Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the DigitalOcean Third Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Thank you. I'd now like to turn the call over to Melanie Strate, Head of Investor Relations. You may begin.

Thank you, and good morning. Thank you all for joining us today to review DigitalOcean's third quarter 2024 financial results. Joining me on the call today are Paddy Srinivasan, our Chief Executive Officer; and Matt Steinfort, our Chief Financial Officer. After our prepared remarks, we will open the call up to a question-and-answer session. Before we begin, let me remind you that certain statements made on the call today may be considered forward-looking statements, which reflect management's best judgment based on currently available information. I refer specifically to the discussion of our expectations and beliefs regarding our financial outlook for the fourth quarter and full year 2024, as well as our business goals and outlook. Our actual results may differ materially from those projected in these forward-looking statements. I direct your attention to the risk factors contained in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and those referenced in today's press release that is posted on our website. DigitalOcean expressly disclaims any obligation or undertaking to release publicly any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statements made today. Additionally, non-GAAP financial measures will be measured on this conference call and reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are also available in today's press release, as well as in our investor presentation that outlines the financial discussion on today's call. A webcast of today's call is also available the IR section of our website. And with that, I will turn the call over to Paddy.

Thank you, Melanie. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today as we review our third quarter 2024 results. DigitalOcean had a successful third quarter, continuing to deliver progress on our key metrics and executing on the initiatives we laid out earlier in the year, further establishing ourselves as the simplest scalable cloud. In my remarks today, I will briefly highlight our third quarter results, share tangible examples of how our increased pace of innovation is benefiting our customers, discuss the continued momentum we are seeing with our AIML platform and give an update on our strategic partnerships and engagement with the developer ecosystem. First, I would like to briefly recap our third quarter 2024 financial results. Revenue growth remained steady in the third quarter at 12% year-over-year with solid performance in core cloud and continued growth in AI, despite lapping difficult comps from our managed hosting price increase in April 2023 and from the Paperspace acquisition in July 2023. We continue to see momentum in demand for our AIML products, where Q3 ARR again grew close to 200% year-over-year. In addition, we saw revenue growth contributions from new customers and steady growth from core business as we continue to enhance our customer success and go-to-market motions. Having delivered strong results through the first three quarters, we are increasing the lower end of our full year revenue guide by $5 million and the top end by $2 million. We continue to focus the majority of our product innovation and go-to-market investments on our builders and scalers, who drive 88% of our total revenue and are growing 15% year-over-year ahead of our overall 12% revenue growth. We also delivered strong adjusted EBITDA margins at 44% and have maintained our full year free cash flow margin guidance as we continue…

Thanks, Paddy. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us today. As Paddy just covered, we had a very successful Q3, both executing on key initiatives and delivering solid financial performance. In Q3, we continued to see increased momentum from our AIML platform and steady growth across our core business while consistently delivering attractive adjusted EBITDA and adjusted free cash flow margins. Revenue in the third quarter was $198.5 million, up 12% year-over-year. Annual run rate revenue or ARR in the third quarter was $798.3 million, also up 12% year-over-year. We added $17 million of ARR in the quarter. Most notably, builders and scalers, which are our largest customers, together grew 15% year-over-year. Contributing to our overall growth was healthy incremental revenue from new customers and increased momentum from our AIML platform, which saw significant growth, again growing close to 200% year-over-year on an ARR basis. Overall growth was partially muted by our managed hosting platform as we are lapping difficult comps related to the April 2023 managed dosing price increase and a temporal surge of managed hosting revenue in Asia in late 2023. Our Q3 net dollar retention rate was steady at 97%. As with prior quarters, we continued to see consistent but below historical net expansion levels, while our churn levels have remained low for well over a year. We will continue efforts to improve growth in NDR, including executing our product road map, working to layer on additional go-to-market motions to complement our durable product-led growth engine. Turning to the P&L. Gross margin for the quarter was 60%, which was 100 basis points lower than the prior quarter and consistent with the prior year. We are able to maintain healthy gross margins, while continuing our investment in AI infrastructure due to the success of our ongoing cost…

Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Raimo Lenschow from Barclays. Your line is open.

