Please email me at brian.mcwilliams@barclays.com. We can get those questions in. Bill, you know, pretty whirlwind, I'm sure, over the past couple of weeks. You know, congrats on taking the new role. I guess I'd love to start with, like, your thoughts on, you know, this GitLab opportunity and some of the reasons why you decided to move over to GitLab.
Yeah. I've been asked that a lot lately. It's so good to be here. You know, thanks for having us and inviting me. I'm five days on the job. This is my fifth day. So, you know, when I look at GitLab, I see a really singular and unique company, with so much opportunity. I'm a mission-driven person. I always have been, but at this stage in my career, I really want to be part of something that's going to have a profound impact on the world, and you know, I reflect on the last decade of my life, and one thing that's changed the world in my lifetime is software. Changed my personal life, changed my professional life. I'm sure it's changed all of your lives with our devices and cloud and services, and all of that's built by engineers.
If there's one thing I know, it's software that helps engineers do their job. I've spent 30 years building developer tools and platforms, and GitLab is at the heart of all of that, at the center of the developer DevSecOps lifecycle and, you know, a really unique company to be part of. I couldn't be more excited to be part of that.
Well, Barclays is a customer, and I can say you guys help us do our job, so I appreciate that. Reviews have been good so far. That's rolling out. You know, it's always great to be on stage five days after you take the job, Bill. But look, I mean, just at a high level, love to hear kind of any early thoughts on how you think your first few months will look like, and maybe your strategy from the start.
Yeah. Well, sort of three areas of focus for me: customers, team members, and investors, and I've had a chance in the first five days to do a little bit of all of those, but I plan on doing a lot more of engagement across all three of those audiences. I'm in learning mode. I want to learn from all perspectives, what the company's doing really well and that we should continue to do and amplify and where we can improve, you know. It's, I think, my goal with our interim CRO is when I get out on the road and see up to 50 customers in the first 60 days. I'm here, obviously, meeting with investors and analysts, and the callbacks last week after earnings were another great opportunity for that.
And then, we just got done with an offsite with the executive team Monday and Tuesday, where we spent all day and evening getting to know each other, talking about FY26 planning, kind of bringing me up to speed. And we've also already had a couple of, ask-me-anythings with the entire company. So, first five days have been very eventful, but all three of those audiences are in my mind, and that's what I plan on doing the first, 60 days.
Excellent, and you know, next year, this fireside, it'll be like hard mode for questions for us, but most of those are going to go to Brian today, but you know, before then, just love to hear, like, you know, your past background's been, within software. Anything that you think could correlate to the GitLab opportunity?
Oh, yeah. There's three things I think pretty obvious. First, like I said in the beginning, I know this user and our customer very, very well. Having built, you know, the developer platforms at Microsoft and Azure, I know our customer, our buyer, our users. Same thing at Adobe, same thing at New Relic. Just a wealth of experience with our customer. Second, I know how to build products in this space that have reached millions of users and adoption and generate billions in revenue for those companies that I've worked for. And third, you know, I've been part of organizations that are at scale, that are, you know, three, four, 10, sometimes larger scale than GitLab. So from a people, from a process, from a business perspective, I know what great looks like and want to bring that knowledge and skill experience into GitLab.
Excellent. And then, as a sell-side analyst, I can sometimes pretend to be a lot of things, but one of them is not a New Relic expert. But would just love to hear we heard about you made some pricing changes in your past role, you know, add some consumption pricing. You know, obviously, super early days. We're not trying to break news here on this fireside, though if you would like to, I'm always encouraging. But I guess, like, we'd love to hear about your past experience with SaaS pricing and maybe, like, if you see any tweaks or anything early for GitLab.
Well, I'll cut to the chase and just say, like, Sid did a great job on the earnings call saying he's not committing us to anything and we're not announcing any pricing, and I won't hear either.
Fair enough.
I will say, you know, I do have a background in pricing going all the way back to Azure services, you know, have been part of how we price, and package all the companies I've been part of. And so I'm sure that knowledge will come in handy. But we're early days with the workflow service where Sid mentioned to me there's an opportunity. And we're going to do the right thing, build it, validate it with customers, test, understand willingness to pay, and pick the best monetization vehicle, and we'll share it when we get.
