Fastly Q2 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
August 6, 2025

Key Takeaways

  • Positive Sentiment: Q2 revenue of $148.7 million grew 12% year-over-year and beat the high end of guidance, driven by new customer wins and pricing improvements.
  • Positive Sentiment: Security revenue hit a record 20% of total revenue at $29.3 million, up 15% year-over-year on strong adoption of new security products.
  • Positive Sentiment: Gross margin expanded to 59% (up 170 bps sequentially) and operating loss narrowed to $4.6 million (better than guidance), while cash flow from operations was $26 million.
  • Positive Sentiment: 2025 guidance was raised by $8 million in revenue and $3 million in operating loss at midpoints, and the company now expects positive free cash flow of up to $10 million.
  • Neutral Sentiment: CFO Ron Kisling is stepping down and will be replaced by Richard Wong on August 11, and Chief Revenue Officer Scott Lovett has been promoted to President of Go-to-Market.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
Fastly Q2 2025
00:00 / 00:00

There are 8 speakers on the call.

Operator

Good afternoon. My name is Bailey, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Fastly Second Quarter twenty twenty five Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question and answer session.

Operator

Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference over to Vern Essi, Investor Relations at Fastly. Fastly. Please go ahead.

Speaker 1

Thank you, and welcome everyone to our second quarter twenty twenty five earnings conference call. We have Fastly's CEO, Kipp Compton and CFO, Ron Kisling with us today. The webcast of this call can be accessed through our website, fastly.com, and will be archived for one year. Also, a replay will be available by dialing (800) 770-2030 and referencing conference ID number 700000543239 shortly after the conclusion of today's call. A copy of today's earnings press release, related financial tables and investor supplement, all of which are furnished in our eight ks filing today, can be found in the Investor Relations portion of FASTA's website.

Speaker 1

During this call, we will make forward looking statements, including statements related to the expected performance of our business, future financial results, product sales, strategy, long term growth and overall future prospects. These statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected or implied during the call. For further information regarding risk factors for our business, please refer to our filings with the SEC, including our most recent annual report filed on Form 10 ks and quarterly report filed on Form 10 Q filed with the SEC and our second quarter twenty twenty five earnings release and supplement for a discussion of the factors that could cause our results to differ. Please refer in particular to the section entitled Risk Factors. We encourage you to read these documents.

Speaker 1

Also note that the forward looking statements on this call are based on information available to us as of today's date. We undertake no obligation to update any forward looking statements except as required by law. Also during this call, we will discuss certain non GAAP financial measures. Unless otherwise noted, all numbers we discuss today other than revenue will be on an adjusted non GAAP basis. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are provided in the earnings release and supplement on our Investor Relations website.

Speaker 1

These non GAAP measures are not intended to be a substitute for our GAAP results.

Speaker 2

Before we begin our prepared comments,

Speaker 1

please note that we will be attending two conferences in the third quarter, the KeyBanc Technology Leadership Forum on August 12 in Park City at the Piper Sandler's Fourth Annual Growth Frontiers Conference in Nashville on September 10. Now I'll turn the call over to Kipp.

Speaker 2

Kipp? Thanks, Byrne. Hi, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'm delighted to join you today in my first earnings call as CEO, and I'm excited about the road ahead for Fastly. We continue to see momentum in the business and have a strong Q2.

Speaker 2

We look forward to sharing the details of the quarter and our updated view for the year in today's call. In my first forty five days as CEO, my top priority has been building on the momentum we established in the first half of the year as well as looking ahead with a focus on clear execution for the second half. Since joining Fastly about eighteen months ago, I've been deeply involved in leading the product organization and working closely with the executive team and the board in developing and driving our strategy. My role as Chief Product Officer here at Fastly, together with my prior experience running large scale organizations and growing SaaS businesses has enabled my seamless transition to CEO. Throughout this transition and as we look ahead, we remain committed to delivering long term value to all of our stakeholders by keeping customers at the center of our decision making and building products that are responsive to their evolving needs.

Speaker 2

Going forward, I'm excited to share my vision for Fastly with a keen focus on accelerating our growth rate and driving to profitability in the near term. We will continue to evolve our strategy and sharpen our execution dedicating significant time to understanding and responding to the needs of our customers. I firmly believe that understanding our customers' business challenges and solving problems together is what Fastly does best. Before we begin our review of the quarter, I want to discuss two changes to our leadership team. Earlier today, we announced that our Chief Financial Officer, Ron Kisling, is stepping down.

