Corey Thomas
Analyst · Barclays. Your line is open
Hello, and thank you to everyone joining us this afternoon. Rapid7 ended the first quarter with revenue and operating income above our guidance ranges, while our ARR fell short of our expectations, ending at $837 million with 4% year-over-year growth. During the quarter, we saw continued strength in Detection and Response, progress towards stabilizing our Risk and Exposure Management business and resilience and profitability and free cash flow. In a moment, I'll walk through the details of our performance. But first, I want to remind everyone of the expectations we shared on our last earnings call. We entered 2025 with a clear strategy and commitment to reaccelerate long-term growth and expand free cash flow over time. This strategy rests on three pillars. First, building on our scale and success and Detection and Response where we have strong customer demand and are well positioned to sustain growth. Second, upgrading our large vulnerability management customer base to our Exposure Management platform, which will both increase retention and provide a valuable on-ramp to our D&R platform. And third, improving our underlying cost structure while continuing to innovate by leveraging our new operations center in India and streamlining our processes. In Q1, Detection and Response continued as the core growth driver of our business from both an ARR and product expansion perspective. This business now represents over half of our total ARR and maintain mid-teens growth in the quarter. Our D&R performance would have been even better if not for a few seven-figure deals slipping into the second quarter, which have now since closed. However, our Risk and Exposure Management business continue to see challenges missing our expectations with continued growth deceleration. While exposure command continued to gain traction, this was offset by ongoing negative growth in our traditional vulnerability management offering. A positive note our investments to improve our cost structure remain on track, setting us up for profitability reacceleration in 2026. Our performance took place in a more challenging macro environment than we anticipated entering the year. We observed customers becoming increasingly cautious and measured about their investments, both in terms of what they purchase and win. Extended deal cycles have become more common across multiple sectors and many organizations are actively evaluating vendors, reprioritizing budgets and implementing tighter spending controls. These dynamics are particularly evident in the North American mid-market enterprise segment, which has experienced slower deal cycles. This customer segment is demonstrating greater scrutiny and tighter budget control, trends that are reflected more broadly as customers reassess their priorities and spending commitments. As we've seen in previous periods of economic uncertainty, the pressure is more pronounced in our Risk and Exposure Management products. While our Detection and Response offerings continue to show resilience. Now let's examine our product base performance in detail. Our Detection and Response business continues to be our growth engine, anchored by strong momentum in our managed offering. We ended Q1 with over half of our ARR coming from Detection and Response, growing in the mid-teens year-over-year. This growth is driven by persistent demand trends, particularly for NBR, which represents more than 75% of our D&R business. As customers seek enhanced visibility, broader coverage and operational efficiency in managing an increasingly complex threat landscape. We believe the Detection and Response market offers attractive and durable tailwinds, and we're still in the early innings of its development. We spent years investing and laying the foundation to position ourselves to capitalize on this opportunity and we continue to innovate and invest for growth. This includes our recently announced Intelligence Hub which seamlessly integrates threat intelligence into our command platform experience and expanding our capabilities through our recently opened SOC innovation center in India, which will scale over the coming quarters. These investments are helping us deliver services more efficiently while driving better customer outcomes. As organizations increasingly turn to Rapid7 to monitor and respond to threats across complex environments, our integrated platform and MDR expertise continues to stand out in a private marketplace. A great example is a first quarter competitive win with a midsized enterprise health care customer who consolidated their security stack with our managed threat complete solution. They were seeking broader visibility, greater automation and reduced operational complexity, challenges we were uniquely positioned to address. Our differentiation was clear across several dimensions. Our managed XDR capabilities enable seamless third-party Detection and Response through native integrations with their existing tools. Our AI-powered SIEM and log management offered unlimited ingestion and long-term retention, providing unmatched visibility, our customizable analytics and automated alert triage streamline their operations and we delivered true defense in-depth by correlating alerts across multiple sources, not just endpoints, creating a more robust security posture. This win was driven by our technology and strengthen our partner collaboration and ability to support the customers' goals with speed and clarity. It exemplifies how our consolidated platform continues to drive success in highly competitive environments. With our proven brand, our track record and the right capabilities to win we remain excited about the future of this business and expect to continue to drive growth for Rapid7. Now let's turn to our Risk and Exposure Management business, which is where we experienced the most pressure during the first quarter. As we've shared in recent quarters, we have made a deliberate shift transitioning from a traditional standalone VM business to a consolidated integrated approach to Risk and Exposure Management. We believe customers increasingly need unified visibility across their attack surface with streamline remediation and smarter risk prioritization. This is what exposure demand delivers, bringing together vulnerability management, cloud native application protection and threat context into a cohesive experience by consolidating risk insights across hybrid environments, automating response workflows and focusing teams on what truly matters, real, exploitable threats were helping security teams efficiently secure their expanding attack surface. Our strategy to improve Risk and Exposure Management is center on driving adoption of exposure command across our VM customer base. And we continue to believe this will stabilize performance and ultimately position the business back to growth. We laid the right foundation in 2024 with our exposure coming at launch. And today, we're actively working to transition our VM installed base to this more modern integrated solution. While we've not yet made the full progress we hoped, we are resolute in our strategy and the key consideration is around timing. The most significant variable in our near-term performance will be the velocity of the upgrade cycle and Risk and Exposure Management. This is where we're focusing our efforts, accelerating migrations, enabling partners and removing friction points to shorten time to upgrade in what is clearly a more competitive and measured environment. On the go-to-market side, we have completed initial partner and build enablement and are now refining our packaging and pricing to support clear customer pads and more streamlined upgrades. We also recognize the need to better communicate the strength of our CNAPP capabilities, which remain a core differentiator but are still underappreciated in the market. On the product side, we continue to invest in innovation, including several recent enhancements that expand coverage, improve automation, and reinforce our leadership in unified Exposure Management across hybrid environments. Now turning to our outlook for the remainder of the year. We remain confident that our strategy can position Rapid7 for sustainable growth and expanding cash flow in the years ahead. Our Detection and Response business continues to perform and remains the primary growth engine for 2025 as we work to modernize our Risk and Exposure Management platform and return that business to growth. That said, it's clear the environment is more dynamic and fluid than when we initially provided guidance in February. We're seeing greater variability in customer decision cycles, something we experienced firsthand with certain March deals slipping into April and we recognize that broader policy and budget implementations take additional time to play out. Additionally, we've taken the opportunity to leverage the expertise and input from our new board members to help evaluate and enhance our guidance approach. Given the evolving backdrop and our slower start to the year, we're adjusting our ARR guidance by lowering the overall range and also widening the range to account for increased budgetary uncertainty. Importantly, we are maintaining our expectations for operating profitability, which is a reflection of the operating discipline, flexibility and resiliency that we've built into our model. As we look ahead, our focus remains clear and grounded in three strategic priorities. First, we will continue to drive industry-leading product innovation across both our growing D&R franchise and our established Risk and Exposure Management business. Second, we remain committed to delivering successful outcomes for our customers helping them navigate increasingly complex threat environments while ensuring clear returns to their security investments. And third, we're focused on driving comfortable growth and strong cash generation, including through operational efficiency and continued leverage in our expanded partner ecosystem. Before I turn the call over to our CFO, Tim Adams, to discuss financials, I want to take a moment to welcome our newest addition to our Board of Directors. Wael Mohamed, Michael Burns and Kevin Galligan, each brings expertise that will support our efforts as we navigate a rapidly evolving landscape. We look forward to leveraging their experience to drive growth, enhance our industry leadership and create value for all our shareholders. With that, I'll turn the call over to Tim to walk through the results in more detail.