Datadog, Inc. - Annual Report: 2020 (Form 10-K)

UNITED STATES

SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION

WASHINGTON, DC 20549

FORM 10-K

(Mark One)

For the fiscal year ended December 31, 2020

OR

For the transition period from             to            

Commission File Number: 001-39051

Datadog, Inc.

(Exact Name of Registrant as Specified in its Charter)

Registrant’s telephone number, including area code: (866) 329-4466

Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(b) of the Act:

Indicate by check mark if the registrant is a well-known seasoned issuer, as defined in Rule 405 of the Securities Act. Yes  ☐  No  ☒

Indicate by check mark if the registrant is not required to file reports pursuant to Section 13 or 15(d) of the Act.   Yes  ☐   No  ☒

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant (1) has filed all reports required to be filed by Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to file such reports), and (2) has been subject to such filing requirements for the past 90 days. Yes ☒ No ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has submitted electronically every Interactive Data File required to be submitted pursuant to Rule 405 of Regulation S-T (§ 232.405 of this chapter) during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to submit such files). Yes ☒ No ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a large accelerated filer, an accelerated filer, a non-accelerated filer, a smaller reporting company, or an emerging growth company. See the definitions of “large accelerated filer,” “accelerated filer,” “smaller reporting company,” and “emerging growth company” in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act.

If an emerging growth company, indicate by check mark if the registrant has elected not to use the extended transition period for complying with any new or revised financial accounting standards provided pursuant to Section 13(a) of the Exchange Act. ☐ 

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has filed a report on and attestation to its management’s assessment of the effectiveness of its internal control over financial reporting under Section 404(b) of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (15 U.S.C. 7262(b)) by the registered public accounting firm that prepared or issued its audit report. ☒

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a shell company (as defined in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act). Yes ☐ No ☒

The aggregate market value of the voting and non-voting common equity held by non-affiliates of the registrant, based on the closing price of the registrant’s shares of Class A common stock as reported by The Nasdaq Global Select Market on June 30, 2020 was approximately $26.28 billion.

As of February 15, 2021, there were 221,583,813 shares of the registrant’s Class A common stock and 84,907,962 shares of the registrant’s Class B common stock, each with a par value of $0.00001 per share, outstanding.

DOCUMENTS INCORPORATED BY REFERENCE

Portions of the registrant’s Proxy Statement for its 2021 Annual Meeting of Stockholders are incorporated by reference into Part III of this Annual Report on Form 10-K to the extent stated herein. Such Proxy Statement will be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission within 120 days of the registrant’s fiscal year ended December 31, 2020.

DATADOG, INC.

2020 ANNUAL REPORT ON FORM 10-K

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1

RISK FACTORS SUMMARY

Our operations and financial results and an investment in our Class A common stock are subject to various risks and uncertainties, the most significant of which are summarized below. You should consider carefully the summary below and the risks and uncertainties described in the “Risk Factors” section of this Annual Report on Form 10-K, as well as the other information contained in this Annual Report on Form 10-K, including our consolidated financial statements and related notes. The risks and uncertainties described below and in “Risk Factors” are not the only ones we face. Additional risks and uncertainties that we are unaware of, or that we currently believe are not material, may also become important factors that adversely affect our business. If any of such risks or others not specified below or in “Risk Factors” materialize, our business, financial condition and results of operations could be materially and adversely affected. In that case, the trading price of our Class A common stock could decline.

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SPECIAL NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This Annual Report on Form 10-K contains forward-looking statements about us and our industry that involve substantial risks and uncertainties. All statements other than statements of historical facts contained in this Annual Report on Form 10-K including statements regarding our future results of operations or financial condition, business strategy and plans and objectives of management for future operations, are forward-looking statements. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements because they contain words such as “anticipate,” “believe,” “contemplate,” “continue,” “could,” “estimate,” “expect,” “intend,” “may,” “plan,” “potential,” “predict,” “project,” “should,” “target,” “will” or “would” or the negative of these words or other similar terms or expressions. These forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements concerning the following:

You should not rely on forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. The outcome of the events described in these forward-looking statements is subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors described in under the header “Risk Factors” and elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Moreover, we operate in a very competitive and rapidly changing environment. New risks and uncertainties emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for us to predict all risks and uncertainties that could have an impact on the forward-looking statements contained herein. The results, events and circumstances reflected in the forward-looking statements may not be achieved or occur, and actual results, events or circumstances could differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements.

The forward-looking statements made in this Annual Report on Form 10-K relate only to events as of the date on which the statements are made, and we undertake no obligation to update them to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this Annual Report on Form 10-K or to reflect new information or the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as required by law.

Unless the context otherwise indicates, references in this report to the terms “Datadog”, “the Company,” “we,” “our” and “us” refer to Datadog, Inc. and its subsidiaries.

“Datadog” and other trade names and trademarks of ours appearing in this report are our property. This report contains trade names and trademarks of other companies, which are the property of their respective owners. We do not intend our use or display of other companies’ trade names or trademarks to imply an endorsement or sponsorship of us by such companies, or any relationship with any of these companies.

We may announce material business and financial information to our investors using our investor relations website (www.investors.datadoghq.com). We therefore encourage investors and others interested in Datadog to review the information that we make available on our website, in addition to following our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, or the SEC, webcasts, press releases and conference calls.

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MARKET, INDUSTRY AND OTHER DATA

The statistical data, estimates and forecasts referenced throughout this Annual Report on Form 10-K are based on independent industry publications or other publicly available information, as well as information based on our internal sources. While we believe the industry and market data included in this prospectus are reliable and are based on reasonable assumptions, these data involve many assumptions and limitations, and you are cautioned not to give undue weight to these estimates. We have not independently verified the accuracy or completeness of the data contained in these industry publications and other publicly available information. None of the industry publications referred to in this prospectus were prepared on our or on our affiliates’ behalf or at our expense. The industry in which we operate is subject to a high degree of uncertainty and risk due to a variety of factors, including those described in the section titled “Risk Factors” and “Special Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements,” that could cause results to differ materially from those expressed in these publications and other publicly available information.

The Gartner content referenced herein (the “Gartner Content”) represents research opinion or viewpoints published, as part of a syndicated subscription service, by Gartner, Inc. (“Gartner”), and are not representations of fact. The Gartner Content speaks as of its original publication date (and not as of the date of this Annual Report on Form 10-K) and the opinions expressed in the Gartner Content are subject to change without notice.  

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PART I

Item 1. Business

Overview

Datadog is the monitoring and analytics platform for developers, IT operations teams and business users in the cloud age.

Our SaaS platform integrates and automates infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, log management and security monitoring to provide unified, real-time observability of our customers’ entire technology stack. Datadog is used by organizations of all sizes and across a wide range of industries to enable digital transformation and cloud migration, drive collaboration among development, operations and business teams, accelerate time to market for applications, reduce time to problem resolution, understand user behavior and track key business metrics.

Software applications are transforming how organizations engage with customers and operate their businesses. Companies across all industries are re-platforming their businesses to cloud infrastructures to enable this digital transformation. Historically, engineering teams have been siloed, making the development of next generation applications on dynamic cloud environments challenging. We started Datadog to break this model and facilitate collaboration among development and operations teams, enabling the adoption of DevOps practices. Since then we have continuously pushed to unify separate tools into an integrated monitoring and analytics platform, readily available to everyone who cares about applications and their impact on business.

From our founding goal of breaking down silos between Dev and Ops, we set out in 2010 to build a real-time data integration platform to turn chaos from disparate sources into digestible and actionable insights. In 2012, we launched our first use case with infrastructure monitoring, purpose-built to handle increasingly ephemeral cloud-native architectures. This enabled us to be deployed on our customers’ entire cloud IT environments and gave our product broad usage across Dev, Ops and business teams, in turn allowing us to address a bigger set of challenges through our platform. In 2017 we launched our Application Performance Monitoring, or APM, product, designed to be broadly deployed in very distributed, micro-services architectures. In 2018, we were the first to combine the “three pillars of observability” with the introduction of our Log Management product. To allow for full-stack observability, in 2019, we launched user Experience Monitoring and Network Performance Monitoring. In 2020, we extended into security with the launch of Security Monitoring to detect threats in real time, as well as launched Continuous Profiler and Incident Management to enhance workflows and collaboration as incidents occur. Today, we offer end-to-end monitoring and analytics, powered by a common data model that is extensible for potential new use cases.

Our proprietary platform combines the power of metrics, traces and logs to provide a unified view of infrastructure and application performance and the real-time events impacting this performance. Datadog is designed to be cloud agnostic and easy to deploy, with hundreds of out-of-the-box integrations, a built-in understanding of modern technology stacks and endless customizability. Customers can deploy our platform across their entire infrastructure, making it ubiquitous and a daily part of the lives of developers, operations engineers and business leaders.

We believe that our platform currently addresses a significant portion of the IT Operations Management market. According to Gartner, the IT Operations Management market represents a $44 billion opportunity in 2024. We believe a large portion of this spend is for legacy on-premise and private cloud environments but does not fully include the opportunity in modern multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments. Our platform is designed to address both legacy and modern environments.

We employ a land-and-expand business model centered around offering products that are easy to adopt and have a very short time to value. Our customers can expand their footprint with us on a self-service basis. Our customers often significantly increase their usage of the products they initially buy from us and expand their usage to other products we offer on our platform. We grow with our customers as they expand their workloads in the public and private cloud.  

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Our Solution and Key Strengths

Datadog was founded on the premise that the old model of siloed developers and IT operations engineers is broken, and that legacy tools used for monitoring static on-premise architectures do not work in modern cloud or hybrid environments. Datadog’s cloud-native platform enables development and operations teams to collaborate, quickly build and improve applications, and drive business performance. Empowered by our out-of-the box functionality and simple, self-service installation, our customers are able to rapidly deploy our platform to provide application- and infrastructure-wide visibility, often within minutes.

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Key Benefits to Our Customers

Organizations of all sizes, in all industries, both private and public, purchase our products for a variety of use cases. As of December 31, 2020, we had approximately 14,200 customers in over 100 countries. Our platform provides the following key benefits to our customers:

Our Growth Strategies

We intend to pursue the following growth strategies:

Our Platform

Our proprietary platform provides real-time insights into software applications and IT infrastructure performance to enable better user experiences, faster problem detection and resolution and smarter, more impactful business decisions. Our platform is also modular and includes infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, log management, user experience monitoring, network performance monitoring, security monitoring, and incident management as well as a range of shared features such as sophisticated dashboards, advanced analytics, collaboration tools and alerting capabilities. Each of our products is fully capable stand-alone so clients can choose to use different capabilities incrementally or deploy many at once. When deployed together, our products automatically enable cross-correlation, which in turn allows customers to gain greater levels of visibility across their infrastructure and applications to more rapidly troubleshoot problems.

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Our platform is supported by hundreds of integrations to seamlessly aggregate metrics and events across all of the systems and services that power digital businesses. Our easy-to-use platform is deployed through a self-service installation process. Users can derive value from our platform within minutes without any specialized training or heavy implementation or customization. Customers can easily expand their usage of our platform on a self-serve basis, adding hosts or volumes of data monitored. Our platform is massively scalable currently monitoring more than tens of trillion events a day and millions of servers and containers.

The key elements that can be leveraged across our platform:

Our platform consists of the following products that can be used individually or as a unified solution and includes a Marketplace where customers can access products built by our partners on top of the Datadog platform. Our products include:

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Sales and Marketing

Our sales team is segmented into four revenue-generating areas: an enterprise sales team that sells to large businesses; a high velocity inside sales team that is focused on acquiring new customers; a customer success team that handles new customer on-boarding and expansions in existing customers; and a partner team that works with resellers, system integrators, referral partners and managed service providers. Each of these teams is further split regionally for geographic coverage across the Americas, Asia-Pacific, or APAC, and Europe, the Middle East and Africa, or EMEA, regions. The sales teams work with marketing to actively pursue leads generated from marketing programs and help take prospective customers through an evaluation and purchase process.

We focus our multi-touch marketing efforts on the strength of our product innovation, the value we provide and our domain expertise. We target the development and IT operations community through our marketing activities, using diverse tactics to connect with prospective customers, such as content marketing, email marketing, events, digital advertising, social media, public relations, partner marketing and community initiatives. We offer prospective customers free trials to help them understand the power of our platform. We also host and present at regional, national, global and virtual events to engage both customers and prospects, deliver product training, share best practices and foster community.

As of December 31, 2020, we had 1,085 employees in our sales and marketing organization, including sales development, field sales, sales engineering, business development, sales operations, sales strategy, customer success and marketing personnel. We intend to continue to invest in our sales and marketing capabilities to capitalize on our market opportunity.

Research and Development

Our research and development organization is responsible for the design, development, testing and delivery of new technologies, features and integrations of our platform, as well as the continued improvement and iteration of our existing products. It is also responsible for operating and scaling our platform including the underlying cloud infrastructure. Our research and development investments seek to drive core technology innovation and bring new products to market. Research and development employees are located primarily in our New York and Paris offices, as well as remotely distributed.

Our research and development team consists of our software engineering, product management, development and site reliability engineering teams. As of December 31, 2020, we had 927 employees in our research and development organization. We intend to continue to invest in our research and development capabilities to extend our platform and products.

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Our Competition

The worldwide monitoring and analytics market is and has been highly competitive for decades and is rapidly evolving. We compete on the basis of a number of factors, including:

Our unified platform combines functionality from numerous traditional product categories, and hence we compete in each of these categories with different vendors:

Additionally, we compete with home-grown and open-source technologies across the categories described above. We believe that we compete favorably with respect to the factors listed above. However, many of our competitors have greater financial, technical and other resources, greater brand recognition, larger sales forces and marketing budgets, broader distribution networks, more diverse product and services offerings and larger and more mature intellectual property portfolios. They may be able to leverage these resources to gain business in a manner that discourages customers from purchasing our offerings. Furthermore, we expect that our industry will continue to attract new companies, including smaller emerging companies, which could introduce new offerings. We may also expand into new markets and encounter additional competitors in such markets.

Human Capital Management

Headcount

As of December 31, 2020, we had 2,185 employees operating across 28 countries. Approximately 37% of our full-time employees as of that date were located outside of the United States, 42% of whom were located in France. In countries in which we operate, such as France, we are subject to, and comply with, local labor law requirements, which may automatically make our employees subject to industry-wide collective bargaining agreements. We have not experienced any work stoppages and we consider our relations with our employees to be good. 

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Culture and Engagement

All of us at Datadog are driven by the desire to deliver a product that our customers love. In order to do that, we strive to create a culture that our employees love; one that promotes a healthy work-life balance, career growth, low drama, and a friendly office culture with plenty of fun (virtual) activities to ensure our teams remain close in these unprecedented times. To make sure our culture remains positive and strong, we conduct global engagement surveys periodically to gain a better understanding of what is important to our employees. The areas in which we are most successful include the transparency and accessibility of our leadership, support for employees during COVID-19, the strength of our product offerings, and opportunities for employee growth and development. 

Training and Development

Datadog fosters a strong learning culture offering individual- and team-specific training on an ongoing basis, as well as a wide range of learning programs delivered by our global Talent Development team. We also provide robust manager training that shares effective tools and frameworks around recruiting, managing, and developing team members.

We continually invest in our employees’ career growth and provide employees with a wide range of development opportunities, including face-to-face, virtual, social, and self-directed learning, mentoring, coaching, and external development.

Compensation and Benefits

We offer industry competitive wages and benefits and are committed to maintaining a workplace environment that promotes employee productivity and satisfaction. We believe our employees should have the support they need to maintain a strong work/life balance, grow personally and professionally, and save for their future. While the philosophy around our benefits is the same worldwide, specific benefits vary regionally due to local regulations and preferences.

Diversity and Inclusion

At Datadog, diversity means making a conscious effort to reflect the many experiences and identities of the world outside, while treating each other with fairness and without bias. Inclusion is the choice we make every day to foster an environment where people of all backgrounds not only belong but excel, so that together, as a company, we can succeed.

Datadog strives for an inclusive community, both inside and out of the office. Internally, we offer training for employees around unconscious bias, and other diversity and inclusion-related topics designed to create a culture of belonging. 

Intellectual Property

Intellectual property rights are important to the success of our business. We rely on a combination of patent, copyright, trademark and trade secret laws in the United States and other jurisdictions, as well as license agreements, confidentiality procedures, non-disclosure agreements with third parties, and other contractual protections, to protect our intellectual property rights, including our proprietary technology, software, know-how and brand. We use open source software in our services. Our proprietary API and the agent used by customers to upload data to our platform are licensed by us on an open source basis.

