kneat.com, inc.

Good day and welcome to the NEET first quarter 2024 earnings call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. 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. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press star one again. For operator assistance throughout the call, please press star zero. And finally, I would like to advise all participants this call is being recorded. Thank you. I'd now like to welcome Katie Cater to begin the conference. Katie, over to you.

Thank you, Operator, and welcome everyone to NEET's earnings conference call for the first quarter of 2024. Today's call will be hosted by Eddie Ryan, NEET's CEO, and Hugh Cavanaugh, NEET's CFO. Please note the safe harbor statement on slide two and the forward-looking statements disclosure at the end of the earnings release, informing you that some comments made on today's call contain forward-looking information. This information by its nature is subject to risks and uncertainties, so actual results may differ materially from the views expressed today. For further information on these risks and uncertainties, please consult our relevant filings, which can be found on CDAR and on our website at www.neat.com forward slash investors. Also, during today's call, we may refer to certain supplementary financial measures as key performance indicators. We use both IFRS measures and supplementary financial measures as key performance indicators when planning, monitoring, and evaluating our performance. We believe that these non-IFRS measures provide additional insight into NEET's financial results, and certain investors may use this information to evaluate NEET's performance from period to period. I will now pass the call to Eddie Ryan, CEO of NEET.

Thank you, Katie. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining the call. Hugh and I will talk this morning about what we are seeing across the business. We'll discuss what we're seeing in our end markets, and we will talk about how we are building for the future. After that, we will take your questions. As you saw in the numbers we reported yesterday, 2024 is off to a solid start in our first three months, with annual recurring revenue up 57% over last year's first quarter, gross profit margin up to 74% from 67% in the first quarter of last year and operating expense growing at a fraction of last year's pace up 17% year over year versus 77% in quarter one, 2023. This strong top line growth on much lower expense growth highlights the expansion potential baked into our customer base and the returns accruing from earlier expenditure on resources. In the first quarter alone, our existing customers across North America, Europe, and Asia added substantially to their Neat GX license base. And we expect them to continue expanding. Many have sites and processes where they have not yet deployed Neat, and their goal is to harmonize these processes across all their sites and divisions. Standardizing on a single platform improves quality, efficiency, and time to market. And standardizing on the Neat platform appears to be emerging as best practice. As our existing customers scale NEET with confidence and place increasing trust in our platform, this compels other companies to embark on their digital validation journey with NEET. We announced two large strategic customer additions in January and February and added several other smaller customers in the quarter, putting us on pace to surpass last year's number of new customer additions. Our healthy pipeline gives us confidence that we will continue on that track. Based on our strong land and expand capability, and if history is our guide, these incoming customers are the expanders of tomorrow. So I'm pleased to report that we are executing to plan. We have the teams and processes in place to support the increase in customers and the activity we are expecting this year. And most importantly, the teams themselves are in better shape than ever. When I look at our win reports, the one thing I see again and again is the salesperson attributing the win to teamwork. The collaboration between sales, engineering, customer success, our contracts team, and others is core to our culture and a competitive advantage. I believe it contributes significantly to our success, and I'm glad to see it thriving. With that, I will pass it over to Hugh to go over the financials.