Perfect. Thank you. Paddy, there is a lot of product innovation that you discussed. Can you talk a little bit about how we have to think about those new innovations around product and how that feeds into the installed base in terms of like what's the uptake there, what's the timing there? Because the financial number Matt and us will look at as NRR is 97% stable, but there seems to be a little bit of a disconnect. Can you maybe talk to timing there, et cetera? And I have 1 follow-up for Matt.

Thank you, Raimo, for the question. Yes, we are seeing a lot of product innovation across the board, both in the core cloud. That's why I spent so much time explaining all the things we are pumping out, especially in data and scalers, and allowing them or enabling them to run larger workloads on DigitalOcean. As you know from a timing and sequence point of view, there's no magical answer that we can provide, which translates our product innovation to adoption and hence, impact on our financial performance. But we feel, we have to do this to enable our customers move many of their larger workloads that they are currently running in other clouds and make it super compelling for them to run those workloads on the GO platform. And as I did just a few minutes ago, we will get into a habit of explaining some very concrete examples of customers that are starting to do that. So the examples I gave, we are now starting to sign customers in multiyear contracts with commitments on our platform. We are also starting to see a steady dose of migrations coming from other clouds, especially the hyperscalers. So we are playing -- we have we have to ensure that patience in terms of building these capabilities. We are starting to see the green shoots in terms of customer adoption and translation of that into leading indicators. And I have no question if we keep doing it for a handful of quarters; we are going to start seeing the translation into other lagging indicators, including some of the ones that you just mentioned, Raimo. So in terms of the NDR, I think Matt alluded to this fact that we have -- what we are seeing from a core -- the NDR of the core business is trending a little bit ahead of what we are reporting on a blended basis. So it gives us enough reasons to believe that what we are doing is starting to be appreciated by our customers. And as you know, this takes time for the adoption to happen. I have to keep reminding ourselves that we have 638,000 plus customers. So it takes time for the propagation to happen across the board with our customer base.

Okay. Perfect. Thank you. And then matt, one for you. Like if you look on the EBITDA, that's kind of the one we're kind of at the moment outperforming quite a bit. Can you talk a little bit about that, how do achieve that? Like how sustainable are -- is the progression there, especially as you think about like more services coming on stream. You probably want to support them more and then obviously, more AI services coming as well. Thank you.

Thanks, Raimo. Yes, I'd say from a cost standpoint, Q2 was definitely a good quarter from an EBITDA margin perspective. As we brought on our new executives, we had talked about implicit in our guide for the full year. We were making sure that we had enough room to invest to enable them to really improve the pace of innovation and layer on additional go-to-market motion. But at the same time, we were evaluating, okay, what cost do we have now that we just aren't earning a return on? And can we clean those out before the team gets going with the new expenses? So we, I think, did a really good job of optimizing for that. And we also made some decisions to make sure that we were appropriately pacing the increases to see if we're getting a return on the investments as we did it. So I think it was just disciplined kind of cost management in Q3. And as you saw from the guide in Q4, we are expecting to ramp our expenses heading into next year. I don't think it's going to be a meaningful kind of change in the overall expense level. We feel pretty good about the kind of the trailing margin profile that we have and being able to continue that into next year.

Okay. Perfect. Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Mike Cikos from Needham. Your line is open.

Hey, thanks for taking my question guys. I think the first would go to Matt, just coming off of Raimo's question there. But if I look at the EBITDA guide that we have today, the 34% to 38% margin guide in Q4 is the widest range that I think we've had in recent memory. And just wanted to get a little bit more granular there as far as I guess, what needs to go wrong or right or what you guys are weighing for that gets you at the 34% margin versus the 38% margin in December quarter?

