DigitalOcean Holdings Inc

Overview

Our mission is to simplify cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI) to allow builders to spend more time creating software that changes the world.

DigitalOcean is a leading cloud computing platform, offering simple, scalable and approachable on-demand infrastructure and platform services for developers at growing technology companies. Our platform simplifies cloud computing, enabling our customers to rapidly accelerate innovation and productivity. Our customers include growing technology companies across numerous industry verticals ranging from gaming to fintech to cybersecurity, among many others, and leverage our platform for a wide variety of use cases, such as building and hosting websites, developing new web and mobile applications, integrating AI into their businesses, and building AI products and applications, among many others. We believe that being simple, scalable and approachable are our key differentiators, driving a broad range of customers around the world whose needs are not being fully met by larger cloud providers to build and grow their businesses on our platform.

Our platform is designed to be simple, scalable and approachable by providing a variety of product offerings that were built with the needs of growing technology companies in mind. The simplicity of our platform allows users to focus on building and scaling their business instead of on managing their infrastructure. We offer mission-critical solutions across Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), including our Droplet virtual machines, storage and networking offerings; Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), including our Managed Hosting, Managed Database, Managed Kubernetes and Marketplace offerings; and artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), including our GPU Droplets, Notebooks and GenAI Platform offerings. We continue to invest in our platform to further penetrate the growing markets in which we operate. According to International Data Corporation (IDC), the aggregate worldwide IaaS and PaaS markets for individuals and companies with less than 500 employees is estimated to grow from approximately $138 billion in 2025 to $251 billion in 2028, representing a 22% compound annual growth rate. IDC defines the IaaS market as compute, storage and networking, and the PaaS market as database management systems, application platforms, artificial intelligence platforms and other platform services.

We have a highly efficient self-service customer acquisition model, which we complement with a sales force focused on inside sales, targeted outside sales and partnership opportunities to drive revenue growth. The efficiency of our go-to-market model and our focus on the needs of growing technology companies have enabled us to drive organic growth and establish a truly global customer base across a broad range of industries. Our customers rely on us for their critical business needs and we provide all customers, regardless of size, 24/7 customer support. We are committed to making world-class cloud services approachable by providing attentive support to customers and supporting and investing in the broader developer community. We believe our customer support, coupled with our easy-to-use self-help resources and active developer community, has created tremendous brand loyalty amongst our customer base.

Growing our Builders (users that spend more than $50 and less than or equal to $500 in a month), Scalers (users that spend more than $500 and less than or equal to $8,333 in a month) and Scalers+ (users that spend more than $8,333 in a month) is a critical focus for us, and we have successfully increased the number of these customers and their percentage of our total revenue. As of December 31, 2024, we had approximately 165,000 Builders, Scalers and Scalers+ (collectively, our Higher Spend Customers), comprising 87% of our total revenue for the year ended December 31, 2024. See Part II, Item 7. “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations—Key Business Metrics” for more detail on the definition of customer categories and additional information.

Our Solution

DigitalOcean is a simple, scalable and approachable cloud, offering customers solutions that are easy to leverage, reliable and scale along with our growing technology companies. Empowered by an easy-to-use self-service model, intuitive control panel and highly predictable pricing, our customers are able to rapidly accelerate innovation and increase their productivity and agility. The key differentiators of our platform are as follows:

•Simple. Our platform is engineered to take a user from inquiry to deployment within minutes, without any specialized training or heavy implementation. We abstract away the complexity that is generally found across legacy cloud providers to provide a compelling, intuitive interface with click-and-go options. In addition, all

DigitalOcean products come with detailed product and technical documentation to help our customers quickly and seamlessly deploy to our cloud platform.

•Scalable. We offer a comprehensive portfolio of IaaS, PaaS/SaaS and AI/ML products that are specifically designed to address the needs of growing technology companies. Our platform can support a wide range of use cases, including building and hosting websites, developing new web and mobile applications, integrating AI into their businesses, and building AI products and applications, among many others. Customers with any type of use case have the ability to choose from managing their own infrastructure and building their own bespoke solutions using our IaaS or AI/ML offerings, offloading the technical infrastructure entirely through our Managed Hosting offering or delegating certain aspects of management using certain of our other managed PaaS/SaaS offerings or AI/ML offerings. Our scalable platform provides the reliability and security so that our customers can rely on us both today and in the future as their projects and businesses grow and their needs expand.

