Backblaze, Inc. (NASDAQ:BLZE) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Backblaze, Inc. (NASDAQ:BLZE) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript May 8, 2024

Backblaze, 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: Hello, and welcome to the Backblaze First Quarter 2024 Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the call to Mimi Kong, Director of Investor Relations and Corporate Development. Please go ahead.

Mimi Kong: Thank you. Good afternoon, and welcome to Backblaze’s first quarter 2024 earnings call. On the call with me today are Gleb Budman, Co-Founder, CEO and Chairperson of the Board; and Frank Patchel, Chief Financial Officer. Today, Backblaze will discuss the financial results that were distributed earlier this afternoon. Statements on this call include forward-looking statements about our future financial results, use of our IPO proceeds, results from new features and offerings and the impact of price changes, partnerships and sales and marketing initiatives. Our ability to compete effectively and manage our growth and our strategy to acquire new customers and retain and expand our business with existing customers. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially, including those described in our risk factors that are included in our Annual Report on Form 10-K and our other financial filings.

You should not rely on our forward-looking statements as of future events. All forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions and beliefs as of today and we undertake no obligation to update them except as required by law. Our discussion today will include non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for our GAAP results. Reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP results may be found in our earnings release, which was furnished with our Form 8-K filed today with the SEC. You can also find a slide presentation related to our comments in the webcast, which will also be posted to our Investor Relations page after the call. Please also see our press release or presentation for definitions of additional metrics such as NRR and gross customer retention.

Before I turn the call over to Gleb, I’d also like to mention that in the latter portion of our call, as in prior calls, we will be addressing questions from investors that we gathered through the Say Technologies platform. Thank you for joining us and I would now like to turn the call over to Gleb.

Gleb Budman: Thanks, Mimi. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We had a record start across our key financial metrics. This quarter, revenue grew at 28%, 8 percentage points better than last year. We achieved an adjusted EBITDA margin of positive 6% versus negative 12% a year ago. And finally, cash usage this quarter was only $600,000 a dramatic improvement from the $13 million of cash used this same period last year. Not only have we delivered accelerated business growth and improved efficiency, but we have also delivered product innovations that serve our mission of supporting customers and partners with the best storage cloud. Before diving into our business results, I want to speak to a customer trend that we’re already benefiting from today and which we see accelerating.

A few months ago, we conducted a survey of more than 400 IT decision makers. A majority of the respondents indicated that they prefer to choose from best of breed solutions when selecting vendors. And yet, the cloud landscape has been historically defined by Cloud 1.0, where a few diversified cloud providers aim to lock customers into their platforms and take away customer choice. You may have heard that Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure recently announced free egress for their customers. They may have done this to mollify regulators because the Cloud 1.0 model is a walled garden by design, but this move does not at all address what customers actually want because it only applies to customers who leave those platforms completely. What customers really want is to freely use their data with multiple cloud services.

These fake free egress announcements are only free exit, not free egress and underscore that Cloud 1.0 just doesn’t work that way. Businesses want Cloud 2.0, an open cloud ecosystem where businesses can use their data wherever and however they want to. It’s better for them, better for innovation, and ultimately better for the broader economy. And Backblaze is built for Cloud 2.0. First, our egress is actually free, allowing customers to use their data without fear of crippling bills or limits on who they work with. Second, we have a robust partner ecosystem, which gives customers easy access to the best of breed platforms they need. Third, we provide a trusted durable platform that provides strong performance. And last, we continue to deliver innovations that support customers in using the best of breed services they want.

A great example of this last point is our newest innovation called event notifications. Event notifications gives customers the ability to build automated workflows across different best of breed cloud providers. For example, a customer can upload a video to B2 Cloud Storage, and event notifications will automatically trigger a compute process at another provider that prepares the file for streaming. Currently, similar offerings in the market only trigger actions within one platform or require complex and restricted workarounds to work with other providers. We designed event notifications to be platform agnostic, empowering customers to build workflows from the services they want, cutting out significant inefficiencies and costs in the process.

