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Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-08-11Backblaze (BLZE) Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript
Motley Fool
Backblaze (BLZE) Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript
Image source: The Motley Fool. Monday, Aug. 3, 2026 at 4:30 p.m. ET Director of Investor Relations - Mimi Kong Co-founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairperson of the Board - Gleb Budman Chief Financial Officer - Marc Suidan Operator: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us and welcome to the Backblaze second quarter 2026 financial earnings call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. [Operator Instructions] I will now hand the conference over to Mimi Kong, Director of Investor Relations. Mimi, please go ahead. Mimi Kong: Thank you, good afternoon, and welcome to Backblaze's second quarter 2026 earnings call. On the call with me today are Gleb Budman, co-founder, CEO, and chairperson of the board, and Marc Suidan, chief financial officer. Today, Backblaze will discuss the financial results that were distributed earlier. Statements on this call include forward-looking statements about our future financial results, the impact of our sales and marketing initiatives, cost savings initiatives, results from new features, the impact of price changes, supply volatility and pricing, our ability to compete effectively and manage our growth, and our strategy to acquire new customers, retain and expand our business with existing customers. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially, including those described in our risk factors that are included in our most recent quarterly report on Form 10-Q and our other financial filings. All forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions and beliefs as of today and we undertake no obligation to update them except as required by law. Our discussion today will include non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for our GAAP results. Reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP results may be found in our earnings release, which was furnished with our Form 8K filed today with the SEC. You can also find a slide presentation related to our comments in the webcast, which will also be posted to our investor relations page after the call. Please also see our press release or a presentation for definitions of additional metrics such as NRR, gross customer retention rate, and adjusted free cash flows. And finally, we will be hosting an investor d…Read full documentShow less
Image source: The Motley Fool. Monday, Aug. 3, 2026 at 4:30 p.m. ET Director of Investor Relations - Mimi Kong Co-founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairperson of the Board - Gleb Budman Chief Financial Officer - Marc Suidan Operator: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us and welcome to the Backblaze second quarter 2026 financial earnings call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. [Operator Instructions] I will now hand the conference over to Mimi Kong, Director of Investor Relations. Mimi, please go ahead. Mimi Kong: Thank you, good afternoon, and welcome to Backblaze's second quarter 2026 earnings call. On the call with me today are Gleb Budman, co-founder, CEO, and chairperson of the board, and Marc Suidan, chief financial officer. Today, Backblaze will discuss the financial results that were distributed earlier. Statements on this call include forward-looking statements about our future financial results, the impact of our sales and marketing initiatives, cost savings initiatives, results from new features, the impact of price changes, supply volatility and pricing, our ability to compete effectively and manage our growth, and our strategy to acquire new customers, retain and expand our business with existing customers. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially, including those described in our risk factors that are included in our most recent quarterly report on Form 10-Q and our other financial filings. All forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions and beliefs as of today and we undertake no obligation to update them except as required by law. Our discussion today will include non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for our GAAP results. Reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP results may be found in our earnings release, which was furnished with our Form 8K filed today with the SEC. You can also find a slide presentation related to our comments in the webcast, which will also be posted to our investor relations page after the call. Please also see our press release or a presentation for definitions of additional metrics such as NRR, gross customer retention rate, and adjusted free cash flows. And finally, we will be hosting an investor day on Wednesday, September 9th in New York City. Please reach out to IR at www.backblaze.com to RSVP for the in-person event. A live webcast will also be accessible from the Backblaze Industrial Relations website. Thank you for joining us. And I will now like to turn the call over to Gleb. Gleb Budman: Thank you, Mimi. And thank you, everyone, for joining us today. We had a fantastic second quarter. Revenue came in at $42.7 million, $2.5 million above the high end of our guidance range. Adjusted EBITDA margin was 30%, 700 basis points above the high end of our guidance range and B2 growth accelerated to 34% year over year. These results reflect broad momentum across the business. We also signed the largest contract in Backblaze's history, a $335 million multi-year agreement with CoreWeave, which I'll come back to in a moment. We continued to move upmarket and ended the quarter with 235 customers contributing more than $50,000 each in ARR, up 57% year-over-year. ARR from this cohort grew 67% year over year. We signed numerous AI companies, including a leading frontier model developer, introduced the ability to run our cloud storage in customer-owned data centers to support regional and sovereign workloads and expanded our AI startup outreach and agentic developer tooling. This quarter's results are proof that our AI strategy is working. The decision to lean into AI is translating directly into the financial performance you just heard and into the momentum I'll walk you through now. To understand our strategy, consider this. Every training data set, checkpoint, inference output, and Gen AI asset has to be stored and used. Customers consistently tell us they have three needs to support that. Number one, the ability to scale with fast growing data. Number two, architectural freedom to use their cloud of choice. And number three, storage performance that optimizes their AI workloads. And all of that needs to be affordable so that AI scales efficiently. The combination of those three requirements are why they choose Backblaze. Let's talk first about how that plays out with Neoclouds and inferencing clouds. Many of these initially focused on GPUs as a service, but quickly recognized that their customers also needed storage. Some of them began by building flash-based storage tiers to support high-performance workloads. However, as data scaled and flash prices spiked, it became clear that flash storage should only be used where it's necessary. As neocloud scale, they need a more complete storage stack, flash where maximum performance is required and a hard drive based capacity tier for everything else. With five exabytes of storage and almost two decades of technical optimization, we believe Backblaze has built the most efficient hard drive-based capacity storage platform available. And neoclouds, wanting to get performance scale efficiently, are choosing Backblaze. We estimate that this neocloud demand for capacity tier storage represents a $14 billion market opportunity by 2031. Our strategic agreement with CoreWeave, a more than five year multi exabyte deal and the largest contract in Backblaze's history is the clearest proof this quarter that Backblaze can be the capacity tier for AI infrastructure. CoreWeave is recognized as the essential cloud for AI and runs many of the most demanding AI workloads in the world. As its platform expands, it is adding a variety of storage tiers that can scale rapidly and perform reliably and efficiently at massive scale. CoreWeave evaluated the available options and chose Backblaze for the software platform and operating expertise we have developed through years of managing large-scale hard drive-based storage infrastructure. CoreWeave is now the fourth major AI cloud infrastructure company to contract with Backblaze and we're in conversations with many of the leading other ones. As these AI infrastructure companies scale to broaden support of their workloads, we become increasingly relevant to them. Part of the CoreWeave agreement also introduces a new way for us to deliver that value. For Backblaze, this managed storage approach represents a capital light service model that brings our technology and operating expertise directly into a customer's infrastructure. This approach expands our opportunity to service customers in their regional data centers and sovereign cloud needs. Now, beyond AI infrastructure companies and to the broader AI market, we continue to see strong traction with AI native companies like HeyGen, Hume AI, Mirage, and many more. And this quarter, we continue to add to that list. AI companies are choosing Backblaze for our ability to scale fast. Last quarter, we highlighted a training data provider that signed a nearly $1 million deal in just 11 days. Less than a quarter later, as its business grew faster than expected, it added another $1 million commitment. AI customers also choose Backblaze for architectural freedom. It used to be that companies were okay just building inside one cloud, but AI technology is evolving rapidly. AI native builders are choosing from an increasingly fragmented set of cloud infrastructure. That requires the ability to use and move data to whichever hyperscaler, neocloud, inferencing cloud, or other AI infrastructure they need. Backblaze enables that through a combination of free egress, high performance throughput, and optimized networking between us and these clouds. The need for architectural freedom resulted in a six-figure deal with a customer building conversational AI models. They needed a cloud agnostic home for their training data. Expensive egress fees from their prior provider kept their data captive and limited what they could achieve. With Backblaze, they were then able to freely move their data to whatever cloud they wanted without the headache of calculating and worrying if egress fees will break them. And AI companies choose Backblaze for performance. We signed our largest B2 Overdrive deal to date, a seven-figure ARR deal with a frontier AI model developer. At the scale of data they work with, performance is critical, and B2 delivers high throughput at efficient price points. Together, scale, architectural freedom, and performance, all at an affordable price, are why AI companies are choosing Backblaze. And while AI is making this need especially urgent, it extends to nearly every company using storage at scale. In addition to making great strides moving upmarket, we also know the biggest companies start small and we're building for them, our technology advantage is one part of how we are strengthening our position. We're also working to make Backblaze the natural platform for developers and their AI agents to build on. This quarter, we shipped our SDK for TypeScript, the emerging language of choice for AI coding agents, released Genblaze, a generative media SDK, and built out a new set of tools after seeing developers turn to B2 to store their AI agent data. We also launched our multimodal focus generative media hackathon, which drove awareness of B2 as the storage layer for GenAI applications. In closing, we exceeded our financial expectations announced the largest agreement in our history, and delivered new wins and expansions across the AI market, including our largest overdrive deal to date. We also introduced a new managed storage approach that brings our software and operating expertise into customer owned infrastructure. But the bigger point is this, when AI scales, data grows, and that is good for us. When companies look to control AI costs, they come to us for that too. Growth or discipline, either way, we are well positioned to benefit and continue building a durable growth business. With that, I'll turn it over to Marc. Marc Suidan: Thanks, Gleb, and good afternoon, everyone. Q2 was a pivotal quarter reflecting both strong operating results and the significance of our strategic relationship with CoreWeave. Revenue was $42.7 million up 18% year-over-year and representing our strongest growth in six quarters. Adjusted EBITDA nearly doubled year-over-year to $13 million, with the margin expanding by 1,200 basis points to 30%. Both results exceeded the high end of our guidance. These results demonstrate the benefits of our strategy. Based on our Q2 performance and outlook for the remainder of the year, we are raising full year guidance again. Turning to revenue, B2 accelerated to 34% year over year, our strongest growth rate in seven quarters. B2's strong performance was broad-based with almost every route to market and GTM lever overperforming, with strong performance in direct sales bookings, continued self-service momentum, and increased usage from larger customers. We also signed larger and longer duration commitments, increasing RPO. The price increase implemented on May 1 contributed about 8 percentage points in B2 growth. While churn from the price increase was anticipated, it did not materialize. Excluding that impact, underlying growth continues to show strength. Sequential B2 ARR increased by $20 million, of which the price increase drove $9 million of the $20 million. B2 ARR reached $113 million, an increase of 39% year over year. B2 net revenue retention was 113% compared to 114% last year. We also continue to make progress upmarket. Customers contributing more than $50,000 in ARR increased 57% year-over-year to 235, and we closed four deals valued at over $500,000 this quarter, including three AI-related wins. That progress is also showing up in the size and duration of customer commitments. We added approximately $320 million in RPO during the quarter, including $313 million from CoreWeave, net of the $22 million in warrant values. This increase provides greater visibility into contracted demand as more customers enter into multi-year agreements with committed minimum spend. We retain additional upside as usage above those minimums is built on a consumptive basis. Computer backup revenue declined 2% year-over-year, better than expected, as turn initiatives, and targeted customer acquisitions help stabilize performance. The business continues to generate recurring revenue and cash flow, and our focus remains on retention, operating efficiency, and margin improvement over time. Moving on to total company gross margin, it was 63% in Q2, benefiting from the B2 price increase and continued operating efficiency, partially offset by higher hardware infrastructure costs. Operating expenses increased 6% year-over-year, well below revenue growth. As a percentage of revenue, operating expenses improved by 800 basis points to 73%, demonstrating continued operating leverage. We expect to make targeted investments in R&D while continuing to reduce operating expenses as a percentage of revenue. That operating leverage also translated into an adjusted free cash flow margin of 8% for the quarter, even as we continue to invest in infrastructure for 2027's committed demand. We ended the quarter with $50 million in cash and marketable securities, up from $45 million in the prior quarter. We also increased our available and unused capital lease lines to over $150 million, While our new lease lines are generally at lower interest rates, we will continue to look for ways to optimize our cost of capital. Before turning to guidance, I want to note that we filed an S3 today to register the warrants issued to CoreWeave in connection with our agreement. The warrants reflect the strategic and mutually beneficial nature of the relationship and align both companies around the long-term success of the agreement. Moving on to guidance. For Q3, we expect revenue to be in the range of $44.4 million to $44.8 million. We expect adjusted EBITDA margin to be in the range of 27 to 29%. For the full year, we are raising revenue guidance to a range of $172 million to $174 million, up more than $10 million from our prior range of $161.5 million to $163.5 million. At the midpoint, this revised guidance represents approximately 19% in overall year-over-year growth, up from the previous 11%. Consistent with our guidance philosophy, the raised outlook reflects Q2 actuals and greater visibility from contracted demand. Our guidance excludes variable usage above contracted minimums and potential deals greater than $500,000. We are also raising our full year adjusted EBITDA margin outlook to 27% to 29% from 23% to 25%. Looking ahead to 2027, based on the B2 underlying business fundamentals, CoreWeave's minimum RAB, and the previously announced $15 million plus TCV deal, we expect B2 revenue to grow over 40% year over year. This is early directional commentary, not formal guidance. We will provide our full 2027 outlook in February. We wanted to give investors visibility into the contracted demand already supporting growth beyond this year. Turning to capital investments, we are accelerating CapEx in the second half of 2026 and into 2027 to build the required capacity to support signed customer commitments. Using capital leases, we expect to be adjusted free cash flow neutral for the full year despite the increase in CapEx. Our CapEx track record demonstrates how we make use of these assets for well over six years and deliver healthy gross margins. Our CapEx break-even is less than 24 months. Moreover, the managed storage portion of the CoreWeave agreement is delivered on customer-owned hardware, so we have no CapEx requirement for the managed service. B2 revenue growth accelerated, larger customers continued to expand, and contracted demand increased our visibility. On a rule of 40 basis, we are proud of achieving a combined B2 revenue growth and adjusted free cash flow margin of approximately 42%, up from 18% a year ago. We entered 2026 with a clear objective, demonstrate that our business can grow efficiently and generate profitable operating leverage. Q2 showed clear progress against that objective. With that, operator, please open it up for questions. Operator: [Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Mike Cikos with Needham. Mike, your line is now open. Please go ahead. Michael Cikos: Great. Thank you to the team for the question here. Congratulations on the quarter. Marc, I was hoping to start with you on this outlook here. I'm really just trying to get a better sense. Obviously, you have this large deal with CoreWeave that you had announced, and congratulations again on getting that over the finish line and the sheer size of it. Could you help us think about to what degree the improved calendar '26 outlook is tied to the ramp for the minimum commitments from that contract or anything on the calendar '27 to support that 40% plus outlook we're putting out there for B2 Cloud? Marc Suidan: Yes, sure, Mike. Can you hear me fine? Michael Cikos: Yes, I can. Marc Suidan: Okay. Yes. So as it relates to the second half of '26, the $10.5 million raise is benefiting from a broad base of things. The business performing better, the Q2 beat of $2.7 million, the price increase and the CoreWeave ramp. None of them have a dominant role in that. It's a healthy mix of all that. And just a reminder, the way we guide is remaining consistent, which is we're sticking to contracted minimum spend by customers, nothing over that. And given the large deals, even though we just won greater than $0.5 million, we're still not projecting more per quarter, just so we stay consistent with that approach. And that continues through 2027 as well. And with that, I would say B2 should be well on track to grow at 40% or higher during the rest of this year and 2027. On your other part of the question, which is the ramp, it does ramp over -- the CoreWeave specifically does ramp over the coming year, does ramp over the coming year and hits their minimum about mid-2027. And that's what we've got baked into these numbers. Michael Cikos: I see. Thank you. Thank you for that. And maybe a question for Gleb. Gleb, obviously, you guys have made some pretty significant changes to the go-to-market in the last year. And I know we're starting to see that specifically in B2 on the NRR front or I remember last quarter, you guys were talking about pipeline from existing customers. You also have the new CRO in place now for, call it, a quarter or so. Can you just give us a status update on where we are with that go-to-market transformation? I guess, what are the findings for today versus 90 days ago. Gleb Budman: Yes, thanks, Mike. So as you mentioned, we've been undergoing the GTM transformation. Anuj joined as our new CRO. He's been doing a great job as he's coming on board. We've also had a broader people, processes, systems rework. So in addition to Anuj, we have a new sales development leader and a head of RevOps and some of the other leadership functions ahead of an operational strategy under him that he's worked with before. So we've brought up, I think, the team in terms of the GTM site. We also, as you know, we're undergoing a big systems effort. A lot of that is done. We are still continuing to invest, especially with some of the AI technologies that are out there. So we're leaning in on some of those. I think one thing that we look at is, obviously we're excited about the CoreWeave deal, but for as far as the GTM side of things, we have almost 50 more customers that are in the $50,000 plus ARR group than we did last quarter. And that's almost as many or about as many as we add in a year historically. And so I think that more broad-based repeatability is a good sign that the GTM is working. Now obviously I expected that'll fluctuate up and down but the general direction I think of that execution is showing up. Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Ittai Kidron with Oppenheimer & Co. Ittai Kidron: Congrats again. Great numbers. Great to see the acceleration. Gleb, I guess I have a little bit more of a bigger picture here. The announcement of CoreWeave clearly is quite unique, I guess, in its size and its messaging. I was kind of wondering, like I hear your point on the growth in the $50,000 accounts. But if you try to look at the AI cohort specifically, does the deal with CoreWeave, does it generate more interest from customers or less? I'm kind of wondering if customers view that relationship as something that potentially ties you perhaps too closely to CoreWeave for people to do business with you? How do you think about that? Gleb Budman: Yes, thanks, Ittai. So the announcement with CoreWeave has been great. I mean, first of all, I would say the CoreWeave team has been great to work with. But also the announcement has helped, I think, elevate the -- elevate Backblaze as a key player in the AI infrastructure stack. I went to this AI infrastructure conference in Europe, I think about 1.5 months ago. And I'll just say that the conversations that I had were consistently, hey, we're excited by this deal that you did. We may not be as big as CoreWeave, but this seems very relevant to us, very applicable. Can we talk to you about it? How can we leverage your technology to do the same. We're starting to see storage as a key need for us. So I think, obviously, we provide a platform for a variety of customers, both in the neocloud and AI infrastructure space and also to the AI natives themselves. So we have lots of start-ups and developers and larger sized direct AI companies that see the CoreWeave deal and see that it's a stamp of validation. On the AI infrastructure side, there are certainly competitors to them, but it's a big market. It's a growing market, and I think a lot of people are trying to figure out how best to solve it. The other thing I would just mention is we introduced this managed service approach or managed storage approach, right? So we do that for CoreWeave, but we're also doing that as an offering for others. And a number of the conversations that we're now having with these other AI infrastructure companies is them being interested, not only in us providing infrastructure ourselves for them, but also providing this managed storage in their data centers and their sovereign cloud environments. Ittai Kidron: That's great, great to hear. And you kind of set me up for the next one, I guess. On this topic of managed storage, when you look at your pipeline, I know clearly part of CoreWeave, this was part of the CoreWeave transaction as well. But when you look at your pipeline, we look at the conversations that you're having with customers, is this common that people are looking for this? Or this is going to be more the exception rather than the rule. And then also when you talk about the 2 wins, for example, you have this quarter that you highlighted the conversational AI company with 6 figures and the frontier model company with 7 figures. Is there a way for you to have insights into their business to understand how much more opportunity you have within those organizations to kind of expand your use cases with them? Gleb Budman: Yes, so in terms of the managed storage side, it's obviously early, right? That's the newer approach that we're offering. What I will say is that in the past, we've had prospects that have come to us and expressed interest in us doing that. And in the past, we haven't done it. But with CoreWeave, we're doing this in partnership with them and offering it out to the broader market. And so we're having conversations now. I would say there's probably half a dozen of these managed storage conversations that were fairly actively in discussions around the -- this is not going to be every customer doing this in part because it requires a fair level of sophistication on the customer side and it requires a fair amount of scale to make it worth doing. But for the larger AI infrastructure organizations and even frankly, not just AI, but anybody who needs large scale capacity storage, I think that the managed storage is a good approach. So I think we'll see number of those. It's not going to be the predominant number on a volume basis, but I think that those will be larger opportunities. Marc Suidan: I'll add to, I mean, if you want to jump in, Gleb, on a second question, whether we have visibility. I'll let Gleb answer on how much visibility we see into the large type of customers. But generally speaking, what we notice in Q2 is a lot of our, we said 4 deals greater than $0.5 million, a lot of those were expansions. So we're seeing their appetite and needs. We said that before that AI companies grow a lot faster in the data appetite, and so we're seeing that profess itself. Gleb Budman: Yes, and maybe just the one thing to that is, I mean, in the world that we were in at IPO, we were almost entirely self-serving. So we had very little forward insight into what was happening with the customers because they would just sign up and pay on a consumption basis. Now, as we're heavily investing in the sales-led side of the business and working with these larger opportunities, the team is actually actively in discussions with them, working around what their needs are, what their plans are, and kind of co-planning together. So we do have better visibility as well as the commitments themselves. Ittai Kidron: Great stuff. Congrats. Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Jason Ader with William Blair. Jason Ader: First question, just on the CoreWeave deal, could you give us a sense of what the gross margins are going to look like relative to your traditional B2 business? Marc Suidan: Yes, Jason, this is Marc. For our gross margin, I mean, for the time being, we're pricing everything on all deals to keep it in and around where it is. So even with CoreWeave, despite a lot of scale, there shouldn't be that much detriment to the current 63%. What I would say is between the CoreWeave deal, the previous deal, the $15 million plus TCV deal, all these committed contracts we're signing up, it does increase our CapEx needs. And so our CapEx for the year will be between 55% and 65% of revenue. And the reason why I mentioned that is we're putting a lot of CapEx out, so depreciation will start and then we'll start ramping up the customers in terms of that revenue spend. So that 2 quarters or so before they get ramped on that capacity, you'll have more depreciation. So there could be a few hundred basis point setback to our gross margin, but then it should recover after that. Jason Ader: Got you. And then if over time you end up doing more of the managed storage option with CoreWeave, is that, I'd imagine that would be a significant boost. Gleb Budman: Yes. I think that both of those are currently similar-ish in gross margin, although as we think about our capital-light approach with the managed storage overall, we think that, that certainly has the possibility of being a higher-margin offering over the longer term. Jason Ader: Okay. Maybe I'm not clear. I thought you were just selling software there. What are you selling there in the managed storage approach of their if it's delivered on their hardware? Gleb Budman: Yes, good question. It's a managed storage offering. So the way that it works is they provide us the data center space, they provide us how much storage they would like, we provide the bill of materials, they buy the equipment, they hand it to us, but it's actually our people in that part of the data center, which is cordoned off for our purposes. But it's our people racking, stacking, managing with our software that part of the storage stack. So CoreWeave, we'll have multiple parts of their storage stack. We'll have the part that we're managing, but it's -- they will own the equipment. We will have the people. Jason Ader: Got you. Okay. So the main cost for you is people in that scenario. Gleb Budman: Exactly. Jason Ader: Okay. Got you. All right. And then one last question for me, for Marc. And for Gleb, I guess just as we think about going forward and the CoreWeave situation and the CapEx needs that you're going to have over the next few years. What are you contemplating in terms of capital needs? Do you have enough capital today to be able to meet the needs of this build-out? Or are you going to have to raise more capital? Marc Suidan: Yes, Jason, with the. I'd say between our cash balance, we have -- and we have over $150 million of available capital lease lines and our operating cash flows, right, have become really healthy due to operating leverage. So between all of those 3 things, we're well set now to do it the way we're doing it via capital lease lines. And we're always going to evaluate all options and see what's best for shareholders. But we're set to proceed as is now. Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Jeff Van Ree with Craig-Hallum Capital Group. Jeff Van Rhee: Congrats guys, just breadth, really impressive to hear what you guys did. Maybe spend a second on the Frontier model and the win there. I'd love to hear a bit more color, competition, maybe a little more particulars around use case, duration of deal. And then I think you just said 7 figures. I mean, any sense you can dial that in a bit? Are we talking mid-single-digit to some figures, upper or lower? Yes, color around the frontier model would be great. Gleb Budman: Yes. Thanks, Jeff. Good to chat with you. So what I'll say is that this one, similar to some of the others, right? I mean the pattern is the same, but I'll talk to this one, which is they have storage that they use and the -- and the data sets that they use to build their models that they were having a couple of issues. One was that the level of data that they were -- the size of the data increasing, they were actually hitting quota ceilings. So the cloud provider that they were working with, they were having trouble providing them the amount of storage that they need. So they were actually hitting certain ceilings there. They also had performance requirements. So the need to move that data at high throughput over to places where they would be building the models themselves. And so between those 2 things, they needed both the ability to scale and they need the performance of B2 Overdrive. And so they were on another cloud provider previously. They -- so they were familiar with, obviously, the model, they switched to us. The other thing I'll say is -- and like the other use case that we've always said, they're not running the GPU model training directly off of the data on Backblaze. They're using it Backblaze as the place to store the big data set, the capacity tier data set and then they're moving it when they're ready to actually do a training, and they're moving it to the flash tier next to the GPUs, but they're keeping it long term and at scale on Backblaze. The other thing I would say is the pricing is the overdrive pricing. So it's higher than what you see as a $6.95 price for the self-serve business on the website. And maybe the last thing to say there is it's -- it was a large commitment from the outset, but it was also what was called what they referred to as an opening commitment and a building block to start from, but one that they expect to actually expand significantly. Jeff Van Rhee: Yes, I would think so. And then maybe just a follow-up back to the managed storage offering. So when you're selling to a neocloud or one of these larger AI players, what is the delta between when they want the managed offering versus a white label offering? I mean I understand there's sort of some geo data sovereignty issues. A lot of things probably come into the play, but like why one over the other, traditional B2 versus managed storage? Gleb Budman: Yes, the main reasons why most people want us to take care of it on our own infrastructure. And the reason for that is because it's fully taken care of, right? They don't have to worry about it. They don't have to think about it. And even for neoclouds, the neoclouds obviously range in the level of sophistication and their level ability to operate a full platform. You have CoreWeave on one extreme of a company that is very, very good at managing the whole infrastructure and technology and stack and everything else. And you have others who are just brand new. They have data centers, they have GPUs, but they're still building out all the other pieces, right? And so for many of them, they prefer to just have us fully take care of it. The managed storage side comes into play when they want to have the physical data in their own data centers and that has sometimes the conversation has come up because they have data centers in regions that we aren't and so they would like the data there sometimes because they have a sense of they would like a more sovereign experience with their data. And then for some of them, the conversation has simply been that they would like to actually own the assets on their balance sheet. So those have been the reasons why they go one way or the other. Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Erik Suppiger with B. Riley Securities. Erik Suppiger: Congrats. Great quarter. Couple questions. One just on the go to market. Have you hired most of the executives across the go to market team that you need at this point and then secondly I think you talked about the CoreWeave business reaching a minimum level, meaning meeting the minimum commitment level in mid '27. Does that mean that we can assume that one you're kind of at the one-fifth of the $335 million, which is about $65 million run rate. Does that imply that you're reaching about a $65 million run rate by mid-'27 on that CoreWeave agreement? Gleb Budman: Yes. Thanks, Erik. So on the GTM side, yes, we've hired the Chief Revenue Officer. We've hired the Head of Development, Head of RevOps. We've got the Head of Customer Success. We've got the Head of GTM Strategy operations. So we are obviously there. There may always be additional folks, but we are in practice, I would say we're -- we've got the team in place. And one thing I'll mention too is, I think when I was reflecting earlier on kind of our journey, I guess, you were with us when we went public. And so you remember that when we went public, our average customer was a self-serve customer that paid us less than $500 a year. And we said our goal is to move upmarket, become more of this core infrastructure for start-ups, for companies, for enterprises. And we started signing companies that were paying us tens of thousands, $50,000. At some point, we signed our first $1 million deal, then we started highlighting roughly a $1 million deal per quarter. Then we had a $15 million deal that we announced in February and then this $335 million deal that we just announced. So obviously, it was quite a journey to go from a primarily self-serve company doing mostly less than $500 a year deals to a company that is able to service $1 million, $10 million and multi-hundred million dollar deals. But I think we're now in a great place with a great team and process and systems to go and execute against this opportunity. Marc Suidan: Yes, and on the second question, Erik, let me dive into the second question. So the CoreWeave deal has two components. As you know, there's working off of our platform. That's one component, and that was all disclosed in the June 23 deal. And then there's the managed of service component. So roughly speaking, it's like almost a 70-30 split. So when I said we would reach the minimum it's relates to that 70%, not the 30%. The 30% would come afterwards because the managed service has a different kind of ramp. And then the other thing to keep in mind is the warrants are a contra revenue. So that's why you shouldn't take the just a $335 million times 70. You also have to deduct the $22 million value of a warrant. Erik Suppiger: Can you just expand on that? You deduct the $22 million for the warrants. Is that across the five years? Is that a straight up division? Marc Suidan: Yes, exactly. So the warrants just they follow the revenue. So there's five years for both components of the deal. So if you take that 70%. of the $313 million, which is net of the warrants. That one ramps up over the first 12 months, and then once it's up to 12 months, then it starts operating at that minimum. Operator: Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Eric Martinuzzi with Lake Street Capital Markets. Eric Martinuzzi: I wanted to revisit the upward revision to the 2026 guidance. The way I understood it, Marc, you talked about three reasons for the upward revision, and they were all equally weighted. The business outperformance to date and the price increase and the CoreWeave ramp, the business outperformance, is that primarily going to be those greater than $500,000 ARR transactions? Marc Suidan: Yes, Eric, it includes that, but it also includes the self-serve product-led growth. I mean we did that price increase on May 1. So we anticipated some churn. We really haven't seen any churn. In fact, what we've seen is an acceleration of people signing up and the ARPU per sign-up is higher. So we're -- yes, so I think we're seeing good momentum on almost all route to markets and all go-to-market levers. So it's not -- it's pretty broad-based. And Gleb mentioned the 50 customers that went to over $50,000 in ARR. You can see our RPO every quarter goes up. We're getting customers committing into either 1-year or multiyear contracts. So it's broad-based, the general business health. So we're seeing really healthy acceleration. Eric Martinuzzi: And then on the CBU, -- I think you said last quarter that you were expecting it down, what was it 3% or so or low single digits? Is there any change to that expectation for the year in the new forecast. Gleb Budman: Yes, that business is kind of like we talked about, Eric. It's a good business, people like it, the customers like the experience. It's cash flow generating and helps fund some of the B2 growth. But it's an area that we're spending some time and some investment on, but it's still a business that has overall market headwinds. And so it's -- we still think it's kind of single-digit decline. It did perform better this quarter than expected by a little bit. And that was in part because I think we've been doing some efforts on churn mitigation and customer acquisition. But it is still like a kind of a single-digit declining business. Operator: Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Rustam Kanga with Citizens. Rustam Kanga: Great. Thanks, Marc, and glad for taking the question. Great to see the sustaining momentum here. My question is just around CoreWeave. Can you help frame the extent to which that recent win is helping accelerate discussions with other neocloud providers evaluating HDD-based storage tiers? And are you finding that the best conversations are those who have already experienced challenge challenges with the costly slash storage approach or is it better or more effective to cut them off at the pass and approach those who are even yet to begin a DIY approach?. Gleb Budman: It's a good question, Rustam, and I'll tell you, it was actually counterintuitive for us when we went down this path and we saw that this was going to be an opportunity about a year and a half ago, right? We launched B2 Overdrive, we launched B2 Neo, we leaned into this idea that the neoclouds were going to need and AI infrastructure companies were going to need a capacity layer for storage. Our assumption at the time was that the best path would be to go after those that did not have storage yet. What we've found is that generally speaking the more engaged conversations are from those that do and the reason for that it seems is those that have storage are feeling the pain of only having the flash-based storage or trying to do it themselves. Meaning they have customers coming to them, expecting them to be able to service them, but struggling with dealing with the scale or the expense of those things. The ones that don't have storage yet, their customers are going somewhere else for those workflows. And so they're missing out on those workflows and they're not feeling the need for them yet. But as they start having those conversations with customers where they're talking to them about like, servicing their broader need, then they're also starting to feel that demand. So, So I think the short of it is that. The neoclouds are generally heading down the path where they're going to need this capacity of tier of storage. They also will need the flash based tier of storage. It's not -- I don't see it as an either or. I think it's they need both as part of servicing their customers and we're a great solution for the capacity tier. Rustam Kanga: Perfect. Thanks. And then, Marc, just you gave the caller on the CapEx of 55% to 65% of revenues. Was that comment more for the back half of this year, or do you expect that to hold through 2027? Just help us think about if it would ramp from that level, or if that comment was applying to this year and next year. Marc Suidan: Yes, Rus, that's for this year. That's for 2026. Too early to give 2027, frankly, mainly because the prices of this hardware changes pretty quickly and obviously our growth outlook keeps accelerating. So that number will for both those reasons will change the '27 number. So for the time being that 55% to 65% is for the revenue as a percentage of revenue for 2026. Operator: We have reached the end of the Q&A session. I will now turn the call back to Gleb Budman for closing remarks. Gleb Budman: Thank you. So AI is reshaping the entire infrastructure market and Backblaze has built exactly what this moment demands. Storage is that durable layer beneath AI. I'm really pleased with how our team has stepped up to capture this generational opportunity. I want to thank all our Backblazers for leaning in and to our customers and partners and investors for joining us on this journey. Finally, we look forward to seeing many of you at our Investor Day in New York City and on our live webcast on September 9th. Please RSVP to [email protected] if you'd like to join the in-person event. Thank you all for joining today's earnings call. Operator, you may now end the call. Operator: This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect. Before you buy stock in Backblaze, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Backblaze wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut are built for long-term growth and could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $399,832!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $1,374,595!* That performance is why people listen. With a track record of beating the S&P 500 by 4x, Stock Advisor offers a distinct advantage. Don't miss the latest top 10 list, available with Stock Advisor, and join an investing community built for the long haul. See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of August 10, 2026. This article is a transcript of this conference call produced for The Motley Fool. While we strive for our Foolish Best, there may be errors, omissions, or inaccuracies in this transcript. As with all our articles, The Motley Fool does not assume any responsibility for your use of this content, and we strongly encourage you to do your own research, including listening to the call yourself and reading the company's SEC filings. Please see our Terms and Conditions for additional details, including our Obligatory Capitalized Disclaimers of Liability. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Backblaze (BLZE) Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript was originally published by The Motley Fool
Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-08-07BLZE Q2 Earnings Call Focuses on CoreWeave and AI Storage
Zacks
BLZE Q2 Earnings Call Focuses on CoreWeave and AI Storage
Backblaze, Inc. BLZE used its second-quarter 2026 earnings call to frame AI infrastructure as a central growth theme for B2 Cloud Storage, with the $335-million CoreWeave agreement adding visibility. Non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.08 beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate for earnings of $0.01. Revenues of $42.7 million surpassed the consensus estimate of $39.9 million. Management paired the beat with a higher 2026 outlook. Backblaze, Inc. price-consensus-eps-surprise-chart | Backblaze, Inc. Quote CEO Gleb Budman said that B2 revenues grew 34% year over year as AI customers sought scalable capacity storage, architectural freedom and performance at efficient economics. Budman added that CoreWeave selected Backblaze for a multi-exabyte deployment spanning more than five years, across Backblaze-hosted and customer-owned storage. An Oppenheimer analyst asked whether CoreWeave could deter rival AI infrastructure providers. Budman stated that it instead increased interest and noted roughly half a dozen active managed-storage discussions. CFO Marc Suidan said that third-quarter revenues are expected at $44.4-$44.8 million, with an adjusted EBITDA margin of 27-29%. Suidan raised the full-year revenue guidance to $172-$174 million from $161.5-$163.5 million. The adjusted EBITDA margin outlook was raised to 27-29% from 23-25%. A Needham analyst asked how much the increase depends on CoreWeave. CFO Marc Suidan said that the $10.5-million raise reflects the second-quarter beat, pricing and CoreWeave ramp, while guidance excludes usage above contracted minimums and potential deals above $500,000. Suidan also said that B2 revenues are expected to grow more than 40% in 2027, with CoreWeave's platform minimum reached around midyear. He called this an early directional commentary and not formal guidance. Budman said that Backblaze ended the second quarter with 235 customers generating more than $50,000 each in ARR, up 57% year over year. ARR from that cohort rose 67%. Suidan informed that the company closed four deals above $500,000, including three AI-related wins, while many large deals were expansions. A Craig-Hallum analyst asked about the seven-figure ARR B2 Overdrive win with a frontier AI model developer. CEO Budman said that the customer needed more capacity and throughput, and viewed the initial commitment as a starting point for expansion. Suidan said that the May 1…Read full documentShow less
Backblaze, Inc. BLZE used its second-quarter 2026 earnings call to frame AI infrastructure as a central growth theme for B2 Cloud Storage, with the $335-million CoreWeave agreement adding visibility. Non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.08 beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate for earnings of $0.01. Revenues of $42.7 million surpassed the consensus estimate of $39.9 million. Management paired the beat with a higher 2026 outlook. Backblaze, Inc. price-consensus-eps-surprise-chart | Backblaze, Inc. Quote CEO Gleb Budman said that B2 revenues grew 34% year over year as AI customers sought scalable capacity storage, architectural freedom and performance at efficient economics. Budman added that CoreWeave selected Backblaze for a multi-exabyte deployment spanning more than five years, across Backblaze-hosted and customer-owned storage. An Oppenheimer analyst asked whether CoreWeave could deter rival AI infrastructure providers. Budman stated that it instead increased interest and noted roughly half a dozen active managed-storage discussions. CFO Marc Suidan said that third-quarter revenues are expected at $44.4-$44.8 million, with an adjusted EBITDA margin of 27-29%. Suidan raised the full-year revenue guidance to $172-$174 million from $161.5-$163.5 million. The adjusted EBITDA margin outlook was raised to 27-29% from 23-25%. A Needham analyst asked how much the increase depends on CoreWeave. CFO Marc Suidan said that the $10.5-million raise reflects the second-quarter beat, pricing and CoreWeave ramp, while guidance excludes usage above contracted minimums and potential deals above $500,000. Suidan also said that B2 revenues are expected to grow more than 40% in 2027, with CoreWeave's platform minimum reached around midyear. He called this an early directional commentary and not formal guidance. Budman said that Backblaze ended the second quarter with 235 customers generating more than $50,000 each in ARR, up 57% year over year. ARR from that cohort rose 67%. Suidan informed that the company closed four deals above $500,000, including three AI-related wins, while many large deals were expansions. A Craig-Hallum analyst asked about the seven-figure ARR B2 Overdrive win with a frontier AI model developer. CEO Budman said that the customer needed more capacity and throughput, and viewed the initial commitment as a starting point for expansion. Suidan said that the May 1 B2 price increase contributed about 8 percentage points to B2 growth and $9 million of the $20-million sequential increase in B2 ARR. A Lake Street analyst asked whether outperformance was concentrated in large transactions. Suidan informed that strength was broad-based across direct sales and self-service, while anticipated churn did not materialize. B2 ARR grew 39% to $113.3 million, while B2 NRR was 113% versus 114% a year earlier. Budman said that Computer Backup remains cash-generating but is still expected to decline at a single-digit rate. Suidan said that 2026 capital expenditure is expected to be 55-65% of revenues, while the adjusted free cash flow is expected to be neutral for the year. A William Blair analyst pressed on CoreWeave economics. CFO Suidan said that deals are priced around the current 63% gross margin, although depreciation before customer ramps could create a temporary setback of a few hundred basis points. Budman said that managed storage is capital-light because customers own the hardware. CFO Suidan cited about $50 million in cash and securities, more than $150 million in available capital lease lines and operating cash flow as funding for the buildout. Budman kept the strategic focus on becoming a capacity-storage layer for AI infrastructure and AI-native customers while moving toward larger accounts. Suidan emphasized efficient growth and operating leverage, alongside investment for signed commitments. Management's posture centered on contracted demand rather than expanding guidance assumptions beyond committed minimums. BLZE currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). Its Growth Score of A is the strongest style reading, while the Value Score of F and Momentum Score of D are weaker. The VGM Score of C is a middle-tier profile. You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here. Zacks Style Scores complement the Zacks Rank, with A and B scores viewed more favorably than lower grades and the strongest combinations centered on Zacks Rank #1 or #2 (Buy) stocks. BLZE's current mix is not a top-ranked configuration. The Zacks Rank can change as estimate revisions incorporate the just-reported results. Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report Backblaze, Inc. (BLZE) : Free Stock Analysis Report This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com). Zacks Investment Research
Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-08-06Is Backblaze (BLZE) Expensive As Q2 Earnings And The CoreWeave Deal Lift Interest?
Simply Wall St.
Is Backblaze (BLZE) Expensive As Q2 Earnings And The CoreWeave Deal Lift Interest?
Find winning stocks in any market cycle. Join 7 million investors using Simply Wall St's investing ideas for FREE. Backblaze (BLZE) is back in focus after its second quarter 2026 earnings on 3 August, which combined higher sales, a narrower net loss, raised full year revenue guidance, and a new CoreWeave partnership. See our latest analysis for Backblaze. Backblaze shares have been volatile around the Q2 2026 report and CoreWeave agreement, with the 7 day share price return of 47.43% and year to date share price return of 292.83% pointing to strong recent momentum after a 1 year total shareholder return of 178.74%. If AI storage is on your radar after Backblaze's latest moves, now can be a useful moment to see what else is moving in 56 AI infrastructure stocks Backblaze’s latest surge sits at the crossroads of improving business metrics and a rush of enthusiasm around AI infrastructure. How much of this move rests on cash flow and contracts versus changing sentiment around the stock? Backblaze last closed at $18.62 while the most followed narrative anchors fair value at $9.34. This places a spotlight on the growth assumptions behind that gap. Read the complete narrative. Want to see what is baked into that $9.34 view on Backblaze? The narrative leans on specific revenue growth, margin progress, and future valuation multiples. Curious which combination really carries the model? Result: Fair Value of $9.34 (OVERVALUED) Have a read of the narrative in full and understand what's behind the forecasts. However, if AI storage demand softens or large cloud rivals win workloads away from Backblaze, the current growth narrative could come under pressure. Find out about the key risks to this Backblaze narrative. Sentiment around Backblaze is mixed, with enthusiasm for rewards set against clear risk flags, so it can be worthwhile to act promptly and test the case yourself through the 2 key rewards and 3 important warning signs If Backblaze has sharpened your focus, do not stop here. The next smart move is to scan other opportunities that fit clear, disciplined criteria using the Simply Wall St Screener. Target resilient income by reviewing companies that qualify as 8 dividend fortresses and could suit investors who prioritise cash returns and stability. Hunt for quality at a measured price by checking stocks identified as 51 high quality undervalued stocks that pair fun…Read full documentShow less
Find winning stocks in any market cycle. Join 7 million investors using Simply Wall St's investing ideas for FREE. Backblaze (BLZE) is back in focus after its second quarter 2026 earnings on 3 August, which combined higher sales, a narrower net loss, raised full year revenue guidance, and a new CoreWeave partnership. See our latest analysis for Backblaze. Backblaze shares have been volatile around the Q2 2026 report and CoreWeave agreement, with the 7 day share price return of 47.43% and year to date share price return of 292.83% pointing to strong recent momentum after a 1 year total shareholder return of 178.74%. If AI storage is on your radar after Backblaze's latest moves, now can be a useful moment to see what else is moving in 56 AI infrastructure stocks Backblaze’s latest surge sits at the crossroads of improving business metrics and a rush of enthusiasm around AI infrastructure. How much of this move rests on cash flow and contracts versus changing sentiment around the stock? Backblaze last closed at $18.62 while the most followed narrative anchors fair value at $9.34. This places a spotlight on the growth assumptions behind that gap. Read the complete narrative. Want to see what is baked into that $9.34 view on Backblaze? The narrative leans on specific revenue growth, margin progress, and future valuation multiples. Curious which combination really carries the model? Result: Fair Value of $9.34 (OVERVALUED) Have a read of the narrative in full and understand what's behind the forecasts. However, if AI storage demand softens or large cloud rivals win workloads away from Backblaze, the current growth narrative could come under pressure. Find out about the key risks to this Backblaze narrative. Sentiment around Backblaze is mixed, with enthusiasm for rewards set against clear risk flags, so it can be worthwhile to act promptly and test the case yourself through the 2 key rewards and 3 important warning signs If Backblaze has sharpened your focus, do not stop here. The next smart move is to scan other opportunities that fit clear, disciplined criteria using the Simply Wall St Screener. Target resilient income by reviewing companies that qualify as 8 dividend fortresses and could suit investors who prioritise cash returns and stability. Hunt for quality at a measured price by checking stocks identified as 51 high quality undervalued stocks that pair fundamentals with more modest valuation metrics. Reduce portfolio surprises by focusing on businesses highlighted in the 79 resilient stocks with low risk scores which screens for stocks with lower overall risk scores. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. We provide commentary based on historical data and analyst forecasts only using an unbiased methodology and our articles are not intended to be financial advice. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned. Companies discussed in this article include BLZE. Have feedback on this article? Concerned about the content? Get in touch with us directly. Alternatively, email [email protected]
Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-08-04Backblaze, Inc. Q2 2026 Earnings Call Summary
Moby
Backblaze, Inc. Q2 2026 Earnings Call Summary
Our analysts just identified a stock with the potential to be the next Nvidia. Tell us how you invest and we'll show you why it's our #1 pick. Tap here. Performance beat was driven by broad-based momentum across the business, particularly in the B2 cloud storage segment which saw growth accelerate to 34% year-over-year. Management attributes the successful move upmarket to the increasing storage demands of AI workloads, resulting in a 57% year-over-year increase in customers contributing over $50,000 in ARR. The company signed the largest contract in its history, a $335 million multi-year agreement with CoreWeave, validating Backblaze as a critical capacity tier for AI infrastructure. Strategic focus has shifted toward providing 'architectural freedom,' allowing AI native companies to move data between fragmented cloud providers without prohibitive egress fees. A new managed storage approach was introduced, allowing Backblaze to run its software on customer-owned hardware to address regional data sovereignty and capital-light expansion needs. Operational efficiency improved significantly, with adjusted EBITDA margins expanding by 1,200 basis points due to revenue growth outpacing operating expense increases. Full-year 2026 revenue guidance was raised by over $10 million, reflecting increased visibility from contracted demand and the anticipated ramp of the CoreWeave agreement. Management provided early directional commentary for 2027, expecting B2 revenue to grow over 40% year-over-year based on current minimum commitment trajectories. CapEx is expected to accelerate in the second half of 2026 to 55%-65% of revenue to build capacity for signed customer commitments, though the company expects to remain adjusted free cash flow neutral. The CoreWeave contract is expected to reach its minimum commitment levels by mid-2027, providing a predictable revenue floor for the next several years. Guidance philosophy remains conservative, excluding variable usage above contracted minimums and potential large deals exceeding $500,000. A price increase implemented on May 1 contributed 8 percentage points to B2 growth; management noted that anticipated churn from this change has not materialized. The CoreWeave agreement includes $22 million in warrant values which will be treated as contra-revenue, impacting reported GAAP revenue figures over the five-year term. Computer bac…Read full documentShow less
Our analysts just identified a stock with the potential to be the next Nvidia. Tell us how you invest and we'll show you why it's our #1 pick. Tap here. Performance beat was driven by broad-based momentum across the business, particularly in the B2 cloud storage segment which saw growth accelerate to 34% year-over-year. Management attributes the successful move upmarket to the increasing storage demands of AI workloads, resulting in a 57% year-over-year increase in customers contributing over $50,000 in ARR. The company signed the largest contract in its history, a $335 million multi-year agreement with CoreWeave, validating Backblaze as a critical capacity tier for AI infrastructure. Strategic focus has shifted toward providing 'architectural freedom,' allowing AI native companies to move data between fragmented cloud providers without prohibitive egress fees. A new managed storage approach was introduced, allowing Backblaze to run its software on customer-owned hardware to address regional data sovereignty and capital-light expansion needs. Operational efficiency improved significantly, with adjusted EBITDA margins expanding by 1,200 basis points due to revenue growth outpacing operating expense increases. Full-year 2026 revenue guidance was raised by over $10 million, reflecting increased visibility from contracted demand and the anticipated ramp of the CoreWeave agreement. Management provided early directional commentary for 2027, expecting B2 revenue to grow over 40% year-over-year based on current minimum commitment trajectories. CapEx is expected to accelerate in the second half of 2026 to 55%-65% of revenue to build capacity for signed customer commitments, though the company expects to remain adjusted free cash flow neutral. The CoreWeave contract is expected to reach its minimum commitment levels by mid-2027, providing a predictable revenue floor for the next several years. Guidance philosophy remains conservative, excluding variable usage above contracted minimums and potential large deals exceeding $500,000. A price increase implemented on May 1 contributed 8 percentage points to B2 growth; management noted that anticipated churn from this change has not materialized. The CoreWeave agreement includes $22 million in warrant values which will be treated as contra-revenue, impacting reported GAAP revenue figures over the five-year term. Computer backup revenue declined 2% year-over-year, as the company manages this legacy segment for cash flow while focusing investment on the B2 growth engine. Gross margins may face a temporary headwind of a few hundred basis points as depreciation from accelerated CapEx precedes the full revenue ramp of new large-scale contracts. The $10.5 million raise is a 'healthy mix' of the Q2 beat, the May price increase, and the initial CoreWeave ramp, rather than being dominated by a single factor. CoreWeave is expected to hit its minimum revenue commitment levels by mid-2027. One stock. Nvidia-level potential. 30M+ investors trust Moby to find it first. Get the pick. Tap here. The company has completed its core GTM leadership team, including a new CRO, Head of RevOps, and Head of Sales Development. Repeatability is improving, evidenced by adding 50 customers to the $50k+ ARR cohort in a single quarter, a volume typically seen over a full year. The deal has served as a 'stamp of validation,' elevating Backblaze's status in the AI infrastructure stack and accelerating conversations with other neocloud providers. Management noted that the most engaged prospects are those already feeling the 'pain' of expensive flash-only storage tiers. Managed storage involves Backblaze personnel racking and managing software on hardware owned by the customer, creating a capital-light model for Backblaze. This model is particularly attractive for customers with specific data sovereignty needs or those who wish to keep assets on their own balance sheets. Backblaze intends to fund its accelerated CapEx through a combination of cash on hand, $150 million in available capital lease lines, and improving operating cash flows. Management believes they are currently well-positioned to meet demand without immediate additional equity capital raises.
Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-08-04BLZE Stock Hits A 55-Month High — CEO Says Backblaze Had An 'Amazing Quarter', CRWV Deal Impresses Wall Street
Stocktwits
BLZE Stock Hits A 55-Month High — CEO Says Backblaze Had An 'Amazing Quarter', CRWV Deal Impresses Wall Street
Kidron attributed the strong quarter to rising AI demand, improving traction with larger enterprise customers and Backblaze's largest-ever deal with CoreWeave. Lake Street also raised its price target on Backblaze to $21 from $14 while maintaining a ‘Buy’ rating, saying revenue from the CoreWeave partnership is expected to build gradually through 2026. The firm expects the contract's minimum revenue commitments to "fully kick in" by mid-2027, prompting it to raise its adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization estimates. Shares of Backblaze Inc. (BLZE) soared in Tuesday’s opening trade, hitting their highest levels in about 55 months after the cloud storage company reported stronger-than-expected second-quarter (Q2) results. Backblaze’s Q2 performance prompted Wall Street analysts to raise their price targets as AI demand and a record CoreWeave Inc. (CRWV) contract boosted growth. See what 10M+ investors are talking about. Get the Stocktwits Daily Rip for what retail is watching right now, free to your inbox Backblaze shares were up nearly 50% in Tuesday’s opening session. According to TheFly, Oppenheimer analyst Ittai Kidron raised his price target on Backblaze to $25 from $15 while maintaining an ‘Outperform’ rating, saying B2 cloud storage revenue came in well ahead of expectations. The analyst attributed the strong quarter to rising AI demand, improving traction with larger enterprise customers and Backblaze's largest-ever deal with CoreWeave, alongside broader investment in next-generation cloud infrastructure. Kidron said those factors underscore the company's positioning as AI infrastructure spending continues to expand, with the CoreWeave agreement serving as a key contributor to the quarter's outperformance. Lake Street also raised its price target on Backblaze to $21 from $14 while maintaining a ‘Buy’ rating, saying revenue from the CoreWeave partnership is expected to build gradually through 2026 because of data transfer limits and the time required to onboard managed services. The firm expects the contract's minimum revenue commitments to "fully kick in" by mid-2027, prompting it to raise its adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) estimates for both 2026 and 2027. Lake Street said the phased ramp supports stronger profitability over the next two years as the CoreWeave relati…Read full documentShow less
Kidron attributed the strong quarter to rising AI demand, improving traction with larger enterprise customers and Backblaze's largest-ever deal with CoreWeave. Lake Street also raised its price target on Backblaze to $21 from $14 while maintaining a ‘Buy’ rating, saying revenue from the CoreWeave partnership is expected to build gradually through 2026. The firm expects the contract's minimum revenue commitments to "fully kick in" by mid-2027, prompting it to raise its adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization estimates. Shares of Backblaze Inc. (BLZE) soared in Tuesday’s opening trade, hitting their highest levels in about 55 months after the cloud storage company reported stronger-than-expected second-quarter (Q2) results. Backblaze’s Q2 performance prompted Wall Street analysts to raise their price targets as AI demand and a record CoreWeave Inc. (CRWV) contract boosted growth. See what 10M+ investors are talking about. Get the Stocktwits Daily Rip for what retail is watching right now, free to your inbox Backblaze shares were up nearly 50% in Tuesday’s opening session. According to TheFly, Oppenheimer analyst Ittai Kidron raised his price target on Backblaze to $25 from $15 while maintaining an ‘Outperform’ rating, saying B2 cloud storage revenue came in well ahead of expectations. The analyst attributed the strong quarter to rising AI demand, improving traction with larger enterprise customers and Backblaze's largest-ever deal with CoreWeave, alongside broader investment in next-generation cloud infrastructure. Kidron said those factors underscore the company's positioning as AI infrastructure spending continues to expand, with the CoreWeave agreement serving as a key contributor to the quarter's outperformance. Lake Street also raised its price target on Backblaze to $21 from $14 while maintaining a ‘Buy’ rating, saying revenue from the CoreWeave partnership is expected to build gradually through 2026 because of data transfer limits and the time required to onboard managed services. The firm expects the contract's minimum revenue commitments to "fully kick in" by mid-2027, prompting it to raise its adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) estimates for both 2026 and 2027. Lake Street said the phased ramp supports stronger profitability over the next two years as the CoreWeave relationship matures. Citizens analyst Rustam Kanga also raised his price target on Backblaze to $21 from $16, while reiterating an ‘Outperform’ rating. The analyst pointed to the company's higher full-year outlook, citing broad-based business strength rather than a single growth driver. According to Citizens, strong sales execution, resilient customer retention, growing AI-related demand and the CoreWeave contract support Backblaze's growth outlook, with the raised guidance reinforcing confidence in the company's momentum. Backblaze co-founder and CEO Gleb Budman called Q2 "an amazing quarter" after the company exceeded the high end of its revenue and adjusted EBITDA guidance. The company reported earnings per share (EPS) of $0.08 on revenue of $42.7 million, while Wall Street expected an EPS of $0.02 on revenue of $39.9 million, according to Fiscal.ai data. Backblaze stated that its B2 Cloud Storage revenue climbed 34% year-on-year to $26.6 million, driven by growing demand for AI and data-intensive workloads. Budman highlighted the company's recently announced $335 million strategic agreement with CoreWeave as validation of Backblaze's role in the AI infrastructure stack, saying AI workloads require scalable, cost-effective storage where the company is “built to win.” Backblaze also raised its full-year 2026 outlook, increasing its revenue forecast to $172 million-$174 million from $161.5 million-$163.5 million, compared to Wall Street estimates of $164.2 million. Retail sentiment on Stocktwits around Backblaze trended in the ‘extremely bullish’ territory with message volumes at ‘extremely high’ levels. BLZE stock is up 398% year-to-date and 349% over the past 12 months. The iShares Russell 2000 Growth ETF (IWO) is up 31% over the past 12 months, while the iShares Micro-Cap ETF (IWC) is up 49%. Also See: Dow, S&P 500 Hit All-Time High After Bessent Says US-Iran Could Reach A Deal To Reopen Strait Of Hormuz For updates and corrections, email newsroom[at]stocktwits[dot]com. Rounak Jain has no position in any of the stocks mentioned in this article. StockTwits' news team content is for informational purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. For more, see our editorial policy. This article was originally published on StockTwits. Related: AMD Stock Tumbles Overnight As CapEx Surge And SpaceX’s Nvidia Switch Overshadow Q2 Beat KTOS Stock Jumps Overnight On 30% Q2 Revenue Growth: CEO Sees ‘Hypersonic Arms Race’ Ahead Why Is UPST Stock Surging Over 11% Overnight?
Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-08-04Backblaze Inc (BLZE) (Q2 2026) Earnings Call Highlights: Record $335M Coreweave Deal and 34% B2 ...
GuruFocus.com
Backblaze Inc (BLZE) (Q2 2026) Earnings Call Highlights: Record $335M Coreweave Deal and 34% B2 ...
This article first appeared on GuruFocus. Release Date: August 03, 2026 For the complete transcript of the earnings call, please refer to the full earnings call transcript. Revenue of $42.7 million exceeded guidance by $2.5 million, with adjusted EBITDA margin of 30%, 700 basis points above the high end of guidance. B2 growth accelerated to 34% year-over-year, the strongest rate in seven quarters, with B2 ARR reaching $113 million, up 39% year-over-year. Signed the largest contract in company history: a $335 million multi-year agreement with Coreweave, including a capital-light managed storage component. Upmarket momentum continued with 235 customers contributing over $50,000 in ARR, up 57% year-over-year, and four deals over $500,000 closed in the quarter. Raised full-year 2026 revenue guidance to $172-$174 million (from $161.5-$163.5 million) and adjusted EBITDA margin to 27%-29% (from 23%-25%), with early 2027 B2 growth expected to exceed 40%. Adjusted free cash flow margin improved to 8% for the quarter, and the company achieved a rule of 40 score of approximately 42, up from 18 a year ago. Computer backup revenue declined 2% year-over-year, though better than expected, and remains a single-digit declining business. Gross margin may face a few hundred basis points setback due to accelerated CapEx and depreciation before revenue ramps on new capacity. The Coreweave deal includes warrants valued at $22 million, which will be treated as a contra revenue, reducing reported revenue from the agreement. CapEx is expected to be 55%-65% of revenue for 2026, increasing financial burden despite using capital leases. The company's guidance excludes variable usage above contracted minimums and potential large deals, indicating potential upside but also uncertainty in forecasting. The price increase on May 1 contributed 8 percentage points to B2 growth, but churn from the increase was anticipated, though it did not materialize. Warning! GuruFocus has detected 2 Warning Signs with BLZE. Is BLZE fairly valued? Test your thesis with our free DCF calculator. Q: Can you help us think about to what degree the improved Calendar '26 outlook is tied to the ramp for the minimum commitments from the CoreWeave contract or anything on the Calendar '27 to support that 40%-plus outlook we're putting out there for B2 Cloud? A: Mark Swidan (CFO): The $10.5 million raise in the second…Read full documentShow less
This article first appeared on GuruFocus. Release Date: August 03, 2026 For the complete transcript of the earnings call, please refer to the full earnings call transcript. Revenue of $42.7 million exceeded guidance by $2.5 million, with adjusted EBITDA margin of 30%, 700 basis points above the high end of guidance. B2 growth accelerated to 34% year-over-year, the strongest rate in seven quarters, with B2 ARR reaching $113 million, up 39% year-over-year. Signed the largest contract in company history: a $335 million multi-year agreement with Coreweave, including a capital-light managed storage component. Upmarket momentum continued with 235 customers contributing over $50,000 in ARR, up 57% year-over-year, and four deals over $500,000 closed in the quarter. Raised full-year 2026 revenue guidance to $172-$174 million (from $161.5-$163.5 million) and adjusted EBITDA margin to 27%-29% (from 23%-25%), with early 2027 B2 growth expected to exceed 40%. Adjusted free cash flow margin improved to 8% for the quarter, and the company achieved a rule of 40 score of approximately 42, up from 18 a year ago. Computer backup revenue declined 2% year-over-year, though better than expected, and remains a single-digit declining business. Gross margin may face a few hundred basis points setback due to accelerated CapEx and depreciation before revenue ramps on new capacity. The Coreweave deal includes warrants valued at $22 million, which will be treated as a contra revenue, reducing reported revenue from the agreement. CapEx is expected to be 55%-65% of revenue for 2026, increasing financial burden despite using capital leases. The company's guidance excludes variable usage above contracted minimums and potential large deals, indicating potential upside but also uncertainty in forecasting. The price increase on May 1 contributed 8 percentage points to B2 growth, but churn from the increase was anticipated, though it did not materialize. Warning! GuruFocus has detected 2 Warning Signs with BLZE. Is BLZE fairly valued? Test your thesis with our free DCF calculator. Q: Can you help us think about to what degree the improved Calendar '26 outlook is tied to the ramp for the minimum commitments from the CoreWeave contract or anything on the Calendar '27 to support that 40%-plus outlook we're putting out there for B2 Cloud? A: Mark Swidan (CFO): The $10.5 million raise in the second half of '26 is benefiting from a broad base of things, including the business performing better, the Q2 beat of $2.7 million, and the price increase, with no single factor having a dominant role. We are sticking to contracted minimum spend by customers, and the CoreWeave deal specifically ramps over the coming year, hitting its minimum about mid-2027. B2 is well on track to grow at 40% or higher during the rest of this year and into 2027. Q: The announcement of CoreWeave is quite unique in its size and messaging. Does the deal with CoreWeave generate more interest from customers or less? Are customers viewing that relationship as something that potentially ties you too closely to CoreWeave? A: Gleb Budman (CEO): The announcement has helped elevate Backblaze as a key player in the AI infrastructure stack. Conversations at a recent AI infrastructure conference in Europe were consistently positive, with prospects saying the deal is very relevant and applicable to them. The CoreWeave deal serves as a stamp of validation for AI-native companies, and on the AI infrastructure side, while they are competitors, it's a big and growing market. The new managed storage approach is also generating interest from other AI infrastructure companies for their data centers and sovereign cloud environments. Q: On the CoreWeave deal, could you give us a sense of what the gross margins are going to look like relative to your traditional B2 business? A: Mark Swidan (CFO): We are pricing all deals to keep gross margins in and around the current 63%. However, the committed contracts increase our CapEx needs, which will be between 55% and 65% of revenue for the year. As we put out CapEx, depreciation will start before customers ramp up their revenue spend, potentially causing a few hundred basis points setback to gross margin for a couple of quarters before it recovers. Q: When you look at your pipeline, is the managed storage approach common that people are looking for, or is this going to be more the exception rather than the rule? And do you have insights into the two wins you highlighted to understand how much more opportunity you have within those organizations? A: Gleb Budman (CEO): The managed storage approach is early, but we are actively in discussions with roughly half a dozen prospects. It requires a fair level of sophistication and scale on the customer side, so it won't be the predominant number on a volume basis, but those will be larger opportunities. On visibility, as we invest in the sales-led side, the team is actively co-planning with larger customers, giving us better insight into their needs and plans, in addition to the commitments themselves. Q: Can you give us a bit more color on the frontier model win, including competition, use case, duration of deal, and the size of the seven-figure deal? A: Gleb Budman (CEO): The frontier model developer was hitting quota ceilings with their previous cloud provider and had performance requirements to move data at high throughput. They switched to Backblaze for B2 Overdrive to store their large capacity-tier data sets, moving data to flash tiers next to GPUs only when ready for training runs. The pricing is higher than the standard self-serve price, and while it was a large commitment from the outset, they referred to it as an "opening commitment" and a building block they expect to expand significantly. Q: Have you hired most of the executives across the go-to-market team that you need at this point? And does the CoreWeave business reaching a minimum commitment level in mid-27 imply you're reaching about a $65 million run rate on that agreement? A: Gleb Budman (CEO): Yes, we've hired the Chief Revenue Officer, head of sales development, head of RevOps, head of customer success, and head of GTM operations, so the team is in place. Mark Swidan (CFO): The CoreWeave deal has two components: roughly a 70/30 split between the platform and managed service components. The minimum commitment relates to the 70% platform portion, and the warrants are a contra revenue, so you shouldn't just take $335 million times 70%; you also have to deduct the $22 million value of warrants. Q: I wanted to revisit the upward revision to the 2026 guidance. Is the business outperformance primarily going to be those four greater than $500,000 ARR transactions? A: Mark Swidan (CFO): It includes that, but it also includes the self-serve product-led growth. We did a price increase on May 1 and anticipated some churn, but we really haven't seen any churn. In fact, we've seen an acceleration of people signing up with higher ARPU. We're seeing good momentum on almost all routes to market and go-to-market levers, with RPO going up every quarter as customers commit to one-year or multi-year contracts. Q: Can you help frame the extent to which the CoreWeave win is helping accelerate discussions with other neocloud providers evaluating HDD-based storage tiers? Are the best conversations with those who have already experienced challenges with costly flash storage, or is it more effective to approach those yet to begin a DIY approach? A: Gleb Budman (CEO): It was counterintuitive for us. Our assumption was the best path would be to go after those that did not have storage yet, but we found the more engaged conversations are from those that do. Those with storage are feeling the pain of only having flash-based storage or trying to do it themselves. The ones without storage aren't feeling the need yet because their customers are going elsewhere. Neoclouds generally need both flash and capacity tiers of storage, and we're a great solution for the capacity tier. Q: You gave the color on the CapEx of 55% to 65% of revenues. Was that comment more for the back half of this year or do you expect that to hold through 2027? A: Mark Swidan (CFO): That's for 2026. It's too early to give 2027, mainly because the prices of hardware change pretty quickly and our For the complete transcript of the earnings call, please refer to the full earnings call transcript.
Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-08-03Backblaze Announces Second Quarter 2026 Financial Results
Business Wire
Backblaze Announces Second Quarter 2026 Financial Results
34% Revenue Growth in B2 Cloud Storage, 18% Revenue Growth Overall in Q2 2026 SAN FRANCISCO, August 03, 2026--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Backblaze, Inc. (Nasdaq: BLZE), the storage platform powering AI and data-intensive workloads, today announced results for its second quarter ended June 30, 2026. "Q2 was an amazing quarter for Backblaze. We exceeded the high end of our revenue and Adjusted EBITDA guidance, with B2 growth accelerating to 34% year over year," said Gleb Budman, co-founder and CEO of Backblaze. "We also signed a $335 million strategic agreement with CoreWeave offering the strongest validation yet of our critical role in the AI infrastructure stack. AI workloads need a capacity storage layer that can scale to exabytes, while delivering performance at attractive economics. That is where Backblaze is built to win." Second Quarter 2026 Financial Highlights:(1) Revenue of $42.7 million, an increase of 18% year-over-year (YoY). Gross profit of $26.8 million, or 63% of revenue, compared to $23.0 million, or 63% of revenue, in Q2 2025. Adjusted gross profit of $34.3 million, or 80% of revenue, compared to $28.8 million, or 79% of revenue, in Q2 2025. Net loss was $5.1 million compared to a net loss of $7.1 million in Q2 2025. Net loss per share was $0.08 compared to a net loss per share of $0.13 in Q2 2025. Adjusted EBITDA was $12.8 million, or 30% of revenue, compared to $6.6 million, or 18% of revenue, in Q2 2025. Non-GAAP net income of $5.0 million compared to non-GAAP net income of $0.8 million in Q2 2025. Non-GAAP net income per share of $0.08 compared to a non-GAAP net income per share of $0.01 in Q2 2025. Cash flow from operations during the six months ended June 30, 2026 was $13.8 million, compared to $8.5 million for the same period in 2025. Adjusted free cash flow during the six months ended June 30, 2026 was $1.4 million, compared to $(6.0) million for the same period in 2025. Cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities totaled $49.9 million as of June 30, 2026. Second Quarter 2026 Operational Highlights: Annual recurring revenue (ARR) was $177.3 million, an increase of 21% YoY. Net revenue retention rate (NRR) was 103% compared to 106% in Q2 2025. Gross customer retention rate was 91% in Q2 2026 compared to 90% in Q2 2025. Recent Business Highlights: Signed a 5+ year, $335 million strategic agreement with CoreWeave: The landmark agreement incl…Read full documentShow less
34% Revenue Growth in B2 Cloud Storage, 18% Revenue Growth Overall in Q2 2026 SAN FRANCISCO, August 03, 2026--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Backblaze, Inc. (Nasdaq: BLZE), the storage platform powering AI and data-intensive workloads, today announced results for its second quarter ended June 30, 2026. "Q2 was an amazing quarter for Backblaze. We exceeded the high end of our revenue and Adjusted EBITDA guidance, with B2 growth accelerating to 34% year over year," said Gleb Budman, co-founder and CEO of Backblaze. "We also signed a $335 million strategic agreement with CoreWeave offering the strongest validation yet of our critical role in the AI infrastructure stack. AI workloads need a capacity storage layer that can scale to exabytes, while delivering performance at attractive economics. That is where Backblaze is built to win." Second Quarter 2026 Financial Highlights:(1) Revenue of $42.7 million, an increase of 18% year-over-year (YoY). Gross profit of $26.8 million, or 63% of revenue, compared to $23.0 million, or 63% of revenue, in Q2 2025. Adjusted gross profit of $34.3 million, or 80% of revenue, compared to $28.8 million, or 79% of revenue, in Q2 2025. Net loss was $5.1 million compared to a net loss of $7.1 million in Q2 2025. Net loss per share was $0.08 compared to a net loss per share of $0.13 in Q2 2025. Adjusted EBITDA was $12.8 million, or 30% of revenue, compared to $6.6 million, or 18% of revenue, in Q2 2025. Non-GAAP net income of $5.0 million compared to non-GAAP net income of $0.8 million in Q2 2025. Non-GAAP net income per share of $0.08 compared to a non-GAAP net income per share of $0.01 in Q2 2025. Cash flow from operations during the six months ended June 30, 2026 was $13.8 million, compared to $8.5 million for the same period in 2025. Adjusted free cash flow during the six months ended June 30, 2026 was $1.4 million, compared to $(6.0) million for the same period in 2025. Cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities totaled $49.9 million as of June 30, 2026. Second Quarter 2026 Operational Highlights: Annual recurring revenue (ARR) was $177.3 million, an increase of 21% YoY. Net revenue retention rate (NRR) was 103% compared to 106% in Q2 2025. Gross customer retention rate was 91% in Q2 2026 compared to 90% in Q2 2025. Recent Business Highlights: Signed a 5+ year, $335 million strategic agreement with CoreWeave: The landmark agreement includes warrants valued at approximately $22 million, aligning the companies’ long-term interests and validating Backblaze as a strategic storage tier provider for AI workloads at massive scale. Expanded momentum with larger customers: ARR from customers generating $50,000+ in ARR grew 67% year over year, and the number of these customers increased 57% year over year, reflecting continued success scaling with larger accounts. Won largest B2 Overdrive deal to date with a frontier AI model: Signed a seven-figure ARR B2 Overdrive deal with a leading AI model developer, demonstrating demand for high-performance, cost-effective storage for AI workloads. Strengthened long-term revenue visibility: RPO reached $396 million, up $319.5 million quarter over quarter, led by the CoreWeave agreement and demand from AI-native companies. Expanded the B2 developer ecosystem: Shipped new SDKs and AI agent tools and launched Backblaze’s Generative Media Hackathon, increasing awareness of B2 as a storage platform for AI applications. Financial Outlook: Based on information available as of the date of this press release, For the third quarter of 2026, we expect: Revenue between $44.4 million and $44.8 million. Adjusted EBITDA margin between 27% and 29%. Basic weighted average shares outstanding of 62.3 million to 62.5 million shares. For full-year 2026, we have raised our outlook: Revenue between $172.0 million and $174.0 million, raised from $161.5 million to $163.5 million. Adjusted EBITDA margin range of 27% to 29%, raised from 23% to 25%. Conference Call Information: Backblaze will host a conference call today, August 3, 2026, at 2:00 p.m. PT (5:00 p.m. ET) to review its financial results. Attend the webcast here: https://events.q4inc.com/attendee/704175018 An archive of the webcast will be available shortly after its completion on the Investor Relations section of the Backblaze website at https://ir.backblaze.com. Register to listen by phone here: https://events.q4inc.com/analyst/704175018?pwd=29EpzfWI Phone registrants will receive dial-in information via email. About Backblaze Backblaze (NASDAQ: BLZE) is the object storage layer powering AI infrastructure and data-intensive workloads at scale. Built over two decades, the company has leveraged hardware, software, and operational innovation into a platform that delivers the performance and economics the AI era demands—without lock-in. Today, more than 500,000 customers trust Backblaze to move and store the data powering their businesses, reaching hundreds of millions of end users across 175 countries. For more information, visit www.backblaze.com. Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-looking Statements This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, which involve risks and uncertainties. These forward-looking statements are frequently identified by the use of forward-looking terminology, including the terms "anticipate," "believe," "continue," "could," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "likely," "may," "plan," "possible," "potential," "predict," "project," "should," "target," "will," "would," or other similar terms or expressions that relate to our future performance, expectations, strategy, plans or intentions, and include statements in the section titled "Financial Outlook." Our actual results could differ materially from those stated in or implied by the forward-looking statements in this press release due to a number of factors, including but not limited to: the impact of our go-to-market transformation and ability to attract and retain customers, including increasingly larger customers; the continued growth of data stored by our customers; continued growth of AI related business; rapidly evolving technological developments in the market, including advancement in AI; realizing the anticipated benefits relating to cost savings initiatives and the re-investment of savings in additional sales capacity; market competition, including competitors that may have greater size, offerings and resources; effectively managing growth and scaling of our platform; ability to offer new features and other offerings on a timely basis, including new enterprise features, B2 Overdrive offering and geographic expansion in Canada or other jurisdictions, and achieve desired market adoption; disruption in our service or loss of availability of customers’ data; cyberattacks; ability to continue to scale the business; the impact of pricing and other product offering changes, including the May 1, 2026 pay-as-you-go storage pricing increase; material defects or errors in our software, such as problems with our internal systems, network, or data, including actual or perceived breaches or failures; supply chain disruption; ability to maintain existing relationships with partners and to enter into new partnerships; hiring and retention of key employees; the impact of changes to global trade and tariff policies, on us or our vendors, partners and customers; war or hostilities, and other significant world or regional events on our business and the business of our customers, vendors, supply chain and partners; litigation and other disputes; availability of additional capital; and general market, political, economic, and business conditions. Further information on these and additional risks, uncertainties, assumptions, and other factors that could cause actual results or outcomes to differ materially from those included in or implied by the forward-looking statements contained in this release are included under the caption "Risk Factors" and elsewhere in our Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and other filings and reports we make with the SEC from time to time. The forward-looking statements made in this release reflect our views as of the date of this press release. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements in this press release, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Non-GAAP Financial Measures To supplement the financial measures, which are prepared and presented in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles in the United States (GAAP), we provide investors with non-GAAP financial measures including (i) adjusted gross profit (and margin), (ii) adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA margin, (iii) non-GAAP net income (loss) and non-GAAP net income (loss) per share, (iv) adjusted free cash flow and adjusted free cash flow margin, and (v) other Non-GAAP measures. These non-GAAP financial measures are not necessarily comparable to other companies and should be considered as a supplement to, not a substitute for, or superior to, the corresponding measures calculated in accordance with GAAP. We present these non-GAAP measures because management believes they are a useful measure of our performance and provide an additional basis for assessing our operating results. Please see the appendix attached to this press release for a reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of non-GAAP guidance measures to corresponding GAAP measures is not available on a forward-looking basis without unreasonable effort due to the uncertainty regarding, and the potential variability of, expenses and other factors in the future. For example, stock-based compensation expense-related charges are impacted by the timing of employee stock transactions, the future fair market value of our common stock, and our future hiring and retention needs, all of which are difficult to predict with reasonable accuracy and subject to constant change. Adjusted Gross Profit and Margin We believe adjusted gross profit (and margin), when taken together with our GAAP financial results, provides a meaningful assessment of our performance and is useful to us for evaluating our ongoing operations and for internal planning and forecasting purposes. We define adjusted gross profit as gross profit, excluding stock-based compensation expense, depreciation and amortization and restructuring charges within cost of revenue. We define adjusted gross margin as a percentage of adjusted gross profit to revenue. We exclude stock-based compensation, which is a non-cash item, and restructuring charges because we do not consider these items as indicative of our core operating performance. We exclude depreciation expense of our property and equipment and amortization expense of capitalized internal-use software because these may not reflect current or future cash spending levels to support our business. We believe adjusted gross profit (and margin) provides consistency and comparability with our past financial performance and facilitates period-to-period comparisons of operations. Adjusted EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA Margin We define Adjusted EBITDA as net loss adjusted to exclude depreciation and amortization, stock-based compensation, interest expense, investment income, income tax provision, realized and unrealized gains and losses on foreign currency transactions, impairment of long-lived assets, restructuring charges, legal settlement costs, and other non-recurring charges. Adjusted EBITDA Margin is defined as Adjusted EBITDA divided by revenues for the period. We use Adjusted EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA Margin to evaluate our ongoing operations and for internal planning and forecasting purposes. We believe that Adjusted EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA Margin, when taken together with our GAAP financial results, provide meaningful supplemental information regarding our operating performance by excluding certain items that may not be indicative of our business, results of operations, or outlook. We consider Adjusted EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA Margin to be important measures because they help illustrate underlying trends in our business and our historical operating performance on a more consistent basis. Non-GAAP Net Income (Loss) and Non-GAAP Net Income (Loss) Per Share We define non-GAAP net income (loss) as net income (loss) adjusted to exclude stock-based compensation, realized and unrealized gains and losses on foreign currency transactions, impairment of long-lived assets, restructuring charges, legal settlement costs, and other items we deem non-recurring. Non-GAAP net income (loss) per share is defined as non-GAAP net income (loss) divided by basic and diluted weighted average common shares outstanding. We believe that non-GAAP net income (loss) and non-GAAP net income (loss) per share, when taken together with our GAAP financial results, provide meaningful supplemental information regarding our operating performance by excluding certain items that may not be indicative of our business, results of operations, or outlook. Adjusted Free Cash Flow and Adjusted Free Cash Flow Margin We believe that Adjusted Free Cash Flow and Adjusted Free Cash Flow Margin are useful metrics for assessing liquidity that provide information to management and investors about the cash generated from our core operations that can be reinvested in the business. However, these measures should not replace cash flows from operations as a liquidity benchmark. One limitation of these metrics is that they do not reflect our future contractual commitments, nor do they capture the overall changes in our cash balance during a specific period. Nonetheless, we believe that Adjusted Free Cash Flow and Adjusted Free Cash Flow Margin are key metrics providing insight on our financial trajectory that helps us make informed decisions as we work towards sustainable positive cash flow. We define adjusted free cash flow as net cash provided by operating activities less purchases of property and equipment, capitalized internal-use software costs, principal payments on finance leases and lease financing obligations, as reflected in our consolidated statements of cash flows, and excluding payments on restructuring charges, legal settlement payments, and payments on other non-recurring charges. Adjusted free cash flow margin is calculated as adjusted free cash flow divided by revenue. Other Non-GAAP Measures Adjusted Cost of Revenue and Adjusted Operating Expenses Adjusted research and development, adjusted sales and marketing, and adjusted general and administrative (collectively, "adjusted operating expenses") and adjusted cost of revenue are non-GAAP financial measures that we define as each respective GAAP expense category excluding stock-based compensation expense, depreciation and amortization, restructuring costs, and other non-recurring charges. These measures provide management with greater transparency into the underlying trends in our business by facilitating period-to-period comparisons of our ongoing cost structure, excluding the impact of certain non-cash or non-recurring items that may not be indicative of our operating performance. These measures are intended to assist in forecasting and budgeting by providing greater visibility into our normalized expense base. Key Business Metrics: Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) We define ARR as the annualized value of all Backblaze B2 and Computer Backup arrangements as of the end of a period. Given the renewable nature of our business, we view ARR as an important indicator of our financial performance and operating results, and we believe it is a useful metric for internal planning and analysis. For subscription-based arrangements, ARR is calculated by multiplying the monthly revenue for the last month of a period by 12. For consumption-based arrangements, ARR is calculated by multiplying average daily revenue for the last month of a period by 365. Total Company ARR represents the annualized value of all B2 Cloud Storage consumption- and subscription-based arrangements and Computer Backup subscription-based arrangements as of the end of a period. Beginning in the first quarter of 2026, to improve comparability between periods, we revised our methodology for calculating ARR for our consumption-based arrangements to use a daily revenue rate during the last month of the period rather than a monthly rate. Prior period ARR amounts presented have been recast to conform to the current period presentation. Net Revenue Retention Rate (NRR) To calculate NRR for a specific quarter, we determine the revenue recognized in that quarter from customers who generated revenue during the last month of the same quarter of the previous year. This revenue is then divided by the revenue generated from those same customers in the prior year quarter. Beginning in the first quarter of 2026, we are presenting NRR using a single-quarter calculation, comparing current quarter revenue to the corresponding prior year quarter, rather than an average of quarterly rates over the prior four quarters, in order to provide a more current measure of customer retention. Prior period NRR amounts have been recast to conform to the current period presentation. Gross Customer Retention Rate We use gross customer retention rate to measure our ability to retain our customers. Our gross customer retention rate reflects only customer losses and does not reflect the expansion or contraction of revenue we earn from our existing customers. We believe our high gross customer retention rates demonstrate that we provide a vital service to our customers, as the vast majority of our customers tend to continue to use our platform from one period to the next. To calculate our gross customer retention rate, we take the trailing four-quarter average of our quarterly gross customer retention rates. We calculate the quarterly gross customer retention rates by dividing (i) the number of accounts that generated revenue in the last month of the current quarter that also generated recurring revenue during the last month of the corresponding quarter in the prior year, by (ii) the number of accounts that generated recurring revenue during the last month of the corresponding quarter in the prior year. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260803978932/en/ Contacts Investors Contact Mimi [email protected] Press Contact Renatta [email protected]
Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-08-03Backblaze Q2 Non-GAAP Earnings, Revenue Rise; Shares Gain After Hours
MT Newswires
Backblaze Q2 Non-GAAP Earnings, Revenue Rise; Shares Gain After Hours
Backblaze (BLZE) reported Q2 non-GAAP net income late Monday of $0.08 per diluted share, up from $0.
Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-08-03Backblaze Q2 Earnings Call Highlights
MarketBeat
Backblaze Q2 Earnings Call Highlights
Interested in Backblaze, Inc.? Here are five stocks we like better. Backblaze exceeded Q2 expectations: Revenue rose 18% year over year to $42.7 million, while adjusted EBITDA nearly doubled to $13 million and the margin reached 30%. B2 Cloud Storage accelerated: B2 revenue grew 34%, ARR increased 39% to $113 million, and larger-customer momentum strengthened, including four deals above $500,000 and three AI-related wins. CoreWeave deal boosts visibility and investment needs: The more-than-five-year, $335 million agreement added about $313 million in remaining performance obligations, prompting increased infrastructure spending but supporting raised 2026 revenue guidance of $172 million to $174 million and adjusted EBITDA margin guidance of 27% to 29%. MarketBeat Week in Review – 05/04 - 05/08 Backblaze (NASDAQ:BLZE) reported second-quarter 2026 results that exceeded its guidance, supported by accelerating B2 cloud-storage growth, improved profitability and a new multi-year agreement with AI cloud provider CoreWeave. Revenue totaled $42.7 million, up 18% from a year earlier and $2.5 million above the high end of the company’s guidance range. Adjusted EBITDA was $13 million, nearly double the prior-year level, while adjusted EBITDA margin reached 30%, exceeding the high end of guidance by 700 basis points. → Lost in Space: Why Aerospace Valuations Are Plummeting Right Now Is Backblaze the Next Momentum Monster? Chief Executive Officer Gleb Budman said the quarter reflected “broad momentum across the business,” including an acceleration in B2 growth, larger customer commitments and AI-related customer wins. The company also announced what it described as the largest contract in its history: a $335 million, more-than-five-year agreement with CoreWeave. B2 revenue grew 34% year over year, its strongest growth rate in seven quarters, according to Chief Financial Officer Marc Suidan. B2 annual recurring revenue reached $113 million, up 39% year over year, while sequential B2 ARR increased by $20 million. The company said its May 1 price increase accounted for $9 million of that sequential ARR increase and approximately eight percentage points of B2 growth. → MarketBeat Week in Review – 07/27- 07/31 Big Rallies Brewing? 3 Analyst Favorites to Watch Closely Suidan said the company had anticipated churn following the price increase, but that churn “did not materializ…Read full documentShow less
Interested in Backblaze, Inc.? Here are five stocks we like better. Backblaze exceeded Q2 expectations: Revenue rose 18% year over year to $42.7 million, while adjusted EBITDA nearly doubled to $13 million and the margin reached 30%. B2 Cloud Storage accelerated: B2 revenue grew 34%, ARR increased 39% to $113 million, and larger-customer momentum strengthened, including four deals above $500,000 and three AI-related wins. CoreWeave deal boosts visibility and investment needs: The more-than-five-year, $335 million agreement added about $313 million in remaining performance obligations, prompting increased infrastructure spending but supporting raised 2026 revenue guidance of $172 million to $174 million and adjusted EBITDA margin guidance of 27% to 29%. MarketBeat Week in Review – 05/04 - 05/08 Backblaze (NASDAQ:BLZE) reported second-quarter 2026 results that exceeded its guidance, supported by accelerating B2 cloud-storage growth, improved profitability and a new multi-year agreement with AI cloud provider CoreWeave. Revenue totaled $42.7 million, up 18% from a year earlier and $2.5 million above the high end of the company’s guidance range. Adjusted EBITDA was $13 million, nearly double the prior-year level, while adjusted EBITDA margin reached 30%, exceeding the high end of guidance by 700 basis points. → Lost in Space: Why Aerospace Valuations Are Plummeting Right Now Is Backblaze the Next Momentum Monster? Chief Executive Officer Gleb Budman said the quarter reflected “broad momentum across the business,” including an acceleration in B2 growth, larger customer commitments and AI-related customer wins. The company also announced what it described as the largest contract in its history: a $335 million, more-than-five-year agreement with CoreWeave. B2 revenue grew 34% year over year, its strongest growth rate in seven quarters, according to Chief Financial Officer Marc Suidan. B2 annual recurring revenue reached $113 million, up 39% year over year, while sequential B2 ARR increased by $20 million. The company said its May 1 price increase accounted for $9 million of that sequential ARR increase and approximately eight percentage points of B2 growth. → MarketBeat Week in Review – 07/27- 07/31 Big Rallies Brewing? 3 Analyst Favorites to Watch Closely Suidan said the company had anticipated churn following the price increase, but that churn “did not materialize.” B2 net revenue retention was 113%, compared with 114% a year earlier. Backblaze continued to move upmarket during the quarter. It ended the period with 235 customers contributing more than $50,000 in ARR, up 57% from a year earlier. ARR from that group increased 67% year over year. The company closed four deals valued above $500,000 during the quarter, including three AI-related wins. → GE HealthCare Stock Climbs on Vital Diagnostics Demand Budman said the company added nearly 50 customers to the $50,000-plus ARR category from the prior quarter, which he characterized as evidence of broader go-to-market progress beyond the CoreWeave agreement. He said Backblaze has added a chief revenue officer, a sales-development leader, a head of revenue operations, a customer-success leader and other go-to-market personnel as part of its sales transformation. The CoreWeave agreement includes two components: use of Backblaze’s platform and a managed-storage service delivered on customer-owned hardware. Backblaze said the contract represents a multi-exabyte commitment and positions the company as a capacity-storage provider for AI infrastructure companies that need hard-drive-based storage alongside flash storage used for higher-performance workloads. During the quarter, Backblaze added approximately $320 million in remaining performance obligations, including $313 million related to CoreWeave after accounting for $22 million in warrant value. Suidan said the CoreWeave agreement’s platform-related portion is roughly 70% of the net contract amount and is expected to ramp to its minimum commitment approximately 12 months after the agreement began, or around mid-2027. The managed-service component is expected to ramp later. The company said CoreWeave is its fourth major AI cloud infrastructure customer. Budman said the announcement has led to additional discussions with AI infrastructure providers, including conversations around the new managed-storage approach. He said Backblaze was actively engaged in roughly half a dozen managed-storage discussions, though he noted the offering is intended for larger and more sophisticated customers rather than every customer. Under the managed-storage model, customers provide data-center space and purchase equipment, while Backblaze supplies the build materials and manages the designated storage environment with its software and personnel. Budman said the approach may be useful for customers seeking regional deployments, sovereign cloud environments or asset ownership on their own balance sheets. Total company gross margin was 63% in the second quarter, benefiting from the B2 price increase and operational efficiency, partly offset by higher hardware infrastructure costs. Operating expenses rose 6% year over year, below revenue growth, and declined by 800 basis points as a percentage of revenue to 73%. Adjusted free cash flow margin was 8% for the quarter. Backblaze ended the period with $50 million in cash and marketable securities, compared with $45 million in the previous quarter, and said it had more than $150 million in available and unused capital-lease lines. The company plans to accelerate capital expenditures in the second half of 2026 and into 2027 to support signed customer commitments. Suidan said capital expenditures are expected to equal 55% to 65% of revenue for full-year 2026. Using capital leases, Backblaze expects to be adjusted free-cash-flow neutral for the full year despite the increased infrastructure investment. Management said the added investment could result in a temporary gross-margin decline of a few hundred basis points as depreciation begins before customer capacity ramps, though it expects margins to recover afterward. The managed portion of the CoreWeave agreement does not require Backblaze capital expenditures because it is delivered on customer-owned hardware. Third-quarter revenue is expected to be between $44.4 million and $44.8 million. Third-quarter adjusted EBITDA margin is projected at 27% to 29%. Full-year 2026 revenue guidance was raised to $172 million to $174 million, from $161.5 million to $163.5 million previously. Full-year adjusted EBITDA margin guidance was increased to 27% to 29%, from 23% to 25%. At the midpoint, the revised full-year revenue outlook implies approximately 19% year-over-year growth, compared with the company’s prior expectation of about 11%. Suidan said the outlook reflects second-quarter results and greater visibility from contracted demand, while excluding variable usage above customer minimum commitments and potential deals larger than $500,000. Looking into 2027, Backblaze said it expects B2 revenue to grow more than 40% year over year based on underlying B2 performance, CoreWeave’s minimum commitment and a previously announced deal with total contract value above $15 million. The company emphasized that the 2027 figure is early directional commentary rather than formal guidance. Computer Backup revenue declined 2% year over year, a result the company said was better than expected. Management said it remains focused on retention, customer acquisition efforts, operating efficiency and margin improvement in that business, while continuing to expect low-single-digit declines. Backblaze, Inc, a storage cloud platform, provides businesses and consumers cloud services to store, use, and protect data in the United States and internationally. The company offers cloud services through a web-scale software infrastructure built on commodity hardware. It also provides Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, which enables customers to store data, developers to build applications, and partners to expand their use cases. This service is offered as a consumption-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and serves use cases, such as public, hybrid, and multi-cloud data storage; application development and DevOps; content delivery and edge computing; security and ransomware protection; media management; backup, archive, and tape replacement; repository for analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning; and Internet of Things. This instant news alert was generated by narrative science technology and financial data from MarketBeat in order to provide readers with the fastest reporting and unbiased coverage. Please send any questions or comments about this story to [email protected]. The article "Backblaze Q2 Earnings Call Highlights" was originally published by MarketBeat. View MarketBeat's top stocks for August 2026.
TranscriptFY2026 Q22026-08-03FY2026 Q2 earnings call transcript
Earnings source - 95 paragraphs
FY2026 Q2 earnings call transcript
Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us, and welcome to the Backblaze second quarter 2026 financial earnings call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star one again. I will now hand the conference over to Mimi Kong, Director of Investor Relations. Mimi, please go ahead.
Thank you. Good afternoon and welcome to Backblaze's second quarter 2026 earnings call. On the call with me today are Gleb Budman, Co-Founder, CEO, and Chairperson of the Board, and Marc Suidan, Chief Financial Officer. Today, Backblaze will discuss the financial results that were distributed earlier. Statements on this call include forward-looking statements about our future financial results, the impact of our sales and marketing initiatives, cost savings initiatives, results from new features, the impact of price changes, supply volatility in pricing, our ability to compete effectively and manage our growth, and our strategy to acquire new customers, retain and expand our business with existing customers. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially, including those described in our risk factors that are included in our most recent quarterly report on Form 10-Q and our other financial filings.
All forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions and beliefs as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update them except as required by law. Our discussion today will include non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for our GAAP results. Reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP results may be found in our earnings release, which was furnished with our Form 8-K filed today with the SEC. You can also find a slide presentation related to our comments in the webcast, which will also be posted to our Investor Relations page after the call. Please also see our press release or presentation for definitions of additional metrics such as NRR, gross customer retention rate, and adjusted free cash flows.
Finally, we will be hosting an Investor Day on Wednesday, September 9th in New York City. Please reach out to [email protected] to RSVP for the in-person event. A live webcast will also be accessible from the Backblaze Investor Relations website. Thank you for joining us, and I will now like to turn the call over to Gleb.
Thank you, Mimi. Thank you everyone for joining us today. We had a fantastic second quarter. Revenue came in at $42.7 million, $2.5 million above the high end of our guidance range. Adjusted EBITDA margin was 30%, 700 basis points above the high end of our guidance range, and B2 growth accelerated to 34% year-over-year. These results reflect broad momentum across the business. We also signed the largest contract in Backblaze's history, a $335 million multi-year agreement with CoreWeave, which I'll come back to in a moment. We continued to move upmarket and ended the quarter with 235 customers contributing more than $50,000 each in ARR, up 57% year-over-year. ARR from this cohort grew 67% year-over-year.
We signed numerous AI companies, including a leading frontier model developer, introduced the ability to run our cloud storage in customer-owned data centers to support regional and sovereign workloads, and expanded our AI startup outreach and agentic developer tooling. This quarter's results are proof that our AI strategy is working. The decision to lean into AI is translating directly into the financial performance you just heard and into the momentum I'll walk you through now. To understand our strategy, consider this. Every training data set, checkpoint, inference output, and GenAI asset has to be stored and used. Customers consistently tell us they have three needs to support that. Number one, the ability to scale with fast-growing data. Number two, architectural freedom to use their cloud of choice. Number three, storage performance that optimizes their AI workloads. All of that needs to be affordable so that AI scales efficiently.