As of December 31, 2020, we own one issued patent and six patent applications pending for examination in the United States, five pending PCT applications, and no foreign patents or patent applications. The pending U.S. patent applications, if issued, would be scheduled to expire in 2038 and 2039. Despite our pending U.S. patent applications, there can be no assurance that our patent applications will result in issued patents. As of December 31, 2020, we own four registered trademarks in the United States and twenty-nine registered trademarks in various non-U.S. jurisdictions. However, as we have expanded internationally, we have been unable to register or obtain the right to use the Datadog trademark in certain jurisdictions, and as we continue to expand may face similar issues in other jurisdictions.

Although we rely on intellectual property rights, including patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets, as well as contractual protections to establish and protect our proprietary rights, we believe that factors such as the technological and creative skills of our personnel, creation of new services, features and functionality, and frequent enhancements to our platform are more essential to establishing and maintaining our technology leadership position.

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We control access to and use of our proprietary technology and other confidential information through the use of internal and external controls, including contractual protections with employees, contractors, customers and partners. We require our employees, consultants and other third parties to enter into confidentiality and proprietary rights agreements and we control and monitor access to our software, documentation, proprietary technology and other confidential information. Our policy is to require all employees and independent contractors to sign agreements assigning to us any inventions, trade secrets, works of authorship, developments, processes and other intellectual property generated by them on our behalf and under which they agree to protect our confidential information. In addition, we generally enter into confidentiality agreements with our customers and partners. See the section titled “Risk Factors” for a more comprehensive description of risks related to our intellectual property.  

Corporate Information

We were incorporated in Delaware in June 2010. Our principal executive offices are located at 620 8th Avenue, 45th Floor, New York, New York 10018, and our telephone number is (866) 329-4466. Our website address is www.datadog.com. Information contained on, or that can be accessed through, our website is not incorporated by reference into this Annual Report on Form 10-K, and you should not consider information on our website to be part of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

Available Information

Our Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, and amendments to reports filed pursuant to Sections 13(a) and 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, or the Exchange Act, are filed with the SEC. Such reports and other information filed by us with the SEC are available free of charge on our website at www.investors.datadoghq.com when such reports are available on the SEC’s website. The SEC maintains an internet site that contains reports, proxy and information statements and other information regarding issuers that file electronically with the SEC at www.sec.gov. The information contained on the websites referenced in this Annual Report on Form 10-K is not incorporated by reference into this filing. Further, our references to website URLs are intended to be inactive textual references only.

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Item 1A. Risk Factors

Our operations and financial results are subject to various risks and uncertainties including those described below. You should consider carefully the risks and uncertainties described below, in addition to other information contained in this Annual Report on Form 10-K, including our consolidated financial statements and related notes. The risks and uncertainties described below are not the only ones we face. Additional risks and uncertainties that we are unaware of, or that we currently believe are not material, may also become important factors that adversely affect our business. If any of the following risks or others not specified below materialize, our business, financial condition and results of operations could be materially and adversely affected. In that case, the trading price of our Class A common stock could decline.

Risks Related to the “COVID-19” Pandemic

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and any related economic downturn could negatively impact our business, financial condition and results of operations.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic may prevent us or our employees, customers, partners, suppliers or vendors or other parties with whom we do business from conducting certain marketing and other business activities for an indefinite period of time, which could adversely impact our business, financial position and results of operations. Further, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many state, local and foreign governments have put in place, and others in the future may put in place, quarantines, executive orders, shelter-in-place orders and similar government orders and restrictions in order to control the spread of the disease. Such orders or restrictions, or the perception that such orders or restrictions could occur or reoccur, have resulted in business closures, work stoppages, slowdowns and delays, work-from-home policies, travel restrictions and cancellation of events, among other effects that could negatively impact productivity and disrupt our operations or those of our customers, partners, suppliers or vendors or other parties with whom we do business.

In light of the uncertain and rapidly evolving situation relating to the spread of COVID-19 and in compliance with recent shelter-in-place orders and other government executive orders directing that all non-essential businesses close their physical operations, we have taken measures intended to help minimize the risk of the virus to our employees and the communities in which we participate. These measures include temporarily suspending all non-essential travel worldwide for our employees, canceling, postponing or holding virtually any Datadog events and discouraging employee attendance at any industry events or in-person work-related meetings. In addition, although we have recently and may continue to selectively reopen certain of our offices in compliance with applicable government orders and guidelines, the vast majority of our employees continue to work remotely. We have a distributed workforce and our employees are accustomed to working remotely and working with others who are working remotely. However, the temporary suspension of travel and in-person meetings could negatively impact our marketing efforts, the length or variability of our sales cycles, our international expansion efforts or the length of our average recruiting cycle for employees across the organization. Further, operational or other challenges could arise as we and our customers, partners, suppliers and vendors and other parties with whom we do business continue to operate via a remote workforce. In addition, our management team has, and will likely continue, to spend significant time, attention and resources monitoring the COVID-19 pandemic and seeking to manage its effects on our business and workforce.

COVID-19 could also adversely affect workforces, economies and financial markets globally, potentially leading to an economic downturn and a reduction in customer spending on our solutions or an inability for our customers, partners, suppliers or vendors or other parties with whom we do business to meet their contractual obligations. While it is not possible at this time to predict the duration and extent of the impact that COVID-19 could have on worldwide economic activity and our business in particular, the continued spread of COVID-19 and the measures taken by governments, businesses and other organizations in response to COVID-19 could adversely impact our business, financial condition and results of operations. For example, during the second quarter of 2020, we experienced some impact to the rate of usage growth from our existing customers. In addition, we have provided and may continue to provide guidance about our business and future operating results, which is based on certain assumptions, estimates and expectations as of the date such guidance is given. Guidance is necessarily speculative in nature, and is inherently subject to significant business, economic and competitive uncertainties and contingencies, many of which are beyond our control, such as the global economic uncertainty and financial market conditions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. If we were to revise or fail to meet our announced guidance or expectations of analysts as a result of these factors, the price of our Class A common stock could be negatively affected. Moreover, to the extent the COVID-19 pandemic adversely affects our business, financial condition and results of operations, it may also have the effect of heightening many of the other risks described in this “Risk Factors” section, including but not limited to, those related to our ability expand within our existing customer base, acquire new customers, develop and expand our sales and marketing capabilities and expand internationally.

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Unfavorable conditions in our industry or the global economy, or reductions in information technology spending, could limit our ability to grow our business and negatively affect our results of operations.

Our results of operations may vary based on the impact of unfavorable changes in our industry or the global economy on us or our customers and potential customers. Unfavorable conditions in the economy both in the United States and abroad, including conditions resulting from changes in gross domestic product growth in the United States or abroad, financial and credit market fluctuations, international trade relations, political turmoil, natural catastrophes, outbreaks of contagious diseases (such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic), warfare and terrorist attacks on the United States, Europe, the Asia Pacific region or elsewhere, could cause a decrease in business investments, including spending on information technology, disrupt the timing and cadence of key industry events, and negatively affect the growth of our business and our results of operations. For example, these types of unfavorable conditions could disrupt the timing of and attendance at key industry events, which we rely upon in part to generate sales of our products. If those events are disrupted, our marketing investments, sales pipeline and ability to generate new customers and sales of our products could be negatively and adversely affected. In addition, our competitors, many of whom are larger and have greater financial resources than we do, may respond to challenging market conditions by lowering prices in an attempt to attract our customers and may be less dependent on key industry events to generate sales for their products. In addition, the increased pace of consolidation in certain industries may result in reduced overall spending on our products and solutions. We cannot predict the timing, strength, or duration of any economic slowdown, instability, or recovery, generally or how any such event may impact our business.

Risks Associated with our Growth

Our recent rapid growth may not be indicative of our future growth. Our rapid growth also makes it difficult to evaluate our future prospects and may increase the risk that we will not be successful.

Our revenue was $603.5 million, $362.8 million and $198.1 million for the years ended December 31, 2020, 2019 and 2018, respectively. You should not rely on the revenue growth of any prior quarterly or annual period as an indication of our future performance. Even if our revenue continues to increase, we expect that our revenue growth rate will decline in the future as a result of a variety of factors, including the maturation of our business. Overall growth of our revenue depends on a number of factors, including our ability to:

We may not successfully accomplish any of these objectives, and as a result, it is difficult for us to forecast our future results of operations. If the assumptions that we use to plan our business are incorrect or change in reaction to changes in our market, or if we are unable to maintain consistent revenue or revenue growth, our stock price could be volatile, and it may be difficult to achieve and maintain profitability. You should not rely on our revenue for any prior quarterly or annual periods as any indication of our future revenue or revenue growth.

In addition, we expect to continue to expend substantial financial and other resources on:

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These investments may not result in increased revenue growth in our business. If we are unable to maintain or increase our revenue at a rate sufficient to offset the expected increase in our costs, our business, financial position, and results of operations will be harmed, and we may not be able to achieve or maintain profitability over the long term. Additionally, we may encounter unforeseen operating expenses, difficulties, complications, delays, and other unknown factors that may result in losses in future periods. If our revenue growth does not meet our expectations in future periods, our business, financial position and results of operations may be harmed, and we may not achieve or maintain profitability in the future.

We have a history of operating losses and may not achieve or sustain profitability in the future.

We generated net losses of $(24.5) million, $(16.7) million and $(10.8) million for the years ended December 31, 2020, 2019 and 2018, respectively. As of December 31, 2020, we had an accumulated deficit of $148.2 million. While we have experienced significant revenue growth in recent periods, we are not certain whether or when we will obtain a high enough volume of sales to sustain or increase our growth or achieve or maintain profitability in the future. We also expect our costs and expenses to increase in future periods, which could negatively affect our future results of operations if our revenue does not increase. In particular, we intend to continue to expend significant funds to further develop our platform, including by introducing new products and functionality, and to expand our inside and field sales teams and customer success team to drive new customer adoption, expand use cases and integrations, and support international expansion. We will also face increased compliance costs associated with growth, the expansion of our customer base, and being a public company. Our efforts to grow our business may be costlier than we expect, or the rate of our growth in revenue may be slower than we expect, and we may not be able to increase our revenue enough to offset our increased operating expenses. We may incur significant losses in the future for a number of reasons, including the other risks described herein, and unforeseen expenses, difficulties, complications or delays, and other unknown events. If we are unable to achieve and sustain profitability, the value of our business and Class A common stock may significantly decrease.

We have a limited operating history, which makes it difficult to forecast our future results of operations.

We were founded in June 2010. As a result of our limited operating history, our ability to accurately forecast our future results of operations is limited and subject to a number of uncertainties, including our ability to plan for and model future growth. Our historical revenue growth should not be considered indicative of our future performance. Further, in future periods, our revenue growth could slow or our revenue could decline for a number of reasons, including slowing demand for our products, increasing competition, changes to technology, a decrease in the growth of our overall market, or our failure, for any reason, to continue to take advantage of growth opportunities. We have also encountered, and will continue to encounter, risks and uncertainties frequently experienced by growing companies in rapidly changing industries, such as the risks and uncertainties described herein. If our assumptions regarding these risks and uncertainties and our future revenue growth are incorrect or change, or if we do not address these risks successfully, our operating and financial results could differ materially from our expectations, and our business could suffer.

We may require additional capital to support the growth of our business, and this capital might not be available on acceptable terms, if at all.

We have funded our operations since inception primarily through equity and debt financings and sales of our products. We cannot be certain when or if our operations will generate sufficient cash to fully fund our ongoing operations or the growth of our business. We intend to continue to make investments to support our business, which may require us to engage in equity or debt financings to secure additional funds. Additional financing may not be available on terms favorable to us, if at all. If adequate funds are not available on acceptable terms, we may be unable to invest in future growth opportunities, which could harm our business, operating results, and financial condition. If we incur additional debt, the debt holders would have rights senior to holders of common stock to make claims on our assets, and the terms of any debt could restrict our operations, including our ability to pay dividends on our common stock. Because our decision to issue securities in the future will depend on numerous considerations, including factors beyond our control, we cannot predict or estimate the amount, timing, or nature of any future issuances of debt or equity securities. As a result, our stockholders bear the risk of future issuances of debt or equity securities reducing the value of our common stock and diluting their interests.

Strategic and Operational Risks

Our business depends on our existing customers purchasing additional subscriptions and products from us and renewing their subscriptions. If our customers do not renew or expand their subscriptions with us, our future operating results would be harmed.

Our future success depends in part on our ability to sell additional subscriptions and products to our existing customers, and our customers renewing their subscriptions when the contract term expires. The terms of our subscription agreements are primarily monthly or annual, with some quarterly, semi-annual and multi-year. Our customers have no obligation to renew their subscriptions for our products after the expiration of their subscription period. In order for us to maintain or improve our results of operations, it is

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important that our customers renew or expand their subscriptions with us. Whether our customers renew or expand their subscriptions with us may be impacted by a number of factors, including business strength or weakness of our customers, customer usage, customer satisfaction with our products and platform capabilities and customer support, our prices, the capabilities and prices of competing products, mergers and acquisitions affecting our customer base, consolidation of affiliates’ multiple paid business accounts into a single paid business account, the effects of global economic conditions, including due to the global economic uncertainty and financial market conditions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, or reductions in our customers’ spending on IT solutions or their spending levels generally. In addition, the factors impacting our ability to sell additional subscriptions and products to our customers may be exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.  These factors may also be exacerbated if, consistent with our growth strategy, our customer base continues to grow to encompass larger enterprises, which may also require more sophisticated and costly sales efforts. If our customers do not purchase additional subscriptions and products from us or our customers fail to renew their subscriptions, our revenue may decline and our business, financial condition and results of operations may be harmed.

If we are unable to attract new customers, our business, financial condition and results of operations will be adversely affected.

To increase our revenue, we must continue to attract new customers. Our success will depend to a substantial extent on the widespread adoption of our platform and products as an alternative to existing solutions. Many enterprises have invested substantial personnel and financial resources to integrate traditional on-premise architectures into their businesses and, therefore, may be reluctant or unwilling to migrate to cloud computing. Further, the adoption of SaaS business software may be slower in industries with heightened data security interests or business practices requiring highly customizable application software. In addition, as our market matures, our products evolve, and competitors introduce lower cost or differentiated products that are perceived to compete with our platform and products, our ability to sell subscriptions for our products could be impaired. Similarly, our subscription sales could be adversely affected if customers or users within these organizations perceive that features incorporated into competitive products reduce the need for our products or if they prefer to purchase other products that are bundled with solutions offered by other companies that operate in adjacent markets and compete with our products. As a result of these and other factors, we may be unable to attract new customers, which may have an adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations.

Failure to effectively develop and expand our sales and marketing capabilities could harm our ability to increase our customer base and achieve broader market acceptance of our products.

Our ability to increase our customer base and achieve broader market acceptance of our products and platform capabilities will depend to a significant extent on our ability to expand our sales and marketing organization. We plan to continue expanding our direct sales force, both domestically and internationally. We also plan to dedicate significant resources to sales and marketing programs. All of these efforts will require us to invest significant financial and other resources, including in channels in which we have limited or no experience to date. Our business and results of operations will be harmed if our sales and marketing efforts do not generate significant increases in revenue or increases in revenue that are smaller than anticipated. We may not achieve anticipated revenue growth from expanding our sales force if we are unable to hire, develop, integrate and retain talented and effective sales personnel, if our new and existing sales personnel, on the whole, are unable to achieve desired productivity levels in a reasonable period of time, or if our sales and marketing programs are not effective.

If we or our third-party service providers experience, or are unable to protect against cyber attacks, ransomware, security incidents, or security breaches, or if unauthorized parties otherwise obtain access to our customers’ data, our data, or our platform, then our solution may be perceived as not being secure, our reputation may be harmed, demand for our platform and products may be reduced, and we may incur significant liabilities or additional expenses.

We collect, receive, store, process, generate, use, transfer, disclose, make accessible, protect, secure, dispose of and share personal information, confidential information and other information necessary to provide our service, to operate our business, for legal and marketing purposes, and for other business-related purposes. We may use third-party service providers and sub-processors to help us deliver services to our customers. These vendors may store or process personal information on our behalf

Our platform and products involve the storage and transmission of data, including personal information, and security breaches or unauthorized access to our platform and products, or those of our third-party service providers, could result in the loss of our or our customers’ data, litigation, indemnity obligations, fines, penalties, disputes, investigations and other liabilities. We have previously and may in the future become the target of cyber-attacks by third parties seeking unauthorized access to our or our customers’ data or to disrupt our ability to provide our services. For example, in July 2016 an unidentified third party gained unauthorized access to, and exfiltrated data from, certain of our infrastructure resources, including a database that stored our customers’ credentials for our platform and for third-party integrations. Some of the customer credentials accessed and exfiltrated included confidential and personal information. As a precautionary measure following this event, we reset customer passwords and instructed customers to revoke credentials that had been shared with us. In addition, our employees are temporarily working remotely

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due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which may pose additional data security risks (including, for example, an increase in phishing and spam emails experienced during 2020).

