Dear Fellow Shareholders,
We are firmly in the AI era, which is transforming both the scale of cyber threats and how organizations defend against them. As AI-powered attacks become more sophisticated in targeting data and identity, the prevention and detection security model is dead. The need for true cyber resilience has never been greater.
At Rubrik, we have built our strategy for this moment. Our platform sits at the intersection of data, identity, and AI. By operating from this unique position, we deliver a series of interlocking or complementary products that provide indispensable value to our customers. As I wrote in my shareholder letter last year, we stack multiple S-curves by taking a portfolio of products approach to manage innovations at different points on various S-curves.
This strategy is delivering strong results. Fiscal 2026 was a remarkable year for us with a number of milestones. Our subscription ARR reached $1.46 billion, growing 34% year over year. We wrapped up the year with strong momentum, accelerating net new ARR growth to a record $115 million in Q4.
We generated $237.8 million in free cash flow – more than 10 times the prior fiscal year. We are accelerating growth while improving margins and growing free cash flow, which is a rare combination at our scale. In fact, we are intentionally laying the foundation of a highly profitable, durable growth business. In other words, we are focused on creating significant shareholder value over the long term.
Rubrik Has No Finish Line
We aim to build Rubrik into a generational company. We do this by relentlessly delivering delightful products to our customers. We have evolved Rubrik from a data protection company into a platform for cyber and AI resilience across data and identity, reflecting both changing customer needs and our continued expansion of the platform.
From our earliest days, we have operated with a singular conviction: that the most enduring companies in history were not those that captured a moment, but those that defined an era. They did not simply respond to the world as it was, but they continuously shaped the world as it became. That is the standard we hold ourselves to.
Building a generational company is not a destination. It is a commitment to our customers and partners, to our shareholders, to our mission, and to the belief that the most important work we will ever do is still ahead of us.
Building a Platform That Compounds
The most enduring competitive advantage in technology is not a product. It is a platform — one where customer value multiplies.
Rubrik is built on the principle of Complementary Network Effects: every product we build makes every other product more powerful. When a customer adopts Rubrik, they are not just buying a solution. They are stepping into an ecosystem where they get more value from their existing Rubrik products as they adopt more Rubrik products.
For example, when a Rubrik data protection customer adopts Rubrikʼs Identity Resilience product, they not only achieve cyber resilience across data and identity but also gain a complete understanding of the blast radius and characteristics of a cyberattack across data and identity through the Rubrik platform. This is the additional platform value. Contrast this to the alternative: customers requiring multiple siloed products for data and identity protection, plus requiring another third party tool to surface insights across their data and identity silos to comprehend the full scope of a cyberattack.
Our compounding platform is the architecture of a generational company. Customers do not simply use Rubrik. They rely on it to deliver resilient minimum viable businesses. And the more they use it, the more indispensable it becomes. That is value creation that endures.
Innovation Culture
Since our growth strategy depends on our ability to continuously stack multiple S-curves, the question becomes how do you foster a relentless innovation culture? This is especially important in the AI era, when software development time is significantly compressed.
To be successful, we adhere to two principles.
1. Counter Consensus Ideas
We are living in an age of technology acceleration. AI is not only turbo- charging the pace of innovation, but also compressing years-long product development cycles into weeks or months.
In the AI era, durable business advantage lies in the product-market readiness time. This time goes beyond the product development cycle. This is the time it takes to iterate with customers, absorb market and product feedback, and scale a solution for widespread adoption faster than anyone else.
The only way to win now is to start on products earlier than the market believes is necessary. That is where counter consensus ideas come in.
A counter consensus idea is one that the majority of market participants do not yet believe in, other than a small, conviction-driven minority. To most, these ideas feel uncomfortable. They invite skepticism. They are, by definition, lonely positions to hold.
But if your culture encourages the pursuit of such ideas and if you have built an organization that can live with uncertainty and take asymmetric bets, you can accelerate the course while the market catches up. When the world arrives at the conclusion you reached years earlier, you are not scrambling to catch up. You already have a pole position and are defining the next S-curve.
Rubrikʼs transformation into a cybersecurity company is the most powerful example of this principle in action.
