Fastly Inc. (FSLY) Q1 2021 Earnings Call Transcript

Fastly Inc. (NYSE: FSLY) Q1 2021 earnings call dated May. 05, 2021

Corporate Participants:

Maria Lukens — Vice President, Investor Relations

Joshua Bixby — Chief Executive Officer

Adriel Lares — Chief Financial Officer

Analysts:

John Weidemoyer — William Blair — Analyst

Tim Horan — Oppenheimer — Analyst

Rudy Kessinger — Craig-Hallum Capital Markets — Analyst

Robert Majek — Raymond James — Analyst

James Fish — Piper Sandler — Analyst

Tyler Radke — Citigroup — Analyst

Brad Reback — Stifel — Analyst

Presentation:

Operator

Good afternoon. My name is Christian and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Fastly First Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Ms. Maria Lukens, Vice President of Investor Relations. Ma’am, please go ahead.

Maria Lukens — Vice President, Investor Relations

Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining our first quarter 2021 earnings call. We have Fastly’s CEO, Joshua Bixby; and CFO, Adriel Lares, with us today.

Before we start, I want to remind everyone about the usual format of our call. We published a Shareholder Letter on our Investor Relations website and with the SEC about an hour ago. Since the letter provides a lot of details, we’ll make some brief opening remarks and reserve the rest of the time for your questions.

During this call, we will be making forward-looking statements, including statements related to the expected performance of our business, future financial results, strategy, long-term growth and overall future prospects. These statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected or implied during the call. Please take a look at our filings with the SEC and our Q1 2021 Shareholder Letter for a discussion of the factors that could cause our results to differ.

Also, note that the forward-looking statements on this call are based on information available to us as of today’s date. We disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required by law. Also, during this call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are provided in the Shareholder Letter on our Investor Relations website. These non-GAAP measures are not intended to be a substitute for our GAAP results.

Finally, this call is being webcast and will be archived on our website shortly afterwards.

With that, I’ll turn the call over to Joshua.

Joshua Bixby — Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, Maria. Hi, everyone. And thanks for joining us today.

We had another outstanding quarter delivering 35% year-over-year top-line growth with revenues of nearly $85 million. We are now over a year into the pandemic and digital transformation is showing no signs of slowing, in fact it’s accelerating. And we believe we are at the start of a new era. We are innovating and building the delivery, edge computing and security products necessary to accelerate the digital capability of every organization in the world.

Fastly makes sure online experience everywhere around the world fast and secure. Unlike Q2 of 2020, which was extraordinary in many ways, 2021 appears to be more in line with our historical trends. Typically, we signed new customers in Q1 and Q2, which then ramp on our platform in the latter half of the year. Historically, usage expansion on the platform is slower in Q2 as people tend to spend more time outside and less time on devices. This year, we believe this effect will be somewhat exaggerated as the world begins to reopen.

Despite the challenging year-over-year compare, we remain confident in our continued growth. If you take a long-term view, you’ll note that we’re exiting Q1 and subsequently guiding Q2 at a CAGR of over 35% from Q1 and Q2 of 2019, which continues to exceed our expectations from the time of our IPO. Our current guidance reflects continued growth and is more in line with our seasonal trends where Q2 is roughly flat with Q1, followed by an uptick in growth in the second half of the year as indicated by our increased revenue outlook for full year 2021.

This quarter, thanks in part to the integration of Signal Sciences and the tremendous leadership and sense of urgency we have seen from Brett as our new Chief Revenue Officer, we saw significant cross-sell and joint selling opportunities as demonstrated by customer wins across multiple verticals. In less than two quarters since the closing of the Signal Sciences’ acquisition, we’ve made it possible for customers to purchase Fastly and Signal Sciences’ offerings on a single unified contract, simplifying the ordering process and shortening sales cycles.

Additionally, we are very pleased with the continued maturity of Compute@Edge, which continues to drive customer interest as well as produce major operational efficiencies in our product development. Our customers have communicated to us that the key difference of the platform is our position and technology to support privacy. Privacy is core to who we are and we view it as inseparable from security.

