GitLab Inc. (GTLB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Welcome to another great afternoon session at day 3 of the Morgan Stanley TMT Conference. As a reminder, I'm Sanjit Singh, I run the infrastructure software coverage. On the team, we are pleased to have the management team from GitLab, newly announced CEO, Bill Staples; and Chief Financial Officer, Brian. Bill and Brian, welcome to the TMT conference once again.

Thank you.

Thank you for having us.

Awesome. So before we dive into what I think is a very interesting GitLab story, let me go through the disclosures. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley research disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative.

I thought we spent the beginning conversation just introducing yourself, Bill. You and I worked together while you were at New Relic. Maybe if you could just, as the newly appointed CEO, for those in the audience who are unfamiliar with your background, can you give us a sense of your sort of clear highlights? And what was the sort of reasons why you took on the CEO role at GitLab?

Yes. It's great to be here today. Thanks for inviting us. And my journey has been 30 years now building developer tools and platforms. So in many ways, the journey to GitLab feels like home, back home to me. I spent a lot of time at Microsoft, helping build out the developer platform and application platforms there, spent some time at Adobe and then, as you said, New Relic last. And have been drawn to this mission of software for my entire career. As I reflect on my last 10, 20 years, probably the same for you. I think about how software has just changed our world. Fundamentally, the way we communicate, entertain, get business done is largely through software, and that's driven by software developers, creating that software in really specialized languages, deep technical talent. And I just love serving that customer and have done it now for nearly 30 years. So I'm drawn to that mission. And I think of GitLab as the heart and soul of creating software. We're known as a market leader for software development life cycle. And it's really a special company, strong value, strong culture, exactly what I want to be doing at this part -- stage of my career.

Yes, you've had intimate experience with these end users and these customers throughout the course of your career. The point that you just made about creating -- GitLab has created a sort of a distinctive culture. I think that was one of Sid's hallmarks creating one of the most distinctive and transparent cultures in all public company software. What -- how do you anticipate the current learning curve will be for you over the next year? As you look at the business, what do you think is going well? Where do you think changes need to be made as you look to grow faster and sharpen the execution?

Yes. Actually, let me start with culture, and it leads naturally to that second part of your question. It is a really distinctive culture, as I came in, it's all remote company, 0 offices. And so the company culture has been built up around how do we scale and build a world-class product, build a world-class business without any offices with everyone remote, more than 2,000 employees across 65 countries. And the culture, therefore was driven to be very collaborative, very asynchronous, very transparent. You use the word transparent, it's one of our core values, transparency. And it's a really incredible environment because our team members, we don't call them employees, we're all team members, demand for me a level of integrity, a level of transparency that you do. And that drives a high level of excellence in thought and in execution. So when I came into the company, I wanted to live those values. I wanted to engage team members and learn from them what it is like to be in GitLab, what the opportunities are and where we should focus as a company? So the very first thing I did actually is I invited every team member to send me an e-mail and answer 3 questions. Number one, why are you here? Number two, what's one thing that you think we should not change as a company? And number three, what is one thing we should change in order to grow? I got about 2,000 e-mails and I learned a ton about GitLab, about our people, about what they value and care about. I heard their passion for our mission and our business as well as opportunities to improve. We got a ton of advice and feedback on things that we should do differently and grow in order to grow the organization. I also then went on a number of customer visits. So I think I've visited now more than 50 customers in my first 90 days, quite a few weeks on the road and also virtual calls, of course, and heard from customers their passion, their love for GitLab and what we do. The amazing missions that we support across public sector, large enterprise, mid-market and SMB. And learn from them as well, like where they think we do really well, product-wise and business-wise, and what we could do improvement. I took all of that kind of experience in learning from both team members as well as customers and I lived our transparent value. I wrote it all down. In fact, I wrote a 20-page memo, and published it internally to every team member and say, here's what I heard from you, here's what I heard from customers and here's what I think we need to do about it. We shared that at the beginning of the fiscal year. And then last week, the executive team held what we call the company kickoff meeting, and it was basically 90 minutes of the executive team virtually inviting every team member to sit down with us at the table and talk through the company plan. And we also then did our sales kickoff and did the traditional sales kickoff events and training for all the sales team. So we're now completely aligned around our fiscal year plan, around our company objectives and what we're going to focus on going forward. I'll just summarize those 3 and happy to double click, if you want. But our 3 objectives for FY '26 are win new customers, drive more value faster with customers and focus on customer-centered innovation. Those might seem very kind of [indiscernible], kind of boring, if you will but it's really a focus of back to fundamentals. I believe to scale a $1 billion business at the 20% to 30% year-over-year growth rates that we've been doing, it's really about executing the fundamentals really, really well. So that's the focus of the organization.

