JFrog Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
November 1, 2023

There are 9 speakers on the call.

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us and welcome to J. Frog's Third Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. I'll hand the conference over today to Shanti Erika, Chief Legal Officer. Shanti, please go ahead.

Speaker 1

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us as we review JFrog's to Q3 2023 financial results, which were announced following market close today via a press release. Leading the call today will be JFrog's CEO and Co Founder, Shlomi Ben Chaim and Jacob Schulman, JFrog's CFO. During this call, we may make statements related to our business that are forward looking under federal securities laws and are made pursuant to the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements relating to our to future financial performance, including our outlook for Q4 and the full year of 2023. The words anticipate, believe, to continue, estimate, expend, intend, will and similar expressions are intended to identify forward looking statements or similar indications of future to our expectations. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward looking statements, which reflect our views only as of today and not as of any subsequent date.

Speaker 1

Please keep in mind that we are not obligating ourselves to revise or publicly release the results of any revision to these forward to discuss our financial results in light of new information or future events. These statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties that could to cause actual results to differ materially from these expectations. For a discussion of material risks and other important factors that could affect our actual results, Please refer to our Form 10 ks for the year ended December 31, 2022, filed with the SEC on February 9, 2023, which is available on the Investor Relations section of our website and the earnings press release issued earlier today. Additional information will be made available in our Form 10 Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2023, and other filings and reports that we may file from time to time with the SEC. Additionally, non GAAP financial measures will be discussed on this conference call.

Speaker 1

These non GAAP financial measures, which are used as measures of JFrog's performance, should be considered in addition to, not as a substitute for or in isolation from GAAP measures. Please refer to the tables in our earnings release for a reconciliation of those measures to their most directly comparable GAAP financial measures. A replay of this call will be available on the JFrog Investor Relations website for a limited time. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to JFrog's CEO, Shlomi Benghaim. Shlomi?

Speaker 2

Thank you, Shanti, for the introduction, and thanks for stepping in today as we send warm wishes for fast return to health for Jeff Fryner, our VP of Investor Relations. Greetings from Israel. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. On Saturday, October 7, the nation of Israel awoke to a brutal terrorist attack targeting its civilian population. This tragic event resulted in the loss of innocent lives, including children, women and the elderly.

Speaker 2

This heartbreaking incident escalated rapidly into an expanded war against the terrorist organization, Hamas. A few hours into the situation, JFrog as a global company with a presence in 10 different countries activated its business continuity plan comprising 3 pillars: first, our internal plan to ensure the safety of our employees in Israel and maintaining communication channels. 2nd is a technology pillar to ensure continuity of our services, security, Cyber Defense and R and D. Finally, we activated the plan for external facing activities to ensure continuity of our customers' engagements, support and external communication. I'm pleased to report that our operations are running smoothly and our employees are safe and accounted for.

Speaker 2

Notably, the conflict in Israel has not prompted us to change our fiscal year 2023 business goals that were previously shared with you. We are closely monitoring the situation, but remain confident that the company will meet these targets. We extend our heartfelt condolences to the families who have tragically to lost their loved ones. Our thoughts and prayers are with them during this incredibly difficult time. We pray for the safe and fast return of the hostages who have been kidnapped by Hamas, and we hope for the complete recovery of the thousands of individuals who have been injured.

Speaker 2

With that, I will move to the business. I'm pleased to report that JFrog's 3rd quarter revenue again exceeded our prior guidance, driven by increased cloud consumption, broader adoption of our security solution and growing enterprise scale adoption of the JFork software supply chain platform. Our Q3 revenue was $88,600,000 reflecting 23% year over year growth. Cloud usage accelerated in Q3, delivering revenue of $30,600,000 increasing 46% year over year. We also exceeded our profitability guidance with a non GAAP profit of $16,600,000 generating $25,400,000 in free cash flow.

Speaker 2

Customers with ARR over $100,000 grew to 848 compared to 696 in the year ago period, increasing 22% year over year. Customers with ARR over $1,000,000 increased by 6 companies in the quarter to a total of 30 versus having 18 customers over $1,000,000 in Q3 of last year. This is up 67% compared to the year ago period. These results reflect the critical importance of the full JFork software supply chain platform for software development infrastructure with our 3 pillars of DevOps, Security and IoT driving strategic customer value. Now I would like to expand on what made Q3 a strong quarter for JFrog as our investments continue to bear fruit in accordance with the long term plans we shared with you at the beginning of the year.

