GitLab Inc. reported stronger-than-expected earnings for the third quarter of 2024, with earnings per share (EPS) surpassing analyst forecasts. Despite this positive financial performance, GitLab's stock experienced a slight decline in aftermarket trading.
Key Takeaways
- GitLab reported an EPS of $0.23, exceeding the forecasted $0.15.
- Revenue for Q3 reached $196 million, marking a 31% year-over-year growth.
- Stock price fell by 0.13% in aftermarket trading despite earnings beat.
- SaaS revenue grew by 44% year-over-year, now comprising 29% of total revenue.
- Non-GAAP operating income saw a significant increase to $25.9 million.
Company Performance
GitLab's performance in the third quarter showcased robust growth compared to the same period last year. The company achieved a 31% increase in revenue, driven by strong demand for its DevSecOps platforms and new product offerings. GitLab continues to expand its customer base, with over 9,500 customers contributing at least $5,000 in annual recurring revenue (ARR). This growth is occurring amidst a competitive landscape, where GitLab is gaining ground against rivals like GitHub and Atlassian (NASDAQ:TEAM).
Financial Highlights
- Revenue: $196 million, a 31% increase year-over-year.
- Earnings per share: $0.23, compared to a forecast of $0.15.
- Non-GAAP operating margin: 13.2%, improving by 1,000 basis points year-over-year.
- Dollar-based net retention rate: 124%.
- Total (EPA:TTEF) remaining performance obligations (RPO) grew 48% year-over-year to $811.8 million.
Earnings vs. Forecast
GitLab's EPS of $0.23 significantly surpassed the forecasted $0.15, representing a positive surprise of approximately 53%. This earnings beat is notable when compared to previous quarters, reflecting the company's effective cost management and revenue growth strategies.
Market Reaction
Despite the earnings beat, GitLab's stock price declined by 0.13% in aftermarket trading, closing at $66.48. This movement contrasts with the company's 52-week high of $78.53 but remains well above its 52-week low of $40.72. The stock's slight dip may reflect broader market trends or investor caution despite strong financial results.
Company Outlook
Looking ahead, GitLab has provided guidance for Q4 revenue between $205 million and $206 million, indicating a 25-26% year-over-year growth. For the full fiscal year 2025, the company anticipates revenue to reach $753 million to $754 million, with continued investment in artificial intelligence and platform expansion expected to drive future growth.
Executive Commentary
"We believe it's still early. We think that the vast, vast majority of enterprises are on DIY DevOps today," said Sid Brandi, emphasizing the growth potential in the DevOps market. New CEO Bill Staples added, "As I look at recent technology trends, including all the rapid advancements in AI, I believe the ability for software to transform our world is enormous."
Q&A
During the earnings call, analysts inquired about the impact of AI on productivity, with GitLab reporting productivity gains of up to 50% for customers using AI tools. There was also interest in the company's transition to potential consumption-based pricing and its implications for future revenue streams.
Risks and Challenges
- Market saturation in the DevOps sector could limit growth opportunities.
- Economic uncertainty may impact enterprise spending on software solutions.
- Competition from established players like GitHub and Atlassian poses a continuous challenge.
- Rapid technological changes require ongoing investment in innovation.
- Potential disruptions in partnerships, such as with AWS, could affect service offerings.
GitLab's strong financial performance and strategic initiatives position it well for future growth, though challenges remain in navigating a competitive and rapidly evolving market landscape.
Full transcript - Gitlab Inc (NASDAQ:GTLB) Q3 2025:
Conference Moderator: Good day, everyone, and welcome to today's GitLab Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2025 Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in view and listen only mode. Later, you will have the opportunity to ask questions during the question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question, please use the raise hand function located in the menu of your Zoom (NASDAQ:ZM) controls at the bottom of your screen. In addition, please ensure your Zoom name reflects your full name and the firm you are joined with.
And if you are joining via phone only, you may press star 9 to ask a question. Please note this call is being recorded. I will be standing by should you need any assistance and it is now my pleasure to turn the conference over to Kelsey Turcotte.
Kelsey Turcotte, Investor Relations, GitLab: Good afternoon. We appreciate you joining us for GitLab's Q3 fiscal year 2025 financial results conference call. With me are Sid C. Brandi, our Co Founder and Executive Chair of the Board Brian Robbins, our CFO and Bill Staples, our newly appointed CEO. During this afternoon's call, we will introduce Bill, provide commentary on our Q3 results and guidance for the Q4 fiscal year 2025.
Before we begin, I'll cover the Safe Harbor statement. I'd like to direct you to the cautionary statement regarding forward looking statements on Page 2 of our presentation and in our earnings release issued earlier today, both of which are available under the Investor Relations section of our website. The presentation and earnings release include a discussion of certain risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors that could cause our results to differ from those expressed in any forward looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. As is customary, the content of today's calls and presentation will be governed by this language. In addition, during today's call, we will be discussing certain non GAAP financial measures.
These non GAAP financial measures exclude certain unusual or non recurring items that management believes impact the comparability of the periods referenced. Please refer to our earnings release and presentation materials for additional information regarding these non GAAP financial measures and the reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measure. I'll now turn the call over to Sid C. Brandi. Sid?
