Near Intelligence Inc (NIR) 2023 Q1 法說會逐字稿

Hello and welcome to Near Intelligence's First Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. This is [Gwen Lauber] with Near, and with me on today's call are Anil Matthews, Near's Chief Executive Officer and Rahul Agarwal, our Chief Financial Officer.

Our earnings press release was issued this afternoon and is posted on our website. The primary purpose of today's call is to provide you with information regarding our first quarter 2023 performance and offer an outlook for our second quarter and full-year 2023.

Certain statements made on this call that are not historical facts, including those related to our future plans, objectives and expected performance, are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements represent our outlook only as of the date of this conference call.

While we believe any forward-looking statements made on this call are reasonable, actual results may differ materially because the statements are based on our current expectations and subject to risks and uncertainties. These risks and uncertainties are discussed in our filings with the SEC. You should refer to and consider these factors when relying on such forward-looking information.

Any forward-looking statements made speaks only as of the date on which it is made and we do not undertake and expressly disclaim any obligation to update or alter our forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by applicable law. I encourage you to visit our Investor Relations website at investors.near.com to access our first quarter press release, SEC reports and the webcast replay of today's call.

During the course of today's call, we will refer to certain adjusted financial measures. We use these non-GAAP financial measures to review and assess our performance and for planning purposes. These non-GAAP financial measures should be considered in addition to, not as a substitute for or in isolation from GAAP measures.

Additional information about these non-GAAP measures, including a reconciliation of non-GAAP to comparable GAAP measures, is included in our press release. Finally, unless otherwise stated, all financial comparisons on this call will be made to our fiscal year 2022 results on a historical basis. And with that, let me turn the call over to Anil.

Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Let me start with our financial highlights. First quarter, revenue was $15.5 million, slightly above the high end of our guidance. Net revenue retention for the quarter continues to be greater than we expected and came in at around 10% well within our popular expectations. Notwithstanding on target revenue growth, we continued to sharpen our focus on the path to profitability.

Against our planned adjusted EBITDA, we have delivered a better than expected adjusted EBITDA of negative $7 million in Q1. This should further improve our year-end adjusted EBITDA realization. The results of our quarter support our belief that as pledges tighten, companies continue to spend on products that deliver ROI.

Because our solutions provide insights that help our customers to make better decisions and to more effectively utilize their budget, we believe our customers will continue to subscribe to our solutions as we help them to understand which programs had a positive impact on their bottom line.

Now additionally, one question has come up in all my meetings, what are we doing with generative AI? AI is not new to Near. It's a part of the foundation that our products are built on. And generative AI should help us develop even more advanced solutions in the future. It's a natural complement to over 10 years of our learning and innovation.

Now I'd like to talk to you about Near's products and our strategy for the future. Today, Near solutions are built on three pillars; data, privacy and AI. Each pillar enhances the others, making our solutions better. Let's take the first pillar, which is data.

Data is what we understand, it's what we built our initial business on over the past decade. Data is what sets Near apart from other companies because we believe that we have high quality, proprietary, large scale data that is unmatched. You probably heard me say that data is the jet fuel that you need to train your AI model. Data is what helps us realize our vision of truly helping organizations make better decisions.

While other companies talk about the scale of the data and how fast they are growing the data, Near actually is investing heavily in data quality and the depth. We believe we have enough data. Our focus now is on providing our customers with the highest quality data, making it even more useful to them. We believe that we can further improve the quality of our data by embedding AI models in the pipeline in the data.

The second pillar of our foundation is privacy. Clearly, you cannot aspire to be a leading trustworthy global data company without having made significant investments in privacy and driving a lot of innovation through our work on privacy. Our products are built with privacy led design to provide the largest source of interlinking with people, places and products.

Being in compliance with local regulations everywhere, our customer's business is crucial for the leading company and our customers take comfort in knowing that we work every day to ensure that privacy built solutions are in compliance. In our industry, privacy is here to stay.

