PagerDuty, Inc. (PD): History, Ownership, Mission, How It Works & Makes Money

In a world where every second of downtime costs real money, how does PagerDuty, Inc. (PD) maintain its position as the critical platform for real-time digital operations, especially as it leans into Artificial Intelligence (AI)? The company closed its 2025 fiscal year with $467.5 million in revenue and an Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) of $494 million, underscoring its essential infrastructure status for more than 31,000 total customers. That kind of growth, which delivered a non-GAAP operating income of $82.7 million, signals a definsible business model, but what are the specific mechanics-the history, core mission, and monetization levers-that make this digital lifeline so sticky for the enterprise? You need to understand the engine behind those numbers to map out your own investment or strategy, so let's get into the details.

PagerDuty, Inc. (PD) History

You want to understand how PagerDuty, Inc. evolved from a simple on-call alerting service to a leader in digital operations management. The direct takeaway is that the company's trajectory was fundamentally shaped by three things: a foundational focus on the DevOps movement, a strategic shift to a platform-centric model (The PagerDuty Operations Cloud), and a rapid, recent investment in Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) offerings in 2025.

PagerDuty, Inc.'s Founding Timeline

The company was born out of a common pain point for engineers: the manual, disruptive nature of being on-call. The founders, all former Amazon software engineers, essentially commercialized an internal tool concept, which is a classic Silicon Valley move.

Year established

The company was established in 2009.

Original location

PagerDuty originally started in Toronto, Canada, before moving to San Francisco, California, after being accepted into the Y Combinator accelerator program in 2010.

Founding team members

The company was founded by three University of Waterloo graduates and former Amazon engineers:

• Alex Solomon
• Andrew Miklas
• Baskar Puvanathasan

Initial capital/funding

Initial capital came from the founders' own savings and a small friends and family round. The first major external funding was a Seed Round of $1.9 million secured in September 2010, led by Harrison Metal.

PagerDuty, Inc.'s Evolution Milestones

The company's growth wasn't just about funding; it was about expanding the platform from a simple notification router to a full-lifecycle incident management system. Here's the quick math on their scale: for the full fiscal year 2025, PagerDuty reported total revenue of $467.5 million.

PagerDuty, Inc.'s Transformative Moments

The biggest shifts weren't single events, but strategic pivots that broadened the product's scope, moving it up the value chain from a simple utility to a mission-critical platform. The most recent focus in 2025 is defintely the most impactful.

The core transformation was from a reactive tool-an alert siren-to a proactive, intelligent system of action. This is what you need to focus on.

• The Platform Pivot (2018-2019): The company transitioned from selling incident management to selling the PagerDuty Operations Cloud, encompassing AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations), automation, and business operations. This move expanded the total addressable market far beyond just on-call engineers.
• The Enterprise Focus: Under CEO Jennifer Tejada, the company successfully scaled its customer base, with 849 customers having Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) over $100 thousand as of January 31, 2025. This focus on large, sticky enterprise contracts provides revenue stability.
• The AI-First Strategy (2024-2025): The introduction of Agentic AI in 2025 is a massive step. These AI agents, like the Shift Agent and the Scribe Agent, automate complex, time-consuming tasks like resolving on-call conflicts and summarizing incident calls. This shift is about reducing human toil and accelerating resolution times, which is a direct value-add for customers.

What this estimate hides is the ongoing challenge of integrating new AI features seamlessly into existing enterprise workflows, but the product direction is clear: full automation. You can learn more about the company's long-term strategy here: Mission Statement, Vision, & Core Values of PagerDuty, Inc. (PD).

PagerDuty, Inc. (PD) Ownership Structure

PagerDuty, Inc.'s ownership is heavily concentrated among institutional investors, which is typical for a mature, publicly traded software company, leaving little float for retail investors to influence major decisions.

The company's governance is therefore largely steered by the interests of major asset managers like Vanguard Group Inc. and BlackRock, Inc., who collectively hold a significant portion of the total shares outstanding.

