Freshworks Inc. (NASDAQ:FRSH) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript May 1, 2024

Freshworks Inc. isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).

Operator: Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Freshworks First Quarter 2024 Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your speaker today, Joon Huh, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Joon Huh: Thank you. Good afternoon and welcome to Freshworks first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. Joining me today are Girish Mathrubootham, Freshworks' Chief Executive Officer; Dennis Woodside, Freshworks' President and Tyler Sloat, Freshworks' Chief Financial Officer. The primary purpose of today's call is to provide you with information regarding our first quarter 2024 performance and our financial outlook for our second quarter and full year 2024. Some of our discussion and responses to your questions may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are based on Freshwork's current expectations and estimates about its business and industry, including our financial outlook, macroeconomic uncertainties, management's beliefs and certain other assumptions made by the company, all of which are subject to change.

These statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Such risks include, but are not limited to, our ability to sustain our growth, to innovate, to reach our long term revenue goals, to meet customer demand, and to control costs and improve operating efficiency. For a discussion of additional material risks and other important factors that could affect our results, please refer to today's earnings release, our most recently filed Form 10-K, and our other periodic filings with SEC. Freshworks assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements in order to reflect events or circumstances that may arise after the date of this call, except as required by law.

During the course of today's call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures for historical periods are included in our earnings release, which is available on our Investor Relations website at ir.freshworks.com. I encourage you to visit our Investor Relations site to access our earnings release supplemental earnings slides, periodic SEC reports, a replay of today's call, or to learn more about Freshworks. And with that, let me turn it over to Girish.

Girish Mathrubootham: Thank you, Joon, and thank you all for joining us on this call today to cover our first quarter of 2024. We delivered solid, profitable growth in Q1, as we reported revenue of $165.1 million, reflecting an increase of 20% year-over-year. We meaningfully surpassed our estimate for free cash flow with $38.7 million in Q1 for a strong free cash flow margin of 23%. Our results reflect aspects of our growth strategy that are working specifically in AI innovation, IT business momentum and CSS adoption with larger customers, as well as the current macro environment. Before talking about our product and growth initiatives for the business, let me start with the news we announced earlier today, that we have signed a definitive agreement to acquire Device42.

With more than 800 customers around the world, Device42 provides enterprise grade IT asset management capabilities, which we believe can further strengthen our Freshservice offering. This is our first acquisition since we became a public company in 2021 and I'm excited about how this will enhance Freshservice, which is currently our fastest growing business. With this acquisition, we will be able to provide advanced asset discovery and application dependency mapping across data center and cloud environments. Combined with our robust ITOM and ITSM capabilities, this will help IT infrastructure and Ops teams track and understand the IT landscape to achieve greater efficiency in service delivery and reliability in IT operations. Through the combination, we'll be able to offer a more comprehensive solution for our customers.

We have historically partnered with Device42 on large enterprise opportunities in the field and after the transaction closes, we look forward to serving customers as one integrated team. We expect the transaction to close later in Q2. Turning to the quarter, I am pleased with our progress across the business in Q1. First, we advanced AI innovations across our products and platform to improve agent productivity and customer satisfaction. The use of our bots with Freddy self-service, continues to strengthen deflection capabilities across customers' preferred channels. Companies including Porsche eBike, Litrix and Travelopia can leverage self service capabilities to improve personalization and provide AI generated answers from their knowledge base.

Over the past quarter, our customers have seen deflection rates of more than 40% resulting from these bots. During the quarter, we made Freddy Copilot generally available to customers and I'm excited about the initial traction. We received early feedback that customer service agents are realizing more than a 30% improvement in their response times. While it's still early to track copilot metrics, we are encouraged by the initial results. Mahindra & Mahindra is an Indian maker of cars and farm equipment with more than $16 billion in revenue. Their on premise ITSM solution became complicated to manage had a clunky UI and poor self service capabilities. The company says adopting Freddy Copilot on top of Freshservice has been a game changer. The solution article generator feature in particular is enabling more than 1,000 engineers to make knowledge management more efficient and enjoyable, and now the company plans to scale these products across other teams.

We also saw continued momentum in our IT business with mid-market and enterprise customers. Customers are choosing us because our products are enterprise grade with a much lower total cost of ownership, including the latest AI capabilities. A global leader in golf equipment needed to find a way to solve for its 2,000 employees, walking up to the IT service desk with simple or complex problems. After deploying Freshservice, they later adopted our Freddy Self-service capabilities. With the help of our latest AI bots, the company has been able to further automate requests and significantly reduce resolution times and eliminate the lines waiting for IT help. We continue to invest in helping organizations manage their IT infrastructure and operations.

