Workiva Inc. Class A

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Kavita and I'll be your host operator on this call. After the prepared comments, we will conduct a question and answer session. Instructions will be provided at that time. If at any time during the conference you need to reach an operator, please press star followed by zero. Please note that this call has been recorded on May 4th, 2021 at 5 p.m. Eastern Time. I will now turn the meeting over to your host for today's call, Mike Ross, Vice President of Corporate Development and Industrial Relations at Workiva. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us for Workiva's first quarter 2021 conference call. Today's call has been prerecorded and will include comments from our Chief Executive Officer, Marty Vander Plauw, followed by our Chief Financial Officer, Jill Quinn. We will then open the call up for a live Q&A session. Julie Iskow, our Chief Operating Officer, is also on the call. A replay of this webcast will be available until May 11, 2021. Information to access the replay is listed in today's press release, which is available on our website under the Investor Relations section. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that during today's call, we will be making forward-looking statements regarding future events and financial performance. including guidance for the second quarter and full fiscal year 2021. These forward-looking statements are subject to unknown and unknown risks and uncertainties. Rekima cautions that these statements are not guarantees of future performance. All forward-looking statements made today reflect our current expectations only, and we undertake no obligation to update any statement to reflect the events that occur after this call. please refer to the company's annual report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings for factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from any forward-looking statements. Also during the course of today's call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliation of non-GAAP to GAAP measures and certain additional information are also included in today's press release. With that, we'll begin by turning the call over to our CEO, Marty Vander Plaat.

Hello, and thank you for joining today's call. Workiva is off to a strong start in 2021, feeding first quarter guidance for revenue and operating income. We exceeded 24% growth in subscription and support revenue driven by broad-based demand for our platform and fit for purpose solutions. Macro business trends such as digital transformation, changes in the regulatory landscape, and remote workplaces continue to create favorable conditions for the adoption of our platform. Due to improved market demand and an expanding addressable market, we are raising our guidance. Jill will provide further details about our financial results and future outlook later in the call. Our team is executing. We are maintaining an aggressive pace on our 2021 growth priorities, which include expanding globally, ramping our partner ecosystem, and launching new platform-based fit-for-purpose solutions. Starting with global expansion, we continue to expand outside of North America. EMEA continues to show accelerated year-over-year growth as we continue to focus on ESEP and other use cases that we expect will drive logo expansion. Strong momentum continues with our partner ecosystem. Our partners continue to play a key role in extending the value of our platform and accelerating its adoption. They are also strategically involved in the go-to-market for our new fit-for-purpose solutions. At our 2020 Investor Day, we discussed our approach to identifying and bringing new and enhanced solutions to market. Our recent ESG announcement is a result of our idea to incubation process that provides the optimum mix of discipline, speed, and agility This process allows us to innovate on our platform, validate with our partners and prospects, and define a commercial offering. Our ESG solution enables global organizations to simplify the complex ESG ecosystem and achieve greater transparency and accountability. Organizations across the globe are motivated to report their non-financial data alongside their financial data to provide a broader company valuation. And we believe we are well positioned to deliver the solution. We have years of experience delivering a cloud platform that supports investor grade reporting for the world's largest organizations. ESG reporting is complex, making it a natural fit for our platform and a compelling market for us to enter. ESG requires the capture, management, and reporting of financial and non-financial data from many sources and the collaboration of many internal stakeholders. We have been helping customers manage complex reporting for over a decade. Our ESG solution is end-to-end where customers can automate and consolidate the collection of ESG data, connect directly to source documents and systems, utilize globally recognized or proprietary ESG frameworks, work in an audit-ready environment, bring together teammates, data sets, and data sources in a controlled setting, and achieve greater transparency and accountability with full XBRL capabilities. Currently, approximately 11,700 large companies and groups across the EU are subject to mandatory requirements for non-financial reporting. Last month, the European Commission introduced a new corporate sustainability reporting directive, CSRD, intended to improve the quality of ESG reporting and bring more companies within the mandate. Upon finalization of the European legislative process, the proposed CSRD will potentially impact nearly 50,000 companies in the EU. The directive also requires companies to digitally tag reported data using the ESEF inline XBRL standard, and Merkiva is the leading provider of XBRL and inline XBRL software and services. Therefore, we believe ESG will drive global demand for our cloud platform and lead to an expansion of our addressable market. In response, we are scaling our operations by making targeted investments in R&D, sales, and marketing. For us, the launch of ESG is not just another fit-for-purpose solution. It aligns with the values we support and our mission to build trust in the global economy with transparent data and connected reporting. We believe we have the right platform at the right time to help our customers address their ESG requirements. In these extraordinary times, we are honored to contribute our part to climate awareness and sound corporate governance and to elevate fairness, trust, and overall compassion across the global community. In closing, our Q1 results are reflective of our entire global team working together to build innovative solutions, deliver superior customer experiences, and to live our values-based culture. We have always been intentional about prioritizing our culture and standing behind our values, which is why we are honored to once again be named the Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For and Best Workplaces in Technology. Before I turn the call over, I would like to welcome Jill Clint to her first earnings call as our CFO. Jill is an accomplished leader with strong knowledge of our business and all aspects of our financial reporting and corporate governance. I look forward to working with her in her new capacity to position Workiva for future success. With that, I now turn the call over to Jill.