Twilio Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Twilio Inc. 4th Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference call. At this time all participants are in the listen only mode. After the speaker's presentation there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during this session you'll need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. You'll then hear an automated message advising you 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, Brian Vienerman, SVP of Investor Relations and Corporate

Development. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon everyone and

thank you for joining us for Twilio's 4th Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference call. Joining me today are Kozama Shipchandler, Chief Executive Officer and Aidan Vegiano, Chief Financial Officer. As a reminder we will disclose non-GAAP financial call. Definitions and reconciliations between our GAAP and non-GAAP results can be found in our earnings release and our earnings presentation posted on our IR website at .twilio.com. We will also make forward looking statements on this call including statements about our future outlook and goals. Such statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described. Many of those risks and uncertainties are described in our SEC filings including our most recent Form 10Q and our forthcoming Form 10K. Forward looking statements represent our beliefs and assumptions only as of the date such statements are made. We disclaim any obligation to update any forward looking statements except as required by law. And with that I'll hand it over to Kozama and Aidan who will discuss our Q4 and 2024 results and will then open the call for Q&A.

Thank you, Brian. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Twilio had a terrific Q4 reaching $1.195 billion in revenue, an 11% increase year over year, and our second consecutive quarter of double digit growth. Q4 also marked an important milestone for Twilio as it's the first time we've delivered quarterly GAAP operating profitability in the company's history, well ahead of our initial target. For the full year we generated $4.458 billion in revenue representing 9% organic growth year over year. Over the past two years we've dedicated ourselves to transforming Twilio's business from one primarily focused on growth to one that balances innovation, growth, and profitability. Our results demonstrate the success of those efforts. Not only have we recently accelerated revenue growth, but we've also significantly boosted our non-GAAP profitability while meaningfully accelerating our path to GAAP profitability plus reducing our net burn rate and outstanding share count. And we've increased annual free cash flow by nearly $1 billion since 2022. All of this illustrates our commitment to operating the company with more discipline, rigor, and focus. And while there's more work to be done, the results speak for themselves. At our investor day a few weeks ago, you got a chance to hear about the new Twilio, including our product strategy, growth levers, and financial framework that we have in place to win a much larger market. As marketing, sales, and customer support converge into customer experience as a service, we strongly believe that Twilio's leading communications platform plus contextual data powered by segment and our innovations with AI position us to win in this massive market and reinforce our vision that every digital interaction we power between brands and consumers is nothing short of amazing. While we provided a lot of details during our investor day, today I wanted to take the opportunity to reinforce a few of the key takeaways while also sharing some of the highlights from Q4. On the innovation front, in 2024 we launched 251 products, enhancements, and services. These innovations align to our strategy of building a trusted, simple, and smart platform that enables brands to drive more secure, relevant, and personalized interactions with their customers. Throughout the quarter, we continue to invest in our core capabilities to drive even greater customer value. During Cyber Week, Twilio powered more than 5 billion messages, delivered more than 65 billion emails, and supported 678 million calls, all while delivering 100% uptime. The confidence our customers have in Twilio is stronger than ever, and critical periods like Cyber Week prove to our customers that Twilio has the trusted, simple, and smart platform that they need. During the fourth quarter, we expanded our trusted channels to meet our customers' evolving needs by adding new capabilities to support existing channels, including RCS and WhatsApp. For RCS, we also recently announced that rich content cards, media, and rich card carousels are now available and supported by our content template builder that helps streamline development. RCS is proving a valuable expansion vehicle for existing messaging customers. Customers like MarketBeat are able to benefit from Twilio's streamlined approach to development on a single messaging API and our universal template management system. It's also clear that Twilio continues to be at the center of the AI value chain, as we already have 90% of the Forbes 50 AI startups building on Twilio. We continued to drive ROI with our AI-enabled products, benefited from emerging AI companies that chose Twilio as an essential