The call in brief

Read the Q2 2026 earnings summary ↗

Braze posted a strong fiscal Q2 2026 with revenue up 24% year-over-year to $180 million, passed $700 million in committed ARR, and raised full-year revenue and operating income guidance on better-than-expected downsell trends and stabilizing in-quarter net retention. The newly closed OfferFit acquisition got off to a strong start with wins across all three regions, while non-GAAP operating income reached $6 million. Gross margin compression from premium messaging volumes was the main offset to otherwise broad-based momentum.

What went well
  • Braze generated $180 million of revenue in fiscal Q2 2026, up 24% year-over-year and 11% from the prior quarter, and recently passed $700 million of committed annual recurring revenue.
  • The company delivered $6 million of non-GAAP operating income, $17 million of non-GAAP net income, and $4 million of free cash flow, marking three straight quarters of positive non-GAAP operating income and free cash flow and five straight quarters of positive non-GAAP net income.
  • Total customer count grew 259 year-over-year and 80 sequentially to 2,422, while customers spending $500,000 or more annually rose 27% year-over-year to 282.
  • The OfferFit acquisition, closed June 2nd, got off to a strong start, with the company tallying post-acquisition OfferFit wins in each of its Americas, EMEA, and APAC regions at full deal-desk pricing.
  • In-quarter dollar-based net retention stabilized over the prior seven months, increasing modestly from slightly below 107% in Q1 to slightly above 107% in Q2, and management raised full-year revenue and operating income guidance.
  • The enterprise legacy replacement cycle remained a robust source of new business, with takeaways from legacy marketing clouds and continued vendor consolidation supporting strong competitive win rates.
What went wrong
  • Non-GAAP gross margin declined to 69.3% from 70.9% a year earlier, driven primarily by higher premium messaging volumes.
  • Trailing dollar-based net retention of 108% remained below year-ago levels, reflecting elevated downsell activity earlier in the cycle, though management noted the decline was only one point versus the prior quarter.
  • Free cash flow fell to $4 million from $7 million a year earlier, including roughly $6.9 million in cash payments related to the OfferFit acquisition.
  • Switching costs continued to act as a drag on enterprise deal cycles in a demand environment where companies remain focused on cost optimization.

Management Commentary

Read the Q2 2026 summary ↗
Christopher Ferris
VP, Braze Investor relations, Braze

Thank you, Operator. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today to review Braze's results for the fiscal second quarter 2026. I'm joined by our Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Bill Magnuson, and our Chief Financial Officer, Isabelle Winkles. We announced our results in a press release issued after the market closed today. Please refer to the Investor Relations section of our website at investors.braze.com for more information and a supplemental presentation related to today's earnings announcement. During this call, we will make statements related to our business that are forward-looking under Federal Securities Laws and the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.

These statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding our financial outlook for the third quarter and fiscal year ended January 31, 2026, the anticipated benefits from and product advancements due to the combination of Braze and OfferFit technologies, our expectations concerning new customer verticals, our anticipated customer behaviors including vendor consolidation and replacement trends and their impact on Braze, our potential market opportunity and our ability to effectively execute on such opportunity, and our long-term financial targets and goals. These statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations and reflect our views only as of today. We assume no obligation to update any such forward-looking statements.

For a discussion of the material risks and uncertainties that could affect our actual results, please refer to the risks identified in today's press release and our SEC filings, both available on the Investor Relations section of our website. I'd also like to remind you that today's call will include certain non-GAAP financial measures used by management to evaluate our ongoing operations and to aid investors in further understanding the company's fiscal second quarter 2026 performance, in addition to the impact these items have on the financial results. Please refer to the reconciliations of our non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable financial measures calculated in accordance with U.S. GAAP, included in our earnings release under the Investor Relations section of our website. The non-GAAP financial measures provided should not be considered as a substitute for or superior to the measures of financial performance prepared in accordance with U.S.

GAAP. Now, I'd like to turn the call over to Bill.

Bill Magnuson
Co-founder and CEO, Braze

Thank you, Chris, and good afternoon, everyone. We delivered great second quarter results, generating $180 million of revenue, up 24% year-over-year and 11% from the prior quarter. I'm also pleased to announce that we recently passed $700 million of committed annual recurring revenue, demonstrating continued strong demand for the ROI delivered by the Braze customer engagement Platform. Thank you to our dedicated team across the world who helped us achieve this milestone. I look forward to building on this success as we continue our journey to make Braze the industry standard for customer engagement. We also continued to drive efficiency in our business, delivering $6 million of non-GAAP operating income, $17 million of non-GAAP net income, and $4 million of free cash flow in the quarter.

We've now posted three straight quarters of positive non-GAAP operating income and free cash flow, as well as five straight quarters of positive non-GAAP net income. Looking ahead, we remain committed to driving higher profitability while thoughtfully reinvesting in our business, strengthening our competitive advantage, and maintaining our position as a leading customer engagement platform globally. Our business momentum continued in Q2 as we achieved solid bookings across verticals and geographies. As we've stated the past several quarters, global trade and economic concerns have yet to materially affect deal cycles, and we are optimistic looking into the second half of the year and fiscal year 2027 as we realized record pipeline generation and competitive strength across regions. In the quarter, we increased our customer count by 80 sequentially and 259 year-over-year to 2,422. Our large customer additions were again strong, with $500,000 + ARR customers rising 27% year-over-year to 282.

Recent new business wins and existing customer expansions include Doc Morris, Fogo de Chão, gopuff, Klein anz eigen, Laundryh eap, Little Caesars, Metcash, Saily, Sweetgreen, and Wix. Additionally, the enterprise replacement cycle remains a robust source of new business. Takeaways from the legacy marketing clouds in the quarter included a European digital employment solutions firm, a Japanese career website, a Canadian telecommunications company, a North American discount retailer, and digital media and consumer companies across the U.S., Europe, and APAC. Our competitive win rates remain strong as a result of these ongoing legacy replacement cycles and continued trends in vendor consolidation, which creates further opportunities for Braze to expand its market share.