Speaker 2

After four years, he is moving on to explore new opportunities. On behalf of the Board and all of our employees, I want to thank Ron for his dedication, commitment and many contributions to Fastly. We wish him all the best. Ron's departure creates an opportunity to evolve the leadership team. I'm pleased to welcome Richard Wong to Fastly as our new Chief Financial Officer.

Speaker 2

Rich joins us with three decades of financial leadership experience. He has held a number of senior leadership roles at platform and SaaS companies, including CFO of Benchling, CFO of Houzz and senior finance roles at LinkedIn and Yahoo. Rich has a strong combination of strategic financial planning experience and vision combined with a robust foundation in investment banking. He will be an excellent addition to our leadership team as we grow and scale the business, and I look forward to him engaging with our investor community. Rich will join Fastly on August 7 as an advisor and officially assumed the CFO role on August 11.

Speaker 2

Separately, as we build on our market momentum and focus on accelerating growth, we must continue to deliver even stronger go to market execution and provide a seamless experience for our customers. With that in mind, I've asked Scott Lovett, our Chief Revenue Officer, to expand his responsibilities and take on a new role as President, go to market, bringing together all of our revenue functions and our marketing organization under his leadership. Since joining Fastly, Scott has recruited world class leadership to accelerate the transformation of our go to market motion. We've segmented our customer base to better align our sales resources around customers who value performance. This realignment has increased both our new customer revenue and our cross sell and upsell results across our existing customer base.

Speaker 2

I'm confident that this combined go to market team will better serve new and existing customers and importantly elevate Fastly's visibility in the marketplace. We believe this will also result in greater internal efficiencies and improved coordination across our product, marketing and revenue teams. I'm excited about these changes and believe Rich and Scott will each have a significant impact in their new roles. Now let's review our Q2 results and forward guidance. Our Q2 revenue was $148,700,000 above the high end of our

Speaker 3

guidance range with a growth rate of 12% year over year, an improvement compared to 8% year over year in

Speaker 1

the first quarter.

Speaker 2

This was the result of new customer acquisition, share gains due to competitive takeout strategies as well as favorable pricing. Security revenue reached a record high and accounted for 20% of total revenue. This represents 15% year over year growth driven by increasing adoption of our new security products launched over the last year. We posted a gross margin of 59%, a 170 basis point gain quarter over quarter as we experienced margin leverage on our revenue upside along with improved network efficiency resulting from technology enhancements and optimized networking. Additionally, we experienced favorable pricing which we expect to continue into the 2025.

Speaker 2

Our operating loss of 4,600,000 outperformed the guidance midpoint of a $6,000,000 loss. We achieved notable operating leverage this quarter with OpEx up just 2% year over year compared to 12% revenue growth. Continued cost optimizations and cash collection management yielded better than expected results and contributed to our healthy cash flow from operations of $26,000,000 or 17% of revenue. We are raising both our 2025 revenue guidance and operating loss guidance by $8,000,000 and $3,000,000 at their respective midpoints. Similar to Q2, we anticipate double digit growth rates year over year for our third quarter revenue.

Speaker 2

Consistent with prior commentary on the 2025 quarterly progression, we expect operating loss to improve through 2025 and to deliver operating profit during the second half. Moreover, we are now guiding to positive free cash flow for the year and anticipate the range to be between breakeven and positive $10,000,000 Ron will review our financial results and guidance in more detail later in the call. Total customer count was 3,097 and enterprise customer count was six twenty two, an increase of 27 from last quarter. Additionally, we saw our LTM NRR increased to 104% from 100% in the first quarter reflecting this recovery momentum. Our top 10 customers represented 31% of revenue down from 33% in the first quarter.

Speaker 2

Revenue outside the top 10 grew 17% year over year outpacing overall revenue growth and continuing to drive revenue diversification. This marks the fifth quarter in a row where revenue outside the top 10 grew faster than overall revenue. During the second half of the year, Scott will drive three pillars of expansion in his new role as President of Go to Market. First, we will continue to target customers where performance matters. This extends beyond delivery and into newer intelligent features within our platform, including adaptive security and observability analytics features that can only exist on the edge.

