Q4 2024 JFrog Ltd Earnings Call
Speaker Change: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us and welcome to JFrog's fourth quarter and fiscal 2024 financial results conference call.
Speaker Change: After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question at that time, please raise your hand. If you have dialed into today's call, please press star 9 to raise your hand and star 6 to unmute.
Speaker Change: I will now hand the conference over to Jeffrey Schreiner, VP, Investor Relations. Jeffrey, please go ahead.
Jeffrey Schreiner: Thank you, Nicole. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us as we review JFrog's fourth quarter and fiscal 2024 financial results, which were announced following the market close today via press release.
Speaker Change: Leading the call today will be JFrog's CEO and co-founder Shlomi Ben-Haim and Ed Grabscheid, JFrog's CFO.
Speaker Change: During this call, we may make statements related to our business that are forward-looking under federal security laws and are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.
Speaker Change: including statements related to our future financial performance and including our outlook for Q1 and the full year of 2025.
Speaker Change: The words anticipate, believe, continue, estimate, expect, intend, will, and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements or similar indications of future expectations.
Speaker Change: You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which reflect our views only as of today, and not as of any subsequent date.
Speaker Change: Please keep in mind that we are not obligating ourselves to revise or publicly release the results of any revision to these forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events.
Speaker Change: These statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations.
Speaker Change: For a discussion of material risks and other important factors that could affect our actual results, please refer to our Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2023, which is available on the Investor Relations section of our website.
and the earnings press release issued earlier today.
Speaker Change: Additional information will be made available in our Form 10-K for the year ending December 31st, 2024, to be filed with the SEC on February 14th, 2025, and other filings and reports that we may file from time to time with the SEC.
Speaker Change: Additionally, non-GAAP financial measures will be discussed on this conference call.
Speaker Change: These non-GAAP financial measures, which are used as measures of JFROG's performance, should be considered in addition to, not as a substitute for, or in isolation from GAAP measures.
Speaker Change: Please refer to the tables in our earnings release for a reconciliation of those measures to their most directly comparable GAAP financial measures.
Speaker Change: A replay of this call will be available on the JFrog Investor Relations website for a limited time.
Speaker Change: With that, I'd like to turn the call over to JFrog's CEO, Shlomi Van Haim. Shlomi?
Speaker Change: Thank you, Jeff. Good afternoon to you all, and thank you for joining our call. I'm excited to share that JFO closed the fourth quarter and fiscal year 2024 on a high note with meaningful results across all key focus areas, which we will discuss today.
Speaker Change: We believe that JFrog's strong cloud growth and adoption of our holistic advanced security solutions by enterprises underscore the strength of our platform strategy.
Speaker Change: We are honored to gain the trust of many of the world's leading companies which are choosing JFrog as their go-to software supply chain infrastructure.
Speaker Change: Our enterprise-focused go-to-market strategy in 2024 has secured multi-year, sizable platform subscriptions from customers who chose JFrog as the single source of tools for all types of software packages and AI models.
Speaker Change: This approach has driven higher customer lens, delivered durable revenue growth, and reinforced our leadership in the market.
Speaker Change: As we close out 2024, I'm pleased by the focused execution of our vision, making software universally accessible, continuously updated, and trusted everywhere. A true realization of the liquid software revolution in the era of AI.
This momentum propels us into 2025, fueled and energized.
Let me review some of our results in more detail.
Speaker Change: In 2024, JFrog's total revenue was $428.5 million, up 22% year-over-year.
Speaker Change: Cloud revenue for 2024 was $168 million, representing 41% year-over-year growth.
Speaker Change: Our gross margin for the year was 83.8%, alongside strong free cash flow of $107.8 million, or free cash flow margin of 25% for the year.
Speaker Change: 2024 successes were driven by strong execution with our enterprise customers.
Speaker Change: Our investments in the first half of the year fueled their initiatives, resulting in some of JFrog's largest deals ever, closing in the second half of the year.
Speaker Change: In today's call, Ed will further discuss the fourth quarter results and dive deeper into our annual performance.
Speaker Change: Now, let me discuss the core of what fueled our accomplishments in Q4 and throughout 2024.
First, JFrog's cloud success.
Speaker Change: Despite navigating tight budgetary environment and rigid procurement processes in 2024, we remain focused on execution and securing strong wins.
Speaker Change: As a result, we were pleased in Q3 and Q4 to see large companies demonstrate confidence in JFrog with multi-year commitments, as they reignited their strategic cloud migration journeys with us once they had reached their optimal timing.