While we have taken steps to protect the confidential and personal information that we have access to, our security measures or those of our third-party service providers that store or otherwise process certain of our and our customers’ data on our behalf could be breached or we could suffer a loss of our or our customers’ data. Our ability to monitor our third-party service providers’ data security is limited. Cyber-attacks, computer malware, viruses, employee mistakes or malfeasance, social engineering (including spear phishing and ransomware attacks), and general hacking have become more prevalent in our industry, particularly against cloud services. In addition, we do not directly control content that our customers store in our products. If our customers use our products for the transmission or storage of personal information and our security measures are or are believed to have been breached as a result of third-party action, employee error, malfeasance or otherwise, our reputation could be damaged, our business may suffer, and we could incur significant liability. In addition, our remediation efforts may not be successful.

We also process, store and transmit our own data as part of our business and operations. This data may include personal, confidential or proprietary information. There can be no assurance that any security measures that we or our third-party service providers have implemented will be effective against current or future security threats. While we have developed systems and processes designed to protect the integrity, confidentiality and security of our and our customers’ data, our security measures or those of our third-party service providers could fail and result in unauthorized access to or disclosure, modification, misuse, loss or destruction of such data.

Because many different security vulnerabilities exist and exploits of such vulnerabilities continue to evolve, we may be unable to anticipate attempted security breaches, react in a timely manner or implement adequate preventative measures. Among other things, our applications, systems, networks, software and physical facilities could be breached, or the personal or confidential information that we store could be otherwise compromised due to employee error or malfeasance, if, for example, third parties fraudulently induce our employees or our members to disclose information or user names and/or passwords, or otherwise compromise the security of our networks, systems and/or physical facilities.  Additionally, employees or service providers may inadvertently misconfigure resources or misdirect certain communications that lead to security incidents for which we must then expend effort and incur expenses to correct.

Third parties may also conduct attacks designed to temporarily deny customers access to our cloud services. Any security breach or other security incident, or the perception that one has occurred, could result in a loss of customer confidence in the security of our platform and damage to our brand, reduce the demand for our products, disrupt normal business operations, require us to spend material resources to investigate or correct the breach and to prevent future security breaches and incidents, expose us to legal liabilities, including litigation, regulatory enforcement, and indemnity obligations, and adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations. These risks are likely to increase as we continue to grow and process, store, and transmit increasingly large amounts of data.

We use third-party technology, systems and services in a variety of contexts, including, without limitation, encryption and authentication technology, employee email, content delivery to customers, back-office support, credit card processing and other functions. Although we have developed systems and processes that are designed to protect customer data and prevent data loss and other security breaches, including systems and processes designed to reduce the impact of a security breach at a third-party service provider, such measures cannot provide absolute security.

We may have contractual and other legal obligations to notify relevant stakeholders of security incidents. For instance, most jurisdictions have enacted laws, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (“HIPAA”), requiring companies to notify individuals, regulatory authorities, and others of security breaches involving certain types of data. Such mandatory contractual and legal disclosures are costly, could lead to negative publicity, may cause our customers to lose confidence in the effectiveness of our security measures and require us to expend significant capital and other resources to respond to and/or alleviate problems caused by the actual or perceived security breach, and any failure to provide appropriate notice may violate the terms of our customer contracts. Our contracts, our representations, or industry standards, may require us to use industry-standard or reasonable measures to safeguard sensitive personal information or confidential information. A security breach could lead to claims by our customers, or other relevant stakeholders that we have failed to comply with such legal or contractual obligations. As a result, we could be subject to legal action or our customers could end their relationships with us. Further, there can be no assurance that any limitations of liability in our contracts would be enforceable or adequate or would otherwise protect us from liabilities or damages.

The costs to respond to a security breach and/or mitigate any security vulnerabilities that may be identified could be significant, our efforts to address these problems may not be successful, and these problems could result in unexpected interruptions, delays, cessation of service, negative publicity, and other harm to our business and our competitive position. We could be required to

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fundamentally change our business activities and practices in response to a security breach or related regulatory actions or litigation, which could have an adverse effect on our business.

Additionally, we cannot be certain that our insurance coverage will be adequate for fines, judgments, settlements, penalties, costs, attorney fees and other impacts that arise out of privacy or security incidents or breaches. If the impacts of a privacy or security incident or breach, or the successful assertion of one or more large claims against us that exceeds our available insurance coverage, or results in changes to our insurance policies (including premium increases or the imposition of large deductible or co-insurance requirements), it could have an adverse effect on our business. In addition, we cannot be sure that our existing insurance coverage, cyber coverage and coverage for errors and omissions will continue to be available on acceptable terms or that our insurers will not deny coverage as to any future claim. The successful assertion of one or more large claims against us that exceed available insurance coverage, or the occurrence of changes in our insurance policies, including premium increases or the imposition of large deductible or co-insurance requirements, could adversely affect our reputation, business, financial condition and results of operations. Our risks are likely to increase as we continue to expand, grow our customer base, and process, store, and transmit increasingly large amounts of proprietary and sensitive data.

Interruptions or performance problems associated with our products and platform capabilities may adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

Our continued growth depends in part on the ability of our existing and potential customers to access our products and platform capabilities at any time and within an acceptable amount of time. We have experienced, and may in the future experience, disruptions, outages, and other performance problems due to a variety of factors, including infrastructure changes, introductions of new functionality, human or software errors, capacity constraints due to an overwhelming number of users accessing our products and platform capabilities simultaneously, denial of service attacks, or other security-related incidents.

It may become increasingly difficult to maintain and improve our performance, especially during peak usage times and as our products and platform capabilities become more complex and our user traffic increases. If our products and platform capabilities are unavailable or if our users are unable to access our products and platform capabilities within a reasonable amount of time or at all, we may experience a loss of customers, lost or delayed market acceptance of our platform and products, delays in payment to us by customers, injury to our reputation and brand, legal claims against us, and the diversion of our resources. In addition, to the extent that we do not effectively address capacity constraints, upgrade our systems as needed and continually develop our technology and network architecture to accommodate actual and anticipated changes in technology, our business, financial condition and results of operations may be adversely affected.

We may not be able to successfully manage our growth, and if we are not able to grow efficiently, our business, financial condition and results of operations could be harmed.

As usage of our platform capabilities grow, we will need to devote additional resources to improving and maintaining our infrastructure and integrating with third-party applications. In addition, we will need to appropriately scale our internal business systems and our services organization, including customer support and professional services, to serve our growing customer base. Any failure of or delay in these efforts could result in impaired system performance and reduced customer satisfaction, resulting in decreased sales to new customers, lower dollar-based net retention rates or, the issuance of service credits or requested refunds, which would hurt our revenue growth and our reputation. Further, any failure in optimizing our spend on third-party cloud services as we scale could negatively impact our gross margins. Even if we are successful in our expansion efforts, they will be expensive and complex, and require the dedication of significant management time and attention. We could also face inefficiencies or service disruptions as a result of our efforts to scale our internal infrastructure. We cannot be sure that the expansion of and improvements to our internal infrastructure will be effectively implemented on a timely basis, if at all, and such failures could harm our business, financial condition and results of operations.

We rely upon third-party providers of cloud-based infrastructure to host our products. Any disruption in the operations of these third-party providers, limitations on capacity or interference with our use could adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

We outsource substantially all of the infrastructure relating to our cloud solution to third-party hosting services. Customers of our cloud-based products need to be able to access our platform at any time, without interruption or degradation of performance, and we provide them with service-level commitments with respect to uptime. Our cloud-based products depend on protecting the virtual cloud infrastructure hosted by third-party hosting services by maintaining its configuration, architecture, features and interconnection specifications, as well as the information stored in these virtual data centers, which is transmitted by third-party internet service providers. Any limitation on the capacity of our third-party hosting services could impede our ability to onboard new customers or expand the usage of our existing customers, which could adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations. In addition, any incident affecting our third-party hosting services’ infrastructure that may be caused by cyber-attacks, natural disasters,

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fire, flood, severe storm, earthquake, power loss, telecommunications failures, outbreaks of contagious diseases, terrorist or other attacks, and other similar events beyond our control could negatively affect our cloud-based products. A prolonged service disruption affecting our cloud-based solution for any of the foregoing reasons would negatively impact our ability to serve our customers and could damage our reputation with current and potential customers, expose us to liability, cause us to lose customers or otherwise harm our business. We may also incur significant costs for using alternative equipment or taking other actions in preparation for, or in reaction to, events that damage the third-party hosting services we use.

In the event that our service agreements with our third-party hosting services are terminated, or there is a lapse of service, elimination of services or features that we utilize, interruption of internet service provider connectivity or damage to such facilities, we could experience interruptions in access to our platform as well as significant delays and additional expense in arranging or creating new facilities and services and/or re-architecting our cloud solution for deployment on a different cloud infrastructure service provider, which could adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

We offer free trials and a free tier of our platform to drive developer awareness of our products, and encourage usage and adoption. If these marketing strategies fail to lead to customers purchasing paid subscriptions, our ability to grow our revenue will be adversely affected.

To encourage awareness, usage, familiarity and adoption of our platform and products, we offer free trials and a free tier of our platform. These strategies may not be successful in leading customers to purchase our products. Many users of our free tier may not lead to others within their organization purchasing and deploying our platform and products. To the extent that users do not become, or we are unable to successfully attract paying customers, we will not realize the intended benefits of these marketing strategies and our ability to grow our revenue will be adversely affected.

We expect fluctuations in our financial results, making it difficult to project future results, and if we fail to meet the expectations of securities analysts or investors with respect to our results of operations, our stock price could decline.

Our results of operations have fluctuated in the past and are expected to fluctuate in the future due to a variety of factors, many of which are outside of our control. As a result, our past results may not be indicative of our future performance. In addition to the other risks described herein, factors that may affect our results of operations include the following:

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Any of these and other factors, or the cumulative effect of some of these factors, may cause our results of operations to vary significantly. For example, the full impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is unknown at this time, but could result in adverse changes in our results of operations for an unknown period of time as the virus and its related social and economic impacts spread.  If our quarterly results of operations fall below the expectations of investors and securities analysts who follow our stock, the price of our Class A common stock could decline substantially, and we could face costly lawsuits, including securities class action suits.

Seasonality may cause fluctuations in our sales and results of operations.

Historically, we have experienced seasonality in new customer bookings, as we typically we enter into a higher percentage of subscription agreements with new customers and renewals with existing customers in the fourth quarter of the year. We believe that this results from the procurement, budgeting, and deployment cycles of many of our customers, particularly our enterprise customers. We expect that this seasonality will continue to affect our bookings and our results of operations in the future, and might become more pronounced as we continue to target larger enterprise customers.

Downturns or upturns in our sales may not be immediately reflected in our financial position and results of operations.

Because we recognize the majority of our revenue ratably over the term of the subscription agreement, any decreases in new subscriptions or renewals in any one period may not be immediately reflected as a decrease in revenue for that period, but could negatively affect our revenue in future quarters. This also makes it difficult for us to rapidly increase our revenue through the sale of additional subscriptions in any period, as revenue is recognized over the term of the subscription agreement. In addition, fluctuations in monthly subscriptions based on usage could affect our revenue on a period-over-period basis. If our quarterly results of operations fall below the expectations of investors and securities analysts who follow our stock, the price of our Class A common stock would decline substantially, and we could face costly lawsuits, including securities class actions.

We target enterprise customers, and sales to these customers involve risks that may not be present or that are present to a lesser extent with sales to smaller entities.

We have a field sales team that targets enterprise customers. Sales to large customers involve risks that may not be present or that are present to a lesser extent with sales to smaller entities, such as longer sales cycles, more complex customer requirements, substantial upfront sales costs, and less predictability in completing some of our sales. For example, enterprise customers may require considerable time to evaluate and test our solutions and those of our competitors prior to making a purchase decision and placing an order. A number of factors influence the length and variability of our sales cycle, including the need to educate potential customers about the uses and benefits of our solutions, the discretionary nature of purchasing and budget cycles, and the competitive nature of evaluation and purchasing approval processes. As a result, the length of our sales cycle, from identification of the opportunity to deal closure, may vary significantly from customer to customer, with sales to large enterprises typically taking longer to complete. Moreover, large enterprise customers often begin to deploy our products on a limited basis, but nevertheless demand configuration, integration services and pricing negotiations, which increase our upfront investment in the sales effort with no guarantee that these customers will deploy our products widely enough across their organization to justify our substantial upfront investment.

If we fail to retain and motivate members of our management team or other key employees, or fail to attract additional qualified personnel to support our operations, our business and future growth prospects would be harmed.

Our success and future growth depend largely upon the continued services of our executive officers, particularly Olivier Pomel, our co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Alexis Lê-Quôc, our co-founder, President and Chief Technology Officer, and David Obstler, our Chief Financial Officer, as well as our other key employees in the areas of research and development and sales and marketing functions. From time to time, there may be changes in our executive management team or other key employees resulting from the hiring or departure of these personnel. Our executive officers and other key employees are employed on an at-will basis, which means that these personnel could terminate their employment with us at any time. The loss of one or more of our executive

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officers, or the failure by our executive team to effectively work with our employees and lead our company, could harm our business. We also are dependent on the continued service of our existing software engineers because of the complexity of our products and platform capabilities.

In addition, to execute our growth plan, we must attract and retain highly qualified personnel. Competition for these personnel is intense, especially for engineers experienced in designing and developing SaaS applications and experienced sales professionals. If we are unable to attract such personnel in cities where we are located, we may need to hire in other locations which may add to the complexity and costs of our business operations. From time to time, we have experienced, and we expect to continue to experience, difficulty in hiring and retaining employees with appropriate qualifications. Many of the companies with which we compete for experienced personnel have greater resources than we have. If we hire employees from competitors or other companies, their former employers may attempt to assert that these employees or we have breached their legal obligations, resulting in a diversion of our time and resources. In addition, prospective and existing employees often consider the value of the equity awards they receive in connection with their employment. If the perceived value of our equity awards declines, experiences significant volatility, or increases such that prospective employees believe there is limited upside to the value of our equity awards, it may adversely affect our ability to recruit and retain key employees. If we fail to attract new personnel or fail to retain and motivate our current personnel, our business and future growth prospects would be harmed.

If we fail to maintain and enhance our brand, our ability to expand our customer base will be impaired and our business, financial condition and results of operations may suffer.

We believe that maintaining and enhancing the Datadog brand is important to support the marketing and sale of our existing and future products to new customers and expand sales of our platform and products to existing customers. We also believe that the importance of brand recognition will increase as competition in our market increases. Successfully maintaining and enhancing our brand will depend largely on the effectiveness of our marketing efforts, our ability to provide reliable products that continue to meet the needs of our customers at competitive prices, our ability to maintain our customers’ trust, our ability to continue to develop new functionality and use cases, and our ability to successfully differentiate our products and platform capabilities from competitive products. Our brand promotion activities may not generate customer awareness or yield increased revenue, and even if they do, any increased revenue may not offset the expenses we incur in building our brand. If we fail to successfully promote and maintain our brand, our business, financial condition and results of operations may suffer.

If we cannot maintain our company culture as we grow, our success and our business and competitive position may be harmed.

We believe our culture has been a key contributor to our success to date and that the critical nature of the platform that we provide promotes a sense of greater purpose and fulfillment in our employees. Any failure to preserve our culture could negatively affect our ability to retain and recruit personnel, which is critical to our growth, and to effectively focus on and pursue our corporate objectives. As we grow and develop the infrastructure of a public company, we may find it difficult to maintain these important aspects of our culture. If we fail to maintain our company culture, our business and competitive position may be harmed.

If we fail to offer high-quality support, our reputation could suffer.

Our customers rely on our customer support personnel to resolve issues and realize the full benefits that our platform provides. High-quality support is also important for the renewal and expansion of our subscriptions with existing customers. The importance of our support function will increase as we expand our business and pursue new customers. If we do not help our customers quickly resolve issues and provide effective ongoing support, our ability to maintain and expand our subscriptions to existing and new customers could suffer, and our reputation with existing or potential customers could suffer.