In addition to our wins against the legacy marketing clouds, we also continue to displace less sophisticated point solutions, including recent new business wins at an American e-commerce company, a women's online retailer in APAC, an American shapewear and clothing brand, and many others. As frontier capabilities in artificial intelligence continue their rapid advance, brands are increasingly eager to leverage AI-driven innovation to achieve improved customer results and greater marketer productivity. Braze remains future-focused and is rapidly deploying new AI solutions in tandem with first-party data activation, applying leading-edge reinforcement learning and generative AI technology to an ever-evolving set of messaging channels and product interfaces to help our customers deliver more relevant customer experiences and grow their businesses.

Throughout our history, Braze has emphasized the importance of living in the flow of first-party data and customer context, pairing it with the intelligence of a machine learning-enhanced stream processor and delivering on critical use cases with the reliability, performance, and security that enterprises demand. As Braze forges ahead, it is increasingly clear that the same architectural defects, user experience complexity, and performance limitations that held back our competitors through the rise of mobile and the advent of stream processing are also barriers to their ability to leverage frontier capabilities in AI and machine learning. By contrast, Braze has built the critical foundations of customer engagement, delivered them to our growing customer community at extreme scale, and we are eager to continue to unlock the promise of our sophisticated vision for customer engagement with the rapidly advancing power of AI.

While our product development accelerates, we also remain committed to category-leading UX design and heavy investment in the education and activation of the community of marketers and agencies that are integral to the Braze ecosystem. Now is an opportune moment to lift the craft of customer engagement to new heights, allowing marketers to transcend the mundane aspects of campaign creation and emerge as conductors of exceptional experiences and business strategy. After closing the acquisition in early June, we also got off to a strong start with OfferFit by Braze, quickly integrating their team, melding cultures, fostering tight collaboration, and beginning to educate our customers on the potential for AI decisioning to transform their customer engagement strategies.

Within our existing customer base, the pipeline for OfferFit by Braze has sharply accelerated, especially across our enterprise segment, where we have earned a high level of trust by delivering sophistication at scale throughout our lifetime as a company. Our combined selling motion is off to a great start, tallying Q2 wins in each of our major geographic regions. We view OfferFit's AI decisioning engine as a uniquely effective asset, providing a best-of-breed platform for autonomous one-on-one personalization with a deep technical moat. By integrating OfferFit's AI decisioning engine with the Braze customer engagement platform and combining our R&D teams, we are extremely excited to be expanding and accelerating the BrazeAI roadmap to elevate the experiences delivered to customers through the billions of content and orchestration decisions made by Canvas and BrazeAI decisioning products every day.

As customer engagement teams continue to prioritize one-on-one connection, creativity, and business growth, the tools and techniques for delivering relevant and memorable experiences are rapidly evolving, and AI is set to revolutionize the role of customer engagement teams, transforming them from day-to-day campaign tacticians into strategic conductors of autonomous customer engagement systems that foster mutual customer value and drive business growth. With the BrazeAI roadmap, we are harnessing composable intelligence to enhance both the marketer and customer engagement experiences. This approach unlocks meaningful one-on-one personalization at scale while maintaining continuity of brand and product experiences.

Much as Canvas embeds the knowledge and creativity of a brand's business priorities and marketing strategy today, in the near future, we believe that the context and intelligence of brands and marketing teams will be embedded in composable models, agents, and operators, fundamentally reshaping how marketers operate and interact with their customers, providing not just efficiency but also strategic leverage and improved decision-making. We plan to share more of our AI vision and upcoming product innovation plans during our annual customer conference, Forge, which takes place from September 29th - October 1st in Las Vegas. You'll learn more about our approach to investing in AI, data unification, activation and distribution, channel expansion, and our generative, predictive, and agentic solutions to deliver composable intelligence to customer engagement.

We'll also share more about our growing work with global strategic partners, many of whom are sponsoring Forge, including new joint solutions like Subscribed Studios, which was built by VML in collaboration with Stripe and is specifically designed to address the unique challenges of subscription businesses. It combines AI-driven lifecycle intelligence with live customer and usage data, enabling smarter subscription journeys. Through the integration with Braze, these insights become immediately actionable, triggering personalized event-based communications across the subscriber lifecycle. At Forge, attendees will have the opportunity to experience exciting customer engagement innovations from top brands and Braze practitioners at live workshops and hear from many of our outstanding customers and partners, both on stage and in the hallways. While we won't be hosting a full Investor Day this fall, we will be welcoming investors for a reception on the evening of Tuesday, September 30th. Contact Investor Relations for more details.

I'll wrap my remarks by reiterating our commitment to driving long-term growth, efficiency, and profitability in our business. Thank you for your interest and support of Braze, and now I'll turn the call over to Isabelle.

Isabelle Winkles
CFO, Braze

Thank you, Bill, and thank you everyone for joining us today. As Bill stated, we reported a strong second quarter with revenue increasing 24% year-over-year to $180 million, driven by a combination of existing customer contract expansions, renewals, and new business. Excluding the $2.8 million contributed by OfferFit for the two months of Q2, organic revenue grew 22% to $177 million. Subscription revenue remains the primary component of our total top line, contributing 95% of our second quarter revenue, while the remaining 5% represents a combination of recurring professional services and one-time configuration and onboarding fees. Total customer count increased 12% year-over-year to 2,422 customers, up 259 from the same period last year and up 80 from the prior quarter. This figure includes 17 net new OfferFit customers added as a result of the transaction.

As a reminder, OfferFit had 27 customers, of which 10 were Braze customers prior to closing the transaction. The number of large customers, which we define as those spending at least $500,000 annually, grew 27% year-over-year to 282, up 60 from the same period last year and up 20 from the prior quarter. OfferFit contributed two net new large customers as a result of the transaction. Customers spending $500,000 or more annually contributed 62% to our total ARR, compared to a 61% contribution as of the same quarter last year. Measured across all customers, dollar-based net retention was 108%, while dollar-based net retention for our large customers was 111%. Expansion was again broadly distributed across industries and geographic regions. Revenue outside the U.S. contributed 45% of our total revenue in the second quarter, down approximately 60 basis points sequentially and in line with the prior year quarter.

