Braze, Inc. 10-K

Item 1 . Business Mission Our mission is to forge human connections between consumers and the brands they love through absolutely engaging experiences. Overview Braze is a leading customer engagement platform that empowers brands to Be Absolutely Engaging™. Customer Engagement is an emerging category of business activity and software which we define as the full set of activities that companies use to build and maintain direct, meaningful relationships with their customers. 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. As of January 2024, 2,044 customers around the world trusted Braze to power their cross-channel customer engagement strategies. In January 2024, our platform enabled interactions with 6.2 billion monthly active users via our customers’ apps, websites, and other digital interfaces, up from 4.8 billion in January 2023. Over the last decade, as individuals and as consumers, our bond with technology has strengthened immensely. We have welcomed more and more digital services and products into our lives and integrated them into nearly every activity we take part in. Braze was founded in 2011 in response to the step change in human history ushered in by the "smartphone", where we began to become significantly more connected to each other and to the products and services that brands compete to sell to us. Today, consumers interact with many brands across a myriad of digital and physical touchpoints. The first-party data generated from digital experiences and the increased number of consumer touchpoints have provided brands with new opportunities to reach customers and personalize brand experiences, but it has also increased consumer expectations for highly relevant, personalized, and seamless cross-channel interactions. These trends have put competitive pressure on brands and led even traditional enterprises to increase their focus and investment on customer experience. Brands have evolved to create engagement opportunities with customers through the use of customer engagement software, increasing the use of first-party data and making those first-party relationships actionable in a way that helps differentiate them from their competition or transform their businesses, while forming lasting customer relationships that can increase brand loyalty and customer value over time. We view our own role as steward of a brand's first party relationships, achieved through the sophisticated management of their first-party data, as well as the orchestration and delivery of critical components of their marketing and product experience across an increasingly non-linear and digital customer journey. Most cross-channel marketing automation platforms available today approach customer engagement on a channel-by-channel basis, which creates data and engagement silos that result in disjointed customer experiences and diminishes customer loyalty. We built Braze to facilitate the craft of customer engagement— a pursuit that is distinct from merely the activity of sending marketing messages. The craft of customer engagement brings together diverse skillsets, bold creativity, the sophisticated use of data, and an agile, experimental approach to the strategy that unlocks value in more of the moments that matter for customers as they move through their journey with a brand. In addition to avoiding siloed channels and data, our platform empowers real-time engagement between brands and their customers. The real-time nature of the interactions we enable is crucial, and 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 listen like a human would, process new information in context, and react instantaneously, enabling marketers to run engagement campaigns and messaging that feel relevant and personal. 4 Table of Contents Braze also unleashes the power of interdisciplinary teams by serving numerous stakeholders beyond traditional marketers, including product and engineering teams, business intelligence, and data engineering teams. Our platform produces valuable data that informs decisions and actions across customer engagement strategies. Our engagement 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. As a result, Braze is often a critical part of our customers’ communications infrastructure. Our platform is also 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, 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. A key aspect of Braze's differentiation is that we offer a platform, not a point solution, that gives brands an end-to-end solution for achieving their customer engagement goals, not just a tool to send messages. We vertically integrate our data ingestion, orchestration, classification, and personalization capabilities, so coordinating between them is simple and fast. Meanwhile, we abstract away the particulars of disparate data sources and the vagaries of the many messaging channels we support, so that when marketers implement their customer engagement strategies in Braze, they can maintain a customer-centric mindset – focused on the intersection of the goals of their brand with the needs of the consumer, not the complexity of data integrations or siloed message channels. This also provides consistency across Braze's classification, orchestration, and personalization feature set, making it easier for our customers to expand across channels, and allowing our R&D investments into areas like predictive intelligence or Braze's Canvas visual development environment to deliver broad impact quickly and efficiently. This product architecture supports differentiated use of AI and machine learning through its comprehensive access to first party-data, and an ability to directly take action to guide the customer journey. When deployed by our customers, our platform is typically leveraged across nearly all consumer touchpoints and sources of first-party data, including integration of the Braze SDKs into end-user applications and websites, and the configuration of automated connections into customer data warehouses or data platforms. This enables more advanced automated decision making and creates the opportunity to optimize customer journeys, improving outcomes for consumers and brands through improved content relevance and personalization. Our platform also has the promise to improve operational efficiency for the teams that use Braze – as we continue to expand our product surface area and enhance its capabilities by infusing AI, we can help brands create personalized, cross-channel solutions faster, and compound their learnings through automated experimentation and data analysis, ultimately increasing their return on investment over