Speaker 2

Our DDoS attack insights launched in April further exemplifies our unique edge positioning. Beyond our largest customers, there is a target rich environment of Fortune 1,000 digitally native organizations that are in play as incumbents have been slow to evolve. We are continuing to gain share and are driving competitive takeouts. Second, we will continue to cross sell and upsell within our installed base of customers. This is a high priority for our revenue team.

Speaker 2

Scott has driven great results in expanding wallet share this year by incentivizing the teams to grow more within our existing base. Customers that purchased more than one product from Fastly continue to increase. In the second quarter, almost 50% of our customers used two or more products and those customers generate more than 75% of our revenue. Third, we will unlock further revenue growth via geographic expansion. Fastly is underexposed to international revenue and we see this as an incremental revenue opportunity.

Speaker 2

To increase our focus in this area, we've created a new leadership position to drive opportunities in APJ. Nikola Gerber is now head of our APJ region, bringing more than twenty years of experience in networking and cloud services at AWS and Cisco. Additionally, we recently brought on board a new regional vice president for Southern Europe. You will hear more about our international go to market expansion later this year with targeted impact in 2026. All three of these pillars of expansion will be built on a simple customer acquisition motion.

Speaker 2

We will continue to drive simplicity in both pricing and ease of implementation, reducing customer onboarding friction. Packages are part of this simplified approach. And in the second quarter the number of packages sold increased more than 50% year over year and package renewals grew over 130% year over year. Our high touch customer success motion has helped our top 10 cohort return to year over year growth with strong revenue commitments across these customers. Our recent strength in RPO reflects the success.

Speaker 2

RPO grew 41% year over year and now sits at a record high. While I'm very pleased with this progress, we are continuing to look for ways to improve our customer acquisition motion and drive even greater simplicity, velocity and success. In the second quarter, we continued our momentum in penetrating key industry verticals mainly at the expense of incumbents. Financial services and healthcare are both security rich verticals and are often early adopters of advanced threat detection and observability technologies. Omnichannel retail continues to be a fastly strength as customers demand edge based capabilities to process secure transactions and enhance their customers' digital experiences to drive better business outcomes.

Speaker 2

Examples of key wins across these verticals include a leading provider of ambulatory healthcare technology solutions selected Fastly for our security offerings. A premier programmable financial services company selected Fastly's DDoS technology and a key cross selling opportunity expanding the use of our platform. A cloud native SaaS banking platform selected Fastly for their security needs replacing a competitor's WAF with our comprehensive next gen WAF solution. A leading global omnichannel retailer of sports, fashion and outdoor brands selected Fastly for our complete platform, replacing an incumbent's delivery and WAF offerings as well as a third party bot detection solution. And a major international warehouse club selected Fastly's full platform to modernize its entire technology stack.

Speaker 2

The go to market transformation Scott and his team are driving has contributed to our favorable results and we believe that that momentum will continue. Additionally, our platform strategy remains a core part of our success. We've established momentum in our product releases and feature improvements. This is especially true in security where we launched several new products in the last year. You can expect to see more releases across the platform in the coming quarters.

Speaker 2

And now I'll ask Ron to discuss the financial details of this quarter and our guidance. Ron?

Speaker 3

Thank you, Kip, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today. I'll discuss our financial results and business metrics before turning to our forward guidance. Note that unless otherwise stated, all financial results in my discussion are non GAAP based. Revenue for the second quarter increased 12% year over year to $148,700,000 coming in above the high end of our guidance range of $143,000,000 to $147,000,000 Increased new customer acquisition from our go to market initiatives and share gains from our competitive takeout strategies coupled with a favorable pricing environment contributed to this upside. Network services revenue of $114,900,000 grew 10% year over year.

Speaker 3

Security revenue of $29,300,000 grew 15% year over year, comprising a record 20% of total revenue. And our other products revenue of $4,500,000 grew 60% year over year, driven primarily by sales of our compute products. In the second quarter, our top 10 customers represented 31% of our revenue. We continue to see strength in our broader customer base, with revenue from customers outside our top 10 customers growing 17% year over year and 6% sequentially. We anticipate revenue from our top 10 customers will remain in the low 30s percent range throughout 2025.