component for their customer engagement layer, and partnered with key AI players in the ecosystem like AWS, Databricks, Google Cloud, OpenAI, and Snowflake. In Q4, Conversation Relay, which helped simplify the process of building robust AI voice agents, went into public beta. While it's still early, we believe that AI will drive a renaissance in voice, and everyone from enterprises to startups will begin orchestrating new voice experiences that are two-way and personalized. On the segment front, the AI innovations that are getting to generate tangible results for our customers. As an example, with predicted audiences, one company realized a 70% improvement in audience accuracy, and in Q4 found an average of four weeks of data science time saved by giving marketers the ability to predict behavior. Emerging AI startups are continuing to build on Twilio. In fact, more than 9,000 companies building in the AI space utilize Twilio services in 2024. Paradox.ai, one of Twilio's AI Searchlight winners, is using conversational AI for recruiting, and leverages their AI assistant, Olivia, to help with frontline recruitment. Starting as a self-serve customer in 2017, they reached unicorn status in under five years, and today Twilio powers over 150 million messages a month on their behalf. But more importantly, with Twilio messaging, they've been able to help companies like McDonald's, Workday, and SAP get interviews scheduled in minutes versus the manual process that used to take anywhere from five to seven days. And finally, we're continuing to partner with established AI companies like OpenAI. During the quarter, we helped OpenAI launch calls and WhatsApp messaging through their Twilio-powered number -CHAT-GPT, which has seen incredible volume since launch. Our innovation strategy and execution continues to pay off as we renamed a leader in multiple analyst reports. During the quarter, IDC named Twilio a leader in its market scape. Worldwide customer data platforms focused on B2C users. And, Omdia also named Twilio a leader in two of its reports, the Omdia Universe Customer Engagement Platforms and the Omdia Universe Customer Data Platforms. With respect to distribution, we continued to focus on our key growth levers, self-serve, cross-sell, international expansion, and our partner ecosystem while also optimizing for scale and efficiency. In Q4, our -to-market team continued to deliver improved execution as evidenced by strong large-deal activity during the quarter. On the communications side, we closed 78 deals worth $500,000 or more, up 47% -over-year. And, in Q4, we closed our largest segment deal ever with one of the world's largest financial services companies. Within self-serve, we saw a continued acceleration in sign-ups, upgrades, and revenue growth, a testament to the improvements we've delivered in our self-serve experience over the course of 2024. Cross-sell and up-sell continues to be a massive growth opportunity. During the quarter, we had terrific wins, including one with a long-standing Twilio voice customer that's a top health system in the U.S., which operates 33 hospitals. The customer adopted Twilio's RCS messaging, branded calling, and engagement suite in order to increase call adoption, establish a stronger brand presence, and increase messaging deliverability and engagement. Additionally, we also signed a deal with a leading web hosting provider. The company has been a long-time Twilio messaging customer and expanded their use to include Twilio's Conversations API to power two-way SMS and voice channels. With Twilio, the company has integrated the product into their own proprietary unified inbox, giving customers the ability to manage their business communications needs on their smartphone and simplify the communication with their own customers. International expansion and partner distribution continue to help us unlock an under-penetrated addressable market. As an example, during the quarter, Twilio expanded its relationship with Klaviyo with several SMS deals in European markets. Finally, we are driving our -to-market strategy more efficiently by leveraging AI and automation, which is built upon Twilio's own technology. In pre-sales, we're using data to lead the identification process, which has shortened sales cycles. Additionally, today, 80% of our new inbound leads are being handled by AI, which has led to a faster sign-up and upgrade process for prospects due to faster responses, multilingual support, and depth of knowledge. Post-sales, our help center assistants have garnered a 75% ticket deflection rate when AI is engaged. I'm proud of how our discipline, rigor, and focus has helped position the company well for the years ahead as we drive strategic, customer-centric growth with innovation at the core. In many respects, 2024 was about rebuilding the foundation. 2025 is the year we'll stay focused on executing against our ambitious innovation roadmap to unlock the power of communications, contextual data, and AI. And as we unlock it, every consumer that interacts with the ,000-plus active customer accounts that we power will benefit. Our strategy is clear, our execution is focused, and our impact is real. I'm incredibly proud to see the hard work paying off as we enter this next phase of growth and create more value for our shareholders in the years ahead. And with that, I'll turn it over to Aidan.