Speaker 2

1st, we continue to see growth in large scale enterprise adoption of our complete software supply chain platform. Next, our comprehensive integrated software supply chain security and the adoption of our built in end to end technology versus built on legacy point solution scanners 3rd, our cloud growth and marketplace channels driven by our strategic sales team and through our cloud partnerships and finally, JFrog's expansion into machine learning operations and AI solutions. I'll start with the growth in large scale enterprise platform adoption. With increasing demand for delivering speed and the need for scalability and regulatory compliance, we are seeing more of our enterprise customers consolidating tools into a comprehensive platform. As an example, one of the largest telecommunication providers in the United States with millions of global users Migrated away from a competitive self hosted solution to the JFOC platform in Q3 with an 8 figure multi year new business deal to standardize their operation and modernize their DevOps and DevSecOps practices in the cloud.

Speaker 2

They selected the JFrog platform's end to end capabilities, allowing them to build faster using JFrog Artifactory as a single source of record with high availability and efficient redundancy across their entire software development lifecycle. They further noted a need to deliver more robust policy management capabilities at scale and bring comprehensive security to their complete pipeline processes. We look forward to partnering with these customers to achieve with the goals of on prem to cloud migration, developer experience upgrades, high availability, universal binary management in a comprehensive software supply chain security implementation. This use case reflects a growing trend of enterprise wide adoption of the JFrog platform and long term standardization on JFrog DevSecOps Technologies. At our recent user conference, SwampUp, customer speakers from global companies such as Fidelity, Netflix, Capital One and eBay, just to name a few, all reflected a common trend.

Speaker 2

A single source of record of your software supply chain required complete management and control of binaries. A platform that is binary centric from end to end is the only way to automate and secure with speed. On that note, I would like to address adoption of our holistic security solutions and the customer trend of Turing consolidation. It's a fact that the softer supply chain flow is the flow of binaries, Meaning, through security, can only be achieved with complete control of both binary release cycle as well as binary contents, dependencies and metadata. JFork continues to deliver security solutions into the market that are aligned with new attack threats and consolidations of point solution under one vendor.

Speaker 2

For example, JFrog Curation Released in July and keynoted at our Swamp Up Conference addresses the real pain of the enterprise around the secure consumption of open source technologies coming from public repositories. In addition, the new release of J4 Catalog to provide a listing of over 4,000,000 third party software packages stored in public repositories, solidifying JFrog as a single source of truth for the holistic secure management of software packages. While company's blind spot may be the security of open source and third party packages, Binaries are also built by in house developers writing first party code. To achieve end to end security coverage, JFrog is taking the security of software releases a step further to the left with the general availability of code scanning capabilities, often known as to deliver end to end software supply chain security, providing customers complete coverage from code to production. J for code scanning with the new SaaS solution protects first party code.

Speaker 2

J for Curation protects to companies from unwanted third party packages from entering their organizations. And JFork catalog provides metadata and augmented information about the company's binaries. Together with JFrog X-ray and advanced security for secret detection and contextual analysis, JFrog is the only company that delivers complete security solution with a binary centric approach. Combined with Artifactory, the leading binary repository, JFrog provides a complete DevSecOps solution for your software supply chain. This end to end security approach continues to gain traction across verticals.

Speaker 2

For example, one of the world's largest Biotech Companies recently adopted our entire security offering on the JFrog platform. Looking to consolidate point solutions, to migrate away from point solutions such as MEND in Deltoolstock. In another highly regulated A nuclear security group within the United States Department of Energy recently acquired the JFOC platform to improve their software supply chain security posture. To one of the cybersecurity specialists in the Nevada National Security Site Team, Brian Workman, noted, A software supply chain platform is necessary for practical means to meet certain governmental and standards requirements. More importantly, security at all stages of the software development lifecycle is necessary for national security interest.