•Approachable. Creating solutions for cloud and AI is the focus of our business. We offer expert technical support and customer service to all customers free of charge on a 24/7 basis to ensure our customers quickly achieve their objectives and overcome challenges. Customers cite our attentive support as a key driver of their decision to start and grow their businesses on our platform. Our platform is easy to use and we provide extensive guidance on our website through product documentation and numerous high-quality developer tutorials that attract users and reinforce our highly efficient self-service customer acquisition model. In addition, our platform is designed to take advantage of open source technology, which helps customers to more efficiently write their own integrations. We have built one of the world’s largest developer communities to foster opportunities for developers to learn, grow and innovate on our platform. We continue to invest in supporting developers in myriad ways, including through local knowledge-sharing meetings and webinars in cities around the world. We also host large industry-wide events including Hacktoberfest, a global hackathon, and Deploy, a conference for developers, startups and founders. Being approachable also extends into our pricing model, which is transparent and predictable, eliminating surprises for our customers. Like everything we do, we approach billing with a customer-first focus, enabling our customers to spend more time developing and deploying innovative applications rather than interpreting and navigating convoluted invoices.

Our Growth Strategies

We are driving significant growth by executing on the following key strategies:

•Increasing Usage by Our Existing Customers. Our existing customer base represents a significant opportunity for further sales expansion through increased usage of our platform and adoption of additional product offerings. We are highly focused on gaining a better understanding of the needs and growth plans of our existing customers, increasing our feature velocity and shaping our product roadmap around the needs of Higher Spend Customers, and introducing an account management function to provide more direct coverage of our top spending accounts. This deeper relationship with our customers will help us identify opportunities to educate our customer base on ways to utilize the platform more effectively for their individual use cases, as well as provide a feedback loop to inform our product roadmap, in order to build trust with customers and encourage them to run more of their critical cloud workloads on our platform. We closely monitor our net dollar retention (NDR), which reflects our ability to retain and grow revenue from our existing customers. While NDR decreased from 101% in 2023 to 98% in 2024 as we lapped the effects of the 2022 price increases, we expect to increase our revenue in the future from existing customers through the introduction of new products and features tailored to our Higher Spend Customers through expanded customer outreach, and targeted services to support our customers in migrating additional workloads from other cloud providers to DigitalOcean.

•Growing Our Base of Higher Spend Customers. We believe there is a substantial opportunity to further expand our customer base. We are investing in strategies that we believe will drive adoption by new Higher Spend Customers, including new marketing initiatives that further optimize our self-service revenue funnel to identify potential Higher Spend Customers, enhanced research and development to build our product roadmap around the needs of Higher Spend Customers, the creation of a new migration services team to support migration to our platform from other cloud providers, and a dedicated AI sales team with deep AI expertise to help prospective customers understand our offerings and the process to onboard onto our platform.

•Investing in Our Platform and Product Offerings. We have a history of, and will continue to invest significantly in, delivering innovative products, features and functionality for our Higher Spend Customers. Our product strategy is anchored in addressing the needs of our Higher Spend Customers and other growing technology companies and on continuously innovating to meet those needs in a simple, scalable and approachable way. We have accelerated the pace of product innovation and made disciplined investments to expand our offerings for our IaaS and PaaS offerings, as well as our newer AI/ML offerings. In 2024, we released a number of new products and product features, including GPU Droplets, our GenAI platform, Autonomous on our Managed Hosting offering to automatically scale resources based on website traffic, and enhancements to our role-based access control functionality and Backups offering. The market opportunity for our services continues to expand and we expect to make additional investments to offer an enhanced and tailored suite of IaaS, PaaS/SaaS and AI/ML offerings that address the changing needs of our customers.

