CrowdStrike Q1 2024 Earnings Report

CrowdStrike EPS Results

• Actual EPS: $0.01
• Consensus EPS: -$0.03
• Beat/Miss: Beat by +$0.03
• One Year Ago EPS: N/A

CrowdStrike Revenue Results

• Actual Revenue: $692.58 million
• Expected Revenue: $677.30 million
• Beat/Miss: Beat by +$15.28 million
• YoY Revenue Growth: N/A

CrowdStrike Announcement Details

• Quarter: Q1 2024
• Date: 5/31/2023
• Time: N/A
• Conference Call Date: Wednesday, May 31, 2023
• Conference Call Time: 5:00PM ET

CrowdStrike (NASDAQ:CRWD) Holdings, Inc. is a cybersecurity company that provides cloud-delivered security products and services to organizations worldwide. Its platform is designed to help businesses prevent, detect, investigate and respond to cyber threats across endpoints, cloud workloads, identities, applications and other technology environments.

The company’s primary offering is the CrowdStrike Falcon platform, which uses cloud-based technologies, artificial intelligence and threat intelligence to support cybersecurity operations. Falcon includes capabilities for endpoint protection and detection, managed threat hunting, identity protection, cloud security, security information and event management, vulnerability management and incident response. CrowdStrike also provides professional services and cybersecurity consulting.

CrowdStrike was founded in 2011 and is headquartered in Austin, Texas. The company serves customers across a broad range of industries and geographic markets, including enterprises, government organizations and other institutions. George Kurtz is CrowdStrike’s co-founder and chief executive officer, and the company completed its initial public offering in 2019.

CrowdStrike Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Key Takeaways

• Beat guidance across top- and bottom-line metrics, achieved GAAP profitability for the first time in company history, and delivered record non-GAAP profitability and free cash flow.
• Sustainable data advantage spans petabytes of global sensor telemetry and over 10 years of threat graph history combined with human-validated intelligence, creating a unique competitive moat.
• Introduced Charlotte AI, a generative AI security analyst that leverages CrowdStrike’s high-fidelity data and continuous human feedback loop to accelerate threat response and reduce customer costs.
• Continued momentum in platform consolidation with $174.2M in net new ARR, over 50% more deals involving eight or more modules year-over-year, and raised FY24 revenue and profitability guidance.
• Expanded cloud security offerings and strategic partnerships (AWS, Pax8), and received Impact Level 5 provisional authorization from the Department of Defense to grow in the public sector.

Presentation

[Operator]

Good day, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the CrowdStrike Fiscal First Quarter 2024 Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star one one on your telephone. You will hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Maria Riley, Vice President of Investor Relations.

[Maria Riley, VP of Investor Relations at CrowdStrike]

Good afternoon. Thank you for your participation today. With me on the call are George Kurtz, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Co-founder of CrowdStrike, and Burt Podbere, Chief Financial Officer. Before we get started, I would like to note that certain statements made during this conference call that are not historical facts, including those regarding our future plans, objectives, growth, and expected performance, including our outlook for the second quarter and fiscal year 2024, and any assumptions for fiscal periods beyond that, are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements represent our outlook only as of the date of this call. While we believe any forward-looking statements we make are reasonable, actual results could differ materially because the statements are based on current expectations and are subject to risks and uncertainties.

[Maria Riley, VP of Investor Relations at CrowdStrike]

We do not undertake and expressly disclaim any obligation to update or alter our forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. Further information on these and other factors that could affect the company's financial results is included in the filings we make with the SEC from time to time, including the section titled Risk Factors in the company's quarterly and annual reports. Additionally, unless otherwise stated, excluding revenue, all financial measures disclosed on this call will be non-GAAP. A discussion of why we use non-GAAP financial measures and a reconciliation schedule showing GAAP versus non-GAAP results is currently available in our earnings press release, which may be found on our investor relations website at ir.crowdstrike.com, or on our Form 8-K filed with the SEC today.

[Maria Riley, VP of Investor Relations at CrowdStrike]

I would like to note that we are conducting today's call from one of our European offices and ask for your patience in the event of technical difficulties. With that, I will now turn the call over to George.

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

Thank you, Maria, and thank you all for joining us. Our continued execution, despite a challenging macro environment, translated to strong growth and exceptional margins, which drove record non-GAAP profitability, record free cash flow, and GAAP profitability for the first time in company history. We exceeded our guidance across both top and bottom-line metrics. Increased gross margin, cost discipline, and moderated headcount growth contributed to our strong bottom-line results. Reaching GAAP profitability so early in our life as a public company provides insight into the strength of the model we have built and what we can achieve over time. Burt will cover the financial results in more detail. I will focus my comments on why we believe CrowdStrike has a clear and sustainable advantage as three megatrends continue to unfold: AI, consolidation, and cloud. Let's start with AI.

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

Since inception, CrowdStrike has been and will continue to be at the forefront of leveraging AI to drive better customer outcomes and efficiencies within our own business. In addition to industry-leading detections and rapid remediation for customers, utilizing AI has benefited our business by lowering costs and yielding higher margins. One example of AI benefiting our financial model is Falcon Complete. For years, our use of AI has enabled us to rapidly scale that business to a leadership position with an exceptional product margin that exceeds our overall company gross margin. The margin profile and scale we have achieved for our managed offering would not have been possible without our innovations in AI. While others are just now jumping on the AI bandwagon, we have transformed cybersecurity with an AI-powered cloud business from inception. Generative AI is transforming the world, and security is no exception.

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

Large language models, or LLMs, are only as good as the data on which they are trained, and human-annotated content makes for the best training data. Driving better customer outcomes relies on having a data advantage and the context derived from that data. While we expect that LLMs will become commoditized over time, the data on which they are trained will not. CrowdStrike is uniquely positioned to benefit from this new technology. Our dataset spans petabytes and captures trillions of new events daily from our global fleet of sensors. Combine that with our over 10 years of attack data and Threat Graph that has been paired with high-quality human analysis from OverWatch, complete intelligence and incident response services, and you get unrivaled telemetry. Simply put, we believe CrowdStrike has a sustainable data advantage, the most powerful and unique set of correlated human and machine-generated data across all of cyber.