Speaker Change: Our 2024 cloud revenues were in line with the guidance we provided in Q2.
Speaker Change: We remain focused on driving more enterprise adoption of our cloud platform and building even tighter relationships with our cloud partners at AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
Speaker Change: as an outcoupling of our strategic partnerships with the cloud providers.
Speaker Change: I'm pleased to report that we have recently signed a strategic collaboration agreement with AWS that we believe will enable joint enterprise customers to cost-effectively scale their DevSecOps and AI-driven software solutions in the cloud.
Speaker Change: We are looking forward to keeping the cloud momentum and promoting partnerships to support customers' cloud adoption.
Second, to security.
Speaker Change: JFrog was early to the market with the concept of the DevOps and security were inseparable and believed the powerful combination should displace all point solution via one platform.
Speaker Change: We continue to envision a future where security is no longer fragmented, a secured future powered by a single, holistic, and modern solution that optimizes operation and budget for JFrog users.
Speaker Change: Emboldened by this vision, we set out to deliver a platform designed not only to consolidate tools, but to amplify development teams' work, delivering unmatched protection and risk mitigation to our users' entire software supply chain.
Speaker Change: For over three years, we have doubled down on this security vision and invested organically and inorganically in what became the industry standard, a single solution that automates a system of record and security as a unified process.
as demanded by global CIOs and CISOs.
Speaker Change: I'm pleased to report that 2024 closes on a strong note with our security code becoming a mission-critical piece of our enterprise offering.
JFOG Advanced Security and JFOG Curation.
Speaker Change: as part of our JPEG platform was successfully adopted by approximately 250 customers that are migrating from point solution tools like Snyk.
Black Dock, Mint
Veracode, Checkmarkz, Coverity, and others.
Speaker Change: In 2024, our most sizable deals included not only DevOps migration to the cloud, but a clear bet placed by customers on one solution, one platform that also covers their modern security requirements.
Speaker Change: We were excited to see the validation of this trend led by standardization and consolidation as some of the world's most recognizable companies demonstrated their trust in JFrog across verticals in 2024, including four wins across the top five companies in automotive, financial, healthcare, and telecommunication.
Speaker Change: Each of these industry-leading companies placed multi-million dollar, multi-year, security-driven platform deals in 2024.
Speaker Change: In 2024, we invested not only in sales, but also in strategic partnerships, focusing on the security persona experience. Through our GitHub partnerships, we enabled a one-platform experience that coupled AI capabilities with security in GitHub Copilot and JFrog curation.
Speaker Change: This is all supported by our Advanced JFrog Catalog Vulnerability Database backed by our security research team enhancing enterprise security.
Speaker Change: To summarize our security success for 2024, I'm happy to report our core security solutions comprise over 5% of our final ARR and approximately 12% of our ending RPO in 2024.
And third, to our enterprise strategic success.
Speaker Change: To successfully focus on the enterprise market, an organization needs more than just a dedicated sales force targeting high-end customers. This shift demands a comprehensive transformation in how a company operates and delivers value.
Speaker Change: Additionally, it calls for an adjusted customer success approach, engagement with diverse persona and budget holders within client organizations, and a redefined partner strategy.
Speaker Change: Sometimes it even involves making difficult decisions such as parting ways with the subset of low subscription customers to remain focused on the enterprise segment and ensure long-term success in the upmarket space.
Speaker Change: The number of customers with ARR exceeding $1 million increased to 52, up from 37 in the a year ago period.
Ed Grabscheid: Now, before handing over to Ed, I want to dive into JFrog's perspective on MLOps and Responsible AI.
Ed Grabscheid: In recent weeks, we launched the first implementation of JFrog ML available now to our cloud customers.
Ed Grabscheid: Our core values, such as multi-cloud and hybrid enterprise-grade offerings, are further empowering the JNAI and MLOps ecosystem with JFrog's strong partnerships and integrations, including HuggingFace.
GitHub, and NVIDIA to enhance users' workflows.
Today's enterprises know that Machine Learning Operation, MLOps,
Ed Grabscheid: is inseparable from DevOps and DevSecOps, as getting AI models to production requires the same principle across development, security, deployment, and maintenance of binaries.
Ed Grabscheid: Just as we have expanded our offering with security capabilities, building on artifactory as the secured registry and the foundation of our platform, this MLOps expansion will empower our customers as they embrace AI-driven technologies.
Ed Grabscheid: We are excited about what's ahead and look forward to promoting our partnerships with our customers and the community.
