Backblaze, Inc. Q4 FY2021 Earnings Call

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Backblaze fourth quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. As a reminder, today's program may be recorded. And now I would like to introduce your host for today's program, James Kisner, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you and good afternoon. And welcome to Backblaze's fourth quarter in the Fiscal Year 2021 Earnings Call. On the call with me today are Gleb Budman, co-founder, CEO, and Chairperson of the board, and Frank Patchel, Chief Financial Officer. Today Backblaze will discuss the financial results that were distributed earlier this afternoon. Things on this call include forward-looking statements that include, but are not limited to our future financial results, use of our IPO proceeds and investments in our business, our ability to compete effectively, acquiring new customers and retaining and expanding our business with existing customers, hiring and retaining key personnel, and effectively managing our growth. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. In particular, those described in our Risk Factors that will be included in our Form 10-K for the year ended December 31st, 2021, and our other financial filings. You should not rely on our forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. All forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions and beliefs as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update them, except as required by law. Our discussion today will include non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to, and not as a substitute for, our GAAP results. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP results may be found in our earnings release, which was furnished with our Form 8-K filed today with the SEC. You can also find a slide presentation related to our comments in the webcast, which will also be posted to our Investor Relations page after the call. Before I turn the call over to Gleb, I'd also like to mention that in the latter portion of our call, we will be addressing questions we have gathered from non-institutional or retail investors. We're very excited to be able to engage more broadly with retail investors and look forward to a robust dialogue with all of our investors. I would now like to turn the call over to Gleb.