Speaker 3

Also, no single customer accounted for more than 10% of revenue in the second quarter and affiliated customers that are business units of a single company generated an aggregate of 10% of the company's revenue for the quarter. Our trailing twelve month net retention rate was 104%, up from 100% in the prior quarter and down from 110% in the year ago quarter. The quarter over quarter increase was primarily due to revenue increases from a few of our largest customers in prior quarters and closely follows our overall growth rate trends. We exited the second quarter with record RPO of $315,000,000 growing 41% year over year. This growth reflects progress in our efforts to increase the number of customers with revenue commitments and to drive higher commitment levels with our largest customers coupled with an increasing share of predictable revenue packages as a proportion of our revenue.

Speaker 3

I will now turn to the rest of our financial results for the second quarter. Our gross margin was 59% in the second quarter, coming in 120 basis points above our implied guidance and down 40 basis points from 59.4% in Q2 twenty twenty four. The upside to our guidance was margin leverage from the higher revenue and moderation in price declines. We are also seeing the benefits of increasing international traffic, enabling network efficiencies, including increased network peering. We believe moderation in price declines in network efficiencies will continue into the second half and coupled with the increase in our revenue guidance, we expect to maintain these improved gross margins through the remainder of 2025.

Speaker 3

Operating expenses were $92,300,000 in the second quarter, coming in as expected relative to our revenue upside and reflected 4% sequential growth due to the impact of increased payroll related expenses and IT spend. We are continuing our focus on our operating expenses and driving leverage in our operating results. Due to these efforts and the abating of seasonally high payroll taxes we see in the first half, we expect our operating expenses to decline in the second half, which is reflected in our guidance I will discuss in a moment. We reported an operating loss of $4,600,000 in the second quarter, coming in better than the $6,000,000 midpoint of our operating loss guidance range of 8,000,000 to $4,000,000 In the second quarter, we reported a net loss of $5,000,000 or a zero three dollars loss per basic and diluted share compared to a net loss of $8,100,000 or a $06 loss per basic and diluted share in Q2 twenty twenty four. Our adjusted EBITDA was $8,900,000 in the second quarter compared to $2,000,000 in the 2024.

Speaker 3

Turning to the balance sheet. We ended the quarter with approximately $321,000,000 in cash, cash equivalents, marketable securities and investments, including those classified as long term, a a sequential increase of $14,000,000 over Q1 twenty twenty five. As a reminder, our March 2026 zero percent coupon convertible notes balance of $188,000,000 became current in the first quarter and is now reflected in our current liabilities. We have adequate liquidity to cover our working capital operating requirements and to pay the March 2026 convertible notes when they become due. Our cash flow from operations was positive $25,800,000 in the second quarter compared to negative $4,900,000 in Q2 twenty twenty four.

Speaker 3

Our free cash flow for the second quarter was $10,900,000 representing a $20,500,000 increase from negative $18,500,000 was in Q2 twenty twenty four quarter. While cash capital expenditures were approximately 12% of revenue in the second quarter, we anticipate our cash CapEx will be in the range of 9% to 10% of revenue for the full year, with our medium to long term cash CapEx declining to 6% to 8% of revenue. As a reminder, our cash capital expenditures include capitalized internal use software. I will now discuss our outlook for the third quarter and full year 2025. I'd like to remind everyone again that the following statements are based on current expectations as of today and include forward looking statements.

Speaker 3

Actual results may differ materially and we undertake no obligation to update these forward looking statements in the future, except as required by law. Our revenue guidance reflects these dynamics in our business and is based on the visibility we have today. I'd like to note that on June 19, the current administration extended the prior non enforcement instructions on TikTok's U. S. Operations until September 17.

Speaker 3

Globally, ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, represented less than 10% of our revenue in the 2025 and their United States traffic represented less than 2% of our revenue in the same period. While we do not know the outcome of U. S. Policy on TikTok to be consistent with our practice in the 2025, we are excluding TikTok's U. S.

Speaker 3

Forecasted revenue beyond September 17 from our guide. As Kip discussed, we saw revenue strength from new customer acquisition, share gains due to competitive takeout strategies as well as favorable pricing. We expect these dynamics to continue into the second half and as a result we expect to see modest upside to our typical flattish sequential seasonal growth in the third quarter. For the third quarter, we expect revenue in the range of 149,000,000 to $153,000,000 representing 10% annual growth at the midpoint. Given the ongoing network efficiency improvements in our cost of revenue, we anticipate our gross margins for the third quarter will improve 50 basis points relative to the second quarter to 59.5% plus or minus 50 basis points.