I'll note that the in-quarter dollar-based net retention has stabilized over the last seven months and increased modestly from slightly below 107% in Q1 to slightly above 107% in Q2. While we are not providing specific guidance for the trailing 12-month DBNR, we are encouraged by the recent in-period stabilization and look forward to updating you on this metric in the coming quarters. In the second quarter, our total remaining performance obligation was $862 million, up 25% year-over-year and up 4% sequentially. Current RPO was $558 million, up 27% year-over-year and up 7% sequentially. These numbers include a contribution from OfferFit of approximately $12 million to RPO and approximately $10.5 million to cRPO. The year-over-year increases were driven by contract renewals and upsells and the signing of new customer contracts. Overall, our dollar-weighted contract length remains at just over two years.

Non-GAAP gross profit in the quarter was $125 million, representing a non-GAAP gross margin of 69.3%. This compares to a non-GAAP gross profit of $103 million and non-GAAP gross margin of 70.9% in the second quarter of last year. The decrease in year-over-year gross margin was driven primarily by higher premium messaging volumes, partially offset by continued cost optimization of our technology stack, with additional benefits from personnel efficiencies. The OfferFit acquisition had no material impact to our gross margin in the quarter. Non-GAAP sales and marketing expenses were $70 million, or 39% of revenue, compared to $58 million, or 40% of revenue in the prior year quarter. The dollar increase reflects our year-over-year investments in headcount costs to support our ongoing growth and global expansion. The improved efficiency reflects our disciplined investment approach to resource deployment across our go-to-market organization.

Notably, we achieved this incremental efficiency while adding the two months of OfferFit expenses during the quarter. Non-GAAP R&D expense was $27 million, or 15% of revenue, compared to $21 million, or 15% of revenue in the prior year quarter. The dollar increase was primarily driven by increased headcount costs to support the expansion of our existing offerings, as well as to develop new products and features to drive growth. Our R&D expenditures reflect our intentional yet disciplined technology investment strategy and are in line with our long-term non-GAAP R&D percent of revenue target of 13% - 15%. Non-GAAP G&A expense was $22 million, or 12% of revenue, compared to $19 million, or 13% of revenue in the prior year quarter.

The dollar increase was driven by investments to support overall company growth and global expansion, with continued efficiency as a percent of revenue driven by economies of scale and use of strategic cost locations. Non-GAAP operating income was $6 million, or 3.4% of revenue, compared to a non-GAAP operating income of $4 million, or 2.9% of revenue in the prior year quarter. Non-GAAP net income attributable to Braze shareholders in the quarter was $17 million, or $0.15 per share, compared to $9 million, or $0.09 per share in the prior year quarter. The OfferFit acquisition increased Braze's deferred tax liability balance by approximately $8 million. This resulted in a commensurate reduction in the company's valuation allowance, which generated a one-time $8 million benefit to non-GAAP net income in Q2.

Now turning to the balance sheet and cash flow statement, we ended the quarter with approximately $368 million in cash, cash equivalents, restricted cash, and marketable securities. This includes the impact of the cash portion of the OfferFit acquisition of $181 million. Cash provided by operations during the quarter was $7 million, compared to cash provided by operations of $12 million in the prior year quarter. Including the cash impact of capitalized costs, free cash flow in the quarter was $4 million, compared to free cash flow of $7 million in the prior year quarter. Free cash flow includes the impact of approximately $6.9 million in cash payments related to the OfferFit acquisition. We expect our free cash flow to continue to fluctuate from quarter to quarter, given the timing of customer and vendor payments. Now turning to guidance.

As a reminder, we closed the OfferFit acquisition on June 2nd, and as such, our third quarter forecast includes a full quarter contribution from the transaction, while our full year forecast incorporates only an eight-month impact from the transaction. For the third quarter of fiscal 2026, we expect revenue to be in the range of $183.5 million - $184.5 million, which represents a year-over-year growth rate of approximately 21% at the midpoint. Third quarter non-GAAP operating income is expected to be in the range of $3.5 million - $4.5 million, which implies a non-GAAP operating margin of approximately 2% at the midpoint. As a reminder, third quarter operating income includes the impact of expenses related to Forge, our annual customer conference, as well as several other global events scheduled during the quarter.

Third quarter non-GAAP net income is expected to be in the range of $6.5 million - $7.5 million, and third quarter non-GAAP net income per share in the range of $0.06 - $0.07 per share, based on approximately 113.5 million weighted average diluted shares outstanding during the period. For the full fiscal year 2026, we expect total revenue to be in the range of $717 million - $720 million, which represents a year-over-year growth rate of approximately 21% at the midpoint. Consistent with commentary we provided on our fourth quarter and first quarter conference calls, we expect OfferFit to contribute approximately two percentage points to year-over-year growth for the full fiscal year. Fiscal year 2026 non-GAAP operating income is expected to be in the range of $24.5 million - $25.5 million.

At the midpoint, this implies a non-GAAP operating margin of 3.5%, a roughly 350 basis point improvement versus fiscal year 2025. Non-GAAP net income for the same period is expected to be in the range of $45.5 million - $46.5 million, and net income per share is expected to be $0.41 - $0.42 per share, based on a full year weighted average diluted share count of approximately 112 million shares. I'll close my remarks by expressing my enthusiasm for the future of Braze. We are steadfast in our commitment to providing leading customer engagement solutions and remain well-positioned to achieve our long-term financial targets. With that, we'll now open the call for questions. Operator, please begin the Q&A.

