What changed in this filing

/stocks — the workspaceLOADING

Item 1. Business

2025-02-19 compared with 2024-02-15 · 137 added, 79 removed, 156 unchanged (58% of the section changed)

Appian Corporation (together with its subsidiaries, “Appian,” “the Company,” “we,” or “our”) is a software company that automates business processes and operationalizes artificial intelligence (“AI”) with low-code design, providing rapid time to value for our customers.

We empower our customers to transform the way they work by using our platform to combine people, technologies, and data in end-to-end processes that can maximize our customers' resources and dramatically improve business results.

We believe organizations across all industries face pressure to keep up with a rapid pace of technological innovation, particularly in AI.

The past year has ushered in a whole new economy, in which AI promises to transform workflows to drive efficiency and innovation.

As we enter 2024, the focus will shift from exploring these technologies to actively leveraging them to innovate with new products, services, and value creation for customers and employees alike.

We believe companies that can quickly incorporate AI's full potential into their business processes will lead the future AI economy.

We are dedicated to helping our customers navigate this new AI economy and realize transformational change.

We see a human-centric future for AI, one of teamwork rather than replacement, where AI adds value to data and employees, and where all customers and businesses—not big tech—are the winners.

We recognize AI is not a standalone technology.

It is highly dependent on two foundational technologies:

data and process.

Data is the intellectual fuel for AI, empowering it to make smart, informed decisions.

The more data AI gets, and the better that data is, the better the AI answers may be.

Data was already among the most important assets for leading organizations;

now, it’s worth more than ever.

Process is the necessary layer for customers to create a mixed autonomy, routing tasks between humans and AI automations.

We believe customers will increasingly rely on AI to accelerate common tasks but must ensure humans maintain control and oversight of business processes.

We offer leading expertise in all three areas.

We have been leveraging AI technologies for many years as part of our automation suite.

We have a leading data fabric which powered billions of data fabric queries in 2023, and we offer innovative process platforms, supporting billions of transactions every day.

We weave all three elements together in a single product that empowers our customers to achieve rapid value.

Appian Corporation (together with its subsidiaries, “Appian,” “the Company,” “we,” or “our”) is The Process Company.

We deliver a software platform that helps organizations run better processes that reduce costs, improve customer experiences, and gain a strategic edge.

Committed to client success, we serve many of the world’s largest companies across industries.

We believe processes define each organization.

Processes are how they operate, deliver value, and interact with their customers.

Nothing is more transformative for an organization than improving their processes.

Appian has both the platform and the expertise to enable enterprise transformation.

The Appian Platform

The Appian Platform enables customers to easily design, automate, and optimize their mission-critical business processes, driving continuous innovation.

Through Appian's unified platform, customers can swiftly develop new digital solutions using a low-code approach, creating applications and workflows tailored to their unique business requirements.

We catalyze the AI-driven enterprise by combining AI, data, and process capabilities in a single platform.

Our low-code design experience delivers solutions for customers quickly.

It is unified, reduces training times and dependencies on additional tools, and is built for enterprise-grade applications requiring high reliability, security, and scalability.

Appian’s architecture is based on our four critical capabilities:

process automation, data fabric, total experience, and continuous improvement through process mining.

Process Automation

We are a long-time innovator in process automation.

Our process capabilities are crucial in orchestrating AI alongside humans and systems within business environments.

Our business rules technology allows organizations to encode and enforce policies and routing decisions that reduce risk, while our native RPA and AI enable organizations to automate process steps to deliver greater efficiency and increase customer and employee satisfaction.

We sell our platform as a unified set of automation technologies that accelerates customer implementation times and return on investment.

Data is at the heart of AI's transformative power, and we excel in enabling customers to utilize data effectively.

By leveraging our sophisticated data fabric, organizations can unify data across the enterprise into a single virtual data model, empower users to make informed decisions, and train AI models, transforming reservoirs of enterprise data into a source of powerful innovation.

This capability is pivotal in feeding AI algorithms and human workers with quality data and extracting meaningful insights that drive business decisions.

In addition, the secure infrastructure of our data fabric architecture is designed to provide a safe environment for storing and handling sensitive information, ensuring confidential data remains protected.

Total Experience

Total experience is about creating superior experiences across desktop and mobile devices for every user, uniting customers and employees in a seamless workflow.

