profitability through key initiatives designed to improve margins, reduce operating costs, and increase the company's financial strength and flexibility. The Rubicon team continues to successfully execute our plan and we are just beginning to see the impact of these efforts on the financials, which is reflected in the double digit margins in certain segments of the business. We are confident this impact will gain significant momentum in the third quarter and result in positive adjusted EBITDA for the fourth quarter. We will provide more details of our progress later in the call, but for those of you who are new to the Rubicon story, I will take a few minutes to describe our company and the work we do with our customers and partners. Rubicon was founded in 2008 and today is the leading global provider of cloud-based waste and recycling solutions. We serve three key constituents, waste generators, haulers, and processors. For our waste generator customers, including businesses and local governments, Rubicon's software platform is a single solution for waste and recycling service management across all their locations, eliminating the need to coordinate with multiple vendors for waste pickups. Our products also provide data, analytics, and reporting that enable customers to optimize their pickup schedule and monitor and report on their ESG performance. Streamlined operations, consolidated billing, optimized pickup frequencies, and unified reporting ultimately drive reduction in overall costs. Further, Rubicon also provides a suite of transformative artificial intelligence and computer vision technology products, which customers can use to assess the volumes and types of materials in their waste streams. Our technology identifies materials that can be diverted from the waste stream for recycling, allowing customers to sell them as commodities, which helps to offset expenses or even generate net profit. For waste haulers, including both city and private fleets, Rubicon's platform provides easy to use fleet management and route optimization services, access to new business opportunities through our network of waste generator customers, and access to a buying consortium where fleets can purchase products and services such as fuel, parts, tires, and insurance at a discount. These benefits help fleet customers save time and money, and for our city and municipal fleets, have resulted in significant taxpayer savings. In fact, our solution for municipal fleets, Rubicon Smart City, is one of our fastest growing products. Rubicon Smart City helps cities run faster, smarter, and more efficient waste recycling and heavy duty municipal fleet operations. Our software not only helps drivers become more time efficient with their routes, but it also captures and sends information back to department managers which can improve response times for service issues like blocked bins, missed pickups, recycling contamination, and illegal dumping. All of this can lead to increased citizen satisfaction, lower carbon operations, improved driver safety and morale, and substantial cost savings for municipal operators. Our waste processor partners rely on our technology and relationships with waste generator customers to receive high quality and consistent volumes of valuable commodities. Rubicon's proprietary technology enables our customers to increase diversion rates and send more and higher quality materials to recycling processors. We also design programs for our customers that incorporate best practices for material handling and logistics that allow them to command premium commodity rates. Today, Rubicon has achieved significant scale, surpassing 13 million unique service locations and 8,000 haulers and recycling partners, with the ability to manage more than 160 types of waste streams. As our network continues to grow, our customers benefit from better pricing, a broader service offering, increased diversion capabilities, and improved performance. In the past quarter, we've made great strides and achieved significant objectives as we positioned the company for profitability. In June, we announced that we had secured a comprehensive financial package, which was the final of the three strategic financing objectives we discussed on our earlier calls. The