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

Our data advantage creates a unique competitive moat, yielding better models, better automation, and better outcomes. We see the rapidly growing adoption of generative AI as a democratizing force within cybersecurity, from both an adversarial and protection standpoint. From an adversarial perspective, we expect that the adoption of LLMs will lower the barrier of entry for malicious actors to create sophisticated cyber attacks. Generative AI is expected to make it even easier for less advanced attackers to craft nation-state caliber campaigns. We believe this will catalyze even greater demand for modern cybersecurity technologies like Falcon. From a protection standpoint, we see generative AI as a democratizing force by dramatically lowering the learning curve for practitioners, transforming even a novice analyst into a power user. With all of this in mind, we introduced Charlotte AI, an exciting new generative AI security analyst, utilizing CrowdStrike's high fidelity data advantage.

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

We believe Charlotte AI will empower our newly minted Tier One analysts to yield the results of an advanced Tier Three analyst. The net benefit to the customer, faster results, better security outcomes, and lower overall costs. Charlotte AI represents CrowdStrike's latest innovation in helping security teams worldwide contend with the cybersecurity skills gap, respond to threats faster, and reduce operational costs. Charlotte AI will uniquely benefit from a continuous human feedback loop with our OverWatch, Falcon Complete, and Intel teams. This continuous feedback loop on human-validated content is critical, and because of this, no other vendor in cyber will be able to match CrowdStrike's approach to generative AI. Demonstrating our commitment to lead and protect the industry through this next wave of innovation, we teamed up with AWS to develop powerful, new generative AI applications that help customers accelerate their cloud, security, and AI journeys.

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

Through this initiative, CrowdStrike and AWS will bring together their solutions and teams to keep customers safe across a range of AI services while meeting stringent security requirements. CrowdStrike already has a leadership position in helping protect AI innovators. A perfect example of this is a recent expansion with a B2B generative AI research and development company. This customer leverages significant public cloud resources to support their solutions. All too aware of the dangers others have faced from adversaries compromising cloud environments, this customer expanded to Falcon Cloud Security Complete to support their small team with fully managed coverage, provide both cloud runtime protection and posture monitoring across their multi-cloud environment, and scale seamlessly with their growth, all without having to deploy multiple products or hire more people. Another megatrend continuing to unfold in cybersecurity is consolidation.

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

The macro backdrop has only accelerated the need for customers to reduce vendor sprawl, reduce agents, reduce costs, and protect their businesses with the best of SaaS platform. On average, enterprise customers can realize over 200% ROI with Falcon. With ROI results like this, it's no surprise companies turn to CrowdStrike to protect, power, and drive efficiencies for their businesses. In Q1, net new ARR from our million-dollar-plus customers grew year-over-year, even as these larger, more complex deals can have longer sales cycles. We delivered $174.2 million in net new ARR for the quarter, which exceeded our stated assumptions. Our momentum with large customers, record Q2 pipeline, and success tracking deals to close gives us confidence in the back half of the year.

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

In Q1, we closed over 50% more deals involving eight or more modules compared to a year ago. We believe this speaks to increasing customer demand for consolidation using the Falcon platform. When we look at our pipeline for the remainder of the year, we expect this trend to continue, giving us confidence in our ability to deliver net new ARR growth in the back half of the year. Over the past few months, I have personally met with many of our customers, prospects, and partners. These conversations all centered on the same topic. Customers want to consolidate their security stack with Falcon and drive greater cost efficiencies while unlocking new capabilities. Let me share a few recent customer wins, highlighting ways companies use CrowdStrike to consolidate while improving their cybersecurity outcomes. First, our wins with two new Fortune 100 customers.

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

These organizations are consolidating on Falcon, a single modern XDR platform, unifying their approach to security across their different business units. Each of these new CrowdStrike customers purchased multiple modules, with one adopting nine modules, displacing legacy and next gen vendors in their environment and standardizing on CrowdStrike. One of my favorite customer wins this quarter was with a regional healthcare customer brought to us by our partner, Dell. This organization was frustrated by the volume of false positives generated by their legacy security product, which hampered their security team's efficiency and obscured critical incidents.

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

Recognizing the increased value they could gain by modernizing their security stack and consolidating on CrowdStrike, this customer adopted eight Falcon modules, including Falcon Complete, Identity Threat Protection, and LogScale, in a seven-figure total value deal. In addition, our managed services teams have catapulted CrowdStrike to a leader position in the Forrester Wave for managed detection and response, and the number one market share position for the second consecutive year in Gartner's MDR for Managed Security Service report. CrowdStrike's MDR leadership extends beyond our managed services and into our MDR partner ecosystem. Of the top 25 MDR vendors by market share defined by Gartner, 88% have built their MDR services on top of the Falcon platform, showcasing Falcon as their modern XDR platform of choice. We are proud that the Falcon platform powers so many different partners, enabling them to build their businesses on top of CrowdStrike.

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

Our industry-leading partner ecosystem continues to expand rapidly, contributing meaningfully to our growth. CrowdStrike recently entered into a strategic partnership with Pax8, the leading MSP cloud marketplace, with over 30,000 MSP partners across North America, EMEA, and APJ that serve the SMB market. This partnership provides CrowdStrike a born in the cloud route to market for MSP consumption and a prime opportunity to displace the legacy AV and next gen product vendors Pax8 partners use today. MSPs are increasingly turning to the Pax8 marketplace for ease of product purchase, rapid software deployment, and fully integrated billing to run their businesses, including cybersecurity. Pax8's MSP partner base will now be enabled to protect their end customers with the same cutting edge XDR technology selected by the world's leading and largest enterprises. Our momentum in the public sector continues to expand.

