Richard Wong
Analyst · Citi
Thank you, Kip, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. Before I review our detailed financial results, I want to emphasize that Q3 demonstrated the strength of our underlying business model that Kip and I discussed at our first earnings call together a year ago and highlighted again at our Investor Day back in September. We delivered durable revenue growth of 20% or more for 4 consecutive quarters while driving meaningful operating leverage across our expense base. Q3 was also our fifth consecutive quarter of non-GAAP operating profit and our seventh consecutive quarter of positive free cash flow. Now on to the specifics of our Q3 results. I'd like to remind you that unless otherwise stated, all financial results in my discussion are non-GAAP based. Revenue for the third quarter increased 20% year-over-year to $190.2 million, above the high end of our guidance range of $184 million to $190 million. This result was a record high for Fastly, and as I mentioned, the fourth consecutive quarter of 20% or more year-on-year revenue growth. The revenue strength in the quarter was driven by continued success in our go-to-market upsell and cross-sell motions as we see customers adopt more product suites within our platform. The upside was driven by better-than-anticipated traffic at some of our larger customers and continued success with our security products. At Investor Day, we highlighted our shift toward a single unified edge platform with 6 main product suites. Beginning in 2027, we're aligning our financial metrics to match this strategy by transitioning from 3 separate revenue lines, network services, security and other down to 1 consolidated revenue line. To give investors full visibility into platform adoption, we're introducing a new reporting metric, multiproduct adoption. This metric measures the percentage of large customers adopting 2 or more product suites and those adopting 4 or more product suites. In the third quarter, 74% of our large customers adopted 2 or more product suites, up 7 percentage points year-over-year and up 2 percentage points quarter-over-quarter. More importantly, 34% of large customers have now adopted 4 or more product suites, up from 30% in the second quarter and more than 3x the level we saw just 2 years ago. For more information on multiproduct adoption, including a description of the product suites and historical trend in view of this data, please refer to our investor presentation and supplement on our IR website. I will now review our prior 3 revenue line reporting. In the third quarter, network services revenue of $138 million grew 16% year-over-year. Security revenue was $44.7 million, which represented growth of 32% year-over-year and represented 24% of revenue. Recall that our security revenue growth faced tougher year-over-year comps as it was impacted by a large security win with a top 10 customer in the third quarter of 2025. However, on a sequential basis, security revenue has demonstrated growth in excess of 7% for every quarter in 2026. Our other products revenue of $7.4 million grew 37% year-over-year. We will report these 3 revenue lines one final time for the fourth quarter of 2026 before retiring them in favor of our streamlined single revenue structure and multiproduct adoption metrics. In the third quarter, our top 10 customers represented 39% of revenue, a moderate increase from 37% in the second quarter. Revenues from our top 10 customers grew 46% year-over-year. Revenue from our customers outside of our top 10 grew 8% year-over-year. Also, no single entity accounted for 10% of our revenue in the third quarter. A group of entities under common control as a single customer accounted for 12% of the company's revenue for the quarter. Our large customer count, which represents customers with more than $100,000 in annualized revenue in the quarter was 634 customers. Our trailing 12-month net retention rate was 119%, up from 117% in the prior quarter and up from 106% in the year ago quarter. This marks Fastly's sixth consecutive quarter of NRR expansion. The quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year increases were due to revenue increases in our larger customers as they expand their use of our platform. We exited the third quarter with RPO of $334 million, growing 24% year-over-year. The current portion of RPO was 81% of total RPO and grew 31% year-over-year. We believe improvements in our go-to-market motion have contributed to year-over-year RPO growth, though RPO will fluctuate quarter-to-quarter with the timing of large renewals. Given this variability, we continue to encourage investors to focus on our current RPO, which gives a more accurate indication of our revenue visibility and year-over-year progress. I will now turn to the rest of our financial results for the third quarter. Our gross margin was 65.8% in the third quarter, matching our record high for Fastly. Gross margin was 80 basis points above our guidance midpoint of 65% and up 300 basis points from 62.8% in Q3 2025. Our gross margin performance is driven by revenue scale relative to our cost-effective software-defined infrastructure. Combined with our continued financial discipline in our cost of revenue, we believe our gross margins are sustainable at these levels. This is further substantiated by our incremental gross margin flow-through on a trailing 12-month basis, increasing to 93% in the third quarter, up from 58% a year ago. Operating expenses were $94 million in the third quarter, coming in better than anticipated due to disciplined expense management and a nonrecurring tax benefit of $1.5 million that favorably impacted operating expenses. We had operating income of $31.2 million in the third quarter, exceeding the high end of our operating income guidance range of $20 million to $24 million. As mentioned, this upside was a combination of higher revenue and