Wall Street Wildlife Investing Podcast Podcast #49 - CrowdStrike deep dive
Jul 27, 2021
31:00
This week, we deep dive another stock in our 2021 model portfolio, CrowdStrike. It seems that hacking is constantly in the news with disturbing reports of spyware infiltrating our devices and ransomware attacks against government agencies, corporations, and public services. CrowdStrike aims to protect these systems from hackers with an advanced cybersecurity platform powered by artificial intelligence and modern security foundations.
- According to Gartner, the worldwide cybersecurity market is predicted to reach $150B this year. While this is a huge market, it is dwarfed by the estimated $6T of economic damage to be caused by cybercrime in 2021, and this figure is expected to grow 15% per year to reach $10.5T by 2025.
- CrowdStrike is a leading provider of endpoint security. Endpoints include personal computers, servers, mobiles, tablets and IoT devices, all potentially vulnerable to hackers attempting to access corporate and government systems. There were an estimated 31B connected devices in 2020 and this is expected to grow to 75B by 2025.
- CrowdStrike was founded in 2011 by former McAfee executives, George Kurtz and Dimitri Alperovitch. Its Falcon cybersecurity platform is cloud-native, designed and built for the cloud to provide modern endpoint protection and threat intelligence. This SaaS business model allows them to scale quickly and cost-effectively with near-limitless capacity.
- The power of CrowdStrike’s platform comes from their 'Threat Graph' breach prevention engine. It collects data from the entire CrowdStrike customer base and uses artificial intelligence, behavioural analytics, and human experts to predict where the next major threat will appear. It has, in effect, crowdsourced threat detection and prevention with a powerful network effect where each additional customer makes the platform stronger for all customers.
- CrowdStrike's services are packaged into modules and customers can just pay for the modules they require to get started, adding others as their businesses grow and their requirements increase. This 'land and expand' growth strategy has resulted in a DBNER of over 120% for several years running. The number of customers using 4 or more modules has grown from 27% in FY2018 to 61% in FY2021.
- As of 30 Apr 2021, they have 11,420 subscription customers, a YoY increase of 83%. CrowdStrike have partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS), IBM, Google Cloud, and many players in the cybersecurity space. CrowdStrike is the recommended endpoint protection for AWS which has been instrumental in the adoption of CrowdStrike by small to midsize businesses.
- Cybersecurity is an inherently risky business, and breaches can damage a company’s reputation and customer perception. As a sign of confidence in their platform and capabilities, CrowdStrike offers a warranty with their Falcon Complete subscription level to cover $1M of incident response expenses for breaches suffered by a customer under their watch.
- The company has been growing quickly for a number of years with a total revenue CAGR from FY2017 to FY2021 of 102%. Growth rates are slowing as the company gains market share but remains high, with a 70% YoY increase reported in the latest quarter. The gross margin has been improving quickly, rising from 57% in FY2018 to 77% in the latest quarter. With a market cap of $60B and a P/S ratio of just under 60, the company has a valuation to reflect its high rate of growth.
The following companies are mentioned in this episode: CRWD, ZS, MSFT, AMZN, S
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