Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to the GitLab conference call. My name is Joel Fishbein from Truist Securities. I'll be the host of this call today. Before we start the call, I need to read the following disclaimer statement. This call has been arranged by Truist Securities Research Department for use by institutional investors as well as issuer clients of the firm as defined under FINRA rules. If you are not an institutional investor or issuer, please disconnect at this time. On today's call, we're very pleased to have Sid Sijbrandij, CEO, and Brian Robbins, CFO of GitLab. These call participants are not members of the Truist Securities Research Department unless otherwise indicated. Their views are their own and may differ from the views of the Truist Securities Research Department and from the views of others within the firm.
Please see our website at www.truistsecurities.com for our equity research library and required disclosures. We're very pleased to have Sid and Brian join us today. In the most recent quarter, GitLab delivered a very strong performance across all metrics to finish FY 2024, posting records during the quarter across growth in 100,000 and 1,000,000 customers, hyperscaler contribution, the largest first order in the company history, largest bookings, and dollar-based net retention reaccelerated to 130%. It seemed like churn and contractions continued to improve. We see numerous growth initiatives, including Premium pricing tier increase, Ultimate tier, Agile Planning add-on, GitLab Dedicated deployment, and their new Duo Pro AI-assisted add-on. In addition, the company has made significant investments in AI capabilities across their platform over the last year. I've asked participants to send me questions ahead of time, so I'll just start asking away.
If someone would like on the line would like to ask for me to ask a question, please email me at Joel.Fishbein@truist.com. With that, Sid and Brian, thank you very much for joining today. I know you guys both have been very busy, and we appreciate your time. Let's just dive in, if that's okay with you guys. Start with the macro. Obviously, on a lot of people's mind, we've got mixed feedback from companies in our coverage in the software land on the macro through the first earnings season of the year. On your most recent earnings call, you said we're seeing customer buying behavior normalize with particular strength in enterprise. Where do you think we are in a rebound from an enterprise environment of contractions you called out a year ago?
Is there something specific about GitLab that makes you more poised to bounce back than other software companies? I'll start with the big macro question.
Yeah, thanks, Joel, and I appreciate you having us on today, and thanks for everyone who is joining the call. You know, it's hard to talk about the broader economy. We can talk about sort of what we're seeing. You know, I think, you know, just starting off with the premise, you know, every company has to become a software company, and they're trying to accelerate their software development and deployment. And so they want to ship software faster. And you know, that's why we've really been seeing the demand is because of the time to value and business outcomes that we're driving. And so, you know, with our Ultimate product, we spoke about, you know, the payback period is under six months. The ROI is over 400% in a three-year period. And that's what our customers are seeing. So cohorts back to 2016 are still expanding today.
Within the Q4, we actually saw churning contraction go back to what rates were six quarters ago. You know, we saw really strong expansion in first order that you alluded to in your opening remarks.
That's great. Sid, did you want to add anything, or?
No, thanks.
Okay. In terms of, Brian, how does the macro impact your hiring plans for the year? And what's a typical enterprise customer conversation like these days?
You know, it's been the same. You know, throughout the sort of the pandemic, it went from a technical to somewhat of a financial sale. And so our team has, you know, modified their approach a little on really focusing on the savings, the payback, and the return. But you know, we've seen, you know, buying behavior patterns overall just normalize. You know, in Q4, we had a really strong enterprise quarter, which we're really happy about. You know, and you alluded to this as well. We saw an uptick in our dollar-based net retention rate to 130%. And Ultimate bookings were for the second quarter in a row greater than 50% of the total bookings. Our total Ultimate bookings, our ARR, is now 44% of our ARR. And you know, we saw really strong hyperscaler bookings as well. Hyperscalers grew 100% year-over-year.
That's great. How has your thought process around hiring changed at all now that the macro seems to be stabilizing a little bit?
You know, we're hiring really in two main areas. One, you know, in sales, and that's really around our internal capacity model. And depending upon what our attainment is, is what we'll hire. You know, we've got, you know, we've got, you know, basically it all built out, and so it's really adding more capacity. And then the other area is within R&D. And so, you know, we're developing a lot around security and compliance. We talked about our Agile Planning SKU. You know, we've done a lot on AI. And so we continue to invest in R&D as well.
