Yext

Prospectus Summary

PROSPECTUS SUMMARY
This summary highlights information contained elsewhere in this prospectus. This summary does not contain all of the information you should consider before buying shares in this offering. Therefore, you should read this entire prospectus carefully, including the "Risk Factors" and "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations" sections and our consolidated financial statements and the related notes included elsewhere in this prospectus, before deciding to purchase shares of our common stock. Unless the context requires otherwise, the words "we," "us," "our" and "Yext" refer to Yext, Inc. and its wholly owned subsidiaries.

YEXT, INC.

Overview

Yext is a knowledge engine. Our platform lets businesses manage their digital knowledge in the cloud and sync it to over 100 services, including Apple Maps, Bing, Cortana, Facebook, Google, Google Maps, Instagram, Siri and Yelp. Digital knowledge is the structured information that a business wants to make publicly accessible. For example, in food service, the address, phone number or menu details of a restaurant; in healthcare, the health insurances accepted by a physician or the precise drop-off point of the emergency room at a hospital campus; or in finance, the ATM locations, retail bank holiday hours or insurance agent biographies. We believe a business is the ultimate authority on its own digital knowledge, and it is our mission to put that business in control of it everywhere.

Intelligent search, which are searches of digital knowledge that combine context and intent, has grown significantly in recent years. In particular, searches that return maps in the results have grown significantly with the proliferation of mobile devices and now make up 30% of all mobile searches. For example, searches for categories, such as "restaurants", "wine", "insurance", "wealth advisor" or "doctor", or for specific brands, such as "Marriott", "McDonald's" or "Home Depot", return maps directly in the search results. The source of the results for each of these searches is not a web page—it is structured data. Businesses and service providers want their information to be accurate, compelling and more prominent than that of their competitors when consumers look for them on search platforms, applications, social media, connected devices and other digital sources. Our solution drives commerce by providing real-time digital knowledge that allows consumers to find the businesses and service providers that are most relevant to them.

The vast majority of digital knowledge provided by searches currently comes from third-party sources such as data aggregators, governmental agencies and consumers. The net result of this third-party sourcing has been to produce "best guess" data that can often miss or misstate the true digital knowledge about businesses worldwide. We have built our business on the fundamental premise that the best source of accurate and timely digital knowledge about a business is the business itself. We have established direct data integrations between our software and the over 100 members of our PowerListings Network that end consumers around the globe use to discover new businesses, read reviews and find accurate answers to their queries. These integrations include Apple Maps, Bing, Facebook, Google, Google Maps, Instagram, Yelp and many others. Our platform uses our patented Match & Lock process to ensure that our customers' digital knowledge is in sync across our PowerListings Network. Businesses can directly control their own digital knowledge rather than leaving it in the hands of third parties, thereby making our platform the system of record for such vital knowledge.

We offer our cloud-based digital knowledge platform, the Yext Knowledge Engine, to customers on a subscription basis in several packages. Each package provides varying levels of access to our key Listings, Pages, Reviews and other features. Our Listings feature provides customers with control over their digital presence, including their location and other related attributes published on the most widely used third-party applications. Our Pages feature allows customers to establish landing pages on their own websites and to manage rich and compelling digital content on those sites, including calls to action. Our Reviews feature enables customers to encourage and facilitate reviews from end consumers, thereby increasing the quantity and quality of the reviews available to potential consumers and improving the search relevance for businesses on our PowerListings Network.

Our customers use our platform to manage their digital knowledge covering over 17 million attributes and nearly one million locations. These customers include leading businesses in a diverse set of industries, such as healthcare and pharmaceuticals, retail, financial services, manufacturing and technology. Our customers include AutoZone, Ben & Jerry's, Best Buy, Citi, Denny's, Farmers Insurance Group, H&R Block, HCA, Infiniti, Marriott, Michael's, McDonald's, Rite Aid, Steward Health Care and many others.

