Rubrik, Inc. Q4 FY2026 Earnings Call

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the rubric fourth quarter and fiscal year 2026 results conference call. At this time, all lines are in listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. If at any time during this call you require immediate assistance, please press star zero for the operator. This call is being recorded on Thursday, March 12, 2026. I would now like to turn the conference over to Melissa Franke, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Rubric's fourth quarter and fiscal year 2026 Financial Results Conference Call. On the call with me today are Bipul Sinha, CEO, Chairman and Co-Founder of Rubric, and Karen Chaudry, Chief Financial Officer. Our earnings press release was issued today after the market closed and may be downloaded from the Investor Relations page at www.ir.rubrick.com. Also on this page, you'll be able to find a slide deck with financial highlights that, along with our earnings release, includes a reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial results. These measures should not be considered in isolation from or as a substitute for financial information prepared in accordance with GAAP. During this call, we will make forward-looking statements, including statements regarding our financial outlook for the first quarter and full fiscal year 2027, our expectations regarding market trends, our market position, opportunities, including with respect to generative AI, growth strategy, product initiatives, and expectations regarding those initiatives, and our go-to-market motions. These statements are only predictions that are based on what we believe today, and actual results may differ materially. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and other factors that could affect our performance and financial results, which we discuss in detail with our filings with SEC. Rubric assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements we make on today's call. With that, I'll hand the call over to Bipple.