Thank you, James. And thanks to all of you for joining us. Given that we have a number of investors new to the Backblaze story, I want to briefly review what Backblaze does. Backblaze is building the leading independent cloud for data storage. We provide two easy and affordable cloud storage services on our purpose-built storage cloud. Our B2 Cloud Storage service provides developers and IT people a public cloud storage service that is dramatically easier and one-fifth the price of Amazon Web Services S3 and others. Backblaze can scale to any size, but we are optimized for the underserved mid-market, which we define as companies with less than 1,000 employees. We also offer our Computer Backup Service, that provides unlimited cloud backup for laptops and desktops for companies and individuals. This service is especially beneficial as remote work accelerates. Now, to the business highlights. We had a strong Q4 to finish off a great year and grew overall revenue 28% year-on-year to $18.7 million, with continued robust growth of 56% for our B2 Cloud Storage business, and 16% growth in our Computer Backup business. ARR for the company reached $75 million and our high-growth B2 Cloud Storage crossed over one-third of the entire business, reaching ARR of approximately $27 million. Importantly, we achieved these results with essentially no benefit from investment of our IPO proceeds. The Backblaze team continues to work toward being the leading independent cloud for data storage. Our strong Q4 results support our plan to increase our investments at a faster rate than we previously planned just a few months ago. Frank will offer more detail. But broadly, we intend to increase our sales and marketing investments by over 100% in 2022, or about $10 million more than our prior internal plans. I'll now share detail on four ways we're scaling the business in 2022 and beyond. First, outbound sales. We began last year with no outbound sales team. We believed that we could grow Backblaze by reaching out to businesses that would benefit from our cloud services. And we started a small initiative. As the program showed signs of success, we started scaling the team. By the end of Q3 2021, we had increased the number of outbound sales reps to five; today, we are at 13, and we intend to continue scaling up that team. Second, paid advertising. Before going public, we focused on optimizing our significant organic inbound traffic with proceeds; we are investing to raise brand awareness among our key go-forward markets, namely developers and IT admins. We launched our Blaze It advertising campaign, which is reaching millions of video viewers. While the campaign is still ongoing, initial data suggests that brand awareness is a significant opportunity area for us to drive new interest in our offerings. Third, partnerships. Our partners represent tremendous and efficient growth opportunities for Backblaze. We regularly announce new partners and a recent example is the expansion of our Veeam partnership to include their Kasten offering. Kasten is a leader in Kubernetes data protection. To those who number Kubernetes is a leading open-source platform that developers use to build and deploy applications. Kasten customers can designate Backblaze B2 as their storage destination to protect their Kubernetes environments from loss or ransomware attacks, while also supporting regulatory compliance. Providing storage for Kubernetes data is just another way we are carrying out our strategy to be the independent provider of storage for developers. We're also excited to announce that we'll be accelerating our partner-driven revenue through the launch of a new partner marketing team. We believe the creation of a dedicated partner marketing team will bring the focus necessary to better build both our existing partner relationships and bring new partners on board. As part of this effort, we've already hired a great leader for that team. Fourth, developers. Developers are a strategically important group for Backblaze, and our efforts on this front are bearing fruit. B2 Cloud Storage ARR from developer accounts roughly doubled in the past year. And this customer boasts a net revenue retention of nearly 150%. And so in 2022, we are increasingly focusing our go-to-market and engineering efforts on engaging and growing with developer customers. To support our momentum, we recently established an evangelism team and recruited key members from the developer community. We believe we are well-positioned to become the cloud storage of choice for the developer community, aided by our strong relationships with developer partners, such as Cloudflare, Fastly, and HashiCorp, and our commitment to ease-of-use, interoperability, and straightforward value. I'll highlight a developer customer that demonstrates several aspects of the strength of our platform and marketing efforts for developers. Can Stock Photo is one of the earliest stock image and video sites. They provide royalty-free images, photos, digital illustrations, clip art, and videos to their customers. They have roughly 70 million photos alone, and their 106,000 contributors add roughly 30,000 new files every day. Can Stock Photo was an early adopter of Amazon S3 when it launched in 2006. While Amazon S3 worked for them at first, it became increasingly expensive. To minimize costs, Cloudflare started to use Amazon S3 Glacier, but the retrievable delays and complicated pricing tiers increasingly frustrated the Can Stock team. As their business grew, they also worried about vendor lock-in. Because of Amazon's excessive penalties, if they ever wanted to leave, the cost to switch providers would only grow steeper over time. In the case of Can Stock, the CEO happened to use Backblaze Computer Backup to protect his personal computer, and his DevOps staff were fans of the popular Drive Stats series on our blog. If you are familiar with our blog, it is much loved and read by about three million people per year. If you're interested in learning about storage or our company, I recommend you visit backblaze.com/blog. While Can Stock wanted to switch to Backblaze, they worried about the complexity of leaving Amazon. But with our migration service, we make it point-and-click easy for customers to unshackle themselves from a major diversified cloud vendor. And we cover our customers' costs to egress their data out of those providers. The CEO of Can Stock said that it was literally like flipping on a light switch. It was that easy. Finally, while storage is at the core of businesses like Can Stock, they also use other cloud services to run their infrastructure. Our partnerships enabled Can Stock Photo to move the rest of their cloud infrastructure out of AWS as well. By freeing them from the walled garden of AWS, we enabled Can Stock to dramatically decrease the cost and complexity of their cloud infrastructure while getting the benefits of best-of-breed independent cloud services. This is just one customer example, but we believe it epitomizes how our marketing efforts and product offerings work synergistically to attract developers and other customers. As we outlined during our IPO, we see a large market and the opportunity to become the leading independent cloud for data storage. We are executing on the strategy we laid out by investing significantly in our sales and marketing efforts, including scaling up our outbound sales, paid advertising, partnerships, and developer focus. And we continue to invest in the products and platform. One example is our Cloud replication feature, which we are on track to make available by the end of the first half of 2022. We do this to ensure we provide our customers an incredibly easy-to-use, affordable, trustworthy storage platform for all their data needs. I will now turn the call over to Frank Patchel, who can review the financial results for the quarter in more detail.

