Everpure, Inc. Class A common stock

Good day and welcome to Everpeer's fourth quarter fiscal 2026 financial results conference call. Today's conference is being recorded. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Paul Dyett, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to EverPure's fourth quarter fiscal year 2026 earnings conference call. On the call, we have Charlie Giancarlo, Chief Executive Officer, Tarek Robiadi, Chief Financial Officer, and Rob Lee, Chief Technology and Growth Officer. Following Charlie's and Tarek's prepared remarks, we will take questions. Our press release was issued after close of market and is posted on our website where this call is being simultaneously webcast. The slides that accompany this webcast can be downloaded at investor.purestorage.com. On this call today, we will make forward-looking statements which are subject to various risks and uncertainties. These include statements regarding our financial outlook and operations, our strategy, technology, and its advantages, our current and new product offerings, supply chain, hyperscaler opportunity, and competitive industry and economic trends. Any forward-looking statements that we make are based on facts and assumptions as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update them. Our actual results may differ materially from the results forecasted and the reported results should not be considered as an indication of future performance. The discussion of some of the risks and uncertainties relating to our business is contained in our filings with the SEC, and we refer you to these public filings. During this call, all financial metrics and associated growth rates are non-GAAP measures other than revenue, remaining performance obligations, or RPO, and cash and investments. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are provided in our earnings press release and slides. This call is being broadcast live on the Everpure Investor Relations website and is being recorded for playback purposes. An archive of the webcast will be available on the IR website and is the property of Everpure. Our first quarter fiscal year 2027 quiet period begins at the close of business Friday, April 17, 2026. With that, I'll turn it over to Charlie.

Thank you, Paul. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to EverPure's Q4 and fiscal 2026 earnings call. Q4 was an outstanding quarter. Our first billion-dollar revenue quarter capped off a strong performance for FY26 with full-year revenue of $3.7 billion. And we enter FY27 with strong momentum. Revenue in Q4 was driven by broad-based strength across our business, particularly in enterprise. We are executing a clear strategy to modernize and simplify data infrastructure for our enterprise and hyperscale customers amid rising AI demand, power constraints, and increasing operational complexity. Our enterprise data cloud architecture continues to strongly resonate with customers, with over 600 customers adopting Fusion since its introduction a year ago. Consistent with our core strategy of investing in data storage as high technology rather than a commodity, EverPure can now support practically all enterprise storage needs and use cases with our unified Purity operating environment and our Evergreen hardware platform. Purity, enhanced with Fusion, now adds a unified control plane to its unified data plane and enables customers to manage their global data as their own enterprise data cloud with consistent enterprise policies implemented in software. The focused investment in our enterprise business is translating into accelerating demand and growth. Our purity software, direct flash architecture, and evergreen promise have proven their flexibility and universality by extending smoothly into our FlashBlade EXA offering. As a reminder, FlashBlade EXA supports AI scale workloads at industry leading performance and efficiency. FlashBlade EXA has achieved industry leading ML perf benchmark performance and recently published the highest results in the spec storage AI image benchmark. This past quarter, in a strong competitive contest, we secured our first EXA customer and are in advanced stage discussions with dozens more. Our hyperscale business grew beyond our expectations in FY26. We have broadened and expanded our solution, and we've standardized on our financial structure, which Tarek will detail later. Entering FY27, we expect continued growth in our hyperscale solutions concentrated in the second half of our year, which is also incorporated in our guidance. This broad and increasing momentum is reflected in our strong FY27 revenue guidance of almost 19% year-over-year growth at the midpoint, which Tarek will also discuss in more detail. As I stated earlier, Everpure has now reached a point where we can support the full spectrum of our customers' data storage needs, from high performance to low cost, from tens of terabytes to tens of exabytes, from AI to backup, and all protocols, including block, file, and objects. We support all customer use cases, including all databases, all virtualization, containers, file systems, object systems, and Kubernetes. We deliver all of this through a single software operating environment combined with our direct flash technology and our unique evergreen architecture and business model. Today, they ensure our customers always have access to the latest technology. This set of capabilities has been developed