Netskope, Inc.

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to NETSCOPE's fourth quarter and four-year fiscal year 2026 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. I would now like to hand the call over to Michelle Schwarber, Chief Communications and Investor Relations Officer.

You may begin. Good afternoon and thank you for joining us today. With me on the call are Netscope CEO and co-founder Sanjay Barry and CFO Drew DelMotto. The press release announcing our financial results for the fourth quarter and full year fiscal 2026 was issued earlier today and is posted to our investor relations website at investors.netscope.com along with a supplemental presentation. Before we begin, let me remind everyone that some of the statements we make on today's call are forward-looking, including statements related to our guidance for the first quarter and full 2027 fiscal year, growth opportunities, competitive position, and the impact of AI adoption. These forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated by these statements. Additionally, these statements apply only as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update them in the future. For a detailed description of risks and uncertainties, please refer to our SEC filings as well as our earnings press release. Finally, unless otherwise noted, all financial metrics we discuss on this call, other than revenue, will be on an adjusted non-GAAP basis. We have provided reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures against the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures in our earnings press release. Now, let me turn the call over to Sanjay to discuss our business and high-level Q4 financial performance.

Thanks, Michelle. Welcome, everybody, and thank you for joining us to discuss Netscope's fourth quarter and fiscal year 2026 results. We ended the year on a high note with results that exceeded our guidance across all key metrics. Our focus on delivering a market-leading platform for networking, security, and analytics in the modern world of cloud and AI is is resonating well with customers and driving both new and expansion business. Strong global execution resulted in robust fourth quarter results, highlighted by record net new ARR of $57 million and ending ARR of $811 million, representing true organic growth of 31% year over year. Revenue in Q4 grew 32% year over year to $196 million. And revenue for the full fiscal year 2026 also grew 32% to $709 million. We continue to leverage the investments we've made in our Netscope One platform and New Edge Global Private Cloud Network to drive efficient growth, which is reflected in the five percentage point improvement in operating margin in Q4. And in 18%, stitch point improvement for the full fiscal year 2026. We were also very pleased to generate 12 million in free cash flow for fiscal year 2026, marking a notable milestone of Netscope's first ever year of positive free cash flow. We also saw a strong mix of both new logo growth and customer expansion across key verticals and geographies. The average number of products per customer increased to 4.4. Customers are solving key use cases through the adoption of our Netscope One platform of 25 security networking analytics and AI products. This is reflected in our net retention rate of 116% and 22% growth in customers with over $100,000 in ARR year over year. Drew will give more color on our Q4 and full year fiscal 2026 financials in a few minutes. We've had many innovations go to market and operational highlights during the quarter. And one theme that threaded prominently across all of these was AI. NetScope is uniquely positioned as a significant beneficiary of the AI super cycle because we have engineered a unified AI-native fabric that eliminates the legacy trade-off between performance and security. We have organically built the Netscope One platform as the intelligent edge, an inherently adaptive architecture where our native AI fluency and active context are seamlessly integrated into our global infrastructure, defined by its performance, resilience, and dynamic orchestration. I'd like to spend some time today walking through the four pillars of our AI strategic framework. which demonstrate why Netscope is the essential engine powering the scale of the modern AI enterprise. First, Netscope is an AI native platform with sovereignty and privacy by design. From day one, we were engineered as an AI native platform. Our competitive moat is architectural, not a single bolt-on feature. Since our inception, we have leveraged and integrated AI as foundational across our platform. In the early days, we used shallow and deep learning. And today, we further augment these capabilities with generative AI models to deliver maximum impact for our customers. Every implementation follows our core principle of privacy by design. We believe intelligence should never come at the cost of data privacy or sovereignty. And we operate a library of more than 190 proprietary, purpose-built, specialized AI models optimized for security and network performance. This quarter, we continue to enhance those models, and our AI labs released additional models that are used in our new AI security products. Unlike competitors using just generic LLMs, Netscope's intelligence is purpose-built, high-speed, and hyper-accurate. The second key pillar in our AI strategy is enabling and securing AI in real time. While legacy and first-generation SASE vendors perform so-called post-event autopsies with out-of-band scanners, Netsco provides real-time, in-line AI security for corporate and shadow AI. We don't just see that an AI transaction is happening. We understand the data and intent within it. and take real-time granular action. Let me explain. Most solutions simply see a connection. Netskope understands the deep interaction. Because our proxy is natively AI fluent, we possess the active context to determine dynamically in real time the specific AI app instances, activities, data, and more. We also determine the semantic intent of prompts and responses in real time and enforce in-line policy. Our Netscope One agentic broker, one of a number of new AI products we announced earlier today, also seamlessly applies this to all MCP transactions, whether sanctioned or unsanctioned. This is why, at Netscope, we aren't just observing and enabling the AI revolution. We are the engine generating the high-fidelity data that secures it. In today's world, the most valuable asset isn't just the AI model. It's the unique real-time data and transaction telemetry that understands the intent and lineage behind every interaction. NetScope One generates a vast and proprietary set of AI-fluent metadata and data for trillions and trillions of transactions a month that traditional security tools simply cannot see or generate. Decoding the complex language of AI agents, generative AI apps, AI tools, and cloud JSON in mid-flight. But while the power of our unique data is a competitive moat, our purpose is singular. The dynamic protection of our customers and their non-humans and humans. We leverage this unprecedented visibility. to protect our customers, ensuring that they can innovate at the speed of AI without ever compromising the integrity or sovereignty of their most sensitive information. We apply in-line decisiveness, or put in another way, we make granular no-go or no-go decisions in flight. This allows us to stop sensitive data from entering prompts and block poisoned AI responses or injection attacks before they ever reach a customer's environment. protecting users, apps, and autonomous agents