grepcent / static financial knowledge base

Fastly, Inc. (FSLY)

CIK: 0001517413. SIC: 7372 Services-Prepackaged Software. Latest 10-K as of: 2026-02-25.

SIC breadcrumb: Services > Business Services > SIC 7372 Services-Prepackaged Software

SEC company page: https://www.sec.gov/edgar/browse/?CIK=1517413. Latest filing source: 0001517413-26-000053.

Informational only - descriptive public-record data, not investment advice.

Business

Read FSLY's verbatim Item 1 Business section from its latest 10-K: Business.

Risk Factors

Read FSLY's verbatim Item 1A Risk Factors from its latest 10-K: Risk Factors.

Selected Fundamentals

MetricValueUnitFYFiled
Revenue624,018,000USD20252026-02-25
Net income-121,677,000USD20252026-02-25
Assets1,499,477,000USD20252026-02-25

Financials

Annual standardized facts from SEC companyfacts as of latest extracted filing date 2026-02-25. Source: https://data.sec.gov/api/xbrl/companyfacts/CIK0001517413.json. Derived margins, ratios, and free cash flow are computed from the extracted annual SEC facts.

Download these verified figures (annual + quarterly, with per-value filing provenance): JSON · CSV

Flow metrics use full-year FY periods from 10-K/10-K/A filings; balance-sheet metrics use FY-end instants. Free cash flow = operating cash flow - capital expenditures. Missing metrics are omitted rather than fabricated.

Metric2016201720182019202020212022202320242025
Revenue104,900,000144,563,000200,462,000290,874,000354,330,000432,725,000505,988,000543,676,000624,018,000
Net income-32,450,000-30,935,000-51,550,000-95,932,000-222,697,000-190,774,000-133,088,000-158,058,000-121,677,000
Operating income-31,030,000-29,138,000-46,548,000-107,212,000-219,021,000-246,199,000-198,028,000-167,915,000-119,000,000
Gross profit56,228,00079,064,000112,140,000170,867,000187,328,000209,781,000266,328,000295,938,000356,203,000
Diluted EPS-0.75-0.93-1.92-1.57-1.03-1.14-0.83
Operating cash flow-25,861,000-16,985,000-31,303,000-19,916,000-38,482,000-69,632,000362,00016,406,00094,444,000
Capital expenditures12,099,00016,702,00014,609,00029,569,00034,816,00019,975,00010,976,00010,330,00028,694,000
Assets162,754,000320,969,0001,219,951,0002,159,020,0001,896,113,0001,525,191,0001,451,359,0001,499,477,000
Liabilities75,097,00063,317,000158,086,0001,145,067,000940,955,000545,703,000486,109,000569,899,000
Stockholders' equity-78,249,000-107,006,000-131,927,000257,652,0001,061,865,0001,013,953,000955,158,000979,488,000965,250,000929,578,000
Cash and cash equivalents31,309,00036,963,00016,142,00062,900,000166,068,000143,391,000107,921,000286,175,000180,563,000
Free cash flow-37,960,000-33,687,000-45,912,000-49,485,000-73,298,000-89,607,000-10,614,0006,076,00065,750,000

Ratios

ROE and ROA use period-end equity/assets. Liabilities / equity uses total liabilities divided by stockholders' equity. Current ratio uses current assets divided by current liabilities when both are reported.

Metric2016201720182019202020212022202320242025
Net margin-30.93%-21.40%-25.72%-32.98%-62.85%-44.09%-26.30%-29.07%-19.50%
Operating margin-29.58%-20.16%-23.22%-36.86%-61.81%-56.90%-39.14%-30.89%-19.07%
Return on equity-20.01%-9.03%-21.96%-19.97%-13.59%-16.37%-13.09%
Return on assets-19.01%-16.06%-7.86%-10.31%-10.06%-8.73%-10.89%-8.11%
Liabilities / equity0.250.151.130.990.560.500.61
Current ratio3.696.722.784.744.183.144.212.61

Industry Peer Context

Each number-line places FSLY against the min, median, and max of latest reported values among companies in the same SIC industry when at least three peers report that ratio.

Net margin peer context

FSLY Net margin versus SIC peer range. Source: grepcent computed from latest SEC companyfacts ratios for SIC industry 7372; peer count 121.FSLY Net margin versus SIC peer range. Source: grepcent computed from latest SEC companyfacts ratios for SIC industry 7372; peer count 121.121 SIC peersMin -134.9%Median 1.5%Max 40.3%FSLY -19.5%

Operating margin peer context

FSLY Operating margin versus SIC peer range. Source: grepcent computed from latest SEC companyfacts ratios for SIC industry 7372; peer count 120.FSLY Operating margin versus SIC peer range. Source: grepcent computed from latest SEC companyfacts ratios for SIC industry 7372; peer count 120.120 SIC peersMin -108.2%Median 1.5%Max 48.8%FSLY -19.1%

ROE peer context

FSLY ROE versus SIC peer range. Source: grepcent computed from latest SEC companyfacts ratios for SIC industry 7372; peer count 112.FSLY ROE versus SIC peer range. Source: grepcent computed from latest SEC companyfacts ratios for SIC industry 7372; peer count 112.112 SIC peersMin -270.0%Median 2.0%Max 135.2%FSLY -13.1%

ROA peer context

FSLY ROA versus SIC peer range. Source: grepcent computed from latest SEC companyfacts ratios for SIC industry 7372; peer count 124.FSLY ROA versus SIC peer range. Source: grepcent computed from latest SEC companyfacts ratios for SIC industry 7372; peer count 124.124 SIC peersMin -77.9%Median 0.9%Max 150.6%FSLY -8.1%

Financial Bridges

Waterfall figures reconcile reported SEC companyfacts components. Missing bridges are omitted when required components are not present for the same fiscal year.

Income statement bridge from reported figures

FSLY FY2025 income statement bridge from reported figures.FSLY FY2025 income statement bridge from reported figures.FSLY income bridgeFY2025: revenue to net incomeSource: SEC companyfacts FY2025.Income statement bridgeReported amount-$250.0M$0.0B$750.0M$624.0MRevenue-$267.8MCost$356.2MGross-$475.2MOpEx-$119.0MOperating-$2.7MOther/tax-$121.7MNet income

Figure provenance: SEC companyfacts FY 2025. Revenue: accession 0001517413-26-000053; concept RevenueFromContractWithCustomerIncludingAssessedTax; source concepts us-gaap:RevenueFromContractWithCustomerIncludingAssessedTax | Gross profit: accession 0001517413-26-000053; concept GrossProfit; source concepts us-gaap:GrossProfit | Operating income: accession 0001517413-26-000053; concept OperatingIncomeLoss; source concepts us-gaap:OperatingIncomeLoss | Net income: accession 0001517413-26-000053; concept NetIncomeLoss; source concepts us-gaap:NetIncomeLoss

Free cash flow = operating cash flow - capital expenditures

FSLY FY2025 free cash flow bridge from reported figures.FSLY FY2025 free cash flow bridge from reported figures.FSLY free cash flow bridgeFY2025: operating cash flow less capital expendituresSource: SEC companyfacts FY2025.Free cash flow bridgeReported amount$0.0B$125.0M$250.0M$94.4MOperating cash flow-$28.7MCapex$65.8MFree cash flow

Figure provenance: SEC companyfacts FY 2025. Operating cash flow: accession 0001517413-26-000053; concept NetCashProvidedByUsedInOperatingActivities; source concepts us-gaap:NetCashProvidedByUsedInOperatingActivities | Capital expenditures: accession 0001517413-26-000053; concept PaymentsToAcquirePropertyPlantAndEquipment; source concepts us-gaap:PaymentsToAcquirePropertyPlantAndEquipment | Free cash flow: accession 0001517413-26-000053; concept NetCashProvidedByUsedInOperatingActivities - PaymentsToAcquirePropertyPlantAndEquipment; source concepts us-gaap:NetCashProvidedByUsedInOperatingActivities; us-gaap:PaymentsToAcquirePropertyPlantAndEquipment

Financial Charts

FSLY revenue, last 5 periods. Source: SEC companyfacts FY2025.FSLY revenue, last 5 periods. Source: SEC companyfacts FY2025.FSLY RevenueLatest point: FY2025 = $624.0MSource: SEC companyfacts FY2025.Fiscal yearReported revenue$0.0B$375.0M$750.0MFY2021FY2022FY2023FY2024FY2025

Figure provenance: SEC companyfacts. Latest point: FY 2025 ended 2025-12-31; accession 0001517413-26-000053; filed 2026-02-25. Concept: RevenueFromContractWithCustomerIncludingAssessedTax. Source concepts: us-gaap:RevenueFromContractWithCustomerIncludingAssessedTax.

FSLY net income, last 5 periods. Source: SEC companyfacts FY2025.FSLY net income, last 5 periods. Source: SEC companyfacts FY2025.FSLY Net incomeLatest point: FY2025 = -$121.7MSource: SEC companyfacts FY2025.Fiscal yearNet income-$250.0M-$125.0M$0.0BFY2021FY2022FY2023FY2024FY2025

Figure provenance: SEC companyfacts. Latest point: FY 2025 ended 2025-12-31; accession 0001517413-26-000053; filed 2026-02-25. Concept: NetIncomeLoss. Source concepts: us-gaap:NetIncomeLoss.

FSLY operating income, last 5 periods. Source: SEC companyfacts FY2025.FSLY operating income, last 5 periods. Source: SEC companyfacts FY2025.FSLY Operating incomeLatest point: FY2025 = -$119.0MSource: SEC companyfacts FY2025.Fiscal yearOperating income-$250.0M-$125.0M$0.0BFY2021FY2022FY2023FY2024FY2025

Figure provenance: SEC companyfacts. Latest point: FY 2025 ended 2025-12-31; accession 0001517413-26-000053; filed 2026-02-25. Concept: OperatingIncomeLoss. Source concepts: us-gaap:OperatingIncomeLoss.

FSLY gross profit, last 5 periods. Source: SEC companyfacts FY2025.FSLY gross profit, last 5 periods. Source: SEC companyfacts FY2025.FSLY Gross profitLatest point: FY2025 = $356.2MSource: SEC companyfacts FY2025.Fiscal yearGross profit$0.0B$250.0M$500.0MFY2021FY2022FY2023FY2024FY2025

Figure provenance: SEC companyfacts. Latest point: FY 2025 ended 2025-12-31; accession 0001517413-26-000053; filed 2026-02-25. Concept: GrossProfit. Source concepts: us-gaap:GrossProfit.

FSLY diluted eps, last 5 periods. Source: SEC companyfacts FY2025.FSLY diluted eps, last 5 periods. Source: SEC companyfacts FY2025.FSLY Diluted EPSLatest point: FY2025 = -$0.83/shareSource: SEC companyfacts FY2025.Fiscal yearDiluted EPS (USD/share)-$2.00/share-$1.00/share$0.00/shareFY2021FY2022FY2023FY2024FY2025

Figure provenance: SEC companyfacts. Latest point: FY 2025 ended 2025-12-31; accession 0001517413-26-000053; filed 2026-02-25. Concept: EarningsPerShareDiluted. Source concepts: us-gaap:EarningsPerShareDiluted.

FSLY operating cash flow, last 5 periods. Source: SEC companyfacts FY2025.FSLY operating cash flow, last 5 periods. Source: SEC companyfacts FY2025.FSLY Operating cash flowLatest point: FY2025 = $94.4MSource: SEC companyfacts FY2025.Fiscal yearOperating cash flow-$250.0M$0.0B$250.0MFY2021FY2022FY2023FY2024FY2025

Figure provenance: SEC companyfacts. Latest point: FY 2025 ended 2025-12-31; accession 0001517413-26-000053; filed 2026-02-25. Concept: NetCashProvidedByUsedInOperatingActivities. Source concepts: us-gaap:NetCashProvidedByUsedInOperatingActivities.

FSLY capital expenditures, last 5 periods. Source: SEC companyfacts FY2025.FSLY capital expenditures, last 5 periods. Source: SEC companyfacts FY2025.FSLY Capital expendituresLatest point: FY2025 = $28.7MSource: SEC companyfacts FY2025.Fiscal yearCapital expenditures$0.0B$125.0M$250.0MFY2021FY2022FY2023FY2024FY2025

Figure provenance: SEC companyfacts. Latest point: FY 2025 ended 2025-12-31; accession 0001517413-26-000053; filed 2026-02-25. Concept: PaymentsToAcquirePropertyPlantAndEquipment. Source concepts: us-gaap:PaymentsToAcquirePropertyPlantAndEquipment.

FSLY assets, last 5 periods. Source: SEC companyfacts FY2025.FSLY assets, last 5 periods. Source: SEC companyfacts FY2025.FSLY AssetsLatest point: FY2025 = $1.5BSource: SEC companyfacts FY2025.Fiscal yearAssets$0.0B$2.0B$4.0BFY2021FY2022FY2023FY2024FY2025

Figure provenance: SEC companyfacts. Latest point: FY 2025 ended 2025-12-31; accession 0001517413-26-000053; filed 2026-02-25. Concept: Assets. Source concepts: us-gaap:Assets.

FSLY liabilities, last 5 periods. Source: SEC companyfacts FY2025.FSLY liabilities, last 5 periods. Source: SEC companyfacts FY2025.FSLY LiabilitiesLatest point: FY2025 = $569.9MSource: SEC companyfacts FY2025.Fiscal yearLiabilities$0.0B$1.0B$2.0BFY2021FY2022FY2023FY2024FY2025

Figure provenance: SEC companyfacts. Latest point: FY 2025 ended 2025-12-31; accession 0001517413-26-000053; filed 2026-02-25. Concept: Liabilities. Source concepts: us-gaap:Liabilities.

FSLY stockholders' equity, last 5 periods. Source: SEC companyfacts FY2025.FSLY stockholders' equity, last 5 periods. Source: SEC companyfacts FY2025.FSLY Stockholders' equityLatest point: FY2025 = $929.6MSource: SEC companyfacts FY2025.Fiscal yearStockholders' equity$0.0B$1.0B$2.0BFY2021FY2022FY2023FY2024FY2025

Figure provenance: SEC companyfacts. Latest point: FY 2025 ended 2025-12-31; accession 0001517413-26-000053; filed 2026-02-25. Concept: StockholdersEquity. Source concepts: us-gaap:StockholdersEquity.

FSLY cash and cash equivalents, last 5 periods. Source: SEC companyfacts FY2025.FSLY cash and cash equivalents, last 5 periods. Source: SEC companyfacts FY2025.FSLY Cash and cash equivalentsLatest point: FY2025 = $180.6MSource: SEC companyfacts FY2025.Fiscal yearCash and cash equivalents$0.0B$250.0M$500.0MFY2021FY2022FY2023FY2024FY2025

Figure provenance: SEC companyfacts. Latest point: FY 2025 ended 2025-12-31; accession 0001517413-26-000053; filed 2026-02-25. Concept: CashAndCashEquivalentsAtCarryingValue. Source concepts: us-gaap:CashAndCashEquivalentsAtCarryingValue.

FSLY free cash flow, last 5 periods. Source: SEC companyfacts FY2025.FSLY free cash flow, last 5 periods. Source: SEC companyfacts FY2025.FSLY Free cash flowLatest point: FY2025 = $65.8MSource: SEC companyfacts FY2025.Fiscal yearFree cash flow-$250.0M$0.0B$250.0MFY2021FY2022FY2023FY2024FY2025

Figure provenance: SEC companyfacts. Latest point: FY 2025 ended 2025-12-31; accession 0001517413-26-000053; filed 2026-02-25. Concept: NetCashProvidedByUsedInOperatingActivities - PaymentsToAcquirePropertyPlantAndEquipment. Source concepts: us-gaap:NetCashProvidedByUsedInOperatingActivities; us-gaap:PaymentsToAcquirePropertyPlantAndEquipment.

Quarterly

Quarterly standardized facts from SEC companyfacts as of latest extracted filing date 2026-05-06. Source: https://data.sec.gov/api/xbrl/companyfacts/CIK0001517413.json.

Flow metrics use discrete quarter-length periods from 10-Q/10-Q/A filings. Q4 revenue and net income are derived only when annual FY and nine-month YTD facts exist for the same fiscal year; derived Q4 values are labeled. EPS Q4 is not derived.

QuarterEnd DateRevenueNet IncomeDiluted EPSMethod
2022-Q22022-06-30-0.14reported discrete quarter
2022-Q32022-09-30-0.52reported discrete quarter
2023-Q12023-03-31-0.36reported discrete quarter
2023-Q22023-06-30122,831,000-10,704,000-0.08reported discrete quarter
2023-Q32023-09-30127,816,000-54,311,000-0.42reported discrete quarter
2023-Q42023-12-31137,777,000-23,386,000derived Q4 = FY annual - nine-month YTD
2024-Q12024-03-31133,520,000-43,427,000-0.32reported discrete quarter
2024-Q22024-06-30132,371,000-43,729,000-0.32reported discrete quarter
2024-Q32024-09-30137,206,000-38,016,000-0.27reported discrete quarter
2024-Q42024-12-31140,579,000-32,886,000derived Q4 = FY annual - nine-month YTD
2025-Q12025-03-31144,474,000-39,148,000-0.27reported discrete quarter
2025-Q22025-06-30148,709,000-37,541,000-0.26reported discrete quarter
2025-Q32025-09-30158,223,000-29,483,000-0.20reported discrete quarter
2025-Q42025-12-31172,612,000-15,505,000derived Q4 = FY annual - nine-month YTD
2026-Q12026-03-31173,021,000-20,524,000-0.13reported discrete quarter

Quarterly Charts

FSLY quarterly revenue, last 12 periods. Source: SEC companyfacts 2026-Q1.FSLY quarterly revenue, last 12 periods. Source: SEC companyfacts 2026-Q1.FSLY Quarterly RevenueLatest point: 2026-Q1 = $173.0MSource: SEC companyfacts 2026-Q1.Fiscal quarterQuarterly Revenue$0.0B$125.0M$250.0M2023-Q22023-Q32023-Q42024-Q12024-Q22024-Q32024-Q42025-Q12025-Q22025-Q32025-Q42026-Q1

Figure provenance: SEC companyfacts. Latest point: FY 2026 ended 2026-03-31; accession 0001517413-26-000132; filed 2026-05-06. Concept: RevenueFromContractWithCustomerIncludingAssessedTax. Source concepts: us-gaap:RevenueFromContractWithCustomerIncludingAssessedTax.

FSLY quarterly net income, last 12 periods. Source: SEC companyfacts 2026-Q1.FSLY quarterly net income, last 12 periods. Source: SEC companyfacts 2026-Q1.FSLY Quarterly Net incomeLatest point: 2026-Q1 = -$20.5MSource: SEC companyfacts 2026-Q1.Fiscal quarterQuarterly Net income-$250.0M-$125.0M$0.0B2023-Q22023-Q32023-Q42024-Q12024-Q22024-Q32024-Q42025-Q12025-Q22025-Q32025-Q42026-Q1

Figure provenance: SEC companyfacts. Latest point: FY 2026 ended 2026-03-31; accession 0001517413-26-000132; filed 2026-05-06. Concept: NetIncomeLoss. Source concepts: us-gaap:NetIncomeLoss.

FSLY quarterly diluted eps, last 12 periods. Source: SEC companyfacts 2026-Q1.FSLY quarterly diluted eps, last 12 periods. Source: SEC companyfacts 2026-Q1.FSLY Quarterly Diluted EPSLatest point: 2026-Q1 = -$0.13/shareSource: SEC companyfacts 2026-Q1.Fiscal quarterQuarterly Diluted EPS (USD/share)-$1.00/share-$0.50/share$0.00/share2022-Q22022-Q32023-Q12023-Q22023-Q32024-Q12024-Q22024-Q32025-Q12025-Q22025-Q32026-Q1

Figure provenance: SEC companyfacts. Latest point: FY 2026 ended 2026-03-31; accession 0001517413-26-000132; filed 2026-05-06. Concept: EarningsPerShareDiluted. Source concepts: us-gaap:EarningsPerShareDiluted.

Macro Cross-References

Latest quarter (10-Q)

Latest 10-Q source: 0001517413-26-000132.

Extracted structurally from real Item 2 body heading to real Item 3/4 boundary. Confidence: high. Filing date: 2026-05-06. Report date: 2026-03-31.

ITEM 2. MANAGEMENT’S DISCUSSION AND ANALYSIS OF FINANCIAL CONDITION AND RESULTS OF OPERATIONS

You should read the following discussion and analysis of our financial condition and results of operations together with the condensed consolidated financial statements and related notes that are included elsewhere in this Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q. This discussion contains forward-looking statements based upon current plans, expectations, and beliefs that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements as a result of various factors, including those set forth under “Risk Factors” and in other parts of this Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q. Our fiscal year ends on December 31.

As used herein, “Fastly,” “we,” “our,” “the Company,” and similar terms include Fastly, Inc. and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise.

Overview

Organizations around the world are more dependent on the quality of digital experiences they provide than ever before. As the internet approaches an inflection point where automated, artificial intelligence (“AI”)-driven traffic increases demands on infrastructure, Fastly is the essential platform to deliver resilient, highly performant, always-on software and services at global scale.

The edge cloud is a category of Infrastructure as a Service (“IaaS”) that enables software engineers to build, secure, and deliver digital experiences at the edge of the Internet. Our platform represents the convergence of the Content Delivery Network (“CDN”) with functionality that has traditionally been delivered by hardware-centric appliances such as Application Delivery Controllers (“ADC”), Web Application Firewalls (“WAF”), API Management, Bot Detection, Distributed Denial of Service (“DDoS”), Web Application and API Protection (“WAAP”), and infrastructure protection.

Processing at the edge is an ideal way to handle highly dynamic and time-sensitive data, especially when performance matters. Organizations of all sizes, including Fortune 500 companies that run 24/7 operations, leverage our edge cloud platform for a diverse range of critical functions that benefit from processing at the edge, including enhancing user experience, scaling agentic AI workloads, and powering core commerce capabilities to drive conversion and customer success. The edge cloud complements data center, central cloud, and hybrid solutions, and is critical for responsive, safe, and secure AI-centric experiences.

Fastly focuses holistically on the edge cloud from developer creation to end-user experience, with our global footprint and integrated security core to our platform. Our platform is poised to capitalize on the rise of agentic AI, where autonomous agent consumption is driving the bulk of internet traffic. Fastly is uniquely positioned – and has laid the groundwork – to lead the intelligence fabric that helps enterprises adapt to this shift. We are capturing this opportunity by supporting edge workloads and AI traffic management, allowing organizations to optimize AI-driven services alongside human interactions. We play a unique role in helping enterprises optimize and accelerate interactions with authorized AI agents and blocking abuse, powering their differentiation and AI-fueled innovation.

Organizations must keep up with a complex and ever-evolving landscape. We’ve built a powerful unified edge platform designed from the ground up to be programmable and support agile software development, and we continuously drive innovation to meet the ever changing needs of our customers. We believe that our platform gives our customers a significant competitive advantage – whether they were born into the AI-centric digital age or are just embarking on their transformation journey.

We focus our direct selling efforts on expanding our customers’ use of our platform, which includes companies that are exhibiting significant growth. We engage with and support these customers with our field sales representatives, account managers, and technical account managers who focus on customer satisfaction and drive expansion of their usage of our platform and products. These teams work with technical and business leaders to help our customers’ end users receive the best possible digital experience, while also lowering our customers’ total cost of ownership. These direct selling efforts are reflected by the revenue generated by our large customers. Our Last-Twelve Months Net Retention Rate (“LTM NRR”) metric also measures the revenue growth from existing customers attributable to increased usage of our platform and features, and purchase of additional products and services. For additional details on our key metrics, refer to the “Key Business Metrics” section.

We generate substantially all of our revenue from charging our customers based on their usage of our platform, and we generate a substantial majority of our revenue from customers that have negotiated contracts with us. Customers typically choose to utilize our platform for Network Services, for which we charge fees based on their committed or actual use of our

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platform, as measured in gigabytes and requests. Many of our customers generate billings in excess of their minimum commitment. We also generate revenue from Security and Other product lines, including Compute and Observability, as well as professional and other services, such as implementation, account management and enhanced customer support. We charge a flat one-time or recurring monthly fee depending on the additional products and services selected. Typically, the term of our contracts with customers is 12 months and includes a minimum monthly billing commitment in exchange for more favorable pricing terms. In addition, customers can sign up online by providing their credit card information and agreeing to a minimum monthly fee.

The majority of our revenue is usage based and changes in usage by our largest customers can create volatility in our revenue. We receive a substantial portion of our revenue from a limited number of customers and within a limited number of industries, such as media and entertainment. The length of our sales cycles, from initial evaluation to payment, can range from several months to well over a year and can vary substantially from customer to customer. Similarly, the onboarding and ramping process with new as well as existing large customers with new business can take several months and can be subject to delays for unanticipated reasons. The timing of new revenue from our sales efforts and changes in usage by our largest customers can make revenue difficult to predict.

For the three months ended March 31, 2026 and 2025, our revenue was $173.0 million and $144.5 million, respectively, an increase of 20%. For the three months ended March 31, 2026 and 2025, we incurred a net loss of $20.5 million and $39.1 million, respectively.

No single customer accounted for more than 10% of revenue for the three months ended March 31, 2026 and 2025. No affiliated customers that are business units of a single company generated more than 10% of revenue for the three months ended March 31, 2026 and 2025.

Factors Affecting Our Performance

We are focused on continuing to attract new customers and expanding our relationship with existing customers by enhancing our product experience, investing in technology, and leveraging our partner ecosystem. Our customer base ranges from emerging companies to large enterprises undergoing digital transformation across diverse industries and verticals. Utilizing our direct sales force, we have multiple selling points within organizations to acquire new customers and increase usage from our existing customers. We will continue to increase our discretionary marketing spend, including account-based, targeted demand generation and brand spend, to drive the effectiveness of our sales teams. As a result, we expect our total operating expenses to increase as we continue to expand. A key component of our cost-efficient customer acquisition strategy is developer outreach, as developers often advocate for the adoption and promotion of our platform within their organizations and across the broader developer community. We will also continue to build out a single, unified platform, simplify customer onboarding and service usage, and simplify our pricing and packaging. This will require us to dedicate significant resources to further develop the market for our platform and differentiate our platform from competitive products and services. We will also need to expand, retain, and motivate our sales and marketing personnel in order to target our sales efforts at larger enterprises and senior management of these potential customers.

We emphasize retaining our customers and expanding their usage of our platform and adoption of our other products. Customers often begin with smaller deployments of one of our products and then expand their usage over time. Our platform includes a variety of offerings across Network Services, Security, and Other product lines, including Compute and Observability. As our customers mature, we assist them in expanding their use of our platform, including the use of additional offerings beyond content delivery or security. In addition, given that customer acquisition costs are incurred largely for acquiring and initial onboarding, we may gain operating leverage to the extent that existing customers expand their use of our platform and products. Our ability to retain customers and expand their usage could be impaired for a variety of reasons, including a customer moving to another provider or reducing usage within the term of their contract. Even if our customers expand their usage of our platform, we cannot guarantee that they will maintain those usage levels for any meaningful period of time or that they will renew their commitments.

We intend to continue expanding our efforts to attract customers outside of the United States by augmenting our sales teams and strategically increasing our presence in the number of markets in select international locations. Our international expansion, including our global sales efforts, continues to add increased complexity and cost to our business. This requires us to continue to expand our sales and marketing capabilities outside of the United States, increase the number of markets we have a presence in around the world to support our customers, and manage the administrative aspects of a global organization, each of which place a strain on our business and culture. In addition, our bandwidth costs are higher in markets outside of the United States and Europe, which may impact our gross margins.

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Many jurisdictions have enacted laws on data localization and cross-border data transfers, and the evolving enforcement and interpretation of such laws has created uncertainty regarding data stored abroad and transferred across borders, which could impact customer growth and acquisition for customers and potential customers conducting business in Europe and elsewhere outside of the United States. In addition, we cannot be certain what actions the United States or another country’s government may take with respect to certain of our customers that may adversely affect our ability to do business with our customers that operate in China, target China as a market or that have strong business ties to China, and any such governmental action could have a negative impact on our business. In April 2024, under the prior administration, a bill was signed into law that would effectively ban TikTok in the United States if ByteDance, its China-based parent company, does not sell its stake in TikTok within a set time frame. Following a series of executive orders in 2025 that suspended enforcement of this law, on January 22, 2026, ByteDance announced the establishment of TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC in compliance with the law

[Excerpt truncated for page length; source filing is linked above.]

Latest 10-K MD&A

Extracted structurally from real Item 7 body heading to real Item 7A/8 boundary. Confidence: high. Filing date: 2026-02-25. Report date: 2025-12-31.

ITEM 7.     Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations

You should read the following discussion and analysis of our financial condition and results of operations together with the consolidated financial statements and related notes that are included elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. This discussion contains forward-looking statements based upon current plans, expectations, and beliefs that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements as a result of various factors, including those set forth under “Risk Factors” and in other parts of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Our fiscal year ends on December 31.

As used herein, “Fastly,” “we,” “our,” “the Company” and similar terms include Fastly, Inc. and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise.

Overview

Organizations around the world are more dependent on the quality of digital experiences they provide than ever before. As the internet approaches an inflection point where automated, artificial intelligence (“AI”)-driven traffic increases demands on infrastructure, Fastly is the essential platform to deliver resilient, highly performant, always-on software and services at global scale.

The edge cloud is a category of Infrastructure as a Service (“IaaS”) that enables software engineers to build, secure, and deliver digital experiences at the edge of the Internet. Our platform represents the convergence of the Content Delivery Network (“CDN”) with functionality that has traditionally been delivered by hardware-centric appliances such as Application Delivery Controllers (“ADC”), Web Application Firewalls (“WAF”), API Management, Bot Detection, Distributed Denial of Service (“DDoS”), Web Application and API Protection (“WAAP”), and infrastructure protection.

Processing at the edge is an ideal way to handle highly dynamic and time-sensitive data, especially when performance matters. Organizations of all sizes, including Fortune 500 companies that run 24/7 operations, leverage our edge cloud platform for a diverse range of critical functions that benefit from processing at the edge, including enhancing user experience, scaling agentic AI workloads, and powering core commerce capabilities to drive conversion and customer success. The edge cloud complements data center, central cloud, and hybrid solutions, and is critical for responsive, safe, and secure AI-centric experiences.

Fastly focuses holistically on the edge cloud from developer creation to end-user experience, with our global footprint and integrated security core to our platform. Our platform is poised to capitalize on the rise of agentic AI, where autonomous agent consumption is driving the bulk of internet traffic. Fastly is uniquely positioned – and has laid the groundwork – to lead the intelligence fabric that helps enterprises adapt to this shift. We are capturing this opportunity by supporting edge workloads and AI traffic management, allowing organizations to optimize AI-driven services alongside human interactions. We play a unique role in helping enterprises optimize and accelerate interactions with authorized AI agents and blocking abuse, powering their differentiation and AI-fueled innovation.

Organizations must keep up with a complex and ever-evolving landscape. We’ve built a powerful unified edge platform designed from the ground up to be programmable and support agile software development, and we continuously drive innovation to meet the ever changing needs of our customers. We believe that our platform gives our customers a significant competitive advantage – whether they were born into the AI-centric digital age or are just embarking on their transformation journey.

We focus our direct selling efforts on expanding our customers’ use of our platform, which includes companies that are exhibiting significant growth. We engage with and support these customers with our field sales representatives, account managers, and technical account managers who focus on customer satisfaction and drive expansion of their usage of our platform and products. These teams work with technical and business leaders to help our customers’ end users receive the best possible digital experience, while also lowering our customers’ total cost of ownership. These direct selling efforts are reflected by the revenue generated by our enterprise customers. Our Last-Twelve Months Net Retention Rate (“LTM NRR”) metric also measures the revenue growth from existing customers attributable to increased usage of our platform and features, and purchase of additional products and services. For additional details on our key metrics, refer to the “Key Business Metrics” section.

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We generate substantially all of our revenue from charging our customers based on their usage of our platform, and we generate a substantial majority of our revenue from customers that have negotiated contracts with us. Customers typically choose to utilize our platform for Network Services, for which we charge fees based on their committed or actual use of our platform, as measured in gigabytes and requests. Many of our customers generate billings in excess of their minimum commitment. We also generate revenue from Security and Other product lines, including Compute and Observability, as well as professional and other services, such as implementation, account management and enhanced customer support. We charge a flat one-time or recurring monthly fee depending on the additional products and services selected. Typically, the term of our contracts with customers is 12 months and includes a minimum monthly billing commitment in exchange for more favorable pricing terms. In addition, customers can sign up online by providing their credit card information and agreeing to a minimum monthly fee.

The majority of our revenue is usage based and changes in usage by our largest customers can create volatility in our revenue. The length of our sales cycles, from initial evaluation to payment, can range from several months to well over a year and can vary substantially from customer to customer. Similarly, the onboarding and ramping process with new as well as existing enterprise customers with new business can take several months and can be subject to delays for unanticipated reasons. The timing of new revenue from our sales efforts and changes in usage by our largest customers can make revenue difficult to predict.

For the years ended December 31, 2025 and 2024, our revenue was $624.0 million and $543.7 million, respectively, an increase of 15%. We incurred a net loss of $121.7 million and $158.1 million in the years ended December 31, 2025 and 2024, respectively.

Our 10 largest customers generated an aggregate of 32% and 33% of our revenue in the trailing 12 months ended December 31, 2025 and 2024, respectively.

No single customer accounted for more than 10% of revenue for the years ended December 31, 2025 and 2024. Affiliated customers that are business units of a single company generated an aggregate of 10% of the Company’s revenue for the year ended December 31, 2025. No affiliated customers that are business units of a single company generated more than 10% of revenue for the year ended December 31, 2024.

Factors Affecting Our Performance

We are focused on continuing to attract new customers and expanding our relationship with existing customers by enhancing our product experience, investing in technology, and leveraging our partner ecosystem. Our customer base ranges from emerging companies to large enterprises undergoing digital transformation across diverse industries and verticals. Utilizing our direct sales force, we have multiple selling points within organizations to acquire new customers and increase usage from our existing customers. We will continue to increase our discretionary marketing spend, including account-based, targeted demand generation and brand spend, to drive the effectiveness of our sales teams. As a result, we expect our total operating expenses to increase as we continue to expand. A key component of our cost-efficient customer acquisition strategy is developer outreach, as developers often advocate for the adoption and promotion of our platform within their organizations and across the broader developer community. We will also continue to build out a single, unified platform, simplify customer onboarding and service usage, and simplify our pricing and packaging. This will require us to dedicate significant resources to further develop the market for our platform and differentiate our platform from competitive products and services. We will also need to expand, retain, and motivate our sales and marketing personnel in order to target our sales efforts at larger enterprises and senior management of these potential customers.

We emphasize retaining our customers and expanding their usage of our platform and adoption of our other products. Customers often begin with smaller deployments of one of our products and then expand their usage over time. Our platform includes a variety of offerings across Network Services, Security, and Other product lines, including Compute and Observability. As our customers mature, we assist them in expanding their use of our platform, including the use of additional offerings beyond content delivery or security. In addition, given that customer acquisition costs are incurred largely for acquiring and initial onboarding, we may gain operating leverage to the extent that existing customers expand their use of our platform and products. Our ability to retain customers and expand their usage could be impaired for a variety of reasons, including a customer moving to another provider or reducing usage within the term of their contract. Even if our customers expand their usage of our platform, we cannot guarantee that they will maintain those usage levels for any meaningful period of time or that they will renew their commitments.

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We intend to continue expanding our efforts to attract customers outside of the United States by augmenting our sales teams and strategically increasing our presence in the number of markets in select international locations. Our international expansion, including our global sales efforts, continues to add increased complexity and cost to our business. This requires us to continue to expand our sales and marketing capabilities outside of the United States, increase the number of markets we have a presence in around the world to support our customers, and manage the administrative aspects of a global organization, each of which place a strain on our business and culture. In addition, our bandwidth costs are higher in markets outside of the United States and Europe, which may impact our gross margins.

Many jurisdictions have enacted laws on data localization and cross-border data transfers, and the evolving enforcement and interpretation of such laws has created uncertainty regarding data stored abroad and transferred across borders, which could impact customer growth and acquisition for customers and potential customers conducting business in Europe and elsewhere outside of the United States. In addition, we cannot be certain what actions the United States or another country’s government may take with respect to certain of our customers that may adversely affect our ability to do business with our customers that operate in China, target China as a market or that have strong business ties to China, and any such governmental action could have a negative impact on our business. In April 2024, under the prior administration, a bill was signed into law that would effectively ban TikTok in the United States if ByteDance, its China-based parent company, does not sell its stake in TikTok within a set time frame. Following a series of executive orders in 2025 that suspended enforcement of this law, on January 22, 2026, ByteDance announced the establishment of TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC in compliance with the law to secure United States user data, apps, and the algorithm through data privacy and cybersecurity measures. TikTok was one of our largest customers for the year ended December 31, 2025 and remains a customer of ours. We do not know how the restructuring may impact our traffic levels. For additional details, refer to the section titled “Risk Factors.”