Thank you, Melissa, and thank you all for joining us today. Let me start by saying we ended the year with a spectacular Q4 that significantly exceeded our expectations. We accelerated net new subscription ARR growth to a record $115 million. For the full fiscal year, we generated tremendous free cash flow of about $238 million, which is more than 10 times the free cash flow for the prior fiscal year. This is a clear indication that we are indeed laying the foundation of a long-term, highly profitable growth business. With that, we have once again exceeded all guided metrics across top line and profitability. Here are five key numbers. First, subscription ARR reached $1.46 billion, growing 34% year-over-year. Second, our subscription revenue was $365 million, growing 50% year-over-year. Third, our subscription NRR remained strong once again above 120%. Fourth, customers with 100K or more in subscription ARR reached 2,805, growing 25% year-over-year. And finally, on profitability, we once again made material improvement in subscription ARR contribution margin, up over 950 basis points year-over-year. We generated $70 million in free cash flow this quarter. Accelerating growth while improving margins and growing free cash flow, as I stated before, at our scale is not only very impressive, but a rare combination. Now, let me explain why and how we got here. Enterprise AI and agentic work disruptions are creating significant opportunities for us, and we are leaning into it. Rubrik is a multi-product company built on a unique and highly differentiated platform that solves the most consequential problem across data, identity, and AI. We continue to deliver phenomenal results quarter after quarter because we are comprehensively winning against the competition and enabling enterprise AI acceleration. In fact, our competitive win rates have crossed 90% in Q4 as we continue to disrupt the data and identity protection market with our transformative products that deliver comprehensive cyber resilience. This is why we continue to accelerate our growth while our competition has stalled. At the same time, Rubik Agent Cloud aims to deliver dynamic, real-time AI agent controls to accelerate enterprise AI transformation. I will talk about Rubik Agent Cloud in a few minutes. But first, let me talk about why our products are transformative. We have built a single platform that understands data, identity, and application context. On top of this platform, we deliver two solution suites, Rubrik Security Cloud for cyber resilience and Rubrik Agent Cloud for accelerated AI transformation. Let me start with Rubrik Security Cloud. In our platform, we have the unique ability to bring together time series data and metadata across complex enterprise environments that span on-premises, sovereign, cloud, SaaS, and identity providers. We have built a single policy engine to deliver uniform, policy-driven automation for complete cyber resilience, including protection, security, and cyber recovery. On top of this, we have built a proprietary preemptive recovery engine that precalculates the clean points of recovery across data and identity. These make up Rubrik's true moat. This is how we deliver record-fast recoveries when our customers are compromised by ransomware and identity-based attacks. Our software architecture is hardware and platform-optimized to deliver cyber resilience to thousands of our enterprise customers. This is why we are winning the cyber resilience market. Rubrik is a true platform company, and we provide multiple independent paths for our customers to get started. Whether a customer buys a single product or the whole Rubrik security cloud suite, they get the same platform. In fact, our customers realize more value from our platform as they adopt more and more of our product, which is a testament of Rubrik's true platform strategy. We were the first to recognize the need for cyber resilience and its subsequent evolution in enterprises. which is what underpins our success. The trends are clear. Enterprise agentic AI transformation promises tremendous productivity gains. However, these agents also assume your identity and act on trusted data. If agents hallucinate or are compromised by bad actors, they can do 10 times more damage in one-tenth of the time. That exposes companies to unprecedented risk. Moreover, cyber attackers are actively deploying AI to breach businesses and governments around the world. In essence, AI has made the world more dangerous. The best metaphor we can provide is protecting your home. You can close the windows and put on the locks. But ultimately, you need a bunker underneath your house to survive the doomsday. So your cloud and AI transformation journey continues uninterrupted. Rubric security cloud is that bunker for enterprises. When ransomware inevitably hits, a LLM or wide code will not recover your business. Rubric will. We can do this because we have years of cyber resilience and enterprise customer experience built into our platforms. Rubik not only understands the complexity of enterprise data and identities, but also delivers the minimal viable services that companies need to run their digital businesses 24 cross 7. We help enterprises rapidly recover their services by quickly pinpointing the clean state of data and identities, all the while isolating the threat to prevent malware reinfection. The Rubric Bunker delivers complete cyber resilience across on-premises, sovereign, cloud, and SaaS applications. Rubric Security Cloud is powered by a unique and proprietary system of record of last resort of data and identity. This is our secret sauce. Let me provide two specific customer examples of legacy replacement in very large enterprises. First, Rubrik secured a major win with a Fortune 500 global hospitality company this quarter. The company chose Rubrik to enhance their cyber resilience and recovery speed from ransomware attacks, deploying our single platform across their hybrid and multi-cloud environments. This company displaced a deeply entrenched legacy provider and a cloud-native backup solution. And we also out-competed several next-generation vendors. Furthermore, the move is projected