•Driving Increased Adoption Through Our Community Ecosystem. We attract a large number of developers to our website and platform and we are committed to supporting and expanding this community of innovators and technologists by continuing to produce high-quality educational content and hosting developer-focused programs and events around the world. Supporting and educating the developer community is not only one of our values, but it also fosters brand loyalty, expands our customer base and drives increased adoption of our products.

•Augmenting our Platform though Strategic Partnerships and Acquisitions. In addition to organic growth, we believe that strategic partnerships and acquisitions will allow us to accelerate our key platform, product and marketing initiatives. In recent years, we completed acquisitions of Paperspace, which launched our AI/ML offerings, and Cloudways, which added our Managed Hosting offering to our platform. In addition, we have entered into partnerships to augment our product offerings. For example, in 2024, we announced a partnership with Hugging Face, which allows customers to quickly and easily deploy the most popular third-party models on GPU Droplets and significantly simplifies the model deployment process for our customers. We intend to actively pursue both strategic partnerships and acquisitions that we believe will be complementary to our business, accelerate customer acquisition, increase usage of our platform and/or expand our product offerings in our core markets.

Our Platform and Product Offerings

We have designed our global cloud platform to ensure a simple, scalable and approachable cloud computing experience for our customer base of growing technology companies. This entails maintaining a high-performance and reliable global infrastructure, offering a highly curated set of solutions and providing a superior customer experience. The combination of these elements enables our customers to focus their time and attention on building and running their applications or businesses rather than managing the underlying infrastructure.

Our Global Infrastructure & Technology Network

Our global infrastructure and technology network, built on the foundation of open source scalable cloud-native technologies, allows us to deliver an exceptional developer experience and suite of infrastructure and software solutions to our customers spread across the globe. Our infrastructure is offered to our customers across 16 data centers worldwide that are connected by a high-speed private backbone, enabling our customers to deploy their solutions across nine different geographic regions. We lease data centers in the New York, San Francisco and Atlanta metropolitan areas in the United States, as well as in Australia, Canada, Germany, India, the Netherlands, Singapore and the United Kingdom. We plan to open our new Atlanta data center in 2025. These data center locations were selected for their proximity to key customer markets and to allow access to global internet exchange points to provide consistent low-latency connectivity to large end-user networks. Our global data center network allows our customers to choose where best to deploy the solution to optimize performance and minimize latency for their users. In addition, we utilize points of presence locations situated across the globe to improve website and application performance by allowing geographically dispersed users to receive content from a location nearest to them.

We work closely with leading hardware manufacturers when designing our server platforms to continue to reduce acquisition costs while at the same time aligning our long-term server strategy to future technology advancements. We optimize reliability and performance for our customers by providing physical security and availability for our customers; managing the physical server capacity to ensure that we are able to meet our customers’ demands; operating the global networking backbone to ensure that we are making the best connectivity peering agreements to get customer traffic to the destination via the best available path; and actively monitoring the cloud environment and responding to network incidents to ensure that customer impact is minimized and service availability is managed.

We focus heavily on securing our network, products and customer data from potential security threats, leveraging a dedicated team of security professionals. We have implemented a cybersecurity risk management program that includes administrative, technical and physical safeguards designed to maintain the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of our company’s and our customers’ information. We design our products with security in mind and build security features to integrate directly with our platform, making it simple for our customers to build the additional security layers required for their use cases, rather than navigating the operational complexity of purchasing, integrating, and managing disparate security tooling into their projects. We also offer a number of security features to our customers free of charge, including our Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Protection service and enhanced Role Based Access Control (RBAC) offering. See Part I, Item 1C. “Cybersecurity” for additional detail on our cybersecurity program.

In combination, our infrastructure and network provide our customers with a reliable, highly-performant and cost-effective platform to confidently build, deploy and scale their optimal solution, from single node based applications to globally distributed systems.

Our Product Portfolio

We provide a variety of cloud products and services that are specifically designed to address the needs of growing technology companies. We listen carefully to our customers’ feedback so we understand what they want and need. Our goal is to address the core needs of our customer base instead of offering thousands of complex products and services that are more suited to large enterprise companies.