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

Public sector wins in the quarter included a Falcon Complete win at a top 20 U.S. government contractor and a win with a major U.S. federal agency. Today, we announced CrowdStrike was granted an Impact Level 5, or IL5, provisional authorization from the Department of Defense. IL5 certification positions us well to extend our reach into the massive defense IT and cybersecurity market. The competitive environment has not changed since our deep dive in April, where we disclosed that eight out of 10 times when an enterprise customer tests, they choose CrowdStrike over Microsoft, and our win rates across all competitors remained strong in the quarter. Organizations today, more than ever before, need security partners with deep expertise that can stop breaches while driving efficiencies in their security programs. However, for Microsoft, companies experience added complexity, less coverage, and higher costs.

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

One enterprise customer with over 50,000 employees told us the upgrade cost of moving from Microsoft E3 to E5 would be at least $2.3 million more than their CrowdStrike subscription, and that's just for the upgrade. With Microsoft's excessive annual cost increases, this would grow to $4.7 million by year 5, excluding the additional costs required for support or a SIEM solution or increased staff to manage the extra complexity. When customers map it all out, they quickly realize that using Microsoft E5 for security is more expensive, requires more headcount, and increases their cyber risk. The cloud is the third mega trend, representing a long and sustainable tailwind for our business. The cloud is rapidly emerging as the new adversary battleground.

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

We have observed a 95% year-over-year increase in cloud service exploitation, and a 288% increase in threat actors that know how to operate in cloud environments. Securing cloud assets is paramount today and will continue to grow in importance. As a leader in protecting some of the largest and most critical cloud companies, we have seen strong net new ARR growth from modules deployed in public clouds. Our Falcon Cloud Security offering unifies our agent and agentless cloud native security capabilities into a single offering that's easy to deploy from built to runtime across all major cloud environments, and is driving incredible customer momentum as customers consolidate their cloud security, replacing multiple cloud point products with Falcon.

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

Tying this all together, the rapidly evolving and expanding threat environment demonstrates why it is so critical to have your endpoint, cloud, identity, and data protection on one unified modern XDR platform, Falcon. We've covered a lot today, and you can see that our relentless innovation continues to widen the gap between CrowdStrike and the competition. In closing, I will reiterate a few key points. First, CrowdStrike has a clear data advantage built over the past 12 years by combining our unmatched AI and human threat intelligence expertise. For customers, CrowdStrike's advantage means better, faster, and more cost-effective cybersecurity. For our business, CrowdStrike's AI excellence shines through our differentiated business model efficiencies. Second, we ushered cybersecurity into a new era with the introduction of Charlotte AI. Third, companies must consolidate their security stack to reduce complexity, reduce agents, and reduce costs without sacrificing coverage or security.

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

They need to protect their cloud environments from built to runtime with a single unified platform. To achieve this, customers choose CrowdStrike. Fourth, we believe that in addition to building a winning platform, we built a robust business model capable of generating rapid growth at scale, earnings, and durable free cash flow. With that, I will turn the call over to Burt to discuss our financial results.

[Burt Podbere, CFO at CrowdStrike]

Thank you, George, and good afternoon, everyone. As a quick reminder, unless otherwise noted, all numbers except revenue mentioned during my remarks today are non-GAAP. We delivered a strong first quarter, even with the continued challenging macro environment, with revenue, subscription gross margin, operating income, net income, and free cash flow, all exceeding our guidance and reaching new records. We believe our financial performance speaks to the strength of our business model and the operational excellence ingrained in the fabric of CrowdStrike's culture, which includes diligence and discipline when balancing growth and profitability. The demand environment remains resilient. Although we continue to see increased deal scrutiny and longer than typical sales cycles, especially for larger consolidation deals, with our relentless focus on sales execution, we achieved Q1 net new ARR of $174.2 million, which was above stated assumptions.

[Burt Podbere, CFO at CrowdStrike]

We ended the quarter with ending ARR reaching $2.73 billion, up 42% over last year. The quarter was well-balanced, with the mix between new logos and expansion cross-sell net new ARR similar to Q4. We continue to be very pleased with the success of our land and expand strategy, with our dollar-based net retention rate once again above the 120% benchmark in Q1. Subscription customers with five or more, six or more, and seven or more modules now represent 62%, 40%, and 23% of subscription customers, respectively. Moving to the P&L, total revenue grew 42% over Q1 of last year to reach $692.6 million. Subscription revenue grew 42% over Q1 of last year to reach $651.2 million.

[Burt Podbere, CFO at CrowdStrike]

Professional services revenue was $41.4 million, setting a new record for the 11th consecutive quarter and representing 48% year-over-year growth. During the quarter, we also saw strength in Europe, the Middle East, and Japan. International revenue grew 53% year-over-year. Our first quarter non-GAAP gross margin performance was outstanding, with both total and subscription non-GAAP gross margins ascending to new heights. Total non-GAAP gross margin was 78%, and subscription gross margin crossed the 80% milestone for the first time. Our investments in data center and workload optimization drove our gross margin improvement in the quarter. As we have said in the past, we expect subscription gross margin to fluctuate by up to one point on a quarter-to-quarter basis as we balance optimization investments with capacity growth and new platform functionality.

[Burt Podbere, CFO at CrowdStrike]

We expect these investments to drive further margin enhancement in the future as we continue to execute on our long-term plan to drive subscription gross margin sustainably above 80%. Total non-GAAP operating expenses in the first quarter were approximately $424.6 million, or 61% of revenue, versus $291.0 million last year, or 60% of revenue. The sequential increase in sales and marketing reflects the timing of in-person events and marketing programs. In Q1, our magic number was 1.0, and we achieved a Rule of 75 on a free cash flow basis, both metrics reflecting the continued efficiency of our model. First quarter non-GAAP operating income grew 40% year-over-year to reach a record $115.9 million, and we reported operating margin of 17%.