Analyst Q&A

Brent Bracelin — Analyst, Piper Sandler
Thank you. Good afternoon. You beat Q2 by $8 million. You're raising the full year by $14 million. You're raising the full year operating profit by $15 million. cRPO growth accelerated 300 basis points. Bill, what's changed here with the demand environment and the appetite to lean into Braze now? Isabelle, what's behind your confidence that you can drive higher growth and higher operating leverage here for the rest of the year? Thanks.
Bill Magnuson — Co-founder and CEO, Braze
Yeah, so high level, as we mentioned, I don't think we've seen a meaningful change in either the macro or the demand environment, but we've been really happy with our execution globally. As we referenced, historically high competitive win rates mean that our late-stage pipeline is operating very efficiently for the business. We've also, as we've been talking about for the last several quarters, been looking at the attenuation of downsell activity, and we're starting to see that materialize as well. Generally, we're seeing great momentum around the world. We're seeing, I think, solid performance across verticals and across geos, with everyone contributing within the verticals. We've mentioned in the past that our focus verticals for this year on retail and e-commerce and financial services have been an area where we've been aligning investments across marketing, product, and sales.
Those have been working out very well, increasing the efficiency specifically of our pipeline generation and our win rates within those categories. A lot of the investments that we've been making to improve execution have been synchronizing with each other around the world. It's still a challenging demand environment, but we're working with what we've got, and I think we've been happy with the performance, and we've got a good line of sight to where that strength will continue through the back half of the year.
Isabelle Winkles — CFO, Braze
Yeah, and just specifically on some of the numbers, I think on our ability to better manage and have visibility on improved outcomes on downsells, you're seeing that in the dollar-based net retention. I did provide a little bit of added color there on where in-period is trending and where that has been trending over the last several months. I think the sustained performance that we're seeing there is giving us greater confidence through the back half of the year. OfferFit is also performing as expected, and we've got some events now behind us. The OfferFit integration is performing extremely well. We've onboarded Ed McDonnell, which is going very, very well. We know these were some sources of some uncertainty over the last few months. That's now behind us, and we're really pleased with our plan for capital deployment through the back of the year.
When you combine that visibility and transparency with some of the upside that we're seeing on the revenue piece, that's how you come up with the improved profitability, and we're excited to be on that path.
Brent Bracelin — Analyst, Piper Sandler
Great to see. Thanks a lot.
Seti Pendegree — Analyst, Mizuho
Thank you. It's great to join the call. I want to ask about the OfferFit. You talked about a strong start with OfferFit. Help us understand a little bit more. What are you hearing from your customer base after this integration, and what kind of ACV uplift do we see from your customer base with OfferFit?
Bill Magnuson — Co-founder and CEO, Braze
Yeah.
Seti Pendegree — Analyst, Mizuho
As a follow-up.
Bill Magnuson — Co-founder and CEO, Braze
Yeah, so first of all, as I mentioned, we were excited to tally a post-acquisition OfferFit win within all three of our Americas, EMEA, and APAC regions. Those are all executed in line with our full deal desk pricing and contracting practices, which were obviously important early milestones for the integration. These are still enterprise deal cycles. They've got six-figure price tags and the sales cycles that are typically measured in months, not weeks. We are encouraged by the pipeline generation in the quarter and the pace of the integration so far.
I think the pattern that we're seeing is that the high levels of trust, in particular in our enterprise category, that our customer base has with Braze's ability to deliver and really just the integrity and the pragmatism that we've always incorporated into the BrazeAI roadmap and really looking at the defensible and provable performance uplift from the technology of OfferFit has combined together to create a really compelling offering that people are really interested in. We are very excited about the potential there. We continue to think we're going to see very high attach rates, in particular in the high end of our customer base, for the full OfferFit offering. As a reminder, the full OfferFit offering is priced around $300,000 annually. There are other flavors of that offering, and we are looking at definitely providing a full spectrum of reinforcement learning offerings.
We're going to share more about that at Forge at the end of the month so that we've got different price points and different deployment mechanisms so that we can definitely sell, especially as we get further down the product development, the combined product development road with the existing BrazeAI investments alongside the OfferFit roadmap and the synergies of those coming together. We think it's going to be able to provide a robust, kind of fully fledged offering. We're going to share more about that at Forge, and we're going to share more about that in the coming quarters. I think that all of our assumptions leading into the acquisition have so far been vetting out not only positively, but also we're moving at pace, and we've been really happy with the urgency and the velocity of the integration and continue to be really excited about it.
Isabelle Winkles — CFO, Braze
Specifically on your question around the top line impact, just to reiterate that we talked about a 2% uplift to year-over-year revenue growth. I think the rough range is sort of an $11 million- $12 million contribution in the year, and we are perfectly on pace for that contribution.
Seti Pendegree — Analyst, Mizuho
That's a great color. I have a follow-up in terms of margin. It's great to see that you raised your margin for the year. I wanted to specifically ask you about OfferFit. I know it has a lot of service. How do you plan to scale OfferFit business and further drive even margin expansion there with OfferFit?
Isabelle Winkles — CFO, Braze
Yeah, so there's two pieces to that. I think on gross margin, the OfferFit numbers today mix in pretty much exactly as our business is structured. There's no dilution right now on a gross margin basis. They are an earlier stage company, and we do see opportunities to improve that gross margin over time as we mature their delivery operations. We do see opportunity for that to improve and actually exceed Braze's overall average gross margin over time. On operating income, obviously they mixed in a little bit negatively, and what we've been doing is just aggressively looking for ways to ensure that there are appropriate synergies between the two as we have completed or as we continue to complete the integration.
We want to continue to invest in that business to make it as successful as possible, but we're being extremely disciplined and diligent about how that is being executed. You're seeing some of that in our ongoing plan to improve profitability.
Raimo Lenschow — Analyst, Barclays
That's great. Congrats on a good quarter.
[Analyst] — Stephens
Good afternoon, everybody. Can you hear me okay?
Bill Magnuson — Co-founder and CEO, Braze
Yep.
[Analyst] — Stephens