We believe that the market for digital knowledge management is a large and mostly untapped market. As a subset of digital knowledge, we estimate that there are currently over 100 million potential business locations and points of interest in the world that could benefit from our platform, representing an estimated addressable market, solely with respect to locations, of approximately $10 billion annually for our existing platform in 2016.

We have experienced rapid growth in recent periods. For our fiscal years ended January 31, 2015 and 2016, our revenues were $60.0 million and $89.7 million, respectively, our net loss was $17.3 million and $26.5 million, respectively, and our non-GAAP net loss¹ was $14.4 million and $22.0 million, respectively. For the nine months ended October 31, 2015 and 2016, our revenues were $64.0 million and $88.6 million and our net loss was $18.2 million and $28.6 million, respectively, and our non-GAAP net loss was $15.2 million and $22.3 million, respectively.

Industry Background

Consumer Discovery Has Changed. Intelligent search has grown significantly in recent years. Businesses are now able to leverage intelligent search to help individuals discover what they need without having to necessarily visit the business's own website and return digital knowledge, such as location and other related data, for nearly any search.

Knowledge Is Fundamental. Businesses spend significant sums on developing their brands and creating product and market awareness. When potential consumers reached through those efforts want to make a purchase, businesses need their digital knowledge to be widely available and correct so that they can be found efficiently. Inaccurate or incomplete information results in lost sales opportunities, negative brand experiences and organizational inefficiencies.

Intelligent Search Drives Commerce. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, approximately 92% of U.S. retail sales occurred at physical locations during 2016. When searching for a business, consumers need to know many relevant attributes such as the address, phone number, menu options of a restaurant or operating hours. According to Think with Google, 76% of location searches in the United States in May 2016 resulted in visits to a business within one day of the search and 28% of those searches resulted in a purchase.

Managing Digital Knowledge Is Challenging. Many businesses lack the capabilities to effectively control, structure and manage digital knowledge across the digital ecosystem where consumers discover businesses. This lack of management capability is due to several factors:

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Lack of Control of Digital Knowledge. The vast majority of digital knowledge currently comes from third-party sources such as data aggregators, governmental agencies and consumers. The net result

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Non-GAAP net loss is a financial measure not calculated in accordance with accounting principles generally accepted in the United States, or GAAP. A reconciliation of this non-GAAP measure to the most directly comparable GAAP-based measure along with a summary of the definition and material limitations of this measure are included under "Selected Consolidated Financial Data—Non-GAAP Net Loss."

of this third-party sourcing has been to produce "best guess" data that can often miss or misstate the true digital knowledge for businesses worldwide.

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Attributes that Comprise Digital Knowledge Are Expanding. Businesses need to be able to define their digital knowledge using detailed, category-specific attributes about their business, ranging from name, address and phone number to more detailed items such as whether a hotel accepts pets, a restaurant has a gluten-free menu or a doctor accepts certain insurance plans.


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Digital Knowledge Is Dynamic. Digital knowledge increasingly includes dynamic attributes that change frequently, such as opening hours, holiday hours, menus and promotions.


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Digital Knowledge Exists in Many Places. The number of applications that leverage digital knowledge continues to increase, both from the proliferation of vertical search applications and intelligent search using mobile, voice-based and in-app search. Businesses need an efficient way to manage their digital knowledge across a multitude of services, such as Google, Facebook and Yelp.

Businesses Need to Provide Customers with Relevant and Actionable Information. When consumers search for businesses, they expect to be able to quickly find all of the relevant information they need about those organizations, such as a description, the nearest store if it is a chain, the actual location on a map, the ability to make an appointment if it is a professional service provider, such as an insurance agent, or the ability to search for a menu item if it is a restaurant.

Existing Alternatives Are Inadequate. Traditional methods for managing digital knowledge about location include paper or legacy software-based solutions, such as word processors or spreadsheets. Simply managing and updating the few core search engines, such as Google and Bing, through these traditional methods is already very challenging, and becomes even more so when implementing updates on newer services such as Instagram, Snapchat and Uber.