Maybe just Sid one for you on the product side. Have you seen consolidation, platform play of GitLab versus best of breed become more or less of a theme in conversations with customers recently? And if you can elaborate on that, that'd be great.
Yeah, I think it's becoming more of a theme. I think last year the big change was that the analysts, Gartner and Forrester, introduced DevOps platforms as a category. We're super proud to be leading that. Forrester, we were the only leader of the category. I think that's helping customers get around to the idea that if they consolidate their point solutions into a platform, not only do they save on software spending and integration costs, but they will be able to be more efficient and move faster. Typically, they have a seven times faster cycle time by not having to hop between all the different point solutions.
That's great. And you know, Brian just mentioned, you know, the continued strength in the Ultimate product. What do you think is the driver of that? And are there any specific use cases or product features that are resonating with customers?
Yeah, the main driver of that today is security and compliance. Customers typically already have a lot of security point solutions. What GitLab enables them to do is to consolidate their spend. Like instead of four different products, they just need GitLab. They don't have as much of an integration effort. The most important thing is that they can shift it left and prove compliance. Shifting security left means doing it earlier in the cycle. And if you have your security earlier in the cycle, the findings are quicker to address. It's easier to address the findings. The other thing is to have compliance as a part of it. Prove that you're doing the things you need to be doing. Prove that to externals, internals. At T-Mobile, they moved to GitLab. They moved 25,000 software projects in two months.
That certainly enabled them to run hundreds of thousands of security scans and to prove that they're running them.
That was a great use case that you had called out. Are there any other things that you may be working on to help bolster your security and compliance offering to maybe continue to differentiate from others?
Yeah, we keep improving the product to make sure that it's kind of best in class in every aspect. We already have the broadest offering with SaaS, DAST, SAST, API security. But we keep investing in it, and we recently announced acquiring Oxeye to further improve the static application security testing in GitLab. Today, sometimes GitLab's functionality is better than the point solution. Sometimes we're worse. We want to make sure we're better in every single dimension.
That's great. You know, the one question we're getting, I'm starting to get more in. There's a recent announcement regarding, you know, Devin, autonomous coding. You know, a lot of noise about it. You know, what's your thought about autonomous coding and what's going on with this, you know, with Devin from your perspective?
Yeah, I think it's indicating two trends. The first trend is, hey, it's not about just writing the lines of code. You also need to test the code. You need to fix security issues. You need to deploy it. And that's something we've been emphasizing. It's not just generating the line of code. You need to do everything else in the process. And according to the latest Omdia report, GitLab has more AI functionality. We address more use cases than any other platform by some margin. So the second thing is it also shows that AI needs context. So the AI not only needs to be aware of like the files you have opened, but also your other code bases. It also needs to be aware of what you're planning to make.
So because GitLab is kind of the system of record for a lot of these things, we are able to provide the AI with more context, enabling the AI to give better suggestions.
That's great. Another question here about a deeper dive into Duo Pro and where you think your penetration can go and your value there. Also questions about, you know, go-to-market on Duo and, you know, is there any flexibility in how you may be pricing the product, etc. So any deep dive on Duo would be really helpful.
Yeah, we're kind of early in kind of the adoption cycle of it. We typically deal with enterprise sales cycles. So it's early days. We're excited that customers like NatWest committed to Duo and purchased it. And we're working to kind of make sure that our entire customer base gets to hear the Duo story. And so it's early. It's not a giant contributor to the revenue for this year. We do think it will have significant impact in the outer years.
You also, you know, NASDAQ did a pretty interesting, you know, use case webinar or, you know, video as well. You know, they were pretty excited about it. Was there any, can you talk a little bit about the competitive dynamics maybe in either NatWest or NASDAQ relative to them adopting Duo versus something else?
Yeah. Typically, what we win when the customers realize that AI is not about just writing code, it's about everything else. We have now 15 different Duo functionalities. And our kind of code writing offering is competitive, but the unique thing that they only get with GitLab is addressing everything else. For example, helping, assisting them in resolving vulnerabilities, helping them assigning work to the right person, doing a forecast of how fast you're going to deliver something. A lot of that is unique to GitLab, and that's the differentiator that drives this.
Interesting. You mentioned the Oxeye acquisition. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it right. Was that more IP engineering talent both? And, you know, love to understand how that came to fruition.