financing package, which includes a $75 million term loan and a new revolving credit line of up to $90 million, improves liquidity and solidifies the path forward to positive adjusted EBITDA by the end of the year. With a stronger balance sheet in place, we are now fully focused on growth and optimizing our operations for the future. In addition, we continue to make significant progress on our Bridge to Profitability plan, which is focused on improving margins, reducing operating costs, and increasing the company's financial strength and flexibility. Since the end of the third quarter of 2022, we have expanded our adjusted gross profit margin by 260 basis points to 10.3% as of the end of the second quarter of 2023. This was achieved through growth in our higher margin SaaS business, targeting higher margin businesses lines for growth within our Rubicon Connect business, high grading the existing customer portfolio, and eliminating less profitable accounts. We have also reduced expenses by an estimated $45 million on an annualized basis as of July 2023. through actions designed to help optimize supplier costs and general and administrative expenses, and previously announced workforce reductions. We've been able to fine-tune our operations without sacrificing growth within the core business. During the second quarter alone, we announced several big commercial wins. In June, we welcomed Denver, Colorado to the Rubicon Smart City family. Our technology is now powering the city and county of Denver's entire solid waste and recycling fleet of more than 150 vehicles, digitizing operations and enabling greater efficiency. We are also proud to announce that Rubicon has successfully deployed our Smart City technology for municipal fleets in more than 100 cities, including eight of the top 20 US cities by population. This incredible milestone was achieved in just six years, with the city adoption doubling year over year over the last few years. We expect similar momentum to continue for this product line. We had an opportunity to meet with Smart City partners and prospects at our Rubicon Smart City Next Summit in New York in June. The event featured keynotes, panels, and workshops on the innovative ideas shaping the future of waste management, municipal operations, and fleet technology. For me, the most rewarding aspect of this event was receiving the positive feedback from our customers and hearing them share best practices with their peers, as well as with prospective customers, many of whom attended due to their interest in the features and capabilities of the Rubicon Smart City product. We continue to grow with our customers by offering new features and functionality within the platform, During the next summit, we announced the launch of an integrated billing feature to digitize interaction between operations and billing functions, automatically creating charges from exceptions, easily updating customers' status based on billables, and further streamlining fleet operations. In addition to our wins in Rubicon Smart City, our Rubicon Connect product has added several new customers as well as extensions with current customers. Most recently, we welcomed True Food Kitchen and Artisan Floors to our growing family of customers. These companies, like our other valued commercial customers, will experience the full benefits of our digital platform for scalable waste and recycling services. We are excited to support their efforts in reducing environmental impact while providing exceptional value and service to their own customers. We are also delighted to announce some notable customer renewals. Recently, Gap Incorporated renewed their contract with Rubicon for a further five years. Our market-leading Rubicon Connect platform has been deployed at more than 2,000 Gap retail stores across the United States and Canada, including at all of Gap's lifestyle brands, Old Navy, Gap, Banana Republic, and Athleta, and Gap Outlet and Banana Republic factory locations. Additionally, Goodyear Tires renewed their contract with Rubicon for a further two years. Our platform is deployed at more than 800 Goodyear retail and commercial locations across the United States. I will now turn the call over to Kevin to provide a review of the second quarter financials.