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Acquisitions, strategic investments, partnerships, or alliances could be difficult to identify, pose integration challenges, divert the attention of management, disrupt our business, dilute stockholder value, and adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

We have in the past and may in the future seek to acquire or invest in businesses, joint ventures, products and platform capabilities, or technologies that we believe could complement or expand our services and platform capabilities, enhance our technical capabilities, or otherwise offer growth opportunities. Any such acquisition or investment may divert the attention of management and cause us to incur various expenses in identifying, investigating and pursuing suitable opportunities, whether or not the transactions are completed, and may result in unforeseen operating difficulties and expenditures. In particular, we may encounter difficulties assimilating or integrating the businesses, technologies, products and platform capabilities, personnel or operations of any acquired companies, particularly if the key personnel of an acquired company choose not to work for us, their software is not easily adapted to work with our platform, or we have difficulty retaining the customers of any acquired business due to changes in ownership, management or otherwise. These transactions may also disrupt our business, divert our resources, and require significant management attention that would otherwise be available for development of our existing business. Any such transactions that we are able to complete may not result in any synergies or other benefits we had expected to achieve, which could result in impairment charges that could be substantial. In addition, we may not be able to find and identify desirable acquisition targets or business opportunities or be successful in entering into an agreement with any particular strategic partner. These transactions could also result in dilutive issuances of equity securities or the incurrence of debt, which could adversely affect our results of operations. In addition, if the resulting business from such a transaction fails to meet our expectations, our business, financial condition and results of operations may be adversely affected or we may be exposed to unknown risks or liabilities.

Macroeconomic and Industry Risks

If we fail to adapt and respond effectively to rapidly changing technology, evolving industry standards, changing regulations, or to changing customer needs, requirements or preferences, our platform and products may become less competitive.

Our ability to attract new users and customers and increase revenue from existing customers depends in large part on our ability to enhance and improve our existing products, increase adoption and usage of our products, and introduce new products and capabilities. The market in which we compete is relatively new and subject to rapid technological change, evolving industry standards, and changing regulations, as well as changing customer needs, requirements and preferences. The success of our business will depend, in part, on our ability to adapt and respond effectively to these changes on a timely basis. If we were unable to enhance our products and platform capabilities that keep pace with rapid technological and regulatory change, or if new technologies emerge that are able to deliver competitive products at lower prices, more efficiently, more conveniently, or more securely than our products, our business, financial condition and results of operations could be adversely affected.

The success of our platform depends, in part, on its ability to be deployed in a self-service installation process. We currently offer more than 400 out-of-the-box integrations to assist customers in deploying Datadog, and we need to continuously modify and enhance our products to adapt to changes and innovation in existing and new technologies to maintain and grow our integrations. We expect that the number of integrations we will need to support will continue to expand as developers adopt new software platforms, and we will have to develop new versions of our products to work with those new platforms. This development effort may require significant engineering, sales and marketing resources, all of which would adversely affect our business. Any failure of our products to operate effectively with future infrastructure platforms and technologies could reduce the demand for our products. If we are unable to respond to these changes in a cost-effective manner, our products may become less marketable and less competitive or obsolete, and our business, financial condition and results of operations could be adversely affected.

The markets in which we participate are competitive, and if we do not compete effectively, our business, financial condition and results of operations could be harmed.

Our unified platform combines functionality from numerous traditional product categories, and hence we compete in each of these categories with home-grown and open-source technologies, as well as a number of different vendors. With respect to on-premise infrastructure monitoring, we compete with diversified technology companies and systems management vendors including IBM, Microsoft Corporation, Micro Focus International plc, BMC Software, Inc. and Computer Associates International, Inc. With respect to APM, we compete with Cisco Systems, Inc., New Relic, Inc. and Dynatrace Software Inc. With respect to log management, we compete with Splunk Inc. and Elastic N.V. With respect to cloud monitoring, we compete with native solutions from cloud providers such as AWS, GCP and Microsoft Azure. In addition, we may increasingly choose to allow these third-party hosting providers to offer our solutions directly through their customer marketplaces. An increasing number of sales through cloud provider marketplaces could reduce both the number of customers with whom we have direct commercial relationships as well as our profit margins on sales made through such marketplaces.

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With the introduction of new technologies and market entrants, we expect that the competitive environment will remain intense going forward. Some of our actual and potential competitors have been acquired by other larger enterprises and have made or may make acquisitions or may enter into partnerships or other strategic relationships that may provide more comprehensive offerings than they individually had offered or achieve greater economies of scale than us. In addition, new entrants not currently considered to be competitors may enter the market through acquisitions, partnerships or strategic relationships. As we look to market and sell our products and platform capabilities to potential customers with existing internal solutions, we must convince their internal stakeholders that our products and platform capabilities are superior to their current solutions.

We compete on the basis of a number of factors, including:

Our competitors vary in size and in the breadth and scope of the products offered. Many of our competitors and potential competitors have greater name recognition, longer operating histories, more established customer relationships and installed customer bases, larger marketing budgets and greater resources than we do. Further, other potential competitors not currently offering competitive solutions may expand their product or service offerings to compete with our products and platform capabilities, or our current and potential competitors may establish cooperative relationships among themselves or with third parties that may further enhance their resources and product offerings in our addressable market. Our competitors may be able to respond more quickly and effectively than we can to new or changing opportunities, technologies, standards, and customer requirements. An existing competitor or new entrant could introduce new technology that reduces demand for our products and platform capabilities. In addition to product and technology competition, we face pricing competition. Some of our competitors offer their solutions at a lower price, which has resulted in, and may continue to result in, pricing pressures.

For all of these reasons, we may not be able to compete successfully against our current or future competitors, and this competition could result in the failure of our platform to continue to achieve or maintain market acceptance, any of which would harm our business, results of operations, and financial condition.

The market for our solutions may develop more slowly or differently than we expect.

It is difficult to predict customer adoption rates and demand for our products, the entry of competitive products or the future growth rate and size of the cloud-based software and SaaS business software markets. The expansion of these markets depends on a number of factors, including: the cost, performance, and perceived value associated with cloud-based and SaaS business software as an alternative to legacy systems, as well as the ability of cloud-based software and SaaS providers to address heightened data security and privacy concerns. If we have a security incident or other cloud-based software and SaaS providers experience security incidents, loss of customer data, disruptions in delivery or other similar problems, which is an increasing focus of the public and investors in recent years, the market for these applications as a whole, including our platform and products, may be negatively affected. If cloud-based and SaaS business software does not continue to achieve market acceptance, or there is a reduction in demand caused by a lack of customer acceptance, technological challenges, weakening economic conditions, data security or privacy concerns, governmental regulation, competing technologies and products, or decreases in information technology spending or otherwise, the market for our platform and products might not continue to develop or might develop more slowly than we expect, which would adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.  

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Legal and Regulatory Risks

We typically provide service-level commitments under our subscription agreements. If we fail to meet these contractual commitments, we could be obligated to provide credits for future service or face subscription termination with refunds of prepaid amounts, which would lower our revenue and harm our business, financial condition and results of operations.

Our subscription agreements typically contain service-level commitments. If we are unable to meet the stated service-level commitments, including failure to meet the uptime and response time requirements under our customer subscription agreements, we may be contractually obligated to provide these customers with service credits which could significantly affect our revenue in the periods in which the failure occurs and the credits are applied. We could also face subscription terminations and a reduction in renewals, which could significantly affect both our current and future revenue. Any service-level failures could also damage our reputation, which could also adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.

Indemnity provisions in various agreements to which we are party potentially expose us to substantial liability for infringement, misappropriation or other violation of intellectual property rights, data protection and other losses.

Our agreements with our customers and other third parties may include indemnification provisions under which we agree to indemnify or otherwise be liable to them for losses suffered or incurred as a result of claims of infringement, misappropriation or other violation of intellectual property rights, data protection, damages caused by us to property or persons, or other liabilities relating to or arising from our software, services, platform, our acts or omissions under such agreements or other contractual obligations. Some of these indemnity agreements provide for uncapped liability and some indemnity provisions survive termination or expiration of the applicable agreement. Large indemnity payments could harm our business, financial condition and results of operations. Although we attempt to contractually limit our liability with respect to such indemnity obligations, we are not always successful and may still incur substantial liability related to them, and we may be required to cease use of certain functions of our platform or products as a result of any such claims. Any dispute with a customer or other third party with respect to such obligations could have adverse effects on our relationship with such customer or other third party and other existing or prospective customers, reduce demand for our products and services and adversely affect our business, financial conditions and results of operations. In addition, although we carry general liability insurance, our insurance may not be adequate to indemnify us for all liability that may be imposed or otherwise protect us from liabilities or damages with respect to claims alleging compromises of customer data, and any such coverage may not continue to be available to us on acceptable terms or at all.

We and our third-party service providers are subject to stringent and changing laws, regulations and standards, and contractual obligations related to data privacy and security. Actual or perceived failure by us or our third-party service providers to comply with such laws, regulations, standards, or contractual obligations could harm our business.

We have legal and contractual obligations regarding the protection of confidentiality and appropriate use of personal information, confidential information, and other proprietary information. We are subject to a variety of federal, state, local and international laws, directives, and regulations, and industry standards, relating to the collection, use, retention, security, disclosure, transfer and other processing of personal information. The regulatory framework for privacy and security issues worldwide is rapidly evolving and as a result implementation standards and enforcement practices are likely to remain uncertain for the foreseeable future.

Internationally, nearly every jurisdiction in which we operate has established its own data security and privacy legal framework with which we, our third-party service providers, or our customers must comply. The data protection landscape is currently unstable, resulting in possible significant operational costs for internal compliance and risk to our business. The European Economic Area, or EEA, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, collectively “Europe,” adopted the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, which contains numerous requirements and changes from previously existing law, including more robust obligations on data processors and heavier documentation requirements for data protection compliance programs by companies.

In addition, European data protection laws including the GDPR also generally prohibit the transfer of personal information from Europe to the United States and most other countries unless the parties to the transfer have established a legal basis for the transfer and implemented specific safeguards to protect the transferred personal information. One of the primary mechanisms allowing U.S. companies to import personal information from Europe in compliance with the GDPR has been certification to the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield and Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield frameworks administered by the U.S. Department of Commerce. However, the Court of Justice of the European Union, in its recent “Schrems II” ruling, invalidated the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield framework. The Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner also recently opined that the Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield is inadequate for transfers of data from Switzerland to the United States. Authorities in the United Kingdom may similarly invalidate use of the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield as mechanisms for lawful personal information transfers from the U.K. to the United States. Inability to import personal information from Europe to the United States may decrease demand for our products and services as our customers that are subject to the GDPR may seek alternatives that do not involve personal information transfers out of Europe.

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The Schrems II decision also raised questions about whether one of the primary alternatives to the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield, namely, the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses, or “SCCs,” can lawfully be used for personal information transfers from Europe to the United States or most other countries. At present, there are few, if any, viable alternatives to the SCCs. The European Commission recently proposed updates to the SCCs, and additional regulatory guidance has been released that seeks to imposes additional obligations on companies seeking to rely on the SCCs. As such, any transfers by us or our third-party service providers of personal information from Europe pursuant to SCCs may not comply with European data protection law, may increase our exposure to the GDPR’s heightened sanctions for violations of its cross-border data transfer restrictions, and may result in lower sales on our platform because of difficulty of establishing a lawful basis for personal information transfers out of Europe. While we have taken steps to mitigate the impact on us with respect to transfers of data, such as implementing SCCs, the efficacy and longevity of these transfer mechanisms remains uncertain. Moreover, as a result of the Schrems II decision, data exporters may now have an obligation to assess, analyze and verify on a case-by-case basis that personal information will be adequately protected in the country to which it is being exported, which increases the difficult of selling to European customers and may lead to longer sales cycles.

Further, the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union, often referred to as Brexit, has created uncertainty with regard to data protection regulation in the United Kingdom. In particular, it is unclear whether the transfer of personal information from the EU to the United Kingdom will in the future remain lawful under the GDPR. The United Kingdom-EU post-Brexit trade deal provides that transfers of personal information to the United Kingdom will not be treated as restricted transfers to a non-EU country for a period of up to six months from January 1, 2021. However, unless the EU Commission makes an “adequacy finding” with respect to the United Kingdom before the end of that transition period, from that date the United Kingdom will be a “third country” under the GDPR and transfers of personal information from the EU to the United Kingdom will require an “adequacy mechanism,” such as the SCCs.

In addition to the GDPR, the European Commission has another draft regulation in the approval process, known as the Regulation on Privacy and Electronic Communications, or ePrivacy Regulation, that would replace the current ePrivacy Directive. Originally planned to be adopted and implemented at the same time as the GDPR, the ePrivacy Regulation continues to be delayed. While the new legislation contains protections for those using communications services (for example, protections against online tracking technologies), the timing of its proposed enactment following the GDPR means that additional time and effort may need to be spent addressing differences between the ePrivacy Regulation and the GDPR. New rules related to the ePrivacy Regulation may negatively impact our platform and products and our relationships with our customers. Following Brexit, it is unclear whether, and if so how, the United Kingdom will introduce any or all of the ePrivacy Regulation into law in the United Kingdom.

Complying with the GDPR and the ePrivacy Regulation, when it becomes effective, may cause us to incur substantial operational costs or require us to change our business practices. Despite our efforts to bring practices into compliance before the effective date of the GDPR and ePrivacy Regulation, we may not be successful in our efforts to achieve compliance either due to internal or external factors such as resource allocation limitations or a lack of vendor cooperation. Non-compliance could result in proceedings against us by governmental entities, customers, data subjects or others. We may also experience difficulty retaining or obtaining new European or multi-national customers due to the legal requirements, compliance cost, potential risk exposure, and uncertainty for these entities, and we may experience significantly increased liability with respect to these customers pursuant to the terms set forth in our engagements with them. While we utilize a data center in the EEA to maintain certain customer data (which may include personal data) originating from the EEA, we may find it necessary to establish additional systems and processes to maintain such data in the EEA, which may involve substantial expense and distraction from other aspects of our business.

Additionally, other countries outside of Europe have enacted or are considering enacting similar cross-border data transfer restrictions and laws requiring local data residency, and strict limitations to the processing of personal information, which could increase the cost and complexity of delivering our services and operating our business. In the past year, for example, Brazil enacted the General Data Protection Law, New Zealand enacted the New Zealand Privacy Act, China released its draft Personal Information Protection Law, and Canada introduced the Digital Charter Implementation Act.

Domestic laws in this area are also complex and developing rapidly. In the United States, rules and regulations governing data privacy and security include those promulgated under the authority of the Federal Trade Commission Act, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the California Consumer Privacy Act, or CCPA, and other state and federal laws relating to privacy and data security. Many state legislatures have adopted legislation that regulates how businesses operate online, including measures relating to privacy, data security, and data breaches. Laws in all 50 states require businesses to provide notice to customers whose personal information has been disclosed as a result of a data breach. The laws are not consistent, and compliance in the event of a widespread data breach is costly. States are also constantly amending existing laws, requiring attention to frequently changing regulatory requirements.

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The CCPA, which became effective on January 1, 2020, gives California residents expanded rights to access and delete their personal information, opt out of the sale of personal information, and receive detailed information about how their personal information is used. The CCPA provides a private right of action and statutory damages for data breaches and may increase our compliance costs and potential liability with respect to other personal information we collect about California residents. In addition, the California Privacy Rights Act, or the CPRA, which amends the CCPA, was approved by California voters on November 3, 2020 and is scheduled to go into effect on January 1, 2023. The CPRA would, among other things, amend the CCPA to give California residents the ability to limit the use of their sensitive information, provide additional penalties for CPRA violations concerning California residents under the age of 16, and establish a new California Privacy Protection Agency to implement and enforce the law. Both the CCPA and CPRA could impact our business activities depending on how they are interpreted.  These laws exemplify the vulnerability of our business not only to security incidents but also to the evolving regulatory environment related to personal information and protected health information. Some observers have noted that the CCPA and CPRA could mark the beginning of a trend toward more stringent privacy legislation in the United States, which could increase our potential liability and adversely affect our business, the results of our operations, and our financial condition.