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense for AI use cases especially, right? Like, get people adding more value, adding their own workloads, and then kind of we can figure out the pricing afterwards. Brian, this one might be for you. Just on the CRO search, you know, been ongoing. Like, any update there or how you guys are thinking about it?
Yeah. So as Bill said, Ashley, as our interim CRO, has been doing a great job. She worked very closely with our prior CRO, and so it was a seamless transition between the two. And I think the quarter that we just posted and the beat and raise is a testament to that. We've seen a lot of great candidates, but we want to get the best candidate, so we're in no rush to fill the role. The search is ongoing, and it's under Bill's leadership right now.
Excellent. And then just on, I mean, I got the CFO right before the end of the year. I got to try at the very least anything that we can get that's crunchy from a top-line perspective on how to think about next year or, like, maybe what are some of the things you're seeing in your business that can help investors as they're trying to figure out their model?
Yeah, absolutely. As we, you know, so next quarter we'll actually give our guidance for next year.
Sure. Fair enough.
And so no breaking news today. Good try. But, you know, there's a lot of growth drivers in the business that we're super excited about going into the year. You know, as we entered this year, we primarily had Premium and Ultimate from a SKU perspective, and we've been talking a lot on the calls about Dedicated Pro and Enterprise, and early adoption has been really positive. Customer productivity has been up to 50%. You know, with that said, it's going to take a little while for that to make a material impact in the financials. We're also super excited about what we're seeing in Dedicated. That's our single-tenant SaaS platform that we host for customers, mostly highly regulated, you know, higher complexity. And so happy with where we're at there.
Then we have the agile planning SKU, so we have a lot more to sell into our customer base to get greater wallet share. But you know, it's a big market. You know, it's a $40 billion TAM, you know, we're, you know, just shy of $1 billion. Our next largest competitor is, you know, us combined still a small fraction of the market. So you know, landing new customers, expanding existing customers, hyperscaler partnerships. So lots to be excited about, and next quarter we'll be happy to update you on next year's guidance.
That's perfect. Just to, you know, stay with the third quarter, what happened? You talked about federal as a vertical that has performed really well for GitLab. And you know, I'm sure there's a lot of efficiency that you guys can help with, you know, across our government. But you know, how should investors think about, like, the TAM for that federal business? You know, how do they think about, like, how that can be a bigger vertical for GitLab going forward?
Yeah. You know, we're you know, with our self-hosted model, you know, it fits well in the federal space. You know, really happy, you know, one of our top 10, you know, in our top 10, we have two three-letter agencies. And so when they deploy, they deploy really big. I think it really goes to show the testament of the platform itself, how extensible it is, you know, whether any vertical you're in and sort of the efficiencies that you get from that. And so I think the federal vertical, we're going through a FedRAMP process right now. We've gotten early traction with some customers there as well. And so I think it's a you know, especially with the new administration, what's it called? DOGE.
Yep.
The DOGE committee that got established. I think we're well-positioned to actually help with that, and so excited to see what happens, and you know, we had the best quarter in company history in the federal sector. You know, September is their year-end, so, you know, it's, you know, to be expected in some case, but you know, happy with what we're seeing there.
And look, I'm happy to plug my own research, but we published the Developer Hiring Trends this morning, like we do every month. And you've seen some pretty strong year-over-year growth over the last few months. We track GitLab job postings as well, and, you know, your results track in line with that sentiment, as well. I know, you know, that might not be a part of your guidance, but, at least within your installed customer base, are you seeing, you know, early signs of stabilization, like maybe larger customers doing better results? Like, any commentary there?
Yeah. So thanks for the question. We're landing with, you know, this quarter, one of the things I called out in last quarter as well is our enterprise customer base has been really strong. And so if you look at our customers over 100K, they've grown 31% year- over- year. And, you know, we're landing larger as well. So the size of the deals is getting bigger as well. You know, but with that said, we typically land smaller. We don't do mostly wall-to-wall lands. And so within a given quarter, a lot of our business has expansion within our existing client base. And, you know, we may land with the developer, then we go to operations and we get to security. It's more seats plus an upgrade. And so we have the existing business continue to sell into. We call that our landed TAM.
And then, obviously, we're going after new logos, you know, every day.