to deliver multi-million dollar savings by eliminating cloud-native backup costs. Second, a leading European financial services firm selected Rubrik as their strategic cyber resilience partner to meet stringent DORA and ECB guidelines, replacing their multi-decade legacy incumbent. Rubrik was selected for our single unified platform, providing data protection and resilience across the entire environment, including enterprise, cloud, and SaaS applications, as well as the mission-critical identity system. Speaking of SaaS applications, our SaaS protection had a particularly strong Q4, as customers look to rubrics for end-to-end risk and remediation across the mission-critical applications, including M365 and identity services. In fact, over 50% of Rubrik M365 bookings this quarter were attached to our identity solution. Let me give you one representative customer example. A major global logistics provider expanded Rubrik to protect M365, Active Directory, and AntraID, critical systems that run their mission-critical business operations. Rubrik displaced an incumbent new-gen competitor because our superior identity coverage and faster recovery time across these Tier 1 applications, reducing considerable business risk in case of a cyber attack or operational disruption. Next, let's talk about our identity business. Our identity line of business continues to be highly successful in garnering budget from CISOs. Extending rubric beyond our traditional CIO and CTO buying personas. We have been rapidly disrupting the identity protection market with our identity recovery and resilience product. This quarter, we announced protection for Okta Identity, making Rubrik the only identity recovery platform to expand Okta, Active Directory, and Antra ID. In just one quarter of selling, we have already seen notable deal activity for Okta recovery, and we are excited about what's ahead. Let me give you two specific examples of identity customer wins. A Fortune 500 U.S. financial services firm added Okta Recovery in a significant expansion that also included identity resilience suite, as well as protection for unstructured data and cloud data. This customer chose rubric to meet a board-mandated less than 48-hour recovery time objective. displacing a cloud-native backup solution and a legacy protection vendor. Second, a major U.S. healthcare provider also expanded the Arubic partnership this quarter, adopting identity resilience and unstructured data protection for over 10 petabytes of data. This strategic move is expected to cut Active Directory and Antra ID cyber recovery time from over 30 days to under four hours, substantially reducing potential downtime losses estimated at tens of millions in revenue daily. Now, let's talk about Rubrik Agent Cloud, which accelerates AI adoption with agent guardrail controls. Rubrik's mission is to secure and accelerate the world's AI transformation. I have already discussed the security and cyber resilience aspects of our business. Let's focus on how rubric accelerates AI transformation. Agentic AI is now a business imperative. While agents promise 100 times more productivity, they also introduce 100 times more risk. Since agents autonomously execute business processes, the cascading impact of agent hallucinations as well as cyber compromise will result in catastrophic damage for enterprises. While AI gives you a better, faster car, you need an intelligent, autonomous driving system for control to steer, change lanes, and brake safely. We believe enterprise needs a comprehensive AI operations platform that can dynamically monitor, control, and remediate agentic action. You need to have visibility into what agents, sanctioned or unsanctioned, exist in your environment and what they are doing. You also need real-time guardrains to dynamically authorize agentic interactions that comply with your company's policies and industry regulations. If agents get compromised or hallucinate, then you need a rewind button to undo destructive actions. Rubric Agent Cloud is this comprehensive AI operations platform. This is the intelligent, autonomous driving system that we provide, so our customers can safely drive fast with AI agents. Our predibase acquisition, which developed LLM fine-tuning and inference-serving platform, provides the AI firepower required to dynamically govern agentic interactions. By leveraging AI to control agentic work, agents can't leak sensitive data, can't say wrong things, and can't take wrong actions. AI controlling AI agents is key. After all, you can't bring a knife to a gunfight. ReadyBase is now integrated into the rubric platform, which uniquely understands the data, identity, and application layers to deliver the first-of-its-kind enterprise control layer for managing and guardrailing AI agents. Last quarter, we shared that Rubric Agent Cloud was in beta. Just a few weeks ago, we made Rubric Agent Cloud generally available, and we have a number of POCs ongoing across early AI adopters as well as Fortune 500 companies. While we are still in the early innings of a multi-year effort to scale our Rubik Agent Cloud suite, we believe that we are building the most consequential security and AI operations company for the AI era. We look forward to sharing more details about our interactions with with Rubrik Agent Cloud in the coming quarters and years. I couldn't be more happy with this quarter and annual results, and I'm excited about what's ahead. We are squarely focused on advancing our mission to secure and accelerate the world's AI transformation. In closing, I will leave you with three key takeaways. First, Rubrik is winning the cyber resilience market across data and identity. Second, we have accelerated our business growth while the competition has stalled. And third, we are defining the enterprise AI market with our unique and differentiated agent control and guardrail solution. To our shareholders, thank you for your trust. We are just getting started. it. And once again, to all rubricans around the world, I cannot be more appreciative of all the hard work and results we are creating. With that, I'm pleased to pass it over to our Chief Financial Officer, Kiran Chaudhary.