resulting gross profit flow-through as well as less-than-anticipated operating expenses. We believe this reflects the inherent operating leverage in our business model. This is demonstrated by our operating margin expanding from 7% in the third quarter of last year to 16% this quarter, expansion of approximately 900 basis points year-over-year. This is underscored by our incremental operating margin flow-through of 79% of revenue on a trailing 12-month basis, significantly above our long-term target of 30% to 40%. In the third quarter, we reported a net profit of $31.6 million or $0.17 per diluted share compared to a net profit of $11.1 million or $0.07 per diluted share in Q3 2025. Our adjusted EBITDA was $43.5 million or 23% of revenues in the third quarter compared to $25.7 million or 16% of revenues in the third quarter of 2025. Turning to the balance sheet. We ended the quarter with approximately $365 million in cash, cash equivalents, marketable securities and investments, including those classified as long term, a sequential increase of $28 million over Q2 2026. We also ended the quarter with a positive net cash balance of $41 million compared to $5 million 1 year ago. Our cash flow from operations was positive $40 million in the third quarter compared to positive $29 million in Q3 2025. Our free cash flow for the third quarter was positive $25 million, representing our seventh consecutive quarter of positive free cash flow. Our infrastructure capital expenditures were approximately 6% of revenue in the third quarter. As we discussed in prior quarters, we front-loaded our 2026 CapEx to ensure we have adequate equipment given supply chain constraints. We anticipate our CapEx spend will remain at a lower level in the fourth quarter, as I will discuss in a moment. In closing, the results from our first 9 months reflect disciplined execution and expanding platform reach. We believe this strengthens our underlying financial model and reinforces our conviction in our 2026 and longer-term goals. I will now discuss our outlook for the fourth quarter and full year 2026. I'd like to remind everyone again that the following statements are based on current expectations as of today and include forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially, and we undertake no obligation to update these forward-looking statements in the future, except as required by law. Our revenue model is primarily based on customer consumption, which can lead to variability in our quarterly results. Our revenue guidance reflects these dynamics in our business and is based on the visibility that we have today. Customers who trust us with one business problem bring us to the next. That's the engine behind our platform strategy, which as Kip discussed, is foundational to our success. Over time, we expect this to mean deeper relationships and a more durable revenue model. The strategy is working, and it gives us added assurance in the opportunity ahead. In the fourth quarter, we expect revenue in the range of $198 million to $202 million, representing 16% annual growth at the midpoint. We anticipate our gross margins for the fourth quarter will be 65.5%, plus or minus 50 basis points. As a reminder, our gross margin performance is highly dependent upon incremental revenue increases or declines relative to our infrastructure costs. We anticipate OpEx to increase mid-single-digit millions on a sequential basis due to increased go-to-market spend on incentives and seasonal marketing activities as well as increased IT spend. As I mentioned earlier, we incurred a $1.5 million nonrecurring tax benefit in the third quarter. For the fourth quarter, we expect a non-GAAP operating profit of $30 million to $34 million, reflecting an operating margin of 16% at the midpoint. We expect a non-GAAP net earnings per diluted share of $0.16 to $0.18. For calendar year 2026, we are raising our revenue guidance to a range of $744 million to $748 million, reflecting annual growth of 20% at the midpoint. We anticipate our 2026 gross margins will be 65.5%, plus or minus 50 basis points. We are increasing our non-GAAP operating profit expectations to a range of $107 million to $111 million, reflecting an operating margin of 15% at the midpoint and highlighting our improved profitability compared to 2025's operating margin of 4%. We expect our non-GAAP net earnings per diluted share to be in the range of $0.61 to $0.63. We continue to closely monitor supply chain dynamics, particularly regarding memory components and have taken strategic actions in the end of 2025 and through the first half of 2026 to mitigate potential impact. Our software-defined infrastructure is continuously improving, typically with lower capital requirements for expansion than legacy competitors. We are also implementing server component upgrades in our fleet to efficiently expand our capacity. This structural efficiency underpins our expanding gross margins, positions us to stay ahead of global traffic trends while maintaining strict capital discipline. For 2026, we anticipate our infrastructure capital spend will be approximately 10% of revenue compared to our previous guidance range of 10% to 12% of revenue as we are at the tail end of our front-loaded 2026 capacity expansion. We will continue to have a rigorous planning process to ensure that our capital investments align with demand. As a result, we are raising our 2026 free cash flow guidance in the range of $50 million to $60 million. To recap, we're seeing continued evidence that disciplined execution and growing platform adoption are translating into stronger financial performance. We believe our refined strategy to focus on the power of our platform is working, and we are evaluating ways to better align our financial disclosures to success. Before we open the line for questions, we would like to thank you for your interest and your support in Fastly. Operator?