Thank you, Kozima, and good afternoon, everyone. Twilio finished the year with a strong Q4, delivering our second consecutive quarter of double-digit revenue growth and our first-ever quarter of gap operating profitability. For Q4, we generated record revenue of $1.195 billion, which represented 11% -over-year generated record non-gap income from operations of $197 million and $93 million in free cash flow. We came into 2024 committed to driving durable growth, continued margin expansion, and increased free cash flow generation. And I'm pleased with our execution throughout the year. For the full year, we generated revenue of $4.458 billion, representing 9% organic growth, non-gap income from operations of $714 million, and free cash flow of $657 million. We also completed our prior $3 billion share repurchase authorization, returning over $2.3 billion to shareholders in 2024 alone, and reducing our outstanding share account by 16% since the start of the year. Revenue in our communications business for the quarter was $1.121 billion, up 12% -over-year. Messaging revenue growth accelerated for a second consecutive quarter, while email performance remained strong, driven in part by strong volumes during cyber week and the holiday season. Political revenue contributed roughly 60 basis points to our reported revenue growth rate. This was partially offset by a 40 basis point headwind associated with sunsetting the software component of our ZipWeb business, which we have now fully lapped. Segment revenue for the quarter was $74 million, down 1% -over-year. We were encouraged by the -to-market execution in the quarter, with bookings slightly accelerating -over-year, along with over half of new bookings coming from multi-year deals. Our Q4 dollar-based net expansion rate was 106%, representing our best performance since Q1 of 2023, and reflecting the improving growth trends we've seen in our communications business over the last several quarters. Our dollar-based net expansion rate for communications was 108%, and the dollar-based net expansion rate for segment was 93%. We delivered record non-GAAP gross profit of $621 million, up 10% -over-year. This represented a non-GAAP gross margin of 52%, down 40 basis points -over-year, and 100 basis points -over-quarter. The decline in gross margins was driven by expected higher hosting costs during cyber week, as we referenced during our Q3 earnings call, along with an increase in revenue mix from messaging. Non-GAAP gross margin for our communications business unit was 50.6%, down 10 basis points -over-year, and 110 basis points -over-quarter. As we referenced on our Q3 earnings call, the sequential decline was driven primarily by higher hosting costs associated with the holiday shopping season, as well as higher messaging revenue mix. Non-GAAP gross margin for our segment business unit was 72.3%, down 210 basis points -over-year, and up 240 basis points -over-quarter. The sequential improvement was primarily driven by benefits from our segment infrastructure migration project, as well as hosting credits in the quarter. We largely completed this project during the fourth quarter, which we expect will help support segment gross margins as we move into 2025. Q4 non-GAAP income from operations came in modestly ahead of expectations at a record $197 million, up 14% -over-year, driven by strong revenue growth and ongoing cost disciplines. Our non-GAAP operating margin of .5% was up 40 basis points -over-year and sequentially. In addition, we generated $14 million in GAAP income from operations, representing Twilio's first-ever quarter of GAAP operating profitability. As I referenced at Investor Day last month, in Q4 we incurred $17 million in bad debt expenses related to our customer, OI, a British company that is currently operating in the U.S. and Brazil telecom company, as a result of a slowdown in their ongoing payment activity. We fully reserved our exposure to OI's existing accounts receivables, which reduced operating margin by 140 basis points in the quarter. For the full year 2024, we generated non-GAAP income from operations of $714 million, up 34% -over-year, and our non-GAAP operating margin of 16% was up 320 basis points -over-year. Non-GAAP income from operations for our communications business was $275 million in the fourth quarter. For the full year 2024, our communications business generated over a billion dollars in non-GAAP income from operations. Non-GAAP loss from operations for our segment business was $10 million in the fourth quarter. Segment operating losses improved sequentially as a result of the gross margin improvement in the quarter and ongoing cost discipline. Our segment business remains on track to achieve break-even non-GAAP income from operations by Q2 of this year. Stock-based compensation as a percentage of revenue was 13%, down 60 basis points -over-quarter and 240 basis points -over-year, as we continue our efforts to reduce equity costs. For the full year 2024, net burn rate was 3.3%, down 160 basis points -over-year. As a reminder, this does not include the impact of share repurchases conducted over the course of the year. We continue to manage dilution on a net burn basis, which we define as the number of employee stock units granted in a year, net of forfeitures, and divided by the prior year ending share count. We generated free cash flow of $93 million in the quarter, down sequentially as we anticipated, driven by incremental vendor prepayments totaling roughly $130 million. As a reminder, we periodically pay certain vendors early to secure favorable terms and pricing. For the full year 2024, we generated $657 million in free cash flow, up 81% -over-year, and representing a margin of .7% per year. We also generated a margin of .7% which was up 600 basis points -over-year. Before I turn to Q1 and fiscal year 2025 guidance, I wanted to recap the financial framework we announced at our investor day in January. In 2027, we're targeting non-GAAP operating margins in the range of 21 to 22%, up 500 to 600 basis points compared with our full year 2024 results. In 2027, we expect to generate $3 billion plus in cumulative free cash flow. We're targeting GAAP operating profitability in fiscal year 2025 and each year thereafter. We continue to focus on managing stock-based compensation and dilution responsibly, and we're targeting stock-based compensation at about 10% of revenue and net burn at less than 3% in fiscal year 2027. As a reminder, we continue to orient the business to deliver double-digit growth over time, though our framework assumes annual revenue growth through 2027 that is similar to our 2025 guidance of 7 to 8%. Finally, our board recently authorized a $2 billion share repurchase program expiring at the end of 2027, and we're targeting an average of 50% of our annual free cash flow in capital year 2025. We're also encouraging the board to provide additional capital returns to shareholders from 2025 through 2027. Moving to Q1 guidance, we're encouraged by the growth acceleration we saw in the second half of 2024, but we're continuing to plan prudently given our usage-based revenue model. For Q1, we're initiating a revenue target of $1.13 billion to $1.14 billion, representing -over-year growth of 8% to 9%. The -over-quarter decline in revenue reflects both the Q4 seasonality dynamic that we've seen in the last couple of years, as well as a modest impact from Q4 political revenue. I would also note that there are two fewer days in Q1 versus Q4, and one fewer day in Q1 versus the year-ago quarter. That being said, we continue to feel good about our guidance for the year, and we're maintaining our full-year 2025 organic revenue growth guidance range of 7 to 8% per year. Turning to our profit outlook, for Q1, we expect non-GAAP income from operations of $180 million to $190 million, and for the full year, we expect non-GAAP income from operations in the range of $825 million to $850 million. As anticipated, free cash flow in Q1 will be impacted by a roughly $120 million payment related to our company-wide cash bonus program that we implemented in the first half of 2020. We are also expecting to see a $2.5 million budget cut from Q1 to Q4, which we implemented in 2024 as part of our efforts to reduce stock-based compensation. This will limit free cash flow generation in the first quarter. That said, we continue to expect to generate strong quarterly free cash flow over the balance of the year, and for the full year, we expect free cash flow in the range of $825 million to $850 million. I'm very pleased with the accelerated revenue growth we delivered in the fourth quarter, as well as our ongoing cost discipline that is driving strong profitability and free cash flow. I'm also encouraged by the innovation we are delivering and the impact new products and features are having both for our customers and on our revenue growth. We are confident in our plans to drive durable revenue growth, continued margin expansion, and new ways to increase revenue growth. We are also confident that we will continue to generate strong free cash flow generation in 2025. With that, we will now open it up to questions.

Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star 1-1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. One moment while we compile our Q&A roster. Our first question is going to come from the line of Jim Fish with Piper Sandler. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hey guys. Thanks for the additional color here following the Analyst Day. Well done again at the Analyst Day. Try to understand, given some of the macro stuff that's going on, how much of the strength you guys are seeing in messaging and email is due to somewhat this return of the crypto world?

Hey Jim. This is Aiden. I'll take that question. So I'd say from a crypto perspective, we do see those customers exhibiting stronger volume, though I would say nowhere near returning to the levels that we saw in 2020 to 2022. So it's a bit better, but it's relatively immaterial to the grand scheme of things. So not a big driver for the business, messaging or email.

So it was nice to see segment here in terms of like while revenue was a little bit down year on year, if I look at that deferred revenue build, it seems that implied billings was up north of 20% if I get most of that over to that side. Is the segment business seeing a bottom or how much is the sort of billing strength attributable to that big deal you referenced?

Yeah, maybe I'll comment on the RPO and if Kozima wants anything on the business, he can do so. But yeah, both the RPO balance you're looking at, the CRPO balance as well, they're really driven by segment. And so the growth really is driven by a combination of bookings growth as well as the percentage of new bookings that are tied to multi-year deals. And what we saw in the quarter was bookings were up a bit, but also that over 50% of the deals that we booked in the quarter were multi-year deals. And so that's been a point that the team has been working on and focused on and we're starting to see that kind of show up in the bookings metrics. So that's part of what is driving it. And then I would say, I would note that any of these metrics that you're kind of looking at, any of these deals, that they're 12 months or less in initial duration when you look at the actual metrics that you're looking at on the balance sheet. So they're not fully representative of segment's book of business. So that's a little bit on the metric. I don't know if you want to add anything on the business, Kozima. Yeah,

Jim, all I would say is that I think this has been sort of a steady as she goes story, right? Like I think that there have been a number of operational improvements that we made in the business. I think going back to the operating review that we announced last year, there were a number of things that we wanted to do to improve performance both on the technology and innovation side, but also in terms of the way that we were running the business. And I think you're starting to see a lot of that show up in the balance sheet item that you referenced. And I think ultimately, you know, that will turn into revenue. I think it's going to take a little bit of time. Revenue does lag. But I think sitting here today, we feel pretty good about the standalone business. I think we feel even better about the way that the segment asset actually contributes to the overall growth story that we laid out during the investor day. Helpful. Thanks, guys. Thanks.

Thank you. And one moment as we move on to our next question. Our next question is going to come from the line of Michael Turin with Wells Fargo Securities. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hey, great. Thanks very much. Appreciate you taking the question and congrats on the return to double digit growth. I was hoping you could maybe just spend some time speaking to ways you aim to ensure the growth improvements you're seeing prove durable. What are you using to build those initial 2025 assumptions? And then what are some of the swing factors we should contemplate that could keep you going? What are some of the things that could keep you at the more aspirational double digit growth level?

Maybe I'll start by kind of what we saw in the quarter. And I think what's important when we look at the growth in both Q3 and Q4. First of all, it really wasn't driven by political. In Q4, we talked about it being 60 basis points. That was largely offset by the end of life of our software business and Zipwhip. So it's true 11% operational growth. And importantly, it wasn't one thing driving it, right? When you look at it by product, we saw strength again and accelerated growth in messaging. Emails been strong all year, continue to be strong. We had a record breaking cyber week with strength in both in messaging, email, and voice. Kazama kind of gave you some of those stats in his prepared remarks. ISDs were strong, self-service strong. When you look at it by industry, we've disclosed the top five at our investor day. But we saw strength in tech, financial services, healthcare, retail, e-commerce, advertising. They all exhibited healthy growth. And then geographically, it was similar. So I think that's important for us, right? It's not one thing that's kind of driving the strength, but it's pretty broad overall. From a planning perspective, and as we think about what we're guiding to, which is 7% to 8% for the year, we feel pretty good about that. We know that we're running ahead of that, obviously, in the second half of 2024. But just given the usage-based nature of our business, we think that it's prudent to continue to plan and smart to continue to plan prudently. In terms of what swing factors could be to drive double-digit growth, as we talked about in investor day, that's how we're orienting the business today. We are running the place internally that way. We're planning a bit more prudently, but we'll continue to drive those actions internally.

Yeah, there's nothing, Michael, that I would really add. I'd certainly echo all of what Aidan said. I think when you break it down by some of the channels, I think you're talking about the activity there. I think we referenced during the investor day, as well as during today's conversation, the fact that we are seeing a number of AI green shoots. I think that's pretty positive. I think the most important part of the story, frankly, is that the way that we're tuning and running the place is towards that double-digit number. Guidance aside, that's the way that we are running the place. Then I think on the other side, we're also looking at the momentum in terms of the number of things that we have underway that's ultimately going to spring from innovation and technology. We feel pretty good about the way that things are shaping up. Look, we just did our investor day a couple of weeks ago, so we're just a few weeks on from there. In the context of the framework, we feel really good going forward.