alike. And our Netscope One AI guardrails, also announced today, takes this to the next level. These deep contextual controls are necessary for enterprises to move from prohibiting AI to enabling AI with confidence. We don't just see more. We protect better, turning our unique data into the ultimate foundation of trust for the agentic era. Our third AI strategy pillar centers around providing differentiated and unmatched performance and resilience through our new edge AI infrastructure. AI transactions are uniquely sensitive to latency. Legacy networks create a latency tax that breaks AI performance. Conversely, our new edge infrastructure, the world's largest high-performance private security cloud, is the AI fast path. It is the most resilient high-speed highway for AI transactions globally, including AI applications and agents hosted in public, private, and neoclouds. It is also an agile edge. Our infrastructure is defined by performance, resilience, and dynamic orchestration. We process complex security at the edge, closest to the agent app or user, reducing lag for secure real-time inference. while allowing the network to dynamically adapt to the high-velocity traffic patterns of the AI era. And lastly, our fourth AI strategy pillar is a platform built organically and natively for the agentic economy with an AI fluent proxy and for autonomous operations. The perimeter has shifted from being filled with people to entities, Netscope uniquely addresses this with a platform that specifically speaks the language of AI. As we mentioned, our architecture and native AI speaking proxy innately understands APIs and JSON. This AI native visibility enables hyper granular zero trust control over AI transactions that other vendors simply cannot see. Through our just announced Netscope AI gateway, we extend this enforcement anywhere, public cloud, private data center, or the edge. We also just released our first autonomous Netscope AI agents, which have already been met with exceptional customer feedback. One of the areas our agents will address will be automating operations. These classes of agents from Netscope automate complex network and security tasks, drastically reducing the human-in-the-loop requirements for global enterprises. Our recently released ZPNA AI agent has been received very well in this area. And finally, we offer universal governance. By marrying our market-leading data protection with our newly introduced Netscope AI guardrails, we secure and moderate for acceptable use all communications, either via model context protocol, MCP, via our agentic broker, prompts, or shadow AI for humans and non-humans alike. Because of these unique and highly differentiated four pillars of our AI strategic framework, many of the world's most sophisticated enterprises choose to secure, accelerate, and analyze their AI transactions through Netskope. As a result, Netskope has become one of the most definitive sources of enterprise AI data uses and trends in the world. We were pleased to announce today the Netskope AI Index, which consists of a first-of-its-kind interactive view of real-time AI usage across the world. Data covering virtually every country, industry vertical, and company size, providing a granular view of AI adoption. And attributable intelligence that positions Nescope as the authority that customers and the public can cite when describing the real-world trajectory of the AI economy. We have also kept our foot on the gas innovating across our Netscope One platform of security networking and analytics products in other related areas. Let me share a few recent examples. On the data security front, we strengthened our competitive edge with the introduction of Netscope One Data Lineage. Data Lineage enables security teams to track and visualize the movement of sensitive data across their entire organization through various levels of origin, usage, and access, including visibility into when that data propagates or evolves. We also introduced new capabilities and integrations to improve secure connections to enterprise applications from unmanaged or BYOD devices. Enterprise browser support was expanded to a new range of iOS and Android mobile devices, while deeper integration with a remote browser isolation and private access solutions provides a range of highly secure deployment models to enable users to connect to private apps through web browsers on their unmanaged devices. And on the networking and infrastructure side, we delivered our DNS as a service that enables customers to point their DNS traffic to net scope for resolution, which can then use our DNS content filtering and security to provide secure access for often overlooked and unprotected use cases like guest Wi-Fi access. Our continued innovation expands our robust Netscope One unified platform of 25 security networking analytics and AI solutions, providing more opportunity to land and expand with customers. We are an organically built, truly integrated, modern platform for the AI and cloud era. I want to emphasize this point about platforms in the context of what we repeatedly hear from customers. They are telling us that while they desire truly unified platforms over a slew of point solutions, they also are not seeking a single platform for all their security and networking needs. The unification they desire in a platform is what Netscope uniquely delivers. We built our AI-native Netscope One organically, not through M&A, which results in a disjointed, cobbled-together solution and often frustration for customers. Our 25 products share one common code base, one engine, one console, and one network, providing both better efficiency and a seamless customer experience. And our new edge private cloud runs Netscope's full stack of products at high speed at all of our more than 120 locations. To illustrate how our customers are adopting our Netscope on-platform, let me pivot to our go-to-market accomplishments. during Q4. We saw significant customer wins across verticals and geographies, with customers turning to the Netscope One platform to enable AI adoption, modernize their security and infrastructure, consolidate vendors and replace legacy and first-generation cloud security products. I'll touch on some key wins and expansions across common use cases. First, customers are choosing the Netscope One platform for modernization, to facilitate secure access from humans and non-human identities to their AI ecosystem, including generative AI apps and LLMs, cloud apps, web apps, and private apps. One notable win was a large global manufacturer who sought better data visibility and control and the ability to safely allow the use of AI in cloud. They chose six Netscope products to secure generative AI and cloud access, protect their data, and improve their network performance. We also landed a top regional health system in the U.S., who initiated a modernization selection process to replace its legacy security and network infrastructure after previously suffering a severe and costly breach. We shined in this competitive bake-off, and the customer purchased 11 products within our Netscope One platform. including our next-generation SWIG with AI controls, ZK-NX Advanced DLP, which includes proprietary AI models from our AI Labs team, borderless WAN, cloud firewall, enterprise browser, and other products to replace legacy firewall networking products. Customers also continue to turn to Netscope for our superior unified data protection. For example, one of the largest hotel companies in the world with operations in nearly 150 countries, with a notable unified data expansion win during the