Braze, Inc. 10-K

Item 1 . Business Mission Our mission is to forge human connections between consumers and the brands they love through relevant and memorable experiences. Overview Braze is a leading comprehensive customer engagement platform that powers customer-centric interactions between consumers and brands. Our platform empowers brands to listen to their customers better, understand them more deeply and act on that understanding in a way that is human and personal. Using our platform, brands ingest and process customer data in real time, orchestrate and optimize contextually relevant, cross-channel marketing campaigns and continuously evolve their customer engagement strategies. As of January 2022, more th an 1,300 customers around the world trust Braze with their most valuable assets: their customer relationships. In January 2022, our platform enabled interactions with 3.7 billion monthly active users via our customers’ apps, websites and other digital interfaces, up from 3.0 billion in January 2021. In fiscal year 2022 alone, we processed over nine trillion consumer-generated data points on our platform, and our customers sent approximately one and a half trillion messages to their consumers using our platform. Today, consumers can interact with a seemingly unlimited number of brands anytime, anywhere, resulting in a dramatic increase in competitive pressure among brands. At the same time, the data generated from digital experiences and the increased number of consumer touchpoints have provided brands with new opportunities to reach consumers and personalize consumer experiences. But with this opportunity comes greater consumer expectations for highly relevant and seamless cross-channel interactions. These trends have led brands to increase their focus and investment on customer experience–the holistic impression that brands create across the customer journey–to differentiate themselves and form long-lasting customer relationships. Most marketing platforms available today approach customer engagement on a channel-by-channel basis. Channel-centric strategies often lead to disjointed customer experiences that destroy brand equity and diminish customer loyalty. We offer a new and different way of thinking about customer engagement. We built our platform on the premise that in order to foster positive customer experiences and long-lasting customer relationships, brands must create personal and human connections with consumers. To ensure that interactions between brands and consumers have the same relevance and cross-channel continuity as human interactions, we avoid channel silos so that each channel is aware of activity occurring in other channels and is able to react to that activity in real time. The real-time nature of the interactions we enable is made possible by our proprietary, enterprise-grade stream processing architecture. This architecture receives, contextualizes, and responds to first-party customer data in the moment. We have designed it to mimic the human ability to listen, process new information in context, and react instantaneously. 4 Table of Contents We vertically integrate our orchestration, classification and personalization capabilities such that coordinating between them is simple and fast. Meanwhile, we decouple our data ingestion and message sending capabilities from the channels they support. This enables our capabilities to be centralized and available across channels and easily extensible to new channels. We support interactions across in-product and out-of-product messaging channels. Today, our in-product messaging channels consist of Content Cards, which are pieces of personalized content embedded into a brand’s website or application, and in-app and in-browser messages. Our out-of-product channels include, but are not limited to, mobile push notifications, web push notifications, email, SMS and MMS messages, webhooks, Facebook and Google advertisements and multiple over-the-top, or OTT, media services and connected TV channels. Braze unleashes the power of interdisciplinary teams by serving numerous stakeholders, beyond traditional marketers, including product and engineering teams and business intelligence teams. Our platform produces valuable data that informs decisions and actions across the entire customer engagement spectrum. Our messaging capabilities transcend marketing use cases, often being used for product or transactional use cases that facilitate or enhance the consumer’s experience with the brand or product. We enable brands to easily integrate our platform with both their in-house technical infrastructure and our expanding partner ecosystem of best-in-class technologies. Our customers can import data from other systems into any layer of our technology stack via our application programming interfaces, or APIs. They can also use Braze Currents to stream data in real time to those systems, which increases the return on our customers’ other technology investments. We support direct integrations with cloud data service providers such as Snowflake, customer data management platforms such as Segment, analytic solutions such as Amplitude and other components of the modern marketing technology ecosystem. Our platform is designed to serve the needs of customers across sizes, stages of growth, industries, and geographies. Our customers include many established global enterprises and leading technology innovators. We employ a land-and-expand business model centered around offering products that are easy to adopt and have a rapid time to value. We expand our reach within existing customers when our customers add new channels, purchase additional subscription products such as Braze Currents, implement new engagement strategies, or onboard new business units and geographies. We also grow as our customers grow because our pricing is based in large part on the number of consumers that our customers reach and the volume of messages our customers send. Our Competitive Strengths Cross-Channel Approach, Enabling Customer-Centric Experiences Our cross-channel engagement approach enables customer-centric experiences. We build a more complete picture of the customer and draw insights from data to inform strategy, enabling brands to tactically deploy channels according to each channel’s strengths