Yes, it's a good question, Mike. I think part of it is, as we've been ramping the -- particularly on the R&D spend, we're evaluating kind of surge resources using contractors for -- to accelerate a handful of things on the product roadmap and the timing of that, which, again, I view that as a relatively lumpy potential investment and the timing of being able to get that spun up and fully staffed and moving, whether that hits in Q1 or it hits in Q4, I think that's really what's causing the range. Again, I think on a go-forward basis, we don't anticipate a material change in the overall kind of R&D as a percent of revenue, but we are advancing the expense. So, in any one quarter, it may be a little bit lumpier. But again, over a longer period of time, we don't -- we think we grow into that, and some of that is surge resource.

Terrific. And just another follow-up. I know that you guys aren't providing explicit guidance for 2025 here. I do appreciate the qualitative commentary. Just wanted to see what gives you the confidence to kind of put that bogey out there for the baseline growth? And how should we be thinking about what it takes for DigitalOcean to be entering the year with that kind of baseline growth that you had commented on?

Yes, I think it's very similar to what we described at the beginning of this year, right? What can you count on. Well, you can count on the growth on the self-serve funnel, and we're a little bit better, doing a little bit better than that, on that year-to-date, and we had outlined at the beginning of year. We've got the managed hosting business, which is kind of returning to growth after lapping some difficult comps. We've got AI/ML that we had said would contribute around 3 points of growth. It's a little bit ahead of that for the year. And then NDR, while it's frustrating that we've had to print a bunch of 97s in a row. As Paddy said, the core DO, NDR is actually ahead of that it. We've got a little bit of a headwind for managed hosting that's going to be in place for the next, call it, through the first quarter of next year. And so if you take all those together, we've moved up a couple of points from the baseline growth that we had described coming into the year. And none of it is on the back of kind of macro improvements. It's steady kind of improvements and continuing to deploy products that our customers need. And so as we look at that trajectory, we feel comfortable kind of at the pace of growth that we're at right now and hopefully continuing to improve NDR every month going into next year and beyond to eventually get it to be above 100%. So, I'd say we're just making sure that folks understand that we feel pretty comfortable with the baseline growth that we're delivering.

Great answer. Thank you very much guys.

Your next question comes from the line of James Fish from Piper Sandler. Your line is open.

Hey guys. Paddy, for you. You guys are seeing adoption -- are you seeing adoption of the GPU droplet with more of the builders and scalers or more net new customers? And how should we think about the mix between on demand versus your contracts and what you guys are seeing around supply availability with GPUs?

Yes, great. Thank you, Jim, for the question. So, in terms of the adoption, we are seeing adoption across the board. A lot of new customers, which we absolutely love, that are taking the tires and also explained on the call, building real-world applications on our GPU infrastructure, both droplets as well as more hard and bare metal type of services. I would say from between on-demand versus contract, we see more contracts when the customer is deploying live workloads, whether it is training or inferencing. And sometimes these contracts are fairly short term, but some are longer term. And on-demand is typically for experimentation, which is what we would have guessed when we started this journey, but that's where things are. And from an on-demand point of view, we're also seeing a very nice uptick and interest in our Gen AI platform. So companies that don't have the deep bench in terms of AI/ML skill set have a very easy time just using our Gen AI platform, standing something up very quickly, many times in just a matter of a few minutes just to see if they can prove to themselves that there's value in integrating Gen AI into their platform. So that's what we are seeing broadly from an adoption point of view.

And from a supply chain standpoint. Yes, on the supply chain, James, we don't see the same kind of headwinds that we had seen coming into the year. We've got orders out for the next generations of the technology. We've got H-200s coming. We're keeping an eye on Blackwell to see the timing of that. And it's certainly not so tight that you can get it in a week or two from ordering. But it's -- I'd say the supply chain is open enough that we've been able to get the equipment in the time frames that we need it. And again, with our build-out of the Atlanta data center coming on kind of at the beginning of next year, we're in good shape from a logistics and a scheduling standpoint.