The most tangible benefit of securing the enterprise is to ensure the privacy of their customers. The intersection of edge compute, security and privacy is ripe for innovation. By making user security and privacy a core focus of our efforts, we can provide more benefits to a wider array of customers around the world. All of these things fueled strong demand in the beginning of 2021.

Our total customer count, excluding Signal Sciences, increased to 2,207, up from 2,084 in Q4 2020 and enterprise customers increased to 336, up from 324 in Q4 2020. We saw several customer wins across hi-tech, e-commerce, digital publishing, financial services, cryptocurrency and healthcare, including human security, a leading bot mitigation provider relied on by many of the Internet’s largest advertising platforms or enterprises, a leading provider of multi-layered network switches and software-defined networking solutions and a leading automotive insurance SaaS provider, among others.

In addition to generating new customer demand, we continue to execute on our land-and-expand strategy among existing customers with average enterprise customer spend increasing to $800,000, up from $782,000 in the prior quarter and another strong dollar-based net expansion rate of 139%.

We believe our edge cloud platform, which seamlessly combines delivery, edge computing and security presented tremendous market opportunity and we will continue to invest in it to position our company for future growth.

Before I turn it over to Adriel to go over the financials, I’d like to take a moment to address some news we shared in our press release and Shareholder Letter that Adriel will be stepping down from his role as CFO after five years of service. Adriel will continue in his role as CFO for a transition period during which we expect to appoint a successor and, for a period of time after, as an advisor to ensure a smooth transition.

On behalf of the entire Board and management team, Adriel, you will be greatly missed and we wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors. We’re also deeply appreciative that you will remain with Fastly to help facilitate a smooth leadership transition.

Now, I’ll turn it over to Adriel to go over the financials.

Adriel Lares — Chief Financial Officer

Thank you, Joshua. I appreciate the kind words. And good afternoon, everyone. As Joshua mentioned, we had a strong first quarter, building up the continued demand trends we saw in 2020 as companies remain focused on their digital transformation.

Before I go through the numbers, I want to again point out, as I mentioned last quarter, that the contribution of Signal Sciences has been consolidated into our first quarter financial information, so the revenue and margin numbers I’m about to give include Signal Sciences. We have provided separate Fastly and Signal Sciences’ customer metrics in the Shareholder Letter this quarter. We intend to begin reporting consolidated customer metrics later in 2021.

This quarter, we generated nearly $85 million in revenue, net of $1.5 million deferred revenue write-down associated with the acquisition of Signal Sciences, representing 35% year-over-year growth. We believe our edge cloud platform, complemented by Signal Sciences’ security offerings, provides a vast market opportunity and we will continue to invest in the business to accelerate our expansion and position ourselves for further success.

Our gross margin for the quarter reflects its focus and additional scale in recent acquisition of Signal Sciences. GAAP gross margin was 55.8% for the quarter compared to 56.7% in the same quarter a year ago. This reflects investments for additional scale and the recent acquisition of Signal Sciences, among other factors.

Non-GAAP gross margin, which excludes stock-based compensation and intangible amortization expenses, was 60.1% for the quarter, reflecting continued year-over-year improvement, up from 57.6% in the same quarter last year.

As we have always said, our gross margin will continue to be impacted by the timing of personnel and infrastructure investments and seasonal usage by customers on our platform, but we remain confident in our ability to deliver long-term leverage on an annual basis.

In terms of the balance sheet, we ended the quarter with $1.1 billion in cash, restricted cash and investments. As a reminder, in March, we took advantage of favorable market conditions to issue $949 million in aggregate principal amount of 0% convertible senior notes due in 2026 in a private offering. This new capital solidifies our strong financial position and provides us the flexibility to take full advantage of the opportunities ahead.