Thanks, Phil. I will now take a few minutes to review our second quarter results. Rubicon generated approximately $175 million of revenue in the second quarter. This was an increase of $10 million, or 6%, compared to the second quarter of 2022. Adjusted gross profit in the second quarter was approximately $18 million, an increase of $5 million, or 41%, compared to the second quarter of 2022. And we are very proud to say that Q2 2023 was our second consecutive quarter of record adjusted gross profit. Adjusted EBITDA for the second quarter was negative $9.7 million, which is an improvement of $9.2 million and an approximately 50% improvement versus the $19 million loss for the second quarter of 2022. It is worth noting that the adjusted EBITDA figure still includes an additional $1 million of non-recurring items which have not been adjusted for. These items relate to expenses mostly resulting from our recent financing transactions. As of the end of the second quarter, the company had $27 million of cash and undrawn availability under our credit facility. We are proud of the steady improvements that are making a material impact on our results. Looking forward to the remaining two quarters of 2023, we expect to be in line with the guidance we gave on our previous calls and remain confident in our ability to generate positive adjusted EBITDA for the fourth quarter of this year, as well as for the full year 2024. Phil will now give an update on the key strategies we're implementing to achieve these projections.

Thank you, Kevin. We believe Rubicon's industry-leading service experience for waste generators, fleets, and processors is strategically well positioned as the definitive platform to enable the elimination of waste in years to come. As I mentioned earlier, we have completed all the highest priority tasks within our Bridge to Profitability plan, which lays the foundation for the company to achieve profitability and positions us for profitable growth moving forward. For example, in the near term, we plan to achieve profitable growth through customer wallet share expansion, new product offerings, and improved operational efficiency. We currently estimate that we have about 30% of our customers' wallet share. We see this as a considerable opportunity to increase sales within our current customer base, whether that is through additional service locations, material streams, or products. In addition to capturing additional wallet share, we are able to focus on selling higher margin products and will improve the overall margin profile. For prospective customers, we will offer flexible and tailored experiences. In the past, our Rubicon Connect products were offered only as a package, with service, procurement, solutions consulting, and commodities handling bundled together. But we will now offer those products a la carte. For some smaller prospects, the expense and vast functionality of the package as a whole could be a barrier to winning their business. Now we can earn their business through custom product selection and build these relationships over time. We also plan to improve efficiency across the board with the strategic use of artificial intelligence-based systems in our operations. As mentioned on the last call, we are deploying a chat GPT-like large language model to automatically process inbound work order requests, thereby reducing the need for employees to do repetitive data entry and freeing up their time to provide value-added services. Using similar technology, we are digitizing, processing, and matching hauler invoices against customer work orders to automatically audit invoices and reduce processing costs. We will also have new products to offer our customers. As a software company, we are able to be flexible and solve our customers' problems as they arise. As mentioned earlier, our most recent product enhancement is a billing feature integrated into our fleet management solution, Rubicon Pro. This new feature unifies and simplifies interactions between the operational side of fleet management and the back office billing functions to ensure that the bills generated are accurate and reflective of all the services provided to customers. Another example is our Snowplow fleet management software. which was born out of Kansas City, Missouri's request to implement the same efficiency gained in their waste program into their snow program. We will shortly be rolling out the newest version of that software with more features to improve our customers' experience. Our progress to date strengthens our confidence in achieving positive adjusted EBITDA in Q4, expanding our adjusted gross profit margins to the low double-digit range, and attaining operating cash flow positivity by the end of the year. We've invested in scaling our business by building a network of over 8,000 haulers, serving 13 million unique service locations, and analyzing 1 million images daily for insights on the waste streams and infrastructure. With our broad service portfolio, growth opportunities, and improved profitability and product leadership, we will continue to expand the network we serve and expand the range of services we offer. Thank you for continuing this journey with us. We look forward to updating you on our progress in the coming quarters. With that, I will turn the call over to the operator, who can open the line for questions.

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session.

As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad.

We'll take our first question from Maria Ripps with Canaccord.

Great. Good afternoon, and thank you for taking my questions. First, could you maybe provide us with an update on your efforts to onboard new loggers? Have you seen brands and holders sort of exhibit greater adoption of your solutions, given their main value proposition is efficiency gains? And how would you characterize how sales cycle length has been trending here more recently?

Thank you for the question. So in terms of onboarding new haulers, I think it's important to note that we have over 8,000 haulers and processors on our platform today. And effectively, we curate that list to make sure that we have the best available haulers in the exact locations that we actually need them. So our efforts in terms of we're always constantly kind of looking for new haulers that can provide unique and specific services, whether that be new material types that we want to be able to handle for our customers. But in terms of the software side, I think is where the orientation to our question is in terms of how are we bringing kind of haulers and cities onto our Smart City and or Rubicon Pro products. Those sales cycles, typically there's multiple ways we sell. You know, first and foremost, we'll typically kind of go through our traditional kind of RFPs, which have a longer cycle. But we also kind of sell via kind of partnership networks. So we have, you know, hardware providers that we actually sell through, you know, that actually those are very kind of valuable partnership, you know, partnerships that we have. So if a fleet already has a hardware provider that they're working with, they can get our solution kind of on top of that. So those kind of are more expedited sales. And then we also have buying consortiums that we're actually part of. HGAC buys is an example of that. And so we're effectively kind of pre-vetted for certain categories. So I'd say, you know, our ability to kind of onboard kind of customers or onboard fleets onto our platform has been very robust. And I think, you know, we noted in the last quarter, you know, we've surpassed our 100th city on the platform itself.