time. Within the orchestration layer, we enable marketers to easily design, visualize, and launch customer journeys utilizing Canvas, our proprietary, no-code journey orchestration tool. With Canvas’s comprehensive journey testing, marketers can also test, implement, and optimize the most effective channels, cadence, messaging, or creative elements from a single tool. As the usability of Canvas has improved over time, more customer communication and engagement workloads have adopted it, which we believe cements Braze in our customers’ technology ecosystems. We have also developed, and continue to refine, an AI recommendation engine that utilizes a custom-trained transformer model to match items for Braze catalogs with customers more likely to buy them, providing content personalization that can outperform competing techniques. We support interactions across both in-product and out-of-product messaging channels. Today, our messaging channels consist of in-app messages (including in-product messaging to apps on connected TV platforms), in-browser messages, surveys, mobile and web push notifications, email, SMS and MMS messages, WhatsApp messaging, webhooks, Content Cards – which are flexible, content-rich messages embedded in a mobile app or web browsers, and Feature Flags, which allows our customers to remotely enable or disable mobile or web experiences for different audiences. Braze Audience sync unifies owned and paid channels such as Meta and Google and, in the past year, we have launched audience sync to TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, and Criteo. The flexibility of our platform also allows us to add new channels quickly and efficiently as they become relevant to our customers. We enable brands to easily integrate our platform with both in-house technical infrastructure and our expanding partner ecosystem of best-in-class technologies. For instance, Braze Cloud Data Ingestion allows our customers to set up a direct connection between their data warehouses or platforms and Braze to automatically sync relevant user attributes, events, and purchases. Once synced to Braze through Cloud Data Ingestion, this data can be imported into any layer of our platform and can be leveraged for use cases such as personalization or segmentation. Customers 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 Amazon Redshift, Databricks, Google BigQuery, and Snowflake, customer data management platforms such as Rudderstack, analytic solutions such as Amplitude, and other components of the modern marketing technology ecosystem, including integrations with Shopify. 5 Table of Contents Our Competitive Strengths Cross-Channel Approach, Enabling Customer-Centric Experiences Our cross-channel engagement approach enables customer-centric experiences. We build a more timely, contextual, and complete picture of the customer and draw real-time insights from data flow to inform strategy and drive execution. This fosters a more cohesive messaging and brand engagement experience across all channels, allowing brands to deploy the right communication and engagement messaging through channels based on a 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. This is particularly valuable for the investments we have and will continue to make in artificial intelligence and machine learning features, such as predictive audience targeting, AI copywriting assistance, and automatic multivariate testing and optimization, which are designed to reduce the amount of manual time that marketers dedicate to building and executing customer engagement campaigns, thereby improving overall results without additional effort. Additionally, when we add new channels, they immediately benefit from all of the existing functionality that we have already built, which makes them fully featured and robust from the outset. This means that these new channels can compete against existing point solutions at launch and reach scale more quickly. Because Braze offers a true end-to-end customer engagement platform, and not a point solution, marketers benefit from the applicability of features across all channels. Combined with our intuitive user interface, this allows our customers to quickly and easily construct cross-channel consumer journeys without the need to learn different skills for each channel, making it easier for them to grow with Braze over time. This is accomplished without sacrificing the unique qualities and 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 reacts to first-party customer data in the moment. Our platform allows for high-volume, continuous streaming of user data to be processed in real time, providing a live understanding of the many 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, in contrast to batch processing, where 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 any messaging channel that Braze delivers, or any of the brand’s digital products or services that have been integrated with an embedded Braze software development kit (SDK), that consumer generates data that is processed and contextualized with existing user data models in real time. This allows marketers to better understand consumer behavior and associate specific content or messaging with in-product engagement, providing further context that can be leveraged for deeper engagement. Our stream processing architecture and access to first-party data also supports differentiated use of AI and machine learning, which can improve consumer outcomes and, in turn, increase the return on investment our platform provides to our customers. Global, High Performance at Scale As brands continue to grow, transform, and conduct more of their business digitally, they need a customer engagement platform that scales with them. In January 2024, our platform enabled interactions with 6.2 billion monthly active users via our customers’ apps, websites, and other digital interfaces, up from 4.8 billion in January 2023. Our scalability distinguishes our platform from point solutions, and we can handle the biggest of enterprise needs with highly reliable uptime. 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 events or scenarios. The depth and breadth of our business footprint around the world offers always-on support and local market expertise, which we view as a differentiator as organizations become more global. Braze has customers in over 70 countries and an operational presence across North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. Rapid Time to Value Across the Organization While for many brands the marketing organization has traditionally owned the responsibility for customer engagement, 6 Table of Contents 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 data, product and engineering teams to optimize customer engagement. For example, our Feature Flags product is designed to support product and growth teams to easily deliver personalized experiences allowing brands to launch features faster, tailor functionality to different audiences, and coordinate feature releases with cross-channel messages. 