Yeah, our typical acquisition, and this is an example of that, is the rebuilding GitLab acquisition. So we acquired an IP, but also the team that built the product because GitLab is a platform with one interface, one data store. We have to typically shut down the product and then have them rebuild it within GitLab on a timescale kind of within a year. And this is another example of that. So these are relatively smaller acquisitions that are very cost-efficient. And they enhance the product so that our customers can replace more point solutions. Typical security solutions we replaced are Snyk, Checkmarx, Synopsys, Black Duck, and Veracode.
Yeah, that's that abstract space that's been, you know, around for a long time, but not a lot of modern development there, right? Is that how, and do customers come to you to, you know, potentially acquire technologies, or do you find them on your own, or is it a combination of both?
Yeah, there's an interesting section in the GitLab handbook about it. So if you Google GitLab handbook acquisitions, you'll find a lot of details. But the short of it is we want to do these acquisitions where we still have a little gap to the best-in-class solution in some aspects and kind of use these acquisitions to speed up how fast we're closing the gap, kind of make faster progress on our roadmap.
Gotcha. Brian, I'll go to you. In terms of go-to-market, is there anything that you're changing from a strategic perspective to drive net new customer adds? Are you doing anything with sales rep enablement incentives to drive net new customer adds?
Yeah, I think, you know, we try to keep our comp program, you know, pretty basic. So we aren't pushing someone to actually ultimate or premium. We do have something in there that does drive first order. You know, and we've been continually working on our enablement. You know, I think what's really important is we have a lot of go-to-market motions that we actually sell through. And so talked about the hyperscaler and how well those have been doing. We also have a channel program. We have a direct sales motion as well. And, you know, obviously, we're expanding geographies too. And so a number of different go-to-market motions that we have deployed.
So can you talk about some of the changes that have been made since Chris Weber, I guess he's been on for about eight months now, has made to the sales organization over the time that he's been there? I know it's only eight months, but.
Sid, do you want to take that?
Happy to take this. So it's evolution, not revolution with Chris, but one thing he's been focusing on is serving the biggest companies even better. The more complex an organization is, the more kind of compliance requirements they have, the kind of bigger the payoff of GitLab. And we want to make sure we get really, really close to these customers with a lot of people in sales who have big technical foundations, like field CTOs or solution architects, making professional services a bigger component of what we do because it's not just selling the product. It's also kind of making the customer successful with it and what we're focusing there more and more.
Great. Has Chris been able to do any recruiting of maybe higher-end enterprise salespeople to the organization that fits into that model of bigger and more strategic?
Yeah, for sure. We keep hiring in sales as our revenue grows. And if you want to get a good overview, if you Google GitLab jobs, you'll find all our open positions. But we're hiring especially for kind of the technical expertise to make our customers successful because you can imagine kind of the champions of GitLab, like they bet on us. They're deprecating these point solutions, moving over, and we want to make sure that it's a great experience and it gets better in every single dimension for them.
Gotcha. Thank you for that. Brian, I get a question, you know, switching over to FY25, you know, drivers. You have a lot of irons in the fire. I talked about Premium price increase, Duo, Dedicated, Agile Planning. How should we think about each of those as growth drivers and from a priority perspective?
Yeah, absolutely. We've talked about, you know, this call and other calls that, you know, these are a number of new S-curves that we launched this year. It takes a little while for those to develop, if you will, and substantially add to our financials. And so we've included those in our guidance. We're super excited about all the things that we launched this year and we'll keep you updated throughout the course of next year or this year.
So yeah, so that's a good, I guess, transition into the question that I get all the time, and I'm sure you're probably sick of hearing it as well in terms of you gave, you know, constructive commentary about green shoots and normalized buying behavior across the board in terms of the demand landscape. Can you help us, you know, contextualize your commentary on the earnings call about less conservatism? And just love to hear what you think about that.
Yeah, absolutely. You know, we've been public for over two years. Our average beat since we've been public has been about 7%. You know, we're a very transparent company. I get asked all the time, you know, has your guidance philosophy changed? So the way that we actually come up with guidance, the process internally, has not changed, but we're modeling to lower beats, which is really common, you know, across software in general. So we did that because we are transparent. We're super excited about the growth vectors that we talked about. They're still there. You know, all that means is like after Q1, if I beat by more than I anticipated internally, I'll have to do a bigger raise to basically get to a lower beat that we're modeling internally. So we wanted to call that out on this call.