Sid C. Brandi, Co-Founder and Executive Chair, GitLab: Thank you for joining us today. And before I get to the numbers, I couldn't be more excited to welcome Bill Staples to the team. This afternoon, we announced Bill will succeed me as CEO of GitLab. He will also take a seat on the GitLab Board. And I'll continue on as Executive Chair of the GitLab Board.
As I have gotten to know Bill, his passion for software and commitment to innovation makes me confident he is the right person to lead the company going forward. Over his career, Bill has an impressive track record of building and scaling enterprise software organizations. He most recently served as CEO of New Relic (NYSE:NEWR) and held senior leadership roles at Adobe (NASDAQ:ADBE) and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT). I couldn't be more excited to welcome Bill to the team. Congratulations.
Bill, over to you.
Bill Staples, Newly Appointed CEO, GitLab: Thank you, Sid, and good afternoon, everyone. I'm humbled to have been asked by Sid and the board to take on the role of GitLab CEO. I've spent nearly 3 decades building developer platforms and tools, and I know our customer and category very well. I'm convinced that we have a significant opportunity ahead of us. We've all seen how software has changed all aspects of our lives and transformed every business into a software driven business.
However, I believe we're still in the early stages of the software transformation, which I expect AI to further accelerate. In my view, there's never been a better time to serve developers and GitLab offers the best and most comprehensive platform to do that. We sit at the heart of the software development lifecycle, improving the development experience for everyone involved and enabling customers to create better quality software faster for enterprises. I look forward to rolling up my sleeves, spending time with customers, partners, and you, as well as GitLab team members. Sid, I'm honored to take the helm of the company that you worked so hard to build.
Thank you for entrusting me with your vision. Now, I'll turn the call back to you.
Sid C. Brandi, Co-Founder and Executive Chair, GitLab: Thanks, Bill. I really look forward to working with you. Turning back to the business, I want to talk about a few things. First, our really strong Q3. 2nd, our competitive advantage in AI and where we are going.
And finally, the tremendous momentum we are seeing with GitLab Ultimate. We executed well and once again we exceeded both revenue and profitability guidance. 3rd quarter revenue increased 31% year over year to $196,000,000 And consistent with our commitment to responsible growth, our non GAAP operating margin reached 13.2%. This is an increase of over 1,000 basis points year over year. From cybersecurity threats to compliance mandates, CTOs, CIOs and CISOs are facing increasingly complex challenges.
Despite all of this, organizations need to accelerate the pace of software development to remain competitive and respond to ever increasing customer expectations. This is why our DevSecOps platform resonates so well. On the AI front, we continue to build momentum with GitLab Duo Pro and Enterprise. Customers are realizing tangible value with it. 1 recently told us that 40% of their developers are saving more than 2 hours per week with Duo.
And another customer is seeing productivity improvements of up to 50%. In their first purchase with GitLab, Emirates, the world's largest international airline, chose Ultimate and Duo Pro. After comparing different AI powered developer tools, it was our platforms, building security and compliance capabilities and our AI code assistance that made us the choice. Another new customer, OxBlue, a leading global provider of construction video camera services, chose Ultimate and Duo Enterprise in a competitive assessment against GitHub. This is because of our ability to improve the developer experience across the entire software development lifecycle, including productivity improvements and security.
The combination of Ultimate and Duo Enterprise is a powerful one. While there are many AI solutions that can generate code, we go beyond that. We integrate AI throughout the software development lifecycle. And we serve all stakeholders involved in shipping grade software, including product managers, security engineers and operations teams. To take advantage of our end to end AI capabilities beyond the code creation, F5 moved from Duo Pro to Duo Enterprise in Q3.
An international insurance and financial services company expanded their ultimate deployment and purchased Duo Enterprise. By the end of 2024, they will have replaced 4 point products, saving over $2,000,000 They plan to consolidate more tools over the next 3 years, securing their entire software supply chain with a single DevSecOps platform. And with Duo Enterprise, they estimate that their engineering teams will spend up to 45% less time on mundane tasks like writing code, allowing them to spend time on more strategic valuable work. LATAM Airlines (NYSE:LTM), the largest airline in Latin America and a new GitLab customer selected Ultimate and Duo Enterprise in a competitive evaluation between us and several security AI and CICD point solutions. Now letM can consolidate their software toolchain, reduce costs and improve productivity.
And they can leverage our extensive security scanner coverage and AI throughout the software development life cycle. Looking ahead, we intend to be the vendor customers choose to partner with for a comprehensive approach to AI. There are three reasons we believe we are uniquely positioned to do this. 1st is our end to end DevSecOps platform. To be effective, AI models need context.
And our platform's unified data store allows us to give the AI more and more relevant context. 2nd, customers value security when it comes to AI. I'm excited to share that GitLab Duo Enterprise customers can now deploy self hosted models. This is a significant differentiator for us. With self hosted models, customers can implement AI capabilities without their private data leaving the organization.
This lowers the risk of security breaches and enables adherence to data protection laws. Recently, a large U. S. Government agency chose to add 2,000 GitLab Duo enterprise users to their existing ultimate licenses to provide their developers with an AI experience in an offline environment. They chose GitLab Duo because they could use their own self hosted large language models with their existing GitLab instance.