Awesome. Brian, Bill just talked about the growth rates that you GitLab have been posting. You guys grew, I think, about a little over 30% for the year. There's not that many companies in software growing at that rate. In Q4, you grew 29%. You guided next year, if you sort of squint, about 24%. Can you talk to us about the themes coming -- exiting the year in Q4 from a business perspective? And what are sort of the key underlying assumptions that frames out that 24% guidance for next year?

Yes, absolutely. So as you said, we grew last year 31% year-over-year, and we guided to around 24% for next year. And so as we entered this year, we only had really Premium and Ultimate. And as we went through the year, we added a number of new SKUs really to address some of the market demand. And so one is Dedicated as our single-tenant SaaS offering. It was really requested from us from our highly regulated customers to have a private cloud network so they could get up and running quicker. Two is our Duo products. We have Duo Pro, Duo Enterprise and then also announced private beta Duo Workflow. On Duo Pro, that's basically the code generation that allows companies to do some -- there's a lot of code generation tools out there, but it does add to help software developers become more productive. On Duo Enterprise, we're injecting AI throughout the entire software development life cycle, just not in code generation. Software developers spend probably about 25% of their time actually writing code, but you have to plan, manage, deploy, test, secure and so putting those AI features into the entire software development life cycle is very important. And then Duo Workflow is a agentic AI, and we'll probably get into that a little bit more later. And so these new products, coupled with our existing products will expand our existing clients. We do that pretty much every quarter, we'll land new customers and then we'll upsell those customers with additional wallet share. And so we put all that together, internal model. We rolled out from a field roll-up perspective. We also got the leadership team together and looked at that, then also looked at some historical trend rates. And those are the factors that went into establishing the guidance for next year.

Awesome. When we think about that bucket of new opportunities, Duo Pro and Enterprise, GitLab Dedicated, ultimately, GitLab workflows will come online. You have the Agile Planning product that gained some momentum. And as we look at that as a category, when do you think, Brian, that starts to meaningfully impact the results maybe through the lens of NRR, maybe NRR is not the right lens, NRR ticked down about a point this quarter. As we look into next year, when does that class of new products really have the scale and have to drive overall growth?

Yes. As a company, we guided to roughly $939 million, I think, at the midpoint, it is. And so for the -- as a ratable business model for these products to make a meaningful impact to our financials, it's going to take a little time. And so it's built into our guidance this year. We believe that there are great growth drivers even in the years to come. We're seeing good adoption of those today. We're very happy with how we did in Duo in fourth quarter alone. We landed some really big clients that we talked about on the call, CACI, NatWest, Barclays and so forth. And so I think it will take a little time. The early traction is positive. And we're happy with what we're seeing.

Yes. On the customer front, a lot of headliners there, including [ Infodoptic ] and some of the others. Maybe a couple of follow-up questions before we get in to the meat of the opportunity. You mentioned on the call that public sector is about 12% of ARR. How did you incorporate any sort of Fed spending uncertainty into the fiscal year '26 guidance?

Great question. It's interesting. There's been a lot of changes with the new administration and the Department of Government Efficiency we're hearing a lot about lately. And so we are meeting with our customers on a regular basis. Obviously, what the Department of Government Efficiency is trying to do is what GitLab does. And so a lot of our customers buy our product because in 3 years, the ROI is over 480%, payback is less than 6 months. So this is really aligned with what's happening from a government perspective. And so right now, we didn't change anything from an assumptions perspective. We've gone through customer by, customer by customer, and looked at all the agencies. Our federal team is working very closely with them. And there's really -- until there's an update, there's really no sort of definitive thing that we could provide. But it's something that we're watching closely.