Okay. I think that's pretty helpful in terms of the context. So I guess the bottom line is the philosophy hasn't changed, just that the conservatism is around the beats and necessarily the size of the beats as you, it's more of the law of larger numbers is the way I'm thinking about that, right?
100%. Law of larger numbers, you know, being public for a longer period of time and just being more prudent, you know, as we go forward.
So can you remind us why CRPO and calculated billings are not necessarily good indicators of the business? You know, historically looking at software companies, you know, they're generally good indicators for seat-based software models. Your CRPO was really, really strong last quarter. Does this increase the amount of visibility that you have into the model going forward, regardless of whether it's on a quarterly basis, etc.?
Yeah, you know, the great thing about the business model at GitLab, in my opinion, is that, you know, most of our revenue is ratable. And so, you know, with a ratable revenue recognition, you know, you have a waterfall of, you know, how that's going to come out over time. You know, we talk about, you know, short-term calculated billings, total billings, RPO, and CRPO as a data point, a single data point. You know, it's directionally correct, but, you know, don't read too much into it based on the timing, the duration of customer contracts, and so forth. If you look at those numbers over, you know, a period of a couple of quarters, you know, you can really tell directionally, you know, where the business is going.
That's great. Then can you just do the same thing with NRR? It inflected positively this quarter. Was there something particular about this renewal cohort that drove the performance? Because you've told me, and I've heard you talk to other investors, that you don't allow pull-ins, right? So you weren't able to pull in any, you didn't pull in any business into the last quarter. So you're on a natural trajectory. So maybe you could talk about that.
Yeah, you know, we don't. You know, when we did the price increase, your renewal had to be, you know, within two weeks to basically renew it. And so we specifically did not encourage or allow pull-ins as it relates to the price increase or any other parts of the business. And so, as you noted, super happy that the Dollar-Based Net Retention Rate went up to 130%. You know, I think this is sort of another indication that validates our platform approach is resonating, you know, with the market overall. You know, I talk a lot about, you know, time to value and positive business outcomes for our customers. And that's why cohorts from 2016 all the way up until, you know, 2023 are still expanding with us today in a relatively tight range.
As we go through the dollar-based net retention rate, we historically have given sort of what the breakdown is between seats, increased price yield, and tier upgrades. About 40% of it is related to more seats this 12 months over the prior 12 months. The other 40% is increased price yield. It's important. We've talked about this since being public. When we sell the product, we may give a certain discount for year one. Then year two, we give less of a discount. Year three, we give less of a discount. This is because we put so much feature functionality continually in the platform. It's comprised of increased yield per customer as well as the Premium price increase. That was roughly about 40%. Tier upgrade is the remaining 20%.
Okay, that's helpful. I'm getting a lot of questions, you know, just about seat assumptions. I think people are concerned that, you know, there's still a problem with net new seats. Obviously, we've heard about, you know, layoffs in the developer community, etc. Can you just level set us relative to, you know, seat count and where we are with seat expansion assumptions?
Yeah, you know, so I have different information than, you know, investors and how they build up the model. A lot of them, it's sort of P times Q. And so, you know, the seat conversation's really coming around. You know, it was interesting when Ultimate percent of ARR was constant for about three quarters. I got a lot of questions about, you know, Ultimate and how that's doing. Now that that's upticked, you know, we in essence sell less seats within a quarter because we're selling more Ultimate just due to the price difference between Premium and Ultimate. And so, you know, we're happy with the, you know, the seat growth that we've seen. Super happy with the Q4 print and, you know, how we did against all those metrics that you went, you know, at the beginning of the call.
And so, yeah, so that's the comments around seats.
All right, so I'll let you take a breather and go back to Sid for a minute and just talk about AI. It's on everybody's mind. Investors have voiced concerns around AI potentially driving down the overall development time. Just curious, Sid, of your thoughts there.
Yeah, we're not seeing that. What we suspect is that AI is going to make it easier for people to Create software and that it might increase the number of people involved with the software development process because it becomes more accessible to people.
Gotcha. I asked you about, you know, Duo Pro before, and we talked about NatWest and NASDAQ or whatever. And I know you're trying to tamper down expectations relative to revenue, so I'm not asking about revenue. I'm more interested in people that are actually testing it and using it. Are you happy with the level of receptivity you have relative to the amount of people that are in trials on it? And do you feel like that it's going to be the rollout may be different with Copilot than you've seen that you've seen with other, you know, areas, other products within, you know, the GitLab base?