So even with your largest customers then, like, because, you know, there's so few that are wall-to-wall, like, there's still seat opportunities for even them to continue to expand?
Absolutely.
Perfect. And just on pricing, for this year, we previously talked about, like, $10 million-$20 million in, like, total contribution for this year. Is that still the right way to think about it for FY25 or any updates there?
Yeah. So for those who are new to GitLab, about three quarters ago, I think it was, you know, when I looked at the consensus for this year, the models were way, way off, and so we dug into the models and said, "Where are we off at?", and it was on the impact of the pricing increase, and so we gave out soft guidance for what the pricing increase would be relative to this year. We haven't updated that because the consensus has actually come in more in line, but what we have said externally is we're doing better than what we expected internally, and we're happy with what we're seeing there. Really on two fronts. One is, you know, we're improving unit economics, obviously with a higher price increase.
And more importantly, when we actually did the price increase, if you're an existing client, we didn't allow you to renew early. So we were doing this to try to pull in a rush of bookings. You had to actually be up for renewal. You could only do a new contract reset two weeks before renewal. And so, you know, we announced that spring of last year where the first part of that was going from $19-$24 per seat per month and then from $24 to $29. So we're about halfway through. You'll continue to see the impact for many quarters to come. And we're happy with where we're, you know, currently landing with it.
Just with that dynamic, your average customer duration's like 15 months, right? So.
Yeah.
Like you previously mentioned that next year you should see a stronger price increase benefit than this year just as those contract renewals come through. That still kind of tracks what you're seeing?
Yeah. It's really the way that we actually rolled it out and the ratable nature of the model. And so from 2019 to 2024, you know, we're almost through all of those contracts, you know, from an average basis of 15 months. We still have three and five-year contracts as well, so we'll get the benefit from that when they come up. So you'll get everything that you've recognized this year, the full nature of that next year from a ratable nature, plus the 2024 to 2025 as well.
Excellent. Yeah, definitely.
24 to 29, so.
Yeah, so that will be like stronger pricing benefit next year. Bill, to tag you back in, you know, as you kind of did your homework on GitLab and you talked to customers and suppliers and resellers and all that, was there anything that, like, stuck out to you, like a common theme or anything that you thought was interesting, from those conversations?
Yeah. I mean, GitLab is really a strategic asset for our customers. It's where their intellectual property is created, maintained, you know, and where their innovation happens. It's, you know, with the digital age, every business is in some way a digital business, and it's really exciting to be part of that. I'd say, the productivity and ROI numbers that we share are just so impressive to me. Like, customers who adopt this, even they're moving from probably some homegrown stack. That's our primary competitor. Not only did they get rid of the maintenance and development of that, but they can move to a SaaS solution that's best in class, get enormous ROI and productivity benefits that they can then invest back into their own business. That theme came out, and it's like really is world-class.
And to Brian's point, I mean, you guys are midway through a two-legged price increase, and you just saw, like, lows for churn in this most recent quarter. So I just showed you customers are getting more value of the platform.
Absolutely.
When it comes to the ultimate strength that you've seen, would you attribute this to, like, in AI is still early days, so like more people wanting to adopt security, or do they feel like they need to go to ultimate anyway? So like they get those ultimate AI features. Like, how would you say where that strength is coming from?
I think it's coming from many different aspects, right, and so one of the things that surprised me, quite frankly, was the number of people adopting GitLab during the height of the pandemic when they were doing massive amount of layoffs, and so one of the things is with a comprehensive DevSecOps platform and consolidating to a system of record and getting rid of a number of point solutions, you can actually gain efficiency in several different ways. The first way is you eliminate point solutions. Second way, you can minimize the teams that actually do the integrations. The third way is your developers are more productive. We've reported, you know, cycle times about seven times faster, and then fourth, if you have a revenue-generating app, you get that out to market quicker, and so people are adopting a platform over point solutions for that.
When they evaluate Ultimate versus Premium, they tend to like Ultimate more because of the advanced security features, as well as the compliance, everything that comes along with that. Ultimate is much more expensive than Premium, but I like to view it from a different way and say at list price, $99 per month, $1,200 a year, you know, if, you know, our customers actually look how much they pay for all their other SaaS solutions. And for an engineer who, a senior engineer who typically has multiple years of experience, highly compensated to have a full software platform that enables them to make software better, faster, cheaper, more secure, for $1,200 a year is a great deal. And so we're seeing more and more people land on Ultimate.