Got it. And then, Matt, for you, circling back on the 97% net expansion rate. The AI side of things turned organic this quarter. By my math, it's probably adding about 1 to 2 points to NRR as it looks like net new ARR for AI was up around $10 million. So what's going on with that core business? Specifically, you were starting to mention around Cloudways, obviously, the price increase lapping, but why is that business kind of weaker than what you guys are anticipating? And how should we think about the mix of Cloudways hosting DigitalOcean versus other cloud platforms?

That's a great question and good clarification. AI products are not in NDR. So just to make sure that everybody understands that. The revenue from the AI products are not in net dollar retention. And that's -- it's clear in the definitions that we have. A lot of the AI revenue, if you think about it, is project-based, right? So someone's training something, somebody is coming in and experimenting. It's not yet at the point where people are coming in and running large-scale inference workloads where you could say, "Oh, well, that should -- the revenue that you get from that inference workload should be bigger next year than it was this year because they're spending -- they have a lot more customers. If someone comes in and train a model for a month or two and then turns it off and then does -- goes and focuses on inferencing, the revenue is going to be lumpy. And so at this point, and we could reevaluate this going forward. But at this point, AI is not reflected in NDR, so it contributes nothing to the improvement in the NDR that we've seen. What we have seen is steady improvement in the core cloud business, which we said is tracking above the reported NDR. Cloudways, which has historically been literally until we lack the price increase, it was always a positive contribution to NDR. It's been a headwind to NDR since April and will continue to be probably until next April because of the vagarities of the lagging metric like NDR. But we expect, both the Cloudways, the managed hosting business and the core DO business, we expect to be able to get those back above 100, and we're certainly working aggressively to accomplish that. And we can't tell you exactly when that's going to happen. But we're very encouraged by the green shoots that we're seeing in both businesses on that improvement in NDR.

Very helpful. Thanks, Matt.

Your next question comes from the line of Gabriela Borges from Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking my question. Matt, I wanted to follow-up some of your comments for 2025 and more specifically on how we should think about the seasonality of the business, given some of the moving pieces we've had this year versus last year. So any comments on seasonality? And I'm noticing that the size of the beat this quarter was about 1% versus the 2% last quarter. Any nuances we should be aware of there in terms of why the size of the beat was smaller this quarter? Thank you.

I don't think there's any seasonality in the business that would reflect that. I think that again, we've been very focused on the full year and providing guidance that's appropriate and reflective of that, that causes kind of bigger wins than the quarterly kind of beats, right? So we're more focused, I think, from an annual standpoint. But I think that as we look at the business going into next year, again, going back to my earlier comments, we're very encouraged by the steady growth that we're seeing and improving growth versus what we thought with the self-serve funnel and feel confident about that. The managed hosting business is coming back from, again, some difficult comps. The AI business is likely ahead of where we had expected and kind of in the last thing to move for us, which would give us the confidence to increase the -- our outlook on the revenue is that NDR just needs to come up and expense steadily, but stubbornly moving up. And so I don't think there's anything seasonal that would suggest we would be more or less on an individual quarter.

Got it. Okay. And then the follow-up is for Paddy. So given the paper change that we're seeing in the GPU as a service market. Maybe you could walk us through what are one or two of the areas where you feel like you've learned the most over the last three months as it relates to your AI services strategy and particularly around your LLM as a service offerings, the platform offerings, how you think you can differentiate versus something like a sage maker or a better option? Thank you.

Thank you, Gabriela. Great question. So in terms of what we have learned over the last 90 days, we have learned a lot. As you can see, we have also shipped a lot. So in preparation of that, I think we have learned quite a bit on all three layers of our platforms. I would say, for me, personally, the biggest learning has been that our customers, which are typically companies that don't have a tremendous bench of deep machine learning, data scientists or engineering skill sets, they look at the AI platform almost in an inverted fashion. What I mean by that is everyone, us included, the market, everyone looks at it from an infrastructure first and then platform and then finally applications, our customers actually look at it top down. They look at, okay, what applications can I or agents can I leverage today from Gen AI that makes my app more productive or my customers save money or deliver some innovation that was not possible so far. So it's almost a realization that we need to innovate more rapidly on the platform and application layer is why we accelerated some of our Gen AI platform capabilities, and we already have seen a customer push that into production, which is amazing. And the part two of your question is what makes our Gen AI platform stand out against something like a SageMaker or Bedrock. As you know, we have very deep expertise in both SageMaker and Bedrock at DigitalOcean today. And the biggest difference is some of our -- some of the technologies you mentioned are phenomenal. They're very broad and very powerful if you have a broad set of skills available to take all of that and build something fantastic for a very complex use case. For…