quarter. This client needed continuous real-time visibility into the full breadth of its data security posture. They also needed to confidently manage and protect sensitive data across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments, including AI and cloud data stored. They purchased Netscope's DSPM solution and are now using 14 products in the Netscope One platform across its organization. Many customers also deploy our suite of Netscope One products to modernize their infrastructure, including replacing legacy VPNs with our zero-trust architecture, branch firewalls with our borderless SD LANs, and migrating their networks to our high-performance private cloud, especially as they adopt more AI and cloud, where performance becomes even more critical. For example, we landed a Canadian gaming company that needed to modernize their network for AI and cloud, provide secure remote access to their global workforce, and meet governmental regulatory requirements. This customer replaced legacy hardware products at more than 5,000 locations with Netskope's borderless SD-WAN and ZTNA Next secure access solutions and purchased our next-gen secure web gateway with added AI protections for secure generative AI usage. In another wind, A European government chose us to modernize its legacy on-prem security infrastructure and drive data sovereignty. They wanted to consolidate multiple point solutions into a single centrally managed platform to protect sensitive data while meeting strict government regulatory requirements. The organization purchased our comprehensive Netscope SSE platform covering security for AI, web, cloud, and data. Finally, Our global, fast, and resilient new edge private cloud network makes us particularly well-suited to deliver globally distributed and highly regulated customers the data sovereignty and regulatory compliance that they require. For example, we landed two of the largest banks in Africa in two separate deals. One was a unified data protection deal that we successfully baked off against a primary competitor. The other was a network modernization deal where we replaced the same competitor. with Netskope's market leading SSE solutions and higher performing new edge private cloud. Our local data centers in Africa were a driver for the wins as we are able to deliver superior performance and data sovereignty to these customers. The geographic and vertical diversity of these customer wins and use cases is a testament to our clear technical differentiation and disciplined execution across all regions. Our new customer wins were all competitive bake-offs against primary competitors where the capabilities of the Netscope platform proved itself in extensive POVs. We continue to land with multiple products and have seen strong growth in multi-product adoption across our customer base. As of the end of Q4, 56% of our customers were using four or more Netscope One products, and 27% were using six or more products. I'm pleased with the strong performance of our go-to-market team across the globe. Our newly hired sales reps are ramping and our tenured reps are delivering strong productivity. We put great leaders in place and recently filled some of our remaining key sales leadership positions, including the appointment of Joe Welsh to lead our U.S. public sector vertical, an area where we are underpenetrated but have strong opportunities. Joe is a seasoned veteran with decades of public sector experience in this space. We are also continuing to hire highly talented reps in all geographies, many of who are joining us from key competitors across our space. I just returned from our annual sales kickoff, and I can tell you that our team's excitement, energy, and conviction is truly palpable. Our momentum is only building. As part of our comprehensive go-to-market strategy, we also continue to strengthen our relationships with system integrators and strategic partners. During Q4, we partnered with the largest GSI in the world on a major enterprise deal in the energy sector, supporting digital transformation and zero trust for approximately 80,000 employees. Other recent engagements include a large government defense customer in Asia Pacific and a major healthcare customer in North America. This key partner holds over 150 certifications on the Netscope platform, and their support extends our global operations. This is just one example of how we are partnering well on a large-scale, partner-driven enterprise transformations globally. On the technology partner side, Netskope also recently achieved the Amazon Web Services Security Competency status for AI security. This competency assures AWS customers that Netskope has met technical and quality standards to deliver best-in-class solutions for securing AI workloads across AI security use cases. In closing, I want to reiterate that we are in the early innings of an AI super cycle that is exposing a fundamental flaw in legacy and first generation SASE architecture. Legacy security acts as a latency tax on AI performance, forcing enterprises to choose between safety and speed. We believe the next decade will be defined by a structural shift towards an intelligent edge architecture built specifically for an autonomous agentic economy. Netskope is uniquely positioned for this era for three reasons. First, we have an architecture for the future. While legacy vendors proxy the past, Netskope is the distinctly AI native proxy with innate fluency to secure the languages of the future, APIs, JSON, and emerging protocols like MCP. Two, we also scale without friction. We have eliminated the security tax. Our AI FastPath infrastructure has unique capabilities to perform complex real-time security at the speed of AI inference. And three, finally, we are an intelligence moat. Our advantage is rooted in active context and the real-time AI-fluent proprietary data we generate. While others count traffic, we understand intent. Our proprietary data from trillions of real-time transactions validated by the Netscope AI Index, makes us the indispensable source of truth for the AI economy. Sitting squarely at the intersection of cloud, AI, networking, and security, Netscope has a massive market opportunity, which is projected to grow to at least $149 billion by 2028. We've just begun to scratch the surface and look forward to what's to come. The plumbing of the AI era is being laid today. And it will take many years to fully realize. By unifying high-speed performance with deep semantic intelligence, Netscope isn't just selling a platform. We are providing the essential adaptive fabric for the modern AI enterprise for the next decade plus. This is a structural, durable moat designed to stand the test of time. Fiscal 2026 was an incredible year of growth and expansion for Nesco, and our IPO in September was just the beginning of our public company journey. We see an incredible path ahead as we attack the AI security and networking opportunity with exciting new products, continue to bring more customers onto our platform, expand business with existing ones, drive further innovation, ramp our sales team, and drive awareness globally. I'm proud of what we have accomplished, particularly our first full year of positive free cash flow generation and industry-leading ARR growth at scale. I look forward to seeing many of you at RSA in a few weeks where we'll demonstrate and share more about our AI strategy and new products and engage in other ways in the months ahead. With that, let me now turn it over to Drew to provide financial details on the fourth quarter and our outlook for the first quarter and fiscal year 2027. Drew?