and proven customer preferences. Our architecture ensures that our capabilities can be used across all of our channels, maximizing the impact of new feature development. Additionally, when we add new channels, they immediately benefit from all of the existing features that we have already built, which makes them fully robust from the outset. The applicability of features across all channels, combined with our intuitive user interface, allows our customers to quickly and easily construct cross-channel consumer journeys without the need to learn different skills for each channel or be constantly retrained. This is accomplished without sacrificing the unique qualities or capabilities associated with each individual channel that we support. Data Streaming Architecture Processes First-Party Data in Real Time The real-time nature of the interactions we enable is made possible by our proprietary, enterprise-grade stream processing architecture. This architecture receives, contextualizes and responds to first-party customer data in the moment. Our platform allows for high-volume, continuous data streaming, providing a live view of the various interactions that consumers are having with a brand. Unlike batch processing, where data is processed only when a specific time or threshold is hit, our data streaming architecture processes each unit of data as it is created. Real-time data processing enhances messaging relevance, while delayed data processing often leads to irrelevant messages and frustrated consumers. We not only process data but also create analytical data. When a consumer interacts with an out-of-product marketing campaign or a website or application with the Braze software development kit, SDK, embedded, that consumer generates data that is processed and contextualized with existing data in real time. 5 Table of Contents Value Propositions Across the Organization While for many brands the marketing organization has traditionally owned overall responsibility for customer engagement, cross-functional collaboration enhances the experience for the customer and improves the return on investment for the marketing organization. For brands that take a collaborative approach, marketing teams work hand-in-hand with other groups within the organization, including data, product and engineering teams to optimize customer engagement. Braze unleashes the power of interdisciplinary teams by serving numerous stakeholders, beyond traditional marketers, including product and engineering teams, and business intelligence teams. Our platform produces valuable data that informs decisions and actions across the entire customer engagement spectrum. Our messaging capabilities transcend marketing use cases, often being used for product or transactional use cases that facilitate or enhance the customer’s experience with the brand or product. Braze gives teams across a company the power to imagine, create and evolve brilliant customer experiences. When designing campaigns, marketers use our composition tools to unlock new creative ideas that can be deployed across all appropriate channels and platforms. They can also leverage the strategic and creative insights of our Customer Success teams or find inspiration through engaging with our Braze Bonfire customer community as they brainstorm new approaches. When it comes time for execution, marketers and product engineers use Braze to orchestrate personalized messaging experiences directly into their products, and to ensure that all campaigns, regardless of channel, are highly coordinated and additive to the overall customer experience. Finally, data scientists and business intelligence teams analyze data gained from marketing and lifecycle campaigns, creating a rapid experimentation loop that compounds improvements and gains over time, and helps inspire new creative ideas. We serve as the unifying thread that enables brands to draw on the strength of multiple teams working in concert to bring creative, technical and business intelligence skills together. Rapid Time to Value Our platform’s ease of use and seamless integration into existing technologies, coupled with the high value data and insights that it generates, enables brands to develop and run campaigns that meet their strategic goals quickly and efficiently. Using our intuitive user interface, individuals across all roles and technical skill levels can design and quickly deploy multi-message, multi-channel, A/B-tested strategies, with the process of new campaign creation accelerating over time. High Performance at Scale As brands continue to globalize and conduct more of their business digitally, they need a scalable customer engagement platform. In January 2022, our platform enabled interactions with 3.7 billion monthly active users via our customers’ apps, websites and other digital interfaces, up from 3.0 billion in January 2021. Our scalability distinguishes our platform from point solutions, and we can handle the biggest of enterprise needs. We facilitate the rapid delivery of a high volume of messages, which enables us to power a brand’s highest-volume events, whether they are expected, like Black Friday, or unexpected, like the sudden surge of food delivery demand during the COVID-19 pandemic. Seamless, Real-Time Interoperability across the Customer Engagement Technology Stack Our open APIs support easy-to-implement integrations with an expanding selection of technology partners, which we refer to as Braze Alloys, other third-party technology providers and in-house systems. These integrations allow our platform to import and export data to and from a wide variety of sources. These seamless integrations with technology partners not only enrich the consumer insights collected by our platform but also increase the return on other technology investments by allowing other systems and tools to benefit from or add to the data and insights collected by our platform. For example, a food delivery app may combine a consumer’s food preferences with weather data to either send a campaign to encourage a consumer to order in their favorite foods when a blizzard is forecasted or skip the “order-in tonight” discount on days when the weather is sunny. A retailer might reach out to a consumer when a favorite article of clothing goes on sale after confirming