Great. That's very helpful. And maybe just to follow up on your SaaS segment, could you maybe refresh us on when we might see you sort of break the business out? And how are you thinking about potential long-term mix of SaaS versus marketplace revenue?

Yeah, I think, you know, our position has always been, you know, maybe towards the end of the year when we have significant kind of volume on the platform that we'd start kind of breaking it out. That's not a guarantee, but I think, you know, probably in that timeframe it would make sense. But yeah, we'll see as things kind of go on.

And the mix of revenue?

Mix of revenue, I think you would see it kind of in the – if we break it out, you'd see it there as well.

Got it. That's very helpful. Thank you so much. We'll take our next question from Brett Noblock with Cantor Fitzgerald.

Hi, guys. Congrats on the quarter. So maybe if we can dive into your relationship with Palantir, I know there's news in the quarter about them kind of like increasing their ownership. Can you just remind us of what that relationship is, what product that you guys are building, when we should expect that to be deployed and maybe the potential revenue opportunity from that product that you guys see?

Sure. I appreciate the question, Brent. So, as you know, Palantir was an investor during our pipe process during the SPAC, and they have since invested further in the company, which we're very thankful for as well. And the reason being, we have a great relationship with them. They are helping us certainly build out many of the AI functionality that we have that helps us with the optimizations, and whether that be optimizations on pickup frequency optimizations and material characteristic type of optimizations. That's where kind of some of the artificial intelligence kind of comes in on the image recognition side as well. And then lastly, you know, we're really looking for them, you know, and it's probably more back to the house. You don't necessarily kind of see it as a kind of name product out in the market, but, you know, behind the scenes, you know, what we're doing in terms of kind of recognizing kind of, you know, Invoice is much faster and much quicker on our side. There's a lot of artificial intelligence that goes on that when you're reading an invoice automatically, extracting the pertinent data points along the way. That really helps us speed the processing of those invoices, helps us bill faster to our customers. It actually helps us on a working capital perspective and certainly actually helps us reduce the overall operational expense of the company. sometimes you don't necessarily see it as a kind of a, you know, forefront kind of product out in the marketplace. But, you know, suffice it to say they've been instrumental in actually helping us on our optimization front.

Perfect. Understood. And then the kind of performance on net revenue margin in the quarter was very good. I know you guys were kind of expecting to exit the year above 10% and you guys did it this quarter. Can you maybe break out, you know, what are the moving pieces in there that you know, allowed to kind of reach it maybe a couple quarters earlier, and how we should be thinking about, you know, additional expansion for the rest of the year?

I'm sorry about that.

Yeah, no, I mean, really, it was really just the focus of the team, right, and optimizing expenses as we went through and really driving sort of that upgrading of our portfolio that we've been looking at and really mindful of looking at every piece of our portfolio, you know, and driving sort of price action where we can and really thinking about our portfolio mindfully as we really had to achieve tremendous scale. So now it was a really the opportunity to go through and mine that and really think about it smartly and how we can optimize it. And, you know, we just found, you know, a number of opportunities to really sort of drive that growth. I would say, I think we're going to probably continue to see, you know, margin expand further, but, you know, at a slower rate, I think, you know, you're not going to see substantial jumps from here, but sort of small incremental increases as you move forward, as you were able to drive, you know, significant expansion through this most recent

Got it.

And then I guess if I could just ask one more on the recyclable commodity segment. You know, it continues to kind of be weak, I guess. Recyclable commodity prices bottomed. Any expectations for that segment as we kind of think about the rest of the year and into next year?

Hey, Brett.

Yeah, we did see about an $11 million decrease in our revenues year over year related to the declines in commodity pricing for the quarter. We have seen that modestly rebound starting off of this quarter, but we would expect revenues to remain roughly flat from commodities, absent some underlying volume growth going forward. We've not taken a bias on improvements in commodity prices, especially given, as you probably recall, we're effectively insulated at the adjusted gross profit level from swings in commodity price movements.