[Burt Podbere, CFO at CrowdStrike]

Non-GAAP net income attributable to CrowdStrike in Q1 grew to a record $136.4 million, or $0.57 on a diluted per share basis. Our weighted average common shares used to calculate first quarter non-GAAP EPS attributable to CrowdStrike was on a diluted basis and totaled approximately 241 million shares. We also reached GAAP profitability for the first time in company history. While we are very proud of this milestone, we have yet to reach sustained GAAP profitability. Q1 benefited significantly from fewer net new hires in Q1, which we expect to pick up throughout the remainder of the year, albeit at a much more moderated pace in comparison to FY 2023. We believe reaching this milestone demonstrates that our financial model will deliver GAAP profitability in due time. We ended the first quarter with a strong balance sheet.

[Burt Podbere, CFO at CrowdStrike]

Cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments increased to approximately $2.93 billion. Cash flow from operations grew 40% year-over-year to a record $300.9 million. Free cash flow grew 44% year-over-year to a record $227.4 million, or approximately 33% of revenue. Before I move to our guidance, I'd like to provide a few modeling notes. We are raising our revenue guidance for the fiscal year and maintaining our net new ARR assumptions for the first half and fiscal year, which call for a 10% year-over-year headwind to net new ARR in the first half and in line to modestly up net new ARR for the full year.

[Burt Podbere, CFO at CrowdStrike]

Our strong Q2 pipeline and momentum with large consolidation deals give us confidence in the remainder of the year, including the back half, where we expect to return to year-over-year growth in net new ARR. As a reminder, given the timing of expenses, billing seasonality, and the mid-year ESPP purchase, the second quarter is generally our lowest cash flow generation quarter of the year. This year, we expect to see more pronounced seasonality and maintain our target of achieving 30% free cash flow margin for the fiscal year. As we discussed during our investor briefing in April, this is inclusive of estimated full year impacts from billings duration and cash taxes, balanced by the positive tailwinds of increased operating leverage, higher interest income, and lower CapEx. Lastly, our assumptions on interest income, cash outlay for income taxes, and capital expenditures are unchanged.

[Burt Podbere, CFO at CrowdStrike]

For the second quarter of FY 2024, we expect total revenue to be in the range of $717.2 million-$727.4 million, reflecting a year-over-year growth rate of 34%-36%. We expect non-GAAP income from operations to be in the range of $116.4 million-$123.8 million, and non-GAAP net income attributable to CrowdStrike to be in the range of $129.5 million-$137.0 million. We expect diluted non-GAAP net income per share attributable to CrowdStrike to be in the range of $0.54-$0.57, utilizing a weighted average share count of 242 million shares on a diluted basis. We are raising our revenue and profitability guidance for the full fiscal year 2024.

[Burt Podbere, CFO at CrowdStrike]

We currently expect total revenue to be in the range of $3,000.5 million-$3,036.7 million, reflecting a growth rate of 34%-35% over the prior fiscal year. Non-GAAP income from operations is expected to be between $498.9 million and $526.2 million. We expect fiscal 2024 non-GAAP net income attributable to CrowdStrike to be between $562.8 million and $590.1 million. Utilizing 243 million weighted average shares on a diluted basis, we expect non-GAAP net income per share attributable to CrowdStrike to be in the range of $2.32-$2.43. George and I will now take your questions.

[Operator]

Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Participants will be limited to one question. Our first question comes from Saket Kalia with Barclays. You may proceed.

[Saket Kalia, Managing Director at Barclays]

Okay, great. Hey, guys, thanks for taking my question here, and congrats on the DoD authorization.

[Burt Podbere, CFO at CrowdStrike]

Hey, Saket.

[Saket Kalia, Managing Director at Barclays]

George, Hey, Burt. Hey, George, thanks for taking my question here. George, maybe for you, and I'll just stick to one here. Can we just talk a little bit about what you're seeing in legacy endpoint share gains? I mean, clearly, CrowdStrike has a broader platform beyond just endpoint, but I'm curious, just given the macro and everything happening, curious how you feel about that opportunity for continued share gain in endpoint specifically?

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

I feel good about that opportunity, and if you look at our current market leadership and it is market-leading leadership at 17.8% for modern endpoint security, it's still a very fragmented market, and we continue to take share from the legacy players that are in the market. When you look at different geographies, obviously, we've got heavier penetration in North America, but there's many geographies in the rest of the world that still have to be penetrated deeper, particularly in converting those legacy players. I feel really good about it. It's a fragmented market if you just look at the numbers and the ongoing conversion of legacy technologies into next gen players like CrowdStrike will continue for the foreseeable future.

[Operator]

Thank you. Our next question comes from Sterling Auty with SVB MoffettNathanson. You may proceed.

[Sterling Auty, Senior Managing Director at SVB MoffettNathanson]

Yeah, thanks. Hi, guys. I wonder if you could give us a sense of what kind of impact you saw in the business from the disruption from the banking crisis in March, both on kind of ARR linearity and maybe even billings in the quarter?

[Burt Podbere, CFO at CrowdStrike]

Thanks, Sterling. How are you? 1, let's talk about the impact of, you know, the banking crisis. For us, there was not a material impact on ARR from the banks. I think the impact of churn from the banking industry was really de minimis, and we continued to close deals with regional banks in the quarter, as banks in particularly need robust cyber defenses. Overall gross retention remain high and best in class. We felt pretty good in terms of that particular piece of the segment. In terms of, you know, overall billings, you know, billings is, of course, for us, quite cyclical, and, you know, it is driven primarily through seasonality.

[Burt Podbere, CFO at CrowdStrike]

Q4 has our largest deals, and the renewals that came up have an impact, and then the impact, you know, falls into Q1, which we would see, you know, an overall decrease. That's how we think about it. As you know.

[Sterling Auty, Senior Managing Director at SVB MoffettNathanson]

... the business, is focused on ARR as opposed to billings, which can have whipsaw effects, and the focus on ARR just gives you an idea about the overall health of the business.

[Operator]

Thank you. Our next question comes from Joel Fishbein with Truist Securities. You may proceed.