Thank you, Bipal. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'm pleased to note that we concluded this year with an exceptionally strong performance. This included record, net new subscription ARR with accelerated growth, and continued improvement in subscription contribution margin. This robust financial outcome demonstrates our focused execution and solidifies our leading position in the mission-critical cyber resilience market, a market that is benefiting from the ramping AI transformation. I'll start by briefly recapping our fourth quarter fiscal 2026 financial results and key operating metrics. and then I'll provide guidance for the first quarter and full year fiscal 2027. All comparisons, unless otherwise noted, are on a year-over-year basis. We are very pleased to have ended Q4 with subscription ARR of $1.46 billion, growing 34%. We added over $115 million in net new subscription ARR, another record amount for Rubrik. Continued adoption of rubric security cloud resulted in $1.29 billion of cloud ARR, up 48%. We're at the tail end of our cloud transition, with cloud ARR now representing 88% of subscription ARR as of Q4. We continue to see strong subscription net retention rate, which remained over 120% in the fourth quarter. We are very proud of the high customer retention and expansion dynamics of our business. expansion occurs through data growth in existing applications, securing more applications or identities, or adding more security products. In fact, adoption of additional security products contributed over 45% of our subscription net retention rate in the quarter, up from 34% in the year-ago period. In the fourth quarter, we saw significant growth in our largest accounts, with the number of customers contributing $100,000 or more in subscription ARR rising 25% to $2,805. These large customers now represent 87% of our subscription ARR, an increase from 84% a year ago. Furthermore, we added a record 32 customers with subscription ARR of $1 million or more, driving over 50% growth in our over $1 million subscription base. For our fourth quarter, subscription revenue was $365 million, up 50%. Total revenue was $378 million, up 46%. Revenue in Q4 primarily benefited from our strong ARR growth. However, we again had tailwinds from our cloud transformation, resulting in higher non-recurring revenue, which is accounted for as material rights. Material rights contributed approximately $18 million to revenue this quarter, modestly higher than our expectation. Revenue growth normalized for material rights was approximately 43% in the quarter. Turning to the geographic mix of revenue. Revenue from the Americas grew 45% to $268 million. Revenue from outside the Americas grew 51% to $109 million. Before turning to gross margins, expenses, and profitability, I would like to note that I will be discussing results on a non-GAAP basis going forward. A non-GAAP gross margin was 84% in the fourth quarter compared to 80% in the year-ago period. Our gross margin benefited from the revenue outperformance, including higher non-recurring revenue and greater efficiency in hosting costs. As a reminder, we look at subscription ARR contribution margin as a key measure of operating leverage and believe the improvement in our subscription ARR contribution margin demonstrates our ability to drive operating leverage and profitability at scale. Subscription ARR contribution margin was 12% in the last 12 months ended January 31st, compared to 2% in the year-ago period, an improvement of approximately 950 basis points. When normalizing for the $23 million in employer payroll taxes associated with the IPO in the prior period, the improvement was approximately 730 basis points. The improvement in subscription ERR contribution margin was driven by higher sales, the benefits of scale, and improving efficiencies and management of costs across the business. Free cash flow was $70 million compared to $75 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025. Free cash flow for fiscal 2026 was $238 million compared to $22 million for fiscal 2025. This increase was driven by higher sales, improved operating leverage, and optimizing our capital structure. Turning to our balance sheet, we ended the fourth quarter in a strong cash position with $1.7 billion in cash, cash equivalents, restricted cash, and marketable securities, and $1.1 billion in convertible debt. Let me now provide some context in our guidance. We are confident in our outlook, fueled by the robust cyber resilience market, our differentiated technology platform, and scaling of emerging products such as identity security. This momentum, coupled with our consistent and effective execution, positions us to achieve robust growth in subscription ARR. We plan to continue making operational investments across two key areas. First, we'll continue to invest in R&D to accelerate innovation in the large but developing markets of data, security, and AI. Second, we'll invest in our go-to-market, specifically targeting regions and verticals that offer the most attractive ROI. These go-to-market investments will also focus on scaling our newer innovations such as identity resilience platform and rubric agent cloud. Now turning to guidance for the first quarter and full year fiscal 2027. In Q1, we expect revenue of $365 million to $367 million, up approximately 31% to 32%, or approximately 36% to 37% when normalized for material rights. We expect material rights related to a cloud transformation to contribute approximately $4 million to revenue in Q1. We expect non-GAAP subscription ARR contribution margins of 10% to 11%. We expect non-GAAP earnings per share of negative $0.04 to negative $0.02 based on approximately 204 million weighted average shares outstanding. For the full year fiscal 2027, we expect subscription ARR in the range of $1,829 million to $1,839 million, reflecting a year-over-year growth rate of approximately 25% to 26%. We expect total revenue for the full year 2027 in the range of $1,597 million to $1,607 million, up approximately 27% to 28% when normalized for material rights. We expect material rights related to our cloud transformation to contribute approximately $10 million to revenue in fiscal year 2027. As we have always communicated, subscription ARR is the primary top-line metric to evaluate our business performance as it is not impacted by accounting dynamics related to our cloud transformation. In terms of profitability, we will continue to stay focused on taking advantage of the market opportunity in cybersecurity and AI while balancing growth with improved efficiency. Based on our current investment plans, we expect non-GAAP subscription AR contribution margins of approximately 13% for the full year fiscal 2027. We expect non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.07 to $0.27 based on approximately 232 million weighted average shares outstanding for the full year. We expect free cash flow of $265 million to $275 million. dollars. As always, we have included some additional modeling notes in our investor presentation. In closing, we are pleased with our strong performance in fiscal 2026 while exceeding our financial targets across the board. Looking ahead, we are excited about the opportunities awaiting us in fiscal 2027 and beyond. We plan to share more about our ambitious vision throughout the year, including at our Forward User Conference in Las Vegas. Please note that our inaugural investor day will be held on June 10th during the conference. More details on that event will follow. With that, we'd like to open up the call for any questions.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. We will now begin the question and answer session. Should you have a question, please press the star key followed by the number one on your touch tone phone. You will hear a prompt that your hand has been raised. Should you wish to decline from the polling process please press the star key followed by the number two in the interest of time we ask you please limit yourselves to one question each thank you one moment please while we assemble the queue your first question comes from matthew martino of goldman sachs please go ahead hey good afternoon thank you guys for uh letting me ask a question here uh people you mentioned ongoing agent cloud pocs with the fortune 500 and ai startups can you help us understand what those