Thank you, Gleb. And thanks, everyone, for joining us today. Turning to our Q4 financial results, unless otherwise noted, I will be referring to non-GAAP metrics, and the growth rates mentioned are year-on-year. We remain focused on two key metrics, revenue growth and adjusted EBITDA. Adjusted EBITDA is defined as earnings before interest, depreciation, amortization, stock-based compensation expense, and other expenses or benefits that are non-cash or that we deem non-recurring. Our Q4 revenue totaled $18.7 million, an increase of 28% year-on-year. B2 contributed sales of $6.6 million, reflecting 56% growth. Computer Backup revenue totaled $11.9 million, reflecting 16% growth. In Q4, B2 Cloud Storage represented 35% of total revenue, continuing its upward trend. Computer Backup benefited from the first full quarter of the price increase we implemented in the last month of Q3. The cost, since most backup customers are on an annual or two-year subscription, this increase, which was from approximately $6 per month to $7 per month, will continue to phase in as they renew across the next two years at the higher price. Our retention metrics remain strong. Recall, we track two key metrics, net revenue retention (NRR) and gross customer retention. These metrics are defined in more detail in our earnings release and filings, but basically, NRR is the growth of the recurring revenue for a set of customers, while gross customer retention measures retention of customers. Both metrics are trailing four-quarter averages. The total company NRR was 110%, with B2 at 130% and Computer Backup at 102%. Gross customer retention was 91% overall, with 89% for B2 and 91% for Computer Backup. These NRR and gross customer retention metrics were within one point of the values for Q3 2021. Now, this quarter we made a slight refinement to our methodology for calculating NRR and gross customer retention. This had no impact on our reported financials or our overall company metrics and only a very minor impact on these metrics for our two separate product lines. As part of our year-end numbers, we've also disclosed customer count and annual average revenue per customer as of December 31st, 2021. We plan to share these metrics once per year. Our paid customers increased to 499,000 from 466,000 in Q4 2020. The number of customers for B2 grew to 74,000 from 59,000 one year ago. The number of customers for Computer Backup totaled 439,000, up from 419,000 in Q4 2020. Now turning to Annual Average Revenue Per Customer or ARPU. For the entire company, it increased to $147 versus $124 in Q4 2020. B2 Cloud Storage ARPU grew to $348 versus $292 one year ago. In Computer Backup, ARPU was $108, up from $97 in Q4 of 2020. Working down the P&L, adjusted gross margin, which excludes non-cash expenses of depreciation, amortization, and stock-based compensation was 75%, improving from 74% last quarter and in line with our expectations. Adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $1.3 million or negative 7% of revenue, down from positive $2 million or 14% in Q4 of 2020. This reflects expenses from higher investments in both sales and marketing and R&D, as we continue to increase investments pursuing the large market potential for B2, as well as increased G&A expenses chiefly related to public company costs. Turning to the balance sheet, cash and cash equivalents were approximately $105 million as of December 31, 2021, which includes the proceeds from our November initial public offering? Now, I'd like to provide our outlook for both quarter one and full-year 2022. For the first quarter, we expect revenue to be in the range of $19 million to $19.5 million. We expect one adjusted EBITDA margin of negative 20% to negative 16%. We expect a Q1 2022, basic share count of approximately 30.5 million to 31 million shares. Turning to the full year 2022 outlook, we expect revenue to be in the range of $83 million to $86 million. While we are increasing our spend in 2022, we are not currently anticipating a significant benefit to revenue from this spend until late 2022 or 2023. Turning to the 2022 EBITDA margin guidance, we expect a full year 2022 adjusted EBITDA margin of negative 18% to negative 14% as we increase our investments and address our significant market opportunity and aim to accelerate our growth. I will now turn the call back to James.

Thank you, Operator. We're now ready to take questions from analysts.

Certainly. Our first question comes from the line of Ittai Kidron from Oppenheimer & Company. Your question, please.

Thanks, guys. Solid quarter. Gleb, thanks for the review on the four items where you're investing a lot. That's very helpful. Touching on that, perhaps trying to grow a little bit deeper. You've now been a few months into this investment cycle. So two questions. One, what have you learned so far about the investment in these four areas? Some insights on what you've learned through this process would be interesting to hear. And then, second, from an ROI standpoint, is there a way for you, and I know it's early because you've yet to see material upside from this. Yes. I think you mentioned later this year is where we see the benefit, but perhaps letting your gut call the shot here a little bit. How do you feel about ROI here? Well, what areas do you feel you've got to get better ROI versus less, with respect to these investment areas?