Thank you, Sanjay, and hello, everyone. As Sanjay shared, Netskope had a very successful fourth quarter, closing out the year on a strong note. We continue to deliver significant growth as our investments in New Edge, new product innovation, and our go-to-market organization continue to pay off. Before I share Q4 and fiscal year 2026 results, let me remind you that all financial comparisons are on both a year-over-year and non-GAAP basis, unless stated otherwise. For the full year of 2026, we are proud of what we accomplished. We delivered revenue of $709 million or 32% growth. ARR of $811 million, up 31% year over year. Net new ARR of $193 million, up 35% versus fiscal 2025. Operating margin of improvement of 18 percentage points. while continuing to invest in our innovation and go-to-market engines. And we generated $12 million in positive free cash flow, which marks Netscope's first fiscal year of positive free cash flow and an improvement of $163 million over fiscal 2025. This translates to a 30 percentage point free cash flow margin improvement year over year. Moving on to Q4 results, ARR grew 31%, to $811 million at the end of Q4. As Sanjay noted, we also had a record quarter for net new ARR of $57 million. Q4 revenue grew 32% to $196 million. We also experienced strength across geographies. In Q4, revenue in the Americas grew 32%, EMEA increased 36%, and APJ grew 26%. Our teams executed well, and our investments in our sales organization are paying off. In terms of customer metrics, the number of customers generating more than $100,000 in ARR in Q4 grew 22% year-over-year to 1,531. Enterprise and large enterprise customers are our focus, and more than 85% of our ARR comes from $100,000-plus ARR customers. that the average ARR from this customer cohort grew to more than $450,000 per customer. This is indicative of our success in both expanding our install base and securing significant new enterprise deployments. Our Q4 net retention rate, or NRR, was 116%, while our churn and downsell rates remained at historic lows. Composition of deals varies quarter by quarter, But our consistently strong NRR reflects our customers' ongoing confidence in Netscope's platform and expansion of their deployments as they consolidate vendors and modernize their infrastructure. Customers view Netscope as a long-term strategic partner, given our commitment to innovation and ability to deliver products that solve the complex and evolving security challenges in the cloud and AI era. In addition to NRR, we look at multi-product adoption to demonstrate our expansion opportunity within our customer base. As Sanjay mentioned, at the end of Q4, 56% of our customers were using four or more products, versus 48% a year ago. And 27% were using six or more products, up from 22% a year ago. We're pleased with this progress and believe our 25-product Netscope One platform gives us a clear opportunity to continually expand within our growing customer base as they consolidate more of their security and networking stack with us. Moving on to the rest of the income statement, where we saw the benefits of Netskope being built to scale. Gross margin was 76%, an increase of approximately five percentage points from Q4 last year. Our gross margin expansion is being driven by the efficiency of our new edge architecture which is generating better unit economics as we scale. Q4 operating expenses totaled $171 million, up approximately 3% sequentially. Operating margin improved 5 percentage points year-over-year to negative 10%. R&D expenses improved 100 basis points year-over-year to 36% of revenue, driven by earlier investments in a common data platform and hiring in high-talent, cost-efficient locations. Sales and marketing expenses remain flat at 40% of revenue as we continue to invest in quota-carrying sales reps. Our consistent improvement in gross margin and operating margin reflect the operating leverage we've unlocked as our earlier strategic investments in infrastructure and talent begin to compound. Net loss per share was $0.04, using 395 million weighted average shares outstanding. As a reminder, our non-GAAP EPS excludes the change in fair value of the convertible notes we issued prior to our IPO. Fully diluted share count using the Treasury stock method was approximately 503 million shares as of January 31, 2026. We generated $4 million in free cash flow in Q4, representing a 2% free cash flow margin. Note that this was driven by our laser focus on efficiencies, and in the first year of our transition to annual billings. We're pleased with our ability to drive positive free cash flow as this demonstrates the leverage inherent in our model. While we'll continue to realize the benefits of being built to scale on margins and cash flow, our path to sustainable positive free cash flow is not expected to be linear. The timing of cash collections can vary quarter to quarter, and we expect to continue investing in the business for long-term growth. And finally, We ended the fourth quarter with $1.2 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities. Before I share our guidance for the first quarter and fiscal year 2027, let me briefly outline some factors that should be considered. We're continuing to make investments in our business, most notably in R&D and sales and marketing. We're continuing to hire sales reps across the globe to support our expanding market opportunity aligned to the AI super cycle that Sanjay noted. At the same time, we are leaning further into our AI roadmap and expanding our AI-naked data Netscope One platform with additional products to support our customers' AI adoption journeys both today and in the future. While we're adding AI engineers and data scientists to drive further innovation in this important emerging area, we're also empowering our teams with AI tools to drive efficiencies in development in other areas of our business. We expect to see most of the impact from these investments to operating margin during the first half of the year, leading to improving operating margin in the second half of the year. As we look at gross margin, we are on track to achieve our long-term target of 80%. With the foundational investments we've made in New Edge, we now expect margin gains to come through top-line growth and continued optimization. Now that gross margin has improved into the mid-70s, We expect progress from here to be more gradual and may not follow the linear step function seen in recent quarters. Also, as we've discussed in the past, we are shifting customers to annual billing on multi-year contracts where possible. Billing annually will improve the predictability and consistency of our cash flows. I'm pleased to highlight that this transition is occurring faster than we originally expected. While it's difficult to predict exactly how this will impact future free cash flow, we expect to see the most significant impact in Q1 with negative free cash flow in the range of $50 to $60 million. We expect that to improve in the second quarter, return to positive free cash flow during the second half of the year, and to end the full year with positive free cash flow in the range of 2 to 4%. We will continue to provide you with quarterly updates as we progress throughout the year. We began this billing transition a year ago and expect to see the bulk of the impact this year. And finally, we believe we are uniquely positioned as a significant beneficiary of the AI super cycle due to our unified AI native fabric that eliminates the trade-off between performance and security. At the same time, we are early in the year, still have a large portion of our sales reps ramping, and we are continuing to establish our reporting cadence as a public company. And while AI and cloud adoption are driving significant investments in platforms like Nesco, we recognize that macro and geopolitical factors have the potential to impact customer spending plans. We build our guidance with these factors in mind. Let me now provide our guidance for Q1 and fiscal year 2027. As a reminder, These numbers are all non-GAAP unless stated otherwise. For Q1 fiscal 2027, we expect revenue in the range of $197 million to $199 million, representing growth of approximately 26% at the midpoint. Operating margin of approximately negative 16%. Net loss per share of 6 cents to 7 cents, using approximately 405 million weighted average common shares outstanding. We expect to see the largest free cash flow impact of our transition to annual billings in the first half of fiscal 2027, with much of that impact in Q1. As I mentioned, we expect negative free cash flow in Q1 of $50 to $60 million. For the full year, fiscal 2027, we expect revenue in the range of $870 million to $876 million, representing growth of approximately 23% at the midpoint. Gross margin of approximately 77%. Operating margin of approximately negative 10%, gradually improving from negative 16% in the first half of the year. Net loss per share of 19 cents using approximately 415 million weighted average common shares outstanding. Free cash flow margin in the range of 2% to 4%. Note that the annual billings transition is estimated to reduce our free cash flow margin by approximately six percentage points, which is reflected in this guidance. As noted earlier, we expect that to improve in the second quarter, return to positive free cash flow during the second half of the year, and end the year with positive free cash flow. We highlighted these modeling points in the appendix of our investor presentation. In closing, We remain confident in our ability to execute on our long-term strategy and innovation, driving strong and durable revenue growth and capturing share of our expanding opportunity. We remain focused on prioritizing disciplined execution and strategic investments that strengthen our competitive advantage and continue to drive growth and margin expansion. Innovation drives our flywheel for growth. As such, we will continue to invest in data and AI engineers while utilizing AI to drive efficiency and product velocity. We'll also continue to invest and go to market while remaining fiercely committed to delivering profitable growth. Thank you for your time today. With that, I'll turn it over to the operator for Q&A.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, to ask the question, please press star 1-1 on your telephone. Then wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from the line of Brian Exes with JP Morgan. Your line is open.