We offer IaaS, PaaS/SaaS and AI/ML solutions to our customers. Our initial product, launched in 2012, was the Droplet, a virtual machine that provides flexibility to build, test, secure and grow customers’ applications from start-up to scale. Since then, we have successfully launched many new products, which honor our commitment to always provide a simple, scalable and approachable experience for our core customer base. We have expanded our product portfolio with product innovations such as Dedicated Droplets, Premium Droplets, Spaces, Managed Kubernetes, Managed Databases, App Platform, and, more recently, GPU Droplets and our GenAI Platform, which have proven our ability to successfully launch or acquire new products to market and serve our customers’ needs. Furthermore, we regularly launch new product features in response to customer needs and requests and to grow the functionality of our platform. We have developed a product roadmap designed to enhance our ability to offer secure, scalable and reliable solutions for our customers to grow their applications or businesses. We also provide management and collaboration tools to enable our customers to monitor and manage their usage of our platform.

•IaaS Offerings. Our Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings include our compute, storage and networking products. We provide flexible server configurations sized for any application, attractive price-to-performance and highly predictable pricing that is the same across regions and usage volumes. Our current IaaS offerings include:

◦Droplets. Droplets are our core compute offering. Developers can spin up the virtual machine of their choice in under a minute. We offer basic Droplets and Dedicated Droplets, such as general purpose, CPU-optimized, memory-optimized or storage-optimized configurations, which provide flexibility to build, test, secure and grow any application from start-up to scale. Our Premium Droplet offerings provide enhanced speed and memory performance, while maintaining our commitment to simplicity.

◦Storage Offerings. Our storage solutions allow our customers to store and quickly access any amount of data reliably in the cloud. We offer several kinds of storage offerings, depending on the customer’s needs, including:

▪Spaces (Object Storage). Our object storage with a built-in content delivery network (CDN) makes scaling easy, reliable and affordable. Our simple and predictable pricing makes this offering very attractive compared to our competitors.

▪Volumes (Block Storage). Our block storage product allows customers to add more storage space and mix and match compute and storage to suit their database, file storage, application, service, mobile and backup needs. This provides supplemental storage beyond the generous local solid-state drive (SSD) offered with our compute offerings.

▪Backups and Snapshots. Our disk images of Droplets provide peace of mind and a sense of security to our customers. Our customers can choose between Backups, which are automatically-created disk images of Droplets taken on a daily or weekly basis, or Snapshots, which are manually-created disk images taken on demand, providing our customers with the ability to revert to an older state or create new Droplets. We also provide the flexibility to customize backup windows for disk images, choose retention policies and elect which files to back up.

◦Networking Offerings. We provide a suite of networking capabilities to secure and control the traffic to our customers’ applications. Data transfer costs can quickly become a major expense for operators of complex cloud applications. At DigitalOcean, we provide a generous amount of bandwidth with each successive Droplet purchase. This bandwidth is pooled for the customer’s account and shared by all applications or resources running in their account, which we believe is a key differentiator for us in the marketplace. Our key networking product offerings include:

•Cloud Firewalls. Our Cloud Firewall offering is a software service that allows customers to quickly secure their infrastructure from common vulnerabilities and define what services are visible on their infrastructure. Cloud Firewalls are free to our customers and are used for staging and production deployments of software.

•Managed Load Balancers. Our Managed Load Balancer offering is a software service that allows customers to load balance traffic to their software applications located on multiple Droplets, enabling them to scale their applications and improve availability, security and performance across their infrastructure in a few clicks with affordable pricing.

•Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Our VPC offering is a private network interface for collections of DigitalOcean resources. VPC networks provide a more secure connection between resources because the network is inaccessible from the public internet and other VPC networks, enabling our customers to manage their information and data traffic between applications without exposure to the public internet.

•IP Address Management. In addition to IPv4 addresses, we also offer IPv6 addresses, which provide larger address space and increased security, among other benefits. Customers also have the option to use Reserved IP Addresses, which are publicly-accessible static IP addresses that can be assigned to Droplets and instantly remapped to other Droplets in the same data center.

