Tomer Weingarten
Analyst · Piper Sandler. Your line is now open
Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining our fiscal second quarter earnings call. We reported strong second quarter results and exceeded our expectations on all key metrics, including ARR, revenue, gross margin and operating margin. We're also raising our outlook for revenue and margins for the fiscal year '24. I'm proud of the resilience, dedication and execution of our teams. Our performance also reflects the progress we are making towards enhancing business processes, operations and cost discipline. We pioneered the world's first purpose-built AI-powered cybersecurity platform to deliver autonomous defense for the enterprise. We introduced the industry to the first-ever autonomous AI agent with a fully integrated data and security platform and self-healing capabilities. We've established a noble and transformative approach to cybersecurity, a unified data and security platform across attack vectors. Once again, we're leading the industry by incorporating generative AI into cybersecurity through purple AI supercharging security operations. Superior technology is the foundation of how we help our partners and our customers build more resilient enterprises with streamlined operations, less product complexity, best-in-class security and a leading return on investment. Our competitive success is a direct result of our innovation and technology leadership. We're in the early innings of taking market share and mind share of a massive $100 billion addressable market right for disruption. As always, please read our shareholder letter published on the Investor Relations website, which provides more detail. Let's review the details of our second quarter performance, which exceeded our top and bottom line expectations. Our ARR grew by 47% year-over-year to $612 million, reflecting net new ARR of $49 million in the quarter. Our gross margin reached a new record of 77%. Since our IPO just two years ago, we've expanded our gross margin by more than 20 percentage points. We're now opening within our long-term gross margin target range. This important achievement reflects the scalability of our business model, driven by our strong unit economics and price discipline. We're making significant progress in improving our operating and free cash flow margins. We proactively streamlined our cost structure to ensure our path to profitability. Our operating margin expanded by 34 percentage points driven by higher scale and cost discipline. We've delivered margin improvement at a staggering pace. Q2 marked our eighth consecutive quarter of more than 25 percentage points of year-over-year operating margin expansion. Let me also highlight the remarkable improvement we've made to our free cash flow profile delivering 55 percentage points of expansion compared to just a year ago. The level of margin improvements we're delivering is a rarity among public companies with strong liquidity of more than $1 billion in cash and equivalents we will build on this progress. We're confident in achieving positive free cash flow in the second half of our next fiscal year. Looking beyond key financial metrics, our competitive differentiation and superior platform value is resonating with customers. We continue to win in a significant majority of competitive evaluations. Our win rates remain strong, including against large next-gen competitors. Our single platform architecture helps enterprises consolidate spend, point products and consoles. We're addressing the most important needs to enterprises, reducing complexity, streamlining operating efficiency and delivering better security all to AI and automation. I'm especially pleased with the positive feedback from our customers. As captured by Gartner Peer Insights, hundreds of customers provided favorable feedback on the singularity platform. We achieved top two ranking not only DDR, but also in MDR and cloud workload protection categories outperforming even the largest vendors in the space. As evidenced by these results, our technology delivers on our promise to our customers. In Q2, we added about 700 new customers, and our total customer base now exceeds 11,000. Remember that this number does not include the customers served by our MSSP partners, so it is understated, especially as more enterprises turn to MSSPs for minute security services. Customers with more than $100,000 in ARR grew 37% year-over-year, much faster than our total customer growth and customers with more than $1 million in ARR grew even faster. Our momentum with large enterprises and platform adoption continues to drive higher ARR per customer. In Q2, we secured many large customer wins across U.S. federal agencies to global health care companies and technology pioneers spanning both endpoint and cloud footprints. Our singularity platform helps enterprises simplify cybersecurity by consolidating multiple vendors in this jointed platforms. Let me highlight two examples. First, a large enterprise selected our unified platform to replace a total of seven different security vendors, including the two largest endpoint vendors. The security team at this enterprise was grappling with the challenge of managing multiple solutions and consoles. Following hands-on experience, the customer selected our Singularity platform for EDR with five additional modules. Through autonomous protection in a single console, we deliver better security and superior customer experience. In another multimillion dollar win from the quarter, a global health care enterprise selected SentinelOne's unified platform to integrate multiple security ecosystem products and bring them together, replacing the closed garden approach of their incumbent vendor. The customer valued SentinelOne's open platform that unites security data and actions future-proofing their enterprise security posture. Our platform approach continues to be a source of growth through expansion, driving a net retention rate of more than 115%. As a reminder, our NRR now includes legacy products from the acquisition of Attivo networks a year ago. The inclusion of Attivo and macro-driven budgetary constraints are impacting our near-term expansion rate. We believe this is temporary. Over the long-term, we see significant platform expansion potential based on high customer retention rates, expanding product categories and early-stage adoption from our installed base. Our NRR expansion was driven by continued license and module adoption. Singularity cloud remained our fastest-growing solution in Q2 followed by strong contributions from Singularity Data Lake, Vigilance MDR and Ranger. Overall, module adoption remains a meaningful opportunity for growth, and we're beginning to see opportunities for large security data deals and other massive market opportunity that is ripe for disruption. Our platform solutions beyond endpoint continue to drive more than one-third of our quarterly bookings in Q2, illustrating the diversity of our business mix. On to our partner ecosystem. We achieved another quarter of standout growth with our MSSP partners in Q2. Businesses are increasingly turning to managed security to elevate protection, address cybersecurity talent shortages and better align cost structures. Despite recent macro-related industry headwinds, the demand for managed security remains strong. Our large partners continue to expand their business with SentinelOne through additional licenses and modules. In a multimillion dollar deal from the quarter, we quadrupled our business with a fast-growing