The product launched in private preview just 3 weeks ago, and we already have over 100 organizations that have requested to join the early release. Event notifications was also recognized as product of the year for cloud computing and storage at the National Association of Broadcasters Conference, a major trade show for the media and entertainment industry. I’m very encouraged by the early reception and the potential for our services to become increasingly strategic for our customers. Including event notifications, Backblaze has announced 4 major releases over the past 6 months from the shard stash performance upgrade to enterprise control for business backup to our powered by Backblaze program, I am proud of our team for delivering features that differentiate us and strategically position us as the de facto cloud storage provider for the open cloud.

In Q1, we also made significant progress in our compliance and security programs, including and the Motion Picture Association’s trusted partner network. Focusing on compliance and security is another key element in our effort to make our services as easy to adopt as possible. In this case, for the state and local government and educational industries and the media and entertainment industry. At the same time, we continue to expand and enrich our partner network. Recently, Backblaze and Carahsoft, which is one of the largest privately held IT software and services companies in the world announced that we’ve been added to their NASPO ValuePoint contract, which eases the procurement process in government and education. Our partners also continue to help us facilitate and win deals with larger customers.

Recently, the media team of one of the world’s largest retailers needed a trusted location to hold their creative work. Their preferred reseller recommended adopting Backblaze. Our performance, ease of use and affordability won the deal. In addition, our sole focus is a best of breed provider for cloud storage means that this retailer doesn’t need to worry about any conflict of interest. With a vendor like Amazon that obviously wouldn’t be the case. Additionally, a number of meaningful partners have already joined our powered by Backblaze program, which we announced just last quarter. One of the most recent companies to join powered by is Axle AI. Their new Axle AI Cloud leverages our cloud platform to deliver AI powered media search tools.

In the broader AI space, we’re seeing a growing number of partners and customers utilizing the value of B2 cloud storage for AI workflows. Since the beginning of 2023, the number of AI companies using B2 for data storage has doubled with a wide range of use cases such as wild fire management and monitoring, manufacturing optimization, satellite data analysis and much more. I’m very proud of what the team has achieved to not only reach our record financial results, but to also deliver our platform and product innovations. I believe these put us in a strong position to deliver the transformational power of Cloud 2.0. I love seeing what businesses can do after we help to free their data from legacy platforms. Before I hand off the call, today we announced that our CFO, Frank is planning to retire this year.

A search for his successor is already underway and Frank intends to remain with us to help ensure a smooth transition to our new CFO. We’re all hugely thankful for everything Frank has brought to the team, but we’ll save our gratitude and celebration of his many accomplishments for his departure later this year. Until we hire and onboard his replacement, Frank will continue to help us drive great results. I’ll pass the call to Frank now to review our financial results. Frank?

Frank Patchel: Thank you, Gleb, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today. As Gleb mentioned, I’m planning to retire once we’ve identified my replacement and completed the onboarding process. There will be time for goodbyes when we get there, but until then, it will be business as usual. And I’m happy to turn to the record business results we have to share today. As a reminder, unless otherwise noted, I will be referring to non-GAAP metrics and the growth rates mentioned are year-on-yea . We remain focused on 2 key metrics, revenue growth and adjusted EBITDA, which is defined in our earnings release. As Glenn mentioned, we have made significant strides in strengthening our financials from a year ago. This quarter compared to last year, we accelerated our growth rate, while expanding our adjusted gross margin, significantly improving adjusted EBITDA margins and meaningfully reducing cash usage.

The tremendous strides made over the year were positively impacted by the operating leverage inherent in our business. We have continued to execute and build a strong and consistent track record as a public company. Our Q1 revenue totaled $30 million an increase of 28% year-over-year versus 20% the same period last year. V2 cloud storage revenue was $14.6 million reflecting 47% growth. Computer backup revenue totaled 15.3 million reflecting 14% growth. Turning to our net revenue retention or NRR, total company NRR was 112% with B2 cloud storage at 126% and computer backup at 101%, which continued to show quarter-on-quarter improvement. Working down the P&L, adjusted gross margin increased about 500 basis points year-over-year to 77%, reflecting the price increase we put in place in Q4 of last year and further operating efficiencies at our data centers.