Ed Grabscheid: With that, I will turn the call over to our CFO, Ed Grabscheid, who will provide an in-depth recap of Q4 financial results and our outlook for 2025 Q1 and full fiscal year of 2025. Ed?
Thank you, Shlomi, and good afternoon, everyone.
Ed Grabscheid: During the fourth quarter of 2024, total revenues were $116.1 million, up 19% year-over-year. For the full year 2024, revenues equaled $428.5 million, up 22% year-over-year.
Ed Grabscheid: Fourth quarter cloud revenues grew to $49.4 million, up 37% year-over-year, and representing 43% of total revenues versus 37% in the prior year.
Ed Grabscheid: Our strength in the cloud was driven by contribution from large customer wins as well as smaller customer migration activity during the quarter.
Ed Grabscheid: In the fourth quarter of 2024, we recognized cloud revenues from customer migrations to a new enhanced cloud database product launched in 2024, which was previously delivered as an on-prem product.
Contributions from this product in Q4 were approximately $1.3 million.
Ed Grabscheid: Future customer migrations will be included as cloud revenues on a going-forward basis.
Ed Grabscheid: For the full year 2024, cloud revenues equaled $168 million of 41% year-over-year.
Ed Grabscheid: Full-year cloud revenues equal 39% of total revenues versus 34% in the prior year.
Ed Grabscheid: During the fourth quarter, our self-managed or on-prem revenues were $66.7 million, with full year 2024 equaling $260.5 million, up 13% year-over-year.
Ed Grabscheid: Aligned with our strategy, we continue to see the majority of our new customers land and expand with our cloud solutions.
Ed Grabscheid: JFrog's cloud-first approach naturally results in a slowing of customers on-prem investments as they look forward to capturing even greater value coming from our cloud solutions.
Ed Grabscheid: During 2024, we experienced another year of strong customer adoption of the complete JFrog platform, driven by customers looking to consolidate tooling and secure their software supply chain.
Ed Grabscheid: In Q4, 54% of total revenues came from Enterprise Plus subscriptions, up from 49% in the prior year, while delivering year-over-year revenue growth of 31%.
Ed Grabscheid: Driven by the strong execution of our enterprise go-to-market strategy and upsell from our security core products, revenue contributions from Enterprise Plus subscriptions grew 35% year-over-year in 2024.
Ed Grabscheid: Our security core, which includes JFrog Curation, JFrog Advanced Security, and JFrog Runtime, has gained momentum as customers actively consolidate point solutions.
Ed Grabscheid: Revenue contribution from Security Corps in 2024 was impacted by expanded proof of concept and timing of purchasing decisions.
Ed Grabscheid: For the full year of 2024, security core revenue was 3% of total revenues, with our core security products now comprising more than 5% of our ending total ARR.
Ed Grabscheid: Driven by a number of large, multi-year commitments to JFrog, our Security Corps represented approximately 12% of our remaining performance obligation, or RPO, as of December 31st, 2024.
Ed Grabscheid: We continue to anticipate that Security Corps products will achieve material revenue contribution in 2025.
Net dollar retention for the four trailing quarters was 116%.
Ed Grabscheid: We continue to demonstrate that our customers view JFrog solutions as mission critical to their software supply chain, with gross retention that equaled 96% in 2024.
Ed Grabscheid: As noted by Shlomi, during 2024, we continue to focus our go-to-market initiatives around the enterprise, demonstrated by our success in the second half as we secured some of the largest deals in the company's history.
Ed Grabscheid: Our team also prioritized new customer acquisition, specifically targeting opportunities with higher initial ARR and greater expansion durability.
Ed Grabscheid: Given our enterprise go-to-market focus, our customer count in fiscal 2024 equaled approximately 7,300.
Now I'll review the income statement in more detail.
Ed Grabscheid: Gross profit in the quarter was $96.5 million, representing a gross margin of 83.2%, in line with our expectations.
compared to 84.6% in the year-ago period.
Ed Grabscheid: We expect annual gross margins to remain between 82.5% and 83.5% in the near future.
Ed Grabscheid: Operating expense in the fourth quarter was $75.6 million, flat sequentially, equaling 65% of total revenues.
Ed Grabscheid: This compares to $66.1 million, or 68% of revenues in the year-ago period.
Ed Grabscheid: We remain focused on expense discipline while we continue to invest in strategic initiatives.