Great. Good afternoon. Thank you for taking the question and congrats on some solid results. Maybe one question for Sanjay and then a follow-up for Drew. I guess for Sanjay, you know, where – Where would you assess that we are in the maturation cycle with respect to enterprises knowing what they need to secure AI? Are your AI security announcements ahead of the curve, or are these approaches that you're already seeing CIOs demand as they look to kind of, you know, secure their, you know, AI estate? And then, you know, for Drew, could you maybe just help us understand the context of the sequential revenue guide? Looks like one cue would imply only up a couple million dollars. We'd love to understand the puts and takes there. Thank you both.

Great question, Ryan. So I think, first of all, from an AI perspective, most organizations are in the infancy. They're in the first inning. 90% of their usage of AI is shadow AI, meaning they actually didn't bring it in. Their end users did. And so when you think about that concept, you harken back to this really just being very early. And so from an AI security perspective, our focus is always to kind of skate to where the puck's going, anticipate what they'll need, and deliver a best-of-breed solution to solve this problem, discover their AI, guardrail it and control it, and then enable it with precision. And so that's what these new products do, building upon our previous capabilities to enable AI. So we'll share more at RSA and beyond as well on that. Drew?

Yeah. Thanks, Brian. In terms of the Q1, I think you're talking about Q1 guidance. Again, first year in the public company, and so, you know, we're going to remain prudent, as we've said in the past, and so there's that. We do have reps ramping, as we talked about before. They tend to ramp more later in the year, let's say, and so we still have a little bit of, you know, quite a bit of ramping going on with terms of the rest who's come in over the last year. And then finally, there is some geopolitical macro headwinds that probably happened over the last, you know, I would say the last couple of weeks.

Right, right. Thank you both. Very helpful on both fronts.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Meadow Marshall with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.

Great. Thanks. And Echo, congratulations. Maybe for Sanjay, just in terms of, you know, are you seeing, I think during the IPO process, you kind of talked about these four main use cases that people were kind of coming in with. Are you seeing any changes in what either of those use cases are or as you start to expand more of the product portfolio that you're selling, just any changes to kind of where a majority of people are coming in? And then maybe a follow-up just in terms of, you know, maybe the net new ARR growth this quarter, net expansion, you know, stepping back from Q3. Just any commentary on kind of what you saw there would be helpful.

Great question. So from a use case perspective, when you look at our top use cases, they were come in to help people enable cloud and web no matter where they are. The second was securing and enabling AI. I will say that has moved up in the stack. Every conversation I have, people come to us and say, look, we already run all our AI traffic through you. We released the Netscope AI Index today. It's probably the first definitive source of worldwide AI tracking by vertical, by geo, and by size of customer. Well, that kind of shows you the amount of AI traffic traversing the new edge network. And so what people have come to us to say is, look, you are the fast path to AI. Let us Like, help us secure it, enable it, guardrail it, and let us say yes to it. And so that is a top, top use case that they're coming to us with, and that has been elevated. Obviously, the other ones, remote access, modernize my infrastructure, converge, consolidate, simplify my network security, all of those are still top of mind, but definitely the AI one has been raised. And so we're very excited about that, to be blunt, because we feel like, hey, this is what we were born for, right? Our proxy is really a JSON, API, MCP, Fluent Proxy. It started with a cloud, and now AI is sort of a one-two punch in a good way for us. And so we're very excited, obviously, about what's to come, to be blunt, in the many, many years, because we're early, obviously, in the AI super cycle. As far as net new AR, we had obviously a high comp in Q4 of last year. You can see that as you kind of metric it and you watch through that growth. We're obviously happy to record the highest net new AR we've ever had. You saw the growth in our customers of over 100,000 in ARR, right, in 23 plus percent, and obviously strong upsell as well. And so for us, the other big point to remember is, We really started hiring and ramping our reps mid-year, so beginning in Q3 last year. It takes about 12 months for them to ramp to full productivity, and so that's another big piece for us that we continue to drive.

Great. Thanks. Thank you. Our next question comes from with Piper Sandler. Your line is open.

Great. Appreciate you taking my question this afternoon. I want to ask more high level just around revenue model. And as you think forward, and I know it's been disclosed here, you're primarily a seat-based model. And obviously, there's some concerns in the marketplace around what seat-based models look like going forward, especially in light of all the recent layoffs. So, as you add new modules and new capabilities, do you see that shifting more either towards traffic or capacity or I think that it will be an underlying seed-based model, but you're protected by adding more modules on top. So we just love some colors. Thanks.

Yeah, that's a great question. So when you look at what we do, we run the traffic for most enterprises. We run everything. All their generative AI traffic, all their genetic traffic, their cloud traffic, their on-prem traffic, it goes through us. The reality, though, is there is no free lunch on our network. And so if you're going to run users through our infrastructure, which is what obviously people do, you pay for that by user. If you're going to run agentic traffic, right, either it's server-side RAG, client-side RAG, whether you have an AI agent, you pay by transaction. And so all of the new products we release today, they're charged by transaction. What's a transaction? It's a prompt and a response, right? That's kind of the token for the agentic economy, and that's how we charge. So No matter what people run and what that balance is over time, we're going to make money off that. And so you will see, and you've already seen four new products today, all transaction-based, which is essentially maps to when you can think about tokens.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Gray Powell with BTIG. Your line is open.

