Yext, Inc.

Hello and welcome to the Yext, Inc. first quarter fiscal 2024 financial results 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 a question. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw from the question queue, please press star then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Nils Erdmann, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Yext's Fiscal First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. With me today are CEO and Chair of the Board, Mike Walrath, President and COO, Mark Farentino, and CFO, Daryl Bond. During this call, we will make forward-looking statements, including statements related to our future financial performance, expectations regarding the growth of our business, our outlook for the second quarter in fiscal year 2024, our strategy and estimates of financial and operating metrics, capital expenditures, and other indications of future opportunities, as further described in our first quarter earnings press release. These forward-looking statements are subject to certain risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, including those related to the exit's growth, the evolution of our industry, our product development and success, our management performance, and general economic and business conditions. These forward-looking statements represent our beliefs and assumptions only as of the date made, and we undertake no obligation to revise or update any statements to reflect changes that occur after this call. Further information on factors and other risks that could cause actual results to materially differ from these forward-looking statements is included in our reports filed with the SEC, including in the sections titled Special Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements and Risk Factors in our most recent Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2023, and our press release that was issued this afternoon. During the call, we also refer to certain metrics, including non-GAAP financial measures, Reconciliations of the most comparable historical gap measures are available in the earnings press release, which is available at investors.yext.com. We also provide definitions of these metrics in the earnings press release. I will now turn the call over to Mike.

Thanks, Nils, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today. We are pleased to report solid Q1 results and a strong start to the year. We generated revenue of $99.5 million, non-gap earnings per share of $0.09, and over 14 million of adjusted EBITDA. Our non-GAAP EPS and adjusted EBITDA were the highest in Yext history, and we continue to hit new peak levels of efficiency and profitability. Our performance in the first quarter was a direct result of our continued execution on our priorities, creating value for our customers and improving productivity across the organization. Last year was a turning point for Yext, and we spent the better part of fiscal 23 reorganizing our team, reorienting ourselves around our customers to deliver the highest value and delivering tremendous product innovation. Our first quarter total non-GAAP cost of revenue and operating expenses totaled 89.7 million down from 106.2 million last year, a 16% decrease. We've hit the ground running in fiscal 2024. And in the first quarter, we continued to build awareness for the power of Yext Answers platform, and its ability to deliver and generate trusted answers across the full spectrum of digital experiences. Both new and existing customers are realizing how much our platform can enhance their digital transformation by reducing friction, streamlining operations, addressing customer pain points, and driving increased value. Our launches of Content Generation, Studio, and Yext Chat in beta have been catalysts for more in-depth discussions around generative AI. As DX becomes increasingly engaged in strategic discussions about the end-to-end customer journey through the digital experience, our conviction in the long-term opportunity of our platform grows stronger. In the last couple of weeks, we launched two new global campaigns focused on the importance of having a modern, composable, best-in-breed architecture that shows the possibilities of what customers can do with our AI-led DXP. Our go-to-market executive team has been in place for six months, and we're pleased with the progress we are making. While the full transformation of our go-to-market will take a couple more quarters, we are beginning to see increases in pipeline production and conversions, particularly with smaller enterprise customers. Our mid-market team benefits from shorter sales cycles and less complex integrations, and the uptake is a good indicator of how our value proposition is landing with customers. So while it is still early, we believe this momentum will eventually carry over to the larger enterprises as well. Our first quarter performance delivered against the goals we laid out in March and again in April during our investor day. We streamlined our operations and demonstrated even greater efficiency and profitability. And in spite of macroeconomic headwinds, we exceeded our revenue, adjusted EBITDA, and non-GAAP EPS targets for the quarter. We generated significant year-over-year profit growth And as Darrell will describe in more detail, we are raising all of our top and bottom line targets for the year. During our previous earnings call, we mentioned our multi-year plan to transition a portion of our services business to our systems integrator and partner ecosystem. As part of our restructuring plan, we reduced the size of our professional services organization. As expected, the shift in our services strategy had a modest impact on our retention and bookings in Q1. and we expect this to continue as we work through the renewals and build more partnerships throughout the year. The upside to this was felt immediately, and the margin profile of our business has increased significantly. This resulted in non-GAAP gross margin of 79.2% for the quarter, which exceeded our expectations and contributed to our bottom line beat. Overall, we experienced business conditions in Q1 that were similar to the previous several quarters. Our net retention rate for direct on the basis of ARR was consistent with the fourth quarter. We achieved year-over-year growth with a smaller sales organization, which indicates that our emphasis on productivity is having the desired effect. We've made steady progress in Q1 despite a continuing cost-conscious demand environment, and as our go-to-market and demand-gen engines begin to ramp, we're looking forward to picking up momentum. At the same time, our team remains committed to growing our business profitably and managing efficiently. I'm grateful for the commitment and efforts of our entire global team who are performing well in a challenging environment and staying focused on the significant opportunities ahead of us. With that, I'd now like to turn the call over to Mark.