Years ago, when Rubrik was widely understood as a data protection company, we made a counter consensus bet: that data security and cyber resilience would converge, and that the company positioned at that intersection would define a new category. When most of the market did not see it, we created this new category and called it cyber resilience.
We believed it. We built for it. We earned the trust of customers navigating it.
Today, cyber resilience is a boardroom imperative. As AI makes the world more dangerous and effectively voids the old security paradigm of prevention and detection, cyber resilience is the only effective cybersecurity strategy.
That is the power of a counter consensus idea.
2. Unexpected Product Delight
If counter consensus thinking is how we choose what to build, unexpected product delight is how we like to build our products.
Our aspiration with every product is to beam something into our customersʼ hands from the future. Not a feature they asked for, but a capability they didnʼt know they needed. The product that makes them say: “I didnʼt know this was possible. I canʼt imagine going back.”
But there is a fine and critical balance here. Be too far ahead, and you lose customers. The product becomes a curiosity, not a solution. Be just ahead enough, and you create genuine delight. We call this the difference between being 2 miles ahead of your customers versus 200 miles ahead of them. At 200 miles, youʼre alone. At 2 miles, youʼre leading.
Identity Resilience is our clearest proof point of this principle.
Identity-based attacks have become the dominant vector in modern cybersecurity. This shift is being accelerated by AI-driven threat actors, increasing both the scale and sophistication of attacks. And yet, identity protection has historically sat outside the scope of data-centric cyber resilience — treated as a separate problem, owned by a separate buyer, solved by a separate tool.
We saw the gap and we owned it.
Rubrikʼs Identity Resilience solution is built for the CISO organization, with a product experience designed to create genuine delight: exceptional ease of use, powerful cyber protection, and coverage across the full lifecycle of a cyber event. Before, during, and after an attack. Not a point solution for one phase, but a comprehensive cyber resilience solution across all three phases and across data and identity systems delivered through a single platform.
Staying Uncomfortable
Since inception, we have intentionally designed Rubrik to be a living, breathing system. We define ourselves. Then we redefine ourselves. Then we do it again — when it is uncomfortable, and when it is working. This discipline of continuous innovation is essential in the age of AI-fueled technology acceleration. If you set the agenda of the market and youʼre successful, the whole market will eventually align to your agenda. And the moment the market catches up is the moment you must begin the cycle again.
As human beings, we operate in two kinds of situations: certain and uncertain.
If you are driving to work, that is a certain activity. The risk of failure is minimal. In the certain world (the known), your knowledge works. Past patterns apply. Experience is an asset.
If you are building a company at the frontier, this is uncertain. There is no blueprint. There is no playbook. In the uncertain world (the unknown), your intuition plays. If you apply past knowledge, history, and expertise as a template for the future, it will fail. Because the future is uncertain and does not reflect the past.
To build the future, you sit in an uncomfortable, dissatisfied state — knowing that you donʼt know and trying things to find a path out. The path reveals itself not through pattern recognition, but through first principles thinking and experimentation. Through the discipline to stay in the uncertain space long enough to find where asymmetric insight lives.
That is where Rubrik has always lived. That is where we intend to stay.
A Final Word
We are grateful to our customers who trust us with their most critical data, identity, and businesses, to our partners who extend our reach, to all Rubrikans who bring relentless curiosity and conviction to work every day, and to our shareholders who believe in a vision that is, by design, always unfinished.
We are just getting started.
Bipul Sinha
Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer
Rubrik, Inc.
P.S. I continue to travel the world to meet and learn from our customers.
Here are my top 5 bold eats around the world.
Lahori, San Jose
Delicious, intensely rich curries and kebabs that never disappoint
Abd El Wahab, Dubai
Exceptional Lebanese food paired with a breathtaking view
Mustard, Singapore
Perfectly smoked chicken that blends Bengali and Punjabi flavors
La Taberna de Peñalver, Madrid
Garlic prawns and paella at their very best
Chourangi, London
Finest expression of Calcuttaʼs three centuries old cuisine
Letter from the CEO, April 2025:
Last fiscal was an electrifying year for us. We not only became a publicly traded company in April 2024 but also finished at over $1.0 billion in Subscription ARR, growing 39% year-over-year while making significant leaps toward profitability. Rubrik delivered the rare combination of high top-line growth and fast-growing free cash flow margins.