•Domain Name System (DNS) Management. DNS Management offering allows customers to add domains to their DigitalOcean accounts and manage the domain’s DNS records through our control panel. Managing DNS records through the DigitalOcean platform also allows customers to integrate DNS records with other DigitalOcean offerings, including Load Balancers to manage traffic and Spaces to streamline automatic SSL certificate management.

•PaaS/SaaS Offerings. Our Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings provide a complete development and deployment environment. PaaS/SaaS offerings include infrastructure as well as database management systems, application platforms, development tools and other services designed to support the complete web application lifecycle. Our current PaaS/SaaS offerings include:

◦Managed Hosting. Our Managed Hosting offering provides simple onboarding and day-to-day management for hosting that is purpose-built for growing technology companies looking to outsource their on-ramp to the internet and offload the complexities of cloud infrastructure so they can spend more time running and scaling their businesses. This offering is particularly attractive for growing technology companies without the knowledge or resources to fully manage their hosting infrastructure, including digital agencies, entrepreneurs creating eCommerce sites, bloggers, freelancers, and other users hosting on WordPress, PHP and Magento.

◦Managed Databases. Our Managed Databases offering, a fully-managed database solution, provides our customers with the application performance they need without the operational demands that come with building and running a database server. We currently offer managed offerings for relational databases (SQL) such as PostgreSQL and MySQL, as well as NoSQL databases such as Redis. In addition, we offer DigitalOcean Managed MongoDB, a fully-managed database as a service offering in partnership with MongoDB, and Dedicated CPU Managed MongoDB to boost the performance of MongoDB and enable users to migrate databases from any source to DigitalOcean Managed MongoDB with minimal downtime. Finally, our Managed Kafka offering provides our customers with the ability to build high-throughput, low-latency data streams of Kafka without the complexity of managing their infrastructure.

◦Managed Kubernetes and Container Registry. Our easy-to-use Managed Kubernetes service provides scalability and portability for cloud-native applications. Customers can get started quickly and cheaply with our free control plane, inexpensive bandwidth and our free egress gateway, which give our customers even more confidence in leveraging our Kubernetes offering to deploy their code in the cloud. Alternatively, customers have the option to scale-up with our high availability control plane, which increases control plane availability and uptime. Our Managed Container Registry offering lets customers easily store and manage private container images for rapid deployment to our Managed Kubernetes service.

◦App Platform. Our App Platform offering allows customers to build, deploy and scale applications quickly using a simple, fully-managed solution. We handle the infrastructure, application runtimes and dependencies so that developers can push code to production in just a few clicks, enabling them to deliver applications to market faster and on a global scale.

◦Functions. Our Functions offering is a serverless compute solution that leverages our App Platform product. Serverless computing has become a popular trend in cloud application development because it allows for freedom from server management and the ability to pay only for what you use. Our Functions offering runs on-demand, which simplifies the cloud programming experience and helps customers focus more on application development and business outcomes and less on managing the underlying infrastructure.

◦Uptime. Our Uptime offering provides real-time uptime and latency alerts, allowing customers to quickly recover from incidents before their own customers are impacted. Alerts are triggered when customer assets are slow, down, or vulnerable to attack.

◦Marketplace. Our Marketplace is a platform where developers can find pre-configured applications and solutions that are optimized to run on our infrastructure quickly. The DigitalOcean Marketplace contains highly-curated everyday applications and cutting-edge technologies, providing customers access to the most efficient tools to build their businesses while removing the time and expense of research, configuration and manual setup. We work closely with partners to deliver a truly seamless experience for customers, creating the ability for developers to deploy thoroughly tested app environments with the click of a button on Droplets and Kubernetes clusters. The DigitalOcean Marketplace also offers add-ons that run in the cloud and are available on demand. More than 350 preconfigured one-click applications are available in our Marketplace, including WordPress, LAMP, Docker, Grafana, and Plesk, among others.