Speaker 2

Our response is, Jayaprak does that. Next, I would like to address Growth in cloud adoption, marketplace channel growth and our strategic sales motions. The expansion in the number of our Over $1,000,000 ARR customers this quarter demonstrate the continuing focus of our strategic sales team on driving large scale software supply chain platform implementation with the key partnership of the major cloud providers. For example, one of the world's largest cloud computing and virtualization technology companies came to JFrog looking to implement their DevOps and DevSecOps Cloud 1st, strategy. 1st looking to host JFork platform services themselves in the cloud, they rapidly realize They would greatly lower their total cost of ownership due to the lower maintenance and infrastructure cost that would be safe by utilizing JFrog Cloud Services.

Speaker 2

With nearly 3,000 developers, this company is working with JFrog to provide a complete end to end platform implementation, which they acquired through the Microsoft Azure Marketplace to our strategic sales and partner teams. We believe our long term investment in this top down enterprise sales approach Driven by our strategic team, we'll continue to provide the North Star for JPOXX top shelf customers' growth. Finally, regarding AI and machine learning, we were proud to announce the availability of DevOps and DevSecOps industry first support for machine learning, model management in the JFrog platform in late Q3. As Katie Norton, Senior Research Analyst for DevOps at IDC noted in her Swamp Up report, The ML model management capabilities expand the JFrog platform into an entirely new space and persona, a single system of record that can help automate ML models development, Ongoing management and security alongside all other components packaged into an application offers a compelling alternative. Just as we provided common ground for developers and IT engineers years ago when DevOps started, JFrog now has the opportunity to bring the world of AI and MLOps into the world of DevOps and DevSecOps.

Speaker 2

Just as companies increasingly placed the demand on development teams to support security. They are now pressuring DevOps teams to deliver machine learning and AI capabilities in line with their applications. JFrog now provides a platform for binary management for developers, data scientists, machine learning engineers and the machine themselves. As Keith noted at SwampUP, JFrog is the 1st and only repository manager to proxy the most popular public AI and ML model repository Hugging Face. We are also the 1st solution embedding security for ML model to scan models before they are used.

Speaker 2

Artifactory now natively supports AI models within the JFrog platform to manage and deliver ML capabilities alongside all other binaries within an organization. The AI supply chain is a software supply chain, and we are proud to be addressing this demand on developers. With that, I will turn the call over to our CFO, Jacob Schulman, who will provide an in-depth recap of Q3 financial results as well as update you on our guidance for Q4 and for fiscal year 2023. Jacob?

Speaker 3

Thank you, Shlomi, and good afternoon, everyone. During the Q3, total revenues were $88,600,000 up 23% year over year. Our stronger than expected revenues in the quarter were driven by continued strength in our cloud business and expansion of large customers on the JFrog Software Supply Chain platform. In the Q3 of 2023, our cloud business saw sequential expansion in customer usage, Equaling revenues of $30,600,000 up 46% year over year. We're happy to see the acceleration in our cloud business growth, Driven by continued increase in cloud usage and better collaboration with public clouds to enable large customers on their marketplaces.

Speaker 3

We reiterate our baseline cloud growth rate of mid-40s during fiscal year 2023. Self managed revenues on prem were $58,000,000 up 14% year over year during the quarter. We continue to see that our customers' roadmaps and plans are focused on SaaS migration and therefore they do not expand their on prem footprint at the same pace as in prior years. We continue to believe that our security solutions can be a potential catalyst to reaccelerate revenue growth and customer expansion within our self hosted business. Net dollar retention for the 4 trailing quarters was 119%, a decline of 1 point sequentially.

Speaker 3

As predicted, NDR is stabilizing And we continue to expect our net dollar retention rate for the year to be at these levels. Our gross retention continued to be 97% with no change in overall customer churn trends. In Q3, 46% of total revenue came from Enterprise Plus subscription, Up from 39% in Q3 of 2022. Revenue from Enterprise Plus subscription grew 46% year over year. Now let me discuss our income statement in more detail.

Speaker 3

Gross profit in the quarter was $74,100,000 Representing a gross margin of 83.7%, up by 10 basis points from the 2nd quarter as economies of scale and cost control offset higher cloud revenue contribution. Operating expenses for the 3rd quarter was $62,300,000 up by $100,000 sequentially, equaling 70.2% of revenues compared with $59,400,000 or 82.5 percent of revenues in the year ago period. During the Q3, we continue to remain focused on expense discipline, while investing and scaling our enterprise sales and channel partner teams and introducing multiple new products. Our operating profit in Q3 was $11,900,000 or at 13.4 percent operating margin compared to an operating income of $1,200,000 to 1.7 percent operating margin in the prior year as we continue to execute toward increased profitability as suggested in our long term model. 3rd quarter net income equaled $16,600,000 or $0.15 per diluted share based on 110,000,000 diluted shares outstanding versus a year ago net profit of $1,800,000 or income of $0.02 per diluted share.