Our patented Self-Assembling Interface Layer, or SAIL, user experience architecture delivers the speed and flexibility to provide new experiences that capture our customers’ brands quickly and instantly work on the latest web browsers and mobile devices.

Continuous Improvement

Our integrated process mining and process analytics capabilities enable customers to measure and track their process performance accurately.

Customers can gain a deeper understanding of their business operations and pinpoint areas for improvement.

Using this data, customers can drive continuous process improvement and optimize their processes for maximum efficiency and effectiveness.

These features provide customers with the necessary insights to make informed decisions and optimize their operations to meet the evolving needs of their business.

Appian is a leading platform for process orchestration, automation, and intelligence.

Our unified platform provides everything an organization needs to design, automate, and optimize critical processes.

It enables continuous adaptation, allowing organizations to thrive in changing environments.

Core Capabilities

Appian provides capabilities to tackle any process challenge.

Appian tightly integrates data fabric;

robotic process automation, or RPA;

intelligent document processing, or IDP;

generative artificial intelligence, or generative AI;

artificial intelligence agents, or AI agents;

low-code design;

application programming interfaces, or APIs;

business rules;

and process intelligence capabilities in a single platform.

These capabilities are unified and scalable, meeting enterprise demands and easy to change as requirements evolve.

• Process Orchestration:

The Appian platform coordinates tasks between AI, automation, and humans to ensure processes run efficiently and intelligently.

RPA enables customers to build bots with low-code to automate repetitive manual tasks.

Appian AI agents extract data, process documents, and initiate processes at scale.

API integration easily connects systems with low-code design tools and hundreds of prebuilt connections.

• Data Fabric:

Appian’s data fabric is an integrated data layer that unifies data across systems without requiring companies to migrate their data.

Appian empowers users to explore data in real-time, build reports, and get AI-powered insights for smarter decision-making.

Our patented data fabric technology supports both analytical and transactional workloads, which allows users to build applications that create and update enterprise data.

It also includes row-level security rules to enforce access controls at every level.

Our data fabric functionality powers and secures our AI offering.

• Process Intelligence:

Process intelligence allows users to gain deep insights into process performance through Appian’s Process HQ.

It also preps data for process mining with just a few clicks, even across multiple sources.

Companies can use AI to monitor processes, identify issues, and get intelligent recommendations for optimization.

• Artificial Intelligence:

We believe the key to unlocking AI’s full potential is embedding it inside a business process.

Process is where business happens.

It’s where companies make decisions, save and spend money, serve customers, and scale business operations.

When AI operates within processes, it gains purpose, governance, and accountability—all essential to delivering value from AI.

Appian can embed AI into every process, which gives AI the context and actions it needs to accelerate outcomes for the enterprise.

Appian delivers six key benefits with our “AI in process” approach:

Process makes AI easy.

Deploying AI in isolated projects is complex and costly.

By embedding AI within a process, enterprises can easily access valuable AI capabilities when and where they need them.

Process gives AI structure.

AI is only as useful as the structure surrounding it.

A process gives AI defined goals in a structured flow of work.

AI can work alongside humans and automation tools, escalating issues so humans always maintain oversight and control.

Process gives AI data.

AI is nothing without data.

But most enterprises struggle to feed AI complete data from across systems, while still ensuring privacy and maintaining access privileges.

By integrating AI into processes, enterprises ensure AI receives quality, real-time data from all systems.

Organizations can enforce privacy controls to prevent unauthorized access and optimize data governance to comply with regulations (such as GDPR, HIPAA, etc.).

Process makes AI safe.

AI is powerful, but no one wants to give AI free reign over their enterprises.

Processes provide crucial safety mechanisms, including human approval steps for high-risk actions and escalation paths to ensure AI errors don’t cause harm.

Additionally, activity logs make auditing and compliance simple for organizations with strict regulatory requirements.

Process makes AI measurable.

For many enterprises, AI is a black box, which can’t be measured for impact.

Appian processes track every AI action, allowing organizations to measure performance, identify bottlenecks, and optimize outcomes.

Process makes AI enterprise-grade.

A process provides the necessary infrastructure to scale AI use.

The right tooling puts AI to work with security certifications, enterprise scalability, and other capabilities such as process orchestration, automation, and intelligence.