As we continue to see strong demand for our edge cloud and security offerings, our focus remains on innovating and investing in our platform for further growth in 2021 and beyond. Our Q2 and full-year 2021 outlook reflects our strong top-line growth momentum, our strategic investments in security and cloud computing and this incremental expense for the Signal Sciences acquisition. Consistent with prior years, we based our revenue guidance on the visibility that we have today. And given our usage-based business model, we expect to gain additional visibility as the year progresses.

Beginning with the second quarter, we expect revenue in the range of $84 million to $87 million, non-GAAP operating loss in the range of negative $22 million to negative $18 million, non-GAAP net loss per share in the range of negative $0.19 to negative $0.16. For the full-year 2021, we’ve increased our revenue guidance range to $380 million to $390 million from $375 million to $380 million. We maintained non-GAAP operating loss in the range of negative $50 million to negative $40 million and non-GAAP net loss per share in the range of negative $0.44 to negative $0.35.

And finally, before we begin Q&A, I just would say that I’m grateful to Artur for bringing me to Fastly and allowing me the privilege of shepherding Fastly from pre-IPO to a public company to one of the premier companies leading the charge to the future of the Internet I’m going to be here for a while still and I look forward to continuing to work with Joshua, Artur and the rest of the Fastly team as we keep expanding our offerings and delivery on our edge cloud platform.

With that, I’ll turn it back to the operator to take your questions.

Questions and Answers:

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Your first question is from Jonathan Ho from William Blair. Your line is open.

John Weidemoyer — William Blair — Analyst

Hi. This is John Weidemoyer for Jonathan. Thanks for taking our question. First off, for Adriel, anytime the CFO takes a company through an IPO, that’s something to be proud of. So, congratulations on that. And wish you best of luck in your future endeavors. For Josh, I would like to ask, can you talk about some of the parameters you’re looking for in a replacement?

Joshua Bixby — Chief Executive Officer

Sure. I mean, Adriel is going to be big shoes to fill. So, we have had, over the last few quarters, a number of executive searches. I think one of the things which come out is how desirable Fastly is as a place. As Adriel talked about, the opportunity here is tremendous. So, certainly looking for that knowledge and expertise somebody who has seen a much larger business, we believe, as you know, that we are poised for continued successful growth many years into the future. And as such, we want somebody who has seen that and seen it at scale. So that’s really important.

I think Adriel brings a really special mix as well on the cultural side. So we need someone who understands the values of Fastly and wants to live by them. We’re certainly looking for someone with a lot of experience in the field. So we found that before, if we found that with Brett, we found that with Danielle, And in all of the searches that we’ve conducted like this one, the demand is high and people with tremendous amount of experience are interested in joining us. So, excited about the prospects of bringing someone in, but we’ll certainly miss Adriel.

John Weidemoyer — William Blair — Analyst

Thank you. Appreciate the color. Would like to also ask a question, you — I’d like you to elaborate as you go down your outlook, it’s pretty good explanation on how the year will progress with 2Q being more typical flat with 1Q and then second half taking off. But I’m curious, since you raised your outlook — as you raised your outlook overall, did anything change in the quarter since first quarter met — it was within your guidance range. Did anything happen in a market or have you seen anything that has made you — what made you increase your outlook? Is it that — is it the COVID reopening — reopening from COVID that’s turning it or anything in the marketplace that’s driving that? Can you give a little more color there as to the raise for the full year, even though second quarter is expected to be somewhat flattish with first quarter?

Joshua Bixby — Chief Executive Officer

Sure. Happy to do so and happy to have Adriel sort of add some color after. I think — this starts with our traditional business cycle. And if you look at our business, customers come to us, land all throughout the year, but a lot of the big ones make buying decisions in Q1 and Q2, so that in the Q3 and particularly and the Q4 timeframe, they are ready. Think about any e-commerce business that has a huge amount of business at the end of the year or many of our businesses have a similar cycle. So, as the year progresses, we get more visibility into that.

And I think what we are seeing is robust customer acquisition, it’s really the quality of those customers that matters. We see a lot of really large opportunities. We’re seeing green shoots sprout in industries that were definitely challenged by COVID. And in the industries that really got a bounce from COVID, we’re not seeing them give back those gains as we see things open up.