[Joel Fishbein, Managing Director at Truist Securities]

Thanks for taking the question. Hey, George, one for you. Thanks for the update on AI. I'm just curious, as it increases the attack surface, just curious if you've seen any threats recently, that it may have been exploited, new threats as a result of, you know, the proliferation of some of these new models that are out there? I have a quick follow-up.

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

We continue to see, and we have seen for some period of time, adversarial AI, so the use of AI, specifically, by the adversary, to try to defeat the security system. That's been going on for some time. I think what we're seeing now with generative AI and LLMs is the fact that it becomes very easy for even a novice adversary to be able to have the same capabilities as a nation-state to create new exploits, new vulnerabilities, to be able to deliver phished emails, et cetera. That will be an ongoing effort, and again, we're really excited about Charlotte AI, which we announced this week.

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

I think it's an absolute game changer for us and the company and what we're able to do, and to really compress the workloads for analysts and provide a lot of the intelligence that we have, and our analysts have, right through the Falcon platform. We'll continue to monitor that, but that's been an ongoing activity that we've seen for some time.

[Joel Fishbein, Managing Director at Truist Securities]

Great. Just, as a follow-up on this CrowdStrike Falcon Complete XDR, can you just talk about how the new release may increase your competitive advantage in that space? I think there's a lot of noise out there.

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

There is a lot of noise, and when you look at, you know, XDR and what we've talked about with our use of AI in terms of really, driving additional leverage in the business, it does help to automate a lot of what we do, and we can now provide that level of automation in a complete offering. Because XDR is still, as an industry, still an immature technology, I think wrapping it with a complete service really allows customers to have peace of mind. They can allow us to take in that third-party data, leverage the models that we've already built to get better outcomes, faster response, and drive down their overall operational costs.

[Operator]

Thank you. Our next question comes from Hamza Fodderwala with Morgan Stanley. You may proceed.

[Hamza Fodderwala, Executive Director at Morgan Stanley]

Hey, guys, good evening. Thank you for taking my question. George, an AI question for you as well. I'm curious, how are you thinking about monetizing some of the new AI services that you've released? I mean, is it something that's gonna drive more sort of top-of-the-funnel conversion? You know, do you think it's gonna drive more demand for LogScale? Is there, like, explicit SKU that you're offering? Just curious how you're thinking about that. I know it's pretty early days.

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

It's something that's really foundationally built into the platform, and we believe it's gonna drive a lot of additional adoption of modules and platform usage throughout the customer base. We'll start there. As it evolves over time, we'll look to see if we'll monetize it with specific SKUs. I think, first and foremost, let's get it to the customer base. Let's iterate it. Let's leverage the data advantage that we have, because as I've talked about in the earnings call, we've got 10 years of being able to train these algorithms. I think as most know, it really is the human interaction that allows those LLMs to shine.

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

We've got, I think, a real advantage because we've got 10 years of attack pairing, if you will, with data and how the attacks work that can be used for training. We're gonna get it out in the customer base, continue to iterate it, and then I believe it'll drive more adoption of the platform modules, and then we'll see how we'll monetize it after that from a separate SKU perspective.

[Operator]

Thank you. Our next question comes from Matt Hedberg with RBC. You may proceed.

[Matt Hedberg, Managing Director and Software Research Analyst at RBC]

Great, guys. Thanks for taking my question. You're talking about a lot of confidence in the second half, net new ARR acceleration. You know, when you, when you sit back and you look at it, there's a lot of things, I think, to be, to be excited about. What do you think are the biggest drivers of that growth? Maybe I missed it, but are you still targeting low 30% ARR growth for fiscal 2024?

[Burt Podbere, CFO at CrowdStrike]

Yeah. Hey, great question. First, let's talk a little bit about the second half. Obviously, the easier comp in the back half, right? That's number one. What really gives us confidence, you know, going into the second half is three things. one is pipeline. We see momentum and deal activity rapidly building for the second half. It really started in the middle of, you know, the Q1. We saw that momentum to be able to build the pipe, you know, for the second half. That was number one. Number two, products. We're excited about LogScale. George has talked about it a lot. We've given some examples. We think that there's a, you know, a great opportunity with LogScale. We're also seeing momentum in cloud.

[Burt Podbere, CFO at CrowdStrike]

I think that's something that we're really excited about, and AI-powered XDR. Now with Charlotte, George has already talked about that. Third, partnerships. Whether it's Dell or Pax8 or others that are coming online, we think that can be something that will move the needle for us in the second half. The key here is cybersecurity remains mission-critical, and I think customers want to consolidate and drive down TCO more than ever, and Falcon is designed to do exactly like that. I think that when you look at the overall module adoption, and we talk about.

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

You know, we closed over 50% more deals involving eight or more modules this quarter compared to a year ago. That speaks to the power of our platform. All those things give us confidence about what we talked about in, you know, for our second half. The stated assumptions remain the same.

[Operator]

Thank you. Our next question comes from Andrew Nowinski with Wells Fargo. You may proceed.

[Andrew Nowinski, Senior Research Analyst at Wells Fargo]

Great, thank you. Thanks for taking the question. I was wondering if you could just expand on your partnerships with Dell that you talked about last quarter. Just wondering, you know, how much it contributed into the quarter, whether you have enough visibility from that partnership yet to factor that into your new revenue guidance for the year, and if that's actually driving any traction in that SMB sector? Thanks.

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

Yeah, it's a good question. You know, one, we're tracking to plan. We're still early days, obviously, with Dell. We called out one seven-figure deal with a regional healthcare company that was brought through our partnership with Dell in the quarter. Obviously, with any new alliance, it does take time to gain traction. The numbers that are coming from, you know, that Dell partnership, we anticipate to grow over time. In terms of, you know, big piece of the quarter, not yet, right? We have great expectations, but like anything else, those things do take time, and but we are still excited about it.

[Operator]

Thank you. Our next question comes from Tal Liani with Bank of America. You may proceed.

