Pure Storage: Fiscal 3Q26 Financial Results

Summary:

Q3 total revenue growth of 16% YoY
Increases full-year revenue and operating profit guidance

Pure Storage Inc., an IT pioneer that delivers the world’s most advanced data storage technologies and services, announced financial results for its third quarter fiscal year 2026 ended November 2, 2025.

“Pure Storage delivered another strong quarter as global customers increasingly choose Pure to solve their toughest data management challenges,” said Charles Giancarlo, CEO and chairman, Pure Storage. “Competitive advantage in the AI era demands data accessibility. Pure’s Enterprise Data Cloud breaks data free from application silos, allowing enterprises to harness the power of AI, automation, and analytics.”

Third Quarter Financial Highlights

Revenue $964.5 million, up 16% YoY
Subscription services revenue $429.7 million, up 14% YoY
Subscription annual recurring revenue (ARR) $1.8 billion, up 17% YoY
Remaining performance obligations (RPO) $2.9 billion, up 24% YoY
GAAP gross margin 72.3%; non-GAAP gross margin 74.1%
GAAP operating income $53.9 million; non-GAAP operating income $196.2 million
GAAP operating margin 5.6%; non-GAAP operating margin 20.3%
Operating cash flow $116.0 million; free cash flow $52.6 million
Total cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities $1.5 billion
Returned approximately $53 million to stockholders through share repurchases of 0.6 million shares

“In the third quarter, we generated strong revenue and record operating profit, exceeding the high end of our guidance,” said Tarek Robbiati, CFO, Pure Storage. “To sustain this momentum beyond FY26, we will continue to make significant incremental investments in both research and development and sales and marketing to capture additional profitable growth opportunities consistent with our long-term strategy.”

Third Quarter Company Highlights
Simplifying workload expansion with a unified data plane

Expanded the Enterprise Data Cloud into the public cloud with the introduction of Pure Storage Cloud Azure Native, developed jointly with Microsoft – the industry’s first fully managed, enterprise-grade block volume as a service
Continued the evolution of the FlashArray family with FlashArray//XL190 R5, FlashArray//X R5, and FlashArray//C R5

Advancing Pure Storage’s intelligent control plane

Expanded Pure1 AI Copilot with Portworx Pure1 AI Copilot, the first AI-powered platform engineering assistant for Portworx customers and announced integration of Pure1 AI Copilot with Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers
Bridged the gap between traditional and modern applications with the integration of Portworx and Pure Fusion

Expanding our partner ecosystem to deliver greater value through integrated cybersecurity and data protection

Introduced Pure Protect Recovery Zones and cyber resilience delivered as a service with Veeam to help customers proactively detect threats and recover faster
Enabled built-in and integrated detection capabilities to provide broader visibility across an entire environment with tools like real-time security with CrowdStrike Falcon, and file and user monitoring and remediation with Superna

Industry recognition and accolades

Named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Storage Platforms, positioned highest in execution and furthest in vision
Named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Infrastructure Platform Consumption Services
Positioned in the Leaders category in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Hardware Support Services 2025 Vendor Assessment report
Named one of Fortune’s “Best Workplaces in Technology 2025”

Fourth Quarter and FY26 Guidance

These statements are forward-looking and actual results may differ materially. Refer to the Forward Looking Statements section below for information on the factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from these statements. Pure has not reconciled its guidance for non-GAAP operating income and related year-over-year growth rate to their most directly comparable GAAP measures because certain items that impact these measures are not within Pure’s control and/or cannot be reasonably predicted. Accordingly, reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures guidance to the corresponding GAAP measures are not available without unreasonable effort.

Comments

Pure Storage delivered a strong quarter approaching the famous $1 billion threshold. It means a sequential growth of 12% and 16% YoY. The company expects to pass this barrier with Q4 for the very first time in the company history. The ARR, last 12 months revenue, reaches almost $3.5 billion ($3.48 billion) for a final annual revenue above $3.6 billion according to the firm's guidance. Finally the $4 billion barrier should be passed in FY27.

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The business profile illustrates the market traction for several initiatives and products such as Enterprise Data Cloud, the various Flash Array iterations, some AI and data protection extension. The Cloud partnership had some positive effects as well. The FlashBlade//EXA received also significant interests and invited the firm to jump into the high performance high end unstructured data services. Strong in NAS for years, the market expected some reactions from Pure Storage especially as AI put serious pressure on the infrastructure. It's now the case with the integration of pNFS, even with a limited implementation, and the next Purity release, earlier 2026, should introduce some interesting features like file striping at the client level.

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As prices for DRAM and NAND are impacted by some market movements, Pure Storage's results could also fluctuate a bit in the coming quarters.

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