Speaker 3

Turning to the balance sheet and cash flow. We ended the September quarter with $502,000,000 in cash and short term investments, up from $443,000,000 as of December 31, 2022. Cash flow from operations was a record to $26,000,000 in the quarter. After taking into consideration CapEx, free cash flow was $25,400,000 Generating a 28.6 percent free cash flow margin. Our strong free cash flow margin is driven by better than expected profitability and strong collection from our customers.

Speaker 3

We increased our expectations for free cash flow margin in fiscal 2023 and now believe We'll be able to achieve 15% to 16% free cash flow margin. As of September 30, 2023, our remaining performance obligation totaled to $235,100,000 Now I'd like to speak about our guidance for the Q4 and full year 2023. For Q4, we expect revenue to be between $92,500,000 to $93,500,000 with non GAAP operating profit between $10,000,000 to $11,000,000 and non GAAP earnings per diluted share of $0.12 to $0.13 assuming the share count of approximately 111,000,000 shares. For the full year 2023, We anticipate total revenues in the range between $345,100,000

Speaker 2

$346,100,000

Speaker 3

Non GAAP operating income is expected to be between $32,800,000 $33,800,000 And non GAAP earnings per diluted share of $0.44 to $0.45 assuming a share count of approximately 109,000,000 shares. Now let me turn the call back to Shlomi for some closing remarks before we take your questions. Shlomi?

Speaker 2

Thank you, Jacob. We believe that Q3's strong results showcased the alignment with our long term strategic growth plans as we continue to meet technology and business goals. To JFrog's tireless global teams, thank you for your focus, to take a look at the Q3, Q3 is a testament to our resilience. I'm excited to welcome Ed Grubscheid as our new CFO beginning January 1, 2024. Ed brings vast experience prior to his time at JFrog and in the past 4 years as part of our finance leadership.

Speaker 2

Ed, we are confident that your leadership will continue to drive JFrog's success. From here, I would like to send our CFO, Jacob Schulman, the best of wishes on his next journey. While you will be with us through the end of this year, I'll take the opportunity now to thank you, Jacob, for the years of friendship and partnership. You will always be a frog. I would also like to congratulate Orit Gorin, who was recently appointed as our Chief Sustainability Officer, highlighting JFrog's commitment to maintaining and driving responsible business.

Speaker 2

After many years as our Chief Operation Officer, I want to thank you, Orit, for taking on this very important role. In closing, our thoughts and prayers to continue to be with the families affected by the brutality of the terror on Israel. Israel, like JFrog, is strong and will prevail. We hope for peaceful and secure days ahead. With that, thank you all for joining us for our Q3 earnings call and may the frog be with you.

Speaker 2

Now we will be happy to take your questions. Operator?

Operator

Thank you so much. And at this time, I would like to remind everyone that in order to ask a question, press star and the number 1 on your telephone keypad. And in the interest of time, we ask only one question per caller. Thank you in advance for understanding. And we will take a moment to compile the Q and A roster.

Operator

Please stand by. Okay. It looks like our first caller is from Pinjalim Bora from JPMorgan. Go ahead, please.

Speaker 4

Hey, guys. This is Noah on for Pendulum. Glad to hear everyone is staying safe and Congrats, Jacob. It's been great working with you and looking forward to working with you as well. Can you maybe just walk us through what you're seeing in terms of the cloud optimizations at this And any other incremental color you could provide on what drove the acceleration of cloud revenue growth?

Speaker 4

Thanks.

Speaker 3

Yes. Hi, Noah. So the trends that we see in Q3 continued positive momentum on cloud usage. As you could see, our revenues accelerated, driven primarily by usage of our large customers and growth of our large customers and marketplaces. So that's very positive.

Speaker 3

We continue to see that migrations, while accelerated a bit from prior quarter, still below to prior year levels and the overall adoption of our Enterprise Plus platform solution Our marketplaces continue to drive our cloud revenues, and that's the reason for acceleration in

Speaker 2

the cloud in the quarter.