Speaker 3

Guidance for our third quarter operating results reflect the impact of a sequential increase in revenue and gross margin and the benefit of a sequential decrease in operating expenses. As I described earlier, we will benefit from seasonal declines in payroll taxes as well as the seasonal declines in our marketing spend on events and an increase in capitalized internal use software related expenses in R and D. As a result, for the third quarter, we expect a non GAAP operating loss of $1,000,000 to a non GAAP profit of $3,000,000 We expect a non GAAP net loss of $02 per basic and diluted share to a non GAAP net profit of $02 per diluted share. Note that for the third quarter, fully diluted shares for positive EPS will increase approximately 5,000,000 shares over our basic share count of 148,000,000 shares. The recent momentum in our business and gains in profitability position us well to achieve profitability on a non GAAP basis.

Speaker 3

For calendar year 2025, we are raising our revenue guidance to a range of $594,000,000 to $6.00 $2,000,000 reflecting annual growth of 10% at the midpoint. We anticipate our 2025 gross margins will be approximately flat, plus or minus 50 basis points, relative to twenty twenty four gross margins of 58.8%. We are reducing our non GAAP operating loss expectations to a range of $9,000,000 to $3,000,000 reflecting an operating margin of negative 1% at the midpoint, an improvement of approximately 73% in dollar terms over twenty twenty four's operating loss margin of 4%. For modeling purposes, this implies 2025 operating expenses are approximately $355,000,000 to $360,000,000 We expect our non GAAP loss per share to be in the range of $0.10 to $04 and we expect free cash flow to be in the range of breakeven to positive $10,000,000 compared to negative $36,000,000 in 2024, an improvement of $41,000,000 year over year at the midpoint. Before we open the line for questions, I'd like to thank Kipp, the Fastly Board and all Fastly employees for their support.

Speaker 3

I'm confident in Fastly's future, and thank you for your interest and your support in Fastly. Operator?

Operator

Your question comes from the line of Jonathan Ho with William Blair. Your line is open.

Speaker 4

Good afternoon and congratulations on the strong results. Ron, it's really been great to work with you these past few years and we really wish you the best for the future as well. Welcome on board, Kip and Rich as well. Just maybe to start out, you know, clearly, there's been significant change at the management level. It seems, you know, in many of the key leadership positions, should we view this as a new chapter in the Fastly story?

Speaker 4

And if it isn't maybe too early, you know, what does that opportunity set maybe look like, you know, as you as you look a little bit longer term? I know you've you've outlined some of the strategic and and tactical opportunities here. But how should we think about the opportunity to unlock faster growth for Fastly?

Speaker 2

Thanks for the question. I think new chapter is probably right. I feel like we have an opportunity to build on what we have achieved, including Ron's many contributions. We've established a strategy that's beginning to show results. And I think this quarter exemplified that.

Speaker 2

Of course, we're looking forward to more results to come. But we have an opportunity, I think, to lean into where we've established momentum, particularly in go to market and product velocity and really just overall increase our focus and speed in executing our strategy and accelerate results and accelerate towards profitability as soon as possible. And I think longer term, that strategy will open up significant opportunities for us, obviously, in security and compute, and we'll have more to say about that in future calls.

Speaker 4

Got it. And just as a quick follow-up, can you talk a little bit about the pricing environment? And what's maybe giving you the optimism that this can hold? Any additional color would be valuable. Thank you.

Speaker 2

Yeah. I'll comment and I'm sure Ron will have a perspective on this as well. I think that we've seen we've talked about an improving pricing environment, I think, for a couple of quarters now. I think one thing that started to kick in for us is the increased discipline and focus that Scott and his leadership team on the go to market side have brought, where we're being very thoughtful about how we're negotiating discounts with our customers as well as how we're negotiating commitments, committed revenue from those customers. And then that's very important, and I think you can see that in our record RPO.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Speaker 3

And I think the the only thing I would add to that, in addition to kind of that internal discipline is kind of what we're seeing in the macro. One, I think with the consolidation in the industry, that's creating some stability. I think we're also seeing, you know, just kind of a post 2024 where we did see some acceleration. I think we're seeing stability. We're seeing that, you know, not only in the second quarter, but, you know, in the negotiations and, you know, renewal conversations we're having for q three and Q4 where we're seeing stability.

Speaker 3

And so I think that trend line, see favorable through at least the end of the year. Thank you.