So I think we are in this luxurious position having a worldwide global network. I’ve talked about this crystal ball in the past where we can look in and say, okay, what happens in these countries that are opening up? What happens to these services that we are all looking at and saying, hey, are these COVID bumps, are they not COVID bumps? I think we’re seeing a true phenomenon that not only is Fastly not a stock driven and defined by COVID and a business driven and defined by COVID but neither are most of our customers. And I think that’s giving us tremendous sense that the future is bright. And as we see that, we obviously present that back.

So in terms of a general concept, the reopenings, although that’s going to have an impact on Q2, as we talked about, because it’s an extraordinary quarter not just because of COVID but also because of specific customers that are a little bit different in form than they are now. But overall, we are seeing that optimism. And that’s certainly — I’m glad you’re picking up on that, because that’s certainly what we’re projecting.

Adriel, anything to add to that?

Adriel Lares — Chief Financial Officer

Yeah. Thanks, Joshua. And thanks John for the kind words. Definitely going to miss Fastly, but I know there’s still plenty ahead. But sort of specific to the question, one of the things that’s been — that I’ve observed is that 2021, just from a business standpoint, in terms of what we’re seeing in the business, is beginning to sort of act and feel like years past. And I’m putting sort of 2020 in sort of the exception category and really look at more of 2018 and 2019 where we were growing in the high-30% — 37.8% and 38.7%. And if I look at this past quarter, DBNER of 139%, churn still sub-1%, those are sort of making [Phonetic] that will continue to acquire customers as we get more visibility. So, this basically, as we get further into of the year, I can sort of see a little bit further. And so, it’s because of sort of that very fundamental reason why we’re able to sort of raise that year as we did. And again, as we go over further at the end of Q2, we’ll get a little bit more visibility beyond that.

So, always at the beginning of every calendar year, we’re sort of a little bit more conservative just because we are primarily a usage-based model. But again, with the passage of time and with the metrics being what they are, we just got a little bit more confidence. We sort of see what our current customers doing, to Joshua’s point, by making these decisions or planning for the second half of the year. And then — so that part is sort of familiar, which is why it gives me confidence to do what we did.

John Weidemoyer — William Blair — Analyst

Okay. That’s very helpful color. Thank you very much. I’ll jump back in the queue.

Joshua Bixby — Chief Executive Officer

Thank you.

Operator

Your next question is from Tim Horan from Oppenheimer. Your line is open.

Tim Horan — Oppenheimer — Analyst

Thanks guys. So, just to be clear on the guidance, the second half, we’re looking for a pretty large ramp, I mean, mathematically, it’s like 15% of sequential growth the third and fourth quarter. I know it can kind of balance out in either way. But are bookings stronger — well, yeah, just any more color on the confidence of that and the visibility on that and what gave you the confidence to kind of guide to that? Thanks.

Joshua Bixby — Chief Executive Officer

As we talked about, it’s a collection of a number of things. You’re right, it’s us looking at what’s coming down the pipe. It’s the growth in our existing customers. And it’s a lot of really important opportunities that are coming our way that our foundation of us being unique extremely large network that really value security, privacy and other things that are really top of mind. So, it’s absolutely a confidence in what we’re seeing in the pipe.

As Brett has come on and I talked about this in the prepared remarks, we certainly have seen an operational rigor and a diligence, which is really, we’ve already seen start to help in terms of focus. One of the things that he is focusing on as well in a slight shift for us is really focusing on partners. And we’re seeing renewed and strong growth through channels, which gives us a lot of leverage in our business. So, a lot of things combined to give us that confidence.

Tim Horan — Oppenheimer — Analyst

And is Compute@Edge an important part of that yet? And maybe just any more color on your confidence of Compute@Edge, how differentiated it is longer term from what you’re seeing right now?

