Release Date: July 29, 2026
For the complete transcript of the earnings call, please refer to the full earnings call transcript.
Positive Points
- Tenable One achieved a record 50% of new business in Q2 2026, driven by strong adoption of the new pricing and packaging.
- Net dollar expansion rate improved to 106%, the first acceleration in several quarters, signaling stabilization and growth in the install base.
- The company exceeded all guided metrics for Q2 and raised its full-year 2026 outlook for revenue, operating income, and EPS.
- Early traction with Hexa AI is strong, with over 80% of users submitting prompts and nearly half using it to take action, driving platform engagement.
- Strategic partnerships with frontier AI labs (Anthropic and OpenAI) provide early insight into evolving attack landscapes and reinforce Tenable's competitive moat.
Negative Points
- Revenue growth remains modest at 8.6% year-over-year, with Q3 guidance implying a slight deceleration to 7.6% at the midpoint.
- Non-GAAP gross margin slightly declined to 81.4% from 82.0% in the prior year quarter.
- The company faces ongoing competitive pressure from large platform vendors like Microsoft, which recently launched a VM program.
- While pipeline and momentum are strong, the conversion to accelerated revenue growth is expected to be a lagging indicator, with benefits weighted to the second half.
- The company is adding significant sales capacity in the second half, which could pressure near-term operating margins if productivity does not scale as expected.
Q & A Highlights
Here are the key highlights from Tenable Holdings Inc TENB's Q2 2026 earnings call, presented as Q&A pairs.Q: The net dollar expansion rate (NDER) improved to 106% from 105% in the prior quarter. Have we hit the low water mark, and what are you seeing from new customers in the post-Mythos environment?
A: **CFO Matt Brown** confirmed that the NDER improvement was ahead of expectations and the first quarter-over-quarter increase since Q1 2022. The company expects the rate to hold steady at 106% for the rest of the year. **Co-CEO Mark Thurmond** added that the Mythos AI lab environment has been a significant tailwind, driving strong demand for exposure management and a notable uptick in competitive displacements of legacy VM solutions. The new pricing and packaging has also streamlined the path for customers to adopt the Tenable One platform.
Q: Can you provide more color on how customers are responding to the new flex pricing and packaging, specifically the adoption of Tenable One Advanced versus Foundation?
A: **Co-CEO Steve Vintz** stated that the adoption of Tenable One Advanced was greater than anticipated, which drove higher average selling prices. The number of net new seven-figure customers more than doubled compared to typical quarters, driven by customers migrating from standalone products to the platform and existing platform customers expanding their spend. **CFO Matt Brown** specified that the ratio of Advanced to Foundation adoption was roughly 2:1. **Co-CEO Mark Thurmond** attributed this to Advanced's inclusion of cloud CNAPP capabilities, advanced attack path analysis, and a significantly higher number of tokens for Hexa AI.
Q: What is the initial customer feedback on Hexa AI, and what is the average selling price uplift for customers moving from VM to Hexa?
A: **Co-CEO Mark Thurmond** reported that Hexa adoption has been very high, with hundreds of Tenable One customers using it. Over 80% of users submit a prompt, and nearly half use it to take action rather than just consume information. Customers are using it for automated remediation, creating dashboards, and managing workflows. The demand was so high that Tenable created a new SKU for incremental tokens due to customer overages. **Co-CEO Steve Vintz** added that Hexa, being exclusive to the platform, was a major driver of the record 50% of new business coming from Tenable One, which carries a significant price uplift from standalone VM.
Q: With the strong early momentum following Mythos, when might we see this translate into accelerated revenue growth?
A: **CFO Matt Brown** explained that the first step to inflecting growth higher is stabilizing the top-line growth rate, and the company is seeing early signs of that with strong pipeline, competitive win rates, and expansion growth. This enabled a $5 million raise to the full-year revenue guidance midpoint. He also noted that expectations for current contract billings (CCB) are now $8 million to $10 million higher than at the start of the year, with the majority of that benefit coming in the second half of 2026.
Q: Can you talk about your "harness" advantage relative to other exposure management providers and the barriers to entry against LLM providers moving upstream?
A: **Co-CEO Steve Vintz** explained that the real moat is above and below the model. The moat above the model is the application layer (the harness) that provides context and trust to run models safely and deterministically. The moat below the model is Tenable's extensive, proprietary sensor layer and data fabric, which is deeply embedded behind customer firewalls. He emphasized that the best model today may not be the best tomorrow, but Tenable's unique data and ability to orchestrate deterministic action create a durable competitive advantage.
Q: How are CFOs and CIOs reacting to the elevated threat environment from Mythos, and how is that elevated pipeline converting to revenue?
A: **Co-CEO Mark Thurmond** stated that the Mythos discussion is still omnipresent and creating a sense of urgency among CISOs and boards. This is driving a rapid consolidation trend, where customers want to move from fragmented tools to a single exposure management platform like Tenable One. While there isn't a massive incremental budget increase, the pace of exposure management projects has accelerated. **CFO Matt Brown** added that this momentum is reflected in the improved guidance for the second half of the year.
Q: What are the dynamics with customers as they move towards automated remediation, and what is driving the preference for Tenable One Advanced?
A: **Co-CEO Steve Vintz** noted that the preference for Advanced is driven by its core use cases: the ability to take action and measure risk. Advanced includes orchestrated remediation, risk measurement, benchmarking, and scoring. This is the critical problem in the AI era, and it's a key differentiator for Tenable. The strong customer conversations and higher selling prices give the company confidence in its raised full-year guidance.
Q: Has there been any change in competitive dynamics with larger platform vendors, especially with them embedding LLM technologies?
A: **Co-CEO Mark Thurmond** reported that Q2 was one of the best competitive quarters, with double-digit growth in deals that involved ripping and replacing incumbent players. Tenable wins against larger players offering free capabilities by demonstrating superior visibility across the entire environment, higher accuracy in finding vulnerabilities, and exponentially more coverage of CISA KEVs. The technical differentiation is very compelling to CISOs.
Q: What are your hiring plans for the second half of 2026 given the success you are seeing?
A: **Co-CEO Steve Vintz** stated that the company saw some of the highest levels of sales productivity in years. As a result, Tenable plans to add more sales capacity in the second half of the year than it has over the last two years combined. The company is confident in its ability to generate a return on this investment and is leaning into the opportunity while balancing growth with profitability.
For the complete transcript of the earnings call, please refer to the full earnings call transcript.
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