Processes take AI from a collection of disconnected pilots to an enterprise-wide capability.

Appian’s unified approach delivers all the capabilities leading organizations need to orchestrate their business processes in one place.

It empowers enterprises to transform their processes and improve business outcomes.

Committed to Customer Success

At Appian, we do more than deliver a platform;

we are invested in our customers’ success.

Our Customer Success team partners with enterprises every step of the way.

From strategic guidance to hands-on support, we strive to ensure their process transformation delivers measurable, lasting value.

The world’s most innovative organizations trust Appian to solve their critical process challenges, achieve operational excellence, and drive sustainable growth.

With Appian, we believe businesses are equipped to thrive in a world where process is everything.

Go-to-Market Strategy

1 unchanged sentence

We sell our software almost exclusively as subscriptions.

We intend to grow our revenue by adding new customers, increasing the product usage of existing customers, and expanding product usage across new business processes and applications.

We grow our revenue by adding new customers, increasing the product usage of existing customers, and expanding product usage across new business processes and applications.

Our strategic partners work with organizations undergoing digital transformation projects, and when they recognize an opportunity for our platform, they often introduce us to potential customers.

2 unchanged sentences

Every additional application an organization creates on our platform increases the value of our platform for that organization because it further integrates people, processes, and data and facilitates knowledge sharing.

Applications built on our platform may be used only on our platform and only while customers have active subscriptions, creating a substantial incentive for customers to avoid the difficulties and costs associated with moving to a different software platform.

associated with moving to a different software platform.

At the same time, our industry-leading Customer Success team helps customers build and deploy applications on our platform to achieve their digital transformation goals more quickly.

6 unchanged sentences

• Grow revenue from key industry verticals.

While our platform is industry-agnostic, we continue to make investments to enhance the expertise of our sales and marketing organization within our key industry verticals of financial services, government, life sciences, insurance, and manufacturing.

In 2024, we generated over 77% of our subscriptions revenue from customers in these verticals.

6 unchanged sentences

Our platform enables our customers to build applications quickly.

We, along with our partners, offer pre-built solutions in certain of our key industries such as financial services, government acquisition, and insurance to give our customers an even faster start.

We, along with our partners, offer pre-built solutions in certain of our key industries such as financial services, government, and insurance to give our customers an even faster start.

Every Appian solution is built on our platform and designed to be standardized, upgradeable, and compatible with each other.

2 unchanged sentences

Appian Cloud meets the data residency requirements of our global customers by operating in 16 countries across 36 regions and 114 availability zones.

In 2023, approximately 36% of our total revenue was generated from customers outside of the United States.

In 2024, 37% of our total revenue was generated from customers outside of the United States.

We believe we have a significant opportunity to continue to grow our international footprint.

1 unchanged sentence

• Leverage our partner base.

We have strategic partnerships including with Accenture, Capgemini, Deloitte, EY, KPMG, PwC, and TCS.

We have a number of strategic partnerships with companies, including Accenture, Capgemini, Deloitte, EY, KPMG, PwC, and TCS.

These partners work with organizations undergoing digital transformation projects.

When they recognize an opportunity for our platform, they introduce us to potential customers.

Additionally, they go to market with their own pre-built solutions using our platform, delivering software license revenue to Appian.

Additionally, they often go to market with their own pre-built solutions using our platform, delivering software license revenue to Appian.

We intend to further leverage our base of partners to provide broader customer coverage and solution delivery capabilities.

4 unchanged sentences

Our culture was purposefully cultivated by our four founders, who are still heavily involved in operating our business, including recruiting, interviewing, and educating new employees at Appian.

Led by Matt Calkins, one of our founders and our Chief Executive Officer, we have grown our business organically by employing a unified team to maximize the cohesion and simplicity of our platform and our company.

As of December 31, 2023, we had a total global workforce of 2,243 full-time employees, 1,518 of which were based in the United States.

Led by Matt Calkins, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, we have grown our business organically by employing a unified team to maximize the cohesion and simplicity of our platform and our company.

As of December 31, 2024, we had a total global workforce of 2,033 employees, 1,339 of which were based in the United States.

None of our U.S.

2 unchanged sentences

Additionally, we are subject to, and comply with, local labor law requirements in all countries in which we operate.