The third pillar is AI. We've been leveraging machine learning and AI in our platform and products for the past decade. Many of you have seen this work demonstrated in our Allspark platform where we use natural language to query people and their behavior across places and product categories.

In 2016, this was groundbreaking because it allowed our customers and partners to seamlessly access a large repository of consumer data using natural language. With the development of generative AI, we are even more excited about Near's opportunity because we think we'll be able to add more value to the work we do for our customers and to be even more differentiated from our competitors.

We look at generative AI as a significant platform and shift that will have profound impact on many industries, including our own data industry. We also believe that it will uncover a chasm where our proprietary data will be a major competitive differentiator as we believe we'll be able to train our models not just to help our customers discover insights, but also to fill in the knowledge gaps while protecting privacy.

Near's three pillars, data and AI underpinned by privacy, provide us with a solid foundation today. But it's the convergence of our high quality proprietary data with generative AI in an ever changing regulatory compliance landscape, which we believe will give us an even greater advantage in the future.

What is important? At Near, our goal is to maximize data utility while protecting privacy. We are driving innovation to make sure that our customers get maximum value out of data. We believe our high quality data, coupled with generative AI, will put an end to having to choose between the value of data and compliance.

We believe that we have the tools that will, in the near future, allow our customers to be privacy compliant without sacrificing the insights that the data delivers. Generative AI should allow us to break the traditional model and to fill in the gaps so that we are able to not only be privacy compliant, but still provide valuable insights to our customers.

Moving on to our quarterly results, a significant part of our go to market strategy is our focus on landing and expanding within our customers. We've had much success by starting with a small view with a customer in one geography or division and then expanding the relationship over time. We've been able to do this by providing solutions that exceed their expectations.

On the last call, I mentioned a large European retailer who started working with us a few years ago, with a small subscription to our platform. They have just renewed the contract with us for an eight figure, one-year subscription. And that's a great example of a land and expand strategy.

Building on that experience, during the quarter, we also find the new customer Aldi, one of the top supermarket chains in the world, in partnership with Prospect Media. The customer will use Near to drive footfall traffic into their stores and measure the effectiveness of their add campaigns. Near solutions will allow them to get a better understanding of the appropriate catchment area for each store and help them attract prospects and customers.

In the first quarter, one of our customers, one of the world's largest commercial real estate services and investment firms, renewed its contract with Near with a three-year extension for its Canadian unit. In the United Kingdom unit, the customer renewed its subscription and expanded relationship by adding on a second product. In time, I believe, we will continue to expand our footprint with this customer.

During the quarter, we also expanded our relationship with a tourism partner to offer more insights to his clients across New York state. Due to high demand, they continue to expand the number of points of interest they have to offer to their New York clients. Through its relationship with Near, the partner can better understand tourist visitation trends, providing its customers with insights at a more granular level.

In the US, we signed a partnership with a leading digital marketing platform built for travel marketers. The customer's platform uses artificial intelligence and travel data to provide multi-channel marketing solutions that drive visitors' destinations. Near's insights will help them deliver deeper reporting on the impact of digital marketing programs for their customers, which will in turn help those destination marketers measure and prove their impact to the stakeholders.

As you know, Near is a global company. Beyond its large customers in Europe and North America, we also have a large presence in APAC. One of the customers is Yahoo Australia and we recently expanded our multi-year relationship.

Since the beginning of the relationship in 2020, Near has expanded into additional geographies that Yahoo serves. Near solutions serve as a measurement tool for Yahoo APAC property, helping the customer to demonstrate increased value across its online property.

Recently, we also closed our largest single contract in Southeast Asia with Admatik Malaysia. This is a leading digital media company in Southeast Asia that works with some of the region's largest brands. Again, this is a three-year deal and partnership with a minimum commitment well into seven figures.

Another exciting aspect of Near is a broad array of challenges that we help to get our customers solved. For example, in the US, we recently worked on a study with the County of Quay and several government agencies to help them understand tourist movement throughout the county. Our goal was to deliver real world insights that would provide information that would help transportation planning on the island.