In Q1, we enabled IT teams to proactively communicate the status of critical services to their stakeholders using status pages. This has increased trust and led to reduced incident reports during service downtime. One such customer taking advantage of this capability is The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation. With more features and improvements, we are winning more mindshare with CIO's as we go after the large market opportunity in ITSM, ESM and beyond. Turning to the CS business, adoption continues to grow for our customer service suite, our multi-channel solution that combines conversational support with robust ticketing features and powered with AI. Companies like Monica Vinader and Stitch Fix are choosing CSS. Stitch Fix employs more than 5,000 people and leverages Stylus and AI to deliver personalized clothing and accessories to over three million customers.

Their previous customer service solution was expensive and complicated with outdated AI technology. A longstanding Freshservice customer, Stitch Fix adopted customer service suite as their solution in Q1, largely because of our leading AI innovations, including our copilot capabilities. Pretty copilot is boosting productivity for agents as power users have seen a reduction of resolution and response times of more than 30% and CSAT scores increase on average by more than 5%. As we continue to improve productivity for these agents, we believe this will lead to higher adoption within organizations and more expansion opportunities. This quarter, we introduced sentiment analysis for real time insights into the emotional tone of customer interactions.

We also added generative AI led quality management capabilities like article suggestions and auto completion to help support teams deliver superior responses. Within one quarter, these capabilities generated over 38 million interactions. Finally, I want to acknowledge today's news that I am transitioning into an Executive Chairman role at Freshworks and Dennis Woodside, currently Freshworks' President, will assume the Chief Executive Officer role. I'm incredibly proud of what we have accomplished at Freshworks since I founded the company 14 years ago. We are the first Indian SaaS company to be listed on Nasdaq, a true friend to more than 67,000 customers around the world and home to our 4,900 strong global kudumba. Our business is strong and we have a fantastic platform to launch Freshworks into a sustainable and growing public company.

Through these 14 years of building and scaling Freshworks, our hiring philosophy takes inspiration from an ancient poem from Tirukkuṟaḷ, written by a Tamil poet and philosopher, Thiruvalluvar 2,000 years ago. Ithanai Ithanaal Ivanmutikkum Endraaindhu Adhanai Avankan Vital, Translated in English, it means find the right person with the skills and resources to finish the job and empower them to do it. After seeing this play out beautifully over the years, the time has come to apply this to the CEO role at Freshworks and I'm fully confident that Dennis is the right leader to step into the CEO role. His deep understanding of the Freshworks business, his admiration and respect for our Indian roots, ability to attract world-class talent, and the operational excellence he has brought into Freshworks over the last 18 months, gives me the confidence to pass over the baton to Dennis, and I look forward to being his trusted advisor in my new capacity to help make Freshwork software available to the Fortune 5 million.

Moving forward, I look forward to working with our product teams to drive our AI vision and long-term product strategy. I would like to thank the entire Freshworks team for all the support they have given me over the years and for delivering another solid quarter as we continue on our mission to deliver modern AI powered customer and employee service solutions that increase efficiency and improve engagement for companies of all sizes. I would like to congratulate Dennis and now turn it over to him to share what we are seeing in the marketplace, how larger customers are driving our business growth, and how companies are expanding the use of our products.

Dennis Woodside: Thank you, Gi. I am honoured to build on what Gi started 14 years ago. What he has created is truly special. Our mission and strategy remain the same. We stand before extraordinary opportunities and have the right foundation to make it possible; a winning combination of our strong focus on delighting customers and our product innovation. I'm committed and excited to continue our journey of growth. As Gi mentioned, we efficiently scaled the business in Q1, with revenue growth of 20% and strong free cash flow margins of 23%, we exceeded the Rule of 40 for the quarter. We continue to see momentum with larger customers choosing our enterprise-grade solutions. In Q1, customers paying over $50,000 in ARR grew 29% to 2,593, representing 49%, or nearly half of our business.

Our solutions provide enterprise-grade capabilities combined with consumer level usability to address the needs of large, complex organizations. For example, Cineworld Group is the world's second largest cinema chain with more than 700 movie theaters across the US, UK and other countries. Their prior customer service solution wasn't allowing them to respond to queries fast enough and gain insights into their customer's experience. They adopted Freshdesk across their Cineworld, Picturehouse and Regal customer service teams. Now the company is able to quickly identify and respond to customer queries, understand root causes and develop better steps to resolve them using the power of Freshworks. I'm also very excited about entering into a definitive agreement to acquire Device42.

