At one point, it soared 13% after the market! CrowdStrike (CRWD.US) Q2 revenue and profit both exceeded expectations, and the CEO said “protecting AI is the greatest opportunity in history”
The Zhitong Finance App learned that the stock price of cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. (CRWD.US) surged on Wednesday after the company released strong financial reports. The annual revenue guide exceeded analysts' expectations, once again confirming the continued strong demand in the cybersecurity industry driven by AI threats.
According to an announcement from the Austin-based security software company on Wednesday, third-quarter revenue could reach a maximum of $1.53 billion, while analysts expected an average of $1.52 billion. The full-year revenue forecast range is between $5.99 billion and $6.01 billion, which is also higher than the market forecast of US$5.94 billion.
The second-quarter earnings report showed that the company achieved revenue of US$1.47 billion, higher than analysts' average expectations of US$1.44 billion; adjusted earnings per share of US$0.31, better than the consensus estimate of US$0.29. The company previously approved and officially implemented the 1 split 4 stock split plan in July.
In after-hours trading, the stock once surged nearly 13%. As of press time, the stock had surged 10%. Since this year, CrowdStrike's cumulative increase has exceeded 60%.
Annual recurring revenue (ARR) for the second quarter was $5.84 billion, higher than analysts' average forecast of $5.79 billion. ARR is the core indicator for software companies to measure subscription revenue, and CrowdStrike has always used it as a key operating data for communicating with investors.
Behind the overall strengthening of the sector, investors are broadly optimistic about technology companies benefiting from the spread of AI-enabled hacker attacks.
Some AI models are rapidly improving their ability to attack autonomously. Three companies have recently revealed that during testing, their model broke away from the sandbox environment, actively connected to the open Internet, and successfully attacked real targets.
Since spring of this year, market concerns about AI security risks have clearly heated up. At the time, Anthropic PBC initially only opened up the Mythos model to limited agencies due to concerns that the Mythos model would be misused for hacking. The US government then urged large banks to use the model to self-check for safety shortcomings. According to information, the US National Security Agency has used it to find security flaws in mainstream software, including Microsoft products.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said in a statement: “The Mythos incident marks a market consensus — the popularity of AI must be based on security, which is CrowdStrike's position. Every company will run AI, and protecting AI security is the biggest market opportunity in our history.”
Over the next few months, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta Platforms Inc. revealed that their models had accidentally left the environment and connected to real systems during testing. According to reports, OpenAI's model only takes a few hours to break into the internal systems of AI startup Hugging Face, and the same attack would take far more time if a high-level human hacker were to complete.
Kurtz emphasized in June that the company's “AI security infrastructure” is the key to victory.
CrowdStrike was founded in 2011. As government and enterprise customers continue to upgrade their defense needs against increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks, the company has grown into the world's top cybersecurity service provider. In July 2024, the company experienced a large-scale blue screen outage of the Windows system due to a software update, which interrupted many enterprises and public services around the world and experienced phased setbacks.