The combination of those three requirements are why they choose Backblaze. Let's talk first about how that plays out with neoclouds and inferencing clouds. Many of these initially focused on GPUs as a service, but quickly recognized that their customers also needed storage. Some of them began by building flash-based storage tiers to support high-performance workloads. However, as data scaled and flash prices spiked, it became clear that flash storage should only be used where it's necessary. As neoclouds scale, they need a more complete storage stack. Flash where maximum performance is required, and a hard drive-based capacity tier for everything else. With five exabytes of storage and almost two decades of technical optimization, we believe Backblaze has built the most efficient hard drive-based capacity storage platform available. Neoclouds wanting to get performant scale efficiently are choosing Backblaze.
We estimate that this neocloud demand for capacity tier storage represents a $14 billion market opportunity by 2031. Our strategic agreement with CoreWeave, a more than five-year multi-exabyte deal and the largest contract in Backblaze's history, is the clearest proof this quarter that Backblaze can be the capacity tier for AI infrastructure. CoreWeave is recognized as the essential cloud for AI and runs many of the most demanding AI workloads in the world. As its platform expands, it is adding a variety of storage tiers that can scale rapidly and perform reliably and efficiently at massive scale. CoreWeave evaluated the available options and chose Backblaze for the software platform and operating expertise we have developed through years of managing large-scale hard drive-based storage infrastructure. CoreWeave is now the fourth major AI cloud infrastructure company to contract with Backblaze. We're in conversations with many of the leading other ones.
As these AI infrastructure companies scale to broaden support of their workloads, we become increasingly relevant to them. Part of the CoreWeave agreement also introduces a new way for us to deliver that value. For Backblaze, this managed storage approach represents a capital-light service model that brings our technology and operating expertise directly into a customer's infrastructure. This approach expands our opportunity to service customers in their regional data centers and sovereign cloud needs. Beyond AI infrastructure companies and to the broader AI market, we continue to see strong traction with AI-native companies like HeyGen, Hume AI, Mirage AI, and many more. This quarter, we continue to add to that list. AI companies are choosing Backblaze for our ability to scale fast. Last quarter, we highlighted a training data provider that signed a nearly $1 million deal in just 11 days.
Less than a quarter later, as its business grew faster than expected, it added another $1 million commitment. AI customers also choose Backblaze for architectural freedom. It used to be that companies were okay just building inside one cloud, but AI technology is evolving rapidly. AI-native builders are choosing from an increasingly fragmented set of cloud infrastructure that requires the ability to use and move data to whichever hyperscaler, neocloud, inferencing cloud, or other AI infrastructure they need. Backblaze enables that through a combination of free egress, high-performance throughput, and optimized networking between us and these clouds. The need for architectural freedom resulted in a six-figure deal with a customer building conversational AI models. They needed a cloud-agnostic home for their training data. Expensive egress fees from their prior provider kept their data captive and limited what they could achieve.
With Backblaze, they were then able to freely move their data to whatever cloud they wanted without the headache of calculating and worrying if egress fees will break them. AI companies choose Backblaze for performance. We signed our largest B2 Overdrive deal to date, a seven-figure ARR deal with a frontier AI model developer. At the scale of data they work with, performance is critical, and B2 delivers high throughput at efficient price points. Together, scale, architectural freedom, and performance, all at an affordable price, are why AI companies are choosing Backblaze. While AI is making this need especially urgent, it extends to nearly every company using storage at scale. In addition to making great strides moving upmarket, we also know the biggest companies start small, and we're building for them. Our technology advantage is one part of how we are strengthening our position.
We're also working to make Backblaze the natural platform for developers and their AI agents to build on. This quarter, we shipped our SDK for TypeScript, the emerging language of choice for AI coding agents; released Genblaze, a generative media SDK; and built out a new set of tools after seeing developers turn to B2 to store their AI agent data. We also launched our multimodal-focused generative media hackathon, which drove awareness of B2 as the storage layer for GenAI applications. In closing, we exceeded our financial expectations, announced the largest agreement in our history, and delivered new wins and expansions across the AI market, including our largest B2 Overdrive deal to date. We also introduced a new managed storage approach that brings our software and operating expertise into customer-owned infrastructure. The bigger point is this—when AI scales, data grows, and that is good for us.
When companies look to control AI costs, they come to us for that too. Growth or discipline, either way, we are well positioned to benefit and continue building a durable growth business. With that, I'll turn it over to Marc.
Thanks, Gleb. Good afternoon, everyone. Q2 was a pivotal quarter, reflecting both strong operating results and the significance of our strategic relationship with CoreWeave. Revenue was $42.7 million, up 18% year-over-year, and representing our strongest growth in six quarters. Adjusted EBITDA nearly doubled year-over-year to $13 million, with the margin expanding by 1,200 basis points to 30%. Both results exceeded the high end of our guidance. These results demonstrate the benefits of our strategy. Based on our Q2 performance and the outlook for the remainder of the year, we are raising full-year guidance again. Turning to revenue. B2 accelerated to 34% year-over-year, our strongest growth rate in seven quarters. B2's strong performance was broad-based with almost every route-to-market and GTM lever over-performing, with strong performance in direct sales bookings, continued self-service momentum, and increased usage from larger customers.
We also signed larger and longer duration commitments, increasing RPO. The price increase implemented on May 1st contributed about 8 percentage points in B2 growth. While churn from the price increase was anticipated, it did not materialize. Excluding that impact, underlying growth continues to show strength. Sequential B2 ARR increased by $20 million, of which the price increase drove $9 million of the $20 million. B2 ARR reached $113 million, an increase of 39% year-over-year. B2 net revenue retention was 113%, compared to 114% last year. We also continued to make progress up market. Customers contributing more than $50,000 in ARR increased 57% year-over-year to 235, and we closed four deals valued at over $500,000 this quarter, including three AI-related wins. That progress is also showing up in the size and duration of customer commitments.
We added approximately $320 million in RPO during the quarter, including $313 million from CoreWeave, net of the $22 million in warrant values. This increase provides greater visibility into contracted demand as more customers enter into multi-year agreements with committed minimum spend. We retain additional upside as usage above those minimums is billed on a consumptive basis. Computer Backup revenue declined 2% year-over-year, better than expected, as churn initiatives and targeted customer acquisitions helped stabilize performance. The business continues to generate recurring revenue and cash flow, and our focus remains on retention, operating efficiency, and margin improvement over time. Moving on to total company gross margin. It was 63% in Q2, benefiting from the B2 price increase and continued operating efficiency, partially offset by higher hardware infrastructure costs. Operating expenses increased 6% year-over-year, well below revenue growth.
As a percentage of revenue, operating expenses improved by 800 basis points to 73%, demonstrating continued operating leverage. We expect to make targeted investments in R&D while continuing to reduce operating expenses as a percentage of revenue. That operating leverage also translated into an adjusted free cash flow margin of 8% for the quarter, even as we continued to invest in infrastructure for 2027's committed demand. We ended the quarter with $50 million in cash and marketable securities, up from $45 million in the prior quarter. We also increased our available and unused capital lease lines to over $150 million. While our new lease lines are generally at lower interest rates, we will continue to look for ways to optimize our cost of capital. Before turning to guidance, I want to note that we filed an S3 today to register the warrants issued to CoreWeave in connection with our agreement.
The warrants reflect the strategic and mutually beneficial nature of the relationship and align both companies around the long-term success of the agreement. Moving on to guidance. For Q3, we expect revenue to be in the range of $44.4 million-$44.8 million. We expect Adjusted EBITDA margin to be in the range of 27%-29%. For the full year, we are raising revenue guidance to a range of $172 million-$174 million, up more than $10 million from our prior range of $161.5 million-$163.5 million. At the midpoint, this revised guidance represents approximately 19% in overall year-over-year growth, up from the previous 11%. Consistent with our guidance philosophy, the raised outlook reflects Q2 actuals and greater visibility from contracted demand. Our guidance excludes variable usage above contracted minimums and potential deals greater than $500,000.
We are also raising our full-year Adjusted EBITDA margin outlook to 27%-29% from 23%-25%. Looking ahead to 2027, based on the B2 underlying business fundamentals, CoreWeave's minimum RAB, and the previously announced $15+ million TCV deal, we expect B2 revenue to grow over 40% year-over-year. This is early directional commentary, not formal guidance. We will provide our full 2027 outlook in February. We wanted to give investors visibility into the contracted demand already supporting growth beyond this year. Turning to capital investments, we are accelerating CapEx in the second half of 2026 and into 2027 to build the required capacity to support signed customer commitments. Using capital leases, we expect to be adjusted free cash flow neutral for the full year, despite the increase in CapEx.
Our CapEx track record demonstrates how we make use of these assets for well over six years and deliver healthy growth margins. Our CapEx breakeven is less than 24 months. Moreover, the managed storage portion of the CoreWeave agreement is delivered on customer-owned hardware, so we have no CapEx requirements for the managed service. B2 revenue growth accelerated, larger customers continued to expand, and contracted demand increased our visibility. On a Rule of 40 basis, we are proud of achieving a combined B2 revenue growth and adjusted free cash flow margin of approximately 42%, up from 18% a year ago. We entered 2026 with a clear objective—demonstrate that our business can grow efficiently and generate profitable operating leverage. Q2 showed clear progress against that objective. With that, operator, please open it up for questions.
We will now begin the question-and-answer session. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star one again. We ask that you pick up your handset when asking a question to allow for optimum sound quality. If you are muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Mike Cikos with Needham. Mike, your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Great. Thank you to the team for the question here. Congratulations on the quarter. Marc, I was hoping to start with you on this outlook here and really just trying to get a better sense. Obviously, you have this large deal with CoreWeave that you had announced, and congratulations again on getting that over the finish line and the sheer size of it. Can you help us think about to what degree the improved calendar 2026 outlook is tied to the ramp for the minimum commitments from that contract or anything on the calendar 2027 to support that 40%+ outlook we're putting out there for B2 Cloud?
Sure. Mike, can you hear me fine?
Yes, I can. Thank you.
As it relates to the second half of 2026, the $10.5 million raise is benefiting from a broad base of things, the business performing better, the Q2 beat of $2.7 million, the price increase, and the CoreWeave ramp. None of them have a dominant role in that. It's a healthy mix of all that. Just a reminder, the way we guide is remaining consistent, which is, we're sticking to contracted minimum spend by customers, nothing over that. Given the large deals, even though we just won four greater than $500,000, we're still not projecting more per quarter, just so we stay consistent in that approach. That continues through 2027 as well. With that, I would say B2 should be well on track to grow at 40% or higher during the rest of this year in 2027.
On your other part of the question, which is the ramp, the CoreWeave specifically, does ramp over the coming year and hits their minimum about mid-2027. That's what we've got baked into these numbers.
I see. Thank you for that. Maybe a question for Gleb. Gleb, obviously, you guys have made some pretty significant changes to the go-to-market in the last year, and I know we're starting to see that specifically in B2 on the NRR front. I remember last quarter you guys were talking about pipelines from existing customers. You also have the new CRO in place now for call it a quarter or so. Can you just give us a status update on where we are with that go-to-market transformation? I guess what are the findings for today versus 90 days ago? Thank you again.
Thanks, Mike. As you mentioned, we've been undergoing the GTM transformation. Anuj joined as our new CRO. He's been doing a great job as he's coming on board. We've also had a broader people, processes, systems rework. In addition to Anuj, we have a new sales development leader and a head of RevOps and some of the other leadership functions, a head of operational strategy under him that he's worked with before. We've brought up, I think, the team in terms of the GTM side. As you know, we're undergoing a big systems effort. A lot of that is done. We are still continuing to invest, especially with some of the AI technologies that are out there, we're leaning in on some of those.
One thing that we look at is, obviously we're excited about the CoreWeave deal, but as far as the GTM side of things, we have almost 50 more customers that are in the $50,000+ ARR group than we did last quarter. That's almost as many, or about as many as we add in a year historically. So that more broad-based repeatability is a good sign that the GTM is working. Now, obviously, I expect that'll fluctuate up and down, but the general direction of that execution is showing up.
Excellent. Thank you so much.
Thanks, Mike.
Your next question comes from the line of Ittai Kidron with Oppenheimer & Co. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Thanks. Hey, guys. Congrats again, great numbers. Great to see the acceleration. Gleb, I guess I have a little bit more of a bigger picture here. The announcement of CoreWeave clearly is quite unique, I guess, in its size and its messaging. I'm kind of wondering, I hear your point on the growth into owning $50,000 accounts, but if you try to look at the AI cohort specifically, does the deal with CoreWeave generate more interest from customers or less? I'm kind of wondering if customers view that relationship as something that potentially ties you perhaps too closely to CoreWeave for people to do business with you. How do you think about that?
Thanks, Ittai. The announcement with CoreWeave has been great. First of all, I would say the CoreWeave team has been great to work with, but also the announcement has helped, I think, elevate Backblaze as a key player in the AI infrastructure stack. I went to this AI infrastructure conference in Europe, I think about a month and a half ago, and I'll just say that the conversations that I had were consistently, hey, we're excited by this deal that you did. We may not be as big as CoreWeave, but this seems very relevant to us, very applicable. Can we talk to you about it? How can we leverage your technology to do the same?
We're starting to see storage as a key need for us. I think, obviously we provide a platform for a variety of customers, both in the neocloud and AI infrastructure space, and also to the AI natives themselves. We have lots of startups and developers and larger size direct AI companies that see the CoreWeave deal and see that it's a stamp of validation on the AI infrastructure side. There's certainly competitors to them, but it's a big market, it's a growing market, and I think a lot of people are trying to figure out how best to solve it. The other thing I'll just mention is we introduced this managed service approach or managed storage approach. We do that for CoreWeave, but we're also doing that as an offering for others.
A number of the conversations that we're now having with these other AI infrastructure companies is them being interested not only in us providing infrastructure ourselves for them, but also providing this managed storage in their data centers and their sovereign cloud environments.
That's great. Great to hear. You kind of set me up for the next one, I guess. On this topic of managed storage, when you look at your pipeline, I know clearly this was part of the CoreWeave transaction as well, but when you look at your pipeline, when you look at the conversations that you're having with customers, is this common that people are looking for this, or this is going to be more the exception rather than the rule? Also, you talk about the two wins, for example, you had this quarter that you highlighted, a conversational AI company with six figures and the frontier model company with seven figures. Is there a way for you to have insights into their business to understand how much more opportunity you have within those organizations to expand your use cases with them?
In terms of the managed storage side, it's obviously early. That's the newer approach that we're offering. What I will say is that in the past, we've had prospects that have come to us and expressed interest in us doing that. In the past, we haven't done it, but with CoreWeave, we're doing this in partnership with them and offering it out to the broader market. We're having conversations now. I would say, there's probably half a dozen of these managed storage conversations that we're fairly actively in discussions around. This is not going to be every customer doing this, in part because it requires a fair level of sophistication on the customer side, and it requires a fair amount of scale to make it worth doing.
For the larger AI infrastructure organizations, even frankly, not just AI, but anybody who needs large-scale capacity storage, I think that the managed storage is a good approach. I think we'll see a number of those. It's not going to be the predominant number on a volume basis, but I think that those will be larger opportunities.
I'll add too. If you want me to jump in, Gleb, on his second question.
Where do we have visibility? I'll let Gleb answer on how much visibility we see into the large type of customers. Generally speaking, what we notice in Q2 is a lot of our, we said four deals greater than $500,000, a lot of those were expansions. We're seeing their appetite, the needs. We've said that before, that AI companies generally grow a lot faster in their data appetite, we're seeing that profess itself.
Maybe just the one piece to that is, in the world that we were in at IPO, we were almost entirely self-serve. We had very little forward insight into what was happening with the customers, because they would just sign up and pay on a consumption basis. Now, as we're heavily investing in the sales led side of the business and working with these larger opportunities, the team is actually actively in discussions with them, working around what their needs are, what their plans are, and kind of co-planning together. We do have better visibility as well as the commitments themselves.
Great stuff, progress. Thanks.
Thanks, Ittai.