Operator

Okay. Thank you so much. Next, we have a Question from Koji Ikeda, BofA Securities. Koji, go ahead.

Speaker 5

Yes. Hi. Thank you. Thanks for taking Just wanted to follow-up on the cloud growth, the strong growth there. And Jacob, you just mentioned the migrations.

Speaker 5

But earlier in your prepared remarks, you were also talking about Advanced Security and its availability within the self managed portion that could to help reaccelerate that segment of the revenue mix. And so just trying to think of the puts and takes here, thinking out into the future of how we should be thinking about overall migration as a SaaS revenue driver, but also the Advanced Security, which either could help stabilize or maybe even accelerate, the self managed piece and when could that we could start seeing that in that piece of the revenue mix? Thanks, guys.

Speaker 2

Hi, Koji, and thank you for the question. This is Shlomi. I'll take this one. I think that what we see in the cloud And the growth, the 4% to 6% year over year growth is also a result of our strategic enterprise sales team together with our partner team. We discussed that earlier this year and the investments that we have done there.

Speaker 2

This team is focusing on not only migrating customers from self hosted to the cloud to bring new logos to the cloud. This team is also focusing on looking holistically at the DevOps and DevSecOps requirements of our customers. Therefore, advanced security, And the new capabilities that we announced recently at SwampUP and before are also included. We spoke about one of the biggest telecommunication in North America that just migrated to the cloud together with JFrog. This company also adopted JFOG Advanced Security with a meaningful part of the subscription.

Speaker 2

The other company which was discussed, the nuclear security company also adopted the food platform together with security. So we see some kind of a movement, not only to have DevOps end to end software supply chain solution, but also to have a comprehensive built in security within the platform rather than using point solution. Okay. Thank you so much.

Operator

All right. Our next question is from Sanjit Singh with Morgan Stanley. Sanjit, please go ahead. Nice to hear about you.

Speaker 2

Hello, can you hear me?

Operator

Yes, we can hear you. Go ahead.

Speaker 6

Okay, sorry. Yes, it's nice to hear about you investing in Southern Marketing to drive adoption in the large enterprise. But if we look at the last couple of quarters, That as a percentage of revenue has sort of lowered.

Speaker 3

How should we think about that?

Speaker 6

Is your plan to increase your headcount in that department or if at this point you have the needed

Speaker 4

Salesforce

Speaker 2

to drive that adoption. Thank you.

Speaker 3

Yes, sure. So over the past years, we've made significant investments into our go to market capabilities. A few years back, we started building our enterprise sales team strategic sales team. Then last year, we started building to our partnership and channel team. So we continue to make investments and we built security overlay and some additional capabilities on holistic top down approach to go to market approach.

Speaker 3

So those investments started bearing fruit, and that's why we see that S and M investment as a percent of revenue It's becoming more scalable and we see more leverage. We'll definitely continue to invest in those capabilities and we'll continue to grow Our sales and marketing expenses in absolute dollars, but in the long term, as predicted in our long term model, We expect to see more leverage and therefore as a percent of revenue, these expenses will continue to go down in the long term.

Operator

Okay, thank you very much. Next we have a question from Miller Jump with Truist and Company.

Speaker 2

Go ahead, Miller. Hey, thank you for taking the

Speaker 6

question and congrats on the strong results. I guess, I was

Operator

just curious, could you talk about Maybe the

Speaker 6

advance or excuse me, the opportunity you see for advanced security and curation this year going into the Q4 given the concentration of renewals there. And just any color you could give on what you're baking into guidance for that? Thanks.

Speaker 2

Earlier this year, it's a set of 6 capabilities that are added to the platform. Just last quarter, we announced Qation, which is an additional product that protects the organization from the get go. We think that what we see here is an adoption of a consolidated security solution, which will become material in the next year. And this is how we guided the market. Currently, we are very pleased with the adoption.

Speaker 2

Tons of customers that already adopted this as part of the platform usage. The security additions will become material in the next year.

Operator

Okay, thanks so much. Next, we have a question from Kingsley Crane with Canaccord Genuity Corporation. Kingsley, go ahead.