Operator

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

Speaker 5

Hey, congrats on the new promotion here. And Ron, I'll echo Jonathan's comments that it was great to work with you and best of luck on your next endeavor. Did wanna dive into the the cross sell initiative for the '25 comp plan. Anything you guys can share beyond, you know, the the greater than 50% and and greater than a 130%, metric wise on how this cross sell upsell is going? It's it's what I'm backing into on the in period NRR, it looked actually exceptionally strong.

Speaker 5

So anything else you guys can share? How is productivity of the new security specialist? Things like that.

Speaker 2

Yeah. I'll again, I'll comment and I'm sure Ron will have a perspective. And I'll just comment maybe qualitatively. I've spent a lot of time with customers, and I can kind of share with you what I've seen from customers. Our platform strategy is really starting to have a meaningful impact on the way that they think about us as a partner and as vendor.

Speaker 2

And we've seen more and more situations where our existing customers pick up new products for this to enhance the use cases or even to go into new use cases that Fastly wasn't previously involved in. And a lot of the feedback we get is that they're very happy with the performance and the support are opted to call outs. And they're looking for more opportunities to leverage Fastly. And as we've launched particularly the additional security products over the last year, that's been a little bit of a recurring theme Some of our existing customers expanding into new use cases with us. But Ron may have have some other more quantitative thoughts on the only

Speaker 3

thing I would add to that, we we talked about this for a while. I think the industry as a whole has been moving more toward a platform where people do wanna buy a platform with their security with compute all on a single platform. I mean, that's evolving as we continue to do our platform unification, making it a lot easier to add those products. And then just to add what Kit said, we've expanded our product portfolio, particularly around security. It's really enabled us to start to kind of gain from those trends in the market and accelerate, you know, the number of products that people have.

Speaker 3

And, you know, we certainly built a sales plan around leveraging that capability.

Speaker 5

Got it. Makes sense. And and look, I was, you know, on the higher revenue commitments from from the top 10, it looked like it drove a a decent acceleration here on the RPO side of things. So how should we think about some of the bookings from them this quarter? And any vertical strength you saw within those top ten, four, looking at those minimum commitments?

Speaker 5

Is it I'm trying to understand how much of it is really just the Edgeo benefit here of them kind of exiting the market that it's kind of onetime bookings kind of higher commitments there versus you guys seeing more durable tailwinds outside of Edgeo? Thanks, guys.

Speaker 4

Yeah. I mean,

Speaker 3

I think there's a couple of drivers here, you know, like a lot of things. I think, one, certainly, you know, the exit of NGO does improve kind of the the traffic allocation and improve the the commitment level. I think our performance differentiation in a number of customers has sort of solidified, you know, our position in terms of traffic allocation where customers are are willing to to make that commitment. On the heels of, I think, us taking a very a position that if you want the bigger discounts, you've got to sign up for a bigger commit. And we're seeing success from that.

Speaker 2

Yes. I mean, I think, Adjio clearly is perhaps a onetime event in terms of the capacity shift within the industry. But I think Scott and the team have really shifted the compensation and the focus to where there's a greater emphasis on negotiating commits with those customers. And that obviously helps us stabilize revenue and drive investment in the business to meet those customers' needs. So I think there could be a onetime effect from Edgeo, but I think the focus on commitments is part of the story here, that's certainly going to continue.

Speaker 5

Great. Thanks.

Operator

Next question comes from the line of Frank Lewiso with Raymond James. Your line is open.

Speaker 3

Great. Thank you. So maybe walk us through sort

Speaker 1

of how you're viewing the company coming in

Speaker 6

and maybe some broader strategic things you think that you needed to change to reach more better growth and profitability? And

Speaker 7

do you

Speaker 1

think you have the team you

Speaker 6

need in place now? Or do we expect some more management changes going forward? Thanks.

Speaker 2

No, I appreciate it. Great question. And while I'm new to the CEO role, of course, I'm not new to Fastly. I've been here for a little while previously as the Chief Product Officer and worked very closely with the executive team and the Board on our strategy and other matters across the company. I think the team will continue to evolve.

Speaker 2

I think as our business changes and grows, we'll expect changes in our leadership teams. And I'm not here to forecast any additional imminent change, but I would just say I view it as a healthy part of the evolution of the company. And change always brings an opportunity. And so we look at it that way. And I'm focused on building a world class team that's oriented around executing our strategy.