Joshua Bixby — Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, Compute remains strong in terms of our view on this market. I think, to put this into context, as you know, our Compute story is very differentiated. We’re talking about a technology that works at scale, that is secure, that has passed the muster of the largest technical — and most savvy technical organizations in the world and that is available to our customers now. It is forming a very important part of the buying decision for our customers, but it’s not just Compute, we’re also looking at really significant differentiation on the security front as well.

And as we started to integrate Signal Sciences into the portfolio, we’re seeing emerging qualities where — what they do, plus what we do creates an even better outcome for customers in terms of visibility and capability, operational ease of use, all things that are very important. So, I would say, it’s a combination of both the Compute and the security stories, which are coming together to create that unique differentiation. And that differentiation we seem to be increasing our lead, particularly versus the legacy players.

Tim Horan — Oppenheimer — Analyst

Very helpful. Thank you.

Joshua Bixby — Chief Executive Officer

Thank you.

Operator

Your next question is from Jeff Van Rhee from Craig-Hallum Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Rudy Kessinger — Craig-Hallum Capital Markets — Analyst

Hey, guys. This is Rudy on for Jeff. Thanks for taking my question. When I kind of circle back to the guide, I’m just — I’m curious with the linearity Q2 to Q3 and Q4, in past years, excluding 2020, that Q2 to Q3 typically saw 7% to 8% sequential increase, Q3 to Q4 to be mid-teens. I mean, if I were to assume a typical 7% or 8% Q2 to Q3, that would force like a 30% sequential from Q3 to Q4, just to get to the low end of the annual guide. So, I’m just curious how you expect that linearity to play out for the rest of the year?

Joshua Bixby — Chief Executive Officer

Sure. Adriel, you wan to on handle that one?

Adriel Lares — Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it’s — you’re likely going to see probably stronger growth across both of those two parameters. And the other factor here is clearly just where we sort of come out in Q2. But overall, just in terms of the visibility of the underlying sort of growth that we see in the customers that we currently have today — in some respects are clearly applying sort of a faster growth in the second half of the year than we’ve experienced so far in the first half of the year. But the sub-positions of how exactly it’s going to sort of play out in Q3 and Q4, I think, will remain to be seen, but I think you’re definitely going to see a second half growth that’s going to be a bit faster than the first half.

Rudy Kessinger — Craig-Hallum Capital Markets — Analyst

Got it. And then, with respect to Signal Sciences, I’m just curious what you guys have learned right now with respect to the kind of the different buying motion, are you seeing different kinds of customers, how is that sales team integrating with the existing sales team, just any more color you can share on that front?

Joshua Bixby — Chief Executive Officer

Sure. Let me start — in terms of integration, we moved at the start of the year to integrate the sales teams completely. So, everyone at Fastly is selling the complete suite. Again, it really comes back to our view that delivery and security are intimately intertwined. The advent of the differentiated sort of buyer opportunity here does have us expand into different buying centers. We’re seeing some buying centers, for example, in the CECL of the security groups that Signal Sciences has been able to crack and we’re taking advantage of that.

So we’re definitely seeing an expansion of that. It’s allowing us to wedge into organizations in sort of lieu of waiting for these larger enterprise sales cycles that may be a renewal of a large delivery contract. And Fastly has always had a history of finding ways to slip the camel’s nose into the tent. We’ve done that in the delivery space and we’re seeing real opportunities in the security space. So, overall, a differentiated approach expanding out the customer subset. We saw a really nice growth in the Sig Sci business as well over quarter-over-quarter, which is fantastic.

Rudy Kessinger — Craig-Hallum Capital Markets — Analyst

Great. And then, just lastly, if I could. Gross margin obviously pretty steep step down from Q4, about 250 basis points, just what drove that? Was it — we’ve heard some competitors talk about some pricing pressures. And then, just how should we think about that from here for the rest of the year?

Joshua Bixby — Chief Executive Officer

Sure. Adriel?