Speaker 6

Hi, thanks for taking the question. So, at SwampUP, you mentioned that The products you were releasing were thematically consistent with the growth drivers of cloud and security. So it kind of fit nicely in with the long term model of 30% Plus Growth. So as we move forward, how much of that how much of your existing product portfolio can contribute to to that growth figure or in other words, how much more products do we need to be released in order to hit that target?

Speaker 2

Thank you, Kingsley. What we announced in SwampUp was part of our roadmap. We announced several tools that support the full software supply chain platform play that we implement in the market. JFOC Advanced Security comes first, then JFOC Curation and Catalog, which was announced and keynoted in SwampUP. We are also planning to have some security capabilities on the run time, So shifting right, we added static analysis security on the left to secure your code.

Speaker 2

And by that, we provide an end to end security solution. On top of that, we also announced the AI and MLOps Capabilities as part of the platform, natively supporting security scanning for ML models and storage of for ML Models and Artifactory. If you look at the global picture altogether, JFrog platform today provides full end to end solution for DevOps and DevSecOps from code to production. And in the next few quarters, We already have items in our roadmap to complete even further right to what we discussed.

Speaker 3

And if I may add to that, so when we released our long term model, we already had these new products either at the market, Launched in the market or just about to be launched in the market. So we definitely took those products into account when we to release and share our long term targets with you.

Speaker 2

Okay. Thank you both.

Operator

And our next caller is Atay Kidron with Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.

Speaker 7

Thank you. And Shlomi, I'll start with you and the whole team in Israel, of course. Shlomi, I wanted to make sure I understand the Security side, could customers buy your security solutions without artifacts or that's still not a possibility? So when will that happen? And then maybe for you, Jacob, on the expansion rate with all the new product coming along and clearly with this better execution On the up sale and distraction of $1,000,000 customers, how should we think about net dollar expansion rate here going forward for the next couple of quarters.

Speaker 2

Hi, Ty. What we see as reported is that our net dollar retention I stabilized around the 1,200,000, 1,000,000,000, 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, as predicted and as guided. In the self hosted solution, since our security solution is based on a per seat model on top of the platform, We look to see some acceleration there. Though our strategy is very focused on the cloud and the cloud migration and there as well, Security will be a strong driver to support the net dollar retention guidance that we provided. Security in both cases, both deployment environment, cloud and self hosted is based on by developers and not only by consumption.

Speaker 2

So we think it will support the net dollar retention and it will be aligned with our guidance.

Speaker 3

Yes, it will be stability of net dollar additions at this level. And it's obviously too soon for us to provide the guidance for 2024.

Speaker 7

Okay. But just to make sure I understand, Can I buy your security advanced security and curation without buying artifacts?

Speaker 2

No. Currently Security, our solution security is part of the platform coming with the Artifactory and X-ray. In the future, we may consider to have it as a standalone solution. Currently, it's a full solution coming with the platform.

Speaker 7

Appreciate it. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. And our next caller is Brad Ryback from Stifel. Brad, go ahead. Great. Thanks very much.

Operator

Shlomi, as we think about sort of the emergence of AI and ML large language models, how does that play to help accelerate usage of to cloud Artifactory. Thanks.

Speaker 2

Yes. Good evening, Brad. AI and MLOps, These are technologies that are being adopted rapidly by all organization and also the enterprise are looking into it. As you Familiar with our portfolio, the majority of our customers are enterprise customers with thousands of developers. And to be frank with you, Most of them are trying to first kind of put down the playbooks and the regulation of how you use AI, How you secure AI, how you automate it and how you become more efficient with it before you let machine code and build binaries and distribute it for you.

Speaker 2

So we planted the seeds. JFrog is the 1st and only company in the world that practically provide AI solutions for our customers. We planted the seed not only for DevOps, but also for security, our refactory, natively proxy, Hugging Face, the public repository, and X-ray automatically scan all ML models before they are getting into the to the software supply chain. With the rapid growth and rapid adoption of AI and MLOps, We believe that this will be just another practice for the JFold user and will accelerate the adoption of our platform, will put us in a very good position in terms of competition that might come up in the future and we'll serve our customers and community better within the popularity that we provide. Currently, it's too early to say how will this impact

Operator

That's great. Thanks very much. Thank you. And our next caller is Jonathan Rookhayver from Cantor Fitzgerald. Jonathan, go ahead.