We are closely monitoring various global conflicts and developments, including, but not limited to, the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, as well as the hostilities in the Middle East, and their global impacts. While the conflicts are still evolving and the outcomes remain highly uncertain, we do not believe the Russia-Ukraine, Israel-Hamas, or other conflicts will have a material impact on our business and results of operations. We do not have Points of Presence (“POPs”) in Russia, Ukraine, or Israel. However, some threat actors now engage and are expected to continue to engage in cyber-attacks, including without limitation nation-state actors for geopolitical reasons and in conjunction with military conflicts and defense activities. During times of war and other major conflicts, we, the third parties upon which we rely, and our customers may be vulnerable to a heightened risk of these attacks, including retaliatory cyber-attacks, that could materially disrupt our systems and operations, supply chain, and ability to produce, sell and distribute our goods and services. If such conflicts continue or worsen, leading to greater global economic disruptions and uncertainty, our business and results of operations could be materially impacted.

We must continue to invest in our platform and network infrastructure to maintain our position in the market. We expect our revenue growth to be dependent on an expanding customer base and continued adoption of our edge cloud delivery, security, and other products and services. In anticipation of winning new customers and staying ahead of our customers’ needs, we plan to continue to invest in order to expand the scale and capacity of our software-defined modern network. This could result in increased network service provider fees, which could adversely affect our gross margins if we are unable to offset these costs with revenue from new customers and increase revenue from existing customers. Our customers require constant innovation within their own organizations and expect the same from us. Therefore, we will continue to invest in resources to enhance our development capabilities and introduce new products and features on our platform. We believe that investment in research and development will contribute to our long-term growth but may also negatively impact our short-term profitability. For the years ended December 31, 2025 and 2024, our research and development expenses as a percentage of revenue were 26% and 25%, respectively. Our research and development expenses in each period are impacted by the amount of software development costs that meet the criteria for capitalization. We may also seek to acquire or invest in businesses, products, or technologies that we believe could complement or expand our platform, enhance our technical capabilities, or otherwise offer growth opportunities.

Developers use our platform to build custom applications and require a state-of-the-art infrastructure to test and run these applications. We will continue to invest in our network infrastructure by strategically increasing our POPs. We also anticipate making investments in upgrading our technology and hardware to continue providing our customers a fast and secure platform. Our gross margins and operating results are impacted by these investments. As we continue to experience growth, we may face challenges managing adequate server capacity in our POPs due to potential component delays, shortages, price increases, hardware efficiencies gained through internal development, or any potential changes in server architecture, including due to technological advances or obsolescence. If we have server asset levels in excess of forecasted network capacity needs,

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we have in the past and may need to continue to write-down or write-off server assets. Conversely, if we underestimate network capacity needs, we may in future periods be unable to meet demand and be required to incur higher costs to secure necessary parts and components of our servers.

In addition, international trade disputes may further disrupt or delay our supply chain for these components or lead to pricing increases. For example, the United States has imposed or indicated an intention to impose tariffs on certain countries which may lead to retaliatory actions such as counter-tariffs and increase production costs and disruptions in our supply chain. The United States and other jurisdictions have also leveraged various trade and value chain requirements, including on environmental and social criteria, which may make sourcing more costly, require us to change suppliers, or otherwise adversely impact our operations. Further, it is possible that government policy changes, including policy changes made with little to no advance notice, and related uncertainty about policy changes could increase market volatility. If our supply of certain components is further disrupted or delayed, there can be no assurance that we will be able to obtain adequate replacements for the existing components or that supplies will be available on terms and prices that are favorable to us, if at all. In the event that there are errors in software, failures of hardware, damages to a facility or misconfigurations of any of our services, whether caused by our own error, security breaches, third-party error, or natural disasters, we could experience lengthy interruptions in our platform availability as well as delays and additional expenses in arranging new facilities and services. In addition, there can be no assurance that we are adequately prepared for unexpected increases in bandwidth demands by our customers, particularly when we or our customers experience cyber-attacks. The bandwidth we have contracted to purchase may become unavailable for a variety of reasons, including service outages, payment disputes, network providers going out of business, natural disasters, networks imposing traffic limits, or governments adopting regulations that impact network operations.

Key Business Metrics

We use the following key metrics presented in the table below to evaluate our business, measure our performance, identify trends affecting our business, prepare financial projections, and make strategic decisions. The calculation of these key metrics below may differ from other similarly titled metrics used by other companies, analysts, or investors.

As of December 31,
20252024
Total Customer Count (based on current quarter revenue)3,0923,061
Enterprise Customer Count (based on annualized revenue)628596
Annual Revenue Retention Rate98.7%99.0%
Last-twelve Months Net Retention Rate (“LTM NRR”)110.1%102.3%
Remaining Performance Obligations (“RPO”) (in millions)$353.8$244.4

Total Customer Count

We believe that our total number of customers is an important indicator of the adoption of our platform. Our definition of a customer consists of identifiable operating entities with which we have a billing relationship in good standing and which we have recognized revenue from during the reporting period. An identifiable operating entity is defined as a company, a government entity, or a distinct business unit of a larger company that has a relationship with us through direct sales or through one of our reseller partners where charges are identified on an end-customer basis. We may treat separate subsidiaries, segments, divisions, or business units of a single organization that use our platform as unique customers where they have distinct account identifiers. In cases where charges are identified through a reseller partner rather than on an end-customer basis, we would count the reseller as a single customer in our customer count. Our customer groupings may be impacted by changes to our customers’ business, including any impact from acquisition activities, internal business reorganizations leading to operational and decision-making changes, and corporate structure changes such as subsidiary consolidation and reorganization that may arise in the future. During the fourth quarter of 2024, we identified an immaterial error in the historical calculation of our total customer count related to our online self-service customers. Revenue that would have been recorded for these customers was less than $0.1 million for the quarter ended December 31, 2024. Due to the immateriality, we have not revised prior periods.

In addition to our paying customers, we also have trial, developer, nonprofit and open source programs, and other non-paying accounts that are excluded from our customer count metric. We operate globally and as a result, the success of our ability to retain our customers is also affected by general economic and market conditions around the world. As of December 31, 2025 and 2024, we had 3,092 and 3,061 customers, respectively.

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Enterprise Customer Count

Historically our revenue has been driven primarily by a subset of our customers, our enterprise customers, who have leveraged our platform substantially from a usage standpoint. We believe that the recruitment and cultivation of enterprise customers is critical to our long-term success. Our enterprise customer count is defined as customers with annualized current quarter revenue in excess of $100,000. This is calculated by taking the revenue we recognized for each customer in the current quarter and multiplying it by four. As of December 31, 2025, we had 628 enterprise customers which generated 94% of the total annualized current quarter revenue for our total customers for the period ended December 31, 2025. As of December 31, 2024, we had 596 enterprise customers which generated 93% of the total annualized current quarter revenue for our total customers for the period ended December 31, 2024.

Annual Revenue Retention Rate (“ARR”)

We separately monitor customer retention and churn on an annual basis by measuring our annual revenue retention rate, which we calculate by first multiplying the final full month of revenue from a customer that terminated its contract with us (a “Churned Customer”) by the number of months remaining in the same calendar year to get our “Annual Revenue Churn”. The quotient of the Annual Revenue Churn from all of our Churned Customers divided by our annual revenue of the same calendar year is then subtracted from 100% to determine our annual revenue retention rate. We believe this calculation is helpful in that it is based on the amount of revenue that we would expect to have received in the remaining portion of a particular period had a customer not terminated its contract with us. It is not indicative of the actual revenue contribution from churned customers in past periods. By comparing this amount to actual revenue for the period, we are able to assess our ability to replace terminated revenue by generating revenue from new and continuing customers.

Our ARR rate is calculated by subtracting the quotient of the Annual Revenue Churn from all of our Churned Customers from which we recognized revenue during the last quarter of the prior year divided by our annual revenue of the same calendar year from 100%. For the years ended December 31, 2025 and 2024 the ARR was 98.7% and 99.0%, respectively.

Last-Twelve Months Net Retention Rate (“LTM NRR”)

Our ability to generate and increase our revenue is also dependent upon our ability to retain our existing customers. LTM NRR allows us to track customer retention which demonstrates the stickiness of our edge cloud platform.

Our LTM NRR removes some of the volatility that is inherent in a usage-based business model from the measurement of the NRR metric. We calculate LTM NRR by dividing the total customer revenue for the prior twelve-month period (“prior 12-month period”) ending at the beginning of the last twelve-month period (“LTM period”) minus revenue contraction due to billing decreases or customer churn, plus revenue expansion due to billing increases during the LTM period from the same customers by the total prior 12-month period revenue. For the trailing twelve months ended December 31, 2025 and 2024 our LTM NRR was 110.1% and 102.3%, respectively.

Remaining Performance Obligations (“RPO”)

RPO represent future committed revenue for periods within current contracts with customers, as well as deferred revenue arising from consideration invoiced for which the related performance obligations have not been satisfied. As of December 31, 2025, the aggregate amount of the transaction price in our contracts allocated to RPO that were unsatisfied or partially unsatisfied was $353.8 million.

Key Components of Statement of Operations

Revenue

We derive our revenue primarily from usage-based fees earned from customers using our platform. We also earn fixed-rate recurring revenue from security and other products and services.

Our usage-based fees earned from customers using our platform are generally billed in arrears. Our security products are primarily annual subscriptions that are billed in advance. Many customers have tiered usage pricing which reflects discounted rates as usage increases. For most contracts, usage charges are determined on a monthly basis based on actual usage

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within the month and do not impact usage charges within any other month. Our larger customers often enter into contracts that contain minimum billing commitments and reflect discounted pricing associated with such usage levels.

We present our disaggregated revenue by three product lines: Network Services, Security, and Other. Network Services include solutions designed to improve performance of websites, apps, application programming interfaces (“APIs”), and digital media. Security includes products designed to protect websites, apps, APIs and users. Other includes Compute solutions that allow developers to build and deploy modern web applications on our edge cloud platform, and Observability solutions that provide real-time logs, data and metrics streamed from our edge platform for actionable insights.

We define United States revenue (“U.S. revenue”) as revenue from customers that have a billing address in the United States, and we define international revenue as revenue from customers that have a billing address outside of the United States.

Cost of Revenue and Gross Margin

Cost of revenue consists primarily of fees paid to network providers for bandwidth and to third-party network data centers for housing servers, also known as colocation costs. Cost of revenue also includes employee costs for network operation, build-out and support and services delivery, network storage costs, cost of managed services and software-as-a-service, depreciation of network equipment used to deliver services, and amortization of network-related internal-use software. Our arrangements with network service providers require us to pay fees based on bandwidth use, in some cases subject to minimum commitments, which may be underutilized. Over the long term we expect cost of revenue to decrease as a percentage of revenue as we continue to drive efficiencies in our operations. However, our cost of revenue may fluctuate as a percentage of our revenue from period to period due to the timing and extent of these expenses.

Our gross margin has been and will continue to be affected by a number of factors, including utilization of our network, the timing of our investments in the expansion of our network, which can increase depreciation and colocation costs in advance of expected demand, our ability to manage our network service providers and cloud infrastructure-related fees, the timing of amortization of capitalized software development costs, changes in personnel costs to provide customer support and operate the network, and customer pricing. Over the long term we expect gross margin to increase as we continue to drive efficiencies in our operations and increase our revenue. However, our gross margin may fluctuate from period to period.

Research and Development

Research and development expenses consist primarily of personnel costs, including salaries, benefits, bonuses, and stock-based compensation. Research and development expenses also include cloud infrastructure fees for development and testing, and an allocation of our general overhead expenses. We capitalize the portion of our software development costs that meet the criteria for capitalization.

We continue to focus our research and development efforts on adding new features and products including new use cases, improving the efficiency and performance of our network, and increasing the functionality of our existing products. Over the long term we expect our research and development expenses to decrease as a percentage of our revenue. However, our research and development expenses may fluctuate as a percentage of our revenue from period to period due to the timing and extent of these expenses.

Sales and Marketing

Sales and marketing expenses consist primarily of personnel costs, including commissions for our sales employees, salaries, benefits, bonuses, and stock-based compensation. Sales and marketing expenses also include expenditures related to advertising, marketing, our brand awareness activities, bandwidth and co-location costs for free trial users, costs related to our customer events, including our customer conferences, professional services fees, amortization of our intangible assets, and an allocation of our general overhead expenses.

We focus our sales and marketing efforts on generating awareness of our platform and products, creating sales leads, and establishing and promoting our brand, both domestically and internationally. Over the long term, we expect our sales and marketing expenses to decrease as a percentage of our revenue. However, our sales and marketing expenses may fluctuate as a percentage of our revenue from period to period due to the timing and extent of these expenses.

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General and Administrative

General and administrative expenses consist primarily of personnel costs, including salaries, benefits, bonuses, and stock-based compensation for our administrative support personnel. General and administrative expenses also include costs related to legal and other professional services fees, an allocation of our general overhead expenses, credit losses, and acquisition-related costs.

In the near term, we expect to continue to incur costs associated with supporting the growth of our business, including international expansion, but expect these costs to decrease as a percentage of our revenue over the long term as we continue to drive efficiencies in our operations. However, our general and administrative expenses may fluctuate as a percentage of our revenue from period to period due to the timing and extent of these expenses.

Impairment Expense

Our impairment expense relates to non-recurring charges for our long-lived assets.

Restructuring Charges

Our restructuring charges relate to a 2024 restructuring plan to reduce expenses including a reduction of the Company’s workforce. The charges incurred consist primarily of employee-related severance and termination benefits in connection with such 2024 workforce reduction.

Net Gain on Extinguishment of Debt

Our net gain on extinguishment of debt relates to the partial retirement of our outstanding senior convertible notes.

Other Income and Expenses

Our interest income consists primarily of interest earned on our cash, cash equivalents, and investments. Our interest expense consists primarily of the interest expense on our finance leases, amortization of discount, coupon interest expense, and debt issuance costs associated with our debt obligations. Our other expense, net, consists primarily of foreign currency transaction gains and losses.

Income Taxes

Our income tax expense (benefit) consists primarily of income taxes in certain foreign jurisdictions where we conduct business and state minimum income taxes in the United States. We currently maintain a full valuation allowance on our U.S. Federal and state net deferred tax assets. We expect to maintain this valuation allowance for the foreseeable future.

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Results of Operations

In this section, we discuss the results of our operations for the year ended December 31, 2025 compared to the year ended December 31, 2024. For a discussion of the year ended December 31, 2024 compared to the year ended December 31, 2023, please refer to Part II, Item 7, “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2024.

Year ended December 31,
20252024
(in thousands)
Consolidated Statement of Operations:
Revenue$624,018$543,676
Cost of revenue267,815247,738
Gross profit356,203295,938
Operating expenses:
Research and development162,662137,980
Sales and marketing201,434198,610
General and administrative110,692113,399
Impairment expense4154,144
Restructuring charges9,720
Total operating expenses475,203463,853
Loss from operations(119,000)(167,915)
Net gain on extinguishment of debt9411,365
Interest income12,29014,871
Interest expense(12,699)(2,747)
Other expense, net(721)(1,028)
Loss before income tax expense(119,189)(155,454)
Income tax expense2,4882,604
Net loss attributable to common stockholders$(121,677)$(158,058)

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The following tables set forth our results of operations for the period presented as a percentage of our revenue:

Year ended December 31,
20252024
Consolidated Statements of Operations, as a percentage of revenue:*
Revenue100%100%
Cost of revenue4346
Gross profit5754
Operating expenses:
Research and development2625
Sales and marketing3236
General and administrative1821
Impairment expense1
Restructuring charges2
Total operating expenses7685
Loss from operations(19)(31)
Net gain on extinguishment of debt
Interest income23
Interest expense(2)(1)
Other expense, net
Loss before income tax expense(19)(29)
Income tax expense
Net loss attributable to common stockholders(19)%(29)%

__________

*    Columns may not add up to 100% due to rounding.

Revenue

Year ended December 31,Change
20252024$ Change% Change
(in thousands)
Network Services$477,774$427,690$50,08412%
Security125,061103,03722,02421%
Other21,18312,9498,23464%
Total revenue$624,018$543,676$80,34215%
Percentage of revenue:
Network Services77%79%(2)%
Security20%19%1%
Other3%2%1%

Revenue was $624.0 million for the year ended December 31, 2025 compared to $543.7 million for the year ended December 31, 2024, an increase of $80.3 million, or 15%. Revenue growth was driven by a $66.4 million increase in revenue related to further adoption of our modern edge platform and products.

For the years ended December 31, 2025 and 2024, approximately 96% and 95% of our revenue was driven by usage on our platform, respectively. Revenue was primarily from existing customers, as revenue from new customers contributed less than 10% of our revenue. The proportion of the revenue contribution between new and existing customers is consistent with prior periods and typical customer behavior as customers tend to contribute more revenue over time as their use of the platform

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increases. The remainder of our revenue was generated by our other products and services, including support and professional services.

Network Services revenue was $477.8 million for the year ended December 31, 2025, compared to $427.7 million for the year ended December 31, 2024, an increase of $50.1 million, or 12%. The increase in Network Services revenue was primarily driven by growth in usage from existing customers. Security revenue was $125.1 million for the year ended December 31, 2025, compared to $103.0 million for the year ended December 31, 2024, an increase of $22.0 million, or 21%. The increase in Security revenue was primarily driven by an increase in Next-Gen WAF revenue, partially offset by a decrease in Fastly legacy WAF revenue. Other revenue was $21.2 million for the year ended December 31, 2025, compared to $12.9 million for the year ended December 31, 2024, an increase of $8.2 million, or 64%. The increase in Other revenue was primarily driven by further adoption of our Compute solutions.

Cost of Revenue

Year ended December 31,Change
20252024$ Change% Change
(in thousands)
Cost of revenue$267,815$247,738$20,0778%

Cost of revenue was $267.8 million for the year ended December 31, 2025 compared to $247.7 million for the year ended December 31, 2024, an increase of $20.1 million, or 8%. The increase in cost of revenue is a result of an increase in bandwidth costs of $8.0 million, a $5.5 million increase in amortization of capitalized software and a $4.4 million increase in software costs. There was also a $3.9 million increase in colocation costs, a $1.7 million increase in depreciation expense as a result of increased investments in our platform, as well as a $1.5 million increase in stock-based compensation expenses. This increase was partially offset by a $2.5 million decrease in intangible asset amortization, a $1.3 million decrease in personnel-related costs, a decrease in repair and maintenance cost of $0.6 million, as well as a $0.5 million decrease in network costs.

Gross Profit and Gross Margin

Year ended December 31,Change
20252024$ Change% Change
(in thousands)
Gross profit$356,203$295,938$60,26520%
Gross margin57%54%3%

Gross profit was $356.2 million for the year ended December 31, 2025 compared to $295.9 million for the year ended December 31, 2024, an increase of $60.3 million, or 20%. Gross margin was 57% for the year ended December 31, 2025 compared to 54% for the year ended December 31, 2024, an increase of 3%. The increase in gross margin was driven by revenue growth during the year ended December 31, 2025 outpacing the increases in the costs incurred to support the growth of our network.

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Operating Expenses

Year ended December 31,Change
20252024$ Change% Change
(in thousands)
Research and development$162,662$137,980$24,68218%
Sales and marketing201,434198,6102,8241%
General and administrative110,692113,399(2,707)(2)%
Impairment expense4154,144(3,729)(90)%
Restructuring charges9,720(9,720)(100)%
Total operating expenses$475,203$463,853$11,3502%
Percentage of revenue:
Research and development26%25%1%
Sales and marketing32%36%(4)%
General and administrative18%21%(3)%
Impairment expense%1%(1)%
Restructuring charges%2%(2)%

Research and Development

Research and development expenses were $162.7 million for the year ended December 31, 2025 compared to $138.0 million for the year ended December 31, 2024, an increase of $24.7 million, or 18%. This increase was primarily due to a $10.8 million increase in stock-based compensation expense, a $9.2 million decrease in capitalized software, an increase of $5.7 million of personnel-related costs, as well as a $1.0 million increase in software costs. This increase was partially offset by a $1.4 million decrease in travel and entertainment expense, as well as a $0.6 million decrease in corporate costs.

Sales and Marketing

Sales and marketing expenses were $201.4 million for the year ended December 31, 2025 compared to $198.6 million for the year ended December 31, 2024, an increase of $2.8 million, or 1%. This increase was primarily due to a $3.9 million increase in stock-based compensation expenses, a $0.7 million increase in marketing expenses, and a $0.5 million increase in third party commissions. The increase was partially offset by a $0.8 million decrease in personnel related costs including sales commissions, a $0.6 million decrease in software costs, as well as a $0.5 million decrease in corporate costs.

General and Administrative

General and administrative costs were $110.7 million for the year ended December 31, 2025 compared to $113.4 million for the year ended December 31, 2024, a decrease of $2.7 million, or 2%. The decrease was primarily due to a $6.9 million decrease in stock-based compensation expenses as well as a $1.4 million decrease in personnel related costs. This decrease was partially offset by a $2.8 million increase in professional service fees, a $1.3 million increase in corporate costs, as well as a $1.0 million increase in executive transition costs.

Impairment Expense

During the year ended December 31, 2025, we recognized an impairment charge of $0.4 million, which primarily consisted of the write-off of intangible assets no longer in use. During the year ended December 31, 2024, we recognized an impairment charge of $4.1 million related to property and equipment.

Restructuring Charges

During the year ended December 31, 2024, in an effort to streamline our organization, we initiated a restructuring plan to reduce expenses including a reduction of our workforce. In connection with this plan, we incurred charges of $9.7 million primarily consisting of employee-related severance and termination benefits. There were no restructuring activities in 2025.

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Net Gain on Extinguishment of Debt

Year ended December 31,Change
20252024$ Change% Change
(in thousands)
Net gain on extinguishment of debt$941$1,365$(424)(31)%

Net gain on extinguishment of debt was $0.9 million for the year ended December 31, 2025 compared to $1.4 million for the year ended December 31, 2024, a decrease of $0.4 million, or 31%. The decrease was primarily due to a lower aggregate principal amount of convertible notes retired in the year ended December 31, 2025.

Other Income and Expense

Interest Income

Year ended December 31,Change
20252024$ Change% Change
(in thousands)
Interest income$12,290$14,871$(2,581)(17)%

Interest income was $12.3 million for the year ended December 31, 2025 compared to $14.9 million for the year ended December 31, 2024, a decrease of $2.6 million, or 17%. This decrease was primarily due to lower interest income on our cash equivalents and marketable security investments as a result of decreased interest rates.

Interest Expense

Year ended December 31,Change
20252024$ Change% Change
(in thousands)
Interest expense$12,699$2,747$9,952362%

Interest expense was $12.7 million for the year ended December 31, 2025 compared to $2.7 million for the year ended December 31, 2024, an increase of $10.0 million, or 362%. This increase was primarily due to the coupon interest on our 2028 Notes issued in December 2024.

Other Expense, net

Year ended December 31,Change
20252024$ Change% Change
(in thousands)
Other expense, net$721$1,028$(307)(30)%

Other expense, net was $0.7 million for the year ended December 31, 2025 compared to $1.0 million for the year ended December 31, 2024, a decrease of $0.3 million, or 30%. The decrease was mainly driven by our foreign currency transaction gains between the periods.

Income Taxes

Year ended December 31,Change
20252024$ Change% Change
(in thousands)
Income tax expense$2,488$2,604$(116)4%

Income tax expense was $2.5 million for the year ended December 31, 2025 compared to $2.6 million for the year ended December 31, 2024. The Company continues to maintain a full valuation allowance in the U.S. and the tax expense for the periods were primarily due to foreign tax expense.

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Liquidity and Capital Resources

As of December 31, 2025, we had cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities totaling $361.8 million. Our cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities primarily consisted of money market funds, investment-grade commercial paper, corporate notes and bonds, U.S. treasury securities, certificates of deposit, and municipal bonds. As of December 31, 2025, we did not have any marketable securities classified as non-current.

To date, we have financed our operations primarily through equity issuances, payments received from customers, the net proceeds we received through sales of our debt securities, and proceeds from our convertible notes. Our principal uses of cash in the near term have primarily been around funding our operations, our capital expenditures, business acquisitions, and investments and fulfilling our debt and contractual commitments. We have also entered into longer term commitments to support our operations, including arrangements to directly lease and operate our infrastructure assets and colocation facilities. We have not entered into any off-balance sheet arrangements and do not have any holdings in variable interest entities.

We believe that our cash and cash equivalents balances, available borrowing capacity under our credit facility, and the cash flows generated by our operations, net of the cash outflows used in our operations, will be sufficient to satisfy our anticipated cash needs for working capital and capital expenditures for at least the next 12 months. We have generated losses from operations in the past and may continue to incur operating losses for the foreseeable future due to the investments and strategic initiatives we intend to make to grow our business. Our uses of cash beyond the next 12 months will depend on many factors, including the general economic environment in which we operate and our ability to generate cash flow from operations, which are uncertain. We may also use our cash to buy back any outstanding debt on our convertible notes or on any future equity issuances.

Senior Secured Credit Facilities Credit Agreement

In 2021, we entered into the Credit Agreement (as defined in Note 8 in our consolidated financial statements). As of December 31, 2025, we were in compliance with the covenants described in Note 8 to the consolidated financial statements in Part II, Item 8 of this Annual Report on Form 10-K, and we expect to continue to be in compliance for at least the next 12 months. During the year ended December 31, 2025 and 2024, no amounts were drawn down on the Credit Agreement.

Convertible Senior Notes

In March 2021, we issued approximately $948.8 million aggregate principal amount of 0% convertible senior unsecured notes due in 2026 (the “2026 Notes”) in a private placement to qualified institutional buyers pursuant to Rule144A under the Securities Act.

On May 25, 2022, we entered into separate, privately negotiated transactions with certain holders of the 2026 Notes to repurchase (the “Repurchases”) $235.0 million aggregate principal amount of the 2026 Notes for an aggregate cash repurchase price of $176.4 million and aggregate transaction costs of $0.7 million.

During the year ended December 31, 2023, we entered into several separate privately negotiated transactions with certain holders of the 2026 Notes to repurchase $367.3 million aggregate principal amount of the 2026 Notes for an aggregate cash repurchase price of $309.1 million and aggregate transaction costs of $2.0 million.

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During the year ended December 31, 2024, we entered into separate, privately negotiated transactions with certain holders of the 2026 Notes to exchange $157.9 million aggregate principal amount of the 2026 Notes for $150.0 million aggregate principal amount of 7.75% convertible senior notes due 2028 (the “2028 Notes”) and aggregate transaction costs of $5.8 million.

On December 9, 2025, we entered into separate, privately negotiated transactions with certain holders of the 2026 Notes to repurchase $150.0 million aggregate principal amount of the 2026 Notes for an aggregate cash repurchase price of $148.9 million and aggregate transaction costs of $6.7 million. On December 17, 2025, we also issued $180.0 million aggregate principal amount of 0% convertible senior unsecured notes due in 2030 (the “2030 Notes”) in a private offering to persons reasonably believed to be qualified institutional buyers pursuant to Rule 144A under the Securities Act.

Capped Calls

In connection with the pricing of the issuance of the 2030 Notes, the Company entered into privately negotiated capped call transactions with certain counterparties (the “Capped Calls”). The Capped Calls resulted in a $18.2 million outflow of cash. Refer to Note 8 to the consolidated financial statements in Part II, Item 8 of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

As of December 31, 2025 our material cash requirements include non-cancelable contractual obligations from the 2028 Notes, 2030 Notes, purchase commitments and lease obligations. Refer to Notes 5, 6, and 8 to the consolidated financial statements in Part II, Item 8 of this Annual Report on Form 10-K for more information regarding these material cash requirements.

In addition to the contractual obligations described above, as of December 31, 2025, we had a $7.7 million purchase commitment for equipment due within the next twelve months.

Cash Flows

The following table summarizes our cash flows for the period indicated:

Year ended December 31,
202520242023
(in thousands)
Net cash provided by operating activities$94,444$16,406$362
Net cash (used in) provided by investing activities$(213,032)$178,900$294,940
Net cash (used in) provided by financing activities$12,761$(17,099)$(331,380)

Cash Flows from Operating Activities

For the year ended December 31, 2025, cash provided by operating activities consisted primarily of our net loss of $121.7 million, adjusted for non-cash items of $239.0 million, and net cash flows used in operating assets and liabilities of $22.9 million. The main drivers of the changes in operating assets and liabilities were $20.7 million of operating lease payments, an increase in other assets of $19.5 million related to deferred contract costs, a $18.0 million increase in other liabilities, a $6.2 million increase in accounts receivable, primarily due to an increase in revenue and the timing of cash receipts, a $4.5 million decrease in accounts payable due to timing of payments, and a decrease of $1.6 million in prepaid expenses and other current assets due to pre-payments for hosting services and software licenses.

For the year ended December 31, 2024, cash provided by operating activities consisted primarily of our net loss of $158.1 million, adjusted for non-cash items of $228.6 million, and net cash flows used in operating assets and liabilities of $54.1 million. The main drivers of the changes in operating assets and liabilities were $26.5 million of operating lease payments, an increase in other assets of $11.9 million related to deferred contract costs, an increase of $7.6 million in prepaid expenses and other current assets due to pre-payments for hosting services and software licenses, a $6.4 million decrease in other liabilities and a $2.9 million decrease in accrued expenses due to timing of payments.

For the year ended December 31, 2023, cash provided by operating activities consisted primarily of our net loss of $133.1 million, adjusted for non-cash items of $203.3 million, and net cash flows used in operating assets and liabilities of

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$69.9 million. The main drivers of the changes in operating assets and liabilities were an increase in accounts receivable of $32.9 million, primarily due to an increase in revenue and the timing of cash receipts, an increase in other assets of $23.1 million related to deferred contract costs as well as $22.1 million of operating lease payments. This was partially offset by decreases of $8.7 million in prepaid expenses.

Cash Flows from Investing Activities

For the year ended December 31, 2025, cash used in investing activities was $389.8 million in purchases of marketable securities, $17.7 million of additions to capitalized internal-use software, and $28.7 million of payments related to purchases of property and equipment to expand our network. This was offset by $223.1 million of maturities and sales of marketable securities.

For the year ended December 31, 2024, cash provided by investing activities was $178.9 million, primarily consisting of $371.2 million of maturities and sales of marketable securities. This was offset by $155.1 million in purchases of marketable securities, $26.1 million of additions to capitalized internal-use software, and $10.3 million of payments related to purchases of property and equipment to expand our network.

For the year ended December 31, 2023, cash provided by investing activities was $294.9 million, primarily consisting of $459.4 million of maturities and sales of marketable securities. This was offset by $132.2 million in purchases of marketable securities, $21.3 million of additions to capitalized internal-use software, and $11.0 million of payments related to purchases of property and equipment to expand our network.

Cash Flows from Financing Activities

For the year ended December 31, 2025, cash provided by financing activities was $12.8 million, primarily consisting of proceeds of $180.0 million from issuance of convertible notes, $7.0 million in proceeds from the employee stock purchase plan (“ESPP”), and $1.0 million in proceeds from stock option exercises by our employees and directors. This was partially offset by $148.9 million paid for debt extinguishment, $18.2 million for purchase of capped calls, $5.9 million payment of debt issuance costs, and $2.3 million of finance lease liabilities repayments.

For the year ended December 31, 2024, cash used in financing activities was $17.1 million, primarily consisting of $15.0 million of finance lease liabilities repayments, $5.7 million payment of debt issuance costs and $3.8 million in payments for deferred consideration for business acquisitions. This was partially offset by $6.2 million in proceeds from the employee stock purchase plan (“ESPP”) and $1.1 million in proceeds from stock option exercises by our employees and directors.

For the year ended December 31, 2023, cash used in financing activities was $331.4 million, primarily consisting of $310.5 million used for the partial repurchase of our convertible debt, $27.2 million of finance lease liabilities repayments and $4.4 million in payments for deferred consideration for business acquisitions. This was partially offset by $8.6 million in proceeds from the employee stock purchase plan (“ESPP”) and $2.2 million in proceeds from stock option exercises by our employees and directors.

Critical Accounting Estimates

We prepare our consolidated financial statements in accordance with U.S. GAAP. The preparation of our consolidated financial statements requires us to make estimates, judgments, and assumptions that affect the reported amounts of assets, liabilities, revenue, costs, expenses, and related disclosures. Actual results and outcomes could differ significantly from our estimates, judgments, and assumptions. To the extent that there are material differences between these estimates and actual results, our future financial statement presentation, financial condition, results of operations, and cash flows will be affected.

Revenue Recognition

We recognize revenue in accordance with ASC 606, where revenue is recognized upon transfer of control of promised services to customers in an amount that reflects the consideration we expect to receive in exchange for those services. The processing and recording of certain revenue requires a manual process, which uses a set of procedures to generate complete and accurate data to record these revenue transactions. We enter into contracts that can include various combinations of services, each of which are distinct and accounted for as separate performance obligations.

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Recent Accounting Pronouncements

Please refer to Note 2—Summary of Significant Accounting Policies included in the Notes to consolidated financial statements.

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MD&A history

Prior-year 10-K MD&A spans are extracted from SEC filings with the same bounded parser used for the latest filing. The latest 10-K appears above; prior years are below.

FY 2024 10-K MD&A

SEC filing source: 0001517413-25-000063.

Extracted structurally from real Item 7 body heading to real Item 7A/8 boundary. Confidence: high. Filing date: 2025-02-26. Report date: 2024-12-31.

ITEM 7.     Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations

You should read the following discussion and analysis of our financial condition and results of operations together with the consolidated financial statements and related notes that are included elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. This discussion contains forward-looking statements based upon current plans, expectations, and beliefs that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements as a result of various factors, including those set forth under “Risk Factors” and in other parts of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Our fiscal year ends on December 31.

As used herein, “Fastly,” “we,” “our,” “the Company” and similar terms include Fastly, Inc. and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise.

Overview

Organizations around the world are more dependent on the quality of digital experiences they provide than ever before. At Fastly, we deliver an edge cloud platform capable of delivering fast, safe, and engaging digital experiences. By focusing holistically on the edge cloud from developer inspiration to end-user experience, we have the opportunity to differentiate with our global footprint, dynamic infrastructure, and security solution. Performance, security, and building the most engaging applications are paramount to driving mission success for Fastly’s customers.

The edge cloud is a category of Infrastructure as a Service (“IaaS”) that enables developers to build, secure, and deliver digital experiences, at the edge of the Internet. This service represents the convergence of the Content Delivery Network (“CDN”) with functionality that has been traditionally delivered by hardware-centric appliances such as Application Delivery Controllers (“ADC”), Web Application Firewalls (“WAF”), Bot Detection, Distributed Denial of Service (“DDoS”) and Observability solutions. It also includes the emergence of a new, but growing, edge computing market which aims to move compute power and logic as close to the end user as possible. When milliseconds matter, processing at the edge is an ideal way to handle highly dynamic and time-sensitive data. This has led to its acceptance and adoption by organizations who monetize or grow their user base with every millisecond saved. Organizations that want to improve their user experience, whether it’s faster loading websites or reduced shopping cart abandonment, can benefit from processing at the edge. The edge cloud complements data center, central cloud, and hybrid solutions.

Organizations must keep up with complex and ever-evolving end-user requirements. We help them surpass their end users’ expectations by powering fast, safe, and engaging digital experiences. We built a powerful edge cloud platform, designed from the ground up to be programmable and support agile software development. We believe that our platform gives our customers a significant competitive advantage, whether they were born into the digital age or are just embarking on their digital transformation journey.

Developers on the Fastly platform have a high degree of flexibility with granular control and real-time visibility, where they can write and deploy code in a serverless environment and push application logic to the edge. Our infrastructure is built for the software-defined future. Our network is powerful, efficient, and flexible, designed to enable us to rapidly scale to meet the needs of the most demanding customers. Our approach to scalable, secure reliability integrates security into multiple layers of development: architecture, engineering, and operations. That’s why we invest in building security into the fabric of our platform, alongside performance. We provide developers and security operations teams with a fast and safe environment to create, build, and run modern applications.

We serve established enterprises, mid-market companies, and technology-savvy organizations. Our customers represent a diverse set of organizations across many industries with one thing in common: they care about delivering best-in-class digital experiences. With our edge cloud platform, our customers are disrupting existing industries and creating new ones. For example, several of our customers have reinvented digital publishing by connecting readers through subscription models to indispensable content. Fastly’s ability to dynamically manage content in real time enables readers to have instant access to the most up to date information.

Our customers’ ecommerce solutions use Fastly’s edge compute functionality to deliver very low-latency customer experiences, including providing better recommendations to their shoppers, converting more shopping carts into sales and executing fast and secure financial transactions. Content streaming organizations leverage Fastly’s platform to deliver content

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to users around the world and those that livestream gain easy access to enormous edge compute resources for even greater reliability. The range of applications that developers build with our edge cloud platform continues to expand rapidly.

Our mission is to make the Internet a better place where all experiences are fast, safe, and engaging. We want all developers to have the ability to deliver the next transformative digital experience on a global scale. And because big ideas often start small, we love it when developers experiment and iterate on our platform, coming up with exciting new ways to solve today’s complex problems.

For the years ended December 31, 2024 and 2023, our revenue was $543.7 million and $506.0 million, respectively, an increase of 7%. We incurred a net loss of $158.1 million and $133.1 million in the years ended December 31, 2024 and 2023, respectively.