But here’s what really matters. We’re building a generational company. We aspire Rubrik to be a truly exceptional company with no finish line. Then the question is: how do you build an enduring institution? You need great talent and ever-evolving products, all governed by strong cultural values and unlimited company ambition.
I’ve been an outsider all my life. Whether immigrating to the U.S. from India, working at companies like Oracle, attending Wharton, or becoming a venture capitalist, I was entering unfamiliar territory. It was only once I co-founded Rubrik that I moved from “outsider” to “insider.” As we created our culture from the ground up, I felt strongly that Rubrik should have a collaborative, trusting, maximal thinking and risk-tolerant culture — in other words, a culture hospitable to outsiders.
Our Culture
Our culture is encapsulated as RIVET — Relentless, Integrity, Velocity, Excellence and Transparency. These values serve as our compass even when the map changes. What does culture really mean though? It’s not what is written on the wall but what really happens when the founders are not in the room. How do we work with each other to produce exemplary work? How do we not let the past cloud our judgment for the future? How do we consistently raise our collective ambition for the company?
In our weekly Executive Leadership Team meeting my Co-Founder Arvind and I often debate why we are building, what we’re building or why we aren’t moving even faster. Our conversations can get heated but it’s important to us that other leaders in the company see this. That we have an open and transparent dialogue in which we challenge each other to uncover edge-case insights and solutions. Fostering this type of environment is how we can make high-quality decisions and reduce blind spots when we’re operating at high speeds.
Age of Acceleration
Speed matters especially in an age of technology acceleration. Microsoft took 20 years to become a household name, Google 5 years, Facebook 2 years and ChatGPT just 3 months. Rapid technology changes means businesses must reorient constantly. The product-market fit is now effectively dead and zero-to-one must happen every few months. The traditional “Executive Mode” of top-down command and control playbooks no longer work. By the time you come up with a plan, delegate it and then let it cascade through the ranks, the plan no longer works. That’s why I ask my leaders to live at the edge of innovation and obsessively keep their ears to the ground. Last year, I traveled around the world doing over 400 customer meetings to ensure we continuously adjust our strategy to stay ahead of technology shifts.
Forward Motion
The key to success in the age of technology acceleration is to maintain maximal momentum while preparing for what’s coming next. To do this, we use the combination of Forward Motion, scaling current successes, and Lateral Motion, building and exploring new opportunities. Our Forward Motion is taking our cyber resilient Data Protection business from scale to super-scale.
We do this by expanding our data protection solutions across new applications and workloads that span enterprise, cloud and SaaS environments while exploring new routes to market, accelerating distribution networks, serving new customers and expanding our value proposition within our customer base. Our investments in data security — years before ransomware became a headline topic — have resulted in scaled businesses with broad adoption today. This is how we’ve been able to transform the legacy backup and recovery budget into a data security investment that delivers cyber resilience.
Lateral Motion
But you can’t just rely on Forward Motion to achieve sustained success. Failing to innovate or explore new opportunities could lead to eventual stagnation. In other words, by the time one product is scaling, it’s already time to start building the next product strategy. We allocate resources — time, talent and money — across a portfolio of innovation initiatives as the Lateral Motion to unlock the next S-curve. If you don’t build a Lateral Motion, you risk falling behind. Furthermore, we take a portfolio approach to S-curves, in which we’re managing innovations at different points on various S-curves.
Market Transitions
To do this, we have a dedicated team staffed with folks who excel at going from zero to one — finding new product-market fit. This helps us operate a multi-product portfolio while reducing complexity. Within a product discipline, we often deploy different go-to-market teams to establish higher positions on an S-curve while we’re still adding and fine-tuning new capabilities. This is how we go faster in developing new markets with significant upside and in leading market transitions.
Just like any portfolio of risks, some bets work, some don’t. When they work, the mission becomes going from one to scale by combining both Lateral and Forward Motions. We’ve used this approach to build, for example, our M365 Protection solution into a scale business. We’re using the same approach to introduce new Identity Resilience solutions that bring data context and identity together for the first time in the industry. We’ll continue using these Forward and Lateral Motion teams to explore and scale horizontal use cases from our vantage point at the nexus of data, security and AI.