Adriel Lares — Chief Financial Officer

Yes, certainly. I mean I think, first and foremost, we still feel confident that we’re going to grow gross margin year-over-year at least 100 basis points. In terms of the sort of the step down, I mean, a few things driving that. Primarily we’re doing a few investments as we normally do at the beginning of the year. So you normally see a stepdown. The other factor is, as we’ve got some additional investments into our actual infrastructure, into our publications that will sort of increase the resiliency of the network, better than it already is. And so, I think from our standpoint, this is sort of a normal cadence that we experienced if you look at our capex in Q1, it’s in the high-single digits and we still expect to be capex spend this year to be somewhere in that sort of 30% to 40% range.

So from my standpoint, this is all normal. You sort of see a normal seasonal sort of down tick here in the first half and then you’ll see as revenue and utilization picks up in Q3 and Q4. You’ll see that gross margin guide again. In particular, especially some of the customer wins on the enterprise side were some joint wins with Signal Sciences. And so, I think on that side, I feel good about our sort of future uptick in gross margin as well, because the Signal Sciences products are clearly a much greater and accretive gross margin that will be had typically.

Rudy Kessinger — Craig-Hallum Capital Markets — Analyst

Great, thanks. That’s it from me.

Joshua Bixby — Chief Executive Officer

Thank you.

Operator

Your next question is from Robert Majek from Raymond James. Your line is open.

Robert Majek — Raymond James — Analyst

Great. Thanks. Best of luck, Adriel. It’s always a pleasure working with you. Two questions, if I can. One, you touched on it, but maybe you could just quantify how should we think about the level of year-over-year CDN traffic growth in Q2 and for the remainder of the year. And what’s embedded in your guidance as we start to exit COVID and you start to face some pretty tough prior-year comparison?

And two, can you give us some color on the revenue contribution from Signal Sciences in Q1 and/or the implied contribution in the Q2 guide? And if you can’t share specifics, so any further general color on how quickly that product portfolio is ramping would be helpful. Thanks.

Joshua Bixby — Chief Executive Officer

Sure. Why don’t I take the traffic question and Adriel, why don’t Sig Sci question. I think traffic has grown, it continues to grow, we continue to see a nice pace of that growth. There is nothing that is unexpected in that. And I think that — that speaks to our confidence when we look at the world moving back into normality in Q3 and Q4, we certainly see that continue. And I think that’s outlined and projected in our assumptions around guidance. We’re pleased with the growth and it’s important and it’s strong.

Adriel, why don’t you take the Sig Sci question?

Adriel Lares — Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, happy to. So, Sig Sci was around approximately 10% of revenue in Q1. And in terms of growth rates, it grew approximately mid-teens around 15% quarter-over-quarter. So, that business still continues to grow nicely. And as I’ve mentioned earlier before, there’s some great cross-sell results we’ve had and also in the pipe. There’s just a lot of business that it’s really being generated from the top of the funnel perspective on the security side. It’s nice to see. I think it’s what we think the world is going to. So, having one of the best products out there, I think, going for [Phonetic] Fastly. And again, also thank you for the kind words. Much appreciated.

Robert Majek — Raymond James — Analyst

That was helpful. Thank you.

Joshua Bixby — Chief Executive Officer

Thank you.

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Your next question is from James Fish from Piper Sandler. Your line is open.

James Fish — Piper Sandler — Analyst

Hey, guys. Adriel, I’ll miss working with you here. But maybe just going back on that last question, obviously you guys have talked about it being revenue off the balance sheet for Signal Sciences, but there is new term licenses and new SaaS licenses. What did you see this quarter and what do you expect kind of next quarter? Is most of the business generated from new and upsell or renewals and maintenance at this point for Signal Sciences?

Joshua Bixby — Chief Executive Officer

Adriel?

Adriel Lares — Chief Financial Officer

Yeah. Hey, Jim, definitely. I would definitely see you out there regardless, but I think we’re still expecting Signal Sciences to be in that sort of 10% range. I think, given the growth rates that we’re seeing, we’re still — we’re bullish. And I think what we’re trying to really encourage more is sort of the cross-selling and the co-selling, because it does also bring on new opportunities for us to sell sort of the Fastly heritage delivery part of the business. So, I think, from our standpoint, things look good. I think that’s what’s leading to not only the results we just saw in Q1 but also just the general bullishness that we have for the rest of the year.