Okay, thanks. Congrats on a nice quarter and lots of great stats here, given lots of different theses going on in the market. To that end, I feel like I need to ask the AI question. Can you talk a little bit or just remind us again how the usage is trending for your AI products, maybe in a little more detail to provide some meat on the bone on the defensibility of what we think is Braze's position? Also, talk a little bit maybe about the forward deployment of folks you have, I think, around OfferFit. I have a follow-up as well.
Bill Magnuson — Co-founder and CEO, Braze
Yeah, for sure. I think that when we look out across the BrazeAI feature set, we obviously have a full spectrum of offerings, including some that we launched years ago. They deploy a number of different AI technologies, ranging from advanced data science and machine learning into reinforcement learning processes, transformer-driven recommendations, and then GenAI assistants and copilots and such. We're seeing rapid levels of adoption really across that entire feature set. Some of them are correlated with different verticals. Things like catalog recommendations tend to be more prominent in retail and consumer goods, as well as media and entertainment, both of which are super strong verticals for us. We're seeing great usage of our assistants within the dashboard.
Arguably, one of the few competitive weaknesses for Braze historically has not been a lack of raw capability, but rather apprehension from prospects on whether they can make full use of Braze. I think our AI roadmap has tremendous promise to close that gap, both by lowering the barriers to entry for those more sophisticated features, as well as decreasing the manual effort required to test and deploy both new use cases and run ongoing experience experiments. We've been really happy primarily with continuing to see that gap being closed, where the differentiation that Braze has always been able to deliver due to our power and our flexibility is becoming more accessible to more of our customer base.
That's giving us both stronger differentiation in sales cycles, but also stronger usage and ongoing value creation for our customers, not just from the AI features, but from the existing differentiation that we already had, but that was maybe not as accessible or as usable. AI is helping really close that gap. As I referenced, we're super excited to share a lot more about the upcoming AI roadmap at Forge in just a few weeks. I don't want to scoop too many of those product announcements, but we're excited to be able to be investing both in enhancing the customer experience as well as the marketer experience.
You heard me speak in the prepared remarks about this idea around composable intelligence, which is something that we're extremely excited about as we continue to build out more opportunity for configurable and tunable models, as well as agents and operators within the dashboard, all of which help simultaneously actually improve marketer productivity, but also improve the high-level capabilities for these systems to act in more autonomous ways after being imbued with the creativity and the intelligence of the marketing teams and the brands that are utilizing them. I think really excited to see across the board just the adoption of the AI features, the adoption of the existing features being helped out by AI, and a lot of excitement in the roadmap as well.
[Analyst] — Stephens
That's super helpful. The second question is on sales execution. You all have been talking about this, and I think showing results demonstrating that the sales execution has gotten better. I think we underestimated maybe just how much better, how much of that contributed to it. I know you called it out, or maybe Isabelle did in the opening remarks, but any more to add there?
Bill Magnuson — Co-founder and CEO, Braze
I think that as I referenced at the top of the Q&A here, what we're seeing is really a synchronization of a lot of positive impacts from a lot of the operational changes, a lot of the investment that we've put into achieving high competitive win rates and really making sure that we've got strong qualification, in particular of late-stage pipelines so that we can better prioritize our efforts. I've spoken in prior quarters about some of the sales efficiency downsides that came about from it being a very opportunity-scarce environment for a while.
That was a combination of the macro and also just a combination of pipeline and led to, in particular, some enterprise deal cycles where we were trying to force timelines that were just more difficult to execute on, where we would either run out the clock and someone would be forced to renew, or we were trying to force someone to incur switching costs earlier when they still had another year, a year and a half, and some other contract. We're operating in a stronger pipeline ratio environment that's allowing for our sales team to be a lot more judicious about where and how they spend their time, how they sequence the opportunities that they have in their patches, and how they execute on those deal cycles.
Of course, I think our competitive strength is in a really great position, which is allowing for us to execute on that late-stage pipeline in a really positive way, and that's synchronizing together around the world.
[Analyst] — Stephens
Great, thank you so much. Appreciate it.
Raimo Lenschow — Analyst, Barclays
Hey, perfect. Thank you. At the moment, like your customer addition was really decent, and you know, you talked about still challenging environments out there, but if you think about where are we in terms of customer understanding of your offering, but also customers kind of thinking about how they kind of are doing, you know, communicating with their clients in this new AI world. Do you see a change in behavior, a change in thinking there that kind of helps you to have a better situation in the market, position in the market? Thank you.
Bill Magnuson — Co-founder and CEO, Braze
Yeah, so I think that there's aspects of this where, even before we were referring to the concept of an AI-native software world, I think that Braze really arrived to the realities of a lot of what this thesis has identified as changes in the software world. We've spoken about a number of these things in prior quarters. Our pricing, as an example, has always been outcome and consumption-oriented. As you know, we've never charged for seats. Braze was designed from the beginning to enable small teams to perform massive scale work through a combination of both the deterministic automation that you see in things like the journey building in Canvas, as well as machine learning-driven automated decision-making. With AI and some of the new frontier capabilities, the scope of what's possible with that automated decision-making is increasing.
That's being supplemented also by our ramping investments in both reinforcement learning and Gen AI. I think that actually strengthens our foundational thesis that small teams should be able to build, manage, and optimize comprehensive customer engagement strategies. They need a system like Braze to be able to manage the complexity that's inherent in that problem space so that as a small team, they can grapple with the complexity of all the different channels and all the different ways that customers are interacting with them across all the different touchpoints and the real-time changing of the context around them.
Those goals remain the same, which is that you need to be able to generate insights in real time about customers using the real-time context that they generate, being able to make sense of the data as quickly as possible after it's generated, to be able to harmonize that with what your business priorities and strategies are, drive great customer experiences, and build strong relationships, right? These are fundamentals about humans, human relationships, our associations with brands, the way that we bring new products and services into our lives. Those things are not, those I think are, many of those are very timeless. A lot of these strategies, I think, when you connect them back to the more timeless truths about building strong relationships with customers and about building strong businesses on the backs of strong relationships, those things haven't changed.
