Rubrik (NYSE:RBRK) executives said the company closed fiscal 2026 with what CEO and co-founder Bipul Sinha described as a “spectacular” fourth quarter that exceeded internal expectations, highlighted by record net new subscription annual recurring revenue (ARR), expanding margins, and sharply higher free cash flow.
Quarterly and full-year highlights
Management said subscription ARR ended the quarter at $1.46 billion, up 34% year over year, with $115 million of net new subscription ARR added in the period—an all-time quarterly record for the company. Subscription revenue in the quarter was $365 million, up 50%, while total revenue was $378 million, up 46%, according to CFO Kiran Choudary.
Customer scale continued to shift upward. Rubrik ended the quarter with 2,805 customers generating $100,000 or more in subscription ARR, up 25% year over year. Those customers represented 87% of subscription ARR, up from 84% a year ago. The company added a record 32 customers with $1 million or more in subscription ARR, driving over 50% growth in that cohort, Choudary said.
Cloud transition, material rights, and profitability
Rubrik said it remains near the end of its cloud transition. Cloud ARR was $1.29 billion, up 48%, and represented 88% of subscription ARR in the quarter.
Choudary said revenue again benefited from “tailwinds” tied to the cloud transition in the form of non-recurring revenue accounted for as material rights. Material rights contributed approximately $18 million to fourth-quarter revenue, which was modestly above the company’s expectation. On a normalized basis excluding this impact, revenue growth was approximately 43% in the quarter.
On a non-GAAP basis, gross margin in the quarter was 84%, up from 80% a year earlier, benefiting from revenue outperformance—including higher non-recurring revenue—and improved hosting efficiency. Rubrik highlighted subscription ARR contribution margin as a key operating leverage metric. For the last 12 months ended January 31, subscription ARR contribution margin was 12% versus 2% in the year-ago period, an improvement of roughly 950 basis points. Choudary said that when normalizing for $23 million in employer payroll taxes associated with the IPO in the prior period, the improvement was about 730 basis points.
Free cash flow was $70 million in the fourth quarter, compared with $75 million a year earlier. For the full fiscal year, free cash flow was approximately $238 million, up from $22 million in fiscal 2025. Sinha said the annual result was “more than 10x” the prior year, while Choudary attributed the improvement to higher sales, operating leverage, and optimizing the company’s capital structure.
Rubrik ended the quarter with $1.7 billion in cash, cash equivalents, restricted cash, and marketable securities, and $1.1 billion in convertible debt.
Product strategy: cyber resilience, identity, and agentic AI controls
Sinha emphasized Rubrik’s platform positioning across data, identity, and application context, describing two solution suites: Rubrik Security Cloud for cyber resilience and Rubrik Agent Cloud for AI “agent” controls. He said competitive win rates “crossed 90% in Q4,” and later reiterated that win rates against data protection vendors were “north of 90%.”
Management pointed to customer examples where Rubrik replaced legacy vendors, including a Fortune 500 global hospitality company and a European financial services firm seeking to meet DORA and ECB guidelines. Sinha also said SaaS protection was particularly strong in Q4 and noted that over 50% of Rubrik Microsoft 365 bookings in the quarter were attached to the company’s identity solution.
On identity, Sinha said Rubrik is increasingly winning CISO budget and highlighted the addition of Okta Identity protection, which he said makes Rubrik “the only identity recovery platform to span Okta, Active Directory, and Entra ID.” He also disclosed that Rubrik crossed 900 customers “just on identity” in Q4, up from more than 400 customers cited in the prior quarter, calling it the fastest-growing product in the company’s history.
For Rubrik Agent Cloud, Sinha said the product recently became generally available after a beta period and that the company has multiple proofs of concept underway with early AI adopters and Fortune 500 companies. In Q&A, he said early customer priorities are focused on:
- Discovering how many agents exist in an environment, including sanctioned and “shadow IT” agents
- Understanding what those agents are doing (monitoring/observability)
- Implementing real-time, dynamic guardrails to allow or block agent actions
Sinha characterized “rewind” capabilities—undoing unwanted actions—as a “day two problem” once customers are more operational at scale.
Market themes and other Q&A topics
Executives repeatedly tied cyber resilience demand to accelerating AI adoption and rising threats, with Sinha arguing that AI increases the potential blast radius of both mistakes and attacks. He also said he does not expect AI to commoditize Rubrik’s core recovery and resilience value proposition, describing Rubrik as a “system of record of last resort” for data and identity and emphasizing the company’s years of enterprise-scale engineering investment.
Asked about sovereign cloud, Sinha cited geopolitical and regulatory drivers behind data sovereignty and said the addressable market is “fast emerging,” but added that the total addressable market is still evolving and he did not have a firm sense for its size or whether it represents net-new spend.
On hardware component concerns such as memory pricing, Choudary said Rubrik is “watching the situation closely” but has not seen a significant impact, noting that while some customers self-host and procure hardware, the company has not observed a material business effect in results so far.
Choudary also addressed sales leadership transition questions, saying Jesse Greene had been hired nearly three years ago with a succession path in mind and that the change has been smooth, with a stable team and multiple “ways to land” the platform across products.
Outlook for fiscal 2027
For the first quarter of fiscal 2027, Rubrik guided for revenue of $365 million to $367 million, representing approximately 31% to 32% growth, or about 36% to 37% when normalized for material rights. The company expects material rights to contribute roughly $4 million to Q1 revenue. Rubrik also guided to non-GAAP subscription ARR contribution margins of 10% to 11% and non-GAAP EPS of -$0.04 to -$0.02 based on approximately 204 million weighted average shares outstanding.
For the full fiscal year 2027, the company guided to subscription ARR of $1.829 billion to $1.839 billion, implying 25% to 26% year-over-year growth. Total revenue is expected to be $1.597 billion to $1.607 billion, up approximately 27% to 28% when normalized for material rights, with about $10 million of material rights expected to contribute to fiscal 2027 revenue. Rubrik also forecast non-GAAP subscription ARR contribution margins of approximately 13%, non-GAAP EPS of $0.07 to $0.27 based on about 232 million weighted average shares, and free cash flow of $265 million to $275 million.
Choudary said the company plans continued investment in R&D and go-to-market, including scaling newer offerings such as the Identity Resilience Platform and Rubrik Agent Cloud, while noting that the company has not assumed “much” contribution from AI in its fiscal 2027 outlook given the early stage of adoption.
Rubrik also announced that its Forward user conference will be held in Las Vegas, and that the company’s inaugural Investor Day is scheduled for June 10 during the conference.
About Rubrik (NYSE:RBRK)
Rubrik, Inc is a cloud data management and security company that delivers a unified platform for data protection, disaster recovery, compliance and intelligent data governance. Its flagship offering, the Rubrik Security Cloud, enables organizations to automate backup and recovery workflows across on-premises, edge and multi-cloud environments. By combining policy-driven orchestration with real-time threat detection, Rubrik helps clients guard against ransomware, ensure business continuity and enforce data retention requirements.
The company’s platform supports a range of services including backup and restore, long-term data archiving, replication, and disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS).