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 and drag-and-drop tools like Canvas, individuals across all roles and technical skill levels can design and quickly deploy multi-message, cross-channel, A/B-tested strategies, with the process of new campaign creation accelerating over time. 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 bring new creative ideas to life across all appropriate channels and platforms. They can also leverage the strategic and creative insights of our Customer Success and Strategic Consulting 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 experiences and directly embed them into their products. 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. Seamless, Real-Time Interoperability across the Customer Engagement Technology Stack Our open APIs support easy-to-implement integrations with an expanding selection of in-house systems, third-party technology providers, global systems integrators, and our formal technology partners, which we refer to as Braze Alloys. These integrations and partnerships allow customers to easily expand to messaging channels Braze may not offer native support for, easily import and export data to and from a wide variety of sources, or provide specialized services that speed integration and time to value. Our 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 instance, with Braze Cloud Data Ingestion, our customers can set up a direct connection between their data warehouses or platforms and Braze to automatically sync relevant user attributes, events, and purchases. Once synced to Braze through Cloud Data Ingestion, this data can be imported into any layer of our platform and can be leveraged for a number use cases. Customers can also use Braze Currents to stream data in real time back into those systems, which increases the return on our customers’ other technology investments. 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. These and other integrations provide an opportunity for our customers to further build the personalized brand relationships that consumers desire. Customer Engagement Expertise and Highly Engaged Community 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. We provide a number of resources to help brands design effective marketing strategies and use our platform to its maximum capability, including customer success and technical support teams, a comprehensive documentation library, and interactive online learning paths and certifications, including certifications for Braze Certified Practitioners, Braze Certified Marketers, Braze Certified Digital Strategists, or Braze Certified Developers. Braze Bonfire, our virtual, global customer community, includes thousands of individuals across a wide spectrum of industries, business sizes, and roles. Thousands of 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, engage in professional networking, and explore career growth opportunities. Growth Strategy The principal components of our growth strategy are: 7 Table of Contents • Acquire new customers: We intend to continue to expand our customer base in verticals where we already have a strong presence — such as retail, media, and entertainment, on-demand services, gaming, health and lifestyle, and financial services — and to increase our presence in verticals where we are not yet strongly represented. Through our sales and marketing efforts, we also plan to capitalize on industries and verticals subject to ongoing digital transformation and where direct-to-consumer relationships are accelerating to further propel adoption of our technology, such as Consumables. • 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 with 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 connect directly with additional consumers, which in turn leads to a need for greater messaging capacity. The addition of new channels that benefit from our orchestration engine and real-time streaming platform may also further differentiate our product, helping to sustain or increase win-rates. 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. For instance, we have operational footprints across North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, and we expect to continue increasing our market penetration in these regions, particularly the Asia-Pacific where we’ve recently expanded our footprint in Indonesia, while further capitalizing on the greenfield opportunities 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 have also invested in, and continued to expand, our relationships with the ecosystem of solution partners, marketing agencies, consultancies, and global system integrators that offer opportunities for new customer referrals. Our Products 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, all of which is supported by Sage AI by Braze, our AI engine designed to power AI functionality across all layers of this stack. 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 8 Table of Contents 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 Data Integrations: Brands can sync user cohorts from partners such as Amplitude, Tealium, or Mixpanel to our platform. They can then use membership in these user cohorts as additional criteria in the Braze Classification layer. Retail brands can also sync e-commerce data directly from Shopify, configurable via a simple web interface. • Data Transformation: Brands can programmatically sync and transform user data from SaaS tools or platforms that can send webhooks. Once synced to our platform, this data can be used just like any other data in the Braze platform. • Braze Cloud Data Ingestion: Braze Cloud Data Ingestion enables brands to quickly set up a direct connection from a data warehouse to Braze in order to sync relevant customer and product data with Braze. This enables brands to harness the bulk of their customer data to perform deeper levels of segmentation, message triggering, and personalization without the need to maintain complex data pipelines. Braze Cloud Data Ingestion supports syncing data from commonly used data platform solutions such as Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery and Databricks. Classification • Segmentation: Customers can define reusable