MSSP partner compared to just a year ago. From the beginning, we've built our business by enabling our partners instead of competing with them. Our differentiated platform capabilities such as multi-tenancy, automation and remote management makes SentinelOne a foundational platform for MSSPs who are building their practices on top of our technology. One of our strategic partners, Pax8, recently recognized SentinelOne's significant impact with its Pax8 Most Valuable Vendor award. We're still in the early innings of a massive business expansion opportunity with our MSSP partners. Overall, our quarterly performance reflects strong execution by our teams. Our proactive efforts to enhance operational efficiencies are showing measurable improvements. We've expedited our deal closed processes and cash collections all while growing the average deal size. Over the last few years, our product portfolio has evolved from endpoint to a broad security platform covering endpoint, cloud identity and data. Similarly, our go-to-market framework is evolving towards a full enterprise-wide security platform. The actions we've undertaken are yielding positive results but there's always more work to be done. As we continue our journey towards surpassing $1 billion in ARR and achieving profitability, our focus remain on continuously sharpening our execution from training and enablement to support and services. We're in a terrific position to disrupt the $100 billion security and data market opportunity, and we're raising our full-year growth and margin guidance to reflect a stronger outlook and better execution. Let's turn the discussion to the market environment and the wave of secular tailwinds behind cybersecurity. Global macroeconomic conditions and the broader demand environment remained consistent with the trends we discussed last quarter. Enterprises continue to rightsize their security investments based on near-term budget constraints. We've seen a proliferation of cyber incidents, new software vulnerabilities and an uptick in the use of AI-based attack methods. The evolving fiber threat landscape and sophistication of moderate attacks have exposed the shortcomings of key cybersecurity vendors and reinforce the structural importance of AI-powered autonomous scalable security. In a recent cyber incident linked to China, attackers gained access to user authentications, opening the door to a range of Microsoft applications and services. In addition to the vulnerability a Microsoft Defender couldn't defend, the hackers were able to use the stolen keys to access government and corporate accounts, it's no surprise. Microsoft Solutions are known to be rated with vulnerabilities which are accompanied by cybersecurity that has been repeatedly breached. Law makers and security experts are questioning the significant shortcomings of Microsoft cybersecurity and are asking for an investigation into the company's security practices. Numerous incidents such as this underscore that inadequate and legacy security solutions are exposing enterprises to enormous cost business disruptions and brand reputation concerns. Increasingly, cybersecurity is an executive and board level priority as governments begin to require high level of oversight and disclosure. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission established new rules to require a public company to regularly disclose matters related to cybersecurity risk and to report material cybersecurity incidents. All of this, once again, shine a spotlight on the structural importance of blazing fast and AI-driven cybersecurity platform as well as the collection and retention of all enterprise log data. In today's evolving threat landscape, point solutions are falling out of favor. Security vendors that focus on a narrow set of data sources or attack vectors are unable to furnish comprehensive and cost-effective protection. Customers are seeking to consolidate not only their security vendors, but also the security consoles and data in order to gain a unified view of the enterprise security landscape. Enterprises need a specialized security approach centered on all enterprise data to prevent attacks. Our autonomous technology brings this vision to life with a unified AI-based security analytics platform that seamlessly aggregates and connects data from all security products to deliver enterprise-wide visibility in a single streamlined technology and interface. We eliminate the need to operate this jointed platforms. As the attacks move beyond a single surface, it's imperative to tie together telemetry logs from key security products. Singularity data lake is the only unified platform in the market that is able to bring together full fidelity logs and visibility from all key sources for enterprise security, like e-mail security, identity access management, firewalls, SaaS providers and others. Frost & Sullivan recently ranked SentinelOne is the XDR Growth Index leader ahead of all the security vendors evaluated. I'm proud of our leading AI-based technology and the innovations we're bringing to customers. Our newly launched vulnerability management solution, Ranger Insights is another example of how we're helping customers eliminate disparate tools in a single platform. Ranger Insight connects two closely tied elements of cybersecurity, application vulnerability identification and endpoint mitigation, which were disconnected until now. CR ranked Ranger Insight as the #1 in their list of cooler security products unveiled at Black Hat 2023. We also introduced a new cloud data security product line, which offers threat detection for customers using cloud storage vendors like Amazon S3 and network storage providers such as NetApp. On top of delivering industry-leading workload protection, we're expanding our cloud security product suite to include capabilities like cloud vulnerability management to asset discovery and visibility, making Singularity Cloud one of the broadest CNA platforms to have end-to-end functionality from runtime protection to data security. Last but not least, building upon our success in delivering best-in-class autonomous security, we're extending our lead by bringing generative AI to security professionals. Purple AI transformed security operations by supercharging users to control all aspects of enterprise security from visibility to response with unmatched speed and efficiency. This is much more than a sidecar system. It can upgrade any security analysts to superhuman levels. We expect this to be a significant source of expansion and growth in the future. At the Black Hat conference earlier this month, thousands of visitors eagerly discovered the capabilities of corporate AI and engage in immersive, interactive, end zone product demos. The best way for companies to prevent cyber-attacks is to leverage the best security and SentinelOne delivers it. Our innovations and holistic approach to cybersecurity puts us in a strong position for long-term growth across multiple large addressable markets, including endpoint, cloud, identity and data. In closing, I extend my gratitude to our incredible team despite a persistently challenging macro environment, sentinels across the world rose to the occasion, addressing critical enterprise needs with the most disruptive technology of the market. I also thank our valued customers, partners and shareholders for their support and trust. We remain focused on the long-term opportunity and maximizing our business potential. With that, I will turn the call over to Dave Bernhardt, our Chief Financial Officer.