PagerDuty, Inc.'s Current Status

PagerDuty, Inc. is a publicly held company, trading on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker symbol PD. This status means its financial and strategic decisions are subject to public scrutiny and the regulatory oversight of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

As of November 21, 2025, the company's share price was around $14.91 per share, reflecting a market capitalization of approximately $1.54 billion based on 93.2 million shares outstanding. The trailing 12-month revenue as of July 31, 2025, was $484 million, showing continued scale in the digital operations management market. You can dig deeper into the shareholder base at Exploring PagerDuty, Inc. (PD) Investor Profile: Who's Buying and Why?

PagerDuty, Inc.'s Ownership Breakdown

The company's ownership structure is dominated by institutional funds, which control the vast majority of the equity. This high institutional ownership-around 92.49%-indicates a strong belief in the long-term growth story by professional money managers.

The largest single institutional holder is Vanguard Group Inc., which holds approximately 10.53 million shares, making it a critical stakeholder in any governance matters. This level of concentration means you defintely need to watch 13F filings for any major shifts in institutional sentiment.

PagerDuty, Inc.'s Leadership

The company is steered by a seasoned executive team focused on expanding the PagerDuty Operations Cloud beyond traditional incident response into AIOps and automation.

• Jennifer Tejada: Chairperson and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), leading the company since 2016 from a pioneer in Incident Response to a platform leader.
• Howard Wilson: Chief Financial Officer (CFO), who manages the company's financial strategy and its path to profitability.
• Alex Solomon: Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Co-Founder, guiding the core technology and product innovation.
• Todd McNabb: Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), responsible for leading the global go-to-market strategy, sales, and revenue growth.
• Allison Corley: Chief Customer Officer (CCO), driving the customer-centric strategy and ensuring exceptional customer experiences.

Recent leadership additions, such as Pritesh Parekh as Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) and Rukmini Reddy as Senior Vice President of Engineering, signal a strong focus on enterprise security and platform scale going into the 2026 fiscal year. The executive team's deep experience in scaling public and private enterprise technology companies provides a stable, authoritative hand on the wheel.

PagerDuty, Inc. (PD) Mission and Values

PagerDuty, Inc. stands for transforming critical work into predictable outcomes, aiming to build customer trust by making sure organizations can anticipate and manage the unexpected in an unpredictable digital world. This purpose is supported by a clear set of core values that drive both product development and internal culture, focusing on operational resilience and customer delight.

Given Company's Core Purpose

The company's purpose is deeper than just incident management; it's about empowering teams with the time and efficiency to build the future. Honestly, that's the real value proposition for customers-getting back to innovation instead of constantly fighting fires. This focus is why they grew their impact customers-nonprofits, healthcare providers, and B Corps-by 22% in FY25, supporting them with $2.2 million in product discounts and donations.

Official mission statement

The formal mission statement is a clear declaration of their market intent, which is to become the essential platform for digital operations management.

• To revolutionize operations and build customer trust by anticipating the unexpected in an unpredictable world.

It's simple: they want to change how work gets done, especially when seconds matter, and they want to be your defintely trusted partner when things go wrong. For more detail on this, you can check out Mission Statement, Vision, & Core Values of PagerDuty, Inc. (PD).

Vision statement

Their vision statement maps their technology to a broader, more equitable societal goal, which is a key differentiator for a B2B software company.

• An equitable world where we transform critical work so all teams can delight their customers and build trust.

This vision shows they look past just the Fortune 500-though 68% of the Fortune 100 already use them-to ensure all organizations can achieve operational excellence. Here's the quick math: with Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) reaching $494 million in FY25, their platform is clearly scaling this vision across a growing customer base.

Given Company slogan/tagline

While a single slogan can be stiff, the company's market positioning is best captured by its platform description and core values, reflecting its current AI-driven trend.

• The AI-First Operations Platform.

Their corporate values are the operational code for this platform and its people, known internally as Dutonians:

• Champion the Customer: Put users first and build great products.
• Run Together: Create belonging and deepen bonds.
• Ack & Own: See opportunities, make it yours, and do right.
• Take the Lead: Disrupt more, improve everywhere, and learn forever.
• Bring your self: Earn trust, be present, and have heart.

These values translate directly to the bottom line; they finished FY25 with a healthy $108.4 million in free cash flow, proving that mission-driven growth and financial discipline aren't mutually exclusive.