Ultimate was greater than 50% of the bookings in the last quarter and now comprises of 48% of our total AR.
Yeah, that's a good point. And like the developer that they're attaching to, right? Like that salary is going to be a lot higher than $1,200, just when it comes to that ultimate shift. Like I think that's what you just described as a broader deployment and a larger decision than just beyond like, you know, we saw a price increase in premium, so let's move to ultimate. Like, do you think the premium price increase had like a minimal impact on that ultimate shift?
I think a little. If you go through the Salesforce notes, you'll actually see, you know, they were looking at Premium. Now they're going to Ultimate because Premium was 5X. You know, it was a 5X difference. Now it's a little over 3X. But really I think it's a core platform going back to security and compliance. The ROI that Bill talked about is the payback period is less than six months with Ultimate, and the ROI is over 480% in three years, and so we're seeing significant savings with our customers when they consolidate onto a platform, just by increasing cycle times.
And just on, like, that which also leads to better unit economics on your perspective, and you've seen improving, you know, margin growth, especially in the most recent quarter. It looks like some of that savings also you got much more leverage on the sales and marketing line for this quarter. You know, do you think, you know, you're comfortable with your sales capacity now, or was that like is that in the right spot, or like is that just like a part of the trend of like you guys seeing better Ultimate, seeing better revenue growth, so getting more leverage on that line?
Yeah. So, you know, sales capacity and capacity model is something near and dear to my heart. You know, I've made my career out of spending most of the time with the CRO because if you have a good go-to-market model that's highly efficient, that's where you can create the most value for a company. When I got to the company, the E to R ratio for sales and marketing was well over 100%, and it's increased every quarter for the last four years. So part of it's just getting larger, economies of scale. You know, we've the leadership has been, you know, in there for some period of time now, landing larger with our customers. And, you know, one of the things from a capacity model perspective, you never want to get behind. And so every quarter we're actually evaluating what attainment was within the quarter.
We know that it takes enterprise, you know, sales reps about nine months to ramp, and so we'll bring those on throughout the year depending upon how we do, and we never want to get behind because it takes 18 to 24 to 30 months to actually catch back up on your capacity, so it's the leverage that we're getting in the business through the economies of scale, leadership, landing larger, less discounting, that's really having an impact, you know, on the overall operating margin. In Q3, as you talked about, we had 1,000 basis points year- over- year.
We can expect that every quarter going forward, right? Like.
I did not say that.
Oh, man. I try.
I try.
You're trying to be provocative.
Yeah.
I'm going to keep going. I mean, so you could say your margins are under-represented because you have JiHu, right? And I know it's tough to put timing around, like, if you could consolidate or not, but maybe for investors that, like, that aren't familiar with dynamics, can you just talk about, like, you know, what that looks like for GitLab and, like, how you guys are trying to consolidate JiHu today?
Consolidate?
The expenses for Jihu.
Oh, Jihu.
Jihu.
Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. No worries on.
Billy Accent.
You know, so for those who, you know, are newer to the story, so Jihu is our China joint venture, and you know, when we started the joint venture, we wanted to actually be in China, but didn't want to be distracted from the management and everything else, so we actually contributed the IP, and we had a venture, it was Sequoia China that actually came in and put the money in, and due to our ownership structure, you know, we actually have to put that in our consolidated results, and so for this year, there will be roughly about $14 million of Jihu expenses. There's a number of tests that you have to run through. We're just above 50% in equity ownership, and once we get below 50% and some other things, we will actually not consolidate that anymore.
Back a couple of years ago, right after we went public, it was important to deconsolidate it because from a company perspective, we're losing a lot of money, and Jihu was spending a lot more than $14 million per year, but two things have happened. One is Jihu has brought down their expenses considerably, and then, you know, GitLab actually crossed the threshold of being free cash flow generating, and so we're still trying to deconsolidate it. You know, it's sort of a pass-fail thing on equity ownership. Until they raise more or we get diluted down, we'll continue to keep it in our consolidated results.