Hey Ittai. It's good to hear your voice. And thanks for the questions. So on the outbound sales side of things, that's a program that we kicked off at the beginning of last year and in a very small scale, and then we've been scaling it up. Part of the reason that we've been investing in and scaling it up more rapidly in this last little bit is because we're seeing a good return from that, especially on the opportunity potential side. And so it's an area that I'm very excited about; as I said, we've scaled it from one to three to five to 13, and we're continuing to scale that up. So that's definitely one that we're investing behind because we're seeing a good opportunity there. And we track metrics similar to other companies. We track opportunity potential, we track conversion rates, we track time to close, and we're enthused by what we're seeing on that front. So the upfront sales is exciting. On the partnership side, we've been doing partnerships for a long time. We've been successful with those partnerships. And so one of the things that we talked about as part of the IPO process was that with our partnerships, we had responsibility for bringing the partners and making them successful, which was part of the broader marketing and sales effort. One thing that I'm excited about is that we're now focusing on it with a dedicated partner marketing team, which will help us bring more partners on board and also get them more successful. On the paid advertising side, that one is a more nascent motion for us. But we've seen that the Blaze It campaign that we launched is something that resonates with people, so the actual campaign itself is well-received. And the early results that we've seen in terms of getting viewership from the investments has been positive, and we're tracking carefully to see what we see on our trends. Finally, on the developer side, developers are just a very strategic audience for us. It's something that is very important for Backblaze overall. And we think that the product-market fit of the B2 platforms for developers is excellent, and as we mentioned on the call, the NRR metrics are very positive with developers and the early signs in terms of our doubling of the ARR coming from our developer accounts is also very positive. So we're excited to invest further behind that with the evangelism team and into the product and platform as well.

Okay, that's very helpful. Maybe as a follow-up, when you touched on NRR, it is down in both product categories on a year-over-year basis. So help me think about the path forward here on this metric and especially with new investments coming. And maybe also if you could tie it into pricing; clearly on the Computer Backup, you have some pricing mechanisms that still need to work in your favor over the next year or two, but perhaps on B2, anything under competitive fund held, how do you think about how pricing is holding up in that category? Thanks.

On the NRR side it's certainly a metric that we track and care about. I think if you look at the B2 NRR, it's pretty consistent to what it's been, and it's still best-in-class at around 130%. We don't guide NRR. I will say that cloud application is something that we expect to have some impact on helping NRR, the pricing that flows through on the Computer Backup side, we expect to have some impact in helping NRR as well.

Very good. Thanks, guys.

Thank you all. Our next question comes from the line of Jason Ader from William Blair. Your question, please.

Yes. Thanks. Hey, guys. I guess I wanted to follow up on Ittai's question on the investment posture. Here is definitely from an EBITDA margin outlook standpoint is lower than what we were modeling, what we had in our models for 2022. And I just want to understand a little bit better the calculus there at the board level, at the management level, what was the back and forth around how much you should invest and from a timing perspective, and from just an overall opportunity perspective, just any more kind of color in terms of how that process played out.

Yeah, that's a good question, Jason. Because obviously, as we said, it's an increase over our prior plans. I think one of the things that we looked at was as the programs that we were seeing were starting to look successful, we wanted to put dollars behind those. So some of the programs that we kicked off earlier in the year, earlier in 2021, we didn't have data internally to support accelerating them. We do have some of that data now, and so we've made some of those decisions. I think one of the things we talked about was, we didn't want to fundamentally drastically change the way we run Backblaze, but we do want to invest for growth. And so finding that healthy balance between investing behind things that we feel good about, and without getting ahead of our skis. So let me see if Frank wants to add anything to that.

I really think that covers it, but I think what we're really doing is we're sacrificing EBITDA in the short term for really accelerating the growth. And asking how we got there, it was a careful, methodical approach, as you would expect. We looked at increasing it at the rate that we had first projected and we felt that seeing some good results from Q4; that really would make us believe that we should be accelerating further. Having said that, the investments are in every quarter, and we are measuring them. So we have the opportunity as the quarters progress to see where we should accelerate further or where we should cut back in any of the areas.