Speaker 2

In terms of sort of what's next, I mean, was here to help formulate the strategy and I believe the results this quarter show elements of the strategy working. I think it's really a matter of leaning in and accelerating the results there. There's opportunity with the momentum that Scott's building for us to get more results on go to market. And I'm working with the leadership team to just increase our focus and velocity as we execute on these things. I think we're making some progress on security.

Speaker 2

You saw the record revenue there. We certainly have big aspirations going forward, so we'll be continuing to drive that. And I think Compute is somewhat partially tapped or even untapped opportunity for the company. And we've got some ideas of how we can grow that business that we'll be able to talk about more in the future. So I'm excited about where the company is at.

Speaker 2

I played a role in positioning us prior to becoming CEO. And frankly, I've really enjoyed the support I've received from from the board and and from our leadership team and our employees as I stepped into the role.

Speaker 3

That's that's great. How long do you think

Speaker 6

it'll be before you replace, someone in Scott's position?

Speaker 2

How long will it be before I replace someone in Scott's position? Well, you you've moved the No. I I don't I'm sorry. Yeah. The the Oh, no.

Speaker 2

I don't think I think, actually, that's I'm sorry. That's probably not how we're thinking about it. We're elevating Scott and his direct reports. We'll continue reporting to him and he will and he's gaining the marketing function. So I don't anticipate having a President of go to market and a Chief Revenue Officer.

Speaker 2

So Scott is going to be in this position for a long time. We're really excited about his leadership.

Speaker 6

Great. Alright. And, Ron, thank you very much for all your help over the years.

Speaker 7

Appreciate

Speaker 6

it. Thank you.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Rudy Kessinger with DA Davidson. Your line is open.

Speaker 6

Great, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. Congrats to everybody in new roles. And, Ron, similar to everybody else, I miss, miss working with you, and best of luck on what's next. On security revenue, the growth rate has been rather volatile.

Speaker 6

You know, last year, it decelerated from 16% q one to 4% q four. Now it's accelerated back to 15% over the last two quarters. Just any color on what's driving the volatility there? And in particular, what drove the acceleration in q two? And how should we be modeling or thinking about security growth in the second half of this year than the 2026?

Speaker 3

Yeah. I I think one of the ways to understand the revenue volatility, I think, really has to do with kind of the history and what we saw in 2024. Again, we would end the year with very high revenue concentration. We saw some big dislocations from what our historical trends were with just a handful of customers. It had an outside impact that

Speaker 7

had

Speaker 3

a significant adverse impact on 2024. I mean, you kind of look at the breakout that we shared, top 10 versus everyone else, you can really see the impact that that had while customers outside of the top 10 continue to grow in the mid to high teens. And so that created a lot of the 2024 volatility. I think what you're seeing this year is a recovery and more stability in the top 10 from some of the efforts we put in place to engage with those top 10 customers, some of the commitments that we've been able to achieve with those top 10 customers, and the success of the efforts of the go to market efforts Scott's brought into in terms of accelerating new customer acquisition. And you can see that we saw a big acceleration, you know, kind of the largest acceleration we've seen since 2023 in new customers.

Speaker 3

And while it's not going be a straight line, we expect to continue to see increasing new customers, and that will build on our revenue growth rates going forward. So I think that's really kind of the lens that we're looking at. And I think when you look at, you know, our outlook for the second half with with the raise, you know, we brought that number up to where at the midpoint where it's at 10%. You know, broken better than the midpoint, but, you know, I think we are starting to see some stability after 2024.

Speaker 6

Okay. Got it. And then you you guys have called out in the prepared remarks maybe some competitive displacements on the DDoS with the the new DDoS and bot mitigation product. Could could you expand on that? Maybe, you know, what vendors did you displace?

Speaker 6

What would the typical, you know, vendors we would think of? Or any more color you can share there?

Speaker 2

Yeah. I probably won't get into specific deals or competitors, but I think we're seeing two patterns, and perhaps this is a helpful sort of detail. Often, customer is using a third party standalone, if you will, bot mitigation vendor. And as we've launched those capabilities on our platform, they've often done proof of concept and consolidate that into their Fancy relationship. And gives them a simpler experience and better performance of doing all that processing in one platform at the edge.

Speaker 2

The other example that I've seen a bunch of times is the presence of our bot capabilities opening up opportunities for us to sell a broader set of the platform capabilities, where perhaps we weren't able to position ourselves before. So in some cases, customers have that as a requirement and that new product has unlocked broader opportunities for us. So those are two patterns we're seeing.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Jeff Van Rhee with Craig Hallum. Your line is open.