Our 10 largest customers generated an aggregate of 33% and 37% of our revenue in the trailing 12 months ended December 31, 2024 and 2023, respectively.

No single customer accounted for more than 10% of revenue for the years ended December 31, 2024 and 2023. No affiliated customers that are business units of a single company generated more than 10% of revenue for the year ended December 31, 2024. Affiliated customers that are business units of a single company in the streaming entertainment space generated an aggregate of 12% of the Company’s revenue for the year ended December 31, 2023.

We focus our direct selling efforts on expanding our customers’ use of our platform, which includes companies that are exhibiting significant growth. We engage with and support these customers with our field sales representatives, account managers, and technical account managers who focus on customer satisfaction and drive expansion of their usage of our platform and products. These teams work with technical and business leaders to help our customers’ end users receive the best possible digital experience, while also lowering our customers’ total cost of ownership. These direct selling efforts are reflected by the revenue generated by our enterprise customers. Our Last-Twelve Months Net Retention Rate (“LTM NRR”) metric also measures the revenue growth from existing customers attributable to increased usage of our platform and features, and purchase of additional products and services. For additional details on our key metrics, refer to the “Key Business Metrics” section.

We believe that an annual cohort analysis of Fastly’s customers, as depicted in the chart below, demonstrates the continued expansion of our customers’ use of our platform. Once a customer begins to generate revenue for us, they tend to increase their usage of our platform, in particular in their second year. Customer accounts acquired in 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 are referred to as the 2020 Cohort, 2021 Cohort, 2022 Cohort, 2023 Cohort, and 2024 Cohort, respectively. We calculate the Compound Annual Growth Rate (“CAGR”), which represents the rate of revenue return of our revenue cohorts, over a five year history from when they were first customers.

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Summary of Revenue Generated by Customer Cohorts Over Time (in millions):

Our 2020 Cohort increased its revenue 2.4 times in fiscal 2021 and has grown at approximately a 27% CAGR over the next four years from fiscal 2021 to fiscal 2024.

We generate substantially all of our revenue from charging our customers based on their usage of our platform, and we generate a substantial majority of our revenue from customers that have negotiated contracts with us. Initially, customers typically choose to become platform customers, for which we charge fees based on their committed or actual use of our platform, as measured in gigabytes and requests. Many of our customers generate billings in excess of their minimum commitment. We also generate revenue from additional products as well as professional and other services, such as implementation, account management and enhanced customer support. We charge a flat one-time or recurring monthly fee depending on the additional products and services selected. Typically, the term of our contracts with customers is 12 months and includes a minimum monthly billing commitment in exchange for more favorable pricing terms. In addition, customers can sign up online by providing their credit card information and agreeing to a minimum monthly fee. We also offer subscriptions to access a unified security web application and application programming interface at a fixed rate.

The majority of our revenue is usage based and changes in usage by our largest customers can create volatility in our revenue. The length of our sales cycles, from initial evaluation to payment, can range from several months to well over a year and can vary substantially from customer to customer. Similarly, the onboarding and ramping process with new as well as existing enterprise customers with new business can take several months and can be subject to delays for unanticipated reasons. The timing of new revenue from our sales efforts and changes in usage by our largest customers can make revenue difficult to predict.

Factors Affecting Our Performance

Winning New Customers

We are focused on continuing to attract new customers, including those in diverse vertical markets, and expanding our relationship with existing customers, by enhancing our product experience, investing in technology, and leveraging our partner ecosystem. Our customer base includes large, established enterprises that are undergoing digital transformation and emerging companies spanning a wide array of industries and verticals. Developers within these companies often use and advocate for the adoption of our platform by their companies and promotion across the broader developer community. We will continue to

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invest in our products and features and developer outreach, leveraging it as a cost-efficient approach to attracting new customers, and our sales and marketing programs, including various online marketing activities as well as targeted account-based marketing.

We are continuing to bring a durable, consistent, and predictable pipeline of new innovations to our edge cloud platform and software-defined modern network architecture, and are seeing interest from customers in our existing product lines like Network Services and Security, and newer product lines like Compute and Observability. We will continue to build out a single, unified platform, simplify customer onboarding and service usage, and simplify our pricing and packaging. This will require us to dedicate significant resources to further develop the market for our platform and differentiate our platform from competitive products and services. We will also need to expand, retain, and motivate our sales and marketing personnel in order to target our sales efforts at larger enterprises and senior management of these potential customers.

Many jurisdictions have enacted laws on data localization and cross-border data transfers, and the evolving enforcement and interpretation of such laws has created uncertainty regarding data stored abroad and transferred across borders, which could impact customer growth and acquisition for customers and potential customers conducting business in Europe and elsewhere outside of the United States. For additional details, refer to the section titled “Risk Factors.”

Expanding into New Markets and within Our Existing Customer Base

We aim to continue to add customers from a diverse set of industry verticals through our differentiated platform that offers a broad range of capabilities. By focusing on our key differentiators, including performance and security, we have an opportunity to continue to add customers from a diverse set of industries.

We emphasize retaining our customers and expanding their usage of our platform and adoption of our other products. Customers often begin with smaller deployments of one of our products and then expand their usage over time. Our platform includes a variety of offerings across Network Services, Security, Compute and Observability product lines. As our customers mature, we assist them in expanding their use of our platform, including the use of additional offerings beyond content delivery or security. As enterprises grow and experience increased traffic, their needs evolve, leading them to find additional use cases for our platform and expand their usage accordingly. In addition, given that customer acquisition costs are incurred largely for acquiring and initial onboarding, we may gain operating leverage to the extent that existing customers expand their use of our platform and products.

Our ability to retain customers and expand their usage could be impaired for a variety of reasons, including a customer moving to another provider or reducing usage within the term of their contract. Even if our customers expand their usage of our platform, we cannot guarantee that they will maintain those usage levels for any meaningful period of time or that they will renew their commitments. The data localization and cross-border data transfer issues described above also impact current customers’ usage of our products and services.

In addition, we cannot be certain what actions the United States or another country’s government may take with respect to certain of our customers that may adversely affect our ability to do business with our customers that operate in China, target China as a market or that have strong business ties to China. And any such governmental action could have a negative impact on our business. In April 2024, President Biden signed into law a bill that would effectively ban TikTok in the United States if ByteDance, its China-based parent company, does not sell its stake in TikTok within a set time frame. President Trump signed an executive order on January 20, 2025 instructing the Attorney General not to enforce the law or impose any penalties against any entity for noncompliance for a period of 75 days and to provide written guidance as to how the law will be implemented. TikTok was one of our largest customers for the year ended December 31, 2024 and remains a customer of ours. While the full impact of the legislation is unknown, it could eventually lead to a reduction in this customer’s United States traffic levels which could have a negative impact on our business. We do not know whether or how ByteDance might restructure its business and how that may impact our traffic levels.

International Expansion

We intend to continue expanding our efforts to attract customers outside of the United States by augmenting our sales teams and strategically increasing our presence in the number of markets in select international locations.

Our international expansion, including our global sales efforts, continues to add increased complexity and cost to our business. This requires us to continue to expand our sales and marketing capabilities outside of the United States, increase the number of markets we have a presence in around the world to support our customers, and manage the administrative aspects of

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a global organization, each of which place a strain on our business and culture. In addition, our bandwidth costs are higher in markets outside of the United States and Europe, which may impact our gross margins.

We are closely monitoring the unfolding events of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as well as the more recent hostilities in Israel, and their global impacts. While the conflicts are still evolving and the outcomes remain highly uncertain, we do not believe the Russia-Ukraine or Israel-Hamas conflicts will have a material impact on our business and results of operations. We do not have Points of Presence (“POPs”) in Russia, Ukraine, or Israel. However, some threat actors now engage and are expected to continue to engage in cyber-attacks, including without limitation nation-state actors for geopolitical reasons and in conjunction with military conflicts and defense activities. During times of war and other major conflicts, we, the third parties upon which we rely, and our customers may be vulnerable to a heightened risk of these attacks, including retaliatory cyber-attacks, that could materially disrupt our systems and operations, supply chain, and ability to produce, sell and distribute our goods and services. If either conflict continues or worsens, leading to greater global economic disruptions and uncertainty, our business and results of operations could be materially impacted. Our customers operating in Russia, Ukraine, and Israel represented an immaterial portion of our consolidated revenue as of December 31, 2024 and 2023, respectively.

Investing in Sales and Marketing

Our customers have been pivotal in driving brand awareness and broadening our reach. While we continue to leverage the self-service approach to drive adoption by developers, we will continue to expand our sales and marketing efforts, with an increased focus on sales to enterprises globally. Utilizing our direct sales force, we have multiple selling points within organizations to acquire new customers and increase usage from our existing customers. We will continue to increase our discretionary marketing spend, including account-based, targeted demand generation and brand spend, to drive the effectiveness of our sales teams. As a result, we expect our total operating expenses to increase as we continue to expand. Our investments in sales and marketing teams are intended to help accelerate our sales, onboarding, and ramp cycles.

These efforts will require us to continue to invest in sales and marketing resources. Furthermore, we believe that there is significant competition for sales personnel with the skills and technical knowledge that we require. Our ability to achieve significant revenue growth will depend, in large part, on our success in recruiting, training, and retaining sufficient numbers of sales personnel to support our growth.

Continued Investment in Our Platform and Network Infrastructure

We must continue to invest in our platform and network infrastructure to maintain our position in the market. We expect our revenue growth to be dependent on an expanding customer base and continued adoption of our edge cloud delivery, security, and other products and services. In anticipation of winning new customers and staying ahead of our customers’ needs, we plan to continue to invest in order to expand the scale and capacity of our software-defined modern network. This could result in increased network service provider fees, which could adversely affect our gross margins if we are unable to offset these costs with revenue from new customers and increase revenue from existing customers. Our customers require constant innovation within their own organizations and expect the same from us. Therefore, we will continue to invest in resources to enhance our development capabilities and introduce new products and features on our platform. We believe that investment in research and development will contribute to our long-term growth but may also negatively impact our short-term profitability. For the years ended December 31, 2024 and 2023, our research and development expenses as a percentage of revenue were 25% and 30%, respectively. Our research and development expenses each period is impacted by the amount of software development costs that meet the criteria for capitalization. We may also seek to acquire or invest in businesses, products, or technologies that we believe could complement or expand our platform, enhance our technical capabilities, or otherwise offer growth opportunities. For example, in May 2022, we acquired Glitch, a software company specializing in developer project management tools to bolster our existing product offerings, by making it easier to innovate at a layer in the Fastly software stack.

Developers use our platform to build custom applications and require a state-of-the-art infrastructure to test and run these applications. We will continue to invest in our network infrastructure by strategically increasing our POPs. We also anticipate making investments in upgrading our technology and hardware to continue providing our customers a fast and secure platform. Our gross margins and operating results are impacted by these investments. As we continue to experience growth, we may face challenges managing adequate server capacity in our POPs due to potential component delays, shortages, price increases, hardware efficiencies gained through internal development, or any potential changes in server architecture, including due to technological advances or obsolescence. If we have server asset levels in excess of forecasted network capacity needs, we have in the past and may need to continue to write-down or write-off server assets. Conversely, if we underestimate network

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capacity needs, we may in future periods be unable to meet demand and be required to incur higher costs to secure necessary parts and components of our servers.

In the event that there are errors in software, failures of hardware, damages to a facility or misconfigurations of any of our services, whether caused by our own error, security breaches, third-party error, or natural disasters, we could experience lengthy interruptions in our platform availability as well as delays and additional expenses in arranging new facilities and services. In addition, there can be no assurance that we are adequately prepared for unexpected increases in bandwidth demands by our customers, particularly when we or our customers experience cyber-attacks. The bandwidth we have contracted to purchase may become unavailable for a variety of reasons, including service outages, payment disputes, network providers going out of business, natural disasters, networks imposing traffic limits, or governments adopting regulations that impact network operations.

Key Business Metrics

We use the following key metrics presented in the table below to evaluate our business, measure our performance, identify trends affecting our business, prepare financial projections, and make strategic decisions. The calculation of these key metrics below may differ from other similarly titled metrics used by other companies, analysts, or investors. Effective as of the first quarter of 2024, we no longer consider Average Enterprise Customer Spend, Dollar-Based Net Expansion Rate, and Quarterly Net Retention Rate to be key business metrics. We believe Average Enterprise Customer Spend to be redundant in light of our disclosure of Total Customer Count and Enterprise Customer Count. Dollar-Based Net Expansion Rate and Quarterly Net Retention Rate were used infrequently by investors and are no longer used by management to manage and monitor the performance of our business. In lieu of Quarterly Net Retention Rate, a measure that is seasonal and fluctuates frequently throughout the year, management believes LTM Net Retention Rate, which measures the last twelve-month period and removes seasonality, is a more accurate performance metric to monitor the business. As such, we will no longer report those metrics because we do not believe they are material to an understanding of our business.

As of December 31,
20242023
Customer metrics:
Total Customer Count (based on current quarter revenue)3,0613,243
Enterprise Customer Count (based on annualized revenue)596578
Annual Revenue Retention Rate99.0%99.2%
Other key metrics:
Last-twelve Months Net Retention Rate (“LTM NRR”)102.3%113.4%

Total Customer Count

We believe that our total number of customers is an important indicator of the adoption of our platform. Our definition of a customer consists of identifiable operating entities with which we have a billing relationship in good standing and which we have recognized revenue from during the reporting period. An identifiable operating entity is defined as a company, a government entity, or a distinct business unit of a larger company that has a relationship with us through direct sales or through one of our reseller partners where charges are identified on an end-customer basis. We may treat separate subsidiaries, segments, divisions, or business units of a single organization that use our platform as unique customers where they have distinct account identifiers. In cases where charges are identified through a reseller partner rather than on an end-customer basis, we would count the reseller as a single customer in our customer count. Our customer groupings may be impacted by changes to our customers’ business, including any impact from acquisition activities, internal business reorganizations leading to operational and decision-making changes, and corporate structure changes such as subsidiary consolidation and reorganization that may arise in the future. During the fourth quarter of 2024, we identified an immaterial error in the historical calculation of our total customer count related to our online self-service customers. Revenue that would have been recorded for these customers was less than $0.1 million for the quarter ended December 31, 2024. Due to the immateriality, we have not revised prior periods.

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In addition to our paying customers, we also have trial, developer, nonprofit and open source programs, and other non-paying accounts that are excluded from our customer count metric. We operate globally and as a result, the success of our ability to retain our customers is also affected by general economic and market conditions around the world. As of December 31, 2024 and 2023, we had 3,061 and 3,243 customers, respectively.

Enterprise Customer Count

Historically our revenue has been driven primarily by a subset of our customers, our enterprise customers, who have leveraged our platform substantially from a usage standpoint. We believe that the recruitment and cultivation of enterprise customers is critical to our long-term success.

Historically our revenue has been driven primarily by a subset of our customers, our enterprise customers, who have leveraged our platform substantially from a usage standpoint. We believe that the recruitment and cultivation of enterprise customers is critical to our long-term success. Our enterprise customer count is defined as customers with annualized current quarter revenue in excess of $100,000. This is calculated by taking the revenue we recognized for each customer in the current quarter and multiplying it by four. As of December 31, 2024, we had 596 of such enterprise customers which generated 93% of the total annualized current quarter revenue for our total customers for the period ended December 31, 2024. As of December 31, 2023, we had 578 of such enterprise customers which generated 92% of the total annualized current quarter revenue for our total customers for the period ended December 31, 2023.

Annual Revenue Retention Rate (“ARR”)

We separately monitor customer retention and churn on an annual basis by measuring our annual revenue retention rate, which we calculate by first multiplying the final full month of revenue from a customer that terminated its contract with us (a “Churned Customer”) by the number of months remaining in the same calendar year to get our “Annual Revenue Churn”. The quotient of the Annual Revenue Churn from all of our Churned Customers divided by our annual revenue of the same calendar year is then subtracted from 100% to determine our annual revenue retention rate. We believe this calculation is helpful in that it is based on the amount of revenue that we would expect to have received in the remaining portion of a particular period had a customer not terminated its contract with us. It is not indicative of the actual revenue contribution from churned customers in past periods. By comparing this amount to actual revenue for the period, we are able to assess our ability to replace terminated revenue by generating revenue from new and continuing customers.

Our ARR rate is calculated by subtracting the quotient of the Annual Revenue Churn from all of our Churned Customers from which we recognized revenue during the last quarter of the prior year divided by our annual revenue of the same calendar year from 100%. For the years ended December 31, 2024 and 2023 the ARR was 99.0% and 99.2%, respectively.

Last-Twelve Months Net Retention Rate (“LTM NRR”)

Our ability to generate and increase our revenue is also dependent upon our ability to retain our existing customers. LTM NRR allows us to track customer retention which demonstrates the stickiness of our edge cloud platform.

Our LTM NRR removes some of the volatility that is inherent in a usage-based business model from the measurement of the NRR metric. We calculate LTM NRR by dividing the total customer revenue for the prior twelve-month period (“prior 12-month period”) ending at the beginning of the last twelve-month period (“LTM period”) minus revenue contraction due to billing decreases or customer churn, plus revenue expansion due to billing increases during the LTM period from the same customers by the total prior 12-month period revenue. For the trailing twelve months ended December 31, 2024 and 2023 our LTM NRR was 102.3% and 113.4%, respectively.

Remaining Performance Obligations (“RPO”)

RPO represent future committed revenue for periods within current contracts with customers, as well as deferred revenue arising from consideration invoiced for which the related performance obligations have not been satisfied. As of December 31, 2024, the aggregate amount of the transaction price in our contracts allocated to RPO that were unsatisfied or partially unsatisfied was $244.4 million.

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Key Components of Statement of Operations

Revenue

We derive our revenue primarily from usage-based fees earned from customers using our platform. We also earn fixed-rate recurring revenue from security and other products and services.

Our usage-based fees earned from customers using our platform are generally billed in arrears. Our security products are primarily annual subscriptions that are billed in advance. Many customers have tiered usage pricing which reflects discounted rates as usage increases. For most contracts, usage charges are determined on a monthly basis based on actual usage within the month and do not impact usage charges within any other month. Our larger customers often enter into contracts that contain minimum billing commitments and reflect discounted pricing associated with such usage levels.

We report our revenue by three product lines: Network Services, Security and Other. Network Services include solutions designed to improve performance of websites, apps, application programming interfaces (“APIs”) and digital media. Security includes products designed to protect websites, apps, APIs and users. Other includes Compute solutions that allow developers to build and deploy modern web applications on our edge cloud platform, and Observability solutions that provide real-time logs, data and metrics streamed from our edge platform for actionable insights.

We define United States revenue (“U.S. revenue”) as revenue from customers that have a billing address in the United States, and we define international revenue as revenue from customers that have a billing address outside of the United States.

Cost of Revenue and Gross Margin

Cost of revenue consists primarily of fees paid to network providers for bandwidth and to third-party network data centers for housing servers, also known as colocation costs. Cost of revenue also includes employee costs for network operation, build-out and support and services delivery, network storage costs, cost of managed services and software-as-a-service, depreciation of network equipment used to deliver services, and amortization of network-related internal-use software. Our arrangements with network service providers require us to pay fees based on bandwidth use, in some cases subject to minimum commitments, which may be underutilized. Over the long term we expect cost of revenue to decrease as a percentage of revenue as we continue to drive efficiencies in our operations. However, our cost of revenue may fluctuate as a percentage of our revenue from period to period due to the timing and extent of these expenses.

Our gross margin has been and will continue to be affected by a number of factors, including utilization of our network, the timing of our investments in the expansion of our network, which can increase depreciation and colocation costs in advance of expected demand, our ability to manage our network service providers and cloud infrastructure-related fees, the timing of amortization of capitalized software development costs, changes in personnel costs to provide customer support and operate the network, and customer pricing. Over the long term we expect gross margin to increase as we continue to drive efficiencies in our operations and increase our revenue. However, our gross margin may fluctuate from period to period.

Research and Development

Research and development expenses consist primarily of personnel costs, including salaries, benefits, bonuses, and stock-based compensation. Research and development expenses also include cloud infrastructure fees for development and testing, and an allocation of our general overhead expenses. We capitalize the portion of our software development costs that meet the criteria for capitalization.

We continue to focus our research and development efforts on adding new features and products including new use cases, improving the efficiency and performance of our network, and increasing the functionality of our existing products. Over the long term we expect our research and development expenses to decrease as a percentage of our revenue. However, our research and development expenses may fluctuate as a percentage of our revenue from period to period due to the timing and extent of these expenses.

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Sales and Marketing

Sales and marketing expenses consist primarily of personnel costs, including commissions for our sales employees, salaries, benefits, bonuses, and stock-based compensation. Sales and marketing expenses also include expenditures related to advertising, marketing, our brand awareness activities, bandwidth and co-location costs for free trial users, costs related to our customer events, including our customer conferences, professional services fees, amortization of our intangible assets, and an allocation of our general overhead expenses.

We focus our sales and marketing efforts on generating awareness of our platform and products, creating sales leads, and establishing and promoting our brand, both domestically and internationally. Over the long term, we expect our sales and marketing expenses to decrease as a percentage of our revenue. However, our sales and marketing expenses may fluctuate as a percentage of our revenue from period to period due to the timing and extent of these expenses.

General and Administrative

General and administrative expenses consist primarily of personnel costs, including salaries, benefits, bonuses, and stock-based compensation for our administrative support personnel. General and administrative expenses also include costs related to legal and other professional services fees, SaaS costs, an allocation of our general overhead expenses, credit losses and acquisition-related costs.

In the near term, we expect to continue to incur costs associated with supporting the growth of our business, including international expansion, but expect these costs to decrease as a percentage of our revenue over the long term as we continue to drive efficiencies in our operations. However, our general and administrative expenses may fluctuate as a percentage of our revenue from period to period due to the timing and extent of these expenses.

Impairment Expense

Our impairment expense relates to write-off charges for certain long-lived assets.

Restructuring Charges

Our restructuring charges relate to a restructuring plan to reduce expenses including a reduction of our workforce. The charges incurred consist primarily of employee-related severance and termination benefits.

Net Gain on Extinguishment of Debt

Our net gain on extinguishment of debt relates to the partial retirement of our outstanding senior convertible notes during the years ended December 31, 2024, 2023, and 2022.

Other Income and Expenses

Our interest income consists primarily of interest earned on our cash, cash equivalents and investments. Our interest expense consists primarily of the interest expense on our finance leases and amortization of discount and debt issuance costs associated with our debt obligations. Our other income (expense), net, consists primarily of foreign currency transaction gains and losses.

Income Taxes

Our income tax expense (benefit) consists primarily of income taxes in certain foreign jurisdictions where we conduct business and state minimum income taxes in the United States. We currently maintain a full valuation allowance on our U.S. Federal and state net deferred tax assets. We expect to maintain this valuation allowance for the foreseeable future.

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Results of Operations

In this section, we discuss the results of our operations for the year ended December 31, 2024 compared to the year ended December 31, 2023. For a discussion of the year ended December 31, 2023 compared to the year ended December 31, 2022, please refer to Part II, Item 7, “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2023.

Year ended December 31,
20242023
(in thousands)
Consolidated Statement of Operations:
Revenue$543,676$505,988
Cost of revenue247,738239,660
Gross profit295,938266,328
Operating expenses:
Research and development137,980152,190
Sales and marketing198,610191,773
General and administrative113,399116,077
Impairment expense4,1444,316
Restructuring charges9,720
Total operating expenses463,853464,356
Loss from operations(167,915)(198,028)
Net gain on extinguishment of debt1,36552,416
Interest income14,87118,186
Interest expense(2,747)(4,051)
Other expense, net(1,028)(1,832)
Loss before income tax expense (benefit)(155,454)(133,309)
Income tax expense (benefit)2,604(221)
Net loss attributable to common stockholders$(158,058)$(133,088)

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The following tables set forth our results of operations for the period presented as a percentage of our revenue:

Year ended December 31,
20242023
Consolidated Statements of Operations, as a percentage of revenue:*
Revenue100%100%
Cost of revenue4647
Gross profit5453
Operating expenses:
Research and development2530
Sales and marketing3638
General and administrative2123
Impairment expense11
Restructuring charges2
Total operating expenses8592
Loss from operations(31)(39)
Net gain on extinguishment of debt10
Interest income34
Interest expense(1)(1)
Other expense, net
Loss before income tax expense (benefit)(29)(26)
Income tax expense (benefit)
Net loss attributable to common stockholders(29)%(26)%

__________

*    Columns may not add up to 100% due to rounding.

Revenue

Year ended December 31,Change
20242023$ Change% Change
(in thousands)
Network Services$427,690$405,116$22,5746%
Security103,03792,86410,17311%
Other12,9498,0084,94161%
Total revenue$543,676$505,988$37,6887%
Percentage of revenue:
Network Services79%80%(1)%
Security19%18%1%
Other2%2%%

Revenue was $543.7 million for the year ended December 31, 2024 compared to $506.0 million for the year ended December 31, 2023, an increase of $37.7 million, or 7%. Revenue growth was driven by a $24.9 million increase in revenue related to further adoption of our modern edge platform and products.

For the years ended December 31, 2024 and 2023, approximately 95% and 95% of our revenue was driven by usage on our platform, respectively. Revenue was primarily from existing customers, as revenue from new customers contributed less than 10% of our revenue. The proportion of the revenue contribution between new and existing customers is consistent with prior periods and typical customer behavior as customers tend to contribute more revenue over time as their use of the platform

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increases. The remainder of our revenue was generated by our other products and services, including support and professional services.

Network Services revenue was $427.7 million for the year ended December 31, 2024, compared to $405.1 million for the year ended December 31, 2023, an increase of $22.6 million, or 6%. The increase in Network Services revenue was primarily driven by growth in usage from existing customers. Security revenue was $103.0 million for the year ended December 31, 2024, compared to $92.9 million for the year ended December 31, 2023, an increase of $10.2 million, or 11%. The increase in Security revenue was primarily driven by an increase in Next-Gen WAF revenue, partially offset by a decrease in Fastly legacy WAF revenue. Other revenue was $12.9 million for the year ended December 31, 2024, compared to $8.0 million for the year ended December 31, 2023, an increase of $4.9 million, or 61%. The increase in Other revenue was primarily driven by further adoption of Compute solutions.

U.S. revenue was $407.3 million and 75% of revenue for the year ended December 31, 2024, and $370.4 million and 73% of revenue for the year ended December 31, 2023. This represents an increase of $36.9 million, or 10%. International revenue was $136.4 million and 25% of revenue for the year ended December 31, 2024, compared to $135.6 million and 27% of revenue for the year ended December 31, 2023. This represents an increase of $0.8 million, or 1%.

Cost of Revenue

Year ended December 31,Change
20242023$ Change% Change
(in thousands)
Cost of revenue$247,738$239,660$8,0783%

Cost of revenue was $247.7 million for the year ended December 31, 2024 compared to $239.7 million for the year ended December 31, 2023, an increase of $8.1 million, or 3%. The increase in cost of revenue is a result of an increase in bandwidth costs of $6.3 million, a $2.4 million increase in depreciation expense as a result of increased investments in our platform as well as an increase in repair and maintenance cost of $1.8 million. There was also a $1.2 million increase in colocation costs, and a $1.1 million increase in personnel-related costs due to an increase in headcount. This increase was partially offset by a decrease of $3.0 million in stock-based compensation expenses, a decrease of $1.3 million in software costs and a $0.6 million decrease in travel and entertainment expenses.

Gross Profit and Gross Margin

Year ended December 31,Change
20242023$ Change% Change
(in thousands)
Gross profit$295,938$266,328$29,61011%
Gross margin54%53%2%

Gross profit was $295.9 million for the year ended December 31, 2024 compared to $266.3 million for the year ended December 31, 2023, an increase of $29.6 million, or 11%. Gross margin was 54% for the year ended December 31, 2024 compared to 53% for the year ended December 31, 2023, an increase of 2%. The increase in gross margin was driven by revenue growth during the year ended December 31, 2024 outpacing the increases in the costs incurred to support the growth of our network.

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Operating Expenses

Year ended December 31,Change
20242023$ Change% Change
(in thousands)
Research and development$137,980$152,190$(14,210)(9)%
Sales and marketing198,610191,7736,8374%
General and administrative113,399116,077(2,678)(2)%
Impairment expense4,1444,316(172)(4)%
Restructuring charges9,7209,720100%
Total operating expenses$463,853$464,356$(503)%
Percentage of revenue:
Research and development25%30%(5)%
Sales and marketing36%38%(2)%
General and administrative21%23%(2)%
Impairment expense1%1%%
Restructuring charges2%%2%

Research and development

Research and development expenses were $138.0 million for the year ended December 31, 2024 compared to $152.2 million for the year ended December 31, 2023, a decrease of $14.2 million, or 9%. This decrease was primarily due to a decrease of $12.2 million in stock-based compensation expense, a $6.0 million increase in capitalized software costs, a $2.8 million decrease in executive transition costs, as well as a $0.5 million decrease in colocation costs. This decrease was partially offset by an increase of $5.8 million of personnel-related costs, such as salaries and benefits as well as a $1.5 million increase in software costs.

Sales and marketing

Sales and marketing expenses were $198.6 million for the year ended December 31, 2024 compared to $191.8 million for the year ended December 31, 2023, an increase of $6.8 million, or 4%. This increase was primarily due to a $14.4 million increase in personnel related costs, such as salaries, sales commissions and benefits. The increase was also due to a $1.7 million increase in third party commissions as well as a $1.4 million increase in professional fees. The increase was partially offset by a $4.6 million decrease in stock-based compensation expenses, a $4.4 million decrease in marketing expenses, a $0.8 million decrease in amortization expense as well as a $0.6 million decrease in travel and entertainment expenses.

General and administrative

General and administrative costs were $113.4 million for the year ended December 31, 2024 compared to $116.1 million for the year ended December 31, 2023, a decrease of $2.7 million, or 2%. The decrease was primarily due a $6.5 million decrease in stock-based compensation expenses as well as a $1.6 million decrease in professional fees. The decrease was also due to a $0.8 million decrease in insurance expense as well as a $0.8 million increase in capitalized software costs. This decrease was partially offset by an increase of $4.0 million in uncollected sales taxes, primarily due to a sales tax refund received in the prior year, a $1.8 million increase in bad debt expense and a $0.8 million increase in personnel related costs.

Impairment expense

During the year ended December 31, 2024, we recognized an impairment charge of $4.1 million related to write-off of certain equipment, an internal-use software project as well as right-of-use assets. During the year ended December 31, 2023, we recognized an impairment charge of $4.3 million related to property and equipment.

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Restructuring charges

During the year ended December 31, 2024, in an effort to streamline our organization, we initiated a restructuring plan to reduce expenses including a reduction of our workforce. In connection with this plan, we incurred charges of $9.7 million primarily consisting of employee-related severance and termination benefits. There were no restructuring activities in 2023.

Net Gain on Extinguishment of Debt

Year ended December 31,Change
20242023$ Change% Change
(in thousands)
Net gain on extinguishment of debt$1,365$52,416$(51,051)(97)%

Net gain on extinguishment of debt was $1.4 million for the year ended December 31, 2024 compared to $52.4 million for the year ended December 31, 2023, a decrease of $51.1 million, or 97%. The decrease was primarily due to less convertible notes retired in the year ended December 31, 2024.

Other Income and Expense

Interest income

Year ended December 31,Change
20242023$ Change% Change
(in thousands)
Interest income$14,871$18,186$(3,315)(18)%

Interest income was $14.9 million for the year ended December 31, 2024 compared to $18.2 million for the year ended December 31, 2023, a decrease of $3.3 million, or 18%. This decrease was due to a decrease in the investment portfolio.

Interest expense

Year ended December 31,Change
20242023$ Change% Change
(in thousands)
Interest expense$2,747$4,051$(1,304)(32)%

Interest expense was $2.7 million for the year ended December 31, 2024 compared to $4.1 million for the year ended December 31, 2023, a decrease of $1.3 million, or 32%. This decrease was primarily due to the repurchases that occurred during the years ended December 31, 2023 and December 31, 2024, which reduced the principal amount of our notes.

Other income (expense), net

Year ended December 31,Change
20242023$ Change% Change
(in thousands)
Other expense, net$1,028$1,832$(804)(44)%

Other expense, net was $1.0 million for the year ended December 31, 2024 compared to $1.8 million for the year ended December 31, 2023, a decrease of $0.8 million, or 44%. The decrease was mainly driven by our foreign currency transaction gains between the periods.

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Income Taxes

Year ended December 31,Change
20242023$ Change% Change
(in thousands)
Income tax expense (benefit)$2,604$(221)$2,8251,278%

Income tax expense was $2.6 million for the year ended December 31, 2024 compared to income tax benefit of $0.2 million for the year ended December 31, 2023. The Company continues to maintain a full valuation allowance in the U.S. and the tax expense (benefit) for the periods were primarily due to foreign tax expense.

Liquidity and Capital Resources

As of December 31, 2024, we had cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities totaling $295.9 million. Our cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities primarily consisted of money market funds, investment-grade commercial paper, corporate notes and bonds. As of December 31, 2024, we did not have any marketable securities classified as non-current.

To date, we have financed our operations primarily through equity issuances, payments received from customers, the net proceeds we received through sales of our debt securities, and proceeds from our convertible notes. Our principal uses of cash in the near term have primarily been around funding our operations, our capital expenditures, business acquisitions, investments and fulfilling our debt and contractual commitments. We have also entered into longer term commitments to support our operations, including arrangements to directly lease and operate our infrastructure assets and colocation facilities. We have not entered into any off-balance sheet arrangements and do not have any holdings in variable interest entities.

We believe that our cash and cash equivalents balances, and available borrowing capacity under our credit facility, and the cash flows generated by our operations, net of the cash outflows used in our operations, will be sufficient to satisfy our anticipated cash needs for working capital and capital expenditures for at least the next 12 months. We have generated losses from operations in the past and expect to continue to incur operating losses for the foreseeable future due to the investments and strategic initiatives we intend to make to grow our business. Our uses of cash beyond the next 12 months will depend on many factors, including the general economic environment in which we operate and our ability to generate cash flow from operations, which are uncertain. We may also use our cash to buy back any outstanding debt on our convertible notes or on any future equity issuances.

Senior Secured Credit Facilities Agreement

On February 16, 2021, we entered into a Senior Secured Credit Facilities Agreement (as amended by that certain First Amendment to Credit Agreement, the “Credit Agreement”) with the lenders from time to time party thereto (the “Lenders”) and Silicon Valley Bank, a division of First-Citizens Bank & Trust Company, as administrative agent, issuing lender and swingline lender (“SVB First-Citizens”), which provides for a $100.0 million senior secured revolving credit facility , with a maturity date of February 16, 2024. Loans under the Credit Agreement bear interest at a rate per annum equal to at our option, the ABR (as defined in the Credit Agreement) or the Adjusted Term SOFR (as defined in the Credit Agreement), in each case, plus a margin based on the average daily outstanding balance of all loans and letters of credit under the Credit Agreement and ranging from 0.75% to 1.00%, in the case of loans bearing interest at ABR, and 1.75% to 2.00%, in the case of loans bearing interest at Adjusted Term SOFR.. On February 16, 2024, we entered into the Second Amendment to Credit Agreement with the Lenders and SVB First-Citizens, which, among other things, extended the maturity date of the loans under the Credit Agreement to June 14, 2024. On April 30, 2024, we entered into the Third Amendment to Credit Agreement with the Lenders and SVB First-Citizens, pursuant to which, among other things, we (a) reduced the commitments under the Credit Agreement to $60.0 million, (b) set the interest rate for loans bearing interest at ABR at 1.00% and loans bearing interest at Adjusted Term SOFR at 2.00%, and (c) extended the maturity date under the Credit Agreement to the earliest of (i) April 30, 2027, (ii) so long as any permitted convertible debt is outstanding, on January 30, 2027 unless Net Liquidity as of January 30, 2027 is greater than or equal to $200.0 million (or, if the amount of outstanding permitted convertible debt is less than $35.0 million, $120.0 million), January 30, 2027 and (iii) so long as any permitted convertible debt is outstanding after January 30, 2027, if Net Liquidity is less than $200.0 million (or, if the amount of outstanding permitted convertible debt is less than $35.0 million, $120.0 million), on such date.

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Interest payments on outstanding borrowings are due on the last day of each interest period. The Credit Agreement has a commitment fee on the unused portion of the borrowing commitment, which is payable on the last day of each calendar quarter at a rate per annum of 0.20% to 0.25% depending on the average daily outstanding balance of all loans and letters of credit under the Credit Agreement. The Credit Agreement contains a financial covenant that requires us to maintain a consolidated adjusted quick ratio of at least 1:25 to 1:00 tested on a quarterly basis as well as a springing revenue growth covenant for certain periods if our consolidated adjusted quick ratio falls below 1.75 to 1:00 on the last day of any fiscal quarter. As of December 31, 2024, we were in compliance with these covenants and we expect to continue to be in compliance for at least the next 12 months. During the year ended December 31, 2024 and 2023, no amounts were drawn down on the Credit Agreement.

Convertible Senior Notes

In March 2021, we issued approximately $948.8 million aggregate principal amount of 0% convertible senior unsecured notes due in 2026 (the “2026 Notes”) in a private placement to qualified institutional buyers pursuant to Rule144A under the Securities Act.