•AI/ML Offerings. Our artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) offerings enable customers to more easily test, develop and deploy AI/ML applications or augment and enhance existing AI/ML applications. Our current AI/ML offerings include:

◦GPU Droplets. Our GPU Droplets provide similar functionality to our core CPU offerings, but with the extra power of GPUs, and come pre-configured with pre-installed drivers, software and one-click models, allowing AI developers to simply and quickly run AI experiments, train large language models, and scale AI projects. Our GPU Droplets provide fast, easy and affordable access to high-performance GPUs without requiring upfront investments in costly hardware.

◦GenAI Platform. Our GenAI platform is a comprehensive solution for deploying AI applications. The platform provides access to third party foundational models out-of-the-box so that customers can easily put together an AI application without requiring specific AI expertise.

◦Bare Metal GPUs. Our Bare Metal GPU offering provides customers with access to a GPU server without any virtualization layer, to give developers with an entirely customizable server for their use case.

◦Jupyter Notebooks. Our Jupyter Notebooks offering provides customers with a simple cloud workspace that runs on GPUs, providing a managed interactive development environment for exploring data and training and building machine learning models.

Sales and Marketing

Our sales and marketing teams work together closely to drive awareness and adoption of our platform, accelerate customer acquisition and expand our revenue from existing customers. These teams focus on customer acquisition, our self-service acquisition funnel, customer support and success, community education, inside sales, targeted outside sales, and partnership and channel development.

By reducing the friction that typically accompanies the purchase of business software and eliminating the need for complicated and costly implementation and training, our efficient self-service acquisition model enables customers to get started on our platform very quickly and without the need for assistance. We attract visitors to our website through a combination of high-quality content, developer outreach and highly-targeted paid demand generation campaigns.

We focus on building a large, highly-engaged community that can connect and educate developers across the globe. Our developer community enables new and experienced developers to learn new skills and technologies and create and deliver new applications. The DigitalOcean community is based on forging genuine relationships through a series of meaningful and memorable interactions. We believe that our focus on community drives brand loyalty amongst a fast-growing developer community and spurs our community followers to become advocates for us and our platform. Our community education websites contain high-quality technical tutorials and a forum with tens of thousands of questions and answers that guide developers in creating and delivering modern applications—not just focused on DigitalOcean products and services, but relevant to any cloud service. We expect to continue to grow the high-quality developer content on our websites, including through the creation of new content and product demonstrations, alongside continuous maintenance and refreshes of our legacy content, while making our education website easier to navigate by integrating our own GenAI platform on our education websites so our customers can get the answers they need more seamlessly and efficiently.

We host a number of events to further build our community, including Hacktoberfest with over 65,000 developers participating in 2024 and Deploy, a conference for developers, startups, founders, and others to learn from experts, connect, and be inspired to build their vision on our platform. We are focused on expanding our developer engagement efforts by hosting regular in-person meetings and creating innovative knowledge-sharing hubs in cities around the world. In addition, we operate the “Hatch by DigitalOcean” program to support entrepreneurs and startups more directly as they begin their journey by providing them with a robust set of benefits to help them succeed. Many attendees at our meetings and events and participants in our Hatch program have learned about DigitalOcean through these developer engagement efforts and have not only become loyal DigitalOcean customers but have become advocates of our platform, drawing others to DigitalOcean.

We complement our efficient self-service customer acquisition model and community building and developer outreach efforts with a sales force focused on inside sales, outbound prospecting targeting specific use cases, volume expansion of our self-service customers, expanding our revenue in specific international markets and seeking partnership opportunities to drive revenue growth. Our sales team includes experienced engineers who fashion technical solutions for customers to convert and migrate their workloads from other cloud providers. Our customer success professionals focus on customer retention and customer expansion by adding value throughout the customer lifecycle as customers scale and expand their usage of our product portfolio and will directly contact customers to determine if there are ways to augment their usage of our platform with additional services. We are also focused on partnership opportunities that introduce new avenues for customer growth. As we continue to evolve our sales motion, we have introduced a high-touch approach for retaining and expanding top customers, and securing new cloud and AI business from outbound efforts — all to help augment our highly-efficient self-service customer acquisition model and accelerate growth.

