Freshworks opened 2026 with Q1 revenue of $228.6 million, up 16% year-over-year as reported (14% constant currency), exceeding the high end of estimates, with non-GAAP operating margin of 18% and a 24% adjusted free cash flow margin, again achieving Rule of 40. EX ARR grew 27% year-over-year to over $540 million while CX ARR grew 6% to over $395 million, and the company signed the two largest deals in its history including its first seven-figure EX ARR deal. Alongside results, Freshworks announced a workforce reduction of approximately 11% in Q2 to consolidate go-to-market efforts and increase AI/automation leverage, with ~$8 million in one-time restructuring charges. Net dollar retention improved to 106% as reported (105% constant currency), a 1-point acceleration from the prior quarter, driven by EX strength.
Thank you. Good afternoon, and welcome to Freshworks' first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. Joining me today are Dennis Woodside, Freshworks' Chief Executive Officer and President, and Tyler Sloat, Freshworks' Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer. The primary purpose of today's call is to provide you with information regarding our first quarter 2026 performance and our financial outlook for our second quarter and full year 2026. Some of our discussion and responses to your questions may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are based on our management's beliefs about our business and industry, including our financial expectations and estimates, uncertainties in the macroeconomic environment in which we operate, and market volatility, and certain other assumptions made by the company, all of which are subject to change.
These statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Such risks include, but are not limited to, our ability to sustain our growth, to innovate, to reach our long-term revenue goals, to meet customer demand, and to control costs and improve operating efficiency. For a discussion of additional material risks and other important factors that could affect our results, please refer to today's earnings release, our most recently filed Form 10-K, and other periodic filings with the SEC. Freshworks assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements in order to reflect events or circumstances that may arise after the date of this call, except as required by law. During the course of today's call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures.
Reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures for historical periods are included in our earnings release, which is available on our investor relations website at ir.freshworks.com. I encourage you to visit our investor relations site to access our earnings release, supplemental earnings slides, periodic SEC reports, and a replay of today's call to learn more about Freshworks. For presentation purposes today, Dennis' financial comments will be on an as-reported basis. Tyler will be providing financial comments on an as-reported and constant currency basis. I will now turn the call over to Dennis. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Freshworks delivered a strong start to 2026, exceeding expectations across revenue, profitability, and free cash flow. Our Q1 revenue grew 16% year-over-year, above the high end of our estimates. Non-GAAP operating margin was 18%, nearly 3 points above our estimate, and adjusted free cash flow margin was 24%. Once again, we achieved Rule of 40. In Q1, we signed the twi largest deals in Freshworks' history, including our first seven-figure EX ARR deal. Customers with more than $100,000 in ARR grew 29% year-over-year, and customers with more than $50,000 in ARR grew 22% year-over-year. This demonstrates our continued success in serving mid-market and enterprise customers.
Freshworks is the AI-enabled unified service operations platform that is fast to deploy, intuitive to use, and enables every employee to be more productive. We entered 2026 with clear goals, expanding our EX business, monetizing AI at scale, and profitably growing our CX business. Let's look at the results for each of these areas in Q1. As we grow Freshworks to a $1 billion ARR company and beyond, our EX business represents the primary and largest growth opportunity. In Q1, EX ARR grew 27% year-over-year, with both new and expansion business coming in ahead of our expectations. We are attracting a fast-growing base of mid-market companies and enterprises choosing Freshservice for enterprise-grade capabilities, fast time to value, and lower complexity in implementation.
Most notably, in Q1, a global leader in nutrition replaced our largest competitor with Freshservice in what represents the largest new customer deal in our company's history. They were seeking a solution that could handle enterprise-grade scale without sacrificing the intuitive experience necessary to manage their complex workflows. Following that historic win, Piedmont Healthcare also selected Freshservice over our largest competitor, citing our significantly lower total cost of ownership, faster implementation, and enterprise capabilities. Finally, Reed, the U.K.'s number one specialist recruitment company, moved to Freshworks to achieve a faster and more collaborative enterprise IT experience. These wins underscore a clear trend.