Awesome. So let me just talk about -- I kind of tag in my notes, conviction in the opportunity. When we initiated [ Overweight ] last year, broadly what we saw was a highly innovative company that's targeting a market that's been, frankly, best of breed, and we saw opportunities for that to consolidate while driving a lot more automation and ROI for your customers. The skeptics on the story kind of believe that the runway is actually a lot shorter, that there may be headwinds on developer seat growth. There's a notion that maybe customers are already sort of self-selected into GitHub versus GitLab. From your perspective, why is that line of thinking on the size of the opportunity for GitLab? Why is that misplaced?

Yes. I mean just building on the public sector question, I spent a week in Washington, D.C. meeting with some of the biggest government agencies and while they certainly feel the noise of DOGE and concerns around that, the conversations were all around the seat growth and the opportunity for that -- and that's kind of really true. I hear a lot about the worries around seat engineering, capacity needing -- shrinking given the rise of AI. I think that's largely driven out of, frankly, engineers' anxiety when they see how easy it is to generate code. It may threaten their feeling of security around job security in particular. But for those of us who've been in the business for a while, this is a pretty common pattern. As soon as those abstraction levels rise, that anxiety of maybe my skill set, maybe my experience doesn't matter. But inevitably, what's happened in software is more software creators are coming into the market nearly every single year and more software is built every single year. The reason for that is Software is the ultimate scale and leverage point for business. It has driven enormous productivity and efficiency gains for companies. It's opened new channels for revenue. And frankly, we've been constrained on engineering resource and capacity for the entire existence of software. We think about in terms of humanity. There's less than 1% of humanity who has the technical skills to write code today and yet they reach 6 or 7 billion people with smartphones and cloud. And so this tiny fraction has unlocked enormous GDP and productivity for the entire world. Imagine when more people can create software because you don't have to know all those deep technical languages. It will create more software creators, and it will unlock even more code generated by humans and through machines. And to us, that's really exciting because more software creators means more seats, more code means more demand for our platform because you can't just take code and have it unlock value. You have to run an entire software life cycle. You have to manage the quality of the code, the security of the code, the privacy compliance. You have to govern it, you have to version control it. You have to do all the things that GitLab does really, really well, whether it's created by humans or machines. Same thing is true. And so we see that as a virtuous cycle actually for AI to drive more platform demand for us. And of course, we're going to participate in the AI code generation and agentic services approach as well with our Duo Workflow product.

Awesome. Let's talk a little bit about the drivers of growth, maybe starting with Ultimate. Pretty interesting time on the Ultimate journey, just hit 50% of ARR. So Brian, to what extent has price increase on Premium nudge customers to come in fiscal year '25. And then ultimately, where do you think the mix of Ultimate gets to?

Well, we as a company think Ultimate is a great value proposition in every company should use Ultimate. And so one of the things that we don't actually compensate the sales force on Ultimate versus Premium. When we go in, it's really a consultative sales approach and we find out what's best for the customer and we're trying to solve their problems and trying to get them very good time to value and positive business outcomes. And so happy with Ultimate since it's over 3x the price of Premium, how well it's done, as you said, it's 50% of our total ARR today. People primarily go to Ultimate for security and compliance. And so security is on the top of everyone's mind. When you can actually shift security left in the process and actually allow that to happen at the same time, people are coding and managing and deploying. It just speeds up the cycle times. And so that's one of the reasons why people go to Ultimate. It's difficult -- I sit in every forecast call, and it's difficult to know how many people went from Premium to Ultimate because of the lower price differential. That has happened, I would say, more on the periphery. But majority of the reason why people are going to Ultimate are for security and compliance.

Is there any detail you can provide because that's another question that we get is that it sounds like Ultimate is doing really, really well. I get a lot of questions on the Premium subscription tier, sort of trend lines around seat growth. Obviously, there's a migration impact that's happening directionally from Premium to Ultimate. But what's the -- maybe excluding the migration impact, how do you feel about the trend line of seat expansion on Premium?

When you look at -- I'll give you a couple of different data points to answer the question. And so by default when you set a net ARR target for your sales team and they can get there through Ultimate and Premium. The more Ultimate you sell, by default, the less seat you're going to sell. So there's sort of a mixing going on. This quarter, in particular, as you know in our dollar-based net retention rate, we break out the percentage contribution from seats, tier upgrade and increased customer yield/price increase. And this quarter, in particular, the seat component was 75% of the dollar-based net retention. Premium seats this quarter, net adds was the best it's been in the last 6 quarters. And so we had a very positive seat addition this quarter, both in Ultimate and Premium.