Thank you for the detail.

Your next question comes from the line of Jeff Hickey from UBS. Your line is open.

Hey, everyone. Thanks for taking the question. The first one, I wanted to ask is it's very helpful just detailing that AI is not included in the NDR metric. But maybe with some of the existing AI customers that you've had a few quarters that maybe do have some workloads already in production, do you have any sense of like how they're expanding their spend over time, maybe even just on a quarterly basis? Or do you typically see those customers kind of launch a workload and then have that spend at sort of a stable level from there?

We've seen good traction with a number of our early AI customers that have come in and experimented on the platform, and they may have started with a small cluster. And as they touched it, they’ve expanded their use of the platform. So if the question is when we land customers, do we see them grow or do we see a big rotation of customers in and out, we actually see a fairly healthy expansion from the customers when they come in. But again, back to my earlier comment, it's in, okay, I'm training a model. I need eight nodes. And now I'm going to do something, I need more. But it's not the same dynamic because they're still evaluating. They're still going through the testing phases. But we've seen very good traction, growing customers, the initial customers that we've had on the AI platform.

And Matt, one thing I will add to that is, it's interesting to note that our AI customers are also very similar to our core cloud customers in the sense that most of them, if not all of them, are ISVs or independent software vendors or digital native application providers. So they are taking -- they are building solutions on our AI platforms, whether it is infrastructure or GenAI, to create software solutions for their customers. So as they grow and expand, they will -- they are expanding their footprint, to Matt's point, on our platform. So that's a very interesting thing for us to notice versus a customer that is coming to build a solution just for their internal use.

Got it. That's really helpful. And then one just quick follow-up. You mentioned earlier about just supply and that's gotten better relative to the beginning of the year for AI investments. Just curious with the October 1 launch of H100 instances broadly available. Are you supply constrained at all right now as we're kind of in the fourth quarter? Or are you able to meet all the demand you currently have as well? Thanks.

We've ordered enough. And we talked about this in the last earnings, because we have the ability to see the demand and plan out the capacity, that we've been able to get enough capacity to meet the demand as we've gone, which is a very good sign because we don't have those supply constraints. So again, because we're not spending hundreds of millions of dollars on GPU, we can get the quantums that we need to meet our requirements. And when you have something like the GPU droplet, which is more on demand and it's less committed contract, you have to see what the utilization is and then plan your purchases based on that capacity utilization. And we've been able to manage that effectively. So it hasn't been a drag or a constraint to us.

Got it. Very helpful. Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Josh Baer from Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.

Great. Thanks for the question. One for Paddy, I guess just thinking about the 42 new product features more than higher period, and I think calling out some of them features that hyperscale customers are generally looking for, moving contracts to committed contracts, even migrating workloads from hyperscalers to DO. It's like in the past, the story was more about DigitalOcean's simplicity of the platform and better support, lower pricing and maybe a little bit less about getting into the competitive dynamic with hyperscale. Just wondering, is the right takeaway that there is a little bit of a shift in focus, either upmarket or a little bit of expansion outside the simplest start-ups in SMBs just to be a little bit more competitive in the market? Is there a strategy shift there?