Your next question comes from the line of Jason Ader with William Blair. Jason, your line is open. Please go ahead.
Thanks. Good afternoon, guys. First question just on the CoreWeave deal. Could you give us a sense of what the gross margins are going to look like relative to your traditional B2 business?
Hi, Jason. This is Marc. For our gross margin, for the time being, we're pricing everything on all deals to keep it in and around where it is. Even with CoreWeave, despite the lot of scale, there shouldn't be that much detriment to the current 63%. What I would say is, between the CoreWeave deal, the previous deal, the $15+ million TCV deal, all these committed contracts we're signing up, it does increase our CapEx needs. Our CapEx for the year will be between 55%-65% of revenue. The reason why I mention that is we're putting a lot of CapEx out, so depreciation will start, and then we'll start ramping up the customers in terms of that revenue spend. That two quarters or so before they get ramped on that capacity, you'll have more depreciation.
There could be a few hundred basis points setback to our gross margin. But it should recover after that.
Got you. If over time you end up doing more of the managed storage option with CoreWeave, I'd imagine that would be a significant boost to the gross margin.
I think that both of those are currently similar-ish in gross margin. Although, as we think about our capital-light approach with the managed storage overall, we think that certainly has the possibility of being a higher margin offering over the longer term.
Maybe I'm not clear. I thought you were just selling software there. What are you selling there in the managed storage approach if it's delivered on their hardware?
Good question. It's a managed storage offering. The way that it works is they provide us the data center space. They provide us how much storage they would like. We provide the build materials. They buy the equipment. They hand it to us, but it's actually our people in that part of the data center, which is cordoned off for our purposes. It's our people racking, stacking, managing with our software that part of the storage stack. CoreWeave will have multiple parts of their storage stack. We'll have the part that we're managing. They will own the equipment, we will have the people.
Got you. The main cost for you is people in that scenario?
Exactly.
Got you. One last question from me for Marc and for Gleb. I guess just as we think about going forward and the CoreWeave situation and the CapEx needs that you're going to have over the next few years, what are you contemplating in terms of capital needs? Do you have enough capital today to be able to meet the needs of this build-out, or are you going to have to raise more capital?
Jason, I'd say between our cash balance, we have over $150 million of available capital lease lines, and our operating cash flows have become really healthy due to operating leverage. Between all of those three things, we're well set now to do it the way we're doing it via capital lease lines. We're always going to evaluate all options and see what's best for shareholders. We're set to proceed as is now.
Thank you. Good luck.
Thanks, Jason.
Your next question comes from the line of Jeff Van Rhee with Craig-Hallum Capital Group. Jeff, your line is open. Please go ahead.
Great. Thanks for taking the questions. Congrats, guys. Just breadth, really impressive to hear what you guys did. Maybe spend a second on the frontier model and the win there. I'd love to hear a bit more color, competition, maybe a little more particulars around use case, duration of deal, and then I think you just said seven figures. Any sense you can dial that in a bit, are we talking mid-single digit, seven figures, upper, lower? Color around the frontier model would be great.
Thanks, Jeff. Good to chat with you. What I'll say is that this one, similar to some of the others, the pattern is the same, but I'll talk to this one, which is, they have storage that they use, and the data sets that they use to build their models, that they were having a couple issues. One was that the size of the data increasing, they were actually hitting quota ceilings. The cloud provider that they were working with, they were having trouble providing them the amount of storage that they needed. They were actually hitting certain ceilings there. They also had performance requirements, the need to move that data at high throughput, over to places where they would be building the models themselves.
Between those two things, they needed both the ability to scale and they needed the performance of B2 Overdrive. They were on another cloud provider previously, so they were familiar with obviously the model. They switched to us. The other thing I'll say is, and like the other use cases that we've always said, they're not running the GPU model training directly off of the data on Backblaze. They're using Backblaze as the place to store the big data set, the capacity tier data set, and then they're moving it when they're ready to actually do a training run. They're moving it to the flash tier next to the GPUs, but they're keeping it long-term and at scale on Backblaze.
The other thing I would say is, the pricing is B2 Overdrive pricing, so it's higher than what you see as a $695 price for the self-serve business on the website. Maybe the last thing to say there is, it was a large commitment from the outset, but it was also what they referred to as an opening commitment, and a building block to start from, but one that they expect to actually expand significantly.
I would think so. Maybe just to follow up back to the managed storage offering. When you're selling to a neocloud or one of these larger AI players, what is the delta between when they want the managed offering versus a white label offering? I understand there's some geo data sovereignty issues. A lot of things probably come into the play, but why one over the other, traditional B2 versus managed storage?
The main reasons why most people want us to take care of it on our own infrastructure is because it's fully taken care of. They don't have to worry about it, they don't have to think about it. Even for neoclouds, the neoclouds obviously range in the level of sophistication and their level of ability to operate a full platform. You have CoreWeave on one extreme of a company that is very, very good at managing the whole infrastructure and technology and stack and everything else. You have others who are just brand new. They have data centers, they have GPUs, but they're still building out all the other pieces. For many of them, they prefer to just have us fully take care of it.
The managed storage side comes into play when they want to have the physical data in their own data centers, sometimes the conversation has come up because they have data centers in regions that we aren't, so they would like the data there. Sometimes it's because they have a sense of they would like a more sovereign experience with their data. Then for some of them, the conversation has simply been that they would like to actually own the assets on their balance sheet. Those have been the reasons why they go one way or the other.
Great. I'll leave it there. Thanks so much. Congrats.
Thanks, Jeff.
Your next question comes from the line of Erik Suppiger with B. Riley Securities. Erik, your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Thanks for taking the question and congrats. Great quarter. A couple questions. One, just on the go-to-market. Have you hired most of the executives across the go-to-market team that you need at this point? Secondly, I think you talked about the CoreWeave business meeting the minimum commitment level in mid-2027. Does that mean that we can assume that, one, you're at the one-fifth of the $335 million, which is about $65 million run rate? Does that imply that you're reaching about a $65 million run rate by mid-2027 on that CoreWeave agreement?
Thanks, Erik. On the GTM side, yes, we've hired the chief revenue officer, we've hired the head of field development, head of RevOps, we've got the head of customer success. We've got the head of GTM strategy operations. Obviously there may always be additional folks, but we are in practice, I would say we've got the team in place. One thing I'll mention, too, is I think when I was reflecting earlier on kind of our journey, I guess, you were with us when we went public, you remember that when we went public, our average customer was a self-serve customer that paid us less than $500 a year. We said our goal is to move upmarket, become more of this core infrastructure for startups, for companies, for enterprises. We started signing companies that were paying us tens of thousands, $50,000.
At some point, we signed our first million-dollar deal. We started highlighting roughly a $1 million deal per quarter. We had our $15 million deal that we announced in February, this $335 million deal that we just announced. Obviously, it was quite a journey to go from a primarily self-serve company doing mostly less than $500 a year deals, to a company that is able to service $1 million, $10 million, and multi $100 million deals. I feel like we're now in a great place with a great team and processes and systems to go and execute against this opportunity.
Erik, let me dive into the second question. The CoreWeave deal has two components, as you know. There's working off of our platform, that's one component, and that was all disclosed in the June 23 deal. There's the managed service component. Roughly speaking, it's almost a 70/30 split. When I said we would reach the minimum, it relates to that 70%, not the 30%. The 30% would come afterwards, because the managed service has a different kind of ramp. The other thing to keep in mind is the warrants are a contra revenue, so that's why you shouldn't take just the $335 million times 70%. You also have to deduct the $22 million value of warrants.
Can you just expand on that? Do you deduct the $22 million for the warrants? Is that across the five years? Is that a straight-up division?
Exactly. The warrants just follow the revenue. There's five years for both components of the deal. If you take that 70% of the $313 million, which is net of the warrants, that one ramps up over the first 12 months, after 12 months, it starts operating at that minimum.
Perfect. Thank you very much, and congratulations.
Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Eric Martinuzzi with Lake Street Capital Markets. Eric, your line is now open. Please go ahead.
I wanted to revisit the upward revision to the 2026 guidance. The way I understood it, Marc, you talked about three reasons for the upward revision. They were all kind of equally weighted. The business outperformance to date, the price increase and the CoreWeave ramp. The business outperformance, is that primarily going to be those four greater than $500,000 ARR transactions?
Eric, it includes that. It also includes the self-serve product-led growth. We did that price increase on May 1st. We anticipated some churn. We really haven't seen any churn. In fact, what we've seen is an acceleration of people signing up. The ARPU per sign-up is higher. I think we're seeing good momentum on almost all route-to-markets and all go-to-market levers. It's pretty broad-based, and Gleb mentioned the 50 customers that went over $50,000 in ARR. You can see our RPO every quarter goes up. We're getting customers committing into either one-year or multi-year contracts. It's broad-based, the general business health. We're seeing really healthy acceleration.
On the CBU, I can't remember. I think you said last quarter that you were expecting it down, what was it? 3% or so, or low single-digits. Is there any change to that expectation for the year in the new forecast?
That business is kind of like we talked about, Eric. It's a good business. People like it. The customers like the experience. It's cash flow generating and helps fund some of the B2 growth. It's an area that we're spending some time and some investment on, but it's still a business that has overall market headwinds in. We still think it's kind of single-digit declines. It did perform better this quarter than expected by a little bit. That was in part because I think we've been doing some efforts on churn mitigation and customer acquisition. It is still likely kind of a single-digits declining business.
Got it. Thanks for taking my questions.
Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Rustam Kanga with Citizens. Rustam, your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Great. Thanks, Marc, and Gleb for taking the question. Great to see the sustaining momentum here. My question is just around CoreWeave. Can you help frame the extent to which that recent win is helping accelerate discussions with other neocloud providers evaluating HDD-based storage tiers? Are you finding that the best conversations are those who have already experienced challenges with the costly flash storage approach, or is it better or more effective to cut them off at the pass and approach those who are even yet to begin a DIY approach?
It's a good question, Rustam, and I'll tell you, it was actually counterintuitive for us. When we went down this path and we saw that this was going to be an opportunity about a year and a half ago. We launched B2 Overdrive, we launched B2 Neo. We leaned into this idea that the neoclouds were going to need, and AI infrastructure companies were going to need, a capacity layer for storage. Our assumption at the time was that the best path would be to go after those that did not have storage yet. What we've found is that generally speaking, the more engaged conversations are from those that do. The reason for that, it seems is, those that have storage are feeling the pain of only having the flash-based storage or trying to do it themselves.
Meaning they have customers coming to them, expecting them to be able to service them, but struggling with dealing with the scale or the expense of those things. The ones that don't have storage yet, their customers are going somewhere else for those workflows, they're missing out on those workflows, and they're not feeling the need for them yet. As they start having those conversations with customers where they're talking to them about servicing their broader need, then they're also starting to feel that demand. I think the short of it is that the neoclouds are generally heading down a path where they're going to need this capacity of tier of storage. They also will need the flash-based tier storage. I don't see it as an either/or.
I think they need both as part of servicing their customers, and we're a great solution for the capacity tier.
Perfect. Thanks. Then Marc, you gave the color on the CapEx of 55%-65% of revenues. Was that comment more for the back half of this year, or do you expect that to hold through 2027? Just help us think about if it would ramp from that level or if that comment was applying to this year and next year.
Rustam, that's for this year. That's for 2026. Too early to give 2027, frankly, mainly because the prices of this hardware changes pretty quickly, and obviously our growth outlook keeps accelerating. That number, for both those reasons, would change the 2027 numbers. For the time being, that 55%-65% is for the revenue as a percentage of revenue for 2026.
Thank you very much.
We have reached the end of the Q&A session. I will now turn the call back to Gleb Budman for closing remarks.
Thank you. AI is reshaping the entire infrastructure market, and Backblaze has built exactly what this moment demands. Storage is that durable layer beneath AI. I'm really pleased with how our team has stepped up to capture this generational opportunity. I want to thank all our Backblazers for leaning in, and to our customers and partners and investors for joining us on this journey. Finally, we look forward to seeing many of you at our Investor Day in New York City and on our live webcast on September 9th. Please RSVP to [email protected] if you'd like to join the in-person event. Thank you all for joining today's earnings call. Operator, you may now end the call.
This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.
Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-07-31Earnings To Watch: Backblaze Inc (BLZE) Q2 2026 -- GF Value Sees 49% Downside
GuruFocus.com
Earnings To Watch: Backblaze Inc (BLZE) Q2 2026 -- GF Value Sees 49% Downside
This article first appeared on GuruFocus. Backblaze Inc (NASDAQ:BLZE) is set to release its Q2 2026 earnings on Aug 3, 2026. The consensus estimate for Q2 2026 revenue is 39.93 million, and the earnings are expected to come in at -0.11 per share. The full year 2026's revenue is expected to be $162.33 million and the earnings are expected to be $-0.41 per share. More detailed estimate data can be found on the Forecast page Warning! GuruFocus has detected 2 Warning Signs with BLZE. Is BLZE fairly valued? Test your thesis with our free DCF calculator. Over the past 90 days, revenue estimates for Backblaze Inc (NASDAQ:BLZE) have increased from $157.50 million to $162.33 million for the full year 2026, and from $174.68 million to $200.10 million for 2027. During the same period, earnings estimates have declined from $-0.39 per share to $-0.41 per share for the full year 2026, while remaining flat at $-0.30 per share for 2027. In the previous quarter of 2026-03-31, Backblaze Inc's (NASDAQ:BLZE) actual revenue was $38.67 million, which beat analysts' revenue expectations of $37.79 million by 2.33%. Backblaze Inc's (NASDAQ:BLZE) actual earnings were $-0.10 per share, which beat analysts' earnings expectations of $-0.11 per share by 9.09%. After releasing the results, Backblaze Inc (NASDAQ:BLZE) was up by 63.58% in one day. Based on the one-year price targets offered by 6 analysts, the average target price for Backblaze Inc (NASDAQ:BLZE) is $15.17 with a high estimate of $16.00 and a low estimate of $14.00. The average target implies an upside of 20.18% from the current price of $12.62. Based on GuruFocus estimates, the estimated GF Value for Backblaze Inc (NASDAQ:BLZE) in one year is $6.49, suggesting a downside of -48.57% from the current price of $12.62. Based on the consensus recommendation from 7 brokerage firms, Backblaze Inc's (NASDAQ:BLZE) average brokerage recommendation is currently 2.00, indicating an "Outperform" status. The rating scale ranges from 1 to 5, where 1 signifies Strong Buy, and 5 denotes Sell.
Investor releaseQuarter not tagged2026-07-13Backblaze to Announce Second Quarter 2026 Results on August 3, 2026
Business Wire
Backblaze to Announce Second Quarter 2026 Results on August 3, 2026
SAN FRANCISCO, July 13, 2026--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Backblaze, Inc. (Nasdaq: BLZE), the high-performance cloud storage platform for the AI era, will report financial results for its second quarter ending June 30, 2026 on Monday, August 3, 2026 after market close. Following the release of results, Backblaze will host a conference call and webcast at 2:00 p.m. PT (5:00 p.m. ET) on August 3, 2026 to discuss the results. Attend the webcast: https://events.q4inc.com/attendee/704175018 Register to listen by phone: https://events.q4inc.com/analyst/704175018?pwd=29EpzfWI Phone registrants will receive dial-in information via email. An archive of the webcast will be available shortly after its completion on the Investor Relations page of the Backblaze website at https://ir.backblaze.com. About Backblaze Backblaze (NASDAQ: BLZE) gives businesses the freedom to innovate without limits by removing the barriers of lock-in, complexity, and cost. Our high-performance cloud object storage accelerates AI workflows, powers data-heavy applications, streamlines media management, and protects critical data. As an award-winning independent cloud, we provide unparalleled levels of interoperability that enable over 500,000 of our customers to reach and serve hundreds of millions of end users in 175 countries around the world. For more information, please go to www.backblaze.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260713980854/en/ Contacts Investors Mimi KongInvestor [email protected] Press Contact: Renatta [email protected]