two customer sets are each trying to solve for and whether the early poll is showing up more around the monitoring and guardrail side or around remediating rewind thank you thanks matt so as you would anticipate customer first are trying to understand how many agents do they have in the set system both sanctioned ones as well as shadow it unsanctioned one so first understanding of all the agents in the platform then they want to understand what these agents are actually doing and then once they have understanding of this kind of monitoring observability then the second step for them is to understand how they control it and this is where the real-time dynamic card rail that rubric has developed which is a unique solution we are actually demonstrating to our customers as how you can stop agentic interactions in real time the rewind piece will be a day two problem so to say once the customers get fully operationalized at a scale with agents then they will work on like agentic rewind and how do you undo the effects of unwanted action. But I think the first and the second piece is a high priority right now. Thanks a lot.

Thanks, Matt. Your next question comes from Fatima Boulani of Citi. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon. Thank you for taking my question. Dippo, I wanted to talk to you about the Sovereign Cloud opportunity and the release of a rubric Sovereign Cloud. We have, in principle, seen this notion of sovereignty and data sovereignty pop up in other pockets of software and other domains of cybersecurity. So I wanted to get to the bottom of what has been the customer impetus in order for you to formalize and really build an opportunity and a dedicated product effort around this.

And bringing that into kind of the numbers and how we think about the incremental opportunity what is that incremental or new cam that is now capturable as a result of this formed factor or flavor of rsc being available thank you thanks patima very very insightful question what has really happened is given the geopolitics of the world and how things have evolved in the last call it five to ten years every country is concerned about containing the supply chain containing the economic infrastructure which is data center compute infrastructure and actual data within their own borders and so they have like two kinds of requirements so requirement number one is where they want the government infrastructure to be totally sovereign constrained and in their own data center controlled by very high ring fence of security so that's one and then the second one is the public cloud infrastructure located in their countries but with additional control of what data can go out and what can come in within those infrastructures. So the two flavors of sovereign kind of infrastructure or cloud if you can call so. And AI is adding a new angle to this. In many countries they are also thinking about creating AI infrastructure in a way that they can rent it out to other countries and that ai infrastructure will be in the think about like a digital embassy and that digital embassy will run the ai infrastructure plus in a sovereign way so this is a new space it is fast emerging space there is a significant product changes development adaptation is required because of the additional control and an on-premises data center nature of it but we are engaged with a number of customers on this we are watching this market time is still evolving i don't have a good sense of how big the time would be but uh and how if it is a net new it is also unclear because before the sovereign concept the customers was consuming it services but in a more shared way or cloud way so it is also unclear if it is a net new but this architectural shift will require modernization uh infrastructure maybe cloud transformation so we believe that it's an interesting opportunity for us and we are actively working on it thank you

Your next question comes from John DeFucci of Guggenheim Securities. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Dippo, I have a question for you. So listen closely to your prepared remarks. And Rubrik sort of redefined its core market, right, not only with a new modern architecture that was needed because of shifts in the IT infrastructure of the world, but you also expanded it beyond its traditional boundaries from backup recovery to security against ransomware to what became what you guys defined as cyber resilience platform. And it sounds like you're doing it again from an identity perspective. So my question, though, is on AI. It's something I don't like to ask about because I think it's asked too much and I think people talk about it too much. But should we be thinking about AI as another technology shift that will need the IT infrastructure of the world to adjust, which require something you've talked about all the time, and that's continuous innovation to address, not simply the application of old technology, which I think is sometimes what's happening out there. I guess, in other words, is there more to come from a rubric on this topic and even others from a technology perspective that have similar DNA to adjust to a changing world? I'm sorry for a long-winded question.

No, that's a good question, John. Thank you so much. Rubric is not a traditional company. Rubric is a living and breathing entity that has no finish line. And we are always thinking about how do we help our customers as they adopt newer technology, they go through their own platform transition, and how do we be like two miles ahead of them, not 200 miles ahead of them, but positively surprise them with newer and newer solutions. And our original vision was that natural disaster and human error doesn't happen every day, but cyber disaster is the biggest problem in our industry, and we built rubric to solve for cyber disaster in terms of cyber recovery and cyber resilience. And we created that market, we are dominating that market, and then we saw was that identity-based attacks had become a real problem for our customers. And if you look at the recent attacks with BrickStorm and Cypress, the Scattered Spider, they are attacking identity-based systems. So we built an identity solution in like most comprehensive identity recovery and identity resilience set of products. And I'm very happy to report that in Q4, we crossed 900 customers just on identity. So, in just three, four quarters of selling, we have now crossed 900 customers. In Q3, we had reported that we had crossed 400 customers. Now, we have crossed 900 customers. And it is the fastest growing product in the history of our company. But identity we built two years ago, we are now building a new escurs in AI because our customers want to adopt AI. They are concerned about the risk of AI, because if the agents get compromised, then somebody can be controlling their business sitting in North Korea, and they don't want that. So they want agentic guardrails, that guardrail to be in real time. For example, even if you have an agent that has access to sending emails, you don't want them to send an email to everybody in Guggenheim all the time. So every agentic action has to be judged and stopped or allowed based on every action. So we are building a very comprehensive platform for agentic operations for management, control, and rewind of AI agents. And we believe our platform's unique ability around data, identity, and applications gives us a very natural position to really create the most important solutions to accelerate enterprise AI adoption. I always am a huge believer in non-consensus ideas. And we are building the most important AI company that nobody is focused on. and we'll continue to build rubric into where our customers are going and where our markets are going, and we'll continue to be on the leading edge.