Finally, customers need to trust the AI they are using. This concern is raised at all levels of our customers' organization, including the Board of Directors. We partner with LLM vendors who do not use our customers' proprietary code to train their models. And we have adopted a transparency and privacy first approach to safeguard customers' data and IP. Earlier this week, we announced a bundle offering for GitLab Duo with Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) Q, allowing developers to create and deploy high quality secure code faster on AWS.
The joint offering integrates AI capabilities from GitLab Duo and Amazon Q into a single interface for AWS customers using GitLab Ultimate. GenAI Innovation started with AI powered code creation, which we offer in GitLab Duo Pro. With the introduction of Duo Enterprise, we expanded AI to everyone in the software development lifecycle. We anticipate the next evolution in AI will be Agentik, where AI will be autonomous and proactive rather than prompt based and reactive. Agentik AI is the foundation of GitLab Duo Workflow, an autonomous agent for end to end software development that we shared a preview of earlier this year.
This is where we see the industry going and we intend to be the leader. Now I'll move on to the success we're seeing with Ultimate. There are multiple drivers creating demand for Ultimate and interest from partners like AWS. These include integrated security and compliance, GitLab Dedicated and, as I discussed, Duo Enterprise. Ultimate has now reached 48% of our total ARR.
During the quarter, Indeed, the number one job site in the world moved from GitLab Premium to Ultimate. Prior to the upgrade, Indeed migrated thousands of projects from a legacy competitor to GitLab, increasing daily pipelines by 79% and cutting hardware costs by up to 20%. In Q3, they chose Ultimate to consolidate multiple tools into one platform for source code management, CICD and security. Ultimate creates a paradigm shift in how customers can embed security in the earliest stages of software development. We also seamlessly integrate security checks and guardrails as the code is being written.
Our recent Forrester study found that Ultimate customers can decrease their incident response times from 1 month to 1 hour. USAA is one of our longest standing customers. With Ultimate, they have been able to boost the productivity and efficiency of their developers by setting and enforcing security and compliance scans and shifting security left. In addition, a large global supermarket chain with 12 1,000 stores in 18 countries upgraded to Ultimate to take advantage of our platform's full suite of security and compliance features. With Ultimate, they've told us they expect to save 90 minutes per developer per day on manual security tasks and reduce costs by $10,000,000 to $15,000,000 per year.
Ultimate is also attracting new customers like Prometheus Group, a provider of enterprise asset management software for plans and facilities. They chose GitLab to increase security and compliance with a single all in one platform while also consolidating their tool chain and increasing visibility across projects. In fact, 9 of our top 10 largest new first order customers in Q3 all purchased Ultimate. In the Q3, GitLab Advanced SAST became generally available for all our ultimate customers. Advanced SAST is powered by technology we acquired with the acquisition of Oxide.
It uses a proprietary detection engine to identify exploitable vulnerabilities in 1st party code. This delivers more accurate results so developers and security teams don't have to sort through the noise of false positive results. And unlike other standalone security scanners, advanced SaaS is natively built into the GitLab DevSecOps platform. This provides a developer experience free from the overhead that comes with integrating multiple point solutions. GitLab Dedicated, which continues to exceed our expectations, is also driving demand for Ultimate.
To leverage Dedicated, customers must be on Ultimate. Because Dedicated is fully managed by GitLab, customers can achieve quicker time to value compared to hosting the platform themselves while maintaining high security and compliance standards. Enterprise work management platform Smartsheet (NYSE:SMAR) purchased Dedicated through a hyperscaler partner to remove the need for maintenance, reduce infrastructure costs and give teams time back for innovation, all while ensuring they have a highly reliable software development process. Blackstone (NYSE:BX), the world's largest alternative asset manager, purchased Dedicated for toolchain consolidation, compliance and visibility. Dedicated also contributed to a record quarter in our public sector business.
And we are building momentum with our in process designation for FedRAMP Moderate. The U. S. General Services Administration, our agency sponsor for FedRAMP selected GitLab Dedicated for government. Dedicated will reduce the burden of building new tools and will establish a factory floor with an end to end FISMA compliant DevSecOps platform.
GitLab is a great choice for highly regulated industries, and I am pleased with our performance in this market. I want to finish by saying thank you. 1st, to our team members for living our values and mission, to our customers for placing their trust in us and our partners for their support, and finally to the wider GitLab community. And with that, I'll turn it over to Brian.
Brian Robbins, CFO, GitLab: Thank you, Sid, and welcome, Bill. I'm really pleased with our Q3 FY 'twenty five results, which exceeded our expectations. We built off the momentum we saw in Q2 and continued to deliver against our commitment to profitable growth. Q3 revenue reached $196,000,000 an increase of 31% from Q3 of the prior year, and we delivered a record non GAAP operating margin. We now have 9,519 customers with ARR of at least $5,000 which contributed over 95% of total ARR in Q3.