Because the interpretation and application of many privacy and data protection laws and regulations, along with contractually imposed industry standards, are uncertain, it is possible that they may be interpreted and applied in a manner that is inconsistent with our existing data management practices or the features of our products and platform capabilities. If so, in addition to the possibility of fines, lawsuits, regulatory investigations, imprisonment of company officials and public censure, other claims and penalties, significant costs for remediation and damage to our reputation, we could be required to fundamentally change our business activities and practices or modify our products and platform capabilities, any of which could have an adverse effect on our business. Any inability to adequately address privacy and security concerns, even if unfounded, or comply with applicable privacy and data security laws, regulations, or contractual obligations, could result in additional cost and liability to us, damage our reputation, inhibit sales, and adversely affect our business. Furthermore, the costs of compliance with, and other burdens imposed by, the laws, regulations, and contractual obligations that are applicable to the businesses of our customers may limit the use and adoption of, and reduce the overall demand for, our products. Privacy and data security concerns, whether valid or not valid, may inhibit market adoption of our products, particularly in certain industries and foreign countries. If we are not able to adjust to these changing laws, regulations, and contractual obligations, our business may be harmed.

We publicly post our policies and other documentation regarding our practices concerning the collection, processing, use, transfer, and disclosure of data. Although we endeavor to comply with our published policies and documentation, we may at times fail to do so or be alleged to have failed to do so. The publication of our policies and other documentation that provide promises and assurances about privacy and security can subject us to potential state and federal action if they are found to be deceptive, unfair, or misrepresentative of our actual practices. Any failure by us, our third-party service providers or other parties with whom we do business to comply with our policies or other documentation could result in proceedings against us by governmental entities, private parties or others. We are or may also be subject to the terms of our external and internal privacy and security policies, codes, representations, certifications, industry standards, publications and frameworks and contractual obligations to third parties related to privacy, information security, including contractual obligations to indemnify and hold harmless third parties from the costs or consequences of non-compliance with data protection laws or other obligations.

We are subject to anti-corruption, anti-bribery, anti-money laundering, and similar laws, and non-compliance with such laws can subject us to criminal or civil liability and harm our business, financial condition and results of operations.

We are subject to the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, or FCPA, U.S. domestic bribery laws, the UK Bribery Act, and other anti-corruption and anti-money laundering laws in the countries in which we conduct activities. Anti-corruption and anti-bribery laws have been enforced aggressively in recent years and are interpreted broadly to generally prohibit companies, their employees and their third-party intermediaries from authorizing, offering, or providing, directly or indirectly, improper payments or benefits to recipients in the public or private sector. As we increase our international sales and business and sales to the public sector, we may engage with business partners and third-party intermediaries to market our products and to obtain necessary permits, licenses, and other regulatory approvals. In addition, we or our third-party intermediaries may have direct or indirect interactions with officials and employees of government agencies or state-owned or affiliated entities. We can be held liable for the corrupt or other illegal activities of these third-party intermediaries, our employees, representatives, contractors, partners and agents, even if we do not explicitly authorize such activities.

While we have policies and procedures to address compliance with such laws, we cannot assure you that all of our employees and agents will not take actions in violation of our policies and applicable law, for which we may be ultimately held responsible. As we increase our international sales and business, our risks under these laws may increase.

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Detecting, investigating, and resolving actual or alleged violations of anti-corruption laws can require a significant diversion of time, resources, and attention from senior management. In addition, noncompliance with anti-corruption, anti-bribery, or anti-money laundering laws could subject us to whistleblower complaints, investigations, sanctions, settlements, prosecution, enforcement actions, fines, damages, other civil or criminal penalties or injunctions, suspension or debarment from contracting with certain persons, reputational harm, adverse media coverage, and other collateral consequences. If any subpoenas or investigations are launched, or governmental or other sanctions are imposed, or if we do not prevail in any possible civil or criminal proceeding, our business, financial condition and results of operations could be harmed. In addition, responding to any action will likely result in a materially significant diversion of management’s attention and resources and significant defense costs and other professional fees.

Sales to government entities and highly regulated organizations are subject to a number of challenges and risks.

We may sell to U.S. federal, state, and local, as well as foreign, governmental agency customers, as well as to customers in highly regulated industries such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare. Sales to such entities are subject to a number of challenges and risks. Selling to such entities can be highly competitive, expensive, and time-consuming, often requiring significant upfront time and expense without any assurance that these efforts will generate a sale. Government contracting requirements may change and in doing so restrict our ability to sell into the government sector until we have attained the revised certification. Government demand and payment for our products are affected by public sector budgetary cycles and funding authorizations, with funding reductions or delays adversely affecting public sector demand for our products.

Further, governmental and highly regulated entities may demand contract terms that differ from our standard arrangements and are less favorable than terms agreed with private sector customers. Such entities may have statutory, contractual, or other legal rights to terminate contracts with us or our partners for convenience or for other reasons. Any such termination may adversely affect our ability to contract with other government customers as well as our reputation, business, financial condition and results of operations.

We are subject to governmental export and import controls that could impair our ability to compete in international markets or subject us to liability if we violate the controls.

Our platform and products are subject to U.S. export controls, including the Export Administration Regulations, and we incorporate encryption technology into certain of our products. These encryption products and the underlying technology may be exported outside of the United States only with the required export authorizations, including by license, a license exception, or other appropriate government authorizations, including the filing of an encryption classification request or self-classification report.

Furthermore, our activities are subject to U.S. economic sanctions laws and regulations administered by the Office of Foreign Assets Control that prohibit the shipment of most products and services to embargoed jurisdictions or sanctioned parties without the required export authorizations. Obtaining the necessary export license or other authorization for a particular sale may be time-consuming and may result in the delay or loss of sales opportunities. Violations of U.S. sanctions or export control regulations can result in significant fines or penalties and possible incarceration for responsible employees and managers.

If our channel partners fail to obtain appropriate import, export, or re-export licenses or permits, we may also be adversely affected through reputational harm, as well as other negative consequences, including government investigations and penalties.

Also, various countries, in addition to the United States, regulate the import and export of certain encryption and other technology, including import and export licensing requirements, and have enacted laws that could limit our ability to distribute our products or could limit our end-customers’ ability to implement our products in those countries. Changes in our products or future changes in export and import regulations may create delays in the introduction of our platform in international markets, prevent our end-customers with international operations from deploying our platform globally or, in some cases, prevent the export or import of our products to certain countries, governments, or persons altogether. From time to time, various governmental agencies have proposed additional regulation of encryption technology. Any change in export or import regulations, economic sanctions or related legislation, increased export and import controls, or change in the countries, governments, persons, or technologies targeted by such regulations, could result in decreased use of our platform by, or in our decreased ability to export or sell our products to, existing or potential end-customers with international operations. Any decreased use of our platform or limitation on our ability to export or sell our products would adversely affect our business, results of operations, and growth prospects.

Any future litigation against us could be costly and time-consuming to defend.

We may become subject to legal proceedings and claims that arise in the ordinary course of business, such as claims brought by our customers in connection with commercial disputes or employment claims made by our current or former employees. Litigation

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might result in substantial costs and may divert management’s attention and resources, which might seriously harm our business, financial condition and results of operations. Insurance might not cover such claims, might not provide sufficient payments to cover all the costs to resolve one or more such claims, and might not continue to be available on terms acceptable to us. A claim brought against us that is uninsured or underinsured could result in unanticipated costs, potentially harming our business, financial position and results of operations.

We could be required to collect additional sales taxes or be subject to other tax liabilities that may increase the costs our clients would have to pay for our products and adversely affect our results of operations.

An increasing number of states have considered or adopted laws that attempt to impose tax collection obligations on out-of-state companies. Additionally, the Supreme Court of the United States recently ruled in South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc. et al, or Wayfair, that online sellers can be required to collect sales and use tax despite not having a physical presence in the buyer’s state. In response to Wayfair, or otherwise, states or local governments may adopt, or begin to enforce, laws requiring us to calculate, collect, and remit taxes on sales in their jurisdictions. A successful assertion by one or more states requiring us to collect taxes where we presently do not do so, or to collect more taxes in a jurisdiction in which we currently do collect some taxes, could result in substantial tax liabilities, including taxes on past sales, as well as penalties and interest. The imposition by state governments or local governments of sales tax collection obligations on out-of-state sellers could also create additional administrative burdens for us, put us at a competitive disadvantage if they do not impose similar obligations on our competitors, and decrease our future sales, which could have a material adverse effect on our business and results of operations.

Our ability to use our net operating losses to offset future taxable income may be subject to certain limitations.

As of December 31, 2020, we had NOL carryforwards for federal and state income tax purposes of approximately $263.2 million and $177.5 million, respectively, which may be available to offset taxable income in the future, and which expire in various years beginning in 2031 for federal purposes and 2028 for state purposes if not utilized. A lack of future taxable income would adversely affect our ability to utilize these NOLs before they expire. In general, under Section 382 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, as amended, or the Code, a corporation that undergoes an “ownership change” (as defined under Section 382 of the Code and applicable Treasury Regulations) is subject to limitations on its ability to utilize its pre-change NOLs to offset future taxable income. We may experience a future ownership change under Section 382 of the Code that could affect our ability to utilize the NOLs to offset our income. Furthermore, our ability to utilize NOLs of companies that we have acquired or may acquire in the future may be subject to limitations. There is also a risk that due to regulatory changes, such as suspensions on the use of NOLs or other unforeseen reasons, our existing NOLs could expire or otherwise be unavailable to reduce future income tax liabilities, including for state tax purposes. For these reasons, we may not be able to utilize a material portion of the NOLs reflected on our balance sheets, even if we attain profitability, which could potentially result in increased future tax liability to us and could adversely affect our operating results and financial condition.

Changes in our effective tax rate or tax liability may have an adverse effect on our results of operations.

Our effective tax rate could increase due to several factors, including:

Any of these developments could adversely affect our results of operations.

Our reported financial results may be adversely affected by changes in accounting principles generally accepted in the United States.

U.S. generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP, are subject to interpretation by the Financial Accounting Standards Board, the SEC and various bodies formed to promulgate and interpret applicable accounting principles. A change in these principles

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or interpretations could have a significant effect on our reported results of operations and could affect the reporting of transactions already completed before the announcement of a change.

If our estimates or judgments relating to our critical accounting policies prove to be incorrect, our results of operations could be adversely affected.

The preparation of financial statements in conformity with GAAP requires management to make estimates and assumptions that affect the amounts reported in our consolidated financial statements and accompanying notes. We base our estimates on historical experience and on various other assumptions that we believe to be reasonable under the circumstances, as described in Note 2 in the Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements included in “Part II, Item 8. Financial Statements and Supplementary Data” of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. The results of these estimates form the basis for making judgments about the carrying values of assets, liabilities and equity, and the amount of revenue and expenses that are not readily apparent from other sources. Significant estimates and judgments involve revenue recognition, deferred contract costs, and the valuation of our stock-based compensation awards, among others. Our results of operations may be adversely affected if our assumptions change or if actual circumstances differ from those in our assumptions, which could cause our results of operations to fall below the expectations of securities analysts and investors, resulting in a decline in the market price of our Class A common stock.

Risks Related to Intellectual Property

Any failure to obtain, maintain, protect or enforce our intellectual property and proprietary rights could impair our ability to protect our proprietary technology and our brand.

Our success depends to a significant degree on our ability to obtain, maintain, protect and enforce our intellectual property rights, including our proprietary technology, know-how and our brand. We rely on a combination of trademarks, trade secret laws, patents, copyrights, service marks, contractual restrictions, and other intellectual property laws and confidentiality procedures to establish and protect our proprietary rights. However, the steps we take to obtain, maintain, protect and enforce our intellectual property rights may be inadequate. We will not be able to protect our intellectual property rights if we are unable to enforce our rights or if we do not detect unauthorized use of our intellectual property rights. If we fail to protect our intellectual property rights adequately, our competitors may gain access to our proprietary technology and develop and commercialize substantially identical products, services or technologies, our business, financial condition, results of operations or prospects may be harmed. In addition, defending our intellectual property rights might entail significant expense. Any patents, trademarks, or other intellectual property rights that we have or may obtain may be challenged or circumvented by others or invalidated or held unenforceable through administrative process, including re-examination, inter partes review, interference and derivation proceedings and equivalent proceedings in foreign jurisdictions (e.g., opposition proceedings) or litigation. Despite our pending U.S. patent applications, there can be no assurance that our patent applications will result in issued patents. Even if we continue to seek patent protection in the future, we may be unable to obtain or maintain patent protection for our technology. In addition, any patents issued from pending or future patent applications or licensed to us in the future may not provide us with competitive advantages, or may be successfully challenged by third parties. There may be issued patents of which we are not aware, held by third parties that, if found to be valid and enforceable, could be alleged to be infringed by our current or future technologies or products. There also may be pending patent applications of which we are not aware that may result in issued patents, which could be alleged to be infringed by our current or future technologies or products. Furthermore, legal standards relating to the validity, enforceability, and scope of protection of intellectual property rights are uncertain. Despite our precautions, it may be possible for unauthorized third parties to copy our products and platform capabilities and use information that we regard as proprietary to create products that compete with ours. Patent, trademark, copyright, and trade secret protection may not be available to us in every country in which our products are available. For example, as we have expanded internationally, we have been unable to register and obtain the right to use the Datadog trademark in certain jurisdictions, including in the EU, and as we continue to expand, we may face similar issues in other jurisdictions. The value of our intellectual property could diminish if others assert rights in or ownership of our trademarks and other intellectual property rights, or trademarks that are similar to our trademarks. We may be unable to successfully resolve these types of conflicts to our satisfaction. In some cases, litigation or other actions may be necessary to protect or enforce our trademarks and other intellectual property rights. Furthermore, third parties may assert intellectual property claims against us, and we may be subject to liability, required to enter into costly license agreements, or required to rebrand our products and/or prevented from selling some of our products if third parties successfully oppose or challenge our trademarks or successfully claim that we infringe, misappropriate or otherwise violate their trademarks or other intellectual property rights. In addition, the laws of some foreign countries may not be as protective of intellectual property rights as those in the United States, and mechanisms for enforcement of intellectual property rights may be inadequate. As we expand our international activities, our exposure to unauthorized copying and use of our products and platform capabilities and proprietary information will likely increase. Moreover, policing unauthorized use of our technologies, trade secrets, and intellectual property may be difficult, expensive, and time-consuming, particularly in foreign countries where the laws may not be as protective of intellectual property rights as those in the United States and where mechanisms for enforcement of intellectual property rights may be weak.

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Accordingly, despite our efforts, we may be unable to prevent third parties from infringing upon, misappropriating or otherwise violating our intellectual property rights.

We enter into confidentiality and invention assignment agreements with our employees and consultants and enter into confidentiality agreements with other third parties, including suppliers and other partners. However, we cannot guarantee that we have entered into such agreements with each party that has or may have had access to our proprietary information, know-how and trade secrets. Moreover, no assurance can be given that these agreements will be effective in controlling access to, distribution, use, misuse, misappropriation, reverse engineering or disclosure of our proprietary information, know-how and trade secrets. Further, these agreements may not prevent our competitors from independently developing technologies that are substantially equivalent or superior to our products and platform capabilities. These agreements may be breached, and we may not have adequate remedies for any such breach.

In order to protect our intellectual property rights, we may be required to spend significant resources to monitor and protect our intellectual property rights. Litigation may be necessary in the future to enforce our intellectual property rights and to protect our trade secrets. Litigation brought to protect and enforce our intellectual property rights could be costly, time-consuming, and distracting to management, and could result in the impairment or loss of portions of our intellectual property. Further, our efforts to enforce our intellectual property rights may be met with defenses, counterclaims, and countersuits attacking the validity and enforceability of our intellectual property rights, and if such defenses, counterclaims or countersuits are successful, we could lose valuable intellectual property rights. Our inability to protect our proprietary technology against unauthorized copying or use, as well as any costly litigation or diversion of our management’s attention and resources, could delay further sales or the implementation of our products and platform capabilities, impair the functionality of our products and platform capabilities, delay introductions of new solutions, result in our substituting inferior or more costly technologies into our products, or injure our reputation.

We may become subject to intellectual property disputes, which are costly and may subject us to significant liability and increased costs of doing business.