On May 25, 2022, we entered into separate, privately negotiated transactions with certain holders of the 2026 Notes to repurchase (the “Repurchases”) $235.0 million aggregate principal amount of the 2026 Notes for an aggregate cash repurchase price of $176.4 million and aggregate transaction costs of $0.7 million.

During the year ended December 31, 2023, we entered into several separate privately negotiated transactions with certain holders of the 2026 Notes to repurchase $367.3 million aggregate principal amount of the 2026 Notes for an aggregate cash repurchase price of $309.1 million and aggregate transaction costs of $2.0 million.

During the year ended December 31, 2024, we entered into separate, privately negotiated transactions with certain holders of the 2026 Notes to exchange $157.9 million aggregate principal amount of the 2026 Notes for $150.0 million aggregate principal amount of 7.75% convertible senior notes due 2028 (the “2028 Notes”) and aggregate transaction costs of $5.8 million.

The remaining 2026 Notes with an aggregate principal balance of $188.6 million will mature on March 15, 2026, unless earlier converted, redeemed or repurchased.

Cash Flows

The following table summarizes our cash flows for the period indicated:

Year ended December 31,
202420232022
(in thousands)
Net cash (used in) provided by operating activities$16,406$362$(69,632)
Net cash provided by investing activities$178,900$294,940$235,751
Net cash used in financing activities$(17,099)$(331,380)$(189,149)

Cash Flows from Operating Activities

For the year ended December 31, 2024, cash provided by operating activities consisted primarily of our net loss of $158.1 million, adjusted for non-cash items of $228.6 million, and net cash flows used in operating assets and liabilities of $54.1 million. The main drivers of the changes in operating assets and liabilities were $26.5 million of operating lease payments, an increase in other assets of $11.9 million related to deferred contract costs, an increase of $7.6 million in prepaid expenses and other current assets due to pre-payments for hosting services and software licenses, a $6.4 million decrease in other liabilities and a $2.9 million decrease in accrued expenses due to timing of payments.

For the year ended December 31, 2023, cash provided by operating activities consisted primarily of our net loss of $133.1 million, adjusted for non-cash items of $203.3 million, and net cash flows used in operating assets and liabilities of $69.9 million. The main drivers of the changes in operating assets and liabilities were an increase in accounts receivable of

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$32.9 million, primarily due to an increase in revenue and the timing of cash receipts, an increase in other assets of $23.1 million related to deferred contract costs as well as $22.1 million of operating lease payments. This was partially offset by decreases of $8.7 million in prepaid expenses.

For the year ended December 31, 2022, cash used in operating activities consisted primarily of our net loss of $190.8 million, adjusted for non-cash items of $207.3 million, and net cash flows used in operating assets and liabilities of $86.2 million. The main drivers of the changes in operating assets and liabilities were an increase in other assets of $35.4 million related to deferred contract costs, an increase in accounts receivable of $27.4 million, primarily due to an increase in revenue and the timing of cash receipts from certain of our larger customers and an increase of $6.8 million in prepaid expenses and other assets due to pre-payments for hosting services and software licenses. We also had $27.0 million of operating lease payments. There were also increases of $8.3 million in accrued expenses and $2.1 million in accounts payable and other liabilities due to timing of payments.

Cash Flows from Investing Activities

For the year ended December 31, 2024, cash provided by investing activities was $178.9 million, primarily consisting of $371.2 million of maturities and sales of marketable securities. This was offset by $155.1 million in purchases of marketable securities, $26.1 million of additions to capitalized internal-use software, and $10.3 million of payments related to purchases of property and equipment to expand our network.

For the year ended December 31, 2023, cash provided by investing activities was $294.9 million, primarily consisting of $459.4 million of maturities and sales of marketable securities. This was offset by $132.2 million in purchases of marketable securities, $21.3 million of additions to capitalized internal-use software, and $11.0 million of payments related to purchases of property and equipment to expand our network.

For the year ended December 31, 2022, cash provided by investing activities was $235.8 million, primarily consisting of $697.0 million of maturities and sales of marketable securities. This was offset by $355.5 million in purchases of marketable securities, $42.2 million of advanced payments and $20.0 million of payments related to purchases of property and equipment to expand our network, $26.0 million related to business acquisitions and $18.1 million of additions to capitalized internal-use software.

Cash Flows from Financing Activities

For the year ended December 31, 2024, cash used in financing activities was $17.1 million, primarily consisting of $15.0 million of finance lease liabilities repayments, $5.7 million payment of debt issuance costs and $3.8 million in payments for deferred consideration for business acquisitions. This was partially offset by $6.2 million in proceeds from the employee stock purchase plan (“ESPP”) and $1.1 million in proceeds from stock option exercises by our employees and directors.

For the year ended December 31, 2023, cash used in financing activities was $331.4 million, primarily consisting of $310.5 million used for the partial repurchase of our convertible debt, $27.2 million of finance lease liabilities repayments and $4.4 million in payments for deferred consideration for business acquisitions. This was partially offset by $8.6 million in proceeds from the employee stock purchase plan (“ESPP”) and $2.2 million in proceeds from stock option exercises by our employees and directors.

For the year ended December 31, 2022, cash used in financing activities was $189.1 million, primarily consisting of $177.1 million used for the partial repurchase of our convertible debt and $22.5 million of finance lease liabilities repayments. This was partially offset by $4.8 million in proceeds from the ESPP and $5.7 million in proceeds from stock option exercises by our employees and directors.

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Contractual Obligations and Other Commitments

The following table summarizes our non-cancelable contractual obligations as of December 31, 2024:

Less than 1 Year1-3 Years3-5 YearsMore than 5 YearsTotal
(in thousands)
Purchase obligations – non-equipment(1)$43,320$14,990$288$$58,598
Purchase obligations – equipment (2)3,9517,53811,489
Operating lease obligations(3)29,12038,4655,62044273,647
Finance lease obligations(4)2,3442,344
Debt obligation(5)188,594150,000338,594
Total$78,735$249,587$155,908$442$484,672

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(1)    Purchase obligations-non equipment represent total future minimum payments under contracts with our cloud infrastructure providers, network service providers, and other vendors. Purchase obligations exclude agreements that are cancellable without penalty. Our purchase obligations exclude our operating lease commitments associated with our colocation arrangements which have been separately disclosed under our operating lease obligations.

(2)     Purchase obligations-equipment represent total future minimum payments under contracts for capital expenditures.

(3)     Operating lease obligations represent total future minimum rent payments under non-cancelable operating lease agreements, such as our facilities and colocation (i.e. data center) leases.

(4)    Finance lease obligations represents principal and interest payments under our networking equipment leases.

(5)    Debt obligation aggregate principal amount of our 0% convertible senior notes due on March 15, 2026 as well as our 7.75% convertible senior notes due on June 1, 2028.

These commitments will generally be settled with existing cash on hand, cash generated from operations and our current or any future financing arrangements.

Critical Accounting Estimates

We prepare our consolidated financial statements in accordance with U.S. GAAP. The preparation of our consolidated financial statements requires us to make estimates, judgments, and assumptions that affect the reported amounts of assets, liabilities, revenue, costs, expenses, and related disclosures. Actual results and outcomes could differ significantly from our estimates, judgments, and assumptions. To the extent that there are material differences between these estimates and actual results, our future financial statement presentation, financial condition, results of operations, and cash flows will be affected.

Revenue Recognition

We recognize revenue in accordance with ASC 606, where revenue is recognized upon transfer of control of promised products or services to customers in an amount that reflects the consideration we expect to receive in exchange for those products or services. The processing and recording of certain revenue requires a manual process, which uses a complex set of procedures to generate complete and accurate data to record these revenue transactions. We enter into contracts that can include various combinations of products and services, each of which are distinct and accounted for as separate performance obligations.

Our performance obligations generally represent stand-ready obligations that are satisfied over time as the customer simultaneously receives and consumes the benefits provided by us. These obligations can be network services, security, compute, professional services, support, and other edge cloud platform services. For contracts with multiple performance obligations that are delivered over different time periods, we allocate the contract transaction price to each performance obligation using the estimated standalone selling price (“SSP”) of each distinct good or service in the contract. Judgment is required to determine the SSP for each distinct performance obligation. We analyze separate sales of our products and services or the discounted list price per our approved price list as a basis for estimating the SSP of these products and services. In instances where SSP is not directly observable, such as when we do not sell the product or service separately, we determine the SSP using information that may include market conditions and other observable inputs. We typically have more than one SSP

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for individual products and services due to the stratification of those products and services by customers and circumstances. In these instances, we may use information, such as geographic region and distribution channel, in determining the SSP.

Stock-based Compensation Fair Value determination

We recognize compensation expense related to stock options based on the fair value of stock-based awards on the date of grant. We determine the grant date fair value of the awards using the Black-Scholes option-pricing model. The related stock-based compensation expense is recognized on a straight-line basis over the period in which an employee is required to provide service in exchange for the stock-based award, which is generally four years. Our stock price volatility and expected option life involve management’s best estimates, both of which impact the fair value of the option calculated under the Black-Scholes option pricing model and, ultimately, the expense that will be recognized over the life of the option.

We recognize stock-based compensation expense related to market-based performance stock awards based on the grant-date fair value of the awards. We determine the grant date fair value of the awards using the Monte Carlo simulation valuation model. The related stock-based compensation expense is recognized on an accelerated attribution method over the derived service period. The expected volatility was a blended volatility rate which incorporated both our observed equity volatility and our relevant guideline companies’ volatilities. The derived service period and the expected volatility involve management’s best estimates, both of which impact the fair value of the option calculated under the Monte Carlo simulation valuation model and, ultimately, the expense that will be recognized over the life of the option.

Valuation of Goodwill and Other Acquired Intangible Assets in Business Combinations

We account for our acquisitions using the acquisition method of accounting, which requires, among other things, allocation of the fair value of purchase consideration to the tangible and intangible assets acquired and liabilities assumed at their estimated fair values on the acquisition date. The excess of the fair value of purchase consideration over the values of these identifiable assets and liabilities is recorded as goodwill.

Determining the fair value of assets acquired and liabilities assumed requires significant judgment and estimates including the selection of valuation methodologies, future expected cash flows, discount rates, and useful lives. Our estimates of fair value are based on assumptions believed to be reasonable, but which are inherently uncertain and, as a result, actual results may differ from estimates. During the measurement period, not to exceed one year from the date of acquisition, we may record adjustments to the assets acquired and liabilities assumed with a corresponding offset to goodwill to reflect new information obtained about facts and circumstances that existed as of the acquisition date. At the conclusion of the measurement period, or final determination of the values of assets acquired or liabilities assumed, whichever comes first, any subsequent adjustments are reflected in the consolidated statements of operations.

Long-lived Assets Impairment

Long-lived assets, including property and equipment, are reviewed for impairment whenever events or changes in circumstances, such as service discontinuance, technological obsolescence, facility closures, planned use of the assets or work-force reductions indicate that the carrying amount of the long-lived asset or asset group may not be recoverable. When such events occur, we compare the carrying amount of the asset or asset group to the undiscounted expected future cash flows related to the asset or asset group. If this comparison indicates that an impairment is present, the amount of the impairment is calculated as the difference between the carrying amount and the fair value of the asset or asset group. The estimates required to apply this accounting policy include forecasted usage of the long-lived assets, the useful lives of these assets and expected future cash flows.

Goodwill Impairment

Goodwill represents the excess of the purchase price of an acquired business over the fair value of the net tangible and identifiable intangible assets acquired. The carrying amount of goodwill is reviewed for impairment at least annually, in the fourth quarter, or whenever events or changes in circumstances indicate that the carrying value may not be recoverable. We have a single operating segment and reporting unit structure for all of the periods presented. To test for goodwill impairment, we compare the carrying value of our reporting unit with its fair value. If the carrying value of the goodwill is considered impaired, a loss is measured as the excess of the reporting unit’s carrying value over the fair value.

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Certain critical assumptions used to estimate the fair value of our reporting unit, including management’s forecasted revenue growth, gross and operating margins and cost of capital, are based on management’s best estimate about our current and future conditions. These estimates are inherently uncertain and can be affected by numerous factors, including changes in economic, industry or market conditions, changes in business operations, a loss of significant customer revenues or changes in competition. If our stock price were to trade below book value per share for an extended period of time or we experience adverse effects of a continued downward trend in the overall economic environment, changes in the business itself, including changes in projected earnings and cash flows, we may have to recognize an impairment of all or some portion of our goodwill in subsequent periods.

Recent Accounting Pronouncements

Please refer to Note 2—Summary of Significant Accounting Policies included in the Notes to consolidated financial statements.

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FY 2023 10-K MD&A

SEC filing source: 0001517413-24-000048.

Extracted structurally from real Item 7 body heading to real Item 7A/8 boundary. Confidence: high. Filing date: 2024-02-22. Report date: 2023-12-31.

ITEM 7.     Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations

You should read the following discussion and analysis of our financial condition and results of operations together with the consolidated financial statements and related notes that are included elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. This discussion contains forward-looking statements based upon current plans, expectations, and beliefs that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements as a result of various factors, including those set forth under “Risk Factors” and in other parts of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Our fiscal year ends on December 31.

As used herein, “Fastly,” “we,” “our,” “the Company” and similar terms include Fastly, Inc. and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise.

Overview

Organizations around the world are more dependent on the quality of digital experiences they provide than ever before. At Fastly, we deliver an edge cloud platform capable of delivering fast, safe, and engaging digital experiences. By focusing holistically on edge cloud from developer inspiration to end-user experience, we have the opportunity to differentiate with our global footprint, dynamic infrastructure, and security solution. Performance, security, and building the most engaging applications are paramount to driving mission success for Fastly’s customers.

The edge cloud is a category of Infrastructure as a Service (“IaaS”) that enables developers to build, secure, and deliver digital experiences, at the edge of the Internet. This service represents the convergence of the Content Delivery Network (“CDN”) with functionality that has been traditionally delivered by hardware-centric appliances such as Application Delivery Controllers (“ADC”), Web Application Firewalls (“WAF”), Bot Detection, Distributed Denial of Service (“DDoS”) and observability solutions. It also includes the emergence of a new, but growing, edge computing market which aims to move compute power and logic as close to the end user as possible. When milliseconds matter, processing at the edge is an ideal way to handle highly dynamic and time-sensitive data. This has led to its acceptance and adoption by organizations who monetize or grow their user base with every millisecond saved. Organizations that want to improve their user experience, whether it’s faster loading websites or reduced shopping cart abandonment, can benefit from processing at the edge. The edge cloud complements data center, central cloud, and hybrid solutions.

Organizations must keep up with complex and ever-evolving end-user requirements. We help them surpass their end users’ expectations by powering fast, safe, and engaging digital experiences. We built a powerful edge cloud platform, designed from the ground up to be programmable and support agile software development. We believe that our platform gives our customers a significant competitive advantage, whether they were born into the digital age or are just embarking on their digital transformation journey.

Developers on the Fastly platform have a high degree of flexibility with granular control and real-time visibility, where they can write and deploy code in a serverless environment and push application logic to the edge. Our infrastructure is built for the software-defined future. Our network is powerful, efficient, and flexible, designed to enable us to rapidly scale to meet the needs of the most demanding customers. Our approach to scalable, secure reliability integrates security into multiple layers of development: architecture, engineering, and operations. That’s why we invest in building security into the fabric of our platform, alongside performance. We provide developers and security operations teams with a fast and safe environment to create, build, and run modern applications.

We serve established enterprises, mid-market companies, and technology-savvy organizations. Our customers represent a diverse set of organizations across many industries with one thing in common: they care about delivering best-in-class digital experiences. With our edge cloud platform, our customers are disrupting existing industries and creating new ones. For example, several of our customers have reinvented digital publishing by connecting readers through subscription models to indispensable content. Fastly’s ability to dynamically manage content in real time enables readers to have instant access to the most up to date information.

Our customers’ ecommerce solutions use Fastly’s edge compute functionality to deliver very low-latency customer experiences, including providing better recommendations to their shoppers, converting more shopping carts into sales and executing fast and secure financial transactions. Content streaming organizations leverage Fastly’s platform to deliver content

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to users around the world and those that livestream gain easy access to enormous edge compute resources for even greater reliability. The range of applications that developers build with our edge cloud platform continues to expand rapidly.

Our mission is to make the Internet a better place where all experiences are fast, safe, and engaging. We want all developers to have the ability to deliver the next transformative digital experience on a global scale. And because big ideas often start small, we love it when developers experiment and iterate on our platform, coming up with exciting new ways to solve today’s complex problems.

For the years ended December 31, 2023 and 2022, our revenue was $506.0 million and $432.7 million, respectively, an increase of 17%.

Our 10 largest customers generated an aggregate of 37% and 35% of our revenue in the trailing 12 months ended December 31, 2023 and 2022, respectively.

No customer accounted for more than 10% of revenue for the years ended December 31, 2023 and 2022. Affiliated customers that are business units of a single company in the streaming entertainment space generated an aggregate of 12% and 11% of the Company’s revenue for the years ended December 31, 2023 and 2022, respectively. We incurred a net loss of $133.1 million and $190.8 million in the years ended December 31, 2023 and 2022, respectively.

We focus our direct selling efforts on expanding our customer’s use of our platform, which includes companies that are exhibiting significant growth. We engage with and support these customers with our field sales representatives, account managers, and technical account managers who focus on customer satisfaction and drive expansion of their usage of our platform and products. These teams work with technical and business leaders to help our customers’ end-users receive the best possible digital experience, while also lowering our customers’ total cost of ownership. These direct selling efforts are reflected by the revenue generated from our enterprise customers. Our Dollar-Based Net Expansion Rate (“DBNER”), Net Retention Rate (“NRR”) and Last-Twelve Months Net Retention Rate (“LTM NRR”) metrics also measure the revenue growth from existing customers attributable to increased usage of our platform and features, and purchase of additional products and services. For additional details on our key metrics, refer to the “Key Business Metrics” section.

We believe that an annual cohort analysis of Fastly’s customers, as depicted in the chart below, demonstrates the continued expansion of our customers’ use of our platform. Once a customer begins to generate revenue for us, they tend to increase their usage of our platform, in particular in their second year. Customer accounts acquired in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 are referred to as the 2019 Cohort, 2020 Cohort, 2021 Cohort, 2022 Cohort and 2023 Cohort, respectively. We calculate the Compound Annual Growth Rate (“CAGR”), which represents the rate of revenue return of our revenue cohorts, over a five year history from when they were first customers.

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Summary of Revenue Generated by Customer Cohorts Over Time (in millions):

Our 2019 Cohort increased its revenue 5.5 times in fiscal 2021 and has grown at approximately a 88% CAGR over the next four years from fiscal 2020 to fiscal 2023.

We generate substantially all of our revenue from charging our customers based on their usage of our platform, and we generate a substantial majority of our revenue from customers that have negotiated contracts with us. Initially, customers typically choose to become platform customers, for which we charge fees based on their committed or actual use of our platform, as measured in gigabytes and requests. Many of our customers generate billings in excess of their minimum commitment. We also generate revenue from additional products as well as professional and other services, such as implementation, account management and enhanced customer support. We charge a flat one-time or recurring monthly fee depending on the additional products and services selected. Typically, the term of our contracts with customers is 12 months and includes a minimum monthly billing commitment in exchange for more favorable pricing terms. In addition, customers can sign up online by providing their credit card information and agreeing to a minimum monthly fee. We also offer subscriptions to access a unified security web application and application programming interface at a fixed rate.

The majority of our revenue is usage based and changes in usage by our largest customers can create volatility in our revenue. The length of our sales cycles, from initial evaluation to payment, can range from several months to well over a year and can vary substantially from customer to customer. Similarly, the onboarding and ramping process with new as well as existing enterprise customers with new business can take several months and can be subject to delays for unanticipated reasons. The timing of new revenue from our sales efforts and changes in usage by our largest customers can make revenue difficult to predict.

Factors Affecting Our Performance

Winning New Customers

We are focused on continuing to attract new customers, including those in diverse vertical markets, and expanding our relationship with existing customers, by enhancing our product experience, investing in technology, and leveraging our partner ecosystem. Our customer base includes large, established enterprises that are undergoing digital transformation and emerging companies spanning a wide array of industries and verticals. Developers within these companies often use and advocate for the adoption of our platform by their companies and promotion across the broader developer community. We will continue to invest in our products and features and developer outreach, leveraging it as a cost-efficient approach to attracting new customers, and our sales and marketing programs, including various online marketing activities as well as targeted account-based marketing.

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We are continuing to bring a durable, consistent, and predictable pipeline of new innovations to our edge cloud platform and software-defined modern network architecture, and are seeing interest from customers in our existing product lines like Network Services and Security, and newer product lines like Compute and Observability. We will continue to build out a single, unified platform, simplify customer onboarding and service usage, and simplify our pricing and packaging. This will require us to dedicate significant resources to further develop the market for our platform and differentiate our platform from competitive products and services. We will also need to expand, retain, and motivate our sales and marketing personnel in order to target our sales efforts at larger enterprises and senior management of these potential customers.

Many jurisdictions have enacted laws on data localization and cross-border data transfers, and the evolving enforcement and interpretation of such laws has created uncertainty regarding data stored abroad and transferred across borders, which could impact customer growth and acquisition for customers and potential customers conducting business in Europe and elsewhere outside of the United States. For additional details, refer to the section titled “Risk Factors.”

Expanding into New Markets and within Our Existing Customer Base

We aim to continue to add customers from a diverse set of industry verticals through our differentiated platform that offers a broad range of capabilities. By focusing on our key differentiators, including performance and security, we have an opportunity to continue to add customers from a diverse set of industries.

We emphasize retaining our customers and expanding their usage of our platform and adoption of our other products. Customers often begin with smaller deployments of one of our products and then expand their usage over time. Our platform includes a variety of offerings across Network Services, Security, Compute and Observability product lines. As our customers mature, we assist them in expanding their use of our platform, including the use of additional offerings beyond content delivery or security. As enterprises grow and experience increased traffic, their needs evolve, leading them to find additional use cases for our platform and expand their usage accordingly. In addition, given that customer acquisition costs are incurred largely for acquiring and initial onboarding, we may gain operating leverage to the extent that existing customers expand their use of our platform and products.

Our ability to retain customers and expand their usage could be impaired for a variety of reasons, including a customer moving to another provider or reducing usage within the term of their contract. Even if our customers expand their usage of our platform, we cannot guarantee that they will maintain those usage levels for any meaningful period of time or that they will renew their commitments. The data localization and cross-border data transfer issues described above also impact current customers’ usage of our products and services.

In addition, we cannot be certain what actions the United States or another country’s government may take with respect to certain of our customers that may adversely affect our ability to do business with our customers that operate in China, target China as a market or that have strong business ties to China.

International Expansion

We intend to continue expanding our efforts to attract customers outside of the United States by augmenting our sales teams and strategically increasing our presence in the number of markets in select international locations. As of both December 31, 2023 and 2022, our edge network spanned across 58 markets and 34 countries that are outside of the United States.

Our international expansion, including our global sales efforts, continues to add increased complexity and cost to our business. This requires us to expand our sales and marketing capabilities outside of the United States, increase the number of markets we have a presence in around the world to support our customers, and manage the administrative aspects of a global organization, each of which place a strain on our business and culture. In addition, our bandwidth costs are higher in markets outside of the United States and Europe, which may impact our gross margins.

We are closely monitoring the unfolding events of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as well as the more recent hostilities in Israel, and their global impacts. While the conflicts are still evolving and the outcomes remain highly uncertain, we do not believe the Russia-Ukraine or Israel-Hamas conflicts will have a material impact on our business and results of operations. We do not have POPs or operations in Russia, Ukraine, or Israel. However, some threat actors now engage and are expected to continue to engage in cyber-attacks, including without limitation nation-state actors for geopolitical reasons and in conjunction with military conflicts and defense activities. During times of war and other major conflicts, we, the third parties upon which we rely, and our customers may be vulnerable to a heightened risk of these attacks, including retaliatory cyber-

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attacks, that could materially disrupt our systems and operations, supply chain, and ability to produce, sell and distribute our goods and services. If either conflict continues or worsens, leading to greater global economic disruptions and uncertainty, our business and results of operations could be materially impacted. Our customers operating in Russia, Ukraine, and Israel represented an immaterial portion of our consolidated revenue as of December 31, 2023 and 2022, respectively.

Investing in Sales and Marketing

Our customers have been pivotal in driving brand awareness and broadening our reach. While we continue to leverage the self-service approach to drive adoption by developers, we will continue to expand our sales and marketing efforts, with an increased focus on sales to enterprises globally. Utilizing our direct sales force, we have multiple selling points within organizations to acquire new customers and increase usage from our existing customers. We will continue to increase our discretionary marketing spend, including account-based, targeted demand generation and brand spend, to drive the effectiveness of our sales teams. As a result, we expect our total operating expenses to increase as we continue to expand. Our investments in sales and marketing teams are intended to help accelerate our sales, onboarding, and ramp cycles.

These efforts will require us to continue to invest in sales and marketing resources. Furthermore, we believe that there is significant competition for sales personnel with the skills and technical knowledge that we require. Our ability to achieve significant revenue growth will depend, in large part, on our success in recruiting, training, and retaining sufficient numbers of sales personnel to support our growth.

Continued Investment in Our Platform and Network Infrastructure

We must continue to invest in our platform and network infrastructure to maintain our position in the market. We expect our revenue growth to be dependent on an expanding customer base and continued adoption of our edge cloud delivery, security, and other products and services. In anticipation of winning new customers and staying ahead of our customers’ needs, we plan to continue to invest in order to expand the scale and capacity of our software-defined modern network. This could result in increased network service provider fees, which could adversely affect our gross margins if we are unable to offset these costs with revenue from new customers and increase revenue from existing customers. Our customers require constant innovation within their own organizations and expect the same from us. Therefore, we will continue to invest in resources to enhance our development capabilities and introduce new products and features on our platform. We believe that investment in research and development will contribute to our long-term growth but may also negatively impact our short-term profitability. For the years ended December 31, 2023 and 2022, our research and development expenses as a percentage of revenue were 30% and 36%, respectively. Our research and development expenses each period is impacted by the amount of software development costs that meet the criteria for capitalization. We may also seek to acquire or invest in businesses, products, or technologies that we believe could complement or expand our platform, enhance our technical capabilities, or otherwise offer growth opportunities. For example, in May 2022, we acquired Glitch, a software company specializing in developer project management tools to bolster our existing product offerings, by making it easier to innovate at a layer in the Fastly software stack.

Developers use our platform to build custom applications and require a state-of-the-art infrastructure to test and run these applications. We will continue to invest in our network infrastructure by strategically increasing our POPs. We also anticipate making investments in upgrading our technology and hardware to continue providing our customers a fast and secure platform. Our gross margins and operating results are impacted by these investments. As of December 31, 2023, our global network is located in 79 markets across 35 countries. As we continue to experience growth, we may face challenges managing adequate server capacity in our POPs due to potential component delays, shortages, price increases, hardware efficiencies gained through internal development, or any potential changes in server architecture, including due to technological advances or obsolescence. We have in the past needed to, and may need to continue to, write-down or write-off server assets if we have server asset levels in excess of forecasted network capacity needs. For example, in the year ended December 31, 2023, we recognized computer and networking equipment related write-off charges of $4.3 million. Conversely, if we underestimate network capacity needs, we may in future periods be unable to meet demand and be required to incur higher costs to secure necessary parts and components of our servers.

In the event that there are errors in software, failures of hardware, damages to a facility or misconfigurations of any of our services, whether caused by our own error, security breaches, third-party error, or natural disasters, we could experience lengthy interruptions in our platform availability as well as delays and additional expenses in arranging new facilities and services. In addition, there can be no assurance that we are adequately prepared for unexpected increases in bandwidth demands by our customers, particularly when we or our customers experience cyber-attacks. The bandwidth we have contracted to purchase may become unavailable for a variety of reasons, including service outages, payment disputes, network providers

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going out of business, natural disasters, networks imposing traffic limits, or governments adopting regulations that impact network operations.

Key Business Metrics

We use the following key metrics presented in the table below to evaluate our business, measure our performance, identify trends affecting our business, prepare financial projections, and make strategic decisions. The calculation of these key metrics below may differ from other similarly titled metrics used by other companies, analysts, or investors.

In the first quarter of 2023, we updated the methodology (“new methodology”) by which we calculate our customer count metrics, including Total Customer Count, Enterprise Customer Count and associated metrics. We believe that the new methodology more accurately reflects the trends in our business, gives management more insight into these trends, including customer usage of our platform and the seasonality we experience, and reduces lagging indicators inherent in our previous methodology (“prior methodology”). In conjunction with this update, for comparability purposes we will continue to report our customer count metrics using both the prior and new methodology, for the current and comparative periods presented in our Annual Reports on Form 10-K through the end of the fiscal year ended December 31, 2023. We will no longer report our customer count metrics using the prior methodology beginning with our Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2024.

As of December 31,
20232022
Customer metrics (prior methodology):
Total Customer Count (based on last month revenue)3,0972,958
Enterprise Customer Count (based on trailing 12-month revenue)532493
Average Enterprise Customer Spend (based on trailing 12-month revenue; in thousands)$859$782
Annual Revenue Retention (“ARR”) Rate99.1%99.2%
Customer metrics (new methodology):
Total Customer Count (based on current quarter revenue)3,2433,062
Enterprise Customer Count (based on annualized revenue)578533
Average Enterprise Customer Spend (based on annualized current quarter revenues; in thousands)$880$822
Annual Revenue Retention Rate99.2%98.9%
Other key metrics:
Dollar-Based Net Expansion Rate (“DBNER”)119.0%122.7%
Net Retention Rate (“NRR”)110.1%110.7%
Last-twelve Months Net Retention Rate (“LTM NRR”)113.4%119.1%

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Due to the revisions reflected in the above methodology, the customer count metrics included above calculated using our new methodology are not comparable to the historical customer count metrics included in our previously filed Annual Reports on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and Form S-1 and Form S-3 Registration Statements, outside of the data included in the table above.

Total Customer Count

We believe that our total number of customers is an important indicator of the adoption of our platform. Our definition of a customer consists of identifiable operating entities with which we have a billing relationship in good standing and which we have recognized revenue from. An identifiable operating entity is defined as a company, a government entity, or a distinct business unit of a larger company that has a relationship with us through direct sales or through one of our reseller partners where charges are identified on an end-customer basis. We may treat separate subsidiaries, segments, divisions, or business units of a single organization that use our platform as unique customers where they have distinct account identifiers. In cases where charges are identified through a reseller partner rather than on an end-customer basis, we would count the reseller as a single customer in our customer count. Our customer groupings may be impacted by changes to our customers’ business, including any impact from acquisition activities, internal business reorganizations leading to operational and decision-making changes, and corporate structure changes such as subsidiary consolidation and reorganization that may arise in the future.

Our prior methodology by which we calculate total customer count, includes identifiable operating entities with which we have a billing relationship in good standing, from which we recognized revenue during the last month of the quarter. As of December 31, 2023 and 2022, we had 3,097 and 2,958 customers, respectively.

Our new methodology by which we calculate total customer count, includes identifiable operating entities with which we have a billing relationship in good standing, from which we recognized revenue during the quarter. As of December 31, 2023 and 2022, we had 3,243 and 3,062 customers, respectively.

In addition to our paying customers, we also have trial, developer, nonprofit and open source programs, and other non-paying accounts that are excluded from our customer count metric. We operate globally and as a result, the success of our ability to retain our customers is also affected by general economic and market conditions around the world.

Enterprise Customer Count

Historically our revenue has been driven primarily by a subset of our customers, our enterprise customers, who have leveraged our platform substantially from a usage standpoint. We believe that the recruitment and cultivation of enterprise customers is critical to our long-term success.

Under our prior methodology, our enterprise customer count is defined as customers with revenue in excess of $100,000 over the trailing 12-month period. As of December 31, 2023, we had 532 of such enterprise customers, which generated 90% of our revenue for the trailing 12 months ended December 31, 2023. As of December 31, 2022, we had 493 of such enterprise customers which generated 89% of our revenue for the trailing 12 months ended December 31, 2022.

Under our new methodology, our enterprise customer count is defined as customers with annualized current quarter revenue in excess of $100,000. This is calculated by taking the revenue we recognized for each customer in the current quarter and multiplying it by four. As of December 31, 2023, we had 578 of such enterprise customers which generated 92% of the total annualized current quarter revenue for our total customers for the period ended December 31, 2023. As of December 31, 2022, we had 533 of such enterprise customers which generated 92% of the total annualized current quarter revenue for our total customers for the period ended December 31, 2022.

Average Enterprise Customer Spend

Our enterprise customers continue to leverage our platform, increasing their spend on our platform and driving our revenue growth year over year. The continued retention and growth of our enterprise customer spend is key to our long-term growth strategy.

Under the prior methodology, our average enterprise customer spend is calculated by taking the sum of the trailing 12-month revenue contributed by enterprise customers, as defined under our prior methodology as customers with revenue in excess of $100,000 over the trailing 12-month period, existing as of December 31, 2023, and dividing that by that same number

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of enterprise customers as of December 31, 2023. As of December 31, 2023, our average enterprise customer spend under the prior methodology was $859 thousand, as compared to $782 thousand as of December 31, 2022.

Under the new methodology, our average enterprise customer spend is calculated by taking the annualized current quarter revenue contributed by enterprise customers, as defined under our new methodology as customers with annualized current quarter revenue in excess of $100,000, existing as of December 31, 2023, and dividing that by that same number of enterprise customers as of December 31, 2023. As of December 31, 2023, our average enterprise customer spend under the new methodology was $880 thousand, as compared to $822 thousand as of December 31, 2022.

Annual Revenue Retention Rate (“ARR”)

We separately monitor customer retention and churn on an annual basis by measuring our annual revenue retention rate, which we calculate by first multiplying the final full month of revenue from a customer that terminated its contract with us (a “Churned Customer”) by the number of months remaining in the same calendar year to get our “Annual Revenue Churn”. The quotient of the Annual Revenue Churn from all of our Churned Customers divided by our annual revenue of the same calendar year is then subtracted from 100% to determine our annual revenue retention rate. We believe this calculation is helpful in that it is based on the amount of revenue that we would expect to have received in the remaining portion of a particular period had a customer not terminated its contract with us. It is not indicative of the actual revenue contribution from churned customers in past periods. By comparing this amount to actual revenue for the period, we are able to assess our ability to replace terminated revenue by generating revenue from new and continuing customers.

Under the prior methodology, our ARR rate is calculated by subtracting the quotient of the Annual Revenue Churn from all of our Churned Customers from which we recognized revenue during the last month of the prior year divided by our annual revenue of the same calendar year from 100%. For the years ended December 31, 2023 and 2022 the ARR was 99.1% and 99.2%, respectively.

Under the new methodology, our ARR rate is calculated by subtracting the quotient of the Annual Revenue Churn from all of our Churned Customers from which we recognized revenue during the last quarter of the prior year divided by our annual revenue of the same calendar year from 100%. For the years ended December 31, 2023 and 2022 the ARR was 99.2% and 98.9%, respectively.

Dollar-Based Net Expansion Rate (“DBNER”)

Our ability to generate and increase our revenue depends on our ability to increase the number of new customers and usage of our edge cloud delivery platform, security, and other products and services by our existing customers. We track our growth, in part, by measuring DBNER. Our DBNER increases when customers increase their usage of our platform or purchase additional products, and declines when they reduce their usage, benefit from lower pricing on their existing usage, or curtail their purchases of additional products. We believe that DBNER is a key metric in measuring the long-term value of our customer relationships and our ability to grow our revenue through increased usage of our edge cloud delivery platform, security, and purchase of additional products and services by our existing customers. However, our calculation of DBNER indicates only expansion among continuing customers and does not indicate any decrease in revenue attributable to former customers, which may differ from similar metrics of other companies.

We calculate DBNER by dividing the revenue for a given period from customers who remained customers as of the last day of the given period (“current period”) by the revenue from the same customers for the same period measured one year prior (“base period”). The revenue included in the current period excludes revenue from (i) customers that churned after the end of the base period and (ii) new customers that entered into a customer agreement after the end of the base period. For example, to calculate our DBNER for the trailing 12 months ended December 31, 2023, we divide (i) revenue, for the trailing 12 months ended December 31, 2023, from customers that entered into a customer agreement on or before December 31, 2023, and that remained customers as of December 31, 2023, by (ii) revenue for the trailing 12 months ended December 31, 2022, from the same set of customers.

For the trailing 12 months ended December 31, 2023 and 2022 our DBNER was 119.0% and 122.7%, respectively. DBNER may fluctuate from quarter to quarter based on, among other things, the timing associated with new customer accounts. We expect our DBNER for individual cohorts to decrease once customers in that cohort have used our platform for more than two years and become a larger portion of both our overall customer base and the revenue that we use to calculate DBNER.

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Net Retention Rate (“NRR”) and Last-Twelve Months Net Retention Rate (“LTM NRR”)

Our ability to generate and increase our revenue is also dependent upon our ability to retain our existing customers. In addition to measuring expansion using DBNER, NRR and LTM NRR also allow us to track customer retention which demonstrates the stickiness of our edge cloud platform.