In particular, we monitor performance of our larger customer cohort of $100,000 plus in ARR, which increased 31% this quarter and reached 11.44. As they scale, this cohort continues to make significant investments in Ultimate, including our top 7 deals in the quarter. We are also seeing new customers land with GitLab Duo. In Q3, this included 5, 6 figure first order deals that included Duo. On the expansion front, we ended the quarter with a dollar based net retention rate or DBNR of 124%.
Q3 DB and RR was driven by a combination of seat expansion at approximately 50%, increased customer yield at approximately 40% and tier upgrades at approximately 10%. Total RPO grew 48% year over year to $811,800,000 while CRPO grew 39% year over year to $515,200,000 We encourage investors to look at these metrics over a multi quarter period. Non GAAP gross margin was 91% for the quarter. The team continues to do a very good job of driving operating efficiencies to maintain our best in class gross margin. SaaS now represents 29% of total revenue and grew 44% year over year.
The considerable traction we are getting with GitLab Dedicated is helping drive this momentum. Once again, we saw a significant increase in operating leverage. Q3 non GAAP operating income was $25,900,000 compared to $4,700,000 in Q3 of last year. Similar to Q2, we dropped our revenue outperformance to the bottom line, which in combination with the team's focus on execution translated to a record non GAAP operating margin of 13.2% compared to 3.1% in Q3 of last year. This is an increase of more than 1,000 basis points year over year.
As we scale, our land and expand model becomes increasingly efficient, which allows us to both invest in future growth while also driving operational efficiencies. Q3 FY 'twenty five adjusted free cash flow was $9,700,000 compared to negative $6,700,000 in the prior year period. Cash from operating activities was negative $177,000,000 in the 3rd quarter compared to negative $6,000,000 in the prior year period. Cash flow from operations reflects the conclusion of the bilateral advanced pricing agreement, or APA with the IRS and the Netherlands Dutch Tax Authority. In addition to the 3rd quarter payment of $188,000,000 to the Dutch Tax Authority, which resulted from the APA negotiations, we have reserved an additional $10,000,000 to be paid to the IRS.
Although we have petitioned for an abatement of this amount, we expect it to be finalized in Q4. Now turning to guidance. For the Q4 of FY 'twenty five, we expect total revenue of $205,000,000 to $206,000,000 representing a growth rate of 25% to 26% year over year. We expect non GAAP operating income of $28,000,000 to $29,000,000 and we expect a non GAAP net income per share of $0.22 to $0.23 assuming 170,000,000 weighted average diluted shares outstanding. For the full year FY 2025, we expect total revenue of $753,000,000 to $754,000,000 representing a growth rate of approximately 30% year over year.
We expect a non GAAP operating income of $69,000,000 to $70,000,000 and we expect a non GAAP net income per share of $0.63 to $0.64 assuming 168,000,000 weighted average diluted shares outstanding. Separately, I would like to provide an update on Jihu, our China joint venture. In Q3 FY 2025, non GAAP expenses related to Jihu were $3,500,000 compared to $4,300,000 in Q3 of last year. Our goal remains to deconsolidate Jihu. However, we cannot predict the likelihood or timing of when this may potentially occur.
Thus, for FY 'twenty five modeling purposes, we forecast approximately $14,000,000 of expenses related to Jihu compared with $18,000,000 last year. In summary, Q3 was another strong quarter driven by demand for our leading AI powered DevSecOps platform. To help our customers build better software, GitLab brings together developers, security experts and operations teams on a single platform to collaborate, improve quality and prioritize security. In a time when there is intense demand for software, this allows customers to both drive innovation and reduce cycle times. This is a large market that is ripe for consolidation and I'm confident in our ability to build long term shareholder value.
The team is focused on a strong close to the year and we look forward to seeing many of you over the coming weeks. Thank you all for joining today. With that, I'll turn it over to Kelsey, who will moderate the Q and A.
Kelsey Turcotte, Investor Relations, GitLab: Thanks, Brian. We'll take our first question from Koji Ikeda of Bank of America. Koji, go ahead.
Koji Ikeda, Analyst, Bank of America: Yeah. Hey, guys. Thanks so much for taking the questions. I wanted to ask a question. Actually, before that, Sid, real high level here.
Thank you for everything you've done for the DevSecOp Industry as CEO GitLab. We wish you very much the best on your journeys from here. And Bill, great to meet you, and and hi, Brian. Okay. So first question, Brian, you know, this is a numbers game here, and you just beat the midpoint of your guidance by 4.6%.
And so what stood out from this quarter that was maybe above the the less conservative guidance posture that you had from earlier this year?
Brian Robbins, CFO, GitLab: Thanks, Koji. Appreciate the question. This quarter was a strong quarter across the board. We executed well across all fronts. A couple of things I'd like to point out is in the prepared remarks, Sid said this was the best quarter in PubSec that we've had in the company history.
Ultimate continues to perform really well, 48% of total ARR now. It was greater than 50% of bookings. Net dollar retention was strong at 124%, remains best in class. CRPO at 39%. And so last thing I'll mention is turning contraction.
As a percent of available to renew, It was the best quarter we had in the last 12 quarters. And so every aspect of the business performed really well, really driven by the strength of the enterprise. So really happy how we ended the quarter.