[Tal Liani, Technology Analyst at Bank of America]

Hi, guys. Two questions. Can you give us an update on going down market and your attraction with Falcon Go, the SMB focus, area? What kind of competition do you see there, given that Microsoft is stronger in the down market? Second question, we have seen many companies in the space having sales to existing customers much stronger than sales to new customers, and there is slowdown in sales to new customers. Can you give us kind of the data on where do you see the growth coming from and existing versus new customers? Thanks.

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

Sure. I'll start out. Burt can add anything if he needs to. Falcon Go has been a success for us. We continue to target the SMB market. I think I called out in one of the prior earnings calls of how we organized ourselves internally. We've got a specific focus and a leader on that. We've seen a lot of success there. I need to, you know, call out the pairing to our success in the MSP market and a partnership like Pax8, which really allows us to get those lower cost offerings out to customers through managed service providers. It's a big market for us, SMB. It's a very highly fragmented market.

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

You have some players there, but we've been successful because customers are looking for outcomes. You know, you talk about Microsoft, customers routinely come to us after they get hit with ransomware, or after they have an issue, and looking for a next gen solution that doesn't depend on signatures. We see success there. We've got to ramp our channels up. We're working with Dell and others and managed service providers. I feel really good about that opportunity, and that will continue to grow over time.

[Burt Podbere, CFO at CrowdStrike]

I'll take the second part of the question, Tal. We really haven't seen a material difference in terms of the mix between the size of our install base and net new logos versus last quarter. We do think that we will see over time, as our install base gets larger, they'll have more opportunities to sell, you know, to our install base. Having said that, we still think we have a lot of headroom in terms of net new logos. We have a long way to go, and we talked about that on earlier calls. Overall, we're really pleased with our opportunity on both net new logos from a new logo standpoint and from a cross-sell, upsell opportunity.

[Operator]

Thank you. Our next question comes from Shaul Eyal with TD Cowen. You may proceed.

[Shaul Eyal, Managing Director of Equity Research at TD Cowen]

Thank you. Hi, good afternoon, guys. George, last quarter, I believe, or maybe during the update, you talked a lot about, you know, some of the Microsoft displacements, and I know you've actually just kind of mentioned that. In that context, maybe shifting to, you know, from a model perspective, any specific trends you can talk to us about this quarter versus prior quarters, with respect to the leading, the leading modules, the identity, some of the emerging ones, versus everything that you're seeing from Microsoft in that respect? Thank you.

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

Sure. I think I'll start with consolidation, and I'll reference back to what I spoke about in the prepared remarks. Every customer that we spoke to, and I spoke to many, many customers at RSA, and even throughout the quarter, it was really about consolidation. I think we've done a good job of showing a very cost-compelling model for them, where they're actually paying less than, say, an E5, for the security pieces, particularly CrowdStrike, and they're getting better outcomes. There are many customers that have said, "We want to consolidate on CrowdStrike. We want to buy more." Obviously, these sort of bigger deals take time. They have more deal scrutiny, those sort of things.

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

That's what we're seeing, and that's, I think, reflective in what we saw this quarter, and certainly what we've seen growing in the pipeline, as customers want to do more with CrowdStrike.

[Operator]

Thank you. Our next question comes from John DiFucci with Guggenheim Securities. You may proceed.

[John DiFucci, Senior Managing Director at Guggenheim Securities]

Thank you. My question's for George. This is the first quarter ever that new ARR declined for you guys, whereas most others declines started quarters ago, like several quarters ago. T-Paul asked about competition in the SMB market, but what about demand? We started to hear some weakness in the SMB, in the mid-market. We realize that's largely greenfield for you, so it might be harder for you to tell, but are you seeing any changes in that market demand this quarter versus previously? No, we actually saw a strong demand and results in SMB. I think we've got a great model, we've got the right technology for it, and we're solving outcomes, right?

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

When you look at, not only the technology itself, you know, obviously, you can buy Falcon Go as a customer, but you can also buy Falcon Complete. We have many SMB customers, many that are Falcon Complete customers. Why? Because it's a very compelling proposition from a price perspective. They couldn't even fill one head for the cost of what we're charging them, and they're getting the best in the world in terms of security. We have not seen a slowdown in SMB. We've got, I think, really good traction there, and at the end of the day, as you pointed out, it's still a fragmented market, and it's a smaller part of our overall revenue. We see great future opportunity with it and didn't see any impact last quarter.

[Operator]

Thank you. Our next question comes from Brian Essex with J.P. Morgan. You may proceed.

[Brian Essex, Executive Director at JPMorgan]

Hi, good afternoon, and thank you for taking the question. I guess maybe for Burt, you know, nice milestone of hitting GAAP profitability. I guess I would love a little bit more color around your commitment to maintaining GAAP profitability. What should we expect? And you also had a really, I think, for the first time, stock-based comp declined sequentially. What is kind of the outlook there, and how should we kind of frame out your view and your plans to drive GAAP profitability and balance growth and profitability going forward? Thank you.

[Burt Podbere, CFO at CrowdStrike]

Thanks, Brian. Great question. One, overall, you know, we've had a very methodical approach in how we look at the various aspects of the model. First, we focused on growth margin, and you can see the progress that we've made there. Second piece was focusing on non-GAAP profitability and free cash flow. Free cash flow, as you know, which is at 30%, and that is something that's ongoing. Third evolution is GAAP profit, which we will continue to focus on and drive towards, you know, achieving sustainability. Of course, SBC is the biggest piece of that. We continue to manage SBC and, you know, we're going to be mindful with the balance, with retaining the best and the brightest talent. That's paramount for us. We also look to dilution.

[Burt Podbere, CFO at CrowdStrike]

Our dilution, we feel, is in a good place. Less than 2% this year, strive to keep it under 3% in the years that are coming. Overall, we are very pleased with hitting the GAAP profitability and believe it demonstrates the power of the model, and that we are, you know, disciplined in our growth, and we're disciplined in how we see the market today. Everything we do is by design. It's not a fluke. We think about it, in terms of, you know, where we can extend and how we can extend. For us, with SBC, we really focus on making sure we're able to get the best talent and retain the best talent and attract the best talent.