Okay, great. Thanks for taking the question. Yeah, maybe one on the product side. So one of your larger network security peers, they appear pretty bulled up on the potential for improved demand in the SD-WAN market and the opportunity for legacy replacement this year. Netscope also often receives high marks on SD-WAN capabilities. So I'm just interested, what are you seeing in your pipeline And then how often are you having discussions where both security and networking are the buying centers that are involved in deals?

Yep, great question. First of all, you're right, like in an organization, when you map out the structure, you have a CIO and you have the security leader and the infrastructure ops leader. You also now have an AI leader, and we often train all our reps, go after that square. You've got to hit all four. Now, where buying decisions are made can be in one or it can be in multiple, but we obviously hunt across all of those. For us, we are a networking and a security company for the cloud and AI era, right? And so we think about consolidation of both. The SD-WAN, what does it do? It's for speed. It's for performance. It's for resilience. And that's how we do it. And so we offer it in software form factor on your endpoint, right? You can put in your infrastructure. And we've seen great growth in it. You saw a great win we had in a very large distributed organization where they combined our SD-WAN as a on-ramp, a smart on-ramp to our new edge network and all our security functionality. And so that concept, often called unified FASI by analysts, for us, we can deliver on that. And so what do I see in the future? Well, look at agentic traffic. The key is that agentic traffic is going to come from a user working remote. It's going to come from a oil rig, which is running AI on it. It's going to come from agents, right, many of them running on servers. All of that traffic needs to be accelerated. And that's really what the AI fast path is. We are the best path for agentic and non-agentic traffic, whether you're doing inference or beyond. And so, SD-WAN is just one small part of that fast story.

Okay. Thank you very much. That was helpful. Yeah.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Matt Hedberg with RDC. Your line is open.

Great. Thanks for taking my question, guys. Drew, I think in your prior remarks you said deal composition can change from quarter to quarter. I'm curious, was that sort of the reason why NRR ticked down by a couple hundred basis points? I'm just trying to get a little bit more clarity on that element.

Well, first of all, we view 116% NRR as very strong, to be frank. I think anything in the mid-topper teams is something we'd be very happy with. That But, look, NRR does vary quarter to quarter. Some quarters we have more upsells. Some quarters we have more new logo revenue. You know what? I think we've said that before. And note that Q4 a year ago was one of the strongest, if not, you know, a record quarter from an upsell perspective, Q4 of FY25. That being said, looking forward, we have a large install base. Average customer has, I think, 4.4 products. We have 25-plus products, 4.2 products announced today. Again, as Sanjay said, transaction-based, so a lot of white space and, you know, hopefully a lot of upside there. And just want to mention that downsell insurance remains at historic lows, so retention remains very strong. Got it. Thanks, Drew.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Brad Zilnick with Distribite. Your line is open.

Great. Thank you so much for taking the questions. A lot of good information. information that you've revealed in these results. I've got one for Sanjay, one for Drew. Sanjay, you spoke to a lot of this in your remarks, but I just want to hit it head on. It's great to see the unveiling of Netscope One AI security today, and I think there's consensus that network traffic will grow exponentially as AI agents are rolled out into production. My question is, with the massive throughput requirements that agentic east-west traffic may demand, why is that city, and more specifically Netscope, best position to secure this traffic versus maybe a virtual firewall vendor? And then just quickly for Drew, Drew, just why is the shift to annual billings happening faster? And should we expect to see that result in maybe an unexpected benefit to ARR and revenue as you get better pricing? Thank you very much.

Thanks for the question. So when you look at agentic traffic, what is like an AI agent doing? And what are people most worried about it doing? Well, an AI agent unleashed We'll go access your endpoint. Guess what? Nescope, we monitor that. We have our endpoint data protection. It will go access your cloud apps, right, over the internet. That's what we do. We monitor it, understand what are they accessing, restrict what it can access dynamically, whether it's a shadow agent or not. Your on-prem data, that's what our AI-enabled ZTNA does. And so I guess the summary is when you look at what Nescope does, we have a sensor. that sees all traffic that goes back on-prem to your cloud, to your AI applications, no matter where it goes, to a website. We also have a sensor on the endpoint where we do our data protection and beyond. And then we also have a sensor which looks at all out-of-band activity, right, when you look at our lineage around understanding how these applications work with CASB and beyond. And so we're in this unique spot where the world is about, do you have unique data? Can you generate proprietary data that no one else can see or has? And that's what we do. Because we are the most performant, largest cloud private network, because we have the ability to interpret this data at a much more granular level, we understand the agentic interactions at that granular detail. And as a result, our policy enforcement, our analytics, and everything else that we do and will do will be very, very precise, accurate, and enable people to be secure. And so that's really why I think customers, well over 1,000 of them have chosen us to secure their agentic traffic. Very helpful.

Yeah. And, Brad, great question on the billings. Look, I would remind everybody that, you know, the billings transition provides strong predictability and consistency of, you know, both billings and free cash flow ultimately. We added a slide 24 to help illustrate the transition and where we are. I would point everybody to the 78% growth in the fee-for-billing commitments, the fee-for-committed billings. And the interesting part about that is we can see what's coming. We can actually see the dates we bill. We can obviously model collections better. And, again, we have been free cash flow positive, and that will obviously build up later in the year. But as far as, like, why going faster, it's just really strong execution. We've been very focused on it internally. We've been inspecting the deals, so to speak, and make sure that we're communicating with the salespeople and helping them through the transition along with our customers. And then just in terms of pricing, I mean, the way we really think about pricing is we focus on value. You know, we have high win rates, and so pricing to us is more about selling the value of our products. And quite frankly, you know, we'll continue to focus on that. We have new products to offer. I think a stronger story with the new AI products coming out. And those are the things I'd really look to to be, you know, to strengthen the trend on pricing.

Awesome. Thank you so much for taking my questions.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Jonathan Ho with Wim Blair. Your line is open.

Hi. Good afternoon. In terms of your profitability guide for 2026, I know you talked a little bit about investments. Can you help us understand maybe where you see the most opportunity to place those investments? And, you know, what would be sort of the timeframe for us to see, you know, perhaps an inflection in growth as you spend more on R&D and sales and marketing? Thank you. Yeah.