PagerDuty, Inc. (PD) How It Works

PagerDuty operates as the central nervous system for a company's digital operations, automatically detecting disruptions across the entire technology stack and orchestrating the right human or automated response in real-time. It fundamentally transforms reactive incident management into proactive, AI-powered digital operations management, ensuring continuous service uptime for customers.

PagerDuty, Inc.'s Product/Service Portfolio

PagerDuty, Inc.'s Operational Framework

The core of PagerDuty's value creation lies in its Operations Cloud, which is designed to automate and orchestrate the full incident lifecycle, moving operations from manual toil to intelligent, automated workflows. This framework is what allows customers to achieve operational efficiency at scale.

• Ingest and Detect: The platform absorbs signals from over 700 third-party monitoring, observability, and security tools, consolidating event data into actionable alerts.
• Intelligent Triage: AIOps capabilities, including Global Intelligent Alert Grouping, use machine learning to correlate noise, suppress redundant alerts, and surface only the critical, high-impact incidents.
• Mobilize and Orchestrate: For critical issues, the platform triggers automated response protocols, notifying the correct on-call teams via multiple channels (SMS, phone, push), and launching automated diagnostics and remediation actions.
• Resolve and Learn: Post-incident, the platform uses its Generative AI Assistant, like the Scribe Agent, to instantly transcribe communications and generate structured summaries for post-incident reviews, accelerating the learning loop.

This multi-product strategy is defintely working; multi-product customers now drive 65% of the company's total Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) as of the end of fiscal year 2025. Here's the quick math: with an ARR of $494 million as of January 31, 2025, that means approximately $321.1 million is driven by customers using more than one product. You can learn more about the company's strategic focus on resilience here: Mission Statement, Vision, & Core Values of PagerDuty, Inc. (PD).

PagerDuty, Inc.'s Strategic Advantages

The company maintains its market leadership through a combination of platform maturity, deep integrations, and an aggressive, AI-first innovation roadmap. This focus is what keeps them ahead of the curve.

• AI and Automation Leadership: PagerDuty was named a Leader and Outperformer in the 2025 GigaOm Radar for AIOps, validating its focus on automated remediation and Agentic AI. This is a significant competitive edge.
• Enterprise Penetration: The platform is trusted by nearly 70% of the Fortune 100 and half of the Fortune 500, establishing it as essential infrastructure for the world's most demanding digital businesses.
• Ecosystem Breadth: With integrations to over 700 applications, PagerDuty acts as a vendor-agnostic orchestration layer, unifying disparate monitoring, ticketing, and collaboration tools across complex enterprise environments.
• Financial Resilience: The company achieved full fiscal year 2025 revenue of $467.5 million and delivered $108.4 million in free cash flow, providing the capital for sustained investment in its cutting-edge AI agent suite.

What this estimate hides is the increasing competitive pressure from observability platforms like Datadog, but PagerDuty's deep-seated incident response workflows and new Agentic AI features, like the SRE Agent projected for Q4 2025 General Availability, are designed to maintain its specialized focus and market share.

PagerDuty, Inc. (PD) How It Makes Money

PagerDuty, Inc. primarily makes money by selling subscription access to its cloud-based digital operations management platform, the PagerDuty Operations Cloud, which helps companies detect, diagnose, and resolve critical incidents in real-time. This revenue is predictable, driven by Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), and is increasingly supplemented by premium, usage-based add-ons like its generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) offerings.

PagerDuty's Revenue Breakdown

The company's revenue engine is overwhelmingly a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. While PagerDuty does not formally break down its revenue by product line in its public filings, the high gross margin and focus on ARR confirm that subscription fees for the core platform and its advanced features account for nearly all income. The table below represents the core revenue streams based on the business structure and the latest financial data as of the end of Q2 Fiscal Year 2026 (ended July 31, 2025).

Business Economics

The economic fundamentals of PagerDuty are built on a high-margin, land-and-expand strategy, where the initial sale of the core incident management platform is followed by upselling advanced features and increasing user count. This model is currently facing a slight headwind from cautious enterprise spending, but the shift toward usage-based pricing for AI features is a clear strategic pivot.