Excellent. Question coming from the audience. You know, you can look at the GitLab website, and I apologize, you guys are being very open about some of the, what you guys are working on internally. And you can see like kind of the product roadmap for like security features for ultimate or some observability features. But the question from the investor probably is, what's next in the product roadmap to increase the breadth of the platform?
You know, I think if you look at the investments that we're making overall in the company, they really fall into three core categories. One is the DevSecOps platform. In our investor presentation, we have what we delivered from a platform perspective in 2019 versus where we're at in 2024 today. And we've really built out the security vertical, if you will. And so one of the things that a lot of our customers love is shifting security left. We've made some investments in observability, but more importantly, the feature functionality over the entire platform has grown. And I love numbers being a CFO, and you know, that shows up in the net dollar retention rate of cohorts from like 12 years ago. So cohorts for every year of the company's history are still expanding at about the same rate of the net dollar retention that we've actually published.
And so that just talks about the benefit and the value and what customers are getting from us. So one is the core platform, and it's important to continue to innovate and differentiate and so forth. Number two is security. You know, security is on top of minds of all board CEOs, CISOs, CFOs, you know, everybody within the company. And the fact that we can actually shift that security left, you know, to make it a system of record whereas you're actually doing your program, you can get the vulnerability alerts, you can do the container scanning, DAST, SAST, fuzz testing, all that upfront. That really, instead of going back and forth, we were talking about earlier today, and Bill was saying like the CISO would come up with all the vulnerabilities and then create a flat file, send it over here.
It was two different systems and the accountability between the two. It just creates a lot of friction and so forth, and so our investment in security, creating a very good security vertical that can shift left that comes inherently with the platform, is really great, and then the last area of investment is AI, and we've actually taken a fundamental different approach to AI than a lot of other folks, and so if you look at our AI features, we have Duo Pro, which is really meant for the developer, and that's code assistance. Duo Enterprise is very different in the sense that we have 15 AI features that we bundled up in Duo Enterprise, and that's basically injecting AI throughout the entire software development lifecycle. We did a DevSecOps report, and in that report, I'm going out and talking to, you know, hundreds of developers.
On average, a developer spends only about 25% of their time coding. They spend the rest of their time managing, planning, deploying, QA, and so forth. And so when you put all that other stuff in it, if you just have AI for the coding aspect, that's a small part of their overall workflow and their day's activities. And so by injecting it throughout the entire workflow, that's where we're seeing these productivity enhancements and the differentiating, really pay off.
No, I completely agree, and I like that was a pretty crunchy comment around the like your existing customer cohorts are all growing around your net retention rate. I mean, I guess that goes back to what we talked about in the beginning, which is like your customer base really isn't wall to wall, GitLab, largely. So there's still like even within your existing base, like a larger seat count opportunity from there. Just on Duo, since you brought it up, we can't go, you know, the whole time without talking about AI. I know there's a lot of excitement, and you gave some good stats on like the net, like how new customers adopt, the Duo product. So can you just help us with like where Duo stands today, any metrics around its utilization, and then we'll go into like how to think about it from here?
Absolutely. So I like to break this up into sort of two talk tracks. And so one from what we're seeing in early adoption and the customer feedback that we're getting and some of the new logos that we're landing. And then from a financial standpoint, which I think you're getting at from a contribution standpoint. And so from a new customer standpoint, you know, we've landed a number of great customers. Second quarter, I talked about AI did 3X what our internal projection was. This quarter, it was over our internal projection as well. We landed LATAM Airlines and Emirates and a number of other great clients this quarter.
The change that I've seen with AI in general from a product perspective that we're selling is, about two to three quarters ago when people would buy the AI product, they would buy 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 licenses and really try to test and understand what was happening. As company, there's been a lot of, AI talk, I guess is the best way to say it. And, with that, there's been privacy issues, IP issues, you know, code getting out there and so forth. And so it was really done more in a controlled test type fashion. When I ran the numbers this quarter, I was really curious of all the deals that included Duo, either Pro or Enterprise, how much of that was a percentage of the total AR of those deals.
So summed up all the deals, and I was actually pretty surprised that Duo made up over 25% of the total AR, and so what that tells me is that when you go back and look at the client, all the deals individually, what it tells me is that not only are they buying for sort of, if they buy ultimate licenses, they're buying a Duo license, so they're buying more for the enterprise. When I dug further into that and actually looked at deployment and active users and all that, and actually went to the sales rep and talked to the sales rep, they're actually buying licenses for the, you know, most of the enterprise to match what they bought from a DevOps perspective, but they're actually rolling them out in waves now.