The insights will help them to understand resident and visitor travel patterns, identify intuitive solutions for reducing traffic conditions and contribute to planning for a more sustainable Quay. Clearly, Near is a global company. I believe our land and expand strategy is working, resulting in larger deals and longer contracts.

In the end, our success will be driven by our ability to deliver on our promise to consumers that their proprietary data is safe and our promise to enterprise customers that they can be privacy compliant, while maximizing the insights that the data delivers. We believe that we will be able to achieve both because of the strong foundation that we built on our three pillars, data, privacy and AI.

As a leading trustworthy global data intelligence company with a history of innovation, we will continue to build products with privacy led design and to provide our customers with the largest source of influence on people, places and products. Now I'll turn the call over to my colleague, Rahul Agarwal.

Thank you, Anil. For the first quarter of 2023, GAAP revenue was $15.5 million, just above the high end of our guidance and up 10% year-over-year. Revenue from subscription customers came in at 88% of our revenue. Net Revenue Retention or NRR, measures our success in retaining and growing revenue from our existing customers and was 110% in the quarter.

We are seeing these numbers fluctuate from quarter-to-quarter and although it was below our expected long term steady state goal, the NRR was in line with our expectations for the first quarter.

Now looking at some key profitability metrics, GAAP gross profit was $10.4 million in Q1, representing 67% gross profit margin. Our long-term GAAP gross profit margin is expected to be relatively steady in the 68% to 72% range barring any unusual items. GAAP operating expense was $32.7 million in Q1. This includes stock-based compensation of $5.8 million and one-time expenses related to the closing of the business combination of $6.8 million.

Having already made substantial investments in our go to market and R&D teams going forward, we expect our operating expense structure to remain fairly stable over the next few quarters, with sequential growth of approximately 2% to 3% per quarter. However, we may make additional investments in newer technologies, including training, resources and research to remain ahead of the competition.

GAAP operating loss for Q1 was $22.3 million and GAAP net loss was $19.2 million. Looking at the balance sheet, we ended the quarter with $56.5 million in cash and cash equivalents, including restricted cash and $25.2 million in accounts receivable.

Our accounts receivable balance remains slightly elevated due to delayed collections we experienced during our reorganization. We continue to expect our AR balance to normalize by the middle of 2023. Our total outstanding debt based on GAAP as of 31st March 2023 was $95.3 million.

Turning to cash flow, cash flow used in operations in Q1 was $9.2 million. Moving to our outlook, for Q2, we currently expect revenue to be in the range of $17.5 million to $18 million. Adjusted EBITDA is expected to be approximately negative $5.5 million down from negative $7 million in Q1. We are reiterating our guidance of approximately $81 million in revenue for fiscal year 2023 on the back of our expected long-term steady state goal of 120% NRR.

In summary, we continue to execute well, delivering strong top and bottom line results and believe that Near remains well positioned to maintain this momentum and operating discipline throughout 2023.

Now before I turn the call over to the operator for questions, I would like to highlight a Form-8k filed earlier this afternoon. As described in the Form-8k, our senior secured lender, Blue Torch Capital, has agreed to temporarily forbear from exercising its default related rights and remedies against the company with respect to certain existing defaults under our financing agreement.

The forbearance is in effect until May 20th, subject to earlier termination in the event of certain additional defaults. We are actively working with Blue Torch for a waiver and amendment to the financing agreement.

In light of recent developments, we require additional time to prepare and review our Form 10-Q for the second quarter to ensure adequate disclosure of the requisite information, particularly with respect to our efforts to cure existing defaults under the financing agreement. We intend to file a Form 12b-25 notification with respect to the late Form 10-Q and anticipate that we will file the Form 10-Q on or before May 19.

If we are unable to obtain a waiver from Blue Torch and amend the financing agreement prior to termination of the forbearance period, Blue Torch may, among other rights and remedies under the financing agreement, declare all or any portion of the outstanding loans under the financing agreement to be accelerated and due and payable.