[Burt Podbere, CFO at CrowdStrike]

That's how we really think about it. For us, we're going to look forward to when we reach sustainability. We have other things we're going after right now, including that retention and attraction.

[Operator]

Thank you. Our next question comes from Jonathan Ho with William Blair. You may proceed.

[Jonathan Ho, Partner at William Blair]

Hi there, good afternoon. I just wanted to maybe ask a little bit about sort of the success that you've seen with these additional add-on modules. Can you help us understand, you know, maybe where that success is coming from, whether it's, you know, some of your newer products in areas like cloud or EASM, or is this in, you know, sort of multi-product sales from your more existing endpoint capabilities? Thank you. Sure. Well, we've seen strength in many different areas. We had some incredible wins with LogScale. I'm really seeing the momentum on that. There's a real need in the industry for faster, better, cheaper logging, and customers are looking for a solution. That was great to see.

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

I think when you look at identity, this is one of those areas where, just like, EDR in the early days, it wasn't necessarily budgeted, and what we're starting to see now is that companies are actually budgeting, in, current and future budgets for identity, just like XDR as, sorry, EDR, as an emerging product. The third area is cloud. We've packaged up our offering to include both agent and agentless on the cloud as basically one SKU. Customers can use it. They love the fact that they're getting results from both agent and agentless technologies, and that is a true differentiator in the environment, the competitive environment.

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

Overall, when you look at a lot of these areas that I've called out in the past, you know, it's full speed ahead on them, and we continue to add more capabilities, and I'm really excited about the product lineup that we have for this fiscal year.

[Operator]

Thank you. Our next question comes from Gregg Moskowitz with Mizuho. You may proceed.

[Gregg Moskowitz, Managing Director of Enterprise Software at Mizuho]

Okay, thank you for taking the question. First, a quick clarification from Burt. If you could just comment on average duration this quarter and if there was any change. For George, I know you've been incorporating AI into Threat Graph and, you know, the broader platform for years, but on Charlotte AI, you alluded to commoditizing LLMs, but might you leverage open source and develop your own LLMs based on your dataset to provide additional value there? Just curious to hear a little more on how you may augment existing LLMs to potentially drive a greater wedge, so to speak, based on your inherent data advantage there. Thanks.

[Burt Podbere, CFO at CrowdStrike]

Hey, Gregg. I'll take the first part of that question. As you know, we've called out that we expect to see, in the long term, the shift from multi-year deals to 1-year deals. I think that's traditional in software, but we did not see a material shift in the trend this quarter in comparison to the last quarter. Just to be very, very clear on that point, deal durations are getting shorter, but are expected, and it remains within the parameters of how we've modeled out, you know, our overall business.

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

Greg, on the question regarding LLMs, obviously, there is some great technology that's already out there, I think our view is to leverage LLMs. It's a very similar concept to being able to leverage different cloud providers. You leverage the LLMs that suit you for a particular purpose. Doesn't mean we couldn't build our own, but I think what's important, and I called this out in the prepared remarks, is the fact that the training is one of the areas that really makes an LLM shine. I think many people have seen that just, you know, with their understanding of ChatGPT. These things have to be trained, or you get hallucinations in terms of the results, spurious results, if you will.

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

From our standpoint, we believe the pairing of the Threat Graph with annotated threat data over the last 10 years is and will continue to be a sustainable advantage and a barrier to entry because we've already done a lot of that kind of human training. We can take advantage and interchange LLMs within our own data set to provide the best outcome, depending on what we're looking for. We'll leverage what's out there. We may build some of our own, but I think more importantly, we've got the right data set to get the training the way we need it.

[Operator]

Thank you. Our next question comes from Alex Henderson with Needham. You may proceed.

[Alex Henderson, Managing Director of Security, Data Networking, and Optical Research at Needham]

Great. Thank you so much. I was hoping you could talk a little bit about what your assumptions are in terms of your pipeline, in terms of deal sizes, duration, closure rates, and price relative to the conditions. Are, are you baking in a little bit more conservatism into your assumptions on some of those parameters? Are you know, expecting the deal sizes to continue to go up, but then push out in the time to close deals? What are you assuming around closure rates in this environment? If you could feather in a little bit on the federal, I would, I would love it. Thanks.

[Burt Podbere, CFO at CrowdStrike]

Thanks, Alex. A few things to unpack there. Let's start with, you know, in terms of larger deals. Again, we closed over 50% more deals involving eight more modules this quarter compared to a year ago. I think this really speaks to the fact that customers really want to do the consolidation play. They wanna continue to leverage Falcon Platform as a means to, you know, get the right outcomes, you know, at the right price. In terms of the overall environment, so first, big picture in the macro, we don't see the macro improving now and for the rest of the year. With that as a backdrop, when we think about deal durations, yeah, sure, we think deal durations, you know, are gonna be, you know, shorter.

[Burt Podbere, CFO at CrowdStrike]

I think people are going to, in terms of their, in terms of their size, are gonna be longer to be able to consummate. That goes to the additional scrutiny that we're continuing to see from companies looking to do bigger deals takes more time. When we think about that all in perspective, we know that there's gonna be deals that are going to be more difficult to close within a particular quarter, and so we've modeled that in. I think that overall, with respect to, you know, some of the other metrics that you had mentioned, I think that, you know, for one, I think that, you know, for our net new ARR, we are gonna maintain the assumptions that we stated previously. I think that's the right thing to do.

[Burt Podbere, CFO at CrowdStrike]

With that, I'll pass it to George to talk about Fed.

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

Sure. As I mentioned, you know, prior comments, we're excited about IL5. That does open up, I think, a much bigger federal opportunity. We had some really nice wins in the quarter, and that's one... Again, it's slow and steady. You've just got to get in. It may take a while to get deals done, but they last a long time, and they're big and meaty. We continue to drive forward on that, and I think this IL5 certification opens up more doors for us.