We believe this acquisition will help us win more mid-market and enterprise customers as advanced ITAM capabilities for discovery and dependency mapping are becoming a critical part of the IT purchasing decision for large customers. With this acquisition, we intend to build on the upmarket momentum and success that we're already seeing with Freshservice for IT customers. Turning to expansion, in Q1, net dollar retention was 106% and customers using more than one product was 26%. We saw notable expansion and multiproduct activity from Freshservice for business teams. We're also executing on the cross-sell of our two largest product areas in IT and customer service. An example of cross sell is Dark Matter Technologies. Dark Matter employs more than 1,000 people and makes software that enables retail banks, credit unions and credit vendors to simplify lending.

Already a Freshservice customer for ITSM, they chose customer service suite to replace their incumbent solution because it was easy to go, live within their tight timeframes and simple to configure. We remain bullish on the AI opportunity. We believe this will be a tailwind to our business and this is a big part of our future growth strategy. As Gi said, we saw promising signs of momentum from Freddie Self-service and Freddie Copilot in Q1, with over 30% improvement in productivity metrics for our customers. This has led to early signs of monetization since the Freddie Copilot add-on became GA this past quarter. From a market demand perspective, we continue to see the impact of a challenging macroeconomic environment. While Q4 saw an uptick in expansion activity, we saw pressure on overall expansion rates for Q1 across our customer base in terms of agent growth.

For the SMB part of the market where we attract customers through an inbound digital motion, there is still work to be done to improve this motion. We're seeing lower expansion rates and a lower number of net new customer adds as the macro economy is having a meaningful impact on this part of our customer base. This led to slower growth for the CS business as the majority of the business is from SMB. Given this current market environment, it's important for us to maintain a balanced approach to our investments. In Q1, we were able to create further efficiencies while investing in the business to drive future growth. I'll turn it over to Tyler to talk about this in more detail.

Tyler Sloat: Thanks Dennis and congratulations and thanks to all of you joining on the call and via webcast. I'm pleased with our ability to deliver another quarter of durable growth, while improving our profitability. All the operational improvements that we implemented last year has created positive business momentum that carried into this year to drive further efficiencies and strong margin expansion in Q1. For our call today, I'll cover the Q1 2024 financial results, provide background on the key metrics and close with our forward-looking commentary and expectations for Q2 and the full year 2024. I'll include constant currency comparisons for certain metrics to provide a better view of our business trends. As a reminder, most of our discussion will be focused on non-GAAP financial results, which exclude the impact of stock-based compensation expenses and other adjustments.

Starting with the income statement, total revenue in Q1 grew 20% to $165.1 million on a reported basis and 19% adjusted for constant currency. Professional services contribute approximately 2.6 million to total revenue, which is a lower contribution percentage than prior quarters. This is intentional as we are shifting more services revenue to our partner network. We continue to see momentum in our IT business specifically for new deals from mid-market and enterprise customers. We're also seeing up market traction from the CS business as our largest expansion deals in Q1 were from our customer service products. Moving to margins; non-GAAP gross margin increased to 85% as we continue to drive efficiencies in our infrastructure spend as we scale the business.

Compared to the prior year, this represents an improvement of more than 200 basis points. We also improved our non-GAAP operating margin to 13% as non-GAAP operating income came in at 21.8 million, which includes a onetime benefit of $3.7 million related to employee benefits expenses. Adjusting for this one-time benefit, non-GAAP operating margin would be 11% and still ahead of our prior expectations as we made ongoing operational improvements and shifted some marketing and legal spend into future quarters. As we talked about previously, our financial model was built for us to make investments in our many growth initiatives. The same time, we have flexibility in the model to adjust our spend as we see demand change throughout the year to prudently manage our expense base and drive efficiencies.

Moving to operating metrics, our two key business metrics are net dollar retention and customers contributing more than $5,000 in ARR. Net dollar retention came in line with our expectations at 1.06% in the quarter, both as reported and on a constant currency basis. While our customers continue to grow, their spend for our products in Q1, we did not see the same elevated levels of large expansion deals that we saw at the end of last year. Overall churn modestly increased and continues to remain squarely in the mid-teens. Looking forward, we're planning for a Q2 net dollar retention range of approximately 105% to 106%. For our other key business metric of number of customers contributing more than $5,000 in ARR, this metric grew 11% year-over-year to 20,549 customers in the quarter and now represents 89% of our ARR.

