Braze, Inc. (NASDAQ:BRZE) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Isabelle Winkles: So thanks for the question. So I think — and I’ll point to kind of the greater than $500,000 spenders which typically are sort of some of these larger multifaceted enterprises. And a good bit of the upsell motion that happens with those organizations is actually a go-to-market motion that looks a lot like net new business. So it is our salespeople trying to access new logos within existing parent organizations. That is new stakeholders, new budgets. It’s an entirely new sales cycle that behaves a lot like trying to acquire a net new organization. And I think that’s where you’re going to see continued pressure where that behaves just like net new business and we’re — that is going to continue to be under pressure and work against us in terms of the evolution of the dollar-based net retention, particularly for those large vendors.

In fact, you’re starting to see kind of the total company and the large guys kind of start to compress in terms of the distance. I will say that in the context of the guide, we are certainly embedding in the guide an assumption that there is more air to come out of the balloon. And so I think you’re correct there in that, that is absolutely assumed in the context of the guide from a conservatism active.

Operator: And our next question comes from Scott Berg with Needham.

Scott Berg: Isabelle, I wanted to see if you can comment maybe on the linearity of sales in the quarter. your Q1 guide kind of suggests the minimal sequential increase from Q4 which suggests maybe a more front-end weighted quarter than back end. But I just wanted to see if you had any commentary around that.

Isabelle Winkles: Yes. So we have been evolving into kind of continually more actually back-end loaded. Q4 was fairly back-end loaded. In fact, we’re actually pretty proud of even our last day of the quarter, had operationally a lot of great success in pushing through quite a bit of business on the last day of the quarter. So that was a great success sort of internally from an operational perspective. But we are continuing to see back-end loaded quarter. So under normal circumstances, it would be about 50% of the net bookings get done in the third month and we’re seeing that trend upward.

Scott Berg: Got it. Helpful. And then from a follow-up perspective, just wanted to see if you all can comment maybe on the expansion activity in the quarter. Did the type of expansion activity change at all, maybe from, I don’t know, new channels, new different types of usage? Or was it really more just expansion on, I don’t know, existing implementations customers were adding?

Isabelle Winkles: Yes. No, it’s — there’s been no sort of dramatic change in any of that. SMS continues to be sort of — it’s on a smaller base. So we’re seeing continued strong growth there. But otherwise, across our various channels and platform items, the growth has been relatively distributed in similar fashions to prior quarters.

Operator: And our next question comes from Pat Walravens with JMP Securities.

Pat Walravens: Bill, we’re going to go a little afield here this future of life pause letter, did you sign it? Would you sign it? What are your thoughts?

Bill Magnuson: I was preparing for earnings and so I didn’t dig into that yesterday. But I definitely think that we — with all technology that could go either way in terms of being helpful or becoming dangerous that we should be responsible around the development of it. I think that BASE is a place that’s always been really measured about what AI is capable of and where we should trust it. I talked about that earlier in the sense that when you’re interacting with first-party data and first-party relationships, the bar is just a lot higher for when we should go and trust the AI. And you’ve seen that base has never been won to promise a Magic Black Box. It’s also all your problems. But it’s definitely an exciting time for AI development.

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