Excellence and Intensity

We have two foundational values, the most important qualities that an Appian person must have:

Excellence and Intensity.

Every hiring decision, every promotion, and every public commendation is based on these values.

Excellence means we have high standards, and we live up to them.

Everything Appian does is done well.

Intensity means we’re all-in.

We’re ambitious.

We bring our full self to work and our full commitment.

We care about the outcome.

We take the results of our work personally.

We assert ourselves.

We hold people to account, even if it’s uncomfortable, because we take pride in our team’s work.

Raising the bar is part of being a leader at Appian.

We respect all people.

We believe diverse ideas and an inclusive environment are paramount to our continued success.

We also believe our individual experiences and knowledge enable us to learn from one another and discover creative solutions.

We sponsor a number of affinity groups, initiated by employees, that aim to build stronger internal and external networks and partnerships, create a positive lasting impact through social and educational outreach, and create development opportunities for future leaders.

Talent Acquisition and Development

2 unchanged sentences

We also provide resources to help our employees grow in their current roles and build new skills, including access to Appian University, a system that houses Appian's in-house learning and development solutions.

Inclusion and Diversity

We respect all people.

We believe diversity of ideas and an inclusive environment are paramount to our continued success.

We also believe our individual experiences, knowledge, and ways of working enable us to learn from one another and discover creative solutions.

Sales and Marketing

Our sales and marketing teams work together closely to market and sell our software platform and services.

We sell to enterprises across a range of industries, including government, financial services, insurance, and life sciences.

Our sales organization includes enterprise account executives, solution consultants, and customer success representatives and is supported by a robust partner ecosystem of global systems integrators, technology partners, and resellers.

We are dedicated to the success of Appian customers, investing in robust post-sales customer success initiatives to ensure adoption, satisfaction, and expanded use over time.

To drive awareness and adoption of our platform, we execute a comprehensive marketing strategy that includes digital marketing, customer advocacy programs, industry analyst and press relations, thought leadership initiatives, digital events, industry conferences, tradeshows, and regional events.

Our flagship annual event, Appian World, brings together customers, partners, and industry leaders to showcase innovations, share best practices, and highlight the business impact of Appian.

Additionally, we engage with our developer community through our Appian Community as well as hackathons, user groups, and technical education programs designed to accelerate application development and foster platform expertise.

As of December 31, 2024, we lease our headquarters office in McLean, Virginia, and we also have five leased offices in cities outside the United States.

In addition to our leased offices, we occupied seven flexible workspaces outside of the United States.

In addition to our leased offices, we occupied nine flexible workspaces.

Our use of flexible workspaces is dependent upon our current business needs.

We believe our facilities are adequate to meet our ongoing needs, including substantial rights to expand within certain properties we lease.

If we require additional space in the future, we believe we will be able to obtain additional facilities on commercially reasonable terms.

we require additional space in the future, we believe we will be able to obtain additional facilities on commercially reasonable terms.

We have historically experienced seasonality in terms of when we enter into agreements with customers.

2 unchanged sentences

Our customers operate in various industries, including financial services, government, life sciences, insurance, manufacturing, energy, healthcare, telecommunications, and transportation.

As of December 31, 2023, we had approximately 1,000 customers.

As of December 31, 2024, we had over 1,000 customers.

Generally, our sales team targets its efforts to organizations with over 2,000 employees and $2 billion in annual revenue.

2 unchanged sentences

Our Competition

Our main competitors fall into three categories:

Our main competitors fall into four categories:

(1) providers of custom software solutions that address, or are developed to address, some of the use cases that applications developed on our platform target;

(2) providers of low-code development platforms;

and (3) providers of one or more automation technologies, including business process management, case management, process mining, and robotic process automation.

(3) providers of one or more automation technologies, including business process management, case management, process mining, and robotic process automation;

and (4) potential customers using their own internal technology departments to develop, build, and modify their own proprietary systems.

As our market grows, we expect it will attract more highly specialized vendors as well as larger vendors that may continue to acquire or bundle their products more effectively.

11 unchanged sentences

We believe we generally compete favorably with our peer group with respect to the features, security, and performance of our platform, the ease of integration of our applications, and the relatively low total cost of ownership of our applications.