Koji Ikeda, Analyst, Bank of America: Got it. Thanks, Brian. And for a follow-up here, Q4 guide revenue guidance looks about 25.5 percent at the midpoint. So as we're thinking about the next 12 months, anything other than the law of larger numbers, is there anything we should be thinking about that would cause that exit growth rate to meaningfully slow from there?
Brian Robbins, CFO, GitLab: From a guidance perspective, we'll give next year's guidance on the next call. We have a number of different growth vectors that we've talked about, the dual enterprise SKU, dedicated agile planning. It's just important to note that these things take time to ramp, roughly $800,000,000 in revenue growing 30%. It takes a while for them to make a meaningful impact. Thank you.
Kelsey Turcotte, Investor Relations, GitLab: Thank you, Koji. Next (LON:NXT) question goes to Sanjit Singh of Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS). Sanjit, go ahead.
Sanjit Singh, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Hi. Thank you for taking the questions and congrats, Bill, and congratulations, Sid, on an outstanding career. Looking forward to what you do next. I guess I wanted to talk a little bit about the category and how and Sid, you mentioned the move to workflows and AgenTek architectures as sort of the next phase of this of AI in this category. And I wanted to see like how you anticipate that playing out.
Is that sort of going to be in conjunction and parallel with CoPilots? Does it sort of subsume code assistance and CoPilots? And what do you think is going to be GitLab's sort of strategic advantage when it comes to agents and AgenTek architectures?
Sid C. Brandi, Co-Founder and Executive Chair, GitLab: Yeah. Thanks for that question. Both are going to exist in parallel. So you'll have GitLab Duo Pro assisting people with coding, GitLab Duo Enterprise helping people with everything else that they need to do their job from planning to securing and everything else. On the other hand, you'll have the AI taking more initiative, being proactive.
That's the AgenTic AI, the dual workflow. And we have an advantage there because we have an end to end solution. Our application does everything from planning all the way to deploying. And what's really important with AI is not so much the models anymore. The state of the art models are all really, really good.
2 things are important in agentic.ai. You give them the right context. For example, it's good that they not only know about the code base, but also what your plans are with the applications. It's great to have planning in GitLab as well, so we can give that context. It's also important that the agents can take action.
So what's great about GitLab, deployments are already part of GitLab. It's already existing functionality. So the agentic AI can hook into that to trigger the action. So that's our strategic advantage. It's again the end to end platform.
It not only makes things easier for humans, faster cycle by 10x, it makes things easier for the AI agents as well.
Sanjit Singh, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: And as a follow-up, I'm here in AWS re event. I'm sure a number of us are. You made a pretty big announcement with AWS and their queue offering. I guess the question there is, it sounds like it's limited to self hosted, at least out of the gate. Do you does does that integration ultimately show up in in in a in a SaaS offering, with with GitLab Cloud?
And from commercially, do you think that can be a a driver for the business as well?
Sid C. Brandi, Co-Founder and Executive Chair, GitLab: Yeah. We're super, super excited about this partnership with AWS. We were mentioned as a partner in the main keynote from Get More at Garmin (NYSE:GRMN). It was very, very exciting. And it's not just us at GitLab that are excited.
Our joint customers are excited. We got more than 1,000 visits to our booth the day of the announcement. So incredible response. We want to make things better for our joint customers. And right now that's in closed beta, and it's accessible to beta participants who are GitLab Ultimate self managed customers.
But you might remember our GitLab dedicated offering, that is launched on AWS. It's AWS is where a lot of our customers are. And we can't wait to bring it to the joint offering to get live dedicated, but we don't have a timeline for that yet.
Sanjit Singh, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Understood. Congrats.
Kelsey Turcotte, Investor Relations, GitLab: Thanks, Sanjit. Next question goes to Matt Hedberg of RBC. Matt, go ahead.
Matt Hedberg, Analyst, RBC: Thanks, guys. Can you hear me?
Kelsey Turcotte, Investor Relations, GitLab: Yeah, we can now.
Matt Hedberg, Analyst, RBC: Okay, great. Thanks Kelsey. Sid, first of all, congrats on everything you've done for GitLab. It's just been a real pleasure to work with you and Bill congrats on the role. We look forward to working with you in greater detail here.
So, there's a lot of good details that you just presented with us to dig in. I guess, could I start with just a macro buying question? It certainly seems like you guys are doing exceptionally well here. A lot of good upsell, a lot of good first order business. Do you get a sense that demand trends are improving maybe since 90 days ago?
Brian Robbins, CFO, GitLab: Hey, Matt, this is Brian. Let me start on that. And so let me start off high level and talk about sort of the macro and then I'll talk a little bit specifics around GitLab. And so on the macro, we're seeing what other companies are seeing and so no changes there. People are buying GitLab for the value that we deliver.
And so the payback period is pretty quick. So I would say that we're resilient there. From a specific to a GitLab perspective, as mentioned, it was a really good quarter all across the board. And so I think that the platform and the value and the payback, people are wanting to consolidate to a platform with a system of record. And that's what we're seeing driving the growth.
Matt Hedberg, Analyst, RBC: Got it. Thanks, Brian. And then maybe one, I don't think it came up too much in the script, but we continue to hear a lot of good things about your enterprise agile planning module. I'm curious, could you talk a little bit about that, where you're seeing success? Are you seeing some Jira replacements more these days?