The practices and the tools and the technology that we have available to us, and actually, I think the ability of the promise of sophisticated automation and sophisticated capabilities like Braze to be able to allow a small team to deliver on those really complex and hard problems, that promise is being realized more and more because of the delivery of AI. I think that that's making these teams more important within companies. We talk about marketers moving on from the drudge work of babysitting campaigns to actually being able to engage in higher-level business strategy, to be that high-level orchestrator of both the creativity that comes out of the brand stories, as well as making sure that the products and services of the brands that they work for are integrating themselves and attaching themselves to people's lives and habits and loyalties.
I think we've been really excited to just see that a lot of those things continue to be provably timeless. AI shows up in order to bridge that gap between the promise and the reality of what's delivered. When you bridge that gap, the teams that we work with become champions within their organizations. They're able to drive higher leverage impact, do so at higher levels of ROI. When you start to look at things like OfferFit coming in as well to be able to provide that high-end customizable offering where the reinforcement learning is providing provable performance edge over the best state-of-the-art, even much more expensive home-built systems and things like that, that just serves to increase the level of leverage and ROI and really the status of those customer engagement teams within organizations. I think we're really happy about the overall arc of how that continues to develop.
I think that within this demand environment, it's also still true that companies in general are still looking for ways to optimize costs. There's not a huge amount of expansionary investment, new greenfield, product introductions, and other geographic expansions and other big growth-oriented investments. That still means that some of these effects we've talked about in prior quarters where switching costs are still costs and it's still hard for organizations to be prioritizing costs like that right now. We continue to see those as drags on deal cycles, but I think that in terms of the fundamentals of customer engagement in the space, the role of the marketer, the ROI that can be delivered by making sophisticated and advanced investments in the customer engagement space are more true than ever.
Raimo Lenschow — Analyst, Barclays
Okay, perfect. Thank you. Isabelle, one on, thanks for the extra disclosure on or the extra comments on NRR. If you think about it, obviously it's a backwards looking kind of metrics. If you think about it, you know, like about a year ago you had like kind of much higher numbers. How quickly does that come back, you know, once the world is changing? You have obviously OfferFit to kind of as a cross-sell option. What are the puts and takes if you think about like the changing of that number going forward? Thank you. Congrats from me as well.
Isabelle Winkles — CFO, Braze
Yeah, I think just in terms of, we obviously don't provide guidance on that number, but if you think about the puts and takes, obviously as the downsell environment continues to moderate and we continue to get stronger in that area, that is going to help that metric. As the demand environment continues to stay strong and continues to improve and when we continue to sell OfferFit as an additional tool in our toolkit, there's opportunity for that metric to reaccelerate at some point in time. We are not calling any time period on that. We are really pleased to see the stabilization and the uplift in Q2 versus Q1 and are excited to continue to provide the trailing 12-month metric to you all going forward.
Taylor McGinnis — Analyst, UBS
Hey, congrats on the quarter and the strong results, and thanks for taking my question. Apologies if there's any background noise. Maybe on going back to the outperformance in the quarter, it was a lot stronger than what we've seen in past quarters. Could you just talk about what area really exceeded your expectations in particular? As we think about the assumptions implied in the guide going forward, how have you adjusted those accordingly and anything to keep in mind there?
Isabelle Winkles — CFO, Braze
Yeah, so there's kind of two areas that work together. Definitely on the downsell component, that came in better than anticipated. Obviously our guidance went up for the full year, so our visibility and our expectations for the back half of the year improved there as well. That had an in-quarter positive impact. The general demand environment continued to be strong across geographies and across customer classifications, across industries. Bill mentioned some of the strength that we continue to see in our verticalization. Across our breadth of products, we're continuing to see strong demand there and more limited downsell. That's great. I will call out one point of the overachieved that is related to two items that one can consider a little bit harder to predict and maybe a little bit more one-time in nature. Revenue reserves came in better than anticipated.
Revenue reserves are taken when we have expectations of poor customer payment. We've had very timely payments from our customers recently, and this has allowed us to not take as large revenue reserves. That's been helpful in the quarter, but again, difficult to predict. A nice leading indicator of customer health, so we're pleased about that. Some overages were a little bit above expectations. Taken together, those were about one point of the overachieved in the quarter.
Taylor McGinnis — Analyst, UBS
Awesome, super helpful on all that color. Just the second question is, if I look at cRPO growth, on an organic basis, it's maintained growth in the mid-20s. Now we saw this inflection in organic growth to the low 20s. We're starting to see a little bit of convergence there. I guess how can we think about those metrics in tandem going forward? Anything to keep in mind from a duration and linearity perspective?
Isabelle Winkles — CFO, Braze
Yeah, we are seeing those metrics kind of move a little bit in tandem here, and that's great to see. There's always, at any given point in time, some noise that can creep into that metric, but we are definitely encouraged, even on an organic basis, on the trajectory of the cRPO metric. Happy to see both the impact on more limited downsells is definitely playing into that, as well as the strength in the overall just kind of core business and momentum that we're seeing in the business. We're excited to see that positive trajectory.
Taylor McGinnis — Analyst, UBS
Awesome. Thank you guys so much.
Brian Peterson — Analyst, Raymond James
Thanks, and I'll echo my congrats on the strong quarter. Bill, I know you said the demand environment's fairly stable. If you kind of unpack the geos and the end markets, have you seen any changes over the course of the year that you would call out in terms of the demand environment from a net new perspective?
Thanks, guys.
Bill Magnuson — Co-founder and CEO, Braze