with their inventory management technology that the particular article of clothing is in stock in the consumer’s size and color preference. Customer Engagement Expertise and Highly Engaged Community 6 Table of Contents When brands partner with us, they get access to strategic and technical advice from our experts and from a community of like-minded, forward-thinking marketers and product leaders. Our documentation library, interactive online certification courses and customer success and technical support teams help brands design effective marketing strategies and use our platform to its maximum capability. Braze Bonfire, our virtual, global customer community, includes thousands of individuals across a wide spectrum of industries, business sizes, and roles. As of January 31, 2022, over 5,000 community members use Braze Bonfire to exchange growth marketing and lifecycle marketing best practices, to give direct feedback to our product and engineering teams and to attend events and engage in professional networking. As of January 31, 2022, Braze Firebrands, our customer advocacy group, consists of over 300 customers that represent us in the market. In addition to serving as references to prospective customers, they participate in case studies, speaking engagements and media interviews, adding to our brand equity and overall market awareness. Growth Strategy The principal components of our growth strategy are: • Acquire new customers: We intend to continue to expand our customer base in verticals where we already have a strong presence, such as retail, eCommerce, media, entertainment, and on-demand services, and to increase our presence in verticals where we are not yet strongly represented. Through our sales and marketing efforts, we plan to capitalize on the ongoing digital transformation in regulated industries like healthcare and financial services to further propel adoption of our technology. • Expand within our existing customer base: We believe we can achieve significant growth by expanding sales within our existing customer base. We expand the use of our platform by existing customers by, among others, adding new channels and increasing the messaging volume we sell to our customers as their businesses and needs continue to grow and as they reach additional consumers, which in turn leads to a need for greater messaging capacity. We also anticipate that as more customers reach higher levels of digital sophistication, they will invest in additional data streaming and data management capabilities. We see an opportunity within our customers’ organizations to create new use cases for our platform as they broaden the use of our platform beyond the traditional marketing team, as marketers become more technically savvy, as technologists work more closely with marketing teams, and as data scientists become more influential within their organizations. Given that many of our customers are multinational conglomerates, we also see the opportunity to further penetrate our existing customer base by expanding to new brands and new geographies within those existing customer organizations. • Expand geographically: We believe there is a significant opportunity to continue to expand usage of our platform outside the United States, both by expanding our presence in international markets where we operate today and by entering markets we have not yet penetrated. We expect to increase market penetration in regions like Europe and Asia-Pacific and to further capitalize on the greenfield opportunity in regions such as Latin America. • Expand our technology leadership through continued investment and new products: We are focused on investing in research and development to continue to enhance our platform. For example, we continue to develop our artificial intelligence capabilities to enable brands to better analyze and act on customer data. We believe our market-driven product development approach maximizes the return on new feature development and channel expansion. Our customers consistently volunteer to participate in the testing of new products, which indicates their appetite for new and innovative functionality. We believe our continued innovation will provide new avenues for growth through which we will continue to deliver differentiated outcomes for our customers. • Continue to increase and strengthen our partnerships: We have built and plan to continue investing in direct integrations with technology partners that augment our core offering with a broad range of complementary offerings, including data augmentation and enrichment, analytics, and channel extensions. We are also expanding our relationships with the ecosystem of solution partners, marketing agencies, and consultancies that offer opportunities for new customer referrals. Our Products 7 Table of Contents We offer a single, vertically integrated platform that encompasses the major functionalities, or layers, required for modern customer engagement: data ingestion, classification, orchestration, personalization, and action. Data Ingestion • Braze SDKs: The primary way in which customers integrate our platform into their websites and applications is via our SDKs. SDKs are software libraries that reside within our customers’ applications or websites, automatically managing data ingestion and the delivery of mobile and web notifications, in-application / in-browser interstitial messages, and Content Cards. Our SDKs can be integrated into a wide variety of digital interfaces including iOS, Android, Desktop / Mobile Web, connected TVs, the Unity and Unreal game engines, and application development frameworks such as React Native and Cordova. By embedding new messaging capabilities directly in our SDKs, we can rapidly deploy new functionality to our customers, with little to no additional effort on their part. • REST API: The majority of our customers also integrate via connecting to server-to-server APIs. The Braze REST API can be used to import or export data or to trigger workflows between Braze and brands’ existing technology stacks. For example, customers can send messages using Braze within internal business processes or connect Braze to third-party services such as customer data platforms or attribution providers. • Partner Cohort Syncing: Brands can sync user cohorts from