Our Solution—the Yext Knowledge Engine

We offer our Yext Knowledge Engine, a cloud-based global platform that enables businesses to control and manage their digital knowledge and make it available through our PowerListings Network of over 100 third-party maps, apps, search engines, intelligent GPS systems, digital assistants, vertical directories and social networks in a complete, up to date and accurate manner. Our platform serves as the system of record for the vital information used internally to execute operations and distributed externally across the web, mobile listings, search platforms, applications, social media and connected devices that leverage intelligent search. The core of our platform is our global Knowledge Engine, which powers our Listings, Pages and Reviews features. We currently offer subscription packages that include some or all of these and other features based on the edition purchased. The key features of our platform are as follows:

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Our Listings feature allows customers to manage their location-related data across our PowerListings Network on the most widely used maps, apps, search engines, intelligent GPS systems, digital assistants, vertical directories and social networks from a single source.


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Our Pages feature allows customers to establish landing pages for their business on their own websites, including for individual locations or for individual professional service providers that vary by location, and to manage rich and compelling digital content on those sites, including calls to action.


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Our Reviews feature enables customers to encourage and facilitate reviews from their end consumers, thereby increasing the quantity and quality of the reviews available to potential consumers, the tools to manage their reviews from multiple sources from a single location and the ability to help strengthen their reviews across our PowerListings Network.

Key Benefits of Our Platform

Our global Knowledge Engine provides the following benefits depending on a customer's subscription level and enabled solutions and features:

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Control over Digital Knowledge. Our platform is the system of record that enables our customers to control their digital knowledge and be the single source of truth for their information everywhere. Our customers quickly gain control of their digital knowledge, such as their location data, listings and related attributes, resulting in the elimination of inaccurate and duplicate data and the ability to seamlessly and simultaneously update data across our PowerListings Network.


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Flexibility for Optimized Management of Digital Knowledge Attributes. Our technology enables businesses to develop structured digital knowledge using standardized best practices that suit their business needs and is optimized for search and discovery. Our solution gives businesses the ability to organize, edit and update digital knowledge based on numerous standard attribute fields, such as address or operating hours, and increase the depth of their digital knowledge using our extensible custom fields, such as menu options or accepted insurance plans.


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Direct Integrations with the Most Relevant Services. Our platform, coupled with our PowerListings Network of over 100 maps, apps, search engines, intelligent GPS systems, digital assistants, vertical directories and social networks, provides our customers with the ability to update their digital knowledge and content across this network with a single click.


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Ability to Create Compelling Local Pages for Consumers. Our Pages feature enables businesses to create a compelling online consumer experience utilizing rich content that accurately represents their brands and establishes a consumer call to action. With Pages, our platform automatically creates and publishes individual pages that a business can manage, such as separate pages for each store, insurance agent or doctor's office. Our content customization technology allows customers to publish information that is easily crawled by search engines, rich in content and optimized for any device. Customer pages built with our Pages feature can also include calls to action, which allow customers to embed applications that permit end consumers to book an appointment with a financial advisor or order a meal. Our software allows those calls to action to be integrated with existing enterprise systems used by the business.


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Ability to Drive More Reviews and Increase Consumer Engagement. Our Reviews feature helps our customers gather additional genuine consumer reviews, which typically raises their published overall consumer satisfaction score by encouraging satisfied consumers who may not otherwise write reviews to do so. This increased review activity helps improve our customers' prominence in intelligent search results on providers in our PowerListings Network and can help drive incremental sales.


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Analytics. Our platform's advanced analytics informs businesses as to their digital public presence.


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Global Reach and Local Expertise. Our platform integrates with both global and country-specific search engines and applications, accepts international address and phone number data, and allows local employees to contribute individual expertise, providing a consumer experience that respects local languages, address formats and customs.

Our Competitive Strengths

We believe our competitive strengths include:

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Leading Technology Platform. Our solution was built from the ground up as a cloud application. As a result, our total cost of ownership for a customer is low, our deployment times are short, and we can easily deploy the latest updates and upgrades to all of our customers via our cloud-based platform.