Ed Grabscheid: Our operating profit in Q4 increased to $20.9 million or an operating margin of 18% compared to $16.2 million and 16.6% operating margin in the fourth quarter of 2023.
Ed Grabscheid: For the full year 2024, we delivered non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.65, a 27% increase year-over-year, assuming approximately 115 million weighted average diluted shares.
Ed Grabscheid: This compares to 51 cents in the prior year and 109 million weighted average diluted shares.
Ed Grabscheid: Cash flow from operations equaled 49.1 million dollars in the fourth quarter. After taking into consideration CAPEX requirements, our free cash flow reached 48.5 million dollars or 42% margin, a record quarter for JFrog.
Ed Grabscheid: For the full year 2024, we generated $110.9 million in operating cash flow and $107.8 million in free cash flow, a 25% margin.
Now, turning to the balance sheet.
Ed Grabscheid: As of December 31st, 2024, our RPO totaled $403 million, a 55% increase year-over-year, benefiting from multi-year commitments to our security and platform solutions.
Ed Grabscheid: Now, I'd like to speak about our outlook and guidance for the first quarter and full year of 2025. As a reminder, our guidance philosophy will be more conservative than what was provided in the past.
Ed Grabscheid: Our outlook for the first quarter of 2025 assumes no change in the current macroenvironment and reflects historical seasonality as JFrog's lowest volume renewal quarter.
Ed Grabscheid: Our outlook for the full year implies increased contributions from our security core, continued adoption of our full platform, and cloud migration activity consistent with 2024.
Ed Grabscheid: We estimate full year 2025 baseline cloud growth to be in the range of 30% to 32% and expect our net dollar retention to stabilize in the mid-teens.
Ed Grabscheid: For Q1, we expect revenues to be in the range of $116 million and $118 million, equaling 17% year-over-year growth at the midpoint.
Ed Grabscheid: with non-GAAP operating profit anticipated to be between $16.5 million and $17.5 million and non-GAAP earnings per diluted share of $0.15 to $0.17, assuming a share count of approximately 118 million shares.
Ed Grabscheid: For the full year of 2025, we would anticipate a revenue range of $499 million to $503 million, up 17% year-over-year at the midpoint.
Ed Grabscheid: Non-GAAP operating income is expected to be between $73 million and $75 million in non-GAAP diluted earnings per share of $0.67 to $0.69, assuming a share count of approximately 120 million shares.
Ed Grabscheid: During 2025, we will remain focused on investing in innovation to expand capabilities of our platform and deliver more value to our customers.
Ed Grabscheid: We continue to be guided by balanced investing and the discipline spending philosophy in line with prior execution.
Ed Grabscheid: Now I'll turn the call back to Shlomi for some closing remarks before we take your questions.
Thank you, Ed.
Speaker Change: 2024, though tough, was a remarkable year for J-PROG, with successes driven by our global team operating under an umbrella of adversity. Frogs, I'm proud and honored to stand beside you as my superheroes throughout the year.
Speaker Change: As we set our sights on 2025, we remain committed to quality growth and expanding our portfolio, bringing us closer to realizing our liquid software vision, a world where software delivery is effortless, secure, and seamless.
Speaker Change: Before we move on to questions, and as we gratefully acknowledge that some of the Israeli hostages have been safely returned and reunited with their families, we continue to hope and pray for the safe return of all those still held captive in Gaza.
Speaker Change: May 2025 bring peace to the region and may the frog be with you. Operator, we are now open to take questions.
Speaker Change: We will now begin the question and answer session. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up.
Speaker Change: If you would like to ask a question, please raise your hand now. If you have dialed into today's call, please press star 9 to raise your hand and star 6 to unmute. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster.
Speaker Change: Your first question comes from the line of Pendulum Borah from JPMorgan Chase. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Pendulum Borah: Oh, great. Thanks for taking the questions. Congrats on a great close to the year.
Speaker Change: Shlomi, obviously you're seeing really strong security traction, now 12% of RPO, 5% of ARR. Given these successes, would you say you are seeing kind of a tangible change in prospective customer conversations?
Speaker Change: especially in those organizations where security is kind of a completely different silo, you know, other than software development or engineering. Basically, I'm trying to understand if the recent successes around security is opening up more doors and if there are more kind of large eight-figure kind of deals in the pipeline.
Yes, thank you, Pendulum, and Happy Valentine's, everyone.
Speaker Change: Specifically regarding security, we hear more and more of the CIOs and the CISOs of the world looking at consolidating point solution tools.
It's, of course, the bold.