partners such as Amplitude or Mixpanel to our platform. They can then use membership in these user cohorts as additional criteria in the Braze Classification layer. Classification • Segmentation: Customers can define reusable segments of consumers based upon attributes, events, or predictive propensity scores from our machine learning algorithms. Braze Segments are updated in real-time as data is ingested, allowing them to stay up-to-date with the latest data inputs. • Segment Insights: Segment Insights allows customers to analyze how segments are performing relative to each other across a set of pre-selected key performance indicators. Additionally, customers can use this tool to understand the factors that determine which consumers belong to a particular segment. • Predictive Suite: Our Predictive Suite allows customers to identify groups of consumers that are of critical business value such as “consumers who are likely to churn.” Our platform uses machine learning to automatically identify consumers who have a propensity to behave similarly to the identified audience, allowing customers to preemptively engage these consumers and thereby encourage or discourage their predicted behaviors. Orchestration • Canvas: Canvas is our flagship orchestration tool, allowing customers to create journeys, mapping out multi-step, cross-channel messaging experiences such as onboarding flows, nurture campaigns, win-back strategies, and more. Canvases are designed to be flexible and real-time, able to execute nearly any digital marketing campaign strategy that customers can envision. Canvas is natively cross-channel and customers use it to design and execute strategies that span all of the platforms and channels that our platform supports. Using Canvas, customers can create multiple variants of a journey and automatically optimize customer journeys based on the performance of the variants. • Campaigns: Campaigns allow customers to send one set of single-channel or multi-channel messages to be delivered to customers in a particular user segment. Campaigns can be one-time or recurring sends that are delivered on a time-based schedule, or can be sent in response to a user’s actions, or triggered by an API call. Campaigns support all of Braze’s messaging channels and offer experimentation such as A/B testing. • Event and API Triggering: Messages, steps within a Canvas, or entire Canvas flows can be triggered in a variety of ways, such as when events of a certain type are received or when API calls are initiated from our customers’ servers. • Frequency Capping and Rate Limiting: Customers can limit the number of messages sent from the platform by capping the frequency of message type (e.g., no more than three push notifications per week or no more than one promotional email per day), or by limiting the speed at which our platform sends messages (e.g., no more than 10,000 messages per minute). 8 Table of Contents • Intelligent Selection: Our platform can automatically run a multi-armed bandit optimization to improve the outcomes of a recurring Canvas or Campaign. Consumers can traverse different Canvas paths or receive different Campaign variations in a manner designed to maximize the total number of conversions. • Reporting and Analytics: We provide a variety of analytics features to help our customers understand and improve their customer engagement strategies: ◦ Campaign and Canvas Analytics: Our platform provides analytics breakdowns for all Campaigns and Canvases, including tracking conversion rates. Customers can create multiple variants and results can be compared statistically against one another or a control. ◦ Funnel and Retention Reports: Customers can analyze the retention uplift caused by a messaging strategy, or create and analyze funnels of actions that were taken by consumers after receiving a message. ◦ Report Builder: Customers can create custom reports to analyze the total uplift and aggregate statistics from their usage of our platform. ◦ Global Holdout Groups: To allow customers to isolate the impact of their marketing efforts, customers can create global holdout groups, consisting of consumers who should only receive a subset of critical communications from the customer (e.g., password reset emails) and otherwise be held out from all communication. Lifetime value of this holdout group can be easily compared against that of consumers who received the full suite of Braze engagement. Personalization • Liquid Templating: Customers can personalize messages using the Liquid Templating language to inject personalized content into their messages. Our platform allows customers to flexibly utilize a wide variety of data in this templating process, including data ingested and stored on consumer profiles, as well as contextual data, such as properties of a consumer action that triggered a message flow. Personalization options include use cases such as listing a set of consumer-specific recommendations or creating complex if/else logic inside of a message to conditionally determine what content to deliver. • Connected Content: Customers can connect to remote servers (including both third-party partners and first-party customer-owned endpoints) and pull back data for advanced personalization use cases. For example, customers can personalize messages on a one-to-one basis by connecting to a recommendation engine or modify messages to a user based upon the current weather at the user’s location. • Content Blocks: Customers can store and reuse blocks of content (including Liquid Templating content) which can be used across multiple messages. Content Blocks can also be updated and managed via API, extending their functionality and connecting them to customer data sources dynamically. • Intelligent Timing: Our platform will automatically calculate when consumers are most likely to engage with a particular messaging channel, and can send messages to consumers at the time that is optimal for them based upon their behavior patterns for a particular channel. • Promotion Codes: Customers can store promotion codes within the platform, and use them to serve unique, one-time use promotional coupon codes to consumers. Action • In-Product Messaging: ◦ In-App and In-Browser Messages: Our platform offers a variety of interstitial messages that can be added to mobile applications and web browsers for engagement use cases – ranging from reminders, confirmation dialogs, promotions, surveys, and more. These in-experience messages can be built from templates or built from scratch with nearly infinite customizability. 