That's good. That's great context. Talking about the category a little bit. When we think about the software development life cycle, it's one of the best playgrounds, I'd argue for AI, one of the top 2, 3 best playgrounds for customers to prove out AI in their organization. So the innovation cycle is progressing rapidly and the category is sort of in real time, making a transition from code assistants to agents. Do you think this focus, the sort of innovation cycle we're in sort of changes the customer buying psychology, which I think, frankly, for the last 18 to 24 months has been around ROA, ROI consolidation back to more of a traditional best-of-breed approach. What are your sort of thoughts about the innovation cycle and how it impacts customer buying behavior?

Yes, the rapid innovation that's going on right now, in particular, in the code creation space is where I see it most. I think everyone was excited by Copilot and what it brought to VS Code originally and then it was Codeium and then it was Cursor. And now its others that are emerging. It's really exciting. And it's exciting to me because it's innovating on the software creation experience in ways that we haven't seen for a few decades. And it's really -- what teams are doing are taking the power of generative AI, putting it in the coding context and experimenting with new patterns for how to author software faster. I will note we make $0 from software -- the software creation part of the life cycle. So there's no revenue at risk for us. In fact, we believe because it's going to raise the abstraction, make software easier to create and more software will be created. It actually just drives more demand for our platform. So we don't see it as a risk, we see it as an opportunity as well. And so we have a Duo Pro product that's similar to those other code creation tools, brings AI into the context of the IDE for -- with GitLab support. And we'll participate in that phase of software creation as well. But ultimately, I see that software creation layer as more of a commodity. VS Code, which has been the #1 tool for many years, Microsoft decided to make t open source and charge $0 for. They really see VS Code, and I think large -- more largely GitHub, as a channel for customers to bring customers into their Azure and other platforms. And so the monetization that we're seeing in early start-ups in that phase are really just passing on the cost of tokens and the AI that needs to drive those experiences. The cost of tokens is going to go down over time. The monetization potential of those tools, I think, goes down over time. And still you will see numerous start-ups experimenting and trying new things. So we want to participate in that. Ultimately, though, I think the benefit for us is it's just going to create more engineers and more code that need to be managed through a software life cycle, and that's really where our defensive mode is. That's where our IP is. That's where customers, enterprises and public sector need the guarantees of security, quality, privacy compliance that you just can't do with a code creation tool.

And talking about agents and what GitLab is doing on the agent front, here -- the offering here is GitLab Workflows, which you have -- you're currently in private beta. Can you describe what GitLab Workflow does in terms of unlocking value across the entirety of the software development life cycle and any sort of early customer feedback on that?

Yes, this is where things get, I think, really exciting, and it's a new approach to software engineering. So we spent a lot of time talking about Duo Pro which is the in IDE, the developer experience creating software that's Duo Pro for us. Duo Enterprise, as Brian mentioned as we take AI and we put it inside of our application. So as you're creating issues or you're managing code mergers or you're reviewing security vulnerabilities, you get the benefit of AI in those tasks in the application experience to make better decisions. What Duo Workflow does is kind of take this a step further and essentially creates what you think of as like autonomous engineers, machines who know how to do software engineering, and they'll be specialized. So for example, we're running this internally. Our own engineering team is using this internally. And you can take a bug or an issue. And today, you can assign that to a human and say, hey, please go work on this bug. Well, in the future, you'll be able to assign that to an agent. And the agent will read the bug just like a human would and decide what to do with it. So for example, right now, we're assigning accessibility bugs to our agents. The agents take the bug report, they read it. They go find the code where the bug is. They'll go create a code fix. They may even queue that up for a review by a human or automatically run the tests around that code block. If the test pass, they can then queue it up for packaging and deployment. And every phase there, the test running and test reviews, the merge -- we have the code merge reviews, the deployment, those are all specialized agents that work with each other to move the software throughout the life cycle. And at any point, the organization can say, no, I want a human involved here to make sure the right things are happening or they can allow the automation. That's a really exciting unlock because a lot of code, a lot of software development today is very detail-oriented mundane tasks like accessibility bugs or a classic one, they're very tedious bugs to go fix. And we're actually seeing our agents fix bugs at a faster rate than our human engineers can today. It allows our engineers to go focus on more strategic, more creative projects and not have to worry about those kinds of bugs. We're going to continue to test out use cases. We have many others that are in private beta that will get customer validation from as well. But ultimately, this is about unlocking augmentation to humans that can take on a lot of the menial work for engineers and just augment the engineering team and accelerate software development.