Yeah, it's another S-curve. So it takes a while to ramp up. It's also like not all of the 15 kind of features are generally available yet. And a lot of our customers want only use feature when there's strong guarantees. So it's up to us to quickly make all the parts generally available. And then customers have seen great things as they trialed it. They see that in general, kind of that the Code Suggestions part is more competitive and that the other things can make a big difference. Code Suggestions-wise, some customers reported that they've seen up to 50% efficiency improvements, so that was very encouraging.
Have you seen any pushback on pricing as it's relative to, would that be a barrier for adoption?
Yeah, it typically isn't. We introduced it at a $9 price, but now it's a $19 price. So it seems that there's room there. You can imagine like a software developer is typically like $200,000 or something in the U.S. all-in costs. So if you make them more effective, there's a lot of gains and a great return even on a $19 offering.
Gotcha. The thing that's also hard that I get a lot of questions on is GitLab, you continually are innovating and adding more features and functionality. Is that what was able for you to be able to drive the higher pricing around the Duo?
Yeah, as we typically, as we kind of add more functionality over time, we've seen average revenue per user go up. We've seen our top tier pricing go up. So it's all about kind of adding more value, replacing more point solutions. And then there's two benefits. Like the customer gets a way faster software development process with more compliance, and we're able to kind of raise our prices just because we're generating so much more value for the customers.
Great. Let me see if there's any other questions in this. So just in terms of the implications from an R&D perspective of having a broader AI deployment, are you required to hire more engineers to support it? And then I have a follow-up relative to, you know, the regulatory requirements around implementing AI and how you guys are in a potentially differentiated position there.
Yeah, so like we're hiring to add to our AI functionality. As Brian alluded to, we're hiring mainly in sales and R&D. And in R&D, we're investing in kind of the security and compliance features in AI and in the planning features. So yes, AI isn't at the stage yet where you need fewer developers. We actually need more developers because of it right now.
Okay. Brian, for you, just in terms of the, if you can go through what the drivers of the acceleration in the 4Q results, do you see the DevOps environment getting better? And again, I'm getting another question around strategies around new customer acquisition. If you have anything to add there, that would be great.
Yeah, you know, I think the, you know, we talked a lot about Q4 and how happy we were with the quarter. You know, we're still really, really early in a big market. And, you know, the platform play is really resonating with a lot of customers. Existing customers, you know, continue to expand and landing new customers. You know, we have 7 times faster cycle time. You know, payback period on Ultimate, you know, is about 6 months, I alluded to earlier. And it's really people trying to, you know, mostly our biggest competition is DIY DevOps. And so they're looking to basically take this sort of toolchain of a whole bunch of different products that they're trying to bundle together and have an integrated platform that they can do, you know, software development, security on, and so forth.
I'm getting another question. Could you remind us, Brian, of the SSP dynamics last year and how it shapes the year-over-year compares?
Yeah, absolutely. And so we reported a week earlier this year. And so the SSP, you know, was not finalized at the time of earnings. And so we used the exact same percentage that we did the year before. SSP, for those who don't know, is called standalone selling price. We use revenue recognition ASC 606. And so every year, we do an analysis to see how much for our self-managed product, how much of it is recognized upfront versus ratable, you know, over the nature of the contract. And so we will give an update on the impact on the next earnings call. And, you know, we mentioned that on our last earnings call. The impact last year was nominal. It was in the $ single millions. In Q1, I called it out last year because there was a, you know, about a $2.5 million increase.
So I wanted to once again be transparent and let investors know that. Every quarter after that, it was less than $1 million. So we didn't break it out specifically. And so when we report our Q1 earnings, I'll give an update on that and say what the impact is.
Okay. Margins. You have very inherent leverage in the operating model. Can you talk about your natural leverage, you know, that you're seeing versus, you know, your cost containment, you know, for the, you know, world that we're in, that you're operating in right now? Just trying to understand what the natural leverage is of the model.
Yeah, no, absolutely. Thank you for the question. You know, Sid and I have been very consistent in our messaging. You know, it's a very large market and, you know, the number one thing is that we want to grow, but we'll do that responsibly. You know, we were able to get a tremendous amount of operating leverage out of the model last year. We, excuse me, for the year, generated cash flow and then hit an important milestone in Q3 on being non-GAAP operating income positive. So we continue to look at investments of where we need to make them. We'll grow responsibly.