Organizations are increasingly choosing our platform for its ability to deliver sophisticated results without the traditional overhead. Freshworks' ability to deliver enterprise-grade outcomes without the implementation drag and administrative burden of legacy systems is exactly why we are displacing vendors whose products have become too expensive and complex for mid-market and enterprise customers to maintain. We are also expanding our right to win by integrating and broadening our EX offerings. In March, we launched a new Freshservice ITAM experience, bringing Device42 capabilities natively into Freshservice and making it easier for customers to use in a single cloud experience. We also completed the acquisition of FireHydrant, which advances our vision for an AI-enabled service ops platform that unifies service, asset, and operational data. We will complete the integration of FireHydrant over the course of 2026.
Moving on to our AI progress, Freddy AI continues to be embedded throughout our platform, enhancing customer outcomes today while building toward a long-term monetization opportunity. Freddy AI Copilot is one of our fastest-growing products with strong customer growth, new business attach rates, and higher expansion among AI customers. In Q1, Freddy AI Copilot customer growth exceeded 80% year-over-year. The attach rate growth in new deals over $30,000 in ARR was above 65%. Specifically, in our EX business in Q1, our customer penetration for AI surpassed 20%, nearly doubling year-over-year. Roughly a third of all new EX customers in Q1 had Copilot attached. Amerisure, a commercial insurance provider and EX customer, has been able to transform service delivery within a single platform using Freshservice's AI-driven workflows and Freddy Insights.
With Freshservice for Business Teams, the use case has expanded beyond IT into legal, HR, underwriting, and marketing, saving thousands of hours in 2025 alone and cutting employee onboarding resolution time by 97%. We look forward to detailing more about our future AI strategy and EX product innovations at our Refresh event next week. Turning to our customer experience business, we continued to deliver durable growth with CX ARR up 6% year-over-year in Q1. We are making progress in this business through go-to-market discipline, platform integration, and increased market fit enabled by our AI capabilities. A leading provider of lender-placed insurance solutions consolidated a fragmented stack of JSM, Genesys, and SharePoint into a single Freshworks platform. By unifying ticketing, automation, and AI in one place, the team reduced manual effort, improved operational visibility, and gained a clear path to scaling support.
Over 80% of our CX customer base has now migrated to the new Freshdesk Omni platform. This successful re-platforming is more than just improving consistency for customers. It is the foundational work to enable the next wave of generative AI capabilities in our CX products and accelerate margin accretion. Since we began offering Freshdesk Omni at the end of last year, ARPA is 2.5x higher for new Freshdesk Omni customers compared to the prior platform. In lockstep with our focus on durable growth from our EX and CX businesses, we remain committed to driving structural operating efficiencies that support enterprise-grade scale and long-term profitability. Q1 non-GAAP operating margin reached 18%, nearly 3 points above our estimate, reflecting the disciplined execution we expect to sustain throughout 2026.
Today, we announced some workforce changes we are making to the company in Q2 to consolidate overlapping go-to-market efforts, streamline our product development process, and apply AI and automation across our business. These actions enable us to focus energy on our momentum in EX and accelerate Freshworks' competitiveness. Tyler will provide the financial impact and updates to our outlook in his remarks. Turning to capital allocation, our operating model continues to deliver durable free cash flow. This operational strength allows us to take a balanced approach to capital allocation, reinvesting in high-return growth opportunities while also returning capital to shareholders. In February, our board authorized a new $400 million share repurchase program, reflecting our confidence in the intrinsic value of our business. In Q1, we reduced shares outstanding by approximately 2%.