Got it. All right. Appreciate it. Thanks, guys. Congrats on the quarter.

We'll take our next question from Stephanie Moore with Jefferies. Hi. Good afternoon. Thank you.

I think congrats again on the second quarter of record gross profit and the improvement in the first half of the year. Could you talk a little bit on the path to continued improvement and what it's going to take to kind of see that accelerated growth kind of going forward?

Sure, and I think our plan overall has been always kind of somewhat um ranging in terms of kind of a profit you know path of profitability but you know we certainly look to kind of expand you know our sales and expand our inroads into our existing customer base you know then as i mentioned uh earlier that you know we we still think we only have about 30 percent of our of our customers kind of wallet share so kind of getting further deeply ingrained with our existing customers is certainly a core to our strategy uh you know certainly we always are looking to kind of you know bring in kind of new customers on the platform at the same time and then you know pairing that with our Smart City and Rubicon kind of pro sales, and we have new products coming out in the marketplace, whether it be the billing feature that we talked about or kind of directly selling temporary kind of open top services, which you'll actually see us do in the near term. So we have more products coming out in the marketplace. So I think from an overall kind of revenue-generating perspective, we expect going to have further growth, which puts us further down along the way on our path to profitability. We still have some savings to go on that plan, and we've not stopped to kind of optimize whatever expenses we actually have on that side. So there are still some big chunks of savings that are within the company that as we further optimize our operations on the back office side, As we further, you know, employ some of these artificial intelligence-based solutions that we've talked about on the optimization front, you know, those are all, you know, things that actually help us operate much more efficiently. So, you'll see that kind of improve our bottom line numbers as well.

And Stephanie, I'd also add this. several new sort of service lines that we're looking at, new areas of growth that we're going into that are really sort of pieces of the pie that we've sort of expanded on. We've built new technologies. Bill mentioned the billing piece that's just coming online, which is really going to allow us to sell the Rubicon Pro piece sort of in earnest. And we're also looking at, you know, several other business lines that we think we'll be able to monetize as we move forward.

Got it. That's really helpful.

And then I think, you know, on this path to profitability, you know, kind of looked at optimizing some of your accounts and your customers. Now, how long do we think we should expect to see this kind of going forward, this kind of customer optimization? And then maybe on the flip side, I think, you know, also in the path of profitability have focused on, you know, kind of raising price and enhancing your profitability with certain customers, too. So maybe you can talk a little bit on how retention rates have been trending.

Thank you.

Yeah, from an optimization standpoint, I would expect it to kind of continue on sort of at least through this quarter, potentially into the fourth quarter as we are continuing to work through. And there is some lead panel on these nights without taking time for it to fully sort of work through the system. So I would expect it to sort of be primarily done by the end of this year. You'll see sort of the results of it as we're continuing to work through it. to the end of the year. But it is going to be an ongoing process, right? I mean, we have the conscious effort that, you know, we are going to be a profitability-focused company. So as we come across other opportunities to do that, we're going to obviously take that. And I apologize. What was the second part of your question?

I just wanted to get a little bit of color on just how our attention rates are trending with your current customers kind of following after price increases and some of the actions you've taken to optimize.

Yes, Stephanie, it's still strong. We posted 105% revenue net retention for the quarter, so consistent with our triple-digit net revenue retention that we've averaged going back over the last few years.

Great. Thank you so much. And we have no further questions at this time.

I'll turn the call back over to Mr. Rodoni for final remarks.

Okay, well, again, thank you, everyone, for spending a little bit of time with us today, and we appreciate your continued interest in the company, and we look forward to reporting to you out in the quarters to come. Thank you all very much.

Thank you, and that does conclude today's presentation. Thank you for your participation, and you may now disconnect.