That's helpful. Thank you. And then Gleb, as you scan the market for opportunities for B2, are there any other verticals or segments of the market where things have popped up and you've said to your team, we got to go more aggressively there. I mean, we know about developers, about smaller organizations, but any other geographies, verticals, market segments where you see some green shoots and some opportunities?

One interesting aspect has been our outbound team. They focus on testing ideal customer profiles. As they identify a target profile, they evaluate its potential, and if it shows promise, they begin to scale their efforts. Over the past year, they've applied this strategy in several verticals. While I won't disclose specific verticals due to competitive concerns, the general approach involves reaching out to various prospects to determine if our core value proposition resonates with them. If it does, they intensify their outbound efforts within that customer profile. We have identified a few key verticals to concentrate on. Developers, in particular, represent a significant strategic focus for us, where we are making substantial investments in our product and platform. Regarding the vertical approach, we can be more tactical, systematically targeting one vertical after another.

Great. And then one final quick one. Just as you think about the ICPs, is it somebody that's got a lot of data that's price-sensitive? What can you tell us about what's resonating with your value proposition standpoint, with those specific customer profiles?

One of the areas that we've been seeing in general interest is in a lot of the ransomware needs. And so a lot of the customers are ones that are interested and concerned about ransomware and protecting from that. And so some of them have been cyclical time-sensitive in terms of their timing, not so. We've seen school districts where, depending on the time of year when they can purchase and deploy new things. We've seen some of it has been somewhat regional based on areas of the country that have been hit by various natural disasters, and they've cared about backup and archive becoming top of mind. So different areas, but in general, those are some of the types of things that have been resonating with our offering with the customers.

Thanks and good luck.

Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Eric Martinuzzi from Lake Street. Your question, please.

I want to focus on the cash impact of the decision to expedite the investment. If we start with $105 million at the end of December 2021, where do we expect to be at the end of December 2022? Considering the guidance for 2022 and starting with a $13.5 million adjusted EBITDA loss at the midpoint, if we factor in capital expenditures, capitalized software, and hard disk drive principal payments, I estimate around $67 million. Can you let me know if my projections for the year-end cash balance are accurate?

Hi, Eric. It's Frank. No, you're too high. The reason is, remember that our capital expenses are at $67 million at the end of the year; is that what you said? Or is the usage $67 million?

Yeah. At the end of the year. I was using $2 million for capex, and $4 million for capitalized software, and $19 million for hard disk drives.

The only thing I would add is that we lease our hard drives, so it doesn't require immediate capital expenditure for us. Our leasing term is three years. However, the other figures you mentioned are accurate. You are indeed tracking our EBITDA correctly.

Okay. As I look at the headcount, this incremental investment of $10 million raises the question of what that means for us. What was the headcount at the end of 2021, and what are the plans for headcount by the end of 2022?

We had 270 employees at the end of '21 and we're expecting to add approximately 180 to give us approximately 450 headcount at the end of '22. I do want to caveat that a little bit because it's very difficult in these times to hire the quality that we want. Last year, we fell a little bit short in our hiring goals. We pushed it over into '22. But it's still a situation where to succeed for us means adding a lot of very good people.

I understand. That's going to keep the HR department busy. Good luck with that. Thanks for taking my questions.

Sure.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Erik Suppiger from JMP. Your question, please.

Thanks for taking the question. Good to see some nice growth on the B2 there. Talk a little bit about what the impact of the incremental spend will be on the B2 service. Do you think that will enable you to accelerate growth from the current 50% range as we get into '22? Or what do you think this will do in terms of a return?

It’s important to note that our initial investments take time to yield significant results. We are currently increasing our headcount, particularly in sales and marketing, as well as across other areas of the business. We are happy with the speed at which we are adding new employees. These new team members will undergo training and will start contributing, but it will take time before we see a substantial number of new accounts. This is why we expect additional revenue growth to materialize in the fourth quarter and into 2023.

Okay. Then I'm curious if you've seen any further changes from AWS since they'd announced some adjustments to their pricing for their egress fees; has there been any change from a competitive perspective or from a pricing perspective from AWS?