We remain confident in our ability to compound adjusted free cash flow and drive long-term shareholder returns. Overall, Freshworks achieved significant progress in Q1, accelerating our momentum with profitable growth fueled by our EX opportunities. By structurally shifting our operating model over the last two years, we have established a durable framework that balances top-line performance with capital efficiency. Our long-term focus is on compounding adjusted free cash flow per share. Having more than doubled this metric over the last two years, we are now positioned to compound adjusted free cash flow per share by at least 20% annually over the next three years. We will share more details on the operational drivers and our long-term vision at the Refresh event next week. I'll now turn it over to Tyler to walk through our financials.
Thanks, Dennis, and thanks everyone for joining on the call and via webcast today. We kicked off 2026 with strong results, exceeding our expectations on revenue, non-GAAP operating income, and free cash flow. Our Q1 performance reflects accelerating momentum and strong retention in EX, increasing success in the enterprise market, and disciplined operational execution across the business. For our call today, I'll cover the Q1 2026 financial results, provide background on the key metrics, and close with our forward-looking commentary and expectations for Q2 and full year 2026. As a reminder, most of my discussion will be focused on non-GAAP financial results, which exclude the impact of stock-based compensation expenses, restructuring charges, and other adjustments. I will also talk about our adjusted free cash flow, which excludes the cash outlay related to the costs associated with the Q2 restructuring announced earlier today.
To provide greater transparency into our underlying business performance, I will also include constant currency comparisons throughout today's call. Starting with the income statement, we had a strong first quarter. Total revenue reached $228.6 million, up 16% year-over-year as reported, or 14% on a constant currency basis. Within this total, professional services revenue was approximately $2 million. Professional services revenue grew in line with our internal expectations and is a key component of our overall customer success strategy, ensuring successful deployment and adoption of our platform. EX continues to be our primary growth engine, and EX ARR ended at over $540 million, growing 27% year-over-year on an as-reported basis and 25% on a constant currency basis.
This performance was supported by strong expansion and new logo activity, including the two largest new business contracts in our history. These large wins validate our enterprise readiness and competitive positioning upmarket. Looking ahead, we anticipate EX ARR to grow in the mid-20s and EX ARR to be over 60% of total ARR by year-end. Turning towards our CX business, we ended Q1 with over $395 million in ARR, up 6% year-over-year on an as-reported basis and 4% on a constant currency basis. The re-platforming work we are doing to Freshdesk Omni to improve product consistency, support AI adoption, and increase the competitiveness of our platform is on track and will enable efficiency gains for the CX business over time.
We have a disciplined focus on our CX business as we complete our customer migration and tighten alignment with our ideal customer profile. Going forward, we are adopting a prudent outlook and anticipate CX ARR to grow in the low single digits in 2026. Moving to margins, we demonstrated the durability of our business model by maintaining a non-GAAP gross margin of 86.3% in Q1, consistent with prior quarters. Our non-GAAP operating income for the first quarter of 2026 reached $41 million, translating to a non-GAAP operating margin of approximately 18%. This performance surpassed the high end of our initial expectations for the quarter. The key drivers behind this result were twofold: strong top-line performance and continued efficiency gains realized across various lines of our operating expenses.
We are structurally continuing to shift our business towards GAAP profitability and strategic efficiency gains, driving a meaningful improvement in margins throughout the year. As Dennis noted, today we announced some operational changes to our workforce that we are making to consolidate overlapping organizational efforts, streamline our product development process, and increase the leverage of AI and automation across our business. As a result of these actions, we are reducing our global headcount by approximately 11%. We anticipate taking one-time restructuring charges of approximately $8 million, with the vast majority in Q2. In a moment, I will discuss our updated Q2 and full-year estimates that incorporate the financial impact of these actions. Moving to operating metrics. Net dollar retention was 106% on an as-reported basis and 105% on a constant currency basis, a 1-point acceleration from the prior quarter.