9 Table of Contents ◦ Content Cards: In addition to ephemeral messages, we offer Content Cards, a proprietary Braze product where a personalized feed of user-controllable content is embedded directly into applications and browsers for persistent viewing. • Out-of-Product Messaging: ◦ Push Notifications: Our platform provides robust push notification messaging capabilities across both mobile and web. In addition to supporting push notifications on all major platforms, we have released advanced functionality such as Push Stories (paginated image carousels within notifications) to increase the power and flexibility of the channel. ◦ Email: Our platform provides a full suite of email engagement technology, including email template editing and management, link tracking and heatmap analytics, email preference centers, and seed lists. We also support advanced email content types, such as Accelerated Mobile Pages, which enables marketers to embed interactive elements. ◦ SMS and MMS: Our platform offers a native product for SMS and MMS messaging. In addition to sending messages via the SMS and MMS protocols, customers can manage links and analytics and respond to inbound keyword responses with an automated follow-up message. ◦ Ad Network Integrations: Using Braze Audience Sync with Facebook or Google, brands can sync user data from Braze to Facebook Custom Audiences and Google Display Network to deliver advertisements outside the Braze platform based upon behavioral triggers, segmentation and more. • Webhooks: Our platform offers flexible webhooks, allowing customers to connect Braze to any external application via outbound web requests, using all of the targeting and templating mechanisms available on other channels. Customers can use webhooks for utility purposes (such as messaging to their own servers) as well as to build integrations with other third-party partner systems, such as to direct email providers, extending the range and utility of our platform. • Transactional Messaging: We offer an optional premium service with even higher speed and reliability guarantees for critical use cases. • Braze Currents: All data sent to and generated by our platform can be exported to a range of partner systems. These systems include data storage partners such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud; Customer Data Platforms such as Segment, mParticle and Tealium; and analytics providers such as Amplitude and Mixpanel. Braze Currents can also export data to generic web endpoints for maximum flexibility. Customers can use these integrations to leverage their Braze data elsewhere within their technology ecosystem, thereby enabling tighter collaboration between marketing/growth teams and their partners in business intelligence or engineering. • Snowflake Data Sharing: Alongside Braze Currents, data tracked and stored within our platform can also be accessed directly via our partnership with Snowflake using Snowflake’s Data Sharing mechanism. In addition, we provide several features for general management of our platform designed to allow customers of all sizes to maximize their efficiency: • Activity Logs: we provide activity logs for major actions that occur in our platform, and changelogs for updates to objects such as Campaigns, Segments, or Canvases on our dashboard. These logs allow customers to troubleshoot their integrations and audit their team’s activities on the platform. • Media Library: we offer a media library consisting of images that can be stored and reused in messages across the entire platform. • User Permissions: we provide a complete set of Role-Based Access Controls to allow large global teams to manage our platform effectively. In addition to these Role-Based Access Control mechanisms, we offer Braze Teams, which allows customers to break their consumer base into segments based on the consumer’s country, language, or a custom attribute. With Braze Teams, customers can create groups to manage individual regions or subsets of their businesses while restricting their ability to view or manage data outside of their assigned region. 10 Table of Contents Our Competition The market for customer engagement solutions is evolving and highly competitive. There are several established and emerging competitors that address specific aspects of customer engagement, but we believe that none of our competitors currently offer comparable comprehensive customer engagement solutions. We face intense competition from software companies that offer marketing solutions, such as legacy marketing clouds like Adobe and Salesforce, and point solutions like Airship, Iterable, Leanplum, MailChimp and MoEngage. Many of our existing competitors have, and our potential competitors could have, substantial competitive advantages, such as greater name recognition, longer operating histories, larger sales and marketing budgets and resources, greater customer support resources, lower labor and development costs, larger and more mature intellectual property portfolios and substantially greater financial, technical and other resources than we do. In addition, our competitors may have an advantage in markets where our policies regarding the use of customer data are more restrictive than local laws, regulations, policies and standards. For example, competitors willing to sell customer data in markets where such activity is permissible may have a pricing advantage over us in such markets. With the introduction of new technologies and the entry of new competitors into the market, we expect competition to persist and intensify in the future. In addition, merger and acquisition activity in the technology industry could increase the likelihood that we compete with other large technology companies. This could harm our ability to increase sales, maintain or increase subscription renewals, and maintain our prices. Conditions in our market could change rapidly and significantly as a result of technological advancements, partnering among our competitors or continuing market consolidation. Some of