Joshua Bixby — Chief Executive Officer

And you may have noticed this in the letter, you would have seen the eight enterprise customer new wins from Sig Sci over the quarter. Again, that’s an indication of the future of what we’re going to continue to see and ramp up.

James Fish — Piper Sandler — Analyst

Yeah. No, absolutely, Josh. I mean, it’s a good environment for Sig Sci. And not to beat a dead horse here, but Q2 guide and full year, obviously it’s a tough compare for Q2. But what are you anticipating for kind of, it seems like you’re anticipating kind of flat to low single-digit organic growth in Q2. Obviously, again a tough compare, but that kind of brings NRR down to kind of around 100%. And really, on the back half guide, obviously some large events like Olympics and other large sporting events, how much of guide is anticipating those events happening and some of the share wins from some — from one of the largest streaming providers out there that we picked up.

Joshua Bixby — Chief Executive Officer

Sure. Adriel, why don’t you take the guide side and I’ll come in on the traffic side.

Adriel Lares — Chief Financial Officer

Sounds good. Yeah. For the second half of the year, it wasn’t particularly and we’ve talked about this before, Jim, which is given necessarily end of debts that drives sort of like a quarters or second half portion of the revenue. I think what you’re seeing in that second half of the guidance — second half of the year guide at least implied in the full year guide is the enterprise customers that we’ve clearly brought on board most recently in Q1, but also just the current customers that we had and the things that they’re planning for. In a way, we’re sort of further penetrating those customers. So, it gives us a level of confidence. That’s kind of outside event. If you will, there isn’t necessarily a particular event that we’re necessarily sort of implying into that guide, it really is just an overall general uptick that we have seen before.

Again, we’re sort of — I’m going back to sort of, seasonal patterns that we’ve seen before in our business. Again, excluding Q2 2020 of last year, and you’re right, 2020 in terms of the comparison of Q2 of 2021, that’s going to be the low point of comparison. And I think once you get beyond that, given some of the disruptions we had from Q3 of last year, you’ll begin to see these sort of upticks that just going to generally follow our business, but it’s the comparisons that would sort of alleviate once you get past Q2.

Joshua Bixby — Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. I think the other thing that’s important to recognize here about Q2 last year is, we had our previously disclosed largest customer who is a large chunk of revenue. So if you normalize or remove that and you normalize for Sig Sci, we’re still seeing 20%-plus growth in the quarter, which — notwithstanding the COVID lockdown, the fact we all were locked in our houses for those three months, which were not seen now.

So if you sort of look at that and say, hey, there is a 20% growth above and beyond that, we’re feeling confident about the growth both in the quarter and leading through the next — the latter part of the year.

James Fish — Piper Sandler — Analyst

Thanks, guys, for the color.

Joshua Bixby — Chief Executive Officer

Appreciate it. Thank you.

Operator

Your next question is from Tyler Radke from Citi. Your line is open.

Tyler Radke — Citigroup — Analyst

Hey, thanks. Thanks a lot, everyone. And just — first a follow up on Jim’s question. Just on the net retention rate, down at, I think, 107%, down from 130% a year ago. Maybe just help me understand kind of the drivers of that. And is this just something that you expect to kind of recover as you get into the back half of the year and as comps normalize, maybe just help put a little bit more color around that net revenue retention number. Thanks.

Joshua Bixby — Chief Executive Officer

Sure. Adriel, you want to take that one?

Adriel Lares — Chief Financial Officer

Yeah. I think the thing that we point to and we sort of publish both metrics. But if you take a look at the LTM version of the NRR, that came in at 133%, which is again — was slightly down from Q4, which was 136.5%. I think that because the sort of the traditional NRR, which is a sort of the SaaS-based metric, which eventually we will have a greater component of within Fastly, that one measures just one month, whereas the LTM version clearly trying to take a bit of the seasonality out, which is why we sort of the DBNER, etc, etc. So I think the LTM version is a better one to look at, whereas the NRR although we will make sure we published just to make sure you have that metric will bounce around a little bit more than normal.