Within this, we are demonstrating strong momentum in the expansion growth of our EX business. Q1 EX net dollar retention achieved 111% on an as-reported basis and 109% on a constant currency basis. Going forward, we expect to sustain net dollar retention of approximately 105% on a constant currency basis for Q2 2026. As a reminder, this excludes any impact from D42 legacy customers. Moving on, I'd like to provide some additional color on results from our customer cohorts. Customers contributing more than $50,000 in ARR grew 22% year-over-year as reported, and 20% on a constant currency basis. This cohort now represents over 55% of our total ARR.
Customers contributing more than $100,000 in ARR grew 29% year-over-year as reported and 26% on a constant currency basis. This cohort represents approximately 39% of our total ARR. Double-digit growth in our larger customer cohorts was driven by the strong performance within EX, which we believe validates our strategy to increase our focused investments on mid-market and our enterprise EX customers. The accelerating growth we are achieving tells us we are structurally well positioned to capture a disproportionate share of the future EX market and sustained, durable growth from our most strategic customers. Now let's turn to calculated billings, balance sheet, and cash items.
Calculated billings came in at $235 million in Q1, up approximately 16% year-over-year as reported, and 13.5% on a constant currency basis. For Q2, we estimate billings growth of approximately 14.5% on both an as-reported and constant currency basis. Looking ahead, we expect billings growth to be in line with revenue growth for 2026. Our cash position remains strong. In Q1, we generated $55.8 million in free cash flow, representing a 24% margin and slightly better than our expectations. Adjusted free cash flow per share was $0.20, an 8% increase over the prior year. This metric underscores our operational efficiency and our disciplined approach to converting growth into tangible shareholder value.
Turning to our capital structure, we view share repurchases as part of a disciplined capital allocation framework and a reflection of our confidence in the long-term opportunity ahead. In Q1, we repurchased 5.7 million shares for $45.4 million while utilizing an additional $7 million to offset dilution through the net settlement of vested equity. We ended Q1 with approximately 318 million fully diluted shares outstanding, down 2% year-over-year. Included within this was approximately 279 million basic shares outstanding, which also declined year-over-year. We ended the quarter with $780 million in cash and investments, providing ample financial firepower to continue our repurchase program while investing in future growth. Now on to our forward-looking estimates.
As a reminder, our non-GAAP net income projections for 2026 assume a tax rate of 24%. For the second quarter of 2026, we expect revenue to be in the range of $232 million-$235 million, growing approximately 13% to 15% year-over-year. Non-GAAP income from operations to be in the range of $41 million-$43 million. Non-GAAP net income per share to be approximately $0.13, assuming weighted average shares outstanding of approximately 280 million shares. For the full year 2026, we expect revenue to be in the range of $958 million-$964 million, growing approximately 14% to 15% year-over-year.
Non-GAAP income from operations to be in the range of $207 million-$215 million. Non-GAAP net income per share to be in the range of $0.61-$0.63, assuming weighted average shares outstanding of approximately 281 million shares. Looking ahead, for the full year 2026, we expect to generate approximately $265 million of adjusted free cash flow. Within this, we expect to generate adjusted free cash flow of approximately $57 million in Q2. This results in an adjusted free cash flow margin of 24% and 27.5% for Q2 and full year 2026 respectively. Our full year 2026 outlook for adjusted free cash flow per share is $0.94, up 24% compared to fiscal 2025.
As a reminder, cash used for stock repurchases is reflected in our financing activities and is excluded from our adjusted free cash flow calculations. Finally, our forward-looking estimates are based on FX rates as of May 1st, 2026, and do not take into account any impact from currency moves. Overall, Freshworks delivered a strong start to 2026, establishing a solid foundation for the year ahead. We remain confident in our ability to consistently exceed our strategic goals as we drive durable growth and expanding profitability. To that end, our internal metric that best aligns with our strategic priorities and long-term shareholder value creation is growth in adjusted free cash flow per share. Over the last two years, we have more than doubled our adjusted free cash flow per share results.