Yes. Thank you, Josh. Great question, as always. The shift is essentially following our customers' fleet, honestly. So as I made a point during the prepared statements to make sure that we are not abandoning or taking our eye off being part of the DigitalOcean and the developer community. We continue to nurture that. In fact, we are doing a lot more with the developer ecosystem this year compared to recent past. But at the same time, we do recognize that have 17,000 hyperscalers who on an average spend more than $25,000 with us. That's a big, and that's 58% of our revenue. And if you add scalers, that's almost 88% of our revenue, which are growing much faster than our blended average growth rate. So we have a unique opportunity to follow their lead and make sure that we are delivering capabilities that will enable them to run or expand their footprint on DigitalOcean. We are increasingly in a multi-cloud world even for smaller customers, like the ones we target. And there is an opportunity for us to keep expanding our share of wallet to these companies. And the examples that I shared are just a starting point for what we believe our fair share slice of this enormous market. And if we keep doing what we are doing now, which is add compelling feature sets that enable our scaler customers to expand their footprint on us, I think there's a lot of value to be created for our customers on our platform.

Very clear. If I could follow up with one for Matt. Just on the -- some of the factors I called out, the managed hosting, tough comp, pricing increases, the Asia influx of revenue, even some of the M&A, like get how that could be impacting some of the -- like the net dollar retention rate or the year-over-year growth. If I'm just looking at quarter-over-quarter net new ARR added $32 million last quarter and $17 million this quarter. Anything to call out as far as that difference just on a quarter-over-quarter basis?

Yes, that's a good point, Josh. The big difference was the availability like the -- we brought on a ton of AI capacity in Q2, which we had pent-up demand for. So we got a bump, a material bump in ARR last quarter. If you look at we were -- we're on 17 or 18 in the quarter before, and then we jumped to 30, now back to 17. I'd say last quarter was more of an anomaly than this quarter. Clearly, we're looking to add more incremental ARR going forward. But most of that change was the result of a surge in AI capacity last quarter.

Got it. Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Pinjalim Bora from JPMorgan. Your line is open.

Great. Thanks guys. Just one question for me. The baseline growth outlook that you kind of shared entering 2025 seems pretty positive. It calls for an acceleration from the exit growth rate in this year. So I want to understand that a little bit more. Are you seeing some signals that projects will accelerate next year around the core business based on some customer conversations? Does that assume 100% MDR as you go into Q1? And how should we think about AI?

Pinjalim, I didn't hear the last part of that question. I heard the first part, but let me answer and then you can maybe come back with the AI question. We're seeing a lot of green shoots around kind of like, as you said, all the product traction that we're getting and some of our larger customers, even be willing to commit to longer term -- there is a long-term contracts and commitment contracts, which isn't something that the company has done extensively in the past. But then the core NDR is improving steadily. We're not assuming that it gets to 100 by Q1. That's not implicit in that kind of comments that we made regarding next year. I mean we're going to work aggressively to get it to be 100, but we can deliver the growth rates that we talked about because we're effectively delivering that now, right, at 12% growth with an NDR that's only 97. And we expect both the managed hosting NDR and the core cloud NDR to improve as we head into next year. And we'll continue to get growth, very positive growth contributions from AI capabilities. We said earlier this year that we thought we'd get 3% of overall growth from AI, and we'll end a little bit ahead of that year. So that's also positive and encouraging as we think about what the baseline growth is heading into next year.

Understood. One quick follow-up. The multiyear commitments is definitely interesting. Are you leaning in on any way to drive those commitments? Is that largely coming from customers? Or are you putting in processes to kind of enable those discussions? Thank you so much.

Yes. I can take that. So we are -- at this point, Pinjalim, we're just letting it happen organically. So we don't have any pronounced, established go-to-market motion. We're not pushing it on our customers. We're just letting it organically happen. The most important thing for us is to learn, learn the patterns, learn what kind of technologies we need to build, learn the migration process itself and things like that. And going into next year, we of course, will look into packaging it a little bit, productizing it and also expand our third-party ecosystem that can help orchestrate some of these things. So there's a lot of work to be done to scale it. But right now, we are focused on nailing it and understanding exactly what it takes to be successful.

Thank you.

And that is all the time we have for questions. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.