That sounds exciting. We'll be watching, but one subtle thing in everything you said was, at least I take away from it, is listening closely to your customers. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Your next question comes from Eric Heath of KeyBank Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Hey, thanks for taking the question, and a nice set of results here and guidance as well. Kind of taking a different direction in the question here, and obviously broader outside of rubric and software, there's some concerns on memory pricing. So Bipple, Kieran, I wanted to get some of your thoughts and feedback on how we should think about your indirect exposure to memory pricing. Are there any risks from higher memory pricing or longer lead times affecting customers procuring Rubik appliances through your partners or willingness to engage in infrastructure modernization projects? So just high-level, how should we think about it? And then if there's any assumptions and been in the guide, just curious to hear any thoughts there. Thanks.

Eric, this is Kiran. I'll take that question. So we are obviously a software company and we are in the business of selling software to our customers, whether self-hosted or in the cloud. But all software runs on some hardware, which requires these components including memory. So far, we're watching the situation closely, and we haven't seen a significant impact on our business. Obviously, there's a portion of our business where customers self-host and they procure hardware. And we'll work with our customers when needed to ease for them. But so far, we haven't seen any material impact on our business as reflected in the results. Now, coming to your question on guidance, I can again make some broad comments there beyond just the assumptions on radio hardware. But we've been very pleased with our Q4 and fiscal year 26 results. It was a quarter of record net new RR dollars in terms of $115 million as well as acceleration of growth. And when you look at our guidance, the subscription ARR metric, which is the key metric in which we measure success or momentum in our business, the Net New Era Growth Guide was higher than the start of last year, and that's really a reflection of the momentum we see in the business. I'll also add that we talk about our company in terms of three businesses. One is the largest business with data protection and cyber resilience business, which is mission-critical, large, still growing, and we believe is largely underpenetrated. penetrated. And we are very well positioned competitively there.

So that's going to be a key driver for growth when you look at this year.

We talked about the identity business earlier on the call. Lots of momentum there. That's our business where we sell products more so to the CISO and lots to build there. The assumption on AI, while we are very excited, is we've not assumed much when we talk about fiscal 27. The feedback's promising, but we'll have to see how the year goes. We've also considered the overall environment, business macro environment, as well as the hardware supply issues you mentioned, and you've taken into account what we see right now and don't see a lot of impact at this very point. In terms of guidance, our approach has been similar. We want to put forward numbers, which based on all the inputs we have today, but want to put forward something we feel really good about in terms of delivering. And as we have progressed in the public markets and now entering the third year, it is natural as another software business is that the results will tend to converge a little bit closer more to guidance over time, and you'd expect to see that as well. Hopefully, that's given you context on how we thought about guidance.

Yeah, very thorough.

Thank you, Eric. Next question comes from Brad Zelnick of Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Thank you so much, and congrats on just a blowout Q4. in a phenomenal year. Kieran, I guess my question is for you. I appreciate all the reasons why the handoff and go-to-market leadership to Jesse Green should be seamless. But how should we think about the possibility of any interruption and extent? You may have contemplated this in your guidance.

Brad, thank you so much for the question. Let me give you a little bit of a sense of how we thought about it. We hired Jesse almost three years ago with this in mind that he will start as leader of America and over time will be the successor for Brian. And so he has been a CRO in training for the last almost three years because he was running America in MongoDB. So he came to Rubric with this kind of clear path to be the CRO. So it was a very natural and easy transition for us. Obviously, we are always paranoid about every aspect of our business and keep thinking about what are different risks, but the transition has gone very smoothly. The team is stable and in place and executing, and again, the opportunity in front of us with respect to three lines of business, data protection, identity resilience, and AI, all three are very exciting. And we have six, seven different ways to land our platform to our customers. Customers don't have to buy our core product or first product to start with Rubik. They can buy either just cloud, just identity, just on-prem. So our sellers see multiple different ways to succeed. And now they're selling a true portfolio of products, which actually creates opportunities for them and also stability in the team.

Very helpful. Thank you.

Our next question comes from Greg Moskowitz of Mizuho. Please go ahead.