This quarter, adjusted EBITDA was a positive 1.9 million or 6% of revenue, reflecting a substantial 18 points higher than the same period last year. Over the past year, we have significantly grown revenue, while carefully managing expenses and increased operating efficiencies. This quarter, we also had slower headcount additions, which was offset by an increase in payroll taxes related to the recent stock price appreciation. Turning to the balance sheet, cash and short-term investments, including restricted cash, totaled 32.8 million at the end of Q1 2024 versus 33.4 million at the end of Q4 2023, reflecting just $600,000 in cash usage. Even after removing the benefit of options proceeds, cash usage for the quarter was about 4.9 million, compared to 13.7 million in Q1 of last year, an almost $9 million improvement.

The reduction in cash usage benefited from the price increases we put in place last quarter and operating expense discipline. Moving on to our guidance, for the second quarter, we expect revenue to be in the range of 30.7 million to 31.1 million. We expect Q2 adjusted EBITDA margin between 6% and 8%. For the full year 2024, we are reiterating revenue guidance of $126 million to $128 million and adjusted EBITDA guidance range of 8% to 10%. For year-end ’24, we continue to project having at least $20,000,000 in cash. So to wrap it up, we are very pleased with our Q1 performance. We had a record start to the year where we accelerated growth and continued to drive more operating leverage. I will now pass the call back to Gleb.

Gleb Budman: Thanks, Frank. I’m proud of our record financial results and technology innovation. Thank you to our employees, customers, partners and investors for joining us on this journey as we help lead the industry shift to Cloud 2.0. I’m excited to see many of you at the Oppenheimer Conference tomorrow and the Needham and Craig-Hallum Investor Conferences later this month. And with that, I’d like to open it up for questions. Operator?

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Q&A Session

Operator: Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Today’s first question comes from Simon Leopold with Raymond James.

Vittorio Chiu : Hi, guys. This is Vittorio Chiu in for Simon. I wanted to follow-up on the egress fee comment that you guys made. Acknowledging that Google and AWS free egress has a number of strings attached. Do these move at least slightly alleviate concerns from customers’ primary concern was vendor lock in and maybe close the gap slightly versus that place when considering egress fees?

Gleb Budman: So the short answer is no. So what they’ve really done is free exit, not free egress. And the thing about it is that in the past before these customers could exit the clouds and some of us as open cloud vendors would actually cover the costs of having them leave those traditional cloud providers. But what customers really want is to be able to actually use their data. So the barrier that they have put in place for what they’re doing is you have to fully 100% stop using their platforms. That’s not what these customers are trying to do. They’re trying to actually use their data. And so an example I think I’ve shared in the prior earnings call was a customer that had previously been entirely on AWS, had some outages and wanted to use multiple cloud services to improve durability.

They actually added back ways, made us the primary, made AWS the secondary and decreased their cost in half overall because our partnership with one of the cloud CDNs, enabled them to transfer data for free. And therefore, they could double their durability, decrease their overall cost in half and improve their overall infrastructure. So that’s the kind of thing that the customers want. These free exit moves don’t help with that at all for customers.

Vittorio Chiu : So the full the kind of migration away was never really an issue anyways, kind of what you’re saying?

Gleb Budman: That’s correct.

Vittorio Chiu : Can you give us an update? I don’t know if you spoke about this in your prerecorded comments around the AI focused solutions that you mentioned last quarter that you guys are working on and developing. Can you give us an update around that, and kind of your progress around that?

Gleb Budman: Sorry, Victor. I’m not sure about an AI solution we talked about developing, but what I’ll tell you is that we’re focused on helping customers with their AI use cases. And we shared some of the examples like the wildfire and example and the satellite navigation example that I mentioned on the call, just to give maybe a little more color on those. So as the customers are building their AI workflows, they need a place where the data itself lives, the foundational data platform for all that information. And more and more customers are coming to Backblaze to have Backblaze be that foundational data platform. So I gave a couple of examples of that on the prior earnings call. In the case of our customer that does wildfire analysis, what they’re trying to do is take camera footage, look at all of the potential wildfires out there and then triage them using AI.