We haven't seen anything material come from that, the egress change on their front was so tiny and immaterial. I think it was really didn't affect customers or the market specifically; it was just, I guess, in the direction of admitting that what we've been saying about them being egregious in what they're charging is being seen by customers, but we haven't seen any actual impact from their changes.

Okay. Any change competitively from anybody?

I wouldn't say any material change in the market since the last earnings call, we continue to focus on being dramatically easier than other products out there. We're still one-fifth the price of competitive offerings like Amazon, Google, and Azure. So I can't give anything material in the market that has shifted in the last quarter.

Very good. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Simon Leopold from Raymond James. Your question, please.

Great. Thanks for taking the question. I just first wanted to clarify two things, pretty straightforward, and then my question. I think upfront, Gleb, you said that the sales and marketing line would be $10 million higher in '22, so roughly $28-ish million. I'd just like to confirm if that's what you said.

No, it's $10 million higher than what we had previously planned in our earlier planning in the Q3 last year timeframe for 2022. Back then, we had planned on increasing spend and we're accelerating that spend by an additional $10 million.

So what are you thinking at this point? So that means roughly $35 million-ish?

Approximately.

Okay, great. I'm glad I clarified that. And the other one was in answering one of the earlier questions, you used a phrase 1, 3, 5, 13, I think you are making a reference to the number of books you've hired for sales assist. I just wanted to make sure I had that down if that's what you were referring to.

Yes. You're exactly right. It was not some sort of Fibonacci sequence or anything. We started the outbound sales team with one person at the beginning of 2021. When we started seeing some early signs of success, we scaled that up. We went to three people to five people, and today we have 13 people on that outbound sales team.

And where do you see that at the end of the year with this hiring push?

So we're not guiding that number specifically, but I will say that we continue to intend to scale that up. So this is not the end point for us. It is a ramp that we intend to continue hiring for, and it is part of our hiring plans.

And just the last one. Glad you gave us these comments. I think Frank said that we're only going to get the customer numbers once per year. Hopefully, you'll give us the ARPU numbers on a regular basis. I'm just wondering how to think about your expectations or your goals for the ARPU metric by year-end. It's been trending up. I think the mix shift helps that. I'm just trying to get a sense of the range of how to think about the growth in ARPU. Thank you.

Well, we're not really prepared to guide ARPU, but you can see and you'll see in our filings the trending that we have there, which we're very pleased with. And the areas that are going to benefit ARPU are the ones that you said. So we really see that continuing.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Zach Cummins from B. Riley Securities. Your question, please.

Yes. Hi. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions. A lot of the ones like I wanted to ask have already been alluded to. In terms of just your initial 2022 annual guidance, can you dig down a little bit about what's really baked into that? I mean, it seems like you're not really assuming much for any of these investments or anything from new products like Cloud replication really impacting much. So this year, I'm just curious on what's really baked into that initial range you guys gave us?

That's correct. On Cloud replication, it's a mid-year release, and it takes a lot of effort even though it has the potential to double the revenue for any B2 customer that adopts it. You need a significant amount to really make a difference, so we're not anticipating much revenue from that in 2022. However, looking ahead, it’s an exciting product with a considerable market demand, and we have positive expectations for the future. Regarding our overall revenue, we’re projecting between $83 million and $86 million. We closely monitor our trends, noting that 99% of our revenue is recurring. We consider factors such as our client base growth and the increase of data for our B2 customers, as well as how subscriptions are being integrated into the market for Computer Backup. These are the areas we are focused on and where we are making our forecasts.

Understood. That's helpful. And Gleb, in reference to the partner marketing team that you are building out. What are kind of the key areas of focus for them? Is it really out of the gate just trying to sign up more partners, or is it really focusing on some of the bigger partners you have right now in the near term and really expand those out, kind of the example that you get with Veeam?