I think, you know, quarter by quarter we have seen differences in country-specific performance around the world, but averaging over, you know, the last few quarters, I think we've been happy with performance globally. We've seen major contributions and strong win rates from each of our global regions and subregions, and that's inclusive of both our more mature areas, you know, where we've had established sales teams for years, as well as some of the places that we've opened up more recently. We've also seen some great, you know, positive momentum from things like the data center that we deployed in Australia. We had across the board really strong performance from actually every single segment in our ANZ region in the most recent quarter. That was certainly helped out by that country-specific investment into the data center.
We're doing a better job, I think, of aligning things like regional support along with partners, as well as vertical-specific investments that drive alignment across, you know, marketing spend, product marketing, and, you know, product-specific investments and making sure that those are all getting aligned around go-to-market activation and execution. Generally, I think what we're seeing is that there are puts and takes around the globe, but I think we've had good visibility into where relative strength and weakness is so that we can deploy capacity in a way that's efficient. We can also align other supporting investments across product and marketing to make sure that we've got the right alignment of sales capacity with the, you know, varying regional strength and that that's all supported and lined up in a focused way.
Brian Peterson — Analyst, Raymond James
Thanks, Bill.
Brian Schwartz — Analyst, Oppenheimer
Yeah, hi, thanks for taking my questions. Bill, given that the sales productivity is improving, which we can see in the results, I think in your prepared remarks you said convergence and normalizing pipelines at a record level, and you have the CRO in place. Does that change at all the pace of hiring new sales reps in the second half of the fiscal year?
Bill Magnuson — Co-founder and CEO, Braze
Yeah, so we are expanding sales capacity in the second half of the year. I wouldn't say that there's any major changes to that other than that, as Isabelle mentioned, certainly we are on the other side of two major events that had uncertainty related to them, one of them being the OfferFit acquisition and the level of disruption and the pace at which we would be able to smoothly integrate that. The second being Ed's onboarding. I think we're about, we're just a couple months into both of those events.
Being on the other side of them, I think that we've been really happy with the pacing so far, both of Ed's onboarding and integration into the executive team and into the go-to-market functions, as well as the OfferFit team integrating into the broader Braze organization and us being able to merge together both the product development as well as the different operational processes in the groups. That's all setting the stage to provide the right foundations for us to continue to execute on the investment plan for the second half of the year. As Isabelle mentioned, I think we simultaneously feel good about the investment path, our ability to drive those investment levels with the certainty that we want from the business.
We combine that with some great results on the top line, as well as on the attenuation of the downsell pattern that we've been, that we had been living with over the last few quarters. That sets the stage for the guidance that you're seeing today.
Brian Schwartz — Analyst, Oppenheimer
For Isabelle, in terms of thinking about the operating leverage, are the internal uses of AI that you're using at Braze and/or the low-cost labor arbitrage, is that moving the needle yet? Is that having an impact on the margin outperformance that we've seen so far, or is that still ahead of the business?
Isabelle Winkles — CFO, Braze
I think it's more so we're seeing more of that leverage coming from the cost-optimized location. The internal use of AI tooling, I think we're still early days on that to really be at a point where you're kind of replacing human capacity to a more material extent.
Brian Schwartz — Analyst, Oppenheimer
Thank you.
Matthew VanVliet — Analyst, Cantor Fitzgerald
Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. First, on the sales execution front, curious on how your average deal sizes came in relative to what was expected in the pipeline. Are you seeing sales cycles drawn out or deals come in maybe at a smaller price point than you were anticipating, but the volume is sort of making up for it? Secondarily, curious on where we're at on the average duration of sales reps' maturation and how much maybe influence that did have on sales execution as well. Thank you.
Bill Magnuson — Co-founder and CEO, Braze
Yeah, overall I would say there's a little bit of quarter-by-quarter noise when it comes to average deal sizes. In general, I think that we've seen a pretty stable productivity. Most of the inputs to sales productivity over the last few quarters have remained fairly consistent. Similarly, some of the mechanics around average durations and even things like annual versus multiyear deal terms, payment terms, et cetera, we're seeing some quarter-by-quarter noise on these things, but no major trend lines to support. I think that a lot of the environment from those dimensions has remained pretty consistent.
Derrick Wood — Analyst, TD Cowen
Great, congrats from me as well. Bill, with search and SEO getting disrupted by AI, are you seeing customers look to shift more marketing spend into first-party data and customer engagement solutions like yours? Just wondering how you see the market reacting to this AI disruption and how you guys are trying to capitalize.
Bill Magnuson — Co-founder and CEO, Braze
Yeah, so we've talked about this in the past. I do think that we will benefit from a need for more and more brands to be able to avoid some of the downsides to demand aggregators that'll come about from people using more assistants and such. I think it's still early days in terms of understanding exactly what kinds of changes are going to be effective in order to navigate the AEO environment and the acquisition side of the house.
I think it's more true than ever that being able to, once you've got a customer, once a customer has discovered you as a brand and they're ready to engage in your product or your service ecosystem, that being able to kind of create a stronger first-party connection with them that is informed by first-party data and context and then rewarded with the ongoing ability to communicate with that person over time. The importance of all of that stuff that's downstream from acquisition, I think always increases whenever new demand aggregators enter into a given vertical or a given market. One of the things that is so important about the presence of tools like ChatGPT and changing user patterns around them is that it's a demand aggregator across a lot of verticals.
Obviously, travel and hospitality, food and quick service restaurants, and a number of other verticals have been dealing with the presence of demand aggregators for a long time. That is now showing up in more and more of our life. I think we should expect the marketing strategy response to be very similar across these newly impacted verticals as we have seen already across categories like restaurants and travel and hospitality, many of which are strength verticals for us because of the importance of running things like loyalty programs and building strong first-party branded connections with people. All of those things, I think, just continue to hammer home the importance of investing in those first-party data sets and establishing first-party connections with people in utilizing things like loyalty programs in order to enhance those connections, etc. We continue to see those trend lines happening.