Speaker 7

Hey, this is Daniel Hibschmann on for Jeff Van Rhee. Kipp, Ron, thanks for taking my questions. Maybe just opening a question for Kipp on your strategic priorities here coming in. You mentioned velocity and product velocity a few times on this call. Maybe you could just expand a little bit on that, what that means to you at Fastly.

Speaker 7

And then I think in the Q and A, you also mentioned accelerating the path toward profitability and OpEx did get guided to be down in the back half of free cash flow was revised up. So it seems a nice movement on profitability already. Maybe just any thoughts on if that changes that were already you're already making, just your thoughts on priorities in regards to profitability as well?

Speaker 2

Absolutely. No. As the former Chief Product Officer, the product velocity is dear and dear to my heart. And one thing we've heard from a lot of our customers is they like more products and more feature releases from us so that they can do more and take advantage of those. And that's what I'm referring to.

Speaker 2

And we've had a notable increase, particularly over the last twelve months versus the prior periods in the number of new products and features that we've shipped. In fact, I think today we launched a new feature in our WAF for account takeover using our deception technology, which a number of customers are pretty excited about. So both in terms of new products and enhancing our current products, we're focused on picking up the pace there. And our engineering and product teams are doing a great job and are also focused on how they can find additional ways to get more value to our customers faster. And of course, that is ultimately value that we can capture as a company.

Speaker 2

In terms of the profitability and just the trajectory we're on longer term, I think we are in a good place. I mean we had we're forecasting lower OpEx. I think there's some seasonal effects there. But we have been I think as Todd spoke about and championed making our company more efficient and making sure that we're investing where we need to grow, but that the investments we're making are ones that do drive growth and a good ROI. And I think that's a journey of continuous improvement.

Speaker 2

We can always look for ways to be more efficient. But the mindset is kind of almost as an investor, not necessarily minimizing spend, but investing where it's going to make a difference for the company and making sure that that's done efficiently. We saw improved cash collection. We saw improved gross margins. So I think that our path to profitability is clear that it's been in a long time certainly since I joined at the 2024.

Speaker 2

And I think the team the leadership team is very excited about that. That's a major priority, the goal for us. And it's exciting frankly, a lot of excitement at the progress we're making. And we're going to double down on that. And I believe that we can drive to that goal without sacrificing key investments to enable our growth.

Speaker 7

Thanks. That's helpful, Kip. And then kind of a follow-up off of that for Ron, again, on the free cash flow. Two quarters now where we've gotten the free cash flow guide increased $10,000,000 so real nice at the midpoint. So it's a real nice improvements to the guide on free cash flow.

Speaker 7

That's getting revised upward faster than the changes to the operating income guide. So maybe if you can just walk us through some of the mechanics there. Is there any change in sort of the assumptions on, like you've just mentioned, cash collection, working capital, CapEx? And whatever those factors are, do you see that as sustainable going forward? Thanks.

Speaker 4

Yes.

Speaker 3

Yeah. Mean, it's a good point. Think if you really dig into it, you can see that we have seen improving cash flow from operations. I think that's been an effort we've had in place, maybe because we're being disciplined around payment terms, but also really increasing our engagement with customers just to drive timely payment. Similarly, across the purchasing team, we've been very focused on efficient payment terms, and cash management.

Speaker 3

I think those are some of the drivers that I think will be sustainable. It's not going to be a straight line, but overall, we expect to continue to drive efficiency in our cash management and hopefully continue to drive more favorable results across our cash flow relative to the P and L, as that improves, that's just going to be a contributor to that cash flow.

Speaker 7

Thanks, Ram. Thanks,

Operator

And there are no further questions at this time. Kip Compton, CEO, I turn it back over to you for closing remarks.

Speaker 2

Thank you. As the new CEO, I'm honored to be leading Fastly. We're building strong momentum in the business. As you heard today, we reported record security revenue, improving margins and record RPO in Q2 among other highlights. We remain focused on accelerating growth, driving towards profitability and delivering lasting value for all of our stakeholders.

Speaker 2

I want to thank the Fastly employees, customers and investors for all of their support. Thank you so much for your time today.

Operator

Thank you. This does conclude today's presentation. You may now disconnect.

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