segments of consumers based upon data such as, but not limited to, attributes, events, user behaviors, product catalog metadata, 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. • Marketing Pressure Management: Customers can create sophisticated and targeted campaigns designed to appropriately target the individual consumer. Customers can use our platform to automatically run a multi-armed bandit optimization, and to send each user the campaign variant they are most likely to engage based on A/B testing. Once the appropriate campaign has been identified, our customers can then 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). • Reporting and Analytics: We provide a variety of analytics features to help our customers understand and improve their customer engagement strategies: 9 Table of Contents ◦ 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. ◦ Predictive Suite: The Braze Predictive Suite enables brands to use machine learning to determine what customers are likely to purchase and/or churn without any engineering resources. Predictive Churn and Predictive Purchases are customizable, on-demand predictive models brands can create in minutes to effectively leverage and act on data seamlessly within the Braze platform. ◦ 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 sophisticated 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 Management: Customers can upload, store and reuse various types of content across messages. Braze offers both pre-built and customer-generated templates, a media asset library, a preference center builder and Content Blocks. Content Blocks enable customers to create reusable, cross-channel content (including Liquid Templating content). Templates, Content Blocks and a customer’s preference center can also be updated and managed via API, extending their functionality and connecting them to customer data sources dynamically. Customers can also utilize our generative AI functions to support the development of new content or images, and use our approval workflows to provide additional oversight of how and when content is used in campaigns. • Intelligent Timing and Channel: 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. • Personalized Variant: Our platform can send each user the campaign variant they are most likely to engage with based on an analysis of how users with similar profiles responded to each variant in an initial A/B test. • AI Item Recommendations: Customers can calculate what is likely to be the most popular item or product or create personalized AI recommendations from a specific catalog which can then be inserted into messages. • Catalogs: Customers can store relational or tabular data with Braze that can be used for segmentation, event triggering, and message personalization. Data stored in Braze Catalogs can be synced automatically from customer data warehouses using Braze Cloud Data Ingestion, and Catalogs natively supports triggered notifications such as "back-in-stock" journeys that can trigger when an item in a Catalog is replenished and back in stock. For example, Catalog data can be combined with our Braze segmentation to identify high-value cohorts of customers, such as users who recently viewed products that are now discounted. Catalogs can also be used for basic product recommendation use cases. Action 10 Table of Contents • In-Product Messaging and Experimentation: ◦ 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 using our drag and drop editor or built from scratch with nearly infinite customizability. ◦ 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. ◦ Feature Flags: Feature flags allow customers to remotely enable or disable mobile app or web functionality for a selection of users. Customers can turn a feature on and off in production without additional code deployment or app store updates. This allows customers to safely roll out new features with confidence and coordinate roll-outs with messaging across the full set of channels supported by our platform. • 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) and iOS Live Activities (persistent, interactive notifications displayed directly on users’ lock screens), 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 with a drag and drop editor, 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 Meta, TikTok, Google, Snapchat, Pinterest, or Criteo, brands can sync user data from Braze to each respective advertising platform to deliver advertisements outside the Braze platform based upon behavioral triggers, segmentation and more. ◦ WhatsApp Integration: Our platform is directly integrated with the WhatsApp Cloud API, making it easy to natively compose and orchestrate two-way messages as part of any cross-channel campaign in Braze. • 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: 11 Table of Contents • Operations and Administration: We provide audit logs for major actions that occur in our platform, change logs for updates to objects such as Campaigns, Segments, or Canvases on our dashboard, and permissions, versioning and approval flow capabilities in various parts of the product. Furthermore, we offer, and plan to expand on, debugging capabilities in the platform that allow customers to better troubleshoot their integrations and messaging strategies. • Access Controls and Security: 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 the ability of specified users to view or manage data outside of their assigned region. We also integrate with a variety of identity providers for single-sign-on or user account provisioning and provide configurable security controls such as session timeouts, password complexity, two-factor authentication, and IP allow lists. 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, Klaviyo, Clevertap (Leanplum) 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. Additionally, to the extent there is a sustained general economic downturn, our customers and potential customers may experience delays and reductions in general customer engagement technology spending. As a result, our competitors may respond to market conditions by lowering prices or making other contractual concessions in an attempt to lure away our current and potential customers. 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. Recently, there has also been significant merger and acquisition activity in the technology industry, including among our competitors. These consolidation trends 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 12 Table of Contents We sell subscriptions to our platform primarily through a direct sales force with primary operations in North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region. 