CrowdStrike narrowly beats estimates on AI tailwinds, but stock falls 10%

CrowdStrike narrowly beat Wall Street's fiscal first-quarter estimates after the bell on Wednesday, but shares slid 10% following the report.

The cybersecurity company said revenue grew 26% from a year ago. Net income totaled about $27.8 million, or 11 cents per share. That's up from a net loss of $104.3 million, a loss of 42 cents per share, last year.

CrowdStrike also announced a four-for-one stock split effective in July. Shares closed at $747.61 on Wednesday.

CEO George Kurtz said the company is benefiting from an " AI inflection point" fueled by rising customer platform adoption.

"In Q1, the worlds of cybersecurity and frontier AI collided: this was the Mythos moment," he said in a press release. "CrowdStrike is AI security infrastructure, critical to successful AI adoption."

CrowdStrike is among a wave of cybersecurity companies profiting from skyrocketing demand for cyber tools as advanced models such as Anthropic 's Mythos threaten to accelerate the pace of cyberattacks.

The sector has also managed to shake off recent AI disruption concerns that rattled software names earlier this year. CrowdStrike is up about 60% this year.

Kurtz told analysts on a Wednesday earnings call that AI detection and response, or AIDR, is emerging as a new growth vector for CrowdStrike. He said its second-quarter pipeline had already exceeded $50 million.