Okay. I'm going to go over to Sid while you get some water. I hope you're all right. So Sid, just to get back to the AI question before, you know, AI, obviously, from a compliance perspective, you know, raises a lot of red flags for people that are trying to adopt. If you could talk about why GitLab is in a unique position to be able to help customers with their compliance needs versus others that are out there?
Yeah, it's in a couple of dimensions, but we are typically a trusted vendor. We've launched an AI trust center page where we detail all the different aspects around AI. Our customers are, on one hand, they want to make sure that the AI has the context relevant to it. Like how does their code look? What are they working on, etc.? Like that needs to be fed into the AI for it to give relevant suggestions. On the other hand, it's really important that their intellectual property kind of doesn't leak outside of their organization. Like we can't use it to train models and then have to make those available to other customers. I think so far we've done a good job navigating those two things.
We're in a position of trust where we can kind of offer this functionality and supply the AI with the context from kind of our system of record to make it more effective.
So that brings up, you know, the question we also get asked a lot, and I'm sure you guys do as well, about your competition versus GitHub. You talk about win rates being very strong against them. And I know DIY is your number one competitor, but they disclosed over 40%, you know, year-over-year growth. Number one, do you believe it? Number two is, how are you planning any changes to your competitive strategy there? Or do you think, or do you think you need to?
Yeah, we feel good about our ability to compete. We are typically, I think, in a kind of at a higher price point because we have a broader platform. The enterprise agile planning, the security, the governance, even the packaging functionality and everything else is much broader. So customers can replace more point solutions. We create more value for them. We can charge more for that. Microsoft typically does bundling, so they have some flexibility in how they attribute revenue. I think kind of if we take them, if we take it as their numbers and assume that the attribution was valid, we're growing at the same rate. But we've caught up, like as a company, we started many years later and we're now kind of in the same ballpark.
I think over time, we've seen that customers are willing to pay for something like this if it makes them more effective. We believe we can. Because we have the broader platform, we can replace more point solutions at customers.
Okay. Thank you for that. Jira, you've continued to call out displacements with Enterprise Agile Planning. Is the server end of life a meaningful catalyst for you as well?
Yeah, I think our Enterprise Agile Planning offering is relatively early. Like there's some stuff in Jira that we don't have equivalents for yet, like custom fields. But deprecation of server by Atlassian has caused the market to kind of take stock and look for alternatives. So we wanted to raise our hand and we got multiple kind of big companies moving thousands of people off of Jira to GitLab with great results for them. So it's early. It's an early S-curve, but we're very encouraged by it.
Great. Brian, you mentioned earlier, you know, hyperscaler growth, I think doubling year-over-year on the earnings call. Can you touch on your relationships with Google and AWS, how it's trended over the years and how that may be a meaningful lever of growth going forward?
Super happy with the partnerships. You know, obviously, they have much more reach than we have. And then also super happy that they're, you know, partnering with us to bundle, you know, their cloud services. And so we've seen that the last two quarters, as you mentioned, this quarter, you know, we grew over, you know, we grew about 100% year-over-year. You know, we're doing a number of things with them, just not only distribution. You know, both of them are being used as a supplier of cloud services to us. We also have technology partnerships that we work on in collaboration with them. And so there's a number of different avenues that we work with each of them. They're important relationships to us.
We have a team that's focused just on the hyperscalers, really to continue to drive, you know, every aspect from technical to sales to the supplier relationships and optimize that as much as we can.
Great. I'm going to ask a couple of questions from the audience, either one. How is Duo Pro sold? Is it self-service or still heavily sales rep-led? And why not let it all be self-serve?
Yeah, so currently, it's sales assisted only. I think they make a great point that in the future, it should also be available for self-serve. So we're working on that.
Do you anticipate any changes in your pricing going forward?
Yeah, we can't announce things before we're ready to announce them to everyone. We have talked earlier about two aspects that as we create more value, our ASP typically goes up and that there's a lot of value in these AI features and we've been able to raise the price already from $9 to 19.
Okay. In terms of, let me just see here. People are asking more about the seat growth as a contributor to net dollar retention today. Why is it such a small contributor to net dollar retention today? And how should we think about seat growth in FY25 and onward growth?