Our platform currently supports over 17 million digital knowledge attributes such as address, business hours, menus and professional credentials.

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Extensive PowerListings Network. We have deep technology integrations with over 100 maps, apps, search engines, intelligent GPS systems, digital assistants, vertical directories and social networks, such as Apple Maps, Bing, Facebook, Google, Google Maps, Instagram and Yelp. We have established strong, long-term relationships with many of our PowerListings Network services. Direct integrations and custom application program interfaces, or APIs, between our Knowledge Engine and our PowerListings Network services position us to deliver control and value to our customers.


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Authoritative and Growing Data Set. We provide integrated application providers and their end consumers with digital knowledge on over 17 million attributes and nearly one million locations as of January 31, 2017. Many of these attributes change frequently, such as holiday hours or menus, and our platform allows our customers to ensure that their digital knowledge data is maintained accurately and is complete. This high-quality data set is valuable to apps that want to provide their users with accurate and complete information.


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Focus on Product Innovation. We have a history of adding innovative new features to our platform. For example, we initially created Listings in 2011, Pages in 2014 and Reviews in 2016. We also have expanded our platform to work with new application types as they have emerged, such as Snapchat and Uber.


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Global Footprint. We have integrated with global search engines and map providers such as TomTom, thereby allowing our customers to control their digital knowledge data worldwide and make it available to consumers around the globe. Our platform enables our customers to publish digital knowledge in over 160 countries and in over 90 languages and dialects. For example, an individual searching for a restaurant in Quebec would be provided with results in French as well as in English. Our platform is also able to distinguish between differing address formats across countries.


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Strong Brand and Thought Leadership. We believe we are a recognized brand and thought leader in the field of digital knowledge management.

Growth Strategy

The key elements of our strategy include:

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Grow Our Customer Base. We believe that there is a substantial opportunity to continue to increase the size of our customer base across a broad range of industries and companies and to include more professional service providers, such as individual doctors, insurance agents and financial services professionals, in addition to businesses. We also plan to continue to invest in our direct sales force to grow our customer base, both domestically and internationally.


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Continue to Enter Attractive Industry Verticals. We have addressed specific industry segments, such as financial services and healthcare, and plan to continue this go-to-market strategy.


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Expand Existing Customer Relationships. We plan to expand our relationships with existing customers. For example, some businesses may initially purchase our solution only for their stores in a particular country. We also plan to up-sell additional features such as Pages and Reviews to existing customers, who generally start with our entry-level Listings feature.


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Expand Internationally. We believe that we have a significant opportunity to expand the use of our software outside the United States. We derived more than 6% of our revenues from non-U.S. sales in the nine months ended October 31, 2016, and we believe there are substantial opportunities to increase sales to customers outside of the United States as well as to help our existing U.S.-based customers manage data for more of their international business. We have an established presence in the United Kingdom and we intend to further expand our footprint in Europe and other regions.

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Develop and Market New Products and Features. We are committed to developing and marketing innovative capabilities for our customers to meet their digital knowledge management needs. We will continue to invest in platform and features development to help our customers better manage their digital knowledge.


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Extend the PowerListings Network. We plan to continue to expand our PowerListings Network. We are increasing our focus on adding more industry vertical-specific and international services to our PowerListings Network as well as including new services that may become more commonly used in the future.


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Expand Our Developer Platform. We have recently opened up our Knowledge Engine to developers with the introduction of our Yext/Developer platform. Yext/Developer offers our customers the ability to integrate into other systems to give our customers programmatic control of their organization's digital knowledge. We believe that the introduction of our Yext/Developer platform will further expand the ways that our Knowledge Engine can be utilized and increase customer retention.

Risks Related to Our Business

Investing in our common stock involves risk. You should carefully consider all the information in this prospectus prior to investing in our common stock. These risks are discussed more fully in the section entitled "Risk Factors" immediately following this prospectus summary. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the following: