AI has unleashed more bad actors for cybersecurity firms to defend against, expanding the total addressable market for the industry.
“AI is minting more adversaries,” CrowdStrike founder and CEO George Kurtz told me at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference on Tuesday.
“We’ve actually identified and found malware that uses any of the number of public GPTs to actually query, figure out what system it’s on, figure out what it’s doing, and then write scripts to actually go out and pull data back based upon each system it’s on.”
CrowdStrike had a solid second quarter, underscoring the strong demand by companies to bolster their cybersecurity defenses in the age of AI. Guidance left some on the Street wanting, however.
Second quarter sales rose 21% from the prior year to $1.17 billion. Annual recurring revenue (ARR) improved 20% from the prior year to $4.66 billion.
For the current quarter, CrowdStrike said it sees sales in a range of $1.21 billion to $1.22 billion. The Street at the time was looking for $1.23 billion. Execs marked up the low end of their full-year sales guidance to $4.75 billion from $4.74 billion.
“It remains a bit unclear to us exactly why revenue wouldn’t benefit more from the uptick in ARR expectations unless CRWD is continuing to discount/incentivize partners which may be a near term rev headwind,” Jefferies analyst Joseph Gallo said.
CrowdStrike shares are down 0.3% since the company’s Aug. 27 earnings report, compared to a slight gain for the S&P 500. Shares are up 22% year to date.
Kurtz says his business has “accelerated,” however. He said strong growth will continue into the back half of 2025.
Customers are sticking with the company one year after an outage that hurt many large companies that use CrowdStrike technology.
“We’ve strengthened our customer relationships. And at the end of the day, people love our technology. They love our platform. And we’re solving a really hard problem for them, which is stopping the breach,” Kurtz explained.
Brian Sozzi is Yahoo Finance’s Executive Editor and a member of Yahoo Finance’s editorial leadership team. Follow Sozzi on X @BrianSozzi, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Tips on stories? Email [email protected].
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