We may become subject to intellectual property disputes. Our success depends, in part, on our ability to develop and commercialize our products and services without infringing, misappropriating or otherwise violating the intellectual property rights of third parties. However, we may not be aware that our products or services are infringing, misappropriating or otherwise violating third-party intellectual property rights and such third parties may bring claims alleging such infringement, misappropriation or violation. Lawsuits are time-consuming and expensive to resolve and they divert management’s time and attention. The software industry is characterized by the existence of a large number of patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, and other intellectual and proprietary rights. Companies in the software industry are often required to defend against litigation claims based on allegations of infringement, misappropriation or other violations of intellectual property rights. Our technologies may not be able to withstand any third-party claims against their use. In addition, many companies have the capability to dedicate substantially greater resources to enforce their intellectual property rights and to defend claims that may be brought against them. We do not currently have a large patent portfolio, which could prevent us from deterring patent infringement claims through our own patent portfolio, and our competitors and others may now and in the future have significantly larger and more mature patent portfolios than we have. Any litigation may also involve patent holding companies or other adverse patent owners that have no relevant product revenue, and therefore, our patent applications may provide little or no deterrence as we would not be able to assert them against such entities or individuals. If a third party is able to obtain an injunction preventing us from accessing such third-party intellectual property rights, or if we cannot license or develop alternative technology for any infringing aspect of our business, we would be forced to limit or stop sales of our products and platform capabilities or cease business activities related to such intellectual property. Although we carry general liability insurance, our insurance may not cover potential claims of this type or may not be adequate to indemnify us for all liability that may be imposed. We cannot predict the outcome of lawsuits and cannot ensure that the results of any such actions will not have an adverse effect on our business, financial condition or results of operations. Any intellectual property litigation to which we might become a party, or for which we are required to provide indemnification, may require us to do one or more of the following:

Even if the claims do not result in litigation or are resolved in our favor, these claims, and the time and resources necessary to resolve them, could divert the resources of our management and harm our business and operating results. Moreover, there could be public announcements of the results of hearings, motions or other interim proceedings or developments and if securities analysts or investors perceive these results to be negative, it could have a substantial adverse effect on the price of our common stock. We expect

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that the occurrence of infringement claims is likely to grow as the market for our platform and products grows. Accordingly, our exposure to damages resulting from infringement claims could increase and this could further exhaust our financial and management resources.

We use open source software in our products, which could negatively affect our ability to sell our services or subject us to litigation or other actions.

We use open source software in our products and we expect to continue to incorporate open source software in our services in the future. Few of the licenses applicable to open source software have been interpreted by courts, and there is a risk that these licenses could be construed in a manner that could impose unanticipated conditions or restrictions on our ability to commercialize our products. Moreover, we cannot ensure that we have not incorporated additional open source software in our software in a manner that is inconsistent with the terms of the applicable license or our current policies and procedures. If we fail to comply with these licenses, we may be subject to certain requirements, including requirements that we offer our solutions that incorporate the open source software for no cost, that we make available source code for modifications or derivative works we create based upon, incorporating or using the open source software and that we license such modifications or derivative works under the terms of applicable open source licenses. If an author or other third party that distributes such open source software were to allege that we had not complied with the conditions of one or more of these licenses, we could be required to incur significant legal expenses defending against such allegations and could be subject to significant damages, enjoined from the sale of our products that contained the open source software and required to comply with onerous conditions or restrictions on these products, which could disrupt the distribution and sale of these products. From time to time, there have been claims challenging the ownership rights in open source software against companies that incorporate it into their products and the licensors of such open source software provide no warranties or indemnities with respect to such claims. As a result, we and our customers could be subject to lawsuits by parties claiming ownership of what we believe to be open source software. Litigation could be costly for us to defend, have a negative effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations, or require us to devote additional research and development resources to change our products. In addition, although we employ open source software license screening measures, if we were to combine our proprietary software products with open source software in a certain manner we could, under certain open source licenses, be required to release the source code of our proprietary software products. Some open source projects have known vulnerabilities and architectural instabilities and are provided on an “as-is” basis which, if not properly addressed, could negatively affect the performance of our product. If we inappropriately use or incorporate open source software subject to certain types of open source licenses that challenge the proprietary nature of our products, we may be required to re-engineer such products, discontinue the sale of such products or take other remedial actions.

Risks Associated with our International Operations

Our current operations are international in scope, and we plan further geographic expansion, creating a variety of operational challenges.

A component of our growth strategy involves the further expansion of our operations and customer base internationally. Revenue, as determined based on the billing address of our customers, from regions outside of North America was 25% for the year ended December 31, 2020. Beyond North America, we now have sales presence internationally, including in Dublin, Paris, London, Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, Sydney and Amsterdam. We are continuing to adapt to and develop strategies to address international markets, but there is no guarantee that such efforts will have the desired effect. For example, we anticipate that we will need to establish relationships with new partners in order to expand into certain countries, and if we fail to identify, establish and maintain such relationships, we may be unable to execute on our expansion plans. As of December 31, 2020, approximately 37% of our full-time employees were located outside of the United States, 42% of whom were located in France. We expect that our international activities will continue to grow for the foreseeable future as we continue to pursue opportunities in existing and new international markets, which will require significant dedication of management attention and financial resources.

Our current and future international business and operations involve a variety of risks, including:

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If we invest substantial time and resources to further expand our international operations and are unable to do so successfully and in a timely manner, our business and results of operations will suffer.

We are exposed to fluctuations in currency exchange rates, which could negatively affect our results of operations.

Our sales contracts are denominated in U.S. dollars, and therefore, our revenue is not subject to foreign currency risk. However, a strengthening of the U.S. dollar could increase the real cost of our products and platform capabilities to our customers outside of the United States, which could adversely affect our results of operations. In addition, an increasing portion of our operating expenses are incurred outside the United States. These operating expenses are denominated in foreign currencies and are subject to fluctuations due to changes in foreign currency exchange rates. If we are not able to successfully hedge against the risks associated with currency fluctuations, our results of operations could be adversely affected.

Our international operations may subject us to potential adverse tax consequences.

We are expanding our international operations to better support our growth into international markets. Our corporate structure and associated transfer pricing policies contemplate future growth in international markets, and consider the functions, risks, and assets of the various entities involved in intercompany transactions. The amount of taxes we pay in different jurisdictions may depend on the application of the tax laws of the various jurisdictions, including the United States, to our international business activities, changes in tax rates, new or revised tax laws or interpretations of existing tax laws and policies, and our ability to operate our business in a manner consistent with our corporate structure and intercompany arrangements. The taxing authorities of the jurisdictions in which we operate may challenge our methodologies for pricing intercompany transactions pursuant to our intercompany arrangements or disagree with our determinations as to the income and expenses attributable to specific jurisdictions. If such a challenge or disagreement were to occur, and our position was not sustained, we could be required to pay additional taxes,

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interest, and penalties, which could result in one-time tax charges, higher effective tax rates, reduced cash flows and lower overall profitability of our operations. Our financial statements could fail to reflect adequate reserves to cover such a contingency.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, or the Tax Act, makes broad and complex changes to the U.S. tax code including, among other things, changes to U.S. federal tax rates, imposes additional limitations on the deductibility of interest, has both positive and negative changes to the utilization of future net operating loss, or NOL, carryforwards, allows for the expensing of certain capital expenditures, and puts into effect the migration from a “worldwide” system of taxation to a territorial system.

Risks Related to Ownership of Our Class A Common Stock

Our stock price may be volatile, and the value of our Class A common stock may decline.

The market price of our Class A common stock may be highly volatile and may fluctuate or decline substantially as a result of a variety of factors, some of which are beyond our control, including:

Broad market and industry fluctuations, as well as general economic, political, regulatory, and market conditions, including those related to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, may also negatively impact the market price of our Class A common stock. The full impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is unknown at this time, but could result in material adverse changes in our results of operations for an unknown period of time as the virus and its related political, social and economic impacts spread.  In addition, technology stocks have historically experienced high levels of volatility. In the past, companies that have experienced volatility in the market price of their securities have been subject to securities class action litigation. We may be the target of this type of litigation in the future, which could result in substantial expenses and divert our management’s attention.

The dual class structure of our common stock has the effect of concentrating voting control with holders of our Class B common stock, including our executive officers, directors and their affiliates, which will limit the ability of holders of our Class A common stock to influence the outcome of important transactions.

Our Class B common stock has ten votes per share and our Class A common stock has one vote per share. As of December 31, 2020, our outstanding shares of Class B common stock represented approximately 80% of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock. As a result, the holders of our Class B common stock, which includes our directors, executive officers and their affiliates, will be able to exercise considerable influence over matters requiring stockholder approval, including the election of directors and approval of significant corporate transactions, such as a merger or other sale of our company or our assets, even if their stock holdings represent less than 50% of the outstanding shares of our capital stock. This concentration of ownership will limit the ability of other stockholders to influence corporate matters and may cause us to make strategic decisions that could involve risks to holders of our Class A common stock or that may not be aligned with the interests of holders of our Class A common stock. This control may adversely affect the market price of our Class A common stock.

Further, future transfers by holders of our Class B common stock will generally result in those shares converting into shares of our Class A common stock, subject to limited exceptions, such as certain transfers effected for tax or estate planning purposes. The

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conversion of shares of our Class B common stock into shares of our Class A common stock will have the effect, over time, of increasing the relative voting power of those holders of Class B common stock who retain their shares in the long term.

We cannot predict the impact our dual class structure may have on the market price of our Class A common stock.

We cannot predict whether our dual class structure, combined with the concentrated control of our stockholders who held our capital stock prior to the completion of our initial public offering, or IPO, including our executive officers, employees and directors and their affiliates, will result in a lower or more volatile market price of our Class A common stock or in adverse publicity or other adverse consequences. For example, certain index providers have announced restrictions on including companies with multiple class share structures in certain of their indexes. For example, in July 2017, FTSE Russell and Standard & Poor’s announced that they would cease to allow most newly public companies utilizing dual or multi-class capital structures to be included in their indices. Under the announced policies, our dual class capital structure would make us ineligible for inclusion in any of these indices. Given the sustained flow of investment funds into passive strategies that seek to track certain indexes, exclusion from stock indexes would likely preclude investment by many of these funds and could make our Class A common stock less attractive to other investors. As a result, the market price of our Class A common stock could be adversely affected.

An active public trading market for our Class A common stock may not develop or be sustained.

Prior to the closing of our IPO in September 2019, no public market for our Class A common stock existed. An active public trading market for our Class A common stock may not continue to develop or, if further developed, it may not be sustained. The lack of an active market may impair the ability of holders of our Class A common stock to sell their shares at the time they wish to sell them or at a price that the holders of our Class A common stock consider reasonable. The lack of an active market may also reduce the fair value of shares of our Class A common stock. An inactive market may also impair our ability to raise capital to continue to fund operations by selling shares and may impair our ability to acquire other companies or technologies by using our shares as consideration.

Future sales of our Class A common stock in the public market could cause the market price of our Class A common stock to decline.

Sales of a substantial number of shares of our Class A common stock in the public market, or the perception that these sales might occur, could depress the market price of our Class A common stock and could impair our ability to raise capital through the sale of additional equity securities. Many of our stockholders who held our capital stock prior to the completion of our IPO have substantial unrecognized gains on the value of the equity they hold based upon the price at which shares were sold in our IPO, and therefore they may take steps to sell their shares or otherwise secure the unrecognized gains on those shares. We are unable to predict the timing of or the effect that such sales may have on the prevailing market price of our Class A common stock.

We have registered all of the shares of Class A common stock and Class B common stock issuable upon exercise of outstanding options or other equity incentives we may grant in the future, for public resale under the Securities Act. The shares of Class A common stock and Class B common stock will become eligible for sale in the public market to the extent such options are exercised, subject to compliance with applicable securities laws.

Further, as of December 31, 2020, holders of a substantial number of shares had rights, subject to certain conditions, to require us to file registration statements covering the sale of their shares or to include their shares in registration statements that we may file for ourselves or other stockholders.

Our issuance of additional capital stock in connection with financings, acquisitions, investments, our equity incentive plans or otherwise will dilute all other stockholders.

We expect to issue additional capital stock in the future that will result in dilution to all other stockholders. We expect to grant equity awards to employees, directors and consultants under our equity incentive plans. We may also raise capital through equity financings in the future. As part of our business strategy, we have and may continue to acquire or make investments in companies, products or technologies and issue equity securities to pay for any such acquisition or investment. Any such issuances of additional capital stock may cause stockholders to experience significant dilution of their ownership interests and the per share value of our Class A common stock to decline. Furthermore, if we issue additional equity or convertible debt securities, the new equity securities could have rights senior to those of our common stock. For example, if we elect to settle our conversion obligation under our 0.125% Convertible Senior Notes due 2025, or our 2025 Notes, in shares of our Class A common stock or a combination of cash and shares of our Class A common stock, the issuance of such Class A common stock may dilute the ownership interests of our stockholders and sales in the public market could adversely affect prevailing market prices.

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If securities or industry analysts do not publish research or publish unfavorable or inaccurate research about our business, or if we fail to meet or significantly exceed our publicly announced financial guidance or the expectations of analysts or public investors, the market price and trading volume of our Class A common stock could decline.

The market price and trading volume of our Class A common stock will be heavily influenced by the way analysts interpret our financial information and other disclosures. We do not have control over these analysts. If few securities analysts commence coverage of us, or if industry analysts cease coverage of us, our stock price would be negatively affected. If securities or industry analysts do not publish research or reports about our business, downgrade our Class A common stock, or publish negative reports about our business, our stock price would likely decline. In addition, the stock prices of many companies in the technology industry have declined significantly after those companies have failed to meet, or significantly exceed, the financial guidance publicly announced by those companies or the expectations of analysts.  If our financial results fail to meet, or significantly exceed, our announced guidance or the expectations or analysts or public investors, analysts could downgrade or Class A common stock or publish unfavorable research on us.  If one or more of these analysts cease coverage of us or fail to publish reports on us regularly, demand for our Class A common stock could decrease, which might cause our stock price to decline and could decrease the trading volume of our Class A common stock.

We do not intend to pay dividends for the foreseeable future.

We have never declared or paid any cash dividends on our capital stock, and we do not intend to pay any cash dividends in the foreseeable future. Any determination to pay dividends in the future will be at the discretion of our board of directors. Accordingly, holders of our Class A common stock may need to rely on sales of their holdings of Class A common stock after price appreciation, which may never occur, as the only way to realize any future gains on their investment.

We will continue to incur increased costs as a result of operating as a public company, and our management will be required to continue to devote substantial time to compliance with our public company responsibilities and corporate governance practices.

We have incurred significant legal, accounting, insurance, and other expenses as a public company, which we expect to further increase because we are no longer an “emerging growth company.” The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the listing requirements of the Nasdaq Global Select Market and other applicable securities rules and regulations impose various requirements on public companies. Our management and other personnel devote a substantial amount of time to compliance with these requirements. These rules and regulations contribute to increased legal and financial compliance costs and make some activities more time-consuming and costly.

As a result of being a public company, we are obligated to develop and maintain proper and effective internal controls over financial reporting, and any failure to maintain the adequacy of these internal controls may adversely affect investor confidence in our company and, as a result, the value of our Class A common stock.

We are required, pursuant to Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, to furnish a report by management on, among other things, the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting for the fiscal year ending December 31, 2020. This assessment will need to include disclosure of any material weaknesses identified by our management in our internal control over financial reporting. In addition, our independent registered public accounting firm is required to attest to the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting.  Our compliance with Section 404 requires that we incur substantial expenses and expend significant management efforts. We have hired , and need to continue to hire, additional accounting and financial staff with appropriate public company experience and technical accounting knowledge to comply with Section 404.

During the evaluation and testing process of our internal controls in future years, if we identify one or more material weaknesses in our internal control over financial reporting, we will be unable to certify that our internal control over financial reporting is effective. We cannot assure you that there will not be material weaknesses in our internal control over financial reporting in the future. Any failure to maintain internal control over financial reporting could severely inhibit our ability to accurately report our financial condition or results of operations. If we are unable to conclude that our internal control over financial reporting is effective, or if our independent registered public accounting firm determines we have a material weakness in our internal control over financial reporting, we could lose investor confidence in the accuracy and completeness of our financial reports, the market price of our Class A common stock could decline, and we could be subject to sanctions or investigations by the SEC or other regulatory authorities. Failure to remedy any material weakness in our internal control over financial reporting, or to implement or maintain other effective control systems required of public companies, could also restrict our future access to the capital markets.

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Anti-takeover provisions in our charter documents and under Delaware law could make an acquisition of our company more difficult, limit attempts by our stockholders to replace or remove our current management and limit the market price of our Class A common stock.

Provisions in our amended and restated certificate of incorporation and amended and restated bylaws may have the effect of delaying or preventing a change of control or changes in our management. Our amended and restated certificate of incorporation and amended and restated bylaws include provisions that:

These provisions may frustrate or prevent any attempts by our stockholders to replace or remove our current management by making it more difficult for stockholders to replace members of our board of directors, which is responsible for appointing the members of our management. In addition, because we are incorporated in Delaware, we are governed by the provisions of Section 203 of the Delaware General Corporation Law, which generally, subject to certain exceptions, prohibits a Delaware corporation from engaging in any of a broad range of business combinations with any “interested” stockholder for a period of three years following the date on which the stockholder became an “interested” stockholder. Any of the foregoing provisions could limit the price that investors might be willing to pay in the future for shares of our Class A common stock, and they could deter potential acquirers of our company, thereby reducing the likelihood that holders of our Class A common stock would receive a premium for their shares of our Class A common stock in an acquisition.