Our NRR measures the net change in monthly revenue from existing customers in the last month of the period (the “current” period month) compared to the last month of the same period one year prior (the “prior” period month) and includes revenue contraction due to billing decreases or customer churn and revenue expansion due to billing increases, but excludes revenue from new customers. We calculate Net Retention Rate by dividing the revenue from the current period month by the revenue in the prior period month. For the last month of the years ended December 31, 2023 and 2022 our NRR was 110.1% and 110.7%, respectively.

Our LTM NRR removes some of the volatility that is inherent in a usage-based business model from the measurement of the NRR metric. We calculate LTM NRR by dividing the total customer revenue for the prior twelve-month period (“prior 12-month period”) ending at the beginning of the last twelve-month period (“LTM period”) minus revenue contraction due to billing decreases or customer churn, plus revenue expansion due to billing increases during the LTM period from the same customers by the total prior 12-month period revenue. For the trailing twelve months ended December 31, 2023 and 2022 our LTM NRR was 113.4% and 119.1%, respectively.

Remaining Performance Obligations (“RPO”)

RPO represent future committed revenue for periods within current contracts with customers, as well as deferred revenue arising from consideration invoiced for which the related performance obligations have not been satisfied. As of December 31, 2023, the aggregate amount of the transaction price in our contracts allocated to RPO that were unsatisfied or partially unsatisfied was $235.7 million. Subsequent to December 31, 2023, we entered into a modification of an existing contract with a total commitment of $9.5 million, which contributed to additional RPO.

Key Components of Statement of Operations

Revenue

We derive our revenue primarily from usage-based fees earned from customers using our platform. We also earn fixed-rate recurring revenue from security and other products and services.

Our usage-based fees earned from customers using our platform are generally billed in arrears. Our security products are primarily annual subscriptions that are billed in advance. Many customers have tiered usage pricing which reflects discounted rates as usage increases. For most contracts, usage charges are determined on a monthly basis based on actual usage within the month and do not impact usage charges within any other month. Our larger customers often enter into contracts that contain minimum billing commitments and reflect discounted pricing associated with such usage levels.

We define United States revenue as revenue from customers that have a billing address in the United States, and we define international revenue as revenue from customers that have a billing address outside of the United States.

Cost of Revenue and Gross Margin

Cost of revenue consists primarily of fees paid to network providers for bandwidth and to third-party network data centers for housing servers, also known as colocation costs. Cost of revenue also includes employee costs for network operation, build-out and support and services delivery, network storage costs, cost of managed services and software-as-a-service, depreciation of network equipment used to deliver services, and amortization of network-related internal-use software. Our arrangements with network service providers require us to pay fees based on bandwidth use, in some cases subject to minimum commitments, which may be underutilized. Over the long term we expect cost of revenue to decrease as a percentage of revenue as we continue to drive efficiencies in our operations. However, our cost of revenue may fluctuate as a percentage of our revenue from period to period due to the timing and extent of these expenses.

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Our gross margin has been and will continue to be affected by a number of factors, including utilization of our network, the timing of our investments in the expansion of our network, which can increase depreciation and colocation costs in advance of expected demand, our ability to manage our network service providers and cloud infrastructure-related fees, the timing of amortization of capitalized software development costs, changes in personnel costs to provide customer support and operate the network, and customer pricing. Over the long term we expect gross margin to increase as we continue to drive efficiencies in our operations and increase in revenue. However, our gross margin may fluctuate from period to period.

Research and Development

Research and development expenses consist primarily of personnel costs, including salaries, benefits, bonuses, and stock-based compensation. Research and development expenses also include cloud infrastructure fees for development and testing, and an allocation of our general overhead expenses. We capitalize the portion of our software development costs that meet the criteria for capitalization.

We continue to focus our research and development efforts on adding new features and products including new use cases, improving the efficiency and performance of our network, and increasing the functionality of our existing products. Over the long term we expect our research and development expenses to decrease as a percentage of our revenue. However, our research and development expenses may fluctuate as a percentage of our revenue from period to period due to the timing and extent of these expenses.

Sales and Marketing

Sales and marketing expenses consist primarily of personnel costs, including commissions for our sales employees, salaries, benefits, bonuses, and stock-based compensation. Sales and marketing expenses also include expenditures related to advertising, marketing, our brand awareness activities, bandwidth and co-location costs for free trial users, costs related to our customer conferences, including our Altitude conference, professional services fees, amortization of our intangible assets, and an allocation of our general overhead expenses.

We focus our sales and marketing efforts on generating awareness of our platform and products, creating sales leads, and establishing and promoting our brand, both domestically and internationally. Over the long term, we expect our sales and marketing expenses to decrease as a percentage of our revenue. However, our sales and marketing expenses may fluctuate as a percentage of our revenue from period to period due to the timing and extent of these expenses.

General and Administrative

General and administrative expenses consist primarily of personnel costs, including salaries, benefits, bonuses, and stock-based compensation for our administrative support personnel. General and administrative expenses also include costs related to legal and other professional services fees, SaaS costs, an allocation of our general overhead expenses, credit losses and acquisition-related costs.

Our general and administrative expenses also include sales and other tax expenses to which we are subject to based on the manner in which we sell and deliver our products. Historically, we have not collected such taxes from our customers and have therefore recorded such taxes as general and administrative expenses. We expect that these expenses will decline in future years as we continue to implement our sales tax collection mechanisms and start collecting these taxes from our customers.

In the near term, we expect to continue to incur costs associated with supporting the growth of our business, including international expansion, but expect these costs to decrease as a percentage of our revenue over the long term as we continue to drive efficiencies in our operations. However, our general and administrative expenses may fluctuate as a percentage of our revenue from period to period due to the timing and extent of these expenses.

Impairment expense

Our impairment expense relates to write-off of excess computer and networking equipment including software that we do not expect to use.

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Net Gain on Extinguishment of Debt

Our net gain on extinguishment of debt relates to the partial repurchases of our outstanding senior convertible notes in May 2022, May 2023, November 2023, and December 2023.

Other Income and Expenses

Our interest income consists primarily of interest earned on our cash, cash equivalents and investments. Our interest expense consists primarily of the interest expense on our finance leases and amortization of discount and debt issuance costs associated with our debt obligations. Our other income (expense), net, consists primarily of foreign currency transaction gains and losses.

Income Taxes

Our income tax expense (benefit) consists primarily of income taxes in certain foreign jurisdictions where we conduct business. The Company currently maintains a full valuation allowance on the Company’s U.S. Federal and state net deferred tax assets. We expect to maintain this valuation allowance for the foreseeable future.

Results of Operations

In this section, we discuss the results of our operations for the year ended December 31, 2023 compared to the year ended December 31, 2022. For a discussion of the year ended December 31, 2022 compared to the year ended December 31, 2021, please refer to Part II, Item 7, “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2022.

Year ended December 31,
20232022
(in thousands)
Consolidated Statement of Operations:
Revenue$505,988$432,725
Cost of revenue239,660222,944
Gross profit266,328209,781
Operating expenses:
Research and development152,190155,308
Sales and marketing191,773179,869
General and administrative116,077120,803
Impairment expense4,316
Total operating expenses464,356455,980
Loss from operations(198,028)(246,199)
Net gain on extinguishment of debt52,41654,391
Interest income18,1867,044
Interest expense(4,051)(5,887)
Other expense, net(1,832)(29)
Loss before income tax expense(133,309)(190,680)
Income tax expense (benefit)(221)94
Net loss attributable to common stockholders$(133,088)$(190,774)

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The following tables set forth our results of operations for the period presented as a percentage of our revenue:

Year ended December 31,
20232022
Consolidated Statements of Operations, as a percentage of revenue:*
Revenue100%100%
Cost of revenue4752
Gross profit5348
Operating expenses:
Research and development3036
Sales and marketing3842
General and administrative2328
Impairment expense1
Total operating expenses92105
Loss from operations(39)(57)
Net gain on extinguishment of debt1013
Interest income42
Interest expense(1)(1)
Other income (expense), net
Loss before income tax expense(26)(43)
Income tax expense (benefit)
Net loss attributable to common stockholders(26)%(43)%

__________

*    Columns may not add up to 100% due to rounding.

Revenue

Year ended December 31,Change
20232022$ Change% Change
(in thousands)
Revenue$505,988$432,725$73,26317%

Revenue was $506.0 million for the year ended December 31, 2023 compared to $432.7 million for the year ended December 31, 2022, an increase of $73.3 million, or 17%. Revenue growth was driven by a $58.1 million increase in revenue related to further adoption of our modern edge platform and products, as well as a $14.7 million increase in revenue related to products acquired from the acquisition of Signal Sciences.

For the years ended December 31, 2023 and 2022, approximately 95% and 94% of our revenue was driven by usage on our platform, respectively. Revenue was primarily from existing customers, as revenue from new customers contributed less than 10% of our revenue. The proportion of the revenue contribution between new and existing customers is consistent with prior periods and typical customer behavior as customers tend to contribute more revenue over time as their use of the platform increases. The remainder of our revenue was generated by our other products and services, including support and professional services.

Under the prior methodology, as defined earlier in the ‘Key Business Metrics’ section, we had 3,097 customers and 532 enterprise customers as of December 31, 2023, compared to 2,958 customers and 493 enterprise customers as of December 31, 2022. This represents an increase of 139, or 5%, in customers and 39, or 8%, in enterprise customers from December 31, 2022.

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Under the new methodology, as defined earlier in the ‘Key Business Metrics’ section, we had 3,243 customers and 578 enterprise customers as of December 31, 2023, compared to 3,062 customers and 533 enterprise customers as of December 31, 2022. This represents an increase of 181, or 6% in customers and 45, or 8%, in enterprise customers from December 31, 2022.

U.S. revenue was $370.4 million and 73% of revenue for the year ended December 31, 2023, and $316.1 million and 73% of revenue for the year ended December 31, 2022. This represents an increase of $54.3 million, or 17%. International revenue was $135.6 million and 27% of revenue for the year ended December 31, 2023, compared to $116.6 million and 27% of revenue for the year ended December 31, 2022. This represents an increase of $19.0 million, or 16%.

Under the prior methodology, we had 2,028 domestic customers and 1,069 international customers as of December 31, 2023, and 2,074 domestic customers and 884 international customers as of December 31, 2022. There was a decrease in domestic customers of 46, or 2%, and an increase in international customers of 185, or 21%, compared to December 31, 2022.

Under the new methodology, we had 2,117 domestic customers and 1,126 international customers as of December 31, 2023, and 2,145 domestic customers and 917 international customers as of December 31, 2022. There was a decrease in domestic customers of 28, or 1%, and an increase in international customers of 209, or 23%, compared to December 31, 2022.

Cost of Revenue

Year ended December 31,Change
20232022$ Change% Change
(in thousands)
Cost of revenue$239,660$222,944$16,7167%

Cost of revenue was $239.7 million for the year ended December 31, 2023 compared to $222.9 million for the year ended December 31, 2022, an increase of $16.7 million, or 7%. The increase in cost of revenue is a result of an increase in bandwidth costs of $10.1 million, $7.9 million increase in depreciation expense as a result of increased investments in our platform as well as an increase in repair and maintenance cost of $1.2 million. There was also a $1.3 million increase in personnel-related costs due to an increase in headcount and equity awards granted to employees supporting the growth of our business. This increase was partially offset by a decrease of $2.0 million in software and network costs, a $1.1 million decrease in colocation costs as well as a $0.6 million decrease in loss on disposals of fixed assets.

Gross Profit and Gross Margin

Year ended December 31,Change
20232022$ Change% Change
(in thousands)
Gross profit$266,328$209,781$56,54727%
Gross margin53%48%5%

Gross profit was $266.3 million for the year ended December 31, 2023 compared to $209.8 million for the year ended December 31, 2022, an increase of $56.5 million, or 27%. Gross margin was 53% for the year ended December 31, 2023 compared to 48% for the year ended December 31, 2022, an increase of 5%. The increase in gross margin was driven by revenue related to further adoption of our modern edge platform and products, as well as an increase in revenue related to products acquired from the acquisition of Signal Sciences. Our revenue growth during the year ended December 31, 2023 outpaced the increases in the costs incurred to support the growth of our network.

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Operating Expenses

Year ended December 31,Change
20232022$ Change% Change
(in thousands)
Research and development$152,190$155,308$(3,118)(2)%
Sales and marketing191,773179,869$11,9047%
General and administrative116,077120,803$(4,726)(4)%
Impairment expense4,316$4,316100%
Total operating expenses$464,356$455,980$8,3762%
Percentage of revenue:
Research and development30%36%(6)%
Sales and marketing38%42%(4)%
General and administrative23%28%(5)%
Impairment expense1%%1%

Research and development

Research and development expenses were $152.2 million for the year ended December 31, 2023 compared to $155.3 million for the year ended December 31, 2022, a decrease of $3.1 million, or 2%. This decrease was primarily due to a decrease of $12.9 million in stock-based compensation expense primarily related to restricted stock awards that fully vested in 2022. The decrease was also due to a $3.1 million increase in capitalized software from headcount growth as well as a $1.6 million decrease in professional fees related to temporary agency costs. This decrease was partially offset by an increase of $10.4 million of personnel-related costs, such as salaries and benefits due to an increase in headcount as well as a $2.8 million increase in costs associated with the transition and separation of a former executive.

Sales and marketing

Sales and marketing expenses were $191.8 million for the year ended December 31, 2023 compared to $179.9 million for the year ended December 31, 2022, an increase of $11.9 million, or 7%. This increase was primarily due to a $15.0 million increase in personnel related costs, such as salaries, sales commissions, and benefits. The increase was also due to a $4.4 million increase in marketing spend associated with brand campaign and advertising, as well as $1.0 million increase in travel and entertainment expenses. The increase was partially offset by a $5.4 million decrease in stock-based compensation expenses primarily due to restricted stock awards that fully vested in 2022. There was also a $1.0 million decrease in corporate expenses, $0.9 million decrease in professional fees, $0.9 million decrease in amortization expense as well as a $0.6 million decrease of capitalized software.

General and administrative

General and administrative costs were $116.1 million for the year ended December 31, 2023 compared to $120.8 million for the year ended December 31, 2022, a decrease of $4.7 million, or 4%. The decrease was primarily due to a $6.7 million decrease in professional fees related to temporary agency costs, as well as a $4.1 million decrease due to sales tax refund and changes in sales tax reserve. The decrease was also due to a $1.9 million decrease in acquisition-related costs, a $1.4 million decrease in impairment of right of use assets, $1.1 million decrease in insurance. This decrease was partially offset by a $6.9 million increase in stock-based compensation expenses primarily due to new awards granted, a $3.1 million increase in personnel related costs, as well as a $1.1 million increase in travel and entertainment expenses.

Impairment expense

During the year ended December 31, 2023, the Company recognized an impairment charge of $4.3 million, of which $3.0 million related to property and equipment, net and $1.3 million related to advance payments for the purchase of property and equipment. The write-off was primarily related to excess computer and networking equipment including software we expect to not be used. There were no such impairment charges recognized during the year ended December 31, 2022.

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Net Gain on Extinguishment of Debt

Year ended December 31,Change
20232022$ Change% Change
(in thousands)
Net gain on extinguishment of debt$52,416$54,391$(1,975)(4)%

Net gain on extinguishment of debt was $52.4 million for the year ended December 31, 2023 compared to $54.4 million for the year ended December 31, 2022, a decrease of $2.0 million, or 4%. The decrease was primarily due to a lower repurchase price we paid for the transaction during the year ended December 31, 2022 as compared to the repurchase transactions during the year ended December 31, 2023.

Other Income and Expense

Interest income

Year ended December 31,Change
20232022$ Change% Change
(in thousands)
Interest income$18,186$7,044$11,142158%

Interest income was $18.2 million for the year ended December 31, 2023 compared to $7.0 million for the year ended December 31, 2022, an increase of $11.1 million, or 158%. This increase was due to an increase in interest rates on our cash balances and investments portfolio.

Interest expense

Year ended December 31,Change
20232022$ Change% Change
(in thousands)
Interest expense$(4,051)$(5,887)$1,836(31)%

Interest expense was $4.1 million for the year ended December 31, 2023 compared to $5.9 million for the year ended December 31, 2022, a decrease of $1.8 million, or 31%. This decrease was primarily due to the repurchases that occurred during the years ended December 31, 2022 and December 31, 2023 which reduced the principal amount of our notes.

Other income (expense), net

Year ended December 31,Change
20232022$ Change% Change
(in thousands)
Other expense, net$(1,832)$(29)$(1,803)6,217%

Other expense, net was $1.8 million for the year ended December 31, 2023 compared to other expense, net, of less than $0.1 million for the year ended December 31, 2022, a decrease of $1.8 million, or 6217%. The decrease was mainly driven by our foreign currency transaction gains between the periods.

Income Taxes

Year ended December 31,Change
20232022$ Change% Change
(in thousands)
Income tax expense (benefit)$(221)$94$(315)(335)%

Income tax benefit was $0.2 million for the year ended December 31, 2023 and income tax expense of $0.1 million for the year ended December 31, 2022. The Company continues to maintain a full valuation allowance in the U.S. and the tax expense (benefit) for the periods were primarily due to foreign tax expense.

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Liquidity and Capital Resources

As of December 31, 2023, we had cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities totaling $328.8 million. Our cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities primarily consisted of bank deposits, money market funds, investment-grade commercial paper, corporate notes and bonds, U.S. treasury securities, municipal securities, foreign government and supranational securities and asset-backed securities held at major financial institutions. As of December 31, 2023, our marketable securities balance includes $6.1 million of marketable securities that were classified as non-current.

To date, we have financed our operations primarily through equity issuances, payments received from customers, the net proceeds we received through sales of our debt securities, and proceeds from our convertible notes. Our principal uses of cash in the near term have primarily been around funding our operations, our capital expenditures, business acquisitions, investments and fulfilling our debt and contractual commitments. We have also entered into longer term commitments to support our operations, including arrangements to directly lease and operate our infrastructure assets and colocation facilities. We have not entered into any off-balance sheet arrangements and do not have any holdings in variable interest entities.

We believe that our cash and cash equivalents balances, and available borrowing capacity under our credit facility, and the cash flows generated by our operations, net of the cash outflows used in our operations, will be sufficient to satisfy our anticipated cash needs for working capital and capital expenditures for at least the next 12 months. We have generated losses from operations in the past and expect to continue to incur operating losses for the foreseeable future due to the investments and strategic initiatives we intend to make to grow our business. Our uses of cash beyond the next 12 months will depend on many factors, including the general economic environment in which we operate and our ability to generate cash flow from operations, which are uncertain. We may also use our cash to buy back any outstanding debt on our convertible notes or on any future equity issuances.

Senior Secured Credit Facilities Agreement

On February 16, 2021, we entered into a Senior Secured Credit Facilities Agreement (“Credit Agreement”) with the lenders from time to time party thereto (the “Lenders”) and Silicon Valley Bank, as a lender and as administrative agent and collateral agent for the Lenders for an aggregate commitment amount of $100.0 million, with a maturity date of February 16, 2024. The Credit Agreement originally bore interest at a rate per annum equal to the sum of LIBOR for the applicable interest period plus 1.75% to 2.00%, depending on the average daily outstanding balance of all loans and letters of credit under the Credit Agreement. On June 28, 2023, we entered into the First Amendment to Credit Agreement with the Lenders and First-Citizens Bank & Trust Company (successor by purchase to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation as Receiver for Silicon Valley Bridge Bank, N.A. (as successor to Silicon Valley Bank)), as a lender and as administrative agent and collateral agent for the Lenders, which, among other things, amended the interest rate provisions of the Credit Agreement to replace LIBOR with the Secured Overnight Finance Rate (“SOFR”) as the interest rate benchmark. On February 16, 2024, we entered into the Second Amendment to Credit Agreement with the Lenders and Silicon Valley Bank, a division of First-Citizens Bank & Trust Company, as a lender and as administrative agent and collateral agent for the Lenders, which, among other things, extended the maturity date of the loans under the Credit Agreement to June 14, 2024. As amended, the revolving loans bear interest, at the Company’s election, at an annual rate based on SOFR or a base rate. Loans based on SOFR bear interest at a rate per annum equal to SOFR, plus an adjustment of 0.10%, plus 1.75% to 2.00%, depending on the average daily outstanding balance of all loans and letters of credit under the Credit Agreement. Loans based on the base rate bear interest at a rate per annual equal to the base rate plus 0.75% to 1.00%, depending on the average daily outstanding balance of all loans and letters of credit under the Credit Agreement.

Interest payments on outstanding borrowings are due on the last day of each interest period. The Credit Agreement has a commitment fee on the unused portion of the borrowing commitment, which is payable on the last day of each calendar quarter at a rate per annum of 0.20% to 0.25% depending on the average daily outstanding balance of all loans and letters of credit under the Credit Agreement. The Credit Agreement contains a financial covenant that requires us to maintain a consolidated adjusted quick ratio of at least 1:25 to 1:00 tested on a quarterly basis as well as a springing revenue growth covenant for certain periods if our consolidated adjusted quick ratio falls below 1.75 to 1:00 on the last day of any fiscal quarter. As of December 31, 2023, we were in compliance with these covenants and we expect to continue to be in compliance for at least the next 12 months. During the year ended December 31, 2023 and 2022, no amounts were drawn down on the Credit Agreement.

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Convertible Senior Notes

In March 2021, we issued $948.8 million aggregate principal amount of 0% convertible senior unsecured notes due in 2026 (the “Notes”) in a private placement to qualified institutional buyers pursuant to Rule144A under the Securities Act.

During the year ended December 31, 2023, we entered into several separate, privately negotiated transactions with certain holders of the Notes to repurchase $367.3 million aggregate principal amount of the Notes for an aggregate repurchase price of $309.1 million and aggregate transaction costs of $2.0 million. The Repurchases were accounted for as a debt extinguishment that resulted in a net gain of $52.4 million, which was recorded as non-operating income on our consolidated statement of operations for the year ended December 31, 2023.

The remaining Notes will mature on March 15, 2026, unless earlier converted, redeemed or repurchased.

Cash Flows

The following table summarizes our cash flows for the period indicated:

Year ended December 31,
202320222021
(in thousands)
Net cash (used in) provided by operating activities$362$(69,632)$(38,482)
Net cash (used in) provided by investing activities294,940235,751(794,511)
Net cash (used in) provided by financing activities(331,380)(189,149)936,551

Cash Flows from Operating Activities

For the year ended December 31, 2023, cash provided by operating activities consisted primarily of our net loss of $133.1 million, adjusted for non-cash items of $203.3 million, and net cash flows used in operating assets and liabilities of $69.9 million. The main drivers of the changes in operating assets and liabilities were an increase in accounts receivable of $32.9 million, primarily due to an increase in revenue and the timing of cash receipts, an increase in other assets of $23.1 million related to deferred contract costs as well as $22.1 million of operating lease payments. This was partially offset by decreases of $8.7 million in prepaid expenses.

For the year ended December 31, 2022, cash used in operating activities consisted primarily of our net loss of $190.8 million, adjusted for non-cash items of $207.3 million, and net cash flows used in operating assets and liabilities of $86.2 million. The main drivers of the changes in operating assets and liabilities were an increase in other assets of $35.4 million related to deferred contract costs, an increase in accounts receivable of $27.4 million, primarily due to an increase in revenue and the timing of cash receipts from certain of our larger customers and an increase of $6.8 million in prepaid expenses and other assets due to pre-payments for hosting services and software licenses. We also had $27.0 million of operating lease payments. There were also increases of $8.3 million in accrued expenses and $2.1 million in accounts payable and other liabilities due to timing of payments.

For the year ended December 31, 2021, cash used in operating activities consisted primarily of our net loss of $222.7 million adjusted for non-cash items of $227.3 million. With respect to changes in operating assets and liabilities, there was an increase in accounts receivable of $14.6 million, primarily due to an increase in revenue and the timing of cash receipts from certain of our larger customers and an increase of $15.2 million in prepaid expenses and other assets due to pre-payments for software licenses. We also had $26.4 million of operating lease payments. This was partially offset by increases of $4.3 million in accrued expenses and $8.9 million in other liabilities due to timing of payments.

Cash Flows from Investing Activities

For the year ended December 31, 2023, cash provided by investing activities was $294.9 million, primarily consisting of $459.4 million of maturities and sales of marketable securities. This was offset by $132.2 million in purchases of marketable securities, $21.3 million of additions to capitalized internal-use software, and $11.0 million of payments related to purchases of property and equipment to expand our network.

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For the year ended December 31, 2022, cash provided by investing activities was $235.8 million, primarily consisting of $697.0 million of maturities and sales of marketable securities. This was offset by $355.5 million in purchases of marketable securities, $42.2 million of advanced payments and $20.0 million of payments related to purchases of property and equipment to expand our network, $26.0 million related to business acquisitions and $18.1 million of additions to capitalized internal-use software.

For the year ended December 31, 2021, cash used in investing activities was $794.5 million, primarily consisting of $928.2 million in purchases of marketable securities, $34.8 million of payments related to purchases of property and equipment to expand our network, and $13.5 million of additions to capitalized internal-use software. This was partially offset by $184.6 million of maturities and sales of marketable securities.

Cash Flows from Financing Activities

For the year ended December 31, 2023, cash used in financing activities was $331.4 million, primarily consisting of $310.5 million used for the partial repurchase of our convertible debt, $27.2 million of finance lease liabilities repayments and $4.4 million in payments for deferred consideration for business acquisitions. This was partially offset by $8.6 million in proceeds from the employee stock purchase plan (“ESPP”) and $2.2 million in proceeds from stock option exercises by our employees and directors.

For the year ended December 31, 2022, cash used in financing activities was $189.1 million, primarily consisting of $177.1 million used for the partial repurchase of our convertible debt and $22.5 million of finance lease liabilities repayments. This was partially offset by $4.8 million in proceeds from the ESPP and $5.7 million in proceeds from stock option exercises by our employees and directors.

For the year ended December 31, 2021, cash provided by financing activities was $936.6 million, primarily consisting of $930.8 million of proceeds from the issuance of the Notes, net of issuance costs, $8.1 million in proceeds from the ESPP and $12.6 million in proceeds from stock option exercises by our employees and directors. This was partially offset by $13.6 million of finance lease liabilities repayments.

Contractual Obligations and Other Commitments

The following table summarizes our non-cancelable contractual obligations as of December 31, 2023:

Less than 1 Year1-3 Years3-5 YearsMore than 5 YearsTotal
(in thousands)
Purchase obligations – non-equipment(1)$54,638$7,990$151$$62,779
Purchase obligations – equipment (2)4,54112,12016,661
Operating lease obligations(3)28,16039,76412,9481,83882,710
Finance lease obligations(4)16,0641,61717,681
Debt obligation(5)346,489346,489
Total$103,403$407,980$13,099$1,838$526,320

__________

(1)    Purchase obligations-non equipment represent total future minimum payments under contracts with our cloud infrastructure providers, network service providers, and other vendors. Purchase obligations exclude agreements that are cancellable without penalty. Our purchase obligations exclude our operating lease commitments associated with our colocation arrangements which have been separately disclosed under our operating lease obligations.

(2)     Purchase obligations-equipment represent total future minimum payments under contracts for capital expenditures.

(3)     Operating lease obligations represent total future minimum rent payments under non-cancelable operating lease agreements, such as our facilities and colocation (i.e. data center) leases.

(4)    Finance lease obligations represents principal and interest payments under our networking equipment leases.

(5)    Debt obligation aggregate principal amount of our 0% convertible senior notes due on March 15, 2026.

These commitments will generally be settled with existing cash on hand, cash generated from operations and our current or any future financing arrangements.

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Critical Accounting Estimates

We prepare our consolidated financial statements in accordance with U.S. GAAP. The preparation of our consolidated financial statements requires us to make estimates, judgments, and assumptions that affect the reported amounts of assets, liabilities, revenue, costs, expenses, and related disclosures. Actual results and outcomes could differ significantly from our estimates, judgments, and assumptions. To the extent that there are material differences between these estimates and actual results, our future financial statement presentation, financial condition, results of operations, and cash flows will be affected.

Revenue recognition

We recognize revenue in accordance with ASC 606, where revenue is recognized upon transfer of control of promised products or services to customers in an amount that reflects the consideration we expect to receive in exchange for those products or services. The processing and recording of certain revenue requires a manual process, which uses a complex set of procedures to generate complete and accurate data to record these revenue transactions. We enter into contracts that can include various combinations of products and services, each of which are distinct and accounted for as separate performance obligations.

Our performance obligations generally represent stand-ready obligations that are satisfied over time as the customer simultaneously receives and consumes the benefits provided by us. These obligations can be network services, security, compute, professional services, support, and other edge cloud platform services. For contracts with multiple performance obligations that are delivered over different time periods, we allocate the contract transaction price to each performance obligation using the estimated standalone selling price (“SSP”) of each distinct good or service in the contract. Judgment is required to determine the SSP for each distinct performance obligation. We analyze separate sales of our products and services or the discounted list price per our approved price list as a basis for estimating the SSP of these products and services. In instances where SSP is not directly observable, such as when we do not sell the product or service separately, we determine the SSP using information that may include market conditions and other observable inputs. We typically have more than one SSP for individual products and services due to the stratification of those products and services by customers and circumstances. In these instances, we may use information, such as geographic region and distribution channel, in determining the SSP.

Stock-based Compensation Fair Value determination

We recognize compensation expense related to stock options based on the fair value of stock-based awards on the date of grant. We determine the grant date fair value of the awards using the Black-Scholes option-pricing model. The related stock-based compensation expense is recognized on a straight-line basis over the period in which an employee is required to provide service in exchange for the stock-based award, which is generally four years. Our stock price volatility and expected option life involve management’s best estimates, both of which impact the fair value of the option calculated under the Black-Scholes option pricing model and, ultimately, the expense that will be recognized over the life of the option.

We recognize stock-based compensation expense related to market-based performance stock awards based on the grant-date fair value of the awards. We determine the grant date fair value of the awards using the Monte Carlo simulation valuation model. The related stock-based compensation expense is recognized on an accelerated attribution method over the derived service period. The expected volatility was a blended volatility rate which incorporated both our observed equity volatility and our relevant guideline companies’ volatilities. The derived service period and the expected volatility involve management’s best estimates, both of which impact the fair value of the option calculated under the Monte Carlo simulation valuation model and, ultimately, the expense that will be recognized over the life of the option.

Valuation of Goodwill and Other Acquired Intangible Assets in Business Combinations

We account for our acquisitions using the acquisition method of accounting, which requires, among other things, allocation of the fair value of purchase consideration to the tangible and intangible assets acquired and liabilities assumed at their estimated fair values on the acquisition date. The excess of the fair value of purchase consideration over the values of these identifiable assets and liabilities is recorded as goodwill.

Determining the fair value of assets acquired and liabilities assumed requires significant judgment and estimates including the selection of valuation methodologies, future expected cash flows, discount rates, and useful lives. Our estimates of fair value are based on assumptions believed to be reasonable, but which are inherently uncertain and, as a result, actual results may

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differ from estimates. During the measurement period, not to exceed one year from the date of acquisition, we may record adjustments to the assets acquired and liabilities assumed with a corresponding offset to goodwill to reflect new information obtained about facts and circumstances that existed as of the acquisition date. At the conclusion of the measurement period, or final determination of the values of assets acquired or liabilities assumed, whichever comes first, any subsequent adjustments are reflected in the consolidated statements of operations.

Long-lived Assets Impairment

Long-lived assets, including property and equipment, are reviewed for impairment whenever events or changes in circumstances, such as service discontinuance, technological obsolescence, facility closures, planned use of the assets or work-force reductions indicate that the carrying amount of the long-lived asset or asset group may not be recoverable. When such events occur, we compare the carrying amount of the asset or asset group to the undiscounted expected future cash flows related to the asset or asset group. If this comparison indicates that an impairment is present, the amount of the impairment is calculated as the difference between the carrying amount and the fair value of the asset or asset group. The estimates required to apply this accounting policy include forecasted usage of the long-lived assets, the useful lives of these assets and expected future cash flows.

Goodwill Impairment

Goodwill represents the excess of the purchase price of an acquired business over the fair value of the net tangible and identifiable intangible assets acquired. The carrying amount of goodwill is reviewed for impairment at least annually, in the fourth quarter, or whenever events or changes in circumstances indicate that the carrying value may not be recoverable. We have a single operating segment and reporting unit structure for all of the periods presented.

To test for goodwill impairment, we compare the carrying value of our reporting unit with its fair value. If the carrying value of the goodwill is considered impaired, a loss is measured as the excess of the reporting unit’s carrying value over the fair value. As of December 31, 2023, we believe the estimated fair value of our one single reporting unit has substantially exceeded its carrying value.

Recent Accounting Pronouncements

Please refer to Note 2—Summary of Significant Accounting Policies included in the Notes to consolidated financial statements.

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FY 2022 10-K MD&A

SEC filing source: 0001517413-23-000035.

Extracted structurally from real Item 7 body heading to real Item 7A/8 boundary. Confidence: high. Filing date: 2023-02-27. Report date: 2022-12-31.

ITEM 7.     Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations

You should read the following discussion and analysis of our financial condition and results of operations together with the consolidated financial statements and related notes that are included elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. This discussion contains forward-looking statements based upon current plans, expectations, and beliefs that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements as a result of various factors, including those set forth under “Risk Factors” and in other parts of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Our fiscal year ends on December 31.

As used herein, "Fastly," "we," "our," "the Company" and similar terms include Fastly, Inc. and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise.

Overview

Organizations around the world are more dependent on the quality of digital experiences they provide than ever before. At Fastly, we deliver an edge cloud platform capable of delivering fast, safe, and engaging digital experiences. By focusing holistically on edge cloud from developer inspiration to end-user experience, we have the opportunity to differentiate with our global footprint, dynamic infrastructure, and security solution. Performance, security, and building the most engaging applications are paramount to driving mission success for Fastly’s customers.

The edge cloud is an emerging category of Infrastructure as a Service ("IaaS") that enables developers to build, secure, and deliver digital experiences, at the edge of the Internet. This service represents the convergence of the Content Delivery Network ("CDN") with functionality that has been traditionally delivered by hardware-centric appliances such as Application Delivery Controllers ("ADC"), Web Application Firewalls ("WAF"), Bot Detection, Distributed Denial of Service ("DDoS") and observability solutions. It also includes the emergence of a new, but growing, edge computing market which aims to move compute power and logic as close to the end user as possible. When milliseconds matter, processing at the edge is an ideal way to handle highly dynamic and time-sensitive data. This has led to its acceptance and adoption by organizations who monetize or grow their user base with every millisecond saved. Organizations that want to improve their user experience, whether it’s faster loading websites or reduced shopping cart abandonment, can benefit from processing at the edge. The edge cloud complements data center, central cloud, and hybrid solutions.

Organizations must keep up with complex and ever-evolving end-user requirements. We help them surpass their end users’ expectations by powering fast, safe, and engaging digital experiences. We built a powerful edge cloud platform, designed from the ground up to be programmable and support agile software development. We believe that our platform gives our customers a significant competitive advantage, whether they were born into the digital age or are just embarking on their digital transformation journey.

Developers on the Fastly platform have a high degree of flexibility with granular control and real-time visibility, where they can write and deploy code in a serverless environment and push application logic to the edge. Our infrastructure is built for the software-defined future. Our network is powerful, efficient, and flexible, designed to enable us to rapidly scale to meet the needs of the most demanding customers. Our approach to scalable, secure reliability integrates security into multiple layers of development: architecture, engineering, and operations. That's why we invest in building security into the fabric of our platform, alongside performance. We provide developers and security operations teams with a fast and safe environment to create, build, and run modern applications.

We serve established enterprises, mid-market companies, and technology-savvy organizations. Our customers represent a diverse set of organizations across many industries with one thing in common: they care about delivering best in class digital experiences. With our edge cloud platform, our customers are disrupting existing industries and creating new ones. For example, several of our customers have reinvented digital publishing by connecting readers through subscription models to indispensable content. Fastly’s ability to dynamically manage content in real time enables readers to have instant access to the most up to date information.

Our customers’ ecommerce solutions use Fastly's edge compute functionality to deliver very low latency customer experiences, including providing better recommendations to their shoppers, converting more shopping carts into sales and executing fast and secure financial transactions. Content streaming organizations leverage Fastly's platform to deliver content to

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users around the world and those that livestream gain easy access to enormous edge compute resources for even greater reliability. The range of applications that developers build with our edge cloud platform continues to expand rapidly.

Our mission is to make the Internet a better place where all experiences are fast, safe, and engaging. We want all developers to have the ability to deliver the next transformative digital experience on a global scale. And because big ideas often start small, we love it when developers experiment and iterate on our platform, coming up with exciting new ways to solve today’s complex problems.

For the years ended December 31, 2022 and 2021, our revenue was $432.7 million and $354.3 million, respectively, an increase of 22%. Our 10 largest customers generated an aggregate of 35% and 33% of our revenue in the trailing 12 months ended December 31, 2022 and 2021, respectively. Our 5 largest customers generated an aggregate of 26% and 22% of our revenue in the trailing 12 months ended December 31, 2022 and 2021, respectively. Affiliated customers that are business units of a single company in the streaming entertainment space generated an aggregate of 11% of our revenue in both the trailing 12 months ended December 31, 2022 and 2021. We incurred a net loss of $190.8 million and $222.7 million in the years ended December 31, 2022 and 2021, respectively.