Our outstanding convertible debentures also include a cross default provision that could be triggered upon the indebtedness under the financing agreement becoming or being declared due and payable. And now, I would like to turn the call over to the operator for questions. Operator, please.

(Operator Instructions). Our first question comes from a lot of Mike Latimore of Northland Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Great, thanks very much. Yeah, congrats on those strong results there at the start of the year. The guidance for the second quarter calls for a meaningful step up in revenue sequentially. I guess is that tied to sort of a normal seasonal pattern or does that relate to strong bookings you've seen so far this year, or both, I guess?

Yeah, thanks, Mike. It's Anil here. So I will just take a second there before I pass it Rahul. What you're seeing is, if you remember our last earnings call, the reps are just ramping up, the sales reps that we have, that we have set up earlier in the last year. And we believe that a lot of this ramp up will happen over the course of the next few quarters, especially over this quarter and then Q3.

And so a lot of this is ramped up towards the end and that's why you would see the difference in these quarters. Rahul, you want to just add to that?

Surely. Thanks, Mike. So as we've highlighted, Q1 generally remains stable flat and we start to really see people coming back from holidays starting to make decisions, starting to really sign up for additional subscriptions and so on and so forth, which is essentially going to drive these numbers up. So reiterating our guidance for Q2, yes, we see that to be a 12% to 13% growth quarter on quarter, but we are fairly confident we'll get that.

Right. And I guess implied in the fair responses is that the sales force productivity is tracking to your expectations?

Yes.

Great. And then just maybe, color on the broader landscape, are there any particular regions or verticals that are showing relative strength or softness?

Yeah. There have been four verticals that's really working well for us. That's retail, restaurants, real estate and tourism. We see sort of solid growth in the tourism vertical that we have seen in the past few quarters. As you can see, consumers start traveling and there's need for data to understand these travel patterns.

Especially also in retail, there's a good sort of uptick in terms of retail analytics and data required in consumers behavior around retail. So these are the verticals that's really working well for us and we are doubling down on these verticals.

Very good. Thanks. Thanks very much. Have a best of luck this year.

You're welcome.

Hi, (inaudible). You line is open.

Oh, great. Thank you. So two questions, one big picture and then one just much more focused. Can you start by just reminding us what the TAM is for Near and sort of what the best profile sort of opportunities are for it? And then on the -- for people who don't have the background, can you just remind us the background of how we got into this situation with Blue Torch and what the background is on that relationship?

Sure. Thanks, [Patrick]. Let me take the first part and my colleague can address the second part. So the total TAM is around 23 billion for our offerings, which actually comprises to two parts. So one is on the marketing intelligence side, which is a product that we sell to the marketers and the CMOs of organizations that we work with. The second is what we call the operational intelligence part, which is what we offer to chief data officers and chief information officers and chief technology officers.

So these two are two different products that we have and it's very interconnected behind the scene. But it offers different cut of our data in terms of, one is a cut of people and the other one is a cut of places. And that comprises this 23 billion market that I spoke about. On the second piece, Rahul, you want to just respond to that?

Sure. Thanks, Patrick. So, yes, just refreshing here, we had a requirement under our senior lender trade agreement to raise certain junior capital, within a certain time period. And while obviously we have been working alongside scaling the business and focusing on getting that funding into the door, there have been some delays.

We have closely worked with our senior secured lender, which is Blue Torch Capital and they have been a great partner in terms of, you know, to make sure that we get more time to get the money into the door. So we are working on that particular aspect right now. And like I mentioned, we have a forbearance till 28th of May to essentially ease all the situation.

Great, thank you both.

You're welcome.

(Operator Instructions). I'm showing no further questions at this time. Let's turn the call back over to Anil for any closing remarks. I turn the call back to Mr. Anil for any closing remarks?

Thank you, operator. Thank you for joining us. I look forward to speaking with you throughout the quarter. Thank you.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this does concludes today's conference. Thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect. Have a great day.