On a constant currency basis, this customer metric grew 12% year-over-year. For our larger customer cohort, contributing more than $50,000 in ARR, this cohort grew 29% year-over-year to 2,593 customers and now represents 49% of our ARR. The constant currency growth rate for this quarter was also 29%. For total customers, we added approximately 400 net customers and ended the quarter with over 67,500 customers. The lower net adds over the past two quarters has largely been a result of a lower number of our new CS customers, especially in the SMB. For the past few quarters, we have been focusing our efforts and go-to-market spend to target higher yielding customers, which is resulting in ongoing increases for ARPA. Now let's turn to calculated billings, balance sheet and cash items.

Our normalized calculated billings growth was 17% in Q1, down one percentage point from the 18% normalized growth rate in Q4. As we've talked about before, billings growth rates can fluctuate quarter-to-quarter due to a number of factors. In Q1, we had a negative impact primarily from lower early renewal activity compared to the prior quarter, resulting in, as reported calculating billings growth rate of 14%, or $174.7 million. Looking forward to Q2 2024, our initial estimate for calculating billings growth is 12%. For the full year 2024, we expect calculated billings growth to be approximately 16%, approximately one percentage point below our annual revenue growth. Moving to our cash items, we meaningfully outperformed our free cash flow estimates, coming in at $38.7 million for Q1.

This was a result of strong collections activities and an ongoing focus to drive efficiencies on our spend around headcount and vendor costs. Given our strong cash flow performance in the quarter, we are increasing our full year 2024 estimates to $125 million with approximately $28 million in Q2. We ended Q1 maintaining a similar balance with prior quarters for cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities with $1.2 billion. We continue to manage and offset some share count dilution by net settling vested equity amounts and using $23 million during the quarter. As a reminder, this activity is reflected in our financing activities and is excluded from free cash flow. We plan to continue net settling vested equity amounts going forward, resulting in Q2 cash usage of approximately $16 million at current stock price levels.

For the year, we expect to use approximately $70 million to net subtle vested equity amounts. Turning to our share count for Q1, we had approximately 322 million shares outstanding on a fully diluted basis as of March 31, 2024, representing a share reduction compared to the prior year and quarter. The fully diluted calculation consists of approximately 299 million shares outstanding, 21 million related to unvested RSUs and PRSUs, and two million shares related to outstanding options. Let me now provide our forward-looking estimates. I'll go through the numbers first and then provide background commentary afterward. For the second quarter of 2024, we expect revenue to be in the range of $168 million to $170 million, growing 16% to 17% year-over-year.

Non-GAAP income from operations to be in a range of $6.5 million to $8.5 million, and non-GAAP net income from per share to be in the range of $0.05 to $0.06, assuming weighted average shares outstanding of approximately 305.6 million shares. For the full year 2024, we expect revenue to be in the range of $695 million to $705 million, growing 17% to 18% year-over-year, non GAAP income from operations to be in the range of $58 million to $64 million, and non-GAAP net income per share to be in the range of $0.32 or $0.35, assuming weighted average shares outstanding of approximately $307.6 million. Our forward-looking estimates are based on FX rates as of April 26, 2024, so any future currency moves are not factored in. We want to provide our best view of the business today in a changing market environment.

So here are a few items to call out. First, on the Device42 acquisition, our forward-looking estimates do not include numbers from the Device42 acquisition. We'll cover details of the financial impact from the acquisition after closing. That said, we expect the transaction to be accretive to our revenue growth for this year and have minimal impact to our free cash flow estimates. Second, our full year 2024 revenue estimates compared to our prior estimate, the current estimates includes negative adjustments of approximately $2 million related to FX moves since last quarter and negative $1.3 million related to the intentional shifting of professional services revenue to partners. Third, our Q2 operating income; as a reminder, we have seasonality in our business as Q2 expenses normally step up as the annual merit increases take effect, leading to lower margins quarter-over-quarter.

Let me close by saying, we're very focused on growing the business while creating a durable, profitable company to deliver long term value for our stakeholders. We're innovating on our products, especially in the area of AI. We're building business momentum and gaining traction with larger customers, and we're driving efficiencies in the business that's reflected in our financial results. We're excited about the many opportunities ahead. And with that, let's take your questions. Operator?

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