We are committed to providing robust customer support to all customers, which we believe has been a strategic differentiator for us. The customer support team addresses account-related questions and provides high-quality technical advice and troubleshooting. Developers and engineers are a key part of the customer support team, and we offer technical support free of charge to all of our customers. In addition, we offer paid support plans, which allow customers to choose the paid support option that best suits their needs and provide customers with faster response times and dedicated support from technical managers. Customer engagement with our customer support team also serves as an important feedback loop to our product and technology teams, helping us better understand the specific needs of our customers. This feedback has influenced, and will continue to influence, our product roadmap, the content strategy for our community tutorials and other business decisions. We closely track various metrics to ensure we are providing exceptional customer support. We internally monitor our customer satisfaction score (CSAT) and net promoter score (NPS) to gauge the quality of our interactions with customers and our ability to increase loyalty. We also have specific service-level objectives (SLOs) for response and resolution times to ensure we maintain a high level of customer satisfaction.

We intend to continue to invest in our sales and marketing capabilities to capitalize on our large and global market opportunity, while remaining very efficient in terms of sales and marketing expense as a percentage of revenue.

Our Customers

Our customer base is incredibly diverse with respect to technical competency, type of business, use case and geography. We have been successful in increasing our customer base of Higher Spend Customers, and our ARPU by expanding our product portfolio and optimizing our sales and marketing initiatives to meet the needs of our customers. While our pricing is primarily consumption-based and the majority of our customers use our platform on a month-to-month basis, a growing number of customers are using our platform for larger workloads and some of these customers are opting to enter into committed contracts, committing to a minimum spend on our platform. As of December 31, 2024, we had approximately 165,000 Higher Spend Customers, an increase from approximately 156,000 as of December 31, 2023. Our ARPU has increased from $82.76 in 2022 to $90.99 in 2023 to $100.71 in 2024. We have no material customer concentration, as our top 25 customers made up 8%, 7% and 10% of our revenue in 2024, 2023 and 2022, respectively. See Part II, Item 7. “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations—Key Business Metrics” for more detail on the definition of ARPU.

Competition

The markets that we serve are highly competitive and rapidly evolving. With the introduction of new technologies and innovations, we expect the competitive environment to remain intense.

We believe that the principal factors on which we compete include:

Simplicity:

•ease of use and operation

•speed of deployment

•price, total cost of ownership and transparency

•features, functionality and quality of tools

Scalability:

•performance, reliability, scalability and security

•geographic reach

Approachability:

•customer experience, support and service

•community engagement and education

•brand awareness and reputation

We compete primarily with large, diversified technology companies that focus on large enterprise customers and provide cloud computing as just a portion of the products and services that they offer. The primary vendors in this category include Amazon (AWS), Microsoft (Azure), Google (GCP), IBM (IBM Cloud), Alibaba (Alibaba Cloud) and Oracle (Oracle Cloud).

We also compete with smaller and/or niche cloud service providers that typically target individuals and smaller businesses, simple use cases and/or narrower geographic markets. Examples in this category include OVHcloud, Akamai (Linode), Hetzner, Vultr, Contabo, Scaleway, UpCloud, and Heroku.

Our AI/ML offerings compete with providers of AI/ML infrastructure and services, including the same large, diversified technology companies, Amazon (AWS), Microsoft (Azure), and Google (GCP), and smaller more infrastructure-focused companies such as Coreweave and Lambda Labs.

Finally, our Managed Hosting offering competes with digital agencies and other managed hosting providers, including Kinsta and WP Engine.

Despite the competitive intensity, we believe we compete successfully on the basis of the factors listed above. We focus on solutions for growing technology companies—and combine the power of being simple, scalable and approachable for the portion of the cloud market whose needs are not fully met by larger cloud providers. This differentiates us dramatically from the enterprise cloud competitors. At the same time, our ability to address complex use cases that allows customers to scale with us as they grow, differentiates us from the many niche competitors who have less robust and extensible offerings.