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 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 Customer Officer, Chief Digital Officer, Chief Marketing 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 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. However, we also use open source software in our services. As of January 31, 2024, we owned 25 patents and had two 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 2043. As of January 31, 2024, we owned six registered trademarks in the United States and 25 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 — Risks Related to Intellectual Property” for a more comprehensive description of risks related to our intellectual property. Seasonality We experience seasonality in our cost of revenue as a result of our customers’ increased usage of our platform based on their business demands. See “Item 7. Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations—Seasonality” for additional information. Privacy, Data Security and Data Protection In the ordinary course of our business, we may process personal data. We are, or may become, subject to a number of privacy, data security and data protection 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 or other subjects. Such obligations may include, without limitation, the Federal Trade Commission Act, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act, the California Consumer Privacy Act (as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act), or the CCPA, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, or the EU GDPR, the EU GDPR’s equivalent in the United Kingdom, or the U.K. GDPR, the ePrivacy Directive, Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act and various related provincial laws, and Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation. In addition, numerous other states within the United States have also enacted, or are in the process of enacting or considering, comprehensive data privacy laws that share similarities with the CCPA. 13 Table of Contents The increasingly stringent and evolving regulatory frameworks related to personal data processing 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’ collection and use of personal data and to respond to certain requests from California residents related to their personal data, including requests to receive information on the business’s personal data processing activities, to delete the individual’s personal data, and to opt out of certain sharing and sales of personal data. The CCPA also provides for civil penalties and a private right of action for violations which may include an award of statutory damages. Moreover, laws in all 50 U.S. states require businesses to provide notice under certain circumstances to consumers whose personal data has been disclosed as a result of a data breach. Further, 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 rights 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 regarding the collection, control, use, sharing, disclosure and other processing of personal data 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. 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 established 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. 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 affinity organizations and conferences that support underrepresented populations from which we can source talent. 14 Table of Contents • Employee Resource Groups: Employee resource groups (or ERGs) 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. 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. ERGs provide employees with opportunities to develop leadership skills, learn about other cultures and build relationships across the company. • Cultural Education, Bias Mitigation and Allyship: We provide regular programming on inclusion, 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. Additional information on our diversity and inclusion strategy, and diversity metrics and programs can be found in our social impact report, which we publish annually and make available on our investor relations website at www.investors.braze.com. Nothing on our website shall be deemed incorporated by reference into this Form 10-K. Social, Environmental, 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. This department oversees our corporate social responsibility, sustainability and DEI initiatives under the pillars of Community, Equity and Environment. We desire to improve our communities through a number of social initiatives, core among them our product grant program, Tech for an Equitable Future. The Tech for an Equitable Future aims to remove barriers and accelerate business growth for underrepresented founders, including women founders, by providing 12 months of free access to the Braze platform and supporting services. As of January 31, 2024, the initiative— originally launched in 2020 as Tech for Black Founders and expanded into Tech for an Equitable Future in December 2023— provides 24 startups led by underrepresented founders free access to Braze. Companies led by one or more underrepresented founders that have bootstrapped or raised less than $30.0 million in venture capital financing and with fewer than 100 employees are eligible for inclusion in this program. Annually, we publish an ESG report, which summarizes the progress of ESG issues (including DEI, data privacy matters, corporate governance programs, our estimated greenhouse gas emissions, and climate change programs, among others). The information contained within our ESG report is not incorporated by reference into this filing. We have established the Braze Cares initiative which focuses on our charitable giving and fostering opportunities for our employees to volunteer in their communities. During the fiscal year ended January 31, 2024, through our Braze Cares program, we and our employees have made donations of approximately $0.2 million to 892 organizations. Our employees have also volunteered with numerous organizations worldwide as part of this program. In 2021, we became a member of the Pledge 1% movement, through which we have reserved up to 964,647 shares of our Class A common stock, which we may continue to donate to a donor advised fund, or DAF, through 2031, to fund our social impact and environmental, social, and governance 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, 2024, we had a total of 1,548 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. 15 Table of Contents 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 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.