Yeah, you know, we break out the components and net dollar retention. It's about the same it was last quarter. You know, and as I mentioned before, super happy that cohorts back to 2016 are still expanding with us today. You know, and it makes up roughly about 40%. And so, you know, that's based on the compensation philosophy that we have and how we compensate our sales reps. It's really an output to the quarter. We compensate them on bookings.
Gotcha. Thank you. Sid, getting a question again on Duo here. Can you talk about your architecture that gives you a competitive advantage in AI outside of the Create category?
Yeah, for sure. So a lot of the Duo functionality is outside of that Create category, outside of Code Suggestions and everything else. So helping customers kind of predict, forecast how their value stream metrics are going to look, how long will it take me to do something? GitLab Duo can help with that today. Helping customers with better kind of security posture. So GitLab Duo can explain what a vulnerability, like apart from the reporting kind of help explain the vulnerability, it can even suggest fixes. That's available today. So these are examples of additional functionality. If you look at the impact of AI, developers spend kind of 25% of their time writing code, 75% doing other things, like understanding issues. GitLab Duo can help summarize an issue. And for every developer in a typical enterprise, there's a security or an operations person.
So as we make the developers more effective, we also need to make those other people more effective. And GitLab Duo can help with that. So super excited about kind of the broad impact that AI can have and us being a leader in that according to the Omdia report.
Thank you. And then in terms of the direct competition between Ultimate and some of the security products, you know, the SAST and DAST vendors that have been, you know, legacy guys, Checkmarx, Snyk, Synopsys, Black Duck, and Veracode. How have your win rates trended against those vendors and are displacements more or less common than they were a year ago?
Yeah, I think in general, like as we keep adding functionality to it, we kind of innovate faster than the incumbents. So we're able to replace them more frequently.
And so the displacement level's going up, not down then, right? So it sounds like.
Yep.
Okay. Brian, I think you already answered this question, but it said, how has ARR from first-order customers in aggregate trended through the year? And I believe you said that it's been up, right? For first order of ARR has been going up per customer?
Yeah, you know, we've commented on this in the past. You know, within a given quarter, the bookings are roughly about 80% expansion from existing customers and 20% from first order. And so that's generally remained about the same, you know, since the numbers are getting bigger. You know, the absolute dollar amount, you know, is increasing.
Great. Sid, for you, are there any of the up-and-coming vendors that you see from a competitive perspective that worry you? Are there any vendors in the market that'd be, you know, coming up on your radar screen from last year? Obviously, the space, there's been a lot of money being raised, etc. And, you know, it's always out there. Is there something out there that we just don't know about?
Well, there's a lot of innovation everywhere. I think there's 50 AI code generation companies or something right now. So there's a ton of innovation. I think we're strong in the planning, the dev, and the SAST part. The operations part of GitLab is not as well fleshed out. And then companies they think about are like Harness and Datadog. They are very strong there. And our offering still has a lot of a long way to go before we kind of are better in every single dimension there.
Do you think that you'll be innovating there internally, acquisition, or both?
Both typically. For example, for the monitoring, we've acquired Opstrace a while back and that's now working into the product. If you look at the competition, the number one thing we compete with is still DIY DevOps. Customers using point solutions. The runner-up is GitHub. They come up more and more. I think this whole space, if you zoom out, like the DevSecOps space, it's a $40 billion market. Us and GitHub together are less than 5% penetrated into it right now. So there's a kind of, there's a lot of road ahead. And it's right now, as I characterize it, a two-horse race.
I think that's a good segue into your recently announced Sabrina is your new CTO. Maybe talk about the same question I asked about Chris in terms of, you know, what's happening in her organization? How's the transition been going? You know, what's the potential impact?
Yeah, it's evolution, not revolution, but really excited about bringing Sabrina on board. She brings a wealth of experience. She was responsible at Google for running 1 billion-user-plus products. So she has kind of the DNA of reliability and trust that we need going forward. I think we're in a good spot now, but she'll be able to grow that even further. So very excited. She's onboarding really well and just really grateful she chooses us as her next step in her career.
Can you talk about some of the new product launches that are coming in FY25 and when do you expect them to contribute to growth?