our larger competitors also have substantially broader product lines and market focus and therefore may not be as susceptible to downturns in a particular market. New start-up companies that innovate, and large companies that are making significant investments in research and development, may invent similar or superior products and technologies that compete with one or more of our platform offerings. In addition, some of our competitors may enter into new alliances with each other or may establish or strengthen cooperative relationships with agency partners, technology and application providers in complementary categories, or other parties. Competitors may also consolidate with existing partners that we rely on, and as a result we could lose such partnerships. Any such consolidation, acquisition, alliance or cooperative relationship could lead to pricing pressure, a loss of market share or a smaller addressable share of the market and could result in a competitor with greater financial, technical, marketing, service and other resources, all of which could harm our ability to compete. Some of our larger competitors use their broader product offerings to compete with us, bundling their competitive products with other products being purchased from that company by a customer or closing access to their technology platform, thereby making it more difficult for customers to integrate. Potential customers may prefer to purchase from their existing suppliers rather than a new supplier, regardless of product performance or features. Furthermore, potential customers may be more willing to incrementally add solutions to their existing infrastructure from competitors than to replace their existing infrastructure with our platform and offerings. These competitive pressures in our market, or our failure to compete effectively, may result in price reductions, fewer sales, reduced revenue and gross margins, increased net losses and loss of, or failure to expand, our market share. Sales and Marketing We sell subscriptions to our platform primarily through a direct sales force with primary operations in New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, London, Berlin, Austin, Tokyo and Singapore. Our team of account executives is responsible for selling to new customers as well as existing customers who may renew their subscriptions, increase the usage of our platform over time and expand the deployment of our platform across their organizations. In addition, we sell our platform through our joint venture in Japan, as well as through resellers in South Korea, Australia and Latin America. Our marketing activities are designed to build broad brand awareness, generate thought leadership and create demand and leads for our sales organizations within our target markets. Our marketing programs target influencers and decision makers participating in the buying cycle, including the chief marketing officer, chief customer officer, chief technology officer, and other key functional marketing and technology heads. Additionally, we conduct marketing programs to engage with our customers to promote upsell and cross-sell opportunities, and we engage with industry analysts, consulting firms, marketing service providers, data and technology partners, marketing agencies and other platform partners, business and trade press and other industry experts who exert considerable influence in our market. Intellectual Property 11 Table of Contents Intellectual property rights are important to the success of our business. We rely on a combination of patent, copyright, trademark and trade secret laws in the United States and other jurisdictions, as well as license agreements, confidentiality procedures, non-disclosure agreements with third parties, and other contractual protections, to protect our intellectual property rights, including our proprietary technology, software, know-how and brand. We use open source software in our services. As of January 31, 2022, we owned 19 patents and had seven patent applications pending for examination in the United States and no non-U.S. patents or patent applications. The pending U.S. patent applications, if issued, would be scheduled to expire in 2039 and 2040. Our pending U.S. patent applications may not result in issued patents. As of January 31, 2022, we owned ten registered trademarks in the United States and 19 registered trademarks in various non-U.S. jurisdictions. Although we rely on intellectual property rights, including patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets, as well as contractual protections to establish and protect our proprietary rights, we believe that factors such as the technological and creative skills of our personnel, creation of new services, features and functionality, and frequent enhancements to our platform are more essential to establishing and maintaining our technology leadership position. We control access to and use of our proprietary technology and other confidential information through the use of internal and external controls, including contractual protections with employees, contractors, customers and partners. We require our employees, consultants and other third parties to enter into confidentiality and proprietary rights agreements, and we control and monitor access to our software, documentation, proprietary technology and other confidential information. Our policy is to require all employees and independent contractors to sign agreements assigning to us any inventions, trade secrets, works of authorship, developments, processes and other intellectual property generated by them on our behalf and under which they agree to protect our confidential information. In addition, we generally enter into confidentiality agreements with our customers and partners. See the section titled “Risk Factors” for a more comprehensive description of risks related to our intellectual property. Security, Privacy, Data Protection and Regulatory Matters In the ordinary course of our business, we may process personal data. We are, or may become, subject to a number of data privacy and security obligations, including federal, state and foreign laws and regulations that involve matters central to our business. These laws and regulations may involve privacy, data security, data protection, rights