Thanks. Great question. So from an investment perspective, obviously you've seen our yearly guide, but you also saw that we're investing upfront. And when that upfront investment is, it's really an AI enabling, continuing to AI enable our R&D team. So when you look at the world today that we live in, I believe that every engineer can be a 10 times engineer. And AI is not about by coding something or so on. It is about making your elite engineers 10 times more productive and and 10 times more focused on architecture. And so what do you have to do to enable that? Well, you want to invest in AI orchestration. That could be to help them automate workflows, to automate their validation and testing, to automate sort of that, you know, the rote stuff that they have to do so they can focus on the unique part. And so that's what we're doing in Q1, investing in that in the first half, in that AI tooling. Now, what you'll see after that is you'll see in the second half and beyond that we really don't need to ramp our R&D in terms of headcount as what you may have thought, right? We can be a lot more efficient. And so this is about laying continually the groundwork for R&D efficiency. You've got to invest a little in the AI tooling, and then you see a lot of that benefit from an R&D leverage, and you'll see that, obviously, as we continue our R&D percentage revenue downwards. And so, one, that's probably one of our bigger investments. The second is in the sale and marketing. We mentioned that really mid-last year, we started bringing on more reps, and those reps take about 12 months to rent. Well, one, not only do we continue to invest in enabling them, but we're hiring more teams, right? And we know what's in front of us in terms of the TAM for the next decade, one of the most durable TAMs you'll ever find in any industry, including security, where we operate on the far right of security, right? We operate the network. We operate the infrastructure, the highway to everything that you can think of. And so we want to take advantage of that and continue to ramp and hire from a sales perspective. But we're doing that very responsibly with this notion of being very efficient in R&D by investing in tooling. And so that's really our upfront investments in the first half.

And that's why you see what you saw from the guide on Q1, Q2 versus the rest. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Richard Poland with Wells Fargo. Your line is open.

Hey, thanks for taking my question. Just a quick one for me. I think it was Drew, you mentioned the geopolitical macro headwinds kind of happening over the last couple weeks. I just wanted to clarify on that. Is that something that, you know, you're starting to see show up in demand and pipeline? Or is it just kind of You know, you're observing what's going on in the macro environment, so you're taking some extra cautionary steps in the guide.

Fair question, Rich. I think, you know, it is something – I think we can all recognize that there's been more events in the last couple of weeks. So it is something just to consider in terms of being prudent in our mind. Keep in mind, we have a – in terms of – That area of the world, so to speak, we have a very small percentage of our business. So it's less about that and just more about, you know, what I would call kind of a more macroeconomic risk.

Okay, great. Thanks, guys. Just prudence.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Shrednick Kafari with Baird. Your line is open.

Yeah, thanks for taking my question. So the AI Fastpass is really interesting. It just has shifts focused from not just securing AI to securing X-ray with the AI-native fabric and the new modules that you announced. So as it pulls the conversation away from traditional kind of FSU-based bake-offs towards more broader discussion, can you talk a little bit about how how the AI fast path has been progressing in your pipeline right now? And then a quick follow up, please.

Sure. Yeah, it's a great question. Like we've always believed that ultimately nobody implements security unless it has a great end user experience. In the agentic world, performance matters more. Agents talk constantly, right? They can talk at a rate that's 100 times a human. And so it accentuates the need for a fabric that can operate and perform and be resilient worldwide. If you look at our infrastructure, it is the largest private cloud in the world. It is the largest highway or airspace for AI. And so those 120 plus data centers with our architecture and software and memory operating at high speed on all authentic traffic, that's a huge advantage for us. And what we tell customers is just try it, just measure it. you'll see a very, very noticeable performance difference, whether you're an AI agent or you're an application, you're a user, right? You're an IoT device. And so the AI fast path is the next evolution of that for the AI era. You're going to a coding application, right? You're going to any of the thousands of generative AI apps you can see on the AI index. We're going to be the fastest path to get there. We're going to handle that. We're not going to throw it on the public internet. We're going to get you there directly. And so for us, the AI FastPath is a big part of how we think about the agentic era. It's performance, resilience, in addition to security, and we're combining them all.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Eric Heath with KeyBank. Your line is open.

Hey, thanks for squeezing me in. It's all finished to the air. Sanjay and Drew, over 30%. Maybe just one for you, Sanjay, and maybe a quick one for Drew. Sanjay, just following up on some of your comments about the customer wins in the quarter being, I think, all of them competitive bake-offs. And I think we all kind of really appreciate the static set of competitors that's been for a long time. But there are some incremental competitors out there that have popped up in the last couple of years. So curious if you could just talk to whether the competitive set, who you're bumping into in these deals, is changing at all, and then Drew, if I could, just any high-level guardrails you want to give us on ARR for the year would be great. Thanks. Great.

So from a competitive perspective, we have, you know, 25 products. We just released four. You know, one of the great things about efficiency in R&D that you've seen, obviously R&D percentage revenue going down, obviously the supercharging effect with AI and the need to not have as, you know, not to hire as many from an R&D perspective, you're also seeing velocity increase. I think I previously said that we release on average two products a year or so. Well, we've already released four plus. And I think that trend will continue for us. And so we're very excited, obviously, about that supercharging. And as a result, because of the breadth of what we do, you do see different competitors. For example, in the data protection area, which, you know, data, frankly, is what drives the agentic world, we would have seen still a lot of the legacy folks. You can't imagine how much legacy – Broadcom Bluecoat and all the rest is out there and Symantec and Prelix and so on. Whereas perhaps in the traditional kind of web world, proxying web, you would see your competitors that you may see in a magic quadrant that you would expect. And then when we delve into sort of what I called about the AI fast path to performance, You really don't see anything there because the network's obviously just very different, very unique from that perspective. And so I think we hit across a cross-section of competitors, but what is noteworthy is our win rate of over 80%. If we get to a POC, a proof of concept, right, that has helped. And so our nirvana is just get to a POC, whether it's about enabling, securing AI, securing cloud, converging, consolidating your network infrastructure, That's why we're growing our sales teams. That's why we announced the GSI partnership and that win with the largest GSI. And that's why we continue, you know, to power through in the mid-market with our MSPs. It's just that's why we went public, to be blunt. Drive awareness. And so that awareness takes time. It's coming. And we definitely have a platform that when you get to knock that door open, we'll win.