Human Capital Management

As of December 31, 2024, we had a total of 1,210 employees, including 703 located outside the United States. We also engage individuals through professional employer organizations and contractors on an as-needed basis. None of our employees are represented by a labor union or covered by a collective bargaining agreement. We have not experienced any work stoppages, and we consider our relations with our employees to be good.

We provide competitive compensation and benefits for our employees globally, including base salary, cash bonuses, commissions (for our sales team), long-term equity awards and the opportunity to participate in an employee stock purchase plan and a wide array of benefits aligned with local reward practices and competitive with those offered by companies with whom we compete for talent.

Talent development and employee engagement are key to attracting and retaining talented employees. We facilitate employee review cycles where employees have development conversations with their managers multiple times throughout the year. We also offer thousands of training courses and videos on a wide range of topics to further support employee development. Finally, we conduct anonymous global engagement surveys regularly to measure the effectiveness of our business and people initiatives and identify areas of strength and development opportunities among teams.

We are also committed to social responsibility as evidenced by our joining the Pledge 1% movement in connection with our IPO and our launch of DO Impact in 2022, which is our social impact effort designed to empower changemakers around the globe through products and philanthropy.

Intellectual Property

Intellectual property rights are important to the success of our business. We rely on a combination of trademark, patent, copyright and trade secret laws in the United States and other jurisdictions, as well as license agreements, confidentiality provision, 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.

As of December 31, 2024, we owned thirteen registered trademarks in the United States and ten registered trademarks in various non-U.S. jurisdictions. We have filed applications for registration for two additional trademarks in non-U.S. jurisdictions. In addition, we own one International Registration through the World Intellectual Property Organization, which has been extended to registrations in seven additional jurisdictions. As of December 31, 2024, we owned five issued patents and had one patent that is published in the United States. The issued patents are each scheduled to expire in 2039 and 2040 and the patent that has been published, when issued, will be scheduled to expire in 2039. In addition, we license third-party software and use open source software and other technologies that are used in the provision of or incorporated into some elements of our services. Many parts of our business utilize proprietary technology and/or licensed technology, including open source software.

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, vendors and partners. 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, vendors and other partners. See Part I, Item 1A. “Risk Factors” for a more comprehensive description of risks related to our intellectual property.

Governmental Regulation

Our business is and will continue to be subject to extensive U.S. federal and state and foreign laws and regulations, including laws and regulations involving privacy, data protection, data transfers, artificial intelligence, content regulation, security, intellectual property, competition, taxation, anti-corruption, anti-bribery, anti-money laundering, and other similar laws. Many of these laws and regulations are still evolving and are likely to remain uncertain for the foreseeable future, and these laws and regulations can vary significantly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. The costs of complying with these laws and regulations are high and are likely to increase in the future. We are also subject to U.S. and foreign laws and regulations that govern or restrict our business and activities in certain countries and with certain persons, including the U.S. Commerce Department’s Export Administration Regulations and economic and trade sanctions regulations maintained by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. Compliance with these laws, rules, and regulations has not had, and is not expected to have, a material effect upon our results of operations, capital expenditures or competitive position. Nevertheless, compliance with existing or future governmental regulations, including, but not limited to, those pertaining to global trade, business acquisitions, consumer and data protection, and taxes, could have a material impact on our business in subsequent periods.

For a more comprehensive discussion of the risks we face from regulation and compliance matters, see Part I, Item 1A. “Risk Factors”.

Corporate Information

We were incorporated in Delaware in 2012 under the name Digital Ocean, Inc. In 2016, as part of a restructuring, Digital Ocean, Inc. was converted into DigitalOcean, LLC, and DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc. was formed as the ultimate parent holding company. We completed our initial public offering in March 2021 and our common stock is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “DOCN.” Our principal executive offices are located at 101 6th Avenue, New York, New York 10013, and our telephone number is (646) 827-4366. Our website address is www.digitalocean.com.

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 (the Exchange Act), are filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the SEC). Such reports and other information filed by us with the SEC are available free of charge on our website at www.investors.digitalocean.com when such reports are available on the SEC’s website. The SEC maintains a website 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.