Shares of the big-data firm Alteryx Inc. rose more than 9% in extended trading today after it revealed that its revenue grew by 73% in the fourth quarter.

It also offered solid guidance for the next quarter and full year, boosting investor’s enthusiasm further.

The company reported a net loss for the quarter of $31.7 million, improving on the $37.5 million loss it posted a year earlier. Earnings before certain costs such as stock compensation came to 84 cents per share, significantly ahead of Wall Street’s target of 51 cents. Revenue for the period came to $301.1 million, soundly beating the analyst forecast of $279.3 million.

The full-year picture was good too, with the company reporting total revenue for fiscal 2022 of $855.4 million, up 60% from a year earlier.

Alteryx is a big-data company that sells extract, transform and load, or ETL, tools that are used by enterprises to prepare massive volumes of information for analysis. The company’s Alteryx Analytics Cloud platform provides baked-in connectivity to business intelligence tools such as Experian and Tableau, and features capabilities around data cleansing, data mining and geospatial analytics.

Chief Executive Mark Anderson (pictured) hailed the company’s “excellent” quarter, saying it ended the year with rising momentum and improved operating profitability.

The company had more good numbers to show, saying it ended the fourth quarter with $833.5 million in annual recurring revenue, up 31% from a year earlier. It also posted a dollar-based net expansion rate of 121%, showing strong growth in its annual contract value. Finally, Alteryx said it ended the quarter with 8,358 paying customers, up from 7,936 one year before. Of those, it said, 140 drove greater than $1 million in revenue per year.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller said Alteryx has grown its revenue at an extremely impressive rate with Anderson at the helm. “60% revenue growth for the full year for a software vendor that’s already driving triple-digit millions doesn’t happen often,” he said.

He added that investors will likely see Alteryx’s ability to grow so fast as proof of its “recession resilience”, coming at a time when few other companies have been able to show the same kinds of numbers. “It’s a testament to the fact that enterprises need analytics tools in an up and down economy,” Mueller continued. “Now Alteryx has to shown that it can manage its costs too, because for all of its growth it actually lost more than double in fiscal 2022 compared to 2021.”

It was a solid quarter and investors were likely also encouraged by the company’s bullish optimism over its prospects for the next quarter and year to come. For the first quarter of fiscal 2023, Alteryx is expecting a loss of 25 to 29 cents per share versus Wall Street’s estimate of a 31-cent loss. It’s also looking at revenue of between $198 million and $202 million, ahead of Wall Street’s forecast of $195.9 million.

The full-year forecast was even better, with Alteryx saying it sees earnings of 36 to 46 cents per share on revenue of $980 million to $990 million. That suggests Alteryx’s management are confident they can deliver another year of epic growth for the company. Analysts, in contrast, had more conservative expectations, forecasting full-year earnings of just six cents per share on revenue of $967.5 million.

“Alteryx’s ambition to reach almost $1 billion in revenue in the next full year is ambitious, but also achievable,” Mueller said. “The next quarter will be telling.”

Photo: Alteryx