That's great. Just as a quick follow-on, on gross margin, know that blind can move around a bit. If we're looking at 4Q relative to rest of year, is that more seasonal traffic-driven and are you confident in ability to continue to deliver some level of gross margin expansion as you progress towards those 27 targets? Thank you.

What I would say, I'll answer that in two pieces. In terms of Q4, and we kind of signaled this a little bit coming into the quarter, we always have higher hosting costs in Q4 just given how much traffic is going over the platform. We provision for that because it's important to us that we maintain trust with our customers and are resilient enough to do that. We're also resilient in terms of being able to deliver important traffic during things like cyber weeks. Hosting costs were a factor. You'll see if you look from Q3 to Q4 in 2023, that was a similar dynamic. The other thing that happened in the quarter was there was a greater mix of messaging product revenue as a percentage of total. We talked about the fact that that business was strong. It accelerated from a growth perspective in Q4. That had a mixed effect as well. As you know, that business carries lower gross margins. Now, as we think about the plan for the framework that we provided at Investor Day and the 21 to 22% operating margin target by 2027, what we said is that that assumes basically constant gross margins. We aren't assuming an uplift in gross margins to achieve that framework. Now, is there opportunity over time? I think so when you look at the mix of our products and how many of them carry software-like gross margins. But I think the reality is in the near term, the messaging mix, both from a product perspective as well as where traffic is terminating geographically will have an impact. So we're planning for roughly flat gross margins over the next several years.

Thanks very much.

Thank you. One moment as we move on to our next question. Our next question is going to come from the line of Nick Altman with Scotiabank. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Awesome. Thank you. You guys alluded to large deal strength in Q4 and at the Investor Day you highlighted how that $1 million plus customer cohort was, I believe, the fastest growing. So, Kazima, can you just maybe talk about the high end and what's driving the strength there? Is that more volume-driven? Is it more -sell-driven? And then my follow-up is when you look at the improvements in the communications expansion rate, how much of that is being driven by those larger deals and by the high end customers? Thank you.

Yeah. So let me just step back for a second. I think that as we look at a lot of these larger deals, it's always going to be a combination of new land and then, of course, expand via cross-sell. But I think what's really important and interesting for our business, as you kind of think back to the Investor Day, is that a lot more of our customers are seeing value from using multiple of our products on the one hand, and more importantly, by using the combination of products, especially as it relates to the way in which communications and data interact, and then as we start to use AI. So I'd say increasingly, the larger, more sophisticated use cases that we're seeing deployed, enterprise customers, they're all kind of heading down that path. But it's always going to be a combination of expansion through cross-sell, but there are a handful of, well, more than a handful of new deals in there as well. So it's kind of a combination, but I think it's customers increasingly moving towards our vision. Remind me, Nick, what was the second part of your question related to expansion?

Yeah, just on the communications DBNRR, that looked pretty good before. How much of it's driven by larger deals?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think it's, again, a little bit more broad than that. I think the fortunate dynamic that we're seeing in the business right now is, as Aiden alluded to, the trends that we're seeing aren't concentrated in any particular area, that instead, they are broad-based. And so I wouldn't per se point to large deals as being the driver. I would instead say we're seeing it kind of across the board, and that's certainly very encouraging for us. Great. Thank you.

Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question is going to come from the line of Mark Murphy with JPMorgan. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much. The number of AI customers that you've racked up is pretty amazing. You had mentioned it at the analyst day. I'm wondering if you could shed light on how much of that is tied to authentication or something that ties into an app download at the front end of the cycle versus something that might align with an ongoing AI usage pattern. And then is that AI business driving any tangible tailwind to revenue growth? For instance, is that greater than where the political contribution tailwind was?

Say the last part again, Mark.

I would say I'll add to the last question, maybe because Amy can take the floor. It's not contributing meaningfully. I'd say it's a mix of different types of customers. Some are really small and just getting started on our platform. Others are larger enterprise customers that are now building different AI use cases. But in terms of the growth rate, it's a mix, obviously, across a different group, but I wouldn't say it's a huge tailwind to our revenue right now.

Yeah, and I think similar dynamic in terms of use cases. I mean, it really expands the spectrum there, Mark. I think you certainly do have folks that are doing 2FA as a part of it. I think one really good example -a-vis usage, -CHAT-GPT, obviously, that was a pretty cool use case to launch, saw a lot of volume. I think as well, you're seeing a lot of vertical AI startups in a number of different industries that are really trying to ramp up quickly. We see a lot of those companies riding on our infrastructure rails. That would be non-authentication, if you will. And so it really kind of runs the gamut. I wouldn't say there's a materially different mix necessarily than the business at large, but I think what's most encouraging about it is, again, the fact that we have as many as we do, the way that we'll be able to grow with these folks over time. I think the folks that are in the vertical spaces in particular, the ability to use data as well will enrich those use cases down the road. Again, having broad-based strength here is a good thing.

Thank you for that, Co. A quick follow-up for Aidan. Just curious how commonly do you think we're going to see this kind of a huge prepayment? You mentioned the $130 million one recently. Should we think of it as being an annual possibility in Q4 if you're going to be benefiting from some great terms and conditions, or do you think it's going to be more episodic than that?

I think it'll be more episodic than that, Mark. We happen to have a large prepayment, as you said, $130 million, in Q4. I just think that the way we think about it is just given the strength of our business, with different strategic vendors from time to time, it really allows us to secure better unit economics and pricing and better terms for the business. It won't necessarily be every Q4, to answer your question directly, but from time to time in different quarters, you will see these different prepayments. There's always kind of a run rate level in the business every quarter, but like I said, some quarters may be bigger than others. I just want to assume it's going to be every Q4. It doesn't necessarily play out that way.

Very clear. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Thank you. One moment as we move on to the next question. Our next question is going to come from the line of Ryan Koontz with Needham & Co. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Great. Nice to hear some of your progress in the RCS market, some early wins there. As we look at this, how would you characterize where the market is today? Can it scale? What are the keys to success here from the industry? Is the multi-operator interconnect working today? Does it work internationally? Can you walk us through just a minute on where we are? Thank you.

Yeah, Ryan, this is Kazama. I'll take that. I think in terms of where we are, it's incredibly early. I think, again, you know the story pretty well. RCS has actually been around for a long time. I think we're encouraged by some of the early deployments, but I still think that there are a variety of challenges that still exist in the ecosystem, I think interoperability being one of those. All that said, I think that we're ready. I mean, we want to support customers. I think the part of it that we're actually the most excited about is the branded nature of it, the notion that when you interact with the brand that you know exactly who it is on the other side. And beyond that, I mean, the engagements themselves are very rich, right, in terms of not having to go to an app or a website or what have you. I think, you know, we've talked in the past, I think the utility of it has a limited set of use cases, depending on how the RCS works. And so I think where we are on it is very much ready. We'd be excited if it really took off. I think we're kind of cautiously optimistic about the way that it plays out. I think we view it as being sort of neutral to modestly accretive to the way that we kind of think about things. And in some, you know, very, very early days, I think the volumes that we're seeing, I mean, they're certainly taking off relative to where they were, but it's off a pretty low base.

I assume the Android ecosystem is kind of far ahead of the Apple ecosystem right now.

Android. Yeah, much further ahead.

Yeah, got it. Yeah, Android, right. Thanks so much.

Thank you. One moment as we move on to our next question. Our next question is going to come from the line of Metta Marshall with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Great. Thanks. Maybe you could just give a sense. I know, obviously, you have a lot of existing customers and you'll get idea of their business performance by usage, but just kind of what you're seeing kind of on the business environment as we start the year, just kind of as you go through sales cycles. And then maybe as a second question on the segment piece, you know, the net expansion rate still kind of being below 100 percent. Just kind of when do you expect some of the new wins and traction that you're seeing can kind of help, you know, improve that metric? Thanks.

Yeah. Hey, Metta, I think we feel pretty positive. We feel positive about the business environment. I mean, I think I don't want to get ahead of Q1 beyond the guidance that we provided, but I think just generally based on the trend line that we saw in Q4 that customers are ready to engage. They're excited about the products and services that we've got. I think they're very excited about the vision that we've laid out in terms of, you know, the communications plus data plus AI. I think the fact that there are a number of fielded use cases now and products that go with that that they can avail themselves of, I'd say pretty positive on balance. I mean, again, I don't want to get too far ahead of it, but we feel pretty good about the business environment. I think just one thing I'll note is we always kind of plan around a neutral macro. So nothing that we've kind of said or and certainly nothing in the business really. I wouldn't take from that that, you know, we're planning for like a rebounding macro or anything like that. We're planning for neutral will certainly be a beneficiary of a higher macro. And if it gets worse, you know, we could see us get a clip from that a little bit, but we're planning for neutral in terms of net expansion. Like we're not it's not like a metric that we per se run the business to. What I would say about it is, is that when we look at some of the key inputs into the way that we think about the standalone segment business, I'd say number one, you know, we're seeing a lot more stickiness in terms of the deals because they are more multi-year. Number two, you know, we've done some work on the technology side to get customers activated much more quickly so that they're getting ROI. I think that certainly helps. And then I think three, you know, the the the way in which it now interoperates with some of the data warehouses, which was sort of long a request from customers like all of that is in place. And I think that that all ends up being, you know, good for the business. I'm sure you heard the question earlier about the balance sheet dynamics with the business. We feel better about where it is. I think it's work in progress. We want to make it even better, of course, and revenue and the expansion characteristics will kind of follow all that.

Great. Thanks. Thank you. One moment as we move on to our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Aran Bhatia with William Blair. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Perfect. Thank you guys. Maybe the first one I'll focus on NRR on the other side of the business, the comm side, the 108 is pretty impressive here. I'll be curious to hear how much of that is improvements in gross retention versus, you know, certainly there's been a focus in the business and investing innovation product cross-sell.

