Semrush revenue grows 35%, reports net loss of $33.8 million

Customer growth increased Semrush’s full-year revenue by 35% in 2022 to $254.3 million, up from 188.0 million in 2021. 

Semrush expects to break even or show a small profit in 2023. It lost $33.8 million in 2022.

The company is financially strong; cash and short-term investments totaled $237.5 million at the end of 2022. 

Customers. Semrush added 13,000 customers in 2022 and ended the year with 95,000 paying customers, up from 82,000 customers in 2021. Semrush customers who paid more than $10,000 annually grew by more than 50% year-on-year.

The company also reported its platform had more than 800,000 free active users, up more than 50% year-on-year, and saw “record levels of new customer registrations and trials.”

Employees. Semrush ended the year with more than 1,300 employees and more than 200 contractors.

The company also reported it has completed a successful relocation of about 600 employees who had been based in Russia, prior to the country’s invasion of Ukraine last year, to new office locations (Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, Armenia, Serbia, Cyprus, and the Czech Republic).

Why we care. These financial results from Semrush confirm there continues to be strong demand for SEO and SEO platforms. Also, the company is cash rich and expects to reach profitability next year. That means the 2022 losses don’t jeopardize the company’s ongoing operations. 

Only “minor fine-tuning” need to help Semrush customers be found in chat-based search. “The outputs of (chat-interface search) are actually very similar to what happens if you try to produce (a) featured snippet based on a couple of top articles,” is how Semrush president Eugene Levin responded to an analyst’s question about search engines transitioning to chat interfaces. He added:

• “So from a technical point of view, optimizing for this is very similar to optimizing for featured snippets, which [we have helped] people to do for a very long time. And actually, we’ve seen a lot of demand for those features and support of our tracking feature snippet, as well as proactive recommendations about how people can… be mentioned in those features snippets.”
• “At this point, we don’t know what the final implementation (of search results) is going to be. We have only seen a couple of examples being implemented their approach to this, which is, I think, very user-friendly.”

Dig deeper. Semrush Announces Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2022 Financial Results.