Just sort of curious on an update there. Thanks.
Sid C. Brandi, Co-Founder and Executive Chair, GitLab: Yes. Thank you so much and thanks for your kind words. So the enterprise agile planning, it's a really important part of GitLab Ultimate. We're still in the early stages of this market opportunity and we will further enhance this functionality. But planning is an essential part of the DevSecOps lifecycle and doing that for the largest customers is amazing.
And for example, a North American professional sports league will leverage GitLab's enterprise agile planning offering as part of a broader effort to streamline its technology stack. And this will allow them to reduce reliance on Atlassian products like Jira and Bamboo. And they're going to enhance their efficiency across their development and operations teams.
Kelsey Turcotte, Investor Relations, GitLab: Great. Thanks. Rob from Piper Sandler, your question is next.
Rob, Analyst, Piper Sandler: Great, thank you for taking my question and Sid best wishes to you and your family. Given some of the productivity gains that you guys talked about from Duo and obviously some exciting metrics, how are conversations with customers just around developer seats and thought process moving forward? And then I guess more tangibly, just what is the pricing yield that you're seeing as you're adding Duo to these seats? Are you getting full price, near full price? We'd love to just get a sense.
Thanks.
Brian Robbins, CFO, GitLab: Yes. Thanks, Ram. Appreciate the question. This is Brian. On Duo, very like I said, very happy with where we landed for the quarter.
We're seeing a lot of deals. And for the top 5 deals that we had for sorter deals, they all had Duo attached to it. And Duo itself, when it's attached to a deal, if you look at the net ARR, Duo makes up over 25% of the total net ARR in year 1. And so a number of people are deploying Duo and seeing the productivity gains up to 50%. And so the feedback we've been getting from the customers has been extremely positive.
Rob, Analyst, Piper Sandler: Great. Thank you. I guess, any comment on the seat side of things just in terms of how customers are thinking about seats given the productivity gains you guys articulated earlier?
Brian Robbins, CFO, GitLab: Yeah, I think they're when you look at seats the way that obviously, we have a long tail of customers. And so this is sort of talking broadly for our customer base and what we're seeing on some of the implementation. And so when they're buying when they come to GitLab and buying Duo, they're buying it for most of their users, but they're doing more of a rolled out approach on implementing. And so, you know, say a customer will buy 100 to 150 seats, they'll roll out a subset of that over time to different groups within the organization.
Kelsey Turcotte, Investor Relations, GitLab: Great. Thank you. Next question goes to Joel Fishbein at Truist.
Joel Fishbein, Analyst, Truist: Thanks for taking the question. Sid, wishing you the best as well. And Bill, congrats on the new role. Sid, I'm going to ask somebody who was sort of on top of what Sanjay asked earlier, which was 2 things are happening. 1 is that people are the skeptics out there say that the market's saturated.
Obviously, your acceleration of revenue growth says that that's not true, number 1. Number 2 is, as part of that, how much what inning do you think that we're in, in terms of this, you know, vendor consolidation and these disparate tools? And how much room do we have to go from that standpoint? Thank you.
Sid C. Brandi, Co-Founder and Executive Chair, GitLab: Yeah. Thanks for that, Joel. We believe it's still early. We think that the vast, vast majority of enterprises, they are on DIY DevOps today. They have so called best in class solutions, but they have all kinds of point solutions.
And the really hard part is integrating that. And you can you know our revenue. You can make an estimate about GitHub's revenue. And then you look at the market. It's a $40,000,000,000 market.
And whatever your estimate is for GitHub, that means that we're in a very early inning here. I would say we're in the 1st inning. So that's why we're so excited about this market. And we see every time that we can make those replacements, the more point solutions they replace, the better the result. And every month, GitLab becomes better, and we're able to replace more of those point solutions.
We're better able to take out more of them when we have an implementation.
Joel Fishbein, Analyst, Truist: That's great. Thanks. And Brian, just a real quick follow-up. Great outperformance on the margin side of the business. I know you've always historically said prioritizing growth over profitability, but love to know how we were thinking about margins going forward.
Brian Robbins, CFO, GitLab: Yes. Thanks, Joel. We're super happy with the increased operating leverage we can continue to get in the model. We look at doing that across the entire enterprise. When we went public, we talked about there may be some pressure on our non GAAP gross margins due to the increase in SaaS.
SaaS has grown 44% year over year and is now 29% of our total revenue. And we've still been able to maintain best in class non GAAP gross margins of 91%. So I'm happy with how we've done there. Sales and marketing E2R is the best it's been in company history this quarter. And so we continue to work on margin.
Our number one thing is to grow, but we'll do that responsibly. And so we continue to invest in growth, the new SKUs, AI and so forth, but we're doing that responsibly. And so that's what you saw this quarter from 3Q 'twenty five to 3Q 'twenty four, we had over 1,000 basis points improvement.
Joel Fishbein, Analyst, Truist: Great. Thank you so much.
Brian Robbins, CFO, GitLab: Thanks, Joel.
Kelsey Turcotte, Investor Relations, GitLab: Next question goes to Kash Rangan of Goldman Sachs. Kash, go ahead.