We focus our direct selling efforts on expanding our customer's use of our platform, which includes companies that are exhibiting significant growth. We engage with and support these customers with our field sales representatives, account managers, and technical account managers who focus on customer satisfaction and drive expansion of their usage of our platform and products. These teams work with technical and business leaders to help our customers’ end-users receive the best possible digital experience, while also lowering our customers’ total cost of ownership.

These direct selling efforts are reflected by our 493 enterprise customers as of December 31, 2022. These enterprise customers are defined as customers with revenue in excess of $100,000 over the previous 12-month period. Our enterprise customers generated 89% of our total revenue for the trailing 12 months ended December 31, 2022, up from 445 enterprise customers which generated 88% of our revenue for the trailing 12 months ended December 31, 2021.

Our Dollar-Based Net Expansion Rate ("DBNER"), Net Retention Rate ("NRR") and Last-Twelve Months Net Retention Rate ("LTM NRR") metrics measure the revenue growth from existing customers attributable to increased usage of our platform and features, and purchase of additional products and services. For additional details on our key metrics, refer to the "Key Business Metrics" section.

We believe that an annual cohort analysis of Fastly's customers, as depicted in the chart below, demonstrates the continued expansion of our customers' use of our platform. Once a customer begins to generate revenue for us, they tend to increase their usage of our platform, in particular in their second year. Customer accounts acquired in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022 are referred to as the 2018 Cohort, 2019 Cohort, 2020 Cohort, 2021 Cohort and 2022 Cohort, respectively. We calculate the Compound Annual Growth Rate (“CAGR”), which represents the rate of revenue return of our revenue cohorts, over a five year history from when they were first customers.

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Summary of Revenue Generated by Customer Cohorts Over Time (in millions):

Our 2018 Cohort increased its revenue 3.1 times in fiscal 2019 and has grown at approximately a 60% CAGR over the next four years from fiscal 2019 to fiscal 2022.

We generate substantially all of our revenue from charging our customers based on their usage of our platform, and we generate a substantial majority of our revenue from customers that have negotiated contracts with us. Initially, customers typically choose to become platform customers, for which we charge fees based on their committed or actual use of our platform, as measured in gigabytes and requests. Many of our customers generate billings in excess of their minimum commitment. We also generate revenue from additional products as well as professional and other services, such as implementation, account management and enhanced customer support. We charge a flat one-time or recurring monthly fee depending on the additional products and services selected. Typically, the term of our contracts with customers is 12 months and includes a minimum monthly billing commitment in exchange for more favorable pricing terms. In addition, customers can sign up online by providing their credit card information and agreeing to a minimum monthly fee. We also offer subscriptions to access a unified security web application and application programming interface at a fixed rate.

The majority of our revenue is usage based and changes in usage by our largest customers can create volatility in our revenue. The length of our sales cycles, from initial evaluation to payment, can range from several months to well over a year and can vary substantially from customer to customer. Similarly, the onboarding and ramping process with new as well as existing enterprise customers with new business can take several months and can be subject to delays for unanticipated reasons. The timing of new revenue from our sales efforts and changes in usage by our largest customers can make revenue difficult to predict.

Factors Affecting Our Performance

Winning New Customers

We are focused on continuing to attract new customers, including those in new vertical markets, and expanding our relationship with existing customers, by enhancing our product experience, investing in technology,, and leveraging our partner ecosystem. Our customer base includes large, established enterprises that are undergoing digital transformation and emerging companies spanning a wide array of industries and verticals. Developers within these companies often use and advocate for the adoption of our platform by their companies and promotion across the broader developer community. We will continue to invest in our products and features and developer outreach, leveraging it as a cost-efficient approach to attracting new customers, and our sales and marketing programs, including various online marketing activities as well as targeted account-based advertising.

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We are continuing to bring a durable, consistent, and predictable pipeline of new innovations to our edge cloud platform and software-defined modern network architecture, and are seeing interest from customers in our existing product lines like Network Services and Security, and newer product lines like Compute and Observability. We will continue to build out a single, unified platform, simplify customer onboarding and service usage, and simplify our pricing and packaging. This will require us to dedicate significant resources to further develop the market for our platform and differentiate our platform from competitive products and services. We will also need to expand, retain, and motivate our sales and marketing personnel in order to target our sales efforts at larger enterprises and senior management of these potential customers.

Many jurisdictions have enacted laws on data localization and cross-border data transfers, and the evolving enforcement and interpretation of such laws has created uncertainty regarding data stored abroad and transferred across borders, which could impact customer growth and acquisition for customers and potential customers conducting business in Europe and elsewhere outside of the United States. For additional details, refer to the section titled "Risk Factors."

Expanding into New Vertical Markets and within Our Existing Customer Base

We aim to continue to add customers from a diverse set of industry verticals through our differentiated platform that offers a broad range of capabilities. By focusing on performance and security, we have the opportunity to continue to add customers from a diverse set of industries.

We emphasize retaining our customers and expanding their usage of our platform and adoption of our other products. Customers often begin with smaller deployments of one of our products and then expand their usage over time. Our platform includes a variety of offerings across Network Services, Security, Compute and Observability product lines. As our customers mature, we assist them in expanding their use of our platform, including the use of additional offerings beyond edge cloud delivery or security. As enterprises grow and experience increased traffic, their needs evolve, leading them to find additional use cases for our platform and expand their usage accordingly. In addition, given that customer acquisition costs are incurred largely for acquiring and initial onboarding, we may gain operating leverage to the extent that existing customers expand their use of our platform and products.

Our ability to retain customers and expand their usage could be impaired for a variety of reasons, including a customer moving to another provider or reducing usage within the term of their contract to their minimum usage commitment. Even if our customers expand their usage of our platform, we cannot guarantee that they will maintain those usage levels for any meaningful period of time or that they will renew their commitments. The data localization and cross-border data transfer issues described above also impact current customers' usage of our products and services.

In addition, we cannot be certain what actions the United States or another country's government may take with respect to certain of our customers that may adversely affect our ability to do business with our customers that operate in China, target China as a market or that have strong business ties to China.

International Expansion

We intend to continue expanding our efforts to attract customers outside of the United States by augmenting our sales teams and strategically increasing our presence in the number of markets in select international locations. As of December 31, 2022, our edge network spanned across 58 markets and 34 countries that are outside of the United States. As of December 31, 2021, our edge network spanned across 51 markets and 31 countries that are outside of the United States.

Our international expansion, including our global sales efforts, continues to add increased complexity and cost to our business. This requires us to expand our sales and marketing capabilities outside of the United States, as well as increase the number of markets we have a presence in around the world to support our customers. Managing the administrative aspects of a global organization places a strain on our business and culture.

We are closely monitoring the unfolding events of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its global impacts. While the conflict is still evolving and the outcome remains highly uncertain, we do not believe the Russia-Ukraine conflict will have a material impact on our business and results of operation. However, some threat actors now engage and are expected to continue to engage in cyber-attacks, including without limitation nation-state actors for geopolitical reasons and in conjunction with military conflicts and defense activities. During times of war and other major conflicts, we, the third parties upon which we rely, and our customers may be vulnerable to a heightened risk of these attacks, including retaliatory cyber-attacks, that could materially disrupt our systems and operations, supply chain, and ability to produce, sell and distribute our goods and services. If the Russia-Ukraine conflict continues or worsens, leading to greater global economic disruptions and uncertainty, our business

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and results of operations could be materially impacted. Our customers in Russia represented an immaterial portion of our net assets and total consolidated revenue as of December 31, 2022 and 2021.

Investing in Sales and Marketing

Our customers have been pivotal in driving brand awareness and broadening our reach. While we continue to leverage the self-service approach to drive adoption by developers, we will continue to expand our sales and marketing efforts, with an increased focus on sales to enterprises globally. Utilizing our direct sales force, we have multiple selling points within organizations to acquire new customers and increase usage from our existing customers. We will continue to increase our discretionary marketing spend, including account-based and brand spend, to drive the effectiveness of our sales teams. As a result, we expect our total operating expenses to increase as we continue to expand. Our investments in sales and marketing teams are intended to help accelerate our sales, onboarding, and ramp cycles.

These efforts will require us to continue to invest in sales and marketing resources. Furthermore, we believe that there is significant competition for sales personnel with the skills and technical knowledge that we require. Our ability to achieve significant revenue growth will depend, in large part, on our success in recruiting, training, and retaining sufficient numbers of sales personnel to support our growth.

Continued Investment in Our Platform and Network Infrastructure

We must continue to invest in our platform and network infrastructure to maintain our position in the market. We expect our revenue growth to be dependent on an expanding customer base and continued adoption of our edge cloud delivery, security, and other products and services. In anticipation of winning new customers and staying ahead of our customers’ needs, we plan to continue to invest in order to expand the scale and capacity of our software-defined modern network. This could result in increased network service provider fees, which could adversely affect our gross margins if we are unable to offset these costs with revenue from new customers and increase revenue from existing customers. Our customers require constant innovation within their own organizations and expect the same from us. Therefore, we will continue to invest in resources to enhance our development capabilities and introduce new products and features on our platform. We believe that investment in research and development will contribute to our long-term growth but may also negatively impact our short-term profitability. For the years ended December 31, 2022 and 2021, our research and development expenses as a percentage of revenue were 36% and 36%, respectively. We may also seek to acquire or invest in businesses, products, or technologies that we believe could complement or expand our platform, enhance our technical capabilities, or otherwise offer growth opportunities. For example, in May 2022, we acquired Glitch, a software company specializing in developer project management tools to bolster our existing product offerings, by making it easier to innovate at a layer in the Fastly software stack.

Developers use our platform to build custom applications and require a state-of-the-art infrastructure to test and run these applications. We will continue to invest in our network infrastructure by strategically increasing our POPs. We also anticipate making investments in upgrading our technology and hardware to continue providing our customers a fast and secure platform. Our gross margins and operating results are impacted by these investments. As of December 31, 2022, our global network is located in 79 markets across 35 countries.

In the event that there are errors in software, failures of hardware, damages to a facility or misconfigurations of any of our services—whether caused by our own error, security breaches, third-party error, or natural disasters—we could experience lengthy interruptions in our platform as well as delays and additional expenses in arranging new facilities and services. In addition, there can be no assurance that we are adequately prepared for unexpected increases in bandwidth demands by our customers, particularly when customers experience cyber-attacks. The bandwidth we have contracted to purchase may become unavailable for a variety of reasons, including service outages, payment disputes, network providers going out of business, natural disasters, networks imposing traffic limits, or governments adopting regulations that impact network operations.

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Key Business Metrics

We use the following key metrics presented in the table below, to evaluate our business, measure our performance, identify trends affecting our business, prepare financial projections, and make strategic decisions. The calculation of these key metrics below may differ from other similarly titled metrics used by other companies, securities analysts, or investors.

As of December 31,
20222021
Number of customers (as of end of period)2,9582,804
Number of enterprise customers (as of end of period)493445
Average enterprise customer spend (in thousands)$782$704
Dollar-Based Net Expansion Rate ("DBNER") (12 months)122.7%120.9%
NRR (as of end of period)110.7%106.6%
LTM NRR119.1%117.6%

Number of Customers

We believe that the number of customers is an important indicator of the adoption of our platform. Our definition of a customer consists of identifiable operating entities with which we have a billing relationship in good standing, from which we recognized revenue during the period. An identifiable operating entity is defined as a company, a government entity, or a distinct business unit of a larger company that has a relationship with us through direct sale or through one of our reseller partners where charges are identified on an end-customer basis. We may treat separate subsidiaries, segments, divisions, or business units of a single organization that use our platform as unique customers where they have distinct account identifiers. In cases where charges are identified through a reseller partner rather than on an end-customer basis, we would count the reseller as a single customer in our customer count. Our customer groupings may be impacted by changes to our customers’ business, including any impact from acquisition activities, internal business reorganizations leading to operational and decision making changes, and corporate structure changes such as subsidiary consolidation and reorganization that may arise in the future.

In addition to our paying customers, we also have trial, developer, nonprofit and open source programs, and other non-paying accounts that are excluded from our customer count metric. We operate globally and as a result, the success of our ability to retain our customers is also affected by general economic and market conditions around the world. As of December 31, 2022 and 2021, we had 2,958 and 2,804 customers, respectively.

Number of Enterprise Customers

Historically our revenue has been driven primarily by a subset of customers who have leveraged our platform substantially from a usage standpoint. These enterprise customers are defined as customers with revenue in excess of $100,000 over the previous 12-month period. As of December 31, 2022, we had 493 enterprise customers which generated 89% of our revenue for the trailing 12 months ended December 31, 2022. As of December 31, 2021, we had 445 enterprise customers which generated 88% of our revenue for the trailing 12 months ended December 31, 2021. We believe that the recruitment and cultivation of enterprise customers is critical to our long-term success.

Average Enterprise Customer Spend

Our enterprise customers continue to leverage our platform, increasing their spend on our platform and driving our revenue growth year over year. Average enterprise customer spend is calculated by taking the sum of the trailing 12-month revenue contributed by enterprise customers existing as of December 31, 2022, and dividing that by the number of enterprise customers as of December 31, 2022. As of December 31, 2022, our average enterprise customer spend was $782 thousand, as compared to $704 thousand as of December 31, 2021. The continued retention and growth of our enterprise customer spend is key to our long-term growth strategy.

Dollar-Based Net Expansion Rate ("DBNER")

Our ability to generate and increase our revenue is dependent upon our ability to increase the number of new customers and usage of our edge cloud delivery platform, security, and other products and services by our existing customers. We track

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our growth, in part, by measuring DBNER. Our DBNER increases when customers increase their usage of our platform or purchase additional products, and declines when they reduce their usage, benefit from lower pricing on their existing usage, or curtail their purchases of additional products. We believe that DBNER is a key metric in measuring the long-term value of our customer relationships and our ability to grow our revenue through increased usage of our edge cloud delivery platform, security, and purchase of additional products and services by our existing customers. However, our calculation of DBNER indicates only expansion among continuing customers and does not indicate any decrease in revenue attributable to former customers, which may differ from similar metrics of other companies.

We calculate DBNER by dividing the revenue for a given period from customers who remained customers as of the last day of the given period ("current period") by the revenue from the same customers for the same period measured one year prior ("base period"). The revenue included in the current period excludes revenue from (i) customers that churned after the end of the base period and (ii) new customers that entered into a customer agreement after the end of the base period. For example, to calculate our DBNER for the trailing 12 months ended December 31, 2022, we divide (i) revenue, for the trailing 12 months ended December 31, 2022, from customers that entered into a customer agreement on or before December 31, 2022, and that remained customers as of December 31, 2022, by (ii) revenue for the trailing 12 months ended December 31, 2021 from the same set of customers.

For the trailing 12 months ended December 31, 2022 and 2021 our DBNER was 122.7% and 120.9%, respectively. DBNER may fluctuate from quarter to quarter based on, among other things, the timing associated with new customer accounts. We expect our DBNER for individual cohorts to decrease once customers in that cohort have used our platform for more than two years and become a larger portion of both our overall customer base and the revenue that we use to calculate DBNER.

We separately monitor customer retention and churn on an annual basis by measuring our annual revenue retention rate, which we calculate by multiplying the final full month of revenue from a customer that terminated its contract with us (a "Churned Customer") by the number of months remaining in the same calendar year ("Annual Revenue Churn"). The quotient of the Annual Revenue Churn from all of our Churned Customers divided by our annual revenue of the same calendar year is then subtracted from 100% to determine our annual revenue retention rate. We believe this calculation is helpful in that it is based on the amount of revenue that we would expect to have received in the remaining portion of a particular period had a customer not terminated its contract with us. It is not indicative of the actual revenue contribution from churned customers in past periods. By comparing this amount to actual revenue for the period, we are able to assess our ability to replace terminated revenue by generating revenue from new and continuing customers. Our annual revenue retention rate for both of the years ended December 31, 2022 and 2021 was 99.2%.

Net Retention Rate ("NRR") and Last-Twelve Months Net Retention Rate ("LTM NRR")

Our ability to generate and increase our revenue is also dependent upon our ability to retain our existing customers. In addition to measuring expansion using DBNER, NRR and LTM NRR also allow us to track customer retention which demonstrates the stickiness of our edge cloud platform.

Our NRR measures the net change in monthly revenue from existing customers in the last month of the period (the “current" period month) compared to the last month of the same period one year prior (the “prior" period month) and includes revenue contraction due to billing decreases or customer churn, revenue expansion due to billing increases, but excludes revenue from new customers. We calculate Net Retention Rate by dividing the revenue from the current period month by the revenue in the prior period month. For the last month of the years ended December 31, 2022 and 2021 our NRR was 110.7% and 106.6%, respectively.

Our LTM NRR removes some of the volatility that is inherent in a usage-based business model from the measurement of the NRR metric. We calculate LTM NRR by dividing the total customer revenue for the prior twelve-month period (“prior 12-month period”) ending at the beginning of the last twelve-month period (“LTM period”) minus revenue contraction due to billing decreases or customer churn, plus revenue expansion due to billing increases during the LTM period from the same customers by the total prior 12-month period revenue. For the trailing twelve months ended December 31, 2022 and 2021 our LTM NRR was 119.1% and 117.6%, respectively.

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Key Components of Statement of Operations

Revenue

We derive our revenue primarily from usage-based fees earned from customers using our platform. We also earn fixed-rate recurring revenue from security and other products and services.

Our usage-based fees earned from customers using our platform are generally billed in arrears. Our security products are primarily annual subscriptions that are billed in advance. Many customers have tiered usage pricing which reflects discounted rates as usage increases. For most contracts, usage charges are determined on a monthly basis based on actual usage within the month and do not impact usage charges within any other month. Our larger customers often enter into contracts that contain minimum billing commitments and reflect discounted pricing associated with such usage levels.

We define United States revenue as revenue from customers that have a billing address in the United States, and we define international revenue as revenue from customers that have a billing address outside of the United States.

Cost of Revenue and Gross Margin

Cost of revenue consists primarily of fees paid to network providers for bandwidth and to third-party network data centers for housing servers, also known as colocation costs. Cost of revenue also includes employee costs for network operation, build-out and support and services delivery, network storage costs, cost of managed services and software-as-a-service, depreciation of network equipment used to deliver services, and amortization of network-related internal-use software. Our arrangements with network service providers require us to pay fees based on bandwidth use, in some cases subject to minimum commitments, which may be underutilized. Over the long term we expect cost of revenue to decrease as a percentage of revenue as we continue to drive efficiencies in our operations. However, our cost of revenue may fluctuate as a percentage of our revenue from period to period due to the timing and extent of these expenses.

Our gross margin has been and will continue to be affected by a number of factors, including utilization of our network, the timing of our investments in the expansion of our network, which can increase depreciation and colocation costs in advance of expected demand, our ability to manage our network service providers and cloud infrastructure-related fees, the timing of amortization of capitalized software development costs, changes in personnel costs to provide customer support and operate the network, and customer pricing. Over the long term we expect gross margin to increase as we continue to drive efficiencies in our operations. However, our gross margin may fluctuate from period to period.

Research and Development

Research and development expenses consist primarily of personnel costs, including salaries, benefits, bonuses, and stock-based compensation. Research and development expenses also include cloud infrastructure fees for development and testing, and an allocation of our general overhead expenses. We capitalize the portion of our software development costs that meet the criteria for capitalization.

We continue to focus our research and development efforts on adding new features and products including new use cases, improving the efficiency and performance of our network, and increasing the functionality of our existing products. Over the long term we expect our research and development expenses to decrease as a percentage of our revenue. However, our research and development expenses may fluctuate as a percentage of our revenue from period to period due to the timing and extent of these expenses.

Sales and Marketing

Sales and marketing expenses consist primarily of personnel costs, including commissions for our sales employees, salaries, benefits, bonuses, and stock-based compensation. Sales and marketing expenses also include expenditures related to advertising, marketing, our brand awareness activities, bandwidth and co-location costs for free trial users, costs related to our customer conferences, including our Altitude conference, professional services fees and amortization of our intangible assets, and an allocation of our general overhead expenses.

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We focus our sales and marketing efforts on generating awareness of our platform and products, creating sales leads, and establishing and promoting our brand, both domestically and internationally. Over the long term, we expect our sales and marketing expenses to decrease as a percentage of our revenue. However, our sales and marketing expenses may fluctuate as a percentage of our revenue from period to period due to the timing and extent of these expenses.

General and Administrative

General and administrative expenses consist primarily of personnel costs, including salaries, benefits, bonuses, and stock-based compensation for our administrative support personnel. General and administrative expenses also include costs related to legal and other professional services fees, SaaS costs, an allocation of our general overhead expenses, credit losses and acquisition-related costs.

Our general and administrative expenses also include sales and other tax expenses to which we are subject to based on the manner we sell and deliver our products. Historically, we have not collected such taxes from our customers and have therefore recorded such taxes as general and administrative expenses. We expect that these expenses will decline in future years as we continue to implement our sales tax collection mechanisms and start collecting these taxes from our customers.

In the near term, we expect to continue to incur costs associated with supporting the growth of our business, including international expansion, but expect these costs to decrease as a percentage of our revenue over the long term as we continue to drive efficiencies in our operations. However, our general and administrative expenses may fluctuate as a percentage of our revenue from period to period due to the timing and extent of these expenses.

Income Taxes

Our income tax expense consists primarily of income taxes in certain foreign jurisdictions where we conduct business and state minimum income taxes in the United States. We have a valuation allowance for deferred tax assets, including net operating loss carryforwards. We expect to maintain this valuation allowance for the foreseeable future.

Net Gain on Extinguishment of Debt

Our net gain on extinguishment of debt relates to the partial repurchase of our outstanding senior convertible notes at a discount in May 2022.

Other Income and Expenses

Our interest income consists primarily of interest earned on our cash, cash equivalents and investments. Our interest expense consists primarily of the interest expense on our finance leases and amortization of discount and debt issuance costs associated with our debt obligations. Our other income (expense), net, consists primarily of foreign currency transaction gains and losses.

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Results of Operations

In this section, we discuss the results of our operations for the year ended December 31, 2022 compared to the year ended December 31, 2021. For a discussion of the year ended December 31, 2021 compared to the year ended December 31, 2020, please refer to Part II, Item 7, "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations" in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2021.

Year ended December 31,
20222021
(in thousands)
Consolidated Statement of Operations:
Revenue$432,725$354,330
Cost of revenue(1)222,944167,002
Gross profit209,781187,328
Operating expenses:
Research and development(1)155,308126,859
Sales and marketing(1)179,869152,645
General and administrative(1)120,803126,845
Total operating expenses455,980406,349
Loss from operations(246,199)(219,021)
Net gain on extinguishment of debt54,391
Interest income7,0441,282
Interest expense(5,887)(5,245)
Other income (expense), net(29)356
Loss before income tax expense (benefit)(190,680)(222,628)
Income tax expense (benefit)9469
Net loss attributable to common stockholders$(190,774)$(222,697)
Year ended December 31,
20222021
Consolidated Statements of Operations, as a percentage of revenue:*
Revenue100%100%
Cost of revenue5247
Gross profit4853
Operating expenses:
Research and development3636
Sales and marketing4243
General and administrative2836
Total operating expenses105115
Loss from operations(57)(62)
Net gain on extinguishment of debt13
Interest income2
Interest expense(1)(1)
Other income (expense), net
Loss before income taxes(43)(63)
Income tax expense (benefit)
Net loss attributable to common stockholders(43)%(63)%

__________

*    Columns may not add up to 100% due to rounding.

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Revenue

Year ended December 31,Change
20222021$ Change% Change
(in thousands)
Revenue$432,725$354,330$78,39522%

Revenue was $432.7 million for the year ended December 31, 2022 compared to $354.3 million for the year ended December 31, 2021, an increase of $78.4 million, or 22%. Revenue growth was driven by the further adoption of our edge platform and products as well as a $17.4 million increase in revenue related to security products acquired from the acquisition of Signal Sciences.

We had 2,958 customers and 493 enterprise customers as of December 31, 2022. We had 2,804 customers and 445 enterprise customers as of December 31, 2021. This represents an increase of 154, or 5%, in customers and 48, or 11%, in enterprise customers from December 31, 2021.

Approximately 94% of our revenue in the year ended December 31, 2022 was driven by usage on our platform, primarily from existing customers, as revenue from new customers contributed less than 10% of our revenue. The proportion of the revenue contribution between new and existing customers is consistent with prior periods and typical customer behavior as customers tend to contribute more revenue over time as their use of the platform increases. The remainder of our revenue was generated by other products and services.

U.S. revenue was $316.1 million and 73% of revenue for the year ended December 31, 2022, and $260.4 million and 73% of revenue for the year ended December 31, 2021. This represents an increase of $55.8 million, or 21%. International revenue was $116.6 million and 27% of revenue for the year ended December 31, 2022, and $93.9 million and 27% of revenue for the year ended December 31, 2021. This represents an increase of $22.6 million, or 24%.

We had 2,074 domestic customers and 884 international customers as of December 31, 2022, and 2,111 domestic customers and 691 international customer as of December 31, 2021. There was a decrease in domestic customers of 37, or 2%, and an increase in international customers of 193, or 28%, compared to December 31, 2021.

Cost of Revenue

Year ended December 31,Change
20222021$ Change% Change
(in thousands)
Cost of revenue$222,944$167,002$55,94233%

Cost of revenue was $222.9 million for the year ended December 31, 2022 compared to $167.0 million for the year ended December 31, 2021, an increase of $55.9 million, or 33%. The increase in cost of revenue is a result of an increase in bandwidth costs of $17.4 million, colocation costs of $8.5 million, hosting services of $4.9 million and other network costs of $2.0 million. Depreciation and amortization expense increased by $10.8 million as a result of increased investments in our platform. There was also a $8.9 million increase in personnel related costs due to an increase in headcount and equity awards granted to employees supporting the growth of our business. There was also a one-time charge of $2.0 million related to cancellation of a commitment. Lastly, there was a $0.6 million increase in employee travel expenses due to the increase in work-related travel with the easing of travel-related restrictions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Gross Profit and Gross Margin

Year ended December 31,Change
20222021$ Change% Change
(in thousands)
Gross profit$209,781$187,328$22,45312%
Gross margin48%53%(4)%

Gross profit was $209.8 million for the year ended December 31, 2022 compared to $187.3 million for the year ended December 31, 2021, an increase of $22.5 million, or 12%. Gross margin was 48% for the year ended December 31, 2022 compared to 53% for the year ended December 31, 2021, a decrease of 4%. The decrease in gross margin was driven by increases in bandwidth, colocation, hosting services and other network costs, an increase in depreciation expense associated with our network equipment and an increase in travel and personnel-related costs, as part of our continued investment in infrastructure and capacity to build out our platform to support future customer traffic.

Operating Expenses

Year ended December 31,Change
20222021$ Change% Change
(in thousands)
Research and development$155,308$126,859$28,44922%
Sales and marketing179,869152,645$27,22418%
General and administrative120,803126,845$(6,042)(5)%
Total operating expenses$455,980$406,349$49,63112%
Percentage of revenue:
Research and development36%36%%
Sales and marketing42%43%(1)%
General and administrative28%36%(8)%

Research and development

Research and development expenses were $155.3 million for the year ended December 31, 2022 compared to $126.9 million for the year ended December 31, 2021, an increase of $28.4 million, or 22%. This is primarily due to an increase of $21.1 million of personnel-related costs, such as salaries, benefits, bonuses, and stock-based compensation due to an increase in headcount and equity awards granted to employees supporting our research and development efforts. There was also an increase of $2.4 million in hosting services and $1.7 million in SaaS costs as we continue to develop new products and features for our next-generation edge computing solutions. There was also a $1.4 million increase in employee travel expenses due to the increase in work-related travel with the easing of travel-related restrictions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. There was also an increase in professional fees of $0.9 million primarily related to temporary agency costs to support our internal development efforts.

Sales and marketing

Sales and marketing expenses were $179.9 million for the year ended December 31, 2022 compared to $152.6 million for the year ended December 31, 2021, an increase of $27.2 million, or 18%. This is primarily due to a $15.6 million increase in personnel related costs, such as salaries, sales commissions, benefits, and stock-based compensation, due to an increase in headcount and equity awards granted to employees supporting our sales and marketing efforts. There was also an increase of $5.9 million related to employee travel expenses due to increase in work-related travel with the easing of travel-related restrictions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. There was also a $2.7 million increase in marketing spend associated with brand campaign and advertising and an increase of $2.3 million in spending related to the software and hosting services costs used in our sales generation efforts.

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General and administrative

General and administrative costs were $120.8 million for the year ended December 31, 2022 compared to $126.8 million for the year ended December 31, 2021, a decrease of $6.0 million, or 5%. The net decrease is primarily due to a $18.9 million decrease in stock-based compensation expenses attributed to the function, offset by increases of $4.4 million in personnel related costs, such as salaries and benefits. The decrease was partially offset by an increase of $2.9 million in professional services such as legal and accounting services, an increase of $2.2 million in increase in the allowance for credit losses due the increase in revenue in the period, an increase of $2.1 million due to impairment of leased assets and a $1.3 million increase in SaaS costs to support the growth of our operations.

Net Gain on Extinguishment of Debt

Year ended December 31,Change
20222021$ Change% Change
(in thousands)
Net gain on extinguishment of debt$54,391$$54,391100%

We recognized a net gain on debt extinguishment of $54.4 million for the year ended December 31, 2022 relating to our repurchase at a discount in May 2022 of approximately $235 million aggregate principal amount of our outstanding 0% convertible senior unsecured notes due in 2026.

Other Income and Expense

Interest Income

Year ended December 31,Change
20222021$ Change% Change
(in thousands)
Interest income$7,044$1,282$5,762449%

Interest income was $7.0 million for the year ended December 31, 2022 compared to $1.3 million for the year ended December 31, 2021, an increase of $5.8 million, or 449%. This increase is due to an increase in interest rates on our cash balances and investments portfolio.

Interest Expense

Year ended December 31,Change
20222021$ Change% Change
(in thousands)
Interest expense$(5,887)$(5,245)$(642)12%

Interest expense was $5.9 million for the year ended December 31, 2022 compared to $5.2 million for the year ended December 31, 2021, an increase of $0.6 million, or 12%. This increase is primarily due to the amortization of debt issuance costs related to the convertible debt and revolving credit facility.

Other income(expense), net

Year ended December 31,Change
20222021$ Change% Change
(in thousands)
Other income (expense), net$(29)$356$(385)(108)%

Other expense, net was $0.0 million for the year ended December 31, 2022 compared to other income, net, of $0.4 million for the year ended December 31, 2021, a decrease of $0.4 million, or (108)%. The increase is mainly driven by our foreign currency transaction gains and losses between the periods.

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Income Tax Expense

Year ended December 31,Change
20222021$ Change% Change
(in thousands)
Income tax expense$94$69$2536%

Income tax expense was $0.1 million both for the year ended December 31, 2022 and for the year ended December 31, 2021. . The Company continues to maintain a full valuation allowance and the tax expense for the periods were primarily due to foreign tax expense.

Liquidity and Capital Resources

As of December 31, 2022, we had cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities and restricted cash totaling $683.1 million. Our cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities primarily consisted of bank deposits, money market funds, investment-grade commercial paper, corporate notes and bonds, U.S. treasury securities, municipal securities, foreign government and supranational securities and asset-backed securities held at major financial institutions. As of December 31, 2022, our marketable securities balance includes $165.1 million of marketable securities that were classified as non-current.

To date, we have financed our operations primarily through equity issuances, payments received from customers, the net proceeds we received through sales of our debt securities, and proceeds from our convertible notes. Our principal uses of cash in the near term have primarily been around funding our operations, our capital expenditures, business acquisitions, investments and fulfilling our debt and contractual commitments. We have also entered into longer term commitments to support our operations, including arrangements to directly lease and operate our infrastructure assets and colocation facilities. We have not entered into any off-balance sheet arrangements and do not have any holdings in variable interest entities.

We believe that our cash and cash equivalents balances, and available borrowing capacity under our credit facility, and the cash flows generated by our operations, net of the cash outflows used in our operations, will be sufficient to satisfy our anticipated cash needs for working capital and capital expenditures for at least the next 12 months. We have generated losses from operations in the past and expect to continue to incur operating losses for the foreseeable future due to the investments and strategic initiatives we intend to make to grow our business. Our uses of cash beyond the next 12 months will depend on many factors, including the general economic environment in which we operate and our ability to generate cash flow from operations, which are uncertain. We may also use our cash to buy back any outstanding debt on our convertible notes or on any future equity issuances.

Senior Secured Credit Facilities Agreement

On February 16, 2021, we entered into a Senior Secured Credit Facilities Agreement ("Credit Agreement") with Silicon Valley Bank for an aggregate commitment amount of $100.0 million, with a maturity date of February 16, 2024. The Credit Agreement bears interest at a rate per annum equal to the sum of LIBOR for the applicable interest period plus 1.75% to 2.00%, depending on the average daily outstanding balance of all loans and letters of credit under the Credit Agreement. Interest payments on outstanding borrowings are due on the last day of each interest period. The Credit Agreement has a commitment fee on the unused portion of the borrowing commitment, which is payable on the last day of each calendar quarter at a rate per annum of 0.20% to 0.25% depending on the average daily outstanding balance of all loans and letters of credit under the Credit Agreement. The agreement allows for an alternative interest rate to be used. The Credit Agreement contains a financial covenant that requires us to maintain a consolidated adjusted quick ratio of at least 1:25 to 1:00 tested on a quarterly basis as well as a springing revenue growth covenant for certain periods if our consolidated adjusted quick ratio falls below 1.75 to 1:00 on the last day of any fiscal quarter. As of December 31, 2022, we were in compliance with the covenant and we expect to continue to be in compliance for at least the next 12 months. During the year ended December 31, 2022and 2021, no amounts were drawn down on the Credit Agreement.

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Convertible Senior Notes

In March 2021, we issued approximately $948.8 million aggregate principal amount of 0% convertible senior unsecured notes due in 2026 (the "Notes") in a private placement to qualified institutional buyers pursuant to Rule144A under the Securities Act. On May 25, 2022, we entered into separate, privately negotiated transactions with certain holders of the Notes to repurchase (the "Repurchases") approximately $235.0 million aggregate outstanding principal amount of the Notes for an aggregate cash repurchase price of approximately $176.4 million. The Repurchases closed on May 31, 2022. The remaining Notes will mature on March 15, 2026, unless earlier converted, redeemed or repurchased.

Cash Flows

The following table summarizes our cash flows for the period indicated:

Year ended December 31,
202220212020
(in thousands)
Cash used in operating activities$(69,632)$(38,482)$(19,916)
Cash provided by (used in) investing activities235,751(794,511)(275,023)
Cash provided by (used in) financing activities(189,149)936,551272,739

Cash Flows from Operating Activities

For the year ended December 31, 2022, cash used in operating activities consisted primarily of our net loss of $190.8 million, adjusted for non-cash items of $207.3 million, and net cash flows used in operating assets and liabilities of $86.2 million. The main drivers of the changes in operating assets and liabilities were an increase in other assets of $35.4 million related to deferred contract costs, an increase in accounts receivable of $27.4 million, primarily due to an increase in revenue and the timing of cash receipts from certain of our larger customers and an increase of $6.8 million in prepaid expenses and other assets due to pre-payments for hosting services and software licenses. We also had $27.0 million of operating lease payments. There were also increases of $8.3 million in accrued expenses and $2.1 million in accounts payable and other liabilities due to timing of payments.

For the year ended December 31, 2021, cash used in operating activities consisted primarily of our net loss of $222.7 million adjusted for non-cash items of $227.3 million. With respect to changes in operating assets and liabilities, there was an increase in accounts receivable of $14.6 million, primarily due to an increase in revenue and the timing of cash receipts from certain of our larger customers and an increase of $15.2 million in prepaid expenses and other assets due to pre-payments for software licenses. We also had $26.4 million of operating lease payments. This was partially offset by increases of $4.3 million in accrued expenses and $8.9 million in other liabilities due to timing of payments.

For the year ended December 31, 2020, cash used in operating activities consisted primarily of our net loss of $95.9 million adjusted for non-cash items of $104.3 million. With respect to changes in operating assets and liabilities, there was a decrease in accounts receivable of $9.3 million, primarily due to increased collections due to the growth of our business and the timing of cash receipts from certain of our larger customers, and $22.7 million in prepaid expenses and other assets due to pre-payments for software licenses. We also had $18.3 million of operating lease payments. This was partially offset by an increase of $22.0 million in accounts payable, accrued expenses, and other liabilities due to timing of payments.

Cash Flows from Investing Activities

For the year ended December 31, 2022, cash provided by investing activities was $235.8 million, primarily consisting of $697.0 million of maturities and sales of marketable securities. This was offset by $355.5 million in purchases of marketable securities, $42.2 million of advanced payments and $20.0 million of payments related to purchases of property and equipment to expand our network, $26.0 million related to business acquisitions and $18.1 million of additions to capitalized internal-use software.

For the year ended December 31, 2021, cash used in investing activities was $794.5 million, primarily consisting of $928.2 million in purchases of marketable securities, $34.8 million of payments related to purchases of property and equipment

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to expand our network, and $13.5 million of additions to capitalized internal-use software. This was partially offset by $184.6 million of maturities and sales of marketable securities.

For the year ended December 31, 2020, cash used in investing activities was $275.0 million, primarily consisting of $269.1 million in purchases of marketable securities, $201.0 million of business acquisitions, net of cash acquired, $29.6 million of payments related to purchases of property and equipment to expand our network, $6.1 million of additions to capitalized internal-use software, and $1.8 million of purchases of intangible assets. This was offset by $232.0 million of maturities and sales of marketable securities.

Cash Flows from Financing Activities

For the year ended December 31, 2022, cash used in financing activities was $189.1 million, primarily consisting of $177.1 million used for the partial repurchase of our convertible debt and $22.5 million of finance lease liabilities repayments. This was partially offset by $4.8 million in proceeds from the employee stock purchase plan ("ESPP") and $5.7 million in proceeds from stock option exercises by our employees and directors.

For the year ended December 31, 2021, cash provided by financing activities was $936.6 million, primarily consisting of $930.8 million of proceeds from the issuance of the Notes, net of issuance costs, $8.1 million in proceeds from the employee stock purchase plan ("ESPP") and $12.6 million in proceeds from stock option exercises by our employees and directors. This was partially offset by $13.6 million of finance lease liabilities repayments.

For the year ended December 31, 2020, cash provided by financing activities was $272.7 million, primarily consisting of $274.9 million in proceeds from our follow-on public offering, net of underwriting fees, $9.3 million in proceeds from the ESPP, and $15.3 million in proceeds from stock option exercises by our employees and directors. This was partially offset by $20.3 million of debt repayments, $5.8 million of finance lease liabilities repayments, and $0.7 million of payments of costs related to our follow-on public offering.

Contractual Obligations and Other Commitments

The following table summarizes our non-cancelable contractual obligations as of December 31, 2022:

Less than 1 Year1-3 Years3-5 YearsMore than 5 YearsTotal
(in thousands)
Purchase obligations - non-equipment(1)$59,896$15,525$243$14$75,678
Purchase obligations - equipment (2)4,37011,12015,490
Operating lease obligations(3)27,41039,14526,9612,92896,444
Finance lease obligations(4)30,28515,89846,183
Debt obligation(5)713,753713,753
Total$121,961$81,688$740,957$2,942$947,548

__________

(1)    Purchase obligations-non equipment represent total future minimum payments under contracts with our cloud infrastructure providers, network service providers, and other vendors. Purchase obligations exclude agreements that are cancellable without penalty. Our purchase obligations exclude our operating lease commitments associated with our colocation arrangements which have been separately disclosed under our operating lease obligations.

(2)     Purchase obligations-equipment represent total future minimum payments under contracts for capital expenditures.

(3)     Operating lease obligations represent total future minimum rent payments under non-cancelable operating lease agreements, such as our facilities and colocation (i.e. data center) leases.

(4)    Finance lease obligations represents principal and interest payments under our networking equipment leases.

(5)    Debt obligation aggregate principal amount of our 0% convertible senior notes due on March 15, 2026.

These commitments will generally be settled with existing cash on hand, cash generated from operations and our current or any future financing arrangements.

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Critical Accounting Estimates

We prepare our consolidated financial statements in accordance with U.S. GAAP. The preparation of our consolidated financial statements requires us to make estimates, judgments, and assumptions that affect the reported amounts of assets, liabilities, revenue, costs, expenses, and related disclosures. Actual results and outcomes could differ significantly from our estimates, judgments, and assumptions. To the extent that there are material differences between these estimates and actual results, our future financial statement presentation, financial condition, results of operations, and cash flows will be affected.

Revenue recognition

We recognize revenue in accordance with ASC 606, where revenue is recognized upon transfer of control of promised products or services to customers in an amount that reflects the consideration we expect to receive in exchange for those products or services. The processing and recording of certain revenue requires a manual process, which uses a complex set of procedures to generate complete and accurate data to record these revenue transactions. We enter into contracts that can include various combinations of products and services, each of which are distinct and accounted for as separate performance obligations.

Our performance obligations generally represent stand-ready obligations that are satisfied over time as the customer simultaneously receives and consumes the benefits provided by us. These obligations can be network services, security, compute, professional services, support, and other edge cloud platform services. For contracts with multiple performance obligations that are delivered over different time periods, we allocate the contract transaction price to each performance obligation using the estimated standalone selling price ("SSP") of each distinct good or service in the contract. Judgment is required to determine the SSP for each distinct performance obligation. We analyze separate sales of our products and services or the discounted list price per our approved price list as a basis for estimating the SSP of these products and services. In instances where SSP is not directly observable, such as when we do not sell the product or service separately, we determine the SSP using information that may include market conditions and other observable inputs. We typically have more than one SSP for individual products and services due to the stratification of those products and services by customers and circumstances. In these instances, we may use information, such as geographic region and distribution channel, in determining the SSP.

Stock-based Compensation Fair Value determination

We recognize compensation expense related to stock options based on the fair value of stock-based awards on the date of grant. We determine the grant date fair value of the awards using the Black-Scholes option-pricing model. The related stock-based compensation expense is recognized on a straight-line basis over the period in which an employee is required to provide service in exchange for the stock-based award, which is generally four years. Our stock price volatility and expected option life involve management's best estimates, both of which impact the fair value of the option calculated under the Black-Scholes option pricing model and, ultimately, the expense that will be recognized over the life of the option.

We recognize stock-based compensation expense related to market-based performance stock awards based on the grant-date fair value of the awards. We determine the grant date fair value of the awards using the Monte Carlo simulation valuation model. The related stock-based compensation expense is recognized on an accelerated attribution method over the derived service period. The expected volatility was a blended volatility rate which incorporated both our observed equity volatility and the relevant guideline company volatility. The derived service period and the expected volatility involve management's best estimates, both of which impact the fair value of the option calculated under the Monte Carlo simulation valuation model and, ultimately, the expense that will be recognized over the life of the option.

Valuation of Goodwill and Other Acquired Intangible Assets in Business Combinations

We account for our acquisitions using the acquisition method of accounting, which requires, among other things, allocation of the fair value of purchase consideration to the tangible and intangible assets acquired and liabilities assumed at their estimated fair values on the acquisition date. The excess of the fair value of purchase consideration over the values of these identifiable assets and liabilities is recorded as goodwill.

Determining the fair value of assets acquired and liabilities assumed requires significant judgment and estimates including the selection of valuation methodologies, future expected cash flows, discount rates, and useful lives. Our estimates of fair value are based on assumptions believed to be reasonable, but which are inherently uncertain and, as a result, actual results may

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differ from estimates. During the measurement period, not to exceed one year from the date of acquisition, we may record adjustments to the assets acquired and liabilities assumed with a corresponding offset to goodwill to reflect new information obtained about facts and circumstances that existed as of the acquisition date. At the conclusion of the measurement period, or final determination of the values of assets acquired or liabilities assumed, whichever comes first, any subsequent adjustments are reflected in the consolidated statements of operations.

Goodwill Impairment

Goodwill represents the excess of the purchase price of an acquired business over the fair value of the net tangible and identifiable intangible assets acquired. The carrying amount of goodwill is reviewed for impairment at least annually, in the fourth quarter, or whenever events or changes in circumstances indicate that the carrying value may not be recoverable. We have a single operating segment and reporting unit structure for all of the periods presented.

To test for goodwill impairment, we compare the carrying value of our reporting unit with its fair value. If the carrying value of the goodwill is considered impaired, a loss is measured as the excess of the reporting unit’s carrying value over the fair value. As of October 31, 2022, our annual goodwill impairment assessment date, the estimated fair value of our one single reporting unit has substantially exceeded its carrying value.

Recent Accounting Pronouncements

Please refer to Note 2—Summary of Significant Accounting Policies included in the Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements.

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FY 2021 10-K MD&A

SEC filing source: 0001517413-22-000038.

Extracted structurally from real Item 7 body heading to real Item 7A/8 boundary. Confidence: high. Filing date: 2022-03-01. Report date: 2021-12-31.

ITEM 7.     Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations

You should read the following discussion and analysis of our financial condition and results of operations together with the consolidated financial statements and related notes that are included elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. This discussion contains forward-looking statements based upon current plans, expectations, and beliefs that involve risks and uncertainties. Our actual results may differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements as a result of various factors, including those set forth under “Risk Factors” and in other parts of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Our fiscal year ends on December 31.

As used herein, "Fastly," "we," "our," "the Company" and similar terms include Fastly, Inc. and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise.

Overview

Developers are reinventing the way we live, work, and play online. Yet they repeatedly encounter innovation barriers when delivering modern digital experiences. Expectations for digital experiences are at an all-time high; they must be fast, secure, and highly personalized. If they aren’t reliable, end-users simply take their business elsewhere. The challenge today is enabling developers to deliver a modern digital experience while simultaneously providing scale, security, and performance. We built our edge cloud platform to solve this problem.

The edge cloud is an emerging category of Infrastructure as a Service ("IaaS") that enables developers to build, secure, and deliver digital experiences, at the edge of the internet. This service represents the convergence of the Content Delivery Network ("CDN") with functionality that has been traditionally delivered by hardware-centric appliances such as Application Delivery Controllers ("ADC"), Web Application Firewalls ("WAF"), Bot Detection, Distributed Denial of Service ("DDoS") and observability solutions. It also includes the emergence of a new, but growing, edge computing market which aims to move compute power and logic as close to the end-user as possible. The edge cloud uses the emerging cloud computing, serverless paradigm in which the cloud provider runs the server and dynamically manages the allocation of machine resources while offering flexibility and control to developers. When milliseconds matter, processing at the edge is an ideal way to handle highly dynamic and time-sensitive data. This has led to its acceptance and adoption by organizations who monetize or grow their user base with every millisecond saved. Organizations that want their websites to load faster for every user can benefit from processing at the edge. The edge cloud complements data center, central cloud, and hybrid solutions.

Our mission is to fuel the next modern digital experience by providing developers with a programmable and reliable edge cloud platform that they adopt as their own.

Organizations must keep up with complex and ever-evolving end-user requirements. We help them surpass their end-users’ expectations by powering fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. We built a powerful edge cloud platform, designed from the ground up to be programmable and support agile software development. We believe our platform gives our customers a significant competitive advantage, whether they were born into the digital age or are just embarking on their digital transformation journey. Our platform consists of four key components: a programmable edge, a software-defined modern network, safety in depth, and a philosophy of customer empowerment. Our programmable edge provides developers with real-time visibility and granular control, where they can write and deploy code in a serverless environment and to push application logic to the edge. It provides tooling and templates to deploy some of the most commonly used workflows and leverages modern application delivery processes, thus freeing developers to innovate without constraints. Our software-defined modern network is built for the software-defined future. It is powerful, efficient, and flexible, designed to enable us to rapidly scale to meet the needs of the most demanding customers and never be a barrier to their growth. Our 184 terabit software-centric network is located across 71 markets as of December 31, 2021.We define markets as unique metropolitan areas where we have one or more Points of Presence ("POPs"). Our safety in depth approach integrates security into multiple layers of development: architecture, engineering, and operations. That's why we invest in building security into the fabric of our platform, alongside performance. We provide developers and security operations teams with a fast, safe environment to create, build, and run modern applications.

Our platform provides developers and security operations teams with solutions that foster innovation without impacting performance. Finally, being developers ourselves, we empower customers to build great things while supporting their efforts through frictionless tools and a deeply technical support team that facilitates ongoing collaboration.

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We serve both established enterprises, mid-market companies and technology-savvy organizations. Our customers represent a diverse set of organizations across many industries with one thing in common: they are competing by using the power of software to build differentiation at the edge. With our edge cloud platform, our customers are disrupting existing industries and creating new ones. For example, several of our customers have reinvented digital publishing by connecting readers through subscription models to indispensable content, helping people understand the world through deeply reported independent journalism. Our customers’ software applications use our edge cloud platform to deliver consistently excellent online shopping experiences, fast and more secure financial transactions, and broadcast quality live streaming on any device. The range of applications that developers build with our edge cloud platform continues to expand rapidly.

So where do we go from here? Our vision is to create a trustworthy internet, where good thrives. We want all developers to have the ability to deliver the next transformative digital experience on a global scale. And because big ideas often start small, we love it when developers experiment and iterate on our edge cloud platform, coming up with exciting new ways to solve today’s complex problems.

We generate substantially all of our revenue from charging our customers based on their usage of our platform. Initially, customers typically choose to become platform customers, for which we charge fees based on their committed or actual use of our platform, as measured in gigabytes and requests. Many of our customers generate billings in excess of their minimum commitment. We also generate revenue from additional products as well as professional and other services, such as implementation. We charge a flat one-time or recurring fee for these additional products and services. Beginning in the fourth quarter of 2020, we also began offering subscriptions to access a unified security web application and application programming interface at a fixed rate.

We focus our direct selling efforts on medium to large organizations as well as smaller companies that are exhibiting significant growth. We engage with and support these customers with our field sales representatives, account managers, and technical account managers who focus on customer satisfaction and drive expansion of their usage of our platform and products. These teams work with technical and business leaders to help our customers’ end-users receive the best possible digital experience, while also lowering our customers’ total cost of ownership.

These direct selling efforts are reflected by our 445 enterprise customers as of December 31, 2021 that generated 88% of our total revenue for the 12 months ended December 31, 2021, up from 378 enterprise customers which generated 89% of our revenue for the 12 months ended December 31, 2020. Enterprise customers are defined as customers with revenue in excess of $100,000 over the previous 12-month period.

Our Dollar-Based Net Expansion Rate ("DBNER"), Net Retention Rate ("NRR") and Last-Twelve Months Net Retention Rate ("LTM NRR") metrics measure the revenue growth from existing customers attributable to increased usage of our platform and features, and purchase of additional products and services.

The financial results of Signal Sciences have been consolidated into our financial results and key metrics since October 1, 2020, the date of acquisition. Our DBNER was 120.9% and 143.6% for the 12 months ended December 31, 2021, and 2020, respectively. Our NRR was 106.6% and 116.3% for the twelve months ended December 31, 2021 and 2020, respectively. Our LTM NRR was 117.6% and 137.4% for the 12 months ended December 31, 2021 and 2020, respectively. We believe the LTM NRR is supplemental as it removes some of the volatility inherent in a usage-based business model from the measurement of the NRR metric.

We believe that an annual cohort analysis of Fastly's customers as depicted in the chart below, demonstrates the continued expansion of our customers' use of our platform. Once a customer begins to generate revenue for us, they tend to increase their usage of our platform, in particular in their second year. Customer accounts acquired in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021 are referred to as the 2017 Cohort, 2018 Cohort, 2019 Cohort, 2020 Cohort and 2021 Cohort, respectively. Our 2017 Cohort increased its revenue 2.3 times after its first year and has grown at approximately a 50% CAGR over the last four years.

In 2017, we generated $5.6 million of revenue from the 2017 Cohort. Revenue from the 2017 Cohort grew to $16.8 million in 2018, representing 200% year-over-year growth. In 2018, we generated $11.2 million of revenue from the 2018 Cohort. Revenue from the 2018 Cohort grew to $34.4 million in 2019, representing 207% year-over-year growth. In 2019, we generated $9.1 million of revenue from the 2019 Cohort. Revenue from the 2019 Cohort grew to $47.7 million in 2020,

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representing 424% year-over-year growth. Revenue from the 2020 Cohort grew to $28.9 million in 2021, representing 144% year-over-year growth.

Summary of Revenue Generated by Customer Cohorts Over Time (in millions):

Customers that have negotiated contracts with us generate a substantial majority of our revenue. These customers typically purchase one or more products, for which we charge a monthly recurring or one-time fee depending on the products selected. Some of these customers also choose to purchase various levels of account management and enhanced customer support for a monthly fee. Typically, the term of these contracts is 12 months and includes a minimum monthly billing commitment in exchange for more favorable pricing terms. Many of these customers generate billings in excess of their minimum commitment. In addition, customers can sign up online by providing their credit card information and agreeing to a minimum monthly fee. Beginning in the fourth quarter of 2020, we also offer subscriptions to access a unified security web application and application programming interface at a fixed rate.

The majority of our revenue is usage based and changes in usage by our largest customers can create volatility in our revenue. The length of our sales cycle, from initial evaluation to payment, can range from several months to well over a year and can vary substantially from customer to customer. Similarly, the onboarding and ramping process with new enterprise customers can take several months, as well as existing enterprise customers with new business, can take several months and can be subject to delays for unanticipated reasons. For example, we experienced delays in the ramping of new traffic due to travel and data center restrictions in South Asia that delayed network build outs and the timing of customer code freezes, each affected in part by COVID-19-related issues. The timing of new revenue from our sales efforts and changes in usage by our largest customers can make revenue difficult to predict.

For the years ended December 31, 2021 and 2020, our revenue was $354.3 million and $290.9 million, respectively. Our 10 largest customers generated an aggregate of 33% and 38% of our revenue in the 12 months ended December 31, 2021 and 2020, respectively. We incurred a net loss of $222.7 million and $95.9 million in the years ended December 31, 2021 and 2020, respectively.

Acquisition of Signal Sciences

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On October 1 2020, we acquired Signal Sciences, for an aggregate purchase price of $759.4 million, consisting of approximately $223.0 million in cash and 6,367,709 shares of our Class A common stock, including 896,499 shares which are restricted as they are subject to revesting conditions. The aggregate purchase price reflects the value of the net shares issued, which excludes the above mentioned shares that are restricted. We also assumed all unvested and outstanding equity awards of Signal Sciences’ continuing employees as converted into our equity awards at the conversion ratio provided in the Agreement and Plan of Reorganization (the "Merger Agreement"), which became options to purchase 251,754 shares of our Class A common stock, with a value of $20.7 million related to the assumed unvested equity awards that are subject to future service conditions.

We have included Signal Sciences in our results of operations as of the acquisition date, October 1, 2020. For the year ended December 31, 2020, the information presented in this section includes the contribution of Signal Sciences starting from October 1, 2020. For the year ended December 31, 2021, the results include the contribution of Signal Sciences for the full year. As a result, comparisons to the prior-year period may not be indicative of future results or future rates of growth.

Please refer to Note 5—Business Combination for further details on the acquisition of Signal Sciences.

Adjustments subsequent to the release of earnings on February 16, 2022

Subsequent to our announcement of earnings and issuance of our press release, furnished in a Form 8-K on February 16, 2022, for the year ended December 31, 2021, we increased our Property and Equipment, net Other Current Liabilities by $6.9 million to accrue for additional assets received at year-end but not yet paid for or financed. This increased total assets, total current liabilities, total liabilities and total liabilities and stockholders' equity by $6.9 million. These adjustments update balances previously disclosed in our press release for the year ended December 31, 2021.

Factors Affecting Our Performance

Winning New Customers

We are focused on continuing to attract new customers. Our customer base includes both large, established enterprises that are undergoing digital transformation and emerging companies spanning a wide array of industries and verticals. In both instances, developers within these companies often use and advocate the adoption of our platform by their companies. We also benefit from word-of-mouth promotion across the broader developer community. We will continue to invest in our developer outreach, leveraging it as a cost-efficient approach to attracting new customers. With our expanded security portfolio from the acquisition of Signal Sciences, other security products, and our edge computing capabilities we will increase our focus on brand awareness, public relations and analyst relations in efforts to help generate awareness and demand for these offerings. We will continue to dedicate significant resources to sales and marketing programs, including various online marketing activities as well as targeted account-based advertising.

We are continuing to bring new innovations to our edge cloud platform and software-defined modern network architecture, and are seeing an increased interest from customers in our programmable edge computing solution. This will require us to dedicate significant resources to further develop the market for our platform and differentiate our platform from competitive products and services. We will also need to expand, retain, and motivate our sales and marketing personnel in order to target our sales efforts at larger enterprises and senior management of these potential customers.

Many jurisdictions have enacted laws on data localization and cross-border data transfers, and the evolving enforcement and interpretation of such laws has created uncertainty regarding data stored abroad and transferred across borders, which could impact customer growth and acquisition for customers and potential customers conducting business in Europe and elsewhere outside of the United States. We have encountered and may continue to encounter heightened concerns relating to privacy, data protection, and information security from customers and potential customers conducting business outside of the United States. Specifically, we have received more requests relating to EU privacy requirements, impacting the sales negotiation process, and we have had potential customers decline to do business with us due to privacy concerns related to updated interpretations of the laws applicable to transfers of personal information to the United States. For additional details, refer to "Item 1A.—Risk Factors".

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Expanding within our Existing Customer Base

We emphasize retaining our customers and expanding their usage of our platform and adoption of our other products. Customers often begin with smaller deployments of one of our products and then expand their usage over time. Our platform includes a variety of offerings, such as load balancing, shielding, web security, and WAF. As our customers mature, we assist them in expanding their use of our platform, including the use of additional offerings beyond edge cloud delivery or security. As enterprises grow and experience increased traffic, their needs evolve, leading them to find additional use cases for our platform and expand their usage accordingly. In addition, given that customer acquisition costs are incurred largely for acquiring and initial onboarding, we gain operating leverage to the extent that existing customers expand their use of our platform and products.

Our ability to retain our customers and expand their usage could be impaired for a variety of reasons, including a customer moving to another provider or reducing usage within the term of their contract to their minimum usage commitment. Even if our customers expand their usage of our platform, we cannot guarantee that they will maintain those usage levels for any meaningful period of time or that they will renew their commitments.

The data localization and cross-border data transfer issues described above also impact current customers' increased usage of our products and services. In addition, we cannot be certain what actions the United States or another country's government may take with respect to certain of our customers that may adversely affect our ability to do business with our customers that operate in China, target China as a market or that have strong business ties to China. For example, our largest customer during the year ended December 31, 2020 had strong business ties to China and significantly reduced its usage of our platform. We believe this was in response to various actions taken by the United States and other governments against them. Further reductions in this customer's traffic levels could have an additional negative impact on our business.

For additional details, refer to "Item 1A.—Risk Factors".

International Customer Growth

We intend to continue expanding our efforts to attract customers outside of the United States by augmenting our sales teams and strategically increasing our presence in the number of markets in select international locations. As of December 31, 2021, our edge network spans across 51 markets and 31 countries that are outside of the United States. As of December 31, 2020, our edge network spans across 40 markets and 25 countries that are outside of the United States.

Our international expansion, including our global sales efforts, continues to add increased complexity and cost to our business. This requires us to expand our sales and marketing capabilities outside of the United States, as well as increase the number of markets we have a presence in around the world to support our customers. Managing the administrative aspects of a global organization places a strain on our business and culture.

Investing in Sales and Marketing

Our customers have been pivotal in driving brand awareness and broadening our reach. While we continue to leverage our self-service approach to drive adoption by developers, we will continue to expand our sales and marketing efforts, with an increased focus on sales to enterprises globally. Utilizing our direct sales force, we have multiple selling points within organizations to acquire new customers and increase usage from our existing customers. We will continue to increase our discretionary marketing spend, including account based and brand spend, to drive the effectiveness of our sales teams. As a result, we expect our total operating expenses to increase as we continue to expand. Our investments in our sales and marketing teams are intended to help accelerate our sales, onboarding, and ramp cycles.

These efforts will require us to invest significantly in financial and other resources. Furthermore, we believe that there is significant competition for sales personnel with the skills and technical knowledge that we require. Our ability to achieve significant revenue growth will depend, in large part, on our success in recruiting, training, and retaining sufficient numbers of sales personnel to support our growth.

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Continued Investment in Our Platform and Network Infrastructure

We must continue to invest in our platform and network infrastructure to maintain our position in the market. We expect our revenue growth to be dependent on an expanding customer base and continued adoption of our edge cloud delivery, security, and other products and services. In anticipation of winning new customers and staying ahead of our customers’ needs, we plan to continue to invest in order to expand the scale and capacity of our software-defined modern network, resulting in increased network service provider fees, which could adversely affect our gross margins if we are unable to offset these costs with revenue from new customers and increase revenue from existing customers. Our customers require constant innovation within their own organizations and expect the same from us. Therefore, we will continue to invest in resources to enhance our development capabilities and introduce new products and features on our platform. We believe that investment in research and development will contribute to our long-term growth but may also negatively impact our short-term profitability. For the years ended December 31, 2021 and 2020, our research and development expenses as a percentage of revenue was 36% and 26%, respectively. We may also seek to acquire or invest in businesses, products, or technologies that we believe could complement or expand our platform, enhance our technical capabilities, or otherwise offer growth opportunities. For example, on October 1, 2020, we acquired Signal Sciences, a security software company that provides protection from web, API, and mobile security threats.

Developers use our platform to build custom applications and require a state-of-the-art infrastructure to test and run these applications. We will continue to invest in our network infrastructure by strategically increasing our POPs. We also anticipate making investments in upgrading our technology and hardware to continue providing our customers a fast and secure platform. Our cash additions for investments in property and equipment for the years ended December 31, 2021 and 2020 were $48.6 million and $49.0 million, respectively, representing 14% and 17% of our revenue in such periods. We expect our investment in property and equipment to increase on an absolute basis and may increase as a percentage of revenue in future periods. Our gross margins and operating results are impacted by these investments. As of December 31, 2021, our network is located in 71 markets across 32 countries.

In the event that there are errors in software, failures of hardware, damages to a facility or misconfigurations of any of our services—whether caused by our own error, security breaches, third-party error, or natural disasters—we could experience lengthy interruptions in our platform as well as delays and additional expenses in arranging new facilities and services. In addition, there can be no assurance that we are adequately prepared for unexpected increases in bandwidth demands by our customers, particularly when customers experience cyber-attacks. The bandwidth we have contracted to purchase may become unavailable for a variety of reasons, including service outages, payment disputes, network providers going out of business, natural disasters, networks imposing traffic limits, or governments adopting regulations that impact network operations.

Uncertainty of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic

The ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic has adversely impacted, and may continue to adversely impact, many aspects of our business. As certain of our customers or potential customers experience downturns or uncertainty in their own business operations and revenue resulting from the spread of COVID-19, they have and may continue to decrease or delay their technology spending, request pricing concessions or payment extensions, or seek renegotiation of their contracts. In addition, a portion of our revenue is related to usage of our platform in connection with live events, such as sporting events, that have continued to be impacted. Usage of our platform fluctuated following the implementation of preventative measures to contain or mitigate the outbreak of COVID-19, and we cannot predict how usage levels will continue to be impacted by these preventative measures. There is no assurance that customers will continue to use our platform, or to the same extent, as the COVID-19 pandemic begins to taper off or when it has ended. As a result, it has been difficult to accurately forecast our revenues or financial results, especially given that the near and long term impacts of the pandemic remain uncertain. Our results of operations could be materially below our forecasts, which could adversely affect our results of operations, disappoint analysts and investors, or cause our stock price to decline.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many state, local, and foreign governments have put in place restrictions in order to control the spread of the disease. Such restrictions, or the perception that further restrictions could occur, have resulted in business closures, work stoppages, slowdowns and delays, work-from-home policies, travel restrictions, and cancellation or postponement of events, among other effects that impacted productivity and disrupted our operations and those of our partners and customers. For example, we experienced delays in the ramping of new traffic due to travel and data center restrictions in South Asia that delayed network build outs and the timing of customer code freezes, each affected in part due to COVID-19-related issues. In addition, our suppliers have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has reduced the availability or

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resulted in delays, and may continue to reduce the availability or result in delays, of parts and components to us. Our offices have remained temporarily closed since March 2020, and we have taken other precautionary measures, such as instituting protocols and guidelines for Fastly-related travel and shifting to hosting virtual Fastly-sponsored events in lieu of in-person events. We may take further actions that alter our operations as may be required by federal, state, or local authorities, or which we determine are in our best interests. While much of our operations can be performed remotely, certain activities such as expanding and maintaining our network of POPs around the world often require personnel to be on-site, and our ability to carry out these activities has been, and may continue to be, negatively impacted if our employees or local data center personnel are not able to travel. In addition, travel restrictions have affected our ability to conduct audits of our data centers and facilities, requiring us to use alternative procedures to the standard on-site visit. Any inability to complete these audits could affect our compliance certifications and cause customers to reduce or cease using our services. In addition, for activities that may be conducted remotely, there is no guarantee that we will be as effective while working remotely because our team is dispersed and many employees and their families have been negatively affected, mentally or physically, by the COVID-19 pandemic. Decreased effectiveness and availability of our team could adversely affect our results due to slow-downs in our sales cycles and our customer ramping and onboarding process, delays in recruiting and onboarding efforts, delays in our entry into customer contracts, delays in addressing performance issues, delays in product development, delays and inefficiencies among various operational aspects of our business, including our financial organization, or other decreases in productivity that could seriously harm our business. Moreover, our finance organization’s ability to ensure that we comply with the requirements of Section 404 may be impaired in the future, including the ability of our registered public accounting firm to issue an attestation report on management’s assessment of our internal control over financial reporting. Furthermore, we may decide to postpone or cancel planned investments in our business in response to changes in our business as a result of the spread of COVID-19, which may impact our ability to attract and retain customers and our rate of innovation, either of which could harm our business.

In addition, while the potential impact and duration of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global economy and our business in particular may be difficult to assess or predict, the pandemic has resulted in, and may continue to result in, significant disruption of global financial markets, and may reduce our ability to access additional capital, which could negatively affect our liquidity in the future.

The ultimate duration and extent of the impact from the COVID-19 pandemic depends on future developments that cannot be accurately forecasted at this time. These developments include the severity and transmission rate of the disease, the emergence of new variants, the actions of governments, businesses and individuals in response to the pandemic, the extent and effectiveness of containment actions and vaccines, the impact on economic activity and the impact of these and other factors. We do not yet know how businesses, customers, or our partners will operate in a post COVID-19 environment. There may be additional costs or impacts to our business and operations, including when we are able to return to our offices and resume in-person activities, travel, and events. In addition, there is no guarantee that a future outbreak of this or any other widespread epidemics will not occur, or that the global economy will recover, either of which could harm our business.

For additional details, refer to our risk factors included in Part I. Item 1A. of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

Key Business Metrics

We regularly review a number of metrics, including the key metrics presented in the table below, to evaluate our business, measure our performance, identify trends affecting our business, prepare financial projections, and make strategic decisions. The calculation of the key metrics and other measures discussed below may differ from other similarly titled metrics used by other companies, securities analysts, or investors. Certain of our key metrics and financial results were favorably impacted by increases in traffic driven by the COVID-19 pandemic and our largest customer in 2020. In 2021, we saw some return to normal seasonal patterns of traffic and growth and an impact to our revenue from an outage in June 2021. We have

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included Signal Sciences in our results of operations as of the acquisition date, October 1, 2020. For the year ended December 31, 2021, the results include the contribution of Signal Sciences for the full year.

As of December 31,
20212020
Number of customers (as of end of period)2,8042,326
Number of enterprise customers (as of end of period)445378
Dollar-Based Net Expansion Rate ("DBNER") (12 months)120.9%143.6%
NRR (as of end of period)106.6%116.3%
LTM NRR117.6%137.4%

Number of Customers

We believe that the number of customers is an important indicator of the adoption of our platform. Our definition of a customer consists of identifiable operating entities with which we have a billing relationship in good standing, from which we recognized revenue during the period. An identifiable operating entity is defined as a company, a government entity, or a distinct business unit of a larger company that has a relationship with Fastly through direct sale or through one of our reseller partners where charges are identified on an end-customer basis. In cases where charges are identified through a reseller partner rather than on an end-customer basis, we record a single customer record for the reseller partner. Our customer groupings may be impacted by changes to our customers’ business, including any impact from merger and acquisition activities, internal business reorganizations leading to operational and decision making changes, and corporate structure changes such as subsidiary consolidation and reorganization that may arise in the future. In addition to our paying customers, we also have trial, developer, nonprofit and open source programs, and other non-paying accounts that are excluded from our customer count metric. As of December 31, 2021 and 2020, we had 2,804 and 2,326 customers, respectively.

Number of Enterprise Customers

Historically our revenue has been driven primarily by a subset of customers who have leveraged our platform substantially from a usage standpoint. These enterprise customers are defined as customers with revenue in excess of $100,000 over the previous 12-month period. As of December 31, 2021, we had 445 enterprise customers which generated 88% of our revenue for the 12 months ended December 31, 2021. As of December 31, 2020, we had 378 enterprise customers which generated 89% of our revenue for the 12 months ended December 31, 2020. We believe the recruitment and cultivation of enterprise customers is critical to our long-term success.

Dollar-Based Net Expansion Rate ("DBNER")

Our ability to generate and increase our revenue is dependent upon our ability to increase the number of new customers and usage of our edge cloud delivery platform, security, and other products and services by our existing customers. We track our growth, in part, by measuring DBNER. Our DBNER increases when customers increase their usage of our platform or purchase additional products, and declines when they reduce their usage, benefit from lower pricing on their existing usage, or curtail their purchases of additional products. We believe DBNER is a key metric in measuring the long-term value of our customer relationships and our ability to grow our revenue through increased usage of our edge cloud delivery platform, security, and purchase of additional products and services by our existing customers. However, our calculation of DBNER indicates only expansion among continuing customers and does not indicate any decrease in revenue attributable to former customers, which may differ from similar metrics of other companies.

We calculate DBNER by dividing the revenue for a given period from customers who remained customers as of the last day of the given period ("current period") by the revenue from the same customers for the same period measured one year prior ("base period"). The revenue included in the current period excludes revenue from (i) customers that churned after the end of the base period and (ii) new customers that entered into a customer agreement after the end of the base period. For example, to calculate our DBNER for the 12 months ended December 31, 2021, we divide (i) revenue for the 12 months ended December 31, 2021, from customers that entered into a customer agreement prior to January 1, 2020, and that remained customers as of December 31, 2021, by (ii) revenue for the 12 months ended December 31, 2020 from the same set of customers.

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For the 12 months ended December 31, 2021 and 2020 our DBNER was 120.9% and 143.6%, respectively. We believe that an annual cohort analysis of our customers demonstrates customer expansion. Once a customer begins to generate revenue for us, they tend to increase their usage of our platform, in particular in their second year. Customer accounts acquired in 2019, 2020, and 2021 are referred to as the 2019 Cohort, 2020 Cohort, and 2021 Cohort, respectively. As described above, our customers tend to increase their usage of our platform in their second year, which is typically followed by more modest increases in usage, if any, in ensuing years. For example, the DBNER for the 2019 Cohort was 580.8% for the year ended December 31, 2020. However, the DBNER for the 2019 Cohort was 150.8% for the year ended December 31, 2021, which generally represents their third year as a customer, depending on when they entered into a customer agreement. DBNER may fluctuate from quarter to quarter based on, among other things, the timing associated with new customer accounts. We expect our DBNER for individual cohorts to decrease once customers in that cohort have used our platform for more than two years and become a larger portion of both our overall customer base and the revenue that we use to calculate DBNER.

We separately monitor customer retention and churn on an annual basis by measuring our annual revenue retention rate, which we calculate by multiplying the final full month of revenue from a customer that terminated its contract with us (a "Churned Customer") by the number of months remaining in the same calendar year ("Annual Revenue Churn"). The quotient of the Annual Revenue Churn from all of our Churned Customers divided by our annual revenue of the same calendar year is then subtracted from 100% to determine our annual revenue retention rate. We believe this calculation is helpful in that it is based on the amount of revenue that we would expect to have received in the remaining portion of a particular period had a customer not terminated its contract with us. It is not indicative of the actual revenue contribution from churned customers in past periods. By comparing this amount to actual revenue for the period, we are able to assess our ability to replace terminated revenue by generating revenue from new and continuing customers. Our annual revenue retention rate for the years ended December 31, 2021 and 2020 was 99.2% and 99.3%, respectively.

Net Retention Rate ("NRR") and Last-Twelve Months Net Retention Rate ("LTM NRR")

Our ability to generate and increase our revenue is also dependent upon our ability to retain our existing customers. In addition to measuring expansion using DBNER, NRR and LTM NRR also allow us to track customer retention which demonstrates the stickiness of our edge cloud platform.

Our NRR measures the net change in monthly revenue from existing customers in the last month of the period (the “current" period month) compared to the last month of the same period one year prior (the “prior" period month) and includes revenue contraction due to billing decreases or customer churn, revenue expansion due to billing increases, but excludes revenue from new customers. We calculate Net Retention Rate by dividing the revenue from the current period month by the revenue in the prior period month. For the last month of the years ended December 31, 2021 and 2020 our NRR was 106.6% and 116.3%, respectively.

Our LTM NRR is intended to be supplemental to our NRR as we believe that it removes some of the volatility that is inherent in a usage-based business model. We calculate LTM NRR by dividing the total customer revenue for the prior twelve-month period (“prior 12-month period”) ending at the beginning of the last twelve-month period (“LTM period”) minus revenue contraction due to billing decreases or customer churn, plus revenue expansion due to billing increases during the LTM period from the same customers by the total prior 12-month period revenue. For the last month of the years ended December 31, 2021 and 2020 our LTM NRR was 117.6% and 137.4%, respectively.

Key Components of Statement of Operations

Revenue

We derive our revenue primarily from usage-based fees earned from customers using our platform. We also earn fixed-rate recurring revenue from security and other products and services.