Yeah, I think we talked a lot about like, hey, we got this Enterprise Agile Planning. We got Duo. We have Dedicated. We got the security acquisitions and that's driving Ultimate. There's a lot to be excited about. I think where typically when we start talking about it, it's because we're super excited about the long-term potential. It doesn't immediately translate into kind of huge revenue next quarter. These are all S-curves and we continually stress like, hey, we're at the beginning of it. It's incorporated into guidance, but it's not a big significant effect that we forecast for this year. But the out years we expect that these are things that might contribute very significantly. But it takes maybe sometimes a bit longer than investors expect or maybe we're just early in telling investors about it. But that's the caution that we always make.
Gotcha. In terms of, you know, just a broader question just around AI adoption and where you are, Sid, from your standpoint, we've all seen the hype. We know all the investment that's been made from a top-down view of where the enterprise is in terms of adoption of generative AI for business purposes. Where do you think we are? Where do you think the barrier to adoption sits right now?
I think what we've seen is, for enterprises like outside of software, it seems to be in kind of customer contact that it's a super powerful thing. For kind of making developers more effective, it is right now really good in greenfield projects. But almost all the work in enterprises is on existing applications. And the AI needs to be fed extra context. We're super excited about kind of the so-called context windows becoming bigger where you can find, you can feed the AI more data around like what's on my planning, what's on my roadmap, what does the rest of the code base look like. And I think that will have a very positive impact about for the ability of AI to contribute. And the other thing is like it's not just code generation. It's like a lot of things.
We're excited that we have something broad, but we still need to, even though we're kind of leading in the scope, we still have a lot of work ahead of us to make sure they're all generally available and really good experiences. So it's still early days, I think. And there's sometimes what we're not seeing yet is customers. Customers have reduced the number of. There's been some layoffs kind of in the last few quarters in the technology industry. It doesn't seem that that's correlated to AI. It's not being driven by greater efficiency. So the efficiency gains are sometimes a bit smaller than you'd say based on the headlines.
Thank you. You took the Ultimate tier pricing off your website. I think, Sid, you and I talked about this before. I think that that was by design to have your salespeople engage with the customer. Is that right? Or is there something else more to read into that?
No, that's exactly it. So GitLab, sometimes we have the perception that we just do kind of version control, maybe version control in CI. We need to be able to kind of tell the story that it's a broader platform. And that typically happens in a conversation. So we wanted to encourage those conversations.
Gotcha. All right. So I'm going to leave you both with the final question for you, Sid. First of all, what are you most excited about 12 to 24 months for GitLab? And then what are you most concerned about? And I'll ask the same question to Brian. But you can't have the same answer. Just kidding.
Yeah. I think we're in an amazing market, the $40 billion market. We have the broadest product that can add the most value. I think that's a lot to be excited about. And then the most concerned, there's a lot of details to get right. And we want to make sure that we kind of mature, kind of pull the 15 different AI pieces as quickly as possible, get them to general availability. We want to close any gaps that we have to the best-in-class security and planning offerings. So I think that's we want to go as fast as we possibly can. And that requires a lot of focus and dedication. How about you, Brian?
So try to abide by Joel's guidelines and answer the same question a bit differently. But you know Sid talked about the $40 billion market. You know we launched Agile Planning. That just shows the robustness of the platform and sort of increase in the personas and the number of people that can use GitLab. And so I'm super excited about all the new things that we've actually have worked on and developed and launched. And seeing those growth vectors sort of take shape over this year and the years to come. From a concern perspective, GitLab has just a tremendous culture. We continue to add a lot of team members. And just sort of maintaining that culture with our values as we grow, I think, will be critically important and a key to one of our successes.
That's great. Last question, Brian, for you. Is there anything you think that I didn't ask or the investor community would want to know that I should have asked you?
You know I think you've asked all the questions. We went through a lot on the financials. Probably the most questions I've got was, can you tell us more about guidance, right? And we went through that. And as I said, we're being more prudent, law of large numbers. Every quarter, we will give guidance. And we're just modeling internally to lower beats. So it's between 0% and 7%. And you'll see that sort of play out through the year. But we're super excited about the quarter, super excited about looking forward in the overall market. And really appreciate you and everybody taking time out of their day for this call.
All right. Well, with that, I really appreciate your time. I look forward to seeing you both soon. Have a great rest of your day.
Thank you so much.
Thank you. Thank you.