Finally, I am proud of the unwavering customer focus and relentless disciplined execution by all Rubrikans globally to produce our phenomenal year for our shareholders. An enduring company is built off the backs of great people who accept reality, think maximally and act with a sense of urgency to transform vision into reality. Below, I attach my original letter published in our IPO prospectus to explain my philosophy of maximal thinking and business building.
As I often share with our team, what we do matters and our future is bright. Thank you to our customers and partners who trust us to secure their data and business. Thank you to our shareholders for your support and trust. We’re just getting started. The best is yet to come.
Bipul Sinha
CEO, Chairman & Co-Founder
P.S. My travels around the world allow me to indulge my other passion in life: food.
Here are my top 5 bold eats around the world.
Ambassadors Clubhouse, London
Home to the best masala tea
Aga’s, Houston
The curries are top notch
Gulati Restaurant, New Delhi
Butter chicken to die for
Zou Zou’s, New York City
The ultimate fire-roasted lamb
Revolver, Singapore
Avant-garde Indian with a twist of fire
Letter from the CEO, April 2024 (IPO Prospectus):
I believe in maximal thinking — constantly imagining a limitless, extraordinary future, while accepting contradictions and maximizing present opportunities. By accepting contradictions, we accept reality — that is the starting point for progress.
I have been fortunate to be able to sit on multiple sides of the table - from software engineer to people manager to venture capitalist to founder and CEO. These experiences have given me a unique perspective on how to weave together complex software platforms, company culture, risk capital, value creation, and market transitions to create durable businesses. When market transitions occur, opportunity arises to transform and massively expand existing markets.
These disruptions allow new products to gain market relevance quickly and set the agenda of the new market order. This is precisely why I left my venture partnership to start Rubrik. The legacy backup and recovery market was ripe for such a transformation into data security based on cloud and cybersecurity trends. I believed there was an opportunity to build a lasting company.
Rubrik was founded on a vision to deliver business resilience by securing the most critical asset of any organization - data. We built a distinct architecture to combine data and metadata (application context) from business applications across the cloud to ensure data security and availability irrespective of incidence. This allowed us to transform backup data into a strategic asset that sits at the epicenter of security and artificial intelligence. Our original architecture uniquely enables application of artificial intelligence directly between data and security to deliver resilience against cyberattacks. We aim to build an enduring institution underpinned by a unique platform that delivers data security products to solve critical problems and delight our customers. Our goal is to lead the data security market which we believe is the future of cybersecurity.
Rubrik lives on the frontier of innovation, and our long-term success depends on our ability to continuously create and commercialize pioneering products. However, vision is useless by itself. We believe a strong culture and disciplined execution are required to build a durable company. That’s why we defined our cultural principles before hiring our first employee. Our culture is encapsulated as RIVET — Relentless, Integrity, Velocity, Excellence and Transparency. RIVET is our north star to empower our colleagues to do their best work, foster long-term thinking, and grow professionally without limits. From the beginning, we have intentionally designed Rubrik to be a living, breathing system. RIVET encourages debate and constructive conflict in order to render high-quality decisions and reduce blind spots when operating at speed. Our ability to continue to adapt, overcome adversity, and leverage emerging technologies and market transitions rests on fostering our unique culture.
We aspire to be a truly exceptional company with no finish line. Building an enduring institution requires maximal thinking. From very early investments in go-to-market to rapidly expanding platform scope, we have taken a unique approach to risk capital since day one to accelerate the business. While our company has grown in organizational size and experience, our mindset, sense of urgency, and risk posture remain as if we were still in the same tiny room as on day one. We will continue to invest in yet-to-be-certain markets and non-consensus ideas, with the approach to create customer and shareholder value. Our goal is to ensure Rubrik has the best opportunities to achieve its highest potential.
Maximal thinking is how I lifted myself out of poverty, built a life in America, and created Rubrik with my co-founders. I am very lucky to have amazing parents who taught me to think that way. I feel very lucky to be building Rubrik. We are defining the future of cybersecurity. In today’s world, no government or business is immune to cyberattacks. What we do matters.
We hope you will join us on this journey to secure the world’s data and build an impactful company along the way.
Best,
Bipul Sinha
CEO, Chairman & Co-Founder