because EverPure alone has invested in data storage and management as high technology rather than as a commodity. We now invest more R&D in data storage and management than any other competitor. Our continuing investment in innovation is increasingly focused on enabling our customers to better control and make use of their data for AI and analytics. We released our latest audited net promoter score, which is the gold standard for customer loyalty and satisfaction. We achieved an industry high NPS of 84 for calendar 2025. While much of the industry remains with scores in the 30s, we have maintained a score above 80 for more than a decade while increasing our customer base to over 14,500. This is yet one more reason why we continue to outperform all other competitors in the market. We have developed a strong brand that is well known for quality, consistent innovation, and strong customer care. Our position has strengthened to where we are now gaining franchise customers who put their trust in us to standardize their IT architecture on our platform for a majority of their storage infrastructure. We are now in position to not only help our customers automate their data storage, but increasingly to enable them to better manage their global enterprise data. With Fusion and our enterprise data cloud architecture, customers can apply policy-driven governance across workloads, moving beyond traditional storage to standardize, protect, and intelligently manage their data sets. This represents a meaningful evolution from infrastructure management to comprehensive data governance. Earlier this week, we announced a definitive agreement to acquire One Touch, which will accelerate our ability to help customers unlock the strategic value of their data and make it ready for AI. One Touch's technology delivers discovery, classification, governance, cyber resilience, data sovereignty and context to prepare data for AI and serve as a critical foundation for the enterprise data cloud and enterprise-scale AI deployment. Our rebranding and name change reflect our growth from operational storage to intelligent data management, empowering customers to extract greater value from their data in an increasingly AI-driven world. Our new name, EverPure, reflects both what we have created and where we are going. We are expanding our brand to align with our expanded horizon and to attract a much broader set of strategic personas. We are entering FY27 with strong momentum, and we expect continued growth across all four products and sectors. These include commercial, enterprise, government, and hyperscaler. our U.S. and international theaters, and our systems, software products, and services, such as evergreen subscriptions. Turning to the broader environment, we expect macroeconomic uncertainty to persist through the coming year. Strong component demand driven by tech titan AI buildouts has outstripped supply across the industry, dramatically increasing NAND, memory, and CPU prices. We expect that the industry, including Everpure, will see unpredictable component shortages, which could lead to extended lead times and potential shipment delays. As we have identified in previous calls, we have a highly distributed and resilient supply chain and have weathered past supply chain disruptions well. Supply chain constraints are operating as both a tailwind and a headwind in our hyperscale discussion. A bit of a tailwind as hyperscalers are more eager to accelerate their testing and certification of new sources of supply. And as a headwind to every vendor's ability to source the necessary components. Everpure raised prices on our product line on February 9th, reflecting the dramatic and rapid rise in component prices. I believe we were the last in our industry to raise prices. And I also believe that our increase was the lowest in the industry to protect our customers. Based on the extraordinary rapid rise in component costs, we expect product gross margins in Q1 to be at the lower end of our typical range of 65% to 70%. But we also expect them to recover through the fiscal year. We have built a diversified supply chain with contingency plans to reduce disruption risk, even as the industry faces shortages. Our longstanding and direct component supplier relationships and in-house hardware design provides us additional flexibility in addressing supply chain disruption. Our Evergreen model provides transparent pricing that protects customer economics. In addition, with our continuous improvements in performance and capabilities entitled in Evergreen, existing customers will benefit from our new data reduction software. This recent release of Purity enhanced data reduction, offsets our higher pricing by providing a cost per effective terabyte that is lower than our previous prices on some workloads. We are at a very exciting time in the story of our company, EverPure. We can now compete for all of our customer storage infrastructure. We provide the world's most consistent, comprehensive, and reliable data storage environment. Our enterprise data cloud architecture will allow customers to more efficiently manage their global data, and we are now creating the technology that will allow our customers to more easily prepare their data for their AI future. Our focus on investing in data storage and management as high technology is driving the accelerated growth that we see today. With that, I'll invite Tarek to provide further details.