And, Eric, on ARR, again, you know, while we don't guide, maybe I can be helpful with how to think about modeling. You know, last quarter we pointed to history. I would do the same thing. You can see that I think we were ARR was about a point below revenue growth. So, you know, I would say if I were modeling kind of at a point above, point below, something like that, right in that range. Awesome. Thank you, gentlemen. Yeah.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Shaw Eadall with TD Co-op. Your line is open.

Thank you. Hi. Good afternoon. Drew, maybe can you talk to us about ASP patterns in light rising memory prices?

I'll take that question. So, for us, when you look, first of all, at ASP, You know, our landing and our average ARR for deal size, you can calculate it, continues, you know, for our customers to continue to go up. When you look at memory, I think that in one case people often talk about that is when you sell boxes and appliances and everything shifts in memory. That's obviously not really what we do in the majority of cases for us. It's our infrastructure. It's our network. What runs on it is our software. And so we feel good about our guide for this year in terms of incorporating what you just said. Obviously, that's a fluid environment, so we'll watch that for next year. But we definitely feel good about the guidance we've given from a financial metric perspective that incorporates all of what you described. The reality is that for us, when you think about us, we process all this traffic. You can see it. You should go to the ai-index.netstrip.com. And when you look at that traffic, what matters there is what you do when you see it. And ultimately, that, in many cases, is our moat. It is uniquely take those transactions and generate very unique granular data that can then inform your security policies, your security analytics, optimization of that, your guardrails, and so on. And so for us, obviously, we're excited about continuing to drive more into our existing infrastructure, which can more than handle what we need to drive for this year.

Thank you, Sanjay.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Trevor Walsh with Citizens. Your line is open.

Great. Hey, team. Thanks for taking the question. Maybe just a quick one for you, Sanjay. I just wanted to square some of the comments that you made both in the prepared remarks and your responses to some of the questions. You said that the AI revolution is exposing legacy architectures within SASE. Is there something that Is that going to result in, like, just breaking of those legacy architectures or more just dissatisfaction just generally with performance? And then secondarily to that, is there some sort of leading indicator that investors could use to just determine whether or not more of that breaking or dissatisfaction is going to come once AI and agent traffic is getting to a certain point? Maybe the AI index you just released could give us clues there. Just trying to get a sense of that. when we really start seeing the wheels fall off potentially of other players?

Yeah, it's a good question. So I look at it in two sides. So one is the infrastructure and the network side, and one is security because you kind of need both. On the infrastructure and network side, the agentic era will expose networks that were built, for example, in the public cloud where you're going to get way worse performance. When you have more interactions back and forth, the performance difference becomes bigger. If you came big with cloud, it would become bigger with AI. And so, one, your infrastructure. The second is, for us, we run all services everywhere, 120 data centers. Everything we do runs everywhere. We don't hairpin people to a public cloud for one, to your own infrastructure for another. And so just the purity and the modernness of our architecture and our infrastructure, it leads to just better performance, and AI accentuates that. So, one, I do think the infrastructure and the network matters. of others gets exposed. The second is, remember, since the beginning of Nesco, we have always said, we're not trying to build a web proxy. We were building a modern API JSON proxy. And it sounds technical, but what does it mean? The language of AI is that. The language of AI is APIs and JSON. I have a patent sitting outside my door here, which is real-time interpretation of internet traffic at the API level. And the reality is that The AI era is about that. How do I say to someone that, hey, you can use a personal instance, well, you can't use a personal instance of Gemini, but you can use a corporate version. And if you want to send sensitive data there, you can only do that with a corporate version. How do I have all these policies that guardrail and enable people to use AI, yet satisfy the business policies they want? You need something that truly understands the new language of the Internet and which is really what AI essentials. And so for us, one of the engines to our car is a high-speed distributed in-memory API JSON proxy, and that's unique. And so I remember this customer who came to me and said, Sanjay, I bought a SASE. I bought it, and it was working. But then I started adopting AI and cloud, and I have to bypass 70% of all traffic because all it can do is block the app or allow it. I don't want to block AI. I don't want to allow it either. I want something more granular, right? And that customer moved all their traffic to Netskope, right? It's close to 100,000 users and agents and beyond. And they're very happy. And so I think that will happen more and more over time. But as you know, it's an enterprise and an enterprise doesn't do things instantly. And so that'll be a transition that will happen over the next many years.

Great. Thanks, all. Appreciate it.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, into the interest of time, our last question will come from the line of Michael Romanelli with Mizzou. Your line is open.

Yeah. Hey, guys. Thanks for squeezing me in here. So, Sanjay, you touched on this in prior response, but how is your sales capacity today compared to where you were a year ago, both in total as well as in the number of ramp reps and then Separately, I guess, how would you characterize or assess your pipeline, you know, as we head into fiscal 27? Thanks. Yeah, that's a great question.

So for us, we obviously started ramping, hiring more reps really full force last year. And you can see that in sort of the S&M spend as well as it ramped really mid-year last year. And it takes about 12 months for us to ramp those reps. And so if you look at that, it's really for us in the second half of the year when a lot of those reps will be fully ramped. And by the way, for fully ramped, as you know, when you get a rep, we don't throw them into a place and give them a bunch of existing accounts. They're hunting new Greenfield accounts. So they get on. They start hunting those accounts. They build their pipeline. They get the POC, do the MSA. And that's why you have those ramp times, to be clear. And then we are continuing to hire. And so we are building that rep funnel for next year as well. And so really that's the best way for you to think about it is a bunch of those reps, fully rent reps coming online in the second half of the year. Beautiful. Okay.

Great. Thank you. I would now like to turn the call back over to Lachelle for closing remarks.

Thank you, Tawanda, and thank you all for joining us today and also staying a few minutes over. We look forward to it.