We feel this is validated by the fact Gartner ranked Appian #1 for the Business Workflow Automation with Integration Use Case in the 2023 Gartner® Critical Capabilities for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms, or LCAP, report as well as positioned as a Leader in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Enterprise LCAP.

Gartner, Critical Capabilities for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms, October 2023 Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms, October 2023 Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation.

Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact.

Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

GARTNER and Magic Quadrant are registered trademarks and service marks of Gartner, Inc.

and/or its affiliates in the U.S.

and internationally and is used herein with permission.

The Gartner content described herein, (the "Gartner Content") represent(s) research opinion or viewpoints published, as part of a syndicated subscription service, by Gartner, Inc.

("Gartner"), and are not representations of fact.

Gartner Content speaks as of its original publication date (and not as of the date of this 10K) and the opinions expressed in the Gartner Content are subject to change without notice.

We feel this is validated by the fact Gartner ranked Appian #1 for the use case of Complex Internal Applications in the 2024 Gartner ® Critical Capabilities for Enterprise Low-Code Application

Platforms (LCAP) as well as positioned Appian as a Leader in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise LCAP.

Intellectual Property

1 unchanged sentence

We rely on patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secret laws, confidentiality procedures, and employee disclosure and invention assignment agreements to protect our intellectual property rights.

As of December 31, 2023, we had 16 granted patents and nine patents pending related to our platform and its technology.

As of December 31, 2024, we had 21 granted patents and 20 patents pending related to our platform and its technology.

None of our issued patents expire before 2034.

We cannot provide complete assurance that any of our

patent applications will result in the issuance of a patent or that the examination process will not require us to narrow our claims.

We cannot provide complete assurance that any of our patent applications will result in the issuance of a patent or that the examination process will not require us to narrow our claims.

Any patents we may be issued may be contested, circumvented, found unenforceable, or invalidated, and we may not be able to prevent third parties from infringing them.

12 unchanged sentences

The information contained on, or that can be accessed through, our website is not incorporated by reference into this Annual Report on Form 10-K or in any other report or document we file with the SEC, and any references to our website are intended to be inactive textual references only.

1 Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms 16 October 2024, Oleksandr Matvitskyy, Kyle Davis, Akash Jain

Gartner, Critical Capabilities for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms 21 October 2024, Akash Jain, Kyle Davis, Oleksandr Matvitskyy

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation.

Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact.

Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc.

and/or its affiliates in the U.S.

and internationally, and MAGIC QUADRANT is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc.

and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission.

The Gartner content described herein (the “Gartner Content”) represents research opinion or viewpoints published, as part of a syndicated subscription service, by Gartner, Inc.

("Gartner"), and is not a representation of fact.

Gartner Content speaks as of its original publication date (and not as of the date of this 10-K), and the opinions expressed in the Gartner Content are subject to change without notice.

Forward-Looking Statements

34 unchanged sentences

These risks are discussed more fully in the section titled “Risk Factors.” Material risks that may affect our business, financial condition, results of operations, and trading price of our Class A common stock include, but are not necessarily limited to, the following:

• Our recent growth may not be indicative of our future growth and, if we continue to grow, we may not be able to manage our growth effectively.

• If we are unable to sustain our revenue growth rate, we may not achieve or maintain profitability in the future.

2 unchanged sentences

• We currently face significant competition.

• Our recent corporate growth may not be indicative of our future growth and, if we continue to grow, we may not be able to manage our growth effectively.

• If our security measures are actually or perceived to have been breached, or if unauthorized access to our platform or customer data occurs, our platform may be perceived as not being secure, and customers may reduce the use of or stop using our platform, and we may incur significant liabilities.

• We derive a material portion of our revenue from a limited number of customers, and the loss of one or more of these customers could materially and adversely impact our business, results of operations, and financial condition.

• A portion of our revenue is generated from subscriptions sold to governmental entities and heavily regulated organizations, which are subject to a number of challenges and risks.

• We have experienced losses in the past, and we may not achieve or sustain profitability in the future.

22 unchanged sentences

Compared sentence by sentence after normalising whitespace, quotation marks, case and digits, so re-formatting and restated figures do not read as changed language. Wording changes appear as one removal and one addition. The current filing and the prior one are authoritative.

What changed 10-K

Item 1. Business