of publicity, content regulation, intellectual property, competition, consumer protection, taxation, anti-bribery, anti-money laundering and corruption, economic or other trade prohibitions or sanctions or securities law compliance or other subjects. Such obligations may include, without limitation, the Federal Trade Commission Act, or the FTCA, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, or COPPA, the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003, the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, or the CCPA, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679, or the EU GDPR, the EU GDPR as it forms part of United Kingdom, or the U.K., law by virtue of section 3 of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018, or the U.K. GDPR, the ePrivacy Directive, and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, or PCI DSS. In addition, several states within the United States have enacted or proposed data privacy laws. For example, Virginia passed the Consumer Data Protection Act, and Colorado passed the Colorado Privacy Act. The CCPA and EU GDPR are examples of the increasingly stringent and evolving regulatory frameworks related to personal data processing that may increase our compliance obligations and exposure for any noncompliance. For example, the CCPA imposes obligations on covered businesses to provide specific disclosures related to a business’s collecting, using, and disclosing personal data and to respond to certain requests from California residents related to their personal data (for example, requests to know of the business’s personal data processing activities, to delete the individual’s personal data, and to opt out of certain personal data disclosures). Also, the CCPA provides for civil penalties and a private right of action for data breaches which may include an award of statutory damages. In addition, it is anticipated that the California Privacy Rights Act of 2020, or the CPRA, effective January 1, 2023, will expand the CCPA. The CPRA will, among other things, give California residents the ability to limit use of certain sensitive personal data, establish restrictions on personal data retention, expand the types of data breaches that are subject to the CCPA’s private right of action, and establish a new California Privacy Protection Agency to implement and enforce the new law. U.S. federal and state consumer protection laws may require us to publish statements that accurately and fairly describe how we handle personal data and choices individuals may have about the way we handle their personal data. European data privacy and security laws (including the EU GDPR and U.K. GDPR) impose significant and complex compliance obligations on entities that are subject to those laws. For example, the EU GDPR applies to any company established in the European Economic Area, or the EEA, and to companies established outside the EEA that process personal data in connection with the offering of goods or services to data subjects in the EEA or the monitoring of the behavior of data subjects in the EEA. These obligations may include limiting personal data processing to only what is necessary for specified, 12 Table of Contents explicit, and legitimate purposes; requiring a legal basis for personal data processing; requiring the appointment of a data protection officer in certain circumstances; increasing transparency obligations to data subjects; requiring data protection impact assessments in certain circumstances; limiting the collection and retention of personal data; increasing rights for data subjects; formalizing a heightened and codified standard of data subject consents; requiring the implementation and maintenance of technical and organizational safeguards for personal data; mandating notice of certain personal data breaches to the relevant supervisory authorities and affected individuals; and mandating the appointment of representatives in the U.K. or the EU in certain circumstances. For additional information about the laws and regulations to which we are or may become subject and about the risks to our business associated with such laws and regulations, please see the section titled “Risk Factors — Risks Related to Privacy, Data Security and Data Protection Laws.” Our Culture We believe our culture and core values are critical to our success and have delivered tangible financial and operational benefits to our customers, employees, and stockholders. We are a mission-driven company and have designed our core values as a guiding set of principles for our employees and business. Our core values are: • Take Your Seat at the Table: Our community welcomes and respects our employees’ unique talents and perspectives. We encourage employees to roll up their sleeves and join in as we build Braze together. • Don’t Ignore Smoke: With constant vigilance, we help each other notice issues before smoke turns to fire. When employees come to us, we celebrate the messenger and assist them however we can. • Shape the Future: We believe in the positive trajectory of change. We make investments, take calculated risks and guide others down the path of our vision for the future. • Embrace Curiosity: We are explorers of details and new horizons. We embrace a growth mindset and pursue our curiosities to acquire new mastery and hone existing skills. • Seek the Trut h : We combine intelligence with humility to challenge our assumptions and ask thoughtful questions. We make better decisions by deeply understanding our world. • Be a Human: Each of us contributes to the Braze culture through our individuality. We operate with integrity, and above all else, we are kind. Our core values were built from the ground up by our employees and represent what our employees have told us Braze means to them. Accordingly, these core values represent not only the ideals of our business, but the guiding tenets of how we operate every day, including how we communicate, how we make decisions, and how we treat our customers and our colleagues. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion We believe our impact is greatest when our workforce represents the diverse and global community that we serve. Accordingly, we started our Braze For ALL initiative in 2018 and our Social Impact Department in 2021 in support of our view that diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, efforts are integral to our success and a key part of our core values. As part of our Braze For ALL initiative, our DEI efforts include: • Hiring Practices: We use a number of techniques focused on the achievement of a diverse workforce. For instance, we try to utilize recruitment strategies that will provide a diverse pipeline of candidates, including partnerships with colleges, universities and non-profit organizations that support underrepresented populations from which we can source talent. • Employee Resource Groups: Employee resource groups at Braze are employee-led and organizationally-supported groups of employees that are drawn together by shared characteristics (such as ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, etc.) or shared interests. Participation is open to all. Our employee resource groups serve as a resource, point of connection and community for underrepresented employees and their allies, and are an important part of building and maintaining an equitable, diverse and inclusive workforce and community. 13 Table of Contents • Cultural Education, Bias Mitigation and Allyship: We provide regular programming on cultural awareness, bias mitigation and allyship, including through partnerships with third parties. All new hires are required to participate in unconscious bias and diversity training. As of January 31, 2022, our workforce was, based upon employee self-identification, 59% white, 20% Asian, 5% of two or more racial groups, 5% black, 4% of Latin background, 3% of our workforce identified as an ethnicity not included in these groups and the remainder declined to self-identify or did not respond. As of the same date, based upon employee self-identification, our workforce was 54% male, 44% female, 0.4% non-binary or gender fluid and the remainder declined to self-identify or did not respond. Social Responsibility and Community Initiatives Our core values not only express how we drive our business, but they also reflect how we seek to support the communities of which we are a part. To support this, we have established a Social Impact Department with the goal of using our technology, expertise, and resources to transform how the world connects and communicates to shape an equitable and more sustainable future. Our Social Impact Department oversees our corporate social responsibility and DEI initiatives under the pillars of community, education, and sustainability. We desire to improve our communities through a number of social initiatives, core among them our participation in the joint-initiative Tech for Black Founders. As part of Tech for Black Founders, our mission is to create an ecosystem that provides resources and technology to empower Black-founded businesses and level the playing field for underserved founders. All companies led by one or more Black founders that have bootstrapped or raised less than $30.0 million in venture capital financing and with fewer than 150 employees are eligible for this program. Companies that satisfy these criteria are eligible to use certain aspects of our platform and certain products for free for a year, with the ability to apply for an additional year if the company continues to meet the applicable criteria. As of January 31, 2022, there were 16 companies using Braze through this initiative. We have established the Braze Cares initiative which focuses on our charitable giving and fostering opportunities for our employees to volunteer in their communities. As of January 31, 2022, through our Braze Cares program, we and our employees have made donations of approximately $294,787 to over 567 organizations. Our employees have also volunteered with numerous organizations worldwide as part of this program. We have also joined the Pledge 1% movement and have reserved up to 964,647 shares of our Class A common stock, which we may donate over the next ten years, to fund our social impact and environmental, social, and governance initiatives. We may also donate our time and technology, in addition to our equity and financial resources, to support our social responsibility and community initiatives. Human Capital As a technology company, our employees are our most valuable resource. We are led by a diverse, global, and talented team of software developers and subject matter experts who seek to understand our customers’ challenges and are dedicated to tackling them. As of January 31, 2022, we had a total of 1,164 full-time employees. We have not experienced any work stoppages, and we consider our relations with our employees to be good. We offer employees a variety of professional development opportunities and encourage a performance-driven environment. We have focused on creating a robust culture to encourage retention and engagement. See “— Our Culture” above for additional information about our human capital management practices. General Corporate Information We were incorporated in Delaware in 2011. Our headquarters is located at 330 West 34th Street, Floor 18, New York, New York 10001 and our telephone number is (609) 964-0585. Our website address is www.braze.com. Information contained on, or that can be accessed through, our website is not incorporated by reference into this Annual Report on Form 10-K, and you should not consider information on our website to be part of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Other Available Information Our Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, and amendments to reports filed pursuant to Sections 13(a) and 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, or the Exchange Act, are filed with the SEC. Such reports and other information filed by us with the SEC are available free of charge on our website at 14 Table of Contents www.investors.braze.com when such reports are available on the SEC’s website. The SEC maintains an internet site that contains reports, proxy and information statements and other information regarding issuers that file electronically with the SEC at www.sec.gov. The information contained on the websites referenced in this Annual Report on Form 10-K is not incorporated by reference into this filing. Further, our references to website URLs are intended to be inactive textual references only.