So the

split between that would be interesting to hear. And then how do you expect this to evolve? Is this a sustainable level going forward? If some of those initiatives play out or, you know, is Q4 maybe, you know, so there's some seasonality in there that we should consider going forward. Yeah,

I'll take that Arjun. This is Aidan. So, you know, the comms, DB&E accelerated to 108% in Q4. I'd say it generally tracks revenue growth, right, if you look at it over time. But when you break it down, obviously, like I said, we had accelerated growth messaging. We saw strong performance in email. So I'd say from a product perspective, largely coming from there, when you break it down between the different, you know, churn contraction expansion elements of DB&E, churn was low, it has historically been low, continued to be low. We really saw the improvement by through increased expansion. And I'd say a modest reduction in contraction, like that's how I'd characterize it. When you look at DB&E by our different sales segments, I'd say the two that I would say performed really well were ISDs as well as self-serve. And we talked about them at our investor day. Those are key -to-market segments for us. They continue to perform well in the fourth quarter as well. And then by industry, it was a number of different industries. But that gives you a sense of how to think about it a couple of different ways. In terms of how to think about it going forward, I just say like it tracks revenue. We don't guide to this metric. So I'm not going to provide a specific number, but it'll track largely kind of the revenue trends of the company.

Okay, I think that's helpful. And then maybe zooming out a little bit, you know, at investor day, we talked a lot about kind of cross-sell as a big driver of growth. And I think you mentioned you, I think 63% of customers are single product. When you think about the cross-sell opportunity, how do you bucket it in terms of maybe like here's kind of the layup products that you can sell and like, you know, are there others that are home runs that are maybe longer sales cycles, but where customers could significantly increase in size? How are you approaching that from a product and -to-market perspective?

Yeah, hey, Arjun, that's a good question. I think a couple answers. So one is, you know, we have concentrated incentives as part of the sales incentive plan to make sure that our teams are focused on it. And I think, you know, they're excited about that alignment there. I think second thing kind of to the real heart of your question, like are there, I think the word you used was layups. I mean, it's never a layup, but I think on some of the easier side, if you will, you know, you would imagine that customers, their ability to use SMS and email in combination or SMS and voice in combination, like some of the kind of classic channels or, you know, if it ever, if it really took off like with RCS, like being able to kind of reinforce some of that activity with a voice workload afterwards. So I'd say any one of those combinations, I wouldn't limit it to those necessarily, but those are pretty attractive. They're going to end up being shorter sales cycles because they're already plugged into one of our communications APIs. We can get customers up and running pretty quickly. We have a number of actually deployed use cases in which customers actually get more value by using two channels at the same time or complementary versus just one. So we can point to a lot of evidence there to where customers getting a lot of value. So I'd say the first part of your question there, like that's probably on the easier side. I think that said, you know, it's a little bit longer of a sales cycle. But again, we're incentivizing our teams to make sure that they're focused on this to that combination of data with communications. Like there's a lot of work that's going on in our R&D team to make sure that in the same way that I described, like on ramping a channel the same way it is as easy to on ramp data also through kind of a singular or simple set of APIs if it can't be done through one. And I do think we're seeing a lot of interest there. I think it'll take a little bit more time. But the easier that we make it if we can make it completely self-servable, like that's really where we're headed with it. And I think that'll start to take off. But that'll take some time because of the R&D investment cycle.

All right. Perfect. Very helpful. Thank you.

Thank you. One moment as we move on to our next question.

Our next question comes from the line of Alex Zucan with Wolf Research. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hey, guys. I wanted to ask just maybe again, we're still early into this whole kind of consistent guidance framework and coming out of the Analyst Day where you did a great job. Maybe just talk about how much conservatism, how you've thought about conservatism baked into both Q1 and as we get through the year. And then just a quick question about that. That expense, the operating income seemed one time that impact in Q4. You can just dive a little bit deeper into that. Those would be the two.

Yeah. Hey, Alex. This is Aidan. So, you know, I think again, we're really pleased with the performance in the second half of the year. So strength across a number of different areas as it relates to the guide for the year. We're guiding to seven to eight percent. As we said in investor day, we're orienting the business for double digits. That's just kind of how we're running the place. But again, the nature of our business matters, right? We are usage based. We're not subscription based. And so with that, there's a little bit more volatility, a little bit less visibility in terms of, you know, forecasting as it relates to Q1. You know, we're guiding to eight to nine percent year over year growth. That's a point higher than we guided in Q4. So you are seeing that these trends that we're seeing in the second half or that we saw in the second half of twenty four are positively impacting our forecasts. But again, just given the nature of the business, given that it's a fairly dynamic market, we'll kind of continue to plan prudently as it relates to the bad debt expense that I mentioned, maybe just a little bit more color. So it was a 17 million dollar charge in Q4 related to a Brazilian telecom customer. We really saw a slowdown in their ongoing payment activity. This is a customer, by the way, that we called out in our 10 Q for several quarters. I think what was different is historically they had been making ongoing payments, which limited our I'd say bad debt exposure to partial reserves this quarter. Their behavior changed a bit and resulted in a bit more risk. And so we fully reserved their receivables in fourth in the fourth quarter. So it was a bit of an unusual for us. It was about one hundred and forty basis point impact on our margins in the quarter. But like I said, we're fully reserved on that customer at this point. We don't expect additional charges related to which is the name of the customer in the future.

Perfect. And then just anything on the competitive environment, the competitive front as you go forward, particularly as you continue to kind of combine the or level up some of these conversations around a broader platform based offering.

