Yext, Inc.

Good day and welcome to the Yext First Quarter Fiscal 2022 Financial Results Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Dominic Peschel, Senior Vice President. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Gary, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to YEC's fiscal first quarter 2022 conference call. With me today, our CEO and founder, Howard Lerman, President and Chief Revenue Officer, David Renitsky, CFO, Steve Cakebread. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that this call may contain forward-looking statements, including statements about revenue, non-GAAP net income, operating margins, product roadmap and timing, demand for our products, net dollar retention, capital expenditures, and other non-historical statements as further described in our press release. These forward-looking statements are subject to certain risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, including those related to YEC's growth, the evolution of our industry, our product development and success, including with answers, and general economic and business conditions, such as the impact of COVID-19 impact. We undertake no obligation to revise any statements to reflect changes that occur after this call. Descriptions of these and other risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements are discussed in our reports filed with the SEC, including our most recent quarter and annual reports and other press releases. that was issued this afternoon. During the call, we refer to non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations with the most comparable GAAP measures are also available in the press release, which is available at investors.yext.com. With that, I will turn the call over to Howard. Thanks, Dom.

I am pleased to report we're kicking off the new fiscal year with a very strong quarter as the world gets back to business. Revenue of $92 million exceeded the high end of our guidance by $3 million, and non-GAAP EPS exceeded the high end of our guidance by 3 cents as we continue to reduce our operating costs while increasing our business efficiencies and strength of our cash position. Non-GAAP sales and marketing expenses decreased by 500 basis points as a percentage of revenue from 59% in Q1 last year to 54% this year, driving continued leverage. And net cash flow from operations for Q1 was a positive $35 million. Yext is in a great position to bring AI search to the enterprise as the world begins to reopen and return to normal. There is a renewed sense of energy here at Yext. We've opened a number of our offices back up, including our new headquarters in New York City. It's been amazing seeing teams off Zoom and working together in person. The excitement is palpable. We've also expanded our answers platform and have an absolutely incredible product roadmap that will allow us to deliver our AI search solutions everywhere across the enterprise. As we said at Investor Day, we intend to solve for five specific search use cases. Marketing answers, support answers, developer answers, e-commerce answers, and workplace answers. We continue to lead closing deals with answers. During the first quarter, we closed 69 Answers-led deals up from 14 a year ago as we see momentum building. With Answers search queries growing to more than 25 million, Yext is well along its way to becoming a global leader in search and specifically AI search. Enterprises are increasingly selecting Yext for AI search for three reasons. First, we are natural language and knowledge graph-based. Nearly every other search technology is based on legacy index-based keyword search. And while others serve blue links, kind of like Yahoo or Lycos from the 90s, we understand questions and offer a Google-like experience with answers. And speaking of Google, the second reason customers choose Yext is because of our federated architecture. For each query, we run multiple algorithms and return multiple sets of results. Think of a Google search engine results page that may contain featured snippets and maps and knowledge cards and more. That's exactly how Yext works, and it presents the user with several potential answers that change depending on context. Third reason that customers are choosing Yext is because of our low-code, easy setup. Anyone can easily set up a search engine without building their own. We continue to make rapid progress in advancing our Answers platform. And during the quarter, we announced one of our most significant platform updates in history. Our spring update added features like extractive Q&A, a website crawler, data connectors, and developer tools for Answers. These features have enabled us to expand into support search with our support Answers offering. Support Answers is a game changer, and our timing couldn't be better. Take a look at some third party reports. Forbes noted that $75 billion is wasted on poor customer service every year. By 2022, Gartner estimates 85% of customer service interactions will start from self-serve, up from 48% in 2019. But the most exciting data point is the Harvard Business Review estimates 81% of all customers attempt to take care of matters themselves because they don't want to reach out to a live representative. Who wants to call 1-800-AMTRAK? Having advanced support search means customers and support agents can swiftly find direct answers to questions and increase call deflection. They can reduce support tickets and lower costs, all while driving up customer satisfaction. It will also give support teams more confidence, as only 36% of service professionals feel fully prepared to handle a surge in service and support cases, and just 39% feel fully prepared to handle increased case complexities. AI-powered support search solves a real pain point for the enterprise, and our sales team have already begun closing deals. In fact, in Q1, we closed two large support answers deals with Altice and Samsung. Altice added support answers to their existing answers marketing solution set, and now they have an internal and external search solution. Samsung, it's a new logo, and they've included support answers in their first deal with Yext. We are really excited about the new opportunities this solution will unlock now that we've officially rolled it out to the market. I couldn't be prouder of this company's focus and adaptability over the last year. We vastly expanded Yext's opportunity with our advancements in AI search. We did all this while becoming more efficient. We have an incredible team, an innovative platform, and great momentum. I've never been more excited about our company, and I am confident that Yext will play an important role in helping businesses accelerate their growth through AI search in a post-pandemic world. With a successful Q1 and with our marketing and support search solutions in market, we're just that much closer to fulfilling our mission to transform the entire enterprise of AI search. With our marketing answers and support answers solution, we've now established our presence in two of the five AI search categories. And you should stay tuned for the rest as they launch throughout the summer and the rest of this year. And with that, I will turn the call over to David Reninsky, our President and Chief Revenue Officer, to share more details from the first quarter.