Great. Thank you for taking the question. So really terrific identity momentum and certainly an exciting opportunity ahead with Agent Cloud. That being said, Biple, in a time when seemingly every investor is questioning the durability of their software portfolios, do you have any concerns about data recovery and resilience being meaningfully automated by AI over time, and potentially impacting your core business value prop or wallet share with customers over the long term? It would just be helpful to get your perspective on this.

RUBRIC is a very large and complex piece of software. And it is an enterprise scale board with about a dozen years of soaking time with thousands of customer feedback and customer use cases in a large enterprise environment that has been built into this. And so it is not something that you can vibe code on LLM can solve. And we are the system of record of last resort around data and identity when a large bank or large hospital face a ransomware attack. And at that time, Rubrik is there to help their business come back online and get going. moreover as i said in my prepared remarks rubric is a hardware optimized platform optimized software so and we have thousand engineers working on it on a on a daily basis to kind of enhance it and take customer feedback and and soak in time with our products so i don't believe that we have of any disruption risk at all from AI. The second important thing is, we are also not an orchestration application software. We are a data infrastructure company. And you know, system of record data management is the most important capability you need for this AI transformation. Because if you have no data or the integrity or confidence in the data or the availability of the data, then you have no AI. Data is the foundation of AI. And Rubrik is the foundation data infrastructure software. We are not price our product based on number of employees in the company. We price our product based on the size and volume of the data. So Rubrik's importance only grows with the growth of AI and AI transformation of the enterprise. And we want to accelerate that transformation. That's why we introduced Rubrik Agent Cloud. Rubrik's stated mission is to secure and accelerate world's AI transformation. Because when world goes through more AI transformation, it has more data, more software, more cyber threat, larger surface area of attack, more agents means more surface area of attack, more cyber compromise. You need more cyber resilience. you need more cyber recovery. So we believe that our opportunity is only, if we believe that our opportunity is only growing and that is reflected in our results. If you look at our results, we deliver the most clean and complete results of any cybersecurity company. And that is not an accident. Thank you.

Thank you, Devol, appreciate it.

Your next question comes from Todd Kouplan of CIBC.

Please go ahead. uh yeah good evening everyone um you had record net new in the quarter uh as we think about uh the coming year um any any i guess uh pull forward in q4 looks like uh the q1 guide is seasonally lower by quite a bit could you just talk about those dynamics and whether or not you had any pull forward in Q4. Thanks a lot.

I thought this, Karen, I'll take that one. So we had a very strong Q4, $115 million accelerating growth, but I would say there's a broad momentum quarter, both large and small deals. And, you know, we have spoken about earlier, we'll always have some deals which close earlier, close later. That's the nature of the enterprise software business. That's why we look at our business from a net near out on an annual basis and really pleased with the 20% growth there. And I won't call out anything from Q4 impacting Q1. Just I would remind everybody that last year Q1 was fairly unique. When you look at Q4 in the previous year versus Q1, there was a small dip. So it's a tougher compare when you look at growth rate, but from an overall scale perspective, and again, if you look at it on a full year and net new year basis, the starting point for the guide is stronger in terms of growth than last year.

Thank you, Todd.

Your next question comes from Junaid Siddiqui from Truist. Please go ahead.

Thank you for taking my question. You know, your growth shows that you're continuing to take market share, making significant inroads and displacing these legacy vendors, as you've cited. You know, how much of a runway do you think is left in displacing that legacy base? And maybe if you could just touch upon the competitive environment at the quarter. Thank you.

Thank you, Junaid. We are very early. in legacy replacement this is a very large and deep market and as we are doing cyber resiliency transformation specifically for the data center environment we have a tremendous opportunity to continue to displace a legacy vendor our win rate against the data protection vendors across the board is north of 90% in Q4. I'll repeat, north of 90%. The only deal that we are losing is the fight that we are not in. We are figuring out how do we get in in more fights, more routes to market, more parts of the world, and continue to disrupt this market. And while we are disrupting the legacy space we are opening up markets around cloud around m365 around identity and with ai this new rubric agent cloud so not only we have disrupted uh the the legacy backup and recovery data protection market but we have vastly expanded this market and completely redefined it to position this towards AI. And we are leaning into the AI and agentic disruption to really create, again, as I said, the most important security and AI operations company.

Thank you.

Our next call comes from Keith Bachman of BMO. Please go ahead.