Awesome. Maybe a couple of follow-ups because that sounds super exciting. When you think about like the time line, like in terms of time line to GA, any sort of color you can provide there. But more importantly, and I think we talked about this on the call back, when you think about the GitLab customer base, are you guys going to get sort of first shot at that at sort of their sort of agentic journey, meaning they'll wait for GitLab Workflows before something from a private sort of comes up and tries to pitch them on. What's sort of your underlying assumptions around how the customer base is going to anticipate and perceive GitLab Workflows?

Yes. There's a bunch of things there to unpack. The first thing I would say is as I went out and visited customers, it's clear like AI is on every single customer's mind. Even those who, a few quarters ago, I would say I was skeptical, I didn't think we'd ever embrace AI. Privacy, compliance, we're worried about these things, they're all now actively exploring AI strategies, which is really exciting to see. I think it's a huge opportunity. Everyone sees the opportunity. I would also say no one knows quite yet how to measure productivity and no one is locking in on AI approach because the space is moving so fast, there's new tools, new approaches coming up all the time. It's really kind of a phase of experimentation. And we're participating in that. We're innovating. We're learning from competitors. We're part of that process. One of the changes that I've asked the engineering team to make, and it's driven out of both customer feedback as well as frankly, team member feedback is we've had an approach of going broad as a platform because we want to be the most comprehensive platform and then slowly going deeper. And we're actually going to inverse that now. So we're actually going deep and being quality and complete in our delivery, and then we'll go broader. So for FY '26, we picked 3 areas we're going to go deep and drive high-quality results in. And those 3 align with our go-to-market motions and where customers tell us they are value. The first one is around core DevOps. This is our bread and butter. This is where customers land in Premium. And we want to make sure we've got to continue to have an awesome place for customers to land into the business. and secure against churn or contraction in the years to come. Second is security. And this is obviously driving a lot of growth for us with the Ultimate upgrade path. Customers, as Brian mentioned, go to Ultimate primarily for security and compliance. We want to strengthen that competitive advantage we have and drive even more upgrades from Premium to Ultimate capabilities to take out multiple other competitors. Then the third area is obviously AI, and we want to land with high quality, complete products, not just at Duo Pro and Duo Enterprise, which are in market, but also this Duo Workflow capability that I just talked about in the FY '26 time frame. But the major theme here is let's go deep and deliver high-quality products that are monetizable and drive value and expansion for our business rather than go broad and shallow. So that's a bit of a change in strategy. And to your -- the other part of your question, we're entering private beta now. We're intentionally keeping it small to have high-quality connections with customers and get the feedback. We're validating both the value of the Duo Workflow product. The product market fit of that and the willingness to pay. Duo Workflow is likely to not be priced in our traditional manner just because there's not a human seat to price on. And so we're going to be experimenting there with what's the right way to monetize it, what's customers' willingness pay. We'll move to public beta in the summer time frame is our current plan. And then depending on customer feedback and all those things I mentioned, sometime in the winter, we should be able to hit GA.

Awesome. Let's take what you just said -- I'm sorry...

I was just going to say to the question about why GitLab customers should use GitLab first. This would be a great opportunity for you to talk about the knowledge graph in context to actually help solve that.

Yes. So one of the things that's unique about GitLab and it's really, I think, one of the technical notes we have is we have the platform advantage. And if there's one thing that AI is fed on powered by, it's data and context. So we're building out a knowledge graph that whether you're in our Duo Pro product in the coding or Duo Enterprise and one of those life cycle application experiences or it's an agent autonomously working on your software, it's fed by this understanding of all of the connections across the life cycle for the task at hand. So you can imagine, for example, if it's an agent or if it's a human looking at code, it can not only understand that code, but it can also understand the issues against that code. You can understand the security scans against that code. It can look at where is this code going to be deployed and it can bring that context in to make better decisions on behalf of the owner. And that's something that the startups that are building those code creation tools, as an example, would love to have, but they don't have because they really just focus on code creation and maybe they have context of the code that they're working on, but not the broader organization, the compliance, security policies, governance and all the artifacts that we manage on behalf. So that's a really powerful thing that was going to ultimately drive higher-quality responses for AI for our customers, and therefore, a best-in-class AI product.