Our amended and restated certificate of incorporation designates the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware and the federal district courts of the United States of America as the exclusive forums for substantially all disputes between us and our stockholders, which could restrict our stockholders’ ability to choose the judicial forum for disputes with us or our directors, officers, or employees.

Our amended and restated certificate of incorporation provides that the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware is the exclusive forum for the following types of actions or proceedings under Delaware statutory or common law: any derivative action or proceeding brought on our behalf; any action asserting a breach of a fiduciary duty; any action asserting a claim against us arising pursuant to the Delaware General Corporation Law, our amended and restated certificate of incorporation, or our amended and restated bylaws; or any action asserting a claim against us that is governed by the internal affairs doctrine. The provisions would not apply to suits brought to enforce a duty or liability created by the Exchange Act. In addition, our amended and restated certificate of incorporation provides that the federal district courts of the United States of America will be the exclusive forum for resolving any complaint asserting a cause of action arising under the Securities Act.

These choice of forum provisions may limit a stockholder’s ability to bring a claim in a judicial forum that it finds favorable for disputes with us or our directors, officers, or other employees. While the Delaware courts have determined that such choice of forum provisions are facially valid, a stockholder may nevertheless seek to bring a claim in a venue other than those designated in the exclusive forum provisions. In such instance, we would expect to vigorously assert the validity and enforceability of the exclusive

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forum provisions of our amended and restated certificate of incorporation. This may require significant additional costs associated with resolving such action in other jurisdictions and there can be no assurance that the provisions will be enforced by a court in those other jurisdictions.

Risks Related to Our Outstanding 2025 Notes

We may not have sufficient cash flow from our business to make payments on our significant debt when due, and we may incur additional indebtedness in the future.

In June 2020, we issued the 2025 Notes in a private placement. We may be required to use a substantial portion of our cash flows from operations to pay interest and principal on our indebtedness. Our ability to make scheduled payments of the principal of, to pay interest on or to refinance our indebtedness, including the 2025 Notes, depends on our future performance, which is subject to economic, financial, competitive and other factors beyond our control. Our business may not continue to generate cash flow from operations in the future sufficient to service our debt and make necessary capital expenditures. If we are unable to generate such cash flow, we may be required to adopt one or more alternatives, such as selling assets, restructuring debt or obtaining additional equity capital on terms that may be onerous or highly dilutive. Our ability to refinance our indebtedness will depend on the capital markets and our financial condition at such time. We may not be able to engage in any of these activities or engage in these activities on desirable terms, which could result in a default on our debt obligations.

In addition, we may incur substantial additional debt in the future, subject to the restrictions contained in our future debt agreements, some of which may be secured debt. We are not restricted under the terms of the indenture governing the 2025 Notes, from incurring additional debt, securing existing or future debt, recapitalizing our debt, repurchasing our stock, pledging our assets, making investments, paying dividends, guaranteeing debt or taking a number of other actions that are not limited by the terms of the indenture governing the 2025 Notes that could have the effect of diminishing our ability to make payments on the 2025 Notes when due.

The conditional conversion feature of the 2025 Notes, if triggered, may adversely affect our financial condition and operating results.

In the event the conditional conversion feature of the 2025 Notes is triggered, holders of the 2025 Notes will be entitled to convert the notes at any time during specified periods at their option. If one or more holders elect to convert their 2025 Notes, unless we elect to satisfy our conversion obligation by delivering solely shares of our Class A common stock (other than paying cash in lieu of delivering any fractional share), we would be required to settle a portion or all of our conversion obligation through the payment of cash, which could adversely affect our liquidity. In addition, even if holders do not elect to convert their 2025 Notes when these conversion triggers are satisfied, we could be required under applicable accounting rules to reclassify all or a portion of the outstanding principal of the 2025 Notes as a current rather than long-term liability, which would result in a material reduction of our net working capital.

The accounting method for convertible debt securities that may be settled in cash, such as the notes, could have a material effect on our reported financial results.

The accounting method for convertible debt securities that may be settled in cash, such as the 2025 Notes, could have a material effect on our reported financial results.  Under ASC 470-20, Debt with Conversion and Other Options, or ASC 470-20, an entity must separately account for the liability and equity components of the convertible debt instruments (such as the 2025 Notes) that may be settled entirely or partially in cash upon conversion in a manner that reflects the issuer’s economic interest cost. The effect of ASC 470-20 on the accounting for the 2025 Notes is that the equity component is required to be included in the additional paid-in capital section of stockholders’ equity in our consolidated balance sheet at issuance, and the value of the equity component is treated as debt discount for purposes of accounting for the debt component of the 2025 Notes. As a result, we are required to record a greater amount of non-cash interest expense in current periods presented as a result of the amortization of the debt discount; such amortization results in the carrying value of the 2025 Notes accreting to their face amount over the term of the 2025 Notes. We have reported larger net losses or lower net income in our financial results because ASC 470-20 requires interest to include both the current period’s amortization of the debt discount and the instrument’s non-convertible coupon interest rate, which could adversely affect our reported or future financial results, the trading price of our common stock and the trading price of the 2025 Notes. However, in August 2020, the Financial Accounting Standards Board published an Accounting Standards Update 2020-06, or ASU 2020-06, eliminating the separate accounting for the debt and equity components as described above. ASU 2020-06 will be effective for SEC-reporting entities for fiscal years beginning after December 15, 2021, including interim periods within those fiscal years. However, early adoption is permitted in certain circumstances for fiscal years beginning after December 15, 2020, including interim periods within those fiscal

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years. The Company chose to early adopt ASU 2020-06 on January 1, 2021. When effective, we expect the elimination of the separate accounting described above to reduce the interest expense that we expect to recognize for the 2025 Notes for accounting purposes.

In addition, under certain circumstances, convertible debt instruments (such as the 2025 Notes) that may be settled entirely or partly in cash are currently accounted for utilizing the treasury stock method, the effect of which is that the shares issuable upon conversion of such 2025 Notes are not included in the calculation of diluted earnings per share except to the extent that the conversion value of such 2025 Notes exceeds their principal amount. Under the treasury stock method, for diluted earnings per share purposes, the transaction is accounted for as if the number of shares of common stock that would be necessary to settle such excess, if we elected to settle such excess in shares, are issued. However, when adopted, ASU 2020-06 will require the potentially more dilutive if-converted method to be used for calculating earnings per share, and the treasury stock method will no longer be allowed for convertible debt instruments whose principal amount may be settled using shares. We also cannot be sure whether other changes may be made to the current accounting standards related to the 2025 Notes, or otherwise, that could have an adverse impact on our financial statements.

The capped call transactions may affect the value of the 2025 Notes and our Class A common stock.

In connection with the pricing of the 2025 Notes, we entered into capped call transactions with the option counterparties. The capped call transactions cover, subject to customary adjustments, the number of shares of our common stock that initially underlie the 2025 Notes. The capped call transactions are expected generally to partially offset the potential dilution to our Class A common stock as a result of conversion of the 2025 Notes. In connection with establishing their initial hedges of the capped call transactions, the option counterparties or their respective affiliates entered into various derivative transactions with respect to our Class A common stock concurrently with or shortly after the pricing of the 2025 Notes, including with certain investors in the 2025 Notes.

In addition, the option counterparties or their respective affiliates may modify their hedge positions by entering into or unwinding various derivatives with respect to our common stock and/or purchasing or selling our Class A common stock or other securities of ours in secondary market transactions following the pricing of the 2025 Notes on June 2, 2020 and prior to the maturity of the 2025 Notes. They are likely to do so on each exercise date for the capped call transactions, which are expected to occur during each 30 trading day period beginning on the 31st scheduled trading day prior to the maturity date of the 2025 Notes, or following any termination of any portion of the capped call transactions in connection with any repurchase, redemption or early conversion of the 2025 Notes. This activity could also cause or prevent an increase or decrease in the price of our Class A common stock or the 2025 Notes. The potential effect, if any, of these transactions on the price of our Class A common stock or the 2025 Notes will depend in part on market conditions and cannot be ascertained at this time. Any of these activities could adversely affect the value of our Class A common stock.

We are subject to counterparty risk with respect to the capped call transactions.

The counterparties to the capped call transactions are financial institutions, and we will be subject to the risk that one or more of the option counterparties may default, fail to perform or exercise their termination rights under the capped call transactions. Our exposure to the credit risk of the option counterparties will not be secured by any collateral. If a counterparty to the capped call transactions becomes subject to insolvency proceedings, we will become an unsecured creditor in those proceedings with a claim equal to our exposure at the time under such transaction. Our exposure will depend on many factors but, generally, our exposure will increase if the market price or the volatility of our common stock increases. In addition, upon a default, failure to perform or a termination of the capped call transactions by a counterparty, we may suffer more dilution than we currently anticipate with respect to our common stock.

Item 1B. Unresolved Staff Comments

None.

Item 2. Properties

Our headquarters are located in New York City, where we lease approximately 129,000 square feet pursuant to four separate subleases. One of these subleases, for approximately 33,000 square feet, will expire in December 2022. The other three subleases, totaling approximately 96,000 square feet, will expire in December 2023. We have other offices including Boston, Dublin, and Paris. These offices are leased, and we do not own any real property. We believe that our current facilities are adequate to meet our current needs.

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Item 3. Legal Proceedings

From time to time we may become involved in legal proceedings or be subject to claims arising in the ordinary course of our business. We are not presently a party to any legal proceedings that, if determined adversely to us, would individually or taken together have a material adverse effect on our business, operating results, cash flows or financial condition. Defending such proceedings is costly and can impose a significant burden on management and employees. The results of any current or future litigation cannot be predicted with certainty, and regardless of the outcome, litigation can have an adverse impact on us because of defense and settlement costs, diversion of management resources and other factors.

Item 4. Mine Safety Disclosures

Not applicable.

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PART II

Item 5. Market for Registrant's Common Equity, Related Stockholder Matters and Issuer Purchases of Equity Securities

Market Information and Holders of Record

Our Class A common stock is traded on The Nasdaq Global Select Market, or Nasdaq, under the symbol “DDOG”.  Our Class B common stock is not listed or traded on any exchange, but each share of Class B common stock is convertible at any time at the option of the holder into one share of Class A common stock, and is automatically converted upon sale or transfer into one share of Class A common stock.

As of February 15, 2021, there were 221,583,813 holders of record of our Class A common stock and 84,907,962 holders of record of our Class B common stock.

Dividend Policy

We have never declared or paid any dividends on our Class A common stock or Class B common stock. We currently intend to retain all available funds and any future earnings for the operation and expansion of our business. Accordingly, we do not anticipate declaring or paying dividends in the foreseeable future. The payment of any future dividends will be at the discretion of our Board of Directors and will depend on our results of operations, capital requirements, financial condition, prospects, contractual arrangements, any limitations on payment of dividends present in any debt agreements, and other factors that our Board of Directors may deem relevant.

Use of Proceeds

In September 2019, we closed our IPO of 27,600,000 shares of our Class A common stock at an offering price of $27.00 per share, including 3,600,000 shares pursuant to the underwriters’ option to purchase additional shares of our Class A common stock, resulting in net proceeds to us of $705.9 million, after deducting underwriting discounts and commissions of $37.3 million and net offering expenses of $2.0 million. All of the shares issued and sold in our IPO were registered under the Securities Act pursuant to a registration statement on Form S-1 (File No. 333-233428), which was declared effective by the SEC on September 18, 2019. There has been no material change in the planned use of proceeds from our IPO from those disclosed in the final prospectus for our IPO dated as of September 18, 2019 and filed with the SEC pursuant to Rule 424(b)(4) on September 19, 2019.

Issuer Purchases of Equity Securities

None.

Stock Performance Graph

The graph below shows a comparison, from September 19, 2019 (the date our Class A common stock commenced trading on Nasdaq) through December 31, 2020, of the cumulative total return to stockholders of our Class A common stock relative to the Nasdaq Composite Index, or the Nasdaq Composite, and the Nasdaq Computer Index, or the Nasdaq Computer.

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The graph assumes that $100 was invested in each of our Class A common stock, the Nasdaq Composite and the Nasdaq Computer at their respective closing prices on September 19, 2019 and assumes reinvestment of gross dividends. The stock price performance shown in the graph represents past performance and should not be considered an indication of future stock price performance.

This performance graph shall not be deemed “soliciting material” or to be “filed” with the SEC for purposes of Section 18 of the Exchange Act, or otherwise subject to the liabilities under that Section, and shall not be deemed to be incorporated by reference into any filing of Datadog, Inc. under the Securities Act or the Exchange Act.

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Item 6. Selected Financial Data

As permitted by final SEC rulemaking effective February 10, 2021, the information called for by this Item 6 is omitted..

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Item 7. Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations

The following discussion and analysis of our financial condition and results of operations should be read in conjunction with our audited consolidated financial statements and related notes appearing elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10- K. This discussion, particularly information with respect to our future results of operations or financial condition, business strategy and plans and objectives of management for future operations, includes forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties as described under the heading “Special Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements” in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. You should review the disclosure under the heading “Part I, Item 1A. Risk Factors” in this Annual Report on Form 10-K for a discussion of important factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements.

Overview

Datadog is the monitoring and analytics platform for developers, IT operations teams and business users in the cloud age.

Our SaaS platform integrates and automates infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, log management, and security monitoring to provide unified, real-time observability of our customers’ entire technology stack. Datadog is used by organizations of all sizes and across a wide range of industries to enable digital transformation and cloud migration, drive collaboration among development, operations and business teams, accelerate time to market for applications, reduce time to problem resolution, understand user behavior and track key business metrics.

We generate revenue from the sale of subscriptions to customers using our cloud-based platform. The terms of our subscription agreements are primarily monthly or annual. Customers also have the option to purchase additional products, such as additional containers to monitor, custom metrics packages, anomaly detection and app analytics. Professional services are generally not required for the implementation of our products and revenue from such services has been immaterial to date.

We employ a land-and-expand business model centered around offering products that are easy to adopt and have a very short time to value. Our customers can expand their footprint with us on a self-service basis. Our customers often significantly increase their usage of the products they initially buy from us and expand their usage to other products we offer on our platform. We grow with our customers as they expand their workloads in the public and private cloud.

As of December 31, 2020, we had $228.7 million in cash, cash equivalents and restricted cash and $1,292.5 million in marketable securities. We have grown rapidly in recent periods, with revenues for the fiscal years ended December 31, 2020, 2019 and 2018 of $603.5 million, $362.8 million, and $198.1 million, respectively, representing year-over-year growth of 66% from the fiscal year ended December 31, 2019 to the fiscal year ended December 31, 2020 and 83% from the fiscal year ended December 31, 2018 to the fiscal year ended December 31, 2019. Substantially all of our revenue is from subscription software sales. We expect that the rate of growth in our revenue will continue to decline as our business scales, even if our revenue continues to grow in absolute terms. We have continued to make significant expenditures and investments, including in personnel-related costs, sales and marketing, infrastructure and operations, and have incurred net losses of $(24.5) million, $(16.7) million and $(10.8) million for the fiscal years ended December 31, 2020, 2019 and 2018, respectively. Our operating cash flow was $109.1 million, $24.2 million and $10.8 million for the years ended December 31, 2020, 2019 and 2018, respectively. Our free cash flow was $83.2 million, $0.8 million and $(5.0) million for the years ended December 31, 2020, 2019 and 2018, respectively. See the section titled “—Liquidity and Capital Resources—Non-GAAP Free Cash Flow” below.

Since December 2019, COVID-19 has spread to multiple countries, including the United States and other countries in which we and our customers, partners, suppliers, vendors and other parties with whom we do business operate. The extent of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our operational and financial performance depends on certain developments, including the duration and spread of the outbreak, its impact on industry events, and its effect on our customers, partners, suppliers and vendors and other parties with whom we do business, all of which are uncertain and cannot be predicted at this time. To the extent possible, we are conducting business as usual, with necessary or advisable modifications to employee travel and employee work locations, and cancelling or holding virtually Datadog marketing events. We are continuing to actively monitor the rapidly evolving situation related to COVID-19 and may take further actions that alter our business operations, including those that may be required by federal, state or local authorities, or that we determine are in the best interests of our employees, customers, partners, suppliers, vendors and stockholders. The extent to which the COVID-19 pandemic may impact our results of operations and financial condition remains uncertain. In addition, due to our subscription model, the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic, if any, may not be fully reflected in our results of operations until future periods.