Tyler Radke — Citigroup — Analyst

Okay, thanks. And then, a follow-up just on Compute@Edge. I know you talked a little bit about it in the prepared remarks with some of the momentum and I think there was a reference to it, a new customer in that investor letter, but kind of curious, number one, are there certain verticals that you’re seeing the momentum the strongest there and what’s kind of the timing in terms of when you would really expect that to be a piece of the business that you’d be ready to disclose?

Joshua Bixby — Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. So, we certainly have seen strong uptick in e-commerce. We’re seeing strong uptick in security as we referenced with the human security example where this is being used to augment security is a fast-moving space and requires this kind of technology to keep up with the bad folks on the other side who are innovating all of the time. So, those are two big markets. We’re certainly seeing some really interesting use cases in the IoT space, etc.

I think, we have said all along that this year is a year — 2021 is a year where we will be getting the marquee examples and cases out there and 2022 is when this will have a meaningful impact on revenue and nothing has changed from my perspective, I believe that to be the case. One thing that’s not well understood about our business is that our customers today are using Compute. I mean, they are writing code at our edges, it happens to be in VCL for many of our customers. But that’s starting to change into the language of their choice. But overall, our customers rely on us in part to, you have there Compute work at the edge. And that’s the case for almost all of our enterprise customers and many of our customers who are below the enterprise level.

So this is not something new to our customers the idea of bringing code. What is new is the ability to write it in languages of their choice. And to be able to extend that beyond some of the functionality that we offer in the VCL version of our product today. But don’t be fooled into thinking that our customers aren’t writing code that’s where core differentiation of Fastly in the past and will continue to be in the future.

Tyler Radke — Citigroup — Analyst

Okay. Thank you.

Joshua Bixby — Chief Executive Officer

Thank you.

Operator

Your next question is from Brad Reback from Stifel. Your line is open.

Brad Reback — Stifel — Analyst

Great. Thanks, Joshua, with $1 billion of cash now on the balance sheet roughly, what’s the appetite for future M&A?

Joshua Bixby — Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. I mean, we raised that money in part with that in mind. We continue to have to be very engaged in the ecosystem. Fastly is not a business that’s grown over its 10-year history. We now are at our 10 year anniversary. So congratulations to all, but we’re not a company that’s grown by having M&A — continuously doing M&A. So I think what you saw in the Signal Sciences deal of the hallmarks for what we’re going to be looking for, which is the best technology, the best people and a real overlap with our customer needs.

We’re going to be picky in that regard. We’re going to continue to — but we will continue to look for opportunities. So that was a unique asset. We’ll continue to look for unique assets and if one pops up and it meets our criteria, which are pretty strict, I could see us acting, but it gives us that opportunity, which is fantastic. And we’ll see what the future holds in that regard.

Brad Reback — Stifel — Analyst

Great. Thank you very much.

Joshua Bixby — Chief Executive Officer

Thank you.

Operator

There are no further question at this time. Mr. Bixby, I will turn the call over back to you.

Joshua Bixby — Chief Executive Officer

Before we sign off, I want to take a quick moment to acknowledge Fastly’s 10-year anniversary as a company, a huge milestone that marks our many achievements together. Reminiscent on the past decade, we take pride in having led with our values, served our customers, safeguarded our culture and remarkably agile in the face of rapid change.

Given all that we’ve accomplished, I’m extremely confident in the growing demand for Fastly in the future of our business, which is guided by our ambitious product vision and unchanged commitments to a fast, secure, private and reliant Internet for all.

I look forward to what lies ahead for us this year. Adriel and I hope to connect with many of you in the upcoming investor conferences. Thank you.

Operator

[Operator Closing Remarks]