And the data for all that underlying analysis is on Backblaze. What the satellite navigation company is trying to do is help create better global navigation and they’re using AI to make the models better, especially in places where tall buildings and other things get in the way of creating those models. And they’re using AI to make those models better and they’re using Backblaze as the foundational data platform for their AI workflows. So that’s what we’re doing. We’re providing that really high performance, highly durable, highly available platform, which supports them in building these workflows because of the, our support for the open cloud ecosystem.

Vittorio Chiu : But, didn’t you mention some specific focus, I’m sorry, kind of like investment let me think. Yes, last quarter, you said the Head of Sales, they returned his focus to our AI initiatives, which are aimed to help support customers in many so, okay. So that’s what you were referring to. It wasn’t a specific product.

Gleb Budman: Yes, exactly.

Vittorio Chiu : Okay, got it.

Gleb Budman: Right. So as we bring on a new Head of Sales, our current Head of Sales nearly will be stepping into the role focused on our AI initiatives. By AI initiatives, I what, I don’t mean is product launches. What I mean is the opportunities in the AI space that we have to help customers because we do think that there are plentiful opportunities that we can help. There are many customers who are already doing it and we would like him to take on the role of really understanding how we can further help more customers with it.

Vittorio Chiu : I see. So it’s like a marketing initiative to help customers understand Backblaze’s role in being able to accomplish those things, that’s more of what you’re referring to?

Gleb Budman: It’s a two sided, yes, it’s both inbound and outbound. So it’s both going out and helping educate more customers and also understanding what their use cases and needs are and bring more of that insight into the organization so we can evolve with their needs.

Operator: Thank you. The next question is from Zach Cummins with B. Riley Securities.

Ethan Widell: This is Ethan Widell calling in for Zach Cummins. To start, could you maybe speak a little bit to the different levers that you can possibly pull to sustain your strong growth in the B2 closet storage area.

Gleb Budman: Sure. Happy to touch on some of those. So the first one is just go-to-market. When we went public, we talked about that 80% of all of our revenue was self-serve. So customers show up to the website, prospects show up to the website, they enter a new one, a password, they enter a credit card, and they sign up and go. They don’t ever talk to a human. And 20% was with our sales assisted motion. And those customers were about 20x bigger. And so at IPO, we said we wanted to lean into that sales motion in addition to continuing to optimize our really efficient self-serve motion. So we’ve added resources and investment to the self-serve side. We’ve done things like optimizing the way the website works and we continue to do that to drive more self-serve business.

And we’ve seen year-on-year growth quarter-on-quarter with the number of paying customers on the self-serve side. We believe we continue to have opportunity for that. We also have built up the sales motion and we’ve done that with salespeople. We’ve brought on some additional salespeople this quarter for some of the upmarket motion and the channel side. So we’ve, last year, we kicked off an initiative to build out our channel efforts. And so we’ve been starting to lean more into that. So the go-to-market motion overall is one way to drive growth. And then the other is the innovation side. So I highlighted on the call, shard stash, enterprise control, powered by and now Event Notifications, those are all innovations which help us expand into new markets, expand our opportunity with existing markets and also upsell to our existing customer base.

Vittorio Chiu : And then can you speak to maybe if there’s been any uptick or downtick in churn?

Frank Patchel: We’re really pleased about the churn statistics that we’ve seen. We think of it as customer retention. Our customer retention has remained at 91% overall. And that considers the fact that we did do a price increase in quarter four. So it’s been very, very strong. We also look at it at our renewal rates. To be a backup customers are continuing to renew at very strong rates, actually a little stronger than we thought. So it’s actually kicking up our deferred revenue nicely and the customer retention there is quite strong as well.

Operator: The next question comes from Jason Ader with William Blair.