Speaker 8

Yes. Thank you. So, Shlomi, an interesting point that has come up in discussions we've had with JFrog customers is around the automation that Artifactory brings to 3rd party CICD solutions and specifically the significant reduction in build time and cost savings. Can you just comment on that dynamic, how important it might be when you look at newslands? And also, what is the implication to pipeline?

Speaker 8

Is pipeline less of an opportunity just given how well you work with other CICD tools?

Speaker 2

Yes. Thanks for this question, John. JFrog Artifactory and JFrog platform overall It's based on an open REST API working with all the major CICD tools in the market. We are immediately supporting GitHub Action, Jenkins, GitLab CICD, CircleCI and obviously others. It's also mandatory for everyone who use CI to use the binary repository because the moment you use CI On top of your source code repository, you create a binary.

Speaker 2

And then the deployment into our factory and pulling out from our factory by CICD and automating the full software supply chain is being made in and out from multi factory. Regarding JFrog Pipeline, JFrog Pipeline is accelerating the automation of the JFrog platform, integrates with all the CICD tools and help you promote binaries from every quality gate all the way to production. JFO pipelines also provide Friendly UI for users to manage the dependencies and to manage the source of all binary. We don't see JPOQ pipeline as a catalyst for the adoption of our platform or major catalyst for ARR. Actually, what we see is that using JFrog pipeline makes our users more faster and secured as they secure their pipeline by using it.

Speaker 8

Okay. So it's having a strong impact in terms of the value proposition, but it's not necessarily impacting ARR or the Adoption of the Enterprise Plus package, correct?

Speaker 2

Correct.

Speaker 8

Okay. Thank you.

Operator

Okay, thank you. Looks like our next call is from Mike Sicos with Needham

Speaker 2

and Company. Mike, go ahead.

Speaker 6

Great. Thank you. Thank you for getting me on the call here and I apologize if I missed this in the prepared remarks or the Q and A. I know I'm juggling a couple of different earnings calls like I imagine my peers are as well. But I think the first question, if I could, for Shlomi.

Speaker 6

We were kind of struck last quarter when the company was saying that the optimization headwinds We're largely behind the company and I apologize if I missed this, but can you provide us an update? Does that still stand here where we are today? Is it fair to think that those optimization headwinds for Jeep Frog are now firmly in the rearview mirror? And then I just had one follow-up.

Speaker 3

Yes, Mike. We did talk about the user strength and we continue to see continued growth of usage. So we do believe that this wave of optimization is behind us. We continue to see the adoption of our platform by larger customers on marketplaces. However, having said that, we also see slower pace of migrations comparing to prior year.

Speaker 3

So definitely macro headwinds in terms of impact on pace of migration is still there, but Cloud usage continues to grow and that's strength that we've been experiencing for a couple of quarters now.

Speaker 2

Got it. Got it.

Speaker 6

Okay. Thank you for calling that out. And I think maybe one other item. I think earlier this year as well. I know that the company was trying to adjust its free tier.

Speaker 6

And I think that you guys had decided to limit the number of users that fell under that free tier, and maybe by creating that limited capacity, there was a thought that, that could benefit the model in some from a monetization standpoint. Can you remind us what the initial findings on conversion were benefit to revenue, if any, Have come through the model at this point?

Speaker 2

Yes, Mike. When we decided to kind of Building the top of the funnel without 3 tier earlier in 2022, the main reason was all the additions that we provided with security and IoT capabilities that you cannot just add on a 3 tier basic DevOps solution. It didn't serve not the product strategy and not the go to market strategy, which became top down strategic enterprise sales. The conversion that we've seen from the free tier where customers, usually small groups of developers, It converted to our T factory and the power subscription, and we decided that it doesn't serve the top of the funnel. I'm happy to report that you can see What we have built now with our enterprise sales and the strategic sales, Barefoot, one of the Results being demonstrated this quarter with the amount of customers that are going over $100,000 and over $1,000,000 This is not coming from free tier as you probably understand.

Operator

Okay. Thank you so much. Our next caller is Nick Altman with Deutsche Bank. Nick, go ahead.

Speaker 8

Hi, this is John Gomez on for Nick. Thanks for taking the questions. Can you talk about how September and Tobar trended from a macro perspective relative to expectations, and whether you have seen any meaningful change in Overall, by improved density from customers. Thanks.