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Factors Affecting Our Performance

Acquiring New Customers

We believe there is substantial opportunity to continue to grow our customer base. We intend to drive new customer acquisition by continuing to invest significantly in sales and marketing to engage our prospective customers, increase brand awareness and drive adoption of our platform and products. We also plan to continue to invest in building brand awareness within the development and operations communities. As of December 31, 2020, we had approximately 14,170 customers spanning organizations of a broad range of sizes and industries, compared to approximately 10,500 as of December 31, 2019. Our ability to attract new customers will depend on a number of factors, including the effectiveness and pricing of our products, offerings of our competitors, and the effectiveness of our marketing efforts.

We define the number of customers as the number of accounts with a unique account identifier for which we have an active subscription in the period indicated. Users of our free trials or tier are not included in our customer count. A single organization with multiple divisions, segments or subsidiaries is generally counted as a single customer. However, in some cases where they have separate billing terms, we may count separate divisions, segments or subsidiaries as multiple customers.

Expanding Within Our Existing Customer Base

Our base of customers represents a significant opportunity for further sales expansion. As of December 31, 2020, we had 1,253 customers with annual run-rate revenue, or ARR, of $100,000 or more, representing 78% of our ARR, up from 858 as of December 31, 2019, representing 75% of our ARR.  We monitor our number of customers with ARR of $100,000 or more, and believe it is useful to investors, as an indicator of our ability to grow the number of customers that are exceeding this ARR threshold.  We define ARR as the annual run-rate revenue of subscription agreements from all customers at a point in time. We calculate ARR by taking the monthly run-rate revenue, or MRR, and multiplying it by 12. MRR for each month is calculated by aggregating, for all customers during that month, monthly revenue from committed contractual amounts, additional usage and monthly subscriptions. ARR and MRR should be viewed independently of revenue, and do not represent our revenue under U.S. GAAP on a monthly or annualized basis, as they are operating metrics that can be impacted by contract start and end dates and renewal rates. ARR and MRR are not intended to be replacements or forecasts of revenue.

A further indication of the propensity of our customer relationships to expand over time is our dollar-based net retention rate, which compares our ARR from the same set of customers in one period, relative to the year-ago period. As of each of December 31, 2020 and 2019, our dollar-based net retention rate was above 130%. We calculate dollar-based net retention rate as of a period end by starting with the ARR from the cohort of all customers as of 12 months prior to such period-end, or the Prior Period ARR. We then calculate the ARR from these same customers as of the current period-end, or the Current Period ARR. Current Period ARR includes any expansion and is net of contraction or attrition over the last 12 months, but excludes ARR from new customers in the current period. We then divide the total Current Period ARR by the total Prior Period ARR to arrive at the point-in-time dollar-based net retention rate. We then calculate the weighted average of the trailing 12-month point-in-time dollar-based net retention rates, to arrive at the dollar-based net retention rate.

We believe that our land-and-expand business model allows us to efficiently increase revenue from our existing customer base. Our customers often expand the deployment of our platform across large teams and more broadly within the enterprise as they migrate more workloads to the cloud, find new use cases for our platform, and generally realize the benefits of our platform. We intend to continue to invest in enhancing awareness of our brand and developing more products, features and functionality, which we believe are important factors to achieve widespread adoption of our platform. Our ability to increase sales to existing customers will depend on a number of factors, including our customers’ satisfaction with our solution, competition, pricing and overall changes in our customers’ spending levels.

Sustaining Innovation and Technology Leadership

Our success is dependent on our ability to sustain innovation and technology leadership in order to maintain our competitive advantage. We believe that we have built a highly differentiated platform that will position us to further extend the adoption of our platform and products. Datadog is frequently deployed across a customer’s entire infrastructure, making it ubiquitous. Datadog is a daily part of the lives of developers, operations engineers and business leaders. We employ a land-and-expand business model centered around offering products that are easy to adopt and have a very short time to value. Our efficient go-to-market model enables us to prioritize significant investment in innovation. We have proven initial success of our platform approach, through expansion beyond our initial infrastructure monitoring solution, to include APM in 2017, logs in 2018, user experience and network performance monitoring in 2019 and security monitoring in 2020. As of December 31, 2020, approximately 72% of our customers were using more than one product, up from approximately 60% a year earlier. We believe these metrics indicate strong momentum in the uptake of our newer platform products.

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We intend to continue to invest in building additional products, features and functionality that expand our capabilities and facilitate the extension of our platform to new use cases. We also intend to continue to evaluate strategic acquisitions and investments in businesses and technologies to drive product and market expansion. Our future success is dependent on our ability to successfully develop, market and sell existing and new products to both new and existing customers.

Expanding Internationally

We believe there is a significant opportunity to expand usage of our platform outside of North America. Revenue, as determined based on the billing address of our customers, from regions outside of North America was approximately 25% of our total revenue for the years ended December 31, 2020 and 2019. In addition, we have made and plan to continue to make significant investments to expand geographically, particularly in EMEA and APAC. Although these investments may adversely affect our operating results in the near term, we believe that they will contribute to our long-term growth. Beyond North America, we now have sales presence internationally, including in Dublin, Paris, London, Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, Sydney and Amsterdam.

Components of Results of Operations

Revenue

We generate revenue from the sale of subscriptions to customers using our cloud-based platform. The terms of our subscription agreements are primarily monthly or annual, with the majority of our revenue coming from annual subscriptions. Our customers can enter into a subscription for a committed contractual amount of usage that is apportioned ratably on a monthly basis over the term of the subscription period, a subscription for a committed contractual amount of usage that is delivered as used, or a monthly subscription based on usage. To the extent that our customers’ usage exceeds the committed contracted amounts under their subscriptions, either on a monthly basis in the case of a ratable subscription or once the entire commitment is used in the case of a delivered-as-used subscription, they are charged for their incremental usage.

Usage is measured primarily by the number of hosts or by the volume of data indexed. A host is generally defined as a server, either in the cloud or on-premise. Our infrastructure monitoring, APM and network performance monitoring products are priced per host, our logs product is priced primarily per log events indexed and secondarily by events ingested. Customers also have the option to purchase additional products, such as additional container or serverless monitoring, custom metrics packages, anomaly detection, synthetic monitoring and app analytics.

In the case of subscriptions for committed contractual amounts of usage, revenue is recognized ratably over the term of the subscription agreement, generally beginning on the date that our platform is made available to a customer. As a result, much of our revenue is generated from subscriptions entered into during previous periods. Consequently, any decreases in new subscriptions or renewals in any one period may not be immediately reflected as a decrease in revenue for that period, but could negatively affect our revenue in future quarters. This also makes it difficult for us to rapidly increase our revenue through the sale of additional subscriptions in any period, as revenue is recognized over the term of the subscription agreement. In the case of a subscription for a committed contractual amount of usage that is delivered as used, a monthly subscription based on usage, or usage in excess of a ratable subscription, we recognize revenue as the product is used, which may lead to fluctuations in our revenue and results of operations. In addition, historically, we have experienced seasonality in new customer bookings, as we typically enter into a higher percentage of subscription agreements with new customers in the fourth quarter of the year.

Due to ease of implementation of our products, professional services generally are not required and revenue from such services has been immaterial to date.

Cost of Revenue

Cost of revenue primarily consists of expenses related to providing our products to customers, including payments to our third-party cloud infrastructure providers for hosting our software, personnel-related expenses for operations and global support, including salaries, benefits, bonuses and stock-based compensation, payment processing fees, information technology, depreciation and amortization related to the amortization of acquired intangibles and internal-use software and other overhead costs such as allocated facilities.

We intend to continue to invest additional resources in our platform infrastructure and our customer support and success organizations to expand the capability of our platform and ensure that our customers are realizing the full benefit of our platform and products. The level, timing and relative investment in our infrastructure could affect our cost of revenue in the future.

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Gross Profit and Gross Margin

Gross profit represents revenue less cost of revenue. Gross margin is gross profit expressed as a percentage of revenue. Our gross margin may fluctuate from period to period as our revenue fluctuates, and as a result of the timing and amount of investments to expand our products and geographical coverage.

Operating Expenses

Our operating expenses consist of research and development, sales and marketing, and general and administrative expenses. Personnel costs are the most significant component of operating expenses and consist of salaries, benefits, bonuses, stock-based compensation expense and sales commissions. Operating expenses also include overhead costs for facilities and shared IT-related expenses, including depreciation expense.

Research and Development

Research and development expense consists primarily of personnel costs for our engineering, service and design teams. Additionally, research and development expense includes contractor fees, depreciation and amortization and allocated overhead costs. Research and development costs are expensed as incurred. We expect that our research and development expense will increase in absolute dollars as our business grows, particularly as we incur additional costs related to continued investments in our platform.

Sales and Marketing

Sales and marketing expense consists primarily of personnel costs for our sales and marketing organization, costs of general marketing and promotional activities, including the free tier and free introductory trials of our products, travel-related expenses and allocated overhead costs. Sales commissions earned by our sales force are deferred and amortized on a straight-line basis over the expected period of benefit, which we have determined to be four years. We expect that our sales and marketing expense will increase in absolute dollars as we expand our sales and marketing efforts.

General and Administrative

General and administrative expense consists primarily of personnel costs and contractor fees for finance, legal, human resources, information technology and other administrative functions. In addition, general and administrative expense includes non-personnel costs, such as legal, accounting and other professional fees, hardware and software costs, certain tax, license and insurance-related expenses and allocated overhead costs.

We have incurred, and expect to continue to incur, additional expenses as a result of operating as a public company, including costs to comply with the rules and regulations applicable to companies listed on a national securities exchange, costs related to compliance and reporting obligations, and increased expenses for insurance, investor relations and professional services. We expect that our general and administrative expense will increase in absolute dollars as our business grows. However, we expect that our general and administrative expense will decrease as a percentage of our revenue as our revenue grows over the longer term.

Other (Expense) Income, Net

Other (expense) income, net consists primarily of interest expense due on the 2025 Notes, and amortization of premiums on our marketable securities, partially offset by interest income, primarily due to income earned on money market funds included in cash and cash equivalents and on marketable securities.

Provision for Income Taxes

Provision for income taxes consists of U.S. federal and state income taxes and income taxes in certain foreign jurisdictions in which we conduct business. We recorded a full valuation allowance on our federal and state deferred tax assets as we have concluded that it is not more likely than not that the deferred tax assets will be realized.

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Results of Operations

The following table sets forth our consolidated statements of operations data for the periods indicated:

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The following table sets forth our consolidated statements of operations data expressed as a percentage of revenue for the periods indicated:

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Comparison of the Years Ended December 31, 2020 and 2019

Revenue

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Revenue increased by $240.7 million, or 66%, for the year ended December 31, 2020 compared to the year ended December 31, 2019. Approximately 59% of the increase in revenue was attributable to growth from existing customers, and the remaining 41% was attributable to growth from new customers.

Cost of Revenue and Gross Margin

Cost of revenue increased by $41.2 million, or 46%, for the year ended December 31, 2020 compared to the year ended December 31, 2019. This increase was primarily due to an increase of $34.7 million in third-party cloud infrastructure hosting and software costs, an increase of $4.9 million in personnel expenses as a result of increased headcount, and an increase of $1.6 million of depreciation and amortization, credit card processing fees and other fees, and allocated overhead costs as a result of an increase in overall costs necessary to support the growth of the business and related infrastructure.

Our gross margin increased by 3% for the year ended December 31, 2020 compared to the year ended December 31, 2019, primarily as a result of increased revenue and cost savings from our third-party cloud infrastructure providers.

Research and Development

Research and development expense increased by $99.2 million, or 89%, for the year ended December 31, 2020 compared to the year ended December 31, 2019. This increase was primarily due to an increase of $82.1 million in personnel costs for our engineering, product and design teams as a result of increased headcount, an increase of $12.9 million in cloud infrastructure related investments, an increase of $3.3 million in allocated overhead costs necessary for supporting the growth of the business and an increase of $0.9 million in other research and development costs.  

Sales and Marketing

Sales and marketing expense increased by $67.0 million, or 46%, for the year ended December 31, 2020 compared to the year ended December 31, 2019. This increase was primarily due to an increase of $60.5 million in personnel costs for our sales and marketing organization as a result of increased headcount and increased variable compensation for our sales personnel, an increase of $4.4 million in marketing and promotional activities, and an increase of $2.1 million of allocated overhead costs necessary to support the growth of the business and related infrastructure.

General and Administrative

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General and administrative expense increased by $26.9 million, or 75%, for the year ended December 31, 2020 compared to the year ended December 31, 2019. This increase was primarily due to an increase of $16.4 million in personnel expenses as a result of increased headcount, an increase of $4.3 million related to outside professional fees primarily related to insurance, finance and legal fees, an increase of $4.1 related to other costs and allocated overhead costs to support the growing business and an increase of $2.1 million related to bad debt expense.

Other (Expense) Income, Net

Other (expense) income, net decreased by $12.6 million for the year ended December 31, 2020 compared to the year ended December 31, 2019. For the year ended December 31, 2020, other expense included $19.3 million interest expense related to our 2025 Notes and $11.1 million amortization of premiums on our marketable securities. These amounts were partially offset by an increase of $17.8 million in interest income, mainly due to income earned from investments in marketable securities and money market funds.

Comparison of the Years Ended December 31, 2019 and 2018

Revenue

Revenue increased by $164.7 million, or 83%, for the year ended December 31, 2019 compared to the year ended December 31, 2018. Approximately 60% of the increase in revenue was attributable to growth from existing customers, and the remaining 40% was attributable to growth from new customers.

Cost of Revenue and Gross Margin

Cost of revenue increased by $42.4 million, or 91%, for the year ended December 31, 2019 compared to the year ended December 31, 2018. This increase was primarily due to an increase of $35.2 million in third-party cloud infrastructure hosting and software costs, an increase of $3.2 million in personnel expenses as a result of increased headcount, an increase of $2.5 million of depreciation and amortization expense, an increase of $0.8 million in credit card processing fees and other fees, and an increase of $0.7 million in allocated overhead costs as a result of an increase in overall costs necessary to support the growth of the business and related infrastructure.

Our gross margin declined by 2% for the year ended December 31, 2019 compared to the year ended December 31, 2018 primarily as the result of the timing and amount of our investments to expand the capacity of our third-party cloud infrastructure providers.

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Research and Development

Research and development expense increased by $56.2 million, or 102%, for the year ended December 31, 2019 compared to the year ended December 31, 2018. This increase was primarily due to an increase of $38.5 million in personnel costs for our engineering, product and design teams as a result of increased headcount, and an increase of $17.7 million in cloud infrastructure related investments and in allocated overhead costs necessary for supporting the growth of the business.

Sales and Marketing

Sales and marketing expense increased by $57.8 million, or 65%, for the year ended December 31, 2019 compared to the year ended December 31, 2018. This increase was primarily due to an increase of $39.6 million in personnel costs for our sales and marketing organization as a result of increased headcount and increased variable compensation for our sales personnel, an increase of $10.4 million in allocated overhead costs as a result of an increase in overall costs necessary to support the growth of the business and related infrastructure, and an increase of $7.8 million in marketing and promotional activities.

General and Administrative

General and administrative expense increased by $17.3 million, or 93%, for the year ended December 31, 2019 compared to the year ended December 31, 2018. This increase was primarily due to an increase of $8.6 million in personnel expenses as a result of increased headcount, an increase of $6.9 million related to outside professional fees primarily related to legal and accounting services, an increase of $1.8 million in allocated overhead expenses related to an increase in overall costs necessary to support the growth of the business and related infrastructure.

Other (Expense) Income, Net

Other (expense) income, net increased by $3.4 million, or 425%, for the year ended December 31, 2019 compared to the year ended December 31, 2018. This increase was primarily due to interest income earned from investments in money market funds and marketable securities.

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Quarterly Results of Operations

The following tables summarize our selected unaudited quarterly consolidated statements of operations data for each of the eight quarters in the period ended December 31, 2020. The information for each of these quarters has been prepared on the same basis as our audited annual consolidated financial statements and reflect, in the opinion of management, all adjustments of a normal, recurring nature that are necessary for the fair statement of the results of operations for these periods. This data should be read in conjunction with our audited consolidated financial statements included in “Part II, Item 8. Financial Statements” of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Historical results are not necessarily indicative of the results that may be expected for the full fiscal year or any other period.