Kelsey Turcotte, Investor Relations, GitLab0: Hi, thank you very much, Sid. All the very best. And Bill, congratulations. Hello, Brian. So Bill, wondering if you could share your insights into granted that you're going to be getting to know the business in more and more detail as you really immerse yourself in the role.
But what do you see what did you see at GitLab? And what do you see as the playbook that you can bring to the company given your experience at other formidable tech companies before? And how would you go about it in your own unique imprint to realize the full potential of GitLab while you have somebody who is fantastic like Sid still on board? Thank you so much.
Bill Staples, Newly Appointed CEO, GitLab: Thank you, Kash. I really am thrilled to be here. I mean, if you just listen to this narrative and look at the numbers, who wouldn't want to be a part of GitLab? I've spent nearly my entire career building software for developers, and I have a ton of respect for what Sid and the GitLab team has done, and the fit really is perfect. For our customers, GitLab is a strategic partnership because we set the heart of their software development process and we directly help them increase the quality, the speed, and the security of their software.
And that drives direct improvements to their business. I also believe there's just an enormous opportunity ahead of us. Sid just described it as the first inning. As I look at recent technology trends, including all the rapid advancements in AI, I believe the ability for software to transform our world is enormous, and GitLab can play a central role in unlocking that transformation. I really couldn't be more excited to lead the company, and my immediate priority is to spend time with our customers, our partners, GitLab team members around the world, and all of you to learn how I can better serve as CEO.
So thanks for the question.
Kelsey Turcotte, Investor Relations, GitLab: Great. Next question goes to Sharnik Kathari at Baird.
Kelsey Turcotte, Investor Relations, GitLab1: Great. Thanks for taking my question. Again, wishing you set a swift recovery and healthy future. And welcome, Bill. It's great to interact with you back in the day at the Future Stacks.
And good to hear you outline your vision for GitLab. Of course, we'll look forward to hearing more from you. And of course, you mentioned what the excitement about AI and also heard from Sid about agentic AI and Duo Workflow. All of that sounds super exciting. Just on the GitLab Ultimate, that's kind of hit a big milestone, 48% of total ARR reflects strong customer adoption.
Of course, you talked about GitLab Duo Enterprise. It's driving significant upsell. Just on a high level, just curious, Sid, what are you guys seeing in terms of, like, any any inflection for for features like integrated security, compliance, which, of course, we have heard before. So all this had a kind of a slower adoption curve overall for our staff, SecOps and mostly tied to organizational challenges. Just could you help us provide some color on anything which is evolving, changing and primary factors which is now driving this acceleration?
Thank you.
Sid C. Brandi, Co-Founder and Executive Chair, GitLab: Thanks for that. Yeah, GitLab Ultimate is doing really well. And over time, its features are becoming better. And I think one remarkable thing was the advanced SaaS launch. We acquired Oxide and we were able to really quickly turn that into a much better product offering.
And that product offering, that advanced SaaS is going to make things better for humans. Like the humans will have fewer false positives. They can focus on what matters and are not don't have to do work that doesn't matter. But it also helps to inform the AI to give the AI better context about what's happening. So kind of the one acquisition is helping both humans and AI, and that's making security better.
We'll make the compliance better over time. And it's such an advantage to have it integrated into the whole workflow. We see that customers are able to be more secure on more projects more of the time if it's totally integrated. And that's a big reason for customers to buy Ultimate.
Kelsey Turcotte, Investor Relations, GitLab: Great. Thanks. We're going to go to one question now just for efficiency. Next up is Ryan McWilliams from Barclays (LON:BARC).
Kelsey Turcotte, Investor Relations, GitLab2: Hey, thanks for taking the question. For Sid, any differences in adoption between Duo Pro and Duo Enterprise adoption at this point? And then where are your customers stand overall in terms of their, developer tool AI rollout? Like, have they done test use cases today and now ready to, you know, go from like initial ROI to broader throughout the organization? Or do you think, that's more of a 2025 story as they just familiarize themselves with your AI tools?
Sid C. Brandi, Co-Founder and Executive Chair, GitLab: Yeah. So what we're seeing is that if a customer is on GitLab Ultimate and they're really bought into using GitLab end to end, that Duo Enterprise is the better candidate. So that's been amazing to see. I think if you talk about Duo workflow, we're very, very early. It's in the hands of a few customers, but we're looking forward to a beta this winter.
But we're early. It's, it's, don't expect a lot this year, this fiscal year. This is the future. We're working on it and it will come and we're doing our best to make sure it's great and that it's secure.
Kelsey Turcotte, Investor Relations, GitLab1: Thank
Kelsey Turcotte, Investor Relations, GitLab: you. Moving on to Michael Turrin at Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC). Michael?
Conference Moderator: Oh. Okay.
Kelsey Turcotte, Investor Relations, GitLab0: Yeah. There we go.
Kelsey Turcotte, Investor Relations, GitLab3: I was waiting for the notification. Sorry. I I wanted to ask Sid the sort of the mirror question to what Kash asked earlier. Certainly wishing you the best, Sid. But would I think it'd be useful just to hear more on your thoughts on Bill, what made him the right fit, anything you saw from the experience perspective and really just thinking about the stage that GitLab is at in terms of maturity, all of the new product, innovation and efforts you're rolling out.