Yeah, I mean, we feel great competitively, right? I mean, I think we're we're the market leader in two really important categories. I think you're seeing some of the recent success that we've had, especially in what I think is going to be really a secular trend around A.I. Like, that's very encouraging. We're growing at a faster clip than than any of the other guys. And I think we want to take that strength and not rest on our laurels, but instead convert that energy into new R&D investments, which kind of lead to a double digit mentality over time. And I think that's going to be a really good setup for the business. And I think some of the R&D investments that we're making are really exciting and are going to unlock a lot of value for customers. Thank you,

guys. Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Patrick Wall Ravens with Citizens JMP. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Oh, great. And let me add my congratulations. Aiden, can you remind me how to think about the operating margin ramp from, you know, like 17 to 18 percent and 25 to the 21 to 22 and 27? I mean, I have 26 pretty flat currently with 25. Is that the right way to think about it?

What I would say, so we committed to 21 to 22 percent. You know that given the guide that we gave for 2025, that implies roughly 17 and a half percent in 2025. So you should assume accretion each year. We didn't give a specifically, you know, how to think about 26 and 27, but you should assume that each year we get a bit of accretion on margin rates. So if we're going from 17 and a half to 21 to 22, that gives you a sense of how to model kind of 26 and 27.

OK, I'll go in the middle. And then, because, Aiden, where are you? Can you can you maybe give us some examples of where you're using agents internally? You reeled off a number of areas during the analyst day, but where is it? Where are you finding it's really working for your own internal office?

Yeah. Yeah. Good question, Pat. So I think there's two areas where we've seen really a marked difference in the way that we're operating. I think the first would be in customer support, where we're seeing a significant amount of deflection as a result of employing AI agents. You know, that's made the workforce a lot more productive on the one hand, but on the other hand, it's also gotten, you know, customers to an answer much, much faster in an effectively self-serve fashion. So that's been very exciting for us, and we're going to obviously continue going deeper there. The other side of it, though, is with respect to SDRs. So instead of necessarily attaching a person to every incoming inquiry, we're able to vet a lot of those now through, again, AI agents. And the reason that one, I think, is even more impactful in some respects is obviously there's a cost savings, but more importantly, you know, when the rep attaches themselves to the vetted account, it's just that it's been vetted, right? So it's a much more high quality lead so that the rep ends up pursuing business that's probably going to materialize versus just chasing something that happened to come in. Great. Thank you both.

Thank you. One moment as we move on to the next question. Our next question comes from the line of Ryan McWilliams with Barclays. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the question. Love to hear about how you're seeing any changes in the macro, you know, through the end of the fourth quarter or to start this year. And if you notice any changes from a usage perspective, from a geographic standpoint in North America versus the rest of the world.

I say, hey, Ryan, I'll start. So I say nothing. I call out specifically from the end of Q4 through kind of early Q1. What I will say is for us, you always see a drop off in volume because you're coming off of a very high holiday season. That's not atypical this year. That's just kind of the seasonality of our business. So I don't think there's anything I'd call out specifically US versus rest of world as it relates to the volumes I'm looking at kind of daily.

Yeah, I agree with Hayden. I mean, there's obviously a lot going on. It's dynamic, but I don't think that we've seen necessarily anything that that would really impact our business this far.

Perfect. And then Kozama, you know, voice AI, we're still really early days and I'm sure this is going to change like 10 different times over the next few years. But as we think about like the potential voice AI use cases that would make sense for Tulio versus might make sense more like over the top via like Siri or Alexa or something like what use cases do you think or have you seen early days that people want to use Tulio for and that you guys are the rails for for your customers? Thanks.

Yeah, I'll give you maybe like an anonymized example. I mean, I think that we have customers who are actively in beta and piloting different use cases right now. So basically, I mean, think about it this way, right? You have a customer who previously may have been using an IVR as the mechanism to handle an incoming workload. And, you know, in many instances, at some point that IVR has got to then flip to a human agent who's got to be able to handle like whatever that transactional workload is. And when that happens, you know, the only measure really of what's going on there is cycle time. And not only is it just cycle time because of the fact that that's the case, you know, there's no real opportunity to drive a more interesting, intimate upsell type experience. And so, you know, the customer that I'm specifically referencing in this case, what they're doing is that they're using the voice product that they were, but layering on top of that our voice intelligence capability. So all of the traits from that call are getting stored. They're using AI on top of it so that instead of even going into an IVR, the AI agent is handling it from start to finish. In addition to that, because it's an AI agent, you know, you're not paying a person to handle that volume. And so there's no constraint on cycle time. And so you can create that much more interesting and intimate experience. And then finally, what's especially interesting in this particular case is that it allows time for upsell, right? And so using some of the data that can be referenced from prior transactions and data history with that particular customer, you can use that data to go forward and say, you know, by the way, you ordered XYZ last time. Here's an opportunity to do it the next time. And it drives more volume, ideally higher margin volume for those customers. And, you know, on the back end of that, we can actually add a channel to thanking them for the business on the other side. So that is a kind of real life one that is in motion right now. It's not a singular example. We're starting to have that conversation with a number of our other customers as well. And I think that is right at the heart of this idea of communications plus data plus AI, which is why we're so excited about it is that we are actually starting to see the green shoots.

That sounds much better than being stuck in IVR hell. Thanks, Kazem. I appreciate the color. Sure.

Thank you. And that was going to be our last question. Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's conference call. Thank you for participating and you may now disconnect. Everyone have a great day.