Tomer Weingarten
Analyst · Bank of America. Your line is now open
Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining our fiscal first quarter earnings call. I'm pleased to announce we had another excellent quarter. The strength of our results reflect two important dynamics. First, the demand environment for cybersecurity remains incredibly strong, and we're executing well. Second, we continue to achieve significant margin expansion stemming from our platform-based land and expand strategy, high-quality revenue growth and operational efficiencies. Let me start with a few highlights from the quarter. Q1 marks our fifth consecutive quarter of triple-digit revenue and ARR growth, and we expect that to continue next quarter as well. The outlook for cybersecurity remains strong, and we're also raising our full year revenue growth guidance to 98% at the midpoint. Consistent with the power of our business model, we're delivering growth and significant margin improvement. Our gross margin reached a new high of 68%, a 15-percentage point year-over-year expansion, and our operating margin is expanding 54 percentage points year-over-year. We expect to achieve Rule of 40 for the full year. Our land and expand strategy is working extremely well. We added a record number of new customers in the quarter, even more than our seasonally strong fourth quarter. We're consistently winning with large enterprises from a major federal agency, another one of North America's largest telecom operators, to a global media conglomerate, among others. On top of that, our net retention rate was a record 131%. And finally, we continue to extend the breadth and diversity of our business, fueling growth and expansion opportunities. We closed the acquisition of Attivo Networks, marking an important milestone, which we believe establishes us as a leader in identity security. We're now covering essential attack services across endpoint, cloud and identity, all of which offer significant growth potential. Cloud security was once again our fastest-growing product offering. Thanks to the dedication and execution of all Sentinels. We delivered another excellent quarterly performance and once again, welcome to the Attivo team. As always, please read our shareholder letter that we published on our Investor Relations website, which provides a lot more detail. On today's call, I'll focus on three key topics related to our business: one, the strong demand environment; two, our path to profitability driven by our strong business model featuring attractive unit economics and operational efficiency gains; and three, the superiority of our autonomous security platform, which delivers leading protection and detection as evidenced by our leadership in this year's MITRE ATT&CK evaluation for the third year in a row. Let's start with the demand environment and our opportunity. Demand for our mission-critical security has never been stronger. Cybersecurity is one of the top IT spending priorities, and we haven't seen that change despite macro conditions. Many secular trends are driving strong demand for cybersecurity, including digital transformation, expanding attack surfaces and data proliferation. The consequences and risks of not being protected by a leading cybersecurity solution are just too hot. On top of these industry tailwinds, our teams are executing extremely well. Our Q1 results reflect broad-based strength across geographies, products and customers. Endpoint remains the engine that fuels our growth. In addition, we're seeing significant growth from our add-on capabilities. For example, our cloud workload protection solution continues to reach new heights and was our fastest-growing module approaching 10% of Q1 ACV. Cloud security represents a vast greenfield opportunity. Enterprises are rapidly shifting workloads to the cloud, which requires advanced protection. Our solution is cloud native and directly integrating to the Kubernetes control plane, delivering autonomous front-end protection. Customers are choosing Singularity cloud in conjunction with endpoints and on a stand-alone basis. The scale of cloud footprint in early deal sizes indicate a much larger future potential. As I mentioned earlier, we added a record number of new customers in the quarter, even more than our seasonally strong Q4. We continue to engage in win-win organizations across the world, which demonstrates the power of our solutions in competitive processes against our largest competitors. Customers choose our Singularity platform for leading efficacy, automation, ease of use and platform breadth. As we look forward, we expect these very strong macro trends and our competitive strength to persist, fueling our growth and future share gains. On top of the excellent sales results, we generated our largest ever pipeline in Q1. With this as a demand backdrop, we expect revenue in Q2 to grow 109% year-over-year, at the midpoint of our guidance range. Importantly, we're also raising our full year revenue guidance to 98% growth at the midpoint. Let's turn the discussion to the second topic, the strength of our business model and an increased focus on both growth and profitability. We fully expect to deliver strong revenue growth with continuous margin expansion as we scale the business. The progress is evident in our Q1 results. Our platform unit economics and business model enable us to grow efficiently in several ways. For instance, we're increasing our market share in two ways: one, adding new customers; and two, expanding our footprint with our installed base. In the first quarter, our win rates remain high as we continue to secure wins across a significant majority of competitive situations. I'm pleased that our win rates improved among larger deals. And once we start protecting a customer, they remain a customer. And customers are choosing SentinelOne to protect more and more of their network. Our net retention rate reached a new high of 131%. Our total addressable market is vast, growing to over $50 billion, significantly larger than just a year ago. We've expanded our Singularity XDR platform to cover more attack surfaces than ever, including endpoint, cloud, identity and an increasing number of emerging capabilities. With the expanding breadth and depth of our Singularity platform, we can efficiently sell to our growing base of enterprise customers. Our platform approach is driving meaningful gross margin improvement. We're able to collect data once and reuse for multiple security applications, all enhanced by our DataSet back end. Customers are adopting more of the