Yes, it's a good question. So the prior marketing team is more focused on doing activities with partners. So we haven't partnership team that has been responsible for bringing partners on board. And the partner marketing team. One of the things that we've found is the partners come on board and many of them say, 'Hey, we wanted to x, y, and z with you.' And the partner marketing team is responsible for making more of those activities happen. So we do joint webinars, joint activities, joint events, and joint materials for sales training. So those kinds of things are what the partner marketing team is initially responsible for.

Understood. Well, thanks for taking my questions and best of luck here in the coming quarters. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks for all those great questions from the sell-side analyst community. I would now like to read questions that come from our non-institutional investors. While a handful looks like they've already been answered. We're going to address a handful of the popular questions that were submitted. The first one is for Gleb. Gleb, where do you see top-line revenue growth coming from over the next five years?

Thanks, James. First, before I answer, I want to thank all the investors who submitted questions. We've always aimed to be transparent with our customers, partners, and employees, and we aim to extend that approach to how we operate as a public company. We have a community of about three million blog readers and half a million customers, and they were critical as a part of our success to date. And we're excited to take the same approach and engage with our retail investors as a key community and stakeholders in our journey. So back to the question on growth over the next five years, we expect the primary driver of our growth will be from B2 Cloud Storage as it becomes a greater portion of our business. We expect that that will be the case with both new customers and also in spend by existing customers. So the sales and marketing activity that we've been talking about drives a lot of the activities to drive more new and somewhat larger customers still in the mid-market. And then also driving NRR, which is the net revenue retention from our existing customers. And the product and platform investments that we're making to support those customers with things such as Cloud replication that we talked briefly about.

Okay, Gleb. I have another one for you. Are there any plans to expand the data centers to more regions and allow selection of where data is stored like with Amazon?

Today, we have multiple data centers. We have them around the U.S. and in Europe. Customers can choose to keep their data in the U.S., in Europe, or both. And while we aren't going to pre-announcement of plans for competitive reasons, we do continue to regularly evaluate whether to add additional regions and whether that would be valuable for our customers. So we'll continue to do that.

This one's for Frank. Frank, when do you anticipate the company will turn a profit or post positive adjusted EBITDA margins?

Well, we need to remember that we have positive adjusted EBITDA in 2021. More conscious of the fact that many of the new public companies do not, but we've had a history of that. But right now what we're doing is we are really prioritizing growth and investing in that growth, which is causing a downward pressure on earnings. So we expect that to happen, and that's why our guidance is for the negative EBITDA.

All right. Next one. Gleb, what's the company's next big move?

As we discussed earlier, it's not really one single big move. It's a series of multiple moves all focused on growing B2 Cloud Storage rapidly. Those big moves include the scaling up of activities that we're seeing successful in sales and marketing, and investing in the product and platform with things like Cloud replication, and focusing on those key target audiences. So the Developer community, the IT community, and helping more and more of those customers find out about us.

Okay, next one. What do you see being the biggest opportunities in markets for secure data storage? And is it more commercial or residential?

We believe that the commercial market, particularly in the small and medium enterprise sector, presents the largest growth opportunities for us. IDC estimates that this segment comprises approximately 60% of the total storage as a service market, and we consider it to be the most underserved area. While we are excited to continue our support for businesses and individuals, our primary growth potential lies within the commercial segment, specifically among small and medium enterprises that are underserved.

Okay, last one. When will Backblaze release a Cloud cellphone backup?

I'm not sure that's coming from an investor or customer, but it's not something that's currently on our roadmap. At this time, we believe much better use of our capital is to invest more in growing the B2 Cloud Storage business, where we believe we have strong competitive differentiation, great product-market fit, and it's a very large impact for the end market.

Thanks to both of you for those answers, for any back to Gleb, I expect the nation that we will be conducting virtual investor meetings next week hosted by Raymond James and every 23rd, 24th we will also be attending the JMP Securities Technology Conference March sixth, intended Frankco and the William Blair of ritual TEGNA Media Summit on March 15th. I'll now turn the call back to Glenn for closing comments.

Thanks, James. And thanks again for your interest, your participation, and we look forward to updating you again on our progress in just a few short months. Operator, you may now end the call. Thank you.

Thank you. And thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect. Good day.