Speaker Change: It's mainly around the coverage of the software supply chain aligned with the new threats.
and integration with other players. So the basic assumption...
Speaker Change: All the findings are presented on a single pane, therefore we are encouraged by what we hear, we are encouraged by what we see in the pipeline.
Speaker Change: of our customers and prospects keep pushing to consolidation and one holistic security solution coming together with DevOps.
Ed Grabscheid: Understood. Thank you, Shlomi. And Ed, just maybe one question for you, trying to understand kind of the assumptions on the guidance.
Speaker Change: A few parts to it. One is when you say NRR being mid-teens, are you talking about plus-minus?
Ed Grabscheid
Speaker Change: the current levels or or it's kind of stay around the current levels. And then are you baking in any migrations into this guidance as well as what would you say kind of contribution from the recent pricing and packaging changes you have done? Thank you.
Speaker Change: So, first off, I'll start with the net dollar retention rate. We're really pleased with where we ended, considering a really tough year in 2024, and what we see is, as I stated in the prepared statements,
Speaker Change: It's really around data consumption, and the data consumption changes above minimum commits have not changed. Therefore, this is why we see that stabilization of our net dollar retention rates.
Speaker Change: We don't see much of a pickup in activity in the migration activity. It's relatively stable.
Anything on pricing, Ed?
Ed Grabscheid: The last thing on the pricing pricing we do a pricing change and we've done that now for consecutive years
Ed Grabscheid: The impact on the pricing in 2025 would be comparable to what we saw during 2024, so it's not a significant change on a year over year basis. The focus was more on the pro subscriptions, but in terms of our upper tier subscriptions, it remains relatively same year over year with a similar impact on the year over year basis.
Understood. Thank you very much.
Speaker Change: Your next question comes from the line of Michael Sikos with Needham. Please go ahead.
Michael Sikos: Hey guys, thanks for taking the questions here, and congrats on a strong finish to the quarter and for the year as well. I wanted to start off just to get some more color on the cloud growth that we saw in Q4, and I guess the expectation is great to hear on that 30-32% you're looking for next year.
Mike: It's Mike. Hi, this is Shlomi. I'll stop and Ed, feel free to jump in.
Mike: Our research team during 2024 was busy building a cloud service which is the JFrog catalog that serves as the database of all of our security suites.
Mike: JFOG X-Ray, JFOG Advanced Security, JFrog Curation, and Runtime. This is now being a cloud service provided to all of our customers, so faster than cloud.
Mike: And therefore, we recognize that as part of our new security suite and part of our cloud services.
Mike: In addition to that, Mike, regarding the 1.3 million, it's not material, first off. Secondly, it's a decision by our self-hosted customers. When they migrate from an older version to this new version, the newer database version, is a cloud service. Therefore, going forward, we will reflect that in our cloud guidance of 30 to 32 percent.
Mike: Got it. Got it. Thank you for helping on that. And then the second question I have for you, again, just hitting on the cloud migrations, and I think Pendulum was teasing at this a little bit before me, but
Mike: to drive that 32%. Again, it sounds like you guys are assuming relatively consistent pace of cloud migrations, but just wanted to make sure I was hearing that properly.
Speaker Change: Yes, Mike, as we guided before, we are being conservative, looking at our pipeline and de-risking it, looking at migration as step one.
Mike: as we saw mainly in the second half of the year, and consumption increasing as an upside, as step two. We are looking at the pipeline, we are looking at the portfolio, we are looking at the trend in the market, and this is how we base our guidance on.
Speaker Change: Great, thank you and congrats on all the security disclosures as well. Thank you very much guys. Thank you.
Speaker Change: Your next question comes from the line of Sanjit Singh with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Sanjit Singh: Yeah, thank you for taking the questions and congrats on a strong Q4.
Speaker Change: To that point, if we rewind about a year ago, you guys also had
Speaker Change: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Q1
First half versus second half dynamic
Speaker Change: It would seem like that was kind of a theme in 2023 and 2024. Is that the sort of the right storyline as we think about 2025? Potentially another optimization cycle to start the year, followed by projects coming online and the increment of the investment in cloud.
So, first off, regarding
Speaker Change: Q4 of 23, we had a one-time benefit in there, so I want to put that out there. Very different than what we saw in Q4 of 24. This is not a one-time benefit, and it's strength in the cloud. As we step into 2025, what we see is customers that remain very cost-conscious, and they are built into their commits and minimum commits. They are not spending above those minimum commits.
