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If you measure progress by focus, Braze made a strong case this quarter. Revenue held steady at $162.1M, up 20% year over year. Free cash flow rose to $23M, and gross margin hit 68.6%. AI moved from road map to execution with Project Catalyst entering private beta and the OfferFit acquisition closing. RCS is now generally available. A new CRO joins next month. And while net retention softened slightly, the platform story is maturing—and messaging orchestration is evolving fast.
The Good
Revenue landed at $162.1M, up 20% YoY. Free cash flow was $23M. Gross margin rose to 68.6%, and Braze notched its fourth straight quarter of non-GAAP profitability. Net income came in at $7M.
Customer count grew to 2,342, up 2% QoQ and 11% YoY. Large customers, defined as those spending $500K or more, hit 262 (up 24%) and now make up 62% of ARR.
Remaining Performance Obligation, or RPO, is the contractually enforceable revenue a company expects to recognize in the future. It comes in two parts: current RPO (revenue due in the next twelve months) and non-current RPO (multi-year contracts that stretch beyond that).
For Braze, total RPO grew 26% YoY to $829M, with current RPO at $522M, up 24%. That reflects a healthy pipeline and a solid mix of renewals and upsells. But as CFO Isabelle Winkels made clear, RPO isn’t a great leading indicator. Current RPO is heavily influenced by renewal timing, which can swing quarter to quarter. See sidebar.
International revenue mix hit 46%, up from 44% last year. Cash stands at $540M.
Ed McDonald, formerly CRO at Asana and EVP at Salesforce Marketing Cloud, will join in July as the new CRO. In the past, I had expressed reservations for a company of Braze’s scale being able to sustain founder-led sales for too long. Filling the gap with a professional hire with strong bonafides is a good sign.
RCS became generally available, part of a broader update to Braze’s cross-channel orchestration. See “The Unknown” as to why I’m optimistically skeptical about this announcement.
Project Catalyst entered private beta, and Braze closed its acquisition of OfferFit—an AI decisioning platform that replaces manual A/B testing with agentic optimization. It’s already being cross-sold into enterprise deals.
The Interesting
NRR softened: Overall was 109%, down slightly. Large customer NRR was 112%. Braze attributes the dip to heavy Q1 renewal volume—many multiyear Q4 contracts come up in Q1—and expects improvement later in the year as newer cohorts renew.
Initial OfferFit deployments are priced at $250K–$300K per use case, with clear relevance in churn prediction, multi-product expansion, and campaign decisioning. Braze plans to embed its agents across the stack as it builds toward a full AI orchestration layer.
Flexible credits appear to be doing their job, allowing customers to draw from the same pool across SMS, email, push, and possibly RCS.
Braze also dropped its long-standing data point limits, which capped how much user data could flow into the platform. These limits were often a sales friction point, especially in AI-heavy use cases where more data typically means better results. They’ve now been replaced with rate-based controls, resulting in shorter deal cycles, smoother upsells, and fewer legacy constraints at renewal.
The company continues to pull share from Salesforce and Adobe, especially in retail, consumer goods, and financial services. Verticalization efforts are expanding, and partner ecosystem engagement is growing, with events like City by City London now rivaling Forge in attendance.
Sidebar: RPO vs. NRR—Two Views on Revenue Health
In recurring revenue businesses, RPO and NRR tell you different things, and you need both to understand the landscape.
RPO is revenue already under contract. Think of it as confirmed product orders: The company has a line of customers and knows how many apples customers have promised to buy. It reflects pipeline strength and near-term visibility.
NRR (Net Revenue Retention) shows whether those same customers stick around and keep buying. It tracks how much of the existing customer base is renewing, expanding, or churning. Some companies call it DBNR (Dollar-Based Net Retention). Same concept, different label.
If RPO tells you how many apples customers have promised to buy, NRR tells you if those customers will, at contract renewal time, come back for more or head to another orchard. A full order book won’t last if customers stop reordering.
When the two signals diverge, it’s worth digging deeper. Maybe expansion isn’t keeping pace with churn. Maybe new bookings are masking a retention issue. Or maybe one part of the customer base is growing while another quietly unmoors.
If RPO shows the backlog, NRR shows the strength of the relationship. Both matter. But when they drift apart, something underneath is shifting.
The Unknown
OfferFit integration is promising, but still early. The product is differentiated, but adoption depends on Braze’s ability to qualify opportunities, deploy quickly, and support variable pricing. Gross margin impact is expected to be accretive longer term, but near-term dilution is expected from services-heavy delivery.
RCS and WhatsApp are in the market, but Braze didn’t break out any usage or revenue data. The messaging stack is clearly stronger, but adoption trends were left vague.
As I mentioned last week, RCS is taking off—nearly 17% of US messaging traffic is now RCS—but that’s still mostly consumer messaging. Business messaging is gaining traction in markets that matter: India, Brazil, Mexico, France, and Spain. But it’s unclear how many of Braze’s customers are active in those regions, how often they’re using RCS, or how much of that volume translates into revenue.
And if anyone from Braze is reading, I would love to see how you’ve actually simplified the user journey with RCS. That’s where the real win is.
Finally
RCS is live, but the traction seems geography dependent. OfferFit adds a powerful engine, but success depends on whether Braze can qualify the right use cases, deploy fast, and show lift that sticks.
The competitive gap with legacy clouds is widening. But expansion needs to accelerate, net retention has to rebound, and the newer pieces—RCS, OfferFit, Catalyst—still need to prove they can scale.
The platform is evolving. The execution is still in progress.