• Gross Margin: The company reported a strong gross margin of 86% in Q2 FY 2026, which is typical for a mature, efficient SaaS business and demonstrates minimal cost of goods sold for its core service.
• Pricing Model: PagerDuty uses a tiered, per-user subscription model (Professional, Business, Enterprise) but drives significant expansion revenue through add-ons like AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations), Runbook Automation, and PagerDuty Advance, which is a premium generative AI offering priced at $4,980 per user/year.
• Dollar-Based Net Retention Rate (DBNR): This key metric, which measures spending from existing customers, was 102% as of July 31, 2025. This means existing customers spent 2% more than they did a year ago, which is a deceleration from the 106% reported in FY 2025, reflecting current enterprise budget scrutiny.
• Geographic Revenue: International revenue accounted for 29% of total revenue in Q2 FY 2026, showing a healthy global diversification and a 12% annual increase in that segment.

PagerDuty's Financial Performance

PagerDuty is successfully executing a pivot toward profitable growth, achieving its first-ever Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) profitable quarter in Q2 FY 2026. This focus on operational efficiency is the main story for investors right now.

• Full-Year Revenue Outlook (FY 2026): The company projects total revenue for the full fiscal year 2026 to be in the range of $493.0 million to $497.0 million, representing a year-over-year growth rate of 5% to 6%.
• GAAP Profitability: PagerDuty reported GAAP operating income of $3.6 million in Q2 FY 2026, a major milestone. Non-GAAP operating income was much stronger at $31.4 million, with a non-GAAP operating margin of 25.4%.
• Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR): ARR reached $499 million as of July 31, 2025, growing 5% year-over-year. The company had 868 customers with an ARR over $100,000, a 6% increase from the prior year.
• Cash Position: The balance sheet remains solid, with cash, cash equivalents, and investments totaling $567.9 million as of July 31, 2025, plus a free cash flow of $30.2 million in that quarter alone.

Here's the quick math: the focus is shifting from pure top-line growth to margin expansion and cash generation. You can read more about the company's strategic alignment with its core values here: Mission Statement, Vision, & Core Values of PagerDuty, Inc. (PD).

PagerDuty, Inc. (PD) Market Position & Future Outlook

PagerDuty, Inc. is pivoting its core incident management strength toward a broader, AI-powered digital operations platform, aiming to accelerate growth from its FY2025 revenue of $467.5 million. The company's strategic focus on generative AI agents is a clear move to capture a larger share of the estimated $50 billion Total Addressable Market (TAM) by automating the entire incident lifecycle and expanding beyond traditional DevOps teams.

While the business has stabilized and achieved a Non-GAAP operating income of $82.7 million for FY2025, the near-term challenge remains converting large enterprise deals to accelerate revenue growth past the 8.5% year-over-year increase seen in the last fiscal year. You can dive deeper into the financials here: Breaking Down PagerDuty, Inc. (PD) Financial Health: Key Insights for Investors.

Competitive Landscape

In the broader IT, Server, and Network Monitoring space, PagerDuty holds a specialized, but smaller, position. Its main competitive advantage is its deep focus on orchestrated, real-time incident response, which is a critical layer that often integrates with larger monitoring platforms.

Opportunities & Challenges

The company's future trajectory hinges on the success of its AI-first strategy and its ability to fend off integrated competition from larger observability platforms.

Industry Position

PagerDuty is a recognized leader in the specialized domain of digital operations management, particularly in AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations) and incident response, which is defintely its sweet spot.

• AIOps Leadership: PagerDuty was named a Leader and Outperformer in the 2025 GigaOm Radar for AIOps, highlighting its strength in event correlation and automated remediation.
• Enterprise Penetration: The platform is trusted by nearly half of the Fortune 500 and approximately two-thirds of the Fortune 100, demonstrating its mission-critical status in large organizations.
• AI-Driven Differentiation: The launch of its end-to-end AI Agent Suite in late 2025 is a key differentiator, promising to slash incident resolution times by up to 50%.
• Financial Resilience: The company ended FY2025 with a strong free cash flow of $108.4 million, providing capital for aggressive AI R&D investment and potential share repurchases.

The core issue is that while PagerDuty is the gold standard for incident response, the broader market is consolidating around full-stack observability, where competitors like Datadog have a massive market share lead. PagerDuty's move into a comprehensive Operations Cloud is a necessary evolution, but it pits them directly against much larger players with deeper pockets.