And so you're starting to see what I would say more broader adoption at the enterprise, than what you saw two or three quarters ago. So I found that very promising.
No, I mean, that's a great point. Like, for instance, like if you're adopting a new workflow and going to GitLab, you might be more willing to, let's, okay, let's start with the AI features. Where existing customer might be set in your ways, we'll start a little smaller, but at least on a like-for-like basis, that new customer has better RPU because you're adding the Duo on top. Just from a monetization standpoint, off, you know, on my side, we like to get over our skis and get a little excited about these things, but what's kind of the best way at least to help us initially framing like the Duo opportunity?
Yeah, you know, I, you know, my personal belief and Bill's belief and, you know, the company's belief is like everybody should be on ultimate and everybody should have AI because, you know, it enhances, you know, they can work on the things they want to work on, it enhances their productivity, you know, it makes them more efficient and so forth. You know, with that said, you know, it's a penetration game and we'll obviously get more penetration over time. The second part of the thread that I want to talk about is the contributions to the model, and you know, we're roughly an $800 million run rate company. We just reported 31% year-over-year revenue growth.
And so when you're selling a new product that's starting off from scratch, you know, there's an adoption curve, but for it to make a material impact to the financials, it's going to take time. It's a ratable model. It's going to take time. And so we're very excited about what we're seeing, the customer feedback, the Gartner Magic Quadrant that came out, you know, the numbers that we see, but we're also measured and tempered on what we think is going to actually happen from a contribution to the model. And so what we're telling people is, you know, with all that excitement, don't expect material impact, you know, until really beyond FY26.
At least from my side, for your third quarter, you posted better than expected results. You've had a stronger beat than the past few quarters. RPO really held up. I'm not picking on you here, but I did save the question for the last, which is like.
Looks like we're out of time.
I was like, can I get this one in? No, but I mean, like the one thing that you could bring up is like, maybe the net new customer adds for your base customers was a little smaller in the past quarters. I know you're more focused on bigger enterprise deployments now, but I guess how should we think about that metric here?
Yeah, so let me start off with some of the metrics for the quarter and why we're super happy with the quarter. You know, 31% year-over-year revenue growth. We did that with non-GAAP gross margin of 91%. You know, we continue to get great operating leverage on the operating margin, 1,000 basis points year-over-year improvement with 39% year-over-year CRPO growth. We don't compensate the sales force to say, hey, you have to sell X of ultimate, Y of premium, nor do we charge differently for a SaaS versus self-managed, nor do we actually compensate them based on the number of new logos they bring in. So they get the same base commission rate for an expansion or a new client.
And one of the things I talked about, you know, when we did the premium price increase, it's going better than expected, but I've noticed some price sensitivity in SMB in the lower end of mid-market. And so when you look at base customers, that's an output to the quarter. It's not something that we're actually trying to drive internally to actually say, hey, we have a goal of X per quarter. So it was lower. And part of the reason why it was lower this quarter was because ultimate did so well. So it's a mix issue. Ultimate greater than 50% of the bookings, three times more than premium. And part of it was mix, but also it was part of the low end of the market that doesn't really have material impact to the financials.
What we've done is we've done some promotional activity for SMB in low end of mid-market. If you're a customer with 75 employees or less, you can buy up to 20 licenses at $19 per user per month. What was really promising about that is we saw a 20% uptick in trial signups and a 20% conversion in first orders, higher than the year before based on that. We're still playing around with pricing and packaging at the low end. Nothing to announce today. We're still assessing that, but hopefully we'll come out with something a little bit more permanent around that to address the low end of the market.
That makes sense. I appreciate that breakdown. Bill, you know, having a trial was a good reason for me to get out of this conference last year and, you know, you just started. So I'm sure the next time we'll talk, I'll have, you know, much more fastballs on your end, but I want to say looking forward to see what you guys are, going to be doing at GitLab over the next few quarters. So thanks for the time. And investors, if you have any questions, we can get through with the GitLab team, but thanks again for being here. Appreciate it.
Thank you.