Our usage-based fees earned from customers using our platform are generally billed in arrears. Our security products are primarily annual subscriptions that are billed in advance. Many customers have tiered usage pricing which reflects discounted rates as usage increases. For most contracts, usage charges are determined on a monthly basis based on actual usage within the month and do not impact usage charges within any other month. Our larger customers often enter into contracts that contain minimum billing commitments and reflect discounted pricing associated with such usage levels.

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We define United States revenue as revenue from customers that have a billing address in the United States, and we define international revenue as revenue from customers that have a billing address outside of the United States.

Cost of Revenue and Gross Margin

Cost of revenue consists primarily of fees paid for bandwidth, peering, and colocation. Cost of revenue also includes personnel costs, such as salaries, benefits, bonuses, and stock-based compensation for our customer support and infrastructure employees, and non-personnel costs, such as amortization of capitalized internal-use software development costs, depreciation of our network equipment and amortization of our intangible assets. Our arrangements with network service providers require us to pay fees based on bandwidth use, in some cases subject to minimum commitments, which may be underutilized. We expect our cost of revenue to continue to increase on an absolute basis and may increase as a percentage of revenue.

Our gross margin has been and will continue to be affected by a number of factors, including utilization of our network, the timing of investments in the expansion of our network, which can increase depreciation and colocation costs in advance of expected demand, our ability to manage our network service providers and cloud infrastructure-related fees, the timing of amortization of capitalized software development costs, changes in personnel costs to provide customer support and operate the network, and customer pricing.

Research and Development

Research and development expenses consist primarily of personnel costs, including salaries, benefits, bonuses, and stock-based compensation. Research and development expenses also include cloud infrastructure fees for development and testing, and an allocation of our general overhead expenses. We capitalize the portion of our software development costs that meet the criteria for capitalization.

We continue to focus our research and development efforts on adding new features and products including new use cases, improving the efficiency and performance of our network, and increasing the functionality of our existing products. Over the long term we expect our research and development expenses to decrease as a percentage of our revenue. However, our research and development expenses may fluctuate as a percentage of our revenue from period to period due to the timing and extent of these expenses.

Sales and Marketing

Sales and marketing expenses consist primarily of personnel costs, including commissions for our sales employees, salaries, benefits, bonuses, and stock-based compensation. Sales and marketing expenses also include expenditures related to advertising, marketing, our brand awareness activities, costs related to our customer conferences, including our Altitude conference, professional services fees, amortization of our intangible assets and an allocation of our general overhead expenses.

We focus our sales and marketing efforts on generating awareness of our company, platform and products, creating sales leads, and establishing and promoting our brand, both domestically and internationally. We plan to increase our investment in sales and marketing by hiring additional sales and marketing personnel, expanding our sales channels, driving our go-to-market strategies, building our brand awareness, and sponsoring additional marketing events. Over the long term, we expect our sales and marketing expenses to decrease as a percentage of our revenue. However, our sales and marketing expenses may fluctuate as a percentage of our revenue from period to period due to the timing and extent of these expenses.

General and Administrative

General and administrative expenses consist primarily of personnel costs, including salaries, benefits, bonuses, and stock-based compensation for our accounting, finance, legal, trust, human resources and administrative support personnel, and executives. General and administrative expenses also include costs related to legal and other professional services fees, sales and other taxes, an allocation of our general overhead expenses, credit loss expense and acquisition-related costs. We expect that we will incur costs associated with supporting the growth of our business, our operation as a public company, and to meet the increased compliance requirements associated with our international expansion.

Our general and administrative expenses include a significant amount of sales and other taxes to which we are subject based on the manner we sell and deliver our products. Historically, we have not collected such taxes from our customers and

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have therefore recorded such taxes as general and administrative expenses. We expect that these expenses will decline in future years as we continue to implement our sales tax collection mechanisms and start collecting these taxes from our customers.

Overall, we expect our general and administrative expenses to continue to increase on an absolute basis and may increase as a percentage of revenue in future periods. Over the long term, we expect our general and administrative expenses to decrease as a percentage of our revenue.

Income Taxes

Our income tax expense consists primarily of income taxes in certain foreign jurisdictions where we conduct business and state minimum income taxes in the United States. In 2020, our income tax benefit was primarily the result of a reduction in the valuation allowance recorded against our net deferred tax assets. In connection with the acquisition of Signal Science in 2020, we recorded a net deferred tax liability which provides an additional source of taxable income to support the realization of the pre-existing deferred tax assets. We have a valuation allowance for deferred tax assets, including net operating loss carryforwards. We expect to maintain this valuation allowance for the foreseeable future.

Results of Operations

In this section, we discuss the results of our operations for the year ended December 31, 2021 compared to the year ended December 31, 2020. For a discussion of the year ended December 31, 2020 compared to the year ended December 31, 2019, please refer to Part II, Item 7, "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations" in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2020. Certain of our key metrics and financial results were favorably impacted by increases in traffic driven by the COVID-19 pandemic and our largest customer in 2020. In 2021, we saw some return to normal seasonal patterns of traffic and growth and an impact to our revenues from an outage in June 2021. We have included Signal Sciences in our results of operations as of the acquisition date, October 1, 2020. For the year ended December 31, 2020, the information presented in this section includes the contribution of Signal Sciences starting from October 1, 2020. For the year ended December 31, 2021, the results include the contribution of Signal Sciences for the full year. As a result, comparisons to the prior-year period may not be indicative of future results or future rates of growth.

Year ended December 31,
20212020
(in thousands)
Consolidated Statement of Operations:
Revenue$354,330$290,874
Cost of revenue(1)167,002120,007
Gross profit187,328170,867
Operating expenses:
Research and development(1)126,85974,814
Sales and marketing(1)152,645101,181
General and administrative(1)126,845102,084
Total operating expenses406,349278,079
Loss from operations(219,021)(107,212)
Interest income1,2821,628
Interest expense(5,245)(1,549)
Other income (expense), net356(279)
Loss before income tax expense (benefit)(222,628)(107,412)
Income tax expense (benefit)69(11,480)
Net loss attributable to common stockholders$(222,697)$(95,932)

__________

(1)Includes stock-based compensation expense as follows:

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Year ended December 31,
20212020
(in thousands)
Cost of revenue$7,227$3,889
Research and development47,01917,112
Sales and marketing31,15917,028
General and administrative55,08326,404
Total$140,488$64,433
Year ended December 31,
20212020
Consolidated Statements of Operations, as a percentage of revenue:*
Revenue100%100%
Cost of revenue4741
Gross profit5359
Operating expenses:
Research and development3626
Sales and marketing4335
General and administrative3635
Total operating expenses11596
Loss from operations(62)(37)
Interest income1
Interest expense(1)(1)
Other income (expense), net
Loss before income taxes(63)(37)
Income tax expense (benefit)(4)
Net loss attributable to common stockholders(63)%(33)%

__________

*    Columns may not add up to 100% due to rounding.

Revenue

Year ended December 31,
202120202020 to 2021 Change
(in thousands)
Revenue$354,330$290,87422%

2021 compared to 2020

Revenue was $354.3 million for the year ended December 31, 2021 compared to $290.9 million for the year ended December 31, 2020, an increase of $63.5 million, or 22%. Revenue growth was driven by impact of a full year of revenue generated from products acquired from the acquisition of Signal Sciences, which increased by $31.7 million before considering the effect of purchase accounting adjustments, and the further adoption of our modern edge platform and products. Revenue growth was offset by a $4.2 million impact of purchase price accounting adjustments, which represents a $2.2 million increase from 2020.

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We had 2,804 customers and 445 enterprise customers as of December 31, 2021. We had 2,326 customers and 378 enterprise customers as of December 31, 2020. This represents an increase of 478, or 21%, in customers and 67, or 18%, in enterprise customers from December 31, 2020.

Approximately 93% of our revenue in the year ended December 31, 2021 was driven by usage on our platform, primarily from existing customers, as revenue from new customers contributed less than 10% of our revenue. The proportion of the revenue contribution between new and existing customers is consistent with typical customer behavior as customers tend to contribute more revenue over time as their use of the platform increases. The remainder of our revenue was generated by our other products and services, including support and professional services.

United States revenue was $260.4 million and 73% of revenue for the year ended December 31, 2021, and $196.5 million and 68% of revenue for the year ended December 31, 2020. This represents an increase of $63.9 million, or 32%. International revenue was $93.9 million and 27% of revenue for the year ended December 31, 2021, and $94.3 million and 32% of revenue for the year ended December 31, 2020. This represents an increase of $(0.4) million, or 0%.

We had 2,111 domestic customers and 691 international customers as of December 31, 2021.

Cost of Revenue

Year ended December 31,
202120202020 to 2021 Change
(in thousands)
Cost of revenue$167,002$120,00739%

2021 compared to 2020

Cost of revenue was $167.0 million for the year ended December 31, 2021 compared to $120.0 million for the year ended December 31, 2020, an increase of $47.0 million, or 39%. This is primarily due to an increase in bandwidth costs of $11.1 million, an increase in colocation costs of $6.4 million, and an increase in other network costs of $5.4 million to support the increased traffic on our platform. There was an increase in depreciation and amortization expense of $17.0 million as we continue to invest in our platform, which includes a $7.5 million increase in amortization of intangible assets acquired from the Signal Sciences acquisition. There was also a $7.9 million increase in personnel related costs, such as salaries, benefits, bonuses, and stock-based compensation, due to the increased headcount to support the growth of our business.

Gross Profit and Gross Margin

Year ended December 31,
202120202020 to 2021 Change
(in thousands)
Gross profit$187,328$170,86710%
Gross margin53%59%(6)%

2021 compared to 2020

Gross profit was $187.3 million for the year ended December 31, 2021 compared to $170.9 million for the year ended December 31, 2020, an increase of $16.5 million, or 10%. Gross margin was 53% for the year ended December 31, 2021 compared to 59% for the year ended December 31, 2020, an decrease of 6%. The decrease in gross margin reflects a decrease in network utilization in 2021 compared to 2020 related to increased traffic in 2020 driven by the COVID-19 pandemic and the company's largest customer in 2020 and the impact of an increase in investment in infrastructure and capacity made in advance of expected demand. The decline in gross margin also reflects the impact of an increase of $2.2 million of revenue reductions for purchase accounting adjustments and additional $7.5 million of amortization of intangible assets related to our acquisition of Signal Sciences. The impact of these adjustments was a reduction in gross margin of 2.7%.

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Operating Expenses

Year ended December 31,
202120202020 to 2021 Change
(in thousands)
Research and development$126,859$74,81470%
Sales and marketing152,645101,18151%
General and administrative126,845102,08424%
Total operating expenses$406,349$278,07946%
Percentage of revenue:
Research and development36%26%(10)%
Sales and marketing43%35%(8)%
General and administrative36%35%(1)%

Research and development—2021 compared to 2020

Research and development expenses were $126.9 million for the year ended December 31, 2021 compared to $74.8 million for the year ended December 31, 2020, an increase of $52.0 million, or 70%. This is primarily due to an increase of $56.1 million of personnel-related costs, such as salaries, benefits, bonuses, and stock-based compensation due to an increase in headcount and new equity awards granted to employees. The increase in personnel-related costs was primarily driven by the impact of a full year of Signal Sciences expenses. There was also an increase of $3.6 million in hosted data service and other SaaS costs as we continue to continue to develop new products and features for our next-generation edge computing solutions. These increases are partially offset by a $9.6 million increase in capitalization of costs related to the development of internal-use software.

Sales and marketing—2021 compared to 2020

Sales and marketing expenses were $152.6 million for the year ended December 31, 2021 compared to $101.2 million for the year ended December 31, 2020, an increase of $51.5 million, or 51%. This is primarily due to a $33.1 million increase in personnel related costs, such as salaries, sales commissions, benefits, and stock-based compensation, due to an increase in headcount and new equity awards granted to employees. The increase in personnel-related costs was primarily driven by the impact of a full year of Signal Sciences expenses. We also had an increase of $8.4 million in external marketing spend primarily related to various marketing campaigns and an increase of $8.3 million in amortization expense related to certain intangible assets acquired in connection with the Signal Sciences acquisition.

General and administrative—2021 compared to 2020

General and administrative costs were $126.8 million for the year ended December 31, 2021 compared to $102.1 million for the year ended December 31, 2020, an increase of $24.8 million, or 24%. This is primarily due to an increase of $36.1 million in personnel related costs, such as salaries, benefits, and stock-based compensation due to an increase in headcount and new equity awards granted to employees, increases of $1.6 million in software licenses, and $1.3 million in business insurance costs. These increases are partially offset by a $13.4 million decrease in professional services spending primarily driven by a decrease in acquisition-related expenses of $16.9 million, and a $1.5 million decrease in expense for credit losses.

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Other Income and Expense

Interest Income

Year ended December 31,
202120202020 to 2021 Change
(in thousands)
Interest income$1,282$1,628(21)%

2021 compared to 2020

Interest income was $1.3 million for the year ended December 31, 2021 compared to $1.6 million for the year ended December 31, 2020, a decrease of $0.3 million, or 21%. This decrease is due to a reduction in interest rates on our cash balances and investments portfolio.

Interest Expense

Year ended December 31,
202120202020 to 2021 Change
(in thousands)
Interest expense$5,245$1,549239%

2021 compared to 2020

Interest expense was $5.2 million for the year ended December 31, 2021 compared to $1.5 million for the year ended December 31, 2020, an increase of $3.7 million, or 239%. This increase is primarily due the amortization of debt issuance costs related to the convertible debt and revolving credit facility.

Other income(expense), net

Year ended December 31,
202120202020 to 2021 Change
(in thousands)
Other income (expense), net$356$(279)228%

2021 compared to 2020

Other income, net was $0.4 million for the year ended December 31, 2021 compared to other expense, net, of $0.3 million for the year ended December 31, 2020, a change of $0.6 million, or 228%. The increase is mainly driven by our foreign currency transaction gains and losses between the periods.

Income Tax Expense (Benefit)

Year ended December 31,
202120202020 to 2021 Change
(in thousands)
Income tax expense (benefit)$69$(11,480)(101)%

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2021 compared to 2020

Income tax expense was 0.1 million for the year ended December 31, 2021 compared to income tax benefit of for the year ended December 31, 2020, a decrease of $11.6 million or 101% decrease is primarily due to a one-time tax benefit from the reduction in our valuation allowance recorded against our net deferred tax assets. In connection with the acquisition of Signal Science, we recorded a net deferred tax liability which provides an additional source of taxable income to support the realization of the pre-existing deferred tax assets. As a result a portion of our valuation allowance was released and we recorded a $13.0 million tax benefit in the year ended December 31, 2020.

Liquidity and Capital Resources

As of December 31, 2021, we had cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities totaling $1,056.8 million. Our cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities primarily consisted of bank deposits and money market funds held at major financial institutions and investment-grade commercial paper and corporate debt securities. As of December 31, 2021, we had $528.9 million of marketable securities classified as long term investments.

On May 21, 2019, upon the completion of our IPO, we received net proceeds of $192.5 million, after deducting underwriting discounts and commissions, from sales of 12,937,500 shares of our Class A common stock in the IPO. The net proceeds include additional proceeds of $25.1 million, net of underwriters' discounts and commissions, from the exercise of the underwriters' option to purchase an additional 1,687,500 shares of our Class A common stock.

On May 26, 2020, we completed a follow-on public offering in which we sold 6,900,000 shares of Class A common stock, which included 900,000 shares sold pursuant to the exercise by the underwriters of an option to purchase additional shares, at the public offering price of $41.50 per share. We received net proceeds of $274.9 million, after deducting underwriting discounts and commissions, from sales of our shares in the public offering.

In March 2021, we entered into a purchase agreement for the sale of an aggregate of $948.8 million principal amount of our 0% convertible senior notes due 2026 (the “Notes”). The Notes mature on March 25, 2026, unless earlier converted, redeemed or repurchased. The net proceeds from the issuance of the Notes were approximately $930.0 million after deducting the initial purchasers’ discounts and transaction costs.

To date, we have financed our operations primarily through equity issuances, payments received from customers, the net proceeds we received through sales of equity and debt securities and borrowings under our credit facilities. Our principal uses of cash in recent periods have been funding our operations and capital expenditures. We also enter into finance leases to finance our infrastructure assets in co-location facilities that we directly lease and operate. We have not entered into any off-balance sheet arrangements and do not have any holdings in variable interest entities.

We believe that our cash, cash equivalents balances, marketable securities, and our credit facilities, and the cash flows generated by our operations will be sufficient to satisfy our anticipated cash needs for working capital and capital expenditures for at least the next 12 months. We have generated losses from operations in the past and expect to continue to incur operating losses for the foreseeable future due to the investments we intend to make and may require additional capital resources to execute strategic initiatives to grow our business.

We believe we will meet longer-term expected future cash requirements and obligations, through a combination of cash flows from operating activities, available balances of cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities and available credit under our credit facilities. In addition, we may engage in equity or debt financings to secure additional funds. As noted above, our Notes mature on March 25, 2026, and if we are required to repay the Notes or if we are unable to generate sufficient cash flow to service our debt, we may be required to adopt one or more alternatives, such as selling assets, restructuring debt or obtaining additional equity capital on terms that may be onerous or highly dilutive.

As of December 31, 2021, we had $55.4 million of commitments for capital expenditures which will primarily be financed through finance leases under our existing under our existing agreements.

Cash Collateralized Revolving Credit Agreement

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We have a finance lease agreement with an equipment provider that provides financing for up to $90 million in network equipment. Individual leases have average an interest rate of 4.8% and terms of three years. The agreement provides for bargain purchase prices at the end of the terms. The amortization of leased assets is included in depreciation and amortization expense.

On February 16, 2021, we entered into a Senior Secured Credit Facilities Agreement ("Credit Agreement") with Silicon Valley Bank for an aggregate commitment amount of $100.0 million. The Credit Agreement bears interest at a rate per annum equal to the sum of LIBOR for the applicable interest period plus 1.75% - 2.00%, depending on the average daily outstanding balance of all loans and letters of credit under the Credit Agreement. Interest payments on outstanding borrowings are due on the last day of each interest period. The Credit Agreement has a commitment fee on the unused portion of the borrowing commitment, which is payable on the last day of each calendar quarter at a rate per annum of 0.20% - 0.25% depending on the average daily outstanding balance of all loans and letters of credit under the Credit Agreement. The agreement allows for use of an alternative interest rate. In addition, our Credit Agreement contains a financial covenant that requires us to maintain a consolidated adjusted quick ratio of at least 1:25 to 1:00 tested on a quarterly basis as well as a springing revenue growth covenant for certain periods if our consolidated adjusted quick ratio falls below 1.75 to 1:00 on the last day of any fiscal quarter.

Cash Flows

The following table summarizes our cash flows for the period indicated:

Year ended December 31,
202120202019
(in thousands)
Cash used in operating activities$(38,482)$(19,916)$(31,303)
Cash used in investing activities(794,511)(275,023)(87,678)
Cash provided by financing activities936,551272,739168,148

Cash Flows from Operating Activities

For the year ended December 31, 2021, cash used in operating activities consisted primarily of our net loss of $222.7 million adjusted for non-cash items, including $28.8 million of depreciation and amortization, $21.2 million of amortization related to acquired intangibles, $140.5 million of stock-based compensation expense, $26.9 million of lease amortization expense, amortization of deferred contract costs of $6.3 million and amortization of debt issuance costs of $3.2 million. With respect to changes in operating assets and liabilities, there was an increase in accounts receivable of $14.6 million, primarily due to an increase in revenue and the timing of cash receipts from certain of our larger customers and an increase of $15.2 million in prepaid expenses and other assets due to pre-payments for software licenses. We also had $26.4 million of operating lease payments. This was partially offset by increases of $4.3 million in accrued expenses and $8.9 million in other liabilities due to timing of payments.

For the year ended December 31, 2020, cash used in operating activities consisted primarily of our net loss of $95.9 million adjusted for non-cash items, including $20.0 million of depreciation and amortization, $5.1 million of amortization related to acquired intangibles, $64.4 million of stock-based compensation expense, $21.8 million of lease amortization expense, amortization of deferred contract costs of $3.5 million and allowance for credit losses of $1.7 million. This was partially offset by $13.0 million in tax benefits related to release of valuation allowance related to deferred taxes associated with the Signal Sciences acquisition. With respect to changes in operating assets and liabilities, there was a decrease in accounts receivable of $9.3 million, primarily due to increased collections due to the growth of our business and the timing of cash receipts from certain of our larger customers, and $22.7 million in prepaid expenses and other assets due to pre-payments for software licenses. We also had $18.3 million of operating lease payments. This was partially offset by an increase of $22.0 million in accounts payable, accrued expenses, and other liabilities due to timing of payments.

For the year ended December 31, 2019, cash used in operating activities consisted primarily of our net loss of $51.6 million adjusted for non-cash items, including $16.6 million of depreciation and amortization, $12.1 million of stock-based compensation expense, $2.3 million of amortization of deferred contract costs, $0.7 million of amortization of deferred rent, an increase in the fair value of our common stock warrants of $2.4 million, and amortization of debt issuance costs of $1.9 million.

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With respect to changes in operating assets and liabilities, there was an increase in accounts receivable of $12.8 million, primarily due to the growth of our business and the timing of cash receipts from certain of our larger customers, an increase in other long-term assets of $3.9 million due to the adoption of Accounting Standards Update No. 2014-09, Revenue from Contracts with Customers, and an increase of $2.7 million in prepaid expenses and other assets due to pre-payments for software licenses.

Cash Flows from Investing Activities

For the year ended December 31, 2021, cash used in investing activities was $794.5 million, primarily consisting of $928.2 million in purchases of marketable securities, $34.8 million of payments related to purchases of property and equipment to expand our network, $13.5 million of additions to capitalized internal-use software. This was offset by $184.6 million of maturities and sales of marketable securities.

For the year ended December 31, 2020, cash used in investing activities was $275.0 million, primarily consisting of $269.1 million in purchases of marketable securities, $201.0 million of business acquisitions, net of cash acquired, $29.6 million of payments related to purchases of property and equipment to expand our network, $6.1 million of additions to capitalized internal-use software, and $1.8 million of purchases of intangible assets. This was offset by $232.0 million of maturities and sales of marketable securities.

For the year ended December 31, 2019, cash used in investing activities was $87.7 million, primarily consisting of $191.0 million in purchases of marketable securities, $14.6 million of payments related to purchases of property and equipment to expand our network, and $4.9 million of additions to capitalized internal-use software. This was offset by $123.4 million of maturities of marketable securities.

Cash Flows from Financing Activities

For the year ended December 31, 2021, cash provided by financing activities was $936.6 million, primarily consisting of $930.8 million of proceeds from the issuance of the Notes, net of issuance costs, $8.1 million in proceeds from the employee stock purchase plan ("ESPP") and $12.6 million in proceeds from stock option exercises by our employees and directors. This was partially offset by $13.6 million of finance lease liabilities repayments.

For the year ended December 31, 2020, cash provided by financing activities was $272.7 million, primarily consisting of $274.9 million in proceeds from our follow-on public offering, net of underwriting fees, $9.3 million in proceeds from the ESPP, and $15.3 million in proceeds from stock option exercises by our employees and directors. This was partially offset by $20.3 million of debt repayments, $5.8 million of finance lease liabilities repayments, and $0.7 million of payments of costs related to our follow-on public offering.

For the year ended December 31, 2019, cash provided by financing activities was $168.1 million, primarily consisting of $192.5 million in proceeds from our IPO, net of underwriting fees, $5.4 million in proceeds from the ESPP, $6.1 million in proceeds from stock option exercises by our employees and directors. This was partially offset by $29.1 million of net debt repayments, $5.5 million of payments of costs related to our IPO, and $1.4 million of finance lease liabilities repayments.

Contractual Obligations and Other Commitments

The following table summarizes our non-cancelable contractual obligations as of December 31, 2021:

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Less than 1 Year1-3 Years3-5 YearsMore than 5 YearsTotal
(in thousands)
Purchase obligations - non-equipment(1)$49,056$24,085$160$82$73,383
Purchase obligations - equipment (2)55,35855,358
Operating lease obligations(3)19,38946,70213,1745,81385,078
Finance lease obligations(4)22,70023,07145,771
Debt obligation(5)948,750948,750
Total$146,503$93,858$962,084$5,895$1,208,340

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(1)    Purchase obligations-non equipment represent total future minimum payments under contracts with our cloud infrastructure provider, network service providers, and other vendors. Purchase obligations exclude agreements that are cancellable without penalty. Our purchase obligations exclude our operating lease commitments associated with our colocation arrangements which have been separately disclosed under our operating lease commitments.

(2)     Purchase obligations-equipment represent total future minimum payments under contracts for capital expenditures which will primarily be financed through finance leases under our existing agreements.

(3)     Operating lease obligations represent total future minimum rent payments under non-cancelable operating lease agreements, such as our facilities and colocation (i.e. data center) leases.

(4)    Finance lease obligations represents principal and interest payments under our networking equipment leases.

(5)    Debt obligation aggregate principal amount of our 0% convertible senior notes due on March 15, 2026.

These commitments will be generally be settled with existing cash on hand and cash generated from operations. Purchase obligations for capital equipment will be primarily settled by additional finance lease borrowings.

Critical Accounting Policies and Estimates

We prepare our consolidated financial statements in accordance with U.S. GAAP. The preparation of our consolidated financial statements requires us to make estimates, judgments, and assumptions that affect the reported amounts of assets, liabilities, revenue, costs, expenses, and related disclosures. Actual results and outcomes could differ significantly from our estimates, judgments, and assumptions. To the extent that there are material differences between these estimates and actual results, our future financial statement presentation, financial condition, results of operations, and cash flows will be affected.

Revenue Recognition

Revenue is recognized upon transfer of control of promised products or services to customers in an amount that reflects the consideration we expect to receive in exchange for those products or services. The processing and recording of certain revenue requires a manual process, which uses a complex set of procedures to generate complete and accurate data to record these revenue transactions. We enter into contracts that can include various combinations of products and services, each of which are distinct and accounted for as separate performance obligations. Revenue is recognized net of any taxes collected from customers, which are subsequently remitted to governmental authorities.

A performance obligation is a promise in a contract to transfer a distinct good or service to the customer and is the unit of account. Our contracts with customers often include promises to transfer multiple products and services to a customer. Determining whether products and services are considered distinct performance obligations that should be accounted for separately versus together may require significant judgment. For contracts with multiple performance obligations, we allocate the contract transaction price to each performance obligation using our estimate of the standalone selling price ("SSP") of each distinct good or service in the contract.

Judgment is required to determine the SSP for each distinct performance obligation. We analyze separate sales of our products and services as a basis for estimating the SSP of our products and services. We then use the SSP as the basis for allocating the transaction price when our product and services are sold together in a contract with multiple performance obligations. In instances where SSP is not directly observable, such as when we do not sell the product or service separately, we

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determine the SSP using information that may include market conditions and other observable inputs. We typically have more than one SSP for individual products and services due to the stratification of those products and services by customers and circumstances. In these instances, we may use information, such as geographic region and distribution channel, in determining the SSP.

The transaction price in a contract for usage-based services is typically equal to the minimum commit price in the contract less any discounts provided. The transaction price in a contract that does not contain usage-based services is equal to the total contract value. Because our typical contracts represent distinct services delivered over time with the same pattern of transfer to the customer, usage-based consideration primarily related to actual consumption over the minimum commit levels is allocated to the period to which it relates. The amount of consideration recognized for usage above the minimum commit price is limited to the amount we expect to be entitled to receive in exchange for providing services. We have elected to apply the practical expedient for estimating and disclosing the variable consideration when variable consideration is allocated entirely to a wholly unsatisfied performance obligation or to a wholly unsatisfied promise to transfer a distinct good or service that forms part of a single performance obligation from our remaining performance obligations under these contracts.

Performance obligations represent stand-ready obligations that are satisfied over time as the customer simultaneously receives and consumes the benefits provided by us. These obligations can be content delivery, security, subscription services, professional services, support, edge cloud platform services, and others. Accordingly, our revenue is recognized over time, consistent with the pattern of benefit provided to the customer over the term of the agreement.

At times, customers may request changes that either amend, replace, or cancel existing contracts. Judgment is required to determine whether the specific facts and circumstances within the contracts should be accounted for as a separate contract or as a modification.

In contracts where there are timing differences between when we transfer a promised good or service to the customer and when the customer pays for that good or service, we have determined our contracts do not include a significant financing component. We have also elected the practical expedient to not measure financing components for any contract where the timing difference is less than one year.

Stock-Based Compensation

We account for stock-based employee compensation plans under the fair value recognition and measurement provisions, which require all stock-based payments, including grants of stock options, restricted stock units ("RSUs"), restricted stock awards ("RSAs"), performance stock awards ("PSUs") and shares issued under our Employee Stock Purchase Plan ("ESPP") to be measured based on the grant-date fair value of the award and recognized as expense over the requisite service period, which is generally the vesting period of the respective award. We account for forfeitures as they occur.

The fair value of RSUs and RSAs granted to our employees and directors is based on the grant date fair value. The fair value of PSUs granted to our employees is based on the fair value determined when the performance metrics were set. The fair value of stock options granted to our employees and directors, and of the shares to be issued under our ESPP are based on the Black-Scholes option-pricing model. The determination of the fair value of a stock-based award is affected by the deemed fair value of the underlying stock price on the grant date, as well as assumptions regarding a number of other complex and subjective variables. These variables include the fair value of our common stock, the expected stock price volatility over the expected term of the options, stock option exercise and cancellation behaviors, risk-free interest rates, and expected dividends:

These assumptions and estimates are as follows:

•Fair Value of Common Stock. We use the market closing price of our Class A common stock, as reported on the New York Stock Exchange, for the fair value. Prior to our IPO, our board of directors considered numerous objective and subjective factors to determine the fair value of our common stock at each meeting at which awards are approved. These factors included, but were not limited to (i) contemporaneous third-party valuations of Common Stock; (ii) the rights and preferences of Series Preferred relative to Common Stock; (iii) the lack of marketability of Common Stock; (iv) developments in the business; and (v) the likelihood of achieving a liquidity event, such as an IPO or sale of the Company, given prevailing market conditions.

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•Expected Term. The expected term represents the period that our stock-based awards are expected to be outstanding. The expected term assumptions were determined based on the vesting terms, exercise terms, and contractual lives of the options. The expected term was estimated using the simplified method allowed under Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) guidance.

•Volatility. The expected volatility is derived from an average of the historical stock volatilities of the common stock of the Company. In prior years the expected volatility calculation also included the historical stock volatilities of comparable companies as we did not have a long enough trading history of our common stock . Comparable companies consist of public companies in our industry, which are similar in size, stage of life cycle, and financial leverage.

•Risk-free Interest Rate. The risk-free interest rate used in the Black-Scholes option pricing model is the implied yield available on U.S. Treasury zero-coupon issues with a remaining term equivalent to that of the options for each expected term.

•Dividend Yield. The expected dividend assumption is based on our current expectations of our anticipated dividend policy. We have no history of paying any dividends and therefore used an expected dividend yield of zero.

Valuation of Goodwill and Other Acquired Intangible Assets in Business Combination

Accounting for business combinations requires us to make significant estimates and assumptions, especially at the acquisition date with respect to tangible and intangible assets acquired and liabilities assumed. We use our best estimates and assumptions to accurately assign fair value to the tangible and intangible assets acquired and liabilities assumed at the acquisition date as well as the useful lives of those acquired intangible assets. Examples of critical estimates in valuing certain of the intangible assets and goodwill we have acquired include but are not limited to future expected cash flows from acquired developed technologies; the acquired company’s trade name, existing customer relationships and backlog. These estimates are inherently uncertain and unpredictable, and if different estimates were used the purchase price for the acquisition could be allocated to the acquired assets and liabilities differently from the allocation that we have made. Additionally, unanticipated events and circumstances may occur, which may affect the accuracy or validity of such assumptions, estimates or actual results.

The authoritative guidance allows a measurement period of up to one year from the date of acquisition to make adjustments to the preliminary allocation of the purchase price. As a result, during the measurement period we may record adjustments to the fair values of assets acquired and liabilities assumed, with the corresponding offset to goodwill to the extent that it identifies adjustments to the preliminary purchase price allocation. Upon conclusion of the measurement period or final determination of the values of the assets acquired and liabilities assumed, whichever comes first, any subsequent adjustments will be recorded to the Consolidated Statement of Operations.

Impairment of Goodwill, Intangible Assets and Other Long-Lived Assets

Goodwill is the amount by which the cost of acquired net assets in a business combination exceeds the fair value of the net identifiable assets on the date of purchase and is carried at its historical cost. We test goodwill for impairment on an annual basis or more frequently if events or changes in circumstances indicate that the asset might be impaired. We determined that we operate as one reporting unit and we perform our annual impairment test of goodwill as of October 31 and whenever events or circumstances indicate that the asset might be impaired.

Long-lived assets, including property and equipment and intangible assets, are reviewed for impairment whenever events or changes in circumstances, such as service discontinuance, technological obsolescence, significant decreases in our market capitalization, facility closures, or work-force reductions indicate that the carrying amount of the long-lived asset or asset group may not be recoverable. When such events occur, we compare the carrying amount of the asset or asset group to the undiscounted expected future cash flows related to the asset or asset group. If this comparison indicates that an impairment is present, the amount of the impairment is calculated as the difference between the carrying amount and the fair value of the asset or asset group.

Leases

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We lease office space and data centers ("Colocation leases") under non-cancelable operating leases with various expiration dates through 2027. We also lease server equipment under non-cancelable operating finance leases with various expiration dates through 2024. We determine if an arrangement contains a lease at inception.

Operating lease right-of-use assets and lease liabilities are recognized at the present value of the future lease payments at commencement date. The interest rate implicit in our operating leases is not readily determinable, and therefore an incremental borrowing rate is estimated to determine the present value of future payments. The estimated incremental borrowing rate factors in a hypothetical interest rate on a collateralized basis with similar terms, payments, and economic environments. Operating lease right-of-use assets also include any prepaid lease payments and lease incentives.

Certain of the operating lease agreements contain rent concession, rent escalation, and option to renew provisions. Rent concession and rent escalation provisions are considered in determining the single lease cost to be recorded over the lease term. Single lease cost is recognized on a straight-line basis over the lease term commencing on the date we have the right to use the leased property. The lease terms may include options to extend or terminate the lease. We generally use the base, non-cancelable, lease term when recognizing the lease assets and liabilities, unless it is reasonably certain that the option will be exercised. Our lease agreements may contain variable costs such as common area maintenance, operating expenses or other costs. Variable lease costs are expensed as incurred on the consolidated statements of operations. Our lease agreements generally do not contain any residual value guarantees or restrictive covenants.

We lease networking equipment from a third party, through equipment finance leases. These leases include a bargain purchase option, resulting in a full transfer of ownership at the completion of the lease term.

Operating leases are reflected in operating lease right-of-use assets, operating lease liabilities, and operating lease liabilities, non-current on our consolidated balance sheets. Finance leases are included in property and equipment, net, finance lease liabilities, and finance lease liabilities, non-current on our consolidated balance sheets.

Internal-Use Software Development Costs

Labor and related costs associated with internal-use software during the application development stage are capitalized. Capitalization of costs begins when the preliminary project stage is completed, management has committed to funding the project, and it is probable that the project will be completed and the software will be used to perform the function intended. Capitalization ceases at the point when the project is fully tested and substantially complete and is ready for its intended purpose. The capitalized amounts are included in property and equipment, net on the Consolidated Balance Sheets. We amortize such costs over the estimated useful life of the software; completed internal-use software that is used on our network is amortized to cost of revenue over its estimated useful life. Costs incurred during the planning, training, and post-implementation stages of the software development life-cycle are expensed as incurred.

Legal and Other Contingencies

From time to time, we have been and will continue to be subject to legal proceedings and claims. Periodically, we evaluate the status of each legal matter and assess our potential financial exposure. If the potential loss from any legal proceeding or litigation is considered probable and the amount can be reasonably estimated, we accrue a liability for the estimated loss. Significant judgment is required to determine the probability of a loss and whether the amount of the loss is reasonably estimable. The outcome of any proceeding is not determinable in advance. As a result, the assessment of a potential liability and the amount of accruals recorded are based only on the information available to us at the time. As additional information becomes available, we reassess the potential liability related to the legal proceeding or litigation, and may revise our estimates. Any revisions could have a material effect on our results of operations.

Please refer to Note 10—Commitments and Contingencies for discussion around our legal proceedings.

We conduct operations in many tax jurisdictions throughout the United States. In many of these jurisdictions, non-income-based taxes, such as sales and use and telecommunications taxes are assessed on our operations. We are subject to indirect taxes, and may be subject to certain other taxes, in some of these jurisdictions. Historically, we have not billed or collected these taxes and, in accordance with U.S. GAAP, we have recorded a provision for our tax exposure in these jurisdictions when it is both probable that a liability has been incurred and the amount of the exposure can be reasonably estimated. As a result, we have recorded a liability of $7.5 million as of December 31, 2021. These estimates are based on

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several key assumptions, including the taxability of our products, the jurisdictions in which we believe we have nexus and the sourcing of revenues to those jurisdictions. In the event these jurisdictions challenge our assumptions and analysis, our actual exposure could differ materially from our current estimates.

Recent Accounting Pronouncements

Please refer to Note 2—Summary of Significant Accounting Policies included in the Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements.

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