Jason Ader: Just a few questions. First, just maybe some commentary on the macro environment and how it might have changed or not since last quarter? And then just some questions for you, Frank, just on the numbers. So 14% growth in computer backup, what is driving that? Is that just the price increase, but it’s definitely a better growth rate than what we’ve seen over the last 4 quarters? And then on just the B2 growth rate, it’s a little bit worse than what we saw last quarter and then also last year ago quarter, 49 and 47, this quarter was 43. So just what’s going on there? How seen some deceleration on cloud and why we’ve seen some acceleration on computer backup?

Gleb Budman: Jason, I’ll start with the first piece of it and then I’ll let Franco to answer the question. You asked him for to him directly. So on the macro side of things, we aren’t seeing anything massively different. What I will say is that I think we’ve all seen that the Fed has kept interest rates where they are. The bulk of our focus in terms of our customer base is the small to mid market customers who are certainly sensitive to the macroeconomic environment. And so we’re being cautious about where that’s headed, but we haven’t seen anything too significant one way or the other with customers. We continue to sign up customers. Obviously, we had a strong quarter overall and that’s driven by customers continuing to stay with us and continuing to sign up.

Frank Patchel: I’ll talk about the growth rates of the product side. So actually we’re pleased with our growth rates. The first one is that in computer backup, it is 14% this quarter, which is very strong. That is due to the price increase, but it’s also due to what I was referring to before, which is very high renewal rates, because remember every month we have more and more customers renewing off of their one year, two year contract. So those renewal rates have been particularly high. For the full year, we did see 10%, we said that and we’re remaining at that amount. So we do are still thinking in that double-digits. One of the things that’s starting to contribute to the revenue side is B1E, which is our enterprise version.

That is an upsell version for existing accounts, and we’re seeing some uptake there already even though it’s just been introduced. And also we have some new customers coming in on B1E as well, and we’re very excited about that. And that enterprise is really aimed at larger companies, as we move-up market. So, good things there. On computer backup, it’s, excuse me, on B2, the growth there at 47% this quarter in revenue was a bit higher than we thought, that’s why we were at the top of our range. We are pleased with that. It is due to the combination of the price increase and the new business. But you’re right, as we move through the year, we’re saying that our total growth for the entire year will be about 40%. And the reason for that is in quarter four, we’ll be lapping our price increase.

So there’s a little bit less growth there in that quarter. But overall, we do like what we see.

Jason Ader: Yes, sorry, I misspoke. I meant B2 Cloud ARR growth was lower than last quarter, it was 43%, I believe, 49% last quarter and then 47% a year ago. So that’s what was trying to get at.

Frank Patchel: So ARR, it’s not a great, it’s not a perfect predictor for our business, because of the ups and downs and the calculation wobbles a bit. We calculated off of the last month of the quarter. So when you have a higher month because we have so much pay as you go revenue that every day is important. So it wobbles a little bit based on the calculation methodology. But we still think that our growth rates there are well above, the market or the growth rates over the market. So we do feel good about it.

Operator: The next question comes from Bruce Goldfarb with Lake Street Capital Markets.

Bruce Goldfarb: In terms of the market segments, can you compare midsize company demand with SMB demand? Where you’re seeing strength or just strong?

Gleb Budman: Yes, it’s an interesting question, Bruce, and thanks for the question. What I’ll say is that we’ve been doing the smaller size of the mid market for a while and we have volume there, right? We have about 100,000 customers overall using B2. So we have volume there. On the larger end of the mid market, it’s a upmarket momentum that we’ve been doing more recently. And so I think it’s harder to gauge the kind of statistical significance of the number of deals in that part of the market, to be a strong indicator of overall market demand. I think what we are seeing is that customers in the upper market are interested in the value proposition we provide, which is part of why we decided to put more focus there. The platform provides a lot of value for a larger customer because if they have more data, they have more needs around that data and they have the opportunity to optimize their platform further by using Backblaze.

So I think that whilst it’s hard to draw statistical significance from what we’re seeing to the broader market trends, I think we’re pleased with the interest engagement that we’re seeing in the upper mid market. And just to make sure it’s clear, when we talk about moving upmarket, this is not Fortune 500 and the federal government. These are companies that are up to about thousand employees.