Singularity platform every quarter to solve their enterprise needs with notable growth from our cloud data retention and Ranger modules. These capabilities deliver high incremental margin. At the same time, our increasing scale and data optimization is improving our cost efficiency. Over the past year, our footprint expansion has far outpaced the growth of our cost. Our business model is designed for operational efficiency. Our partner-supported go-to-market and global footprint are delivering meaningful operating leverage. Our magic number is above one, demonstrating our high sales efficiency and rapid payback periods. Our sales team are ramping faster and becoming more productive. Compounding this, our channel and alliance partnerships expand our reach in a highly scalable manner. For example, in Q1, our channel helped create a record amount of deal registrations, which directly leads to pipeline opportunities and accelerated customer wins. Finally, we're scaling our global R&D footprint, attracting high-end talent across multiple continents, enabling us to grow in a cost-efficient manner. Given the massive market opportunity and our share gain trajectory, we will continue investing for the long-term success of the business. This is the optimal strategy, and it's leading us closer to our profitability targets. You can see us drive five consecutive quarters of triple-digit growth and consistently expand our operating margin year-over-year. In Q1, we delivered 15 percentage points of gross margin expansion to a new high of 68%. And our operating margin also improved dramatically, expanding 54 percentage points year-over-year. Our business has never been stronger, and we expect these positive trends to continue as we move towards $1 billion in ARR and beyond, which brings me to the third main topic, the technological differentiation of our Singularity XDR platform. It can be hard for all of us to sift through all the marketing and corporate messaging found in cybersecurity. In my opinion, the best way to evaluate the technical performance of an endpoint platform is through the MITRE ATT&CK evaluation framework, an emulation of real-world attack techniques and enterprise requirements. This is as close to a fact-based level playing field as it gets, with objective and measurable metrics produced for each industry participant. This year's MITRE ATT&CK evaluation results again paints a very compelling picture. For the third year in a row, SentinelOne leads the test results with superior visibility and automation. You cannot reverse engineer this type of performance. Out of all the vendors evaluated, our Singularity XDR platform achieved 100% prevention, 100% attack detection, the highest analytical coverage and zero detection delays. We are incredibly proud of the team and our technology that makes results like this happen in real life for our customers every single day. The results demonstrate our commitment to preventing and protecting against the most sophisticated threats in keeping our customers safe from adversaries at machine speed. Our technology paves the way for a whole new experience of running a cybersecurity program across an organization, one which enables fewer people to do more, leveraging the power of data and AI to deliver autonomous and automated cybersecurity. Take a look at our shareholder letter where we visually show a performance comparison across all Magic Quadrant leaders. It may surprise you to see how wide the gap is between our Singularity platform and some of our closest competitors when it comes to protection, delays and configuration changes. One thing is for certain, attackers will not hit pause or idly sit by waiting for a human-powered service to detect and eventually respond to an alert. We're delivering autonomous protection through AI and machine learning. Our platform represents one of the largest operational implementations of AI in the real world. This means that every customer is protected by this technology every day. This is the patented technology core of our Singularity XDR platform, and it underscores all of the transformative decisions we've made in the past few years to bring this vision to life. A year ago, we acquired DataSet to become the unifying data back end to address the speed, scale and scope of modern security needs. DataSet is performing well in security and non-security use cases. We just introduced Kubernetes Explorer, which helps manage the health and performance of Kubernetes clusters, deployed applications and underlying infrastructure. A month ago, we added identity protection to our portfolio through the acquisition of Attivo. Our platform has expanded dramatically in the past year alone, creating an even more diverse business with multiple growth drivers and customer engagement opportunities. Our XDR platform addresses the major attack surfaces that enterprises need. In addition to endpoint, these emerging capabilities like cloud, Ranger, data and vigilance are delivering growth. Cloud grew to nearly 10% of our Q1 ACV. Before I hand the call to Nick, I want to talk about our people and culture. They are our key competitive advantage. In the past year, we've almost doubled our headcount. Even with such rapid growth, we remain committed to fostering a dynamic and inclusive culture, which has been consistently recognized by several best workplace awards. We conducted recent employee survey, and 99% of Sentinels said they're proud to work at SentinelOne. We're focused on protecting our digital way of life from threats and attacks. Our mission, combined with disruptive technology creates a compelling destination for talent. I'm also excited that we've expanded our leadership team at SentinelOne. Vats Srivatsan has joined as Chief Operating Officer. Vats brings excellent experience for scaling and executing the business. As we move towards the $1 billion in ARR and profitability, he will oversee our operational efficiency initiatives. At the same time, I'm thrilled that Nick Warner becomes President of Security, taking a wider focus across security product management and go-to-market. Nick's executive sponsorship will enable even stronger customer engagement and deepen long-term relationships. Again, thanks to all Sentinels for a terrific job into our customers and partners for the trust and collaboration. Our momentum and our platform have never been stronger, and the margin progress we're making is a true testament to the scalability and efficiency of our business model. With that, I will turn the call over to Nick Warner, President of Security.