Speaker 3

No, we did not see any changes and The trends in October continue to be comparable with Q3.

Operator

Okay, thank you. Next caller is from Ethan Weeks with Piper Sandler. Ethan, go ahead.

Speaker 4

Great. Thanks for taking my question. This is Ethan on for Rob. It seems like there's still a large amount of organizations out there using either free or open source to Binary Repository Management Solutions. And as we think about the amount of innovation and product leases you've had on the security side, do you think this could to provide a catalyst maybe for a lot of these organizations to start considering a commercial solution or if not maybe what that catalyst may be in the future as we think about new customer growth and converting some of these onto your platform.

Speaker 4

Thank you.

Speaker 2

Yes, I'll take this one. We built the JFrog to action from the bottom up, from the developers app, and obviously starting with open source, Bill, the concerns that surround the Artifactory as a single source of record for the organization. What we know now years after is that it takes more than just one open source solution. When you want to build a comprehensive software supply chain solution, especially on an enterprise infrastructure level, You have to adopt some security tools, so you have to adopt unitocality, high availability, multi site topology. And very often, we want to move everything to the cloud, which obviously has nothing to do with open source or not.

Speaker 2

It's about having it as a service. So for sure, yes, it's the top of funnel. A lot of potential customers are looking at the open source before they are trying Our tools and the free trial, but the open source is still there serving us among developers. On the enterprise with JFOC shine, it's a very temporary solution and usually being replaced very fast.

Operator

Okay. Thank you. And our final question comes from Michael Turits with KeyBanc Capital Markets. Michael, go ahead. Hey, this is Billy on for Michael.

Operator

Just wanted to ask, with curation crossing between kind of both developers and security, Have you seen that acting at all as a gateway to broader conversations with the CISO? Should we think about Curation as the next logical customer expansion from the core product before to adopting Advanced Security. Thanks.

Speaker 2

Yes, thank you. This is a wonderful question. Curation is very, very unique because curation lands on the common ground of the CIO and the CISO. What I mean by that Companies realize that they can become far more efficient with adopting open source packages by scanning it before it's even getting into the organization. And therefore, curation is very appealing And growing very fast.

Speaker 2

The pipeline, we are very pleased with what we see that people immediately understand it. It doesn't matter if you're coming from the The security side or the DevOps side, you immediately understand the value of preventing malicious packages to get into your organization, to your software supply chain. So we absolutely think that this will accelerate the adoption of our security solution. This is also why on the go to market separated from JAPOC Advanced Security, but still based on the same business model. In the Future, we will add more capabilities that will provide a full comprehensive debt stack up solution.

Speaker 2

But already now, We see that nobody is just building from scratch and everybody brings open source packages and therefore you want to secure them and to curate them to bless them before they are getting into your source of supply chain. Once they are in, then JFrog with their security take and X-ray Take position and secure your pipeline. So my answer is absolutely yes, and I'm looking forward to see how this is changing the landscape of how open source software packages are being used.

Operator

Thank you. And there are no further questions at this time. So I will turn the call back to Shlomi for closing remarks.

Speaker 2

Well, thank you, everyone. Thank you for taking the time to join us today. We pray for more peaceful, quiet days here in Israel And may the frog be with you. Thank you very much.

Operator

And this concludes today's call. Thank you for attending and you may now disconnect.

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Key Takeaways

  • JFrog reported Q3 revenue of $88.6 million, up 23% year-over-year, with cloud revenue accelerating 46% to $30.6 million, non-GAAP profit of $16.6 million and free cash flow of $25.4 million.
  • Customers with ARR over $100K grew 22% to 848, and customers with ARR over $1 million increased 67% to 30, highlighting strong enterprise platform adoption.
  • Launched integrated security offerings—JFrog Curation, Catalog and built-in code scanning—to deliver end-to-end DevSecOps and consolidate point solutions.
  • Introduced first-to-market AI/ML model management in Artifactory, including Hugging Face proxying and model security scanning, extending the software supply chain to MLOps.
  • Q4 guidance calls for revenue of $92.5 million–$93.5 million with non-GAAP operating profit of $10 million–$11 million; full-year 2023 revenue guidance is $345.1 million–$346.1 million.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
JFrog Q3 2023
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