Yes, that's a great point. Great color, Brian. Let's take what you just said in terms of the priorities going into next year and the tweaks and refinements to strategy to the sales organization. So this week, you announced Ian Steward as your new Chief Revenue Officer. He will be starting over the next month. When you look at the changes that are going to be implemented across the go-to-market in sales this year, what does that look like?

Yes. Let me start with Ian and then talk about the go-to-market organization. First, you'll continue to hear from me the characterization of what we're doing is really focus on fundamentals, back to fundamentals. And that's really why I hired Ian. I looked at the number of profiles, people with great resumes and very large billion-dollar businesses as CROs to early up-and-coming strong performers. And we landed on Ian because he represents someone who is very strong on fundamentals. He stood out in that regard, both his personality and character. He can command a room, he can obviously sell directly to CEOs, CTOs, CIOs, he's done that and has a great executive presence. But really his operational and analytical abilities were unmatched against every other profile that I personally interviewed. I got a lot of help from the Board on this as well as management team. And I'm excited by it because a leader who can perform against all of those characteristics is, in my opinion, the kind of leader we need to scale beyond $1 billion because he thinks deeply about the customer and business outcomes we need, but then maps it back to individual contributor success and productivity that we need and is an operational animal to help drive that scale across the organization. So really excited to see Ian come in. And with regard to the go-to-market changes, it's really about doing what we already do but doing it, in some cases, in a more focused and disciplined way. So I already talked about kind of objective number three in this customer value-focused innovation. But I'll say objective one is really about new customers. Obviously, we've been landing new customers for a while. Every quarter, we have more new paid customers but if you look at the growth rate there, it has slowed down in recent quarters. And as a company that's striving to grow at 20% to 30% over $1 billion. We've got to bring new customer cohorts in every quarter. And so we're intentionally going to focus on new customer acquisition. We've got incentives aligned. We've got new offers for customers. We've got now dedicated resources on customer acquisition, and we'll be scaling that up throughout the year. And with the intention of really bringing in more new mid-market and enterprise customers where our upside is the highest. So that's really a refinement and kind of more focus on customer acquisition that's going to feed long-term growth. And then second is around our customer value realization and expansion motion. If you go back 2 years, GitLab really had 1 [ land ] SKU, which is Premium and then 1 upgrade path, which was Ultimate. Now we've got not only Premium to Ultimate, but also Dedicated, also Duo with Pro and Enterprise and Workflow now coming this year. And so there's multiple paths for customers to see more value and for our business to grow. That requires a customer journey. It's a little bit more sophisticated, clear sales plays and a clear way for our go-to-market machine to execute to drive that expansion. We already have the bits and pieces there, but I believe, again, focus on fundamentals to make that acceleration go is going to be key to continuing to scale revenues at 20% to 30% over $1 billion. So that's objective number two, really a refinement of what we're already doing, but with more focus.

Awesome. And the last 25 to 30 seconds that we have, if you look at where GitLab stands -- is approaching $1 billion business, growing at the upper decile of software, still trading at a discount to some of your peers growing at the same rate. What gets you most excited, Bill, about GitLab, the opportunity ahead from here? And from an investment perspective, why should investors get excited about the GitLab opportunity?

Yes. When -- the first day I joined was earnings call a quarter ago, and I remember sitting on the call and as we were talking with Sid and Brian, Brian, I think was the first one to call out. GitLab is a generational business in the making. It's got all the elements, world-class products, market-leading products, competitive moat with an awesome platform approach that's very broad and now getting deeper. It's poised to benefit from the AI wave that's already here and growing fast. And it's an awesome company with the culture and with talent and people to match. So for me, it's the most exciting time of my career having spent 30 years kind of building similar software, I can't imagine a better place to be.

No, seem to be fired up. It's very exciting. We're out of time. Thank you, Bill and Brian, for giving us an update on the GitLab story. Thank you very much.

Thank you.