Speaker Change: First off, so we're not seeing usage above the minimum commit.
Secondly, as you stated, we start to see projects.
Speaker Change: These large projects that we talked about that we de-risked from our pipeline, many of those projects happen towards the second half of the year. Regardless of when we start those conversations, we just see those projects starting towards the second half of the year, and I would anticipate that we would see something very similar in 2025 as we did in 2024.
Speaker Change: Understood, that's great. And then Shlomi, on the security side, with the business at 5% of ARR,
Speaker Change: Is there going to be any additional sort of change in sales motion? I imagine that you're seeing traction with some of these
really large customers and some of these...
Speaker Change: large deals that you sign, particularly the second half buying on the security vision. As you kind of try to push down into the mainstream of the enterprise base within the J-file customer base, are you contemplating any changes, incentives?
Speaker Change: to drive, to broaden the breadth of that adoption of the security solutions or the core security solutions.
Speaker Change: Yes, Sanjit, our strategic team and the entire sales force is armed with what it takes in order to scale with our security offering now matured.
and 20-20 Fold demonstrates that.
Speaker Change: We were very pleased by this very big contract that triggered
a much larger deal because of the security addition.
Speaker Change: And it's now not only JFrog Advanced Security and JFrog Curation. We launched JFrog Runtime recently, as you know. And the MLSecOps is stepping in. Customers are starting to inquire more and more about how they can secure...
Speaker Change: AI models with the JFrog suite. We reported today 250 customers
Speaker Change: embrace our security solution. That means that we have a mission with additional 7,000 and the rest of the industry. So we are very optimistic about it and we will take it leap by leap.
Thank you so much.
Speaker Change: Your next question comes from the line of Kingsley Crane with Canaccord. Please go ahead.
Kingsley Crane: Hey, thank you and congrats on a strong year to Fiscal 24. On the Strategic Collaboration Agreement, SCA, funny that it's also Software Composition Analysis, it's great to see and I'm just curious, like, what's truly incremental about the agreement? And then wondering what sort of increased resources might be allocated for procurement on AWS's side. Thanks.
Kingsley, as you know, and as we
Kingsley Crane: describing the past. We are not just building our cloud solution.
We are also building the relationship with the cloud providers.
Kingsley Crane: And with each of them, it's a different effort that we are pushing, not only on the technology integration and improvement of the user experience in different regions.
Kingsley Crane: but also the commercial part of it. What we've managed to do with AWS, together with our partner team,
Kingsley Crane: is that we got to an agreement that will have more cost-effective scale to our customers. So basically, with the better conditions with AWS, we can be more attractive.
Kingsley Crane: with our customers and this is a very important agreement as we keep scaling with the cloud overall and AWS specifically.
Speaker Change: to guidance now than in years past. So just how much credence is there to that idea? And then second, could you speak to just the fundamental drivers of upside this next year?
Kingsley Crane: Well, I don't think it's an idea. I think it's a fact. We've said it now a couple times on the prepared statement that we're going with a much more conservative guide, and that's the philosophy that I'm taking. It's focused on a couple things here, Kingsley. Number one is
Speaker Change: Jeffrey Schreiner, Shlomi Haim, Ed Grabscheid, Jeffrey Schreiner, Shlomi Haim, Ed Grabscheid,
Speaker Change: of our guidance. Usage is certainly not something that we take in consideration in the guidance, and we're only looking at those opportunities that are committed, strong commitments going forward. Therefore, I'm not pegging a number necessarily in terms of the beat, but I'm saying that it's much more conservative going forward and what you're used to from JFrog.
Makes perfect sense. Looking forward to this year. Thank you.
Speaker Change: Your next question comes from the line of Ryan McWilliams with Barclays. Please go ahead.
Ryan McWilliams: Hey guys, thanks for the question. For Shlomi, how has macro been since the start of the fourth quarter and did you notice any changes or improvement in your conversations with customers since the U.S. presidential election?
Ryan McWilliams: Well, thank you for the question. We don't see a big change in the macro. We still see very conservative usage of the cloud solution. We still see very conservative bets on the commitment, even if it's a multi-use contract.
Projects that are in the pipeline are still being discussed.
There is a lot of discussions about...
Thank you very much.
Hesitating
Ryan McWilliams: and more specifically about the new administration now that the executive order
will change.
Ryan McWilliams: They are taking a bit more time to wait and see what will the new administration bring in terms of regulation of AI adoption in production, but no specific changes I can report on.