Just kind of would just love to hear your thoughts on the overall transition there. Thanks.
Sid C. Brandi, Co-Founder and Executive Chair, GitLab: Thanks, Michael. Yes, I couldn't be more excited than with Bill as a successor. I think he's a perfect fit for GitLab. I've talked to a lot of CEOs and I haven't found anyone with, that is such a kind of good fit with us. Bill has amazing leadership qualities.
He's learned from the best leaders. He's a great leader himself. But he also really cares about the software process. He's been a software developer himself. He has been in this market.
He knows our, what the market is like, what our users are like, what our buyers are like. Of course, he's going to go on tour and see our, speak to our customers. But this is someone who cares very deeply about it and has the operational skills to write an amazing next chapter for GitLab.
Kelsey Turcotte, Investor Relations, GitLab: Thank you. Next question goes to Greg Powell at BTIG. Greg, go ahead.
Kelsey Turcotte, Investor Relations, GitLab4: Okay, Greg. Can you hear me?
Brian Robbins, CFO, GitLab: We can.
Kelsey Turcotte, Investor Relations, GitLab4: All right. Awesome. Well, thanks, Kelsey. I'll keep this one short, help speed things along. Question for Brian.
Just how do you feel about your visibility on the pipeline and the demand environment today versus 6 to 12 months ago?
Brian Robbins, CFO, GitLab: Yeah. Thanks, Greg. Appreciate the question. When we went and talked about Q3, there wasn't many changes from Q2 nor Q1. And so there's been a as I mentioned, there's still the spend environment out there, we're seeing what others are seeing.
It's cautious, but we haven't seen a lot of great fluctuations. And so we had enough confidence to pass through the beat and raise for the year. And so happy with where the pipeline is for 4Q.
Kelsey Turcotte, Investor Relations, GitLab4: Okay. Thank you.
Kelsey Turcotte, Investor Relations, GitLab: Next question goes to pendulum Ghora at JPMorgan. Pendulum, go ahead.
Kelsey Turcotte, Investor Relations, GitLab4: Oh, great. Thank you for taking the questions. Sid, all the best, and welcome, Bill. I want to talk about Agentiq again. As AI agents kind of become a reality with every software developer, you know, might have potentially ephemeral agents working for them, how do you envision GitLab's pricing model evolving to fit that world over time?
Sid C. Brandi, Co-Founder and Executive Chair, GitLab: That's a great question. And the background is, hey, if the agents do the work and it's not directly tied to a user, how do you price that? Do you still price that per seat? And I can't comment on future pricing. But I've already given some ideas of why Bill is great.
One of the things he's also overseeing at New Relic is a move to consumption pricing. That's not the reason we brought him in. We brought him in because he's a great leader, but never hurts. And despite kind of it going to like pricing maybe differently for these workflows, we do see a great future for people working in software. And if you look at AI, it's making it easier for people to get owned in software.
With Duo, it's easier to program something. So I'm not going to give forecasts or preannounce pricing, but those are my thoughts. Thank you.
Kelsey Turcotte, Investor Relations, GitLab: Understood. Great. Thanks, Pendulum. Next and final question goes to Nick Altman at Scotiabank (TSX:BNS). Nick, go ahead.
Kelsey Turcotte, Investor Relations, GitLab5: Awesome. Thank you. Sid, wishing you all the best. My question is on the ultimate premium mix and it sounds like Duo Enterprise is gaining some nice traction especially with the net new customers and being a driver for ultimate adoption. But when you're talking to customers, can you just talk about how much of a driver for the Go enterprises for customers maybe looking to upgrade from premium to ultimate?
And then as we kind of think about that dynamic going forward and potentially more net new customers landing in ultimate, just how should we think about the pace of mix shift as it pertains to ARR from ultimate versus premium?
Sid C. Brandi, Co-Founder and Executive Chair, GitLab: Yeah, I think there's different customers. We talked about the Emirates becoming a customer. And they do they combine Ultimate with Duo Pro. There's also a ton of customers combining Ultimate with Duo Enterprise. So it's going to vary by customer.
I think we should recognize that it's also going to evolve over time. What's important to us is that we are end to end with customers. And we're super excited about working with the hyperscalers to make sure that customers use all of GitLab. We're also making progress with the system integrators of the world, making sure people get all the value out of GitLab. If you look at how much functionality GitLab offers, there's very few companies using everything today.
So that's a big thing we can focus on, making sure to use more of the platform and get even more value. And even though nobody uses everything of GitLab, they already have a 480% return in 3 years. Think about all the features we're still going to add. Think about all the features we still can get adopted. That's where a lot of the leverage is.
Use more of GitLab, become even better in writing software. And yet the AI is helping. Even without the AI, it's already great. And the AI, I think the adoption in the future is going to be greater and greater.
Kelsey Turcotte, Investor Relations, GitLab5: Great. Thank you.
Kelsey Turcotte, Investor Relations, GitLab: Thanks, Sid. This concludes our Q3 FY 'twenty five earnings presentation. Thanks to all of you once again for joining us and have a great evening.
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