I do think the specific questions around AEO, everyone should certainly be and are investing in and trying to better position brands to be able to capitalize on being able to be discovered in places like GenAI chatbots and what have you. It's still pretty much, it's still early days, I think, for a lot of those strategies to be cemented with convicted budget changes. I wouldn't say that we're seeing any sort of massive changes there.
Yun Kim — Analyst, Loop Capital
All right, thank you. Congrats from me as well. If you can provide some color around any trend that you're seeing around different messaging channels, which specific premium channels perform well in the quarter, and is there any messaging channel you expect to get a boost from when a customer adopts OfferFit?
Bill Magnuson — Co-founder and CEO, Braze
Yeah, I think that across messaging channels, we've seen pretty consistent growth across our offerings. As Isabelle mentioned, we have seen more growth in some of the premium messaging channels, and we've also seen more growth in premium messaging channels outside the U.S. I think some of those things are actually driven by a lot of the positive effects of the flexible credits model that we have been predicting and forecasting over the course of the last few quarters. As a reminder, as a Braze, you know, SMS buyer in the past, you used to actually have to contract on a country-by-country basis the volumes that you were going to send.
Now you're able to buy a basket of more fungible flexible credits, which then allows for you to more dynamically test out new markets and new channels and be able to shift strategies as you see different levels of ROI or strengths and weaknesses in different markets in a way that people just couldn't contract before. I think as a result, we are seeing higher adoption of some of those premium messaging channels as well as their spread across more countries and people testing out things like RCS and WhatsApp more flexibly than they were before. We've been really happy to see all of the impact of all of those. We did predict that a number of those things would be a consequence of the change toward the flexible credits model, and that's been coming into fruition.
We've also been seeing great adoption of channels like landing pages and content cards, as well as the banner cards extension to content cards, which are all areas where we've been putting investment into adding more depth and flexibility to those different channels, and customers have been adopting them apace. We've definitely been excited to see that because one of the number one correlators with customer growth and customer retention is the adoption and execution of multi-channel strategies and being able to do so both in product and out of product and merging and coordinating those strategies together. That's exactly what we want to be seeing across the board with customers.
With respect to OfferFit driving messaging channels, they tend to get deployed around email as a primary channel, but as a reminder, the OfferFit decisioning engine is highly flexible and can be applied to strategies across not even just the channels that Braze is super strong in, but it actually has been used for performance marketing use cases and being able to do things like optimizing bid levels on ad buying strategies and such. We're very excited to see the OfferFit decisioning engine be able to be deployed not just on the first-party channels that Braze has pre-existing footprint and strength in, but actually be deployed more broadly across marketing organizations across all of their goals.
[Analyst] — Citizens Capital Markets & Advisory
Apologies. Can you hear me now?
Isabelle Winkles — CFO, Braze
Yes.
[Analyst] — Citizens Capital Markets & Advisory
This is [Kincaid] on for Pat. Thanks so much for taking the question. We've seen customers in this over $500,000 cohort going up quarter over quarter, but we've seen the dollar-based net retention rate dropping. Are we going to see that reaccelerate at any point?
Isabelle Winkles — CFO, Braze
We talked about the dollar-based net retention in quarter and the trends that we've seen there that are an indication of some of that stabilization. Over the last seven months, we've seen some of that stabilization and in particular, Q2 was slightly higher than Q1 on an in-quarter basis. Generally, it's a bit of a leading indicator on directionality. Also, the dollar-based net retention dropped only a point versus the prior quarter. We've seen larger drops in recent quarters, so we're encouraged by the direction of travel there. Just point you to our comments about the in-quarter trajectory.
[Analyst] — Citizens Capital Markets & Advisory
Thank you so much.
Tyler Radke — Analyst, Citi
Hi there. Can you hear me okay?
Isabelle Winkles — CFO, Braze
Yep.
Tyler Radke — Analyst, Citi
Yes. Okay, great. I guess just going back to one of the comments this quarter, Isabelle, I think you talked about some better reserve dynamics just on some of the payment terms. You also talked about improving retention rates across the board. I would just be curious, what's the underlying demand driver here? Is it, are you seeing kind of improvements on the messaging or MAU side? Any commonality across the better payments and better retention?
Isabelle Winkles — CFO, Braze
Yeah, I mean, look, on the better payments, there's no one particular product that's at play there. That's really more customer health and the fact that, you know, we continue to be tier I vendors across, you know, the swath of our customers. Certainly our customers want to maintain us in good standing and have maintained the platform on and operational and avoid any disruption there. I think that's a little bit of speaking to kind of the global health of the customer base. As customers run into their own financial troubles, they'll tend to be more delinquent with payments. It's great to see that not only operationally, our own internal engine to collect payments continues to perform well, but also our customers are prioritizing us. We're actually having, you know, the ability to pay. That's a great directional signal for us.
In terms of the overall kind of demand environment, all of the components continue to perform well. You're seeing, we've had some growth in the monthly active user base. That has historically always underpaced the overall revenue growth. Nothing to shout out there in particular. The messaging continues to perform very well as we continue to sell, you know, on the credits basis. Across the board, just the entitlements that we are making available to our customers, we're seeing kind of broad adoption and continued expansion of multiple SKUs across the board.
Willow Miller — Analyst, William Blair
Hi team, I'm Willow Miller on for Arjun Bhatia. Thanks for taking our question and fitting us in. We appreciate the color on the downsell activity and the prepared remarks. Could you also comment on where you are in terms of ZIRP era customer renewals? Could we expect any more in the balance of the year?
Isabelle Winkles — CFO, Braze
Yeah, we're not going to really untangle that any further. I think we're really happy to see the overall trajectory on downsell activity and the stabilization that we're seeing, as I've mentioned, on the in-quarter dollar-based net retention. We're excited to continue to report on the trailing 12 months over the next couple of quarters.
Willow Miller — Analyst, William Blair
Understood. Thank you.
Bill Magnuson — Co-founder and CEO, Braze
I just want to thank everybody for joining us today. We hope to see many of you at Forge as well. As a reminder, if you're interested in joining us for the investor reception, you can reach out to investorrelations@braze.com.
Source: Braze, Inc. earnings call transcript (2025-09-04). Management commentary and analyst Q&A are reproduced as delivered; speaker roles as stated on the call.

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