Hi. Many thanks for taking the question. Vipul, this is also for you. I wanted to go back to the agent cloud seems like a very interesting opportunity as we look out over the horizon but i wanted to get your perspective on a few things a who do you see as the competition there's lots of companies that you talk about the monitoring control plane if you will of agents and therefore who do you see as your competition for this particular sector and b how do you think about how your go-to-market may transition. So for instance, at BMO, the folks who buy Rubricks Cloud for our backup, they're not the same people who would be buying a tool for monitoring, controlling agents. And just wondering how you think about how you might need to make, if any, any changes to go to market and then see when do you think we would be in position to talk about contribution of agent cloud to your results even in any kind of metrics you may be able to provide when when do you think that'll be that's it for me many thanks thank you Keith so let me take the first question about this market this agent control and governance market is a new market and it's still very early days of this market and as you can imagine everybody with with a mother is jumping into this market and most of the cyber security

observability ml observability companies are now repositioning themselves as as agentic observability agentic governance model my belief is that the traditional cyber security companies or people in those cybersecurity companies will not be suitable for this market because traditional cybersecurity is all about rule-based platform and they are not in the real-time control of action. This market is about dynamic control and you need to bring and AI to control agentic action. And AI requires model engineers. And most of the cybersecurity company, probably none of the cybersecurity company or these startups have any model engineering. We brought Predibase to solve this problem. And we have a, which we believe we have a unique solution to control agentic action with AI to really drive intent-based understanding of action and stopping it. So again, the market is very crowded, a lot of noise, but we believe that we have a unique perspective and solution in this market. Time will tell how this develops and how we grow, but we are excited. In terms of the buyer, again, this is a new market. Somebody under the IO organization will be the buyer. CIO is our ultimate buyer for our data protection business, so we have some convergence with the ultimate buyer. Some organizations we see chief data officer, chief AI officer interested in this space. Some organizations we see engineering team interested in this space.

We'll figure out how it all develops, but we like what we see so far, and we'll keep updating you as we make progress in this space. okay many thanks people your next question comes from james fish of piper sandler please go ahead hey guys thanks for the question uh people for you with the increasing agentic workloads and data being created are you seeing an exponential increase in the amount of data even more so than that sort of traditional workload and and how you're able to kind of compress this down to that enterprises just aren't overwhelmed with with the data and then just as a follow-up on and go to market side, you guys talked that up. How much capacity are you guys looking to add and how did productivity finish for the year? Thanks, guys.

Thanks, James. Obviously, AI requires data and there is definitely that data growth associated with AI. Having said that, agentic deployment in the enterprise is still early and the main hurdle has been governance and security. And that's the problem we are solving. So, I anticipate when the enterprises get fully operational on agents, they will have, again, more usage and production of data. So, we are even very excited about this market. In terms of, like, how much we are going to add from this, again, this is early days for Rubik Agent Cloud. We are still learning and going through our process, just like what we did for identity last year. where we went to work with the customer to understand their problems, understand how tuned our solution was before actually scaling. And we are going through that learning process right now.

Thank you, James.

Your next question comes from Shreem Kofari from Baird. Please go ahead.

Thanks for taking my question. So, Bepo, I know you said time will tell, where you guys have been framing these products as S-curve. And it already feels, of course, identity recovery is moved from proof point to real growth factor. And I know you said it reflects multiple years of work versus agent cloud still early. Of course, I wanted to ask you just if you have to characterize where identity sits today versus your original expectations around the S-Core? And then how should we think about the difference overall from an S-Core perspective in terms of timing, relative magnitude, and size? Again, I mean, I know it's still early, but just curious how you are thinking about those.

Sure. Thank you. If you look at our history, Rubrik is a multi-product platform company. And as I said before, the value from the platform increases as our customers adopt more of Ruby platform. And over the years, we have multiple products that we have scaled to 100 million plus ARRs in a short period of time. And as I said, Identity was the fastest growing product for us. In fact, it did exceed our expectation as how fast the product has scaled. Also, our engineering team did a tremendous job of building an amazing product and also building an amazing set of capabilities, not just identity recovery, but identity resilience, which is both before and during attack, plus also creating an Okta solution, which we are seeing, again, early high interest from our customer base. So we are committed to building a long-term company. The long-term company can only be built by stacking us curves. We are always looking over the horizon and thinking what else should we be building? How else we can serve our customers better? How do we become a long-term strategic partner to our customers so that we learn from them, we build for them, we serve them in a way that creates a multi-decade partnership with them?

Great.

There will be no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back over to Vipul Senha.

Thank you so much, everyone, for your time today. As I said on the call, we remain very excited about the opportunities in front of us. Both cyber resilience and AI resilience and AI operations remain strong opportunities in front of us. Our team is dedicated to making sure that our customers go through AI transformation in a low-risk, risk-free manner and really take advantage of the productivity promised by AI. Thank you so much again for your trust. See you in a quarter.

Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.