Rubrik, Inc. announces Q3 FY2025 financial results

Rubrik, Inc. has announced financial results for the third quarter of FY2025. The data shows revenue is up 42.6% year-on-year compared to Q3 FY2024, with subscription revenue up 38% year-on-year to just over $1 billion. With the psychological billion-dollar barrier breached, what’s next for the company?

Background

Rubrik, Inc. has declared financial results for Q3 FY2025. The data shows a 42.6% increase in revenue for the period to $236 million. Subscription annual recurring revenue rose 38% to $1.002 million, while the number of customers annually spending $100,000 or more increased 32% to 2085. Gross margin for the period was 76.2%, slightly lower than Q3 FY2024 but up on the previous quarter, partly due to a stock-related compensation expense.

We present the data in four graphs, labelled Figures 1 to 4.

Growth

Clearly the highlight of the earnings announcement is the rise in revenue, which we can see from Figure 2 also aligns with a reducing loss. The growth of subscription revenue is particularly impressive, although we should highlight that this doesn’t mean SaaS, but subscriptions from installed products on-premises and in the public cloud.

As we highlighted in this article from 2022, data security is now entwined with data protection, which, through the acquisition of Laminar, has provided Rubrik with additional growth in revenue, as highlighted in the post-earnings call. CEO Bipul Sinha indicated that DSPM customers had doubled quarter over quarter in Q3. This part of the business is now an essential contributor to growth as customers look for the holistic approach to data protection we highlighted in our quoted article above.

Laminar

The Laminar acquisition, now branded as Rubrik Data Security Posture Management, is a technology to identify and classify sensitive data. Laminar implements data security management in the public cloud and on a limited set of cloud SaaS platforms using lightweight Lambda code to track data activity. The code runs within the customer’s account and passes only metadata out of the tenant and into the Laminar platform. For on-premises workloads, Rubrik continues to offer Sonar, which validates data content through backups.

Pre-crime

Laminar is one example of technology that aims to introduce prevention to the process of data security. Post-ransomware attack, the focus is on recovering systems and returning to normal operations as quickly as possible. Pre-attack, tools like Laminar can help identify potential data risk exposures, security issues and suspicious behaviour, all with the intention of mitigating or minimising the impact of a data breach or ransomware attack (some of which could come from insiders).

The Architect’s View®

Rubrik offers a differentiated solution from the many traditional data protection vendors. Over time, the company has expanded from protecting VMware workloads to focusing on data that spans on-premises, the public cloud and some SaaS functionality.

We believe Rubrik has the right strategy, addressing pre-attack challenges to make data more secure and less likely to exfiltration. This methodology, paired with the ability to quickly recover, should an incident occur, it an essential feature for all modern data protection platforms.

The question to ask now is how this should evolve. Rubrik talks frequently about the concept of “zero trust”, which requires a wider strategy that focuses on network and application configuration. It’s perhaps this area where Rubrik should focus next (although the company does already partner here).

However, with the announcement of Rubrik Annapurna, it appears this is not the direction the company is taking. Annapurna is being positioned as technology to bridge the gap between LLM development platforms (such as AWS Bedrock) and enterprise data sitting in multiple locations, including Cloud, SaaS and traditional enterprise applications. From the information provided so far, it appears that Annapurna will use backup data (called time-series data and metadata in Rubrik-speak), rather than data from primary applications.

Rubrik is challenging the existing data pipeline solution providers (such as Qlik) by moving into new territory. From the post-earnings call, this appears to be an experimental move, validating where the company could be in a few years’ time. So, does that mean Rubrik will move from a data protection to a data management company, via data security? The question, perhaps, is whether it makes sense to combine these disciplines together. That’s a discussion for another day, one to which we will return in 2025.

Background

Growth

Laminar

Pre-crime

The Architect’s View®

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