Ryan McWilliams: Perfect. And then, glad to see the strong security commentary. Do you think the fourth quarter going forward could see more seasonality for security sales? You know, like, as people make these decisions towards year end and it's more of an enterprise sale for JFrog?
Ryan McWilliams: Well, if there is one thing, Ryan, that we've learned in 2024 is that if you want to go after big contracts, you have to be patient.
Ryan McWilliams: And to remind you all, we started the year with introductory prices of our security suite, thinking that maybe this will be more tempting. But the big guys are taking their time before they are displacing other products and before they are betting on a holistic solution. And they also want to make sure it's a modern security suite that will fit the requirements in the future. So I don't think that you will see
Ryan McWilliams: any type of special seasonality here, but I do think, and this is how we look at the pipeline, this is why we are being a bit more conservative than last year.
Ryan McWilliams: I do think that proof of concept for security tools will take longer, and at the end, if the customers choose JFrog, this might be a multi-year, multi-million dollar deal that we delivered in 2024.
Appreciate the color. Thanks so much.
Speaker Change: Your next question comes in the line of Billy Mandel with KeyBank Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Speaker Change: And moving along, your next question comes from the line of Andrew Sherman with TD Cowan. Please go ahead.
Thanks. Can you hear me?
Speaker Change: Yes, we can hear you. I like the new Zoom. Congrats on the quarter. Ed, just a quick one for you. Could you confirm there were no true-ups or overages in the cloud number for Q4?
Speaker Change: There's no true-ups. As we stated before, most of our customers have moved to a monthly use-it-or-lose-it mechanism for the cloud, so we don't have the true-up that you saw previously. And so there was nothing that was significant or large true-ups like we did in 2023.
Okay, perfect.
And I have Shlomi, and I know these aren't in...
Speaker Change: don't need guidance anymore but you had a lot of strong big deals in Q3 this year. We'd love to hear what you're seeing in the pipeline given these long sale cycles
Speaker Change: Are there similar types of deals in the pipeline? And any commentary along enterprise traction would be great. Thanks.
Speaker Change: Yeah, a lot of big deals in Q3, and some of them in Q4, and we were very pleased with the second half of 2024. We are looking at the pipeline. We have some big opportunities there to include not only cloud migration, but couple it with security.
Speaker Change: As we reported before, we are looking at it, being very conservative with how we de-risk the pipeline, and we will report in the next quarter and after about the future success.
All right, thank you.
Speaker Change: Your next question comes from the line of Shrenik Kothari with Baird. Please go ahead.
Hey, yeah, thanks for taking my question. Congrats, guys.
Speaker Change: So, Shlomi, of course, you highlighted the 250 customers adopting the advanced security and integration. So, it's a really great job.
Speaker Change: I was just curious, beyond the big deal pipeline, again, I mean, that's a great execution that you have shown so far.
Speaker Change: Seeing any signs of potential kind of correlation between kind of now having an integrated platform approach and also seeing some traction to the faster expansion, or just in terms of visibility, upsell, cross sell, since you mentioned about run time, seen traction. So just curious in terms of incremental adoption of these.
Speaker Change: Advanced Security Modules or features, and then I have a follow-up for Ed.
Yeah, well, thank you, Shrenk, for the question. Obviously...
Speaker Change: Out of 250 customers we reported today that are using the new security suite of JFrog as part of the platform,
Bill
Speaker Change: several that are really multi-year, multi-million dollar deals. The rest are supposed to grow with the buy-seek model and we hope to see this growth coming in 2025 and after. Regarding the rest of the portfolio, the practices are there, the price plan is there.
The team is mature.
Speaker Change: and we are ready to go after the opportunity. I think JFOG offers not only the best holistic security in the market,
Speaker Change: are also aiming to future opportunities like MLSecOps threats and also better integration. One of them is with GitHub, another one with HuggingFace, as we mentioned. So I'm really excited about what the future brings.
Speaker Change: Great. I appreciate that, Shlomi. And just in light of what Shlomi just said, I'm just curious, how should we think about incremental top line and potentially margin contribution attributable to the security, incremental security adoption that we're seeing going forward? Not necessarily asking for the rest of the year, but just as a broad framework of how should we think about incremental margin.
Speaker Change: Yeah, so we have a very strong margin profile. We guide at the corporate level. So the 82.5% to 83.5% takes into consideration all products and all deployments. We do not break it out by
Speaker Change: security or other products. It's captured holistically in our corporate guidance that we provide in terms of our gross margin.