[Operator]

Thank you. Our next question comes from Ittai Kidron with Oppenheimer. You may proceed.

[Ittai Kidron, Managing Director at Oppenheimer]

thanks, George, thanks for the great review on AI. I guess the question is for Burt. With the benefits of AI, as George described them, how soon can you raise your long-term margin target?

[Burt Podbere, CFO at CrowdStrike]

Look, you know, for us, we're really pleased with where we're going with our margins. You know, start to gross margin. You saw, you know, the progress that we've made there. We've talked about the continued developments, you know, for optimization, you know, in our, you know, certainly in our data centers as well as our cloud workloads. You know, the progress that we're making in AI, we build into everything we do, and we've been doing it for 10 years. We do anticipate to continue to see those improvements. Just as a memory, just as a to remind you, Ittai, we've been doing AI from the beginning, just as we did cloud from the beginning. Those two were hand in hand.

[Burt Podbere, CFO at CrowdStrike]

The good news there is we've got, as George had mentioned, over 10 years of all that AI and the training on the AI, and that's a massive head start over any one of our other competitors.

[Operator]

Thank you. Our next question comes from Patrick Colville with Scotiabank. You may proceed.

[Patrick Colville, Lead Equity Research Analyst at Scotiabank]

Hey, thank you so much for squeezing me in. In the prepared remarks, you mentioned that in the quarter you saw increased deal scrutiny and longer sales cycles. Can you just double-click on that comment? I mean, was that increased deal scrutiny and longer sales cycles, was that, like, late in the quarter, you know, in the kind of, in March, April, or was that towards the beginning? I guess any more color or clarity you give on those comments would be fascinating. Thank you.

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

Sure. The comment was meant to be throughout the quarter. You know, as we go into deals, you know, we're seeing customers want to consolidate more, and that takes more time because they're adding more modules with us. They're looking to spend more with us, but then reduce other spends from other competitors. In a sense, they're actually thinking about better outcomes overall in the security space and beyond, and how to get it at a cheaper price. That's, again, things that we've talked about from day one, and we're seeing that happen today. It's throughout the quarter that we're seeing both additional deal scrutiny because of what I just mentioned, but also they do take longer, and that's throughout the entire quarter.

[Operator]

Thank you. Our next question comes from Jonathan Ruykhaver with Cantor Fitzgerald. You may proceed.

[Jonathan Ruykhaver, Managing Director at Cantor Fitzgerald]

Hi, guys. I'm curious, when you look at data retention requirements, particularly around XDR for active threat hunting, but I guess increasingly going forward for these Large Language Models, can you just talk about the issue the industry is facing just, you know, around the increasing data retention requirements and the associated costs? You know, I know you've already talked positively on LogScale adoption, but those costs with LogScale versus other solutions, is there any way for you to quantify what that looks like, the advantage you have?

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

Specifically around LogScale, you see a massive increase in terms of our compression algorithms and our ability to store data. I think one of the areas where you look at LogScale and, you know, just the simple view of it is better, faster, cheaper. That's what we've seen. We've had some big customers that are using that really as I call it their data lake, if you will. They can store lots of data, you know, on-prem or many of them in the cloud, in a very cost-efficient manner, and they still get the performance. I think the architecture, which is a modern architecture around LogScale, really does give us an advantage there, and that's being borne out by customers in their own testing.

[Operator]

Thank you. Our last question comes from Catharine Trebnick with Rosenblatt Securities. You may proceed.

[Patrick Colville, Lead Equity Research Analyst at Scotiabank]

Hi, thank you for the question. At the last Analyst Day, or the one before, you talked about your Coalition partnership. Can you talk to cyber insurance as a... Is that still a tailwind, as big a tailwind as it was last year, or has that dissipated? Thank you.

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

Yeah, I think cyber insurance for a lot of customers is very difficult to get, and it's actually gone up in cost. We have many customers that, as part of the CrowdStrike acquisition, are baking in their ability to, A, get cyber insurance, and B, in many cases, being able to reduce the overall cost, because many of the cyber insurance providers recognize with CrowdStrike in place, overall risk is dramatically going to be reduced. That's what we've seen. I don't know that there's, you know, any anomalies one way or another, but it's a continued problem in the industry to actually get cyber insurance, and it is part of our overall value proposition to a customer, to be able to, A, help them get it, and B, reduce their overall cyber insurance costs.

[Operator]

Thank you. This concludes the Q&A session. I'd now like to turn the call back over to George Kurtz for any closing remarks.

[George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder at CrowdStrike]

Well, I just want to thank everyone for their time and attention, and we appreciate the questions, and we look forward to seeing you next quarter. Thank you so much.

[Operator]

Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.

[Patrick Colville, Lead Equity Research Analyst at Scotiabank]

Goodbye.

Participants

Executives

• Maria Riley, VP of Investor Relations
• George Kurtz, President, CEO, and Founder
• Burt Podbere, CFO

Analysts

• Saket Kalia, Managing Director at Barclays
• Sterling Auty, Senior Managing Director at SVB MoffettNathanson
• Joel Fishbein, Managing Director at Truist Securities
• Hamza Fodderwala, Executive Director at Morgan Stanley
• Matt Hedberg, Managing Director and Software Research Analyst at RBC
• Andrew Nowinski, Senior Research Analyst at Wells Fargo
• Tal Liani, Technology Analyst at Bank of America
• Shaul Eyal, Managing Director of Equity Research at TD Cowen
• John DiFucci, Senior Managing Director at Guggenheim Securities
• Brian Essex, Executive Director at JPMorgan
• Jonathan Ho, Partner at William Blair
• Gregg Moskowitz, Managing Director of Enterprise Software at Mizuho
• Alex Henderson, Managing Director of Security, Data Networking, and Optical Research at Needham
• Ittai Kidron, Managing Director at Oppenheimer
• Patrick Colville, Lead Equity Research Analyst at Scotiabank
• Jonathan Ruykhaver, Managing Director at Cantor Fitzgerald