Speaker Change: Your next question comes from the line of Koji Akita with Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Speaker Change: Yeah, hey guys, thanks so much for taking the question. Only one from me here. Nice performance on the free cash flow margin to end 2024 at 25.2%, which is really close to your 2027 target model here. But when I look at the guide for 2025, 19%. So really just trying to understand the six points of margin degradation there in the free cash flow, and anything we should think about there and from 2025 and the progression to 2027.
Speaker Change: Or is this just, you know, kind of an effect of guidance conservatism on the revenue flowing down to the cash flow side? Thank you
Speaker Change: Jeffrey Schreiner, Shlomi Haim, Ed Grabscheid, Jeffrey Schreiner, Shlomi Haim, Ed Grabscheid,
Speaker Change: choose to pay up front. We don't necessarily know when they choose to do that. So you get some benefit of customers paying up front.
Speaker Change: We go off of a fundamental practice of around 4% to 5% difference from the operating margin. So as you start to see growth in the top line, I would expect that would trickle down to the bottom.
And Koji, may I add, this is Shlomi.
Speaker Change: This is not surprising, I hope, because if there is one thing...
Speaker Change: that you saw us delivering from the beginning is a very disciplined, efficient, BNA around the efficiency of the business. So it's part of our strategy. It was not different in 2021 and it's not different in 2024. And the performance are speaking for themselves.
Speaker Change: Yeah, totally get it. Thanks, guys. Thanks for taking the questions.
Speaker Change: Your next question comes from the line of Rob Owens with Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.
Speaker Change: Great, thanks for taking my question. This is Ethan on for Rob today. Shlomi, I just want to ask, with the AI conversation shifting more and more towards agentic solutions, how does this kind of change the opportunity, the AI opportunity for JFrog, if at all, especially as we consider kind of the new capabilities brought by GWAC?
Shlomi Ben-Haim: Well Rob, putting all the AI fluff aside, I will say that the majority of our enterprise customers are already inquiring about
Having Artifactory
Speaker Change: Ed Grabscheid, Jeffrey Schreiner, Shlomi Haim, Ed Grabscheid, Jeffrey Schreiner, Shlomi Haim,
on the security side.
Speaker Change: There is a lot of kind of big future about how you secure AI, how you secure your IP, and what the administration will set as the regulation.
Speaker Change: and we are setting our security tools with the future demand. We just released our first JPEG ML as a result of the Quark acquisition as part of our platform and we are learning more about our customer demand.
Speaker Change: We said that we are conservative about the pipeline, therefore we didn't include any MLOps guidance in 2025 and we will learn as we go, focusing on the value for the customers.
Speaker Change: Got it. That makes sense. And just as a quick follow-up, I think you mentioned in your prepared remarks around parting ways with some smaller customers as you kind of focus on the enterprise opportunity. And I was wondering if you could kind of provide some more color on that and, you know, maybe how that might have impacted the customer count number that you reported, given it was down slightly earlier, I believe. Thanks.
Speaker Change: Yes, we said starting Q1 of the previous year that we are going to be focused on execution and we are going to be focused on enterprise execution.
Speaker Change: We replaced 740 logos with 640 logos that have more chances to grow with J-FOG and with what we offer.
Speaker Change: Some of the low subscribers, some of them are monthly users of our cloud.
Speaker Change: We had to focus the business, we had to focus the team, we had to focus our technology and offering, and that's some of the results. I hope that you will see more and more growth coming from the customers that choose to stay with JFrog and still the retention is super high.
Speaker Change: As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please raise your hand. If you have dialed into today's call, please press star 9 to raise your hand and star 6 to unmute.
Billy Mandel: Your next question comes from the line of Billy Mandel with KeyBank Capital Markets. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Hey, can you guys hear me all right?
We can hear you, Billy.
Speaker Change: Yes, well, we are getting wonderful feedback from the field about the GitHub integration. Customers who chose GitHub and JPOC together are now enjoying a one-platform experience. We deliver that on the DevOps level.
Speaker Change: and co-pilot with AI. I think that what we currently hear...
Let's discuss some more.
are more interested.
in having a solution.
of co-pilot with the JFrog platform.
Speaker Change: The software supply chain management for this integration is mainly what they are focusing about, because they are immediately pointing the ROI of their development team using both of us together. So that would probably be our main focus.
Great, thank you.
Shlomi Ben-Haim: There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back to Shlomi for closing remarks.
Shlomi Ben-Haim: Thank you, everyone, for joining our call. May the frog be with you, and Happy Valentine's.